Guy of Warwick, Godfrey of Bouillon, and Elizabethan Repertory

Abstract

Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine (Part One, c. 1587; Part Two, c. 1587–88) had a pervasive influence on the early modern stage and in particular on those plays grouped under the flexible generic label “Turk plays.” This influence has been discussed at length, and discussion frequently focuses upon core texts, including early examples, such as Thomas Kyd’s Soliman and Perseda (1592), Robert Greene’s Selimus (1594) and Alphonsus, King of Aragon (1599), George Peele’s The Battle of Alcazar (1594), and later examples such as William Shakespeare’s Othello (c.1602–3), Robert Daborne’s A Christian Turn’d Turk (1612), and Philip Massinger’s The Renegado (1623).1 In this essay, however, I discuss the anonymous play The Tragical History, Admirable Atchievments and various events of Guy earl of Warwick and Thomas Heywood’s The Four Prentices of London. These two plays can also be situated within the parameters of “Turk plays” but have received much less critical attention in this context. Part of the reason for this neglect is that the dates and performance histories for both plays are sketchy or nonexistent. The dates of publication for both plays are not contemporaneous with the dates for their initial performances in the theater: while The Tragical History was published in 1661 and The Four Prentices in 1615, critics have suggested that both plays are Elizabethan and were written for performance during the 1590s.