Making a Scene; or Tamburlaine the Great in Print

This chapter argues that printer-publisher Richard Jones’s experiments with scene divisions in his octavo of Tamburlaine the Great (1590) reflect an effort to accentuate the episodic dramaturgy of the plays in textual form. Contemporary comments about both parts of Tamburlaine in performance accord with modern critical impressions that these plays read as a “sequence, " “series, " “succession, " “procession, " and “progression” of discrete units. By putting the divisions in the context of the earlier typographic patterns for dividing plays, it suggests that Jones purposefully deployed and revised the placement of divisions to articulate one of the plays’ defining qualities onstage-its success in compressing Tamburlaine’s expansive military campaign into the limited time and space of performance and thereby furnishing audiences with a cumulative impression of his life.