George Scanderbeg

Anon. (Marlowe?) (c.1601)

Historical Records

Stationers' Register, 3 July 1601:

"The true historye of George Scanderbarge as yt was lately playd by the right honorable the Earle of Oxenforde his servantes." E. Allde

(Arber, iii.187; qtd. in Chambers 4.400)

Theatrical Provenance

From the S.R. entry it appears to have been played by the Earl of Oxford's men in or around 1601. Harbage assigns a date of 1587, presumably on the basis of the supposed Harvey allusion (see References to the play below).

Probable Genre(s)

Heroical romance (Harbage); Foreign history (Schoenbaum rev. Harbage).

Possible Narrative and Dramatic Sources or Analogues

Giorgio Castriota (1403-1467) was an Albanian prince who, after leading a revolt against the Turks, received the title "Iskender Beg" or "Scanderbeg" (Prince Alexander).

Franklin B. Williams, Jr., has proposed that the lost play may have been based on the Scanderbeg translation by Zachary Jones, Elizabethan barrister, member of the Spenser circle, and translator of French texts:

The sheer bulk of Scanderbeg discourages the twentieth-century reader unless he has a special interest in military science or Balkan history. On the contrary, Elizabethans, to whom the Turk was still a grave threat, found the legendary hero an attractive figure. Jones's book, one may safely assume, was the source for the lost anonymous play on Scanderbeg... (209)

Williams suggests that Jones was translating either the 1576 original Paris edition or the 1592 La Rochelle reprint (209). The translation in question is:

Jaques de La Vardin, The Historie of George Castriot, Surnamed Scanderbeg, trans. "Z. I. Gentleman", 1596.

Intriguingly, Jones's translation is dedicated to Sir George Carey, "who was about to succeed his father as Lord Hunsdon, as Lord Chamberlain, and as patron to Shakespeare's company" (Williams 211).

Suggesting that Marlowe may have used Andrew Cambine's Turkish Affaires ("Englished" by John Shute in 1562) as a source for the siege of Damascus incident in Tamburlaine, Bakeless notes that this text "was bound with an account of Scanderbeg, the Albanian hero on whom Marlowe is supposed to have written a play, as Two Notable Commentaries" (1.218).

References to the Play

A poem in Gabriel Harvey's "Foure Sonets" in his New Letter of Notable Contents (1593) is sometimes thought to contain references to the lost play and to associate Marlowe with the title:

III The Writer's Postscript: or a frendly Caueat to the Second Shakerley of Powles.

Slumbring I lay in melancholy bed,
Before the dawning of the sanguin light:
When Eccho shrill, or some Familiar Spright,
Buzzed an Epitaph into my hed.

Magnifique Mindes, bred of Gargantuas race,
In grisly weedes His Obsequies waiment,
Whose Corps on Powles, whose mind triumph'd on Kent
Scorning to bate Sir Rodomont an ace.
I mus'd awhile: and hauing mus'd awhile,
Iesu, (quoth I) is that Gargantua minde
Conquerd, and left no Scanderbeg behinde?
Vowed he not to Powles A Second bile?
What bile or kibe? (quoth that same early Spright)
Haue you forgot the Scanderbegging wight?

(qtd. in Moore 344)

Critical Commentary

Chambers (4.400) asserted that "There seems no adequate reason for ascribing this to Marlowe (q.v.) or Nashe."

Hale Moore, analysing Gabriel Harvey's ostensible references to Marlowe, cites Harvey's line, "is that Gargantua mind conquered and left no Scanderbeg behind? Vowed he not to Paul's a second bile?" and records Fleay's enthusiastic interpretation of this allusion:

This seems to indicate an affected surprise that Marlowe had not published Scanderbeg as well as Tamberlane, and surely attributes its authorship to Marlowe. The dates would suit very well, for a play performed by the Earl of Oxford's men could not be later than 1588; and Harvey would be likely to know of such plays of Marlowe's as were written at Cambridge and taken with him to London in 1587. This may, then,- have been a play performed before any of Marlowe's extant plays, in 1587; and Marlowe may have 'vowed a second bile' to Paul's by an intended publication of it. (Fleay 2.65)

Moore, however, dismisses the notion of any Scanderbeg connection on the Occam's Razor grounds that "The N.E.D. notes the word as an epithet of abuse, a rascal," observing that "Like Tamberlaine and Ismail, Scanderbeg was regularly used as a synonym for the mighty warrior and conqueror" (353). He thus concludes that "it is possible to understand the words without seeking for a hidden meaning" (353).

Lisa Hopkins has recently elaborated on this allusion's significance:

It is also often said that Marlowe wrote a lost play on the history of the Albanian patriot George Scanderbeg, but the only evidence for this is Gabriel Harvey’s reference to ‘a Scanderbegging wight’ in ‘Gorgon’, which Charles Nicholl has convincingly suggested actually refers to Peter Shakerley (Nicholl 2002: 74-6).

For What It's Worth

<Enter any miscellaneous points that may be relevant, but don't fit into the above categories. This is the best place for highly conjectural thoughts.>

Works Cited

Bakeless, John. The Tragicall History of Christopher Marlowe. 2 vols. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1942. Print.

Fleay, F. G. A Biographical Chronicle of the English Drama, 1559-1642. vol. 2. London, 1891. Print. Internet Archive

Hopkins, Lisa. Christopher Marlowe, Renaissance Dramatist. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2008. Print.

Moore, Hale. "Gabriel Harvey's References to Marlowe." Studies in Philology 23.3 (1926): 337-57. Print. JSTOR

Williams, Franklin B., Jr. "Spenser, Shakespeare, and Zachary Jones." Shakespeare Quarterly 19.3 (1968): 205-12. Print. JSTOR

Site created and maintained by David McInnis, University of Melbourne; updated 08 Aug 2011.