Tamar Cham, Parts 1 and 2

Anon. (1592)


Historical Records

This plot, transcribed by Steevens and printed by Isaac Reed in the "Variorum" Shakespeare of 1803, has since disappeared. Only the published transcription survives. The following is Greg's reprinting, from Henslowe Papers 145-48 (Internet Archive):

Greg, Tamar Cham, 1.jpg Greg, Tamar Cham, 2.jpg


Greg, Tamar Cham, 3.jpg Greg, Tamar Cham, 4.jpg




Theatrical Provenance

Initially produced by Strange's, with Part 2 being performed on 28 April 1592 (marked "ne" by Henslowe). The plays were acquired by the Admiral's by 1596, when Part 1 was revived on 06 May and Part 2 on 11 June. The Admiral's bought the book of the plays from Alleyn in 1602.


Probable Genre(s)

Tragedy; Eastern conqueror.


Possible Narrative and Dramatic Sources or Analogues

Greg Papers 154 Tamar Cham castlist.jpg
Greg's reconstructed castlist for the 1602 revival of "Tamar Cham",
based on the plot (Greg, Papers, 154)



References to the Play

In Dekker's The Shoemaker's Holiday (1600), Simon Eyre refers to Tamar Cham's beard:

Eyre. My liege, a very boy, a stripling, a younker. You see not a white hair on my head, not a grey in this beard. Every hair, I assure thy Majesty, that sticks in this beard Sim Eyre values at the King of Babylon's ransom. Tamar Cham's beard was a rubbing-brush to't. Yet I'll shave it off and stuff tennis balls with it to please my bully King. (XXI.20-25)

In their gloss to this line, the Revels editors suggest that "[p]erhaps something special was made of the hero's beard" in the lost "Tamar Cham" plays, and further note the recurrence of beard imagery in Much Ado, when Benedick offers to fetch "a hair off the great Cham's beard" (II.i.237-8).

In Timber: or, Discoveries, Jonson complained of "the Tamerlanes, and Tamer-Chams of the late Age, which had nothing in them but the scenicall strutting, and furious vociferation, to warrant them to the ignorant gapers" (H&S 8.587).


Critical Commentary

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See also Wiggins serial number 906 and 925.


For What It's Worth

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Works Cited

Dekker, Thomas. The Shoemaker's Holiday. ed. R. L. Smallwood and Stanley Wells. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1979, rpt.1999. The Revels Plays.

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