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Timour the Tartar and Poe's Tamerlane
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
Suggestions for the primary source of Poe's Tamerlane have been either indefinite or improbable. Killis Campbell suggested that while Poe was at school in London he may have learned something of the part played by Tamerlane in history, and that either then or after his return to Richmond in 1820 he may have become acquainted with some of the literary versions of the story. He considered the possibility of Poe's having seen one of the Tamerlane plays on the stage, and noted that Timour the Tartar was acted in Baltimore as late as 1829. Mary E. Phillips advanced the possibility that Poe may have come across a copy of the play Tamerlane in the library of Rector Bransby, since the rôle of Dervish in Tamerlane at Drury Lane was taken by a Mr. Bransby who might have been a relative of Rector Bransby.
- Type
- Research Article
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1941
References
1 Killis Campbell, The Poems of Edgar Allan Poe (New York: Ginn and Company, 1917), p. 148.
2 Mary E. Phillips, Edgar Allan Poe The Man (Chicago: The John C. Winston Company, 1926), i, 161.
3 See my article, “The Proprietors of Richmond's New Theatre of 1819,” William and Mary College Quarterly, Second Series, xix (1939), 302–308.
4 Compiler (Richmond), July 12, 1822.
5 Ibid., July 17, 1822.
6 M. G. Lewis, Timour the Tarlar (London: Lowndes & Hobbs, n. d.), pp. 55–56.
7 Campbell, op. cit., p. 2.
8 The Compiler, July 17, 1822, referred to Timour the Tartar as “having been received on Friday evening with rapturous bursts of applause.”
9 Hervey Allen, Israfel: The Life and Times of Edgar Allan Poe (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1934), p. 141, Cf. p. 165.
10 Op. cit., p. 147.