Tamburlaine the Great

"Arguably the single-most important play of the Elizabethan era, Tamburlaine did more than any other to transform an insignificant form of public entertainment, barely distinguishable from the juggling, fencing, and animal-baiting with which it shared its performance space, into an art of national importance. . . . Tamburlaine cranks the excitements of language and spectacle to an unprecedented pitch, not simply to indulge the fantasies of the audience but as an exemplary demonstration of poetry's dangerous potency." -The New York Review of Books