Selimus: Chronology of Significant Events

Date Event
1402 Bayezid I defeated by Timur the Lame (i.e. the historical source for the protagonist of Marlowe’s Tamburlaine)
December 1447 Birth of Bayezid II (i.e. Bajazeth in the play)
1453 Defeat of Byzantine Empire and occupation of Byzantium by Mehmud II, Bayezid II’s father; Byzantium becomes seat of the Ottoman Empire and is renamed Istanbul
July 1456 Mehmud II defeated at the Battle of Belgrade
1470 Birth of Selim I (i.e. Selimus in the play)
May 1481 Death of Mehmud II; Bayezid II succeeds him as Sultan of the Ottoman Empire
1481-1482 Ottoman Civil War, Bayezid II contending with an uprising led by his younger brother Cem
1485-1491 Mameluke-Ottoman War
1492 Beginning of a large-scale expulsion of Jewish people from the Iberian Peninsula as part of the Spanish Inquisition; many of these people were rescued by Bayezid II and welcomed into Ottoman territories
November 1494 Suleiman, son of Selim I, born
February 1495 Cem, Bayezid II’s exiled younger brother, dies in Naples
April 1495 Hungarian-Ottoman Truce signed
1499-1501 Venetian-Ottoman War
1501 Foundation of Safavid state led by Shah Ismael I (the Ismael alluded to in the play
September 1509 Istanbul devastated by earthquake
1510 Bayezid II’s son Alemsah dies
April 1511 Grand Vezir Hadim Ali Pasha (i.e. father of the play’s Hali Bassa) killed leading a force against a shia uprising
July 1511 Bayezid II soundly defeats Selim I near Chiurlu
April 1512 Bayezid II deposed; Selim I becomes Sultan of Ottoman Empire
May 1512 Bayezid II dies on the road to his birthplace Demotika
March 1513 Capture and execution of Selim I’s oldest brother Korkud (i.e. Corcut in the play)
April 1513 Defeat and execution of Selim I’s older brother Ahmed (i.e. Acomat in the play)
1514 Selim I defeats the Persians and their leader Shah Ismael I
1517 Selim I defeats Egypt and its leader Tuman Bey II
September 1520 Death of Selim I; Suleiman (i.e. Suleiman I, who will become known as Suleiman the Magnificent) succeeds his father as Sultan of the Ottoman Empire
1529 Ottoman Siege of Venice
1530 Paulo Giovio finishes his Commentario de le cose de’ Turchi; the title is printed in Rome in 1532
1541 Ottoman Siege and Defeat of Buda
1546 Peter Ashton’s A Short Treatise upon the Turkes Chronicles, a translation of a Latin version of Paulo Giovio’s Commentario de le cose de’ Turchi, printed
September 1566 Suleiman I dies; his son Selim (i.e. Selim II) succeeds him as Sultan of the Ottoman Empire
December 1574 Selim II dies; his son Murad (i.e Murad III) succeeds him as Sultan of the Ottoman Empire
1581 Levant Company established in London
1583 Queen’s Men formed
1587 1 Tamburlaine written and staged
1588 2 Tamburlaine written and staged
September, 1588 Death of Richard Tarlton, star clown actor of the Queen’s Men
1590 Richard Jones publishes two-part Tamburlaine the Great
1592 Selimus likely written and staged
September, 1592 Death of Robert Greene
1592-1593 London plague; playhouses closed
1593 Thomas Creede opens first printing house under the sign of the Catherine Wheel in Thames Street
1593 Richard Jones publishes the second edition of Tamburlaine the Great
May 1593 Murder of Christopher Marlowe
1594 Thomas Creede publishes The First Part of the Tragical Reign of Selimus
January 1595 Murad III dies; his son Mehmud (i.e. Mehmud III) succeeds him as Sultan of the Ottoman Empire
1595 Thomas Creede publishes The Lamentable Tragedy of Locrine
1600 Nicholas Ling, Cuthbert Burby, and Thomas Hayes publish Robert Allott’s England’s Parnassus, a collection of quotations that includes six passages from Selimus each attributed to Robert Greene
1603 Certaine hellish verses devysed by that Atheist and traitor Ralegh (Sc2 Sp1) appears in two Elizabethan manuscripts; these lines essentially reproduce Selimus’s opening long speech in Scene 2
1638 John Crooke and Richard Sergier reissue The First Part of the Tragical Reign of Selimus as The Tragedy of Selimus Emperor of the Turks. Written T.G.
1881-1886 Selimus reprinted as part of Alexander B. Grosart’s Life and Complete Works in Prose and Verse of Robert Greene
1898 Edited by Grosart, The Tragical Reign of Selimus, the first modernized, single edition of the play, published in the Temple Dramatists series

Prosopography

Andrew Griffin

Andrew Griffin is an associate professor in the department of English and an affiliate professor in the department of Theater and Dance at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is general editor (text) of Queen’s Men Editions. He studies early modern drama and early modern historiography while serving as the lead editor at the EMC Imprint. He has co-edited with Helen Ostovich and Holger Schott Syme Locating the Queen’s Men (2009) and has co-edited The Making of a Broadside Ballad (2016) with Patricia Fumerton and Carl Stahmer. His monograph, Untimely Deaths in Renaissance Drama: Biography, History, Catastrophe, was published with the University of Toronto Press in 2019. He is editor of the anonymous The Chronicle History of King Leir (Queen’s Men Editions, 2011). He can be contacted at griffin@english.ucsb.edu.

Helen Ostovich

Helen Ostovich, professor emerita of English at McMaster University, is the founder and general editor of Queen’s Men Editions. She is a general editor of The Revels Plays (Manchester University Press); Series Editor of Studies in Performance and Early Modern Drama (Ashgate, now Routledge), and series co-editor of Late Tudor and Stuart Drama (MIP); play-editor of several works by Ben Jonson, in Four Comedies: Ben Jonson (1997); Every Man Out of his Humour (Revels 2001); and The Magnetic Lady (Cambridge 2012). She has also edited the Norton Shakespeare 3 The Merry Wives of Windsor Q1602 and F1623 (2015); The Late Lancashire Witches and A Jovial Crew for Richard Brome Online, revised for a 4-volume set from OUP 2021; The Ball, for the Oxford Complete Works of James Shirley (2021); The Merry Wives of Windsor for Internet Shakespeare Editions, and The Dutch Courtesan (with Erin Julian) for the Complete Works of John Marston, OUP 2022. She has published many articles and book chapters on Jonson, Shakespeare, and others, and several book collections, most recently Magical Transformations of the Early Modern English Stage with Lisa Hopkins (2014), and the equivalent to book website, Performance as Research in Early English Theatre Studies: The Three Ladies of London in Context containing scripts, glossary, almost fifty conference papers edited and updated to essays; video; link to Queenʼs Mens Ediitons and YouTube: http://threeladiesoflondon.mcmaster.ca/contexts/index.htm, 2015. Recently, she was guest editor of Strangers and Aliens in London ca 1605, Special Issue on Marston, Early Theatre 23.1 (June 2020). She can be contacted at ostovich@mcmaster.ca.

Janelle Jenstad

Janelle Jenstad is a Professor of English at the University of Victoria, Director of The Map of Early Modern London, and Director of Linked Early Modern Drama Online. With Jennifer Roberts-Smith and Mark Kaethler, she co-edited Shakespeare’s Language in Digital Media: Old Words, New Tools (Routledge). She has edited John Stow’s A Survey of London (1598 text) for MoEML and is currently editing The Merchant of Venice (with Stephen Wittek) and Heywood’s 2 If You Know Not Me You Know Nobody for DRE. Her articles have appeared in Digital Humanities Quarterly, Elizabethan Theatre, Early Modern Literary Studies, Shakespeare Bulletin, Renaissance and Reformation, and The Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies. She contributed chapters to Approaches to Teaching Othello (MLA); Teaching Early Modern Literature from the Archives (MLA); Institutional Culture in Early Modern England (Brill); Shakespeare, Language, and the Stage (Arden); Performing Maternity in Early Modern England (Ashgate); New Directions in the Geohumanities (Routledge); Early Modern Studies and the Digital Turn (Iter); Placing Names: Enriching and Integrating Gazetteers (Indiana); Making Things and Drawing Boundaries (Minnesota); Rethinking Shakespeare Source Study: Audiences, Authors, and Digital Technologies (Routledge); and Civic Performance: Pageantry and Entertainments in Early Modern London (Routledge). For more details, see janellejenstad.com.

Kim Shortreed

Kim is a PhD Candidate in Media Studies and Digital Humanities, through UVicʼs English Department. Kim has worked for years in TEI and XML, mostly through the Colonial Despatches website, and in a number of roles, including technical editor, research and markup, writing and editing, documentation, and project management. Recently, Kim worked with a team of Indigenous students to find ways to decolonize the Despatches projectʼs content and encoding practices. Part of Kimʼs dissertation project, Contracolonial Practices in Salish Sea Namescapes, is to prototype a haptic map, a motion-activated topography installation that plays audio clips of spoken toponyms, in SENĆOŦEN and English, of the W̱SÁNEĆ Territory/Saanich Peninsula, respectively.

Kirk Melnikoff

Kirk Melnikoff is Professor of English at UNC Charlotte and a past president of the Marlowe Society of America. His research interests range from sixteenth-century British Literature and Culture, to Shakespeare in Performance, to Book History. His essays have appeared in a number of journals and books, and he is the author of Elizabethan Book Trade Publishing and the Makings of Literary Culture (U Toronto P, 2018). He has also edited four essay collections, most recently Christopher Marlowe, Theatrical Commerce, and the Book Trade (Cambridge UP, 2018), and published an edition of Robert Greene’s James IV in 2020. He is currently co-editing a collection of early modern book-trade wills which will be published by Manchester UP, editing Marlowe’s Edward II for the Oxford Marlowe: Collected Works project, and working on a monograph on bookselling in early modern England.

Martin Holmes

Martin Holmes has worked as a developer in the UVicʼs Humanities Computing and Media Centre for over two decades, and has been involved with dozens of Digital Humanities projects. He has served on the TEI Technical Council and as Managing Editor of the Journal of the TEI. He took over from Joey Takeda as lead developer on LEMDO in 2020. He is a collaborator on the SSHRC Partnership Grant led by Janelle Jenstad.

Navarra Houldin

Project manager 2022-present. Textual remediator 2021-present. Navarra Houldin (they/them) completed their BA in History and Spanish at the University of Victoria in 2022. During their degree, they worked as a teaching assistant with the University of Victoriaʼs Department of Hispanic and Italian Studies. Their primary research was on gender and sexuality in early modern Europe and Latin America.

Peter Cockett

Peter Cockett is an associate professor in the Theatre and Film Studies at McMaster University. He is the general editor (performance), and technical co-ordinating editor of Queen’s Men Editions. He was the stage director for the Shakespeare and the Queen’s Men project (SQM), directing King Leir, The Famous Victories of Henry V, and Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (2006) and he is the performance editor for our editions of those plays. The process behind those productions is documented in depth on his website Performing the Queen’s Men. Also featured on this site are his PAR productions of Clyomon and Clamydes (2009) and Three Ladies of London (2014). For the PLS, the University of Toronto’s Medieval and Renaissance Players, he has directed the Digby Mary Magdalene (2003) and the double bill of George Peele’s The Old Wives Tale and the Chester Antichrist (2004). He also directed An Experiment in Elizabethan Comedy (2005) for the SQM project and Inside Out: The Persistence of Allegory (2008) in collaboration with Alan Dessen. Peter is a professional actor and director with numerous stage and screen credits. He can be contacted at cockett@mcmaster.ca.

Orgography

LEMDO Team (LEMD1)

The LEMDO Team is based at the University of Victoria and normally comprises the project director, the lead developer, project manager, junior developers(s), remediators, encoders, and remediating editors.

Queenʼs Men Editions (QME1)

The Queen’s Men Editions anthology is led by Helen Ostovich, General Editor; Peter Cockett, General Editor (Performance); and Andrew Griffin, General Editor (Text).

University of Victoria (UVIC1)

https://www.uvic.ca/

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