ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the moment in the 1580s in which two of the Elizabethan period’s most influential playwrights introduced prose into their plays. In 1 Tamburlaine and in The Spanish Tragedy, respectively, both Christopher Marlowe and Thomas Kyd feature scenes in which characters speak prose from or next to a box, neatly providing a metaphor for the emergence of this second language on the Renaissance stage. The chapter also explores the textures of Marlowe’s dramatic prose in some detail.
