Nicholas Rowe, Samuel Johnson, and Rambler 140

In paragraph four of Rambler 140—the second of a two-part critical disquisition on Milton’s Samson Agonistes—Samuel Johnson writes:

It is common among the tragick poets to introduce their persons alluding to events or opinions, of which they could not possibly have any knowledge. The barbarians of remote or newly discovered regions often display their skill in European learning. The god of love is mentioned in Tamerlane with all the familiarity of a Roman epigrammatist; and a late writer has put Harvey’s doctrine of the circulation of the blood into the mouth of a Turkish statesman, who lived near two centuries before it was known even to philosophers or anatomists.²

Yale Works Rambler editor W. J. Bate, glosses the allusion as Christopher Marlowe’s 1590 tragedy, Tamburlaine the Great. However, given the orthographic consonance linking the plays’ titles and the verbal echo of “god of love,” it seems far more likely that Johnson in fact alludes to Nicholas Rowe’s 1701 heroic drama Tamerlane.

The phrase “with all the familiarity of a Roman epigrammatist” provides an additional clue, since it seems far more applicable to Rowe’s elaboration than to Marlowe’s terseness:

Marlowe, Tamburlaine the Great, Part Two: Proud furie, and intollorable fit, That dares torment the body of my Love, And scourge the Scourge of the immortall God: Now are those Spheares, where Cupid usde to sit, Wounding the world with woonder and with love, Sadly supplied with pale and ghastly death, Whose darts do pierce the Center of my soule.3

Rowe, Tamerlane This dull Despair Is the Soul’s Laziness: Rouse to the Combat, And thou art sure to conquer. War shall restore thee; The Sound of Arms shall wake thy martial Ardour, And cure this amorous Sickness of thy Soul, Begun by Sloth, and nurs’d by too much Ease; The idle God of Love supinely dreams, Amidst inglorious Shades and purling Streams; In rosie Fetters, and fantastick Chains, He binds deluded Maids and simple Swains, With soft Enjoyments, wooes ’em to forget The hardy Toils, and Labours of the Great. But if the warlike Trumpet’s loud Alarms To virtuous Acts excite, and manly Arms; The Coward Boy avows his abject Fear, On silken Wings sublime he cuts the Air, Scar’d at the noble Noise, and Thunder of the War.4

Marlowe’s use of Cupid is merely conventional (wounding, darts, smitten howling, etc.), whereas Rowe paints a vivid picture of a god lazily reposing in a pastoral setting, happy enough to harmlessly bind and chain with flimsy fetters (note the absence of the conventional arrows), but much too cowardly to take to real, “manly Arms.” That sounds like the sort of “familiarity” that Johnson suggests: a cheeky take on an old tradition, while the only “familiarity” Marlowe exhibits is a mere acknowledgment of the tradition.

Further support for my argument may be found in Johnson’s “Life of Rowe” (1781): “Rowe does not always remember what his characters require. In Tamerlane there is some ridiculous mention of the God of Love; and Rodogune, a savage Saxon, talks of Venus, and the eagle that bears the thunder of Jupiter” (Yale Works, 22:582). Johnson is known to have composed both the lives of Congreve and Rowe while relying entirely on his memory of their works;⁵ here his rereading of Rowe in this instance simply reinforced an observation he had most likely made three decades earlier and which was fastened firmly to his mind.

According to the General Advertiser (April 9–10, 1751), Rowe’s Tamerlane was to be staged on Thursday, April 11, at the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden, some five weeks before Rambler 140 was published. The same newspaper later advertised performances of Tamerlane on November 4–5, 1751, timed obviously to coincide with the anniversary of the Gunpowder Plot, one of several days set aside to recall the events of the Stuart era; Rowe intended the character of Tamerlane to reflect the end of this era in 1688, the reign of William III (and Mary).

Another significant point...