The Complete Plays (104 page)

Semiramis
legendarily beautiful Assyrian queen, wife of Ninus, she refortified Babylon and built its hanging gardens.

Shatillian
Elizabethan spelling of Châtillon, town in France and the name of the prominent family of the Coligny.

Sichaeus
(Sychaeus) Dido's husband, whose murder at the hands of her brother Pygmalion drove her to flee to Africa.

Sidon
city in Phoenicia.

Silvanus
Roman god of the woods.

Sinon
Greek agent who deceived the Trojans into taking the Wooden Horse into Troy.

Sinus Arabicus
the Red Sea.

Sirens
female sea-deities who lured sailors to their deaths with their song.

Sixtus
Pope Sixtus V, pontiff 1585–90, who revolutionized and centralized the power of papal administration and virtually rebuilt Rome in the process; he also began the overtures to Henry of Navarre which eventually prompted his conversion to Catholicism.

Socrates
philosopher and teacher in 5th-century
BC
Athens, eventually executed for allegedly corrupting the morals of Athenian youth.

Soldino
coastal town opposite Cyprus.

Soria
(i) Syria; (ii) Zor, i.e. Tyre.

Stoka
Stoko, a town on the Dniester.

Styx
the principal river of the underworld.

Tanaïs
the river Don, the boundary of Europe and Asia.

Tenedos
an island off the coast of Troy.

Terrene Sea
the Mediterranean.

Tesella
area south of Oran in North Africa.

Thebes
Greek city in the province of Boeotia. The stones of its walls rose to the music of Amphion.

Themis
goddess of rights and customs, who sent an uncatchable fox to ravage Thebes in revenge for the death of the Sphinx; both the fox and the invincible hunting hound of Cephalus which pursued it were turned to stone by Zeus.

Thessaly
region of Greece famous for its drugs and witches.

Thetis
a sea-nymph, goddess and the mother of Achilles.

Tisiphone
snake-haired Fury; perpetrators of crimes within the family were particularly vulnerable to her persecutions.

Titus
Roman emperor
AD
79–81, conqueror of Jerusalem (
AD
70).

Trasimene
battlefield near Lake Trasimeno, north of Rome, where the Carthaginian commander Hannibal conquered the Romans in 217
BC
.

Trebizond
town in northern Turkey (modern Trabzon).

Trier
town in western Germany.

Triton
sea-god, sometimes half-human and half-fish.

Tully
Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43
BC
), Roman orator and statesman.

Turnus
king of Ardea in Italy, heroic antagonist in Virgil's
Aeneid
; he violently opposed the prophesied marriage between his betrothed, Lavinia, and Aeneas, but the latter killed him in single combat.

Typhon
(Typhoeus) formidable monster with a hundred serpentine heads; his offspring included the three-headed dog Cerberus, the Hydra, the Chimaera and the Sphinx.

Tyre
city in Phoenicia.

Tyros
the river Dniester, which runs through southern Russia.

Ulysses
(Odysseus) wily Greek hero who assisted in the fall of Troy. His adventures in returning home to his faithful wife, Penelope, are recounted in Homer's
Odyssey
.

Uz
biblical homeland of Job, bordering Palestine.

Vanholt
Anhalt in central Germany.

Venus
goddess of erotic love, notoriously unfaithful wife of Vulcan, sometime lover of Mars, and would-be seducer of Adonis.

Verna
Bulgarian seaport.

Vespasian
Titus Flavius Vespasianus, Roman emperor (
AD
69–79), he subdued a rebellion in Judaea, but failed to capture Jerusalem.

Virgil
Publius Vergilius Maro (70–19
BC
), Roman poet of the
Eclogues
, the
Georgics
and the
Aeneid
; buried just outside Naples; he later acquired the reputation of being an adept magician.

Volga
the river Volga; the maps of Ortelius which Marlowe used clearly showed its many tributaries.

Vulcan
Roman god of fire and metalwork, he forged the arms of the gods. He was married to the unfaithful Venus, whom he caught in a net as she made love with Mars. He was lame.

Xanthus
river near Troy.

Xerxes
Persian king (d. 465
BC
) who was said by Herodotus to have assembled the greatest army ever known in ancient times for his disastrous invasion of Greece in 480
BC
.

Zanzibar
in Ortelius's atlas, a south-western province of Africa.

Zona Mundi
(‘the girdle of the world') mountain range in the northern regions of Tartary in central Asia.

Zula
city to the north of the river Danube.

*
New readers are advised that this Introduction and the Commentary make details of the plot explicit.

*
Marlowe

*
Alleyn

*
Perkins