The prologue to Marlowe's Tamburlaine proclaims its author's contempt for the stage verse of the period, in which the "jygging vaines of riming mother wits" presented the "conceits [which] clownage keepes in pay": instead the new play promised a barbaric foreign hero, the "Scythian Tamburlaine, Threatning the world with high astounding terms." English drama was never the same again.