New lands had been discovered, new territories opened up, wonders exposed which were perhaps only the first fruits of greater wonders to come.

Spenser makes the voyagers his warrant for his excursion into fairyland.

Some, he says, have condemned his fairy world as an idle fiction, "But let that man with better sense advise; That of the world least part to us is red; And daily how through hardy enterprise Many great regions are discovered, Which to late age were never mentioned.
Who ever heard of the 'Indian Peru'?
Or who in venturous vessel measured The Amazon, huge river, now found true?
Or fruitfullest Virginia who did ever view?
"Yet all these were, when no man did them know, Yet have from wiser ages hidden been; And later times things more unknown shall show." It is in the drama that this spirit of adventure caught from the voyagers gets its full play.

"Without the voyagers," says Professor Walter Raleigh,[1] "Marlowe is inconceivable." His imagination in every one of his plays is preoccupied with the lust of adventure, and the wealth and power adventure brings.

Tamburlaine, Eastern conqueror though he is, is at heart an Englishman of the school of Hawkins and Drake.
Indeed the comparison must have occurred to his own age, for a historian of the day, the antiquary Stow, declares Drake to have been "as famous in Europe and America as Tamburlaine was in Asia and Africa." The high-sounding names and quests which seem to us to give the play an air of unreality and romance were to the Elizabethans real and actual; things as strange and foreign were to be heard any day amongst the motley crowd in the Bankside outside the theatre door.