Critical Evaluation
A study of driving ambition, Tamburlaine the Great is also notable for the dignity and beauty of Christopher Marlowe’s lines. The poetry of the play is all the more remarkable for being among the first written in English blank verse. Marlowe wrote with so much original invention, that for a time many scholars believed him the author of some plays now attributed to William Shakespeare. It is safe to say that Marlowe is the best of the pre-Shakespearean playwrights.
Marlowe’s turbulent life ended tragically, and perhaps characteristically, in a barroom brawl with a man named Ingram Frizer. Even though he was only twenty-nine when he died, Marlowe managed to set a precedent for the development of English drama by leaving behind a model of Senecan dramatic form. His first production, Tamburlaine the Great, more a dramatic masque than a play, was a milestone of early Elizabethan drama. Certainly Shakespeare must have been influenced, especially in Julius Caesar (pr. c. 1599-1600, pb. 1623), by the conjunction of “Nature,” “Fortune,” and “stars” in the construction of Tamburlaine’s character. Above all, Marlowe made blank verse the accepted mode of Elizabethan theatrical expression, both to reflect delicate grace and to pronounce such mighty lines as, “Even as when windy exhalations/ Fighting for passage, tilt within the earth.” The character Tamburlaine is shown capable of a certain tenderness because of Marlowe’s poetic versatility. As the hero says to Zenocrate, “With milk-white harts upon an ivory sled/ Thou shalt be drawn amidst the frozen pools,/ And scale the icy mountains’ lofty tops,/ Which with thy beauty will be soon resolv’d.”
Basing his drama on the history of Timur the Lane (1336-1406), a Mongol conqueror and descendant of Genghis Khan, Marlowe constructed his first Herculean hero as a bloodthirsty personification of the Renaissance spirit of boldness, defiance, and determination who tests the limitations of human ability. Invulnerable to all attacks but that of death, Tamburlaine moves toward his goals undaunted by considerations of destiny or accidental circumstances. He is the master of his own destiny simply because he decides to be and finds no one strong enough to deny him his ambitions. He says to Theridamas, “Forsake thy king, and do but join with me/ And we will triumph over all the world:/ I hold the Fates bound fast in iron chains,/ And with my hand turn Fortune’s wheel about.” Here is the hubris of classical Athenian tragedy, but with a difference: Tamburlaine is not struck down because of it; instead, he succeeds in everything he has time to undertake. One of the most effective moments of part 2, which is overall less compelling than part 1, is the passage in act 5 when Tamburlaine says, “Give me a map; then let me see how much/ Is left for me to conquer all the world.” Only physical inevitabilities bring Marlowe’s hero low, although it is clear that he becomes somewhat vulnerable once he gains love and possessions and sons.
He succeeds in attaining his goals because he regards the world and every thing and every person in it as an object. It is not surprising that his mighty, rhetorical speeches are filled with references to crimson robes, meteors, jewels, vermilion tents, and gold crowns. There is, in fact, a close connection between Tamburlaine’s rhetoric and his achievements. He is godlike in the sense that what he says he does; his words become deeds. It is not surprising that he regards even Zenocrate’s dead body as an object “Embalm’d with cassia, ambergris, and myrrh/ Not lapp’d in lead, but in a sheet of gold.” It is but...
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another splendid, colorful object under his control to preserve or to destroy. In the same vein, he uses his victims as horses to pull his chariots. Tamburlaine is the egotistic dream of the Renaissance epitomized: “Of stature tall, and straightly fashioned/ Like his desire, lift upwards and divine.” In the correspondence between his appearance and his character there is a prediction of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, but the difference between the two heroes—Tamburlaine does not falter in his purpose for a moment—is much more striking than any similarities.
From the very beginning, after Tamburlaine steps into the power vacuum created by Mycetes’ insufficiency (which is described as the inability to use “great and thundering speech”), the play is a series of episodic atrocities, connected only by the unswerving ambition of the hero. The action of the play has as such little to recommend it by way of originality or structural genius. The hero is both the center and the continuity of the work. Cosroe calls him the model of humanity, as Shakespeare was to call his Hamlet and his Brutus. One of Tamburlaine’s most sympathetic characteristics is his never waning enthusiasm—the sprezzatura of the Italian Renaissance: Tamb.: What say my other friends? Will you be kings? Tech.: Ay, if I could, with all my heart, my lord. Tamb.: Why, that’s well said, Techelles, so would I.
Combined with this essential enthusiasm is Tamburlaine’s expression of a typically Renaissance longing for the infinite of something, whether it be the infinite knowledge sought by Faustus, the infinite riches desired by the Jew of Malta, or Tamburlaine’s insatiable thirst for power. Marlowe’s prologue promises that the hero will be seen “threatening the world with high astounding terms,” and all three last words have thematic significance. Tamburlaine’s description of himself as “the chiefest lamp of all the earth” is the most explicit indication that he desires to join the company of the stars, that is, to escape from earth and wander among realms unknown to ordinary humans. The root of the word “astounding” is related to the intensely rhetorical nature of Tamburlaine’s every speech. Indeed, his approach to stellar glory is primarily through the flamboyant energy of his language—Marlowe’s “mighty line.” It is no coincidence that Tamburlaine is rarely seen in action but usually in speech.
Finally, the word “terms” draws the thematic structure together and indicates the boundaries and limitations of human experience and behavior that Tamburlaine means to break through and cast aside with his speech. This explains why his victims are always so startled. He has no respect for ordinary conventions and not only does the most outlandish things to kings and generals but also slays them. However, it is just as important to note that Tamburlaine has no divine aspirations. What he seeks to accomplish remains human: “A god is not so glorious as a king:/ I think the pleasures they enjoy in heaven/ Cannot compare with kingly joys in earth.” It is for his successful extension of human terms that Tamburlaine becomes a seminal character in the development of English Renaissance drama.
