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DESIRE FOR SUPREME MILITARY POWER

TAMBURLAINE

Christopher Marlowe produced a daring and thrilling play

focusing on the triumphs of the Tartar Conqueror, Tamburlaine. His

first play staged with great success in 1587, is an event of profound

significance in the history of English theatre.

Tamburlaine the Great introduces the supply and swaggering

strain of blank verse which became the medium for all glories of

Elizabethan and Jacobean drama. Marlowe was famous for adeptly

incorporating the style of blank verse, unrhymed iambic pentameter

into English drama. The play was so popular that Marlowe was

compelled to write a sequel to Tamburlaine and his wife’s deaths.

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Marlowe’s Tamburlaine is a character who reveals his power in his

conquests, and the verse conveys brilliantly his sense of excitement.

Rich words trip off his tongue, relished for own sakes in a

manner which becomes characteristic of much English poetry. The

play has a shift from the conventional and low comic style of the

Renaissance works to a practically captivating form.

The actions of the play are not a straightforward glorification

of Tamburlaine’s violent conquests, since Marlowe frequently

highlights his protagonist’s excessive brutality and hubris, or

excessive pride. However, their directness and eloquence make it

difficult not to admire Tamburlaine, both for his rhetorical power

and his lifelike animation.

Alongside Tamburlaine’s ceaseless conquests and their

implications about politics run more general themes of desire,
ambition, and power. Marlowe uses his portrayal of Tamburlaine’s
capture, betrothal, marriage and ultimate loss of his wife Zenocrate,
the daughter of the Egyptian “Soldan”, or Sultan, to highlight these
themes in another context, questioning the true nature of his hero’s
romantic passion.
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The important thing is that Marlowe depicts all the themes

through unique power of Renaissance that is to say; perhaps the

most important aspect of the Renaissance was the aspiration of

man’s spirit after knowledge and power. From this point of view, he

expresses the essential Renaissance spirit when he says:

Nature, that framed us of four elements

warring within our breasts for regiments,

Doth teach us all to have aspiring minds.

Our souls, whose faculties can comprehend

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The wonderous architecture of the world,

It would be difficult to list the characteristics of the

Renaissance in a graded order but with the aspiration that

recognized no limits, there went a wondering speculation about the

mystery of beauty. Tamburlaine being a man of strong decision

and action and also being born a poor shepherd, he raises his

courage and his brilliant use of words to marry with the most

beautiful woman in the world, the divine Zenocrate. By force of

arms and power of will the great warrior Tamburlaine overthrows,

one after another, the established hereditary rulers of the world.

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This is the Renaissance man’s characteristics of unlimited power

and abilities and force. So, Marlowe was the first true voice of the

Renaissance – the period of new learning, new freedom, and new

enterprise and of the worship of Man rather than God. In support of

this view G.R. Kanwal remarks:

That dawn that Marlowe sang into our skies

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with mouth of gold and morning in his eyes.

A brief discussion of Marlowe’s great plays will preserve his

reputation both historically and aesthetically in the chronicle of

English drama.

Source and Concept: Marlowe found his chief source for

Tamburlaine in Thomas Fortescue’s The Forest, a translation of

Silvade Varia Lection of Pedro Mexia, but he used other sources as

well, perhaps most notably George Whetstone’s The English Mirror

and Magni Tamerlains Scythianrum Imperotoris Vita of Petrus

Perondinus. The story of the Scythian conqueror was widely known

in Elizabethan England, and it may be found in many places. By the

time it reached Marlowe, the character of Tamburlaine had thus

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pretty well been moulded by literary and historical tradition. This

tradition had two facets. On the one hand, Tamburlaine had been

glorified in the writings of Italian humanists, beginning with Peggio

Bracciolini in his Devarictate fortunae libri quarttor as the perfect

prince, the symbol of Renaissance virtue. Although a pagan

himself, Tamburlaine was glorified as the defender of Christian

Europe against the Turks. Marlowe’s play carries on this picture

created by the Italian humanists. Alongside, this apotheosis of the

Mongol Conqueror, however, had grown up a parallel tradition.

This idea appeared, as Battenhouse points out, in Marlowe’s most

immediate source, Fortescue’s The Forest. Marlowe thus inherited

an account which was already cast for him in conventional

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Christian terms.

This flamboyant story of the conquering Scythian Shepherd,

presented in a richly declamatory blank verse abounding in

colourful images of power and violence, brought a new kind of life

to the English theatre.

This is a study of lust for power and military achievement

gloried in almost esthetically for its own sake, which requires and
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receives - “a great and thundering speech.” All the excitement of

new geographical discoveries, all the richly luxurious implication

which oriented splendor had held for the accidental imagination.

Ever since the temperate Greeks faced the extravagant Persians or

the restrained self-indulgences of Horace repudiated the “Persicos

apparatus.” All the new glory of Elizabethan poetic utterance, the

Renaissance feeling the virtue the fascination with what man can

achieve along a single line of Endeavour if he sets his mind and

heart to it with sufficient fervor and lyrical enthusiasm.

The interest in pride, in lust for power, in man as master of

his own destiny are challenging and vying with the goals - “How

noble in reason! How infinite in faculties! In form and moving, how

expressive and admirable! In action, how like an angel! In

apprehension, how like a god! - and imagining that by an effort of

the will he can control Fortune’ wheel - all this is in Tamburlaine, a

play which ignores moral considerations to exhibit the

impressiveness of boundless ambition coupled with determination

and self-confidence that similarly know no limits.

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The power of Tamburlaine’s desire equates that of Phaethon,

of Croeton and of Lucifer himself. It is to sit in the seat of the Gods

and to have power over life and death. That’s why before the battle

against Mycetes, Tamburlaine defies the gods and threatens to

chase the stars from heaven with the sun-bright armour of his forces

because, to Tamburlaine’s way of thinking, kings already pass this

power on earth, this strangest aspiration finds its goal in kingship.

To the repetition of the following incantatory question to his

followers:

Is it not brave to be a king, Techelles ?

Usumcasane and Theridamas,

Is it not passing brave to be a king,

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And ride in triumph through Pessepolis?

USUMCASANE replies, with significant stress on superhuman

power:

To be a king, is half to be a God,

THERIDAMAS adds:

A god is not so glorious as a king.

I think the pleasure they enjoy in heaven

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Cannot compare with kingly joys in earth:

To wear a crown enchased with pearl and gold,

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Whose virtues carry with it life and death,

Even before the victory over Mycetes which gains

Tamburlaine his throne, Menaphone sees him as an uncrowned

king, already wielding this authority. The godlike power to spare or

stay is, therefore, the submission of Tamburlaine’s desire - a

misdirected desire, because it makes the royal prerogative an end in

itself rather than the means to justice.

Theme: One of Tamburlaine’s principal themes is conveyed

in its depiction of excessive cruelty and ambition. In fact, the theme

of Power pervades nearly every aspect of the play, from

Tamburlaine’s conquests, to his role as a father, to his relationship

with Zenocrate. Tamburlaine’s military brilliance and his ability to

carry out such horrendous acts, such as slaughtering the population

of Babylon, are the results of these characteristic traits, as are - his

eloquence and rhetorical power and convincing mind.

The theme of the first part of Tamburlaine is the power and

splendour of the human will which bears down all opposition and
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by its own native force achieves its desires. Tamburlaine is shown

to us in the double role of warrior and lover. In both he is

irresistible and the play reaches its climax in his conquest of

Zenocrate’s father, the Soldan, and the crowning of Zenocrate as

Queen and Empress of the kingdoms he has conquered.

The structure of the play is extremely simple and could be

plotted as a single rising line on a graph. There are no setbacks. The

world into which Tamburlaine, the unknown Scythian Shepherd,

bursts like a kind of portent is decadent, divided and torn by petty

strife. Little dignity or grandeur is given to his opponents and, as

Miss Ellis-Fermor justly remarks:

The tragic pity, voiced by Zenocrate,

for ‘the Turk and his great empress’

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is allowed only slight scope.

Opposition appears to melt away at Tamburlaine’s mere

appearance. Theridamas, sent with an army against him, is won

ever by his presence and comes over to his side without a battle;

Cosroe, who dethrones his brother and plans to use Tamburlaine for
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his own purposes, is easily overthrown. In love the path is equally

straight.

Zenocrate, betrothed to the prince of Arabia, when captured by

Tamburlaine, makes no defiance. We are not even shown a wooing!

At their second meeting, she is already in love with him and yields

without a show of resistance, seeking to range herself on his side, as

the others do, by instinct.

The second part is very different and shows that man’s

desires and aspirations may be limitless, but their fulfilment is

limited by forces outside the control of the will. There are certain

facts, of which death is the most obvious, which no aspiration and

no force of soul can conquer. There is a sort of stubbornness in the

stuff of experience which frustrates and resists the human will. This

world is not the plaything of the ambitious mind. There are even

hints in the play that there is an order in the world, of which man’s

minds are apart, and man acts against this order at his peril. This

theme is clashed between man’s desires; and his experience

demands a more complex structure for its expression than was

demanded by the theme of the triumphant human will in the first

part.
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Technique: Marlowe’s critics tend to agree that Marlowe’s

innovation in verse by using mighty lines was the first and foremost

influential stylistic achievement of the era. It was Tamburlaine the

Great that made this powerful verse style famous. Marlowe

stresses: Jigging veins of rhyming mother wits. Marlowe wanted to

create a work of high philosophical ambition and powerful,

astounding verse. He was perhaps the chief innovator to instil blank

verse - with emotional force and rhythmic eloquence, and he was

also influential in skillfully suiting his character’s temperaments to

the nature of their lines. Tamburlaine’s lines, for example, are not

just musical and eloquent but extremely powerful and majestic,

with hard consonant sounds and decisive, accented peaks and

flourishes, while those of Calyphas and Mycetes rhyme

ineffectually and repeat sounds frequently, to no purpose. As the

climax of a rhythmic build-up through three powerful lines the

stress is shifted from ‘ride to ‘triumph’ and Perrepolis is translated

from a geographic fact into an imaginative El Dorado:

MENAPHON Your majesty shall shortly have your wish,

And ride in triumph through Perrepolis.

TAMBURLAINE And ride in triumph through Perrepolis!

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It is not brave to be a king, Techelles?

Usumcasane and Theridamas,

Is it not passing brave to be a king,

And ride in triumph through Perrepolis? 7

This transformation of routine statement into sensuous vision

is specifically a dramatic effect, the use of poetry for dramatic

effect. It is also the transformation of routine blank verse into

Marlowe’s ‘mighty line’: in the final form it is, as Marlowe’s verse

is said always to be end-stopped – on that depends its peculiar

rhythmic splendour.

Tamburlaine’s power of rhetoric is critical to his military

triumphs. Its rhetoric compels Theridamas to join him and allows

him to inspire his soldiers to victory. Also Tamburlaine relies on

rhetoric to win over Zenocrate and instruct his sons in the arts of

war. Of course, he supports his rhetoric with his majestic looks and

forceful actions, but this style and technique of speech is the key

means by which he is able to communicate his power.

Marlowe saw rhetoric as one of the most important keys to

power and truth. In fact, he wrote such grand and forceful speeches
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that writers began to parody Marlowe’s style and technique after

Tamburlaine the Great became famous, seeing Marlowe as the

prime example of powerful writer. The verse conveys brilliantly his

sense of excitement. Rich words trip off his tongue, relished for

own sakes in a manner which became characteristic of much

English poetry. Of course, Elizabethan audiences might sometimes

find Tamburlaine pompous, but his rhetoric is the dramatist’s chief

tools in portraying Tamburlaine as such a captivating figure.

The style of Tamburlaine is well as it serves the expression

of a variety of motifs, and is remarkably uniform. It is partly

achieved by the grandiloquence of the blank verse; however, it is

also permeated and coloured throughout by a rich metaphorical

quality; and is marked by distinctive, a syntactical and stylistic

patterns and by a distinctive vocabulary. 8

Power: The play opens with a prologue declaring that, unlike

the silly wordplay of previous literature, this play will feature the

“high astounding” words and actions of a conqueror. Actually, the

shepherd Tamburlaine wants to become as a god ; this is the

Renaissance man’s desire and ambition, for example, Tamburlaine

says as much in Act 1 scene II as :

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Jove sometimes masked in a shepherd’s weed;

And by those steps that he hath scaled the heavens

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May we become immortal like the gods.

In the next scene, Tamburlaine depicts with military power

that Zenocrate is made important before she even speaks as a

captive of Tamburlaine and his soldiers who are laden with

Egyptian treasure from her possession. Tamburlaine captured the

Egyptian Princess Zenocrate, daughter of Soldan of Egypt. She

remains with him as his concubine, and then his wife, until her

death. Initially, she resists Tamburlaine’s romantic suit and calls

herself “wretched” because she is forced to remain with him. She

entreats him to release her but Tamburlaine explains his inability to

do so in the following words: ‘But, lady, this fair face and heavenly

hue must grace his bed that conquers Asia’. He then proudly

describes, with utter certainty his future as a mighty conqueror.

Act III depicts the siege of Constantinople and introduces

Tamburlaine’s opponent Bajazeth, the emperor of Turkey, who sets

himself up as a formidable adversary. Bajazeth is a proud Islamic

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leader who ultimately beats his brains out on his cage rather than be

subject to more humiliation and starvation.

A number of adversaries rise to the challenge of verbal

combat, notably Bajazeth in part-I. Tamburlaine’s power dismisses

Bajazeth’s basso sent to warn him to back down in the face of

overwhelming numbers; Bajazeth, meanwhile, entered and a direct

challenge follows. Marlowe depicts Bajazeth and Tamburlaine

threatening each other roaring at one another like animals facing

each other down. Bajazeth was the most powerful of Tamburlaine’s

adversaries in the play. They prepare to draw up battle by handing

over their crowns to their women, Zenocrate and Zabina and for the

duration of the combat, the women exchange insults. In Act III,

scene III, as their lord’s march into battle, their two female

counterparts, Zenocrate and Zabina, also indulge in an exchange of

tirades, at that perilous situation.

ZABINA Base concubine, must thou be plac’d by me

That am the empress of the mighty Turk?

ZENOCRATE Disdainful Turkers, and unreverend boss

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Call’st thou me concubine, that am

betrothed unto the great and mighty]

Tamburlaine?

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ZABINA To Tamburlaine, the great Tartarian thief!

Though opponents are confident of victory in their challenges

to Tamburlaine, the shepherd Tamburlaine is ultimately victorious

in the battle. Bajazeth’s contributory kings’ are all killed and their

crowns are claimed by Tamburlaine’s allies, and Zabina’s crown is

given to Zenocrate. He asserts that he will not ransom Bajazeth: it is

power not wealth that motives him. As related, an ideal scene in

Tamburlaine is where Tamburlaine uses Emperor Bajazeth as his

footstool:

TAMBURLAINE Bring out my footstool

[They take him [Bajazeth] out of the cage]

......... ......... ......... ......... ......... .........

BAJAZETH First shalt thou rip my bowels with thy sword

And sacrifice my heart to death and hell

Before I yield to such a slavery.

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TAMBURLAINE Base Villaine, Vassal, slave to Tamburlaine,

Unworthy to embrace or touch the ground

That bears the honour of my royal weights,

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stoop, villain, stoop !

It shows Tamburlaine’s supreme military power and victory

over the Turks and Tamburlaine making slaves of Bajazeth and his

wife Zabina. Tamburlaine’s conquests have no material objective in

view. They are, one might almost say, Metaphysical in inspiration.

His love for Zenocrate does not project any serious dramatic

conflict in the play but is presented as the claims of some eloquent

style that celebrates military power and conquest. But the scenes

which must have struck the Elizabethan audience with most force

are those where the imagery of power is projected in concrete

situations.

Bajazeth, the Emperor of Turks, and his wife kept like beasts

in a cage and taunted to desperation by Tamburlaine for the

amusement of himself and Zenocrate are clearly presented.

Tamburlaine uses Bajazeth as his footstool as he climbs on his

chair.
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For instance, when he sets his feet on the back of the

conquered Turkish emperor Bajazeth, making a footstool of him, he

triumphantly proclaims:

For I, the chiefest lamp of all the earth,

First rising in the east with mild aspect,

But fixed now in the meridian line,

Will send up fire to borrow light of you; 12

In the second part, Tamburlaine with his Chariot drawn by

conquered kings is projected with his might and glory and restless

desire for power after power.

Tamburlaine drawn in his chariot

by Trebizon and Soria with bitters in their mouthes,

reines in his left hand, in his right hand a whip,

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with which he scourgeth them,

Literally, Tamburlaine has decided that the crowns of the

entire world are the “ripest fruit of all” and thus the course is set for

the rest of his career. He wanted to attempt to gather all the fruits

that the world has to offer. Tamburlaine’s quest for kingship is that
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he has only recently witnessed the demise of two kings, Mycetes

and Cosroe, whose royalty did not prevent disaster, and he will later

observe the destruction of Bajazeth. Tamburlaine wants the

kingship of Persia for himself and sends word to Cosroe that he

wants to battle with Cosroe for his crown. They fight and

Tamburlaine is victorious. When Cosroe berates Tamburlaine for

taking his crown, Tamburlaine replies as:

Wills us to wear ourselves and never rest

Until we reach the ripest fruits of all,

That perfect bliss and sole felicity,

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That sweet fruition of an earthly crown.

In the fifth act there is the scene in which the clouds darken

and suspense thickens. “Still doth this man, or rather god, of war”

batter at the walls of Damascus, regardless of the brewing storm.

Such is the power and might of Tamburlaine. The Virgins move

him not. By their slaughter he vindicates his tragic consistency and

throws another gauntlet into the teeth of Nemesis.

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Then, lest tragic pity be lost to sight in all this accumulation

of tragic fear, the man of war exposes in one of the grandest

manners the heart of the lover, the soul of the idealist.

Ah, fair Zenocrate ! divine Zenocrate ! ...........

What is beauty, saith my sufferings, then ?

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If all the pens that ever poets held. ............ .

This play is often linked with Renaissance humanism with

idealism, the potential of humanism. Tamburlaine’s superhuman

aspiration for immense power raises profound religious questions as

he arrogates for himself a role as the “Scourage of God”.

It is worth pointing out that Tamburlaine’s eventually fatal

illness strikes him immediately after this act. Suggesting divine

retribution, however, these are little doubt that the play challenges

some tenets of conventional religious belief. The main cause of

Tamburlaine’s downfall occurs in the excessive appetite for power

and that is his tragic flaw.

In the forthcoming chapter, aspiration for worldly knowledge

and magic power of Doctor Faustus will be discussed.

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Reference

1. Naresh Chandra. The Literature of the English Renaissance

(New Delhi: DOABA House, 1985), p.212.

2. G.R. Kanwal. Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great

(Delhi: Surjeet Publication, 2008), [Link].

3. Irving Ribner. Elizabethan Drama: Modern Essays in

Criticism (n.p., n.d), p. 85.

4. Frank Romany, Robert Lindsey. Christopher Marlowe: The

Complete Plays (London: Penguin Books Ltd., 2003), p.100.

5. Op. cit., pp. 100-101.

6. Judith O’Neill. Critics on Marlowe (New Delhi: George

Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1996), p. 38.

7. Edward Arnold. Elizabethan Theatre (London: Edward

Arnold Publishers Ltd., 1996), p. 88.

8. Wolfgang Clemen. English Tragedy before Shakespeare: The

Development of Dramatic Speech (London: Methuen & Co

Ltd., 1961), p. 116.

9. Frank Romany, Robert Lindsey. Christopher Marlowe: The

Complete Plays, p.87.

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10. Ibid., p. 119.

11. Ibid., p.126.

12. Wolfgang Clemen. English Tragedy before Shakespeare: The

Development of Dramatic Speech, p.120.

13. David Daiches. A Critical History of English Literature

(New Delhi: Allied Publishers Ltd., 1998), p. 238.

14. Frank Romany, Robert Lindsey. Christopher Marlowe: The

Complete Plays, p. 105.

15. Tucker Brooke & Matthias A. Shaaber. The Renaissance

(1500-1660) (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1967),

p. 512.