Tamburlaine the Great

In this chapter we shall discuss Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great ,the earliest
of Marlowe’s plays, the two-part Tamburlaine the Great (c. 1587; published 1590), where
we find Marlowe’s characteristic “mighty line” (as Ben Jonson called it). Marlowe breathed
fresh blood into the otherwise dry blank verse and established the same as the staple
medium for later Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatic writing. It appears that originally
Marlowe intended to write only the first part, concluding with Tamburlaine’s marriage to
Zenocrate and his making “truce with all the world.” But the popularity of the first part
encouraged Marlowe to continue the story to Tamburlaine’s death. This gave him some
difficulty, as he had almost exhausted his historical sources in part I; consequently the
sequel has, at first glance, an appearance of padding. Yet the effort demanded in writing the
continuation made the young playwright look more coldly and searchingly at the hero he
had chosen, and thus part II makes explicit certain notions that were below the surface and
insufficiently recognized by the dramatist in part I. The play is based on the life and
achievements of Timur (Timurlenk), the bloody 14th-century conqueror of Central Asia and
India. Tamburlaine is a man avid for power and luxury and the possession of beauty. When
for a moment he has no immediate opponent on earth, he dreams of leading his army
against the powers of heaven, though at other times he glories in seeing himself as “the
scourge of God”; he burns the Qurʾān, for he will have no intermediary between God and
himself, and there is a hint of doubt whether even God is to be granted recognition.
Certainly Marlowe feels sympathy with his hero, giving him magnificent verse to speak,
delighting in his dreams of power and of the possession of beauty, as seen in the following
of Tamburlaine’s lines:

Nature, that fram’d us of four elements

Warring within our breasts for regiment,

Doth teach us all to have aspiring minds:

Our souls, whose faculties can comprehend,

The wondrous architecture of the world,

And measure every wandering planet’s course,

Still climbing after knowledge infinite,

And always moving as the restless spheres,

Wills us to wear ourselves and never rest,

Until we reach the ripest fruit of all,

That perfect bliss and sole felicity,

The sweet fruition of an earthly crown.

But, especially in part II, there are other strains: the hero can be absurd in his continual
striving for more demonstrations of his power; his cruelty, which is extreme, becomes
sickening; his human weakness is increasingly underlined, most notably in the onset of his
fatal illness immediately after his arrogant burning of the Qurʾān. In this early play Marlowe
already shows the ability to view a tragic hero from more than one angle, achieving a
simultaneous vision of grandeur and impotence.

Tamburlaine the Great, a play in two parts by Christopher Marlowe, as said earlier, is loosely based
on the life of the Central Asian emperor, Timur "the lame". Composed in 1587 or 1588, the play is a
landmark in the Elizabethan public drama; it signals a drifting away from the clumsy language and
loose plotting of the earlier Tudor dramatists, and incites a new interest in fresh and vibrant
language, impressive action, and intellectual complexity. Along with Thomas Kyd's The Spanish
Tragedy, it may be considered the first popular accomplishment of London's public stage.

[Picture from thegreatbooklist.com]

Marlowe, generally believed to be the most outstanding of the University Wits, influenced
playwrights well into the Jacobean period, and resonances of Tamburlaine's bombast and ambition
can be heard in English plays all the way to the Puritan closing of the theatres in 1642. While
Tamburlaine is considered inferior to the great tragedies of the late-Elizabethan and early-Jacobean
period, its importance in building a stock of themes and, especially, in demonstrating the potential
of blank verse in drama, is still recognized.

Publication

The play in both parts was registered into the Stationers' Register on 14 August 1590 as "two
comical discourses". Both parts came in print together in a single black letter octavo that same year
by the printer Richard Jones; its text is usually referred to as O1. A second edition was issued by
Jones in 1592, and a third reprint emerged in 1597, essentially reprinting the text of the first edition.
The plays were next published separately in quarto by the bookseller Edward White, Part 1 in 1605
and Part 2 in 1606, which reprinted the text of the 1597 printing.

Christopher Marlowe is not actually cited as the author in the first printings of the play- there is no
author attributed to Tamburlaine. The first clear mentioning of Marlowe as the author are much
later than 1590 (too much later to be conclusive that he is indeed the author). However, the reason
scholars put forward the play to Marlowe is because of its similarity to other works. Many passages
in Tamburlaine presage and echo passages from another one of his works, and there is a clear
parallel between the character development in Tamburlaine and that of the majority of Marlowe's
 other characters. This data alone leads scholars to deem that Marlowe alone wrote Tamburlaine.[1]

[Picture from catholicworldreport.com]

Characters of the Play.

Mycetes, King of Persia.

Cosroe, his Brother.
Meander, Theridamas, Ortygus, Ceneus, Menaphon, Persian lords.
Tamburlaine, a Scythian shepherd.
Techelles, Usumcasane, his followers.
Bajazeth, Emperor of the Turks.
King of Fez.
King of Morocco.
King of Argier.
King of Arabia.
Soldan of Egypt.
Governor of Damascus.
Agydas, Magnetes, Median lords.
Capolin, an Egyptian.
Philemus, Bassoes, Lords, Citizens, Moors, Soldiers, and
Attendants.
Zenocrate, Daughter to the Soldan of Egypt.
Anippe, her maid.
Zabina, wife to Bajazeth.
 Ebea, her maid.
Virgins of Damascus.

Plot

In the “Prologue” Marlowe informs the audience that they are going to witness a “tragic
glass” and the audience is then introduced to the Scythian shepherd scourging those
kingdoms that are led by rulers weaker than him. The tragedy of the play is of those rulers
who are more concerned with pomp and outward appearances that they must fall. The “De
Casibus Tragedy” was concerned with showing the downfall of those sultans who believe
they were rising on the wheel of fortune however once they reach the top they will go
down. The instability of the fortune’s wheel means that these rulers will always meet their
end unless one can be both a lion and a fox. In the first scenes Tamburlaine is described by
the King of Persia, Mycetes, in Machiavellian terms as a “fox in the midst of harvest-
time/Doth prey upon my flocks of passengers”, creating the impression that Tamburlaine is
a brave, resourceful and a military leader. This description puts in contrast the failings of the
weak king Mycetes who finds himself “aggrieved/Yet insufficient to express the same”. The
King of Persia far from being a “fox” and a “lion” is a weak, inarticulate king who cannot
quite express his “conceived grief”.

Part 1 begins in Persepolis. The Persian emperor, Mycetes, sends out army to settle Tamburlaine, a
Scythian shepherd and at that point a nomadic bandit. In the same scene, Mycetes' brother Cosroe
plots to depose Mycetes and usurp the throne. The scene shifts to Scythia, where Tamburlaine is
shown wooing, capturing, and winning Zenocrate, the daughter of the Egyptian king. Confronted by
Mycetes' soldiers, he persuades first the soldiers and then meets Cosroe to join him in a fight against
Mycetes. Although he promises Cosroe the Persian throne, Tamburlaine reneges on this promise
and, after defeating Mycetes, takes the control of the Persian Empire on his own.

Now a powerful figure, Tamburlaine turns his attention to Bajazeth, Emperor of the Turks. He
defeats Bajazeth and his tributary kings, capturing the Emperor and his wife Zabina. The victorious
Tamburlaine keeps the defeated ruler in a cage and feeds him scraps from his table, releasing
Bajazeth only to use him as a footstool. Bajazeth later kills himself onstage by bashing his head
against the bars upon hearing of Tamburlaine's next victory, and upon finding his body Zabina does
likewise. After conquering Africa and naming himself emperor of that continent, Tamburlaine sets
his eyes on Damascus; this target places the Egyptian Sultan, his father-in-law, directly in his path.
Zenocrate pleads with her husband to spare her father. He complies, instead making the Sultan a
tributary king. The play ends with the wedding of Zenocrate and Tamburlaine, and the crowning of
the former as Empress of Persia.

M.C. Bradbrook observes:

“The unity of Part-I is supplied by Tamburlaine himself. He is hardly thought of as a man, though it is
not in Part-I that he is most frequently equated with a god or a devil. He is a dramatic figure
symbolizing certain qualities, and he defines himself in the famous ‘Nature that framed us of four
 elements.’*All quotations from U.M. Ellis-Fermor’s edition of Tamburlaine, 1930] The most direct
statement of his nature is, however, given by Meander.
Some powers divine or else infernal mixed
There angry seeds at his conception:
For he was never sprung of human race
Since with the spirit of his fearful pride
He dares so doubtlessly resolve of rule
And by profession be ambitious.
Tamburlaine’s ambition has no definite object; it exists in and for itself. His aspiring mind is drawn
upward as naturally as gravitation draws a stone downward. Herein Marlowe encounters a difficulty,
for Tamburlaine’s aims can never be the objective correlative of this divine striving. The
extraordinary drop at the end of ‘Nature that framed us of four elements’ to
That perfect bliss and sole felicity

The sweet fruition of an earthly crown

has been often observed. It is in vain that Marlowe insists that despises wealth and only desire rule: is
in itself no fit equivalent for his feelings (as language has no fit expression for the divine beauty of
Zenocrete). Tamburlaine is god-like (‘a god is not so glorious as a king’) but his accomplishments are
limited to human possibilities. Marlowe escaped from the difficulty by making Tamburlaine’s objects
as generalized as possible, and his conquests effortless; also by formalizing the action which showed
his mundane success and insisting on his contest with ‘Jove’ and the feats.”[2]

On the theme of this Part, Helen Gardner notes:

“The theme of the first part of Tamburlaine is the power and splendour of human will, which bears
down all opposition and by its 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 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’ is allowed only slight scope. Opposition
appears to melt away at Tamburlaine’s mere appearance. Theridamas, sent with an army against
him, is won over by his presence and comes over to his side without a battle; Cosore, who dethrones
his brother and plans to use Tamburlaine for his own purposes, is easily overthrown. In love the path
is equally straight. Zenocrate, betrothed to 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, seeming to range herself on his side, as the others do,
by instinct.”[3]

In Part 2, Tamburlaine grooms his sons to be conquerors in his wake as he continues to conquer his
neighbouring kingdoms. His oldest son, Calyphas, preferring to stay by his mother's side and not risk
death, incurs Tamburlaine's wrath. Meanwhile, the son of Bajazeth, Callapine, escapes from
Tamburlaine's jail and gathers a group of tributary kings to his side, planning to avenge his father.
Callapine and Tamburlaine meet in battle, where Tamburlaine is victorious. But finding Calyphas
remained in his tent during the battle, Tamburlaine kills him in anger. Tamburlaine then forces the
defeated kings to pull his chariot to his next battlefield, declaring,

Holla ye pampered jades of Asia!

What, can ye draw but twenty miles a day?

Upon reaching Babylon, which holds out against him, Tamburlaine displays further acts of
extravagant savagery. When the Governor of the city attempts to save his life in return for revealing
the city treasury, Tamburlaine has him hung from the city walls and orders his men to shoot him to
death. He orders the inhabitants—men, women, and children—bound and thrown into a nearby
lake. Lastly, Tamburlaine scornfully burns a copy of the Qur'an and claims to be greater than God. In
the final act, he is struck ill but manages to defeat one more foe before he dies. He bids his
remaining sons to conquer the remainder of the earth as he departs life.

Helen Gardner makes the following observation on this part:

“The theme of the second part is very different. 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. The 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 men’s minds are a part, and that man acts against this order at his peril. This theme
of the clash between man’s desires and experience demands a more complex structure for its
expression than was demanded by the theme of the triumphant human will in the first part. If the
first part can be plotted as a steadily rising line, the second can be thought of as two lines, and that
of his enemies. Neither rises or falls steadily, but on the whole it can be said that the forces of the
opposing Tamburlaine grow in strength during the first half of the play and reach their zenith in the
third act, and that after this we see the power of Tamburlaine reasserting itself, until, at the moment
of his greatest triumph, he is struck down by death....” [4]

Influence

The influence of Tamburlaine on the play-writing tradition of the 1590s is remarkable indeed. The
play typified, and in some cases shaped, many of the distinctive characteristics of high Elizabethan
drama: verbose and often dazzling imagery, hyperbolic expression, and burly characters stimulated
by awe-inspiring passions. The first recorded remarks on the play are negative; a letter written in
1587 speaks about the account of a child being killed by the accidental release of a firearm during a
presentation, and the next year Robert Greene, in the course of an attack on Marlowe, scoffs at
"atheistic Tamburlaine" in the epistle to Perimedes the Blacksmith. That most playgoers (and
playwrights) responded with gusto is thoroughly recognized by the increase of Asian dictators and
"aspiring minds" in the drama of the 1590s. Marlowe's influence on many characters in
Shakespeare's history plays has been discerned by, among others, Algernon Swinburne. Stephen
Greenblatt considers it likely that Tamburlaine was among the first London plays that Shakespeare
witnessed, an experience that directly motivated his early work like the three Henry VI plays.[5]
By the early years of the 17th century, this hyperbolic idiom had gone out of fashion. Shakespeare
himself puts a dialogue from Tamburlaine in the lips of his play-addled soldier Pistol (2 Henry IV
II.4.155). In Timber, Ben Jonson condemned "the Tamerlanes and Tamer-chams of the late age,
which had nothing in them but the scenically strutting and furious vociferation to warrant them to
the ignorant gapers."

Subsequent generations of critics have not inverted the position advanced by Jonson that the
language and events in plays such as Tamburlaine are not natural and eventually unimpressive. Still,
the play was regarded as the text above all others "wherein the whole restless temper of the age
finds expression" (Long). Robert Fletcher notes that Marlowe "gained a high degree of flexibility and
beauty by avoiding a regularly end-stopped arrangement, by taking pains to secure variety of pause
and accent, and by giving his language poetic condensation and suggestiveness" (Fletcher). In his
poem on Shakespeare, Jonson mentions "Marlowe's mighty line," a phrase critics have accepted as
just, as they have also Jonson's claim that Shakespeare surpassed it. But while Shakespeare is
commonly seen to have captured a far greater range of emotions than his contemporary, Marlowe
retains a significant place as the first genius of blank verse in English drama.

Themes

The play is linked to Renaissance humanism which idealises the potential of human beings.
Tamburlaine's ambition to enormous power raises reflective religious issues as he arrogates for
himself a role as the "scourge of God" (an epithet originally applied to Attila the Hun). Some readers
have linked this position with the fact that Marlowe was blamed of atheism. Others have been more
anxious with a hypothetical anti-Muslim strand of the play, highlighted in a scene in which the main
character burns the Qur'an.

Jeff Dailey remarks in his article "Christian Underscoring in Tamburlaine the Great, Part II" that
Marlowe's work is a direct successor to the traditional medieval morality plays,[6] and that, whether
or not he is an atheist, he has hereditary religious fundamentals of content and allegorical
techniques of presentation.

The Play in Performance

The first part of Tamburlaine was performed by the Admiral's Men late in 1587, around a year after
Marlowe's departure from Cambridge University. Edward Alleyn performed the role of Tamburlaine,
and it apparently became one of his signature roles. The play's reputation, significant enough to
prompt Marlowe to produce the sequel, led to numerous enactments over the next decade.

The stratification of London audiences in the early Jacobean period changed the fortunes of the play
to some extent. For the urbane audiences of private theatres such as Blackfriars and (by the early
1610s) the Globe Theatre, Tamburlaine's "high astounding terms" were an artefact of a simpler
dramatic age. Satiric playwrights occasionally mimicked Marlowe's style, as John Marston does in
the introduction to Antonio and Mellida.

While it is likely that Tamburlaine was still revived in the large playhouses, such as the Red Bull
Theatre that catered to traditional audiences there is no existing record of a Renaissance
performance after 1595. Tamburlaine suffered more from the change in fashion than did Marlowe's
other plays like Doctor Faustus or The Jew of Malta of which there are allusions to performances.
Edward Phillips, in his Theatrum Poetarum (1675), is so unfamiliar with the play that he attributes its
writing to Thomas Newton. A further sign of the anonymity this one-time audience favourite had
fallen into is offered by playwright Charles Saunders. Having written his own play in 1681 on
Tamburlaine, he was accused by critics of having plagiarised Marlowe's work, to which he replied,

“I never heard of any Play on the same Subject, untill my own was Acted, neither have I since seen it,
though it hath been told me, there is a Cock Pit Play going under the name of the Scythian Shepherd,
or Tamberlain the Great, being a thing, not a Bookseller in London, or scarce the Players themselves,
who Acted it formerly could call to remembrance.”

In 1919, the Yale Dramatic Association staged a Tamburlaine which edited and combined both parts
of Marlowe's play. A revival of both parts in a condensed form was presented at The Old Vic in
September 1951, with Donald Wolfit in the title role.[8] For the Stratford Shakespeare Festival (now
the Stratford Festival of Canada) in 1956, Tyrone Guthrie directed another dual version, starring
Donald Wolfit, William Shatner, Robert Christie and Louis Negin;[9] it travelled to Broadway, where it
failed to impress—Eric Bentley, among others, panned it— although Anthony Quayle, who replaced
Wolfit in the title role, received a Tony Award nomination for his performance, as did Guthrie for his
direction.

The Royal National Theatre production in 1976 featured Albert Finney in the title role; this
production opened the new Olivier Theatre on the South Bank. Peter Hall directed. This production
is generally considered the most successful of the rare modern productions.

In 1993 the Royal Shakespeare Company performed an award-winning production of the play, with
Antony Sher as Tamburlaine and Tracy-Ann Oberman as Olympia.

Jeff Dailey directed both parts of the play, uncut, at the American Theatre of Actors in New York City.
He presented Part I in 1997 and Part II in 2003, both in the outdoor theatre located in the courtyard
of 314 West 54th Street.

Avery Brooks played the lead role in a production of the play for the Shakespeare Theatre Company.
The play ran from 28 October 2007 to 6 January 2008 and was directed by Michael Kahn.

A radio adaptation – of Part I – directed by Peter Kavanagh was broadcast on BBC Radio 3 on Sunday
16 September 2012 and starred Con O'Neill as Tamburlaine, with Kenneth Cranham as Cosroe,
Edward de Souza as the Sultan and Oliver Ford Davies as Mycetes.

While the play has been revived periodically over the past century, the obstacles it presents—a large
cast and an actor capable of performing in such a challenging role chief among them—have
prevented more widespread performance. In general, the modern playgoer may still echo F. P.
Wilson's question, asked at mid-century, "How many of us can boast that we are more than readers
of Tamburlaine?"

2005 controversy

In November 2005, a production of Tamburlaine at the Barbican Arts Centre in London was accused
of deferring to Muslim sensibilities by amending a section of the play in which the title character
burns the Quran and excoriates the prophet Muhammad. The sequence was changed so that
Tamburlaine instead defiles books representing all religious texts. The director denied censoring the
play, stating that the change was a "purely artistic" decision "to focus the play away from anti-
Turkish pantomime to an existential epic".

Questions:

Long answer type:

1. Write a note on the Renaissance elements in the play.

2. Write a note on Marlowe’s use of Blank Verse in the play.

Middle answer type:

1. Discuss the theme of Tamburlaine Part 1 & 2.

2. Write a note on the unity of the play.

Short answer type:

1. Briefly assess Zenocrate’s role in the play.

2. How did the play influence the subsequent generations of playwrights?

Notes

1. Harper, W. J. ed. Tamburlaine. London: Ernst Benn Limited. 1971.

2. O’Neill, J. ed. Critics on Marlowe, New Delhi, Universal Book Stall, 1989.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Greenblatt, Stephen Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare W. W. Norton
& Company, 2004.
6. Dailey, J. Christian Underscoring in Tamburlaine the Great, Part II Journal of Religion and
Theatre, Vol. 4, No. 2, Fall 2005.

[For The Play in Performance & 2005 Controversy, took the help of Wikipedia]