The Complete Plays (79 page)

277      
ticing relics
: The love-tokens Aeneas has left behind.

306      
a conqueror
: I.e. Hannibal, the Carthaginian general who invaded Italy and nearly defeated Rome in the Second Punic War, imagined as a phoenix rising from Dido's ashes.

308      
his
: Aeneas'.

310–11  
Litora… nepotes
: ‘I pray that coasts may fight opposing coasts, waves fight waves, arms fight arms; may they and their descendants go on fighting',
Aeneid
IV, 628–9.

313      
Sic… umbras
: ‘Thus, thus I rejoice to go down into the shadows',
Aeneid
IV, 660.

314–28  
O help… to thee
: Marlowe's addition to Virgil.

317      
tires upon
: Feeds on, consumes.

319      
prevail
: (Here) avail.

TAMBURLAINE THE GREAT

Marlowe did not invent Tamburlaine. The historical Timur (1336–1405) was widely known in the West as the conqueror of Baghdad (1401) and Damascus (1403); his defeat and capture of Beyazit I (Marlowe's Bajazeth) in 1402 at the battle of Angora (modern Ankara) made him especially famous as the humbler of the proudest of monarchs, and – since this victory relieved for a time the Ottoman pressure on Christendom – led to the belief that he was the scourge of God. Marlowe draws particularly on the accounts of the Spaniard Pedro Mexía's
Silva de Varia Leción
(1542), as translated both in Thomas Fortescue's
The Forest or Collection of Histories
(1571) and in George Whetstone's
The English Mirror
(1586); and of Petrus Perondinus,
Magni Tamerlanis Scythiarum Imperatoris Vita
(1553), which he seems to have read in Latin. Nonetheless, when Part One,
The Conquests of Tamburlaine the Scythian Shepherd
, was first staged in 1587 by the Lord Admiral's Men, it was a startlingly innovatory play, an aggressively learned celebration of power radically different from the normal repertoire of the popular theatre. There were other plays about eastern conquerors, but their protagonists were usually assimilated to familiar Elizabethan paradigms: Thomas Preston's
Cambises (c.
1561) is a Morality play whose ‘hero' exemplifies the evils and suffers the fate of a tyrant; the anonymous
Wars of Cyrus
(late 1580s) transforms the king of Persia into a model of romance chivalry and magnanimity, ‘A prince… most mild and merciful' (sig. F
^r
). Tamburlaine is different – so different that he seems to stand outside merely human categories:

Some powers divine, or else infernal, mixed

Their angry seeds at his conception;

For he was never sprung of human race. (2.6.9–11)

The excitement the play originally caused can be difficult to recapture today. In performance, however, it can still be exhilarating.

Like its hero, its poetry tends to disrupt familiar categorizations. Tamburlaine's first appearance is a surprise (1.2). We have been led to expect a brigand (Scythia was virtually synonymous with barbarism); instead, he is an Errol Flynn swashbuckler who, however, overwhelms Zenocrate not with erotic charisma but with ‘high astounding terms' (Prologue, 5):

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 resolved. (1.2.98–101)

Everything is in the future tense (‘For “will” and “shall” best fitteth Tamburlaine', 3.3.41), as indefinite as the strange journey he envisages through high, cold places. The ivory sled drawn through the snow by white harts is literally dazzling. At one level, it evokes a delight in material riches, revelling in the luxury of being drawn along, as in the triumphs to which the play frequently returns. But this is also a fantasy of being transported in another, more transcendent sense: the imagined wealth is fabulous, it shades into the exoticism of romance, as, later, will Dr Faustas' dream of spirits ‘Like Almain rutters with their horsemen's staves, / Or Lapland giants, trotting by our sides' (1.127–8). Zenocrate too is both an invaluable prize (‘more worth to Tamburlaine / Than the possession of the Persian crown', 1.2.90–91) and a more-than-mortal being whose radiant beauty can melt (‘resolve', 101) the snow.

There is a comparably exalted materialism in Tamburlaine's lines when he seizes the crown (2.6). One reason the speech compels attention is that, like much of the play's most memorable poetry, it is the hero's
own articulation of his complex, almost superhuman ambition. Another is that the lines condense and draw into themselves many of the verbal motifs we have already heard, and so seem naturally climactic. The defeated Cosroe had earlier supposed Tamburlaine's rebellion to be against the hierarchy of nature, ‘With such a giantly presumption' (2.6.2.) like that of the Titans against Jupiter. But here Tamburlaine propounds a new cosmology: ambition is a bodily need, ‘The thirst of reign' only to be satisfied by the ‘sweetness of a crown' (52); and it is a drive that permeates the universe from Jupiter down through the warring elements that make up the body and the rest of ‘The wondrous architecture of the world' (62) and crosses the divide between matter and spirit to enter our ‘aspiring minds' (60). The world teaches, wills us to aspire. ‘Our souls' become grammatically confused with the ‘wand'ring planet[s]' and ‘restless spheres' they contemplate, all borne along by the perpetually continuing present participles ‘climbing', ‘moving' (61–5). Some readers have felt that the object of all this aspiring, ‘The sweet fruition of an earthly crown' (69), is oddly anti-climactic. But the whole speech centres on the crown Tamburlaine holds in his hand, and is designed to confound the usual hierarchy of spirit and matter: Jupiter's mother, the goddess of earthly wealth whose name in Latin means ‘riches', is here called ‘heavenly Ops' (53), and ‘th'empyreal heaven' (55) turns the empyrean into an empire. Like a great aria, the speech returns in its last line to its opening theme of sensual pleasure, the ‘fruition', enjoyment almost sexually fruity, of the crown's earthly sweetness.

Tamburlaine's
poetry is dominated by excess, by hyperbole and insistent comparatives and superlatives. Like the play's hero, it strives to outdo, to overgo. At its peaks, it turns its own rhetorical power back on itself, declaring that it cannot express its inexpressibility. Thus, when Tamburlaine ponders Zenocrate's beauty (5.1), his words dwell on their own inadequacy (‘Fair is too foul an epithet for thee', 136) and climax in the claim that even a super-poem on beauty distilled from all the poets would leave something unsaid:

Yet should there hover in their restless heads,

One thought, one grace, one wonder at the least,

Which into words no virtue can digest. (171–3)

The verse enacts this unspeakable beauty in its own huge, almost unspeakable sentences, and confounds together the subject and its expression in imagery that fuses Zenocrate's face with the metaphors that describe it:

…thy shining face

Where Beauty, mother to the Muses, sits

And comments volumes with her ivory pen,

Taking instructions from thy flowing eyes –

Eyes, when that Ebena steps to heaven

In silence of thy solemn evening's walk,

Making the mantle of the richest night,

The moon, the planets, and the meteors, light. (143–50)

But
Tamburlaine's
words are not separable from its theatrical action. Words are weapons to be ‘manage[d]' (3.3.131) in verbal duels, part of the play's expression of power. The action itself combines static, symmetrical tableaux with relentless forward movement, as though enacting the tension between the end-stopped single line and the larger verse-paragraph. Tamburlaine is constantly breaking the rules, defying conventions, yet he turns his defiance into ceremonies, rituals, of conflict. The effect is to render the audience's reactions excitedly uncertain. Marlowe tightens the dramatic structure by interweaving the siege of Damascus with the tormenting of Bajazeth, and both with the reactions of Zenocrate (whose part is almost entirely an invention). Tamburlaine's victories are both glamorous and repellant.

The Second Part of the Bloody Conquests of Mighty Tamburlaine
(1588) is a sequel, and is generally felt to be a weaker play. Marlowe had used up most of the historical materials in Part One and had little interest in the real Timur's comfortable old age in Samarkand. Part Two was therefore assembled from a variety of sources, and tellingly little of the new material directly concerns Tamburlaine himself. The hero is no longer so securely at the centre of things; he is slightly displaced by all the new characters and is caught in a wider history just as he moves in a wider geography (taken from the 1570 atlas of Abraham Ortelius). The perfidy and subsequent defeat of the Christians is an adaptation of the events leading up to the later battle of Varna (1444), as reported, for instance, in Antonius Bonifinius,
Rerum Ungaricarum Decades
(1543). Olympia's ruse to escape the attentions of Theridamas is borrowed from Canto 2.9 of Ariosto's
Orlando Furioso
(1516). (Other, smaller borrowings are recorded in the Notes.) The little Olympia sub-plot has certain obvious resonances with the main action: Olympia's devotion to her dead husband is like and unlike Tamburlaine's to the dead Zenocrate, as her murder of her son is like and unlike Tamburlaine's murder of Calyphas. When she contrives to be stabbed in the throat, her death is oddly reminiscent of Tamburlaine stabbing his arm. Yet the action
remains disconnected from the main plot. The play has greater thematic coherence than dramatic unity.

Its organizing theme is death, and its distinctive poetry is funereal. Zenocrate's death reverses the language of Part One (‘Black is the beauty of the brightest day', 2.4.1), and Tamburlaine's finest words are his great lament, with its solemn refrain:

Now walk the angels on the walls of heaven,

As sentinels to warn th'immortal souls

To entertain divine Zenocrate. (15–17)

Tamburlaine can still rise to hymning himself, even recalling (4.1) the earlier speech on the aspiring mind in Part One, but he does so as he kills his own son. And we recognize the play's distinctive leitmotif of mortality when it returns in his captains' choric threnody for Tamburlaine himself at the beginning of the play's last scene.

The dramatic rhythm is slow, gradually arraying the forces of Tamburlaine against those of his enemies, cataloguing the armies and the vast distance of their marches, and finally harnessing them to its central dramatic symbol, Tamburlaine's chariot. In the opening dumb show of George Gascoigne and Francis Kinwelmarsh's
Jocasta
(1566),

there came in upon the stage a king with an imperial crown upon his head, very richly apparelled… sitting in a chariot very richly furnished, drawn in by four kings in their doublets and hosen, with crowns also upon their heads, representing unto us Ambition, by the history of Sesostris, king of Egypt.

In
Tamburlaine
, the emblem of ambition is staged in all its grim cruelty, an extraordinary realization of the persistent language of triumph. Yet it is as though, without knowing it, Tamburlaine is also taking part in the greater triumph of Death. The historical Timur did return to Samarkand, as Tamburlaine here plans to; but ‘death cuts off the progress of his pomp / And murd'rous Fates throws all his triumphs down' (Prologue, 4–5). The chariot becomes the symbol of his limitation as well as of his triumph.

Part Two is a more ideologically self-conscious play. Tamburlaine seems now to be caught inside a more traditional representation of the smallness of human ambition in the face of death. Traditionally, mortal thoughts led to a sober contemplation of religion, normally Christianity. But Marlowe withholds any unambiguous reassurances from his audience:
Orcanes attributes his victory over the Christians to divine punishment, but his henchman is sceptical: ‘'Tis but the fortune of the wars, my lord, / Whose power is often proved a miracle' (2.3.31–2). It is also disturbing that Tamburlaine is so ready to excuse his atrocities by embracing the description of him as ‘the scourge of God' which had traditionally been used to explain him away.

Both Parts of
Tamburlaine
were published together in an anonymous octavo edition of 1590 (the basis for the text printed here); and their popularity is attested by further quarto editions of 1592 and 1605. They were much imitated.

TAMBURLAINE THE GREAT, PART ONE
TO THE GENTLEMEN READERS AND
OTHERS THAT TAKE PLEASURE IN
READING HISTORIES

9          
fond… jestures
: Foolish… comic action.

14        
graced
: Favoured (by popular audiences).

24        
degree
: Rank.

26        
R.J.
: Richard Jones, the publisher responsible for both parts of
Tamburlaine.

PROLOGUE

1          
jigging veins
: The doggerel styles of the comic ‘jigs' which were performed after plays.

rhyming
: Unlike
Tamburlaine's
heroic blank verse.

mother-wits
: Mere natural wits. The opening line makes two contemptuous references to Elizabethan popular theatre.

2          
such conceits… pay: Either
the kind of wit that earns a living from clowning,
or
such tricks as pay the clowns' wages.

7          
glass
: Mirror.

ACT 1

Scene
1

11        
freezing… cold
: Snow and ice.