30 Christopher Marlowe : Tamburlaine the Great

Dr. Bisweswar Chakraborty

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.

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.

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.”

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.”

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….” 

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.

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”.

Reference

1. Bevington, David. From Mankind to Marlowe: Growth of Structure in Elizabethan Drama. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1965.
2. Frederick S. Boas, Christopher Marlowe: A biographical and critical study, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1953.
3. Geckle, George L. Tamburlaine and Edward II: Text and Performance. New Jersey: Humanities Press International, 1988.
4. Kuriyama, Constance Brown. Christopher Marlowe: A Renaissance Life. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 2002.
5. Waith, Eugene. The Herculean Hero in Marlowe, Chapman, Shakespeare, and Dryden. New York: Columbia University Press, 1967.