Tamburlaine the Great, Part 1

Overview

Author

Christopher Marlowe (1564–1593), shoemaker's son from Canterbury and Cambridge graduate, who made his name in London with this play

Genre

Heroic drama of conquest in blank verse, with a few passages of prose; often called a tragedy, though its hero ends the play in triumph

Written and first performed

About 1587, by the Lord Admiral's Men, with Edward Alleyn in the title role; Part 2 followed within a year

First printed

1590, in a single octavo with Part 2, published anonymously by Richard Jones, who cut some comic material; Marlowe's authorship rests on external evidence

Setting

Persia, Asia Minor (Bithynia), and the Egyptian Soldan's lands around Damascus, in the late fourteenth century

Historical basis

The career of Timur (1336–1405), the Central Asian conqueror who defeated the Ottoman sultan Bayezid I at Ankara in 1402

Main sources

Pedro Mexía's Silva de varia lección (1540), read in Thomas Fortescue's English version The Foreste (1571); Petrus Perondinus's Latin life of Tamerlane (1553); Ortelius's atlas, Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (1570)

Verse

Unrhymed iambic pentameter, which the Prologue sets against the 'jigging veins' of rhymed popular drama; Ben Jonson later praised 'Marlowe's mighty line'

Structure

A Prologue and five acts in seventeen scenes, moving through three campaigns: Persia (Acts I–II), the Turks (Act III), Egypt and Damascus (Acts IV–V)

Sequel

Tamburlaine the Great, Part 2, which carries the story to the deaths of Zenocrate and Tamburlaine, is held on Poetry Codex as a separate work

Context

Christopher Marlowe was born in Canterbury in 1564, the son of a shoemaker, and studied at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, on a scholarship meant for future clergymen. He took his MA in 1587, the year in which Tamburlaine seems to have reached the London stage. The play, acted by the Lord Admiral's Men with the young Edward Alleyn as its hero, was an immediate and lasting success. Its popularity produced a second part within a year, and both were printed together in 1590 without the author's name. Marlowe was killed at Deptford in 1593, and in six years he had changed what English tragedy could sound like (Riggs 2004) (Cheney 2004).

The historical Timur (1336–1405), known in Persian as Timur-i Lang, 'Timur the Lame', from which Europe made 'Tamerlane', was a Turco-Mongol chieftain of the Barlas tribe from near Kesh in Transoxiana. From his capital at Samarkand he built an empire stretching from Anatolia to northern India. He sacked Damascus, then held by the Mamluk sultans of Egypt, in 1401, and on 28 July 1402 he defeated the Ottoman sultan Bayezid I, called Yıldırım, 'the Thunderbolt', near Ankara. Bayezid, who had been blockading Constantinople, died in captivity the next year. Timur was no shepherd but a member of his tribe's lesser nobility: the play's 'Scythian shepherd' comes from European tradition, which loved the tale of a man of nothing who humbled the greatest monarch of the age.

Marlowe's sources were humanist histories rather than Eastern chronicles. Pedro Mexía's Spanish miscellany, translated by Thomas Fortescue as The Foreste (1571), gave him the shepherd origin, the three coloured tents of white, red and black, and Bajazeth kept in a cage and used as a footstool; the Latin life of Tamerlane by Petrus Perondinus (1553) added the terrible, magnetic hero. For geography he used Abraham Ortelius's atlas, and the play's long marches can be traced across its maps. Marlowe also reshaped history freely: he makes the defeat of Bajazeth come before the siege of Damascus, invents the Egyptian princess Zenocrate, and ends with marriage and a truce rather than death (Thomas 1994) (Cunningham 1981).

The play arrived on a stage dominated by rhymed fourteeners, clowning and jigs. Blank verse already existed in English, in Surrey's translation of the Aeneid and in the academic tragedy Gorboduc (1561), but Marlowe made it the voice of the popular theatre. His line is usually end-stopped, swollen with sonorous place names, catalogues and comparisons to the gods, and driven forward by rhetorical amplification. Contemporaries felt its force immediately: rivals mocked its bombast, Shakespeare's Pistol parodied it, and Jonson's phrase 'Marlowe's mighty line' became its permanent name (Levin 1952) (Wright 1988) (Steane 1964).

Part 1 ends at the height of Tamburlaine's fortune: he has made himself king of Persia, emperor of Africa, and husband-to-be of Zenocrate, and declares a truce with all the world. Part 2, written after the first part's success, shows the cost of that triumph: Zenocrate's death, the killing of his own son, the burning of the Koran, and the conqueror's death from sickness. Critics argue over whether the two plays form one design or whether Part 2 is a sequel that reinterprets the first. Reading Part 1 on its own, as Elizabethan audiences first did, means facing a play that refuses to punish its hero (Battenhouse 1941) (Cunningham 1981).

Plot overview

The weak king Mycetes of Persia sends his captain Theridamas to capture Tamburlaine, a Scythian shepherd turned bandit, while his brother Cosroe accepts the crown from discontented nobles. Tamburlaine, who has just seized the Egyptian princess Zenocrate and her treasure, wins over Theridamas by speech alone. He joins Cosroe, defeats Mycetes, and then, having tasted the idea of being king, turns on Cosroe and kills him, taking the Persian crown for himself.

The Ottoman emperor Bajazeth, besieging Constantinople, warns Tamburlaine to keep out of Africa. Meanwhile Zenocrate discovers that she loves her captor, and the Median lord Agydas, who urges her to resist, is driven to suicide by Tamburlaine's silent anger. Tamburlaine meets Bajazeth in Bithynia, defeats him and his tributary kings, and takes Bajazeth and his empress Zabina prisoner, while Zenocrate and Zabina trade insults over the battle.

Tamburlaine marches on Damascus, a city of Zenocrate's father, the Soldan of Egypt. He carries Bajazeth in a cage, uses him as a footstool, and taunts him at a banquet, crowning his followers kings of Argier, Fez and Morocco. Zenocrate pleads for her father's city, but Tamburlaine keeps his custom of the white, red and black tents. When the Governor sends out four virgins to beg for mercy on the day of black, he has them killed and the city sacked.

Alone, Tamburlaine reflects on beauty and on Zenocrate's grief. Bajazeth and Zabina, left in despair, dash out their brains against the cage. Tamburlaine defeats the Soldan and the King of Arabia, Zenocrate's former betrothed, who dies in her presence; he spares the Soldan, restores his lands, crowns Zenocrate Queen of Persia, and proclaims a truce with all the world. The story continues in Part 2, held separately as tamburlaine-part-2-marlowe.

Scene by scene

Characters

Protagonist

Tamburlaine

A Scythian shepherd who rises by eloquence, charisma and force to be king of Persia, conqueror of the Turks and master of Egypt. He is generous to friends, devoted to Zenocrate, and utterly merciless to anyone who resists. He believes himself the agent of the stars and the 'scourge of God', and he speaks in the high, sonorous verse that made Marlowe famous. The play neither punishes nor fully endorses him.

Tamburlaine's camp

Zenocrate

Daughter of the Soldan of Egypt, captured by Tamburlaine on her way to her betrothed. She comes to love her captor, and their love is the one tender bond in the play, but she pleads for her father's city and is horrified by the deaths of the virgins and of Bajazeth and Zabina. Her laments supply the play's nearest thing to a moral conscience. She is crowned Queen of Persia at the end.

Theridamas

Mycetes's chief captain, sent to capture Tamburlaine, who is won over by his words and becomes his most trusted follower. He is crowned king of Argier.

Techelles and Usumcasane

Tamburlaine's first companions, Scythians who follow him from the start for the promise of crowns. Bluff, loyal and brutal in their humour, they are crowned kings of Fez and Morocco.

Persia

Mycetes

The foolish king of Persia, who cannot express his own grievance and tries to hide his crown in a hole during the battle. A comic figure whose incompetence makes the Persian throne available.

Cosroe

Mycetes's ambitious brother, crowned by the discontented nobles. He allies with Tamburlaine to overthrow his brother and is then overthrown and killed by him.

Meander, Menaphon, Ortygius and Ceneus

Persian lords. Meander advises Mycetes and then serves Cosroe; Menaphon gives the famous description of Tamburlaine; Ortygius and Ceneus bring Cosroe the crown.

Ottoman Empire

Bajazeth

Emperor of the Turks, based on the historical Bayezid I. Proud of his inherited titles and vast army, he is defeated, caged, used as a footstool and starved, and finally kills himself against the bars of his cage. His curses and despair give him an unexpected tragic stature.

Zabina

Bajazeth's empress, who quarrels with Zenocrate before the battle and shares her husband's captivity. Her mad prose speech before her suicide is one of the most striking moments of the play.

Kings of Fez, Morocco and Argier

Bajazeth's tributary kings, killed in battle; their crowns go to Tamburlaine's captains.

Egypt and Arabia

The Soldan of Egypt

Zenocrate's father, the ruler of Egypt and Damascus, who marches to rescue her. Defeated, he is spared for her sake and accepts Tamburlaine as son-in-law.

The King of Arabia

Zenocrate's first betrothed (called Alcidamus in Act I), who joins the Soldan and dies of his wounds in her presence.

Media

Agydas and Magnetes

Median lords escorting Zenocrate. Agydas tries to turn her against Tamburlaine and is driven to suicide by his silent anger.

Damascus

The Governor of Damascus and the Virgins

The Governor holds out too long and then sends four virgins to plead for mercy on the day of the black tents; they are killed and the city sacked.

Minor figures

Anippe, Ebea, Capolin and Philemus

Zenocrate's maid, Zabina's maid, an Egyptian lord, and a messenger.

Themes

Aspiration and the aspiring mind

The play's driving force is desire without limit. Tamburlaine's speech over the dying Cosroe grounds this desire in nature itself: the elements war within us and the soul climbs after 'knowledge infinite'. Marlowe gives this restlessness the full splendour of his verse, and the audience feels its attraction.

Yet the object of so much aspiration is a crown, and much of the criticism of the play turns on whether that is a glorious or a disappointing end. Harry Levin's phrase for Marlowe's heroes, 'overreachers', captures the ambiguity: they reach beyond human limits, but the reaching may be its own reward (Levin 1952) (Greenblatt 1980).

Words as power

Tamburlaine conquers Theridamas without a blow and wins Zenocrate by promises. His enemies, by contrast, are poor speakers (Mycetes), merely formal (the Soldan), or eloquent only in defeat (Bajazeth). The play makes rhetoric the first instrument of power, and the Prologue's promise of 'high astounding terms' is fulfilled as action.

The limits of words also matter. Agydas dies before a dagger that needs no speech, and in his beauty speech Tamburlaine himself admits a 'wonder' that words cannot digest.

Kingship, legitimacy and the crown

Crowns are passed round the stage like props: offered to Cosroe, hidden by Mycetes, lent and taken by Tamburlaine, served as a course at the banquet, and placed on Zenocrate's head. Kingship has no sacred basis here; it belongs to whoever can seize and hold it.

For an Elizabethan audience taught that rebellion against an anointed king was a sin, the spectacle of a shepherd who makes and unmakes kings without divine punishment was startling. Critics have read the play as a celebration of self-made power or as a demystification of monarchy (Dollimore 1984) (Shepherd 1986).

Birth and virtue

Tamburlaine insists that he is a lord by deeds and a shepherd by birth, and he rewards his low-born followers with crowns because 'virtue is the fount whence honour springs'. The beauty speech ends with the same claim, that virtue alone fashions true nobility. Coming from a shoemaker's son, the argument has been read as Marlowe's own (Riggs 2004).

But 'virtue' here means something close to the Italian virtù: valour, force and will. The play's nobility of merit is also a nobility of the sword.

Beauty, love and cruelty

Zenocrate is Tamburlaine's one tenderness, and his love for her is sincere. Yet she is first his captive, and her pleas for Damascus are refused. The play places its most lyrical speech immediately after its most cruel act, forcing the audience to hold the two together.

Zenocrate's laments give the play a voice of pity that it never fully adopts but never silences (Kuriyama 1980) (Bartels 1993).

Fortune, the heavens and the scourge of God

Medieval tragedy taught that Fortune raises men only to throw them down. Tamburlaine boasts that he turns Fortune's wheel himself, and in Part 1 he is right: Fortune's victims are Mycetes, Cosroe and Bajazeth. He calls himself the 'scourge of God', a title that could mean an instrument of divine punishment, destined to be thrown away when his work is done.

Whether the heavens approve him, use him, or are absent altogether is left open. Bajazeth's 'sleepy Mahomet' and Zabina's cry that there is 'no Mahomet, no God' raise questions that Part 2 takes further (Battenhouse 1941) (Cole 1962).

Motifs

Crowns

More than any other object, crowns pass from hand to hand: Cosroe's crown, Mycetes's hidden crown, the crowns of Bajazeth's kings, the banquet of crowns, and Zenocrate's coronation. Each exchange marks a shift of power and shows kingship as something won, given or taken.

The white, red and black tents

Tamburlaine's custom of signalling mercy, partial slaughter and total destruction by the colours of his tents and dress gives the Damascus scenes their relentless time-scheme. Zabina's mad cry of 'white, red, black' shows how deeply the system has entered his victims' minds.

Gods, giants and Titans

Tamburlaine compares himself to Jove overthrowing Saturn; his enemies compare him to the giants who piled mountains against heaven. The same myth serves as justification and as warning.

Maps and marches

The verse is full of place names, from the Caspian to Mexico and the 'Straits of Jubalter'. Tamburlaine plans fleets and routes like a reader of an atlas and promises to redraw the map in his own and Zenocrate's names.

Eating and hunger

The banquet, the scraps fed to Bajazeth, the jokes about cannibalism and Bajazeth's starving body make hunger the image of utter subjection, in contrast to Tamburlaine's appetite for kingdoms.

Symbols

The cage and the footstool

Bajazeth's cage and his use as a footstool, both from Mexía, make the reversal of rank visible on stage. The hereditary emperor becomes an exhibit, and the cage at last becomes the means of his death.

The shepherd's weeds and the armour

Tamburlaine's casting off of his shepherd's clothes for armour in his first scene symbolizes his self-creation: identity is something one can put on.

Death on the sword-point

Tamburlaine's image of 'imperious Death' sitting on his sword makes him the master of Death, not its subject. It is the boast that Part 2 will most directly overturn.

The pen and the map

The pen with which Tamburlaine will 'reduce' the world to a map links conquest with writing and with the new cartography, and perhaps also with the playwright's own power to create worlds.

The sun at noon

Tamburlaine as 'the chiefest lamp of all the earth', 'fixed now in the meridian line', is an image of triumph at its height, and, to an audience aware of the sun's course, of the decline that must follow.

Critical debates

Hero or monster: does the play judge Tamburlaine?

Early twentieth-century critics, such as Una Ellis-Fermor, read the play as an expression of Marlowe's own soaring aspiration, and the hero as a figure of Renaissance energy. Roy Battenhouse answered in 1941 that the two parts, taken together, form an orthodox moral design in which Tamburlaine is a 'scourge of God' used by heaven and finally destroyed (Ellis-Fermor 1930) (Battenhouse 1941).

Most later critics have found the play more divided than either view allows. Harry Levin saw Marlowe's heroes as 'overreachers' whose grandeur and folly are inseparable; Douglas Cole stressed the suffering the play makes visible; recent readers emphasize that Part 1, at least, withholds the punishment a moral reading requires (Levin 1952) (Cole 1962) (Cunningham 1981).

'The sweet fruition of an earthly crown': climax or anticlimax?

The aspiring-mind speech rises from the elements to the heavens and then lands on a crown. Some critics hear deliberate bathos, Marlowe exposing the gap between the soul's infinite reach and the narrow goal of power. Others argue that for Tamburlaine the crown is no lowering of aim but the very form that infinite desire takes in the world (Levin 1952) (Steane 1964).

Stephen Greenblatt placed the speech within a Renaissance culture of restless self-fashioning, in which desire is endlessly renewed and never satisfied, so that each crown is only the next step (Greenblatt 1980).

Subversion and the politics of the play

Was Tamburlaine dangerous? Robert Greene's jibe in 1588 at the 'atheist Tamburlan' daring God out of heaven suggests that some contemporaries thought so. Cultural materialist critics have read the play as exposing the ideology of divine kingship: if a shepherd can become a king by force, monarchy rests on power rather than sanctity (Dollimore 1984) (Shepherd 1986).

Others reply that the play's spectacle of conquest fed Elizabethan dreams of expansion and was safe precisely because it was set in the East, where tyranny was expected (Bartels 1993).

The Turks, Islam and the East

Bajazeth's empire was the great power of Marlowe's day, and England was opening trade and diplomatic contacts with the Ottomans in the 1580s. Critics have asked how the play represents Turks and Muslims. Tamburlaine frees Christian galley-slaves and humiliates the sultan, which flattered English fears; yet the play also gives Bajazeth and Zabina a dignity in suffering that complicates any simple hostility (Vitkus 2003) (Burton 2005).

Emily Bartels argued that the play's 'strangeness' is a mirror for English imperial ambition: Tamburlaine's map-making and conquests reflect European rather than Eastern desires, and the boundary between civilized and barbarous is constantly blurred (Bartels 1993).

Zenocrate: conscience, captive or ornament?

Zenocrate has been read as the play's moral centre, whose pity tempers Tamburlaine; as a captive whose love is a form of submission; and as a decorative figure who justifies the hero's tenderness. Her laments over Damascus and the Turkish captives are the play's longest expressions of doubt about conquest, but they change nothing (Kuriyama 1980) (Hopkins 2008).

Psychoanalytic and feminist readers have connected her with Tamburlaine's fear of 'effeminate' feeling in the beauty speech, which he masters by turning beauty into another conquest (Kuriyama 1980).

Structure: episodic pageant or design?

The play has often been called episodic: a series of conquests, each repeating the pattern of boast, battle and triumph. David Bevington related its structure to the popular Tudor drama of successive episodes, adapted from the morality play's sequence of temptations and victims (Bevington 1962).

Defenders of its design point to the ordered progression of enemies, each more powerful than the last (a fool, a usurper, an emperor, a sultan), and to the clock of the three colours, which gives the second half its suspense (Cunningham 1981) (Thomas 1994).

Reception: from bombast to revival

The play's success was immediate. Henslowe's diary records frequent revivals of both parts by the Admiral's Men in 1594–95, with Edward Alleyn as the hero, and imitations of conquering, ranting heroes followed for a decade. Its style was mocked as quickly as it was copied: Thomas Nashe sneered at the 'drumming decasyllabon' of the new blank verse, Shakespeare's Pistol garbles a line from Part 2, and Jonson later scorned the 'scenical strutting' of the Tamerlanes even while praising 'Marlowe's mighty line' (Foakes 2002) (Cheney 2004).

After the seventeenth century the play was hardly acted for three hundred years and was read as a great but crude poem. Modern revivals have rediscovered its theatrical power: Tyrone Guthrie's Old Vic production with Donald Wolfit (1951), Peter Hall's with Albert Finney at the National Theatre (1976), and Terry Hands's for the Royal Shakespeare Company with Antony Sher (1992). Directors usually join and cut the two parts, and the questions of how to stage the cage, the slaughter of the virgins and the play's Muslim characters have kept it controversial (Cunningham 1981) (Hopkins 2008).

One play or two?

The Prologue to Part 2 says that the 'general welcomes' given to the first part brought the poet to write a second, which suggests that Part 1 was conceived as complete. If so, its ending in triumph is not a pause but a conclusion, and the moral reckoning of Part 2 is a later reinterpretation.

Others argue that the 'scourge of God' theme, the sun at noon and the warnings of Fortune already point to a fall and that the two parts should be read as a single ten-act tragedy. Editors usually print them together, but the question of how much Part 1 knows about Part 2 remains open (Battenhouse 1941) (Cunningham 1981).

Key passages

Questions for study

1. What does the Prologue reject, and what does it promise? How far does the rest of the play keep those promises?

   Think about rhymed verse, clowning, the word 'hear', and the open-ended 'applaud his fortunes as you please'.

2. How does Tamburlaine win Theridamas in Act I, Scene 2, and what does this scene suggest about the relation between language and power?

   Compare Mycetes's inability to speak in 1.1 and Theridamas's comment on 'working words' in 2.3.

3. Is 'the sweet fruition of an earthly crown' a climax or an anticlimax?

   Trace the movement of the speech in 2.7 from the elements to the spheres to the crown, and decide whether the last line is undercut.

4. How does the play treat the legitimacy of kings? Consider every moment in which a crown changes hands.

   Cosroe's coronation, Mycetes hiding his crown, Tamburlaine crowning himself, the banquet of crowns, Zenocrate's coronation.

5. Compare Tamburlaine and Bajazeth. In what ways are they alike, and how does the play differentiate them?

   Look at their boasts in 3.3, their titles, and the source of their power.

6. What role do Zenocrate's speeches play in the work's moral design?

   Her change of heart in 3.2, her pleas in 4.2 and 4.4, and her lament in 5.1 with its refrain.

7. Why does Marlowe place the beauty speech immediately after the killing of the virgins?

   Consider whether the speech softens Tamburlaine, or shows that beauty and cruelty belong to the same imagination; notice his worry about 'effeminate' thoughts.

8. How does the play represent the Ottoman Turks and Islam? Is its attitude simply hostile?

   Consider Tamburlaine's promise to free Christian galley-slaves, Bajazeth's appeals to Mahomet, and the dignity given to Bajazeth and Zabina in their final speeches.

9. Does Part 1 punish its hero? What does its ending suggest about the need for a Part 2?

   Look at the warnings of Fortune, the 'scourge of God' title, and the final 'truce with all the world'.

10. What are the features of Marlowe's 'mighty line'? Choose one speech and analyse its rhythm, imagery and rhetoric.

    Look for end-stopping, place names, mythological comparison, catalogues and repetition; 2.7 or 4.2 make good examples.

Further reading

• Bartels, Emily C. Spectacles of Strangeness: Imperialism, Alienation, and Marlowe. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993.
• Battenhouse, Roy W. Marlowe's Tamburlaine: A Study in Renaissance Moral Philosophy. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1941.
• Bevington, David M. From 'Mankind' to Marlowe: Growth of Structure in the Popular Drama of Tudor England. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962.
• Burton, Jonathan. Traffic and Turning: Islam and English Drama, 1579–1624. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2005.
• Cheney, Patrick, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Christopher Marlowe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
• Cole, Douglas. Suffering and Evil in the Plays of Christopher Marlowe. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962.
• Cunningham, J. S., ed. Tamburlaine the Great. By Christopher Marlowe. The Revels Plays. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1981.
• Dollimore, Jonathan. Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries. Brighton: Harvester Press, 1984.
• Ellis-Fermor, U. M., ed. Tamburlaine the Great, in Two Parts. By Christopher Marlowe. London: Methuen, 1930.
• Foakes, R. A., ed. Henslowe's Diary. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
• Greenblatt, Stephen. Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980.
• Hopkins, Lisa. Christopher Marlowe, Renaissance Dramatist. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008.
• Kuriyama, Constance Brown. Hammer or Anvil: Psychological Patterns in Christopher Marlowe's Plays. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1980.
• Levin, Harry. The Overreacher: A Study of Christopher Marlowe. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1952.
• Riggs, David. The World of Christopher Marlowe. London: Faber and Faber, 2004.
• Shepherd, Simon. Marlowe and the Politics of Elizabethan Theatre. Brighton: Harvester Press, 1986.
• Steane, J. B. Marlowe: A Critical Study. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964.
• Thomas, Vivien, and William Tydeman, eds. Christopher Marlowe: The Plays and Their Sources. London: Routledge, 1994.
• Vitkus, Daniel. Turning Turk: English Theater and the Multicultural Mediterranean, 1570–1630. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.
• Wright, George T. Shakespeare's Metrical Art. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988.