brought to stage, Tamburlaine remains as capable as ever of generating storms and controversies.
The play can be understood as a paean to empire, an ode to atheism, a celebration of commerce, exploration, social mobility and individualism, a mockery of royalty and hereditary authority, and a defiance of foreign power – for Tamburlaine read Elizabeth, for Bajazeth’s Turkey read Catholic Spain – yet these various layers of interpretation are not what most impress. Tamburlaine the Great is as much about sheer performance as it is about principles. Should there be any doubt, Tamburlaine’s voice, a blast of sound and fury, seizes the attention at the beginning of the first act, and from that moment never lets go.
The set-pieces are engrossing. Marlowe had immersed himself in the most recent scholarship, using sources such as Pietro Perondini’s Life of Temur (1553) and George Whetstone’s English Mirror (1586), and was familiar with the conqueror’s career. Although sometimes on uncertain ground historically, his dramatisations of some of its highlights are powerfully drawn. They have become the stuff of legend. Drama and history coalesce in the confrontation between Tamburlaine and Bajazeth, ‘emperor of the Turks’. A landmark in the conqueror’s career, it becomes a pivotal encounter in the play. Long before the two sworn adversaries even enter the battlefield, Marlowe gives the Ottoman great billing to intensify the scale of the looming encounter. Before battle is joined they meet in person, accompanied by their courtly entourages, and trade insults like boxers before a championship fight. Bajazeth calls Tamburlaine a ‘Scythian slave’, and swears by the holy Koran that he will make him ‘a chaste and lustless eunuch’ fit only for tending his harem. The Tatar shrugs off the threat, telling the Turk that ‘Thy fall shall make me famous throughout the world!’ Which indeed it did.
Battle is brief and devastating. Tamburlaine trounces Bajazeth and imprisons him in a cage, taunting him and his wife to distraction and suicide. Marlowe uses the rout of Bajazeth to emphasise the immutability of fate. Nothing is allowed to stand in the way of Tamburlaine’s inexorable rise to glory. This is a man of magnificence, cruelty, military genius, overarching pride and sensuality, whose sense of his own power knows no bounds. He finds his peer group not on earth but in the heavens. After defeating Bajazeth, he styles himself ‘arch-monarch’ of the earth, ‘the Scourge of God and terror of the world’.
The play echoes to the crash and thunder of arms. It has, as one critic put it, an ‘astounding martial swagger’. But Marlowe’s Tamburlaine is as much a poet as a warrior (testament, though the playwright might not have known it, to Temur’s artistic and intellectual interests). If adversaries on the battlefield provoke his fiery wrath, it is his beloved lover Zenocrate who inspires his passion, unleashed in a sparkling stream of poetry which lifts the play into a higher sphere.
Ah, fair Zenocrate, divine Zenocrate,
Fair is too foul an epithet for thee,
That in thy passion for thy country’s love,
And fear to see thy kingly father’s harm,
With hair dishevelled wipest thy watery cheeks;
And like to Flora in her morning’s pride,
Shaking her silver tresses in the air,
Rainest on the earth resolved pearl in showers,
And sprinklest sapphires on 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.
Later, she falls sick, and Tamburlaine is consumed by the darkest grief. The bloodstained emperor is the poet-lover once more.
Black is the beauty of the brightest day;
The golden ball of heaven’s eternal fire,
That danced with glory on the silver waves,
Now wants the fuel that inflamed his beams,
And all with faintness and for foul disgrace,
He binds his temples with a frowning cloud,
Ready to darken earth with endless night.
Zenocrate, that gave him light and life,
Whose eyes shot fire from their ivory bowers,
And tempered every soul with lively heat,
Now by the malice of the angry skies,
Whose jealousy admits no second mate,
Draws in the comfort of her latest breath,
All dazzled with the hellish mists of death.
But nothing can save her. Lying in her bed of state, surrounded by kings and doctors, her three sons and her husband, she dies. A distraught Tamburlaine rails against ‘amorous Jove’ for snatching her away from him, accusing the god of wanting to make Zenocrate his ‘stately queen of heaven’. The martial imagery and force of language return in his distraught response, but for once they are born of desperation and tragic futility.
The play closes with Tamburlaine’s death. Even here, at the end of his life, there is no regret or repentance, no sense that he is being defeated by a greater force. Instead, he calls for a map and points to this and that battlefield around the world, reliving his great victories in front of his sons. There is time to crown his heir Amyras, and then nature achieves what none of Tamburlaine’s earthly foes could manage. At the final moment, in the throes of death, his arrogance does not desert him:
Farewell, my boys! My dearest friends, farewell!
My body feels, my soul doth weep to see
Your sweet desires deprived my company,
For Tamburlaine, the scourge of God, must die.
As a dramatist, Marlowe is guilty of all the usual sins: exaggeration, historical infelicities, geographical inaccuracies, sensationalism. Yet his Tamburlaine is a triumph of imaginative genius. Nowhere else has the Tatar been so brilliantly conceived, so passionately realised. The grandeur of the poetry, the sweeping cadences of the line, the constantly unfolding military drama, all keep the audience rapt. It is little wonder that Marlowe, rather than the historians, holds the key to the popular image of Tamburlaine, with the full flash and fury of his God-defying protagonist. In the play, as in life, the ‘Scythian shepherd’ transcends all earthly limitations, embarks
