by David Riggs
Like Orpheus, Lucretius, Virgil and Ovid, Tamburlaine begins with the creation of life out of the four elements:
Nature, that framed us of four elements
Warring within our breasts for regiment
Doth teach us all to have aspiring minds …
(II.vii.18–20)
Nature’s teaching follows Ovid’s account of creation. After Nature has reduced the four elements to order, ‘The fire most pure and bright, / The substance of heaven itself / … Did mount aloft’. At the same time, ‘The earth more gross drew down with it each weighty kind of matter’. Tamburlaine embodies this fiery essence: ‘And that made me to join with Tamburlaine,’ his Lieutenant explains, ‘for he is gross and like the massy earth / That moves not upwards’ (II.vii.31–32). Where the biblical Adam is made of clay, Marlowe’s alchemical Adam consists of light and language.
Tamburlaine revives the classical tradition of the ‘first’ poets who wrote cosmological epic in hexameter verses. In the sources, Tamburlaine is a devout Muslim; Marlowe transforms him into a Graeco-Roman sage promulgating poetic theology. The rustic setting, with its shepherd hero and ‘silly country swains’, harks back to the mythic moment, ‘before any civil society was among man’, when poetry first appeared. For poetry, in the words of the critic George Puttenham, ‘was the original cause and occasion of their first assemblies when before the people remained in the woods and mountains, vagrant and dispersed’. William Webbe writes that ‘It was Orpheus, who by the sweet gift of his heavenly Poetry withdrew men from ranging uncertainly and wandering brutishly about.’ Even closer to Marlowe’s primal scene of poetic instruction, the educator Francis Clement depicts the first poets taming an audience of ‘men that in those days were in manner of brute beasts, wildly sparpled [sic] abroad in fields, forest and woody places, wandering vagabonds and peregrinating peasants, living by rapine and raw flesh’. Tamburlaine revives this myth in a modern context. His poetry fashions Elizabethan vagabonds into a potent military formation.
Marlowe’s blank verse lent impact and credibility to this idea. Unfettered by rhyme, the poet’s internal mechanism of arrest, the open-ended sequence of blank verse lines mirrors the hero’s self-fashioning desire. Tamburlaine was the first public exhibition of an unrhymed English line that merited comparison with the classical hexameters devised by the classical poets. The maker voices his scorn for rhymesters like the Queen’s Men in the opening line of his Prologue, ‘From jigging veins of rhyming mother wits’. The line scans as an iambic pentameter, but employs trochaic words (‘jigging’, ‘rhyming’, ‘mother’) to segment the prepositional phrases into metrical units. Ben Jonson replicates this pattern in the encomium recalling how far Shakespeare outshone three of his finest peers: Lyly, ‘Or sporting Kid, or Marlowe’s mighty line’. Every stress in Jonson’s verse conforms to those of the first line of Tamburlaine, while the evolutionary leap from ‘rhyming mother wits’ to ‘Marlowe’s mighty line’ measures the poet’s contribution to English prosody.
Marlowe’s narrative transforms the cycle of poverty, poetry and social mobility that had cast him on to the margins of Elizabethan society into an unparalleled success story. In life, the base-born poet’s opportunities for advancement were severely restricted and could easily prove illusory: witness Marlowe’s own lack of preferment. Humble scholars had to master the language of secular authority, but their class origins prevented them from ever exercising real power. Penury, as every schoolboy knew from Aphthonius, was an inexorable condition; by the same token, poetry connoted a merely verbal facility. Tamburlaine gives the lie to these authoritarian fictions.
9.7 Sir Francis Drake, engraved portrait by Robert Vaughan, 1628.
Critics have felt let down by Tamburlaine’s ultimate destination: ‘The sweet fruition of an earthly crown’ (II.vii.29). Tamburlaine spoke here for the generation of artisans and scholars who took up astronomy and geography in the 1570s and 1580s, aspiring high but motivated by earthly desire. His final about-face epitomizes the Elizabethan conflation of heroic ambition with rank materialism. Sir Francis Drake’s puff for the True Report (1583) of his half-brother Sir Humphrey Gilbert’s circumnavigation strikes the same note in a more pedestrian register: ‘So that, for each degree, this Treatise doth unfold / The path to Fame, the proof of Zeal, and way to purchase gold’. The latent irony of great expectations belied by limited horizons would become explicit in Dr Faustus, where Marlowe’s ‘studious artisan’ (I.i.57) sells his soul for twenty-four years of omnipotence, only to be betrayed by the emptiness of his his own desires.
Tamburlaine’s favourite expressive device is hyperbole, the trope that best conveys the cosmological reach of figurative language. On the horizontal axis, his hyperboles measure the geographical extent of his empire; on the vertical, they provide access to an upper region of deities, planets and astral forces. Like the Aeneid, Tamburlaine the Great unfolds within the full expanse of the universe, a space replete with the powers that bear on Tamburlaine’s story. His followers recognize his immanent divinity from the outset. Tamburlaine’s head is like a pearl, his eyes are ‘fiery circles’ or astrological talismans and his body a microcosm of the universe (II.i.7–30). The Puritans equated theatre with idolatry; Marlowe furnished the players with an idol of godlike proportions.
Tamburlaine rescripts the battle of Ankara, where, according to Whetstone, the Turks were ‘vanquished by the multitude of their enemies’, into a contest between terrestrial and celestial agencies. The Turkish emperor, who commands as many ‘warlike bands’ as ‘hath the ocean or the Terrene sea / Small drops of water’ (III.i.9–11), has many more men than Tamburlaine does, but his hyperboles never rise above sea level. Conversely, Tamburlaine and his men expand to fill the cosmos. The hero’s shoulders can ‘bear / Old Atlas’ burden’ (II.i.10–11), his eyes ‘shine as comets’ (III.ii.74) and ‘the chiefest God, first mover of that sphere / Enchased with thousands ever-shining lamps’ (IV.ii.8-9) shields him from harm. The diffusion of divine agency into the material world enables Tamburlaine, ‘the chiefest lamp of all the earth’ (36), to become a second sun in his own right. This ‘absolute potency is not only what the sun can be,’ writes Giordano Bruno ‘it is also what everything is, and what everything can be … from whence the profound saying of the author of the Book of Revelation, “He who is hath sent me to you; He who is speaks thus.”’
The God of Revelation sent Tamburlaine to rescue Constantinople from the Turks. In carrying out that mission, Tamburlaine evolves into a portent of universal doom. His most notorious custom involved the three tents – first white, then red and finally black – that he pitched outside the walls of a besieged city. The white colours signified ‘the mildness of his mind / That, satiate with spoil, refuseth blood’ (IV.i.52–53). Should the city refuse this offer, ‘As red as scarlet is his furniture’ and his kindled wrath must ‘be quenched with blood, / Not sparing any that can manage arms’ (55–57). The black colours foretold ‘death and hell / Without respect of sex, degree, or age’ (61–62). The sequence of white, red and black followed by slaughter recalled the four horsemen of the Apocalypse in the Book of Revelation, where white, red and black riders precede the ‘pale horse’ bearing Death. This infamous ritual only entered Tamburlaine’s biography in the 1520s, shortly after the Turkish conquest of Belgrade. The rapid dissemination of the new legend attested to the European Christians’ foreboding that God was now judging their fitness for clemency or destruction.
The theatregoers of 1587 had every reason to feel alarmed by this prospect. The prophecies of Regiomantus, the fifteenth-century German astronomer who foretold universal disaster in 1588, took on added impetus from the impending arrival of the Spanish Armada, from the belief that Pope Sixtus V was the Antichrist and from the widespread fascination with prophecy and eschatology. Shelton à Gevran’s account Of the End of the World and Second Coming of Christ went through eleven editions between 1577 and 1589. During the peak years of 1586–88, printers churned out a slew
of astrological and prophetic books. Surely some revelation was at hand.
Marlowe saved the three coloured tents for the end. After proclaiming himself ‘the chiefest lamp of all the earth’, Tamburlaine clothes himself in the apocalyptic imagery of Revelation and the prophetic books of the Hebrew Bible: ‘Then, when the sky shall wax as red as blood / It shall be said I made it red myself’ (IV.ii.53–54). When the virgins of Damascus come forth to beg for mercy on the third and black day of the siege, Tamburlaine shows them ‘the thing itself’. ‘Behold my sword,’ he tells them, ‘For there sits Death’ (V.ii.108–11).
9.8 The end of the world. From John Doleta, Strange news out of Calabria, 1586.
While Tamburlaine’s troops are killing every last man, woman and child in Damascus, the tears that his beloved sheds ‘in thy passion for thy country’s love / And fear to see thy kingly father’s harm’ (V.i.137–38) awaken the hero’s dormant sense of beauty. He likens Zenocrate to Flora, the goddess of fertility, raining showers of liquid pearl on to the earth. Her face metamorphoses into the scene of poetic inspiration and writing, ‘Where Beauty, mother to the Muses, sits / … Taking instruction from thy flowing eyes’ (V.i.144–46). Tamburlaine knows ‘how to tell many lies that sound like truth’: he conveniently forgets that the mother of the Muses is Mnemosyne, or Memory, thus enabling the hero and his audience to forget about the bloody event that has reduced Zenocrate to tears in the first place. His final paean to the thing itself – ‘What is beauty, saith my sufferings then’ (160) – completes the work of forgetting by removing the weeping woman altogether. Beauty turns out to be the inexpressible ‘One thought, one grace, one wonder at the least. / Which into words no virtue can digest’ (172–73). Christopher Marlowe, the servant of the Muses, remembered what his audience forgot. His fusion of beauty and violence discovers brutality in the very apotheosis of classical eloquence.
The endless attempts to make sense of Tamburlaine’s soliloquy suggest that it was never meant to be intelligible in the first place. Quintilian advises the orator to cultivate ‘the gift of signifying more than we say, that is emphasis, together with exaggeration and overstatement of the truth’. The hero’s celebration of Beauty is a perfect example of what Puttenham calls ‘the Gorgeous’. Tamburlaine, the pragmatic orator, diverts his audience with ‘a mass of many figurative speeches, applied to the beautifying of our tale or argument’. Once he has forgotten his killings and beautified his tale, Tamburlaine can marry Zenocrate, retire from the battlefield and begin enforcing the very laws of civil order he unrepentantly violates throughout his two hours’ traffic on the stage.
9.9 Tamburlaine and Zenocrate. From Christopher Marlowe, Tamburlaine the Great, 1597.
The Prologue to The Second Part of the Bloody Conquests of Mighty Tamburlaine registered the enthusiasm of the earliest playhouse audiences for the first part. ‘The general welcomes Tamburlaine received,’ he begins, ‘When he arrivèd last upon our stage / Hath made our poet pen his second part.’ This explanation makes excellent sense on its own terms. Judged as a crowd-pleaser, Marlowe’s work set a standard that was unexampled, and would be unexcelled by any of the Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights who came after him, including Shakespeare and Jonson. Tamburlaine was widely imitated and constantly alluded to. The first edition was printed twice in 1590 and again in 1592, 1597 and 1606. The play became a staple of the Admiral’s Men’s repertory and continues to be performed in England and America to this day. Marlowe could look forward to a cut of the receipts if his new play proved to be a success in its own right.
The format of the sequel confronted Marlowe with the challenge of saying something new. In very broad outline, the plot of The Second Part recycles the story of The First Part. Tamburlaine again defeats the Turks, and again visits apocalyptic terrors on a besieged city. But Marlowe had already used the major episodes from the life of Tamburlaine; he needed to find new material. The Prologue indicates that the Second Part, ‘Where death cuts off the progress of his pomp’ (4), will focus on the issue of mortality. Pursuing this theme, Marlowe consulted a number of sources that lay off the beaten track of Tamburlaine’s biography. Where The First Part applied what Marlowe already knew to the story he found in Whetstone, the Second Part bears the traces of in-depth authorial research.
Marlowe found the miraculous ointment that enables a captive widow to commit suicide in Lodovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso and François Belleforest’s translation of Sebastian Munster’s Universal Cosmography. He discovered Muslim hell, where the damned feed upon ‘That Zoacum, that fruit of bitterness, / That in the midst of fire is ingraft’ (II.iii.20–21) in Phillipus Lonicerus’s Latin history of the Turks. He came across a state-of-the-art fort, complete with its own automated weapons system, in a manuscript of Paul Ive’s Practice of Fortification. He borrowed itineraries and local curiosities, including the lake surrounding Babylon, from Abraham Ortellius’s Theatre of the World. He took the nearby tar pits in the basin of the Euphrates from Plutarch’s Life of Alexander the Great. He retrieved the ‘man with a spear’ who portends Tamburlaine’s death from André Thevet’s Universal Cosmography. In taking this new material on board, Marlowe broke with the strong linear plot line of The First Part; instead, The Second Part veers off into the labyrinthine terrain of moral allegory.
The model of Spenser’s Faerie Queene proved instructive here. By the time Marlowe wrote The Second Part of Tamburlaine, he had seen the first book of Spenser’s allegorical romance in manuscript. The path that led Marlowe to this copy is murky, but the poem had certainly been circulating. The first edition of 1590 included commendatory poems by W.R. (Sir Walter Raleigh), Hobbinol (Gabriel Harvey), R.S., H.B. and W.L., all of whom had read the poem in manuscript. Marlowe signalled his own awareness of Spenser’s masterpiece by appropriating one of his rival’s most widely admired stanzas. The relevant passage from The Faerie Queene describes the allegorical insignia on the crest of Prince Arthur’s helmet:
Upon the top of all his loftie crest,
A bunch of haires discolourd diversly
With sprincled pearle, and gold full richly drest,
Did shake, and seem’d to daunce for jollity,
Like to an Almond tree ymounted hye
On top of greene Selinus all alone,
With blossoms brave bedecked daintily;
Whose tender locks do tremble every one
At every little breath, that under heaven is blowne.
Spenser’s stanza epitomizes the Renaissance ideal of Christian humanism. The flourishing almond tree refers to the Old Testament miracle when Aaron’s rod blossoms and bears ripe almonds to show that God has chosen him as High Priest. The tree sits on ‘grene Selinus’ because in the Aeneid, this was the town of the victor’s palm awarded to military heroes. The combination of biblical sainthood and heroic achievement, with the Scriptural image rising above that of Virgil, signifies Arthur’s consummate virtue; the jolly, multi-coloured strands dancing on the crest bespeak the gaiety of Spenser’s idealized Christian knight.
Tamburlaine restages this passage in a shocking moment of cruel self-assertion. He appears ‘drawn in his chariot’ by a team of captive kings ‘with bits in their mouths, reins in his left hand, in his right hand a whip, with which he scourgeth them’. ‘Holla, ye pampered jades of Asia,’ he cries, ‘What, can ye draw but twenty miles a day…?’ (IV.iii.1–2). Looking ahead to future triumphs, the hero imagines himself riding ‘Thorough the streets with troops of conquered kings’:
And in my helm a triple plume shall spring,
Spangled with diamonds, dancing in the air,
To note me Emperor of the threefold world:
Like to an almond tree ymounted high
Upon the lofty and celestial mount
Of evergreen Selinus, quaintly decked
With blooms more white than Herycina’s brows,
Whose tender blossoms tremble every one
At every breath that thorough heaven is blown.
(
IV.iii.114, 116–24)
Marlowe undermines his rival’s image from within. The ‘triple plume’ that replaces Spenser’s dancing ‘bunch of hairs’ evokes the quill pen that Marlowe uses to rewrite the passage he has lifted from The Faerie Queene. The plume will ‘note’ that Tamburlaine is emperor of Europe, Africa and Asia, the ‘threefold world’ that he means to conquer. The ‘blossoms brave’ of the biblical almond tree metamorphose into ‘blooms more white than Herycina’s brows’. Herycina is the epithet that Ovid adopts for Venus in the Amores, the Art of Love and the Metamorphoses; the name derives from the famous shrine to Venus on Mount Eryx in Sicily. Marlowe’s reference to the ‘brows’ of Ovid’s erotic mountain subverts Spenser’s allusions to Virgil and the Bible. His Ovidian blossoms wander from their appointed place; they blow ‘thorough’ rather than ‘under’ heaven.
The deconsecration of Arthur’s crest indicates how Marlowe responded to The Faerie Queene. The First Book of Spenser’s didactic romance is an allegory of the quest for Holiness. Individual episodes exemplify the way-stations on the path to eternal life; by the time Redcross Knight, the hero, achieves his climactic victory over sin and death, the reader has witnessed many variations on the theme of salvation through Christ. The second part of Tamburlaine, by contrast, recounts a secular journey towards eternal death. The individual episodes that Marlowe drew from his encyclopaedic array of source materials illuminate the meaning of mortality in a desanctified universe; by the time Tamburlaine arrives at his climactic encounter with his ‘slave, the ugly monster Death’ (V.iii.67), the spectator has witnessed many variations on the theme of utter extinction. This strategy resolved the tension between the hero’s infinite aspirations and the ineluctable fact of his mortality. ‘Tamburlaine, the scourge of God, must die’ (249), but when he finally does utter these words, his fear of the afterlife is a thing of the past. Where Christ redeems the Redcross Knight from sin and damnation, Tamburlaine comes to the Epicurean realization that the soul perishes with the body.