by David Riggs
Marlowe lays the groundwork for this recognition with irony and satire. At the outset of the play, the Christian King Sigismond vows ‘By him that made the world and saved my soul, / The Son of God and issue of a maid’ (I.i.133–34) to keep a truce with the Turkish king Orcanes, but then decides to attack him anyway. This event, which occurred many years after the historical Tamburlaine’s death, raises pointed questions about providence and the afterlife. Does God punish Christians who sin in His name? Is there a moral law that transcends the self-centred interests of warring creeds? Who enforces it? The play takes a sceptical line on these issues. King Sigismond’s counsellor argues that God will punish the Christians should they fail ‘to kill and curse at God’s command’ (II.i.55). The Turkish Orcanes makes Sigismond’s betrayal a test case of Christian providence, whence follows the absurd spectacle of Muslims rallying under the banner of Christ: ‘on Christ still let us cry; / If there be Christ, we shall have victory’ (II.ii.64). When Orcanes prevails, he is uncertain whether ‘Christ or Mahomet hath been my friend’, but reckons that Christ’s ‘power had share in this our victory’ (II.iii.11, 35). For his friend Gazellus, however, ‘’Tis but the fortune of the wars … / Whose power is often proved a miracle’ (31–32). The triumphant Orcanes condemns Sigismond to feed ‘upon the baneful tree of hell, that Zoacham’ (19–20). Or do Christian miscreants go to Christian hell? The repentant Sigismond believes that he still qualifies for paradise: ‘And let this death wherein to sin I die, / Conceive a second life in endless mercy’ (7–8). Marlowe leaves his audience with the unsettling prospect that the noble Orcanes will spend out his days in the team of captive kings, while the unscrupulous Sigismond goes straight to heaven.
Tamburlaine, the tragic hero, makes a mockery of divine justice. At the close of The First Part, Jove inspires Tamburlaine to ‘give the world to note, for all my birth, / That virtue solely is the sum of glory / And fashions men with true nobility’ (V.i.188–90). After the death of his queen in Part Two Tamburlaine proclaims that he is not
Crowned and invested by the hand of Jove,
For deeds of bounty or nobility;
But since I exercise a greater name,
The scourge of God and terror of the world,
I must apply myself to fit those terms,
In war, in blood, in death, in cruelty,
And plague such peasants as resist in me
The power of heaven’s eternal majesty.
(IV.i.153–60)
Tamburlaine’s ‘greater name’, the ‘scourge of God’, derived from Romans 13:1: ‘Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers, for the powers that be are ordained of God.’ Tudor monarchs used this passage to enforce the precept of abject obedience to any agent of state power, even tyrants. If the ruler was evil, God must have sent him to punish the wicked. Tamburlaine’s self-assertion exposes the fatal flaw in this logic. The scourge was supposed to be an instrument, not a self-aggrandizing adventurer. If God always ordains the powers that be, then any usurper can claim divine sanction for his own conquests.
Tamburlaine’s consummate act of self-deification is the destruction of Babylon. Marlowe modelled these scenes on parallel events in the Book of Revelation. The Angel in Revelation prophesies that the entire city of Babylon will be cast into the sea. Afterward, at the Last Judgement, ‘whosoever was not found written in the book of life was cast into the lake of fire’. The mapmaker Ortellius conveniently surrounded Babylon with an unnamed body of water, which Marlowe dubbed ‘Lake Limnasphaltis’ after the smouldering tar pits in the nearby basin of the Euphrates. This bit of creative cartography enables Tamburlaine to fulfil the Angel’s prophecy the moment the siege has ended. After shooting the governor, he orders his men to ‘bind the burghers hand and foot, / And cast them headlong in the city’s lake’ (V.i.160–61). And their ‘wives and children’? ‘[D]rown them all, man, woman and child; / Leave not a Babylonian in the town’ (167–69). Tamburlaine’s grotesque parody of the Last Judgement flouted the Puritan anxiety that the players could not be trusted with matters of sacred doctrine. Marlowe’s Second Part encouraged the ‘custom of profane scoffing in holy matters’, which, Bacon observed, ‘doth by little and little, deface the reverence of religion’.
The mockery of religion comes to a climax when Tamburlaine burns the Koran and dares Muhammed to retaliate. Thirty lines later, the hero experiences a delayed reaction: ‘But stay, I feel myself distempered suddenly’ (V.i.216). The two-minute interval is short enough to raise the possibility that Muhammed actually has retaliated, long enough to put this conjecture in doubt and wondrous enough to produce among an Elizabethan audience the momentary sensation of believing in an alien god. Pious critics have inferred that God does strike Tamburlaine down in the end, and Marlowe’s hero has surely done enough to deserve this fate. The play, however, offers a somatic explanation for Tamburlaine’s affliction. Syria, one of the captive kings harnessed to Tamburlaine’s chariot, rightly foresees that the protagonist’s ‘cruel heart / … wanting moisture and remorseful blood’ will ‘Dry up with anger, and consume with heat’ (IV.i.181–83). Tamburlaine’s rage over mortality hastens the very outcome that he strives to avoid. When Tamburlaine’s distemper returns, Theridimas confirms Syria’s diagnosis: ‘Ah, good my lord, leave these impatient words / Which add much danger to your malady’ (V.iii.54–55). The only cure for death is acceptance.
Theridimas can speak with conviction on this question. Tamburlaine’s lieutenant spends the better part of Acts Three and Four wooing Olympia, a widow in search of death. The soldier courts the lady in the lyric strains of ‘Come live with me and be my love’, but Olympia moves to different measures. ‘No such discourse is pleasant in my ears,’ she replies, ‘But that where every period ends with death / And every line begins with death again’ (IV.ii.46–48). When her resistance turns the wooer into a rapist – ‘I must and will be pleased, and you shall yield. / Come to the tent again’ (52–53) – Olympia produces a miraculous salve that will render his skin invulnerable:
To prove it, I will ’noint my naked throat
Which, when you stab, look on your weapon’s point,
And you shall see’t rebated with the blow.
(68–70)
Taking the bait, Theridimas unwittingly gives Olympia the fatal reprieve she yearns for. The widow knows what Tamburlaine has yet to discover: the only way to be invulnerable is to die happy.
The major sources for the life of Tamburlaine agree that he died of old age in his native city of Samarkand. The sole exception to this rule is André Thevet’s Universal Cosmography, which subjects the ageing warrior to a terrifying series of apparitions. The vengeful Ghost of Bajazeth comes to him in a dream on the last night of his life; the next morning Tamburlaine beholds a phantasmal ‘man with a spear’ who has marked him out for death. Overwhelmed with dread, the hero dies from a panic attack. Whetstone raises the same issue at the conclusion of the Mirror. Atheists, he insists, even pagan atheists, invariably die a miserable, god-haunted death (‘he durst not repose in the night, he was so terrified with horrible visions’).
Marlowe incorporates this motif into Tamburlaine’s final hours. At the climax of his last fit, Tamburlaine imagines that ‘the ugly monster Death, / Shaking and quivering, pale and wan for fear, / Stands aiming at me with his murdering dart’ (V.iii.67–69). Tamburlaine’s vision recalls the coming of death in homiletic morality plays like Everyman. What Tamburlaine sees, however, is an illusion; the apparition of death is a symptom, not the cause, of his imminent demise. Marlowe offers Lucretian therapy for this malady. A physician confirms Syria’s preliminary diagnosis. Tamburlaine has a bad fever. His ‘veins are full of accidental heat’ that imperils his ‘humidum and calor’ (V.iii.84, 86), or his moisture and body heat. When these divine essences become extinct, he will die. The physician’s diagnosis rests on the Lucretian precept that ‘the soul is no simple substance, but rather a temperature of the four elements’. That is the thrust of Epicurean medi
cine. Death belongs to the nature of things; anxiety only makes matters worse; those who grasp this lesson have nothing to fear from mortality. The doctor’s diagnosis has the effect of a Lucretian cure. Tamburlaine survives the crisis, surmounts his anxiety about death and comes to a peaceful end surrounded by his loving family and friends. His final conquest is death itself.
CHAPTER TEN
Notoriety
On 19 November 1587, Squire Philip Gawdy wrote to his father about a theatrical ‘device’ that sounds suspiciously like the shooting of the Governor of Babylon in 2 Tamburlaine. Here is what Philip reported:
My Lord Admiral his men and players having a device in their play to tie one of their fellows to a post and so to shoot him to death, having borrowed their callivers [muskets] one of the players hands swerved his piece being charged with a bullet missed the fellow he aimed at and killed a child, and a woman great with child forthwith, and hit another man in the head very sore.
Even if this strange passage refers to another play, it reveals that the Admiral’s Men were firing loaded muskets in performance. Since the bullets coming out of sixteenth-century firearms often strayed a long way from their targets, this practice was bound to produce a sensation of real anxiety among the spectators. The mayhem that came to young Gawdy’s attention could even explain why the Admiral’s Men failed to receive an invitation to play before Queen Elizabeth that Christmas.
Marlowe’s play challenged the limits of acceptable public behaviour. Tamburlaine, his star attraction, gloried in the reputation of a murderous blasphemer. If this was excessively strong stuff for a court entertainment, Tamburlaine thrived in popular culture. In the playhouse, the alehouses and on the streets, he became an urban legend of plebeian self-assertion. The all-conquering shepherd’s popularity had a galvanizing influence on the career of his twenty-three-year-old creator. The play instantly gave Marlowe premier standing among the English popular playwrights; but Marlowe’s fortunes were now tied to those of his dangerously attractive villain-hero. Over the long run of the English Renaissance, Tamburlaine provided the impetus for a vernacular canon of blank-verse classics by Shakespeare, Jonson and Milton. During the brief span of Marlowe’s own life, however, critics deplored the play’s corrosive effect on literary standards.
The ‘general welcomes Tamburlaine received’ soon prompted three more university graduates – Robert Greene, George Peele and Thomas Lodge – to mimic Marlowe’s success in the public playhouse. Greene’s Alphonsus King of Aragon came hard on the heels of Marlowe’s masterpiece: Greene had already penned his play and responded to its critics by the spring of 1588. Alphonsus gave them a lot to criticize. Greene’s plot is a thinly disguised rewrite of 1 Tamburlaine, with corresponding roles for all the major characters. He decks it out with a plodding pastiche of Marlowe’s blank verse line and Grand Guignol effects. When Alphonsus enters under a canopy adorned with the crowned heads of conquered kings, or brags, ‘I clap up Fortune in a cage of gold, / To make her turn her wheel as I think best’, he looks and sounds like a warmed-over Tamburlaine. Greene gives his hero a veneer of legitimacy by making him the rightful heir to the throne of Aragon, but Alphonsus of course wants more:
And nought is left for me but Aragon?
Yes, surely yes, my Fates have so decreed,
That Aragon should be too base a thing,
For to obtain Alphonsus for her King.
Alphonsus shifts the odium of Tamburlaine’s atheism on to Sultan Amurack (the Bajazeth figure), who curses Muhammed in a replay of the scene where Marlowe’s hero burns the Koran. Instead of moral clarity, however, Greene sows confusion. As subsequent imitators soon discovered, there was no way to reconcile Tamburlaine’s crowd-pleasing iniquities with the demands of sober morality.
The following March, Greene announced that he was ‘using mine old poesy still’, even though two gentlemen poets
had it in derision, for that I could not make my verses jet upon the stage in tragical buskins, every word filling the mouth like the faburden of Bo-bell, daring God out of heaven with that Atheist Tamburlaine, or blaspheming with the mad priest of the sun: but let me rather openly pocket up the Ass at Diogenes’ hand: then wantonly set out such impious instances of intolerable poetry …
Although Greene cloaks his meaning in curious allusions and figures (‘I speak darkly Gentlemen’), the thrust of his critique is clear enough. He will adhere to his old poesy, the Horatian motto, ‘Omne tulit punctum qui miscuit utile dulci’ (‘He bears the bell in all respects,’ in Thomas Drant’s Elizabethan translation, ‘Who good with sweet doth mingle’), despite the gentlemen’s taunt that he is incapable of making delightful verses for the stage. Although Tamburlaine’s lines fill the mouth like the faburden (the main melody sustained by the tenor in three-part madrigal singing) of the famous bell in the church of St Mary le Bow, they contain atheism and blasphemy. Sweet but not good, in Horace’s terms, Tamburlaine’s verses mingle sensuous delight with bad instruction. Greene will not dare God out of heaven, as Tamburlaine does in The Second Part, or blaspheme with Marlowe’s kindred spirit Giordano Bruno, the frenzied sun-worshipper.
Greene goes on to say that he would rather endure the gentlemen’s insults than follow the lead of ‘such mad and scoffing poets, that have prophetical spirits as bred of Merlins race’. Merlin was the Elizabethan pronunciation of ‘Marlin’, the name Marlowe went by at Cambridge; the mad and scoffing poets are his imitators. Merlin was also the legendary magician who had instructed King Arthur. Merlin’s followers, Greene continues, are badly misguided, for
if there be any in England that set the end of scholarism in an English blank verse, I think either it is the humour of a novice that tickles them with self-love, or too much frequenting the hot house (to use the German proverb) hath sweat out all the greatest part of their wits …
If there is any English poet who thinks that blank verse – Greene here coins the phrase to describe Marlowe’s innovation – has brought ‘scholarism’ (that is, quantitative measures) to an end, he is either a self-deluded beginner or has been spending too much time in the bathhouse. Yet even Greene has to concede that Tamburlaine has already set a trend. If Merlin is a magician, he is also a prophet who foresees, and a patriarch who inspires, a race of imitators.
* * *
For better or for worse, Marlowe’s contemporary reputation rested on the fortunes of Tamburlaine the Great. Besides Greene’s Alphonsus King of Aragon, the sons of Merlin included George Peele’s The Battle of Alcazar, Thomas Lodge’s Wounds of Civil War and the anonymous Selimus, all written within a few years of Tamburlaine. These early imitators reduced Marlowe’s conception to a marketable formula: poetry and spectacle transform regicide into effective theatre, a source of illicit pleasure. The protagonists speak in thumping blank verse thickly larded with hyperboles. The action reeks of egregious violence. The common practice of quoting or citing Tamburlaine, or of reproducing its most lurid scenes, such as the chariot drawn by captive kings, gave Marlowe’s work a bad eminence, as if ‘Merlin’ were responsible for the exorbitance of his imitators. Nor did the authors of these plays, including Marlowe, want to be seen in public with their work. They kept their conqueror plays out of print, or withheld their names from the title pages. Greene would rather bear the injury like an ass than admit that he had written Alphonsus King of Aragon. Lodge vowed before 1589 ‘To write no more of that whence shame doth grow / [Nor] tie my pen to penny-knaves delight’, a pledge that he promptly broke.
The Queen’s Men, who had the most to lose from Marlowe’s success, contrived to imitate and repudiate their new rival at the same time. The Prologue to Selimus, the company’s contribution to the new wave of heroic historical drama, advised spectators to view their work from the high moral ground:
Here shall you see the wicked son pursue
His wretched father with remorseless spite
And daunted once, his force again renew,
Poison his father, kill his friends in fight.
You shall behold him character in blood
The image of an implacable king …
The hero’s glamour is less instructive than the carnage that he leaves in his wake. The anonymous author well understood what was at stake for the Queen’s Men in this production. Bajazeth, the father, speaks in rhymed verse, just as the Prologue does. His son Selimus begins with rhymed lines, and then switches to blank verse as he turns into a patricidal monster. Selimus’s blank verse is transparently second rate, but that, in a way, is the author’s point. Since Tamburlaine’s imitator is bad, why try to make him sound good?
The Queen’s Men again spelled out their differences with Marlowe in the Prologue to their English history play, The Troublesome Reign of King John (1588):
You that with friendly grace of smoothed brow
Have entertained the Scythian Tamburlaine,
And given applause unto an Infidel:
Vouchsafe to welcome (with like courtesy)
A warlike Christian and your Countryman.
The company’s sales pitch for patriotic plays about English heroes was prophetic of things to come. Shakespeare would soon revitalize the history play along just these lines. The Queen’s Men enjoyed no such luck. Doomed by their inability to make the transition to blank verse, they were about to lose their foothold in the London market and become a provincial company.
Marlowe met his equal only in Thomas Kyd, the son of a London scrivener. Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy (c. 1587) and Tamburlaine belong to the same historic efflorescence. Like Marlowe, Kyd devised a highly original, yet easily imitable, blank verse line. Where Marlowe’s verse is unabashedly grandiloquent, Kyd’s is more terse and varied. The Spanish Tragedy compounded Marlowe’s impact on English verse. Before Marlowe and Kyd, tragic playwrights used rhymed lines; henceforth the dominant medium would be blank verse. Where Marlowe reworked the native genre of the conqueror play, Kyd adapted Senecan revenge tragedy to the popular stage. Seneca’s tragedies are full of violence, but the Roman dramatist’s attachments to bloodlust were mediated by the fact that his plays were declaimed rather than performed. Kyd sets the mangled bodies before our eyes. Tamburlaine and The Spanish Tragedy both employ the scourge of God motif. Where Tamburlaine claims to be a flail sent from heaven, Kyd’s protagonist Hieronimo is a high-minded magistrate driven mad, as Hamlet would be, by the contradictory roles of ‘scourge and minister’. Both authors invoke divine agency to obtain moral leverage on subaltern violence. Tamburlaine and Hieronimo can claim to be ethical subjects even as they kill their social betters. In popular religious drama and in earlier homespun tragedies, tyrants wreak violence on their subjects and God punishes the tyrants. In The Spanish Tragedy and Tamburlaine, subjects punish their rulers. Before Marlowe and Kyd, tragic violence runs from the top down or circulates among equals; henceforth, it issues from the bottom up as well.