49
DESIRE FOR SUPREME MILITARY POWER
TAMBURLAINE
Christopher Marlowe produced a daring and thrilling play
focusing on the triumphs of the Tartar Conqueror, Tamburlaine. His
first play staged with great success in 1587, is an event of profound
significance in the history of English theatre.
Tamburlaine the Great introduces the supply and swaggering
strain of blank verse which became the medium for all glories of
Elizabethan and Jacobean drama. Marlowe was famous for adeptly
incorporating the style of blank verse, unrhymed iambic pentameter
into English drama. The play was so popular that Marlowe was
compelled to write a sequel to Tamburlaine and his wife’s deaths.
50
Marlowe’s Tamburlaine is a character who reveals his power in his
conquests, and the verse conveys brilliantly his sense of excitement.
Rich words trip off his tongue, relished for own sakes in a
manner which becomes characteristic of much English poetry. The
play has a shift from the conventional and low comic style of the
Renaissance works to a practically captivating form.
The actions of the play are not a straightforward glorification
of Tamburlaine’s violent conquests, since Marlowe frequently
highlights his protagonist’s excessive brutality and hubris, or
excessive pride. However, their directness and eloquence make it
difficult not to admire Tamburlaine, both for his rhetorical power
and his lifelike animation.
Alongside Tamburlaine’s ceaseless conquests and their
implications about politics run more general themes of desire,
ambition, and power. Marlowe uses his portrayal of Tamburlaine’s
capture, betrothal, marriage and ultimate loss of his wife Zenocrate,
the daughter of the Egyptian “Soldan”, or Sultan, to highlight these
themes in another context, questioning the true nature of his hero’s
romantic passion.
51
The important thing is that Marlowe depicts all the themes
through unique power of Renaissance that is to say; perhaps the
most important aspect of the Renaissance was the aspiration of
man’s spirit after knowledge and power. From this point of view, he
expresses the essential Renaissance spirit when he says:
Nature, that framed us of four elements
warring within our breasts for regiments,
Doth teach us all to have aspiring minds.
Our souls, whose faculties can comprehend
The wonderous architecture of the world,
1
It would be difficult to list the characteristics of the
Renaissance in a graded order but with the aspiration that
recognized no limits, there went a wondering speculation about the
mystery of beauty. Tamburlaine being a man of strong decision
and action and also being born a poor shepherd, he raises his
courage and his brilliant use of words to marry with the most
beautiful woman in the world, the divine Zenocrate. By force of
arms and power of will the great warrior Tamburlaine overthrows,
one after another, the established hereditary rulers of the world.
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This is the Renaissance man’s characteristics of unlimited power
and abilities and force. So, Marlowe was the first true voice of the
Renaissance – the period of new learning, new freedom, and new
enterprise and of the worship of Man rather than God. In support of
this view G.R. Kanwal remarks:
That dawn that Marlowe sang into our skies
with mouth of gold and morning in his eyes.
2
A brief discussion of Marlowe’s great plays will preserve his
reputation both historically and aesthetically in the chronicle of
English drama.
Source and Concept: Marlowe found his chief source for
Tamburlaine in Thomas Fortescue’s The Forest, a translation of
Silvade Varia Lection of Pedro Mexia, but he used other sources as
well, perhaps most notably George Whetstone’s The English Mirror
and Magni Tamerlains Scythianrum Imperotoris Vita of Petrus
Perondinus. The story of the Scythian conqueror was widely known
in Elizabethan England, and it may be found in many places. By the
time it reached Marlowe, the character of Tamburlaine had thus
53
pretty well been moulded by literary and historical tradition. This
tradition had two facets. On the one hand, Tamburlaine had been
glorified in the writings of Italian humanists, beginning with Peggio
Bracciolini in his Devarictate fortunae libri quarttor as the perfect
prince, the symbol of Renaissance virtue.
Although a pagan
himself, Tamburlaine was glorified as the defender of Christian
Europe against the Turks. Marlowe’s play carries on this picture
created by the Italian humanists. Alongside, this apotheosis of the
Mongol Conqueror, however, had grown up a parallel tradition.
This idea appeared, as Battenhouse points out, in Marlowe’s most
immediate source, Fortescue’s The Forest. Marlowe thus inherited
an account which was already cast for him in conventional
Christian terms.
3
This flamboyant story of the conquering Scythian Shepherd,
presented in a richly declamatory blank verse abounding in
colourful images of power and violence, brought a new kind of life
to the English theatre.
This is a study of lust for power and military achievement
gloried in almost esthetically for its own sake, which requires and
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receives - “a great and thundering speech.” All the excitement of
new geographical discoveries, all the richly luxurious implication
which oriented splendor had held for the accidental imagination.
Ever since the temperate Greeks faced the extravagant Persians or
the restrained self-indulgences of Horace repudiated the “Persicos
apparatus.” All the new glory of Elizabethan poetic utterance, the
Renaissance feeling the virtue the fascination with what man can
achieve along a single line of Endeavour if he sets his mind and
heart to it with sufficient fervor and lyrical enthusiasm.
The interest in pride, in lust for power, in man as master of
his own destiny are challenging and vying with the goals - “How
noble in reason! How infinite in faculties! In form and moving, how
expressive and admirable! In action, how like an angel! In
apprehension, how like a god! - and imagining that by an effort of
the will he can control Fortune’ wheel - all this is in Tamburlaine, a
play
which
ignores
moral
considerations
to
exhibit
the
impressiveness of boundless ambition coupled with determination
and self-confidence that similarly know no limits.
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The power of Tamburlaine’s desire equates that of Phaethon,
of Croeton and of Lucifer himself. It is to sit in the seat of the Gods
and to have power over life and death. That’s why before the battle
against Mycetes, Tamburlaine defies the gods and threatens to
chase the stars from heaven with the sun-bright armour of his forces
because, to Tamburlaine’s way of thinking, kings already pass this
power on earth, this strangest aspiration finds its goal in kingship.
To the repetition of the following incantatory question to his
followers:
Is it not brave to be a king, Techelles ?
Usumcasane and Theridamas,
Is it not passing brave to be a king,
And ride in triumph through Pessepolis?
4
USUMCASANE replies, with significant stress on superhuman
power:
To be a king, is half to be a God,
THERIDAMAS adds:
A god is not so glorious as a king.
I think the pleasure they enjoy in heaven
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Cannot compare with kingly joys in earth:
To wear a crown enchased with pearl and gold,
5
Whose virtues carry with it life and death,
Even before the victory over Mycetes which gains
Tamburlaine his throne, Menaphone sees him as an uncrowned
king, already wielding this authority. The godlike power to spare or
stay is, therefore, the submission of Tamburlaine’s desire - a
misdirected desire, because it makes the royal prerogative an end in
itself rather than the means to justice.
Theme: One of Tamburlaine’s principal themes is conveyed
in its depiction of excessive cruelty and ambition. In fact, the theme
of Power pervades nearly every aspect of the play, from
Tamburlaine’s conquests, to his role as a father, to his relationship
with Zenocrate. Tamburlaine’s military brilliance and his ability to
carry out such horrendous acts, such as slaughtering the population
of Babylon, are the results of these characteristic traits, as are - his
eloquence and rhetorical power and convincing mind.
The theme of the first part of Tamburlaine is the power and
splendour of the human will which bears down all opposition and
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by its own 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 kind of 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.
6
Opposition appears to melt away at Tamburlaine’s mere
appearance. Theridamas, sent with an army against him, is won
ever by his presence and comes over to his side without a battle;
Cosroe, who dethrones his brother and plans to use Tamburlaine for
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his own purposes, is easily overthrown. In love the path is equally
straight.
Zenocrate, betrothed to the 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, seeking to range herself on his side, as
the others do, by instinct.
The second part is very different and shows that 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. This
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 man’s
minds are apart, and man acts against this order at his peril. This
theme is clashed between man’s desires; and his experience
demands a more complex structure for its expression than was
demanded by the theme of the triumphant human will in the first
part.
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Technique: Marlowe’s critics tend to agree that Marlowe’s
innovation in verse by using mighty lines was the first and foremost
influential stylistic achievement of the era. It was Tamburlaine the
Great that made this powerful verse style famous. Marlowe
stresses: Jigging veins of rhyming mother wits. Marlowe wanted to
create a work of high philosophical ambition and powerful,
astounding verse. He was perhaps the chief innovator to instil blank
verse - with emotional force and rhythmic eloquence, and he was
also influential in skillfully suiting his character’s temperaments to
the nature of their lines. Tamburlaine’s lines, for example, are not
just musical and eloquent but extremely powerful and majestic,
with hard consonant sounds and decisive, accented peaks and
flourishes, while those of Calyphas and Mycetes rhyme
ineffectually and repeat sounds frequently, to no purpose. As the
climax of a rhythmic build-up through three powerful lines the
stress is shifted from ‘ride to ‘triumph’ and Perrepolis is translated
from a geographic fact into an imaginative El Dorado:
MENAPHON
Your majesty shall shortly have your wish,
And ride in triumph through Perrepolis.
TAMBURLAINE And ride in triumph through Perrepolis!
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It is not brave to be a king, Techelles?
Usumcasane and Theridamas,
Is it not passing brave to be a king,
And ride in triumph through Perrepolis? 7
This transformation of routine statement into sensuous vision
is specifically a dramatic effect, the use of poetry for dramatic
effect. It is also the transformation of routine blank verse into
Marlowe’s ‘mighty line’: in the final form it is, as Marlowe’s verse
is said always to be end-stopped – on that depends its peculiar
rhythmic splendour.
Tamburlaine’s power of rhetoric is critical to his military
triumphs. Its rhetoric compels Theridamas to join him and allows
him to inspire his soldiers to victory. Also Tamburlaine relies on
rhetoric to win over Zenocrate and instruct his sons in the arts of
war. Of course, he supports his rhetoric with his majestic looks and
forceful actions, but this style and technique of speech is the key
means by which he is able to communicate his power.
Marlowe saw rhetoric as one of the most important keys to
power and truth. In fact, he wrote such grand and forceful speeches
61
that writers began to parody Marlowe’s style and technique after
Tamburlaine the Great became famous, seeing Marlowe as the
prime example of powerful writer. The verse conveys brilliantly his
sense of excitement. Rich words trip off his tongue, relished for
own sakes in a manner which became characteristic of much
English poetry. Of course, Elizabethan audiences might sometimes
find Tamburlaine pompous, but his rhetoric is the dramatist’s chief
tools in portraying Tamburlaine as such a captivating figure.
The style of Tamburlaine is well as it serves the expression
of a variety of motifs, and is remarkably uniform. It is partly
achieved by the grandiloquence of the blank verse; however, it is
also permeated and coloured throughout by a rich metaphorical
quality; and is marked by distinctive, a syntactical and stylistic
patterns and by a distinctive vocabulary. 8
Power: The play opens with a prologue declaring that, unlike
the silly wordplay of previous literature, this play will feature the
“high astounding” words and actions of a conqueror. Actually, the
shepherd Tamburlaine wants to become as a god ; this is the
Renaissance man’s desire and ambition, for example, Tamburlaine
says as much in Act 1 scene II as :
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Jove sometimes masked in a shepherd’s weed;
And by those steps that he hath scaled the heavens
May we become immortal like the gods.
9
In the next scene, Tamburlaine depicts with military power
that Zenocrate is made important before she even speaks as a
captive of Tamburlaine and his soldiers who are laden with
Egyptian treasure from her possession. Tamburlaine captured the
Egyptian Princess Zenocrate, daughter of Soldan of Egypt. She
remains with him as his concubine, and then his wife, until her
death. Initially, she resists Tamburlaine’s romantic suit and calls
herself “wretched” because she is forced to remain with him. She
entreats him to release her but Tamburlaine explains his inability to
do so in the following words: ‘But, lady, this fair face and heavenly
hue must grace his bed that conquers Asia’. He then proudly
describes, with utter certainty his future as a mighty conqueror.
Act III depicts the siege of Constantinople and introduces
Tamburlaine’s opponent Bajazeth, the emperor of Turkey, who sets
himself up as a formidable adversary. Bajazeth is a proud Islamic
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leader who ultimately beats his brains out on his cage rather than be
subject to more humiliation and starvation.
A number of adversaries rise to the challenge of verbal
combat, notably Bajazeth in part-I. Tamburlaine’s power dismisses
Bajazeth’s basso sent to warn him to back down in the face of
overwhelming numbers; Bajazeth, meanwhile, entered and a direct
challenge follows. Marlowe depicts Bajazeth and Tamburlaine
threatening each other roaring at one another like animals facing
each other down. Bajazeth was the most powerful of Tamburlaine’s
adversaries in the play. They prepare to draw up battle by handing
over their crowns to their women, Zenocrate and Zabina and for the
duration of the combat, the women exchange insults. In Act III,
scene III, as their lord’s march into battle, their two female
counterparts, Zenocrate and Zabina, also indulge in an exchange of
tirades, at that perilous situation.
ZABINA
Base concubine, must thou be plac’d by me
That am the empress of the mighty Turk?
ZENOCRATE Disdainful Turkers, and unreverend boss
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Call’st thou me concubine, that am
betrothed unto the great and mighty]
Tamburlaine?
ZABINA
To Tamburlaine, the great Tartarian thief!
10
Though opponents are confident of victory in their challenges
to Tamburlaine, the shepherd Tamburlaine is ultimately victorious
in the battle. Bajazeth’s contributory kings’ are all killed and their
crowns are claimed by Tamburlaine’s allies, and Zabina’s crown is
given to Zenocrate. He asserts that he will not ransom Bajazeth: it is
power not wealth that motives him. As related, an ideal scene in
Tamburlaine is where Tamburlaine uses Emperor Bajazeth as his
footstool:
TAMBURLAINE Bring out my footstool
[They take him [Bajazeth] out of the cage]
......... ......... ......... ......... ......... .........
BAJAZETH
First shalt thou rip my bowels with thy sword
And sacrifice my heart to death and hell
Before I yield to such a slavery.
65
TAMBURLAINE Base Villaine, Vassal, slave to Tamburlaine,
Unworthy to embrace or touch the ground
That bears the honour of my royal weights,
stoop, villain, stoop !
11
It shows Tamburlaine’s supreme military power and victory
over the Turks and Tamburlaine making slaves of Bajazeth and his
wife Zabina. Tamburlaine’s conquests have no material objective in
view. They are, one might almost say, Metaphysical in inspiration.
His love for Zenocrate does not project any serious dramatic
conflict in the play but is presented as the claims of some eloquent
style that celebrates military power and conquest. But the scenes
which must have struck the Elizabethan audience with most force
are those where the imagery of power is projected in concrete
situations.
Bajazeth, the Emperor of Turks, and his wife kept like beasts
in a cage and taunted to desperation by Tamburlaine for the
amusement of himself and Zenocrate are clearly presented.
Tamburlaine uses Bajazeth as his footstool as he climbs on his
chair.
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For instance, when he sets his feet on the back of the
conquered Turkish emperor Bajazeth, making a footstool of him, he
triumphantly proclaims:
For I, the chiefest lamp of all the earth,
First rising in the east with mild aspect,
But fixed now in the meridian line,
Will send up fire to borrow light of you; 12
In the second part, Tamburlaine with his Chariot drawn by
conquered kings is projected with his might and glory and restless
desire for power after power.
Tamburlaine drawn in his chariot
by Trebizon and Soria with bitters in their mouthes,
reines in his left hand, in his right hand a whip,
with which he scourgeth them,
13
Literally, Tamburlaine has decided that the crowns of the
entire world are the “ripest fruit of all” and thus the course is set for
the rest of his career. He wanted to attempt to gather all the fruits
that the world has to offer. Tamburlaine’s quest for kingship is that
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he has only recently witnessed the demise of two kings, Mycetes
and Cosroe, whose royalty did not prevent disaster, and he will later
observe the destruction of Bajazeth.
Tamburlaine
wants
the
kingship of Persia for himself and sends word to Cosroe that he
wants to battle with Cosroe for his crown. They fight and
Tamburlaine is victorious. When Cosroe berates Tamburlaine for
taking his crown, Tamburlaine replies as:
Wills us to wear ourselves and never rest
Until we reach the ripest fruits of all,
That perfect bliss and sole felicity,
That sweet fruition of an earthly crown.
14
In the fifth act there is the scene in which the clouds darken
and suspense thickens. “Still doth this man, or rather god, of war”
batter at the walls of Damascus, regardless of the brewing storm.
Such is the power and might of Tamburlaine. The Virgins move
him not. By their slaughter he vindicates his tragic consistency and
throws another gauntlet into the teeth of Nemesis.
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Then, lest tragic pity be lost to sight in all this accumulation
of tragic fear, the man of war exposes in one of the grandest
manners the heart of the lover, the soul of the idealist.
Ah, fair Zenocrate ! divine Zenocrate ! ...........
What is beauty, saith my sufferings, then ?
15
If all the pens that ever poets held. ............ .
This play is often linked with Renaissance humanism with
idealism, the potential of humanism. Tamburlaine’s superhuman
aspiration for immense power raises profound religious questions as
he arrogates for himself a role as the “Scourage of God”.
It is worth pointing out that Tamburlaine’s eventually fatal
illness strikes him immediately after this act. Suggesting divine
retribution, however, these are little doubt that the play challenges
some tenets of conventional religious belief. The main cause of
Tamburlaine’s downfall occurs in the excessive appetite for power
and that is his tragic flaw.
In the forthcoming chapter, aspiration for worldly knowledge
and magic power of Doctor Faustus will be discussed.
69
Reference
1.
Naresh Chandra. The Literature of the English Renaissance
(New Delhi: DOABA House, 1985), p.212.
2.
G.R. Kanwal. Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great
(Delhi: Surjeet Publication, 2008), p.XX.
3.
Irving Ribner. Elizabethan Drama: Modern Essays in
Criticism (n.p., n.d), p. 85.
4.
Frank Romany, Robert Lindsey. Christopher Marlowe: The
Complete Plays (London: Penguin Books Ltd., 2003), p.100.
5.
Op. cit., pp. 100-101.
6.
Judith O’Neill. Critics on Marlowe (New Delhi: George
Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1996), p. 38.
7.
Edward Arnold. Elizabethan Theatre (London: Edward
Arnold Publishers Ltd., 1996), p. 88.
8.
Wolfgang Clemen. English Tragedy before Shakespeare: The
Development of Dramatic Speech (London: Methuen & Co
Ltd., 1961), p. 116.
9.
Frank Romany, Robert Lindsey. Christopher Marlowe: The
Complete Plays, p.87.
70
10.
Ibid., p. 119.
11.
Ibid., p.126.
12.
Wolfgang Clemen. English Tragedy before Shakespeare: The
Development of Dramatic Speech, p.120.
13.
David Daiches. A Critical History of English Literature
(New Delhi: Allied Publishers Ltd., 1998), p. 238.
14.
Frank Romany, Robert Lindsey. Christopher Marlowe: The
Complete Plays, p. 105.
15.
Tucker Brooke & Matthias A. Shaaber. The Renaissance
(1500-1660) (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1967),
p. 512.