The Sum of Glory: Christopher Marlowe's Tamburlaine the Great Parts 1 and 2

Perhaps the first great play of the Elizabethan stage, Marlowe's Tamburlaine the Great  is relentless and ruthless.  How are we to understand a bloody conqueror and tyrant?  What does Marlowe mean by this spectacle of his success?  We'll look at those questions today!

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• 16:29 (Cont.) The Sum of Glory: Christopher Marlowe's Tamburlaine the Great Parts 1 and 2

Transcript

Good day, everyone!  Thanks for stopping by the Clubhouse for another installment of the Classic English Literature Podcast!  Today, we take in our first Elizabethan play, and, boy, is it a whopper!  Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great, Parts 1 and 2!

But before we sweep across southwest Asia in obsessive, bloody conquest, I’d like to remind you that you can follow the podcast on all of the major social media platforms: I’ve been posting “this day in literary history” reels as well as podcast updates and announcements, so do check those out.  You can email me at classicenglishliterature@gmail.com with questions, comments, and/or compliments.  And you can help me keep throwing these little parties by clicking the “support the show” button.  I deeply appreciate it.

And a special note of appreciation to Eileen.  Thank you so much for your generosity!  I’m very happy that you are here for our little chats!

So here we are at Elizabethan theatre proper and I wanted to start this series off with a bang, a play that “pleased the million,” as it were.  I could have kicked off with The Tragedy of Gorboduc, Sackville and Norton’s 1561 offering which is generally regarded as the first English play to employ blank verse, that is, the unrhymed iambic pentameter line, that is, a ten syllable line with accents on the even syllables.  Or Ralph Roister Doister, Udall’s comedy from the 1550s, often referred to as the first comedy written in English (though I think that honor should go to the medieval shepherd’s plays, but I have yet to be asked my opinion by anyone).

I chose not to start with these two because, frankly, what makes these plays interesting is pretty much their place in the chronology of English theatre and not any particular artistic merit.  Well, perhaps I’m being harsh here, maybe I’ll do a bonus subcast episode looking at these pioneering plays – but I thought they may be a bit niche for a general audience.

So I chose Christopher Marlowe’s blood and thunder play Tamburlaine the Great.  It’s one of his better known works, it’s often reckoned the first big blockbuster of the era, and on its menu is some rather piquant food for thought.

Christopher Marlowe?  The “live with me and be my love” guy?  Wrote that poem about a simp trying to get the girl by giving her posies and wooly slippers?

That’s the guy.  While “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love” is without doubt his most popular lyric, drama was his most productive oeuvre.  He was born in Canterbury in 1564 (the same year as his friend and rival William Shakespeare).  Marlowe's life was relatively short, but crammed with incident. He was educated at Cambridge University, though his alleged atheism in addition to his taking so much time off from his studies led Corpus Christi College to withhold  his degree.  That is, until Queen Elizabeth’s Privy Council intervened, noting that the time away was spent in “good service” and insisting, very politely I’m sure, that Mr. Marlowe be given the old sheepskin.  He thus belonged to what were later called the University Wits – writers who possessed a classical education.  This affair among others posits that Marlowe worked for secretary of state Sir Francis Walsingham’s espionage service. Marlowe's untimely death occurred in 1593 under mysterious circumstances, at the age of 29. He was stabbed to death in a tavern brawl, allegedly a dispute over the bill, but most people suspect that someone – either Catholic enemies or perhaps the Queen herself – put a hit out on him.

So, given that bit of info, it’s the pastoral love poem that seems more out of character than this play about a superhumanly successful, monomaniacal, and brutal Asian warlord.  Marlowe wrote part 1 of Tamburlaine the Great in probably 1587.  It went over so well with the punters that he inaugurated the entertainment franchise model and produced a sequel in 1588.  Both plays were first published in 1590.  We’ll talk about the interesting relationship between parts one and two a bit later on – or, we’ll at least wildly and groundlessly speculate about what they say about Marlowe’s intentions.

The play (here I’m referring to both parts as a single work), the play is based upon the life of Timur, the 14th century amir whose expansive conquests created the Timurid Empire in what is now Iran, Afghanistan, and nearby areas of central Asia.  Of Turkic and Mongol ancestry, and a descendent of Genghis Khan, Timur saw himself as the “Sword of Islam,” charged by Allah to restore the Mongol empire.  Marlowe takes only the outline of Timur’s conquests as the basis for his play, relying for these on 16th century Spanish  and Italian sources, which in turn probably drew from older sympathetic Persian accounts and critical Arabic accounts.

At any rate, Marlowe makes some noteworthy changes to the historical record.  Firstly, he makes his Tamburlaine (from a nickname Timur the lame, due to a limp) a Scythian shepherd, from the area north of the Black Sea that today is Ukraine, instead of the son of a minor chieftain in Uzbekistan.  Secondly, Tamburlaine – to the extent that he has any religion at all – is a Hellenized pagan: the deities he names are the Romanized Olympian pantheon.  Timur was a devout Muslim.  Marlowe’s character is thus more an exoticized European than his historical Mongol counterpart.

So let’s do a quick and dirty for part 1.  We open in the city of Persepolis, where the Persian Emperor, Mycetes, decides to send his army to destroy that turbulent Scythian shepherd and bandit, Tamburlaine. The emperor comes across as quite feeble, bumbling and weak.  In fact, one could argue that he is the play’s comic figure, though if you know the story, the laughs are hard to come by.  His brother, Cosroe, agrees to help, but disgusted at the emperor’s impotence, hatches a treasonous plot to seize the throne himself.

Meanwhile, in Scythia, Tamburlaine has won and wooed Zenocrate, the winsome daughter of the Egyptian Soldan.  The text uses the word “rape,” which has exercised some critics, but you may know that the word at the time, from the Latin “raptus,” could mean capture as well as sexually assault.  Obviously, there are issues of female agency and autonomy here, but I rather think that Marlowe intends her to be understood as an unviolated spoil of war and not a victim of actual sexual violence.  Persian soldiers enter to attack Tamburlaine – but that honey-tongued shepherd convinces them, as well as Cosroe and Theridamas, a Persian lord, to betray Mycetes by joining Tamburlaine.

The Scythian promises Cosroe the Persian crown, and together, they defeat Mycetes. Tamburlaine keeps the crown for himself, killing Cosroe. The shepherd and bandit from the hinterlands is now the emperor of Persia.

Is he satisfied?  Does this remarkable turn of events satiate the lust for glory?  If you answered yes, dear listener, you have an optimistically defective understanding of warlords. Tamburlaine sets his sights on Turkey and its Emperor, Bajazeth. He ne’er shakes hands nor bids him good day, but captures Bajazeth and Zabina, his wife, making them his slaves.  Bajazeth he keeps locked in an iron cage, though he is occasionally let out to serve as Tamburlaine’s footstool, his ottoman, if you will.  

Did you see what I did there?  The pun?  No?  Well, perhaps it was a bit insensitive.  Please allow me to preemptively apologize and spare Contempua X. Smugly the trouble of firing off an outraged Tweet, or X – whatever it is now.  John Dryden once said that puns are “the lowest and most grovelling kind of wit.”  Far be it from me to gainsay Glorious John, but I find it difficult to resist a bit of a good low grovel.  Mea maxima culpa.

As Tamburlaine’s successes increase, Bajazeth brains himself, repeatedly bashing his head against the iron bars. Zabina immediately dislikes widowhood and kills herself, too.

Surely, Tamburlaine will go no further!  Surely he sees the terror and suffering he has caused.  Alas, generous and sensitive listener, Tamburlaine merely crosses Turkey off the to do list, and moves on to the next chore: Damascus. The Governor of that city has a similarly rosy view of human nature, and sends a group of temple virgins to Tamburlaine’s army, hoping their beauty and purity will appeal to the better angels of Tamburlaine’s nature.  It seems the better angels were off on a tea break, so Tamburlaine has the virgins slaughtered, displaying their brutalized remains on the city walls. 

The Soldan of Egypt, Zenocrate’s father and Tamburlaine’s imminent father-in-law, swears to stop the conqueror, enlisting the help of the King of Arabia. Tamburlaine’s goon army goes once more into the breach, killing the Arabian king. Zenocrate begs Tamburlaine to spare her father, and . . .  he agrees!  No, seriously!  He’s not a complete savage!  Instead, he makes the Soldan a tributary king. Tamburlaine declares himself Emperor of all Asia and weds Zenocrate.  And they all live happily ever after.

I do love a happy ending.

As I indicated earlier, this play was a smash hit – real boffo.  But through 21st century eyes, I admit it’s difficult to see why.  There’s not really much of a plot: it’s pretty much like an old-school video game – Tamburlaine clears the screen then moves up to the next level: Persia to Turkey to Damsacus to Egypt.  High score!  While there are plenty of battles, there is no conflict: no psychological tension, no ethical dilemmas, no foils.   And none of the characters are particularly dynamic, none have an arc.  Really, I think the most potentially interesting relationship is between Mycetes and Cosroe: what could have been done with the conflict between two brothers with different psychologies and theories of political leadership? Is Cosroe a traitor?  Or does Mycetes betray his people with his timid incompetence?  Could have a gripping political thriller on your hands.  But that gets snuffed straight away.  And, yes, that would be a different play – it wouldn’t be the one Marlowe wrote.  I wonder if the play’s initial popularity was like the thrill audiences got with the very earliest motion pictures – the kinetoscope.  In the 1890s, moving pictures didn’t tell stories – it was the sheer novelty of the technology that drew the crowd.  Marlowe’s play is full of thunderous declamation and lots and lots of blood, much of the violence depicted onstage.  Maybe it was simply the raw spectacle that drove the audiences in.  After the rush of the 1590s, the play fell out of production for over a century.  I think the next major production was a revival in 1713, but I can’t remember where I heard that and I’ve yet to locate a source.  So that’s a maybe there.  There were a few productions in the 19th century and, according to the University of Warwick, only 20 productions in the 20th century.  Perhaps this rise in stagings says something about the culture of a century with two world wars, an economic collapse, multiple genocides, and the threat of nuclear annihilation.

So what are we to make, then, of Tamburlaine’s character?  How are we supposed to respond to him?  Is he a hero?  An anti-hero?  It really is difficult to say.  I think I’m on pretty safe ground when I say that 21st century readers, by and large, will find him repulsive.  He is cruel, rapacious, brutal, and arrogant.  Now, I don’t think modern audiences are any more morally expansive or refined than Elizabethans.  We need only look at the action heroes in contemporary cinema to see plenty of self-absorbed, barbarous, opportunistic protagonists.  Vigilantism is the dominant ethical code in action films.  So it’s not what Tamburlaine does that makes him ambiguous – I think it’s why he does it.

See, the movie heroes indulge in very similar behaviors: secret agents and maverick cops, soldiers and commandos, fathers whose daughters have been kidnapped, small town sheriffs and superheroes – but they do it for some unspoken and, frankly, unexamined code of honor.  The violence is necessary and permissible because it will ultimately restore the civil order.  We accept, for the two hours of the movie anyway, that the barbarity is in the service of the greater good.  And this is not a new phenomenon in the West.  The dictum “God, gold, and glory” justified the expansion and colonialism of Spain and Portugal in the early modern period – part of the imperial project was, to them, the moral imperative to save the souls of colonized peoples.  By the nineteenth century, particularly for Whiggish British imperialists, civilizational paternalism – ushering the peoples of Africa, Asia, and elsewhere into the modern European world – gave cover to the seamier exploitative dimensions of the endeavor.  And even in the 20th and 21st centuries, American foreign policy has often been cast as an effort to “export democracy” – from the first experimental forays in the south Pacific through the Cold War and up to the recent misadventures in the Middle East.

The trouble with Tamburlaine is that he does what he does only for Tamburlaine.  He declares in Act 1 scene 2 that “I shall be monarch of the East.”  That’s the sum of his motivation: an obsessive drive for ultimate power.  Earlier, he declares: “I hold the Fates bound fast in iron chains, / and with my hand turn Fortune’s wheel about.”  He sees himself as unique, set apart, and ultimately greater than the gods.  

The chiefest god, first mover of that sphere 

Enchas'd with thousands of ever-shining lamps, 

Will sooner burn the glorious frame of heaven 

Than it should so conspire my overthrow. 

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 your turning spheres, 

And cause the sun to borrow light of you. 

So, yeah, quite arrogant.  No worries on the self-esteem front.  And he has the annoying habit of referring to himself in the third-person, which can only point to an unhealthy narcissism.

On the other hand, though, he is unquestionably successful as a war leader.  He’s a man of action, a brilliant tactician, an inspiring leader.  He bends the world to his will.  He has many of the qualities that we, in the modern capitalist west with our worship of the individual, find essential to greatness.  Tamburlaine even has a rags to riches story, which we just love, don’t we?  Such suckers for that one.  In Act 1, he says that he is “a lord, for so my deeds shall prove: / and yet a shepherd by my parentage.”  See?  He believes in himself – even though he’s just a shepherd, he’ll prove that he’s as good as anyone, better than anyone, by his actions, by what he can accomplish through the strength of his own will.  Damn, but that sounds mighty American to me.  Maybe Horace Greeley did say, “go west, young man” – urging young Americans to seize the opportunities that determination and hard work would afford.  Isn’t that what Tamburlaine is doing?  Realizing his manifest destiny?

But, we might object, the purposes to which Tamburlaine works are unethical – they lack compassion and generosity.  True enough.  He seems to endorse an ethical system for which those virtues do not obtain.  In the western world, the notion that compassion and generosity should be the highest virtues and universally applied really comes from the Abrahamic religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.  They are not classical virtues – that is, Greco-Roman – at least not the way we think of them – the idea of charity for the poor was actually quite alien to ancient Greeks and Romans.  Tamburlaine has no religion but the worship of himself and his strength.

In Plato’s Republic, the character Thrasymachus defines justice as that which serves the interest of the stronger.  And in the dialogue Gorgias, the character Callicles asserts that “nature herself makes clear . . .it is right for the superior to have more than the inferior and for the stronger to have more than the weaker.”  To be clear, Socrates (and Plato) reject such a view, but the fact that it appears in two dialogues indicates its prevalence in ancient Athenian thought.  This is a “might makes right” ethics, one that denies the idea of a transcendent moral law and instead asserts the socially constructed nature of our moral beliefs.  This is the one Tamburlaine follows.

Which makes me wonder what Marlowe is saying when such a ruthless ethical vision is allowed to triumph at the play’s end.  The Soldan of Egypt recognizes Tamburlaine’s rights to his land and to his daughter according to this vision:

Renowned Tamburlaine! to whom all kings

Of force must yield their crowns and emperies;

And I am pleased with this my overthrow.

Some have argued that the play’s rather amoral ending is a sign of Marlowe’s putative atheism.  Perhaps.  Those characters in the play who are more conventionally religious are sympathetic, maybe even honorable, but they certainly do not prosper.

But remember that we are only halfway through the entire text as we now have it.  Audiences in 1587 were treated to a bloody and amoral spectacle in which brutality is rewarded.  But we have a sequel produced in 1588, which, depending on what you believe Marlowe’s intentions for writing it were, offers a more complicated picture.

Let’s give the thumbnail of part 2. It’s years later.  The kings of Hungary and Natolia, Sigismond and Orcanes, respectively, make a peace treaty: Sigimond swears to aid Orcanes in the event of an invasion. It just so happens that Tamburlaine is marching towards Natolia. On seeing Tamburlaine’s army, Sigismond soils himself and breaks the treaty.  In what he sees as divine punishment as an oath-breaker, he is defeated.  

Back at the ranch, Zenocrate falls ill, prompting Tamburlaine to leave the campaign and return to her. She dies, of course, and to expiate his grief, Tamburlaine torches that city and warns against anyone rebuilding it.

At the same time, Callapine, the son of the erstwhile Turkish emperor and prisoner of Tamburlaine, escapes his bondage,musters a cadre of tributary kings, and challenges Tamburlaine, hoping to avenge his father’s death and reclaim theTurkish crown. I’m sure you can guess what happens next.

There follows a touching familial scene in which Tamburlaine teaches his three sons about the reality, necessity, and honor of war: “Be all a scourge and terror to the world, / 

Or else you are not sons of Tamburlaine.” Calyphas, the youngest, doesn’t believe it and rather thinks its better to be alive than dead. He says:

I know, sir, what it is to kill a man;

It works remorse of conscience in me.

I take no pleasure to be murderous,

Nor care for blood when wine will quench my thirst.

Accordingly, during the next battle, Calypahas decides discretion is the better part of valor and stays behind in his tent. Ignoring Dr. Benjamin Spock’s advocacy for nurturing parenting, Tamburlaine kills his son for being a coward.  That’ll build character.

Tamburlaine arrives in Babylon in a chariot drawn by the defeated kings. He decorates the city walls with the governor’s corpse and his men proceed to bind every man, woman, and child in the city and drown them in a nearby lake.  Then he burns the Islamic scriptures, the Koran and other “superstitious books,” and declares:

Come, let us march against the powers of heaven,

And set black streamers in the firmament,

To signify the slaughter of the gods.

But conquerors are not immortal, even those who believe themselves above the gods. Tamburlaine falls ill, Amyrus, his son, as successor, ordering him to finish the work he has begun.  In a soliloquy, really the only time we see Tamburlaine in a moment of self-reflection, he proclaims “virtue solely is the sum of glory, / And fashions men with true nobility.”  He dies. 

So there we are.  Tamburlaine’s career is one of unmixed triumph.  He pays no price for his rapine and slaughter.  Yes, Zenocrate dies, but is that divine retribution?  Doesn’t seem so.  His son Calyphus dies, but at his own hand in retribution for what he sees as cowardice.  He dies himself, but not because he overstepped militarily – his death is, well, natural.  A case can be made, though, that finally his hubris has caught up with him, and that his blasphemous self-aggrandizement has reaped the punishment of the gods.

So how do we see the man Tamburlaine now?  Well, if we imagine that Marlowe had not initially intended a part 2 and that it only comes about for commercial reasons, he may have chosen to temper the amorality implied by the ending of part 1, maybe to diminish charges of atheism.  But if we imagine that he always had a two-part play in mind, Tamburlaine’s even more heightened egotism – dismissing the gods, burning holy books, deifying himself – could be the more conventional moralistic conclusion, completing a tragic character arc.

This makes me wonder to what extent Marlowe’s play (again, parts 1 and 2 included) actually interrogates the Renaissance humanism that was the era’s zeitgeist.  Remember that humanism was the idea that human beings, endowed with reason and the power to create, possessed a spark of divinity – remember Edmund Spenser’s argument that his poetry could confer immortality in Sonnet 75?  No spoilers, but soon we’ll look at Marlowe’s most famous play, Dr. Faustus, in which a scholar sells his soul to the Devil for infinite power and knowledge.  So it’s an idea Marlowe returns to, this notion of humanity’s overreach into the realm of the divine.  Atheist or not, Marlowe can be read as skeptical of unlimited human ambition at the same time as being skeptical of any transcendent justice to limit it.  The last two lines of the prologue to part 1 read: “View but his picture in this tragic glass, / And then applaud his fortunes as you please.”

Thanks for listening.  Make sure to like all my social media posts, give a positive review of the show if you’re enjoying it.  If not, do keep it to yourself.  Talk to you soon!