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Marlowe's Tamburlaine and the Language of Romance

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2020

Richard A. Martin
Richard A. Martin*
Affiliation:
University of California, Berkeley
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Abstract

The tone of Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, Parts I and II, has long troubled critics who have approached the plays as either tragedies or romances. This article argues, on the basis of our responses to Marlowe’s language, that each play attempts to define itself as a romance by asserting the mastery of the imagination over the material world and thus denying the effects of tragic realism. Marlowe creates a language that invites us to indulge in the glorification of worldly achievement in spite of the questionable morality of worldliness. In Part I, Marlowe demonstrates that the world of romance is a world of the imagination and, as such, free from the tragic concerns of a problematic humanity. In Part II, Marlowe moves closer to tragedy by exploring the possibilities of romance within a world where the imagination does not triumph and where the attitude toward the romantic hero is left ambiguous.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 93 , Issue 2 , March 1978 , pp. 248 - 264
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1978

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References

Notes

1 See Northrop Frye's The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1976), pp. 35–61.

2 All references to Tamburlaine are to The Works of Christopher Marlowe, ed. C. F. Tucker Brooke (1910; rpt. Oxford: Clarendon, 1966).

3 Eugene Waith's ideas appear in The Herculean Hero in Marlowe, Chapman, Shakespeare and Dryden (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1962). For the moralists' argument see Roy Battenhouse's Marlowe's ‘Tamburlaine’: A Study in Renaissance Moral Philosophy (1941; rpt. Nashville: Vanderbilt Univ. Press, 1964) and Douglas Cole's Suffering and Evil in the Plays of Christopher Marlowe (1962; rpt. New York: Gordian, 1972).

4 Eugene M. Waith, Ideas of Greatness: Heroic Drama in England (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1971), p. 52.

5 See Paul Kocher's Christopher Marlowe: A Study of His Thought, Learning and Character (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1946), pp. 69–103, and Una Ellis-Fermor's Christopher Marlowe (London: Methuen, 1927), pp. 24–60.

6 The Counter-Renaissance (New York: Scribners, 1950), p. 383.

7 The Overreacher: A Study of Christopher Marlowe (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1952), p. 53.

8 See Perondinus' Magni Tamburlanis Sythiarum Imperatoris Vita a Petro Perondino Pratensa conscripta (Florence, 1553). Tamburlaine's positive qualities are summed up in Whetstone's The English Myrror: Wherin Al Estates May Behold the Conquests of Envy ... (London, 1586), p. 80.

9 All references to Thomas Fortescue's Foreste are to The Foreste or Collection of Histories ... Done out of Frenche into Englishe by Thomas Fortescue (London, 1571). Pedro Mexia's Silva de varia lecion is available in the Justo Garcia Soriano ed., 2 vols. (Madrid: Sociedad de Bibliofilos Espanoles, 1933–34). Ethel Seaton argues that Marlowe also consulted several fourteenth-century medieval romances. Seaton traces some words and phrases in Tamburlaine, Part i, to Bevis of Hampton, Richard Cœur de Lyon, and The Prose Life of Alexander. See her “Marlowe's Light Reading,” in Elizabethan and Jacobean Studies Presented to Frank Percy Wilson, ed. Herbert David and Helen Gardner (Oxford: Clarendon, 1959), pp. 17–25.

10 Wiener Beiträge zur Englischen Philologie: Richard Löwenherz, ed. Karl Brunner (Vienna, 1913). Richard engages in cannibalism twice in Richard Cœur de Lyon, once unknowingly (ll. 3078–226) and once in an act of bravado when he invites the Saracens to a banquet and serves them the boiled heads of their kinsmen (ll. 3410–562). Richard's brutality is here, as elsewhere, viewed through nationalistic pride:

Kyng R. sayd, j you waraunt,
per is no fflesch so norysschaunt
Unto an Ynglyssche Cristen-man ...
As is be flesshe of a Sarazyn. (ll. 3547–52)

11 See Haydn, p. 368. Many so-called “romantic” critics are disturbed by the sentiments expressed in the speech. Una Ellis-Fermor, for example, accuses Marlowe of having “broken faith with his idea” in these lines. Marlowe, says Ellis-Fermor, asks us to consent to romance only to destroy in us the romantic instinct by defining its material goals. See her Christopher Marlowe, p. 29.

12 Una Ellis-Fermor summarizes this information in her edition of Tamburlaine the Great (1930; rpt. New York: Gordian, 1966), p. 23.

13 Roy Battenhouse, ‘Tamburlaine, the ‘Scourge of God,’“ PMLA, 56 (1941), 337–48.

14 Ethel Seaton points out that the white, red, and black banners in Marlowe's Tamburlaine appear in several of the European accounts of Tamburlaine but nowhere in the Oriental ones (p. 20). Seaton links the banners with the tricolored tournaments of medieval romances. In Richard Cœur de Lyon, for example, Richard tests the puissance of Sir Fouke Doyle and Sir Thomas of Multon at a three-day tournament at Salisbury. Richard participates on each day disguised in a different color—black, red, or white (ll. 265–590). A similar tournament occurs in Malory's Morte Darthur (Bk. vii, Chs. vi–xi).

15 The source of this famous scene in Marlowe's Tamburlaine, Part ii, has been variously traced to George Gascoigne's Jocasta (the first dumb show) and to Loys LeRoy's La Vicissitude ou variété des choses en l'univers (1575). LeRoy identifies the charioteer as the Egyptian king Sesostris and compares Sesostris to Tamburlaine for his pride and daring. See Hallet Smith's “Tamburlaine and the Renaissance,” in Elizabethan Studies and Other Essays in Honor of George Reynolds, Univ. of Colorado Studies, Ser. B., Vol. 2, No. 4 (Boulder: Univ. of Colorado Press, 1945), 129.

16 Most of the lines in Tamburlaine's speech Marlowe stole from another Elizabethan romance, Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene. Marlowe's ll. 4094–103 correspond to Spenser's i.vii.32. See John Bakeless, The Tragicall History of Christopher Marlowe (1942; rpt. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1970), i, 205–06.