Marlowe's Tamburlaine plays - Threatening the world with high astounding terms

In Christopher Marlowe’s two Tamburlaine the Great plays (performed c. 1587, published 1590) the great Central Asian conqueror Tamburlaine moves from success to success, defeating a series of opponents and committing a series of atrocities.  He is never even wounded in battle.  He dies, in the final scene, after decades of wars, of natural causes, some kind of illness.

I am not sure what “drama” means, but I am pretty sure for most people this is not it.  Tamburlaine does not struggle much to reach his goals and is not a tragic figure, destroyed by, say, his hubris. In the first play he is narrow (in the second part he does develop), and the other characters are hardly deeper. He murders his son, he blasphemes, he slaughters, and lives a long life of ever-increasing power surrounded by devout followers.  What is the conflict?

Mycetes, the king of Persia but a weakling, is the first king Tamburlaine, a glorified bandit, defeats:

MYCETES:  Brother Cosroe, I find myself agriev’d;

Yet insufficient to express the same,

For it requires a great and thundering speech.  (Part I, I.1, 105)

That’s what Tamburlaine has.  Every time he comes onto the stage he brings a great and thundering speech with him.  How theater-goers loved those magnificent blank verse speeches as delivered by the great Edward Alleyn (was he really only 21 at the time?).  People performed them in taverns.  Blank verse became the default poetry for tragedies.  Imitations and parodies followed for about a decade.

The action, the drama, is in a sense a series of speeches.  What is new compared to say Gorboduc, aside from Marlowe being a much better poet, is that the speeches are less pure rhetorical exercises and instead reveal character, even if the character is a weirdo like Tamburlaine:

Nature…

Doth teach us all to have aspiring minds.

Our souls, whose faculties can comprehend

The wondrous architecture of the world,

And measure every wandering planet’s course,

Still climbing after knowledge infinite,

And always moving as the restless spheres,

Wills us to wear ourselves and never rest,

Until we reach the ripest fruit of all,

That perfect bliss and sweet felicity,

The sweet fruition of an earthly crown.  (Pt. I, II.7, 133)

Pure Marlowe, as I understand him.  Doctor Faustus or perhaps even the Jew of Malta could have given this speech although they would substitute something else for the crown in the last line.  That is new, too, that the drama reveals not just the nature of the characters onstage but the nature of the author.

The Tamburlaine plays were published together in 1590, just a few years after performance, the only Marlowe texts published during his lifetime.  The state of Marlowe’s texts is a nightmare, and these are likely the best we have, and even here the lawyerly publisher wrote in a prefatory note that he “omitted and left out some fond and frivolous gestures… far unmeet for the matter” (Laurie E. Maguire, “Marlovian texts and authorship,” The Cambridge Companion to Christopher Marlowe, 2004, p. 42).  In other words he apparently cut the comic scenes promised in Marlowe’s Preface:

From jigging veins of rhyming mother-wits,

And such conceits as clownage keeps in pay,

We’ll lead you to the stately tent of war,

Where you shall hear the Scythian Tamburlaine

Threatening the world with high astounding terms,

And scourging kingdoms with his conquering sword. (105)

So now we have ten acts of “high astounding terms” and little clownage.  I will look at some more high astounding terms tomorrow.

Page references are to The Complete Plays, Penguin Classics, 1969.