Tamburlaine Study Guide

Christopher Marlowe was born to a shoemaker in Canterbury, England, in 1564. These humble origins did not impede the development of his prodigious talent and intellect, evident from a very young age. His grammar school years saw him mastering Latin, to which he would maintain a lifelong devotion. At 16, he earned a scholarship to Cambridge, where he spent the next seven years earning his Bachelor’s, and then Master’s, degrees. Marlowe’s life during this period and afterwards is shrouded in mystery: his presence at Cambridge became increasingly rare towards the end of his enrollment, and the school hesitated to grant him his master’s degree due to rumors of his secret ties to Catholicism and France. A vaguely worded edict from the Queen’s personal council intervened on Marlowe’s behalf, winning him the degree and fueling rumors of his involvement in espionage that persist to this day. Right around this time, the young Marlowe burst onto the scene with Tamburlaine, a smash hit in London that radically reshaped Elizabethan theater. Several more plays followed, and he achieved a creative peak with Doctor Faustus (c. 1592), which remains one of the era’s most revered plays. Marlowe’s life sensationally terminated in 1593 when he was stabbed in a Kent tavern under mysterious circumstances. Whether this was a barroom brawl gone wrong or the assassination of a career spy remains hotly debated. During his life and still to the present day, rumors swirled of Marlowe’s potential atheism, homosexuality, depraved habits, and espionage involvement. Yet his work’s popularity has never waned, and out of the dramatists of his era, only Shakespeare surpassed him in reputation.

Tamburlaine is based on the real life and career of Turco-Mongol conqueror Timur, or Tamerlane (1336–1405). One of the greatest military leaders of all time, Timur never lost a battle in his extremely widespread and devastating campaigns that brought giant swaths of Eurasia under his control. Sharing a bloodline with Genghis Khan, Timur also shared Genghis’s merciless military strategies and relentless pursuit of total domination. At the same time, however, he was a significant patron of the arts and sciences in his conquered territories, sparking what is now known in his honor as the Timurid Renaissance in Central Asia. This duality comes through in Marlowe’s characterization of Tamburlaine as fixated on the power of beauty. Timur was a larger-than-life figure who subdued and commanded an empire vaster than that of any European in Marlowe’s day. He naturally became an object of both fear and fascination for the English, who at that time had nothing close to the imperial presence that they would develop in the following centuries. Tamburlaine vividly capitalizes on the unbelievable but true accounts that had made their way to England of an unstoppable warlord in distant lands.

Tamburlaine kickstarted the golden age of Elizabethan drama (so named for Queen Elizabeth I, England’s ruler at the time). The play’s influence on English theatrical works in the two decades that immediately followed it is immeasurable, not least in the plays of Shakespeare. Shakespeare’s early tragedy Titus Andronicus similarly capitalizes on the violence and bombast that made Marlowe’s play such a sensation, while his history plays like Richard III and Henry IV explore similar themes of power and political ambition. Marlowe’s own fascination with political ruthlessness, on display in Tamburlaine, sprang from his reading of Machiavelli’s 1532 treatise The Prince, which advocates a cynical and cold-blooded approach to ruling (and thus inspired the term “Machiavellian”). Marlowe’s later plays explore themes raised in Tamburlaine with arguably greater depth and subtlety: The Jew of Malta again takes up the clash of religions that dominates Part Two of Tamburlaine, and his masterpiece Doctor Faustus focuses on blasphemy and the price of unrelenting ambition. The poetic language used in Tamburlaine owes much to Marlowe’s intensive study of the Greek and Latin classics, such as Homer’s Iliad and Virgil’s Aeneid, two poems of war and conquest. The Roman writer Ovid, explicitly mentioned in Tamburlaine, likewise exerts a persistent influence on Marlowe’s diction. Marlowe himself produced a highly accomplished translation of Ovid’s love elegies, the Amores. Tamburlaine the man was a real historical figure who has been the subject of many books. A recent non-fiction account is Justin Marozzi’s Tamerlane: Sword of Islam, Conqueror of the World.