Tamburlaine Themes

In the brutal ascent of its protagonist, Tamburlaine explores what it means to live with honor. The play traces Tamburlaine’s unswerving path from his humble origins as a Scythian shepherd to becoming the most powerful emperor on Earth. The quality of honor is central to Tamburlaine’s meteoric rise: he himself remains fixated on it from beginning to end, and even his bitterest enemies seem unable to deny that he possesses it. For such a merciless…

Tamburlaine depicts a low-born nomadic shepherd’s progressive conquest of a large part of the known world. Tamburlaine’s staggering confidence in his own success, from the very beginning, is nearly as unbelievable as his actual uninterrupted string of victories. His ambition is plainly to conquer the world, and the total certainty with which he sets about his task (in the face of impossible odds, at the beginning) proves instrumental in winning him crucial allies like Theridamas …

Gods and religion dominate the talk in Tamburlaine. One of the play’s most striking features is its expansive depiction and willful blending of different religions. Tamburlaine’s enemies are generally either Muslim or Christian, while the Scythian warlord himself seems to acknowledge some form of Greco-Roman paganism. Yet the boundaries between these belief systems are not always solid, with both Christians and Muslims at times invoking the pagan Jove, and Tamburlaine occasionally making positive reference…