Throughout Tamburlaine, beauty and violence show themselves to be surprisingly connected. Though the merciless Tamburlaine seems to exemplify hypermasculine violence, the audience’s first glimpse of him finds Tamburlaine sweetly wooing the beautiful captive Zenocrate. The tenderness and genuine love he exhibits towards her from beginning to end undermine the brutality that is his hallmark. Tamburlaine himself takes up this problem in a long soliloquy towards the end of Part One, his only moment of genuine self-questioning in the entire play. After ruminating at length on the nature of beauty, Tamburlaine stops himself to exclaim, “But how unseemly is it for my sex… To harbour thoughts effeminate and faint!” He arrives at the tortured conclusion that even the manliest warriors are imbued with, and motivated by, a love of beauty. He alone, he claims, will be able to both appreciate and subdue beauty in all its fulness.
However, as the tangled syntax of his soliloquy makes clear, Tamburlaine is confused by and uncomfortable with his own conclusion. The duality of violence and beauty does not easily map onto ideas of “masculine” vs. “feminine.” Marlowe hints at this incongruity by giving Tamburlaine by far the most classically “poetic” and “beautiful” speeches in the play. For a rough-born Scythian shepherd, Tamburlaine seems to effortlessly soar into heights of poetic speech far surpassing any other character. Of course, his beautiful language is applied to descriptions of his violent feats just as much as to his love for his wife. Marlowe thus calls attention to the uncomfortable fact that poetic spectacles like Tamburlaine itself derive beauty from depicting violence, often increasing in proportion to one another.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Beauty and Violence ThemeTracker
Beauty and Violence Quotes in Tamburlaine
Zenocrate, lovelier than the love of Jove,
Brighter than is the silver Rhodope,
Fairer than whitest snow on Scythian hills,
Thy person is worth more to Tamburlaine
Than the possession of the Persian crown,
Which gracious stars have promised at my birth.
A hundred Tartars shall attend on thee
Mounted on steeds swifter than Pegasus […]
The thirst of reign and sweetness of a crown,
That caused the eldest son of heavenly Ops
To thrust his doting father from his chair
And place himself in the empyreal heaven,
Moved me to manage arms against thy state.
What better precedent than mighty Jove?
Nature […]
Doth teach us all to have aspiring minds:
Our souls, whose faculties can comprehend
The wondrous architecture of the world
And measure every wand’ring 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 sole felicity,
The sweet fruition of an earthly crown.
Zenocrate: Yet would you have some pity for my sake,
Because it is my country’s, and my father’s.
Tamburlaine: Not for the world, Zenocrate, if I have sworn.
What is beauty saith my sufferings then?
If all the pens that ever poets held
Had fed the feeling of their masters' thoughts,
And every sweetness that inspired their hearts,
Their minds, and muses on admired themes,
If all the heavenly quintessence they still
From their immortal flowers of poesy,
Wherein, as in a mirror, we perceive
The highest reaches of a human wit,
If these had made one poem's period
And all combin'd in beauty's worthiness,
Yet should there hover in their restless heads
One thought, one grace, one wonder at the least,
Which into words no virtue can digest.
Black is the beauty of the brightest day—
The golden ball of heaven's eternal fire
That danced with glory on the silver waves
Now wants the fuel that inflamed his beams,
And all with faintness, and for foul disgrace
He binds his temples with a frowning cloud,
Ready to darken earth with endless night.
Zenocrate that gave him light and life,
Whose eyes shot fire from their ivory bowers
And tempered every soul with lively heat,
Now by the malice of the angry skies,
Whose jealousy admits no second mate,
Draws in the comfort of her latest breath
All dazzled with the hellish mists of death […etc.]
Ah, good my lord, be patient, she is dead,
And all this raging cannot make her live.
If words might serve, our voice hath rent the air,
If tears, our eyes have watered all the earth,
If grief, our murdered hearts have strained forth blood.
Nothing prevails, for she is dead, my lord.
But now, my boys, leave off, and list to me,
That mean to teach you rudiments of war.
I'll have you learn to sleep upon the ground,
March in your armour thorough watery fens,
Sustain the scorching heat and freezing cold,
Hunger and thirst, right adjuncts of the war.
And after this, to scale a castle wall,
Besiege a fort, […]
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.
Inestimable drugs and precious stones,
More worth than Asia and the world beside;
And from th' Antarctic Pole eastward behold
As much more land, which never was descried,
Wherein are rocks of pearl that shine as bright
As all the lamps that beautify the sky:
And shall I die, and this unconquerèd?
Here, lovely boys, what death forbids my life,
That let your lives command in spite of death.
