J. Random Hermeneut

Tamburlaine

So I've been reading this Christopher Marlowe fellow. Now the long game is that I intend to study Faustus as a literary and theological trope throughout the centuries - and have a specifically Lutheran-cultural-theological angle that I wish to explore. Since this is a totally sideshow pursuit it could be a very long game indeed. Never mind. Better to spread the waxen wings and overreach - that, if anything, is a lesson worth learning from Marlowe. The inevitable catastrophic fall is epic, and epic is totally fun.

But anyhow, Faustus for other days. This short ramble is about the two Tamburlaines. Not being an English-litty type of guy I'd not read these plays before. Understandable. Since I've inevitably approached these plays from the centre of the canon (Shakespeare) sailing out, they slapped me in their face as malformed and odd. The poetry is great and Marlowe is a prodigy who has mastered the classical ground and he richly mines it in his allusions. But, why are we so lustily celebrating what is effectively the ultimate brutal, warlike, monstrous tyrant that is Tamburlaine? What is this? The voice is the voice of Elizabethan verse drama but the hands are all hairy like a pagan Homer. Who can help this blind old non-litty man figure out what's going on here?

Not the tenured English professors I found out. Again, reading from inside the centre of the canon (Shakespeare) sailing out, they had many clever and knowedgeable things to say about it, so I discovered one evening. But reading lit-crit got kind of tired kind of fast. It is not my thing.

But then I stumbled upon a few paragraphs by Frances Yates, who I love and adore, and who enlightened me. Furthermore, since Yates was an astoundingly knowledgable and insightful Renaissance historian whatever she says, compared to an English professor, is 99% more likely to be true. Call me old-fashioned but I think authorial intention and whatnot is a cool way to think about texts. Historians are pretty good at that.

In fine, she has convinced me that the whole celebration of Tamburlaine's rise from a shepherd boy under the star of Saturn to a predestined imperial military dominance and universal, and blood-curdlingly, master of the world - and celebrate is what the vaunted verse does - is satirical. (O.K. time for the inevitable quote-fest, you knew this was coming because this is blogging, right?)

The imperial theme according to Marlowe needs to be compared with other Renaissance imperial themes in order to bring out its peculiarities. The Empire of Charles V aroused visions of world empire for the House of Hapsburg. The propaganda of Guillaume Postel in France aroused visions of the Monarchy of the East for the French king. The imperial theme and its imagery was adapted for the propaganda of Queen Elizabeth I and was very familiar to the Elizabethan public. In Marlowe's use it there is a striking absence of the main accessory of the imperial theme, namely that it represented the establishment of a just rule and the maintenance of peace and all the virtues.
Tamburlaine's rule, though it is adorned with all the glorious trappings of imperial pageantry, is not just. He is a cruel tyrant and there is no word about virtue in all the play. The horrors of his cruelty are displayed on the stage. He spreads war and no peace.
Marlowe would appear to be undermining imperial themes through his presentation of the tyrant Tamburlaine. ... [The effect] would be to devalue the imperial idea, and to dismiss any suggestion of connection of imperial triumphing with the establishment of justice and virtue. Raleigh's and Spenser's poetic cult of Elizabeth as representative of the religious and reforming aspect of empire is in sharp contrast to Marlowe's frenzied emphasis on imperial cruelty and tyranny. Since there is so much in the pageantry of the play which an Elizabethan audience would recognise as reflecting pageantry in honour of the queen, this contrast may even have been intended to be dangerously subversive.
---Yates, Frances, The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age, p. 144.

So, yeah. What's this blog post about? Well, it's unlikely you are still reading this so, does it really matter? But if you've stumbled across this blog post via Google because you're writing a school essay I suggest you check out Yates on Marlowe. Heck, I'd give you a B+.

Oh that reminds me, I was watching that 24 show on DVD over a period of months a while back (a late-night diversion from thesis-writing, you know the drill) and at the time I harboured a secret suspicion about the writers of that series; they were amping up this sort of militaristic, presidential-cultish, neo-fascist "Freedom versus the Terror of the Other" worldview - amping it up to infinity as a profound, ironical critique. The alternative I did not want to contemplate - that the world of 24 was an acceptable imaginative reflection of reality for the American viewer. I'm probably wrong about that. Even if I'm not, the irony appears to have been completely lost on the audience. Maybe this is why I'm clinging to Yates' reading. What the world needs today is a Marlowe working for the Fox Network. But one who can keep his head down and steer clear of Deptford.

That's all for now.

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