part intellect, part thought and part emotion ; the revealing
of some strange, inner significance beneath the outer event,
an illumination irradiating the world with a sure intimation
of immortality. It is then to the attempts to express this
that we turn, and rightly so, for the most searching revelation
of Marlowe as he was when he wrote Tamburlaine, no less
than for the revelation of part of what he was to become,
the poet of clear, tenuous vision in whose imagery the stars,
through inevitable affinity, become natural and familiar :
60 TAMBURLAINE THE GREAT
' Our souls, whose faculties can comprehend
' The wondrous architecture of the world
' And measure every wandring planet's course
' Still climbing after knowledge infinite, . . .'
these are the true theme of the play that Marlowe conceived
and only partially carried forward from conception to ex-
pression. The story of Timur, caught into the illumination
of Marlowe's early vision, appeared to him for a moment
fraught with inexpressible and hitherto unimagined sig-
nificance. To explore the soul of Tamburlaine became all
one, then, with exploring the sources of his own * desire,
lift upward and divine '.
And so it is Tamburlaine who ponders upon beauty ' with
whose instinct the soul of man is touched ' and sees man's
spirit ' Ever moving as the restless spheres ' and, though
seeing neither cause nor end, is yet for a while content,
like a lover with the object of his love.
' Tu prends un arbre obscur et tu I'apotheoses !
' O Soleil ! toi sans qui les choses
' Ne seraient que ce qu' elles sont ! '
Strange things fall under this illumination and go forth the
apotheosis of their former selves ; myth and legend culled
from an arid academic classicism take back some of the
grace of the golden age ; Ovid, Virgil, Lucan, Cicero, Horace,
Seneca — the whole range is wider still than this — all promise
something beyond imagination ; the maps of the Italian
and Dutch cartographers focus the light on strange places
of the world where the lost secrets of man's destiny may
be hidden, vast Groentland by the Frozen Sea, Samarqand
in far Tartary, washed by the golden waves of Jaxartes,
strange, untempted recesses of Africa ; above and beyond
the world, the whirling universe of spheres, their movements
imperfectly discernible through the complicated and subtle
late Ptolemaic system, lead the mind yet further and further
into unimagined countries and stir it to thoughts beyond
its grasp. The same splendour falls upon them as upon
INTRODUCTION 61
the deeds of Tamburlaine and we, perceiving the splendour,
are not always careful to perceive also the source from
which it comes. It does not come from the story that
Marlowe took to form the substance of his play ; it is not
inherent in that world wherein ' a god is not so glorious as
a king '. Rather is the world of conquest deceptively
illuminated from that other world ' Clad in the beauty of
a thousand stars '.
If this, then, be the distinctive quality of the first part
of Tamburlaine, that almost unbearable emotional illumina-
tion, that rare glow derived from the momentary over-
lapping of the freshness of youth and the richness of maturity,
it is easy to see how little Marlowe owes to the theme of his
pla}^, how much the theme owes to the moment. It is easy
to see the contrast between the tone and spirit of the two
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