part, which might have drawn upon Tamburlaine the
epithet ' atheist ', which, in the mind of Greene and his
readers, probably meant a man who held unorthodox tenets.^
But if these passages be examined it will be found that
by far the most striking of them belong to Part II ^ and
1 The Elizabethan term ' atheist ' never means a man who denies the
existence of a deity, but only a man who denies the supremacy of that form
of deity which the Church and the State have prescribed for him to worship.
2 Compare, in Part I, the passages I. ii. 198-200, II. iii. 19-21, v. 56-9,
vii. 58-61, III. iii. 236-7, IV. iv. 75-6, V. ii. 390-1, with the darker audacity
of Part II, III. iv. 52-63, v. 21-2, IV. i, 121-131, V. i. 96-8, iii. 42-5,
58-60, where the growing madness of Tamburlaine leads to outbursts
whose violence leaves upon the mind a memory quite other than the
8 TAMBURLAINE THE GREAT
certainly with the single exception of Theridamas's line ' His
looks do menace heaven and dare the Gods * ^ all those in
which Tamburlaine appears not only as an atheist but as
one who dares * God out of heaven \^ belong there.
It has been necessary to be thus far explicit in explaining
the probability of Greene's words pointing, as was long
assumed, to the second part of the play and not to the first,
because a contemporary scholar has cast doubt upon this
interpretation of the reference, in circumstances which must
be seriously considered.
In a 1912 number of the Revue Germanique ^ M. Danchin
drew attention to the remarkable resemblance between the
' fortification ' passage in the second part of Tamburlaine *
and certain passages in Paul Ive's Practise of Fortification
1589,^ putting it beyond reasonable doubt that Marlowe's
speech was taken almost word for word from the prose
pamphlet.^ From the relation thus established between
exhilaration of the earher poetry. Although the more subtle and deadly
implications of II. i in the second part (especially the ironical lines, 27-41)
were perhaps beyond the reaches of Greene's wit, the extravagant defiance
of the later part has a sinister suggestion of deadly earnest which might
well shock or thrill an audience more impervious to religious emotion than
that of Marlowe's day. Moreover, the boyish exultation of the earlier
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