part of the tale, criticizes ; all are sunk in a profound,
mesmeric adoration.
1 It may be remarked that some of this material found its way into the
second part of the play when Marlowe had partially exhausted the interest
of Tamburlaine's career and was at a loss for episodes to fill out the
play.
40 TAMBURLAINE THE GREAT
One more detail Marlowe deliberately alters from the
combined version of Mexia and Perondinus,^ the comparison
between Tamburlaine and Bajazet — again to emphasize,
though more cheaply this time and by a device we would
willingly be rid of, the power of Tamburlaine's single brain.
In the originals the army of Tamburlaine is as great as
Bajazet 's, some say greater, or better equipped. Marlowe,
to whom Bajazet is after all, only a foil for Tamburlaine,
throws the balance the other way and the Persians and
Scythians have the glory of conquest over numbers many
times exceeding theirs. Bajazet, again, and his Turks are
valiant men, heroic fighters for whom even the later chron-
iclers feel a measure of sympathy, but Marlowe reduces the
dignity and the valour of Bajazet, presenting him as a self-
indulgent, headstrong Oriental, thus leaving Tamburlaine
secure in our undivided sympathy.
An integral part of his interpretation is the inspiration
of Zenocrate's beauty, that beauty a sense of which is
mysteriously inseparable from valour and deprived of which
Tamburlaine's aspiration sinks back upon itself in gloomy
and savage rage. Acting upon hints from Perondinus (but
not from Mexia), he has also given character and personality
to certain of the minor figures who can be so treated as to
enhance the colouring of Tamburlaine ; the Soldan, Theri-
damas, Cosroe and particularly Mycetes and Calyphas.
Such modifications as these tend to simplify the story
and to make the figure of Tamburlaine stand out clearly
from its background. This is the natural process of Mar-
lowe's intellect, and it is precisely how we should expect
to find him handling a large mass of somewhat amorphous
material, reducing it to clarity and continuity, to shapeli-
ness and to the service of one strong clear thought. When
he is writing freely he does not reproduce his sources. He
finds in certain records a figure, a series of events, a situation
1 The version of Primaudaye is so much condensed that little opportunity-
is left for this distinction.
INTRODUCTION 41
which seems shaped by nature to hold, or almost to hold,
his own burning thought. The figure, the event is informed
with the thought and, behold, the place that knew it knows
it no more ; it is not Chalcondylas or Mexia or Perondinus
or Haytoun but the idea of which they had been but faint
reflexions.
Additional Sources of Part II. Of the events and
episodes available to Marlowe when he wrote the first
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