part can be traced to its original, the undramatic and barely
relevant speech on fortification which Tamburlaine delivers
to his two sons (II. III. ii. 62-82). ^
The close resemblance of this passage to parts of Paul
Ive's Practise of Fortification so clearly pointed out by M.
Danchin makes it evident that Marlowe had certainly had
this book in his hands and had deliberately incorporated
a passage which took his fancy there along with the other
heterogeneous borrowings with which he eked out the play.
1 The possibility of his having seen Harington's translation (pub. 1591)
in manuscript must, of course, be considered, but there are no close
resemblances between Marlowe's phrasing and that of Harington in the
passages under discussion.
Miss Seaton {R.E.S., Oct., 1929, pp. 395-6) points out that the earlier
part of Marlowe's episode may be derived from Belleforest's account of an
incident in the siege of Rhodes, where the mistress of the Governor of the
fort killed and burned her children, to keep them from falling into the
hands of the infidels. Thus Marlowe appears to have combined two
stories, that of the Rhodian heroine and that of Ariosto's Isabella, with
the corresponding changes in detail.
2 In an article in the Revue Germanique (Jan.-Fev. 1912) : En marge de
la seconde partie de Tamburlaine, M. F. C. Danchin points out that these
lines are an almost verbal reproduction of the similar description in Paul
Ive's Practise of Fortification (pub. 1589) ; a portion of the passage to
which attention is there drawn may be quoted here :
' Who so shall fortifie in playne ground, may make the fort he pretendeth
of what forme of figure he will and therefore he may with less compasse
of wall enclose a more superficies of ground, then where that scope may not
be had. Also it may be the perfecter because the angles that do happen
in it, may be made the flatter or sharper. Moreover the ground in plains
is good to make ramperts of, and easie for cariage, but where water wanteth,
the building is costly and chargeable, for that a fort scituated in a dry plain,
must have deep ditches, high walls, great bulwarks, large ramparts, and
cavalieros : besides it must be great to lodge five or six thousand men,
and have great place in it for them to fight, ranked in battaile. It must
also have countermines, privie ditches, secret issuinges out to defend the
ditche, casmats in the ditch, covered ways round about it, and an argine
or banke to empeache the approach.' (Chapter II.) As M. Danchin points
out, the name ' quinque angle ', which Marlowe borrowed, occurs in
Chapter III, in a passage ' que Marlowe ne semble pas avoir compris '.
(See Rev. Germ., pp. 27-30.)
46 TAMBURLAINE THE GREAT
In studying the relations of these two parts to the materials
upon which they are based it becomes clear that the true
poetic fusion of material, by which isolated facts are trans-
muted into a consistent interpretation of life and the material
of a portion of life so shaped that that form itself constitutes
an interpretation, can only be traced in the first part.
The first part alone reveals Marlowe's mind at work on a
characteristic structure ; much of the second, though
flashes of power and passages of thought as clear as anything
in the earlier part occur at intervals throughout, is, by com-
parison, journeyman work. The form of the whole is no
longer an inevitable expression of an underlying idea and
the facts or episodes which are used stand out as separate
portions of a piece of composite building, and do not appear so
far subsidiary as to be merely incidental to an overmastering
conception.
One other general source of Tamhurlaine — and not the
least significant — remains, in the examination of which we
find confirmation of the belief, already suggested in this
sketch, that Marlowe's mind was that of a fine scholar no
less than of a poet. The extent of Marlowe's geographical
knowledge has been the subject of as interesting a change of
opinion during the last fifty or sixty years as any other
aspect of his mind or thought. Most of the nineteenth-
century critics who edited or commented upon his works,
finding apparently inexplicable inconsistencies between the
modern maps of Africa, Asia, Europe and the allusions in
Marlowe's work (particularly in the two parts of Tamhur-
laine), assumed, not unreasonably, that his knowledge of
territories unfamiliar to Elizabethan Englishmen v/as slight,
conjectural and amply eked out with imagination. His
topography lapsed into strange fancies : Zanzibar was
assigned to the west coast of Africa and the Danube flowed
into the Mediterranean Sea.^
^ The explanation of the course of the Danube is not traceable to Ortelius,
but to other sources. See notes to II. I. i. 37.
INTRODUCTION 47
It was not till recently, when Miss Seaton's researches on
Tamburlaine led her to investigate this puzzle more closely,
that the stigma was removed.^ When the place-names of
Tamburlaine, particularly of the second play, are checked
against those of the Elizabethan cartographers whose works
Marlowe might have consulted, it becomes clear that
Ortelius, the compiler of the Theatrum Orhis Ten arum, is
the immediate source of much of Marlowe's information, ^
including the curious fact that Zanzibar is a West African
district.^ In her study of Marlowe's Map, Miss Seat on
explained away these divagations, traced the campaigns of
Tamburlaine and of his adversaries, and in every case in
which Marlowe's accuracy has been called in question,
pointed to Ortelius as the source which he followed faith-
fully and as the explanation of the hitherto insoluble riddles
in Tamburlaine :
' As we follow these tracks through the Theatrum, the
conviction grows that Marlowe used this source at least with
the accuracy of a scholar and the commonsense of a mer-
chant-venturer, as well as with the imagination of a poet.
The assurance is all the more welcome as it supports the
growing belief, expressed by such a critic as Swinburne, and
by such an authority on Marlowe as Professor Tucker
Brooke, that he was something more than a dramatist of
swashbuckling violence and chaotic inconsequence — a Miles
Gloriosus of English drama. Here we find order for chaos,
something of the delicate precision of the draughtsman, for
the crude formlessness of the impressionist. Panoramic
though his treatment may be, there is method in his seven-
league-booted strides. We wrong Marlowe if, in our eager-
ness to praise his high moments of poetic inspiration, we
mistakenly depreciate his qualities of intellect, of mental
^ See Marlowe's Map by Ethel Seaton. Essays and Studies by Members
of the English Association, Vol. X, 1924.
2 Especially the maps of Africa, Tartaria, Persiae Regnum, Terra Sancta,
Egyptia, Natolia and Turcicum Imperium.
^ See note to II. I. vi. 67-8.
48 TAMBURLAINE THE GREAT
curiosity and logical construction. We do him wrong,
being so majestical, to see in him only this show of violence.'^
It is gratifying to have this circumstantial and almost
scientific proof of a quality of mind which some of his
critics have long recognized in Marlowe ; the harmony of
intellect and imagination which makes him stand out, even
among Elizabethans, by his thirst for exactitude and scien-
tific detail and the power to clothe again the skeleton trans-
mitted by records with spirit and with reality. The last
apparent inconsistency in his temperament has been
cleared up ; there is no longer a discrepancy between the
acute, logical thinker, the friend and equal of Ralegh and
Harriott and the poet-topographer of the Mongol Empire.
Marlowe was, after all, as accurate a geographer as Harriott.
Such, briefly, are the chief sources from which Marlowe
drew the material for his play and such the modifications
inevitable in his conversion of them. But more significant
than these is the revelation of Marlowe's own habit of mind
which is implicit in his treatment of his authorities.
Marlowe's treatment of his Sources. It is after all but a
slight response that Marlowe makes to the simple medieval
tragedy of Mexia and the saturnine melancholy of Peron-
dinus. He had not yet the power to keep the pathos with
which Mexia invests Bajazet without thereby revealing
Tamburlaine's masterfulness to be mere brutality, his
aspiration to be coarse insolence, his progress a devastating
march of crude destruction and unchivalric self-glorification.
To harmonize these two themes was assuredly beyond
Marlowe's strength when he wrote Tamhurlaine as it was
beyond his immediate purpose. Mexia's account is not
that of a poet but of a moralist of some dignity and the
reflective comment which is perhaps the greatest charm
of the original was not germane to Marlowe's purpose.
His debt is that of a poet who finds in his source the bare
matter of the story, but not his own interpretation or
1 Marlowe's Map, p. 34.
INTRODUCTION 49
orientation. Even Perondinus's version, much closer to his
purpose, is seen upon nearer view to be radically altered.
Marlowe puts aside the ever-present hint of waste which, in
Perondinus, dims the glory of Tamburlaine's aspiration but
reveals, lurking behind, the futility and the pity of it. He
takes the character that Perondinus has described and,
entering more deeply and more exultantly into its aspira-
tions and its dreams, shuts his eyes to the gloom and desola-
tion which was the price of this brief blaze of glory. He
isolates it alike from cause and consequence ; it is self-
contained, self-justified. He converts Perondinus's brief
prose epic, with its breadth of survey and its sense of the
relations of cause and effect, into the drama of an individual
brought so close to the spectator that it hides the back-
ground. Not only does he change the position of Tambur-
laine in the picture, but he lays less emphasis upon the
brutality, the hungry, almost aimless barbarianism, the lust
for slaughter, wreckage and waste. His Tamburlaine is
ruthless, but only because of his undeviating pursuit of a
vision and it is this vision with which Marlowe has dowered
him. He has some of the passion and the poetry of Alex-
ander. Perondinus knew well enough what destruction
and havoc these half-tamed Tartars worked ; he never
spared the long recital of cities wrecked, fanes destroyed,
the monuments of civilization overthrown. Marlowe gives
a picture softened (as it is in part with Mexia) by analogy
with the stories of irresistible and glorious conquerors of
classical story, illuminated with Alexander's beauty,
coloured by the pictures of Xenophon, so that the waste
and destruction of what can never be replaced recedes into
the distance and sunset mists. Marlowe cheats us into
thinking that this too has a strange, perverse beauty of its
own, a deception that only a very young man could practise
on himself or on us. He is still too immature to know the
meaning of civilization, too limited to perceive that though
man civilized has many stains upon him, man uncivilized
4
50 TAMBURLAINE THE GREAT
has all of these and many more. That knowledge was to
come later; I think there is no attempt to deny it in
Edward II or in Hero and Leander. Meanwhile he exults in
the vigour of his Scythian warriors (surely one of the strangest
pictures of primitive fighting men to be found on record ?)
and tumbles down light-heartedly the towers of Babylon
where ' Belus, Ninus, and great Alexander Have rode in
triumph \ The overwhelming pathos and pity escape him.
In the second part, where the career of destruction begins
to pall, this is no longer always so and the mood of Mexia
and of Perondinus makes itself felt. But the poet who had,
in a moment of maturity and wisdom, written the beautiful
lament of Zenocrate over Tamburlaine's love of earthly
glory, still puts resolutely from him that half-incoherent
sense of the pity of things which was later to be one of the
deepest-lying springs of his poetry. He is forcing his
genius, in this later part, and not only forcing it along a line
which it no longer desired to follow, but retarding its due
development, deliberately postponing that later phase in
which, an intuition seems to have told him, the strange
wisdom of tragic perception would strike dumb the arro-
gance upon which his power was now resting.
The * debt ' of Marlowe to his sources is, then, in the nature
of things, as small as any poet's. Of all his contemporaries,
he can say with most assurance, ' I call no man father in
England but myself.' Neither in England, nor in Europe ;
not even in Scythia. For his Tamburlaine, brushing aside
the interpreters, goes to the root of the truth which they
laboriously overlook, sees the spirit ' lift upward and divine '
though it mistake itself and deceive him in hungering for
* the sweet fruition of an earthly crown '. Separated by
race, creed, tradition and civilization he has yet a kinship
with the great Tartan Khan that lies deeper than any of
these, the kinship of genius with genius. Timur would
hardly have recognized his mind and his desire in any of
the portraits so painstakingly painted by the historians
INTRODUCTION 51
from the middle of the fifteenth century onward. There
is much in Marlowe's Tamburlaine that he would have
known for the very echo of his own youth ; I believe there
are things there of which he alone, besides Marlowe, would
have known the full significance.
This being so, it is idle to do more in the case of Marlowe
than to remark such outward resemblance as his story
bears to his originals. The process by which he came to
his real knowledge is his own, and the possession of informa-
tion, after the bare, essential outline was gained, had little
to do with it. Like a later poet, he seems to have known
consciously or unconsciously in early youth that deeper
than the truth of fact lies the truth of the imagination.
Perhaps there is no great poet who has not been aware of
or at least obeyed the law implied in Keats's words. The
dwellers in the suburbs of art submit themselves to experi-
ences and immerse themselves in the world of action,
hoping so to appease the longing for strange horizons and
shoreless seas. The great imaginative poet has no need
of this ; China seas and the skyline of the Gobi desert are
no more to him than the embodiment of that ideal form
that his soul already holds. To have seen is sometimes,
for such minds, to have lost, to have made limited matter of
fact what would else have remained the limitless world of
the imagination. What the imagination seizes upon as
beauty must be truth ; what the eye passes on to the imag-
ination as an impression of an actual experience may be
untrue to the essential spirit both of the beholder and of the
thing beheld. Marlowe's mind ranged over the kingdoms
of the world and their glory ; it were folly to believe that
such a mind could best thrive by a dutiful apprenticeship
to historical record or to the experience of everyday life.
This free movement of poetic imagination does not involve
— as has been sometimes implied — ^vagueness or confused
observation, either of books or of men. Marlowe's absorp-
tion in what he read seems to have been as profound, his
52 TAMBURLAINE THE GREAT
memories as clear cut, as that of the most precise scholar
among his contemporaries, whether the object of his study
were a record, a poem or a map. His numerous allusions
in Tamburlaine to single phrases and details of Ovid's work
would alone be enough to support this, were it not substanti-
ated by the evidence of his treatment of the maps of Ortelius
and his memory of the work of Virgil, Cicero, Lucan, Horace
and of the special records upon which he drew for his other
plays. But accuracy of study and retentiveness of memory
is one thing, the free imaginative handling of what has been
so retained, another and a rarer. In thinking of the process
of Marlowe's mind, it must never be forgotten that he
combines the scientific precision of a fine scholar with the
wide imaginative scope of a great poet, a combination rare
at all times and among Englishmen perhaps only possessed
in greater degree by Milton.
When the substance of Marlowe's story has been traced
to its sources and his indebtedness therein acknowledged,
all that remains is his own ; the poetic conception that
makes his play the only interpretation of genius that the
life and aspiration of Timur has ever received. He finds
in the half-obliterated records of this aspiration an echo of
his own, as yet untried and unquenched. Mind rushes to
mind and the inevitable union is achieved across the barrier
of years and race. All that has intervened drops into in-
significance ; all that is not part of this transcendant vision
falls aside as irrelevant. Marlowe finds in Timiir, as he
found later in Faustus, as he never perhaps found or sought
again, the indication of a mind tuned as his own was to
the reverberations of strange, earth-shaking thunder, to the
beauty and the glancing terror that beset man on that
strange journey that is his destiny. It is the radiance of
youth, to which fear lends rather exhilaration than awe,
that colours the earlier play. Power radiates from Marlowe,
as from Timur, power such as the relatively weary minds
INTRODUCTION 53
of common men rouse themselves in vain to contemplate.
Only such men as were Timiir and Marlowe can feel with
awful exultation the sweep of the great forces in the grip
of which they are carried and which it seems just within
their power to guide and to control. Marlowe, possessed
of the same strange spirit which he discerns in Timiir's
vision, * Looks out upon the winds with glorious fear ' and in
that breathless joy creates the Tamburlaine of the play.
Tamburlaine embodies at first a poet's conception of the
life of action, a glorious dream of quickened emotions, of
exhilaration and stimulus that should ' strip the mind of
the lethargy of custom ', tear the veils from its eyes and
lay bare before it in all-satisfying glory the arcana where
the secret of life dwells, a secret ever elusive yet ever troub-
ling men's desire. In happy exultation Marlowe fills with
this figure the earlier scenes,unsuspicious of the crude, blunt
passions that must necessarily be called up by blood and
the intoxication of battle, of the wary vigilance, the practical
alertness by which alone a rebel leader can preserve his life,
the things that steal away the moment of vision and subdue
the glowing colours of which * youthful poets dream '. But
as the first part of the play proceeds, his Tamburlaine
changes. Marlowe himself perceives this strange conflict
between the service of valour and the service of that beauty
upon which valour yet depends. For a time a union be-
tween them is yet possible ; the ' sum of glory ' is ' that
virtue ' which can conceive and yet control the emotions
stirred by beauty ; the poet, exalted above the world of
dreams and the world of actuality, holds both to their true
task, shaping both to the service of supreme vision. In
the second part of the play Tamburlaine changes still more ;
Marlowe had begun to perceive the discrepancy between his
dream of the life of action and the world of practical life.
The imaginative working out of his story had been enough
to teach him this. There is little exultation or aspiration,
only an overstrained repetition and exaggeration, a vigorous
54 TAMBURLAINE THE GREAT
but futile effort to stimulate a tired imagination and to
sweep again into the tireless, spontaneous rhythms of the
earlier part.
But though the later figure fails of its earlier poetry, all
is not lost. There is a gain in poignancy and in humanity.
Tamburlaine, who breaks down into frenzy and half-insane
rhetorical hyperbole, is humanly nearer to our understanding
than the impenetrable, soaring visionary of the first part.
The same can be said of many of the other characters. When
Tamburlaine ceases to blind us with his unearthly splendour
we are free to perceive them, not merely as obedient parts
of the background, but as themselves potential centres of
drama. Zenocrate, who only speaks effectively once in the
first part, when, in the absence of Tamburlaine, she chants
the moving lament over the Turkish monarchs and the
prayer against Tamburlaine 's worship of the glory of the
world, commands not only the courtiers but Tamburlaine
himself when she lies on her death-bed :
' I fare, my Lord as other Empresses
' That when this fraile and transitory flesh
' Hath sucked the measure of that vitall aire
' ' That feeds the body with his dated health,
'Wanes with enforst and necessary change.'
These are not fitting words for the presence of that
Tamburlaine who held * the Fates fast bound in iron chains ' ;
nor is it to such a man that they are spoken, but to a man
who will falter in the midst of his threats to ' Batter the
shining palace of the sun ' and cry :
* If thou pittiest Tamburlaine the great
' Come down from heaven and live with me againe.'
The deliberate isolating and dehumanizing of his character
in the earlier part has its artistic reward here : ' Though
she be dead, yet let me think she lives,' and it is Theridamas
who has followed him through the conquest of the world,
who tenderly and gravely draws him away : ' This raging
cannot make her live.' In the same way the minor char-
INTRODUCTION 55
acters move forward from their subordinate positions and
show themselves to have been but obscured by the excess
of light turned upon the central figure. That removed,
individuality is revealed in them. Theridamas attempts
his conquest of Olympia ; Calyphas, reared in the purple
and cynically untouched by the harsh virtues of a father
whose sword has raised him from obscurity, makes his
gallant and humorous protest against the Scythian cult of
arms ; Orcanes, the inheritor of the rule of Bajazet, speaks,
before melodrama claims him as its victim, the only lines
in the later play which are fraught either with the tremulous
passion or the clear thought of the earlier part :
'Then if there be a Christ, as Christians say,
' But in their deeds deny him for their Christ : . . .
' Open thou shining veil of Cynthia
' And make a passage from the imperial heaven
' That he that sits on high and never sleeps,
' Nor in one place is circumscriptible
' But every where fills every Continent,
* With strange infusion of his sacred vigour,
' May in his endless power and purity
' Behold and venge this traitor's perjury . . .'
Much has been said of the formlessness of Tamburlaine
and, in strict justice, it must be granted that the play lacks,
even in the first part, that clear shaping of its material
which itself constitutes a great part of a dramatist's inter-
pretation. This can be traced to one evident cause which
has already been suggested, that Marlowe had not, at the
time of writing Tamhurlaine, an interpretation comprehen-
sive enough to include all the material which his story
presented to him. The mind and desires of Tamburlaine
he knows perhaps as no man before or since has known
them, but the interrelations of this mind with others and of
those others among themselves, the consequences and sig-
nificance of his attitude and of his career were obscure to
Marlowe. He hesitates sometimes in confusion as he per-
ceives pressing upon him a world of experience and emotion
56 TAMBURLAINE THE GREAT
that threatens destruction to the single, clear concept upon
which the play rests ; he permits to Zenocrate a speech
fraught with the woe of the vanquished, he draws delicately
the weak figure of Mycetes, more robustly the original char-
acter of Calyphas, then he is driven to bar his mind resolutely
against his perception of the desolation and the nothingness
that follows Tamburlaine's triumphal march. The most
significant failure to order the material into a harmonious
whole is to be seen in his treatment of Bajazet, where he
falters and turns aside from the task of including in one
poetic concept the desire of Tamburlaine * Lift upward
and divine ' and the fate of this king ' So great, so powerful
. . . and that night a slave '. It was not here for lack of
leading from previous historians that he turned aside, but
out of his own incapacity to look steadfastly upon both at
once and perceive the deep foundations of a world order
upon which both should equally be borne. The glories of
the conqueror and of the conquered are not comprehended
together by any minds but those whose reach well-nigh
exceeds human might ; Euripides does not give us at once
the apotheosis of Hellas and the destruction of Troy;
Aeschylus himself achieves it hardly in the Persae.
' . . . . Pauci, quos sequus amavit.
' Juppiter aut ardens evexit ad aesthera virtus,
' dis geniti potuere,'
— the poets of the Oedipus Coloneus and of Anthony and
Cleopatra. For such comprehension implies the perfect
balance of high tragic thought, such interpretation of the
matter of tragedy in life as leaves us poised between pity
and understanding, midway between the world of men
where cause and accident work in dissonance, to the frequent
frustration of beauty and nobility, and that world from
which the Olympians look down to perceive the hidden
causes of things. * Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere
causas ' ; Marlowe was never one of these happy souls.
From the moment of his first uneasy perception — in vain
INTRODUCTION 57
postponed through the writing of the second part of the
play — of the world of tragic possibility which lay about
the glory of Tamburlaine, from that moment the sense of
the inexplicable waste and pain of man's destiny was a
burning torment to him, a misery that would not let him
rest, and he exhausted himself in his attempts to compre-
hend in his youth that mighty and complex system of man's
destin}^ which Sophocles and Shakespeare seem only to
have surveyed in their full maturity.
This is the secret of the failure of Marlowe's tragedies ;
it is no failure of purpose or of scope but rather of a mind
that overreaches itself in its endeavours to include all and
comprehend all, knowing that until this be done, no inter-
pretation is valid :
' Icare est chut ici, le jeune audacieux
* Qui pour voler au ciel eut assez de courage.'
and in the light of this knowledge the structural failure of
Tamburlaine becomes the more interesting. We see Marlowe
here for the last time possessing his exultation untouched,
resisting the inrush of those thoughts that were ultimately
to overwhelm it, rejecting for the moment what he could
not comprehend, degrading the figure of Bajazet because
he could not afford to let it keep its dignity. The play has
been called formless and we have admitted this to mean
that it does not interpret life by means of form. Upon a
nearer view we are driven to the conclusion that the trouble
is rather that it is arbitrarily formed, that instead of per-
ceiving the half-concealed shape lurking in events and reveal-
ing the inherent trend of fundamental law, Marlowe ap-
proaches his subject with a preconceived law of his own
and accepts from the material offered only such parts as
confirm it. It is an unscientific method and one which
Marlowe, already at heart possessed of much of the moral
attitude of a great scientist, was almost immediately to
abandon.
58 TAMBURLAINE THE GREAT
Can we, finally, attempt to approach more nearly the
mood in which Tamhurlaine was conceived, that mood
which could not be prolonged to complete the later part
of the play ; can we define at all the process of transmuta-
tion by which the records set down above became the play
which more nearly expresses Marlowe's untrammelled
thought than any other single work of his imagination ?
Can we, in the light of what has gone before, attempt to
distinguish the material of the play, not this time from the
form that material finally received, so much as from the
spirit that informed it ?
The main theme of the first part of Tamhurlaine, the
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