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Tamburlaine the Great is a play in two parts by Christopher Marlowe. It is loosely based on the life of the emperor Timur (Tamerlane/Timur the Lame, d. 1405). Written in 1587 or 1588, the play is a milestone in Elizabethan public drama; it marks a turning away from the clumsy language and loose plotting of the earlier Tudor period dramatists, and a new interest in fresh and vivid language, memorable action, and intellectual complexity. Along with Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy, it may be considered the first popular success of London's public stage.
Marlowe, generally considered the best of that group of writers known as the University Wits, influenced playwrights well into the Jacobean era period, and echoes of the bombast and ambition of Tamburlaines language can be found in English plays all the way to the Puritan closing of the theatres in 1642. While Tamburlaine is considered inferior to the great tragedies of the late-Elizabethan and early-Jacobean period, its significance in creating a stock of themes and, especially, in demonstrating the potential of blank verse in drama, is still acknowledged.
Whereas the real Timur was of Turkic people-Mongolian people ancestry and belonged to the nobility, for dramatic purposes Marlowe depicts him as a Scythians shepherd who rises to the rank of emperor.
The scene shifts to Scythia, where Tamburlaine is shown wooing, and winning, the captured Zenocrate, the daughter of the Egyptian king. Confronted by Mycetes' soldiers, he persuades first the soldiers and then Cosroe to join him in a fight against Mycetes. Although he promises Cosroe the Persian throne, Tamburlaine reneges on this promise and, after defeating Mycetes, takes personal control of the Persian Empire.
Now a powerful figure, Tamburlaine turns his attention to Bayezid I, emperor of the Turks. He defeats Bajazeth and his tributary kings, capturing the emperor and his wife Olivera Despina. The victorious Tamburlaine keeps the defeated ruler in a cage and feeds him scraps from his table, releasing Bajazeth only to use him as a footstool. Bajazeth later kills himself on stage by bashing his head against the bars upon hearing of Tamburlaine's next victory. Upon finding his body, Zabina does likewise.
After conquering Africa and naming himself emperor of that continent, Tamburlaine sets his eyes on Damascus, a target which places the Egyptian sultan, his to-be father-in-law, directly in his path. Zenocrate pleads with her future husband to spare her father. He complies, instead making the sultan a tributary king. The play ends with the wedding of Tamburlaine and Zenocrate, who is crowned Empress of Persia.
In Part 2, Tamburlaine grooms his sons to be conquerors in his wake as he continues to attack neighbouring kingdoms. His oldest son, Calyphas, preferring to stay by his mother's side and not risk death, incurs Tamburlaine's wrath. Meanwhile, the son of Bajazeth, Callapine, escapes from Tamburlaine's jail and gathers a group of tributary kings to his side, planning to avenge his father. Callapine and Tamburlaine meet in battle, where Tamburlaine is victorious. But finding that Calyphas remained in his tent during the battle, Tamburlaine kills him in anger. Tamburlaine then forces the defeated kings to pull his chariot to his next battlefield, declaring,
The decision to portray Tamburlaine and the Persians as Hellenistic pagans rather than Muslims in the play was apparently made for dramatic purposes and cannot be attributed to a lack of sources on life in the East. For similar reasons, Marlowe departs from his sources in being far more hostile towards Bajazeth and far more sympathetic towards Tamburlaine. Marlowe largely exhausted his historical sources in writing Part I of the play; Part II therefore relies on more extraneous sources and episodes and lacks some of the cohesion of the preceding part.
Although Christopher Marlowe was not actually cited as the author in the first printings of the play – no author is named – and the first clear attributions to Marlowe are much later than 1590, scholars attribute the play to Marlowe based on similarities to his other works. Many passages in Tamburlaine foreshadow and echo passages from others of his works, and there is a clear parallel between the character development in Tamburlaine and that of the majority of Marlowe's other characters. This evidence alone leads scholars to believe with virtual unanimity that Marlowe wrote Tamburlaine.
By the early years of the 17th century, this hyberbolic language had gone out of style. Shakespeare himself puts a speech from Tamburlaine in the mouth of his play-addled soldier Pistol ( 2 Henry IV II.4.155). In Timber, Ben Jonson condemned "the Tamerlanes and Tamer-chams of the late age, which had nothing in them but the scenical strutting and furious vociferation to warrant them to the ignorant gapers".
Subsequent ages of critics have not reversed the position advanced by Jonson that the language and events in plays such as Tamburlaine are unnatural and ultimately unconvincing. Still, the play was regarded as the text above all others "wherein the whole restless temper of the age finds expression" (Long). Robert Fletcher notes that Marlowe "gained a high degree of flexibility and beauty by avoiding a regularly end-stopped arrangement, by taking pains to secure variety of pause and accent, and by giving his language poetic condensation and suggestiveness" (Fletcher). In his poem on Shakespeare, Jonson mentions "Marlowe's mighty line", a phrase critics have accepted as just, as they have also Jonson's claim that Shakespeare surpassed it. But while Shakespeare is commonly seen to have captured a far greater range of emotions than his contemporary, Marlowe retains a significant place as the first genius of blank verse in English drama.
Jeff Dailey notes in his article "Christian Underscoring in Tamburlaine the Great, Part II" that Marlowe's work is a direct successor to the traditional medieval , and that, whether or not he was an atheist, he had inherited religious elements of content and allegorical methods of presentation.
The stratification of London audiences in the early Jacobean period changed the fortunes of the play. For the sophisticated audiences of private theatres such as Blackfriars and (by the early 1610s) the Globe Theatre, Tamburlaine's "high astounding terms" were a relic of a simpler dramatic age. Satiric playwrights occasionally mimicked Marlowe's style, as John Marston does in the induction to Antonio and Mellida.
While it is likely that Tamburlaine was still revived in the large playhouses, such as the Red Bull Theatre, that catered to traditional audiences, there is no surviving record of a Renaissance performance after 1595. Tamburlaine suffered more from the change in fashion than did Marlowe's other plays like Doctor Faustus or The Jew of Malta of which there are allusions to performances. Edward Phillips, in his Theatrum Poetarum (1675), is so unfamiliar with the play that he attributes its writing to Thomas Newton.Quoted in Frederick S. Boas, Christopher Marlowe: A biographical and critical study (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1953), p. 70 A further sign of the obscurity this one-time audience favourite had fallen into is offered by playwright Charles Saunders. Having written his own play in 1681 on Tamburlaine, he was accused by critics of having plagiarised Marlowe's work, to which he replied,
I never heard of any Play on the same Subject, my own was Acted, neither have I since seen it, though it hath been told me, there is a Cock Pit Play going under the name of the Scythian Shepherd, or Tamberlain the Great, being a thing, not a Bookseller in London, or scarce the Players themselves, who Acted it formerly cou'd call to remembrance.Quoted in Boas, Christopher Marlowe, p. 300
Following the Glorious Revolution of 1688, a tradition developed in Ireland of performing the play in Dublin on the anniversary of William of Orange's birthday. This was brought to an end in 1713 when the government banned a performance of the play because it included a controversial prologue including the phrase "No Peace Without Spain".
In 1919, the Yale Dramatic Association staged a Tamburlaine which edited and combined both parts of Marlowe's play. A revival of both parts in a condensed form was presented at The Old Vic in September 1951, with Donald Wolfit in the title role.Boas, Christopher Marlowe, p. xiii For the Stratford Shakespeare Festival (now the Stratford Festival of Canada) in 1956, Tyrone Guthrie directed another dual version, starring Donald Wolfit, William Shatner, Robert Christie and Louis Negin; Louis Negin at the Canadian Theatre Encyclopedia. it travelled to Broadway, where it failed to impress—Eric Bentley, among others, panned it— although Anthony Quayle, who replaced Donald Wolfit in the title role, received a Tony Award nomination for his performance, as did Tyrone Guthrie for his direction.
The National Theatre production in 1976 featured Albert Finney in the title role. The production opened the new Olivier Theatre on the South Bank. Peter Hall directed. This production is generally considered the most successful of the rare modern productions. Brian Cox credits a remark from fellow actor Oliver Cotton during the production as resulting in the title of his autobiography Putting The Rabbit in the Hat published in 2021.
In 1993 the Royal Shakespeare Company performed an award-winning production of the play, with Antony Sher as Tamburlaine and Tracy-Ann Oberman as Olympia.
Jeff Dailey directed both parts of the play, uncut, at the American Theatre of Actors in New York City. He presented Part I in 1997 and Part II in 2003, both in the outdoor theatre located in the courtyard of 314 West 54th Street.
Avery Brooks played the lead role in a production of the play for the Shakespeare Theatre Company. The play ran from 28 October 2007 to 6 January 2008 and was directed by Michael Kahn.http://www.broadwayworld.com/viewcolumn.cfm?colid=16340 Brooks, Page, Etc. Set for New Shakespeare Theatre Season
A new production combining Parts I and II ("trimming Marlowe’s two five-act plays to three hours of stage time with") edited and directed by Michael Boyd opened at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center, Brooklyn, New York on 16 November 2014 with John Douglas Thompson as Tamburlaine, Merritt Janson as Zenocrate/Callapine and a "large, multipurpose ensemble" cast.
A production of Tamburlaine was delivered by the Lazarus Theatre Company in London West End at the Tristan Bates Theatre between 25 August and 12 September 2015.
On 1 November 2014, Tamburlaine opened at Theatre for a New Audience where it won the 2015 Obie Award for John Douglas Thompson's Performance.Obie Awards, 2015 Winners. It closed on 14 January 2015.Theatre for a New Audience, [3].
In August 2018, the Royal Shakespeare Company began a run of Tamburlaine in Stratford-upon-Avon, England.
While the play has been revived periodically over the past century, the obstacles it presents—a large cast and an actor capable of performing in such a challenging role chief among them—have prevented more widespread performance. In general, the modern playgoer may still echo F. P. Wilson's question, asked at mid-century, "How many of us can boast that we are more than readers of Tamburlaine?"Wilson, F. P. Marlowe and the Early Shakespeare (Clark Lecture) Clarendon Press, Oxford 1953
In November 2005, a production of Tamburlaine at the Barbican Arts Centre amended the scene in which Tamburlaine burns the Quran and excoriates the Islamic Prophet Muhammad; instead, he defiles books representing all religious texts. The director, David Farr, stated this was done "to make it very clear that his act was a giant two fingers to the entire theological system, not an piece of Christian triumphalism over the barbarous Turk".David Farr, "Tamburlaine wasn't censored". The Guardian, 25 November 2005.
Some groups claimed the altering of this scene was a show of 'political correctness' and pandering to Muslim sensibilities. The director strongly denied this, stating:
One other thing should be made clear. Never in our rehearsal discussions did we receive any pressure from the Muslim community – this was never the question. Never did we receive any pressure from the Young Vic or the Barbican to change any scenes. Never did I receive external pressure of any kind. The decision to focus the play away from anti-Turkish pantomime to an existential epic was artistic, mine alone, and I stand by it.
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