Danson, Lawrence. “Continuity and Character in Shakespeare and Marlowe.” Studies in
Marlowe’s heroes amaze or dismay us by the sheer tenacity of their will to be always themselves. 217
The appearance of change is in fact the revelation of an unchanging truth: “I am a Lord, for so my deeds shall proove” (1.2.34). Marlowe eschews in Tamburlaine the Shakespearean interest in either the psychological or divine explanation for personal transformation. We are not asked to wonder how a character who is “a shepheard by [his] Parentage” can be something different by virtue of his deeds, but to wonder at the deeds themselves. 221
Tamburlaine does not change at all; he goes through with what he is. There is no decision, only the workings of an impersonal process that implicitly denies the possibility of personal transformation. For Tamburlaine there is no such moment as comes to Angelo when he must ask “What dost thou, or what art thou, Angelo?”; no anxiety about future changes of the sort Brutus experiences in the phantasmagoric interim “Between the acting of a dreadful thing / And the first motion”; no guilt like Macbeth’s for what has passed, “To know my deeds ‘twere best not know myself”; no moment of silent inner struggle or of ensuing recognition like Coriolanus’s, “O mother, mother! / What have you done?” Zenocrate begs Tamburlaine to “have some pitie for my sake,” but for the sake of his own identity, as affirmed by the consistency of his deeds, Tamburlaine cannont: “Not for the world Zenocrate, if I have sworn” (4.2.123, 125). 221
But miracle and conversion would open the great gaps in human nature that Marlowe’s intensity of characterization keeps closed. 221
His consummatum est, like Tamburlaine’s revelation of the armor beneath the shepherd’s cloak, seals an identity at the play’s opening which the subsequent action repeatedly ratifies. 222
Stephen Greenblatt: “The pattern of action and the complex psychological structure embodied in it vary with each play, but at the deepest level of the medium itself the motivation is the same: the renewal of existence through the repetition of the self-constituting act. 222
Marlowe thus creates a world in which there is for Edward no sphere of private autonomy. 224
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