Greenfield, Matthew. “Christopher Marlowe’s Wound Knowledge.” PMLA. 119.2
(2004): 233-2463

What they fell, though, includes not just agony but also a stranger response to severe physical trauma: they develop an uncanny knowledge of what is happening inside their bodies, including the precise anatomy of their injuries and the physiology of the onset of death. In their death speeches, these characters conduct their own autopsies. Their would descriptions provide a useful challenge to our general assumptions about embodiment, pain, and interiority. 233

When Tamburlaine’s wife, Zenocrate, says that her eyes are “glutted” with the sight of two corpses (1.5.1.340), she means she has been overwhelmed by pity, but “glutted” evokes the shadow of a different kind of onlooker, a hungry predator who feeds on spectacles of pain. 234

***Marlowe’s plays continually redistribute sympathy, refusing to allow their audiences a sustained identification with any of their characters (Smith 209, 218).

Marlowe uses self-anatomization as one of his central tropes for the theatrical transaction between spectator and performer. When Marlowe’s characters turn their vision inward, in a peculiarly literal form of interiority, and map the damage to their veins and arteries, they temporarily take possession of the stage. 234

Mortally wounded characters in Renaissance drama often speak with special authority and intensity and at surprising length. 235

Where one would expect to find a martyr’s final profession of faith, instead one finds a verbal self-dissection. 236

A dichotomy is a thing that has been cut in two, and an epitome is a thing that has been cut short. 236

many of Tamburlaine’s victims also perform a sort of verbal self-dissection as they die. 236

By presenting a severely injured character who claims to be in pain but exhibits behavior conventionally associated with the absence of pain, this scene deliberately puzzles and teases the play’s audience, raising doubts about what Cosroe experiences and underlining how difficult it is to describe one’s own pain and to believe in the pain of others. 237

n. 15, p. 244 – One might reasonably wonder if Cosroe’s self-anatomy can be undertood as pure extravagant theatricality, a fictive performance not grounded in actual physical sensation and not meant to be plausible. But any pain behavior in daily life is subject to the same skepticism, the same fear of the theatrical and the performative. To paraphrase Butler, the actor’s performance of pain is to quotidian pain behavior not as copy is to original but as copy is to copy. The fear of being deceived by a theatrical performance may itself be a ruse, a defense against an uncomfortable empathy and an inconvenient ethical obligation.

Tamburlaine’s victims also discover a strange and compelling new knowledge in their wounds. When they share this fascinating knowledge, they momentarily arrest the forward progress of the plot and secure the attention of all the other characters present. 238

Critics frequently neglect the crucial role of Zenocrate, who serves as a proxy for the theater audience and suggests to it possible responses to Tamburlaine’s conquests. 239

The self-mutilation reflects not only a desire to instruct his sons but also curiosity and perhaps even envy. He recognizes an opportunity for a new glory and a new species of compelling theater. 240

***The doctor tells Tamburlaine that if he does not rest he will die, but Tamburlaine ignores the doctor’s advice and has himself carried into battle one last time: his death is a sort of suicide. 241

Doctor Faustus and the second part of Tamburlaine move toward an ultimately unsuccessful self-dissection. 241

Tamburlaine and Faustus could be seen as groping toward the deepening psychological interiority often associated with Shakespeare, the Reformation, and modernity: Marlowe’s characters have become mysterious to themselves. But in the deaths of characters like Cosroe, the captain of Balsera, and Bajazeth in the first of Tamburlaine and Charles IX and the queen of Navarre in The Massacre at Paris, Marlowe offers a strange alternative to the versions of self-narration emerging in his historical moment. In Marlowe’s thought experiments, awareness of the interior spaces, structures, and processes of one’s body displaces other forms of self-awareness. These moments of corporeal insight combine two ordinarily incompatible types of knowledge: first, the knowledge of what it is like to be embodied and, second, the knowledge of what it is like to dissect someone else’s body. 242

In the twenty-first century, we occasionally bring these two types of knowledge together when we undergo an ultrasound examination and see our own hearts pulsing, our own lungs filling and deflating, our own fetuses kicking; what we see teaches us to be more attentive to the vague and cryptic sensations emanating from inside us. 242

Can we expand the perimeter of the self until it annexes the hidden, alien regions deep inside the body? Can we incorporate external representations of our anatomies into our subjective experience of self? 242