Leggatt, Alexander. “Tamburlaine’s Sufferings.” The Yearbook of English Studies. Vol. 3. (1973): 28-38.

But during the siege of Damascus, he is allowed a rare moment of introspection, pausing alone on the stage to consider a debate in his own mind—the only, it would appear, that he is ever confronted with. This radical departure from Marlowe’s normal means of presenting the hero compels us to listen to his words with particular care. Zenocrate has begged him to spare her father the Soldan, and his for beauty tempts him to yield. 28

This is the moment when Tamburlaine seems most human, when his pageant of battle and death becomes intelligible as part of the general, restless striving that drives man forward in all his endeavours, from love to poetry to war. Surrendering to Zenocrate’s beauty would be ‘To harbour thoughts effeminate and faint’, Save only […] (5.2.114). The contemplation of beauty brings not peace, but restlessness, and Tamburlaine, it would appear, sees this as analogous with the restlessness of the warring elements that drive him to seek ‘the sweet fruition of an earthly crown’ (1.2.7.29). And when he concludes ‘That virtue solely is the sum of glory / And fashions men with true nobility’ (5.2.126) we may, I think, identify that ‘virtue’ as the courageous striving for the unattainable that unites the poet, the lover, and the warrior. Tamburlaine at this point contains elements of all three. 29

The great soliloquy on beauty rises out of, and circles back into, the squalid cruelty of conquest. 29

The coarseness of ‘slaughtered carcasses’ haunts us during the opening lines of the soliloquy. And Tamburlaine’s last instruction to his followers suggests that even as he contemplates Zenocrate’s beauty the carnage that she tried to prevent is going on offstage. 30

Tamburlaine’s mind, in soliloquy, is still free to probe after ‘knowledge infinite’ but in action, in his dealings with other characters, he is becoming an ordinary tyrant. In the siege of Damascus, his mind is liberated when his attendants leave the stage, and imprisoned again when they return. 30

He thinks of patterns on maps, identifying Zenocrate not with the town where she was born but with the towns that he will name after her. She is part of the panoply of his greatness, and he is not interested, in any ties that she may have with a world that is not of his making. 30-31

In the end, he unbends to the extent of sparing her father, and this provides a kind of resolution for Part One. 31

She fears—and Tamburlaine’s enemies expect—the sort of action we see in, for example, Shakespeare’s Henry VI and Richard III, a grimly logical cycle of crime, curse, and punishment, broken only by the intervention of an outsider with a clean record. But this is not what happens to Tamburlaine, or at least not in the clear and simple way that the other characters expect. 32

Rather it depends, I would argue, on the simple theatrical consideration that excitement in the same kind of event repeated over and over again is impossible to sustain. 33

The mystery is also dissipated by the increase in on-stage killing in Part Two, in which Tamburlaine himself participates for the first time when he kills Calyphas. Tamburlaine himself is now more ordinary; the air of god-like immunity is beginning to fade. In Part Two he gets his first wound (though it is self-inflicted). 34

But at the end of Part Two, Marlowe at last faces the grisly logic of Tamburlaine’s position: the hero is doomed to a life of endless repetition. the image of the chariot which is also a prison suggests the terrible limitations of Tamburlaine’s life; he is a machine capable of only one thing—conquest. The repetition of anything, even success, finally becomes a kind of nightmare, since it denies the variety and spontaneity of life. 36

Only once did Tamburlaine speak of his ‘sufferings’. But that was in a speech in which he searched the very heart of his vision, and found there a desire that by its very nature could never be satisfied. 38