Lindley, Arthur. “The Unbeing of the Overreacher: Proteanism and the Marlovian Hero.” The Modern Language Review. 84.1 (1989): 1-17.

why, for example, do these plays and their protagonists so elaborately invite sympathy—soliloquy after soliloquy, each one crammed with every conceivable rhetorical appeal—and so violently discourage it—distancing irony piled upon distancing irony? 1

The Marlovian protagonist obsessively seeks the infinite in the finite, the absolute through the relative. Thus, as each nonce symbol is attained, it turns out not to be the real thing and is devalued and discarded as the imagination reinvents its object. 10

As Stephen Greenblatt puts it, the ‘one critical link’ between Marlowe’s protagonists is that ‘they are using up experience’ (p.198) 10

The tangible goals experience can provide are valuable because they stand for something beyond themselves, but contemptible and disposable because they cannot be that something. The true end, the thing these nonce symbols are meant to stand for, remains both ineffable and unattainable, beyond not merely the treacheries of possession but those of expression: ‘one grace, one wonder… / Which into words no virtue can digest’ (Tamburlaine, Part I, 5.2.109-10). You can, briefly, have Zenocrate; you can not have Beauty. When you have the (mere) woman, you alternate between deifying her and regarding her as a source of effeminate pollution: the ‘amorous’ looks which remind you that your sons are not exclusively yours (Tamburlaine, Part II, 1.4.21) 10

Thus, finding himself abased by love for Zenocrate, Tamburlaine must cast the relationship into a form more suitable to his fiction of himself. He does this, in the great soliloquy on beauty (Tamburlaine, Part I, 5.2.72-127), by drawing a firm line between essential Beauty, which is heavenly, ineffable, and unreachable, and its representatives on earth, who are not only reachable but disposable. He has, after all, just had a hundred of them put to death. He can then conflate the two, beginning at the point where the earthly Zenocrate gives ‘instructions’ to the heavenly Beauty (1.83), and proceeding through the lines about poets, where Beauty is at once transcendent and subsumed (it ‘hover[s] in their restless heads’ (1.108; my italics)), until he arrives at the point where beauty is reduced to passive and applauding spectatorship at his glory (2.115-19).

Simply put, the speech is not about Zenocrate or about Beauty; it is about Tamburlaine, as what speech of his is not? Its function is to restore him to a position of centrality in his own mind, to convert beauty from a source of pain to a source of applause, and to declare his own virtue (not hers or the poets’) ‘the sum of glory’ (1.126). I take the notorious grammatical confusion about ‘conceiving and subduing both’ as an enactment of his confused effort to assert mastery over whatever in the speech (beauty, thought, self, other) threatens to escape his control. He has, after all, just admitted a kind of defeat, neatly transferred from himself to poets, whose brains (not his own exactly) finally cannot ‘digest’ essential beauty into words. He can then push that failure further away by reminding himself of ‘the terror of [his] name” (1.113)—an assertion of the power of a word following upon an admission of the failure of words—and going on to reassure himself that even stooping to love is proof of his Jupiter-like divinity (2.121-125). At the point where he has finally assured himself that submission (love) is really assertion (conquest), that he will ‘march in cottages’ (1.124) as if he were sacking them, he can afford to turn his attention to whether Bajazeth has been fed. What Tamburlaine does to his enemies is nothing compared with what he does to logic. 13