Power and Politics

Abstract

The principle of the ‘will to power’ can be applied to interpretations of every one of Marlowe’s protagonists. In their different ways, Faustus, Barabas, Tamburlaine, Edward and Mortimer (in Edward II) are driven by a desire for control. In Faustus’s case, it is a desire to determine his own destiny; for the others, the struggle is a more directly political one. Issues of state politics are crucial to all Marlowe’s plays, with the exceptions of Doctor Faustus and the early work Dido Queen of Carthage. Edward II intervenes in Elizabethan debates over the divine right of the monarch. In The Jew of Malta, the politics of Machiavelli are put under the microscope (another fashionable debate in Elizabethan England); in the end, some critics argue, the Christian Ferneze proves a more able Machiavellian than the Jew Barabas, and we have already seen the implications of this ironic twist for how we read attitudes to religion in the play. The clearest example of all, however, is Tamburlaine, which charts the career of a ruthless, all-conquering soldier and king. There are very few plays from this period that present such an unflinching portrayal of the use and abuse of power: Tamburlaine’s brutal savagery, which even extends to the execution of his own son for cowardice, is shocking and at the same time curiously enthralling in performance.