Abstract
The Prologue to the first part of Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great (1587–88) features a pledge to change the course of Elizabethan theatrical practice:
From jigging veins of rhyming mother-wits, And such conceits as clownage keeps in pay, We’ll lead you to the stately tent of war, Where you shall hear the Scythian Tamburlaine: Threat’ning the world with high astounding terms And scourging kingdoms with his conquering sword. View but his picture in this tragic glass, And then applaud his fortunes as you please.1
Two comparisons are at work here, the first elevating Marlovian drama above the meaner business of contemporary ‘clownage’, the second paralleling a distinction between the action of the stage and the higher rhetoric of the playwright’s ‘tent of war’. Both, however, harbour a more pressing function — the imperative to seduce the paying customer — and, in this sense, the Prologue functions as no simple choric commentator. Rather, the Prologue’s dependence on a provocative invitation, a hyperbolic inauguration and the promise of a unique attraction means that Marlowe’s rousing announcer is closer in spirit to the carnival barker. Similarly, the ‘tent of war’, to which interested parties will be guided, draws energy from the ‘monster’-booth of the contemporary fairground; in the same way that the fairground ‘monster’ unsettles and amazes, so too will Tamburlaine the Great here prefigured as the source of an ‘astounding’ linguistic experience, be judged extraordinary.
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Notes
Joy Kenseth, ‘“A World of Wonders in One Closet Shut”’, in Joy Kenseth, ed., The Age of the Marvellous (Hanover: Hood Museum of Art, 1991), p. 94;
J. Alan B. Somerset, ed., Shropshire, Records of Early English Drama, 2 vols (Toronto, Buffalo and London: University of Toronto Press, 1994), I, p. 237.
I am here, of course, seeking to refine recent arguments that Marlowe’s use of the mirror convention is distinctly unconventional. See Johannes H. Birringer, ‘Marlowe’s Violent Stage: “Mirrors” of Honour in Tamburlaine’,ELH, 51 (1984), p. 224;
Janet Clare, ‘Marlowe’s “theatre of cruelty”’, in J. A. Downie and J. T. Parnell, eds, Constructing Christopher Marlowe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 84;
Troni Y. Grande, Marlovian Tragedy: The Play of Dilation (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1999), pp. 44, 45, 56, 58, 69.
Roy W Battenhouse, Marlowe’s ‘Tamburlaine’: A Study in Renaissance Moral Philosophy (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 1964);
Eugene M. Waith, The Herculean Hero in Marlowe, Chapman, Shakespeare and Dryden (London: Chatto and Windus, 1962), pp. 60–87.
See, for instance, Emily C. Bartels, Spectacles of Strangeness: Imperialism, Alienation, Marlowe (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), p. 60;
Thomas Cartelli, Marlowe, Shakespeare, and the Economy of Theatrical Experience (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), pp. 67, 72;
Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1980), pp. 193–221;
Roger Sales, Christopher Marlowe (Basingstoke: Macmillan — now Palgrave Macmillan, 1991), pp. 54–9. As will become clear, my stress on ‘manufacture’ owes much to Greenblatt’s discussion of ‘self-fashioning’.
David H. Thurn, ‘Sights of Power in Tamburlaine’, English Literary Renaissance, 19 (1989), pp. 3–4.
J. A. Simpson and E. S. C. Weiner, eds, The Oxford English Dictionary, 20 vols (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989), I, p. 166.
James Biester, Lyric Wonder: Rhetoric and Wit in Renaissance English Poetry (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1997), p. 10;
Peter G. Platt, Reason Diminished: Shakespeare and the Marvellous (Lincoln, NB and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), p. 63.
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Elizabeth Cropper, ‘On Beautiful Women, Parmigianino, Petrarchismo, and the Vernacular Style’, Art Bulletin, 58 (1976), p. 376. The argument in this paragraph has also been stimulated by Nancy Vickers, ‘“The blazon of sweet beauty’s best”: Shakespeare’s Lucrece’, in Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman, eds, Shakespeare and the Question of Theory (New York and London: Methuen, 1995), pp. 95–115.
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Henry Crowther, ‘Anthony Payne, the Cornish Giant’, Journal of the Royal Institution of Cornwall, 10 (1890), pp. 3–7.
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© 2002 Mark Thornton Burnett
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Burnett, M.T. (2002). ‘The strangest men that ever Nature made’: Manufacturing ‘Monsters’ in Tamburlaine the Great. In: Constructing ‘Monsters’ in Shakespearean Drama and Early Modern Culture. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403919359_3
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