The World of Christopher Marlowe by David Riggs

Author:David Riggs
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.

9.8 The end of the world. From John Doleta, Strange news out of Calabria, 1586.

While Tamburlaine’s troops are killing every last man, woman and child in Damascus, the tears that his beloved sheds ‘in thy passion for thy country’s love / And fear to see thy kingly father’s harm’ (V.i.137–38) awaken the hero’s dormant sense of beauty. He likens Zenocrate to Flora, the goddess of fertility, raining showers of liquid pearl on to the earth. Her face metamorphoses into the scene of poetic inspiration and writing, ‘Where Beauty, mother to the Muses, sits / … Taking instruction from thy flowing eyes’ (V.i.144–46). Tamburlaine knows ‘how to tell many lies that sound like truth’: he conveniently forgets that the mother of the Muses is Mnemosyne, or Memory, thus enabling the hero and his audience to forget about the bloody event that has reduced Zenocrate to tears in the first place. His final paean to the thing itself – ‘What is beauty, saith my sufferings then’ (160) – completes the work of forgetting by removing the weeping woman altogether. Beauty turns out to be the inexpressible ‘One thought, one grace, one wonder at the least. / Which into words no virtue can digest’ (172–73). Christopher Marlowe, the servant of the Muses, remembered what his audience forgot. His fusion of beauty and violence discovers brutality in the very apotheosis of classical eloquence.

The endless attempts to make sense of Tamburlaine’s soliloquy suggest that it was never meant to be intelligible in the first place. Quintilian advises the orator to cultivate ‘the gift of signifying more than we say, that is emphasis, together with exaggeration and overstatement of the truth’. The hero’s celebration of Beauty is a perfect example of what Puttenham calls ‘the Gorgeous’. Tamburlaine, the pragmatic orator, diverts his audience with ‘a mass of many figurative speeches, applied to the beautifying of our tale or argument’. Once he has forgotten his killings and beautified his tale, Tamburlaine can marry Zenocrate, retire from the battlefield and begin enforcing the very laws of civil order he unrepentantly violates throughout his two hours’ traffic on the stage.

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