"A warre . . . commodious": Dramatizing Islamic Schism in and after <i>Tamburlaine</i>

Abstract

In one of the best-known moments of Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine plays, the eponymous hero orders that copies of the “Turkish Alcoran” (2: 5.1.172) be burned. The play’s spectators watch as his orders are carried out, to Tamburlaine’s jeering dare: “Now, Mahomet, if thou have any power, / Come down thyself and work a miracle” (2: 5.3.186–87). The dare has no immediate effect, temporarily gratifying the Christian spectator’s expectations. But a mere thirty-one lines later, Tamburlaine is suddenly stricken with “distemper,” of which he will soon die—although not before his physician has also had a chance to give a convincing medical account of what ails him. This sensational scene has fueled many a critical argument about Tamburlaine’s self-understanding as the “scourge of God,” and the grammatical double-speaking of that formulation: is Tamburlaine a scourge sent by God to the Muslim world, for the benefit of Christians, as John Foxe sees it? Or might he be the instrument of a wrathful Old Testament God’s anger with Christians for their divisions and divergences from the true path, a Muslim scourge sent to punish them, as Richard Knolles viewed the mighty Ottoman emperors? Further questions arise given the pronounced construction of Tamburlaine as a Muslim, or at least a certain stereotype of Muslim identity, in part 2. From occasionally invoking pagan gods in part 1, Tamburlaine goes on to swear “by sacred Mahomet” (2: 1.3.109), and—killing his own son, torturing and humiliating those he has conquered, becoming increasingly obsessed with imperial expansion and with being “a terror to the world” (2: 4.2.201)—he seems to fall ever more closely into line with prevailing English stereotypes of the cruel Islamic despot. 1 But what might a Muslim Tamburlaine understand himself to be doing in burning the Koran? The answer, perhaps, lies in the complexities of Tamburlaine’s own religious and political identity within Marlowe’s plays (and their sources), as well as in the reciprocal understanding that Marlowe could have expected from his first audiences. And the answer thus pursued sheds light