History in the Inks of West: Tamburlaine by Christopher Marlowe as Self-Fashioning of History

Abstract

First performed in 1587, Tamburlaine by Christopher Marlowe can be considered the first English play to have brought Turk and Mongol characters on stage for the audience dealing with the Mongol-Turkish war fought between Taimur, the Mongol sovereign and Bayazid I, the Ottoman emperor. It goes on to show the heights of savagery and brutality along with the ambitious nature of Taimur in the play which perhaps had little historical relevance. The play for this reason was considered to be Orientalist in nature, as majorly the stereotypical vision of the East tainted the character of the Mongol emperor. Marlowe goes on to bend the characters to appear as an image of the West moreover, attributing and endowing him grandly to surface as an avenger of the defeats that the West faced at the hands of the Turks. In the process, the Mongol emperor Timur, cast by Marlowe as the central figure of the play was turned into a Renaissance Man of the English fancy, losing its Eastern lustre as a figure from Central Asian history and heritage. Tamburlaine autonomously represented the history that was loose and had little to no authenticity in it, while intending to create a dramatic masterpiece astounding the audience. Thus, this paper reads it through a New Historicist perspective highlighting the self-fashioning of the characters like Taimur, Bayazid I, along with history in totality by the hands of Marlowe. It shall read the play alongside the historical background and display how the Elizabethan playwright deviated from history to present a barbaric character, very much tainting facts while mingling it with fiction. Further, it shall stress the self-fashioning of the east during the Renaissance by the triumphant Tamburlaine over the meditative and philosophical Timur.