Kristevan Femininity and Negative Theology in Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, I and II

Tina Takapoui

doi:10.15845/emco.v3i0.1489

Abstract

Christopher Marlowe’s characters, brought along from far-off corners of history to the centre stage, are rid of the illusive integrity of Selfhood. His plays are also famous for their reluctance to favour domestic and female atmosphere. Despite such views, Marlowe’s drama enjoys a specific aura of femininity which is pressed by contemporary French feminist theoreticians, namely Julia Kristeva who finds the term essentially irrelevant to genders, but a spatial and temporal concept. In the present study, such supposition of the absence of femininity in Marlovian drama is questioned, doubted, and eventually rejected. The outlandish characters are also found in the heart of the very society Marlowe was living, only in a theatrical disguise, drawn back into spotlight from the level of the social unconscious.

Highlights

Christopher Marlowe has always been notoriously known as the alien, atheist, and sodomite dramatist of Elizabethan times, especially when shrouded in the shadow of his contemporary poet/playwright, William Shakespeare, whose works eventually pressed the maintaining the ‘Self ’ of the Tudor monarchy
Being at once of a human, vicious, and heroic nature, with heartless and cruel deeds, Tamburlaine performs as a child born of Chaos, one who longs to return to the dark Feminine melange of disorder and madness while examining the sympathy of the audience
An agent of the “black Jove” Himself and the rootless son of savagery, he disregards the norms of all kinds of the Elizabethan patriarchal Law, right in line with the presence of the virgin Queen on the apex of the society (2 Tam. 5.1.98)

Summary

Introduction

Christopher Marlowe has always been notoriously known as the alien, atheist, and sodomite dramatist of Elizabethan times, especially when shrouded in the shadow of his contemporary poet/playwright, William Shakespeare, whose works eventually pressed the maintaining the ‘Self ’ of the Tudor monarchy. While the latter’s literary output would represent the norms of the societal subjecthood, Marlowe’s would unveil its suppressed unconscious. The present study would read Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, Part I and II in the light of feminine as well as theological diversity that supplant the certainty of the dominant ideology of patriarchy of the society. The veiled undercurrent of femininity as defined by Julia Kristeva in the manifestation of Otherness will be found associated with the presence of Elizabeth Tudor, the unmarried queen as a potential threat to certain power points of an essentially patriarchal society

Historical Background

Conclusion