Suspending ekphrasis: Christopher Marlowe’s ‘Brazen World’ in Part 2 of Tamburlaine the Great and its influence

Abstract

I argue that Part 2 of Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great (1587; published 1590) upends the narrative operations of ekphrasis at work in Part 1 to expose Sir Philip Sidney’s ‘brazen world’ progressively. I track Part 2’s descent into this world through rhetorical insufficiencies that generate flawed ekphrases, which lack the requisite enargeia (vivid description) to be seen in the mind’s eye. Particular attention is paid to Zenocrate’s death scene as well as Tamburlaine’s preservation of her body in a gold-lined coffin. I argue that the coffin is a symbol of Tamburlaine’s rhetorical inadequacy and an aesthetic time capsule in which Marlowe suspends ekphrasis. This suspension complicates the ways in which audiences ‘see’, and is the site of a contest between ‘poetic’ (ekphrastic) and ‘dramatic’ (spectacular) ways of seeing. Through the ekphrastic interaction between the Tamburlaine plays, Marlowe challenges dramatists to revive the operations of ekphrasis in new ways. I examine William Shakespeare’s response to this challenge in The Winter’s Tale (1611; published 1623), arguing that he reconciles the poetic and dramatic ways of seeing to create a stage-picture of the revival of ekphrasis in the coming to life of Hermione’s statue.