Tamburlaine’s Soliloquy

Abstract

T A M B U R L A IN E 'S SO LILO Q U Y M.N. MATSON University of Guelph In the fifth act of Christopher Marlowe's Tamburlaine, Part i, the hero soliloquizes.1 Tamburlaine has just ordered that all the inhabitants of Damascus be put to the sword. Shortly before, he had refused the plea by the delegation of Virgins to spare their city - the time had passed when he would have customar­ ily shown full or even partial mercy - and had ordered his horsemen to charge the suppliant Virgins. When he learns that his men have "hoisted vp their slaughtered carcasses" on the walls of Damascus, he orders the rest of the inhabitants killed. After the soliloquy, Tamburlaine abruptly asks if the caged Bajazeth, the Turkish Emperor, has been fed this day, and being informed that he has, he orders Bajazeth brought forth. Informed as well that Damascus has been ransacked, Tamburlaine prepares to meet in battle the Soldan of Egypt and Alcidamus, the King of Arabia, the father and the former betrothed of Zenocrate , who is now in love with Tamburlaine, her captor. To his aide's suggestion that they save the Soldan's life, Tamburlaine replies, That will we chiefly see vnto, Theridamas. For sweet Zenocrate, whose worthinesse Deserues a conquest ouer euery hart: (1987-89) Before the soliloquy, then, Tamburlaine orders the extermination of the Damascenes; after it, he concerns himself for a moment with Bajazeth's feed­ ing, and then proceeds with the battle against the Soldan and Alcidamus, with the provision that the Soldan be spared for Zenocrate's sake. It is an odd moment in Tamburlaine's career. For the first time we see him alone, speaking not to affect someone on stage but directly to affect us, and apparently himself, for the concern he shows for the Soldan's safety afterwards must owe some­ thing to the concern he shows for the Soldan's daughter in this soliloquy;2 and no doubt the generosity with which he finally extends the Soldan's dominion is grounded here.3 Perhaps even his interest in Bajazeth's diet can be traced to the tempering of his martial mood that occurs in the course of this speech. As to the effect on us, the audience: like a many-headed monster rather than English Studies in Ca n ad a, i , 4 (winter 1975) 374 English Studies in Canada a communal consciousness, we are evidently of more than one mind. Some of us are lifted above mundane morality by the powerful rhetoric of what is often regarded as Tamburlaine's hymn to beauty ;4 others of us cannot accept or are puzzled by the apparent incongruity of a man ordering a mass slaughter of innocents and then worrying over the sorrow of one person and elaborately inquiring into the nature of beauty.5 Any one of us might be moved to consider the relation between Tamburlaine's slaughter of beauty and his meditation on it, and that is the main concern of this paper. It is also necessary to face the fact that, no matter how powerful Tamburlaine's rhetoric may be, his grammar appears weak. The soliloquy has three parts. In the first part (1916-40) Tamburlaine apostrophizes Zenocrate, whose sorrows for her people and fear for her father are beautiful and disturbing. In the second part (1941-54) Tamburlaine, suffer­ ing the effects of Zenocrate's beautiful sorrows, asks what beauty is, and concludes that it cannot be totally grasped or comprehended. When a poet attempts to put it into words, something is left over "which into words no vertue can digest." In the third part (1955-71) Tamburlaine concludes, there­ fore, that (a) it is unseemly for him as a soldier to concern himself with the futile attempt to comprehend beauty ("to harbour thoughts effeminate and faint"), except insofar as beauty must of necessity impinge on him ("beat on his concedes"); and that (b) since he is both sensitive and resistant to beauty ("concerning and subduing both"), he shows the world that his particular virtue, a virtue not only above his birth but above the gods - the ability to know...