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Tamburlaine there are elements of cruelty, tyranny, pride, atheism,
defiance to the authorities on earth as well as in heaven. In order to
fulfil his mission, Tamburlaine goes out into the world, marches
against Persia, wins over the military general of Persia, then
proceeds against all the Kingdoms of East, makes captive of the
Kings and humiliated them like a beast.
Tamburlaine’s passion for world conquest by using his
supreme military power is as strong as his passion for Zenocrate
whom he marries. These two tempestuous passions which were the
products of the Renaissance are vividly dealt with in this chapter.
Chapter IV deals with Renaissance man’s unlimited thirst for
knowledge and power, wealth, endless sensuous pleasures, atheism
and revolt against conventional religion and morality. For acquiring
the limitless power, knowledge, wealth and sensuous pleasure, he
can give away his soul to the devil.
There, however, is dealt with the theme of the universal
human conflict between good and evil. A spiritual conflict had, it is
true, been dramatized in the morality plays, for example. In contrast
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to this although to some extent he employs the same technique as
the Moralities. Thus Doctor Faustus develops into a spiritual
tragedy, in the sense that the external circumstances and events of
the play no longer have any intrinsic value but are significant only
in so far as they enable us to understand Faustus’s spiritual state
and to see what goes inside his mind.
Marlowe has depicted Faustus as fully the spirit of
Renaissance, with its rejection of the medieval, God-centered
universe, and its embrace of human possibility. Faustus also
possesses an obtuseness that becomes apparent during his
bargaining sessions with Mephistophilis. Signing a pact with the
devil is the only way to fulfil his ambitions. He imagines piling up
wealth from the four corners of the globe, and gaining access to
every scrap of knowledge about the universe. Desire and frustration
of desire, aspiration and its violent disappointment, here affect the
quality of the language itself, down to the very moment of the
sentence and the choice of diction.
Tamburlaine is ambitious of conquering the world by his
power and action while Faustus is ambitious of conquering the
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elemental forces of Nature and using these forces for his own
benefit or pleasure. Finally, he becomes once again a tragic hero, a
great man undone because his aspirations have butted up against the
law of God.
In chapter V, I have treated the aspect of the great craving for
wealth and indulgence in crimes, and also an intermixture of hatred,
jealousy, greed and criminal madness that sweep through the play,
the Jew of Malta like a storm. It is exemplified by the hurricane of
the craving for wealth rushing through the play The Jew of Malta.
This very play is a dramatic presentation of a ‘Machiavellian’
man, full of greed and cunning, which will stop at nothing to obtain
his ends. But the ambition of Barabas, The Jew of Malta, lacks the
central drive of either Tamburlaine or Faustus, and the play, though
it has some effective moments of grim irony, which is lacking in
any of Marlowe’s other plays. The idea of Barabas as a self-
consciously performed ethnic stereotype is a potentially powerful
one. We can recognize in reading and accentuate in performance
this principle of performed ethnicity that is to say, identification of
Barabas as a villainous character. At the heart of the play, in terms
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of race and ethnicity, the problem of anti-Semiticism remains to be
challenged in some way.
On the one hand, Abigail, daughter of Barabas herself is the
only character in the play that is not ruled by greed, and her
conversion represents an attempt to break free from the limitations
of the narrow and materialistic society which surrounds her. The
attempt is rendered pathetic by the fact that the religious, amongst
whom she hopes to find release, are as mercenary as the outside
world which they pretend to shun. Barabas’s sneer is substantiated
by the behaviour of the two religious caterpillars’. Lastly, Turk,
Moor, Christian and Jew are all as bad as each other, and in these
circumstances a cynical ‘policy’ is to be preferred to a hypocritical
‘profession’ which cloaks greed in a false devotion.
Chapter VI deals with Edward II as a historical play. It is the
matured product of Marlowe’s dramatic genius. This play is not
only the first historical drama in English literature but it also shows
other marks of advance in style and other qualities of dramatic arts.
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