Futility In Tamburlaine

Marlowe’s treatment of Tamburlaine is different from other tragedies in the use of imaginative energy in the portrayal of Tamburlaine, the tyrannical protagonist. To state that Tamburlaine is an ambitious tyrant is somehow an understatement. Even when such labelling takes place on stage, as it does in the frequent invectives used against Tamburlaine by his enemies, there is a paradoxical sense of futility in the censure. It is not only the military invincibility of the protagonist that deviates the judgments but the magic of his “working words,” the charismatic grandiloquence which contains cosmic and mythological allusion, that transforms Tamburlaine’s ambition from a dangerous political vice into something more comparable to a vision that …show more content…
In most of Marlowe’s plays there is a central issue to which all subsidiary issue are related. In Tamburlaine the central issue of the play is an idea. The representative of this idea is the hero himself round whom the whole action and all the other characters revolve.
The characters of the plays written before Marlowe’s time gave the impression that they would take every opportunity for turning a given situation into an occasion for long and lively declamation and the delivery of set speech. Yet, for Tamburlaine, the set speech is a condition of his existence. This means that in what Tamburlaine is concerned there is a close relationship between the speaker and his speeches.
Tamburlaine is a “dramatic figure symbolising certain qualities.” This idea is so powerful that it influences every one of Tamburlaine’s speeches. If we take into consideration M.C. Bradbrook’s idea that “the essential structure of Elizabethan drama lies not in the narrative or the character but in the words,” then Marlowe’s Tamburlaine marks a new stage of development at which the language becomes a dramatic medium of expression and of …show more content…
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This is a form of expression which Marlowe nowhere else uses as often as in this play. Marlowe can use imagery to differentiate his characters, for example, Bajazeth’s speeches contain images from the underworld and are full of monsters and darkness,

Tamburlaine speaks of the “frame of heaven,” “the triple region of the air,” his imagery referring to the heavens and the classical heroes. The playwright ultimate goal was amplification. Tamburlaine’s speech is not redundant rhetoric, but it seems rational and also it seems to express what will happen.
There are sections in the play which compare Tamburlaine with rulers whose incapacity is marked by their linguistic disability. Mycetes finds himself “insufficient” to express his sense of grievance, other people have to speak for him, and his own attempts to speak lose themselves in mixed metaphors:

His brother, Cosroe, seems more capable breaking into alliteration whenever he talks of unseating Mycetes:

Here, the language loses its persuasive power and is seen, stylistically speaking, contrasting with the language of more capable