S trict attention to the surface of Tamburlaine Part One reveals details about Marlowe’s dramaturgy that have not been well understood before, and it shows that Marlowe was the first to make use of techniques that we now think of as characteristically Shakespearean. Tamburlaine puzzles audiences and critics alike when he orders the slaughter of virgins at besieged Damascus and then immediately soliloquizes about beauty’s power to inspire sympathy. The two moments provoke irreconcilable responses; before and after them, however, Part One more often invites the audience to ignore such contradictions. Critics attempting to assimilate their experiences of Tamburlaine to an understanding of it sometimes judge the play to be irresolute or even incoherent. As a play, however, Tamburlaine is—that is, feels—whole, finished, and sure of its identity. It imposes a sense of unity on complicated material by aesthetic rather than logical means. It uses aesthetic techniques that combine potentially contradictory materials into speeches that feel rhetorically coherent and straightforward. Often these techniques make use of seemingly accidental features of the language, such as homophones, multivalent words, and syntactic ambiguity. From the clutter of such substantively incidental debris Marlowe builds patterns that, unnoticed but not unperceived, impose a feeling of unity on material that is not always rationally unified.
The first chapter surveys previous criticism and describes my approach. The second chapter works slowly through many passages in Tamburlaine Part One, identifying places where the language of the play embeds contradictions within linguistic textures that feel insistently coherent. Chapter 3 considers different accounts of Marlowe’s ambiguity in order to formulate a more precise description of the effects I observe. Chapter 4 suggests that Tamburlaine Part One was unique; its characteristic effects are rare in Marlowe’s other plays (I consider Tamburlaine Part Two and Faustus in some detail) and non-existent in the play’s predecessors and imitators, such as Thomas Preston’s Cambyses and the anonymous Tragical Reign of Selimus. Chapter 5 takes Henry V as its example to show how Shakespeare imitated and adapted Marlowe’s novel dramaturgy.