illness, I would relate his death to the limits of visual and to some extent verbal representation in both plays. He may die from a humoral imbalance, or because he has burnt the Babylonians themselves rather than their Qur’an, but if Tamburlaine also dies from an act of hypericonoclasm he does so under a force that the text ultimately fails to render in iconic terms. The very confusion over his death, its overdetermination, makes it impossible to explain through narrative, which depends on cause and effect. His followers nevertheless strive to narrate and depict the coming event. In a passage that recalls Tamburlaine’s own struggles at Zenocrate’s passing, Theridamus tries to imagine spirit armies besieging Tamburlaine’s heart, and yet “These cowards invisibly assail his soul” (II: 5.3.13): that is, the causes dooming his master cannot be pictured. Tamburlaine is more successful:
See where my slave, the ugly monster Death,
Shaking and quivering, pale and wan for fear,
Stands aiming at me with his murdering dart
Who flies away at every glance I give,
And when I look away comes stealing on.
(5.3.67–71)
Yet still more than Milton’s Death, this apparition is unseeable, certainly by those bidden to see it on stage and in the audience (Milton, Paradise Lost 2. 666–673). Even for Tamburlaine, Death, if Death it is, disappears precisely when he looks at it, albeit for fear of Tamburlaine, he claims. The Physician’s dry disquisition on death as a process follows right away: it is Tamburlaine’s urine he has viewed (line 82).
Finally, Tamburlaine attains a sort of reverse epiphany in the plays’ most telling lines:
Casane, no, the monarch of the earth
And eyeless monster that torments my soul
Cannot behold the tears ye shed for me,
And therefore still augments his cruelty.
(II: 5.3.216–219)
Techelles seemingly conjectures in the following speech that Death once more is meant, perhaps in a weak recollection of Tamburlaine’s earlier image (lines 220–223). But it is not clear that death, at first a timid slave, is now the monarch of the earth (although this may also have been Milton’s reading of the passage). It is also possible that it is Tamburlaine’s, and perhaps Marlowe’s, God who sits above that is the eyeless monster, unseeing and a monstrum itself, at once an ominous mystery and a marvel that one must try and fail to picture. That the eyeless monster cannot, not just will not, behold the followers’ tears suggests that it is less than a god, of course, and furthermore that it may be nothing but a figure for the absence of the divine. It is a sublime negative presentation, in Kant’s terms. We personify the blind augmentation of cruelty through a prosopopeia that Tamburlaine himself sought to embody in his violent career. Tamburlaine, simply, is dying for no reason despite the many explanations the text offers, or for reasons closer to those of the Physician than anyone else. If I am right, then this is Marlowe’s “atheism.” The Tamburlainiad approaches a radical aniconism near its end, despite Marlowe’s own ceaseless efforts to visualize power and desire. The plays’ iconoclasm, their relentless destruction of their own images and idols, including Tamburlaine himself, is merely the active arm of a more profound visual Pyrrhonism. Marlowe could well have generated his fundamental critique of representation without reference to the few purported accounts of Islam that he knew (on “doubt-based iconoclasm,” see Elliot, 412). But a glancing encounter with Islamic thought may have marked his career at Cambridge – and the beginnings of his imaginary career in Tamburlaine’s Persia as well.
In this paper, I have juxtaposed two instances of the breakdown of the image on a world scale in Tamburlaine Parts I and II. Medieval and Ptolemaic maps cancel each other out in Tamburlaine’s early vision of conquest. Ortelius’s sophisticated system of book-length world mapping determines the scope of the plays’ action, yet for the most part invisibly, as if the maps’ labeling rather than their iconic presentation was the key to the world-picture they assemble. The belated appearance of a world map, perhaps the world map book itself, on stage, occurs under the sign of global occlusion and disappointment: “Look here, my boys,” Tamburlaine commands as he evidently points to the map,
see what a world of ground
Lies westward from the midst of Cancer’s line
Unto the rising of this earthly globe,
Whereas the sun, declining from our sight,
Begins the day with our Antipodes:
And shall I die, and this unconquered?
(II: 5.3.145–150)
There is something sublime, as later generations would say, about Tamburlaine’s gigantic failure as well as a sublimity in the unavoidable lack of adequation between word and picture when the image of the world is at stake.
The second section of my discussion begins with the proposal that Islam was not in any real sense represented on stage during the English Renaissance. The failure to represent part of the life-world matches the inadequate projection of the orbis terrarum. Even Marlowe, whose Orcanes glimpses a completely immaterial deity, ultimately casts Islam as little more than an idolatrous parody of Christianity: “In vain, I see, men worship Mohomet,” Tamburlaine says as he burns the Qur’an (II: 5.2.178). The “Alcaron” and the world map or map book successively occupy the same place on stage as the action draws to an end in the second play: the authority of both image-objects is simultaneously invoked and defied, and then inexplicably forgotten. That Islam itself resists representation, and in a manner that recalls differing antagonisms toward the image in Judaism, Christianity, and other “world religions,” may be significant. It suggests that religion in general produces an effect antagonistic to representation, a sublime effect that, for all its mystifications, might usefully challenge the way identity is still often framed in critical discourse about what Orcanes calls “a world of people” (Tamburlaine II: 1.1.67).
NOTES
1 1 Margreta de Grazia sees the “framing” of the proscenium stage as a seeming “materialization of this modern concept of visibility and knowability” (de Grazia, 19). Yet Heidegger would place knowability ahead of the visible; he is radically opposed to materialization (albeit to his and our cost) and thus evokes the visible but renders it remote. Early modern dramatists like Marlowe did not write for the proscenium stage, whose framing, in any case, is radically different from Heidegger’s coinage Gestell, which is a setting-in-place or a system, and nothing like a picture frame or proscenium arch (Heidegger, 127, 141).
2 2 For knowledge of Arabic and thus Islam on the part of two instructors in Hebrew at Cambridge, see Miller (264–266). He does not touch on aniconism.
3 3 Burton (58–62). When Burton cites the “superstitious bells” passage later in his reading of Part I as evidence of Tamburlaine’s pro-Christian stance, he does not connect it to his discussion of bell-metals (77).
4 4 Hanmer (B3 verso, C6 verso); and see Lonicerus (117–118).
5 5 The New York Public Library possesses a copy. Bedwell cites this translation in his epistle to the reader and uses it in his glossary entry on “Azzekom,” his version of the word, citing Robertus’s “Ezetius,” “Ezecus,” and finally “Ezzecum”: Mohammedis imposturae (L4 verso).
6 6 My thanks to Ms. Gill Cannell of the Parker Library, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, for this information.
7 7 Lonicerus (Volume I, Book 2, Second Part, 122). I’ve had access only to the 1584 edition of this text in the New York Public Library, with its different pagination from the 1578 edition Seaton consulted.
8 8 Lonicerus (121). On “Curaam,” see Samuel Purchas, Purchas his Pilgrimage, or Relations of the World and the Religions observed in all ages and places discovered (332). See also George Abbot, An exposition upon the prophet Ionah (8). There is no entry as yet in the OED. Compare Tamburlaine himself on “the Turkish Alcaron” as “the abstracts of thy foolish laws”: Tamburlaine II, 5.1.172,