Analysis Of Tamburlaine's Speech

This style is partly achieved by the grandiloquence of the blank verse, the rich metaphorical quality, by the syntactical and stylistic patterns and by a distinctive vocabulary. In Tamburlaine’s speeches there are references to precious metals and other pricy things, immeasurable distances and vast depths open before the spectator. The feeling is that the entire universe is whirling around the audience. Marion B. Smith argues that the “highly individual quality in Marlowe’s imagery fuses the heterogeneous elements of the poetry into a close harmony.” Together with the dynamic character of the blank verse this constitutes the most important unifying principle of the speeches.
The passion and drive in Tamburlaine’s speeches has the effect of disrupting the static pattern of the old rhetorical structure. “The procedure of piling up phrase upon phrase, motif upon motif, balancing verse-paragraph against verse-paragraph in an attempt to build up an obvious symmetry is resorted to comparatively seldom, indeed only in a handful of set speeches.”
Marlowe introduced a new dynamic principle into the dramatic speech which made a profound impression on his contemporaries:

Such metaphorical language is characteristic of the majority of Tamburlaine’s speeches, even when he does not talk about threats or war projects. When he is pursuing Zenocrate, he does it by means of promises for the future which develop into increasingly unreal dreams:

This kind of dramatic speech is not based