Tamburlaine Part 2 Analysis

Part II, with Tamburlaine’s murder of his son and his own death by internal combustion, belongs to the myth. The last half of the play, especially Act V, presenting the final conquest in Babylon, shows Marlowe evoking the imagery of the end of the world. It begins with the episode of Tamburlaine’s receiving the crowns of tributary kings “That little hope is left to save our lives” (p.99), then re-crowning them in a ceremony whose length suggests that in performance this was a bigger version of the crowning of Antichrist. Also like the Antichrist, Tamburlaine then delegates his tributary kings with their special powers of rule. Hyperbolic language emphasizes this sense of greatness. Orcanes calls Tamburlaine Emperor of the world (p.56), supported by the hyperbolic symbol of captive kings drawing the world-ruler across the field.
“What daring god torments my body thus,
And seeks to conquer mighty Tamburlaine?
Shall sickness prove me now to be a man,
That have been term’d the terror of the world?
Techeles and the rest, come, take your swords,
And threaten him whose hand afflicts my soul:
Come, let us march against the powers of heaven,
And set black streamers in the firmament,
To signify the

Others might also think of Revelation’s image of being washed in the blood of the Lamb. Understanding the scene in this way, the reader can probably understand the problematic and unhistorical scene of Tamburlaine’s killing his son, Calyphas. This surprising episode reminds the religious imagery of sacrifice. In fact, Tamburlaine is speaking to Jove in a kind of prayer just at the moment when he cuts Calyphas’s throat as if he were sacrificing an animal. Biblical allusions are present in the last scenes of the play when “Tamburlaine speaks to his remaining two sons as if instituting a Eucharistic self-continuity in them”