Literary Form In Christopher Marlowe's Tamburlaine

Christopher Marlowe’s playwriting career was short, no more than six years. Yet, despite his reputation of a “bad boy”, Marlowe pushed the limits of literary form, especially in the use of the blank verse and his achievements remain in the history of English literature. Marlowe discovered what the audiences of his time wanted, violent fiction, and he was able to provide that. His first play, Dido, Queen of Carthage, was performed in London in the late 1580s. His second play, Tamburlaine, was performed in London in 1587 and in this play Marlowe created the most famous, most versatile and noblest of English measure, the unrhymed decasyllabic (ten syllables) line called blank verse. Blank verse or iambic pentameter as it is known was first used

When stating, “Threatening the world with high astounding terms” and concluding “View but his picture in tragic glass, / And then applaud his fortunes as you please.” (Prologue, Tamburlaine) this is the confident belief of a man who knows what he is doing. Marlowe was just like the conqueror whose conquests he chose to dramatize. The playwright proudly announced that English actors would speak a language and portray a hero worthy of tragedy. 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 dramatic declamation and the delivery of set speech. 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.

This study aims to demonstrate that Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine has marked a new stage of development at which the language becomes a dramatic medium of expression and of character-portrayal. Tamburlaine’s speeches are self-expression and self-portrayal of an exceptional type and it is this that marks the play, is spite of all its weaknesses, as a brilliant work. The style, the vocabulary, the imagery, all contribute to the creation of a very powerful character, Tamburlaine, and prove Marlowe’s genius in spite of his detractors’