Tamburlaine The Great, Christopher Marlowe, Revels Student Edition
Title: Tamburlaine The Great, Christopher Marlowe. Revels Student Edition
Condition: GOOD
Author/s: Edited by J S Cunningham & Eithne Henson
Edition/Year: 1998
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Pages: 226
Format: Paperback
About the Book:
Marlowe’s two part play set itself to explicitly inaugurate a distinctive form of heroic-tragic drama-spectacular, rhetorically lucid and emphatic. It continually challenges the audience to make judgements on significant ethical and political issues: was Tamburlaine a chivalric monster? an aesthetician of cruelty? an explorer and destroyer? A scourge and defier of God? which God?
The play achieved, and sustained, great success on the Elizabethan stage. It also speaks provocatively to our own time, when it has received several major productions. Timur Khan – to give Tamburlaine his original name – was for long perceived in the West as a ruthless conqueror, whose career was marked by vindictive massacres, the sacking of enemy cities, the assertion of egotistical will. In that light, his career connects with twentieth-century experience of genocide, ideological justifications of brutality and conflicts of rival religious faiths. It is significant that the 1990s – four centuries on from Marlowe’s play – have seen the emergence of Uzbekistan of a new model Timur, perceived as a devout, heroic and admirable figure in this state newly ‘liberated’ from the Soviet hegemony.
