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Major Plays
Tamburlaine the Great
 For his first play, Marlowe chose to write something about
the Mongol conqueror
Tamburlaine as his hero in the play. Tamburlaine is a
shepherd who finally becomes a Khan. He conquers other countries in the East
and becomes the master of Asia. He is easy to get angry and cruel. He forced
the conquered kings to drag his chariot. He tortures Bajazeth, Emperor of
the Turks, who is first carried like a wild animal in a cage. Tamburlaine
made Bajazeth his footstool. In a dinner, he orders Zabina, the queen of the
Turks to feed Bajazeth with what is left from his table. Tamburlaine called
himself “arch-monarch of the world”. Through the whole play, his character
and his greed for power keep unchanged. On his deathbed, he calls for a map
where he can see the places conquered and the places he hasn’t conquered.
The play contains two parts and ten acts, being two
plays with a continuous story, that of the rise and fall of the hero
Tamburlaine, or Timur, the Tartar king. The biographies written by a Spanish
writer Pedro Maxia and by an Italian named Perondinus had given the idea to
Marlowe.
Part I tells of the steady rise in the career of the
Scythian shepherd Tamburlaine until he became the King of Persia and the
conqueror of many kings and the Emperor of Turkey as well as the winner of
the affection of Zenocrate, the daughter of the Soldan of Egypt. Part II
continues with further conquests for Tamburlaine, including victories over
kings and princes both Christian and Mohammedan, and then relates the death
first of Zenocrate and finally of Tamburlaine himself. Here, while in
dramatic form Marlowe followed the medieval concept of tragedy as beginning
with the rise of the hero from his humble origin to the zenith of his
success and ending with his downfall or death.
The following prologue opens the play and reveals the nature of the hero of
the play and some features
blank verse:
The Prologue
From jygging vaines of riming mother wits,
And such conceits as clownage keepes in pay,
Weele leade you to the stately tent of War:
Where you shall heare the Scythian Tamburlaine,
Threatning the world with high astounding tearms
And scourging kingdoms with his conquering sword.
View but his picture in this tragicke glasse,
And then applaud his fortunes if you please.
Tamburlaine is described as a great primitive hero who
expresses his high ambitions with great eloquence and conquered others with
force but who was extremely cruel and brutal toward his enemies while lavish
in his love-making. The plot looks a bit monotonous as the central figure
conquers one enemy after another, but the hero’s speeches are in powerful
languages and great poetry as Marlowe makes skilful use of blank verse as
his medium for tragedy.
Marlowe wrote a number of plays and he neglected to publish them so that
some of those works remained incomplete. However, his blank verse influenced
the theatre of his time, including William Shakespeare. The poet Algernon
Charles Swinburne (1837-1909) said that Marlowe was "the father of English
tragedy and the creator of English blank verse, therefore the teacher and
the guide of Shakespeare." Shakespeare and Marlowe both wrote plays for Lord
Strange’s acting company and influenced each other's work. The blank verse
was also Shakespeare’s tool.
The Jew of Malta
 The hero of The Jew of Malta is Barabas, a rich merchant and
a terrible money lender who is characterized by his greed for wealth. The
Emperor of the Turks asked for the tribute, so the Governor of
Malta
orders Barabas to give half of his wealth. Barabas is very angry about this.
Then he begins to revenge. He kills his own daughter and her lover so that
he succeeds in destroying the Governor of Malta and getting the position.
Then he betrays the town to a Turkish commander. In order to have the town
again he wants to kill the commander in a large pot of boiling fat. But he
fails at last. He dies in the pot himself.
The Jew of Malta manifests rich themes such as racial
tension, religious conflict, and political intrigue, all of which can allude
to what was happening in the 16th century England. Although there were no
professed Jews in England during this time (they had been banished in 1290
and would be readmitted in 1656 only as converts to Christianity) the play
deals with anti-Semitic sentiment that was popular throughout Europe.
The play’s theme of religious heterodoxy appears highly significant when one
remembers that Elizabethan England was dealing with its own religious
divisions. Following the failure of the Spanish Armada in 1588, many English
Protestants were wary of the allegiance of their Catholic counterparts.
Thus, although the play is grounded on a real historical event (the 1565
Turkish invasion of Malta), its characterization appeals to a general sense
of fear that many English Protestants felt toward those whom they considered
outsiders—be these Muslims, Jews, or Catholics. With Barabas's sly
allusions to biblical stories and his ironic treatment of Christian
doctrine, one sees how Marlowe raises questions about state religion that
would have had deeper significance in a country occupied with its own
religious tensions.
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