Powerful Looks in Tamburlaine

Several discussions of Tamburlaine have touched on the striking visual dimension of Marlowe's bombastic play—especially with regard to the theatricality of the titular conqueror himself, who, as David Thurn puts it, “steadfastly refuses to relinquish the power of sight.” At the same time, Tamburlaine has been put forth by scholars such as Joseph Khoury as a Machiavellian figure who embodies will-to-power without much impediment. While the larger-than-life Tamburlaine may seem in such readings a force unto himself, spinning victory out of an ultimately hollow rhetorical prowess and superior will, this article argues to the contrary that all major characters in the play, including Tamburlaine himself, operate within the same framework of princely glory as power. The play suggests, in other words, that looking the part and being the part of Machiavelli’s prince are not only directly entangled, but may be one in the same. Paying attention to the language of "looks" and looking within the play, the article thus situates Tamburlaine's visual rhetoric within this larger visual framework in order to argue that the secret of his success at conquest may be found not in a superior will but in the Machiavel's superior understanding of glory and how to manipulate it.

Editorial Note

An introduction to the new issue of The Journal of Marlowe Studies

Demonic Temporality in Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus

“Demonic Temporality in Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus” argues that demonic beings and their temporal experiences serve as useful ways to conceptualize human beings existing in multiple timelines in Marlowe’s play. Plotting Satan’s histories in the Bible, demonology, and the ars moriendi tradition, the essay trace how early modern authors attempted to outline precisely how demonic temporality differed from humanity’s own constricted timescapes. Marlowe’s play, however, undercuts any confidence that early modern readers might have gained from these traditions, and I show how Mephistopheles furthers Faustus’s flawed conception of time as strictly earthly. Mephistopheles, too, is bound by certain temporal demands, particularly when he is forced to arrive upon the clowns Robin and Rafe’s ludic conjurations. Ultimately, Mephistopheles manipulates Faustus’s sense of temporality altogether, and the magus only learns at the very end of the play the true import of “everlasting” and Mephistopheles’s role, his experiences, within that sense of infinitude. In staging an aborted death scene that echoes the first half of ars moriendi texts, Marlowe’s disengagement from the genre rests on differences in understanding demonic temporality.

The Year's Work in Marlowe Studies: 2020

A review of scholarly work on Marlowe from the year 2020.

Christopher Marlowe, The Jew of Malta, ed. William H. Sherman and Chloe Preedy (London: Bloomsbury, 2021); Christopher Marlowe, The Jew of Malta, ed. Lloyd Edward Kermode (New York: Norton, 2021)

A review of two editions of The Jew of Malta newly published in 2021.

Playing with Promethean Fire: Dido, Queen of Carthage and Tamburlaine the Great

This article attempts to consider Marlowe's Promethean imagination in the context of Denis Donoghue's Thieves of Fire (1973). It focuses on two plays Dido, Queen of Carthage and Tamburlaine the Great, but the project extends further to 'Marlowe's Journey', the working title of a book culminating in a new look at Doctor Faustus. The general idea is to link the plays with acting, the inbuilt histrionic style of Marlowe's characterization, with the concept of the Promethean, understood as subversion on the moral and political scales.