Tamburlaine's Style Of Speech In Marlowe By M. Arlowe

M

arlowe, unlike his dramatic predecessors, invented a style of speech that defines more particularly the motivation and the passion that drives Tamburlaine and charms his allies. For them, and, to a certain degree, for the audience as well, to listen to Tamburlaine is comparable to seduction. Come live with me and be my love is in Part I transformed into Come war with me and be my tributary kings.
It was a gift central to Marlowe’s dramatic strategy for creating Tamburlaine’s dominating power. The martial ability of Tamburlaine might have been demonstrated by staged battle scenes, but Marlowe seems to have struggled to avoid that. Most of the battles are off-stage, and the spectator is presented instead with pre-battle scenes of boasting
The rhetoric of persuasion and self-glorification becomes the mad rant of the impotent; the effort to master reality takes on new verbal and visible shapes that increasingly stress the hallucinatory quality of Tamburlaine’s desire to make a myth out of his name and imagination. In Part I, his words of glorious prophecy and his threats disguised in colours always came true. Now his words and symbolic acts, although great, striking, and even shocking, prove ineffective.
His orders to go up a campaign against heaven and hell, accompanied by the wild gesture of wounding the earth, are characteristic to the way the hero has always professed power, but here they are useless. His followers try to bring him back to reality, and ask for patience: “She is dead, / And all this raging cannot make her live.”
(p.75) He requests his sons to bathe their hands in his blood, While I sit smiling to behold the sight. (p.96) Two of them do so and even beg their father to cut their own arms, too. Calyphas, however, the black sheep of the family, protests that he finds it a pitiful sight.
The play represents in its own way a radical reorganization in the matter of diction. In Tamburlaine the celebrated “mighty line” of Marlowe made its first appearance. The metrical treatment of the individual line is regular, and even though some interesting irregularities appear, it is not the variety but the regularity of the line which stands out on examination. Schemes of arrangement built on alliteration and assonance, on balance of adjectives in both halves of the lines are common in Marlowe’s play. The opening lines of the Prologue in which Marlowe dismisses the rhyme and silliness of earlier plays are a typical