Tamerlane: Sword of Islam, Conqueror of the World. Justin Marozzi

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СКАЧАТЬ is one of the most intensely realised warrior heroes of the stage. Shakespeare’s Henry V and Coriolanus seem poorer creatures by comparison.

      For Tamburlaine rises beyond the mortal sphere. As the Persian lord Theridamas remarks on first seeing this ‘Scythian shepherd’ early in Act I:

       His looks do menace heaven and dare the gods,

      His fiery eyes are fixed upon the earth …

      Tamburlaine, the audience rapidly discovers, is interested only in omnipotence:

       I hold the Fates bound fast in iron chains,

       And with my hand turn Fortune’s wheel about,

       And sooner shall the sun fall from his sphere,

       Than Tamburlaine be slain or overcome.

      After routing his Arabian and Egyptian enemy at the close of Part I, he explains his victory to the Soldan of Egypt, who is mourning the loss of his throne. The god of war has resigned to Tamburlaine, the defeated Egyptian is told, and will soon make him ‘general of the world’. Even Jove suddenly looks ‘pale and wan’, fearing Tamburlaine is about to dethrone him. Not content with comparing himself favourably to the gods, he throws down the gauntlet to the Prophet Mohammed, burning the Koran and daring him out of the heavens:

       Now, Mahomet, if thou have any power,

       Come down thyself and work a miracle.

       Thou art not worthy to be worshipped

       That suffers flames of fire to burn the writ

       Wherein the sum of thy religion rests.

      For Elizabethan audiences this was shocking stuff, blasphemy in the eyes of the authorities and an affront to properly Christian sensibilities. Gossip was already afoot concerning Marlowe’s supposed atheism, heresy and dissolute life, dangerous charges at a time when the authorities were rounding up those suspected of libel, sedition or even ‘unsafe’ opinions. Contemporary critics rounded on the play as a glorification of impiety. In his prefix to the largely forgotten Perimedes the Blacksmith (1588), Robert Greene condemned Marlowe for ‘daring God out of heaven with that Atheist Tamburlan’.

      On 12 May 1593, the popular playwright Thomas Kyd was arrested and tortured. He wrote a letter, almost certainly under duress, condemning Marlowe’s ‘monstrous opinions’ and his tendencies to ‘jest at the divine scriptures, gibe at prayers, and strive in argument to frustrate and confute what hath been spoke or writ by prophets and such holy men’. A shady character called Richard Baines, another informer, wrote of Marlowe’s ‘damnable judgement of religion and scorn of God’s word’, including wild allegations that the playwright professed ‘That Christ was a bastard and his mother dishonest,’ ‘That if there be any god or good religion, then it is in the papists,’ ‘That all Protestants are hypocritical asses’ and that Christ and John the Baptist were sodomites. Such testimonies had the desired effect. On 18 May, the Privy Council issued a warrant for Marlowe’s arrest. He was stabbed to death in the notorious Deptford tavern brawl less than two weeks later.

      Tamburlaine the Great provided plenty of ammunition to Elizabethan critics, as it does to this day. Joseph Hall, Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and later Bishop of Exeter and Norwich, accused Marlowe of gross populism and pandering to the rabble – ‘He ravishes the gazing Scaffolders’ – in Virgidemiarum (1597). Ben Jonson joined the chorus of disapproval: in Discoveries, posthumously published in 1640, he argued that there was nothing in plays like Tamburlaine except ‘scenicall strutting, and furious vociferation, to warrant them to the ignorant gapers’. Wonderfully unconcerned by such high-minded criticism, audiences thrilled to what quickly became a phenomenally popular play. To this day, on those rare occasions when it is staged, they still do, alternately shocked and seduced, appalled and entranced, by the brutal machinations of this exotic tyrant.

      Whatever the Elizabethan authorities thought about Marlowe’s atheism, Tamburlaine was otherwise thoroughly in keeping with the zeitgeist of the era. It posed questions about colonisation and kingship, rebellion and religion, all the vicissitudes of power. This was a time of vigorous English expansion and growing self-confidence, the birth of a military and mercantile nation with dreams of empire and the ambition to project its might across the globe. Marlowe’s numerous references to hemispheres, meridian lines and poles, to continents known and unknown, perfectly reflected an age of exploration and commercial endeavour across the seas, personified by Sir Francis Drake, the man who circumnavigated the world in 1577–80 and calmly finished his game of bowls on Plymouth Hoe before routing the Spanish Armada in 1588. Just as Tamburlaine thunders across the world from conquest to conquest, so England, led by her heroic queen, was steadily emerging as a great power on the world stage. In Elizabeth’s famous speech to the English troops at Tilbury on the eve of their engagement with the Armada, there are unmistakable shades of Tamburlaine (written only a year previously): ‘… [I] think foul scorn that Parma or Spain, or any prince of Europe, should dare to invade the borders of my realm; to which, rather than any dishonour shall grow by me, I myself will take up arms – I myself will be your general, judge, and rewarder of every one of your virtues in the field.’

      Little surprise that for all the authorities’ disapproval, the play enjoyed such a remarkable success in its own time. It was so well known that in 1629, more than forty years after its first performance, prisoners pulling carts of sewage through London’s streets were taunted with one of the celebrated lines from the play – ‘Holla, ye pampered jades of Asia,’ the very words which Tamburlaine jeers at Bajazeth’s two sons, whom he has harnessed to his chariot.

      Different eras have naturally judged Marlowe’s Tamburlaine – as well as the real-life conqueror – through different prisms. Nineteenth-century military historians, not least the British, tended to lionise the Tatar for his prodigious military skills, and wrote admiringly of his successful campaigns while downplaying his cold-blooded massacres. In the twentieth century, his career was viewed less enthusiastically. John Joseph Saunders wrote in 1971 that ‘Till the advent of Hitler, Timur stood forth in history as the supreme example of soulless and unproductive militarism.’ In 1996, the historian Leo de Hartog judged Temur a parochial sadist.

      Not surprisingly, different cultures have also reached radically different verdicts. Within the dar al Islam, the Muslim world, Temur is a household name, usually revered as a great conqueror and propagator of the faith. In Christian Georgia, which he ravaged half a dozen times, he is spoken of with dread and remains the country’s greatest anti-hero. In the Soviet empire, he was removed from the history books, the authorities fearful of the nationalism he might inspire among the subject populations of Central Asia. When he was mentioned, it was only as a savage barbarian and despot. In post-Soviet Uzbekistan, as we shall see, Temur has been rehabilitated and championed as the father of a new nation. In the West he languishes in the depths of obscurity.

      Likewise in the theatre, the play that could disgust Elizabethan literary critics was equally able to confirm the prejudices of their late-nineteenth-century successors. Arthur Houston, professor of political economy at Trinity College, Dublin, excused the excesses of Tamburlaine on the grounds that ‘The principal characters are Eastern barbarians, proverbially prone to the extremes of passion, and addicted to the use of hyperbolical expressions. Marlowe in my opinion has been rather under-rated.’ Swinburne admired Marlowe’s poetic gifts, but George Bernard Shaw considered him ‘a fool’ who catered to a ‘Philistine and ignorant’ public. In our own time, Edward Said accused Marlowe’s ‘Oriental stage’ of preparing the ground for Christendom’s jaundiced СКАЧАТЬ