The Sultan and the Queen

by Jerry Brotton

  From jigging veins of rhyming mother-wits,

  And such conceits as clownage keeps in pay,

  We’ll lead you to the stately tent of War,

  Where you shall hear the Scythian Tamburlaine

  Threat’ning the world with high astounding terms

  And scourging kingdoms with his conquering sword.

  View but his picture in this tragic glass

  And then applaud his fortunes as you please.6

  It sounds like a manifesto, which is what Marlowe intended. He tells his audience audaciously to forget the artificial “jigging” rhymes of clowning of plays, leading them halfway across the world into the heart of battle, where the hypnotic beat of the blank verse allows them to “hear” Tamburlaine declaiming in “astounding terms” how he will match his words with deeds.

  Ben Jonson captured the power and originality of Marlowe’s verse when he wrote of “Marlowe’s mighty line,” but he also mocked Tamburlaine’s “scenicall strutting and furious vociferation,” vulgar entertainment that did no more than pander to the playhouse’s poorly educated audience.7 Thomas Nashe ridiculed Marlowe’s innovations as “the swelling bombast of a bragging blank verse,” dismissing his new technique as “the spacious volubility of a drumming decasillabon.”8 Marlowe’s great rival Robert Greene went even further, complaining that Marlowe’s innovation was putting him out of business, “for that I could not make my verses jet upon the stage in tragical buskins, every word filling the mouth like the faburden of Bow-Bell, daring God out of heaven with that atheist Tamburlaine.”9

  Tamburlaine’s grand, declamatory style was notorious for its theatrical impact and the provocative views it conveyed. It allowed Marlowe to question some of his audience’s most cherished beliefs—including their attachment to religion. As the classical writers of ancient Greece and Rome had shown, the ability to persuade was one of the most highly regarded attributes of public figures. Marlowe was as skillful an orator as Cicero but as dangerous as Satan, who had shown in the book of Genesis that artful persuasion could change the fate of mankind. Is Tamburlaine the brave hero who conquers the Turkish, Persian and Egyptian enemies of Christianity in Part One, or the tyrannical atheist who will even march against heaven in Part Two?

  In Part One, as Tamburlaine prepares to go into battle with the Ottoman sultan Bajazeth (Bayezid I), he congratulates his lieutenant Theridamas for his rousing anti-Turkish rhetoric:

  Well said Theridamas! Speak in that mood,

  For “will” and “shall” best fitteth Tamburlaine,

  Whose smiling stars give him assurèd hope

  Of martial triumph ere he meet his foes.

  I that am term’d the scourge and wrath of God,

  The only fear and terror of the world,

  Will first subdue the Turk, and then enlarge

  Those Christian captives which you keep as slaves.10

  Tamburlaine sounds and acts like a Christian agent sent to vanquish the Ottoman Turks, promising to release the captives enslaved in Turkish galleys. Just as Marlowe was writing, William Harborne was struggling to free Christian galley slaves, albeit using more peaceable methods. Within two scenes Tamburlaine defeats Bajazeth and imprisons him in a cage, adding to his humiliation by using him as a footstool to step onto his throne. Bajazeth asks in vain that the “holy priests of heavenly Mahomet”11 poison Tamburlaine, who responds by declaring,

  let the majesty of heaven behold

  Their scourge and terror tread on emperors.12

  The moral ambiguity of Tamburlaine made him a captivating hero: simultaneously tormentor and savior. Marlowe had created a man who was more than a type—he made a character.

  Trampling an enemy underfoot held powerful and immediate religious associations for Marlowe’s audience, who would have heard in Marlowe’s lines the verse from the Psalms, where God says, “Sit thou at my right hand, until I make thine enemies thy footstool” (Psalms 110:1). The 1583 edition of John Foxe’s hugely popular Acts and Monuments gave a particularly English twist to this concept with a woodcut showing Henry VIII in the guise of Solomon, using Pope Clement VII as a footstool. Marlowe knew that many Protestant theologians—including Foxe—conflated the pope with the Turk as two incarnations of the Antichrist, but Tamburlaine was no reformed Christian. At every turn Marlowe confounds his audience’s expectations as to where their sympathies should lie, by creating a hero who is simultaneously antagonistic toward Christianity and a liberator of Christians.

  Henry VIII using Pope Clement VII as a footstool in John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments (1583).

  Perhaps Greene was right that Tamburlaine and his creator were both atheists. In Part Two, Tamburlaine spends much of his time taunting any and all deities, including the Prophet Muhammad. Marlowe shows extensive knowledge of recent reports about Islamic theology. Indeed, his mention of the “Zoacum” tree in Act II, scene 3, suggests that he may even have read the Qur’an, where the tree is mentioned in surah 37.13 In the opening scenes of Part Two, Tamburlaine’s lieutenant Orcanes signs a peace treaty with Sigismund, King of Hungary, promising:

  By sacred Mahomet, the friend of God,

  Whose holy Alcoran remains with us,

  Whose glorious body, when he left the world,

  Clos’d in a coffin mounted up the air,

  And hung on stately Mecca’s temple roof,

  I swear to keep this truce inviolable.14

  Tamburlaine himself proves less respectful. Much later in the play, after he captures Babylon and orders the slaughter of its inhabitants, he asks Usumcasane, King of Morocco:

  where’s the Turkish Alcoran,

  And all the heaps of superstitious books

  Found in the temples of that Mahomet

  Whom I have thought a god? They shall be burned.15

  Boasting that “I live untouch’d by Mahomet,” Tamburlaine then taunts the Prophet, calling out as he watches the Qur’an burn:

  Now, Mahomet, if thou have any power,

  Come down thyself and work a miracle.

  Thou art not worthy to be worshippèd

  That suffers flames of fire to burn the writ

  Wherein the sum of thy religion rests.16

  Continuing his diatribe, he asks:

  Why send’st thou not a furious whirlwind down

  To blow thy Alcoran up to thy throne

  Where men report thou sitt’st by God himself,

  Or vengeance on the head of Tamburlaine,

  That shakes his sword against thy majesty

  And spurns the abstracts of thy foolish laws?17

  He tells his soldiers that “Mahomet remains in hell,” unable to respond to such mockery, and they should “seek out another godhead to adore.”18 Less than twenty lines later, Tamburlaine feels “distemper’d suddenly,” and two scenes later he is dead. Is it just coincidence or is Marlowe finally bringing down the wrath of God upon his antihero? As he enters the play’s final scene, Tamburlaine addresses his general Techelles and other close advisers and rails against all religions:

  What daring God torments my body thus

  And seeks to conquer mighty Tamburlaine?

  Shall sickness prove me now to be a man,

  That have been termed the terror of the world?

  Techelles and the rest, come, take your swords,

  And threaten him whose hand afflicts my soul.

  Come, let us march against the powers of heaven

  And set black streamers in the firmament

  To signify the slaughter of the gods.

  Ah, friends, what shall I do? I cannot stand.

  Come, carry me to war against the gods,

  That thus envy the health of Tamburlaine.19

  Marlowe makes it quite clear here that his hero is the scourge of any divinity, not just the God of Islam or Christianity
. Here, finally and majestically, the body of the man and the mind of God collide: the “terror of the world” has a soul but he will die in “war against the gods.” Only God, Marlowe suggests, can defeat such a man.

  Marlowe was fully aware of Elizabethan England’s close relations with the rulers of Persia, Morocco and the Ottoman Empire that people his play. While he was studying at Cambridge and writing Tamburlaine, he was already associating with the intelligence networks run by Burghley and Walsingham, and he might well have been privy to aspects of the ambiguous and conflicted policy of Elizabeth’s advisers toward the Islamic world.20 Marlowe’s play had little interest in either celebrating or condemning the crown’s strategic alliances with Islam. It explored the contradictory and ambivalent emotions inspired by a traditional enemy that could be—and had been—quickly transformed into an ally, and possibly even a savior. The result was a new kind of drama that embraced duality and encouraged the audience to revel in both the horror and the delight of identifying with a charismatic outsider. The play created a shiver of pleasure rather than a somber moral lesson; it asked the audience to make up their own minds about its eastern hero and “applaud his fortunes as you please.” Judging by the “sundrie times” the play was “showed upon stages in the city of London,” his audience could not get enough of it.21

  Tamburlaine’s success spawned a new generation of playwrights, eager to exploit Marlowe’s style and exotic settings. One of the first was Thomas Kyd, a close friend and former roommate who soon became embroiled in the murky world of Elizabethan espionage. Kyd would subsequently be arrested, tortured and imprisoned on charges of blasphemy arising from documents that he said in fact belonged to Marlowe. The two died within little more than a year of each other, Marlowe in May 1593, Kyd in August 1594. Kyd probably wrote his celebrated revenge play The Spanish Tragedy within months of Tamburlaine. The backdrop for Kyd’s violent and bloody drama was the political struggle between Spain and Portugal, a prescient issue in the late 1580s. It featured a play within the play dramatizing the Ottoman sultan Süleyman the Magnificent’s fictional pursuit of the Greek beauty Perseda. The Spanish Tragedy was so successful that in 1592 Kyd rushed out a follow-up, Soliman and Perseda, which focused exclusively on the Ottoman sultan’s invasion of Rhodes, his capture of Perseda and his eventual downfall.

  Around the time of the Armada’s defeat, another of Marlowe’s contemporaries, George Peele, turned to an earlier moment of conflict involving Iberia for inspiration. If Bilqasim, the Moroccan ambassador, had seen Peele’s Battle of Alcazar on one of the many occasions it was performed by Lord Strange’s Men at the Rose Theatre in Bankside, he would have been perplexed to see his sovereign, Ahmad al-Mansur, renamed “Muly Mahamet Seth.” Peele took the innovative decision to dramatize a recent historical event, drawing on publications that described the battle. The result was more like war reportage than epic drama. It was the first play in English history to use a Presenter to introduce each act, and the first set exclusively in Morocco to put a Moor on the English stage. What Peele did with his “Moorish” characters would have a profound effect on subsequent Elizabethan drama.

  Peele referred to the ruling sultan, Abd al-Malik I, as “Abdelmelec, also known as Muly Molocco, rightful King of Morocco.” His scheming nephew, the exiled Abu Abdallah, Peele called “Muly Mahamet, the Moor” (not to be confused with Muly Mahamet Seth). While Abdelmelec is represented as the legitimate “brave, Barbarian lord Muly Molocco,” Abu Abdallah is “the barbarous Moor, / The negro Muly Mahamet,” a “tyrant,” “Black in his look and bloody in his deeds.”22 The term “Moor” was derived from the Greek word Mαῦρος, which had two distinct meanings: an inhabitant of Mauretania (the ancient land covering today’s Moroccan coast) and “dark” or “dim.” During the Middle Ages the Latin derivation “Maurus” took on an ethnographic sense and, following the Islamic conquest of North Africa, came to be used as a synonym for “Mahomet’s sect” (Muslims).23 The word was thus an explosive mix of religion and ethnicity that Peele exploited to the full as he contrasted the two contenders for the Moroccan throne. He drew on contemporary sources to argue that Moors “are of two kinds, namely white or tawny Moors, and Negroes or black Moors.”24 His face made up with burned cork and oil and wearing black gloves, the actor playing Muly Mahamet was easily transformed into the devilish, scheming “blackamoor,” while Abdelmelec was his complete antithesis, a virtuous “tawny Moor,” a suitable figure for English merchants to do business with.

  The son of Peele’s Abdelmelec would inherit the kingdom and establish an alliance with Elizabeth. But this is where the play began to run into problems. Despite their apparent differences, both Abdelmelec and Muly Mahamet are acknowledged as Muslims and “descended from the line / Of Mahomet.”25 Although Abdelmelec is seen as the legitimate ruler, he announces, “I do adore / The sacred name of Amurath the Great,”26 the Ottoman sultan Murad III, with whom he was in league. Muly Mahamet, by contrast, allied himself with a Christian king, Sebastian I. From this point in the play onward, Peele has to work hard to portray Sebastian as a courageous but tragic figure, flawed by his Catholicism and therefore easily manipulated by the scheming Muly Mahamet.

  The play’s anti-Catholic bias intensifies with the introduction of Thomas Stukeley, surrounded by Irish clergy and Italian soldiers, heading for Ireland and hoping to “restore it to the Roman faith.”27 Sebastian persuades Stukeley to join his Moroccan crusade, but the bombastic Englishman’s thundering speeches reveal him to be a pale, opportunistic shadow of Tamburlaine:

  There shall be no action pass my hand or my sword

  That cannot make a step to gain a crown,

  No word shall pass the office of my tongue

  That sounds not of affection to a crown,

  No thought have being in my lordly breast

  That works not every way to win a crown.

  Deeds, words and thoughts shall all be as a king’s,

  My chiefest company shall be with kings,

  And my deserts shall counterpoise a king’s.

  Why should not I then look to be a king?

  I am the Marquess now of Ireland made

  And will be shortly King of Ireland.

  King of a mole-hill had I rather be

  Than the richest subject of a monarchy.28

  The vain and conceited Stukeley lacks the ambition and linguistic prowess of Tamburlaine. He is blandly fixated on the pursuit of a crown.

  At the end of Peele’s play, his sources dictated that everyone should die. This duly happens in a climactic battle scene, in which Muly Mahamet demands: “A horse, a horse, villain, a horse,” prefiguring the demise of another tragic villain, Shakespeare’s Richard III, four years later. The only man left standing is Muly Mahamet Seth, Elizabeth’s future ally, but even he does little more than order the mutilation of Muly Mahamet’s body followed by a Christian burial for Sebastian (which did not happen historically). Like Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, there is no obvious lesson from Peele’s play. It ends with no Chorus to provide a simple moral and offers no character with which the audience can identify. One is left to choose between the pompous Abdelmelec, the pious Sebastian, the scheming Muly Mahamet and the mercenary Stukeley.29

  This lack of simple identifications was in part a reflection of the contradictory nature of England’s relations with the Muslim world in the late 1580s. These contradictions provided an alternative to the prescriptive histories of classical Rome and Greece, allowing Elizabethan dramatists to develop their own idiom, addressing their audiences’ hopes and fears by staging them in a faraway land where the horrors of warfare, murder, atheism and tyranny could be explored in relative safety, free from the suspicious eyes of censors. We might think the play recommends the avoidance of Catholic-Muslim conflicts, while counseling Elizabeth against pursuing an alliance with al-Mansur, but Tudor dramatists were not moralizing priests or foreign policy advisers. They wanted to exploit
the ambivalent emotions created by English experiences in the east as spectacular, captivating drama.

  The Battle of Alcazar was not Peele’s only foray into contemporary events. He also produced a poem entitled “A Farewell Entitled to the Famous and Fortunate Generals of our English Forces,” dedicated to Sir John Norris and Sir Francis Drake, written in anticipation of the Portuguese Expedition’s departure in the spring of 1589. Where The Battle of Alcazar had shown Catholic Portugal destroyed by its ill-fated Moroccan adventure, Peele’s poem imagined an English Protestant crusade taking on the might of Spanish Catholicism. He describes the fleet leaving “England’s shore and Albion’s chalky cliffs” as they head for “the spacious bay of Portugal” and the “golden Tagus.” Bidding farewell to all they hold dear, Peele glances backward at his own recent play alongside those of Marlowe and Greene:

  Bid theaters and proud tragedians,

  Bid Mahomet’s poo, and mighty Tamburlaine,

  King Charlemagne, Tom Stukeley, and the rest,

  Adieu. To arms, to arms, to glorious arms!

  With noble Norris, and victorious Drake,

  Under the sanguine cross, brave England’s badge,

  To propagate religious piety.30

  Peele invokes the evocative image of a “sanguine” red cross, the traditional symbol of Christian militancy since the time of the Crusades, in anticipation of an English victory as part of a wider religious crusade that will “propagate religious piety.” Clearly, the hope was that Drake and Norris’s heroic exploits would eclipse those of Tamburlaine.

  • • •

  By January 1589, preparations for the Portuguese Expedition were beginning to show signs of strain. The Dutch and English commanders in the Low Countries quarreled over how many troops could be spared. The final number of 1,800, excluding cavalry, was half of Norris’s original request, as was the eventual supply of arms and munitions. Popular enthusiasm for the venture throughout the southeast of England swelled the army’s numbers to nearly 20,000, but many of these were inexperienced adventurers who all needed feeding, adding to the financial headaches. Running out of money but determined to continue, Drake and Norris issued the order for their fleet of 180 vessels to leave Plymouth on April 18, 1589, with provisions to last them less than a month.31 On board were Don António and the returning Moroccan ambassador Bilqasim, disguised as a Portuguese nobleman. It was yet another awkward alliance of Portuguese Catholics and Moroccan Muslims, with echoes of Alcácer-Quibir, but this time the intention was to overthrow Lisbon rather than Marrakesh.