Justice Is a Mirage: Failures of Religious Order in Marlowe's Tamburlaine Plays

In The Defence of Poesy, Philip Sidney declares that poetry is morally useful because it can portray not only what "is or is not, but what should or should not be."¹ Unlike philosophy, which is abstract, or history, which is bound to record events as they happened, literature's representative and imaginative qualities allow it to create an easily comprehensible picture of virtue. Performed a year after Sidney's death (but eight years before the publication of the Defence), Christopher Marlowe's Tamburlaine plays could not be further from this moral project. The play's titular character incarcerates people in cages, kills his own son, burns an entire city to the ground, forces prisoners of war to draw his chariot, and openly defies the gods. While most early modern playwrights bring tyrants like Tamburlaine to violent ends, Marlowe ushers his protagonist into a comparatively comfortable death that caps off a victorious military career. Surrounded by friends, physicians, and multiple sons who can take over his empire, Tamburlaine's only regret is that he has not conquered more land. Although Tamburlaine fills two plays with his acts of cruelty, he himself never experiences cruelty, even at his death.

For contemporary readers accustomed to the poetic justice of the Duke's murder in The Revenger's Tragedy or the fatal plot twist that kills Macbeth, Tamburlaine's death seems out of place with a central tradition of early modern English drama. Why is a character who routinely slaughters civilians, women, and children and who treats humans like animals allowed to die unpunished? While Sidney, had he been alive, might have read Marlowe's plays as an abuse of poetry's power, I argue that the plays perform a different kind of cultural work: instead of offering models of virtuous or immoral behavior, they invite spectators to critique the efficacy of institutions that seek to enforce such moral codes. Tamburlaine and other characters frequently invoke justice as defined by Christianity, Islam, and paganism, but none of these religious orders offers an adequate explanation for the apparent injustice of Tamburlaine's life. Rather than show how Christianity is superior to Islam and polytheism, the plays produce skeptical interpretations of every religious order—and thus of religious justice as a concept.

Some critics have looked to the historical record to explain Marlowe's seeming lack of concern with justice in Tamburlaine I and II.² That is, because the historical Tamburlaine did not suffer military defeat, Marlowe cannot afford his character a tragic fall without stretching the limits of his audience's credulity. Yet because almost no early modern playwright deemed an accurate account of real-life events essential to a "history play," such an argument cannot explain Marlowe's choice to represent Tamburlaine as a terrifying tyrant who escapes both divine and human justice. Furthermore, since Tamburlaine I and II were not commissioned but were conceived by Marlowe himself, one might ask why he chose to dramatize a story of such inexplicable suffering and chilling injustice.³ I propose that Marlowe was attracted to this story precisely because it provides little, if any, affirmation of his own society's religious ideals of justice.

In his formulation of religion as an anthropological phenomenon, Clifford Geertz describes the cultural work of a religious order as "the formulation, by means of symbols, of an image of such a genuine order of the world which will account for, and even celebrate, the perceived ambiguities, puzzles, and paradoxes in human experience. The effort is not to deny the undeniable—that there are unexplained events, that life hurts, or that rain falls upon the just—but to deny that there are inexplicable events, that life is unendurable, that justice is a mirage."⁴ By repeatedly representing situations in which religious faith has no bearing on military success or failure, the Tamburlaine plays raise doubts about whether religion is the correct lens through which to view any historical or political event. For an early modern audience all too familiar with the interchangeability of political and religious rhetoric, the plays threaten to...