Chapter 5

“Conquering Feet”: Tamburlaine and the Measure of English

The Plain Show of a Manifest Maim

Part 1 of Tamburlaine the Great (1587–88) forcefully inverts Spenser’s vision of the English poet as exile, recasting him as a violent intruder. Christopher Marlowe, a recent arrival to the professional London theater, invited audiences to see in the audacious progress of his barbarian hero the image of his own poetic daring, claiming Tamburlaine’s legendary conquest of the East as a vehicle for his campaign to enlarge the boundaries of English verse: “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,” promises his prologue, “Where you shall hear the Scythian Tamburlaine / Threat’ning the world with high astounding terms / And scourging kingdoms with his conquering sword.”1 This announcement of a newly elevated voice and kingly measure for the English stage now seems as prophetic as any of Tamburlaine’s boasts: “will” and “shall” befit the mighty Marlovian line as well as they do its Scythian champion. Londoners swarmed to see the outrageous and eloquent Tamburlaine make his bloody way across the vast imaginary terrain of Marlowe’s play, and an inevitable host of lesser playwrights sought to capitalize on Tamburlaine’s success with their own spectacles of exotic savagery and their own blank verse tragedies.² Together with its sequel, Tamburlaine launched Marlowe’s theatrical career and altered the course of English literary history, establishing blank verse as the keynote of vernacular heroics.

Marlowe dramatizes this conquest at the climax of part 1, when his ruthlessly ambitious hero mounts his imperial throne by stepping on the kneeling form of Bajazeth, “treading him,” as the Turkish sultan’s wife laments, “beneath [his] loathsome feet” (4.2.64). Critics promptly seized upon the punning analogy between Tamburlaine’s martial feet and Marlowe’s insistent iambs, and they have not let it go. In the sixteenth century the satirist Joseph Hall lampooned the “Turkish Tamberlaine,” whose “huf-cap termes and thundring threats” echo “the stalking steps of his great personage”; in a less mocking vein, the twentieth-century scholar Alvin Kernan identifies “the steady, heavy beat of ‘Marlowe’s mighty line,’ carrying authority, determination, and steady onward movement” as the most novel and distinctive feature of the poet’s verse.3 The spectacle of Bajazeth’s humiliation also reminds us that, like Tamburlaine’s military conquest, Marlowe’s literary historical triumph is a drama of usurpation: the deposed Turk whom Tamburlaine makes his “footstool” has a double in the person of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, a sixteenth-century poet whose blank-verse translation of books 2 and 4 of Virgil’s Aeneid, published several decades before Tamburlaine, is now regularly cast as a footnote to the arrival and ascent of Marlowe’s mighty line.

But the analogy is not quite apt: strangely there is no particular arrogance—or “tamberlaine contempt,”⁴ to borrow Gabriel Harvey’s phrase—in Marlowe’s identification of blank verse as a bold and self-authorized departure from established usage. For by the 1580s English poets and critics had largely concurred in writing off the unrhymed, accented line of Surrey’s translation as an interesting but misbegotten experiment in vernacular prosody. Roger Ascham, for instance—one of the most vocal and eager proponents of unrhymed English verse in the mid-sixteenth century—treats Surrey’s Aeneid with condescension: although he praises its author as the “first of all English men” to “haue … by good iudgement, auoyded the fault of Ryming,” he dismisses the poem as a well-intentioned failure, saying that it does not “fullie hite perfite and trew versifying.” Contrasted to Virgil’s quantitative measures, he declares, Surrey’s iambic feet are “feete without ioyntes, that is to say, not distinct by trew quantitie of sillables: And … soch feete, be but numme feete: and be, euen as vnfitte for a verse to turne and runne roundly withall, as feete of brasse or wood be vnweeldie to go well withall. And as a foote of wood, is a plaine shew of a manifest maime, euen so feete, in our English versifiing, without quantitie and ioyntes, be sure signes, that the verse is either, borne deformed, vnnaturall and lame, and so verie vnseemlie to looke vpon, except to men that be gogle eyed them selues.”⁵ This damning assessment of blank verse was enough to obscure Surrey’s achievement from view for decades to come: in Palladis Tamia (1598) Francis Meres praises Surrey as a love poet but repeats Ascham’s criticism of his Aeneid verbatim,⁶ while William Webbe, despite the fact that his Discourse of English Poetry (1586) works hard to revive the cause of metrical versification, classes the “olde Earl of Surrey” among those native poets whose praise, for all their modest talents, would make his “discourse much more tedious.”7 So total is the neglect of Surrey’s poem that O. B. Hardison concludes that “there is no reason to doubt Milton’s sincerity” when, in his prefatory note to Paradise Lost, he claimed his own epic poem to be “the first [example] in English” of heroic verse freed from the fetters of rhyme.⁸

Tamburlaine thus presents us with a peculiar literary historical phenomenon: the triumph of a formal choice that had proved an utter failure just decades earlier, when it appeared in a guise far more likely to appeal to the prejudices and preconceptions of its readers. Derek Attridge has written extensively on the question of why sixteenth-century English poets and critics found it so difficult to recognize, much less appreciate, the accentual patterns of their own verse; here, he suggests, in an especially direct and pervasive way, their formation in the classics estranged those writers from their mother tongue, whose native accents were muffled by antique precepts.⁹ Confounded by the differences between classical “quantities” and English “accents,” they were liable to conclude, as Paula Blank writes, “that English poetry had no meter, no ‘true’ numbers at all, and moreover that the English language itself was intrinsically unfit for true measure.”¹⁰ Even so, the tepid reception of Surrey’s achievement by his contemporaries and successors remains “one of the curiosities of the history of English poetry.”¹¹ For if we attend to the metaphorical terms of the debate over rhyme and quantitative measure in the sixteenth century, Surrey’s Aeneid seems perfectly positioned to satisfy anxieties about the legitimacy of English as a literary language.

More than any other attribute of the language, the vernacular’s supposed lack of measure was perceived as the tell-tale sign of England’s barbarous, nonimperial past. Thus Ascham calls upon readers of The Scholemaster to “acknowledge and vnderstand rightfully our rude beggerly ryming” as the legacy of barbarian conquest, “brought first into Italie by Gothes and Hunnes, whan all good verses and all good learning … were destroyd by them: and after caryed into France and Germanie: and at last, receyued into England” (60_r). Ascham’s “at last” ruefully acknowledges England’s perpetual belatedness: isolated on the periphery of ancient civilization, it is the last to hear even the unwelcome news of barbaric overthrow. But it also stakes out a place for England as the last standing outpost of that civilization, a lone preserve of once-widespread values and practices of eloquence, and in the efforts of his own generation of humanist scholars and pedagogues to overthrow barbaric rhyme and reinstate classical versification, Ascham sees signs that the trajectory of gothic decline might be reversed: “I rejoyce,” he writes, “that euen poore England preuented Italie, first in spying out, than in seekyng to amend this fault in learning” (62_r).

Were it not for his dismissive treatment of the blank-verse Aeneid, we might reasonably suppose that Ascham’s joy had something to do with the Earl of Surrey: given the Virgilian ambitions that inspired the quest for vernacular metrics, the arrival of an English Aeneas who speaks in unrhymed iambic pentameter seems like an occasion for celebration—or at least for something more urgent than the general shrug that Surrey’s poem receives. As Margaret Tudeau-Clayton observes, translating Virgil was a “high stakes” literary enterprise in sixteenth-century England, offering an occasion both for authorial self-promotion and “for the promotion of cultural forms, … national equivalents to the unifying model furnished for the Roman people” by Virgil himself, “the ‘columen linguae latinae’ (‘the pillar of the Latin language’).”12 By anchoring blank verse in the great classical poem of the founding of civilization and the translation of empire, Surrey’s Aeneid speaks directly to the twin desires for poetic measure and imperial stature.¹³ Indeed rarely has a literary text been better positioned for success: Surrey’s translation appears in print (in Richard Tottel’s widely read “Miscellany” of 1557) just as the quest for an alternative to rhyme becomes the centerpiece of English humanist efforts to achieve parity with ancient Greece and Rome. To perpetuate rhyme “now, when men know the difference, and haue the examples, both of the best and the worst,” Ascham famously declares, would be to embrace marginality and exclusion, to affirm one’s own place outside the boundaries of civilization: “to follow rather the Gothes in rhyming than the Greekes in trew versifying were euen to eate ackornes with swine, when we may freely eate wheate bread emonges men” (60_r). Ascham’s metaphor echoes the opening lines of Virgil’s Georgics, the great classical poem of civilization and culture, which hymns the dawn of human society as the moment when “earth … exchanged wild acorns for plump grains of wheat.” The allusion invites English readers to imagine themselves as potential heirs to the empire envisioned in the Georgics, which hails Octavian as lord of “the great circling world,” “god of the great sea,” and master of “more than a fair share of heaven,” while effacing—or at least downplaying—the labor and toil that are the poem’s unceasing theme.¹⁴ “I am sure,” Ascham reassures his audience, “our English tong will receiue carmen Iambicum as naturallie, as either Greke or Latin.” If no English iambic verse has yet succeeded, he concludes, only “ignorance” is to blame (60_v).

What Ascham calls “ignorance”—a culpable but passive defect of knowledge and education—may seem to us like a more active failure of recognition, but it is possible that Surrey’s affiliation of his formal innovation with Virgil’s great epic did English blank verse no favors. Ascham, for one, seems to feel that he has been subjected to a shoddy sleight-of-foot: where Virgil’s dactylic hexameters obey the classical laws of quantity—which measure syllables according to duration in time—Surrey accommodates his iambic pentameter to the vernacular’s own patterns of accentual stress. To a classicist’s ear, the substitution of accent for quantity makes the English feet seem to stumble haltingly behind Virgil’s own: blank verse exposes the language’s native defects, making a “plaine shew of a manifest maime.” English poets who tried, as Ascham urges them, to subject the vernacular to the principles of quantitative measure fared still worse: Surrey’s blank verse may seem to have been “borne deformed,” but according to Edmund Spenser, the imposition of classical quantities crippled even the strongest English feet. Subjected to the alien rule of duration in time, Spenser confesses in a 1580 letter to Gabriel Harvey that “the Accente” of his English hexameters “sometime gapeth, and as it were yawneth ilfauouredly, comming shorte of that it should, and sometime exceeding the measure of the Number, … seemeth like a lame Gosling, that draweth one legge after hir … [or] like a lame Dogge that holds vp one legge.”15 Ascham may present the quest for English measure as a wholly natural turn from humiliation, deprivation, and hardship to abundance and ease—trading in wild acorns for plump grains of wheat, the company of pigs for the company of men—but Spenser’s experience suggests that escaping the barnyard was not so simple: quantitative versification entailed hardships, deprivations, and humiliations of its own. Harvey, who initially responded with encouragement to Spenser’s efforts at quantitative verse, wrote back urging him to leave off. Spenser’s insistence that “rough words must be subdued with Vse,” so that English poets “might … as else the Greekes, haue the kingdome of our owne Language,” arouses his particular indignation: what Spenser dubs a “kingdome of … language” Harvey regards as closer to a military occupation. Objecting to his friend’s heavy-handed manipulation of a familiar English noun, he warns, “[Y]ou shall never have my subscription or consent to make your Carpēnter our Carpênter an inche longer or bigger than God and his Englishe people have made him.” “Is there no other pollicie to pull downe Ryming and set vppe Versifying,” he demands, “but you must needes … forcibly vsurpe and tyrannize vppon a quiet companie of wordes?”¹⁶

As Richard Helgerson has shown, the debate between Spenser and Harvey over the future of vernacular versification turns not on the question of whether English accents are compatible with classical numbers—Harvey hears the same strain and stress in Spenser’s hexameters that Spenser does—but on the question of how to interpret that mismatch metaphorically. The contest between rhyme and quantitative meter in late sixteenth-century vernacular criticism serves as a surrogate for arguments about the kind of rule fit for England, about the ideal balance between centralized authority and the rule of custom.17 But it also precipitates anxieties about the terms of Britain’s relationship with the empires of antiquity. Poems written in English approximations of quantitative meter might be claimed as emblems of cultural parity, poetic fulfillment of the longing—encoded in the myth of Brutus—for a genealogical bond with antiquity. But they were also vulnerable to charges of ongoing cultural subjection, extensions of an ancient dependency. Was the application of classical prosody to English akin to the domestication of a savage and bestial herd, or was it an instance of tyrannical violence inflicted on innocent humanity?¹⁸

That question, which accounts for the urgency with which English humanists treated the arcana of classical prosody, points the way toward a deeper understanding of Marlowe’s otherwise astonishing success with Tamburlaine. For the two rival narratives of the debate about metrical versification—civilizing order versus intolerable tyranny—coexist within sixteenth-century accounts of the career of the fourteenth-century Scythian warlord known variously as Timur Khan, Timur Cutlu, and Timur-i-Lenk. Timur was a popular subject for European and English moralists, who offered his life both as an exemplary instance of spectacular self-improvement—the rude shepherd becomes master of an empire—and as a cautionary tale about violent excess and unbridled ambition—the savage conqueror who is himself cut down by death, leaving his hard-won throne prey to a series of squabbling successors. As most of these narratives also note, the historical Timur walked with a limp: hence the title Tamburlaine—Timur-i-Lenk, or Timur the Lame. Calling upon Tamburlaine as the champion of his blank verse, Christopher Marlowe thus foregrounds the very anxieties—barbarity and cultural degeneracy, tyranny and lameness—that plagued figures such as Ascham, Spenser, and Harvey in their efforts to rehabilitate English quantitative measure.

By doing so he eludes the unfortunate comparisons that condemned Surrey’s Aeneid to the margins of literary history. When Ascham read Surrey’s Aeneid, its hero’s imperial progress seems to have contrasted unfavorably with the effortful pacing of the poet’s own feet; Tamburlaine, by contrast, was already “the plaine shewe of a manifest maime”: English poetry could only look more refined, more humane by comparison. Mary Floyd-Wilson calls Marlowe’s adoption of Tamburlaine “a clever joke,” the reverse of type-casting,”19 but it is possible that Tamburlaine’s Scythian rudeness made him a better advocate for a novel-seeming poetic form than the Trojan Aeneas. After all, as Attridge makes plain, what sixteenth-century poetic theorists needed (and often failed) to reckon with were the fundamental differences between the classical tongues and English, differences that Timur, with his strangeness and his striving, cast in a fresh light. Not everyone welcomed the sound of Tamburlaine’s voice, to be sure, but even the criticisms leveled at Marlowe’s verse by rivals such as Joseph Hall testify to its imperious effect, its “big-sounding sentences, and words of state.”²⁰ Indeed critics such as Hall seem to take their cues from Marlowe himself, who crafts an overtly self-serving analogy between his own poetic ambitions and Tamburlaine’s triumphs: Marlowe’s “base-born hero,” observes David Riggs, “is an extemporaneous oral poet whose verses … are his passport to wealth and dominion,” a “fable [that] transforms the cycle of poverty, poetry, and social mobility that had cast Marlowe on the margins of Elizabethan society into an unexampled success story.”²¹

In a more complicated fashion, I suggest, the Scythian Timur also serves the needs of sixteenth-century English rhetorical and poetic theorists, not as “an unexampled success story” but as a figure for the contradictory values ascribed to prosodic form as an index of cultural achievement. Ascham, for instance, presents quantitative measure as the antithesis of native brutality, a necessary submission to civilizing order, but he also covets classical meter as an emblem of England’s capacity to resist invasion and conquest. As the exchanges between Spenser and Harvey demonstrate, efforts to adapt quantitative measures into English tend to get caught between the twin perils of barbaric marginality and tyrannical coercion: either way subjection lies. By yoking the future of the unrhymed iambic line to the rise of a notoriously violent barbarian, confounding eloquent measure with vulgar excess and outlandish extremity, Marlowe points an unlikely way out of the doomed contest between vernacular and classical prosody, suggesting that English poetry stake its legitimacy precisely on its disregard for the decorums of more civilized tongues.

He is not the only one to do so: at least two of Marlowe’s contemporaries found in the legend of the lawless Timur Khan a possible solution to the question of vernacular prosody. For Marlowe, Tamburlaine serves as the avatar of English poetry freed from the petty constraints of rhyme, but for the rhetorician George Puttenham, a figure dubbed Temir Cutzclewe—Timur Cutlu, or Timur the Lucky—models a form of poetic measure that excels the classical quantities in its rigor. Meanwhile for the poet and critic Samuel Daniel, a staunch proponent of vulgar rhyme, Tamburlaine is the figure for a literary tradition that exceeds the narrow worldview of antiquity and an eloquence that is its own law. Marlowe, Puttenham, and Daniel take very different stances when it comes to defining what English measure ought to look and sound like, but they each recognize in the debate over versification an opportunity to reexamine the most basic terms of rhetorical and poetic judgment, exposing the violence within eloquence, the transgressions on which the rules of restraint depend, and the willfulness with which lines of verse and the boundaries of linguistic community are drawn.

Such internal contradictions expose the inadequacy of Ascham’s binary of Greeks and Goths, humans and beasts: both Englishness and eloquence are found to inhabit a terrain where brutality is the handmaid of humanitas, and Scythians are the progenitors of civilization. Noticing Tamburlaine’s odd prominence within the late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century history of prosody means noticing as well that the paradoxes he comes to embody—violence married to sweetness, measure to excess, barbarity to civility, and license to restraint—are embedded in the foundation of vernacular literary theory and practice. But foundation may be the wrong term altogether, for the strikingly diverse solutions offered by Marlowe, Puttenham, and Daniel (not to mention Ascham, Spenser, and Harvey) to the nagging problem of measure suggest how very unstable and contested that theory and practice remained. More forcefully than even Euphues or Colin Clout, the Scythian Timur resists domestication as a figure of Orphic communion—which seems to have made him the ideal figure for English poetry.

Temir Cutzclewe’s Arte of Poesie

“[W]hat is unrhythmical is unlimited,” Aristotle writes of metrical prose and verse in book 3 of the Art of Rhetoric, “and there should be a limit, … for the unlimited is unpleasant and unknowable.”22 In the opening lines of book 2 of his 1589 Arte of English Poesie, Puttenham echoes Aristotle, observing that “all things stand by proportion, and that without it nothing could stand to be good or beautiful”(53). What was at stake, then, in the seemingly picayune debate over rhyme, quantities, and other forms of measure was the viability both of English eloquence and of English theories of English eloquence: without fixed formal standards, English poetry risked condemnation as unpleasant and unknowable, artless in every sense of the word. Marlowe’s Tamburlaine understands the problem precisely; his quest for global dominion is propelled by his desire to know the outermost limits of his power: “Since they measure our deserts so mean … / They shall be kept our forcèd followers / Till with their eyes they view us emperors,” he informs an early set of captives (One 1.2.63, 66–67), and on the point of death he will beg for a map to “see how much / Is left for me to conquer all the world” (Two 5.3.123–24). More pointedly than any other literary critical issue, prosody forced vernacular authors to recognize the interdependence of theory and practice: the question of whether or not the vernacular was eloquent could not, finally, be distinguished from the question of whether and how its eloquence could be measured.

Marlowe’s Tamburlaine dies before he reaches that outermost bound, leaving a pair of inept sons “to finish all [his] wants” (Two 5.3.125), but in book 2 of Puttenham’s Arte, the Scythian Timur helps to rescue the author from his own unbounded—perhaps unhinged—attempt to measure English verse. Puttenham dedicates his second book, “Of Proportion Poeticall,” to fulfilling the bold pronouncement he makes in the Arte’s opening pages, which claim that the vernacular’s lack of quantitative feet is not a defect but a sign of superabundance. Even if English poetry does not obey the strict laws of classical versification, “the nature of our language and wordes not permitting it,” he declares, it possesses “in stead thereof twentie other curious points in that skill more then they euer had, by reason of our rime and tunable concords or simphonie, which they neuer obserued” (4). Puttenham is assisted in making good on his boast because of his willingness to play fast and loose with the etymologies of terms such as rithmos, arithmos and rhyme, “arithmeticall” and ars metrica:23 as the first ten chapters of book 2 demonstrate, a motivated rhetorician can invent meaningful ratios for every possible dimension of a poem, from the arrangement of accents within a line of verse to the number of syllables in each line, the number of lines in a stanza, the ratio of internal rhyme to end-rhyme, the distances between end-rhymes, and the degree of latitude to be granted poets in orthographical and accentual variation.

And yet for all its pretensions to mathematical precision, Puttenhamian proportion (like Puttenhamian ornament) is a contingent, not an absolute value: a function not simply of a poem’s internal workings—of the length of a line relative to its fellows or to the length of the poem as a whole—but also of its relation to an unpredictable outside world. As Lawrence Manley has written, this paradox of rigidity and flexibility defines all literary—indeed, all human—conventions, which “behave as both timeless forms of objective order and temporal expressions of changing values.”24 Book 2 encounters this paradox in terms of place as well as time: Puttenham aims to fix proportion and measure on English terms, but he retains a sense of skepticism about any overly rigid boundary. “[S]hort distaunces [between end-rhymes] and short measures pleas[e] onely the popular eare,” Puttenham declares at one point: “we banish them vtterly” (69). Nonetheless, he adds, it “can be obiected against this wide distance … that the eare by loosing his concord is not satisfied,” and “therefore the Poet must know to whose eare he maketh his rime, and accommodate himselfe thereto, and not giue such musicke to the rude and barbarous, as he would to the learned and delicate eare” (71–72). This willingness to accommodate oneself, to be obedient to both the laws of proportion and the tastes of one’s audience, is the paradoxical precondition of poetic supremacy. The “rhymer that will be tied to no rules at all, but range as he list, may easily utter what he will,” Puttenham allows (62), but the true poet thrives on limitation: what makes verse proportionate is not the absence or presence of rhyme or quantitative feet but responsiveness to the demands and desires of a locally specific set of listeners.

But this locally specific audience is not easily defined or limited: indeed Puttenham’s Arte of English Poesie establishes a conspicuously broad range of reference for courtly English poets, a geography of eloquence extending well past Ascham’s world of Greeks and Goths. According to Puttenham, in fact, rhyme was not the compensatory innovation of barbarous, late-antique poets unable to master quantitative verse but rather an ancient poetic device literally beyond the ken of Homer and Virgil. Citing the testimony of sixteenth-century England’s “marchants and trauellers, [whose] late nauigations haue surueyed the whole world, and discouered large countries and strange peoples wild and sauage,” he “affirm[s] that the American, the Perusine, and the very Canniball do sing and also say their highest and holiest matters in certaine riming versicles, and not in prose.” The correspondence between New World verses and English poetry “proues also that our maner of vulgar Poesie is more ancient than the artificiall of the Greeks and Latines, ours coming by instinct of nature, which was before Art or obseruation, and vsed with the sauage and vnciuill, who were before all science and ciuilitie.” The values enshrined in classical poetic theory are, Puttenham implies, the product of an overly narrow frame of cultural reference. The global perspective afforded by England’s new commercial and colonial ventures allows him to upend the ancient hierarchy of poetic virtues, as the wildness, savagery, and strangeness of rhyme—the very qualities that alienate it from the classical models of poetic excellence—become points of proud commonality with all other tongues. “[I]t appeareth that our vulgar running Poesie was common to all the nations of the world besides, whom the Latines and greekes in speciall called barbarous,” he concludes. Rhyme is not only “the first and most ancient poesie”; it is also “the most vniuersall” (7).25

This investment in poetry as an art whose values are at once local and universal produces a noticeably wayward treatise on measure. “I could not forbeare to adde this forraine example,” Puttenham apologizes after a digression into the uniforms worn by members of the Chinese court ([89]).²⁶ “One other pretie conceit we will impart vnto you and then trouble you with no more,” begins a section on anagrams devised from the titles of various foreign monarchs ([90]). “Thus farre … we will aduenture and not beyond,” he promises in a section exploring possible adaptation of classical feet into English—an approach he earlier dismissed as far-fetched (86); then, a bit further on, “I intend not to proceed any further in this curiositie” (91); and again, a number of pages later,²⁷ still on the same subject, announcing that it “nothing at all furthers the pleasant melody of our English meeter,” “I leaue to speake any more of them” (107). Indeed the whole of book 2, with its haphazard juxtaposition of diagrams, digressions, anecdotes, and pseudo-learned disquisitions on the habits of exotic cultures, seems to constitute a metadiscourse on the difficulty of assessing and maintaining the proportions of its own argument.

But book 2’s willingness to entertain diverse and even contradictory conceptions of measure also transforms the virtue of measure from an attribute of language to an attribute of poets. Thus, at the close of the tenth chapter of book 2, Puttenham condenses all of his rules and precepts into a single exercise, which discerns whether or not a poet is “of a plentiful discourse,” “copious in his language,” and “his crafts maister” by subjecting him to a stringently limited and wholly arbitrary system of measure:

Make me … so many strokes or lines with your pen as ye would haue your song containe verses: and let euery line beare his seuerall length, euen as ye would haue your verse of measure…. Then where you will haue your time or concord to fall, marke it with a compast stroke or semicircle passing ouer those lines, be they farre or neare in distance…. [Finally,] bycause ye shall not thinke the maker hath premeditated beforehand any such fashioned ditty, do ye your selfe make one verse whether it be of perfect or imperfect sense, and giue it him for a theame to make all the rest vpon: if ye shall perceiue the maker do keepe the measures and rime as ye haue appointed him, and besides do make his dittie sensible and ensuant to the first verse in good reason, then may ye say he is his crafts maister. (74)

In this test poetic mastery is recognized through obedience to conditions that are at once contingent and inflexible, subject to change but nonetheless binding at any given moment. The extraordinary influence and power Puttenham bestows on his poet in book 1—his ability to “mollify … hard and stonie hearts by his sweete and eloquent perswasion,” to bring “rude and sauage people to a more ciuill and orderly life,” to “redresse and edifie the cruell and sturdie courage of man” (4)—is the consequence of his own willingness to “keep the measures and rime as ye haue appointed him,” “follow[ing] the rule of … restraint.”

Puttenham’s exercise shifts the burden of measure off the English language and onto English poets, but it also cannily redefines measure so as to put it within reach of the vernacular. The measure set by “you” is not a fixed pattern of long and short syllables but an actual line drawn on the page: a line might be a meter, or a foot, in length, but it need not contain any metrical feet. In the following chapter Puttenham sets aside the entire question of how a poem ought to sound, proposing instead that English poets try to achieve what he calls “proportion in figure”—poems set “in forme of a Lozange or square, or such other figure.” He claims to have learned the technique from “a certaine gentleman, who had long trauailed the Orientall parts of the world, and seene the courts of the great Princes of China and Tartarie”: chief among them the court of the “great Emperor in Tartary whom they call Can,” and who “for his good fortune in the wars & many notable conquests he had made, was surnamed Temir Cutzclewe” (77). This Temir’s oriental pattern-poem, he argues, both epitomizes and transcends the virtue of classical metrical proportion: even more than the strict laws of quantitative measure, “the restraint of the figure” fixes a limit “from which ye may not digresse.” Because “the maker is restrained to keep him within [the shape’s] bounds,” Temir’s pattern-poem “sheweth not onely more art, but serueth also much better for briefenesse and subtilitie of deuice” than either English accentual rhymes or classical meters.

Why Temir Cutzclewe, famed for his fortune in war and his notable conquests? In part Puttenham is once again drawn to a position outside the arena in which English faces off against the classical tongues. Proportion in figure is, he emphasizes, “not … vsed by any of the Greeke or Latine Poets” nor found “in any vulgar writer.” As A. L. Korn points out, this insistence on the alien origin of “proportion in figure” is either an uncharacteristic error or a patent falsehood: Greek, Latin, continental, and even English poets had experimented amply with shape- or pattern-poems well before the late sixteenth century. It is, Korn notes,

a curiositie of Puttenham’s discourse that this otherwise erudite author gives the impression of having known almost nothing at all of the earlier pattern-poems composed by his numerous European predecessors. Puttenham’s role as the naïve discoverer of an Oriental type of pattern-poetry, a literary genre he believed to be alien to the European tradition, has therefore a certain historic interest. In The Arte of English Poesie we find perhaps for the first time an English critic drawing upon Eastern materials, or what he conceives to be such, in the routine practice of his profession.28

Or maybe not so naive: after all, the far-fetched pedigree of his shape-poems constitutes much of their appeal for Puttenham, and perhaps for his readers as well. The English critic had no need of yet one more classical or continental form for the vernacular poet to emulate, but to claim the shape-poem as an exotic import from the Far East invokes a much more appealing cultural narrative: not the Englishman as laggard but the Englishman as adventurer, scouring the globe in search of foreign treasures. And indeed Puttenham’s admiration for the pattern-poem’s obvious formal restraint is coupled with fascination with its conspicuous material extravagance. Typically “engraven in gold, silver or ivory, and sometimes with letters of amethyst, ruby, emerald, or topaz curiously cemented and pieced together,” the Tartarian or Chinese shape-poem becomes a sign of fabulous wealth and power. For Puttenham, moreover, the visuality of the pattern-poem is of a piece with its supposed exoticism: both elements make the pattern-poem a useful addition to a debate stuck on the aural incompatibilities of English accents and classical quantities.²⁹ Read aloud, Temir’s pattern-poems would not register as poetry at all: the rhymes fall at the ends of unevenly matched lines, and accentual stresses are distributed at random. Puttenham cautions that “[a]t the beginning they wil seeme nothing pleasant to an English eare” (76), but his intent may be to bypass the troublesome English ear altogether.

By choosing Temir Cutzclewe as the patron and master of this most excellent form of proportion, Puttenham also underlines the central claim of his treatise on measure: namely that proportion is in the eye of the beholder. Like cannibal rhyme, the “great Emperor in Tartary” and his poems may be barbarous from the perspective of Homer or Virgil, but that judgment is a mark of antiquity’s own provinciality, contrasted implicitly and unfavorably to the more expansive awareness of the sixteenth-century English reader: Temir is “known” to the reader both by virtue of his vast empire and thanks to Puttenham’s own cosmopolitan adventures. The poems Puttenham offers as examples of Temir’s art testify vividly to the splendors of global conquest but also to the tyrannical excesses by which it proceeds. The first, composed by Temir’s lover, was set as a brooch “in letters of rubies and diamonds” and describes Temir’s “sharp / Trenching blade of bright steel … cleaving hard down unto the eyes / the raw skulls of his enemies.” The reply, written by Temir and fashioned “with letters of emeralds and amethysts artificially cut and intermingled,” heralds “Five / Sore battles / Manfully fought / In bloody field,” whereby Temir has “forced … many a king his crown to vail, / Conquering large countries and land” (77).

As a figure for Puttenham’s own rhetorical project, Temir Cutzclewe embodies the simultaneity of ambition and insecurity within sixteenth-century vernacular poetic theory. He offers Puttenham a way out of the prolonged, perhaps irresolvable, contest between rhyme and classical quantities, but his poems present a conspicuously brutal model of poetic self-assertion. The analogy is not merely metaphorical: the violent deeds celebrated within the poems have a formal analog in the typographical devices used to achieve the desired shape. The outer edges of each poem may manifest the virtues of restraint, but the field within is marked by forcings and cleavings within words, as each line is stretched or compressed to fit the boundaries of the imposed shape. In chapter 8 of book 2, Puttenham sternly reprimands the “licentious maker” who twists a word’s natural spelling of pronunciation “to serue his cadence” (67), but in these poems he grants the Scythian Temir license not simply to alter the spelling of words but to sever them into fragments and force them together, leaving gaping holes in some lines and scant room in others, syllables as “artificially cut and entermingled” (78) as the gemstones with which they are set.

Those internal gaps and forcings work to Puttenham’s advantage, however, insofar as they provide a foil for the English pattern-poems that follow—two obelisk-shaped verses, two pillars, and two “roundels,” composed by Puttenham and dedicated to Elizabeth I. Contrasted with Temir’s bloody and spangled verses, Puttenham’s poems adopt a more measured tone and less ostentatious visual effects. This formal conservatism mirrors a shift in thematic content: unlike the bloodthirsty, land-hungry Temir Cutzclewe, the English queen is celebrated as a monarch wise enough to be content with the limits of her domain. Her tireless quest “to mount on high,” mimicked by the obelisk-poem’s upward climb, aims at a heavenly reward: hers is “an higher / Crown and empire / Much greater, / And richer, / And better” than any merely earthly conquest (79). The Temir Cutzclewe of the first poem may have won “honor … all the / World / Round” (77), but Elizabeth’s honor is “assured / In the / Azured / Sky” (79): at its pinnacle the English pattern-poem reverts to assonance, to the unostentatious pleasures of the ear. In fact the two “roundels” are not even round—whatever hint they contain of a desire for global mastery is sublimated into praise for Elizabeth’s chaste self-containment and her preservation of “the dominion great and large / Which God hath given to her charge”: England’s own “most spacious bound” (83).

Figure 1. “Orientall” pattern-poems from the court of Temir Cutzclewe, in George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie (1589). Image courtesy of the Beinecke Library, Yale University.

This decorous sublimation contrasts, in the following chapter, with the too-obvious ambition of Elizabeth’s rival Philip of Spain, who adopts as his emblem the copper figure of “a king sitting on horsebacke vpon a monde or world, the horse prauncing forward with his forelegges as if he would leape of, with this inscription, Non sufficit orbis, meaning, as it is to be conceaued, that one whole world could not content him” (118). The motto’s boast has come to naught, Puttenham observes, since “[t]his immeasurable ambition of the Spaniards” was, by “her Maiestie [and] by God’s prouidence, … prouidently stayed and retranched,” to the gratification of “all the Princes and common wealthes in Christendome, who haue found themselues long annoyed with his excessiue greatnesse.” Within the roundels Puttenham fashions for his queen, greatness is the antidote to excess and measure the key to perfection. Puttenham’s pattern-poems present English insularity—its lack of vast territories and dazzling sources of wealth—as the product of a sophisticated aesthetic and political sensibility: like the maker of the pattern-poem, who displays his genius by severely restricting its expression, Elizabeth’s imperial might is best manifested by the modest proportions of her empire. Elizabeth is the protagonist of the Arte of English Poesie, then, precisely because she is not the ruler of a vast empire; rather in her power resides her talent for keeping measure in all things.

Figure 2. “A special and particular resemblance of her Maiestie to the Roundell,” in George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie (1589). Image courtesy of the Beinecke Library, Yale University.

Marlowe’s Violent Measures

Of course vast empires, whether poetic or real, have an undeniable appeal, and despite Puttenham’s stated commitment to the virtues of modesty and measure, his discussion of proportion is repeatedly pulled off course by his fascination with disproportion, excess, prodigality, extremity, and even loss of control. In this he resembles Marlowe: both Tamburlaine the Great and Puttenham’s Arte invite comparisons between the state of English verse and the state of the English polity. That the playwright and the rhetorician should independently and virtually simultaneously turn to Timur, reimagining the fourteenth-century Scythian warlord as a late sixteenth-century English poet-conqueror, is more than an interesting coincidence. It accentuates the proximity of politics and prosody in the early modern English imagination, and the interplay of boundaries and transgression on which both national and poetic identities depended. When Puttenham, in the opening section of his Arte, names Elizabeth as England’s “most excellent poet” (95), he is not only deploying flattery; he is also suggesting that the contours of English verse correspond to the contours of English empire. Book 2 complicates this equation, however, with its far-flung quest for poetic models: the task of defining the vernacular’s limits gives way to the pursuit of extravagant curiosities.

As Emily Bartels, Richmond Barbour, Stephen Greenblatt, John Gillies, and others have argued, Tamburlaine the Great speaks to a similarly complex sense of English identity, as Marlowe’s expansive approach to vernacular drama captured the enthusiasms and ideals of an increasingly mobile and outward-looking society. Tamburlaine, especially, with his habit of cataloging his conquests in rich detail, has been claimed as a figure for the “emergence of imperialist ideologies and propaganda,”30 for “England’s desire to encompass and enjoy the world,”³¹ and for “the acquisitive energies of English merchants, entrepreneurs, and adventurers.”³² As it happens, Marlowe scholars are indebted to Puttenham’s Arte for this reading of the Marlovian aesthetic: Puttenham’s Englishing of hyperbole as “the overreacher” in book 3’s catalog of tropes and figures supplied Harry Levin with both a title and a guiding conceit for his seminal study of Marlowe’s dramatic career. Puttenham’s epithet, Levin argues, “could not have been more happily inspired to throw its illumination upon Marlowe—upon his style, which is so emphatically himself, and on his protagonists, overreachers all.” It is not simply that Marlowe’s protagonists are prone to hyperbolic utterances; rather, for Levin and his successors, it is Puttenham’s notion of hyperbole as a figure that flirts with infinity, threatening to pass “beyond all measure” (276), as Puttenham cautions his readers, that so perfectly captures both the material and the rhetorical excesses of the Marlovian hero. And it is the empire-hungry hero of Tamburlaine who, with his imperial conquests and soaring rhetoric, provides the “barbaric prototype” for a newly extravagant and frankly imperial vernacular poetics.33

There is, however, an implicit irony to Levin’s conception of Tamburlaine as the paradigmatic Marlovian “overreacher”: the Scythian’s “conquering feet” (One 3.3.230), as Marlowe punningly calls them, do not merely trample down his foes and march across vast expanses of territory; they also regulate and sustain the precisely measured and neatly contained blank verse that the play’s prologue identifies as its foremost achievement. Whatever one might say about its hero, Tamburlaine does not pass beyond all measure so much as it defines English measure. Thus although Tamburlaine has been read as the expression of explicitly far-fetched ambitions, “the Renaissance wish-dream of global empire,”³⁴ it also makes a compelling case for the pleasure and discipline of confinement. The power of “Marlowe’s dramatic poetry,” writes Russ McDonald, “proceeds from his unique combination of the transgressive and the conventional”: “The ‘mighty line’ … is marked by irrepressible energy, thrilling sonorities, and dazzling verbal pictures, but it is still a line, an ordering system, an invariable and comforting rhythmic standard that organizes words and ideas.”³⁵ Levin acknowledges this tension, noting that “[m]ore than a third” of the exotic place names that litter Tamburlaine’s speech and signal his imperial ambitions “gain peculiar stress by coming at the end of a line,” so that the very geographic sweep of the plot helps to cement the impression of metrical containment.

It is tempting, therefore, to read Marlowe’s play as reconciling the rivalrous demands that eloquence has imposed on its practitioners from the beginning: to confine and regulate wayward impulses, while satisfying the longing for estrangement. But what McDonald identifies as Tamburlaine’s distinctive contribution to the history of English eloquence—its novel juxtaposition of high astounding terms and distant locales with rhythmic regularity and metrical restraint—seems to have been lost on Marlowe’s earliest auditors, who are as often critical of the immoderation of Marlowe’s verse as they are outraged by his protagonists’ rhetorical and moral trespasses. Absent the audible boundary inscribed by end-rhyme, the measure of Marlowe’s line proved disconcertingly elusive to the English ear: Thomas Nashe heard in Marlowe’s verse both ill-disguised insufficiency—“the swelling bombast of a bragging blanke verse”—and blatant excess—the “ingrafted ouerflow” and “spacious volubility of a drumming decasillabon”; while Joseph Hall dismissed Marlowe’s “pure Iambick verse” as a far-fetched concoction “patch[ed] … up” with “termes Italianate.”36 What Harvey called Marlowe’s “tamberlaine contempt” was not countered but exemplified by his formal innovation: the “English blancke verse” of “that Atheist Tamburlan” might be rich and sonorous, wrote Robert Greene in 1588, “euerie word filling the mouth like the faburden of Bo-Bell,” but it is “intolerable poetrie.”³⁷ Even Ben Jonson, admiring heir to what he christens “Marlowe’s mighty line,”³⁸ betrays in his commonplace book a more skeptical view of his predecessor’s influence on English theater and English ears: “The True Artificer will not run away from nature, as hee were afraid of her, or depart from life and the likenesse of Truth, but speake to the capacity of his hearers. And though his language differ from the vulgar somewhat, it shall not fly from all humanity, with the Tamerlanes and Tamer-Chams of the late Age, which had nothing in them but the scenicall strutting, and furious vociferation to warrant them to the ignorant gapers.”³⁹ Like Levin, Jonson credits Marlowe with the invention of a “barbaric prototype,” but that prototype is here imagined as an agent of degeneracy, the begetter of a Scythian horde whose language is neither vulgar nor humane, neither common nor classical.

Vested as they are in their own notions of English eloquence, Nashe, Harvey, Greene, and Jonson are hardly disinterested auditors of Marlowe’s verse, but their skeptical, even scathing, commentary provides a useful corrective to the appreciative responses of many modern scholars. For although the critical tradition has long identified blank verse as Marlowe’s “most meaningful contribution” to English drama, the meaning of that contribution, as McDonald also notes, resides in its unlikelihood: however much unrhymed iambic pentameter now sounds like the natural voice of English drama, making it so entailed the “renovation and development of a hitherto undistinguished poetic form,” a “strange tongue” fit for the strange figures with which his plays are peopled.⁴⁰ Marlowe himself suggests that comfort, order, and regularity were not the governing principles of his new poetic form; in fact Jonson’s accusation of reckless departure is more in keeping with the playwright’s own claims for blank verse. According to the prologue to part 1 of Tamburlaine, vernacular verse suffered from needless constraint, from the limited talents and provincial tastes of “rhyming mother wits”; what English poetry requires above all, Marlowe declares, is freedom from end-rhyme’s petty bounds and access to the rhetorical terrain of “high astounding terms.” The prologue thus “invites English auditors away,” “throwing off [the] domestic confinements [of] comedy, rhyme, location” in pursuit of what Richmond Barbour calls “an eloquence of nomadism.”41

To put it in Jonson’s terms, if this Scythian struts, it is because we are meant to notice his feet. According to most early modern histories, the real Tamerlane walked with a limp—hence his name, Timur the Lame—but George Whetstone’s English Myrrour (1586) rejects this bit of the legend, claiming that “the strength and comeliness of [Tamburlaine’s] body, aunswered the haughtiness of his hart.”⁴² Marlowe takes full advantage of his source, imagining a Tamburlaine whose gait is as steady as the stressed and unstressed beats of an iambic pentameter line. In case we should miss the pun, Marlowe’s play is full of references to feet: “A thousand horsemen! We, five hundred foot! / An odds too great for us to stand against!” Tamburlaine exclaims on the verge of an encounter with the Persian monarch’s host (One 1.2.121–²2). But stand they do: Tamburlaine’s forceful eloquence persuades the Persian general to join forces with him against the rest of the Persian army. Later, when he seizes the Turkish sultan’s crown and the title of emperor of the East, Tamburlaine exults that “[t]he pillars that have bolstered up those terms / Are fall’n in clusters at my conquering feet,” and to drive the point home, he uses the former sultan, Bajazeth, as his footstool, “treading him beneath [his] loathsome feet”(One 3.3.229–30, 4.2.64). Such self-conscious jokes invite us to see Tamburlaine’s imperial progress as the perfect and perhaps necessary analog to his creator’s literary innovation: “repeatedly in the play,” observes J. S. Cunningham, “metre and syntax … become analogues of other kinds of capability.”⁴³ But Zabina’s revulsion at Tamburlaine’s “loathsome feet” anticipates the resentment Marlowe’s supposedly orderly and comforting standard occasioned in some auditors. It is not simply that Marlowe’s verse sounded strange in the ears of early modern English audiences; it also seemed to manifest a particularly willful, even violent disregard for the proper limits of poetic expression. If we take those reactions seriously, what can appear as distinct, even opposed qualities of the play⁴⁴—on the one hand, its disregard for geographic and moral boundaries and, on the other, its investment in the apparent regularity and order of the blank-verse line—may better be read as complimentary dimensions of its interest in the often problematic relationship between eloquence and abuse, measure and trespass.

Indeed Marlowe makes it difficult for us to distinguish his protagonist’s extreme strategies for global dominion from his own poetic tactics. Initially, to be sure, the contrast between eloquence and abuse is externalized in the contrast between the smooth-spoken Tamburlaine and his ham-fisted, spluttering rivals. Having promised audiences an outsize spectacle, the prologue to part 1 gives way to a startling anticlimax: instead of the Scythian Tamburlaine with his high astounding terms and conquering sword, the audience is confronted with the Persian Mycetes, feeble and tongue-tied master of a “maimed empery” (One 1.1.126). “Brother Cosroe, I find myself aggrieved, / Yet insufficient to express the same, / For it requires a great and thund’ring speech,” he whines (1–3). Cosroe’s withering response establishes Mycetes’s rhetorical ineptitude as the sign of a more profound unfitness for the task of empire: “Unhappy Persia, that in former age / hast been the seat of mighty conquerors/ that in their prowess and their policies / Have triumphed over Afric, and the bounds / Of Europe,” he laments, while “Now Turks and Tartars shake their swords at thee, / meaning to mangle all thy provinces” (6–10, 16–17). Mycetes protests at the insubordination—“I might command you to be slain for this!”—but the pretense of imperiousness is undercut by his childish appeal for confirmation: “Meander, might I not?” “Not for so small a fault, my sovereign lord,” comes the humiliating reply. “I mean it not, but yet I know I might,” the embarrassed king insists, and then, in a last-ditch effort to save face, “Yet live, yea, live, Mycetes wills it so” (23–24, 25, 26–27). The inability to maintain order within his own throne room is tied to the impoverishment of Mycetes’s speech. Cosroe has at least a rudimentary grasp of rhetorical effect, evident in the aggressive alliteration of “Turks and Tartars … meaning to mangle,” but his brother’s retort degenerates into a mumble, while his sole attempt at wordplay sounds more like a stutter: “I refer me to my noblemen, / That know my wit and can be witnesses” (21–22).

Such incompetence effectively sets the stage for Tamburlaine’s vastly more eloquent and effective sovereignty. The Tamburlaine who appears onstage in the first act of part 1 not only satisfies the expectations aroused by Marlowe’s prologue but also fulfills the fantasy on which the English rhetorical tradition is founded: that eloquence offers a bloodless path to imperial might. “[W]hat worthier thing can there bee, then with a word to winne Cities and whole Countries?” Thomas Wilson asks in the dedicatory epistle to his Arte of Rhetorique (1560). “[W]hat greater gaine can we haue, then without bloudshed achiue to a Conquest? [And] what greater delite doe wee knowe, then to see a whole multitude, with the onely talke of man, rauished and drawne which way he liketh best to haue them?” Rhetoric, Wilson urges, is the key to such profit and pleasure, for “such force hath the tongue, and such is the power of Eloquence and reason, that most men are forced, euen to yeeld in that which most standeth against their will.” Wilson substantiates his claim by invoking the figure of the Gallic Hercules, described by the Greek sophist Lucian as having “all men lincked together by the eares in a chaine” attached to his tongue, “to drawe them and leade them euen as he lusted.” For, Wilson explains, “his witte was so great, his tongue so eloquent, and his experience such, that no man was able to withstande his reason, but eueryone was rather driven to doe that which he would, and to will that which he did, agreeing to his aduise both in word and worke in all that euer they were able.”45 But as Sean Keilen observes, the Gallic Hercules is an ambivalent figure for the civilizing power of eloquence, “a half-divine, half-bestial man,” towering over his captives but swathed in animal skins.⁴⁶ In the numerous sixteenth-century editions of Andrea Alciato’s popular Emblematum Liber, the figure of the Gallic Hercules appears under the motto Eloquentia fortitudine praestantior but rests his weight on a stout club (or, in the image reproduced here, from a 1584 Paris edition, lofts it menacingly in the air): physical force is eloquence’s silent partner.⁴⁷ “The addressees of [Hercules’s] eloquence,” observes Wolfgang G. Müller, “appear as a kind of rhetorical chain gang, with no choice but to listen and accept the wisdom which the orator instills into them.”⁴⁸

In the first act of Tamburlaine, Marlowe provides his audience with a similarly equivocal spectacle of bloodless conquest, in which the eloquence of the Scythian warlord triumphs over the far greater military might of the Persian army. Faced with “a thousand horsemen” against his own “five hundred foot,” Tamburlaine “play[s] the orator”: “Forsake thy king and do but join with me,” he invites his opponent, the Persian captain Theridamas, “And we will triumph over all the world” (One 1.2.121, 129, 171–72). It is a patently ludicrous claim—as Tamburlaine admits, the “odds” of a battle between his own force and the Persian army are “too great for us to stand against” (122)—but one Tamburlaine buttresses with impressive argumentative skill. Improvising as he goes, he builds credibility from hints and shreds of evidence—a hastily assembled display of booty becomes proof that Jove favors Tamburlaine’s prospects, “rain[ing] down heaps of gold in showers, / As if he meant to give my soldiers pay,” while a recent captive, the daughter of the Egyptian sultan, is trotted out “as a sure and grounded argument / That I shall be the monarch of the East” (181–84). Tamburlaine’s bravado succeeds; almost in spite of himself, Theridamas is convinced. “Not Hermes, prolocutor to the gods, / Could use persuasions more pathetical,” he marvels (209–10). In a touch that would have been especially gratifying to an English audience, Theridamas claims that Tamburlaine’s rude origins only make his eloquence the more potent: “What strong enchantments ’tice my yielding soul? / Are these resolved, noble, Scythians” (223–24)? In an ironic reversal, the praise Mycetes conferred upon the Persian captain in scene 1—“thy words are swords, / And with thy looks thou conquerest all thy foes” (One 1.1.74–75)—comes to rest on his opponent, as Theridamas concedes to Tamburlaine without a fight: “Won with thy words, and conquered with thy looks, / I yield myself, my men and horse to thee” (One 1.2.227–28).

Figure 3. “Eloquentia fortitudine praestantior,” in Andrea Alciato, Emblematum Liber (Paris, 1584). Image courtesy of Glasgow University Library.

Thus far Marlowe’s Tamburlaine makes good on the promise of bloodless conquest that underwrites Wilson’s bid for vernacular eloquence. “[W]hat working words he hath!” the dazzled Theridamas exclaims (One 2.3.25). But the spectacle of Tamburlaine’s rhetorical triumph over the Persian army is embedded in a scene that offers a more troubling account of the relationship between persuasion and conquest. For it is not until the middle of scene 2 that Tamburlaine encounters Theridamas; when the audience first sees him, his “working words”—and, more to the point, his weapons—are leveled not against the awesome forces of the Persian army but against the weak capacity of “a silly maid” (One 1.2.10): Zenocrate, the sultan’s daughter ambushed by Tamburlaine’s men and paraded before the Persions as proof of his imperial destiny. To be sure, the Tamburlaine who appears in scene 2 cuts a very different figure from “that sturdy Scythian thief” of the Persians’ imaginings, who “with his lawless train / Daily commits incivil outrages” (One 1.1.36, 39–40). This Tamburlaine is courtly, even gentle, in his dealings with the Egyptian princess, addressing her as “lady” and “fair madam” (One 1.2.1, 252), assuring her that her “jewels and treasure … shall be reserved” (2) and she herself kept “in better state / Than … in the circle of your father’s arms” (3, 5). But the dazzling oration that crowns the scene bears a queasy formal resemblance to the violence it seeks to conceal. Beginning with a series of short, measured questions, the speech opens out into a litany of declarations, each literally and figuratively more expansive than the one before:

Disdains Zenocrate to live with me?

Or you, my lords, to be my followers?

Think you I weigh this treasure more than you?

Not all the gold in India’s wealthy arms

Shall buy the meanest solder in my train.

Zenocrate, lovelier than the love of Jove,

Brighter than is the silver Rhodope,

Fairer than the whitest snow on Scythian hills,

Thy person is more worth to Tamburlaine,

Than the possession of the Persian crown,

Which gracious stars have promised at my birth.

A hundred Tartars shall attend on thee

Mounted on steeds swifter than Pegasus;

Thy garments shall be made of Median silk,

Enchased with precious jewels of mine own

More rich and valurous than Zenocrate’s;

With milk-white harts upon an ivory sled

Thou shalt be drawn amidst the frozen pools

And scale the icy mountains’ lofty tops,

Which with thy beauty will soon be resolved;

My martial prizes with five hundred men

Won on the fifty-headed Volga’s waves

Shall all we offer to Zenocrate,

And then myself to fair Zenocrate. (82–105)

The dilatory power of Tamburlaine’s rhetoric cannot be extricated from the scene of sexual violence that it both anticipates and seeks to assuage: the speech begins and ends with the invocation of Zenocrate’s name, and her body is, ultimately, the territory it claims (and promises to enlarge).49 Indeed listening from the perspective of Zenocrate, we can begin to understand the resentment expressed toward Marlowe’s verse by so many of his early auditors. Like George Gascoigne, who penned his 1576 satire, The Steel Glass, “In rymeless verse, which thundreth mighty threats,”⁵⁰ Marlowe identifies the open-ended capaciousness of blank verse with aggression, although in Marlowe’s case that aggression masquerades as generosity. The association is by no means strictly metaphorical: in a literal sense, the absence of end-rhyme creates a potentially limitless space for rhetorical amplification or auxesis, the steady accumulation of pentameter lines into the free-standing verse paragraph that James Shapiro identifies as the paradigmatic expressive unit of Marlovian poetry.⁵¹ As Tamburlaine’s address to Zenocrate makes plain, auxesis enacts a double display of dominance, as both syntax and audience are held hostage to the speaker’s whim.

The reality of Zenocrate’s situation, her position as one of Tamburlaine’s “forced followers” (66), makes a mockery of the conventional association between rhetorical suasion and erotic seduction. “[W]omen must be flattered,” Tamburlaine explains to his companions (107), but prisoners, of course, need not be, and once the threat of a Persian attack has been dispelled—thanks in part to the mute, unwilling testimony afforded by Zenocrate herself—Tamburlaine abandons his courtly pose: “If you will willingly remain with me / You shall have honours as your merits be— / Or else you shall be forced with slavery” (252–55). Neatly anticipating Milton’s judgment against rhyme as a form of “bondage,” the chiming end sounds of this triplet emphasize the truth of Zenocrate’s predicament: whatever choice she makes, the result will be the same. But Marlowe is far more cynical than Milton when it comes to the asymmetric liberty afforded by unrhymed verse. Zenocrate’s attendant Agydas replies promptly and politely on her behalf in terms that maintain the fiction of mutuality—“We yield unto thee, happy Tamburlaine” (256)—but the princess’s own response is bitterer and more true: “I must be pleased perforce. Wretched Zenocrate!” (257). To be “pleased perforce” is a nasty paradox, a grim euphemism for the rape that has actually occurred, and an unsettling inversion of the idea that eloquence makes subjection pleasurable. By giving the Egyptian princess the last word—the scene concludes on this unhappy note—Marlowe makes Zenocrate the authority on all that has transpired, hinting at a much darker reading of the fantasy of rhetorical conquest. “Linking persuasion to coercion, Wilson minimizes the terror of that equation,” as Barbour writes, but “Marlowe maximizes it … mak[ing] terms and swords not alternative but synergistic.”52 Blank verse is the crucial instrument of that synergy: it is what English poetry sounds like in the mouth of a tyrant who fancies himself a lover.

Of course Zenocrate does eventually fall in love with her captor, so that his once threatening words grow welcome to her ears, “his talk much sweeter than the Muses’ song” (One 3.2.50). But even this development takes a nightmarish turn: when Zenocrate confesses her growing attraction to Agydas, he protests, not realizing that Tamburlaine is nearby, urging his mistress, “Let not a man so vile and barbarous … be honoured with your love, but for necessity” (26, 30). When Tamburlaine reveals himself, he pointedly says nothing, leaving Agydas “aghast” and “most astonied to see his choler shut in secret thoughts, / And wrapped in silence of his angry soul.” As the unhappy Agydas prophesies, this uncharacteristic reticence bespeaks his doom, and when Tamburlaine’s deputy enters bearing a dagger, he requires no further instruction: “It says, Agydas, thou shalt surely die” (95). “He needed not with words confirm my fear,” the Egyptian lord mournfully observes, “For words are vain where working tools present / The naked action” (92–94). The observation is prescient. Although there is no diminution of his rhetoric, as Tamburlaine proceeds on his march toward global domination, eloquence plays less and less of a role in his successes. His crucial first victory, over the Persian army, may be attributable to the power of his “working words,” but subsequent triumphs are openly reliant on the “naked action” of an increasingly baroque display of “working tools”: “his sword, his shield, his horse, his armour, plumes, / And jetty feathers menace death and hell” (One 4.1.60–61), but so do his curtle axes and cannons, his cages and guns, even his bridles and harnesses. When Tamburlaine encounters the Turkish sultan Bajazeth, he delegates the task of rhetorical conquest to Zenocrate, urging her to abuse the Turkish queen Zabina, “vaunt of my worth, / And manage words with her as we will arms” (One 3.3.130–31). Zenocrate’s insults infuriate Zabina, but it is Tamburlaine’s military victory that stops her mouth: when she reproves him for his insolence to an empress, he bluntly informs her that “the pillars that have bolstered up those terms / Are fall’n in clusters at my conquering feet” (229–30).

It is precisely this shattering of linguistic distinction that Marlowe makes the paradoxical achievement of his distinctive poetic style. “There is no greater difference betwixt a ciuill and brutish vtteraunce then cleare distinction of voices,” writes Puttenham in book 2 of his Arte: “the most laudable languages are always most plaine and distinct, and the barbarous the most confuse and indistinct” (61). Puttenham has in mind the civilized pauses—the commas and colons—built into Greek and Latin periods, and especially early on, Marlowe uses line breaks to achieve a similarly measured effect in Tamburlaine’s sententious speeches. But the distinctions effected by meter are gradually effaced as Tamburlaine’s charismatic style is aped by his followers: in this sense the more successful Marlowe’s hero, the more brutish his play. For it is not only Zenocrate who adopts Tamburlaine’s vaunting speech; as Tamburlaine’s imperial might spreads across Asia and into Africa, so too does the influence of his “high astounding terms,” and what was once a distinctive, indeed singular voice dissipates into a cacophony of competing tongues, each more outrageously boastful than the next.53 Mark Thornton Burnett reads this as a sign of the waning of Tamburlaine’s powers, as the rhetorical precedence he wields early on gives way in a world “inhabited by a number of rival speakers,”⁵⁴ but in fact Tamburlaine is the chief agent of that leveling of rhetorical distinction. For one thing, as Emily Bartels observes, many of his own best lines are stolen: “Even when Tamburlaine marks out his own distinctive rhetorical territory, claiming that ‘will and shall best fitteth Tamburlaine,’ he does so after hearing Theridamas ‘speak in that mood’ (One 3.3.40–41) and applauding him for it. And … he first terms himself the scourge of god after noting that he has been ‘term’d the Scourge and Wrath of God’ (One 3.3.44) by others.”⁵⁵ Tamburlaine’s rhetorical thievery—what Burnett calls his “magpie-like” appropriation of glittering words and well-turned phrases56—provides the template, even the impetus, for his thefts of land and titles. Thus when the Persian lord Menaphon congratulates the newly crowned Cosroe with the thought that they shall soon “ride in triumph through Persepolis” (One 2.5.49), Tamburlaine seizes on the phrase and makes it the theme of his own desires. So potent is the force of recitation that simply by repeating the phrase to himself, Tamburlaine is “strongly moved, / that if I should desire the Persian crown, / I could attain it with a wondrous ease” (One 2.5.75–77)—and so he does.

The inverse of this acquisitive talent is Tamburlaine’s compulsion to see his own image and hear his own name wherever he goes. Thus when two of his sons wrangle over who, after their father’s death, deserves to be called “the scourge and terror of the world,” Tamburlaine insists that all three boys bear the epithet: “Be all a scourge and terror of the world / Or else you are not sons of Tamburlaine” (Two 1.3.62–64). It is because his third son, Calyphas, resists the impress of his father’s character that Tamburlaine despises him. “Let me accompany my gracious mother,” Calyphas requests, for two sons “are enough to conquer all the world, / and you have won enough for me to keep” (Two 1.3.67–68). In a world filled with the hyperbole of would-be Tamburlaines, Calyphas stands out as a proponent of witty understatement—“What a coil they keep!” he observes of the climactic encounter between Tamburlaine’s army and the assembled forces of his rival kings; “I believe there will be some hurt done anon amongst them” (Two 4.1.74–75)—and it is this singularity that dooms him. “Thou shalt not have a foot” of empire, Tamburlaine rebukes him, and when he discovers that Calyphas has avoided the battle, he stabs him. Immediately after, Tamburlaine turns to his (literally) captive audience of fallen kings and boasts, “Now you shall feel the strength of Tamburlaine, / And by the state of his supremacy / Approve the difference twixt himself and you” (Two 4.1.135–37). But as Calyphas’s corpse attests, difference is in fact precisely what Tamburlaine seeks to eradicate: his vision of empire entails the imposition of a radical sameness, a sameness achieved through total war and the passionate self-assertion that becomes its rhetorical equivalent.

It is a critical commonplace that “Marlowe takes particular delight in geographical nouns,”⁵⁷ and as we have seen, the recitation of those names possesses an incantatory power for Tamburlaine, as it must also have done for Marlowe’s audience. But Tamburlaine’s true gift, the real expression of his genius, is in unnaming and renaming. When he first meets the Turkish sultan, he asserts his authority over him by calling him “that Bajazeth” (One 3.3.65). The sultan, understandably outraged, exclaims to his followers, “Kings of Fez, Moroccus, and Argier, / He calls me Bajazeth, whom you call lord! / Note the presumption of this Scythian slave” (One 3.3.66–68). But when the battle is won, so are the titles: Tamburlaine distributes the titles of Fez, Moroccus, and Argier to his own loyal deputies, and as for the sultan, “Bring out my footstool,” Tamburlaine commands (One 4.2.1). Zenocrate’s own Damascus is leveled as well, and the victor urges the conquered Egyptian king to regard his new role as Tamburlaine’s father-in-law, “a title higher than thy Sultan’s name” (One 5.1.435). Zenocrate begs that her homeland be spared, but Tamburlaine is adamant that nothing mar the uniform perfection of his empire, a world “reduce[d] … to a map” on which all “the provinces, cities, and towns” are “call[ed] … after thy name and mine” (One 4.4.82–84). So total is the scope of Tamburlaine’s ambition to “see [his] name and honour … spread” (One 1.2.204) that even the alterity of the past becomes an affront to his self-regard: it is only because antiquity knew not Zenocrate, he claims, that Helen, Lesbia, and Corinna are named. “And had she lived before the siege of Troy,” he insists, “Her name had been in every line” that Homer, Catullus, or Ovid wrote, herself “the argument / Of every epigram or elegy” (Two 2.4.90, 94–95).

The ceaseless echo of “Tamburlaine” and “Zenocrate” throughout the two plays is not simply evidence of the Scythian’s boundless egotism; it is also a sheerly pragmatic feature of Marlowe’s prosody, which depends on Tamburlaine’s appetite for conquest to satisfy the demands of metrical form. Indeed there is an unmistakable kinship between the playwright’s metrical strategies and his hero’s ruthless course to empire. “[T]here can not be in a maker a foweler fault, then to falsifie his accent to serue his cadence, or by vntrue orthographie to wrench his words,” Puttenham declares (67). Puttenham calls upon Temir Cutzclewe as the master of a poetic form—the shape-poem or the pattern-poem—that prevents this foul fault by making cadence and other aural effects secondary to visual appeal. As noted, the pattern-poem appealed to Puttenham partly because it depends on a formal rigor that has nothing to do with the way words sound: the wrenching on which Temir Cutzclewe’s poems depend is entirely visual. But in other kinds of poetry, Puttenham cautions, the temptation to “falsify accents” and “wrench words” is strong for the vernacular poet, since “our naturall and primitiue language of the Saxon English, beares not any wordes (at least very few) of moe sillables then one (for whatsoeuer we see exceede, commeth to vs by the alterations of our language growen vpon many conquests and otherwise)” (56–57).

According to Puttenham, then, to the extent that English poets do possess the linguistic resources necessary to conform to the classical laws of prosody, it is only thanks to their own miserable history of invasion and subjugation. Here, yet again, the distinction between violence and generosity is uncomfortably blurred: the enrichment of monosyllabic England with the polysyllables of Latin and French cannot be extricated from its humiliation and defeat. Tamburlaine’s far-flung plot returns repeatedly to this conundrum, but it also affords Marlowe the opportunity to reverse the unhappy association of poetic mastery and imperial conquest: to enrich his line with an enormous quantity of three- and four-syllable words drawn not only, or even primarily, from the Latin and French terms of England’s colonial past but also from the new and strange fruits of Tamburlaine’s own conquests. The names that most enchant Tamburlaine—“Zenocrate,” “Persepolis”—are seductive not only because of what they describe but also because of how they sound, the regular iambs into which they fall; thus the march of Tamburlaine’s conquering feet across the territories of Asia and Africa sustains the rhythm of Marlowe’s own feet.

But not without violence: the wrenching and falsifying against which Puttenham inveighs is evident in many of Marlowe’s lines, and it tends to mirror the protagonist’s own outrageous impositions of will. Thus Bajazeth’s humiliating turn as Tamburlaine’s footstool is accompanied by what Cunningham calls “the play’s most deviant metrical line,” a spondaic command whose piling on of stressed monosyllables mimics the physical abuse it describes: “Stoop, villain, stoop, stoop, for so he bids” (Two 4.2.22). If, as Marjorie Garber says, the “dramatic tension” in Tamburlaine “derives from the dialectic between aspiration and limitation,” ambition and enclosure, a similar tension is at work in the play’s verse.58 At the ends of his lines, Marlowe imposes strong syntactical breaks—as Russ McDonald writes, “For all Marlowe’s reputation as an overreacher, only rarely did he overreach the poetic line”⁵⁹—but what happens within those end-stopped lines is, as in Puttenham’s pattern-poems, often rather irregular.⁶⁰ Cunningham notes that “reading Marlovian blank verse” is a delicate operation: “the ear seeks an appropriate tact of pace, breath-interval, and emphasis,” for “ ‘Cosroe’ sometimes, it seems, asks for two syllables, sometimes three; ‘Fesse’ two or one” (91). What Cunningham views as occasions for readerly tact might just as well be seen as the imprints of Tamburlaine’s own extraordinarily tactless pace. For as Cunningham’s examples help us notice, the disregard Tamburlaine shows for the boundaries of foreign kingdoms and the property of foreign kings has its counterpart in Marlowe’s high-handed treatment of the names of those kings and their kingdoms. “Asia” and “Scythia,” “Media” and “India,” “Syria,” “Parthia,” and all the rest may have two syllables or three; “Egypt” has two, but “Egyptia” three or four; “Greece” possesses merely one, but “Graecia” a lordly four: the willful compressions and elongations of visual space with Puttenham’s pattern-poems find an aural counterpart in Marlowe’s manipulation of foreign polysyllables. When the deposed Turk protests that Tamburlaine’s “Ambitious pride shall make thee fall as low / For treading of the back of Bajazeth,” for instance, Tamburlaine responds, “Thy names and titles and thy dignities, / Are fled from Baj’zeth and remain with me,” and he marks his entitlement by shearing a syllable from the Turk’s once-proper name (One 4.2.76–77, 79–80).

So skeptical is Puttenham of such manipulations—or “metaplasms”—that he dubs the “joining or unjoining of syllables and letters, suppressing or confounding their several sounds” as “figures of the smallest importance” and “forbear[s] to give them any vulgar name” (246). In his view they verge on mere mispronunciation, the tell-tale sign of the barbarous outsider. In his Notes on the Making of English Verse, however, George Gascoigne dubs this Procrustean stretching and lopping of syllables “turkening”—a phrase whose etymological roots identify it with twisting or troping but whose contemporary associations, as observed in Chapter 2, inevitably summon the specter of Islam and of other violent conversions.⁶¹ In The Garden of Eloquence, Henry Peacham allows fourteen distinct varieties of metaplasm to the English poet, permitting not simply “the cleauing a dipthong in sunder … as Aethiopia, for æthiopia,” but even the alteration of emphasis in Greek or Latin words, “necessity of meter so compelling, as … Orphêus, for Orphēus”: “our carpênter” may, according to Gabriel Harvey, be off-limits to the wrenching, lopping, and cleaving of the vernacular poet, but the father of classical eloquence receives no such consideration.⁶²

Marlowe’s imperious turkening of the geography of the East and his carelessness for the propriety of the proper noun, receive spectacular embodiment in Tamburlaine’s most striking and barbarous display of power. Close to the end of part 2, on the road to Babylon, with his empire at what will prove to be its utmost bound, Tamburlaine celebrates his recent triumphs in Asia Minor by harnessing the former kings of Natolia, Jerusalem, Trebizond, and Soria and forcing them to draw his chariot. He represents the degrading treatment as apt repayment for the insults they have hurled at him, “bridl[ing] their contemptuous cursing tongues / That like unruly never-broken jades / Break through the hedges of their fateful mouths / And pass their fixed bounds exceedingly” (Two 4.3.44–47). This is hardly the outcome Wilson imagined for English eloquence, when, in the dedicatory epistle to his Arte of Rhetorique, he described that “greater delite” of “see[ing] a whole multitude, with the onely talke of man, rauished and drawne which way he liketh best to haue them.”63 Wilson’s delightful spectacle is a fantasy of eloquence that Marlowe permits his audience—with qualifications—at the beginning of Tamburlaine’s career, when he wins over the Persian general, but as Marlowe’s hero enlarges his empire, the operations of eloquence and the mechanics of brute force are increasingly indistinguishable. In the notorious staging of the human chariot, tongues are not instruments of moral suasion but silent stubs of flesh. Here men are not “drawne” but made to draw, like beasts; here is not “onely talke” but its blunt objects—harnesses, whips, and “bits of burnished steel” (Two 4.1.183).

The mute lurching of those captive kings across the English stage is the antithesis of the sweet traction Wilson describes, the eloquence that drew beasts and bestial men to Orpheus, but it is an apt image for the violent methods on which Marlowe’s verse often depends for its singularly potent effects. Tamburlaine comes to seem both the agent and the thrall of what George Gascoigne terms “poeticall license,” that “shrewde fellow” who “maketh words longer, shorter, of mo syllables, of fewer, newer, older, truer, falser, and … turkeneth all things at pleasure.”⁶⁴ “I love to live at liberty,” he boasts in his first appearance onstage (One 1.2.26), but as he later confesses, “since I exercise a greater name, … I must apply myself to fit those terms” (Two 4.1.153–55). Applying oneself to fit the terms, applying the terms to fit oneself: such is the license that Marlowe claims for his play, whose exotic and elastic phrasing both defines and defies the limits of his native tongue.

“What Scythian Sorte Soeuer”

The most radical and unexpected articulation of this idea—the idea that eloquence is the exercise of an idiosyncratic and autocratic poetic will—appears in the work of a poet who did his utmost to confine Tamburlaine’s feet to the stage, a poet whose own verse struck many of his contemporaries as too restrained altogether.⁶⁵ A decade and a half after Marlowe announced his departure from rhyme, Samuel Daniel bowed to Tamburlaine’s influence, “confess[ing]” in his 1603 Defence of Ryme that his adversaries in the war over English measure had “wrought this much vpon me, that I thinke a Tragedie would indeede best comporte with a blank Verse, and dispence with Ryme.”⁶⁶ But Daniel had his own uses for Tamburlaine, whom he invokes in the Defence as a counterweight to the humanist tendency to revile native poetic forms as signs of cultural and intellectual barbarism. In a lengthy digression Daniel argues that the notoriously immoderate battle tactics of the Scythian Tamburlaine ought to be recognized as the point of origin for what we now call the Renaissance: the revival of learning in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Italy begins, he claims, at the margins of so-called civilization with a series of rather brutal acts of conquest (sig. H[1]_r–v). By tallying European humanism’s debts to the inhumane achievements of a barbarian warlord, Daniel lays the ground for his critique of humanist rhetoric’s own coercive tendencies, but he also advances his case for a more expansive and elastic version of literary history. His crude yet effective Tamburlaine stands as a rebuke to those who would make the boundaries of eloquence coextensive with those of ancient Athens and Rome, those who fail to recognize in homely rhyme a power that “swais th’affection of the Barbarian” as well as “the harts of Ciuill nations” (sig. G4_r).

Daniel may allow blank verse its dominion over English tragedy, but he insists on retaining the rest of the poetic landscape for rhyme, accusing partisans of quantitative meter of cultural and linguistic tyranny. The Defence begins by dismissing the familiar anxieties over numbers, accents, and feet as inconsequential. Where Puttenham and others—chiefly Thomas Campion, whose 1602 Apologie of Poetrie prompts Daniel’s response—fretted over the difficulty of making English conform to cadences of classical measure, Daniel argues that English poets have no need for such artificial constraints, possessing already a much pleasanter and more natural method of giving shape to their lines. “[W]e are told,” he writes, “that our measures go wrong, all Ryming is grosse, vulgare, barbarous,” but this is mere chauvinism, for “[e]uery language hath her proper number or measure fitted to vse and delight,” and in England rhyme “performes those offices” best, “delighting the eare, stirring the hart, and satisfying the iudgment in such sort as I doubt whether euer single numbers will doe in our Climate” (sigs. G3_r, G4_v–[G5_r]). But not only “our climate”: rhyme, according to Daniel, has “so naturall a melodie” and “so vniuersall,” that “it seemes to be generally borne with al the nations of the world.” Thus the barbarism that is imputed to rhyme as its great defect in fact “argues the generall power of it: … it hath a power in nature on all” (sig. G4_r).

Daniel goes on to invent a genealogy for this universal melody, imagining the spread of rhyme across the globe as an unforced, triumphal march. It is an itinerary that uncannily replicates the course of Tamburlaine’s own progress to world domination: “borne no doubt in Scythia,” rhyming verse is “brought ouer Caucasus and Mount Taurus” to Turkey, carried to “a great part of Asia and Affrique,” adopted by “the Muscouite, Polack, Hungarian, German, Italian, French, and Spaniard,” and finally either brought thence or possessed already by “[t]he Irish, Briton, Scot, Dane, Saxon, English, and all the Inhabitours of this Iland” (sig. G4_v). As for the “single numbers” of Greece and Rome, “notwithstanding their excellencie,” they “seemed not sufficient to satisfie the eare of the world” (sig. [G5]_r), and the veneration they are accorded is, according to Daniel, the fruit of tyranny. The Greeks and Romans, he argues, “may thanke their sword that made their tongues so famous and vniuersall as they are”—and their verses bear the impress of this history, being composed of the “scattered limbs” of severed clauses and “examples … of strange crueltie, in torturing and dismembering of words” (sig. [G5]_v): according to Daniel, classical poets are the original turkeners of language. “We should not,” he therefore urges, “so soone yield our consents captiue to the authoritie of Antiquitie”; although English poets may be accustomed to thinking of themselves as inhabitants of a remote corner of the world, “we are not so placed out of the way of iudgement, but that the same Sun of Discretion shineth vpon vs” (sig. [G6]_v). To exchange rhyme for “single numbers” would be a bad bargain indeed, an exchange of native discretion for strange cruelty, and the loss of “an hereditary eloquence proper to all mankind” (sig. G4_r).

But in order to claim this status for rhyme, Daniel must confront the foundational myth of Renaissance humanism, whereby eloquence is always already defined in relation to the classical literary tradition and Goths are the natural antagonists of Greeks. According to Daniel’s mocking summary of this myth, “all things lay pitifully deformed in those lacke-learning times from the declining of the Roman Empire, till the light of the latine tongue was revived by Rewcline, Erasmus and Moore.” This, Daniel says, is “a most apparent ignorance,” for “three hundred yeeres before them about the coming downe of Tamburlaine into Europe,” the “best notions of learning” in the same “degree of excellencie” were already at work, and “our nation … concurrent with the best of all this lettered world” (sig. H[1]_r). Indeed, Daniel claims, it is thanks to Tamburlaine that the Renaissance happened at all. By taking “Bajazeth … prisoner,” he argues, Tamburlaine inadvertently triggered an intellectual and literary revival: for upon learning of the Turk’s defeat, the learned inhabitants of Constantinople, who had traveled to Italy in hopes of forging political alliances against Bajazeth, were now free to remain in Italy as scholars and teachers, “transport[ing] Philosophie beaten by the Turke out of Greece into Christendome.” “Heereuppon,” Daniel concludes, “came that mighty confluence of learning in these parts,” which “meeting with the new inuented stampe of Printing, spread itself indeede in a more vniuersall sort then the world euer heretofore had it” (sig. H[1]_v). Instead of being the achievement of dedicated scholars, intent on redeeming ancient beauty and truth, Daniel’s Renaissance is the accidental by-product of war and new technologies. Eloquence, meanwhile, is not the instrument of imperial conquest but the sole surviving property of a transient community of refugees: a Gothic barbarian rescues Greek civilization, and poetic measure survives thanks to barbarous excess.

Daniel derives this account of Tamburlaine’s role in the preservation of classical learning and literature from a French historian, Louis Le Roy, whose treatise De la vicissitude ou variété des choses en l’univers (1576; English translation, 1594) takes “the great and inuincible tamberlan” as the emblem of “the power, learning, and other excellence of this age.”67 For Le Roy, the Scythian Timur appeals as a counterweight to humanism’s obligatory sense of indebtedness to the classical past: as Mary Floyd-Wilson argues, his Tamberlan “embodies the paradoxically barbaric origins of early modern cultural advancement” and “refute[s] the geographic truisms of the conventional civilizing narrative—that barbarousness flows from the north and civilization emerges in the south.”⁶⁸ But Le Roy also dwells on Tamberlan as the embodiment of a historiographic injustice: having created the circumstances for “the restitution of the tongues; and of all sciences,” the Scythian warlord has been written out of the record by the beneficiaries of that restitution, men whose study of antiquity taught them to disdain his achievements as those of an unlettered barbarian. “Yet fortune hauing allwaies fauoured him, without euer hauing bin contrary vnto him,” Le Roy laments, “seemeth among so many admirable euents, which exceed the ordinary course of Conquerours, to haue denyed him an Historyographer of excellent learning, and eloquence; agreeable to his vertues: to celebrate them worthily” (fol. 108_v).

Le Roy’s account of Tamberlan as the victim of his own radically transformative power—a figure who made history happen and was promptly shut out of it—authorizes Daniel’s own revisionary project, in which Tamburlaine stands at the head of a long list of those whose contributions to learning and eloquence have been unfairly neglected: “witnesse,” he commands his readers, “the venerable Bede, that flourished about a thousand yeeres since: Aldelmus Durotelmus that lived in the yere 739, … Walterus Mape, Gulielmus Nigellus, Geruasius Tilburiensis, Bracton, Bacon, Ockam, and an infinite Catalogue of excellent men” (sigs. H[1]_v–H2_r). To claim the authors of medieval Latin texts, even the scholastics—the most barbarous of barbarians, according to humanist orthodoxy—as “excellent men” in the cause of learning is to deny that the so-called revival of learning and letters was any such thing. The very idea that such institutions should need reviving is founded, Daniel insists, on a misguided assumption about the identification of eloquence with particular times and places: in truth, he writes, “[t]he distribution of giftes are vniuersall, and all seasons hath them in some sort” (sig. H2_r).

The theory of eloquence Daniel formulates in concert with this leveling of cultural history is at once homely and expansive, firm in its commitment to English forms but catholic in its appreciation of local variation. Daniel may be an apologist for rhyme, but he does not pretend that it possesses any merits beyond that of satisfying the ear and swaying the judgment; that satisfaction, vulgar as it may be, is sufficient guarantee of its value. “Suffer then the world to injoy that which it knows, and what it likes,” he pleads. “Seeing that whatsoeuer forme of words doth mooue, delight and sway the affections of men, in what Scythian sorte soeuer it be disposed or vttered, that is true number, measure, eloquence, and the perfection of speech: which I said, hath as many shapes as there be tongues or nations in the world” (sig. [G5]_r). “In what Scythian sorte soeuer”: the example of Le Roy’s Tamberlan authorizes Daniel in bestowing an unprecedented degree of latitude upon the English author, and in granting an unprecedented weight to the enjoyment of the English tongue and ear. Of course, the “suffering” that Daniel commends to his readers somewhat collapses the distinction between ease and difficulty: like the appalled delight English audiences took in the spectacular barbarity and forceful rhythms of Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, or the rigorous fascination George Puttenham finds in the unforgiving boundaries of the Tartarian shape-poem, Daniel’s idea of “the perfection of speech” marries seemingly intuitive pleasure to the shock of alienation.

But we should not gloss over the differences between—indeed the outright incommensurability of—the forms that perfection assumes for each writer. Although they find inspiration in the same unlikely figure of eloquence, Puttenham, Marlowe, and Daniel arrive at radically disparate versions of vernacularity: oriental pattern-poems, blank verse, and rhyming couplets resist incorporation into any unified account of linguistic progress. Nor should we be too quick to assume that sixteenth-century readers would have found the choice between them an obvious one: Marlowe’s spectacularly successful stage play offers one extremely influential account of where English poetry was headed at the end of the sixteenth century, but it is not the only story, then or now. By charting the unexpected range of associations between the Scythian warlord and the problem of measure, it is thus possible to defamiliarize ourselves with the trajectory of vernacular literature, recovering the confusion and excitement of a moment when the shape of England’s literary history and its literary future were, as Daniel argues, no more distinct or fixed than “a superficiall figure of a region in a Mappe” (sig. H2_r)

The Scythian Timur may prove useful to the modern literary critic as well, insofar as his curious position within Renaissance culture—where he is at once ubiquitous and marginal, a catalyst of widespread change and the begetter of a degenerate line—forecasts the roles assumed by writers such as Lyly, Spenser, and Marlowe, whose self-consciously strange versions of vernacularity inaugurate a literary culture from which they are rather quickly exiled, marked as eccentric, idiosyncratic, and unfitting of imitation. What G. K. Hunter says of euphuism, that “though it contributed to the clarification of vernacular style … it had no real heirs,”69 is equally true of Spenser’s pseudo-archaism: even the tolerant (and otherwise admiring) Daniel politely declined to imitate his “aged accents and untimely words.”⁷⁰ Marlowe’s blank-verse line may seem the exception to this rule, for it has come to sound like the natural and inevitable voice of English eloquence, certainly so far as Renaissance drama is concerned. But blank verse survived the close of the sixteenth century only by being severed from the person of the strutting Scythian, who within a little more than a decade had come to seem, once again, rather lame. “[B]y the turn of the century,” observes Alexander Legatt, “[n]o one was writing plays like Tamburlaine any more, and you could raise a laugh by quoting it.”⁷¹ There was worse to come. In 1681 a playwright by the name of Charles Saunders published a play titled Tamerlane the Great, with an epilogue by John Dryden and a preface in which Saunders defends himself from charges of plagiarism. Addressing those malefactors who have “give[n] out, that this was only an Old-Play Transcrib’d,” Saunders writes:

I hope I may easily unload my self of that Calumny, when I shall testifie that I never heard of any Play on the same Subject, untill my own was Acted, neither have I since seen it, though it hath been told me, there is a Cock-Pit Play, going under the name of the Scythian Shepherd, or Tamberlain the Great, which how good it is, any one may Iudge by its obscurity, being a thing, not a Bookseller in London, or scarce the Players themselves, who Acted it formerly, cou’d call to Remembrance, so far, that I believe that whoever was the Author, he might e’en keep it to himself secure from invasion, or Plagiary.⁷²

Jonson’s caution to playwrights against following in Marlowe’s footsteps seems to have succeeded better than he could have hoped: like Milton, who disregards Surrey’s Aeneid in claiming to originate the blank-verse English epic, Saunders appears sincere in his belief that he was the first English writer to take up the life of Tamburlaine. In an irony the Earl of Surrey might well have savored, the great stage poet of imperial ambition is himself relegated to the margins, the anonymous proprietor of a plot so obscure that no one would bother to usurp his place in it.