[Enter] SIGISMOND, FREDERICK, BALDWIN, with their train.
SIGISMOND
Now say, my lords of Buda and Bohemia,
What motion is it that inflames your thoughts
And stirs your valours to such sudden arms?
FREDERICK
Your majesty remembers, I am sure,
What cruel slaughter of our Christian bloods
These heathenish Turks and pagans lately made
Betwixt the city Zula and Danubius,
How through the midst of Varna and Bulgaria
And almost to the very walls of Rome
10 They have, not long since, massacred our camp.
It resteth now, then, that your majesty
Take all advantages of time and power,
And work revenge upon these infidels.
Your highness knows for Tamburlaine’s repair –
That strikes a terror to all Turkish hearts –
Natolia hath dismissed the greatest part
Of all his army, pitched against our power
Betwixt Cutheia and Orminius’ mount,
And sent them marching up to Belgasar,
20 Acantha, Antioch, and Caesaria,
To aid the kings of Soria and Jerusalem.
Now then, my lord, advantage take hereof,
And issue suddenly upon the rest,
That, in the fortune of their overthrow,
We may discourage all the pagan troop
That dare attempt to war with Christians.
SIGISMOND
But calls not, then, your grace to memory
The league we lately made with King Orcanes,
Confirmed by oath and articles of peace,
And calling Christ for record of our truths?
30 This should be treachery and violence
Against the grace of our profession.
BALDWIN
No whit, my lord. For with such infidels,
In whom no faith nor true religion rests,
We are not bound to those accomplishments
The holy laws of Christendom enjoin;
But as the faith which they profanely plight
Is not by necessary policy
To be esteemed assurance for ourselves,
So what we vow to them should not infringe
40 Our liberty of arms and victory.
SIGISMOND
Though I confess the oaths they undertake
Breed little strength to our security,
Yet those infirmities that thus defame
Their faiths, their honours, and their religion
Should not give us presumption to the like.
Our faiths are sound and must be consummate,
Religious, righteous, and inviolate.
FREDERICK
Assure your grace, ’tis superstition
To stand so strictly on dispensive faith.
50 And should we lose the opportunity
That God hath given to venge our Christians’ death
And scourge their foul blasphemous paganism?
As fell to Saul, to Balaam, and the rest
That would not kill and curse at God’s command,
So surely will the vengeance of the Highest,
And jealous anger of His fearful arm,
Be poured with rigour on our sinful heads
If we neglect this offered victory.
SIGISMOND
60 Then arm, my lords, and issue suddenly,
Giving commandment to our general host
With expedition to assail the pagan
And take the victory our God hath given.
Exeunt.
[Enter] ORCANES, GAZELLUS, URIBASSA, with their train.
ORCANES
Gazellus, Uribassa, and the rest,
Now will we march from proud Orminius’ mount
To fair Natolia, where our neighbour kings
Expect our power and our royal presence,
T’encounter with the cruel Tamburlaine
That nigh Larissa sways a mighty host
And with the thunder of his martial tools
Makes earthquakes in the hearts of men and heaven.
GAZELLUS
And now come we to make his sinews shake
10 With greater power than erst his pride hath felt.
An hundred kings by scores will bid him arms,
And hundred thousands subjects to each score –
Which, if a shower of wounding thunderbolts
Should break out of the bowels of the clouds
And fall as thick as hail upon our heads
In partial aid of that proud Scythian,
Yet should our courages and steelèd crests
And numbers more than infinite of men
Be able to withstand and conquer him.
Methinks I see how glad the Christian king
20 Is made for joy of your admitted truce,
That could not but before be terrified
With unacquainted power of our host.
Enter a MESSENGER.
MESSENGER
Arm, dread sovereign, and my noble lords!
The treacherous army of the Christians,
Taking advantage of your slender power,
Comes marching on us and determines straight
To bid us battle for our dearest lives.
ORCANES
Traitors, villains, damnèd Christians!
Have I not here the articles of peace
30 And solemn covenants we have both confirmed,
He by his Christ and I by Mahomet?
GAZELLUS
Hell and confusion light upon their heads
That with such treason seek our overthrow
And cares so little for their prophet, Christ!
ORCANES
Can there be such deceit in Christians,
Or treason in the fleshly heart of man,
Whose shape is figure of the highest god?
Then if there be a Christ, as Christians say
(But in their deeds deny him for their Christ),
40 If he be son to everliving Jove
And hath the power of his outstretched arm,
If he be jealous of his name and honour
As is our holy prophet Mahomet,
Take here these papers as our sacrifice
And witness of thy servant’s perjury!
[He burns the articles of peace.]
Open, thou shining veil of Cynthia,
And make a passage from the empyreal heaven,
That He that sits on high and never sleeps,
50 Nor in one place is circumscriptible,
But everywhere fills every continent
With strange infusion of his sacred vigour,
May in his endless power and purity
Behold and venge this traitor’s perjury!
Thou Christ, that art esteemed omnipotent,
If thou wilt prove thyself a perfect God
Worthy the worship of all faithful hearts,
Be now revenged upon this traitor’s soul,
And make the power I have left behind
60 (Too little to defend our guiltless lives)
Sufficient to discomfort and confound
The trustless force of those false Christians.
To arms, my lords! On Christ still let us cry.
If there be Christ, we shall have victory.
[Exeunt.]
Sound to the battle, and SIGISMOND comes out wounded.
SIGISMOND
Discomfited is all the Christian host,
And God hath thundered vengeance from on high
For my accurst and hateful perjury.
O just and dreadful punisher of sin,
Let the dishonour of the pains I feel
In this my mortal well-deservèd wound
End all my penance in my sudden death,
And let this death, wherein to sin I die,
Conceive a second life in endless mercy!
[He dies.]
Enter ORCANES, GAZELLUS, URIBASSA, with others.
ORCANES
10 Now lie the Christians bathing in their bloods,
And Christ or Mahomet hath been my friend.
See here the perjured traitor, Hungary,
Bloody and breathless for his villainy.
ORCANES
Now shall his barbarous body be a prey
To beasts and fowls, and all the winds shall breathe
Through shady leaves of every senseless tree
Murmurs and hisses for his heinous sin.
Now scalds his soul in the Tartarian streams
And feeds upon the baneful tree of hell,
That Zoacum, that fruit of bitterness,
20 That in the midst of fire is engraft,
Yet flourisheth as Flora in her pride,
With apples like the heads of damnèd fiends.
The devils there in chains of quenchless flame
Shall lead his soul through Orcus’ burning gulf
From pain to pain, whose change shall never end.
What sayest thou yet, Gazellus, to his foil,
Which we referred to justice of his Christ
And to His power, which here appears as full
30 As rays of Cynthia to the clearest sight?
GAZELLUS
’Tis but the fortune of the wars, my lord,
Whose power is often proved a miracle.
ORCANES
Yet in my thoughts shall Christ be honourèd,
Not doing Mahomet an injury,
Whose power had share in this our victory.
And since this miscreant hath disgraced his faith
And died a traitor both to heaven and earth,
We will both watch and ward shall keep his trunk
Amidst these plains for fowls to prey upon.
40 Go, Uribassa, give it straight in charge.
URIBASSA I will, my lord.
Exit URIBASSA [and SOLDIERS, with the body].
ORCANES
And now, Gazellus, let us haste and meet
Our army, and our brother of Jerusalem,
Of Soria, Trebizond, and Amasia,
And happily, with full Natolian bowls
Of Greekish wine, now let us celebrate
Our happy conquest and his angry fate.
Exeunt.
The arras is drawn, and ZENOCRATE lies in her bed of state, TAMBURLAINE sitting by her; three PHYSICIANS about her bed, tempering potions. THERIDAMAS, TECHELLES, USUMCASANE, and the three SONS [CALYPHAS, AMYRAS, CELEBINUS].
TAMBURLAINE
Black is the beauty of the brightest day!
The golden ball of heaven’s eternal fire,
That danced with glory on the silver waves,
Now wants the fuel that inflamed his beams,
And all with faintness and for foul disgrace
He binds his temples with a frowning cloud,
Ready to darken earth with endless night.
Zenocrate, that gave him light and life,
Whose eyes shot fire from their ivory bowers
10 And tempered every soul with lively heat,
Now by the malice of the angry skies,
Whose jealousy admits no second mate,
Draws in the comfort of her latest breath,
All dazzled with the hellish mists of death.
Now walk the angels on the walls of heaven,
As sentinels to warn th’immortal souls
To entertain divine Zenocrate.
Apollo, Cynthia, and the ceaseless lamps
That gently looked upon this loathsome earth
20 Shine downwards now no more, but deck the heavens
To entertain divine Zenocrate.
The crystal springs whose taste illuminates
Refinèd eyes with an eternal sight,
Like tried silver, runs through Paradise
To entertain divine Zenocrate.
The cherubins and holy seraphins
That sing and play before the King of Kings,
Use all their voices and their instruments
To entertain divine Zenocrate.
And in this sweet and curious harmony,
30 The god that tunes this music to our souls
Holds out his hand in highest majesty
To entertain divine Zenocrate.
Then let some holy trance convey my thoughts
Up to the place of th’empyreal heaven,
That this my life may be as short to me
As are the days of sweet Zenocrate.
Physicians, will no physic do her good?
PHYSICIAN
My lord, your majesty shall soon perceive;
40 An if she pass this fit, the worst is past.
TAMBURLAINE
Tell me, how fares my fair Zenocrate?
ZENOCRATE
I fare, my lord, as other empresses,
That, when this frail and transitory flesh
Hath sucked the measure of that vital air
That feeds the body with his dated health,
Wanes with enforced and necessary change.
TAMBURLAINE
May never such a change transform my love,
In whose sweet being I repose my life,
Whose heavenly presence, beautified with health,
Gives light to Phoebus and the fixèd stars,
50 Whose absence makes the sun and moon as dark
As when, opposed in one diameter,
Their spheres are mounted on the serpent’s head,
Or else descended to his winding train.
Live still, my love, and so conserve my life,
Or, dying, be the author of my death.
ZENOCRATE
Live still, my lord, O, let my sovereign live,
And sooner let the fiery element
Dissolve and make your kingdom in the sky
60 Than this base earth should shroud your majesty!
For, should I but suspect your death by mine,
The comfort of my future happiness
And hope to meet your highness in the heavens,
Turned to despair, would break my wretched breast,
And fury would confound my present rest.
But let me die, my love, yet let me die,
With love and patience let your true love die.
Your grief and fury hurts my second life.
Yet let me kiss my lord before I die,
70 And let me die with kissing of my lord.
But since my life is lengthened yet a while,
Let me take leave of these my loving sons
And of my lords, whose true nobility
Have merited my latest memory.
Sweet sons, farewell! In death resemble me,
And in your lives your father’s excellency.
Some music, and my fit will cease, my lord.
They call [for] music.
TAMBURLAINE
Proud fury and intolerable fit,
That dares torment the body of my love
80 And scourge the scourge of the immortal God!
Now are those spheres where Cupid used to sit,
Wounding the world with wonder and with love,
Sadly supplied with pale and ghastly death
Whose darts do pierce the centre of my soul.
Her sacred beauty hath enchanted heaven,
And, had she lived before the siege of Troy,
Helen, whose beauty summoned Greece to arms
And drew a thousand ships to Tenedos,
Had not been named in Homer’s Iliads;
90 Her name had been in every line he wrote.
Or, had those wanton poets, for whose birth
Old Rome was proud, but gazed a while on her,
Nor Lesbia nor Corinna had been named;
Zenocrate had been the argument
Of every epigram or elegy.
The music sounds, and she dies.
What, is she dead? Techelles, draw thy sword,
And wound the earth, that it may cleave in twain,
And we descend into th’infernal vaults
To hale the Fatal Sisters by the hair
And throw them in the triple moat of hell
100 For taking hence my fair Zenocrate.
Casane and Theridamas, to arms!
Raise cavalieros higher than the clouds,
And with the cannon break the frame of heaven,
Batter the shining palace of the sun
And shiver all the starry firmament,
For amorous Jove hath snatched my love from hence,
Meaning to make her stately queen of heaven.
What god soever holds thee in his arms,
Giving thee nectar and ambrosia,
110 Behold me here, divine Zenocrate,
Raving, impatient, desperate, and mad,
Breaking my steelèd lance with which I burst
The rusty beams of Janus’ temple doors,
Letting out death and tyrannizing war
To march with me under this bloody flag;
And if thou pitiest Tamburlaine the Great,
Come down from heaven and live with me again!
THERIDAMAS
Ah, good my lord, be patient. She is dead,
And all this raging cannot make her live.
120 If words might serve, our voice hath rent the air,
If tears, our eyes have watered all the earth,
If grief, our murdered hearts have strained forth blood.
Nothing prevails, for she is dead, my lord.
TAMBURLAINE
‘For she is dead’! Thy words do pierce my soul.
Ah, sweet Theridamas, say so no more.
Though she be dead, yet let me think she lives
And feed my mind that dies for want of her.
Where’er her soul be, thou shalt stay with me,
130 Embalmed with cassia, ambergris, and myrrh,
Not lapped in lead but in a sheet of gold;
And till I die thou shalt not be interred.
Then in as rich a tomb as Mausolus’,
We both will rest and have one epitaph
Writ in as many several languages
As I have conquered kingdoms with my sword.
This cursed town will I consume with fire
Because this place bereft me of my love.
The houses, burnt, will look as if they mourned,
140 And here will I set up her stature
And march about it with my mourning camp,
Drooping and pining for Zenocrate.
The arras is drawn. [Exeunt.]