Tamburlaine and Attitudes Toward Women

Much of the interest in Marlowe that has been displayed in the last twenty years has been biographical, stimulated by the discoveries of rather sensational documents; but recently, perhaps as a development of that biographical interest, several critical attempts have been made to evaluate the spirit of aspiration or individualism which Marlowe's plays dramatize. Not all critics have, of course, agreed to find this spirit in the plays, any more than any audience, in Marlowe's day or since, has unanimously found the plays inspiring; Battenhouse in particular devoted a book to arguing that Tamburlaine is the tragedy of uncontrolled, misdirected, and diseased passions. 1 But in most of the criticisms such descriptive phrases for Marlowe as the most ruthless individualist of all the Elizabethan dramatists Ad2 frequently recur. Boas, Poirier, and Levin have analyzed Marlowe's expression of individualism into a threefold quest for beauty, and power (in Levin's phrases the appetite for sensation, the zeal for knowledge, and the will to power ), and Levin calls these three quests three aspects of a single figure of speech, hyperbole.' But

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