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Themes And Symbols In Tamburlaine

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Tamburlaine concentrates all his efforts on two objectives: the achievement of his empire, and marriage with Zenocrate. During the play, his two intentions are seen as complementary aspects. The use of the same category of images both for Zenocrate and for thrones and empires has the effect of keeping them in a close relationship from the beginning, anticipating the explicit recognition of their connection in the last act. In his first dialogue with her, Tamburlaine pictures her as his future queen, “Enchased with precious jewels of mine own / More rich and valurous than Zenocrate’s.” (p.10)
In his opinion, she is fairer than rocks of pearl and precious stone. (p.34) And during the speech in which he identifies his feelings for her with the …show more content…

For example, Mycetes’ horses with their milk-white legs fantastically splashed with crimson blood are a decorative detail. When Tamburlaine says that he will “Batter the shining palace of the Sun, /And shiver all the starry firmament” (p.89), Marlowe reaches the highest of purely decorative imagery.
Ellis-Fermor considers that in Tamburlaine, “there is much that is not effective rhetoric.” In this case, Marlowe’s images are not in harmony with the emotions forming the background of the passage and serve rather to illustrate them than to imply any association. There is no harmony between the individual image and its setting. The imagery in Tamburlaine does not lack power, though it is most effective when one rhetorical image leads on to another. Tamburlaine’s description of his triumph in the last act of Part I is an example of such effective, cumulative series of little pictures which according to Ellis-Fermor “no one… can be picked out as having the quality of poetry.” There are showers of blood and meteors in Africa, there are mentions of Jove, the Furies and Death, dead kings lie at Tamburlaine’s feet. This is not a way of poetic …show more content…

There are some critics suspecting that Marlowe was inclined to introduce names in the raw, straight from his note-books into the speech. They suggest some kind of effort as if these names were trying to convince the writer himself and the readers. Marlowe’s mood seems logical and scientific rather than imaginative. But there are passages in which the imagery gives the measure of part of Marlowe’s poetry and Tamburlaine abounds in long passages of majestic description which, although they cannot be considered poetry, have a power that represents the highest of rhetoric. The first of these is the picture which Tamburlaine presents to Zenocrate of her life as his empress: the swift seeds, the Median silk, the jewels, the ivory sledge and the frozen mountain tops that dissolve at the sight of

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