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Article Excerpt
In the Tamburlaine plays Marlowe adapted for dramatic purposes what Jorge Luis Borges termed 'the vast geographies of Ariosto'. These purposes brought the English drama into a close relation with the new cosmography of Ortelius and others. Marlowe was exploiting the growing awareness of the world's full spatial context--an awareness peculiar to Western Europe in his time. In Part One of Tamburlaine he focuses on the establishment of his hero's imperial power: first Emperor of Asia, then Emperor of Africa. This symbolically balanced shaping of his military career is Marlowe's own interpretation. Among other spatially sensitive features, Part Two presents spectacular map-based journeys of a kind prominently exemplified in Ariosto's Orlando furioso.
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Marlowe's geographical awareness will strike any reader of the Tamburlaine plays. At first critics were content to note the mere frequency of exotic place names, and a comparison with Milton's practice in Paradise Lost became a commonplace. There were, after all, over forty different place names mentioned in Part One of Tamburlaine and over eighty in Part Two, and some of these names were introduced not only once but several times and then given even greater salience in studiedly pointed repetition--'And ride in triumph through Persepolis' is an obvious instance. But it was left to Ethel Seaton to take the subject a decisive step forward in her classic essay 'Marlowe's Map' (1924). (1) She advanced the study of Tamburlaine by moving from a vaguely sensed geography to a more precisely focused cartography. She demonstrated conclusively that one notable passage in Part Two was not a mere fantasy of outlandish names but an account of a journey (by Techelles) through Africa, which Marlowe had based on a close study of Ortelius's Theatrum orbis terrarum. This great world atlas was first published in Antwerp in 1570. Some of Marlowe's details, which had been taken by editors to be errors or blunders on his part, could now be justified by reference to Ortelius, notably the placing of 'Zanzibar' on the west coast of Africa rather than on the east. But the chief effect of Seaton's work was to make Marlowe's procedure in the Tamburlaine plays seem incomparably more rational than before. It showed him to be aware of some of the most recent technological innovations by putting him in touch with the enormously influential map culture of his time. But it also gave more point to Marlowe's conception of his hero, who, before succumbing to death at the end of Part Two, actually calls for a map to be brought before him. In Tyrone Guthrie's great production of both Tamburlaine plays at the Old Vic in 1951 (which I was fortunate enough to see), a map was brought on as big as a large Persian carpet and was unrolled to fill the whole central area of the stage. Tamburlaine, now visibly dying, stepped on to the map, while his followers respectfully stood around it and watched. And so, in recalling his life's achievements--endless conquests and journeys--he makes gesturally visible both what he has done and what he would still long to do: 'And shall I die, and this unconquered?' (2 Tamburlaine, v. 3. 150). (2) The line, repeated, becomes a bitterly dejected refrain as he points to this or that place on the map that remains 'unconquered'. 'Marlowe's Map', in Ethel Seaton's phrase, takes form here as Tamburlaine's own map, a stage property as concretely visible to the audience as the royal crown of Persia or Bajazeth's cage had been in Part One, or Tamburlaine's own king-drawn chariot earlier in Part Two. It is as if, at the end of his second Tamburlaine play, Marlowe acknowledges where he found his original inspiration. He was a reader of maps; and maps, along with poems and romances and histories, played a crucial part in feeding his dramatic imagination.
A reading of Seaton's essay, however, might lead one to suppose that, as a result of his poring over Ortelius's maps, all that Marlowe had to do was simply to have the idea of tracing his characters' journeys by using the place names in front of him. Seaton seems to attribute to Marlowe the original idea of using a map in a literary text, and in this she has been followed by later Marlowe scholars. According to this view, Marlowe the map reader directly inspired Marlowe the dramatist.
I want to make a different suggestion. Marlowe may have been the first dramatist to incorporate cartographical passages in a play, but he was not the first writer to do so in a poetic work. In this he was anticipated by Ariosto in Orlando furioso, and it was here that Marlowe found the model for his map-based passages. It has, of course, long been known that Marlowe was acquainted with Orlando furioso. The source for the minor episode of Olympia in the second part of Tamburlaine (iii. 4 and iv. 2) is in Ariosto (Orlando furioso, xxix), which Marlowe presumably read in the Italian, since Harington's English translation was not published until 1591. Apart from this minor plot connection, however, Marlowe's literary relations with Ariosto have not been explored. But before I look further at each of the Tamburlaine plays and their treatment of terrestrial space, I need to say briefly what Ariosto achieved so that it will seem plausible that an English poet such as Marlowe should have sought him out.
Ariosto's huge poem was first published in 1516 (further editions, with revisions by Ariosto, appeared in 1521 and 1532). Ariosto was offering a continuation of Boiardo's Orlando innamorato and, in so doing, was bringing into the sixteenth-century reader's world all the actions and settings (Christian and Saracen) and the themes and conventions of medieval chivalric romance, but always in a distinctively new, modern, post-chivalric way. He did so, moreover, with immense and inimitable urbanity. The poem was an instant success--'the most popular work of modern poetry in the sixteenth century', as Daniel Javitch says in his book-length study of the work. (3) Javitch brings out the potent nature of the poem's appeal and the wide range of its distribution, at first throughout Italy and then through western Europe. Ariosto's final 1532 version was republished sixteen times by 1540, and was then reprinted every year by several publishers: 'Altogether, from 1540 to 1580 there appeared at least 113 editions of Ariosto's poem'. (4) In Italy...
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