The Performative Sublime: Working Words and Marital Observations in Tamburlaine the Great, Part One
Open Access
- Author:
- Portzline, Madeline Elizabeth
- Area of Honors:
- English
- Degree:
- Bachelor of Arts
- Document Type:
- Thesis
- Thesis Supervisors:
- Patrick G Cheney, Thesis Supervisor
Dr. Xiaoye You, Thesis Honors Advisor - Keywords:
- Marlowe
Performativity
Sublimity
Longinus
Early Modern Drama
Performative Sublime
Tamburlaine
Bajazeth
Zenocrate
Drama
Literary Criticism
Tamburlaine the Great
language
divinity - Abstract:
- In this thesis, I argue for the importance of a “performative sublime” in Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine The Great, Part One (1590). By the performative sublime, I mean the playwright’s use of a heightened or “sublime” language of terror and rapture to present characters who effect persuasion or change the outside world. The central figure is Tamburlaine himself; but, those he conquers also deploy the register of the sublime in opposition to him, especially Asian leaders such as Bajazeth, but also Tamburlaine’s future wife, Zenocrate. Particularly innovative are the Virgins of Damascus, for they combine the two principal kinds of gender dynamic from the other contests: they are pleading females, like Zenocrate, but they are national military opponents, like Bajezeth, and in the end the Virgins pay the tragic military price. In Marlowe’s pan-Asian contest of character, Tamburlaine’s use of the performative sublime proves valuable for understanding how a “Scythian Shepherd” who becomes a “Mighty Monarch” (1590 title page) uses language to rise to power, change the landscape, and secure a patrilinear line of political dominance for his sons. Yet Marlowe goes further, to show Tamburlaine committed to using language to deify the human, especially himself. Accordingly, Tamburlaine succeeds, not through military power, but through divine performative utterances that scholars have only recently begun to classify in terms of the sublime. By focusing on a neglected performative sublime in 1 Tamburlaine, we understand the new model of theater for which Christopher Marlowe is renowned.