Summary
4.1. As the battle begins, Amyras and Celebinus leave their tent to join in, but Calyphas remains asleep. They call to him to come out, and he calls back to tell them to leave him: they have no need of him, since Tamburlaine on his own is enough to win the battle. The other two rebuke his cowardice and predict that Tamburlaine will be furious when he hears that Calyphas refused to fight. Still he refuses, and they leave. Calling in his servant Perdicas, Calyphas asks him to play cards with him to pass the time. Blithely unafraid of his father’s wrath, Calyphas suggests they play to decide who’ll kiss the finest Turkish concubine when the battle is won.
4.2. Victorious, Tamburlaine and his train lead in the captured Turkish kings. Almost immediately Tamburlaine calls for Calyphas, goes into his tent, and brings him out. He suggests that Calyphas should suffer the same fate as any soldier who deserts from battle. Both his other sons, along with Theridamas, Ucumcasane, and Techelles, beg for mercy for the boy. But they fail to move Tamburlaine, who, declaring Calyphas unfit to be his son, stabs him. The Turkish captives condemn his tyranny, which sends Tamburlaine into a rage. He promises to quiet his prisoners by making good on his promise to use them as horses to draw his chariot.
4.3. Olympia, entering alone, is still distraught by the death of her son. Theridamas, who has apparently been courting her, enters and asks whether she will accept his suit. She claims to be unfit for anything but death, and meets all of his entreaties with pleas that he draw his sword and kill her. Theridamas makes it clear that he will marry her whether she wills it or not. Olympia then offers him a deal: in exchange for abandoning his suit, she will give Theridamas a special ointment that will make him invulnerable to weapons. Predictably, he doesn’t believe her, so to prove it she offers to demonstrate on herself. She puts the ointment on her throat, and invites him to try to stab her. But her ointment is merely a ploy, and when he stabs her she dies.
4.4. Tamburlaine has the kings of Trebizon and Soria harnessed to his chariot like horses, complete with bits in their mouths, as he mocks them. Orcanes begs Jove to punish Tamburlaine’s pride and cruelty, and Tamburlaine promises that he’s next in line to draw the chariot. He orders the captured royal Turkish concubines brought in and sends them away with his soldiers despite their pleas. Tamburlaine proposes yet another campaign to capture the great city of Babylon, and his followers agree. He paints a majestic, highly hyperbolic picture of what his life will look like after the conquest of Babylon, as emperor of the world; with that, they’re off to the siege.
5.1. Maximus, a captain in the Babylonian army, meets the Governor of Babylon on the city walls to tell him that Tamburlaine has breached the city and that their defeat is assured. He suggests surrendering, which only enrages the Governor. Several citizens also beg the Governor to surrender so that Tamburlaine might be merciful, but he refuses. Techelles and Theridamas show up and offer mercy in exchange for surrender. Still the Governor holds firm. As they and their soldiers scale the walls, Tamburlaine enters with his sons, followers, and prisoners, still drawn by Trebizon and Soria. Techelles and Theridamas, who have captured the Governor, present him to Tamburlaine. Tamburlaine quickly orders him hung up in chains on the walls and shot.
He asks his servants to unharness the kings in order to replace them with Orcanes and the King of Jerusalem. As soon as the bits leave their mouths they begin to curse him, and he orders them away to be executed. As a final touch, he commands his followers to gather and burn the holy books from the Babylonian temple of Mahomet, since that god has proven false to his followers by failing to save them. Techelles, meanwhile, has carried out Tamburlaine’s instruction to slaughter the inhabitants of Babylon. They prepare to return to Persia to glory in their new conquests, but just as they prepare to depart, Tamburlaine begins to feel ill.
5.2. Callapine has regrouped and recruited the King of Amasia and his army to once again attack Tamburlaine. They hope to surprise him while his soldiers are still worn out from the siege. Callapine prays that Tamburlaine’s luck finally be reversed, and that he may win glory by becoming the man to conquer “the tyrant of the world” (5.2.55).
5.3. Theridamas, Techelles, and Usumcasane grieve to one another over Tamburlaine’s worsening illness. He enters, still astride the chariot drawn by Orcanes and Jerusalem, but also clearly frustrated and worried about his growing infirmity. As usual, he has threats for the heavens and calls his men to make war on the gods that have dared to make him sick. Theridamas and Techelles calm him down. A physician says that Tamburlaine will probably live, if he survives the coming hours. Tamburlaine vows to rest.
However, a messenger runs in with the news that Callapine has returned and, emboldened by the news of Tamburlaine’s illness, is about to attack. Deathly ill, Tamburlaine goes out and shows his face. That alone is enough to send Callapine and his forces running in fear. But after the effort Tamburlaine is nearly spent. He calls for maps to review his empire, regretting that so much remains unconquered. But as he comes to accept that he must die, he finds comfort in the fact that his sons will carry on his legacy. He calms his sons and followers as they mourn for him, much as Theridamas did for him when Zenocrate died. His last act is to crown Amyras as his successor. Fittingly, Amyras speaks the final words of the play after his father, Tamburlaine the Great, dies.
Analysis
Calyphas is, arguably, the only comic character in Tamburlaine, and though he’s not a match for his father or even his brothers as a warrior, he demonstrates considerable wit. Some of his wordplay is as clever and compelling as any in the play: “Take you the honor, I will take my ease; / My wisdom shall excuse my cowardice...And should I go and do nor harm nor good, / I might have harm, which all the good I have, / joined with my father’s crown, would never cure” (4.1.50-58). His final words to his brothers “I’ll to cards. Perdicas!” is a striking comedic echo of the common battle cry “I’ll to arms!” (4.1.59).
Though all the other characters, besides Zenocrate, see in Calyphas only a shameful coward, he makes some very sane points: “I know, sir, what it is to kill a man; / It works remorse of conscience in me. / I take no pleasure to be murderous, / Nor care for blood when wine will quench my thirst” (4.1.27-30). He also claims, repeatedly, not to be a coward, and if for a moment we take him at his word we can see that his logic is as follows: If I were needed, I would fight. But you’ll win regardless, so why risk my life?
For Calyphas, then, violence is a means, not an end, and his assertion that heroism in battle is no guarantee against death runs precisely contrary to Tamburlaine’s beliefs. “The bullets fly at random and where they list; / And should I go and kill a thousand men, / I were as soon rewarded with a shot” (4.1.52-54). In this sense Calyphas echoes the sentiments of Zenocrate when she urged Tamburlaine to give up combat before his luck runs out, and can perhaps be seen as representing the persistence of her influence in this latter part of the play. When Tamburlaine kills him, then, he effectively kills off the last earthly representative of the moderating influence exerted on him by Zenocrate. His inability to accept these qualities of Zenocrate in his son is thus a kind of allegory for his failure to fully assimilate them into his own character.
As the only part of the play not directly related to Tamburlaine, the drama of Olympia seems a curious interlude. Some see it as a largely irrelevant side-story, attributable to the messiness of Part Two. Yet we can also see Olympia’s story as an echo of Tamburlaine’s courtship of Zenocrate, though this suit, of course, fails horribly. So on the one hand, Olympia’s story provides another example of the fall from greatness of Tamburlaine and his train in the second part. But on the other hand, Olympia’s story also contains an additional element not present in Zenocrate’s: death. Theridamas in effect attempts to woo Olympia precisely as Tamburlaine wooed Zenocrate, failing to see that in this case the woman in question is still deeply grieving for the death of her husband and son. In this light, this side narrative becomes a further illustration of a major theme of this play: that one can’t overcome the power of death by simple force of will or show of earthly wealth and strength.
We’re thus set up in many ways to expect a resolution to the question of how the now fully tyrannical Tamburlaine will meet his own death when it comes. His cruelty, after being checked by Zenocrate, has regained its zenith in his treatment of the defeated Turkish kings. By the time he executes two of them, along with the Governor of Babylon, it seems almost automatic, not done out of rage or honor but merely out of habit.
Everything points, then, to Tamburlaine’s illness as the ordained punishment for which every “Scourge of God” is destined once he’s fulfilled his purpose. His decision to burn the holy books in Babylon and repudiate Mahomet—even going so far as to literally propose himself as a replacement—is Tamburlaine’s greatest sacrilege yet. Additionally, the story of Babylon figures prominently in the Old Testament as an instance of God’s punishing humankind for aspiring too high.
Even Tamburlaine sees his sickness as the work of a god: “What daring god torments my body thus / And seeks to conquer mighty Tamburlaine?” Yet his doctor says that it’s quite possible Tamburlaine will survive if he rests. One can therefore see Tamburlaine as faced with one final choice: rest, and perhaps survive, but possibly lose to Callapine; or, go out and face the enemy, keep your empire, and quite probably die. For Tamburlaine, of course, the choice is obvious.
Having made his choice, though, Tamburlaine's attitude toward his own impending death appears to change. Looking over a map of the world, he asks, “And shall I die, and this unconquerèd?” (5.3.158). Instead of flying into a rage as one might expect, he turns to his sons: “Here, lovely boys; what death forbids my life, / That let your lives command in spite of death” (5.3.159-160). He will die knowing that he also lives on in them, and crowns Amyras his successor. Tamburlaine then gives Amyras this advice, “Let not thy love exceed thine honor, son, / Nor bar thy mind that magnanimity / That nobly must admit necessity” (5.3.199-201). These three lines are, effectively, a synthesis of the themes of Tamburlaine’s soliloquy in 5.2 of Part One, and Zenocrate’s instruction “yet let me die; with love and patience let your true love die” (2.4.66-68). We may take Tamburlaine as in some sense “conceiving and subduing” both his life and is death—not in the sense of conquering both, but rather in the sense of synthesizing them.
Marlowe’s ending here is fundamentally ambiguous. Has Tamburlaine wound up as a typical story of hubris? Or is this just an exploration of the quite human fact that humans “must” die, with which the gods have little to do? Either reading is plausible, and both are contained in the ambiguity of Tamburlaine’s dying words: “For Tamburlaine, the scourge of God, must die” (5.3.248). It may be that as the scourge of God, his time has come, or simply his time has come as Tamburlaine the man. What you decide might depend on how seriously you take the Prologue and its assertion that this play sees “[the] murderous Fates thro[w] all [Tamburlaine’s] triumphs down.” Whatever interpretation one ultimately decides on, the ambiguity Marlowe establishes surrounding the ultimate fate of Tamburlaine is critical to the significance of Tamburlaine. To go back to the first prologue, it’s up to you to “applaud his fortunes as you please” (l.8).
