ABSTRACT
The majority of the eight direct references Marlowe make to the New World primarily identify it with boundless wealth, particularly gold, and usually associate that wealth with Spanish possession. In an earlier anticipation of Valdes’s promise, Faustus envisions spirits flying ‘to India for gold’ and searching ‘all comers of the new-found world, and princely delicates’. Prior to Marlowe’s composition of 1 Tamburlaine, at least nine works treating Spanish efforts at navigation, mapping, conquest, medical and botanical investigations had been translated into English. Excerpts from several of these would have been available to him in Richard Hakluyt’s Divers Voyages Touching the Discoverie of America, and he might well have had access to others in French, Latin, Spanish, Italian, and Portugese. In Hakluyt’s Discourse of 1584, Spain is spoken of in an ostensibly more ambivalent manner, with its ‘monarchie’ in one instance likened to the ‘Empire of Alexander the grate’ and at another represented as ‘the scourge of the worlde’.
