ABSTRACT
Zenocrate, Tamburlaine’s queen and captive, makes the above plea to Tamburlaine after he expresses anxieties about his sons’ affinity for their mother and her ‘feminine’ pursuits. This moment of domestic tension is one that is often neglected in studies of Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine. Understandably, such marital squabbling might seem innocuous, even mundane, in light of Tamburlaine’s relentless, bloodthirsty pursuit of empire. The moment is emblematic, however, of Tamburlaine’s preoccupation with maternity and the ostensible threat that it poses. Though Zenocrate has traditionally been read as a representation of his ‘feminine’ side, or as a voice of conscience in the midst of his bloodthirsty pursuits,1 Marlowe creates with Zenocrate, and indeed with all of the representations of maternity in the text, something far more threatening. In fact, no military opponent plagues Tamburlaine with as much anxiety as maternity does. Motherhood in Tamburlaine is mysterious, powerful, even lethal – and a reading of both parts of Tamburlaine with a specific interest in aspects of maternity reveals that women have a destabilizing effect, even on the seemingly invulnerable Tamburlaine.2 Confirming early modern anxieties about the potentially debilitating effect mothers might have on their
My sincere thanks to Mandy Reid for her insightful responses to this piece. 1 Prior to Sara Munson Deats’s work, Sex, Gender, and Desire in the Plays of
Christopher Marlowe (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1997), there was little critical focus on women in Marlowe. Joanna Gibbs discusses reasons for this oversight in her essay ‘Marlowe’s Politic Women’, in Constructing Christopher Marlowe, ed. J.A. Downie and J.T. Parnell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 164-76. A recent treatment of a variety of maternal figures in Marlowe’s works is Audrey Becker’s, ‘“The Author of My Death”: Marlowe and the Poetics of Maternity’, in ‘“So troubled with the mother”: Death and the Performance of Maternity in Early Modern Drama’ (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1999), 112-52. Becker insightfully argues that ‘Marlowe’s mothers are positioned profoundly close to death’ (113).
