ABSTRACT
In Tamburlaine martial endeavor and legitimate succession depend on the production of gender difference and the subordination of the female and the feminine. If members of an Elizabethan audience viewed Tamburlaine’s audacity as somehow exhilarating, the political implications would be uncertain. From a Christian humanist point of view, the best move is to present Tamburlaine as vicious and disruptive of a divinely inspired order, but as ultimately involved in ratifying and restoring that order. The unstable relationship between ideology and military success in Tamburlaine lays bare the difficulty of maintaining the distinction between tyranny and lawful rule. Louis Althusser’s distinction between ideological and repressive state apparatuses may encourage the thought that the repressive agencies are resorted to when ideology has failed to produce acquiescent subjects. The contradictions inscribed in ideology produce very many confused or dissident subjects, and control of them depends upon convincing enough of the rest that such control is desirable and proper.
