ABSTRACT
The historical Tamerlane the Great conquered large chunks of Asia and North Africa in the latter fourteenth century. This chapter examines its soldiers' desire for violence without end, concentrating on the affective motivations and consequences of the bloodshed. Christopher Marlowe's characters – males and females, soldiers and civilians – always experience desire not as a universal, but as a historically and socially constructed force. Tamburlaine's speech ventriloquizes a stance toward the naturalness of violence that is readily assumed by many military conduct-book writers of the late sixteenth century. Working on the war rhetoric of Greek epic, Emily Vermeule notes there a similar though not identical phenomenon of gender-switching or gender-baiting one's opponents, contending of the verbal jousts that precede combat, 'When taunting, the aim is to turn the opposing soldier into a female, or into the weaker animal role'. Marlowe's play itself does not unambiguously endorse the unilateral hegemony of men over women.
