ABSTRACT
THE critical controversy which for many years now has been swirling around Tamburlaine turns on the basic problem of determining what attitude the audience is to adopt toward the protagonist. That problem and the attendant controversy, it should be noted, are not concerned with the attitude which Tamburlaine actually does evoke in modern viewers and readers, where we would expect to encounter a considerable variety of personal reactions, but rather with the attitude which Marlowe intended to evoke toward him in the play itself. Yet even on this presumably more objective question we find that the answers proposed by recent critics show the widest possible disagreement, ranging all the way from wholehearted admiration to equally wholehearted condemnation, with a number of intermediate positions. Thus the critics at the negative end of this spectrum,1 although they may differ on many subsidiary points, are all agreed not only in condemning Tamburlaine themselves, but also in asserting that he is unequivocally condemned by Marlowe and hence by the play. Most of them also agree that this condemnation is conveyed primarily by means of a pervasive irony that undercuts Tamburlaine's "apparent" triumphs and reduces them to a series of failures or defeats culminating in his death, which both judges and punishes him, so that his entire career and its outcome are presented as a kind of negative exemplum or admonitory morallesson.2 And for this reason I will call them the ironic critics.
