The Story Archive

Tamburlaine the Great

Christopher Marlowe · c. 1587 CE · Play · English · Renaissance

A Scythian shepherd turned bandit takes a Persian army by talking to it, and goes on taking crowns until captive kings are drawing his coach and a Turkish emperor is kept in a cage. Across two full plays nothing on earth checks him, and his one attachment is to a captured Egyptian princess who follows the camp. Marlowe worked from sixteenth-century lives of Timur rather than any single ancestor, and the blank verse he wrote here set the measure the whole Elizabethan stage then used.

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Attributes

Genre
TragedyHistoricalEpic
Theme
Ambition & HubrisPower & CorruptionWar & ViolenceFame & Glory
Archetype (Jung / Campbell)
Anti-HeroRuler / KingVillain / TyrantLover
Plot structure
Rise and FallEpisodicChronicle
Emotional arc (story shape)
Rise–Fall (Icarus)
Quest object (Greimas)
Power / The Throne
Symbol / motif
The CrownThe SwordThe BattlefieldFire
Conflict
vs Personvs Fate / Gods
Mode / tone
EpicTragic
Culture / tradition
English

Closest analogues