:

The god of war resigns his room to me,
Meaning to make me general of the world:
Jove, viewing me in arms, looks pale and wan,
Fearing my power should pull him from his throne.

These are wild words, chosen from a passage of ridiculous bombast. But
the author, magnificent in his optimism, believed in the thought beneath
the imagery. The same idea in different guises proclaims itself aloud
throughout the play. Sometimes it chooses simple language, sometimes it
is clothed in expressions of noble dignity, most often it hurls itself
abroad in foaming rant. But everywhere the message is the same, that
man's power is equal to the achievement of the aspiration planted within
his breast, and that, to realize himself, he must follow it, with
undivided effort, until it is reached. Tamburlaine, contemplating the
possibility of kingship, says,

Why, then, Casane, shall we wish for aught
The world affords in greatest novelty,
And rest attemptless, faint, and destitute?
Methinks we should not.

Two scenes later, in the hour of triumph, he utters these fine lines,
which may be accepted as Marlowe's most deliberate statement of his
message:

Nature, that framed us of four elements
Warring within our breasts for regiment,[66]
Doth teach us all to have aspiring minds:
Our souls, whose faculties can comprehend
The wondrous architecture of the world,
And measure every wandering planet's course,
Still climbing after knowledge infinite,
And always moving as the restless spheres,
Will us to wear ourselves, and never rest,
Until we reach the ripest fruit of all,
That perfect bliss and sole felicity,
The sweet fruition of an earthly crown.

We have used the extreme superlative, but in reality a point just below
it should have been struck. For the dramatist, sending his imagination
beyond earth to heaven, reserves one peak unscalable in the ascent of
man towards the summit of his aspirations.

There is one potentate whom even Tamburlaine cannot overcome--Death.
Zenocrate dies, nor will 'cavalieros higher than the clouds', nor
cannon to 'batter the shining palace of the sun, and shiver all the
starry firmament', restore her. Tamburlaine himself must die, defiantly,
it may be, yielding nothing through cowardice, but as certainly as time
must pass and age must come. Techelles seeks to encourage him with the
hope that his illness will not last. But he bru