Affordable Bodies and Affective Bodies: The Use of Bodies in Tamburlaine the Great

Abstract

The exceptional success of Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great series proves the public interest and fascination on the heathen sovereignty, along with his spectacular body image that impressed even the enemies within the play. Conflating the both, the play provides a symbolic example of an emperor, overwhelmingly competitive in appearance as well as in belligerence at war. Tamburlaine’s body, depicted as monstrously distinguishable from others, fluctuates between the extremes; an idealized body and a monstrous body. Instead of positing Tamburlaine’s singular body as a source of wonder, this essay traces the different uses of his body, especially the bodies of monarchs, including his own, continuously affecting and being affected to construct the sovereign body of empire. Although it seems that Tamburlaine’s body initiates the project of empire, serving as a prototype or at least a mastermind leading the assembly of bodies at the beginning, it soon reveals that the project of building an empire accompanies the process of his body losing its singularity and autonomy. Marlowe exemplifies how the most extraordinary body succumbs to the collective assembly, ironically demonstrating that the individual bodies do not always comply but may dissent to the mind. Tamburlaine, who wanted to surpass the material limitations of his body with his “aspiring mind” ultimately results in a gruesome marriage ceremony amid the corpses. The symbolic body he created with prosthesis of other living and dead bodies consequently absorbs and transforms Tamburlaine’s body as well, proving its fluidity in response to the “uses” that he himself executed.