Leiden University Student Repository

Young, Sarah (2016)

'I Am a Lord, for So My Deeds Shall Prove:" Performing the Authority of Elizabeth the First in Marlowe's Tamburlaine

Master thesis | Literary Studies (MA)

Combining Stephen Greenblatt's concept of Renaissance self-fashioning and Kevin Sharpe's analysis of the performative authority of the Tudor monarchs, this thesis examines the way in which the political self-fashioning of Queen Elizabeth I specifically is figured within both parts of Christopher Marlowe's Tamburlaine. The first three chapters outline the various ways in which Elizabeth effected this self-fashioning (through language and rhetoric; image, spectacle and symbol; and the instrumentilisation of concepts of religion and empire) and detail how these methods are used by Tamburlaine within the play to create his own authority. The fourth chapter then turns to the question of whether this necessarily makes Tamburlaine a subversive play, ultimately concluding that, although the mimicry of the monarch is surely deliberate, the answer lies in the reaction of the audience to the text.

Tamburlaine

Christopher Marlowe

Elizabeth I

Elizabethan drama

Renaissance

Author

Young, Sarah

Faculty

Faculty of Humanities

Specialisation

English Literature and Culture

Supervisors

Pelt, N.T. van

ECTS Credits

20

Language

en