Tamburlaine The Great And Renaissance Villain-Hero

Christopher Marlowe(1564-1593)is the most important English dramatist before Shakespeare,making great contribution to the development of English tragedy.He is the first one to employ the villain-hero as the tragic hero on the English stage.The villain-hero has been developed into an important type of character,exerting great influence on English literature.This thesis,based on the villain-hero and The Prince of Niccolo Machiavelli(1469-1527),is an attempt to interpret Tamburlaine as a Renaissance hero and monarch.The villain-hero is created when old and new values are in conflict.Since the villain-heroes usually represent the new trend of values and social consciousness,they are unavoidably ill judged by those who are governed by old values,thus creating moral ambiguity.However,the study of villain-hero in Marlowe's Tamburlaine the Great has not been paid much attention to by literary critics at home and abroad.Despite the fact that villain-heroes are evil,it does not mean they are not qualified as tragic heroes.After all,Tamburlaine is not totally evil in that he embodies Renaissance humanism which is in conflict with traditional Christian ideas.The main body of this thesis is divided into three parts.The first part is a brief literature review on the study of Christopher Marlowe and Tamburlaine the Great.The second part compares Marlowe's villain-hero with villain characters in English religious dramas.The comparison reveals that the one-sided traditional villain is greatly transformed by Marlowe into the much more complicated and heroic villain-hero.This chapter also points out how Marlowe portrays Tamburlaine as a villain-hero.The third part is an attempt to reveal Tamburlaine as an ideal monarch who is prudent,wise,cunning and cautious.This chapter also tries to expound the influence of the features of an ideal monarch on Tamburlaine,especially prudence.In sum,Marlowe portrays Tamburlaine as a hero and an ideal monarch who isinfluenced by the conflicts between Renaissance Humanism and Christian tradition.