It owes much to Lucian, and fits well the horrified description of the boy-actors’ repertoire in The Children of the Chapel Stripped and Whipped (1569): ‘Even in her Majesty’s chapel do these pretty upstart youths profane the Lord’s day by the lascivious writhing of their tender limbs, and gorgeous decking of their apparel, in feigning bawdy fables gathered from the idolatrous heathen poets.’6 Jupiter’s sexual wheedling – an extended version of Marlowe’s famous lyric ‘The Passionate Shepherd to his Love’ (‘Come live with me, and be my love’)7 – is the first of many such invitations. Marlowe multiplies and complicates the love-affairs, and his characters express their desires in ways that are persistently and disturbingly linked with children. The principal changes to Virgil are in the boy-parts of Ascanius and Cupid. Venus abducts Ascanius with sticky promises of ‘sugar-almonds, sweet conserves, / A silver girdle and a golden purse’ (2.1.305–6) so that Cupid can take his place and cause Dido to fall for Aeneas. When she does, she offers (‘Conditionally that thou wilt stay with me’) to refit his ships with erotically luxurious

          tackling made of rivelled gold,
Wound on the barks of odoriferous trees;
Oars of massy ivory, full of holes,
Through which the water shall delight toplay (3.1.113,115–18)

and promises Achates a sailor-suit that will allure the nymphs and mermaids, ‘So that Aeneas may but stay with me’ (132). Everyone is turned on, including the old Nurse, who invites Cupid to her

           orchard that hath store of plums,
Brown almonds, services, ripe figs, and dates,
Dewberries, apples, yellow oranges… (4.5.4–6)

The cumulative effect is to drive the play away from epic and towards comedy – the comedy of John Lyly, whose Gallathea (1583–5), also written for boy-actors, makes much of the havoc wreaked by Cupid in disguise.

Yet Dido is tragedy, not comedy, a generically labile play in which love is funny but dangerous, its menace signalled by constant reminders of Helen and the fall of Troy. When Cupid snuggles up to Dido and sings a song on her knee in order to get close enough to touch her with his infatuating golden arrow, the dialogue itself glitters ominously:

DIDO

… tell me where learn’dst thou this pretty song?

CUPID

My cousin Helen taught it me in Troy. (3.1.27–8)

To keep Aeneas, Dido is even prepared to copy ‘that ticing strumpet’ (2.1.300):

So thou wouldst prove as true as Paris did,
Would, as fair Troy was, Carthage might be sacked
And I be called a second Helena! (5.1.146–8)

Dramatic irony works here much as it does in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida: Aeneas won’t be true, but will leave in the ships Dido has given him; and Carthage, of course, will be sacked in the wars with Rome which she calls down at the end of the play. Fire is everywhere – even the most woodenly Elizabethan line, ‘Gentle Achates, reach the tinder-box’ (1.1.166), has a spark in it – and the flames of love at once recall the firing of Troy and point forward to the fire in which Dido immolates herself. Dido’s funeral pyre, fuelled by the tokens of Aeneas’ love, is both a solemn sacrifice and a faintly comic hecatomb. Its arch solemnity is typical of the play as a whole; like the rest of the play, its erotic and ironic force are still underrated.

Tamburlaine the Great was Marlowe’s first big hit. Written for adult players, it too is a striking instance of Renaissance neo-classicism. This may surprise us in a history-play about a fourteenth-century Asiatic conqueror, but part of Tamburlaine’s significance to the Elizabethans was the coincidence of his conquests with the European Renaissance: ‘During [his] reign began the restitution of learning and of the arts.’8 Hence the hero praises his wife by claiming that if Zenocrate had lived

before the siege of Troy,
Helen, whose beauty summoned Greece to arms
And drew a thousand ships to Tenedos,
Had not been named in Homer’s Iliads. (Part Two, 2.4.86–9)

Tamburlaine’s poetry of wealth and power – what Ben Jonson called ‘Marlowe’s mighty line’9 – has in fact less affinity with Homer than with the war-poetry of Lucan’s Pharsalia (Marlowe translated its first book, and Tamburlaine alludes in Part One 3.3 to the battle that gives the poem its title). Jonson more sourly complained of the plays’ ‘scenical strutting, and furious vociferation’,10 and modern audiences also sometimes feel wearied by what can seem a formless action driven on by rant.

But Tamburlaine is not one play, but two. Part One, which its original running-title called The Conquests of Tamburlaine the Scythian Shepherd, is about the unstoppable rise of its hero from poverty and obscurity to ‘The sweet fruition of an earthly crown’ (2.6.69). It has an exceptionally clear five-act structure (roughly one per conquest), and its action was originally diversified by comic scenes which the printer cut because he thought them ‘a great disgrace to so honorable and stately a history’ (‘To the Gentlemen Readers’, 16–17). Nonetheless, it begins with comic bathos: Persia, whose past kings ‘triumphed over Afric, and the bounds / Of Europe’ (1.1.9–10) is now ruled by the effete Mycetes; in the first scene, the crown passes with comic rapidity to his ambitious brother Cosroe, who promises the rebels they will ‘triumph over many provinces’ (173). Into this power-vacuum, in Acts 1 and 2, comes Tamburlaine, a passionate shepherd – Marlowe emphasizes his humble origins, just as he exaggerates Aeneas’ destitution in Dido – whose invitation to love (‘Disdains Zenocrate to live with me?…’, 1.2.82–105) is an astonishing offer of barbaric splendour. He even uses the display of his treasure as a military tactic. He briefly supports Cosroe, until the usurper unintentionally fuels his desire to ‘ride in triumph through Persepolis’, then turns on ‘this triumphing king’ (2.5.49, 87) and, at the end of Act 2, hymning ‘aspiring minds’ (2.6.60) over Cosroe’s expiring body, he plucks the crown from his corpse and puts it on. Thereafter, each act ends with a coronation.

We see few battles. Instead the play feels like a triumphal pageant, and the idea of the Roman triumph is deep in its structure. Roman triumphal processions were celebrations of victory, elaborate street-theatre which displayed the triumphator’s glory in plundered spoils and the marching bodies of enslaved captives. Their fascination for Renaissance artists is apparent in Petrarch’s allegorical Trionfi (1356–74); in Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (1590–96); and most memorably in Mantegna’s Triumphs of Caesar (1486–92), now at Hampton Court and well known in the sixteenth century through reproduction in woodcuts and engravings. Tamburlaine’s catalogues of names, its exhibitions of wealth and its stage-pageantry bring the triumph to the London stage.

Yet Tamburlaine’s triumphs over his enemies increasingly seem the ceremonious exultations of sadism. The defeated Bajazeth is put in a cage and ‘in triumph drawn’ (4.2.86); Tamburlaine, who has felt the ‘thirst of reign and sweetness of a crown’ (2.6.52), feasts while his prisoner starves, and torments him with the strange confection of ‘a second course of crowns’ (4.4.110SD). Zenocrate, herself part of the spoils of war, is increasingly used to register the horror of Tamburlaine’s atrocities. Her pity for his victims prompts his one soliloquy (‘Ah, fair Zenocrate, divine Zenocrate…’, 5.1.135–90); but it is a rapturous contemplation of her suffering beauty – her crying excites him – as a force almost powerful enough to restrain him. The whole play ponders the connection of beauty and pain in his question, ‘What is beauty, saith my sufferings, then?’ (1.160).