Its ending is disconcerting. Zenocrate has drawn the traditional warnings about ‘fickle empery’ and ‘earthly pomp’ (1.352–3) from the fall of Bajazeth and his wife; now, with their corpses and her sometime fiancé’s still on stage, she is enthroned and crowned. This extraordinary tableau has been compared to the amoral triumph of the lovers at the end of Monteverdi’s opera L’Incoronazione di Poppea (1642).11 It is at once an emblem of victory and a warning of the brutality and transience of power.

To some, Part Two seems just more of the same. But the effect may be deliberate. The hero is a murderous automaton, compulsively repeating what the play’s running-title calls The Bloody Conquests of Mighty Tamburlaine. And there are differences. Tamburlaine is offstage for most of the first two acts. He is older; his conquests are now an empire; attention shifts to some extent to his heirs and a new generation of antagonists. The play opens on the banks of the Danube, where the Muslim world meets Christendom, and is set against a backdrop of geopolitical conflicts. (Tellingly, the ringing place-names are now more precise: Marlowe was using an atlas.12) The conflicts are at once religious and territorial, and the play is not on the Christian side. The perfidious Christians are overrun by a pious Muslim who calls on Christ; the God he reveres is one ‘that sits on high and never sleeps, / Nor in one place is circumscriptible’ (2.2.49–50). Beyond the vast Asiatic spaces over which the action is fought out, there is a vaster spiritual dimension.

Tamburlaine too is seen against this background. His conquests continue, but are now vulnerable to irony. Callapine escapes his captivity by seducing his gaoler with an offer of a crown that parodies Tamburlaine’s invitations to power; his idle and cowardly son is a damaging mockery of his killer-ethic; and, most importantly, he is helpless in the face of Zenocrate’s death: his frustrated rant about invading Heaven and Hell to win her back is deflated by Theridamas’s realism: ‘She is dead, / And all this raging cannot make her live’ (2.4.119–20). Hitherto invulnerable, his wounding his own arm to teach his sons courage is also the self-mutilation of blocked grief. He cannot even bury her body, but drags it with him, burning towns as perverse monuments to her memory. There are more victories, but they are circumscribed by the increasingly persistent references to Heaven, Hell and death.

A nuclear scientist, watching the first atomic bomb explode, grimly applied to himself the words of a great Hindu god: ‘I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.’13 Tamburlaine too identifies with death, and his terrible chariot drawn by captive kings belongs in the traditional Triumph of Death. The idea of earthly conquest is still strong towards the end of the play – in Babylon, where earlier conquerors ‘Have rode in triumph, triumphs Tamburlaine’ (5.1.70) – but his march to Samarkand is cut short by his own death. Yet even here, Marlowe avoids conventional Christian moralizing. His final illness begins just after he has burned the Koran, an act which could be interpreted as a fatal defiance of divine power, except that he burns it in the name of God (‘For he is God alone, and none but he’, 5.1.201). And in the last scene, the crown with which he invests his son is the sign of a purely secular power. The play remains studiedly ambiguous about the religious meaning, if any, of ‘Tamburlaine, the scourge of God’ (5.3.248).

Of Marlowe’s own religious views, nothing certain can be known. The closest we come is the dubious record of ‘his damnable judgement of religion, and scorn of God’s word’ preserved in the ‘note’ Richard Baines delivered to the Privy Council close to the time of Marlowe’s death. Baines was a hostile and unreliable witness (he had been apprehended with Marlowe for counterfeiting in Holland; each accused the other of intending to desert to the Catholic enemy), and his note is an informer’s delation. But it is the nearest thing we have to evidence and is reprinted at the end of this Introduction. The opinions it contains are clever and provocative. The religion of Moses was magical trickery, designed, like all religion, ‘only to keep men in awe’. The New Testament is ‘filthily written’, its mysteries sexual scandals. The most entertaining blasphemy – ‘That St John the Evangelist was bedfellow to Christ and leaned always in his bosom, and that he used him [note the ambiguity of the pronouns] as the sinners of Sodoma’ – sounds like an accusation until you read the disarming sequel: ‘That all they that love not tobacco and boys were fools.’

More important, perhaps, to an understanding of the place of religion in Marlowe’s plays is the context of Counter-Reformation Europe. ‘Atheism’ in the sixteenth century did not preclude belief in God.