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The world-picture of the Tamburlainiad is first of all a product of mapping. Contemplating the destruction of Damascus in Part I, Tamburlaine proposes to make it “the point/That shall begin the perpendicular” in a new division of the geographical field (Marlowe, Tamburlaine I: 4.4.83–84). It is necessary to quote once more a passage that has so often inaugurated discussions of Marlowe and cartography. Tamburlaine speaks:

I will confute those blind geographers

That make a triple region in the world,

Excluding regions which I mean to trace,

And with this pen reduce them to a map,

Calling the provinces, cities, and towns

After my name and thine, Zenocrate.

(lines 76–82)

Damascus is the first place to be reduced and reinscribed by the conqueror’s sword. As John Gillies argues, it will both usurp the role of Jerusalem as predetermined central “point” of the three-continent earth on a traditional T-in-O mappamundi and mark the “perpendicular” or initial meridian of longitude on the detailed fifteenth-century world map derived from Ptolemy that replaced the medieval model. The contradiction between Damascus as new sacred center and as arbitrary point on a grid exposes the self-deluding violence of conquest (Gillies, 56–57). The palimpsest of two successive stages in world mapping that Tamburlaine’s words suggest is moreover difficult to visualize beyond the screen of language. Earlier geographers were “blind,” presumably for occluding namable features in their three-part schematic of the earth as well as for excluding Tamburlaine’s anachronistic glimpse of undiscovered regions like the Americas. Tamburlaine, however, cannot propose a proper alignment among mapping, the visual, and the sacred – perhaps because such an alignment does not exist.

Before and after the Damascus moment, a third stage in the project of world mapping traces a covert way through the texts of Tamburlaine Parts I and II. The scholar Ethel Seaton and later editors have demonstrated that Marlowe wrote from a map or rather, from what I will call a world map book, Abraham Ortelius’s Theatrum Orbis Terrarum of 1570 (Seaton, “Marlowe’s Map”). Ortelius’s volume contains a world map and maps of world regions, like the map of Africa that lies behind the lengthy description by Techelles of his route of conquest on Tamburlaine’s behalf (II: 1.3.186–205). Signs of Ortelius’s visual influence on Marlowe’s language are present from the start of Part I (e.g. I: 1.2.162–169, 103 and notes). Marlowe’s misreading of labels in the world map book unknowingly creates an imaginary geography at times, condensing Romania and Rome, for instance, or taking Passera for Balsera and placing it in Turkey (II: 2.1.9, 3.3.3 and notes). Textual error is as arbitrary a tyrant as Tamburlaine, reducing and renaming territory on an invisible map, or collection of maps. It is only at the very end of the second play, when Tamburlaine enters, dying, in his chariot, that the map is made visible at his command, as a stage property. It appears indeed to be the world map included in Ortelius’s collection, for Tamburlaine enumerates unconquered regions moving across the Atlantic from just west of the African coast at the Tropic of Cancer (II: 5.3.126–160). This watery no-place, and not Damascus, formed the meridian at degree zero in the new cartography he now anticipates.

The title of Ortelius’s world map book lays down an itinerary through the visual realization of space that Marlowe also follows. Theatrum Orbis Terrarum: the earth, terra, is displayed in, but also simply is, a “theater.” It is conceived as a world-picture. Latin theatrum derives from a Greek verb for seeing. Here, the word denotes a space of dramatic representation as well as the general “Princes gallery or spacious Theater” for the mounting of large wall maps that Ortelius imagines in his preface (“[T]o the courteous Reader,” in Ortelius, n.p). But it is the term orbis that defines the sixteenth-century world-picture that Marlowe shared with Ortelius. The earth that is displayed is a “circle” or “disk,” not a “flat earth” as such but a projection of a round three-dimensional volume on a flat surface, or a series of such projections, region by region, in the world map book’s pages. Ptolemy’s accounts of projection had been rediscovered in the previous century with his influential world map, and long since applied by mapmakers to continents, countries, and cities. Projection makes the earth visible, but at the expense of distortion; regional maps are accurate, but they depend on the exclusion of the earth in its totality from the visual field. Both types of visual deficiency are evident in Ortelius’s world map book.

Mapmakers also fashioned globes, avoiding distortion by reproducing the earth’s features accurately on a spherical surface. But, as the cartographic theorist Christian Jacob points out, terrestrial globes entail visual problems of their own. If a globe is small, its geographical detail is hard to see and label; if large, “its giganticism exceeds the capacity of the synoptic gaze” (Jacob, 52). This is why the ideal geography lesson began with the globe but moved quickly to the manageable flat surfaces of charts and books. Jacob explains the advantage of Ortelius’s cumulative approach over other totalizing projects like globes and world maps. It is “suited to a different kind of mastery of the world, one that is more intellectual and encyclopedic … [and the] multiplicity of maps turns it into an archive in which all the geographical knowledge of a period may be recorded” (Jacob, 67). The viewer will never see the totality of the world; one can only hope to imagine it instead through reasoning about partial or distorted visual clues, valuable only in the aggregate and by means of a process. What Jacob calls the “logic of accumulation” behind the early modern world-picture was in place before Ortelius’s Theatrum Orbis Terrarum. Italian printers had long gathered loose maps and bound them into ad hoc codices for individual customers, now often called “Lafreri maps” by collectors after Antonio Lafreri, the best-known entrepreneur. Ortelius’s great advance was to render a collection relatively uniform and reproducible with his 1570 volume. Gerard Mercator went further. His Atlas, published in 1595, a year after his death (and two years after Marlowe’s murder), was a single-authored work in its original conception, although others’ maps were added to later editions (Jacob 67, 68–71). Like the African king Atlas who created the first celestial globe, Mercator, who cites this rationalization of the Atlas myth in his preface, lays claim as author to a form of perfect understanding through imperfect means and implicitly offers to help his audience navigate the faulty visual world as well (“Preface upon Atlas,” in Mercator, n.p).

The more familiar image of Atlas carrying a globe on his shoulders has traditionally been assumed to have been the sign of Shakespeare’s Globe Theater. I’d like to let this myth pass unquestioned and to set up, for heuristic purposes, one of my own: as Shakespeare, like Mercator, authored a body of work with an illusory global vision, so Marlowe in the Tamburlaine plays alone offered a manifest projection of the world, an orbis terrarum, on the flat surface of his stage, with the distortions and omissions (fewer omissions than in Shakespeare) laid out for all to see. Atlas as global figure antedates both Mercator and Shakespeare. Lafreri famously printed a generic frontispiece depicting Atlas for one of his cartographic miscellanies contemporary with Ortelius’s 1570 volume, long before Mercator’s first edition appeared (Jacob, 68). But let it stand: Marlowe created an orbicular theater before Shakespeare fashioned a global one, just as Ortelius’s Theatrum preceded Mercator’s Atlas.

The orbicular theater of Ortelius and Marlowe has much in common with Heidegger’s concept of the modern world-picture. Ancient and medieval world-pictures did not exist. In concluding a rumination on the human being’s self-conscious assumption of a new, measuring position as subject, Heidegger remarks that “It is no wonder that humanism first arises where the world becomes picture” (133). Apparent claims about historical periodization by Heidegger are never simple. But on a certain level of argument, one could apply his comments to Tamburlaine’s assertive novelty as well as Pico della Mirandola’s oration on human dignity. Of course, the world-picture is “more than” a painting or image of the earth, although it may also be that; it is not “a picture of the world but the world conceived and grasped as picture” (129). The world is defined as “what is, in its entirety” and is set before the modern subject as a system to be understood by the subject, who thus, in the slang phrase, “gets the picture” or rather gets in the picture, to follow Heidegger’s idiom (129). Having bent Heidegger back toward the Renaissance, one might incline him in the other direction, toward our time, and say that globalization is precisely the conceiving and grasping of the world as a globe – or as a “flat earth” of systematic networking and exchange. Yet the return of the orbis terrarum in recent discourse about globalization also reminds us that such projections always distort according to the position of the mapmaker.

The world map and, more so, the encyclopedic system of the world map book bear a synecdochal relation to the world-picture as a manifestation of being in general under modernity, including early modernity. For instance, the impossibility of accurately representing the earth in its totality as either globe or projection, Christian Jacob’s asynoptic giganticism, is echoed in Heidegger’s concluding meditation on “the gigantic” in modern technology. The gigantic ultimately annihilates itself by shrinking the world by means of communication and through the infinite regress of the purely quantitative toward the increasingly small, as in “the numbers in atomic physics.” When gigantic quantities thus undo themselves, they convert to quality, what Heidegger calls a certain kind of greatness, and the calculable becomes incalculable, a shadow. “By means of this shadow,” Heidegger writes, “the modern world extends itself into a space withdrawn from representation” (135–136). The remarkable passage on the gigantic also suggests a way station between the Renaissance and Heidegger’s modernity, in the mathematical sublime of Kant’s Critique of Judgement. Sublimity proceeds from the subject’s mind when it pictures the world, as the imagination attests to its own vital role as well as reason’s power even as it fails to provide an adequate representation of a magnitude available only to reason (Kant, 106). It is hard to miss Heidegger’s debt to Kant. The earlier philosopher comments on the relative nature of size with the help of the telescope and the microscope, the instruments of Enlightenment physics, and thus relates the sublime not to gigantic objects, like “the earth’s diameter,” but to our failed imagination of ever larger objects, like the solar system and systems of other systems still, “which go by the name of nebulae.” By the time we reach, or fall short of, these shadowy realms, quantity has become quality (Kant, 97, 105, 108).

Kant serves as a midpoint between Marlowe and Heidegger in another manner, one that broaches the argument about representation and religion that follows. The failure to project or present the world or anything else, Kant asserts, creates a sublime “negative presentation” or gap in signification that is an end in itself and that also generates its own kind of sublimity when it is formalized:

Perhaps there is no more sublime passage in the Jewish law than the commandment: Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven or on earth, or under the earth, &c. This commandment can alone explain the enthusiasm which the Jewish people, in their moral period, felt for their religion when comparing themselves with others, or the pride inspired by Mohammedanism.

(127)

Kant truncates the biblical passage, for the burden of the second commandment lies in its injunction not to bow down and worship such images (Exodus 20:4). In his emphasis on the prohibition of representation itself, as we shall see, the philosopher actually assimilates Judaism to what Europeans knew of Islamic belief. Cast as an afterthought in this passage though it is, the image of Islam has played a key role in debates about imagination and its limits in the European theater. I have come to questions about representation much wider than those raised by mapmaking. They call for an examination of Marlowe’s technique and its inaugural swerve from the biblical and classical traditions towards the greater global, or orbicular, scene of Islam. This is the movement of the Tamburlaine plays.