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In turning toward Islam, I register a movement in early modern literary studies away from geography or ethnicity and toward religion as the principal category through which Europeans represented themselves and others during the period. Even as geo-ethnic categories of identity have been challenged, the methodology most associated with them, the study of images or representations of “the other,” has remained front and center. Superb scholarship has already been done on the representation of Islam in the English Renaissance, from Nabil Matar’s pathbreaking book Islam in Britain to Jonathan Burton’s Traffic and Turning: Islam and English Drama. So it is with some trepidation that I suggest Islam was not represented on the early modern English stage. Of course, as with studies of ethnicity, religious studies in the period take the failure of the image into account, especially in the case of the theater, for they are largely about misrepresentations in the sense of stereotypes and tendentious preconceptions, on and off stage. Islam may have been more profoundly misrepresented still, however, to the point of virtual absence despite the staging of putatively Muslim characters, beliefs, and rituals in a range of plays. How, in any case, can literature depict any religion as a category of identity? Is religion like ethnic or racial identity, or like the forms of belonging associated with realms, regions, or countries?

The question of misrepresentation is rendered more complex still by the way in which representation itself was at stake between Christianity and Islam in the world at large. What the art historian Terry Allen has termed “aniconism, the nonuse of images” in Islamic culture was conditioned by theological beliefs (Allen, 20). Though dimly perceived and poorly understood by Christians, the avoidance of representation in Islam was, ironically, one of the few religious concepts to gain some measure of representation in nondramatic European writings on Muslims and the East. Monotheism, to which aniconism is intimately tied, and the importance of prophecy, prayer, and pilgrimage are others. Only rarely are these elements referred to in the drama of the period when it stages what purports to be Muslim belief and practice. Yet in Tamburlaine Parts I and II we do find a series of scenes that may have sprung from an abortive encounter with some traces of Islamic thought in medieval and early modern European learning.

The origin of “Islamic aniconism” remains controversial. Aniconism is not a central belief or practice that defines Islam as a religion, although it is attested in Hadith, traditions about the sayings and actions of Muhammad. The attitude to representation that Western art historians call “aniconism” is complex. It is images of living beings that are banned, not of inanimate objects. Maps or world-images of any kind are not in question, and mapmaking thrived under Islam. Furthermore, the focus is on religious rather than secular art: according to Allen, “figural representation has always been a part of secular art in the Islamic world” (17). There is no question, of course, of attempting visually to represent the godhead in any context, religious or secular. Yet, unlike biblical aniconism and European iconoclasm, Islamic aniconism is not principally a way of avoiding the profanation of religious figures and ideas by means of visuality. Images of people and animals in general, not simply of the Prophet and religious figures, are forbidden, and in religious contexts above all. According to one tradition in Hadith, this is because the image maker or painter tries to appropriate God’s creative power in depicting living things. Muhammad once said that painters would receive a harsher punishment than others on the Day of Judgment. Another saying holds that in Hell, the painter will be commanded to breathe life into the images he has made and will fail (Arnold, 5). These traditions represent a hardening of earlier attitudes toward painting in Islam, and they run counter to the continual presence of figural art on secular themes in Turkey, Iran, and elsewhere up to the sixteenth century and beyond. Allen has influentially distinguished the secular and the religious in Islamic art while insisting that secular practice subtends religious ideology. Nevertheless, the curious punishment of the painter and the theology behind it remain compelling.

As I am neither a theologian nor an art historian, the previous paragraphs are offered in all humility and no doubt require some correction. In unearthing what Marlowe and other late-sixteenth-century Europeans knew, or thought they knew, about Islam, the image, and the world-picture in its widest sense, I felt it necessary to explore what Islamic aniconism, to call it that, was and is. And I admit that the fine distinctions I have described already would have been lost on many in Marlowe’s audience, had they even known about them. Some Christians still maintained medieval notions of Muslims as idolatrous worshippers of Muhammad. The more sophisticated viewed Muslims through the lens of Christianity’s own religious disputes, casting them as iconoclastic. Protestants in England often placed Islam in direct opposition to Catholicism, with its supposed veneration of images as idols that at once profaned and replaced the godhead. Philippus Lonicerus’s Chronicorum turcicorum, a book Marlowe almost certainly knew, describes the Turks’ destruction of “imagines, picturas & effigies” at Constantinople: only God is to be worshipped, they assert, not stone, wood, or base or precious metals (Volume I, Book 2, Second Part, 101). In the vernacular, a sermon by Meredith Hanmer, printed in popular black letter type, trumpeted the conversion of “Chinano” the Turk to Christianity upon his rescue by Drake from 25 years of Spanish captivity. Asked why he had not converted earlier, Chinano claimed two things held him back: the cruelty of the Spaniard, and “his Idolatry in the worshipping of Images.” Hanmer dwells on Muslim anti-idolatry, playing upon a common English theme by assimilating Islam to Reformation Christianity because of its rejection of religious, and especially Catholic, images (Hanmer, E2 recto, E5 recto–verso; Matar, 126–129). Aniconism becomes Protestant iconoclasm. Yet in the Tamburlaine plays traces of a subtler and perhaps somewhat less mistaken view of Islam and representation may be found, one that comprises theological ideas about God and creation, about human misrepresentations and their consequences in the afterlife, and about the very possibility of representing life itself in visual form at all. Spectacular dramatist and poet of ekphrasis though he was, Marlowe began his stage career with a dual challenge to his own strengths. He may have done so in part through a fragmentary knowledge of Islam, gained perhaps during his studies at Cambridge.²

There is only one direct reference to Islam and visual representation in Marlowe’s works. Defeated and captive, the Turkish emperor Bajazeth bemoans his fate in Tamburlaine, Part I:

Now will the Christian miscreants be glad,

Ringing with joy their superstitious bells

And making bonfires for my overthrow.

But ere I die, those foul idolaters

Shall make me bonfires with their filthy bones.

(I: 3.3.236–240)

Unlike the Persian Cosroe, Bajazeth is defined from his earliest appearance in the action by frequent appeals to “Mahomet.” And it is in this scene that Tamburlaine first refers to himself as the “scourge” of God and backhanded protector of the Christians (lines 44–50). These “miscreants” or misbelievers will rejoice for now at the Turk’s defeat, then. Their misbelief consists in foul idolatry, which many in the audience knew was the usual charge of Muslims against the Christians.

Textual editors have been silent on the “superstitious bells” the Christians will ring. Superstition was so closely linked with idolatry that in 1678 Thomas Tenison wrote a substantial tract entitled Of Idolatry: A Discourse, in Which Is Endeavored a Declaration of, Its Distinction from Superstition. In the first chapter, Tenison cites sources on the lengthy association of the two terms and explains that the superstitious veneration of demons or heroes is only one branch of idol-worship (Tenison, 2–11). Jonathan Burton has shown that the term “bell-metals” was regularly applied to the quantities of lead, tin, and other metals exported to the Ottomans by the English Crown for use as canon and munitions. The trade in ordnance was much condemned in Catholic Europe, the more so as its raw materials were derived from the Tudor dissolution of the monasteries and the breaking of their furniture, statuary, and bells. But to English Protestants the bell-metal trade was a logical form of recycling, one that cemented Elizabeth’s delicate negotiations with the Turkish Porte at the expense of its traditional French and Venetian commercial allies. Burton shows how Elizabeth’s diplomatic correspondence with Murad III accentuated a unitarian tendency in Protestantism over against Catholic trinitarianism and the idolatry it was said to promote.³ This strategy was not known only to the elite: in his sermon, Hanmer cites the Ottoman secretary’s praise of Elizabeth for having the most sound religion among the Christians (E6 verso–E7 recto). Murad himself had commended the Lutherans of Flanders for banishing “the idols and portraits and ‘bells’ from churches” (quoted in Burton, 62). To Burton’s research in the diplomatic realm I would add that Hadith often associates painting with bells and other noisemakers used to call Eastern Christians to prayer in their ornate places of worship (Arnold, 10). Marlowe’s expression “superstitious bells” is a linguistic kernel that encodes a meeting of Tudor Protestantism and Islamic tradition over against Catholic visuality.

A key episode in Part II reflects upon religious self-representation and misrepresentation in the widest sense of the term. Sigismond, King of Hungary, swears an oath by Christ to abide by his peace treaty with Orcanes, now leader of the Turkish forces. Orcanes vows in turn:

By sacred Mahomet, the friend of God,

Whose holy Alcaron remains with us,

Whose glorious body, when he left the world Closed in a coffin, mounted up the air And hung on stately Mecca’s temple roof, I swear to keep this truce inviolable.

(II: 1.1.137–142)

The fanciful legend of Muhammad’s iron coffin, suspended by lodestones as a false miracle, was cited by Hanmer; the supposedly anti-idolatrous Turks practice superstition in visiting such shrines, as Catholics do.⁴ The “Alcaron,” no less than the spectacle of the Prophet’s tomb, is implicitly taken as a kind of idol in this passage. Yet Sigismond is the one who misrepresents himself in breaking his oath, causing the faithful Orcanes to offer theological arguments against idolatry. “Can there be such deceit in Christians,” he asks, “Whose shape is figure of the highest God?” (II: 2.2.36, 37). His question looks forward to William Bedwell’s Mohammedis imposturae of 1615, a dialogue published by one of the first Arabic scholars in England, which begins with “Sheich Sinan” citing the creation of man in the “forme and similitude” of God as a prelude to the rejection of idols and human images (B2 recto–B3 recto). Bedwell claims to have translated his tract from an original text by a Christian Arab. The name Sinan is common in Arabic and Turkish, and it sounds like Hanmer’s “Chinano” as well. Perhaps some stock name for a Muslim is reflected in these texts, part of a lost English tradition of legendary converts and their crossover beliefs.

The rest of Orcanes’s speech uses terms that Sinan, and also of course most Christian thinkers, would understand. Tearing the treaty, he calls on Christ as his sign of victory while imagining a God who cannot be reduced to spatial or visual form:

he that sits on high and never sleeps

Nor in one place is circumscriptible,

But everywhere fills every continent

With strange infusion of his sacred vigor.

(II: 2.2.49–52)

The godhead is like the world here, continental in range but uncircumscribed by any map or globe. It has long been recognized that Marlowe’s episode is based on a mid-fifteenth-century clash of worlds, the Hungarian King Vladislaus’s oath-breaking with Amurath II before the battle of Varna. The story is recounted in a Latin history of Hungary that Marlowe may also have seen in translation before it was published in 1603 by Richard Knolles in his Generall Historie of the Turkes (“Introduction,” in Marlowe, 17). Here, Amurath, “beholding the picture of the Crucifix in the displaied ensignes of the voluntarie Christians,” brandishes the treaty document and calls on Christ to revenge the Hungarians’ deceit (Knolles, 297). In the source, both Christian and Turk remain idolaters of a sort. Marlowe suppresses the pictured crucifixes and causes the Muslim to develop from idolater to iconoclast, or aniconist. Perhaps it is in this spirit, rather than simply an opportunistic one, that Orcanes claims either Christ or Muhammad as his friend, for each is the emissary of an invisible God (II: 2.3.11). As for Sigismond, his body will be left for birds to feed upon, “since this miscreant hath disgraced his faith/And died a traitor both to heaven and earth” (lines 36–37). Because Sigismond, the imperfect figure of the highest God, has committed perjury, his visible remains in the human body must be desecrated. With “miscreant” we are brought full circle back to the passage on the superstitious bells and foul idolatry of the Christians. The word appears just twice in Marlowe’s writings.

In the same speeches, Orcanes also imagines Sigismond’s fate in the afterlife:

Now scalds his soul in the Tartarian streams

And feeds upon the baneful tree of hell,

That Zoacum, that fruit of bitterness,

That in the midst of fire is engraft,

Yet flourisheth as Flora in her pride,

With apples like the heads of damned fiends.

(II: 2.3.18–23)

The Zoacum, or Zaqqum, tree appears in the Qur’an, principally in surah 37: “It grows in the nethermost part of Hell, bearing fruit like devils’ heads: on it they [the damned] shall feed, and with it they shall cram their bellies, together with draughts of scalding water” (The Koran, 447; insertion mine). Do we have a remarkable instance of an early modern English playwright citing the Qur’an? In my view, we do (see also Al-Olaqi, 1733). In another classic article, Seaton argued instead that Marlowe found his fantastical tree in Lonicerus’s Chronicorum turcicorum, where the spelling “Zoacum” appears (Seaton, “Fresh Sources,” 385–387). The more usual Latin spelling is “ezecum,” she attests, but she does not cite its probable source: a twelfth-century Latin translation of the Qur’an by Robertus Retenensis (or Robert of Reading, now known as Robert of Chester), printed as Machumetis Sarracenorum principis (Basel: Joannes Oporinus, 1543).⁵ The Parker Library of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, has a copy of the second edition of 1550. Although it cannot be proved to have been present in the collection during the late sixteenth century, this translation of the Qur’an is listed in the Parker Register of books bequeathed to Corpus Christi by Archbishop Matthew Parker in 1575.⁶ Corpus Christi was Marlowe’s college. Of course, as Park Honan has recently remarked in another context, even as an MA candidate Marlowe may not have had access to the prized books of the collection for one reason or another (Honan, 75–76). Yet it is worth noting that the detail of scalding water in descriptions of the tree, which appears in surah 37 and also in the other surahs where Zaqqum is explicitly mentioned (44, 56), is absent from Lonicerus but present in Marlowe’s version.⁷ Lonicerus begins the brief chapter where the tree appears by citing the “Curaam” on the treatment of the damned in general, and this rare word may designate the Qur’an or some putative Turkish digest of it in Europe’s odd early modern Eastern lexicon.⁸ If Marlowe consulted the Qur’an in Latin, cued by Lonicerus, he might also have found surah 56, where the scalding tree is juxtaposed with the assertion of Allah’s creative power (The Koran, 535). Sigismond is punished for misrepresenting himself in his oath by Christ; by doing so, he defies his creation in the image of God.

Against my speculations, the simple fact of Marlowe’s not mentioning the Qur’an in his Zoacum passage must be set. And Marlowe does notoriously mention it later in Tamburlaine II:

Now, Casane, where’s that Turkish Alcaron

And all the heaps of superstitious books

Found in the temples of that Mahomet

Whom I have thought a god? They shall be burnt.

… There is a God full of revenging wrath,

From whom the thunder and the lightening breaks, Whose scourge I am, and him I will obey. So Casane, fling them in the fire.

(II: 5.1.172–175, 182–185)

It is worth revisiting these familiar lines. The “Alcaron” is now one of many “superstitious” or idolatrous books. The very word of God is treated by Tamburlaine as if it was a visual thing, a physical icon. The conqueror believes in a speechless God who, if not quite Orcanes’s placeless deity, also sits on high, above all mortal representation despite the meteorological imagery that Tamburlaine cannot leave behind. “Well, soldiers,” he taunts, “Mahomet remains in hell” (line 197), in effect with the Zoacum tree of the Alcaron itself, whether or not Marlowe knew fully of its source.

Without getting into the reasons for Tamburlaine’s sudden distemperment or illness, I would relate his death to the limits of visual and to some extent verbal representation in both plays. He may die from a humoral imbalance, or because he has burnt the Babylonians themselves rather than their Qur’an, but if Tamburlaine also dies from an act of hypericonoclasm he does so under a force that the text ultimately fails to render in iconic terms. The very confusion over his death, its overdetermination, makes it impossible to explain through narrative, which depends on cause and effect. His followers nevertheless strive to narrate and depict the coming event. In a passage that recalls Tamburlaine’s own struggles at Zenocrate’s passing, Theridamus tries to imagine spirit armies besieging Tamburlaine’s heart, and yet “These cowards invisibly assail his soul” (II: 5.3.13): that is, the causes dooming his master cannot be pictured. Tamburlaine is more successful:

See where my slave, the ugly monster Death,

Shaking and quivering, pale and wan for fear,

Stands aiming at me with his murdering dart

Who flies away at every glance I give,

And when I look away comes stealing on.

(5.3.67–71)

Yet still more than Milton’s Death, this apparition is unseeable, certainly by those bidden to see it on stage and in the audience (Milton, Paradise Lost 2. 666–673). Even for Tamburlaine, Death, if Death it is, disappears precisely when he looks at it, albeit for fear of Tamburlaine, he claims. The Physician’s dry disquisition on death as a process follows right away: it is Tamburlaine’s urine he has viewed (line 82).

Finally, Tamburlaine attains a sort of reverse epiphany in the plays’ most telling lines:

Casane, no, the monarch of the earth

And eyeless monster that torments my soul

Cannot behold the tears ye shed for me,

And therefore still augments his cruelty.

(II: 5.3.216–219)

Techelles seemingly conjectures in the following speech that Death once more is meant, perhaps in a weak recollection of Tamburlaine’s earlier image (lines 220–223). But it is not clear that death, at first a timid slave, is now the monarch of the earth (although this may also have been Milton’s reading of the passage). It is also possible that it is Tamburlaine’s, and perhaps Marlowe’s, God who sits above that is the eyeless monster, unseeing and a monstrum itself, at once an ominous mystery and a marvel that one must try and fail to picture. That the eyeless monster cannot, not just will not, behold the followers’ tears suggests that it is less than a god, of course, and furthermore that it may be nothing but a figure for the absence of the divine. It is a sublime negative presentation, in Kant’s terms. We personify the blind augmentation of cruelty through a prosopopeia that Tamburlaine himself sought to embody in his violent career. Tamburlaine, simply, is dying for no reason despite the many explanations the text offers, or for reasons closer to those of the Physician than anyone else. If I am right, then this is Marlowe’s “atheism.” The Tamburlainiad approaches a radical aniconism near its end, despite Marlowe’s own ceaseless efforts to visualize power and desire. The plays’ iconoclasm, their relentless destruction of their own images and idols, including Tamburlaine himself, is merely the active arm of a more profound visual Pyrrhonism. Marlowe could well have generated his fundamental critique of representation without reference to the few purported accounts of Islam that he knew (on “doubt-based iconoclasm,” see Elliot, 412). But a glancing encounter with Islamic thought may have marked his career at Cambridge – and the beginnings of his imaginary career in Tamburlaine’s Persia as well.

In this paper, I have juxtaposed two instances of the breakdown of the image on a world scale in Tamburlaine Parts I and II. Medieval and Ptolemaic maps cancel each other out in Tamburlaine’s early vision of conquest. Ortelius’s sophisticated system of book-length world mapping determines the scope of the plays’ action, yet for the most part invisibly, as if the maps’ labeling rather than their iconic presentation was the key to the world-picture they assemble. The belated appearance of a world map, perhaps the world map book itself, on stage, occurs under the sign of global occlusion and disappointment: “Look here, my boys,” Tamburlaine commands as he evidently points to the map,

see what a world of ground

Lies westward from the midst of Cancer’s line

Unto the rising of this earthly globe,

Whereas the sun, declining from our sight,

Begins the day with our Antipodes:

And shall I die, and this unconquered?

(II: 5.3.145–150)

There is something sublime, as later generations would say, about Tamburlaine’s gigantic failure as well as a sublimity in the unavoidable lack of adequation between word and picture when the image of the world is at stake.

The second section of my discussion begins with the proposal that Islam was not in any real sense represented on stage during the English Renaissance. The failure to represent part of the life-world matches the inadequate projection of the orbis terrarum. Even Marlowe, whose Orcanes glimpses a completely immaterial deity, ultimately casts Islam as little more than an idolatrous parody of Christianity: “In vain, I see, men worship Mohomet,” Tamburlaine says as he burns the Qur’an (II: 5.2.178). The “Alcaron” and the world map or map book successively occupy the same place on stage as the action draws to an end in the second play: the authority of both image-objects is simultaneously invoked and defied, and then inexplicably forgotten. That Islam itself resists representation, and in a manner that recalls differing antagonisms toward the image in Judaism, Christianity, and other “world religions,” may be significant. It suggests that religion in general produces an effect antagonistic to representation, a sublime effect that, for all its mystifications, might usefully challenge the way identity is still often framed in critical discourse about what Orcanes calls “a world of people” (Tamburlaine II: 1.1.67).