Tamburlaine's Zenocrate

Although five of Marlowe’s six major plays stage the deeds and achievements of men, he also created a different image of women as being allowed to interfere in domains widely seen as restricted to males. His active women adopt attitudes that contradict the common image of women as private and emotional creatures excluded from public matters and politics.8

In works representing men and women as objects of desire, passionate suitors, ambitious politicians, agents and victims of violence, loyal and treacherous towards family and friends, Marlowe navigated the boundaries of acceptable and transgressive behaviour in ways that both reflected and challenged the values of his society.9

Though various scholars suggest that Shakespeare created, according to the change in values and the new definition of gender stereotypes at the end of the sixteenth century, “charismatic androgynous characters,”10 Christopher Marlowe’s plays and his dialectic of gender in them are almost ignored. In contrast to Dido, Queen of Carthage, where Dido’s influential position is already apparent in the title, the character of Zenocrate in Tamburlaine is mostly interpreted as conforming to the traditional patriarchal values and therefore as being a silent, obedient, and pale character with the single function to stress Tamburlaine’s power. However, as Charles Brooks notes, Marlowe’s women are

active, striving to attain individual aims, not passively virtuous women like the usual romantic heroines. Virtue is something to be attained rather than protected, beauty is an asset to be used, women are to be conquered rather than served, and delight in love is a vision of triumph. Destiny is to be moulded rather than endured.11

Stephen Greenblatt states in his book Renaissance Self Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare that “in the sixteenth century there appears to be an increasing self-consciousness about the fashioning of human identity as a manipulable, artful process.”12 Therefore the striving for power in Tamburlaine can be seen as an attempt for self-determination since “Marlowe’s women share with his men a motivation that is as much political as emotional.”13 with men “tend[ing] to seek power for the purpose of determining the destinies of others [and] [...] women [...] do so in order that they may determine their own destinies.”14