Monday, Nov 08, 2004
Tamburlaine Must Die by Louise Welsh
- Anjana BasuAnjana Basu taught English Literature, briefly, in Calcutta University. She writes poetry, stories, features in the local newspapers and in Harmony and Travel Plus. She has had a book of short stories published by Orient Longman, India. The BBC had broadcast one of her short stories and her poems have featured in an anthology brought out by Penguin India. In America she has been published in The Wolfhead Quarterly, Gowanus, The Blue Moon Review, and Recursive Angel, to name a few. Harper Collins India brought out her novel Curses In Ivory last year.
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Book Name:Tamburlaine Must Die
Publisher: Canongate Books
Pages: 147
Price: 9 pounds 99p
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THROUGH THE EYE INTO THE MIND
Christopher Marlowe was the enfant terrible of Elizabethan literature – well, perhaps enfant terrible is too polite a term. Today he would have been a coke snorting, Harley toting, leather jacketed hellraiser always in the forefront of the media with no one raising an eyebrow. In the Elizabethan context, Marlowe was outrageous and he played on his reputation with a flourish, with quotable quotes like, "Them that love not tobacco and boyes are fooles" and similar dictes and sayings that were guaranteed to shock. Several spectacular plays later, he crowned his reputation with an equally spectacular death in a sleazy tavern in Deptford, stabbed through the brainpan by a poignard. Following that came the revelation that Marlowe was probably some kind of a secret agent and his death was a result of his espionage activities.
Louise Welsh’s novella centres on this broth of a boy, Kit Marlowe four square and shocking. It takes as its point in time the three days before Marlowe’s death and takes the reader on a tour of the inside of the playwright’s head. What the book does not do is explain the reasons behind Marlowe’s death, though it does try to point us in certain directions. Marlowe visits his patron and embarks on a love tryst so to speak with him. He visits the pubs and stews of Southwark haunted by the reek of armpit atmosphere and stories of failed actors, arm in arm with Thomas Blaize, leading hero and failed poet. The two have a love hate relationship – Blaize has acted in Marlowe’s plays and is jealous of the latter’s fame and talent.
Written in the first person, the narrative is simply told, without any Elizabethan flourishes of language to divert or confuse the reader. The story flows smoothly and the book goes down in one sitting. Like As in Marlowe’s plays, Tamburlaine Must Die has its fair share of blood and violence, with glimpses into the torture chambers of Elizabeth’s secret service. Welsh has obviously spent a great deal of time researching the era and the results are evident in the brawling cockfighting world that she conjures up, the wicked yet naïve world that we are familiar with from the plays.
Tragedy stalks Marlowe, the great tragedian, in the shape of Tamburlaine. There is a mystery here, one which is not easily answered. If there is a fault in the book, it is the fact that all the blood and violence leaves us dangling in mid air, heels kicking, gasping for answers. But then, to think again, there are no answers in Kyd’s plays either. Or even in Marlowe’s. Just the violence and the melancholy knowledge that man is doomed.
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