Timur the Lame: Marlowe, Disability, and Form.

Marlowe, Christopher, 1564-1593; Tamburlaine the Great (Play : Marlowe); Disabilities in literature; Alleyn, Edward; English drama

Christopher Marlowe's Tamburlaine is based upon the historical Timur the Lame, a fourteenth-century warrior whose name made disability partially constitutive of his identity. And yet Marlowe's plays offer no evidence of Timur's impairment, reveling instead in the physical prowess and the rhetorical feats of their title character. To understand why Timur's impairment is absent from the early modern stage, one might turn to the archive that Marlowe inherits, but, as this essay demonstrates, traces of Timur's impairment do appear within that archive, repeating rather than resolving the question of the relationship between Timur's lameness and his identity. Rather than locating an answer within the archive, the essay contends that the discrepancy between Timur's disability and Tamburlaine's hyperability is rooted in an idea of form. Marlowe's plays rely upon a displacement of disability to posit the extraordinary ability of their title character, one that was furthered by Edward Alleyn's way of embodying the role on the early modern stage. That influence reveals the need for a theory of theatrical form. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]