Academic Details:
Name: Mulrajsinh Gohil
Roll No: 23
Enrollment No: 5108250016
Sem: 1
Batch: 2025-27
E-mail: mulrajsinhgohil100@gmail.com
Assignment Details:
Paper Name: History of English Literature – From 1350 to 1900
Paper No: 105
Paper Code: 22396
Unit: 1 - Chaucer to Renaissance
Topic: "Base Fortune's Wheel": The Marlovian Overreacher, Hubris, and the Mirror of Critical Debate
Submitted To: Smt. Sujata Binoy Gardi, Department of English, Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University
Submitted Date: 6th November 2025
The following information, numbers are counted using QuillBot:
Images: 5
Words: 3257
Characters: 20720
Characters without spaces: 17501
Paragraphs: 42
Sentences: 160
Reading time: 13 m 2 s
Abstract
This essay argues that the central, unifying figure in Christopher Marlowe’s tragedies is the "overreacher," a protagonist defined by the classical flaw of hubris. This hubris is not simple ambition, but a specific transgression against the "limits" of a proper "métier," or sphere of action, in a drive to "master Fortune." By tracing the evolution of this archetype from the libido dominandi of Tamburlaine and the libido sciendi of Faustus to the cynical cunning of Barabas and the political hubris of Mortimer this paper synthesizes thematic analysis with a study of Marlowe's critical reception. It posits that the "moral ambiguity" inherent in the overreacher a deliberate fusion of admirable Renaissance aspiration with inevitable classical nemesis is the primary source of the "Romantic" versus "Orthodox" schism in Marlowe scholarship. Using Joan Parks’s analysis of Edward II as a key case study, the essay demonstrates how Marlowe "forcefully refashions" chronicle history, supplanting the "public sphere" with a "private realm" where the overreacher's will becomes the volatile engine of tragedy. The essay concludes that this unresolved ambiguity is not a flaw but Marlowe’s core dramatic strategy, making the debate itself his ultimate legacy.
Keywords
Christopher Marlowe, Overreacher, Hubris, Nemesis, Fortune's Wheel, Moral Ambiguity, Tamburlaine, Doctor Faustus, Edward II, The Jew of Malta, Critical Debate, Romantic Tradition, Orthodox Christianity, Métier, Renaissance
Research Question
To what extent is the "overreacher" defined as a figure of classical "hubris" who transgresses his proper "métier" the central, unifying archetype in Marlowe's major tragedies, and how does this archetype's inherent "moral ambiguity" directly produce the fundamental schism that defines Marlowe's critical legacy?
Hypothesis
Christopher Marlowe’s major tragedies are unified by the evolving archetype of the "overreacher," a figure whose tragic flaw is the "hubris" of transgressing his proper "métier" in an attempt to master "Fortune." This figure's "moral ambiguity" , a deliberate fusion of Renaissance aspiration and classical nemesis, is not a flaw, but the central dramatic strategy that directly causes the long-standing critical schism between "Romantic" and "Orthodox" interpretations. The evolution of this figure from the "Titanic" figures of Tamburlaine and Faustus to the political schemer Mortimer in Edward II demonstrates Marlowe's increasing sophistication in applying this theme, ultimately refashioning history itself to serve his tragic vision.
1. Introduction: The "Underdog" and the Titan
Christopher Marlowe’s place in the English literary canon is as contested as his reputation was in his own lifetime. Vilified by contemporaries like Robert Greene and Thomas Beard as a "blaspheming atheist" and "ill-regulated... spirit" (Ribner 211-212), he has since been critically overshadowed by his "rich relation," Shakespeare. As Antonio G. Manuud notes, this has often relegated Marlowe to the status of a brilliant but problematic precursor an "underdog dramatist" (623) whose works are treated as a mere prologue to the main event. Yet, this very contentiousness is the key to his genius. The critical confusion Marlowe generates is so profound that, as Irving Ribner observes, scholars land on "utterly diverse positions" (224), seeing in him either a "daring freethinker challenging the most widely accepted beliefs" or a "pious orthodox Christian" using the stage as a "virtual pulpit" (216).
Christopher Marlowe
Image source: Wikipedia
At the heart of this critical storm, and indeed the source of it, stands a single, titanic figure: the Marlovian "overreacher." This figure, whether Tamburlaine, Faustus, Barabas, or Mortimer, is Marlowe's definitive contribution to tragedy. He is the embodiment of what Antonio G. Manuud identifies as an "insatiable thirst for power," a relentless drive not just to succeed, but to "master Fortune" itself (633). This essay will argue that Marlowe’s "overreacher" is a sophisticated fusion of the classical tragic hero and the burgeoning, often terrifying, spirit of the Renaissance. The "weakness" of Marlowe's great men is not merely ambition, but the classical flaw of hubris: an "unknowing disregard for the limits of man's capabilities" that drives them to transgress their proper "métier," or sphere of action (Manuud 638). It is precisely this transgression, this overreaching that brings "nemesis," or the fall.
However, where a simple morality play would offer a clear-cut lesson, Marlowe’s tragedies revel in what David Bevington, cited by Ribner, terms "moral ambiguity" (223). His heroes are not just punished; they are magnificent in their fall, and their poetic "raptures" (Ribner 211) often seem to win the playwright's admiration, if not his endorsement. By tracing the development of this overreacher, this essay will analyze the critical schism Marlowe creates. We will see how the "Titanic" ambition of Tamburlaine evolves through the intellectual pride of Faustus and the cynical cunning of Barabas, culminating in the sophisticated political hubris of Mortimer in Edward II. Using Joan Parks's analysis of Edward II, we will demonstrate how Marlowe’s "most perfect achievement in dramatic structure" (Parks 275) radically refashions history, locating the engine of national destiny not in the "public sphere" of chronicles, but in the "volatile" "private realm" of the overreacher's will (Parks 276, 282). Ultimately, Marlowe’s legacy is not a simple moral, but the debate itself a fractured mirror reflecting our own struggle to reconcile the limitless aspiration of the human spirit with the inevitability of the fall.
2. The Titans: Defining the Overreacher's Hubris
The archetype of the overreacher is established with earth-shattering force in Marlowe’s earliest plays, Tamburlaine the Great and Doctor Faustus. These two works present the figure in its purest, most "Titanic" form, embodying the twin pillars of Renaissance humanism: the will to power and the will to knowledge. They also, in their profound ambiguity, provide the foundational evidence for the entire critical debate that has followed Marlowe for centuries.
Tamburlaine is the libido dominandi, the will to power made flesh. He is a "Scythian shepherd" who, through sheer force of will, rises to conquer the world. From the outset, his ambition is explicitly defined as a challenge to fate. He does not pray to Fortune; he commands it. In what amounts to the overreacher's thesis statement, he boasts, "I hold the Fates bound fast in iron chains, / And with my hand turn Fortune's wheel about" (qtd. in Manuud 633). As Manuud argues, Tamburlaine is "unconquered and unconquerable" so long as he remains within his proper métier (634) namely, war and conquest. His "policy," or strategy, is his strength. His hubris, however, is his belief that this earthly power is absolute, that his personal will can and should supplant the laws of nature and the divine.
This transgression occurs twice. First, upon the death of his wife Zenocrate, he flies into a "gigantic fury" and orders his generals to "wage war against the Fates," (Manuud 634) burning the town where she died. Second, he overreaches by demanding his will be imposed on his own son, killing him when he fails to live up to the "curious ethos of Tamburlaine's world" (Manuud 635). His eventual fall is not a defeat in battle, but a recognition of a boundary he cannot conquer. Stricken by a sudden illness, he finally comprehends his own finitude, declaring with tragic resonance, "For Tamburlaine, the scourge of God, must die!" (qtd. in Manuud 635).
The critical debate here is stark. As Ribner outlines, the Romantic view, exemplified by Levin's The Overreacher, sees Tamburlaine as a "Herculean hero" (224), a figure of sublime "poetic energy" (Ribner 213) whose aspirations we are meant to admire. Conversely, the "orthodox" view, championed by Roy Battenhouse, argues that the play is a "ten-act morality play," a Christian homily in which Tamburlaine is a "scourge of God" whose "death must be viewed as God's inevitable retribution visited upon pride and blasphemy" (Ribner 219). Marlowe’s text supports both: Tamburlaine is blasphemous and cruel, yet he is also given the most "high astounding terms" in all of Elizabethan drama.
This ambiguity is even more potent in Doctor Faustus. If Tamburlaine is the libido dominandi, Faustus is the libido sciendi the will to know. His métier is the intellect; he is a respected doctor who has reached the pinnacle of human knowledge. His hubris is his rejection of these "limits" in pursuit of "preternatural knowledge," (Manuud 636) a power that "Stretcheth as far as doth the mind of man" and makes a "sound magician... a demi-god" (qtd. in Manuud 633). Faustus, like Tamburlaine, seeks to be more than human.
As Ribner notes, Doctor Faustus provides a "natural center" for the critical divide (220). For orthodox critics like W. W. Greg, the play is a "simple orthodox morality play," a "homiletic warning to those who might also be tempted to abjure Christ" (Ribner 220). In this reading, Faustus’s "sin... is a dramatic portrait of the greatest evil known to orthodox Christianity," and his fall is a just "damnation in conventional Christian terms" (Cole, qtd. in Ribner 222). But this reading, while structurally sound, ignores the profound psychological and poetic weight Marlowe gives his hero. The Romantic tradition, following Taine, hears "the living, struggling, natural, personal man," a "hot-headed, fiery... slave of his passions" (Ribner 213-214). We see Faustus not as a mere apostate, but as a "daring speculator" (Ribner 216). His final, magnificent soliloquy, "See, see where Christ's blood streams in the firmament!", is not just the cry of a damned sinner; it is the "cry of intellectual anguish" (Ribner 216) of a man who, in his quest for godhood, has destroyed his own humanity.
In these two plays, Marlowe establishes the grand theme. The overreacher is a figure who challenges the very limits of the human condition. His fall is both a "just reward" (Parks 280) and a magnificent tragedy. This "moral ambiguity" is not a flaw in Marlowe's design; it is the design itself.
3. The Overreacher in Decline? Cunning as Métier
Following the epic scale of Tamburlaine and Faustus, Marlowe's The Jew of Malta presents a different, more cynical kind of protagonist. The play has troubled critics, with many, like M. M. Mahood, arguing that the "Marlowe hero shrinks in stature from the titanic to the puny" (qtd. in Ribner 221). Barabas is certainly no Tamburlaine. His ambition is not for military glory or ultimate knowledge, but for wealth, the libido sentiendi, the will to possess. His opening soliloquy, "So that of thus much that return was made: / And of the third part of the Persian ships... / I stand possessed of infinite riches in a little room," sets his "métier" firmly in the "counting-house" (Manuud 635).
But to see Barabas as a simple "decline" is to miss Marlowe's versatility. The Jew of Malta is not a failed epic; it is a successful, and savage, political satire. Barabas is not a Titan but a Machiavel, and his play explores the theme of hubris within the gritty, "unhallowed" (Ribner 212) world of realpolitik.
As with the other protagonists, Barabas is "eminently successful" so long as he operates within his chosen "métier" (Manuud 635). He is a master of "policy," cunning, and manipulation, running circles around the hypocritical Christians who govern Malta. His tragic flaw, his hubris, is his failure to recognize the limits of this métier. As Manuud argues, Barabas overreaches when he attempts "to expand the boundaries of his counting-house to include the whole island of Malta" (636). Lured by the prospect of "principality," he tries to move from the private world of wealth to the public world of governance.
This is a world for which he is not suited. The "policy" of the counting-house does not translate to the "policy" of the state. His nemesis, fittingly, is not epic or supernatural. There is no "scourge of God" or midnight damnation. Instead, in a moment of black comedy, he is "betrayed and he plummets from his perch... caught in nets of one's own weaving" (Manuud 636) specifically, a boiling cauldron he had prepared for another.
This ironic fall "further[s] Marlowe's thesis that the public, political world is constituted and determined by private forces" (Parks 283), but it does so in a way that resists easy moralization. The play is not a simple anti-Semitic tract; it is a "vindication of Christianity" (Cole, qtd. in Ribner 221-222) only if one ignores that the Christians are portrayed as perfidious, greedy, and inept. Nor is it a "self-portrait" of a "sanguinary" artist (Ribner 213). Rather, it is a cold analysis of a world where all actors, not just the "overreacher," are driven by self-interest. Barabas is not a "puny" hero; he is the perfect hero for a puny and venal world. His fall demonstrates that even the métier of cunning has its limits, and that in a world of pure policy, the only "sin" is to be out-maneuvered.
4. Case Study: The Politics of Hubris in Edward II
If Marlowe's early plays explored the hubris of the individual against God, fate, and knowledge, Edward II marks a profound evolution. Here, the "overreacher" theme is translated into the realm of politics, and hubris becomes the "volatile source" of national collapse. This play, widely seen as Marlowe’s "most perfect achievement in dramatic structure" (Parks 275), is the ideal case study for his mature tragic vision precisely because it’s not a one-man show. Instead, it pits two forms of tragic weakness against each other: the king’s private obsession and the baron’s public ambition.
What makes Edward II so radical is Marlowe’s "forceful refashioning of history" (Parks 289). As Joan Parks demonstrates in her detailed study, the chronicle sources Marlowe drew from (like Holinshed and Stow) were not mere "material." They were "coherent and influential projection[s] of national identity" (Parks 275, 277). They were "proto-democratic," emphasizing the "public sphere," the "ancient constitution," "rights theory," and the role of "the people" and "citizens" (Parks 276, 278). Their version of history was a broad, inclusive, and often "incoherent" collection of public events, where the king was just one actor, bound by "law" and "deliberation" (Parks 278, 280).
Marlowe, as Parks shows, "offers a radical retelling" (281). He "narrows the chronicles' scope and diversity" and "telescopes the twenty-year reign" (Parks 281). He replaces the chronicles' concern for "civic order" with a tight, claustrophobic focus on "fierce passions" and "willful personalities" (Parks 275, 281). His key innovation is the delineation of a "private realm" as the engine of history. As Parks argues, Marlowe "delineates and focuses on a private realm, which he sets up in opposition to the public as a volatile source of decisions affecting the state" (276). In Edward II, the great "decisions affecting the state" are not made in Parliament; they are made in the "nook or corner" Edward wishes for with Gaveston (Parks 282), or in the "lovers' tête à tête" and "adulterous and exclusive relationship" between Isabel and Mortimer (Parks 283).
This new, private battleground hosts two overreachers. The first, King Edward himself, is a tragic figure not of strength, but of weakness; as Manuud notes, Marlowe holds up for "pity" rather than "ridicule" (632). Edward's métier is kingship, a public role he inherited. His hubris is his total rejection of this public duty in favor of his all-consuming private will (his love for Gaveston). He fatally rejects the "political world," preferring "triumphs, tournaments, and masques" (Parks 285). As Parks notes, Gaveston’s opening speech, describing a "lovely boy in Dian’s shape," is a metadiscursive key: it is an "Ovidian entertainment" that prefigures the "dangerous eroticism" and "nonhistorical perspective" (Parks 286, 288) that will ultimately destroy the king. Edward’s fall comes because he refuses to accept the "limits" of his métier as king.
But the true Marlovian "overreacher" in the play is Mortimer. He is the Tamburlaine of the political sphere. Initially, he seems to stand for the "public" world of the chronicles, defending "law" against the king's "wantonness." However, his ambition is soon revealed to be born in the "private realm" (Parks 282). His relationship with Isabel becomes the engine for his public power. He "rule[s]" the prince and "command[s]" the queen (Parks 283), effectively supplanting the king and becoming a tyrant himself. He is the overreacher who succeeds for a time.
His fall, then, becomes the most explicit articulation of Marlowe's grand theme in all the plays. When his own "policy" fails and he is arrested, Mortimer finally understands the force he sought to control. Antonio G. Manuud provides the definitive reading of this moment. Mortimer’s final speech is a direct, knowing confession of his hubris:
Base Fortune, now I see, that in thy wheel There is a point to which, when men aspire, They tumble headlong down: that point I touch'd, And seeing there was no place to mount up higher, Why should I grieve at my declining fall? (qtd. in Manuud 637-638)
This is the overreacher's epitaph. As Manuud concludes, "Mortimer himself admits his helplessness against the relentless turning of Fortune's wheel... This is, even in Renaissance garb, the Greek hubris" (638). In Edward II, Marlowe drains the theme of supernatural spectacle and epic bombast, leaving only the cold, hard mechanism of "Fortune's wheel" and the man who dared to think he could control it. The play is a tragedy because Marlowe refashioned the "truth" of history (Parks 275) to fit his unsparing tragic theme (Manuud).
5. Conclusion: The Legacy of Ambiguity
The critical journey from Tamburlaine to Mortimer is the story of Marlowe’s refinement of his central theme. The "overreacher" begins as a "Titan," a figure of "high astounding terms" who embodies the limitless aspiration of the Renaissance. He becomes Faustus, the intellectual who "dared to walk unfettered" (Ribner 213) and paid the ultimate price. He shrinks, cynically, to Barabas, a master of cunning destroyed by his own policy. And finally, he is perfected in Mortimer, the political schemer who, at the very pinnacle of his success, articulates the "Greek hubris" (Manuud 638) that was his undoing.
This is the figure who has so profoundly "perplexed" (Ribner 216) the critics. As Irving Ribner’s "Marlowe and the Critics" makes clear, the entire "Romantic" versus "Orthodox" schism stems from this ambiguous protagonist.
The Romantics from Hazlitt and Swinburne to modern critics like Harry Levin see the aspiration. They champion the "fine madness" (Ribner 211) and the "hunger and thirst after unrighteousness" (Ribner 212). They are drawn to the overreached half of the overreacher-nemesis equation. For them, Faustus’s "cry of intellectual anguish" (Ribner 216) and Tamburlaine’s "poetic energy" (Ribner 213) make them magnificent tragic heroes, symbols of a "Renaissance yearning for knowledge, power, and delight" (Ribner 216).
The Orthodox from Thomas Beard in 1597 to modern critics like Battenhouse and Cole see the nemesis. They focus on the "inevitable retribution" (Ribner 219) and the "homiletic warning" (Ribner 220). They see Doctor Faustus as a "simple orthodox morality play" (Ribner 220) and Tamburlaine as a "scourge of God" justly struck down (Ribner 219). For them, the overreacher is a moral example, a sinner whose "visitation of God's judgment" (Ribner 211) is the entire point.
Marlowe’s genius was to fuse these two elements so inextricably that they cannot be separated. He took the "ebullient spirit of adventure" (Manuud 638) of the Renaissance and poured it into the classical tragic mold of hubris and nemesis. He created a figure so compelling in his ambition, so magnificent in his poetry, and yet so justly doomed by his own "unknowing disregard for... limits," that he refuses to be a simple hero or a simple sinner.
Marlowe remains an "underdog dramatist" (Manuud 623) not because he is lesser than Shakespeare, but because he demands that his audience (and his critics) live within this irresolvable, "morally ambiguous" (Ribner 223) tension. He provides no easy answers, no simple "doctrine" (Ribner 220). He simply holds up the "mirror of his magistracy" (Manuud 627) and shows us the overreacher in all his glory and all his folly. His true subject is not, in the end, the "visitation of God’s judgment," but the "limits of ambition" in a world that, like Marlowe’s, seems to have none.
Work Citation:
MANUUD, ANTONIO G. “An Underdog Dramatist: Christopher Marlowe.” Philippine Studies, vol. 12, no. 4, 1964, pp. 623–38. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/42719972. Accessed 5 Nov. 2025.
Parks, Joan. “History, Tragedy, and Truth in Christopher Marlowe’s ‘Edward II.’” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, vol. 39, no. 2, 1999, pp. 275–90. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/1556166. Accessed 5 Nov. 2025.
Ribner, Irving. “Marlowe and the Critics.” The Tulane Drama Review, vol. 8, no. 4, 1964, pp. 211–24. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/1124928. Accessed 5 Nov. 2025.
0 Comments