The paradoxical imagery of Arab women in Christopher Marlowe's Dido Queen of Carthage and Tamburlaine the Great

ABSTRACT: This paper explores the paradoxical imagery of Arab women in two plays by
Christopher Marlowe, Dido Queen of Carthage (1594) and Tamburlaine the Great (1590). These
Renaissance plays focus on gender and identity questions which are highly contemporary and
relevant to Oriental culture. The Orient is the scene of action and the cast consists of oriental
characters. The Orient was also one of the main sources of inspiration in the Renaissance. This
paper highlights and compares the interrelationship between Arab male and female identity in a
context of hyper-masculinity. Elizabethan playwrights were interested in dramatizing the Orient
in their dramatic writings (Al-Olaqi, 2012: 1767). They depicted the Orientals as warlike, lustful
and bloodthirsty. (Wann, Louis,1915:427). Marlowe's Tamburlaine and Dido Queen of Carthage
echo the Elizabethan interest in Arab women with an Orientalist discourse focusing on vilifying
Arab characters as patriarchal and immoral beings. A feminist reading of Marlowe’s Dido Queen
of Carthage, reaffirms the image of a seductive East peopled with subversive and lustful Arab
women, while in contrast they are depicted positively in Tamburlaine the Great as adamant,
determined, loyal, and adherents to traditional values. In order to understand this contradiction
in the depiction of Arab women in two plays by the same author, it seems necessary to trace out
the traditions of Elizabethan Orientalism in relation to the religious, cultural, historical, and
political context of that epoch.