Executing Calyphas: Gender, Discipline, and Sovereignty in 2 Tamburlaine

This essay situates the execution of Calyphas in 2 Tamburlaine in the context of the gendered disciplinary regimes imposed by Tamburlaine in his quest for global empire. The execution bears a double significance: a father disciplines his son and, simultaneously, a sovereign military commander exercises martial law. In this doubling, the episode fuses a number of related issues in the history of sovereignty, especially key concepts addressed in Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality and later taken up by Giorgio Agamben in works such as Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. By putting these historical models into dialogue with a revised account of the play’s source materials, this essay argues that Marlowe stages the violence embedded in both absolutist and republican models of governance when they are premised on the rigid enforcement of hierarchical disciplinary regimes.