plays. Julia Briggs argues that “the drama developed into an exact and sensitive register of the age’s central issues: the relative of moral judgment, the unstable nature of language and character, and the individual’s challenging position in relation to the universe.” Tragedy presented itself as a form which matched the expression and subversion of typical Elizabethan issues, partly because the relationship that is established between audience and stage. Instead of exercising the didacticism of the earlier morality plays, Tamburlaine the Great invites the audience to judge its moral. Ordered hierarchically, Elizabethan society was dominated over by the monarch, meaning God’s representative on earth. Increasingly, after the Reformation, people experienced a dilemma: how to reconcile their religious faith and the loyalty to their monarch. Marlowe, like many dramatists of the time, used theatre as a means to explore and question such paradoxes. For a society haunted by conflict and disease, a play like Tamburlaine represents a subversive, yet an accurate reflection of the age. By portraying a lowly shepherd who sheds common weedes in order to command kings, Marlowe implicitly criticizes the immobility of the social order implying that status is determined through actions. In religious terms, Tamburlaine’s ascendancy is controversial. Although blaspheming against God and committing atrocities in his name, Tamburlaine’s success initially seems to cure his brag that “Jove