Shakespeare is replete with war and pity. Beyond the histories, where it is unsurprisingly a central theme, and the bloody classical plays, drawn from the heroic martial narratives that were enthusiastically cited by the military theorists, war also penetrated the tragedies and even the comedies to an extent that makes it almost universal in the canon. It is therefore not surprising to find that war similarly absorbed those who wrote before, during and after Shakespeare's productive twenty-year period of writing for the stage. For some, notably Christopher Marlowe, war could be presented as an abstraction. The two parts of Tamburlaine the Great present militarism on one level as an extreme medium through which an audience observes how the potential of a protagonist for greatness is tragically squandered, leaving only futility and waste. Generically, war for Tamburlaine is as necromancy is for Faustus, as the allure of sex is for his Edward II, and as the corroding temptation of Machiavellian power is for Barabas in the The Jew of Malta. Yet in the context of the Elizabethan theorists' demands for militarism to become less of an abstraction and more of a concrete reification of the emerging state, say, in the form of a standing army whose business was to be conducted by disciplined soldiers, Tamburlaine reaches far beyond mere tragedy. The figure of Tamburlaine offers audiences a vision, in a manner that is much more distinct than in Shakespeare, of the way that the militarised male can become detached from any meaningful sense of political process.