The considerable amount of commentary published on Marlowe's Tamburlaine in recent years makes highly significant the fact that Tamburlaine's catastrophe remains one of the unsatisfactorily explained enigmas of the play. The unwary reader doubtless assumes that at the end of Tamburlaine II the Scythian conqueror simply—though somewhat vitriolically—dies, and that Marlowe should be called to account for marring his play with a badly-motivated catastrophe. The careful reader of Marlowe's text doubtless perceives (or at least suspects) that Tamburlaine's “distemper” at the end of the play is linked definitely with Renaissance medical, physiological, psychological, and astrological concepts. Yet no satisfactory analysis of how these concepts are involved in Tamburlaine's death has been made. Carroll Camden hazards the suggestion that Tamburlaine's death is immediately resultant upon his choleric humour. Miss Una Ellis-Fermor, the most recent editor of Tamburlaine, attempts to supply adequate annotation regarding the physician's diagnosis of Tamburlaine's “distemper,” but her footnotes are woefully inadequate as well as inaccurate. Don Cameron Allen, believing that “Marlowe conceived of his hero as a typical representative of the fortunati,” a Renaissance type of fortunate man upon whom Fortune never failed to smile, contends that Tamburlaine comes to no catastrophe at all but triumphantly “dies of old age.” Roy W. Battenhouse has recently considered Tamburlaine an instrument by means of which God, in His providential justice, scourges the world, and then, when the mundane chastisement is completed, strikes down His tyrannical instrument. Although in this article Professor Battenhouse does not explain, or even consider, the express bodily workings of Tamburlaine's malady, in his recent book he assumes (following Camden) that Tamburlaine is—among other things—a typical choleric man, and affirms that the physician's diagnosis indicates that Tamburlaine dies in a mad frenzy brought on by that disastrous affliction of the “humours” which Elizabethans termed choler adjust.