Marlowe's farce in The few of Malta, in the central section of Doctor Faustus and in The Massacre at Paris veils a serious attitude comparable to that of Erasmus in The Education of a Christian Prince:

The whirlwind image used by Erasmus seems to fit the two Tamburlaine plays as well. A verbal storm of contradictory attitudes swirls furiously about Tamburlaine himself as he sweeps on from triumph to triumph. Where his affairs differ from those of the princes in the three other plays is in their relation to ‘folly’. ‘Merlin's prophet’ seems to have carefully dislodged the moral and intellectual foundations on which a dark satire might rest. He uses a ‘mad and scoffing’ style which many readers and spectators, like Robert Greene, have found ‘intollerable’. Especially baffling for any persistent student of the Tamburlaine plays is their combination of Christian allegory, based upon apocalyptic allusions, with tantalizing references to classical gods, heroes, and monsters. This whirlwind of possibilities rarely touches familiar ground. Instead it devastates a fictive space which we might call ‘the land of fortune’.