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Why does Tamburlaine kill his son Calyphas?
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Christopher Marlowe
Detail of a portrait thought to be of Christopher Marlowe, dated 1585, artist unknown; in the collection of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, England.
In Christopher Marlowe's Tamburlaine the Great, the protagonist kills his son Calyphas because the young man refuses to follow his father into battle.1
This act serves to illustrate the increasingly extreme and sickening nature of Tamburlaineās cruelty as the play progresses. While the conqueror views his sons as a means to preserve his vast dominions, Calyphasās refusal to participate in the martial lifestyle his father demands leads to his death, highlighting the hero's relentless, often absurd, obsession with power and his inability to tolerate any deviation from his own path of conquest.1