In his consideration of Christopher Marlowe's life and work, David Riggs concludes that the playwright's first popular play and its eponymous main character result from a growing interest in the changing study of world boundaries. Explaining that ‘Tamburlaine reaped the benefits of Marlowe's MA work in cosmography’, Riggs demonstrates how the Scythian general's desire to redraw the world-map through conquest is directly related to the evolving university curriculum that Marlowe would have studied at Cambridge; cosmography, a branch of study that combined history and geography, had supplanted music in the traditional courses of study. Moreover, exploration of the lands of the New World, impending war with Spain, and encroachment into Western Europe by the Ottoman Empire meant that maps, atlases, and other products of cartography reached beyond the university lecture hall. As Jean Howard notes, ‘We now know how thoroughly chorography, cartography, and geography more generally engaged the attention of early modern England’. Within these new discourses of map-making, Tamburlaine as conqueror, asserts Riggs, is also transforming the idea and purpose of maps. In Part One's oft-quoted speech, the general declares: