ABOUT THE PLAY

Interestingly, we don’t know from the title of Marlowe’s play the proper name of his protagonist.  He is simply “the Jew”.  This reduction of a human being solely to their racialized religious identity can be a way to stereotype and dehumanize that person. This is certainly so in The Jew of Malta.  The title character embodies a particularly vivid and morally offensive version of long-standing anti-Semitic tropes. Eventually the audience learns that this figure’s proper name is Barabas. Importantly, this is the name of the prisoner Pontius Pilate released from jail when, shortly before Christ’s crucifixion, Pilate asked the people whether they would like Jesus or Barabas to be freed. The people chose Barabas, even though he is characterized in the Gospels as a thief and murderer. That Marlow’s protagonist shares a name with this Biblical figure sets him in opposition to the values traditionally associated with Christ, namely, a religion based on love, respect, and the primacy of forgiveness over vengeance.  

 

Marlowe’s Barabas, by contrast, epitomizes the traits long associated with Jews in anti-Semitic thought.  A murderer and a poisoner, he loves money--inert matter--over living beings, including his daughter Abigail; and he is associated with the figure of the stage Machiavel, a byword in popular thought for treachery, trickery, and atheism. While the historical Machiavelli was a sophisticated political thinker and pragmatic strategist, on the stage he was often reduced to a stock villain. Machiavelli delivers the Prologue to Marlowe’s play, claiming that he comes to “present the tragedy of a Jew,/ Who smiles to see how full his bags are crammed,/ Which money was not got without my means.”  

 

While Marlowe’s play thus participates in the circulation of anti-Semitic tropes, it also shows most Christians as anything but moral exemplars.  When the Turks threaten to overrun Malta when the Maltese fail to pay the tax the Turks have laid upon them, the Maltese Governor confiscates half of the immense wealth of Malta’s tiny Jewish community to pay the debt. Those, like Barabas, who resist, are stripped of everything. Later, when Barabas has regained his fortunes and with Turkish help been named Governor of the island, Barabas strikes a deal with the defeated Christian forces to turn against the Turks and reinstate Christian rule of the island.  The Christian Governor of Malta, having regained his power, turns on Barabas and causes him to fall into the giant cauldron of boiling water that Barabas had intended for Calymath, the Turkish ruler. Ever the iconoclast, Marlowe creates a play that trades in negative stereotypes of Jews while painting a devastating portrait of Christian treachery.  

 

Setting the play in Malta provides the context for the rapacious greed that seems to motor the actions of Jew, Muslim, and Christian alike.  Like Cyprus in Othello, Malta was a strategic site that both European Christians and Turkish Muslims sought to control, partly because it was important to protecting the ships necessary to the lucrative trade in spices, silks, and luxury goods passing between Europe and nations to the East.  Jews, barred from many forms of commerce, were indispensable as moneylenders and middlemen in this contested geographical arena. The play opens with Barabas in his counting house, surrounded by “heaps of gold,” a signal of his vast wealth and of what he most values.

 

Two subplot figures, Barabas’s daughter Abigail and his slave Ithamore, further reveal Barabas’s instrumental use of other people.  Abigail is arguably the most admirable figure in the play, someone who loves both her Jewish father and also Don Mathias, a Christian, whom she seeks to marry. Barabas ignores her wishes entirely. Early on, he forces Abigail to pretend to convert to Christianity and join the nuns now occupying his former house so that she can retrieve some of his gold hidden within that house; later he induces her to pretend affection for Don Lodowick, the Governor’s son; ultimately Barbabas is responsible for contriving the deaths of both Mathias and Lodowick and for poisoning Abigail and her fellow nuns after, pushed to the wall by the horrors she has witnessed and experienced on Malta, Abigail genuinely tries to enter a Christian order.  The tense struggles between Abigail and her father, and the tenuousness of her conversion status, stand behind Shakespeare’s subsequent treatment of the relationship between Jessica and Shylock in The Merchant of Venice.  

 

The Jew’s most consequential partner in criminality is Ithamore, the Thracian slave he buys in the extraordinary slave market sequence at the beginning of II.iii.  This scene is a startlingly direct representation of the early modern slave trade.  The assembled slaves, including Moors and Thracians, have prices written on their backs, transforming human flesh into a commodity. Barabas and Ithamore each boast of their villainous histories, and for some time they seem perfectly matched.  Barabas shows affection for his slave that he seems to lack for his daughter.  And yet, the master trickster underestimates the resentment of the slave.  When Ithamore gets the chance, he pursues a courtesan, Bellamira, and begins to blackmail Barabas for money. Ben Jonson clearly remembered these events when he created the relationship between Volpone and Mosca in Volpone. Predictably, Barabas devises a trick with a poisoned flower to kill Ithamore.

 

The Jew of Malta resists moralization.  It depicts a thoroughly corrupt world where the resourcefulness and resilience of a comic villain like Barabas are theatrically entertaining, but ultimately despicable; but so are the acts of is nearly everyone around him, whether Christian or Turk.  It is as if Marlowe glimpsed in this play a future dominated by greed, treachery, and the devaluation of human life and dramatized it with a bitter satirical force verging on farce.        ​

 

ABOUT THE PLAYWRIGHT

Christopher Marlowe, born, like Shakespeare, in 1564, was a spectacularly inventive dramatist. Killed in 1593 in a fight in a tavern in Deptford, Marlowe had his writing career tragically cut off before he turned thirty.  By 1593, however, he had written six plays that pioneered techniques of effective stagecraft that left a profound mark on the evolution of early modern drama.  For example, Marlowe was an adept writer of blank verse, the iambic pentameter, unrhymed poetry that became the dominant form of verse speech in subsequent early modern drama.  His early play Tamburlaine--the first part performed in 1587 and the second part sometime before the two plays’ joint publication in 1590—features a Scythian warrior whose desire to conquer the known world finds extravagant expression in such verse. Thought refuses to stop at the end of each poetic line but rushes forward, sweeping up the audience in its energetic course.  Tamburlaine was a figure much imitated, and parodied, in subsequent plays.  Shakespeare’s Pistol, in the Henry IV plays, often quotes a garbled version of Tamburlaine’s heroic speeches. 

 

Born into a shoemaker’s family in Canterbury, England, Marlowe was a scholarship student at The King’s School in that town, and then received a BA from Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, in 1584.  His knowledge of classical literature is revealed everywhere in his writing.  His first play, Dido, Queen of Carthage, drawing on an event made famous in Virgil’s epic poem, The Aeneid, dramatizes the tragic love affair between the Trojan warrior on his way to establish a new kingdom in Rome, and Dido, the North African Queen of Carthage, who entreats him to marry her and give over his epic quest.  Marlowe’s long erotic poem, “Hero and Leander,” shows a similar deep familiarity with classical myth and imagery. 

 

In the years between Cambridge and his death, Marlowe was dogged by rumors that he was an agent for Francis Walsingham, Queen Elizabeth’s spy master; that he was an atheist or a sodomite.  His death at Deptford has spawned a raft of conspiracy theories; the only thing we know for certain is that he was stabbed while drinking with three men also associated with accusations of spying and political intrigue.  

 

More important is the theatrical legacy Marlowe established and his effect on the careers of other dramatists, including Shakespeare. Marlowe wrote primarily for the Lord Admiral’s Men, whose lead actor, Edward Alleyn, played many of his protagonists, just as Richard Burbage, the lead actor for the Lord Chamberlain’s Company, performed many of Shakespeare’s most memorable tragic and historical figures. The careers of the two dramatists were intertwined, even after Marlowe’s death. Marlowe’s Edward II, one of the first history plays based on the reign of England’s late medieval monarchs, was the impetus for Shakespeare’s Richard II and for Shakespeare’s continuing commitment throughout the 1590s to the genre Marlowe helped initiate.  Marlowe’s exotic settings and characters, not only Tamburlaine, but also Barabas, the title character of The Jew of Malta, stand in the background of The Merchant of Venice and Antony and Cleopatra.  Marlowe’s experiments in tragedy, including Dr. Faustus, laid the groundwork, along with Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, for the period’s subsequent tragic masterpieces, including Hamlet, Macbeth, The Changeling and The Duchess of Malfi. It is hard to imagine what other riches would have emerged from Marlowe’s pen, and how the early modern theater might have developed differently, had he lived beyond the age of twenty-nine.  

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- JEAN HOWARD | Scholar & Dramaturgical Consultant, Columbia University