The Jew of Malta

Overview

Author

Christopher Marlowe (1564–1593), Canterbury-born Cambridge graduate, author of Tamburlaine and Doctor Faustus

Genre

Tragedy of revenge and intrigue in blank verse with prose comedy; T. S. Eliot called it a savage farce, and it hovers between the two

Written and first performed

About 1589–90 (the Prologue mentions the death of the Duke of Guise, December 1588); in Henslowe's records from 1592, with Edward Alleyn as Barabas

First printed

1633, in a quarto edited by Thomas Heywood, who added prologues and epilogues for a court performance and a revival at the Cockpit

Setting

Malta, held by the Knights of St John after the loss of Rhodes, caught between the Ottoman Turks and Spain

Protagonist

Barabas, the richest merchant of Malta, a Jew stripped of his wealth by the Christian governor

Prologue

Spoken by 'Machiavel', the stage caricature of Niccolò Machiavelli, who claims Barabas as his follower

Verse

Blank verse of great range, from the lyric opening soliloquy to clipped asides, with much comic prose for Ithamore, Bellamira and Pilia-Borza

Major themes

Policy and hypocrisy, wealth and trade, religion as a mask, revenge, the outsider, antisemitic stereotype

Afterlife

A model for Shakespeare's Shylock in The Merchant of Venice; revived in 1818 by Edmund Kean, and regularly by the RSC since 1964

Context

Christopher Marlowe, a shoemaker's son from Canterbury, took his Cambridge MA in 1587 and conquered the London stage the same year with Tamburlaine. The Jew of Malta probably followed in about 1589–90: its Prologue speaks of the Duke of Guise as recently dead, and Guise was murdered in December 1588. The play was one of the most often acted of the age. Philip Henslowe's records show it in repertory from 1592 to 1596, first with Lord Strange's Men and then with the Admiral's Men, and Edward Alleyn played Barabas as he had played Tamburlaine and Faustus. Marlowe was killed at Deptford in 1593 (Riggs 2004) (Honan 2005) (Cheney 2004).

No text survives from Marlowe's lifetime. The only early edition is the quarto of 1633, published forty years after his death by the dramatist Thomas Heywood, who supplied the prologues and epilogues used when the play was revived at court and at the Cockpit theatre. Some scholars suspect that Heywood or the playhouse touched up the text, especially in the comic later acts, but there is no firm evidence, and most modern editors treat the play as essentially Marlowe's (Bawcutt 1978) (Siemon 2009) (Logan 2013).

The setting is topical. The Knights of St John, a crusading order, had lost Rhodes to the Ottomans in 1522 and been granted Malta by the emperor Charles V in 1530; in 1565 they had beaten off the great Turkish siege of the island. Marlowe's Malta is a small Christian outpost paying tribute to the Turks while Spain claims the island as its own. The plot is invented, though Barabas has been compared to real Jewish merchants and financiers of the Mediterranean such as Joseph Nasi, and the name itself is that of the criminal freed instead of Christ in the Gospels (Bawcutt 1978) (Hunter 1964).

Jews had been expelled from England in 1290 and had no legal community there in Marlowe's day; a few families of Portuguese converso origin lived in London as nominal Christians. For most of Marlowe's audience a Jew was a figure of sermons, legend and stage tradition, not a neighbour. The stereotypes the play uses (the usurer, the poisoner of wells, the murderer of Christians) came from medieval Christian anti-Jewish polemic. The play's popularity was renewed in 1594, when Roderigo Lopez, the queen's physician and a converso, was executed for an alleged plot to poison her (Shapiro 1996).

Marlowe uses these inherited materials in an unsettling way. His Christians are greedy and hypocritical, his Turks are no better, and the Jew is the cleverest and most energetic person on stage. Critics still disagree about whether the play mocks antisemitism by showing that Christian society is just as corrupt, or simply exploits it for theatrical effect. Both things may be true. The stage history reflects that double edge: after the Caroline revival the play vanished for almost two centuries, returned in 1818 in an adaptation for Edmund Kean that softened Barabas, and since the Royal Shakespeare Company's 1964 production it has usually been staged, often beside The Merchant of Venice, with the antisemitism exposed rather than hidden (Greenblatt 1978) (Bartels 1990) (Shapiro 1996) (Hopkins 2008).

Plot overview

Machiavel, the ghost of the notorious Florentine political writer, introduces the tragedy of a Jew whose money was not got without his help. Barabas, alone in his counting-house, glories in his wealth. The Turkish prince Selim Calymath arrives to demand ten years' unpaid tribute, and the governor Ferneze decides that Malta's Jews shall pay it. When Barabas protests, all his wealth is confiscated and his house is turned into a nunnery.

Barabas has hidden treasure under the floor of the house. He makes his daughter Abigail pretend to become a nun so that she can recover it, which she does at night. Meanwhile the Spanish vice-admiral Del Bosco persuades Ferneze to break with the Turks. Rich again, Barabas buys the Turkish slave Ithamore and uses Abigail as bait to set Ferneze's son Lodowick and her own lover Mathias against each other; they kill each other in a duel.

Abigail, horrified, becomes a nun in earnest. Barabas poisons the whole nunnery with a pot of rice, and Abigail dies confessing his crimes to a friar. Barabas and Ithamore strangle one friar and frame the other for the murder. Ithamore then falls for the courtesan Bellamira and, with her bully Pilia-Borza, blackmails his master; Barabas, disguised as a French musician, poisons all three, but not before they betray him to Ferneze.

Arrested, Barabas feigns death with a sleeping drug, is thrown over the walls, and leads the Turks into Malta through a secret passage. Made governor by Calymath, he at once offers to sell the Turks to Ferneze. He prepares a feast for Calymath with a collapsing floor above a boiling cauldron, but Ferneze springs the trap early, and Barabas himself falls into the cauldron and dies cursing Christians and Turks alike. Ferneze takes Calymath prisoner and gives thanks to Heaven.

Scene by scene

Characters

Protagonist

Barabas

The richest merchant in Malta, a Jew who loses everything to the governor's tax and takes a vast revenge. He is witty, eloquent and tireless, a master of asides and disguises who draws the audience into his schemes. He loves his daughter, but in the same breath as his gold, and he destroys her when she leaves him. Built from the stock figures of the stage Jew, the Machiavel and the morality-play Vice, he is also Marlowe's last great overreacher, and he dies in his own trap.

Barabas's daughter

Abigail

Barabas's only child, who at first obeys him and recovers his treasure by pretending to be a nun. Loved by Mathias, she is used as bait in her father's plot and, when it kills her lover, becomes a nun in earnest. Poisoned with the other nuns, she dies a Christian and asks the friar to convert her father. She is the play's one figure of sincere feeling.

Barabas's slave and accomplice

Ithamore

A Turkish (or Thracian) slave bought in the market, who matches his master boast for boast and helps poison the nuns and strangle the friar. Adopted as Barabas's heir, he is seduced by Bellamira, blackmails his master, and is poisoned with her. His prose and his clownish relish for crime give the play much of its comedy.

Governor of Malta

Ferneze

The Christian governor, who confiscates the Jews' wealth to pay the Turks, then breaks faith with the Turks on Spanish advice. Bereaved of his son by Barabas's plot, he outmanoeuvres Barabas at the end and wins Malta back. His piety is constant and his policy no less ruthless than the Jew's.

Turkish prince

Selim Calymath

Son of the Ottoman sultan, who comes to collect the tribute and later captures Malta with Barabas's help. Courteous and relatively straightforward, he is the last to be deceived, and ends as Ferneze's prisoner.

Spanish vice-admiral

Martin del Bosco

The commander who brings Turkish captives to sell and persuades Ferneze to break with the Turks, promising Spanish help. He speaks the language of crusading honour, but Spain also claims the island.

Ferneze's son

Lodowick

A young man who desires Abigail as a 'diamond' to be bought from her father. Barabas hates him for his father's sake and engineers his death in a duel with Mathias.

Abigail's lover

Mathias

A gentleman who truly loves Abigail. Deceived by a forged challenge, he kills Lodowick and is killed by him.

Mathias's mother

Katharine

A widow who mourns her son beside Ferneze, the two parents united in grief by the Jew's plot.

Friars

Friar Jacomo and Friar Barnardine

Two friars who compete greedily for Barabas's promised wealth when he pretends he will convert. Barnardine hears Abigail's confession and is strangled; Jacomo is framed for his murder and hanged. They embody the play's anti-Catholic satire.

Courtesan

Bellamira

A courtesan whose trade has suffered in the siege. She seduces Ithamore to get at Barabas's money and reveals his crimes before dying of his poisoned flowers.

Bellamira's bully

Pilia-Borza

A thief and pimp who carries the blackmail letters to Barabas and is poisoned with his mistress and Ithamore.

Convent

The Abbess and the nuns

The nuns who receive Abigail into Barabas's former house and are all poisoned by the pot of rice.

Prologue

Machiavel

The ghost of Machiavelli as English legend imagined him: an atheist teacher of power and deceit. He claims the Jew as his disciple, but the play shows his doctrines practised by Christians too.

Themes

Policy and hypocrisy

'Policy', the Elizabethan word for cunning statecraft and self-interested scheming, is the play's key word. Barabas practises it openly and with relish; the Christians practise it under the cover of religion. Howard Babb showed how often the word recurs and how the play turns it against everyone who uses it (Babb 1957).

The final victory of Ferneze makes the point that the Jew is not the only Machiavel. The difference between Christian and Jew, which the governor insists on from the first act, is a difference of profession rather than of conduct, and the hypocrisy of the victors is as visible as the villainy of the defeated (Greenblatt 1978).

Money, trade and value

Barabas's opening speech celebrates international trade, and money passes from hand to hand throughout: the tribute, the confiscated estate, the hidden bags, the price of slaves, the blackmail, the final ransom. People are priced too, from Ithamore in the market to Abigail, offered as a jewel to two suitors.

Stephen Greenblatt argued that Marlowe uses the Jew, as Marx later would, to stand for the spirit of money that in fact rules the whole Christian society; Barabas is less an alien than an image of that society at its most naked. The argument has been influential and disputed, since it risks turning a Jewish figure into a mere symbol of capitalism (Greenblatt 1978) (Greenblatt 1980).

Religion as mask

Every religious act in the play is suspect: Abigail's first conversion is a trick, Barabas's offer to convert is a trap, the friars compete for a rich convert's money, and Ferneze uses Scripture to justify theft. Barabas states the principle plainly when he says that religion hides many mischiefs.

G. K. Hunter argued that beneath the satire lies a coherent theology, in which the name Barabas and the play's biblical allusions place the hero within Christian ideas of the Jew as one who chose the criminal instead of Christ. Others see Marlowe, famous for his reputed atheism, mocking all three faiths equally (Hunter 1964) (Riggs 2004).

The outsider and the island

Malta is a frontier where Christians, Jews and Muslims meet, trade and fight. Each group defines itself against the others, and the play shows those definitions to be unstable: Jew and Turk find common cause, Christians make alliances with Turks, Spain claims what the knights hold.

Emily Bartels read the play as a study of how a colonial society manufactures 'difference', branding the Jew as alien in order to justify taking his wealth. The figure of the stranger is less a fact than a strategy of power (Bartels 1990) (Bartels 1993).

Revenge

The play belongs partly to the revenge tragedy fashionable after Kyd's Spanish Tragedy. Barabas's revenge begins as a response to real injustice, which gives it a grim logic, but it spreads to destroy the innocent, his daughter included, and ends by devouring the revenger himself.

Fathers and children

Three fathers or mothers lose children: Barabas loses Abigail, Ferneze loses Lodowick, Katharine loses Mathias. Barabas's love for his daughter is genuine yet possessive, and once she chooses her own faith he treats her as one more thing lost. The pattern would be taken up in Shylock and Jessica.

Motifs

Asides

Barabas speaks to the audience more than any other character, commenting on his victims as he deceives them. The asides make the spectators accomplices and create much of the play's dark comedy.

Poison

Barabas poisons the nuns with rice and Bellamira's household with flowers, and drugs himself to feign death. Poisoning was a traditional charge against Jews and Machiavels alike, and the play makes it his signature.

Conversion

Conversion recurs as threat, trick and sincere choice: the Jews may escape the tax by becoming Christian, Abigail converts falsely then truly, Barabas pretends to seek baptism. Each instance tests what faith means in Malta.

Tribute and ransom

The tribute owed to the Turks starts the action and a ransom ends it. Political relations in the play are always reckoned in money.

Disguise and feigning

Barabas feigns friendship, grief, conversion and even death, and disguises himself as a French musician. The Cockpit prologue's praise of Alleyn as a 'Proteus for shapes' fits a role built on changes of face.

Symbols

The counting-house

Barabas among heaps of gold is the play's opening image: wealth gathered into a 'little room', private, glittering and vulnerable.

The money-bags

The bags thrown down by Abigail join father, daughter and gold in a single moment; later the bags appear in Machiavel's Prologue and in Barabas's own reckonings as the measure of his being.

The nunnery

Barabas's house turned into a convent is a symbol of Christian appropriation, and the poisoning of the nuns turns that symbol back on itself.

The cauldron

The boiling pit prepared for the Turks becomes the Jew's death, an image of the biter bit and of hell-mouth on the medieval stage.

The pot of rice

The poisoned porridge, sent as a charitable offering, turns a gift into a murder and Christian alms-giving into a joke.

Critical debates

Antisemitic play, or play about antisemitism?

The Jew of Malta is built from antisemitic material: the usurer, the well-poisoner, the child-killer, the enemy of Christians. It was performed in an England without legal Jews, to audiences who knew such images from sermons and plays, and its revival in 1594 coincided with the trial of the converso physician Lopez. On any historical reading the play drew on and fed real prejudice (Shapiro 1996).

Yet Marlowe's Christians are just as corrupt, and Barabas's first wrongs are done to him. Greenblatt argued that the play turns the stereotype into a mirror of Christian society; Bartels that it exposes how a society invents its outsiders. Others reply that satire of Christians does not cancel the harm of the caricature, since the audience is still invited to laugh at the Jew boiling in his cauldron (Greenblatt 1978) (Bartels 1990) (Cartelli 1991).

Tragedy or farce?

T. S. Eliot proposed that the play should be read not as a failed tragedy but as farce, of a savage and serious kind, and that its last acts are not a decline but a fulfilment of its comic method. His view changed the criticism and the staging of the play (Eliot 1920).

Earlier critics often thought the first two acts were tragic and the last three a crude falling-off, perhaps by another hand. Most modern readers accept Eliot's case for unity of tone, while noting that the opening soliloquy and the confiscation still give Barabas a tragic weight (Steane 1964) (Levin 1952).

Barabas as Vice

Bernard Spivack and David Bevington traced Barabas back to the Vice of the morality plays, the merry intriguer who confides in the audience, delights in mischief and is finally carried off to hell. The asides, the disguises and the comic violence all come from that tradition (Spivack 1958) (Bevington 1962).

This lineage explains why the audience enjoys Barabas while condemning him, and why the play shifts so readily into comedy. It also shows how deeply the stage Jew was bound up with older allegories of evil.

Overreacher or Machiavel?

Harry Levin placed Barabas among Marlowe's 'overreachers', with Tamburlaine and Faustus, heroes whose desire exceeds every limit; here the limitless desire is for wealth. Others, starting from the Prologue, see Barabas less as a tragic aspirer than as a stage Machiavel, a type of cunning (Levin 1952) (Minshull 1982).

Catherine Minshull argued that the 'sound Machevill' of the play is in fact Ferneze, whose policy succeeds where Barabas's fails. On this reading the play is a lesson in real Machiavellian statecraft, in which the cleverest outsider loses to the established power (Minshull 1982) (Babb 1957).

Theology or atheism?

G. K. Hunter argued that the play is steeped in Christian theological ideas about the Jews, and that its ironies make sense only within them: Barabas is the anti-Christian figure of tradition, and his fate is providential (Hunter 1964).

Against this, critics who stress Marlowe's reputation for atheism read the religious language as satire on all faiths: Machiavel calls religion a toy, and every pious act is a cover for gain. The final appeal to Heaven, in Ferneze's mouth, can be heard as sincere or as savage irony (Riggs 2004) (Greenblatt 1978).

Malta, empire and difference

Emily Bartels set the play in the context of Mediterranean imperialism and English colonial ambition. Malta, contested by Turks, Spaniards and knights, is a place where identity is made by power, and the Jew is the figure on whom the others project their own greed (Bartels 1990) (Bartels 1993).

Paul Kocher noticed that the confiscation scene echoes English legal practice, suggesting that Marlowe's Malta also reflected his own country's treatment of strangers. The 1593 'Dutch Church libel' against immigrants in London, which alluded to Marlowe's plays, shows how readily such stage language passed into real hostility (Kocher 1963) (Freeman 1973).

Barabas and Shylock

Shakespeare wrote The Merchant of Venice about 1596–97, while The Jew of Malta was still on stage. Shylock, like Barabas, is a rich Jew with a daughter who leaves him for Christianity; his cry over 'my daughter' and 'my ducats' echoes Barabas over his girl and gold, and he even names 'Barabas' in the play. Shakespeare seems to have written with Marlowe's play in his ear (Shapiro 1996) (Logan 2007).

The differences matter as much. Shylock is given grievances, a family history and the famous speech on common humanity, and he is defeated by law rather than boiled alive. Critics have read Shakespeare as humanizing Marlowe's caricature, or as hiding the same prejudice under a more realistic surface (Cartelli 1991) (Shapiro 1996).

Key passages

Questions for study

1. What is Machiavel's role in the Prologue? Is Barabas the play's true Machiavel, or is Ferneze?

   Compare the Prologue's ideas with Barabas's 'policy' and with how Ferneze wins at the end.

2. How does the opening soliloquy shape our view of Barabas before the Christians appear?

   Think about the language of jewels and trade, his contempt for Christian faith, and his love for Abigail.

3. In the confiscation scene, where do your sympathies lie, and how does the play shift them afterwards?

   Look at Ferneze's use of Scripture, Barabas's argument about ancestors, and what follows with Abigail.

4. Is the speech in which Barabas boasts of poisoning wells a confession, a performance or a satire?

   Consider its exaggeration, Ithamore's reply, and the medieval origin of these accusations.

5. What does Abigail represent in the play? Is her conversion sincere?

   Compare her first and second entries into the convent, her speech in 3.3 and her death in 3.6.

6. How are the friars and nuns presented, and what does this tell us about the play's audience?

   Think about Protestant England and anti-Catholic satire, and about the friars' greed.

7. Is the play a tragedy, a farce, or something else? Does the tone change between the first two acts and the last three?

   Use Eliot's idea of savage farce and examine the Barnardine and Bellamira scenes.

8. How do the Turks and the Knights of Malta behave towards each other, and what does this suggest about Christian claims to honour?

   Look at the tribute, Del Bosco's advice, and Ferneze's treatment of Calymath at the end.

9. What is the effect of the cauldron ending? Is Barabas punished by Heaven, by Ferneze, or by himself?

   Consider the trap's design, the medieval hell-mouth, and Ferneze's final couplet.

10. Compare Barabas with Shylock in The Merchant of Venice. What did Shakespeare take from Marlowe, and what did he change?

    Think about daughters, money, revenge, the law, and how each play ends for its Jew.

Further reading

• Babb, Howard S. 'Policy in Marlowe's The Jew of Malta.' ELH 24, no. 2 (1957): 85–94.
• Bartels, Emily C. 'Malta, the Jew, and the Fictions of Difference: Colonialist Discourse in Marlowe's The Jew of Malta.' English Literary Renaissance 20, no. 1 (1990): 1–16.
• Bartels, Emily C. Spectacles of Strangeness: Imperialism, Alienation, and Marlowe. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993.
• Bawcutt, N. W., ed. The Jew of Malta, by Christopher Marlowe. The Revels Plays. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1978.
• Bevington, David M. From 'Mankind' to Marlowe: Growth of Structure in the Popular Drama of Tudor England. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962.
• Cartelli, Thomas. Marlowe, Shakespeare, and the Economy of Theatrical Experience. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991.
• Cheney, Patrick, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Christopher Marlowe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
• Eliot, T. S. 'Notes on the Blank Verse of Christopher Marlowe.' In The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism. London: Methuen, 1920.
• Freeman, Arthur. 'Marlowe, Kyd, and the Dutch Church Libel.' English Literary Renaissance 3, no. 1 (1973): 44–52.
• Greenblatt, Stephen. 'Marlowe, Marx, and Anti-Semitism.' Critical Inquiry 5, no. 2 (1978): 291–307.
• Greenblatt, Stephen. Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980.
• Honan, Park. Christopher Marlowe: Poet & Spy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.
• Hopkins, Lisa. Christopher Marlowe, Renaissance Dramatist. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008.
• Hunter, G. K. 'The Theology of Marlowe's The Jew of Malta.' Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 27 (1964): 211–40.
• Kocher, Paul H. 'English Legal History in Marlowe's Jew of Malta.' Huntington Library Quarterly 26, no. 2 (1963): 155–63.
• Levin, Harry. The Overreacher: A Study of Christopher Marlowe. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1952.
• Logan, Robert A. Shakespeare's Marlowe: The Influence of Christopher Marlowe on Shakespeare's Artistry. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007.
• Logan, Robert A., ed. The Jew of Malta: A Critical Reader. Arden Early Modern Drama Guides. London: Bloomsbury, 2013.
• Minshull, Catherine. 'Marlowe's "Sound Machevill".' Renaissance Drama 13 (1982): 35–53.
• Riggs, David. The World of Christopher Marlowe. London: Faber and Faber, 2004.
• Shapiro, James. Shakespeare and the Jews. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996.
• Siemon, James R., ed. The Jew of Malta, by Christopher Marlowe. 3rd ed. New Mermaids. London: Methuen Drama, 2009.
• Simkin, Stevie. Marlowe: The Plays. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001.
• Spivack, Bernard. Shakespeare and the Allegory of Evil: The History of a Metaphor in Relation to His Major Villains. New York: Columbia University Press, 1958.
• Steane, J. B. Marlowe: A Critical Study. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964.