The Jew of Malta

THE JEW OF MALTA is one of the handful of works by Christopher Marlowe, the Elizabethan playwright who dabbled in political intrigue and atheist proselytizing and died in a barfight before the age of 30. As the play opens, the Ottoman Empire is threatening the Christian island of Malta, whereupon the governor expropriates the holdings of a rich Jewish trade to buy the Turks off. Barabas, this Jew of Malta, doesn't take this too kindly and hatches various plans to destroy people close to the state and church. Even though a great number of people meet gruesome ends in the play, THE JEW OF MALTA is not the Elizabethan tragedy you might imagine from a knowledge of Shakespeare's works. Instead, Marlowe has written a black comedy where murderous plots become so over the top you can't help but chuckle. When Barabas buys a slave to assist him in his dirty work, the Jew of Malta boasts of his earlier successes in bankrupting the poor, poisoning wells, and baiting thieves to stuff them and put them on display in his gallery. The slave, trying to one-up his master, proudly claims to have burned entire Christian villages and cut the throats of patrons of the inn he once owned. No audience could take this seriously, and I'm sure that performed on the stage the play brought laughter to many Elizabethan theatre-goers. Barabas' end, far from being a moving tragical death, is a type of pure slapstick you can find in cartoons to this day. In most ways, Barabas is a stock character meant to appeal to the anti-Semitism of the time, being a miser who heaps up piles of gold in his counting house when he's not involved in one murder or another. What is interesting, however, is how Marlowe uses Barabas to condemn the faults of Christians. Early in the play he claims that many of the monks and nuns of Malta have taken vows only to hide their sporting with each other. The townspeople condemn Barabas as being evil by nature compared to the good Christians of Malta, but his murderous intrigue mainly consists of not killing people himself, but rather fanning the flames of their already present moral faults until the wipe each other out. THE JEW OF MALTA has been highly influential on later English literature. Shakespeare may have been responding to Marlowe's choice of main character in THE MERCHANT OF VENICE, and two of T.S. Eliot's poems take their epigraphs from Marlowe's play. I'd certainly recommend it for its importance in the canon, but beyond that for its entertainment value. Written in Elizabethan English, set in a very different time and place than what we know, it nonetheless succeeds as dark comedy to this day.

Ok, so perhaps not infinite, but lots. Marlowe's plays are all a bit strange in their own way. The Jew of Malta is sort of like a really raw take on the issues in the Merchant of Venice (i.e. no sweet love story here). But Marlowe's Barabas gets to enjoy being bad a lot more than Shylock does, and the character is amazingly capable of perhaps not earning the reader's sympathy but extracting her complicity instead. There's some great language in this play and some spectacular misanthropy. The revels editions are always a good bet; they have enough scholarly apparatus to be of significant help and are well-edited and well laid-out on the page. This one is very thin and portable, and so it can feel like a rip-off for 9 bucks. However, the quality of the critical help here is far greater than in the Everyman collected edition of Marlowe.

Similar to Shakespeare's commercial epicenter, Venice, Malta bubbles with the primordial ooze of modern business. As David Thurn says, "The Jew of Malta may be understood as symptomatic of one phase in the prehistory of capitalism." Among other modern business practices, during the Italian Rennaissance, accounting found a rebirth and in the 16th century became common practice. By the end of Barabas's opening scene, Malta seems as globalized as today's economy. Malta is strategic to vilifying the Jew. Barabas is a merchant working the water hub of the Mediterranean, and like an overseer of a distribution center, squares his assets with his liabilities down to the last silverling. He dislikes accounting his petty cash, saying, "Fie, what a trouble `tis to count this trash!" (1.1.7). His irritation resonates today; like Barabas, large modern firms do not bother with accounting entries below certain dollar values, because of two reasons: time and money. Before "heaps of gold," Barabas hoards his money, and the characterization broadcasts the grossest kind of cartoonish greed, like that of Ebeneezer Scrooge. Instead of entrepreneurial visionary, we see a miserly, selfish, abominable grotesque of greed. Barabas awaits his incoming ships, which creates a striking similarity to Antonio in The Merchant of Venice. However, more important than the mood of the merchant is his religion. The motivation of the Christian merchant seems to be the common good, while the Jew works strictly in self-interest. Like other great villains, Barabas keeps a master inventory of other people's weaknesses. It is a terrifying joy to watch a great villain arrange characters into annihilating arrangements. He has no qualms holding scripture in one hand, a knife in the other, as he explains to Abigail, "religion / hides many mischiefs from suspicion" (1.2.283). To get revenge with the government, he looks past Ferneze to his family, to Ludowick. In a disturbing introspection, Barabas tells what he has learned from years of oppression under the Christians. We Jews can fawn like spaniels when we please; And when we grin we bite, yet are our looks As innocent and harmless as a lamb's. I learned in Florence how to kiss my hand, Heave up my shoulders when they call me dog (2.3.20-24). Years of gross condescension and abuse taught Barabas cunning deceits, but that unfortunate education assists his revenge. Like an effective salesperson or manager, rather than lash out, he knows how to keep bridges intact, at least until he can ignite a blaze on his own terms. He knows to hold his tongue when provoked, to stoop in subordination when helpless, and to attack along appropriate avenues when the hour is right. Before revenge clouds his judgment, Barabas opposes violence and has no political aspirations. Violence leads to temporary gains: "Nothing violent / Oft have I heard tell, can be permanent" (1.1.131-132).