New York Shakespeare Reading Group

TAMBURLAINE THE GREAT—THE SECOND PART By Christopher Marlowe

Sun, Aug 9 · 3:00 PM EDT

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Tamburlaine the Great is a play in two parts by Christopher Marlowe. It is loosely based on the life of the Central Asian emperor Timur (Tamerlane/Timur the Lame, d. 1405). Written in 1587 or 1588, the play is a milestone in Elizabethanpublic drama; it marks a turning away from the clumsy language and loose plotting of the earlier Tudor dramatists, and a new interest in fresh and vivid language, memorable action, and intellectual complexity. Along with Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy, it may be considered the first popular success of London's public stage.
Marlowe, generally considered the best of that group of writers known as the University Wits, influenced playwrights well into the Jacobean period, and echoes of the bombast and ambition of Tamburlaine's language can be found in English plays all the way to the Puritanclosing of the theatres in 1642. While Tamburlaineis considered inferior to the great tragedies of the late-Elizabethan and early-Jacobean period, its significance in creating a stock of themes and, especially, in demonstrating the potential of blank verse in drama, is still acknowledged.
Whereas the real Timur was of Turkic-Mongolian ancestry and belonged to the nobility, for dramatic purposes Marlowe depicts him as a Scythian shepherd who rises to the rank of emperor.
Marlowe chiefly based his work on an abridged translation of Pedro Mexía's 1543 Silva de varia lección (A Miscellany of Several Lessons).[2] The translation into English via French, executed by Thomas Fortescue under the title The Forest or Collection of Historyes no lesse profitable than pleasant and necessary, was first published in 1571.[2][3] Another principal source was Petrus Perondinus's Vita Magni Tamerlinus; Marlowe mostly relied on Mexía for the episodes of the play and Perondinus for characterizing Tamburlaine.[4] Most of the minor characters were invented by Marlowe; the historians he drew on mention few names other than Tamburlaine himself (the historical Timur) and Bajazeth (Ottoman Sultan Bayezid I), though Mexía does mention a "Kyng of Persia and his brother" who were the origin of Marlowe's Cosroe and Mycetes[4] – likely based on the historical personages of the warring Muzaffaridbrother kings Shah Mansur and Shah Yahya. Marlowe was apparently aware from his sources of Timur's three sons Umar Shaikh Mirza I, Miran Shah, and Shah Rukh, but not their names; in the play they become Calyphas, Amyras, and Celebinus.[4]
The decision to portray Tamburlaine and the Persians as Hellenistic pagans rather than Muslims in the play was apparently made for dramatic purposes and cannot be attributed to a lack of sources on life in the East.[4] For similar reasons, Marlowe departs from his sources in being far more hostile towards Bajazeth and far more sympathetic towards Tamburlaine.[4] Marlowe largely exhausted his historical sources in writing Part I of the play; Part II therefore relies on more extraneous sources and episodes and lacks some of the cohesion of the preceding part.[4]
## Publication
The play (in both parts) was entered into the Stationers' Register on 14 August 1590. Both parts were published together in a single black letter octavo that same year by the printer Richard Jones; its text is usually referred to as O1. A second edition was issued by Jones in 1592, and a third reprint appeared in 1597, essentially reprinting the text of the first edition. The plays were next published separately in quarto by the bookseller Edward White, Part 1 in 1605 and Part 2 in 1606, which reprinted the text of the 1597 printing.[5]
Although Christopher Marlowe was not actually cited as the author in the first printings of the play – no author is named – and the first clear attributions to Marlowe are much later than 1590, scholars attribute the play to Marlowe based on similarities to his other works. Many passages in Tamburlaine foreshadow and echo passages from others of his works, and there is a clear parallel between the character development in Tamburlaine and that of the majority of Marlowe's other characters. This evidence alone leads scholars to believe with virtual unanimity that Marlowe wrote Tamburlaine.[6]
## Critical reception
The influence of Tamburlaine on the drama of the 1590s cannot be overstated.[citation needed] The play exemplified, and in some cases created, many of the typical features of high Elizabethan drama: grandiloquent imagery, hyperbolic expression, and strong characters consumed by overwhelming passions. The first recorded comments on the play are negative. A letter written in 1587 relates the story of a child being killed by the accidental discharge of a firearm during a performance, and the next year Robert Greene, in the course of an attack on Marlowe, condemned the "atheistic Tamburlaine" in the epistle to Perimedes the Blacksmith. That most playgoers (and playwrights) responded with enthusiasm is amply demonstrated by the proliferation of Asian tyrants and "aspiring minds" in the drama of the 1590s. Marlowe's influence on many characters in Shakespeare's history plays has been noted by, among others, Algernon Swinburne. Stephen Greenblatt considers it likely that Tamburlaine was among the first London plays that Shakespeare saw, an experience that directly inspired his early work such as the three Henry VI plays.[7]
By the early years of the 17th century, this hyberbolic language had gone out of style. Shakespeare himself puts a speech from Tamburlaine in the mouth of his play-addled soldier Pistol (2 Henry IV II.4.155).[8] In Timber, Ben Jonson condemned "the Tamerlanes and Tamer-chams of the late age, which had nothing in them but the scenical strutting and furious vociferation to warrant them to the ignorant gapers".
The play is often linked to Renaissance humanism which idealises the potential of human beings. Tamburlaine's aspiration to immense power raises profound religious questions as he arrogates for himself a role as the "scourge of God" (an epithet originally applied to Attila the Hun). Some readers have linked this stance with the fact that Marlowe was accused of atheism. Others have been more concerned with an anti-Muslim thread of the play, highlighted in a scene in which the main character burns the Qur'an.
Jeff Dailey notes in his article "Christian Underscoring in Tamburlaine the Great, Part II" that Marlowe's work is a direct successor to the traditional medieval morality plays,[9] and that, whether or not he was an atheist, he had inherited religious elements of content and allegorical methods of presentation.
## Performance history
The first part of Tamburlaine was performed by the Admiral's Men late in 1587, around a year after Marlowe's departure from Cambridge University. Edward Alleyn performed the role of Tamburlaine, and it apparently became one of his signature roles. The play's popularity, significant enough to prompt Marlowe to produce the sequel, led to numerous stagings over the next decade.
The stratification of London audiences in the early Jacobean period changed the fortunes of the play. For the sophisticated audiences of private theatres such as Blackfriars and (by the early 1610s) the Globe Theatre, Tamburlaine's "high astounding terms" were a relic of a simpler dramatic age. Satiric playwrights occasionally mimicked Marlowe's style, as John Marston does in the induction to Antonio and Mellida.

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Bajazeth is encaged, while his captive wife is treated as a slave(1860) byPeter Johann Nepomuk Geiger

While it is likely that Tamburlaine was still revived in the large playhouses, such as the Red Bull Theatre, that catered to traditional audiences, there is no surviving record of a Renaissance performance after 1595. Tamburlaine suffered more from the change in fashion than did Marlowe's other plays like Doctor Faustus or The Jew of Malta of which there are allusions to performances. Edward Phillips, in his Theatrum Poetarum(1675), is so unfamiliar with the play that he attributes its writing to Thomas Newton.[10]A further sign of the obscurity this one-time audience favourite had fallen into is offered by playwright Charles Saunders. Having written his own play in 1681 on Tamburlaine, he was accused by critics of having plagiarised Marlowe's work, to which he replied,

> I never heard of any Play on the same Subject, untill my own was Acted, neither have I since seen it, though it hath been told me, there is a Cock Pit Play going under the name of the Scythian Shepherd, or Tamberlain the Great, being a thing, not a Bookseller in London, or scarce the Players themselves, who Acted it formerly cou'd call to remembrance.[11]
Following the Glorious Revolution of 1688, a tradition developed in Ireland of performing the play in Dublin on the anniversary of William of Orange's birthday. This was brought to an end in 1713 when the government banned a performance of the play because it included a controversial prologue including the phrase "No Peace Without Spain".

The Tragedie of Dido Queene of Carthage

Sun, Aug 16 · 3:00 PM EDT

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Dido, Queen of Carthage (full title: The Tragedie of Dido Queene of Carthage) is a short play written by the English playwright Christopher Marlowe, with possible contributions by Thomas Nashe. It was probably written between 1587 and 1593, and was first published in 1594. The story focuses on the classical figure of Dido, the Queen of Carthage. It tells an intense dramatic tale of Dido and her fanatical love for Aeneas (induced by Cupid), Aeneas' betrayal of her and her eventual suicide on his departure for Italy. The playwrights relied on Books 1, 2, and 4 of Virgil's Aeneid as primary source.[1][2]

The Jew of Malta-Christopher Marlowe

Sun, Aug 23 · 3:00 PM EDT

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# The Jew of Malta

| The Jew of MaltaThe Jew of Malta (full title: The Famous Tragedy of the Rich Jew of Malta) is a play by Christopher Marlowe, written in 1589 or 1590. The plot primarily revolves around a Maltese Jewish merchant named Barabas. The original story combines religious conflict, intrigue, and revenge, set against a backdrop of the struggle for supremacy between Spain and the Ottoman Empire in the Mediterranean that takes place on the island of Malta. There has been extensive debate about the play's portrayal of Jewsand how Elizabethan audiences would have viewed it. |
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## Characters

• Machiavel, speaker of the Prologue
• Barabas, a rich Jewish merchant of Malta
• Abigail, his daughter
• Ithamore, his slave
• Ferneze, Governor of Malta
• Don Lodowick, his son
• Don Mathias, Lodowick's friend
• Katharine, Mathias' mother
• Friar Jacomo
• Friar Bernardine
• Abbess
• Selim Calymath, son of the Emperor of Turkey
• Callapine, a bashaw
• Martin del Bosco, Vice Admiral of Spain
• Bellamira, a courtesan
• Pilia-Borsa, her pimp
• Two merchants
• Three Jews
• A messenger
• A slave
• Knights of Malta
• Officers of Malta
• Bashaws serving the Turkish emperor
• Carpenters
• A nun
• Citizens of Malta, Turkish janizaries, guards, attendants, slaves

## Summary


Lifting of the Siege of Malta(Charles-Philippe Larivière, c. 1842). Marlowe was inspired by the great Christian–Muslim conflict of the 1565 Great Siege of Malta.[1][2]
The play opens with the character Machiavel, a Senecan ghost based on Niccolò Machiavelli, introducing "the tragedy of a Jew." Machiavel expresses the cynical view that power is amoral, saying "I count religion but a childish toy, / And hold there is no sin but ignorance."[3]
Barabas begins the play in his counting-house. Stripped of all he has for protesting against the Governor of Malta's seizure of the wealth of the country's whole Jewish population to pay off the warring Turks, he develops a murderous streak by, with the help of his slave Ithamore, tricking the Governor's son and his friend into fighting over the affections of his daughter, Abigail. When they both die in a duel, he becomes further incensed when Abigail, horrified at what her father has done, runs away to become a Christian nun. In retribution, Barabas then goes on to poison her along with the whole of the nunnery, strangles an old friar (Barnadine) who tries to make him repent for his sins and then frames another friar (Jacomo) for the first friar's murder. After Ithamore falls in love with a prostitute who conspires with her criminal friend to blackmail and expose him (after Ithamore drunkenly tells them everything his master has done), Barabas poisons all three of them. When he is caught, he drinks "of poppy and cold mandrake juice" so that he will be left for dead, and then plots with the enemy Turks to besiege the city.
When at last Barabas is nominated governor by his new allies, he switches sides to the Christians once again. Having devised a trap for the Turks' galley slaves and soldiers in which they will all be demolished by gunpowder, he then sets a trap for the Turkish prince himself and his men, hoping to boil them alive in a hidden cauldron. Just at the key moment, however, the former governor double-crosses him and causes him to fall into his own trap. The play ends with the Christian governor holding the Turkish prince hostage until reparations are paid. Barabas curses them as he burns.[4]

## Discussion

### Religious scepticism

Despite its focus on Judaism, the play expresses scepticism of religious morality in general. Ferneze, the Christian governor of Malta, first penalises the island's Jews by seizing half of all their assets to pay tribute to the Turkish sultan, then picks on Barabas in particular when he objects, by seizing all his assets. Secondly Ferneze allows admiral Del Bosco to persuade him to break his alliance with the Turks and ally with Spain. Thirdly, at the end of the play Ferneze enthusiastically agrees with Barabas's plan to entrap and assassinate the Turks, but then betrays Barabas by triggering the trapdoor which sends him to his death. Similarly Ithamore, the Muslim slave bought by Barabas, betrays his master to Bellamira the courtesan and Pilia-Borza the thief, and blackmails him, despite Barabas having made him his heir. Thus, Christians, Jews and Muslims are all seen to act contrary to the principles of their faiths – as indeed the prologue by Machiavel hints.

### History of Elizabethan antisemitism

Further information: History of the Jews in England
Jews had been officially banished from England by King Edward I in 1290 with the Edict of Expulsion, nearly three hundred years before Marlowe wrote The Jew of Malta. They were not openly readmitted to the country until the 1650s. Throughout the period, Jews continued to work and live in London,[5] and it is suggested that, while they were not fully integrated into society, they were generally tolerated and free to go about their business, within their own circles.[6] That said, Elizabethan audiences would generally have had little to no contact with Jews or Judaism in their daily life.[7] Lacking any actual interaction with Jews, English authors, when choosing to write Jewish characters would often resort to utilizing antisemitic tropes.[7][8] These creations have been the subject of much debate. For instance, some argue that the lack of Jews in England created portrayals different from portrayals of Jewish characters in Europe, where they were permitted to live openly (although constantly in fear of persecution). These differences were, in turn, unique among the marginalized groups of Europe: a kind of double difference marking Jews in England as exceptionally ostracized.[8][9] British author Anthony Julius noted that during this era, as discussion of Jews became more prominent in mainstream discourse, so did plays which contained antisemitic elements.[8][10] Many of the antisemitic tropes in Jewish characters written during this period were also popular among authors on the Continent, coming about during a period of increasing contact amongst the various nations of Europe.[8][11]
These tropes could also have contributed to the popularity of plays such as Marlowe's The Jew of Malta. In 1594 Roderigo López, a Converso and doctor to Queen Elizabeth I, was accused of attempting to poison his mistress and put on trial for treason. Public demands for his execution, many of which were loaded with antisemitic tropes, were an important factor in his conviction for attempted murder. His execution coincided with a performance of Marlowe's play at the Rose Theatre.[12]

### Antisemitism in The Jew of Malta

The Jew of Malta, given the time of its publication, its main character, and the significance of religion throughout the text, is often referenced in discussions about antisemitism. Some of the conversation around antisemitism in The Jew of Malta focuses on authorial intent, the question of whether or not Marlowe intended to promote antisemitism in his work, while other critics focus on how the work is perceived, either by its audience at the time or by modern audiences.
A Marxist critique of The Jew of Malta suggests that Marlowe intended to utilize readily available antisemitic feelings in his audience in a way that made the Jews "incidental" to the social critique he offered. That is, he wished to use antisemitism as a rhetorical tool rather than advocating for it. In this, Marlowe failed, instead producing a work that is, because of its failure to "discredit" the sentiments it toys with, a propagator of antisemitism. Such rhetorical attempts "underestimated the irrationality ... fixation ... and persistence of anti-Semitism".[7]
Another viewpoint suggests that those who claim to see antisemitism in Marlowe's work often do so more because of what they think they know about the period in which they were written rather than what the texts themselves present. Thomas Cartelli, a professor of English and Film Studies at Muhlenberg College, admits that certain of Barabas' features are troublesome vis-à-vis antisemitism, such as his large and often-referenced nose, but suggests that such surface details are not important. If one looks past the surface, it is argued, the play can be seen as uniting all three religions it represents—Judaism, Islam, and Christianity—by way of their mutual hypocrisy. These examples illustrate, though not fully, the breadth of opinions expressed on the subject.[13]

### Authorship


Anonymous portrait, possibly Marlowe
Complicating the accusations of Marlowe's antisemitism, scholars have argued about who wrote the play. These arguments range from suggesting that the text of the play is entirely by Marlowe, but that the beginning was distorted towards the end by the strictures and deadlines of a theater's demands,[5] so that subsequent adaptations and manuscripts have significantly distorted the original text.[14] In particular, observers believe the third, fourth and fifth acts to be written, at least partially, by someone else.[15] Others disagree, pointing out that the steadily building climb of Barabas' sins, culminating with his death by his own plot, to be indicative of a consistent authorial presence.[16]
While the play was entered in the Stationers' Register on 17 May 1594, the earliest surviving edition was printed in 1633 by the bookseller Nicholas Vavasour, under the sponsorship of Thomas Heywood.[17] This edition contains prologues and epilogues written by Heywood for a revival in that year. Heywood is also sometimes thought to have revised the play. Corruption and inconsistencies in the 1633 quarto, particularly in the third, fourth, and fifth acts, may be evidence of revision or alteration of the text.[18]

### The Merchant of Venice

Some critics have suggested that the play directly influenced Marlowe's contemporary, William Shakespeare, in the writing of his play The Merchant of Venice (written c. 1596–99).[19] James Shapiro notes that both The Merchant of Venice and The Jew of Malta are works obsessed with the economics of their day, stemming from anxiety around new business practices in the theater, including the bonding of actors to companies. Such bonds would require actors to pay a hefty fee if they performed with other troupes or were otherwise unable to perform. In this way, greed becomes an allegory rather than a characteristic or stereotype.[19]
Others believe that the suggestion of imitation by Shakespeare of Marlowe is overblown, and that not only the two stories are very different, but the principal characters that are often compared, Shylock and Barabas, are themselves profoundly different.[6]
While critics debate whether or not The Jew of Malta was a direct influence, or merely a product of the contemporaneous society that they both were written in, it is noteworthy that Marlowe and Shakespeare were the only two English playwrights of their time to include a Jewish principal character in one of their plays.[6]

### Biblical punishment

At the end of the play, Barabas attempts to murder his erstwhile Turkish allies by tricking them into falling through a trap door into a hot cauldron in a pit. In the end, it is Barabas who falls into his own fiery pit and dies a violent death.[4] The method by which Barabas dies has several specific Biblical overtones, and these connections have been acknowledged by scholars.[16] In terms of the specifications for punishment dictated by the Old Testament, it matches the crime in Barabas' case: he is guilty of murder, fraud, and betraying fellow Jews.[16] Secondarily, there is a frequent use in Judaism of a device where a perpetrator is ensnared in his own trap. An example of this includes Haman, in the story of Purim, being hanged on the very gallows he intended for the Jews he wished to murder.[16]

## Performance and reception

The Jew of Malta was an immediate success[5] from its first recorded performance at the Rose Theatre in early 1592, when Edward Alleyn played the lead role.[20] The play was subsequently presented by Alleyn's Lord Strange's Men seventeen times between 26 February 1592 and 1 February 1593. It was performed by Sussex's Men on 4 February 1594, and by a combination of Sussex's and Queen Elizabeth's Men on 3 and 8 April 1594. More than a dozen performances by the Admiral's Men occurred between May 1594 and June 1596. (The play apparently belonged to impresario Philip Henslowe, since the cited performances occurred when the companies mentioned were acting for Henslowe.) In 1601 Henslowe's diary notes payments to the Admiral's company for props for a revival of the play.[21]
The play remained popular for the next fifty years, until England's theaters were closed in 1642. In the Caroline era, actor Richard Perkins was noted for his performances as Barabas when the play was revived in 1633 by Queen Henrietta's Men. The title page of the 1633 quarto refers to this revival, performed at the Cockpit Theatre.[22]
The play was revived by Edmund Kean at Drury Lane on 24 April 1818. The script of this performance included additions by S. Penley.[23] It was considered a successful production at the time. However, in an anonymous biography of Kean published seventeen years later, it suggests that the success of the production came from Kean's performance and his addition of a song to the role of Barabas, and that the play itself, on its own, was a failure.[5]
The Royal Shakespeare Company staged a new production at the Barbican in 1988, with Alun Armstrong as Barnabas.
On 2 October 1993, Ian McDiarmid starred as Barabas in a BBC Radio 3 adaptation of the play directed by Michael Fox, with Ken Bones as Machevil and Ferneze, Kathryn Hunt as Abigail, Michael Grandage as Don Lodowick, Neal Swettenham as Don Mathias and Kieran Cunningham as Ithamore.[24]

# The Jew of Malta – antisemitic or a satire on antisemitism?

Wolf Hall meets Quentin Tarantino – religious tensions and racial violence play out in the RSC’s impeccably timed revival of Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta
Charles Nicholl
Fri 27 Mar 2015
Christopher Marlowe’s controversial career was abruptly curtailed when he was stabbed to death at the age of 29. His reputation as the greatest of the pre-Shakespearean dramatists rests on just seven plays written in the late 1580s and early 1590s. The best known of these is Doctor Faustus, a thunderous study of magic and damnation. But perhaps the bleakest and most challenging of his works is The Jew of Malta, now at the Swan theatre in Stratford in a new production by the Royal Shakespeare Company directed by Justin Audibert.
The timing of this revival is almost uncanny. While Doctor Faustus scared its early audiences with visions of hellfire, The Jew of Malta seems tailor-made for more topical fears. Its chief theme is antisemitism. It is a story of religious tensions and racist violence, of tangled motives and shifting sympathies, played out against the backdrop of a cynical society whose true creed is neither religion nor ideology but grasping materialist greed. A searchable online text reveals the play’s keywords to be “gold”, which occurs 38 times, followed by “death” (25), “villain” and “villainy” (24), “money” (23), “poison” (18), “slave” (16) and “policy” (13) – the last in its Elizabethan sense of cunning machiavellian stratagems. The presentation of the eponymous Jew, Barabas, veers between victim, anti-hero and monster. Brutalised – or as we now say “radicalised” – by ill treatment, he goes on a spree of cold-blooded killings. His victims are mostly Christians, but they also include his own daughter Abigail, who has fled to a nunnery, and a troop of Turkish soldiers burned alive in their garrison. He sums up his code of conduct, or survival, thus:

> First, be thou void of these affections:
>
> Compassion, love, vain hope, and heartless fear;
> Be moved at nothing; see thou pity none.

All this might suggest an uncomfortable evening in store, but with Marlowe such expectations are there to be upended, and this toxic cocktail of alienation and murder is laced throughout with deadpan black comedy. Think Wolf Hall reimagined by Quentin Tarantino, and you begin to get the feel of it. The title page of the first extant edition (1633) describes the play as a tragedy, but as TS Eliot observed nearly a century ago, it becomes more “intelligible” if one takes it “not as a tragedy … but as a farce”, written in a tone of “serious, even savage comic humour”. Eliot also enjoyed the equivocating shrug of Barabas’s response to a charge of fornication – “But that was in another country, / And besides the wench is dead” – and took it for the epigraph for his poem “Portrait of a Lady”.


View image in fullscreen
Jasper Britton (Barabas) in the RSC’s The Jew Of Malta.Photograph: Tristram Kenton for the Guardian
The play is sometimes dated to around 1589, as it mentions the death of the Duke of Guise (December 1588), but the chronology of Marlowe’s plays is largely guesswork. The first record of it on stage was on 26 February 1592, when it was performed by Lord Strange’s Men at the Rose theatre in Southwark, with Edward Alleyn in the title role. It was the Rose’s top-earning play of the 1592-93 season, in a repertory that included such crowd-pleasers as Thomas Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy and Shakespeare’s Henry VI Part 1. A line in the latter – “My heart, sweet boy, shall be thy sepulchre” – sounds like an echo of Barabas’s “These arms of mine shall be thy sepulchre”. This foreshadows the more extensive reverberations of Marlowe’s play in Shakespeare’s presentation of Shylock in The Merchant of Venice.
A successful later run at the Rose in 1594 can be related to the high-profile arraignment of the Queen’s physician, Rodrigo López. A Portuguese Jew, López was charged in February 1594 with conspiring to poison the Queen, and was executed with the usual barbarities in June. His trial, in the absence of hard evidence, featured a good deal of anti-Jewish propaganda, and it cannot be doubted that the concurrent revival of the play cashed in on the public mood arising from this. Marlowe was dead by this point (and anyway the playscript belonged to the Rose’s owner Philip Henslowe), so it was not he who cashed in on it.
The Jew of Malta is certainly a play about antisemitism, but is it also (as is often thought) an antisemitic play? It is true that Barabas is given the stock negative attributes of the Jew – rapacious and avaricious, a usurer who has “filled the gaols with bankrupts”, a hater of Christians – and that his name, echoing the Barabbas of the Gospels, alludes to the view that Jews were responsible for Christ’s crucifixion. It may also be true that Barabas was played wearing a large false nose, since a minor Jacobean comedy, The Search for Money by William Rowley, describes a usurer as wearing a “visage like the artificial Jew of Malta’s nose”: this is a late reference (c1609) so it may not describe the original production, though one notes that Marlowe’s text refers to Barabas as a “bottle-nosed knave”.
But Marlowe’s purpose in presenting us with this pantomime Jew is surely to satirise the crudity of the stereotype. It is a provocative or Hebdoesque piece of religious cartooning that challenges the complacencies and credulities of his audience. The outlandish elements of the portrait – “that Jew: he lives upon pickled grasshoppers and sauced mushrumps … He never put on clean shirt since he was circumcised …The hat he wears, Judas left under the elder when he hanged himself”, etc – are a reductio ad absurdum of antisemitic attitudes. It must be remembered that Jews were comparatively rare in Elizabethan England – they had been “expelled” three centuries earlier – so the populist fear of them that the play taps into was essentially folkloric. Contemporary accounts of Marlowe paint him as a trenchant critic of religious superstition – one who “perswades men … not to be afeard of bugbeares and hobgoblins” – and it seems unlikely he actually held the views that are voiced onstage (any more than he actually believed that the scholar Faustus deserved eternal damnation for his extracurricular studies in the occult). I offer this reading of the play as a corrective argument rather than a deeply held conviction – the latter is anyway a currency Marlowe valued very little.


View image in fullscreen
Geoffrey Freshwater (Friar Barnadine), Jasper Britton (Barabas) and Matthew Kelly (Friar Jacomo) in the RSC’s The Jew Of Malta. Photograph: Tristram Kenton for the Guardian
Though Barabas bestrides the stage like a problematic colossus, there is a sense in which the presiding figure of the play is the one brought on at the beginning to deliver its 35-line prologue. The first words of the playscript are a stage direction: “Enter Machevill”. Here too we have a provocative stereotype, for “Machevill” (or “make-evil”) is of course a punning pronunciation of Machiavelli. The Florentine political philosopher Niccolò Machiavelli had died more than 50 years previously, but in England he remained a kind of bogeyman, deplored by the orthodox as one who divested political action of morality. He was essentially a banned author – none of his political texts had appeared in English. There were editions in Italian and Latin, and there were translations in manuscript, but no publisher had dared to print them. Another half-century would pass before Edward Dacre’s translations were printed: the Discourses in 1636, and that handbook of stark realpolitik, The Prince, in 1640. Marlowe’s machiavellian prologue is the coup de theatre of 1592, trailing these dangerous ideas – “I count religion but a childish toy / And hold there is no sin but ignorance” – and fixing the play’s dominant critique. When Barabas briefly becomes governor of Malta he muses in machiavellian vein on the need to profit from his power:

> For he that liveth in authority,
>
> And neither gets him friends nor fills his bags,
> Lives like the ass that Aesop speaketh of,
> That labours with a load of bread and wine,
> And leaves it off to snap on thistle tops.

These lines typify the toughness and stripped-down clarity of Marlowe’s versification, and they convey the play’s central message that the demon Barabas is in essence no different from the Christian governor, Fernese, who has been busily following the same amoral code of power, violence and profit under a cloak of religious hypocrisy – “Ay policy! That’s their profession, / And not simplicity as they suggest.”
Marlowe was himself no stranger to the tawdry world of political intrigue that is the milieu of the play, nor indeed to the dangers of being demonised. In the spring of 1593 he was incriminated by informers as a heretic and blasphemer: the presentation of him in such documents as the infamous “Baines Note” might well be described as the “pantomime atheist”. On 20 May he was brought before the privy council for questioning; 10 days later he was fatally stabbed through the right eye in a Deptford lodging-house – a dissident author (in one reading of this sequence of events) disappearing in a huddle of snoops and spies, those “climbing followers”, to borrow an ominous phrase from The Jew of Malta, who sought advancement in the downfall of others.
The Jew of Malta is at the RSC Swan, Stratford-Upon-Avon, until 8 September. Charles Nicholl’s The Reckoning: The Murder of Christopher Marlowe is published by Vintage.