The Complete Plays Read Online Free PDF

its first audiences. In ancient tragedy, the gods destroy a mortal who offends them with his pride (
hubris
). Marlowe’s application of this tragic model to the damnation of Faustus is not reassuring to a Christian audience.
    â€˜Pythagoras’
metempsychosis
’ (14.104), the transmigration of the soul, offers no escape in the harshly orthodox world of
Doctor Faustus
. At the start of
The Jew of Malta
, the soul of Machevil (Machiavelli’s post-mortem name spells out his immorality as clearly as his claiming to ‘count religion but a childish toy’, Prologue, 14), having transmigrated through the body of the duke of Guise, arrives to ‘present’ (Prologue, 30) Barabas, who sits in his counting-house, like Faustus in his study, counting his wealth – ‘Infinite riches in a little room’ (1.1.37). Thereafter, the soul is irrelevant to the material world of a play filled with jewels and gold. Malta itself is a little room, cramped and urban, a fortified Mediterranean island which draws Turks, Christians and Jews alike, all blown in by ‘The wind that bloweth all the world besides: / Desire of gold’ (3.5.3–4). Religious differences here are harshly ethnic, territorial, not moral. The Knights of Malta sanctimoniously confiscate Barabas’s wealth to buy off the Turks, and most of the action is taken up with his vengeance against Ferneze for this judicial theft. The play is largely a satire on Christian venality and hypocrisy. There is little poetry: ‘The Passionate Shepherd’ reappears in parody-form in the mangled mythologies of the runaway slave Ithamore’s invitation to the prostitute Bellamira:
    I’ll be thy Jason, thou my golden fleece;
…
Thou in those groves, by Dis above,
Shalt live with me and be my love. (4.2.93, 100–101)
    The language is dominated by obliquities, puns and asides. It is a revenge-tragedy that tips over into farce, ‘the farce of the old English comic humour’, in T.S. Eliot’s inescapable formulation, ‘terribly serious even savage comic humour’. 21
    Barabas entirely dominates the plot, and he is something other than a vulgar anti-Semitic stereotype: he is a stereotype, a monster, in the making. Alone when he first appears, Barabas is consistently isolated. He feels no more solidarity with his fellow Jews than with ‘these swine-eating Christians, / (Unchosen nation, never circumcised…)’ (2.3.7–8), and is unmoved by the Turkish threat: ‘Nay, let ’em combat, conquer, and kill all, / So they spare me, my daughter, and my wealth’ (1.1.150–51). But the provisos make him vulnerable. Robbed of his wealth and his house, he becomes further desocialized. His soliloquies and snarling asides, besides being brilliant comic devices, are also the verbal tics of a man talking principally to himself. The complex satirical functions of his interactions are especially clear in 2.3, in which he lures his daughter’s two Christian suitors, Lodowick and Mathias, into a murderous rivalry to be avenged on Lodowick’s father. Barabas covers his asides to the audience with some invented Jewish ritual:
    â€™Tis a custom held with us
That, when we speak with gentiles like to you,
We turn into the air to purge ourselves;
For unto us the promise doth belong. (2.3.45–8)
    This enactment of Jewish separateness maliciously parodies the Christian fantasy of the
foetor Judaicus
, the ‘Jewish stench’ supposedly given off by menstruating Jewish men, and neatly captures the mutual hostility of the two religions. 22 Later in the scene, a respectable Christian matron conveniently illustrates the usual prejudice: ‘Converse not with him, he is cast off from heaven’ (3.161). But this apartheid masks a secret commerce. Both groups, after all, have come to buy people at a Christianrun slave-market; the ‘diamond’ Barabas discusses with Lodowick is his daughter.