Marlowe's hilarious farce The Jew of Malta - How sweet the bells ring now the nuns are dead

A conceptual innovator himself, Christopher Marlowe responded to other innovations.  In The Jew of Malta (1589, maybe), he wrote, following the novelty of The Spanish Tragedy, a kind of revenge tragedy.  For the first couple of acts, it does look like a revenge tragedy.  The Jews of Malta have their wealth seized to bribe the Turks, who threaten invasion.  The richest among them, Barabas, vows revenge on Malta’s Christian rulers:

And there, in spite of Malta, will I dwell,

Having Ferneze’s hand, whose heart I’ll have,

Ay, and his son’s too, or it shall go hard.

I am not of the tribe of Levi, I,

That can so soon forget an injury.  (II.3, 373)

But Barabas, it turns out, is what we now call a total psycho – “For, so I live, perish may all the world!  (V.5, 426) – so once his crazy scheme for revenge starts rolling there is no stopping (until he is caught in one of his own pointlessly elaborate traps).

Barabas is my favorite creation of Marlowe’s, because of his gusto, his boundless energy for evil that somehow surpasses even that of the world-conquering Tamburlaine; he is a miniature tyrant.

                                 Why, is not this

A kingly kind of trade, to purchase towns

By treachery, and sell ‘em by deceit? (V.5, 427)

It is as if Tamburlaine were trapped on an island, where he cannot slaughter five percent of the world’s population but proportionally can get close:

BARABAS: There is no music to a Christian knell!

How sweet the bells ring now the nuns are dead,

That sound at other times like tinkers’ pans!  (IV.1, 398)

In the same scene Barabas is confronted by, and confounds, a pair of friars, “two religious caterpillars”:

FRIAR BARNARDINE: Remember that –

FRIAR JACOMO: Ay, remember that –

BARABAS: I must needs say that I have been a great usurer.

FRIAR BARNARDINE:  Thou hast committed –

BARABAS: Fornication: but that was in another country,

And besides the wench is dead.  (IV.1, 399-400)

I had assumed that everyone loved this scene, but no, following T. S. Eliot in his 1919 “Christopher Marlowe” essay, many people actually read The Jew of Malta as an unsatisfying tragedy rather than as a hilarious farce for which “Marlowe develops a tone to suit this farce.”  The humor is “terribly serious, even savage,” writes Eliot, which is certainly how I read the play.  It is nuts, Marlowe knows it is nuts, and everybody has a good time.

Richard Wilson in his chapter on “Tragedy, patronage, and power” (Ch. 13) in The Cambridge Companion to Christoper Marlowe (2004) argues that Marlowe’s works are mostly about publishing –  “and we see how this is a drama about authors’ rights and ownership of texts” (218).  I wish I had an idea half as wild as this one.  “{T]he playwright-as-hero [Barabas!] wages war on two fronts, against both the patrons who purloin his profit and the performers who sell his plots” (219).  Yes, ha ha ha, why not!

Julia Reinhard Upton’s chapter on The Jew of Malta (Ch. 9) begins with a section on the actual Jews of the actual Malta and is generally quite historicist, which is one way to rescue The Jew of Malta from its blatant anti-Semitism, by which I mean, at minimum, that Marlowe exploits a lot of standard anti-Jewish stereotypes for humor and horror without the humanist ambiguity of The Merchant of Venice.  The Jews were expelled from England in 1289 but the absence of actual people has never done much to tamper Jew-hating.  But even if contemporaries enjoyed The Jew of Malta for the wrong reasons, we can enjoy it for the right reasons.

A 1594 edition of The Jew of Malta was likely published but did not survive.  The text we have is from a 1633 revival.  The forty-year gap has caused a lot of anxiety, which I do not share, that some of the text is not by Marlowe.  Who knows.  Barabas was another big lead role and big hit, like Tamburlaine and Hieronimo in The Spanish Tragedy, for young Edward Alleyn, the great star of his time.  Were these plays famous and important because they are especially good or innovative or because they starred Alleyn?  Who knows, who knows.

Up next is the anonymous, although attributed to everyone, Arden of Faversham (1591?), a true crime play.  I am at the 75% mark and so far it is outstanding.  Highly recommended.  I will write about it soon and thus catch up with my own arbitrary schedule.  Doctor Faustus, one of the greats, after that.

Page numbers go to the 1969 Penguin Classics Complete Plays.