Five-minute digest

The Jew of Malta

Christopher Marlowe

Summary

The Jew of Malta, written around 1589-90 and first printed in 1633, is Christopher Marlowe's dark, savagely comic tragedy of revenge, and it should be read with an understanding of the antisemitic stereotypes of Elizabethan England, where Jews had been expelled since 1290. The prologue is spoken by Machiavel, the ghost of Machiavelli, who declares that he counts religion but a childish toy and introduces the play as the tragedy of a Jew who has grown rich by Machiavellian means. Barabas, a wealthy merchant of Malta, gloats over his wealth as infinite riches in a little room. When the Turks demand tribute from Malta, the Christian governor Ferneze seizes half of every Jew's estate and, when Barabas protests, all of his. His house is turned into a nunnery. Barabas, enraged, recovers hidden treasure with the help of his daughter Abigail, who pretends to convert. He then plots revenge. He sets Lodowick, the governor's son, and Mathias, who loves Abigail, against each other so that they kill each other in a duel. Abigail, grieving, becomes a real nun, and Barabas poisons the whole nunnery, including his daughter. He buys a Turkish slave, Ithamore, who becomes his accomplice, and together they murder two friars. Ithamore betrays him to a courtesan and her accomplice, and Barabas poisons them too. Arrested, Barabas feigns death, escapes, and helps the Turks capture Malta, becoming its governor. Then he plots with Ferneze to destroy the Turks, but Ferneze turns the trap on him, and Barabas falls into a boiling cauldron he prepared for others. The Christian governor's hypocrisy is as plain as Barabas's crimes, and critics read the play as a satire of religious hypocrisy and of Machiavellian politics as well as a portrait of a stage villain. Teachers should frame its antisemitic caricature historically and neutrally; the play is suitable only for mature high-school students in a guided setting.

Top Lessons

Reading a play in its time
The play reflects Elizabethan prejudice.
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- The Age of Voltaire, Lesson: Voltaire's courage and Voltaire's faults
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- Saint Joan, Scene VI (close)
  De Stogumber returns from the burning in a state of breakdown and the executioner reports that her heart would not burn.
- Paradise Lost, Book IV
  Abashed the Devil stood, And felt how awful goodness is, and saw Virtue in her shape how lovely Rebuked by the young cherub Zephon, Satan feels the force of goodness he has lost.
Hypocrisy
Governor Ferneze uses Christian religion to justify seizing Barabas's wealth.
Related across the library
- The Vicar of Wakefield, Lesson: Patience under trial
  Patience under trial. Like Job, the vicar loses wealth, home, health and freedom but keeps his faith.
- Description of the Retreat, Lesson: Description of the Retreat teaches historical caution
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- Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, Ch. V, Conclusion
  Compromise is as impossible between the Church of Christ and the idolatry of wealth, which is the practical religion of capitalist societies, as it was between the Church and the State idolatry of the Roman Empire. Tawney's own closing judgment as a Christian socialist; readers who defend commercial society have contested it, while others have taken it as a call to the Church.
- Villette, Lesson: Endurance in solitude
  Endurance in solitude. Lucy has no family, money or beauty to lean on, and she says plainly that she must live by her own work. Her endurance is not cheerful, but it is real: she keeps her post, her word and her creed through loneliness that nearly breaks her.
- Description of the Retreat, Lesson: Description of the Retreat links evidence and authority
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Revenge
Barabas's revenge destroys even his daughter.
Related across the library
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- The Merchant of Venice, Lesson: Injury and revenge
  Injury and revenge. In Act 3 Shylock answers mockery by insisting that a Jew bleeds, laughs and dies like a Christian, then turns that shared nature into a claim to revenge learned from his enemies. Shakespeare gives the injured man eloquence while showing how grievance closes him off to mercy.
- The Oresteia, Lesson: Justice must outgrow revenge
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- Crime and Punishment, Lesson: Crime and Punishment: formed attention
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Verified Quotes

“I count religion but a childish toy, And hold there is no sin but ignorance”

— Christopher Marlowe, The Jew of Malta, Prologue (Project Gutenberg #901).Quote card

Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livius, Book I, ch. XII
since we can have no surer sign of the decay of a province than to see Divine worship held therein in contempt. The opening of his chapter on the importance of religion to the health of states.
Veazie Bank v. Fenno, Lesson: Who checks the taxing power?
Who checks the taxing power?. Chase holds that judges cannot limit an acknowledged power because it is exercised heavily; the check is the ballot. Nelson, drawing on McCulloch's warning about the power to tax, argues that the federal system itself protects each government's essential functions from the other's taxation.
Sermons and Letter from Birmingham Jail, Medical lens
King's texts matter medically through racial trauma, jail stress, bodily risk in protest, and the language of social sickness. Readings should avoid turning political coercion into only individual pathology.
Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, Ch. II, The Continental Reformers, sec. 3, Calvin
It was a creed which sought, not merely to purify the individual, but to reconstruct Church and State, and to renew society by penetrating every department of life, public as well as private, with the influence of religion. Tawney contrasts the active, reforming character of Calvinism with the socially conservative piety of Lutheranism.
Institutes of the Christian Religion, Book I, ch. 5, secs. 2-3
Medicine and astronomy as sciences that disclose God's wisdom; Galen's anatomy of the human body; man called a microcosm.

“Infinite riches in a little room”

— Christopher Marlowe, The Jew of Malta, Act I (Project Gutenberg #901).Quote card

No Treason, No. II, § II
A traitor is a betrayer—one who practices injury, while professing friendship. Spooner defines treason by its ordinary meaning before giving Benedict Arnold as his example.
The Last Days of Socrates, Euthyphro 10a
The point which I should first wish to understand is whether the pious or holy is beloved by the gods because it is holy, or holy because it is beloved of the gods. The Euthyphro dilemma, one of the most influential questions in moral philosophy.
On Interpretation, Prior Analytics, Topics and Sophistical Refutations, Full Text
equally if you ascend from F there are infinite terms between you and A It follows that if these processes are impossible there cannot be an infinity of intermediates between A and F Nor is it of any effect to urge that some terms of the series AB F are contiguous so as to exclude intermediates while others cannot be taken into the argument at all whichever terms of the series B I take the number of intermediates in the direction either of A or of F must be finite or infinite where the infinite series starts whe...
Gideon v. Wainwright, Lesson: Equal before the law
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Critique of Pure Reason, Table Of The Categories
and without relation to the identity of the subject This relation then does not exist because I accompany every representation with consciousness but because I join one representation to another and am conscious of the synthesis of them Consequently only because I can connect a variety of given representations in one consciousness is it possible that I can represent to myself the identity of consciousness in these representations in other words the analytical unity of apperception is possible only under the pres...

The Jew of Malta

Summary

Top Lessons

Reading a play in its time

Hypocrisy

Revenge

Verified Quotes