‘But I perceive there is no love on earth,
Pity in Jews, nor piety in Turks…’
(Abigail, after learning her father conspired to get her true love murdered)
Provenance
First recorded performance: 26 February 1592, by Lord Strange’s acting company.
First published: 1592.
Earliest extant edition, 1633. This was published to coincide with a revival of the play, which included a performance before King Charles and his wife Queen Henrietta Maria, for which a new prologue and epilogue were written.
Full title: The Famous Tragedy of the Rich Jew of Malta. Note that, although the 1633 quarto divided the play into acts, it wasn’t divided into scenes, there were no indications where scenes were set, or which bit of dialogue were asides to the audience. All of these were added by the Reverend Alexander Dyce in his 1876 edition of the plays, and have been copied by most modern editors.
Like Tamburlaine, the Jew has a large cast of 25 speaking characters, plus numerous unnamed citizens of Malta, Turkish janizaries, guards, attendants and slaves. In other words, it was a theatrical epic, in its day.
Executive summary
The Governor of Malta seizes the wealth of all Jewish citizens to pay the Turks not to invade. In revenge the richest Jew in Malta, Barabas, designs a barrage of retaliation against the governor, helped by his slave, Ithamore.
Barabas’ murderous deeds include:
- getting the governor’s son killed in a duel
- terrorising his own daughter, who joins a nunnery for safety but is afterwards poisoned by her father, along with the entire nunnery
- the strangling of an old friar and the framing of another friar for the murder
- poisoning his servant Ithamore when he deserts him, along with the prostitute and her pimp, who had threatened to expose him
Finally, Barabas betrays the entire population of Malta by helping the Turks conquer Malta Town, but he is then outwitted when the Christian governor turns the tables on him, leaving him to burn alive in the trap he had set for the Turks, but is led to fall into himself. Subtle, it ain’t.
Historical fact check: Barabas and Ferneze are fictional characters, there never was a Jew of Malta or a governor of that name. Malta never fell to the Turks, and never paid them tribute. The entire storyline is a product of the playwright’s imagination.
The play
Prologue The ghost of Machiavelli introduces Barabas, the Jew of Malta. In Marlowe’s time there were only a few hundred Jews in London. They were better known from popular stereotypes of greed or cunning than from personal contact.
It is appropriate, then that one stereotype of cunning is introduced by another. Niccolò Machiavelli (1469 – 1527) was an Italian Renaissance diplomat, philosopher and writer best known for The Prince, a handbook of statecraft which eschews any notions of religion or morality in favour of hard-nosed advice about what actually works when it comes to ruling a state. Machiavelli’s attitude is typified by these lines from the prologue:
I count religion but a childish toy,
And hold there is no sin but ignorance.
Machiavelli’s bluntness and his rejection of Christian morality, in an age drenched in Christian values, caused his name to be associated with complex and unscrupulous scheming – as it has remained, right down to the present day.
Might first made kings, and laws were then most sure
When, like the Draco’s, they were writ in blood.
Anyway, the ghost of Machiavelli introduces Barabas as one of his own – an amoral, cunning schemer.
Act 1
Scene 1 Barabas is counting his wealth. He envies factors for the rich mines of India, and the Moors who (according to legend) simply have to bend down to pick rare stones from the earth. This opening scene establishes Barabas as very rich, very greedy, and the possessor of a Marlowe-sized imagination, rich with exotic and evocative names and visions of boundless riches.
Give me the merchants of the Indian mines,
That trade in metal of the purest mould;
The wealthy Moor, that in the eastern rocks
Without control can pick his riches up,
And in his house heap pearl like pebble-stones,
Receive them free, and sell them by the weight;
Bags of fiery opals, sapphires, amethysts,
Jacinths, hard topaz, grass-green emeralds,
Beauteous rubies, sparkling diämonds,
And seld-seen costly stones of so great price,
As one of them, indifferently rated,
And of a carat of this quantity,
May serve, in peril of calamity,
To ransom great kings from captivity
And of course Barabas’s occupation is a trader in the rarest, most precious jewels, clothes and valuables in the world, so it is an open invitation for reams of Marlovian sensual luxury.
Two merchants come to tell Barabas his ships have arrived from various destinations, including Egypt via Cyprus, bearing rich goods. When they leave he soliloquises on how much more successful the practical Jews are than faithless Christians, name-checking a number of other Jewish millionaires, saying he’d rather be hated as a Jew and be rich, than be accepted as a Christian and be poor.
Three Jews arrive to tell the ominous news that an embassy of Turks has arrived to see the governor and that all the island’s Jews are summoned to the senate house. Barabas assures them they are wrong to have misgivings. When they exit, he continues to tell himself that the Turks and Maltese are at peace, so there will be no trouble. And even if there is, he is only concerned about himself and his daughter.
The scene establishes what will become a format of the play which is the many times Barabas is talking to someone saying one thing – but then makes an aside to the audience in which he reveals he is thinking something quite different.
Scene 3 The senate house The Turkish leader, the Sultan’s son Selim Calymath, makes it clear to the governor of Malta, Ferneze, that they demand ten years worth of tribute – a hundred thousand crowns. Ferneze begs a month to raise it and Calymath agrees, leaving with his retinue.
The governor calls in the island’s Jews, explains Calymath’s extortion and says he is going to raise the lion’s share of it by mulcting them, demanding half their estates. He is quite venomous about it:
SECOND KNIGHT: Have strangers leave with us to get their wealth?
Then let them with us cóntribute.
BARABAS: How! equally?
GOVERNOR FERNESE: No, Jew, like infidels;
For through our sufferance of your hateful lives,
Who stand accursèd in the sight of Heaven,
These taxes and afflictions are befall’n,
And therefore thus we are determinèd. −
So the Christians put up with the Jews but not far beneath the surface hate and despise them. The Governor announces he will confiscate half the Jews’ wealth and anyone who hesitates will a) be forced to convert to Christianity and if they still hesitate, b) all their goods will be confiscated. The other Jews immediately say they’ll surrender half their wealth, but Barabas is outraged, criticises them and tries to haggle with the Governor. Who promptly orders all Barabas’s wealth to be confiscated!
When he protests at this, one of the governor’s knights the governor’s entourage consists of members of the Order of the Knights of St John) suggests they confiscate Barabas’s house and turn it into a nunnery, which the Governor immediately accepts and orders.
The governor and his officials exit and Barabas sinks to his knees to call down a world of vengeance upon them. The other Jews tell him to reflect on the story of Job but Barabas dismisses it, saying he was vastly richer than Job, has lost more, is hugely more inconsolable.
Scene 4 Barabas’s daughter Abigail comes to meet him. She is in tears, she has heard the bad news. He reveals a secret – he had hidden quite a lot of wealth away. But Abigail tells him they have already confiscated the house and started to convert it into a nunnery! Barabas laments his lost gold and jewels, pauses, then comes up with a Cunning Plan. Abigail will convert to Christianity, enrol as a nun and, once she’s in, pull up the floorboards under which the loot is hidden, and return with it to her father.
Abigail agrees but doubts whether she can carry it off. Confidence is all, her father tells her. They exit.
Enter Friar Jacomo, Friar Barnardine, Abbess, and a Nun. They have barely made a few remarks about the new nunnery before Abigail re-enters, identifies herself as the daughter of the Jew, and begs forgiveness, penitence and asks to be enrolled in the order. Improbably the friars and abbess agree.
At which point Baraba re-enters and puts up a pretence of being appalled that his daughter is going over to the enemy. He curses and anathematises her as the Christians try to intervene, but interspersed between his curses, Barabas whispers instructions on how to find the floorboard with the secret mark and find the treasure. They all leave the stage.
Enter Mathias, a young man who, we soon learn, is in love with Abigail and dejected to see her going off to a nunnery. His friend Lodowick enters – who just happens to be the governor’s son – and asks Mathias why he’s in the dumps, allowing Mathias to explain at length his love for Abigail. While he does so, he reveals that she is scarce fourteen-years-old. Lodowick says that if she’s as beautiful as his friend claims, it would be good to visit and see her. They exit.
Act 2
Scene 1 Before the House of Barabas, now a Nunnery Enter Barabas who explains a) that it is night but he can’t sleep, and b) he’s awaiting a signal from Abigail. Enter Abigail, obviously in the balcony of the theatre, where she describes: finding the floorboards, digging up the treasure, coming to the window, whispering to her father waiting below, then throwing him the bags of gold, at which he rejoices and praises her.
Scene 2 The Council House The Governor interviews the Spanish captain – Martin del Bosco – of a ship recently docked in the harbour who describes how his ship was set upon by Turks, how they fought them off and seized one of their ships, whose crew they have come to Malta to sell as slaves.
The governor initially says no, because he is afraid of the Turks, but some of his advisors encourage del Bosco to shame the governor, to tell him not to submit to the Turks, specially after their recent capture of Rhodes (seized from the order of the Knights of St John in 1523).
Del Bosco succeeds in firing the governor’s fighting zeal. He offers to write to the king of Spain for help. Ferneze appoints him military ruler of the island and challenges the Turks to do their worst. If necessary, like the garrison on Rhodes, they’ll fight and die to the last man.
Scene 3 The market place Two officers are lining del Bosco’s captured men up to be sold as slaves. Enter Barabas who tells us he has used the gold to buy a house as big as the governor’s and his daughter has left the convent. He tells us he hails from Florence where he learned to bow and fawn and curtsey to faithless Christians and then to spit into their collecting bowls.
Enter Lodowick and he and Barabas engage in a stylised conversation in which Lodowick asks whether Barabas has a diamond, and Barabas replies, yes a pretty one – by which they both mean Abigail – the dialogue being interspersed with Barabas’s bitter vengeful asides to the audience in which he reveals what he’d really like to do to the governor’s son i.e. poison him.
Having mutually agreed to rendezvous later, Lodowick now accompanies Barabas to the slave market, where they size up the merchandise and chat to the selling officers. He rejects one costing 200 crowns, not least because he looks fit and healthy so will cost a fortune to feed, instead buys a leaner one, from Thrace, named Ithamore, for 100 crowns. Aside to the audience Barabas explains that he is buying the slave solely to further his plans of revenge!
Enter young Mathias and his mother to the slave market, and discuss the wares. We now learn that Barabas knows his daughter and Mathias are in love but plans to foil their love. Nonetheless, he enjoys leading Mathias on. Everyone exits, leaving Barabas alone with Ithamore. Barabas tells him, if he is to please his master, he must forget the Christian virtues of ‘Compassion, love, vain hope, and heartless fear’ and lose pity. He goes on to give a magnificent speech describing his own biography.
As for myself, I walk abroad o’ nights,
And kill sick people groaning under walls:
Sometimes I go about and poison wells;
And now and then, to cherish Christian thieves,
I am content to lose some of my crowns,
That I may, walking in my gallery,
See ’em go pinioned along by my door.
Being young, I studied physic, and began
To practice first upon th’ Italian;
There I enriched the priests with burials,
And always kept the sexton’s arms in ure −
With digging graves and ringing dead men’s knells:
And, after that, was I an engineer,
And in the wars ‘twixt France and Germany,
Under pretence of helping Charles the Fifth,
Slew friend and enemy with my stratagems:
Then, after that, was I an usurer,
And with extorting, cozening, forfeiting,
And tricks belonging unto brokery,
I filled the gaols with bankrouts in a year,
And with young orphans planted hospitals;
And every moon made some or other mad,
And now and then one hang himself for grief,
Pinning upon his breast a long great scroll
How I with interest tormented him.
There’s nothing like a good stage villain. You can imagine the actor taunting the Elizabethan audience, who enthusiastically booed him and threw rotten tomatoes. Boo, hiss, villain! And it turns out that Ithamore is a perfect match. When Barabas asks how he has spent his life, Ithamore gleefully replies:
Faith, master,
In setting Christian villages on fire,
Chaining of eunuchs, binding galley-slaves.
One time I was an hostler in an inn,
And in the night-time secretly would I steal
To travellers’ chambers, and there cut their throats:
Once at Jerusalem, where the pilgrims kneeled,
I strowèd powder on the marble stones,
And therewithal their knees would rankle so,
That I have laughed a-good to see the cripples
Go limping home to Christendom on stilts.
He was raised in Arabia and has served the Turks till his recent capture, so it appears Ithamore is a Muslim i.e. a) like Barabas, an enemy of Christians and b) circumcised. ‘We are villains both; Both circumcisèd; we hate Christians both.’
Scene 4 Now they are in front of Barabas’s new house and enter Lodowick to keep his appointment. Barabas lets him into the house and orders his daughter to entertain him. (In asides he whispers to Abigail to pretend to Lodowick she is in love with him, to lead him on, she protests it is Mathias she loves, Barabas orders her to do it. He plans to kill them both [Lodowick and Mathias]).
Enter Mathias and Barabas play acts that he supports his suit for his daughter’s hand but is having a hard time fighting off Lodowick. Only recently he snuck into his house to see Abigail. He tells Mathias to hide and watch. They both watch Lodowick come out of the house hand in hand with Abigail, as if in love. Mathias makes to draw his sword and kill him, but Barabas says ‘not in my house; contain your wrath; there will be other occasions’ and Mathias exists, mighty angry.
Lodowick sees him depart, asks Barabas about him, who explains that Mathias is mad with jealousy and plans to kill him (Lodowick). He encourages Lodowick’s suit for Abigail, and tells her to continue pretending to be in love with him, doing so in strongly anti-Christian phraseology, which is designed to play up the Christian audience’s stereotypes of wicked Jews, describing Lodowick as:
This offspring of Cain, this Jebusite,
That never tasted of the Passover,
Nor e’er shall see the land of Canaan,
Nor our Messias that is yet to come;
This gentle maggot, Lodowick, I mean
And as to the ‘morality’ of the situation:
It’s no sin to deceive a Christiän;
For they themselves hold it a principle,
Abigail promises herself to Lodowick – then immediately turns to the audience and shares her regret. (This happens throughout the play, it’s one of its leading features – the very high amount of speaking aside, to let the audience hear a character’s true feelings of intentions, as opposed to what they say.)
Lodowick is puzzled why Abigail looks pale and faint. His doubts vanish when he sees that villain Mathias enters and makes as if to attack him. Barabas tells him to hold and leave, while he (Barabas) sorts out the situation. Barabas then tells Mathias that he – Barabas – just saved his life from the incensed rival, Lodowick. He encourages Mathias to attack Lodowick next time he sees him.
Barabas is, as we can see, adopting the role of impresario which emerges clearly as the central role in the city comedies of a decade later, written by Ben Jonson and colleagues – in which the play itself contains a trickster figure who concocts ever-more elaborate scams and schemes to humiliate or punish other characters.
Abigail has witnessed all this and has, of course, played a lying part, deceiving Lodowick. Now she bursts into tears and asks her father why he’s setting the two young men against each other. Barabas orders Ithamore to put her in the house which he does, presumably none too gently. Then Barabas gives Ithamore a letter to deliver to Mathias, as if from Lodowick, challenging him to a duel. Ho ho ho, he rubs his hands with malevolent glee, the audience boos and hisses.
Act 3
Scene 1 The Veranda of the House of Bellamira Enter Bellamira. Who is Bellamira? A courtesan. She laments that business has dried up since the Turks besieged the island. Enter her ‘bully’, meaning either pimp or associate, Pilia-Borza, who has stolen a bag of silver from Barabas’s house, through the window. At that moment, Ithamore enters, Pilia-Borza drags Bellamira away, but not before Ithamore sees her and falls in love at first sight. In passing, he tells us he’s delivered Barabas’s fake letter to Mathias.
NOTE: Ithamore, as a slave, and Pilia-Borza, as a criminal, both speak in prose, unlike every other character in the play who speak in verse.
Scene 2 Mathias and Lodowick encounter each other in the street and have a swordfight while Barabas watches gleefully from a balcony. They kill each other. Enter their respective parents, governor Ferneze Lodowick’s father and Katherine, Mathias’s widowed mother. After initial antagonism, Ferneze and Katherine lock hands in grief, promising to bury the dead boys in one mausoleum, and to discover what drove the former friends to kill each other. Ooops. Sounds ominous for Barabas.
Scene 3 A room in Barabas’s house Ithamore is cackling over the two dead Christians when Abigail enters. Ithamore laughingly tells her that her father was responsible for the scam to fool Lodowick and Mathias into killing each other.
Outraged (and not really that upset) Abigail orders him to go fetch a friar from the nunnery. She gives a little speech which is enough time for Ithamore to go and return with Friar Jacomo. Abigail tells him she wants to enter the nunnery. ‘What, again?’ Jacomo asks. She tried it once and almost immediately left. What’s changed? She’s learned more about life, she replies.
ABIGAIL: Then were my thoughts so frail and unconfirmed
And I was chained to follies of the world:
But now experience, purchasèd with grief,
Has made me see the difference of things.
My sinful soul, alas, hath paced too long
The fatal labyrinth of misbelief,
Far from the Son that gives eternal life!
She is being positioned as the Good Jew, the one who converts to Christianity.
Scene 4 Barabas has heard that Abigail has entered a nunnery. Does she suspect him of murdering her sweetheart? What has made her betray him? Who gave him away? Ironically, at the moment Ithamore enters and, with absurd exaggeration, Barabas now calls him his only hope.
BARABAS: Come near, my love; come near, thy master’s life,
My trusty servant, nay, my second self;
For I have now no hope but even in thee,
And on that hope my happiness is built.
Ithamore begins to explain that it was he who told Abigaill about the murder plot, but Barabas, thinking he is about to defend his daughter, cuts him off and says, henceforth ‘she is hateful to my soul and me.’ Rashly and grotesquely he says he’ll adopt Ithamore as his heir.
But still his servant… He bids Ithamore fetch the pot of rice off the oven. When the servant brings it, Barabas explains that he is going to use it to poison Abigail. Yes, he now shows Ithamore and the audience a vial of ‘precious powder’ that he bought off a bloke in Ancona, which binds, infects and poisons deeply.
He sprinkles the poison powder onto the rice, mixes it in, and tells Ithamore to go and leave it in the dark entrance to the nunnery where people leave offerings when they want to be anonymous. (The reader/audience can immediately foresee unintended consequences i.e. poisonings.)
Ithamore enthusiastically sets off with the pot. As soon as he’s left, Barabas says he will pay Ithamore back, too. Ooh he’s such a bad baddie.
Scene 5 The Council House Apparently it’s a month after the first scene with the Turks, for now a Turkish envoy has arrived to tell the governor the month is up, so where’s the gold? If you remember, governor Ferneze had been encouraged to break his word to the Turks by some of the Knights and the Spaniard Martin del Bosco, and so now he tells the Turkish basso (pashaw) that he will have no tribute and defies the Turks to do their worst. They will, the basso replies and exits.
Ferneze makes a brief speech summoning the young men of Malta to war.
Scene 6 Interior of the nunnery Friar Jacomo and Friar Barnardine announce that all the nuns are sick. In fact as they enter the nunnery one appears to say that all the nuns are dead – except for Abigail, who now meets them, herself grievously sick.
Jacomo goes off and Abigail confesses to Barnardine that her greatest sin or regret is knowledge that her father conspired to set Lodowick and Mathias against each other, and she shows them papers to prove it. But she begs them not to reveal this to anyone and, as it was said in confession, they can’t. And then Abigail dies – poisoned by her father.
Jacomo rejoins Barnardine to see Abigail’s body, and confirm that the nuns are all dead. Barnardine asks him to accompany him to confront the Jew.
Act 4
Scene 1 A street Barabas is malevolently gleeful that all the nuns are dead, poisoned by him! Listen to those Christian bells ha ha ha. There’s a monastery nearby. Ithamore enthusiastically offers to poison all the monks, but Barabas says that won’t be necessary. Since they were all sleeping with the nuns, they’ll all die of grief. Ooooh, you could bottle the malevolent cynicism!
Along come the two monks, to a famous line from Ithamore: ‘ Look, look, master; here come two religious caterpillars.’ There is a clever, stylised dialogue where Bardnardine keeps trying to accuse Barabas of gross sins but Barabas interrupts him to deflect the charges with confessions of more minor sins. The most famous exchange comes at the end , famous because it was used as an epigraph to one of his own poems by T.S. Eliot.:
FRIAR BARNARDINE: Thou hast committed −
BARABAS: Fornication: but that was in another country;
And besides, the wench is dead.
But when Barnardine finally manages to mention Mathias and Lodowick, Barabas panics that his daughter confessed everything, he will be hanged for murder, and makes a panic-stricken appeal to convert to Christianity. As part of which he says some notable lines calumniating his own religion:
Is’t not too late now to turn Christiän?
I have been zealous in the Jewish faith,
Hard-hearted to the poor, a covetous wretch,
That would for lucre’s sake have sold my soul;
Which sounds like libelous anti-Semitism, but consider the context. He is sucking up to two Catholic officials, he wants to make the best possible impression. Of course he’ll tell them what they want to hear.
Anyway, Barabas makes asides to Jacomo about how much wealth he’ll give his monastery, if can make the other leave, which he tries to do but the monks end up poking and pushing each other and then break out fighting, egged on, one imagines by the audience who are thoroughly enjoying themselves.
Barabas and Ithamore part the fighting friars, and Barabas continues to promise them, separately, his bounty. Ithamore takes Barnardine into Barabas’s house, Barabas promises Jacomo he’ll have a special meeting with him that evening.
Left alone onstage, Barabas reveals his plan which is – to murder them to stop them talking about the Lodowick-Mathias con:
Now I have such a plot for both their lives,
As never Jew nor Christian knew the like:
One turned my daughter, therefore he shall die;
The other knows enough to have my life,
Therefore ’tis not requisite he should live.
Scene 2 Inside Barabas’ House Ithamore tells Barabas Father Barnardine has eaten and fallen asleep in a chair. Barabas orders him to take off his girdle and make a noose from it. They pull back the curtain of the stage’s inner room to reveal Barnardine asleep in a chair, startle him awake, slip the noose round his neck and strangle him. Ithamore is pleased that the rope left no mark on the friar’s neck.
He has an idea and they prop the corpse up against a wall holding a staff. He looks large as life. They exit the room.
Scene 3 It’s 1 in the morning. Friar Jacomo has come to keep his appointment. He spots Barnardine, apparently blocking his way, addresses him, is irritated by his silence, eventually gets angry, seizes his staff and strikes him down. At this moment Barabas and Ithamore come out the house and feign horror to discover that Jacomo has murdered his fellow friar. Ithamore makes fun of ‘these Christians’ who murder each other. Jacomo is panic-stricken. Then horrified when Barabas and Ithamore piously make a citizen’s arrest.
Scene 4 Veranda of Bellamira’s house Haven’t seen much of her, have we? She greets Pilia-Borza who returns from delivering a letter to Ithamore. She asks where he found him? At the public gallows watching the hanging of a friar (presumably Jacomo).
Now Ithamore enters. The other two greet him lavishly. Ithamore is not wrong to think they’re planning some scam. They flatter him and Bellamira feigns sexy love for him, while they try to establish how much money Barabas has, where it is hidden, and whether Ithamore will help them steal it. Yes, is his answer, but the Jew buries it secretly every night.
Ithamore is comically ready to write a letter to Barabas threatening to reveal all unless he sends him a hundred crowns. ‘Two hundred’ says Pilia. Ithamore changes it, signs it and hands it to Pilia, condescendingly, who exits.
Now Bellamira takes Ithamore’s head into her lap and calls her servants for food and to bring rich silks to dress her lover in. It is pure comedy the way Ithamore takes to this role immediately. She tells him she’s not married. He says they’ll get married and go to Greece, and then – strikingly – breaks into verse, producing a variation on Marlowe’s famous lyric, ‘Come live with me and be my love.’
Pilia returns and the Jew only gave him ten crowns. Outraged, Ithamore springs up and scribbles another letter demanding at least 500. Pilia departs. Bellamira kisses Ithamore, then takes him inside for a banquet of love i.e. sex.
Scene 5 Barabas’ house Barabas is outraged at Ithamore’s defection, and almost as much by the skinny, hacked-about appearance of Pilia-Borza, ‘a shag-rag knave’. Whining self-pity:
BARABAS: Was ever Jew tormented as I am?
At which moment Pilia appears with the new demands. More demands! Barabas adopts a wheedling tone and tries to persuade Bilia to share a meal (which he will poison) but Pilia is having none of it and simply wants the money.
Scene 6 Bellamira’s veranda Bellamira and Pilia get Ithamore drunk and to confess his role in the murder of Lodowick and Mathias, that he carried the poisoned broth which killed an entire nunnery and strangled Friar Barnardine.
Bellamira and Pilia are just agreeing between themselves that they’ll take this intelligence to the governor, when enter Barabas disguised as a French musician with a lute, offering to play love music. He has a conspicuous nosegay in his hat and Bellamira takes a fancy to it. Barabas graciously hands it over and the other three all take a deep smell of it – which is what Barabas planned, because it is poisoned.
They tell Barabas to play his lute and, as he does so, drunken Ithamore regales the other two with a series of scandalous libels on Barabas’s stinginess and personal hygiene – to each of which Barabas-in-disguise responds with angry asides to the audience. Finally Barabas can stand it no more and – still in disguised as the French musician – makes his excuses and departs.
Drunken Ithamore thinks he needs to send for one more lot of money and now dispatches Pilia, without a letter, just with a verbal threat to reveal all – then goes back inside with Bellamira.
Act 5
Scene 1 In the Council House The governor is just warning the knights that the long-threatened Turkish assault is about to begin, when Bellamira and Pilia-Borza push their way through and blurt out that Barabas is responsible for the death of the governor’s son and the dead nuns and the friar. Ferneze is inclined to dismiss them but they say they have his servant at their place, drunk: he’ll vouch for it.
Ferneze dispatches officers to fetch Barabas and Ithamore and they return approximately ten seconds later. This is theatre, a forum for entertainment not realism or plausibility. Ithamore has belly-ache (from the poison – Barabas kicks himself that he did not administer more, sooner) and readily confesses everything to the governor.
Quick-wittedly, Barabas dismisses the other three as bad witnesses, but Ferneze doesn’t buy it and tells his officers to take all four of them to the cells.
Enter Katherine who wants to know whether it’s true that ‘the Jew’ was responsible for the murder of her son. Yes, the governor tells her. Barely a minute after being taken away, an officer re-enters to say all four of them are dead! Ferneze says bury the other three, get someone to throw the Jew’s body over the wall at the Turks. Everyone exits, leaving Barabas’ corpse lying onstage.
Scene 2 Not exactly to our surprise, Barabas wakes up. He took some kind of fancy sleeping potion (actually explained to be ‘poppy and cold mandrake juice’). Now he is outside the city walls. He gets up and vows vengeance on the city, vows revenge and not in a subtle way:
I’ll be revenged on this accursèd town;
For by my means Calymath shall enter in:
I’ll help to slay their children and their wives,
To fire the churches, pull their houses down,
Take my goods too, and seize upon my lands.
I hope to see the governor a slave,
And, rowing in a galley, whipt to death.
Enter Calymath, Bassoes, and Turks to whom Barabas immediately explains who he is, why he is not a spy, and why he will help them take the town. He explains there’s a secret vault dug under the town to let streams pass under and out. He’ll lead a force of 500 along it and up into the centre of the town, surprise everyone and open the gates. Turkish leader Calyphas says: it’s a deal!
Scene 3 The next scene jumps forward to the city having been stormed by the Turks with Barabas’s help. Enter Calymath, Bassoes, Turks, and Barabas with Ferneze and Knights prisoners. As reward for his help, Calyphas makes Barabas governor of the town and says he can do what he wants with his prisoners – then exits. Barabas orders his new troops, his Janizaries, to throw the governor and his entourage in prison.
Scene 4 Residence of Barabas the governor Barabas soliloquises that he is not safe while the entire population hates him, He must be wary, ‘circumspect’.
Ferneze is brought in and, after he’s finished shouting at Barabas, Barabas surprises him by saying he plans to ‘save’ Malta. How about a plan to trap Calymath and all his men in an out-house and set it on fire? Ferneze is impressed and interested, says he will give Barabas even more wealth if he keeps his word. Barabas promptly grants Ferneze his freedom, and the shake on the deal.
Ferneze exits and Barabas reflects that he will use anyone to suit his ends. He makes what at first seems an anti-semitic remark i.e. invoking anti-Semitic stereotypes:
Thus, loving neither, will I live with both,
Making a profit of my policy;
And he from whom my most advantage comes,
Shall be my friend.
This is the life we Jews are used to lead;
But then backs it with the crucial addition – after all, this is how Christians behave:
And reason too, for Christians do the like.
So the entire play might be a monstrosity of anti-Semitic stereotyping, but Barabas makes a point of repeating that he is only behaving as the faithless Christians do.
Scene 5 Calymath and his officials have finished a tour of the ruins and the island, and Calymath is just musing on its geographical advantages when a messenger arrives inviting Calymath and his men to a grand feast, the men in a big out-house, Calymath and his officers at his house.
Scene 6 A very short scene in which we see Ferneze briefing Martin del Bosco and the Knights about the signal which will tell them it’s the moment to attack the feasting Turks.
Scene 7 Barabas is in his grand hall with carpenters as they finish some big contraption. He pays them to go and drink. In fact he hopes they drink and die. Barabas has arrived at the extreme limit of misanthropy:
BARABAS: For, so I live, perish may all the world!
A messenger arrives to say Calymath will attend the feast.
Then enter Ferneze who hands over to Barabas the sum agreed for freeing Malta from the Turks, 100,000 pounds. Barabas explains his plan: the monastery where the Turkish troops are to be feasted is mined with gunpowder; at the right moment it will be set off, the whole place blown sky high and all the Turkish soldiers massacred.
Meanwhile – Barabas explains – in this hall the carpenters have fixed it so that, at the height of the feast, at a signal Ferneze will cut a cord and the floor will part throwing Calymath and his generals into a deep pit. The Turks approach, Ferneze hides, and Marlowe makes Barabas directly address the audience. Asides are one thing but Barabas ‘breaks the fourth wall’ to boast of his ingenious evil:
A kingly kind of trade, to purchase towns
By treachery, and sell ’em by deceit?
Now tell me, worldlings, underneath the sun
If greater falsehood ever has been done?
Calymath and his entourage enter and salute Barabas up in the gallery who is guilefully greeting them when…. Ferneze steps forward from his hiding place and says he will show Calymath the trap Barabas had prepared. All this time Barabas has been up in the ‘balcony’ section of the theatre. Now, at the sound of a distant trumpet, Ferneze cuts the cord, the floor opens beneath Barabas and… he falls into the vat of boiling oil.
The amazed Turks watch Barabas writhing and screaming for help. Barabas makes a death-moment confession to all his crimes, admits he was going to massacre the Turks, and dies:
Die, life! fly, soul! tongue, curse thy fill, and die!
The Calymath rallies his entourage and says they will fly. They won’t get far, says Ferneze: the trumpet they heard was the signal for the outhouse to be blown up and the entire Turkish army liquidated. Calymath is appalled. Ferneze blames it all on the machinations of the Jew. Now he explains he will hold Calymath hostage, until his father pays the reparations necessary to restore Malta to its former state.
And the play ends on that note: the Christian governor, Ferneze has outwitted both the fiendish ‘Jew’ – seeing him come to a richly deserved end – and the warlike Turk, come out on top and won the day for Christian Malta. Hooray!
Thoughts
Obviously, The Jew of Malta is a garish and extreme entertainment, in some ways not unlike a pantomime where the audience is encouraged to boo and hiss every time the baddie comes onstage. Marlowe’s aim was obviously to create the villainest of villains, as Tamburlaine had been the most megalomaniac of rulers.
Giving him a villainous sidekick was sort of obvious, but the character of the ruthless Muslim, Ithamore, is inspired. They egg each other on to increasingly extreme outrages while the audience hiss and boo them like Alan Rickman playing the Sheriff of Nottingham in Robin Hood, and Ithamore’s scenes with fellow lowlifes Bellamira and Pilia-Borza, are very much played for pantomime laughs, including Pilia-Borza’s ridiculous sense of himself as tall and knightly when he is – according to Barabas – a gangling piece of war wreckage, and Bellamira’s absurd declarations of love.
Anyway, all this garish and crowd-pleasing comedy is why it’s not worth bothering with the play’s many inconsistencies and illogicalities, let alone considering it as a ‘moral analysis’ of anything.
The most glaring plot fault is the notion that Barabas is motivated entirely by revenge for being reduced to utter poverty… and yet by act 4 he is pretty much restored to his former position of super-wealth, having bought a house bigger than the governor’s and, as he tells the friars, once again having investments in ships bringing goods from round the Mediterranean. I.e. the real engine of his revenge has disappeared. It is a theatrical illusion, a motive which is required to quickly set the plot in motion and then just as quickly dropped.
As for the end, it is a wonderful piece of over-the-top theatrical sadism, a Hammer House of Horror, a London Dungeon level of populist, tub-thumping poetic justice, no doubt cheered to the rooftops by the very groundlings Barabas had been boasting to only minutes before.
Historical footnote – the Knights of St John and the Turkish threat
The Order of the Knights of Malta was founded in 1048, when a group of Christian merchants were given permission by the Egyptians to run a hospital in Jerusalem to care for Christian pilgrims travelling to the Holy City. The First Crusade captured Jerusalem in 1098 and the organisation running the hospital, by now called the Order of St. John of Jerusalem, expanded to provide armed escorts for pilgrims, becoming known as the Knights of the Order of St John of Jerusalem.
When the Holy Land fell to the Saracens in 1291, the Order of St John (popularly known as the Hospitallers) moved their
headquarters to the island of Cyprus, from which the order continued to protect pilgrims travelling to Palestine by sea.
The Knights bought the island of Rhodes in 1310. In 1523 the Ottoman Turks laid siege of the island and after six months, the Knights were forced to surrender but were permitted to leave Rhodes with full military honours.
Meanwhile, the island of Malta came into the ownership of the Crown of Aragon in 1282 and passed into the control of the Holy Roman Emperor. In 1530 the Emperor Charles V granted Malta to the Knights of St. John who had been forced to abandon Rhodes in 1523. From that point the order took the name by which it is most familiarly known, the Knights of Malta. These are the knights who are advising governor Ferneze in The Jew of Malta.
Malta was repeatedly besieged by the Ottoman Turks but never fell to them (as they repeatedly tried to capture Venice). It had been besieged in 1565, the year after Marlowe was born and 25 or so years before the play was performed. In 1569 the Ottomans captured Crete and in 1570 Cyprus. That said, the Turks’ seemingly unstoppable advance was stalled at the sea Battle of Lepanto, where an alliance of European powers defeated the Ottoman navy.
It’s worth pointing out that some 12,000 Christian slaves – of the 37,000 slaves chained in the Turkish galleys – were liberated during and after the battle. Not all slaves were black.
The Muslim Turkish threat to Europe was still very real during Marlowe’s lifetime. So Marlowe’s depiction of Ithamore isn’t picking on a helpless ‘minority’ but a caricature of a race who were threatening to seize control of the Mediterranean and invade Europe. It was as if, during the Cold War, a comic playwright created a fiendish Russian communist who took every opportunity to criticise and scheme against ‘capitalist running dogs’, ‘reactionary troglodytes’, ‘bourgeois pigs’ and so on.
Different values, ideologies and buzzwords – but the same basic structure that an overwhelming military threat to civilisation from the East was invoked and then neutralised through theatrical representation and, in this case, crude caricature.
Related links
- The Jew of Malta This excellent website gives you a choice of reading the play script unencumbered by notes, or a very comprehensively annotated text full of fascinating facts.
Marlowe’s works
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