by David Riggs
The following summer, on 14 August 1590, the printer Richard Jones entered The Two Comical Discourses of Tamburlaine the Scythian Shepherd at the Stationers’ Register. To judge from the printed text that appeared later that year, Jones’s new property was an authorial manuscript – either a holograph or a transcript of one – that had not been altered for performance. Scenes are missing, or wrongly numbered; entrances and exits go unmarked; stage directions are omitted, imprecise and confusing; act-scene divisions appear in Latin. Jones dedicated the play ‘To the Gentlemen Readers and others that take pleasure in reading Histories’. Marlowe’s printer informed this select clientele that he had ‘purposely omitted and left out some fond and frivolous gestures, digressing, and in my poor opinion, far unmeet for the matter’ (8–10). With the removal of this comic material, the ‘two comical discourses’ in Jones’s registration turned into ‘The two tragical discourses’ on Jones’s title page. Jones’s dedication reorientates Marlowe’s early masterpiece, away from the ‘vain conceited fondlings’ (13) who welcomed it to the stage and back to the universal histories of Pedro Mexia, George Whetstone and André Thevet. In a final stroke of clever marketing, the title page situates the play amid the ongoing struggle between the actors and the City: it has been ‘sundry times showed on Stages in the City of London’.
The Admiral’s Men fell on hard times. During the autumn of 1590, the company quarrelled with James Burbage, the owner of the Theatre, and with his son, the actor Richard Burbage. The dispute came to a head at the Theatre on 24 November, when John Alleyn threatened to ‘complain to their lord and Master the lord Admiral’. Burbage ‘in a Rage little Reverencing his honour and estate, said, by a great oath, that he cared not for three of the best lords of them all’. John and Edward Alleyn presently left the Theatre and went south across the Thames to the Rose, the new playhouse that Philip Henslowe had erected on the Bankside. There they joined Strange’s Men, which now became the premier acting company in London. The rest of the Admiral’s Men split up into provincial and European touring companies; if there was an early text of Dr Faustus, they took it with them.
Alleyn’s ally Marlowe also attached himself to Strange’s Men, and in this way crossed the outer threshold of Ferdinando Stanley’s personal retinue. The playwright Thomas Kyd had a proper place, perhaps the office of secretary, in Strange’s household. Marlowe created the impression that he too was one of Strange’s clients. Kyd later insisted that Strange had only known Marlowe through the playwright’s connection with Strange’s acting company: for ‘never could my Lordship endure his name, or sight, when he heard of his conditions’. Nevertheless, Kyd tacitly concedes that Strange and Marlowe did know one another until his lordship heard about the playwright’s unsavoury ‘conditions’. It probably was the players – in particular, the Admiral’s Men John and Edward Alleyn – who drew Marlowe into Strange’s circle of acquaintances. By 1591, Marlowe was ‘writing in one chamber’ with Strange’s servant Kyd. Since the two playwrights both appear on a contemporary list of ‘Modern and extant poets that have lived together’, they most likely shared a bed as well, though Kyd does not say this.
Strange’s Men prospered. During the holiday season of 1591–92, the company took in £60 for a remarkable run of six performances at court. On 19 February 1592, the date of the earliest extant entry in Philip Henslowe’s managerial diary, they were performing at the Rose. By this time Strange’s Men possessed a sizeable repertory. Henslowe’s diary lists five ‘ne’ (new or newly revised) plays and eighteen old ones, including Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta.
Machevill (the Italian politician’s infamous name here twisted into ‘make evil’), the Prologue to The Jew of Malta, states that he migrated to England after the death of the Duke of Guise. The Guise was assassinated on 23 December 1588, so a year or more elapsed between The Second Part of Tamburlaine and The Jew. Since the Admiral’s Men broke up in 1590–91 and did not share their scripts with Strange’s Men, The Jew of Malta would have belonged to Strange’s Men all along. The Elizabethan playwright Thomas Heywood recalled that Edward Alleyn’s performance of ‘This Jew, with others many’ won him
The attribute of peerless, being a man
Whom we may rank with (doing no one wrong)
Proteus for shapes, and Roscius for a tongue,
So could he speak, so vary.
(8–11)
These performances presumably commenced after Alleyn went over to Strange’s Men, early in 1591, when the new company acquired an actor equal to the part of Barabas. It is a reasonable surmise, then, that Marlowe composed The Jew for Edward Alleyn in 1591, when he and Kyd were writing in one chamber; but an earlier date of 1589–90 is perfectly feasible.
Marlowe’s approach to drama was less bookish three or four years after his graduation from university. The Jew of Malta has fewer operatic passages of poetic oratory, and draws on a wider range of dramatic devices, than Tamburlaine does. The speeches in The Jew run half as long, on the average, and there are twice as many cues. The characters frequently use soliloquy, disguise and asides to open up private lines of communication with the audience. Where the dominant trope of Tamburlaine is hyperbole, The Jew abounds in irony. The later play is short on belle-lettristic allusions and long on trickery. Marlowe has evolved from the high literariness of university culture into the vernacular milieu of his employers, the common players.
The Jew of Malta has no literary source. Marlowe borrowed the exploding monastery that blows up the Turkish army from Foxe’s Book of Martyrs; Lonicherus’s Chronicles of the Turks supplied him with Juan Miques, the Jewish duke of Christian Naxos under the Turkish emperor Selim II. But his chief model was the morality play framework that he employs in Dr Faustus. The Jew stages a war between vice and virtue: Barabas, Marlowe’s Jewish Vice, makes war on the Christian people of Malta.
On the cultural map of Renaissance Europe, Marlowe’s protagonist belonged to the ‘scattered nation’ of Jews who migrated to the eastern Mediterranean and other parts of Europe during the Spanish Inquisition. In politics, the Jew follows Machiavelli, the master whose disciples ‘count religion but a childish toy, / And hold there is no sin but ignorance’ (14–15). Why did Marlowe seize upon the Jew to personify this scandalous precept? Jewish exiles from Spain and Portugal were usually required to profess Christianity in their new countries; the converts were called Marranos. Although the population of English Marranos consisted of only about two hundred persons, they exerted a fascination disproportionate to their numbers. Marranos had special skills in trade, medicine and diplomacy. Many were sincere Christians, yet they bore the stigma of stateless individuals with no fixed beliefs or lasting allegiance. In common parlance, the word Marrano signified ‘one descended of Jews or infidels, and whose parents were never christened, but for to save their goods will say they are Christians’; or more simply, ‘a Jew, an infidel, a renegado, a nickname for a Spaniard’. Doubly displaced by exile and forced conversion, the Marrano became a displaced image of the duplicity inherent in espionage and intelligence work. The Puritan William Prynne surmised that any Jewish immigrant was likely to be a foreign agent: ‘If extraordinary care be not taken … under pretext of Jews, we shall have many hundreds of Jesuits, Popish priests, and friars come over freely into England … under the title, habit, and disguise of Jews.’
Marlowe’s Prologue provides the clearest image of the historical actors who inspired The Jew of Malta:
Albeit the world think Machevill is dead,
Yet was his soul but flown beyond the Alps;
And now the Guise is dead, is come from France
To view this land and frolic with his friends.
(1–4)
Barabas’s homespun counterparts – the ‘friends’ who have drawn Machiavelli across the Channel – were lurking in the ranks of the English secret service. The Duke of Guise’s true successors were the men who had beaten him at his own game: Richard Baines, Robert Poley, Gilbert Gifford and Michael Moody.
<
br /> Barabas, the Jew of Malta, symbolized the new breed of stateless intelligence agent who shuttled back and forth between one side and the other, remaining loyal to no one but himself. He brags to his slave Ithamore about his own career as a double agent, when he ‘Slew friend and enemy with my stratagems’ (II.iii.194). ‘Thus loving neither, will I live with both,’ he tells the audience, ‘Making a profit of my policy; / And he from whom my most advantage comes, / Shall be my friend’ (V.ii.111–14).
The biblical Barabbas was the thief and murderer whom the Jews chose to set free instead of Christ. For Christian theologians, he personified the so-called ‘Jewish choice’ of materialism over spirituality. Marlowe initially casts Barabas in the allegorical role of Avarice. The opening scene finds him ‘in his counting house, with heaps of gold before him’, contemplating his jewels and precious metals. Avarice formulates his ideal of wealth in a grand paradox. The richest of the rich acquire gems that condense the maximum amount of material value in the minimal amount of space, ‘And as their wealth increaseth, so enclose / Infinite riches in a little room’ (I.i.36–37). Listening to these lines, a Christian spectator could have noticed the allegory, which was available from a wide range of devotional works, of the infant Christ enclosed in the Virgin Mary’s womb. That was the spiritual meaning of Barabas’s metaphor.
For those who had ears to hear, the pearl beyond price was the Christ child who purchased mankind’s redemption from sin. The paradox is embedded in the English word ‘mercy’, which derives from the Latin merces, ‘price’. Mindful of St Paul’s doctrine that ‘The letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life,’ (2 Cor. 3:6) Christian poets like Edmund Spenser elaborated on the spiritual sense of literal events. Marlowe’s hypocritical Christians are deaf to spiritual meanings but alert to literal ones. In The Jew, Marlowe expands the solitary example of Dr Faustus, who perceives the letter but not the spirit, to encompass an entire community of counterfeit Christians. Although The Jew of Malta abounds in Scriptural allusions, no one grasps their religious meaning. Instead, Marlowe explores the literal sense of spiritual language. What interests him about ‘infinite riches in a little room’ is not the power of religion to transform wealth into a spiritual commodity, but vice versa – the power of wealth to turn religion into a purely material practice.
Marlowe thus took the good out of the ancient battle between good and evil. When the Prince of Turkey demands tribute from the Christian Governor of Malta, Governor Ferneze extorts the money from the Jews. ‘Is theft the ground of your religion?’ Barabas asks. In reply, Ferneze echoes the judgement that Caiaphas, the Jewish high priest, had rendered on Christ:
No, Jew, we take particularly thine
To save the ruin of a multitude:
And better one want for a common good,
Than many perish for a private man.
(I.ii.98,99–102)
Christian readers took Caiaphas’s verdict in a spiritual, or allegorical, sense. Since Christ really did die ‘To save the ruin of a multitude’, the priest spoke more wisely than he knew. God ‘caused this wicked man, even as he did Balaam, to be an instrument of the Holy Ghost’. Ferneze’s citation of the Scriptural text has the opposite effect. He interprets the passage in a literal, or ironic, sense that cancels the spiritual meaning. Where the Christian reader of the Gospel according to St John hears the promise of salvation, Governor Ferneze discovers a prejudicial pretext for extortion.
Barabas plays the part of Avarice in a culture where Jews were obliged to accumulate money instead of land, so that Christians could confiscate their possessions when they needed liquid assets. Ferneze uses Barabas in the way that early modern princes used Jewish merchants and moneylenders. The governor lets the Christians’ debt to the Turks accumulate until they can no longer pay it, and then invokes the biblical curse as a pretext for seizing the Jew’s property. Marlowe’s Antichrist literally perishes for the common good. His stolen wealth ransoms the Maltese Christians from the Turk; his sacrificial death in Act Five redeems Malta from the pagan foe that holds it in bondage.
Renaissance critics thought of allegory and irony as diametrically opposed species of metaphor: ‘Allegory points out what things have in common, whereas irony brings together things which are contraries, pointing out the basis of their separation.’ Barabas defends the ironist’s stance in the course of explaining why a Jew who falsely converts to Christianity is better off than a Christian, like Governor Ferneze, who confuses religion with avarice: ‘A counterfeit profession is better / Than unseen hypocrisy’ (I.ii.294–95). The Maltese Christians are easy pickings for Barabas because of their hollowed-out spirituality, the ‘unseen hypocrisy’ that conceals their own cynicism from themselves.
When Barabas’s daughter Abigail confesses to a friar that her father has engineered the killing of Governor Ferneze’s son, her disclosure sets the stage for a memorable encounter between the ironic Barabas and the hypocritical priest. The blackmailing priest knows that Barabas has committed murder, but the priest cannot say so because he has discovered this fact in confession, and the letter of canon law forbids him to reveal it. Barabas knows, but does not say, that the friar knows, but cannot say, what Barabas has done. ‘Thou hast committed –’ the priest begins; ‘Fornication?’ Barabas continues, ‘But that was in another country: /And besides, the wench is dead’ (IV.i.43–45). The sleazy, punning familiarity of ‘in another country’ substitutes fornication for murder, demonstrates the Jew’s mastery of the letter of the law and establishes his control over the literal-minded friar.
The Jew meets his match after his slave Ithamore falls into the clutches of the pick-purse Pilia-Borza and the prostitute Bella Mira. When the thief and the whore enquire about the Jew’s money, Ithamore replies that Barabas has it safely hidden away. ‘But you know some secrets of the Jew,’ Pilia Borza continues, ‘which if they were revealed would do him harm’ (IV.ii.75–76). The discovery that secrets possess monetary value has an electrifying effect on the slave. The ‘poor Turk of tenpence’ suddenly acquires the gift of literacy and metamorphoses into a secretary – ‘Pen and ink; I’ll write unto him, we’ll have money straight’ (78–79) – penning blackmail to his former master: ‘I charge thee send me three hundred by this bearer, and this shall be your warrant; if you do not, no more but so’ (87–89). Ithamore proceeds to serenade Bella Mira with an extemporaneous elegy based on Marlowe’s ‘Come live with me and be my love’, inviting her to
sail from hence to Greece, to lovely Greece:
I’ll be thy Jason, thou my golden fleece;
Where painted carpets o’er the meads are hurled,
And Bacchus’ vineyards overspread the world …
The meads, the orchards, and the primrose lanes,
Instead of sedge and reed, bear sugar canes:
Thou in those groves, by Dis above,
Shalt live with me and be my love.
(IV.ii.102–11)
Ithamore makes bad poetry, but exquisite parody. The carpets hurled over the meadow, the crop of sugar canes and the elevation of Pluto, the god of riches, into heaven transform the pastoral landscape into a spendthrift’s theme park. Where Marlowe’s lyric swain summons the fields into being with song, the newly rich slave substitutes his master’s ‘Hermoso placer de los dineros’ (II.i.64), the beautiful pleasure of money.
This moment of self-referential parody enacts a ludicrous fantasy of poverty, poetry and social mobility. Ithamore’s ‘working words’ extract cash profits instantaneously; he is paid by the line. He can buy a readymade landscape because his words are good as gold: ‘And if he ask why I demand so much,’ he instructs Pilia-Borza, ‘tell him I scorn to write a line under a hundred crowns.’ The thief appreciates the slave’s witty play on words: ‘You’d make a rich poet, sir’ (IV.ii.136–38). The poetry of Ithamore’s lines lies in the hidden or ‘dark’ meaning that is concealed from the uninitiated (‘send me three hundred … if you do not, no more but so’). Like poetry itself, the Jew’s secret
s enclose infinite riches in a little room.
The rise of Ithamore further clarifies the linkage between poetry and spying. Poets and intelligence agents had special skills in the decoding and recoding of texts; they shared a proficiency in wordplay, the various species of allegory and ironic allusions. Richard Mulcaster claimed that this capacity was intrinsic to the very nature of poetry:
For when the poets write sadly and soberly, without counterfeiting though they write in verse, yet they be no poets in that kind of their writing: but where they cover a truth with a fabulous veil, and resemble it with alteration.
Variations of this commonplace definition abound in Elizabethan poetry and criticism. Marlowe’s admirer George Chapman calls poetry a kind of ‘hieroglyphic’ to ‘conceal … within the outer bark … some sap of hidden truth’. Sidney writes that ‘there are many mysteries contained in Poetry which of purpose are written darkly, lest by profane wits it should be abused’. In Christian allegory, the hidden meaning corresponds to the spiritual sense; in the ironic poetry of intelligence and blackmail, it corresponds to the literal facts that give the spy an advantage over his victim. Since these facts possess a cash value, the informant’s wages varied according to the depth of his secrets; he too was paid by the line.
Encountering Barabas outside the city walls, the Turkish prince SelimCalymath recognizes him at once for what he is: ‘Whom have we there, a spy?’ ‘Yes,’ he replies, ‘one that can spy a place / Where you may enter, and surprise the town’ (V.i.69–71). Barabas gives the Turkish prince a virtuoso display of his own secrets. The Jew’s skill at chorography, or fine-grained mapmaking, demonstrates Marlowe’s enhanced grasp of performance practice. Strange’s Men performed The Jew of Malta at the Rose, a Bankside playhouse built along the lines of Johannes de Witt’s sketch of the Swan Theatre. Viewing the raised playing area from the perspective of the yard, Barabas explains that
