"The Jew of Malta" by Christopher Marlowe

On the surface, this play is stuffed with anti-semitism. Marlowe's Barabas is an ill-used character at the start, who therefore has some sort of motivation for his wickedness, but the delight he takes in his evil and his relatively quick downfall make it much harder for us to sympathise with him than for Shakespeare's Shylock.

The relationship between arch-villain Barabas and his clownish sidekick Ithamore is a little like that between Faustus and Mephistopheles and the delight they take in their murders reminded me of the mischievous wickedness in Dr Faustus. The victims of Barabas and Ithamore are fools and idiots; it was difficult to care that they were being slaughtered. 

The plot is picaresque, one thing after another.

The plot (spoiler alert)

The Prologue is spoken by Macchiavel. He argues against morality and sees the only right as that conferred by might. The play the segues into Barabas, the protagonist, in his counting house; neatly it opens with him in mid-thought. His primary (indeed, almost sole) motivation is money.

The Turks turn up in Malta and demand ten years back-payment of the agreed tribute. Governor Ferzene decides that this can best be achieved by taxing all Jews in Malta at 50% of their wealth ... and when Barabas hangs back he, the wealthiest, is taxed at 100%.

But Barabas has hidden some treasure in his house ... which is being turned into a nunnery. So he has to recruit his daughter, Abigail, to become a nun to move into the nunnery to get his hidden treasure back. This done, she stops being a nun.

Martin de Bosco, a Spanish ship's Captain newly arrived from defeating the Turks at sea, persuades Ferzene and his council to refuse to pay the tribute to the Turks and use the money levied on the Jews to mount a defence against the Turkish invasion that will surely follow.

Two boys fancy Abigail: Lodowick, Ferzene's son, and Mathias, whom she fancies. To revenge himself on governor Ferzene, Barabas and his newly purchased Turkish slave and enthusiastic sidekick in evil, Ithamore, decide to trick Lodowick and Mathias into fighting a duel; both are killed. 

Abigail, realising she has been duped into getting her boyfriend killed, becomes a nun again. Barabas and Ithamore, realising they have to silence Abigail, make a poisoned porridge and kills all the nuns in the nunnery, including Abigail. On her deathbed she confesses to Father Barnardine.

Father Barnardine is bound by the seal of the confessional so he can't tell anyone. But, supported by Father Jacomo, he goes to Barabas and Ithamore and drops hints ... so they strangle him and dupe Jacomo into thinking he has done the deed. They then turn Jacomo in to the authorities and he is hanged.

Local prostitute Bellamira and her pimp Pilia-Borza conspire to get gold from Barabas. She pretends she has fallen in love with Ithamore; he, besotted, blackmails Barabas about the two boys tricked into duelling, the poisoned nuns and the strangled friar. Barabas initially pays up but then disguises himself as a musician and tricks Bellamira, Pilia-Borza and Ithamore into smelling poisoned flowers. 

He is not in time to prevent the three denouncing him to the authorities but before he is found guilty the witnesses are dead. He feigns death using a sleeping draught and governor Ferenze has his body thrown over the wall.

Where he encounters the besieging Turks and shows them a way into Valetta. The Turks defeat the Maltese and, in gratitude, make Barabas governor. But he realises that he cannot rule a people who hate him and decides to rebetray Malta, this time back to Ferzene, for money. He arranges to blow up the Turkish troops in an old monastery and to trick the Turkish leader into having dinner on a platform in the castle which will collapse. But Ferzene double crosses Barabas (keeping up?) and it is Barabas who is on the platform when it collapses and tips him into a cauldron where he is boiled to death.

It looks to me like the plot is merely a device for lots of exciting things to happen on stage: 

• Abigail breaking into her own house to steal back the treasure from Barabas and throwing it down from the balcony to where he waits below
• the swordfight between Mathias and Lodowick, cheered on from the same balcony by Barabas
• the comedy when Barabas is poisoning the porridge and Ithamore is protesting that it is a shame to waste such good food
• the deathbed confession of Abigail ... and the problem with the secrets of the confessional leading to the comedy in which Barnardine and Jacomo try to lure Barabas into confessing without ever being able to accuse him outright
• the strangling of Barnardine and the framing of Jacomo
• the ludicrous love scene between Bellamira and Ithamore
• Barabas masquerading as a musician in order to foist poisoned flowers on Bellamira, Pilia-Borza and Ithamore
• the apparent death of Barabas and the hurling of his body from the battlements
• the collapse of the platform the the cooking of Barabas

Irony and betrayal and critique of religion

What distinguishes the play is the use of an outsider's perspective (principally Barabas but a little of Ithamore) to critique the established order. Almost everything that Barabas says is tinged with scorn and irony; he repeatedly criticises the supposedly superior morality of the Christians. Furthermore, Marlowe's characters are almost all motivated by money: Bellamira the prostitute when she seeks to seduce Ithamore to get him to blackmail Barabas, Fathers Jacomo and Barnardine when they fall out over which of their religious houses will benefit from the fortune of converted Barabas, even Ferenze when he realises that if he defies the Turks the Maltese can keep the tax they have levied on the Jews to pay the tribute.

For example:

“I count religion but a childish toy,
And hold there is no sin but ignorance.” (Machiavel in the Prologue; doesn't he sound like Faustus?)

“Who hateth me but for my happiness?
Or who is honour'd now but for his wealth?
Rather had I, a Jew, be hated thus,
Than pitied in a Christian poverty;
For I can see no fruits in all their faith,
But malice, falsehood, and excessive pride,” (Barabas, Act 1)

“Some Jews are wicked, as all Christians are:
But say the tribe that I descended of
Were all in general cast away for sin,
Shall I be tried by their transgression?” (Barabas, Act 1)

Marlowe frequently repeats the contemporary myths about Jews (including that they crucify babies) and this seems to be done ironically, as when Barabas (Act 2) himself says:
“As for myself, I walk abroad o' nights,
And kill sick people groaning under walls:
Sometimes I go about and poison wells
...
Then, after that, was I an usurer,
And with extorting, cozening, forfeiting,
And tricks belonging unto brokery,
I fill'd the gaols with bankrupts 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.
But mark how I am blest for plaguing them;--
I have as much coin as will buy the town.”

“It's no sin to deceive a Christian;
For they themselves hold it a principle,
Faith is not to be held with heretics:
But all are heretics that are not Jews;” (Barabas, Act 2)

Words, words, words

So is the play redeemed by its words? Marlowe has a special place in English letters as the creator of the 'royal line': the iambic pentameter of blank verse that Shakespeare later used to such effect (although Shakespeare developed it by mixing it with prose and by frequently breaking the strict form to include weak endings (such as the extra syllable in 'To be or not to be, that is the question'). 

There are some great lines:

Prologue

“Many will talk of title to a crown:
What right had Caesar to the empery?”

“Might first made kings, and laws were then most sure
When, like the Draco's, they were writ in blood.”

Act One
“What more may heaven do for earthly man
Than thus to pour out plenty in their laps,
Ripping the bowels of the earth for them,”

"Your extreme right does me exceeding wrong”

“she were fitter for a tale of love,
Than to be tired out with orisons;
And better would she far become a bed,
Embraced in a friendly lover's arms,
Than rise at midnight to a solemn mass.”

Act Two
“Thus, like the sad-presaging raven, that tolls
The sick man's passport in her hollow beak,
And in the shadow of the silent night
Doth shake contagion from her sable wings,
Vex'd and tormented runs poor Barabas
With fatal curses towards these Christians.”

“I learn'd in Florence how to kiss my hand,
Heave up my shoulders when they call me dog,
And duck as low as any bare-foot friar”

“First, be thou void of these affections,
Compassion, love, vain hope, and heartless fear;
Be mov'd at nothing, see thou pity none,
But to thyself smile when the Christians moan”

Ithamore, the Moslem, is also allowed to boast of his evils:
“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 kneel'd,
I strewed powder on the marble stones,
And therewithal their knees would rankle so,
That I have laugh'd a-good to see the cripples
Go limping home to Christendom on stilts.”

Act Three
“O mistress, I have the bravest, gravest, secret, subtle, bottle-nosed knave to my master, that ever gentleman had!”

"My sinful soul, alas, hath pac'd too long
The fatal labyrinth of misbelief,”

“he that eats with the devil had need of a long spoon”

"Why, master, will you poison her with a mess of rice-porridge? that will preserve life, make her round and plump, and batten more than you are aware.”

“As fatal be it to her as the draught
Of which great Alexander drunk, and died;
And with her let it work like Borgia's wine,
Whereof his sire the Pope was poisoned!
In few, the blood of Hydra, Lerna's bane,
The juice of hebon, and Cocytus' breath,
And all the poisons of the Stygian pool,
Break from the fiery kingdom, and in this
Vomit your venom, and envenom her
That, like a fiend, hath left her father thus!”

Act Four
“How sweet the bells ring, now the nuns are dead,
That sound at other times like tinkers' pans!"

“Fornication: but that was in another country;
And besides, the wench is dead.”

“To fast, to pray, and wear a shirt of hair,
And on my knees creep to Jerusalem.”

“He sent a shaggy, tatter'd, staring slave,
That, when he speaks, draws out his grisly beard,
And winds it twice or thrice about his ear;
Whose face has been a grind-stone for men's swords;
His hands are hack'd, some fingers cut quite off;
Who, when he speaks, grunts like a hog, and looks
Like one that is employ'd in catzery
And cross-biting; such a rogue
As is the husband to a hundred whores;”

Act 5
“For he that liveth in authority,
And neither gets him friends nor fills his bags,
Lives like the ass that Aesop speaketh of,
That labours with a load of bread and wine,
And leaves it off to snap on thistle-tops”

This is very much a play to be performed rather than read; the spectacle is clear. It is driven by a bitter critique of hypocrisy in religion. But the plot is just one thing after another and the characterisation is weak.

March 2020;

Plays by Marlowe reviewed in this blog also include:
Edward II

Other plays reviewed in this blog may be found here

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"The Reckoning" by Charles Nicholl

On Wednesday 30th Mat 1593, the great Elizabethan playwright Christopher Marlowe was stabbed to death by Ingram Frizer; Robert Poley and Nicholas Skeres were also present. This book is one of many attempts to get at the truth behind this event.

All four of the actors in this scene had links with the Elizabethan espionage world. Marlowe had been given a document by the Privy Council exonerating him when Cambridge had attempted to block his MA on the grounds that he was recruiting students to go to Reims where there was a college turning out Catholics for subversive activities; he later probably worked for Sir Francis Walsingham, Elizabeth's spymaster general who used a sting to gather evidence that Mary Queen of Scots supported the assassination of Elizabeth; Marlowe worked for Walsingham's brother Thomas, who was a diplomat and probably gathered intelligence from abroad. Poley was in and out of prison, sometimes probably as cover for his informing activities, at other times possibly to listen to prisoners, and was involved with Throckmorton and with Babington, Catholic plotters against Elizabeth. Skeres was also involved with the Babington plot. Frizer worked for Thomas Walsingham and also, later, the Earl of Essex. All four would have known one another before the meeting and all four probably, as spies do, mistrusted one another.

And Nicholl's thesis is that this world of espionage was responsible for Marlowe's death. He follows various twists and turns within this secret world but this part of the book is so tortuous that I was quickly confused, largely unimpressed and rather bored. In the end, Nicholl concludes, Marlowe was killed because he was associated with Sir Walter Ralegh, who, having fallen from the Queen's favour, was making a nuisance of himself in Parliament and whom the Earl of Essex wished to put down. I'm just not convinced that Marlowe was murdered for this. The fact that the spies were together for eight hours before the murder, eating and drinking together, makes this scenario unlikely. It is even more unlikely when it becomes clear that Poley worked for Robert Cecil who was an opponent of Essex. Why would Poley collaborate with Frizer, even if it were just to cover the crime up?

Furthermore, Nicholls more or less ignores other avenues. Marlowe was reputedly homosexual (he is reported to have quipped: "All they that love not Tobacco and Boys are fools" but this is by yet another lurker on the sidelines of espionage and may be untrue; this writer also accused him of atheism) but Nicholls avoids this dimension to the extent that 'homosexuality', 'sodomy' and 'buggery' do not appear in the index.

There is also very little discussion of Marlowe's plays. This must have been a major part of his life; despite dying at the age of 29 he wrote the best-selling Tamburlaine the Great parts I and II (which I saw in a production by the Lazarus Theatre Company at the Tristan Bates Theatre on Friday 28th August 2015), the Jew of Malta, Edward II, the Massacre at Paris, and his masterpiece,  Dr Faustus. Marlowe's literary work is chronicled in Shakespeare and Co by Stanley Wells; it also tells about the other playwrights in his life such as Thmoas Kyd, author of The Spanish Tragedy, with whom he shared a room and accusations of atheism.

A great book about the Elizabethan world of espionage is The Watchers by Stephen Alford. A fictionalised version of spying for Walsingham is AEW Mason's Fire Over England, a ripping boys' adventure yarn

The late great Anthony Burgess produced a brilliant fictionalised version of Marlowe's life and death in Dead Man at Deptford. This has all the bits that Nicholl has, and more, fictionalised but told with much more coherence.

The brilliance of this book, like The Lodger, also by Nicholl, about Shakespeare, is the meticulous forensic scrutiny of not just the main protagonist but all the other players in the scene; we find out that Frizer the assassin is buried in Eltham having lived into a presumably peaceful old age. But the price for meticulous detail is sometimes readability and this is better as a sholarly work than a general introduction to the topic.

May 2016; 337 pages

"Dr Faustus" by Christopher Marlowe

I saw the RSC production of this play on Saturday (matinee) 24th September 2016 at The Barbican Theatre in the City of London; it starred Sandy Gierson and Oliver Ryan as Faustus and Mephistopheles (Sloth was played by Richard Leeming who had so impressed me with Abel Drugger in The Alchemist the week before). The RSC made sense of the play but a lot of the drama comes from knockabout comedy and extravagant spectacle and I couldn't help thinking that if Shakespeare rather than Marlowe had written this play we might have had more sense of the existential crises suffered by Faustus; I might have cared when he was dragged to Hell.

This was an interesting experience! The copy that I have purports to reproduce the 1616 quarto edition of the play. It is not split into acts or scenes so I cross-referenced it with the Kindle edition, based on the First Quarto of 1604, the earliest extant edition, which has fourteen scenes (though no division into Acts). But there are significant differences in the text between these two editions.

The story: scene by scene
The basic story is the same. Faustus, a scholar, is dissatisfied with Logic, Medicine, Law ("This study fits a mercenary drudge, /Who aims at nothing but external trash") and Divinity (we are all sinners so we must all die: "What doctrine call you this, Che sera, sera"). So he resolves to study Magic.

O, what a world of profit and delight,

Of power, of honour and omnipotence,

Is promis'd to the studious artizan!

He asks his manservant Wagner to summon his friends Valders and Cornelius who will helps him to summon demons. Whilst waiting for them a Good Angel and a Bad Angel appear, warning and tempting. But Faustus is determined:

'Tis magic, magic that hath ravish'd me

In Scene 2, two scholars appear and engage in word play with Wagner.

Scene 3. In a grove at night Faustus speaks Latin and summons Mephistophilis. When he arrives, Faustus says:

I charge thee to return and change thy shape;

Thou art too ugly to attend on me: 

Go, and return an old Franciscan friar;

That holy shape becomes a devil best.

So M exits and then re-enters as a friar. This is just one of a lot of anti-Catholic sentiment that the play contains.
M now tells F about how Lucifer and his mates were cast from hell. And F asks

How comes it, then, that thou art out of hell?

and M replies:

Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it:

Thinks't thou that I, that saw the face of God,

And tasted the eternal joys of heaven,

Am not tormented with ten thousand hells,

In being depriv'd of everlasting bliss?

This is great stuff. M is warning F of the consequences of rebelling against God and M regrest being a devil because of what he has lost. In this sense it is NOT "better to have loved and lost/ Than never to have loved at all" as Tennyson was later to claim in In  Memoriam.
Nevertheless, F offers his soul to the devil if in return he can have "whatsoever I shall ask".

Scene 4 is 'a street' and is a comedy routine between Wagner, the servant, and a Clown

Scene 5: we are back in Faustus' study. He is debating with himself (and the the Good and Bad Angels) about whether he should sing the contract. He tells himself "The god thou serv'st is thine own appetite" and the Evil Angel calls prayers the "fruits of lunacy". Then Mephistopheles appears and Faustus, using his own blood, signs the contract donating his sou to Lucifer, "Chief lord and regent of perpetual night". The blood dries up and Faustus cannot finish the contract till Mephistopheles brings fire to warm it back into liquid again. Then F says: "Consummatum est"; it is finished, the words spoken by Jesus on the cross in the Latin of the Vulgate Bible translation of St Jerome, the version Faustus mentions in Scene I.
This is surely an incredibly significant line. Marlowe is drawing parallels between Faustus and Jesus.

Faustus now reads the text of what he has just signed and, it being accepted by M, begins to seek knowledge from M. Learning is the motivation for F. But the King James Bible states: "For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow." (In the Vulgate: eo quod in multa sapientia multa sit indignatio; et qui addit scientiam, addit et laborem; in Wycliffe's translation "for in much wisdom is much indignation, and he that increaseth knowing, increaseth also travail"). The first thing he wants to know is where is hell and M replies:

Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscrib'd

In one self-place; but where we are is hell

Very modern!
F now asks M for a woman:

For I am wanton and lascivious,

And cannot live without a wife.

But the "hot whore" M offers is rejected. It is not until much later that F sees Helen of Troy and falls in love.

In Scene 6, again in the study, F quizzes a procession of the Seven Deadly Sins; each tells him who they are and who their parents were. The Sins speak in prose (Wrath admits to "wounding myself when I could get none to fight withal").

Now there is another comic scene in which two rustics, Robin and Dick, have stolen Faust's magic book and wish to pronounce its spells, but they cannot read.

I guess this is the end of an Act or we are half way through the play because the Chorus who started us off and will finish comes on at this stage. The nest few scenes are Faustus and his side-kick Mephistopheles going to exotic places and, using fireworks and conjuring tricks, playing jolly japes on the locals. It seems that F has sold his soul so he can play some practical jokes. He spirits Bruno (perhaps Giordano Bruno the Dominican philosopher who was burnt at the stake for his heretical views regarding the Copernican system in 1600; this would have been too late for Marlowe (who died in 1593) and does not appear in the earlier Faustus, (my version remember is dated 1616 when it might have been topical), who is an anti-pope, away from the rather foolish Pope Adrian. F and M caper about, hitting cardinals and stealing food from the Pope; this so annoys the religious princes that they decide to excommuniate the 'ghost' and F says:

Bell, book, and candle, - candle, book, and bell, -

Forward and backward, to curse Faustus to hell!

Another comic interlude in which Robin and Dick have stolen a cup from a vintner and summon a grumpy Mephistopheles from Constantinople to help them. M turns Dock into an Ape and Robin into a Dog providing Robin with the wonderful innuendo:
A dog! that's excellent: let the maids look well to their porridge-pots, for I'll into the kitchen presently

More merry japes as Faustus meets the Hol Roman Emperor and plays tricks on his courtiers. When, later, they waylay him in a lonely place they cut off his head but he has a false head on and so, having seemed to die, he gets up again. As well as 'It is finished' from the cross, Faustus is now resurrected! Is Marlowe blaspheming or just drawing parallels?

In another comic interlude, Faustus tricks a horse dealer who chops his leg off (but it is a false leg ...)

Faustus is at a posh dinner party with the Duke and Duchess of Vanholt. F says "I have heard that great-bellied [I presume he means pregnant rather than fat] women do long for things that are rare and dainty." The horse seller and Robin and Dick and other clowns disturb the party with their complaints against F. More merriment.

Scene 13: Back home. Faustus has made his will. Some scholars ask F who the most beautiful woman in the world was and Mephistopheles brings in Helen of Troy. Faustus, who has been encouraged by an old man to the brink of repentance, is seduced:

Was this the face that launch'd a thousand ships,

And burnt the topless towers of Ilium? -

Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss. -

Her lips suck forth my soul: see, where it flies! -

Come, Helen, come, give me my soul again. 

Here will I dwell, for heaven is in these lips ...

O, thou art fairer than the evening air

Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars

Then Lucifer, Beelzebub and Mephistopheles walk in. Lucifer is here

To view the subjects of our monarchy

Those souls whose sin seals the black sons of hell

and they tell Faustus to prepare to surrender his soul that very night.

Now the scholars are back, concerned that F looks ill:

He is not well with being over-solitary.

The Good and Evil Angels are there, the Evil one smirking

He that loves pleasure must for pleasure fall.

The clock strikes 11 PM, half past,, then midnight and Faustus, protesting, pleading, is dragged to Hell.
The Chorus returns and says

Cut is the branch that might have grown full straight

Discussion

It is not great literature. It is clearly written for the theatre. The comic interludes would be done these days before the curtain to enable scenery to be changed behind. They are there to lighten the mood of the play and to allow some rustic punning. It is almost formulaic in its structure, alternating serious drama with rustic comedy. But then the middle of the play is the opportunity for Faustus to tour the world being silly. One can see the dramatic potential in having fire-works whizzing about on stage and heads being chopped off and regrown and people sprouting horns from their heads but it is clumsy knockabout stuff.

Of course there are the classic lines but not so many that this play could be in the same league as, say, Macbeth.

Perhaps I need to read the 1604 version. Perhaps some of the things I liked least are the additions made by lesser playwrights after Marlowe's death.

In a lecture to the Gresham College 'How to be a Shakespearean atheist' Ryrie (2019) points oiut that Faustus "claims not to believe in Hell while having explicitly made a pact with the devil. The conventional caricature would call that an outrageous example of wishful thinking. In fact it is more like a defiant refusal to submit to reality."

I also recommend:

• Dead Man in Deptford, a brilliant fictional biography of Marlowe by Anthony Burgess
• Shakespeare and Co by Stanley Wells, a set of biographies of Shakespeare's contemporaries
• Faustus by Leo Ruckbie, a biography of the German alchemist who may be the man behind the legend

April 2014; Not only did my edition not have scenes; it didn't even have page numbers! And I can't be bothered to count them.

Other plays reviewed in this blog can be found here.

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Dead man in Deptford" by Anthony Burgess

This was the last novel written by Burgess before his death in 1994. Other great novels by this accomplished novelist include his first, the Malaysian Trilogy, A Clockwork Orange, The four Enderby novels, One Hand Clapping and what I consider to be his masterpiece, Earthly Powers.

This book is a fictionalised account of the life of Christopher Marlowe who wrote the plays Tamburlaine, Faustus, The Jew of Malta and Edward II; there is a suggestion in the book that he collaborated with a young Shakespeare on Henry VI part 1.

It is narrated by a young actor, who is blatantly not present for much of the action but doesn't actually enter much into the action which seems a rather pointless device. It is also written in Elizabethan English, spelt modern-wise in dialogue but Elizabethan-style when quoting written texts (eg the plays); this is sometimes a little difficult to understand (Burgess makes up a language in A Clockwork Orange called Nadsat based on Russian slang which is easier to read than this; my favourite example of an author immersing you in the language of a bygone age is Hawksmoor by Peter Ackroyd). There is a lot made of the fact that names are flexible, thus Marlowe is often turned into Marley or Merlin.

The life of Kit Marlowe offers a fascinating plot. He was an atheist and sodomite at at time when both of these were capital offences. He wrote world class plays and was an honourable predecessor to Shakespeare. He spied for Francis Walsingham (which might explain how he got away with the sodomy and atheism for so long) and was killed (murdered?) is a brawl in a tavern in Deptford. Burgess turns this is into a classic novel but I think something a little easier to read and slightly faster paced might have been even more exciting.

Nevertheless, every Burgess is a masterpiece. May 2015; 269 pages