The Complete Plays (86 page)

168      
this subject
: This substance (my body).

170      
Must part… impressions
: Must depart, leaving behind its traces.

185–90  
With what… dignity!
: How hard-hearted I would have to be to enjoy the burden of my life, and if my body, all made up of pain, could still put into action the feelings of a heart that felt joy at a worldly honour!

195–8  
How should… sovereignty?
: How could I stir against the
promptings of my heart, living only with the wish to die, and with only an unwelcome crown to cite as an argument?

203      
steelèd stomachs
: Tough spirits.

207      
damnèd
: Doomed, wretched.

208      
send
: May heaven send to.

211      
my fatal chair
: The throne in which I am fated to die,
or
the chariot.

216–17
The monarch… monster
: Death.

225      
And when… sight
: And when my soul enjoys its spiritual sight.

237      
Phyteus
: Apollo, the sun (continuing the thought of lines 230–33 and picked up in lines 242–4).

238–41  
The nature… clifts
: Combining the proverb ‘Take occasion (or time) by the forelock' (Tilley T311 ) with the fate of Hippolytus (N), the anger of whose great father Theseus caused his chariot to be dragged on to rocks where he was torn apart.

250      
earth… fruit
: Earth has exhausted the finest thing she has borne.

252      
timeless
: Untimely.

THE JEW OF MALTA

The play dates from
c
. 1590: Machevil's prologue alludes to the death of the duke of Guise (23 December 1588), and the play's first recorded performance was on 26 February 1592 by Lord Strange's Men, at the Rose. It was immensely popular: thirty-six performances are recorded by June 1596; its title-role was one of Edward Alleyn's great parts; and its influence on Ben Jonson (
Volpone
) and Shakespeare (
The Merchant of Venice, Othello
) was profound. It was further revived in 1601 and, at an uncertain date, for Caroline audiences at court and at the Cockpit theatre. No text survives earlier than a quarto edition of 1633. This has a dedication, prologue and epilogue by Thomas Heywood, but there seems little reason to think that he interfered with the text, and it forms the basis for the present edition.

The play's action has a teasingly uncertain relation to historical fact. No narrative source has been found for its plot, and its events are apparently fictional. Yet it is persuasively set in the Mediterranean world of the later sixteenth century, and, in a way, Fernand Braudel's great history
The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II
(1949, tr. 1972–3) is the best guide to the complex and ambiguous relations between races, nations and cultures the play evokes. Malta was repeatedly besieged by the Turks, most notably in 1565, though its Christian occupiers, the Knights of the Order of St John, never in fact compounded with their Ottoman enemies. There were historical Jews
whose lives may have provided prototypes for the career of Barabas. The favourite candidate is Joseph Mendez Nassi (also known in his native Portugal as Joao Miques), who led an exodus from Christian persecution to Constantinople in 1547. A fabulously wealthy merchant and ‘diplomat', he rose to become an adviser to Siileyman the Magnificent's son Selim. Created duke of Naxos on Selim's succession in 1566, he was reputed to have persuaded the Sultan to attack Venetian-held Cyprus in 1570, and was treated as a notorious enemy by European chroniclers and diplomatic agents.

But Barabas is not copied from a specific historical person. He is, rather, derived from the collective fantasy of ‘the Jew' – the focus not only of continuing medieval anti-Semitism, but also, by the sixteenth century, the object of a more specific fear: the few, converted, Jews living in western Europe were commonly suspected of being covert allies of ‘the Turk', a fifth column whose conversion to Christianity and commitment to the security of Christendom were merely nominal, not to be trusted. (It is hard to say whether this was fear or paranoia: disquietingly, the converted Jews living in London were, apparently, much involved in conspiracies against the Elizabethan regime. See David S. Katz,
The Jews in the History of England
1485–1850 (Oxford, 1994), ch. 2, ‘The Jewish Conspirators of Elizabethan England'.) It would, however, be dull-witted to complain about our uncertainty over the play's links with reality, since such uncertainties are exactly what
The Jew of Malta
is about.

The uncertainties begin with its vertiginously ironic prologue. Machevil speaks like the Presenter of a Morality play, but instead of instruction he offers the beginnings of a ‘lecture' (29) (almost, at this date, a sermon) on atheism. Seemingly an immortal soul, he ‘count[s] religion but a childish toy' (14). One of the Presenter's functions was to gain a hospitable reception for the players – an essentially reciprocal entertainment (cf. 34) – and Machevil too comes to ‘frolic with his friends' (4). If we react with horror to his amorality, we are caught in his paradoxical trap:

To some perhaps my name is odious,

But such as love me guard me from their tongues,

…

Admired I am of those that hate me most. (5–6,9)

Critics have debated how far the play reflects first-hand knowledge of Machiavelli's writings, how far the common stereotype of ‘the murderous Machiavel'. The answer appears to be, ‘Both.' Barabas may be a poisoner, but he is conspicuously less Machiavellian than the canny and unscrupulous Christians.

His first appearance leads us to expect a Morality about the evils of avarice, but the ‘desire of gold' (3.5.4) is a universal in the play, and Barabas himself is soon less interested in riches than in revenge. His name associates him with the thief who was released instead of Christ, but it is the Christians who steal Barabas's wealth in 1.2. Ferneze's opportune production of ‘the articles of our decrees' (67) and the appearance of the soldiers who have already seized Barabas's goods suggest that he is the victim of a preconcerted trick. When he makes the point – ‘Is theft the ground of your religion?' – he is answered:

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. (96, 97–100)

Ferneze's words are uncomfortably close to the sentiments of Caiaphas plotting the death of Christ (John 11:50). G. K. Hunter (1964) argues that the persistent biblical allusions imply the play's conformity with traditional theological anti-Semitism. They seem rather to highlight the gap between reality and ‘counterfeit profession' (291).

Similarly, Barabas casts himself as Job later in the scene, only to reveal that he has provided a further hoard against such a calamity (under a board mockingly marked with a cross). Like the Morality-play Vice, he is protean and unpredictable. Audiences delight in his ambiguities, which frequently occur on the fault line between the material and the spiritual, traditionally the distinction between Judaism and Christianity:

LODOWICK

This is thy diamond. Tell me, shall I have it?

BARABAS

Win it and wear it. It is yet unfoiled.

O, but I know your lordship would disdain

To marry with the daughter of a Jew;

And yet I'll give her many a golden cross,

With Christian posies round about the ring. (2.3.295–300)

The crosses here are pointedly secular, stamped onto the coins of the dowry, and the posies fit equally the mottoes on coins and wedding-rings. And, of course, the promise is false. Barabas is a deceiver, and neither characters nor audience can be sure what can be taken for granted, what is stereotypical ‘Jewish' custom and what malicious improvisation (Barabas turning into the air, Abigail's ‘modesty').

Structurally, the play is built out of the double deceits Barabas calls ‘crossbiting' (4.3.13). He sets Lodowick against Mathias, Friar Jacomo against Friar Barnadine, just as the Knights try to play Spain off against the Turks. Barabas poisons the nuns with what looks like a charitable offering, killing his own daughter with a biblically ambivalent mess of pottage (for which Esau sold his birthright to the deceiver Jacob, Genesis 25). He deceives Ithamore with the promise of making him his heir (‘I'll pay thee with a vengeance, Ithamore', 3.4.117); Ithamore turns against him, gulled in his turn by Bellamira and Pilia-Borza. Barabas poisons them all with flowers, and then, in a crowning deception, fakes his own death. The discrepancy between the frenzied intrigue and the strange, unsettling reflections it implies about Christianity and its inheritance from Judaism is marked. In the end Barabas is caught in his own trap, caught out by the subtler ‘policy' of the Christians.

DRAMATIS PERSONAE

BARABAS
(accented on the first syllable) In the New Testament, Barabbas was a murderer (Mark 15:7, Luke 2.3:19), and a thief (John 18:40) who was released by Pilate instead of Jesus.

ABIGALL
In the Geneva Bible, the catalogue of proper names translates Abigail as ‘the father's joy', but the spelling here hints at the way her actions gall her father. Hunter 1964 argues that the Old Testament Abigail (I Samuel 25) was regarded as an archetype of a Jew who converted to Christianity.

ITHAMORE
Perhaps recalling Ithamar, the son of Aaron (Exodus 6:23).

FERNEZE
Grand Master of the Knights of Malta, perhaps recalling the aristocratic Italian Farnese family.

CALYMATH
Also called Selim Calymath, probably in allusion to Selim, the son of Süleyman the Magnificent (ruled 1520–66) who was Sultan of Turkey during the siege of Malta in 1565.

PILIA-BORZA
From the Italian
pigliaborza
, ‘pick-purse'.

THE DEDICATORY EPISTLE

0.1   
Thomas Hammon
: Probably the Thomas Hammon who was born
c.
1592, and matriculated at Christ's College, Cambridge, in 1608; he entered Gray's Inn in 1611, to become a barrister in 1617. Thomas Heywood had previously dedicated two of his own plays,
The Fair Maid of the West
(part two, 1631) and
The Iron Age
(part one, 1632), to him.

3      
Master Alleyn
: Edward Alleyn (1566–1626), the famous tragedian who also played the parts of Tamburlaine, Faustus and Barabas.

5          
Cock-pit
: The private Drury Lane theatre, also known as ‘The Phoenix'.

19        
Tuissimus
: Latin, your very own.

THE PROLOGUE SPOKEN AT COURT

8          
a sound Machevill
: A true Machiavel.

THE PROLOGUE TO THE STAGE, AT THE COCK-PIT

5          
Hero and Leander
: Marlowe's narrative poem, which was pub lished with a continuation by George Chapman in 1598.

12        
Perkins
: Richard Perkins (d. 1650), the Jacobean and Caroline actor who played Barabas for the play's revival.

14        
condition
: (i) Temperament, (ii) status, birth.

PROLOGUE

1          
SP
MACHEVIL
: I.e. Machiavelli, but so spelt as almost to turn him into a Morality character. He was popularly depicted by Elizabethans as an unscrupulous atheist.

3          
the Guise
: Henri de Lorraine, the third duke of Guise, who oversaw the slaughter of French Protestants (Huguenots) at the Massacre of St Bartholomew in 1572. He was killed on 23 December 1588 by order of the French king, Henri III. The villain of
The Massacre at Paris
.

4          
this land
: I.e. England.

6          
guard me from… tongues
: I.e. don't refer to me openly. In the Morality-play
Respublica
(1.1.12–15 ), Avarice remarks on his fol lowers' reluctance to acknowledge him by name.

8          
weigh
: (Here) esteem.

12        
Peter's chair
: I.e. the papacy.

16        
Birds… murders past
: Possibly an allusion to the Greek poet Ibycus, whose murder was revealed by a flight of cranes. Machevil scoffs at the notion that murders cannot remain hidden.

19        
Caesar
: Machiavelli contended that Julius Caesar was a tyrant because he acquired power by violence rather than by legal right (
Discourses
1.29).

21    
the Draco's
: The laws of Draco (for Q's
Drancus
) were notoriously severe. See (N).

22        
citadel
: Machiavelli expressed divers views regarding the use of citadels: in
The Art of War
(VII) he gave instructions on building them; in
The Prince
(XX), he maintained that citadels provided limited protection for a ruler when confronted with civil disobedience, but are inadequate against foreign intruders; in
Discourses
(II.24) their use is categorically denounced. Bawcutt 1978 notes, however, that the anti-Machiavellian tradition treats them as a standard device of the Machiavellian tyrant.

24–6  
Phalaris… envy
: The Sicilian tyrant Phalaris' reputation for a love of literature depended on the false attribution to him of a book of letters. He was overthrown not, as Machevil implies, through ‘great ones' envy', but in a popular rising at Agrigentum, and was burned alive in the bronze bull which he had used to dispatch his own victims – a fate which perhaps anticipates Barabas's (N).