Kathy Lavezzo
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- May 2017
- ISBN:
- 9781501703157
- eISBN:
- 9781501706158
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Cornell University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7591/cornell/9781501703157.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, Early and Medieval Literature
This chapter examines Christopher Marlowe's early modern remapping of the Jew and urban space in The Jew of Malta, arguing that the 1952 play enacts a spatial contradiction. Even before the play ...
More
This chapter examines Christopher Marlowe's early modern remapping of the Jew and urban space in The Jew of Malta, arguing that the 1952 play enacts a spatial contradiction. Even before the play proper begins, The Jew of Malta foregrounds the ostensible powers of fortification. And just 100 lines into the play, Barabas soliloquizes about Jewish wealth, highlighting the singularly rich Jews inhabiting various lands. A comparison of the space of the Jew to the space of the island reveals that their geographic disparity threatens to render the phrase “The Jew of Malta” something of a non sequitur. This chapter explores Marlowe's staging of how Christian locations in Malta act as doubles of Barabas's counting house. It suggests that Barabas is a canny destabilizer of even Maltese hyperfortified space and that the counting house is a porous site that informs virtually every built environment in The Jew of Malta.Less
This chapter examines Christopher Marlowe's early modern remapping of the Jew and urban space in The Jew of Malta, arguing that the 1952 play enacts a spatial contradiction. Even before the play proper begins, The Jew of Malta foregrounds the ostensible powers of fortification. And just 100 lines into the play, Barabas soliloquizes about Jewish wealth, highlighting the singularly rich Jews inhabiting various lands. A comparison of the space of the Jew to the space of the island reveals that their geographic disparity threatens to render the phrase “The Jew of Malta” something of a non sequitur. This chapter explores Marlowe's staging of how Christian locations in Malta act as doubles of Barabas's counting house. It suggests that Barabas is a canny destabilizer of even Maltese hyperfortified space and that the counting house is a porous site that informs virtually every built environment in The Jew of Malta.
Laurence Publicover
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- September 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780198806813
- eISBN:
- 9780191844362
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198806813.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, 16th-century and Renaissance Literature
Noting that Christopher Marlowe shared a room with Thomas Kyd around the time The Jew of Malta was written and first performed, this chapter reads Marlowe’s play as an ironic response to Kyd’s. By ...
More
Noting that Christopher Marlowe shared a room with Thomas Kyd around the time The Jew of Malta was written and first performed, this chapter reads Marlowe’s play as an ironic response to Kyd’s. By interrogating the problematic relationship between the personal values of chivalry and the wider political world, it argues, Marlowe’s play examines an issue left relatively unexplored within Kyd’s play; The Jew of Malta thus responds to the Mediterranean staged by Kyd, working through an intertheatrical geography. Placing The Jew of Malta within a wider context of Elizabethan attitudes of chivalry, and in doing so demonstrating how Marlowe’s play stages the Mediterranean to reflect on English culture, the chapter interprets Marlowe’s Barabas as a parodic version of the individualistic knight-errant encountered in medieval romance.Less
Noting that Christopher Marlowe shared a room with Thomas Kyd around the time The Jew of Malta was written and first performed, this chapter reads Marlowe’s play as an ironic response to Kyd’s. By interrogating the problematic relationship between the personal values of chivalry and the wider political world, it argues, Marlowe’s play examines an issue left relatively unexplored within Kyd’s play; The Jew of Malta thus responds to the Mediterranean staged by Kyd, working through an intertheatrical geography. Placing The Jew of Malta within a wider context of Elizabethan attitudes of chivalry, and in doing so demonstrating how Marlowe’s play stages the Mediterranean to reflect on English culture, the chapter interprets Marlowe’s Barabas as a parodic version of the individualistic knight-errant encountered in medieval romance.
