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 ...
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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.
