Of the Devil's Party, and Knowing It

Is it possible to stage The Jew of Malta without it being antisemitic?

One of my favorite things about Red Bull Theater—the New York classical company on whose board I serve—is the reading series that we do every year. This season we’ve already done readings of: The Beast of Hungary by Spanish Golden Age playwright Lope de Vega; Another Medea, a contemporary one-man show adaptation of Euripides by Aaron Mark; Sardanapalus, by Lord Byron; The Dark Lady, a contemporary two-hander about Shakespeare and Emilia Bassano by Jessica B. Hill; a concert presentation of the musical of Two Gentlemen of Verona by John Guare, Mel Shapiro and Galt MacDermot; the unjustly obscure The Tragedy of Hoffman or Revenge for a Father by Henry Chettle; and a 1990s-era adaptation of Molière’s The Misanthrope by Martin Crimp. I managed to catch all of those except Sardanapalus, and I’m very glad to have done.

This past Monday night was the reading of The Jew of Malta by Christopher Marlowe, directed by our artistic director, Jesse Berger. (The reading was one-night only, but this was one of the readings that we recorded for on-line viewing for a limited time, so if you want to see it you can buy tickets here and watch it any time between now and midnight Sunday night.) The play is kind of infamous for its over-the-top antisemitism, most notably in the following speech by the title character, Barabas:

BARABAS. As for myself, I walk abroad o' nights,
     And kill sick people groaning under walls:
     Sometimes I go about and poison wells;
     And now and then, to cherish Christian thieves,
     I am content to lose some of my crowns,
     That I may, walking in my gallery,
     See 'em go pinion'd along by my door.
     Being young, I studied physic, and began
     To practice first upon the Italian;
     There I enrich'd the priests with burials,
     And always kept the sexton's arms in ure
     With digging graves and ringing dead men's knells:
     And, after that, was I an engineer,
     And in the wars 'twixt France and Germany,
     Under pretence of helping Charles the Fifth,
     Slew friend and enemy with my stratagems:
     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.

However good or bad the play itself, and however central to Red Bull’s mandate, at a time like, this with antisemitism dramatically on the rise, one has to ask oneself: why stage a play like this, even for a one-night reading, to say nothing of a full production?

I’ve been thinking about that, because I, personally, am an advocate for the play. I think it has some incredible language, and I think it’s a perfectly well playable text. It’s not in the top rank of plays from the period—leaving Shakespeare’s own work aside, it’s not on a level with Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi, or Ford’s ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore, or Jonson’s The Alchemist, or Marlowe’s own Edward II—but I think it holds its own solidly in the second rank. But I also just find the play fascinating, precisely because of the nature of Barabas.

Barabas is an exemplary Marlovian anti-hero, which is to say, a character who is beyond good and evil, who lives by his wits and, because of his intelligence and his clarity about the true amoral nature of reality, defeats those who appear to have more power and position, and looks down on them for their inability to match him. The play begins with a soliloquy by a character named Machiavel who proclaims religion to be bunk, title to be vanity—“what right had Caesar to the empery?”—and Barabas to be his true disciple. So too is he Marlowe’s, an expression of his Nietzscheanism avant la lettre. Shakespeare has his own gleeful nihilists—Richard III, Aaron the Moor, Edmund from King Lear—each of which clearly take something from Marlowe, but it’s Marlowe who wrote plays in which characters like these are the heroes.

But when we first meet Barabas, he seems like a successful capitalist, not a sociopath. He’s very wealthy, and proud of his wealth and of how he got it, through calculated risk in lending and in trade; he disdains violence and position, preferring peaceful rule and private, prosperous life. Then, when Malta suddenly needs a great deal of money to pay tribute to the Turkish sultan, the governor of the island, Ferneze, calls all the Jews to his court, and demands they donate half their wealth to the state. The other Jews humbly submit, but Barabas defies Ferneze’s demand initially, and so the governor takes everything. This injury—and the meekness with which his fellow Jews, many of them poor, greeted similar injury—is what prompts Barabas to seek revenge, which in turn drives the rest of the play.

Barabas has barely begun that project—he’s connived to get wealth again, and is plotting how to kill Ferneze’s son, but hasn’t killed anyone yet—when he purchases Ithamore, a captured Turk, in a slave market, and makes him into a confederate. That’s where the speech above comes from. After it, Barabas asks Ithamore how he spends his time, and Ithamore recounts a litany of his own villainies, and by the end of the dialogue he and Barabas have become bosom friends as well as partners in a prospective career in crime.

The weird thing about the speech is that there’s no sign before this that Barabas is the kind of sociopath who goes around killing people for sport, but now suddenly he’s gleefully confessing to the most horrific of antisemitic calumnies: to poisoning wells, practicing medicine so he can murder his patients—the whole nine yards. And that’s pretty much who Barabas is for the rest of the play: someone who may sometimes commit crimes to exact a specific revenge, but as often as not is just engaged in villainy out of sheer delight in his ability to deceive, defeat and destroy people.

There are two ways to take this transformation. One way would be to see the post-Ithamore Barabas as who Barabas always has been, in which case the dialogue I quoted is just the first time Barabas has allowed someone else on stage—and us in the audience—to see that reality. The Barabas of the first scene, counting his money, wasn’t just a self-satisfied capitalist, but also a serial killer. Barabas protests to Ferneze early in the play that he should not be punished because some Jews are wicked, declaring “The man that dealeth righteously shall live; / And which of you can charge me otherwise?” In this interpretation, Barabas is already one of those “some” Jews who are exceedingly wicked, and is dissembling in pretending otherwise. Meeting Ithamore, Barabas spies a kindred spirit, and this is what prompts him to open up, to him and to us.

I suspect that this is how the play was intended by Marlowe, and how it was likely received by an Elizabethan audience. The frisson of the play comes from the fact that we, like Marlowe, take Barabas’s side notwithstanding his cartoonish wickedness, just as, for a while, we take Richard III’s side and Aaron’s side and Edmund’s side. Why do we side with Barabas? Because he is funny, because he is smart, and especially because he sees through the hypocrisy of all the Christians around him. They’re also cruel and covetous, but they cloak their cruelty and covetousness in pretenses of virtue and right—and they are also stupid, easy prey for Barabas, the superior man. We don’t side with Barabas primarily because we empathize with his injury, in other words, but because some part of us thinks his Nietzschean nihilism is correct, and because we admire that he’s clever enough to defeat his hypocritical enemies.

But I don’t think that works for a Jewish audience. Barabas is the Jew; he is the antisemitic caricature made flesh. The play mocks all religion and religious people, but Barabas is fundamentally different from the Christians; their Christianity is revealed to be a hollow sham, but his Jewishness is supposed to be exemplified precisely by his justified belief in his own superiority and in his nihilism. For this reason, I’m not sure there’s a way to stage The Jew of Malta the way it was intended without it coming off as ferociously antisemitic.

What, though, if Barabas changes when he meets Ithamore? What if he does recognize a kindred spirit, but that spirit is someone else who feels the wrong done to him (in Ithamore’s case, having been sold into slavery by Christians) not only as a harm but as an insult, and is now prepared to do anything to slake his thirst for revenge. Barabas recognizes this, and decides to draw it out and feed it, and in the process makes up a character capable of the villainy that he now wishes to commit, which in turn prompts Ithamore to do the same, each one hyping up the other in a kind of folie a deux? What if, in other words, Barabas decides to become the antisemitic caricature because that Jew wouldn’t meekly accept being insulted?

I’m cribbing a bit from my own writing on Shylock, I know, in suggesting this way of playing the character. But the tone of The Jew of Malta is wildly different from that of The Merchant of Venice, so the choice plays out very differently with Barabas than with Shylock. Barabas is a fantasy figure, someone the audience can identify with as the expression of their own desire for revenge, their own desire to be smarter than their enemies and able to easily defeat them—their own desire, for that matter, to simply be anarchically antisocial, to kill with impunity and laugh about it. That’s not a fantasy that will work for a Jewish audience if Barabas is supposed to be the exemplar of the Jew. If you played Barabas as changing in that scene with Ithamore, though, as choosing to become precisely who the Christians imagine him to be, choosing to fully exercise his vaunted abilities for the first time to cruel and vengeful ends—well, that is a character whom I could imagine a Jewish audience connecting to. Uncomfortably so, for sure—but that’s what theater is for, right?

I think they would, anyway. If not, I’m not sure there’s a way to do the play.

One final thought. Act V of The Jew of Malta is very strange. By this point in the play, Barabas has murdered many more people, including his own daughter and Ithamore, and has finally been captured. The Maltese are also in a bit of a pickle; they’ve been convinced by the Spanish vice-admiral Martin del Bosco to refuse to pay the promised tribute to the Turks, and now the Turks have come back in force to conquer Malta. Barabas uses trickery to escape from prison, then helps the invading Turkish forces conquer Malta, and is rewarded with the governorship, with Ferneze as his prisoner. At this point, Barabas decides that he doesn’t really want to be governor, because he is hated by everyone in Malta and can never be secure. So he decides to help Ferneze and betray his Turkish patrons. He’ll trick the Turkish soldiers into banqueting outside the city over a pile of gunpowder, with which he will blow them up, and will trick their commander, Calymath—the Sultan’s son—into banqueting with him inside the city over a cauldron of boiling oil, into which he will drop him through a false floor he has constructed. He’ll do all this in exchange for a promise from Ferneze of a huge sum of money and the right to return to private life to enjoy and continue to increase his wealth.

The plan fails utterly because the erstwhile governor double-crosses him. Ferneze lets the Turkish army get blown up, but then saves Calymath and pitches Barabas into the boiling oil. Calymath is now Ferneze’s prisoner, and as such will be his security against any further attacks or demands for tribute from the Sultan. On one level, this is a “just” ending: Barabas, the nihilistic revenger, is finally punished for all his crimes. On another level, it’s not justice at all: the Christian Maltese are not figures of virtue like Henry VII or Edgar, but cruel and corrupt hypocrites. But I don’t think Marlowe was concerned with justice. What I think is most important is the way Ferneze triumphs over Barabas: by adopting his ways.

Before this point, the Christians have regularly been violent, oppressive and very greedy. But they haven’t been clever. They haven’t been deceptive. When they decide not to pay tribute to the Turks, they first sell a bunch of Turks into slavery to get money, then tell Calymath to his face that they won’t be paying, and then prepare for a war in which they hope to win honor. They’re very direct; they don’t strategize, the way Barabas does. But to defeat both Barabas and Calymath, they do use deception. Though they don’t acknowledge it, it’s a trick they’ve learned from Barabas, and the final proof that the play is on Barabas’s side. Machiavel said at the opening that this is the true way of the world, and Barabas’s own end proves not that there is a higher justice, but that he was right.

That said, I don’t think even Marlowe thought it was a good idea to go about poisoning wells.