Marlowe and the Stage Machiavel - The Dramatic Function of Barabas in Christopher Marlowe's The Jew of Malta

Seminar paper from the year 2002 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature grade: 10 University of Dusseldorf Heinrich Heine (Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik) course: Elizabethan Stage Villains - Shakespeare and Marlowe language: English abstract: „Marlowe's Jew of Malta is a most puzzling play in different respects. Firstly there is the question of its genre: It is the one play of Marlowe's that strains most obviously against its apparent classification as a tragedy. Secondly there are many different readings of the play. Is The Jew of Malta analogically a serious farce a comedy of evil a tragic farceor plainly an ambiguous sort of drama?3 Furthermore a question which has often been raised is whether the text we have today is corrupt and if it was written by someone else from the second act onwards. The reason behind all those questions and the play's ambiguity seems to be the protagonist Barabas. His character one could argue is not easy to analyze nor is his motivation or disposition as this is what was the focus of analysis in the past. The difficulty in explaining this character might result from different common suggestions what kind of protagonist he is or what his dramatic function might be respectively. Thus Barabas is a conglomerate of stereotypes - as Jew devil Machiavel and a dramatic persona fulfilling different narrative and conventional functions - as villain Vice and protagonist etc. The three most frequent characterizations are to be considered: the Vice figure the stereotyped Jew and the stage Machiavel. While the Vice and the stereotyped Jewishness are often mentioned merely as aspects of Barabas's character the Machiavellian is the most common and distinctive interpretation. For the sake of completeness the aspect of Machiavellianism is discussed very briefly in chapter 2 but a more detailed discussion of the topic follows in part 3 and 4 of this paper. It will be analyzed