YMMV / The Jew of Malta

• Do Not Do This Cool Thing: At least this comes this way to a modern audience. See Evil Is Cool. Considering how the Christians aren’t saints and that Kit Marlowe might have been an atheist himself, it’s debatable as to whether this was intentional or not.
• Evil Is Cool:
  • Barabas, he has the best lines, the play is largely about him, there aren't any heroes, and his antagonists are even worse than he is.
  • Even if most would agree that Machiavel is a poor gloss on Niccolò Machiavelli, his prologue makes him unbelievably rad, even declaring openly that he considers "religion" to be "a childish toy".
• Fair for Its Day: On many levels:
  • The Jew of Malta features a Jewish Tragic Villain Protagonist. This is innovative for the fact that in the Elizabethan age and before, the tragic protagonist were always people of high virtue and bearing — kings, warriors, statesmen, and even then almost always people that society and culture considered to be the "ruling class". Yet Marlowe made Barabas into a protagonist for a tragedy with a clear rise and fall, and whose downfall comes from his own agency and power, while still remaining a member of a persecuted minority. Compare this to Shylock, who's a villain in a comedy centered around Antonio, Bassanio and Portia. By Shakespeare's standards, Shylock is not worthy of tragedy but Marlowe, while obviously no philo-semite, felt otherwise.
  • Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice implicitly condemns Shylock and his Jewish background by invoking the "quality of mercy" which Portia argues comes from Christianity, and more or less suggests that Shylock be given mercy by forced conversion to Christianity, which is disagreeable to many modern sensibilities (including many Christians). Marlowe's play on the other hand side-steps religion altogether, seeing the rivalry between Jews, Muslims and Christians in Malta as largely political in nature (while having Machiavel trot on stage declaring religion to be a childish toy), and shows that Barabas was shaped by the racist policies of Christian rulers, and that the latter are not better in any moral way to him or any other.
• Fandom Rivalry: Literature and theatre fans compare Marlowe's play to The Merchant of Venice. It's largely an academic dispute though, since Shakespeare's play is more well-known to the public than Marlowe's.
• Values Dissonance: A play with the title "The Jew of Malta" is hard to sell to a contemporary audience, even leaving aside the content of the play. Many have noted that the text of Marlowe's play actually holds up much better than The Merchant of Venice and that it's easy to portray Barabas as a tragic figure shaped by the racism of his society, especially as the Christians in Marlowe's play are more explicitly portrayed as villainous themselves, but thanks to the title and overall premise, it would be hard to get people to see it.
• Values Resonance: All of its talk against religious persecution. Even if it comes from the villains, the play shows that it’s anti semitism that made him who he is. Machiavel’s speech about religion being “a childish toy” might be Marlowe using a villain to express his own controversial views, since he was convicted of being an atheist near the end of his life.

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