The Jew of Malta
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This play offers a blistering, darkly comic critique of religious hypocrisy and power politics, making it a foundational work of Elizabethan revenge tragedy.
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Book Summary
In Christopher Marlowe's darkly satirical play, the Jewish merchant Barabas seeks revenge after his wealth is seized by Malta's Christian governor. His ruthless machinations—including murder, betrayal, and political manipulation—ultimately consume everyone around him, culminating in his own ironic death in a boiling cauldron.
The play opens with Barabas, a wealthy Jewish merchant, lamenting the seizure of his fortune by the Christian governor Ferneze to pay tribute to the Turks. Barabas secretly recovers hidden treasure with the help of his daughter Abigail, who is forced to become a nun. To exact revenge, Barabas manipulates Lodowick and Mathias into a fatal duel over Abigail, then poisons Abigail and the nuns when she learns of his treachery. He acquires a slave, Ithamore, and together they murder friars and deceive both Christians and Turks. Barabas feigns conversion to Christianity and becomes governor through treachery, double-crossing both the Turkish leader Calymath and Ferneze. In the final act, Ferneze turns the tables, trapping Barabas in a boiling cauldron. Barabas dies cursing everyone, and Ferneze captures Calymath, restoring Christian rule. The play exposes a world where greed, religious hypocrisy, and Machiavellian cunning drive every character toward destruction.
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Narrative arc
Story tension across the book.
- Setup
Barabas
Barabas begins as Malta's wealthiest Jew, then loses everything when the governor seizes his estate to pay Turkish tribute, and the play's engine becomes his elaborate revenge. He hides gold beneath his own floor, feigns death, and recruits the slave Ithamore as a partner in villainy, speaking to the audience in asides that expose his delight in cruelty. His grievance is real, but his methods are so extravagantly wicked that the audience is forced to watch a victim become a monster.
Ithamore
Ithamore is bought in the slave market for a hundred crowns and immediately trades villainous résumés with his new master, each claiming worse crimes than the other. He carries poison to the nuns, delivers forged challenges, and boasts of his work with a servant's pride, but his weakness is desire: one glimpse of Bellamira and he starts dreaming of buying her with the Jew's gold. His drift from accomplice to liability is the fault line that eventually cracks Barabas's whole scheme.
Abigail
Abigail is the one person Barabas genuinely loves, and she loves him back, offering to storm the senate-house and tear her hair over his losses. When her father uses her as bait in his revenge, she is caught between Lodowick and Mathias, then converts to Christianity and enters a nunnery, seeking a life her father cannot touch. Her choices expose the human cost of Barabas's schemes and give the play its sharpest measure of what his vengeance destroys.
Ferneze
Ferneze rules Malta under Turkish tribute and solves the crisis by seizing the wealth of its Jewish residents, telling Barabas his goods are forfeit for the common good. He grieves his son Lodowick's death with genuine anguish, but his grief hardens into a feud with Katharine and a determination to see the Jew punished, even when the evidence is thin. He is Barabas's mirror: a man who calls his own cruelty providence and who will do whatever the siege demands.
Lodowick
Lodowick is a young nobleman who wants the diamond Barabas dangles and, more dangerously, wants Abigail. He accepts the Jew's invitation into the house and the daughter's company without asking why a grieving father would suddenly play matchmaker. His rivalry with Mathias over Abigail is exactly what Barabas has engineered, and his death becomes the wound that turns Ferneze's grief into a hunt for the truth.
Mathias
Mathias loves Abigail and believes she loves him, a hope Barabas privately vows to destroy as part of his revenge on the governor. He is warned by his mother Katharine to stay away from the Jew, but he keeps returning, first to borrow a book, then to answer a challenge he believes came from Lodowick. His death in the street, watched from a balcony by the man who arranged it, is the play's first proof of how cheaply Barabas spends other people's lives.
Religious Hypocrisy
The play exposes the hypocrisy of both Christians and Jews, as characters like Ferneze and Barabas use religion as a mask for greed, violence, and political manipulation, while the friars are shown as corrupt and self-serving.
Greed and Wealth
Wealth is the central motivator for nearly every character, from Barabas's obsessive counting of gold to the Christian governor's seizure of Jewish assets, illustrating how money drives betrayal, murder, and political intrigue.
Anti-Semitism and Othering
Barabas is systematically oppressed as a Jew, forced to pay half his wealth or convert, and the play reflects Elizabethan anti-Semitic stereotypes while also critiquing Christian persecution of Jews.
Machiavellian Politics
The prologue by Machiavel sets the tone for a world where cunning, deceit, and ruthless policy triumph over morality, as Barabas and the Christian rulers alike employ manipulation and violence to achieve power.
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