Goldberg, Dena. “Sacrifice in Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta.” Studies in English
Literature, 1500-1900. 32.2, Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama. (1992): 233-245.

In the first scene of The Jew of Malta, the protagonist informs the audience that he has…233

The ills of the community are due to some source of pollution in its midst and only the exculpation of that evil will restore general well-being. 234

Thus the first episode of the play follows a pattern familiar in tragedy and probably reflective of its ritual origins. The community is ailing, so the king—or some substitute—or the source of pollution—must die. This is not to say that all tragedy is reducible to this core, but that the pattern is certainly among the seminal types of action in what we call tragedy. 234

Barabas is even less enthusiastic than Hamlet, but the role is thrust upon him, not only in the first episode, but in the play as a whole, of which the first episode is a microcosm. This becomes clear when we look at the outlines of the overplot—the action at the political level. As the play opens, the Christian rulers of Malta are subject to Turkish domination, and the threat of war hovers over Malta. In the first episode, Barabas’s sacrifice restores the peace of Malta, or so it should except that Ferneze—who is the structural protagonist of the overplot—heroically resolves to oppose the Infidel and pocket the money. 235

Thus, the roles of Barabas and Ferneze constitute an inversion of what local mythology would lead the audience to expect. The Jew has replaced the Christian as sacrificial victim. This inversion does not, as J.B. Stean suggests, “confer an almost Christlike status on the Jew.” Barabas does not choose his role, like Christ, or even get used to it, like Hamlet. With a sense of the fitness of things that Ferneze does not share, Barabas struggles to escape from the role in which the latter has cast him. The slaying of Lodowick and Mathias, though motivated (more or less) by the plot, is perhaps best seen as Barabas’s effort to reinstate himself in the role that Ferneze has usurped. Taking over the directorial function, Barabas forces Abigail to play a part in his version of the Passover sacrifice. 236

It is not only this particular myth, but the whole motif of sacrifice that is fleshed out in a parodic way. Barabas is a travesty of a suffering hero or Christ, even to the extent of a faked death and resurrection. 237

The structure of The Jew of Malta parodies tragic structure in centering on the process by which the leader of the community creates a scapegoat to suffer for his own political cowardice and venality. 238

Thus, The Jew of Malta deviates from the hero-savior pattern in this third way, in that suffering brings about no renewal, no new order, not even a glimmer of moral or intellectual light. This is because the rulers of Malta have chosen an outsider to suffer in their place, a sacrificial animal to incarnate their own sins (avarice, hypocrisy, egotism, lovelessness) as alien, exotic deviations. It is this “insistence upon the otherness of what is in fact its own essence” (Greenblatt again) that permits the ruling class of Malta to maintain the status quo. 239

In this respect Ferneze and Barabas are brothers under the skin. 239

As he desacramentalizes, Marlowe inevitably moves in the direction of social science, provoking the spectator to observe the phenomenon of sacrifice with analytic detachment rather than with tragic empathy. 239

Ferneze not only saves Malta from the violence that throughout the play threatens to erupt, then does erupt in war, but he also spares himself and his friends the terrible tasks of introspection and self-criticism. 240

[Girard’s conception of sacrifice = scapegoatism] On the continent the witch-craze was in full swing, while paranoia at home made bugbears and hobgoblins of Puritans and Papists, atheists, Turks, and mathematicians. The Huguenots who had fled to England (first stop Canterbury, Marlowe’s home town) to escape extermination were being attacked by artisans who blamed them for high prices and the housing shortage. All in all, it was a time when even a prolonged period of bad weather was enough to start people sizing up their neighbors as possible moral pollutants of the atmosphere. 241

[Quoting Alfred Harbage] = Granted that Marlowe is more interested in the morally black Barabas than in his morally neutral or mixed milieu, what is the nature of that interest? I should say that it is primarily that of the popular entertainer; and that we shall get nearer the truth about the play if we ourselves are less “terribly serious” about it, and think more in terms of native sports. There was bear-baiting, bull-baiting, and their theatrical equivalent, devil-baiting. 243

And I would agree with Harbage that sympathy for Barabas is out of place—an emotional response that Marlowe does nothing to encourage as the play grows increasingly comic and the protagonist increasingly evil. 243