Greenblatt, Stephen J. “Marlowe, Marx, and Anti-Semitism.” Critical Inquiry. 5.2 (1978): 291-307.

The Jew of Malta opens with an apparent gesture toward the same principle of differentiation that governs The Merchant of Venice. Marlowe’s Jew is introduced in the prologue by Macheuill as one “Who smiles to see how full his bags are cramb’d”; he enters, then, already trailing clouds of ignominy, already a “marked case.” But while never relinquishing the anti-Semitic stereotype, Marlowe quickly suggests that the Jew is not the exception to but rather the true representative of his society. Though he beings with a paean to liquid assets, Barabas is not primarily a usurer, set off by his hated occupation from the rest of the community, but a great merchant, sending his argosies around the world exactly as Shakespeare’s much-loved Antonio does. 296

Barabas’ own desire of gold, so eloquently voiced at the start and vividly enacted in the scene in which he hugs his money bags, is the glowing core of that passion which fires all the characters. To be sure, other values are expressed—love, faith, and honor—but as private values, these are revealed to be hopelessly fragile, while as public values, they are revealed to be mere screens for powerful economic forces. 296

…this ideology is clearly subordinated to considerations of profit. 297

[quoting Marx]: The Jew has emancipated himself in a Jewish manner, not only by acquiring the power of money, but also because money had become, through him and also apart from him, a world power, while the practical Jewish spirit has become the practical spirit of the Christian nations. The Jews have emancipated themselves in so far as the Christians have become Jews. [P. 35]

Barabas’ avarice, egotism, duplicity, and murderous cunning do not signal his exclusion from the world of Malta but rather his central place within it. His “Judaism” is, again, in Marx’s words, “a universal antisocial element of the present time” (p. 34). 297

For neither Marlowe nor Marx does this recognition signal a turning away from Jew-baiting; if anything, Jew-baiting is intensified even as the hostility it excites is directed as well against Christian society. Thus Marlowe never discredits anti-Semitism, but he does discredit early in the play a “Christian” social concern that might otherwise have been used to counter a specifically Jewish antisocial element. 297

Barabas’ frequent asides assure us that he is feeling contempt even when he is not openly expressing it, and the reiteration of the derogatory epithet ‘slaue’ firmly anchors this contempt in the structure of relations that governs the play. 298

Barabas express in extreme, unmediated form the motives that have been partially disguised by the spiritual humbug of Christianity. 299

…his actions are always responses to the initiatives of others. 299

Nevertheless, Barabas’ sense of himself, his characteristic response to the world, and his self-presentation are very largely constructed out of the materials of the dominant, Christian culture. 300

…a society whose speech is a tissue of aphorisms. Whole speeches are little more than strings of sayings: maxims are exchanged, inverted, employed as weapons; the character enact and even deliberately ‘stage’ proverbs. 300

Proverbs in The Jew of Malta are a kind of currency, the compressed ideological wealth of the society. Their terseness corresponds to that concentration of material wealth that Barabas celebrates. 300

This is not the exotic language of the Jews but the product of the whole society, indeed its most familiar and ordinary face. 301

Most dramatic characters—Shylock is the appropriate example—accumulate identity in the course of their play; Barabas loses it. He is never again as distinct and unique an individual as he is in the first moments. 301

But Barabas does seem set apart from everyone in the play, especially in his cold clarity of vision, his apparent freedom from all ideology. “A counterfet profession is better / Then vnseene hypocrisie” (1.531-32), he tells his daughter. In the long run, the play challenges this conviction, at least from the point of view of survival; the governor, who is the very embodiment of “vnseene hypocrisie,” eventually triumphs over the Jew’s “counterfet profession.” But Marlowe uses the distinction to direct the audience’s allegiance toward Barabas; to lie and to know that one is lying seems more attractive, more moral even, than to lie and believe that one is telling the truth. 302

To be sure, Barabas does speak to the end of a turning a profit, but wealth is gradually displaced as the exclusive object of his concern; his main object through the latter half of the play seems to be revenge, at any cost, upon the Christians. Then, with his attempt to destroy the Turks and restore the Christians to power, it becomes evident that even revenge is not Barabas’ exclusive object. At the end he seems to be pursuing deception virtually for its own sake. 303

And, as I have argued elsewhere, it is precisely this dark vision, this denial of Being, that haunts all of Marlowe’s plays. 304

Barabas devises falsehoods so eagerly because he is himself a false-hood, a fiction composed of the sleaziest materials in his culture. 304

In celebrating deception, he is celebrating himself—not simply his cunning, his power to impose himself on others, his inventiveness, but his very distance from ontological fullness. Barabas is the Jewish Knight of Non-Being. From this perspective, the language shift, to which I alluded earlier, is a deliberate assault upon that immediacy, that sense of presence, evoked at the beginning in Barabas’ rich poetry with its confident sense of realized identity. 304

Marlowe’s hero is not defined finally by the particular object he pursues but by the eerie playfulness with which he pursues it. 305

The will to play flaunts society’s cherished orthodoxies, embraces what the culture finds loathsome or frightening, transforms the serious into the joke and then unsettles the category of the joke by taking it seriously. For Barabas, as for Marlowe himself, this is play on the brink of an abyss, absolute play. 305

…and with a character who manifests as little interiority as Barabas…306

That he dies in his own trap is no accident, nor is it solely the result of the governor’s superior cunning: his career is in its very essence suicidal. He proclaims that he always wants to serve his own self-interest: “Ego mihimet sun simper proximus” (1.2228); but where exactly is the self whose interests he serves? Even the Latin tag betrays an ominous self-distance: “I am always my own neighbor,” or even, “I am always next to myself.” Beneath the noisy protestations of self-interest, his career is a steady, stealthy dispossession of himself, an extended vanishing, an assault upon the subject. 307

Greenblatt, Stephen. Introduction. Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare. 1980. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005. 1-9.

…the verb fashion, a word that does not occur at all in Chaucer’s poetry. 2

But, more significantly for our purposes, fashioning may suggest the achievement of a less tangible shape: a distinctive personality, a characteristic address to the world, a consistent mode of perceiving and behaving. 2

And with representation we return to literature, or rather we may grasp that self-fashioning derives its interest precisely from the fact that it functions without regard for a sharp distinction between literature and social life. It invariably crosses the boundaries between the creation of literary characters, the shaping of one’s own identity, the experience of being molded by forces outside one’s control, the attempt to fashion other selves. 3

Literature functions within this system in three interlocking ways: as a manifestation of the concrete behavior of its particular author, as itself the expression of the codes by which behavior is shaped, and as a reflection upon those codes. 4

I should add that if cultural poetics is conscious of its status as interpretation , this consciousness must extend to an acceptance of the impossibility of fully reconstructing and reentering the culture of the sixteenth century, of leaving behind one’s own situation: it is everywhere evident in this book that the questions I ask of my material and indeed the very nature of this material are shaped by the questions I ask of myself. 5

I do not shrink from these impurities—they are the price and perhaps among the virtues of this approach—but I have tried to compensate for the indeterminacy and incompleteness they generate by constantly returning to particular lives and particular situations, to the material necessities and social pressures that men and women daily confronted, and to a small number of resonant texts. 5

So from the thousands, we sieve upon a handful of arresting figures who seem to contain within themselves much of what we need, who both reward intense, individual attention and promise access to larger, cultural patterns. 6

We should note in the circumstances of the sixteenth-century figures on whom this study focuses a common factor that may help to explain their sensitivity as writers to the construction of identity: they all embody, in one form or another, a profound mobility. 7

All of these talented middle-class men moved out of a narrowly circumscribed social sphere and into a realm that brought them in close contact with the powerful and the great. All were in a position as well, we should add, to know with some intimacy those with no power, status, or education at all. 7

The closer we approach the figures and their works, the less they appear as convenient counters in a grand historical scheme. A series of shifting, unstable pressures is met with a wide range of discursive and behavioral responses, inventions, and counterpressures. 8

We may, however, conclude by noting a set of governing conditions common to most instances of self-fashioning—whether of the authors themselves or of their characters—examined here:
1. None of the figures inherits a title, an ancient family tradition or hierarchical status that might have rooted personal identity in the identity of a clan or caste. With the partial exception of Wyatt, all of these writers are middle-class.
2. Self-fashioning for such figures involves submission to an absolute power or authority situated at least partially outside the self—God, a sacred book, an institution such as church, court, colonial or military administration. Marlowe is an exception, but his consuming hostility to hierarchical authority has, as we shall see, some of the force of submission.
3. Self-fashioning is achieved in relation to something perceived as alien, strange, or hostile. This threatening Other—heretic, savage, witch, adulteress, traitor, Antichrist—must be discovered or invented in order to be attacked and destroyed.
4. The alien is perceived by the authority either as that which is unformed or chaotic (the absence of order) or that which is false or negative (the demonic parody of order). Since accounts of the former tend inevitably to organize and thematize it, the chaotic constantly slides into the demonic, and consequently the alien is always constructed as a distorted image of the authority.
5. One man’s authority is another man’s alien.
6. When one authority or alien is destroyed, another takes its place.
7. There is always more than one authority and more than one alien in existence at a given time.
8. If both the authority and the alien are located outside the self, they are at the same time experienced as inward necessities, so that both submission and destruction are always already internalized.
9. Self-fashioning is always, though not exclusively, in language.
10. The power generated to attack the alien in the name of the authority is produced in excess and threatens the authority it sets out to defend. Hence self-fashioning always involves some experience of threat, some effacement or undermining, some loss of self. 8-9

To sum up these observations, before we turn to the rich lives and texts that exemplify and complicate them, we may say that self-fashioning occurs at the point of encounter between an authority and an alien, that what is produced in this encounter partakes of both the authority and the alien that is marked for attack, and hence that any achieved identity always contains within itself the signs of its own subversion or loss. 9