Rice University
Sacrifice in Marlowe's The Jew of Malta Author(s): Dena Goldberg
Source: Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, Vol. 32, No. 2, Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama (Spring, 1992), pp. 233-245
Published by: Rice University
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Sacrifice in Marlowe's TheJew of Malta
DENA GOLDBERG
In the first scene of TheJew of Malta, the protagonist informs the audience that he has "but one sole daughter," whom he holds
"as dear / As Agamemnon did his Iphigen" (lines 136-37).' As editors have pointed out, the allusion to Iphigeneia sets up a sinister dramatic irony for anyone in the audience who knows that, according to the legend, Agamemnon sacrificed that very daughter in the early days of the Trojan War. Marlowe is fond of using classical story to foreshadow disaster, as, for example, in Gaveston's self-identification with Leander (Edward II, I.i.7-9) and the Chorus's allusion to the Icarus myth as a metaphor for Faustus's aspiration and fall (Faustus, Prologue.20-22).2 The story of Iphigeneia seems, at first glance, to bear only a limited correspondence to the action of the play: Abigail will die as a victim of murder by poison, and not, like Iphigeneia, as an offering in a ritual sacrifice. And yet the suggestion of sacrifice resonates when in Act II Barabas tells us that rather than allow Lodowick to marry Abigail, he would "sacrifice her on a pile of wood" (II.iii.54).
Leaving Abigail aside for a prolonged moment, we can see the allusion to ritual sacrifice in scene one as enclosing meanings that will unfold in the course of the play. When Ferneze dumps the goat into the pot in the final scene, he is ringing one last change on the motif compressed in that allusion, the motif of the scapegoat slaughtered for the good of the community. For the slaying of Agamemnon's daughter is, of course, a religious rite.
The Greek army will never prevail-indeed, it will never set out from Aulis-unless the general's daughter is offered up to the goddess Artemis to appease her wrath. Iphigeneia herself has
Dena Goldberg teaches in the English Department of the University of Montreal. She is the author of Between Worlds: A Study of the Plays of John Webster.
THE JEW OF MALTA
done nothing to offend Artemis, but she is to function as a substitute, taking upon her the malevolence that would otherwise be directed at the community as a whole.
It is the same sort of reasoning that Ferneze expresses when he forces Barabas to give up his entire estate to pay the tribute money owing to the Turks:
we take particularly thine To save the ruin of a multitude:
And better one want for a common good Than many perish for a private man.
(I.ii.97-100) Like Iphigeneia, Barabas is elected to save the community at his own expense, although here the sacrifice is modernized. Like Iphigeneia too, Barabas is not responsible for the communal peril he is called upon to dispel. Although Ferneze tries to deflect the guilt from himself, the truth is that it is his failure to pay taxes over a period of ten years that has brought about the Turkish threats of imminent and violent reprisal. If Iphigeneia innocently suffers because of the social disruption caused by Helen and Paris, Barabas (less innocently) suffers because of the political dereliction of the ruling class of Malta.
The ritual nature of Ferneze's act surfaces as he rationalizes it for the enlightenment of his victims:
For through sufferance of your hateful lives, Who stand accursed in the sight of heaven, These taxes and afflictions are befallen.
(I.ii.63-65) 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. While Iphigeneia is admittedly a substitute for the transgressors, Barabas, Ferneze asserts, is the real thing, the polluting element itself. As in the Thebes of Oedipus, it is the outsider who has introduced into the community the plague that afflicts it. We will return to Ferneze's rationalization later; for the moment I only wish to demonstrate that Marlowe has taken pains to articulate the sacrifice motif. This is perhaps most evident in his choice of the name Barabas, which cannot fail to suggest blood sacrifice even to those spectators who might be unable to decipher the classical allusion.
Thus the first episode of the play follows a pattern familiar in tragedy and probably reflective of its ritual origins. The community 234
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. We find it in paradigmatic form in Oedipus Rex, where the king himself suffers in the context of what Francis Fergusson calls "the tragic but perennial, even normal, quest of the whole City for its well-being."3 There are many examples in the English Renaissance; one of its dominant modes, revenge tragedy, often involves a quest for social renewal at the expense of the protagonist's own safety and well-being.
Hieronimo must bring about the "fall of Babylon" (The Spanish Tragedy, IV.i.195)4 to put an end to the chain of violent events initiated by the viceroy of Portugal and the king of Spain. And Hamlet finds himself burdened with the rot in the state of Denmark, although he feels no personal enthusiasm for the role of savior: "The time is out of joint. Oh, cursed spite / That ever I was born to set it right" (I.v.187-89).5
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. This decision ultimately leads to the expulsion of the Turkish overlords, a clear victory for Ferneze and Christianity, as Malta emerges purified of polluting foreign elements. In this second segment of the plot, Barabas is again cast as savior, as he outwits his Turkish allies and betrays them to the Christians. In this action he loses his life and ensures the renewed welfare of the Christian community. This time ritual sacrifice is suggested by the image of Barabas first rushing around to make provision for the "solemn feast" he is going to serve the Turks (V.ii.96) and then being himself served up as the main course. As the god of Abraham provided a surrogate for Isaac, so the god of Ferneze has provided an offering to purify Malta.
But this is all wrong, of course. The god of Ferneze has already provided a sacrifice in the surrogate person of his son, a sacrifice that was intended, it is told, to redeem the fallen world once and for all. Further, for many of Marlowe's contemporaries, who necessarily relied upon myth and legend for their knowledge of Jews (the Jews having been expelled from England in 1290), the
THE JE W OF MALTA
practice of ritual sacrifice was definitivelyJewish.6 Not only (it was said) had the Jews killed Christ, but they reiterated the act every Passover when they could get away with it, slaughtering their youthful male victim like a goat. Although this libel was sometimes condemned by the authorities, the idea of the Jew as sacrificer persisted in the common imagination and, indeed, still survives in ballad form in Britain and Appalachia. (The myth is alluded to in the play when, in response to Friar Barnardine's intimation that Barabas has committed a great crime, Friar Jacomo exclaims:
"What, has he crucified a child?" [III.6.49]). Thus, the roles of Barabas and Ferneze constitute an inversion of what local mythology would lead the audience to expect. TheJew has replaced the Christian as sacrificial victim.
This inversion does not, as J.B. Steane suggests, "confer an almost Christlike status on theJew."7 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. In older versions of the ballad, the Jew's daughter entices the little Christian boy with an apple:
She's gane till her father's garden, And pu'd an apple red and green;
'Twas a' to wyle him, sweet Sir Hugh, And to entice him in.8
In Barabas's version, the Jew's daughter plays a part against her will, becoming herself the apple to entice these more grown-up boys to their doom. In this episode and in the rampage of destruction that follows, Barabas, like a figure in a morality play, tries to act out the implication of his name. He would be Barabas, not Christ. But the Christian world cannot provide the truly redemptive sacrifice.
II
Implicit in Marlowe's handling of the Passover-crucifixion myth is an element of parody that undermines it. The murderous Jewess of late medieval legend, a nightmare creature who lures the child into her house, places him on a table, and "sticks" him with a knife, is replaced by the gentle Abigail, the only nice person in the 236
play. Instead of the innocent youth who has the misfortune to toss his ball into the Jew's garden, Marlowe gives us the two young men who fight each other to the death in sexual rivalry. Finally, the Jew's motive is naturalized: however we may define Barabas's reasons for manipulating Lodowick and Mathias into killing each other, certainly we would not suggest that he needs innocent Christian blood for the performance of some mysterious ritual.
Even as he uses the mythic material, Marlowe plays with it, diluting its polarities, demystifying its ritual center.
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 (V.i). Marlowe's strategy here may be compared with that of Euripides as characterized by Fergusson:
Where Sophocles' celebrated irony seems to envisage the condition humaine itself-the plight of the psyche in a world which is ultimately mysterious to it-Euripides' ironies are all aimed at the incredible "gods" and at the superstitions of those who believe in them. . . . He depends as much as Sophocles upon the common heritage of ritual and myth: but he "reduces" its form and images to the uses of parody and metaphorical illustration.9
I am not suggesting that Marlowe is actually challenging the basis of Christian belief, although it would not surprise me to learn that Marlowe was, in fact, an unbeliever. What I am contending, rather, is that in The Jew of Malta Marlowe's corrosive irony has the effect of debunking myth and ritual, both orthodox and popular, especially as it is used to explain the existence of suffering and evil. The gods may not be incredible in themselves, but one's credulity is stretched by the versions of the gods served up by those in authority. And the myth and ritual invented to legitimize and glorify human suffering is reduced to its political functions.
Whereas Shakespeare, like Sophocles, mystifies and ennobles human suffering, Marlowe demystifies and brutally degrades it, making it the occasion for a monstrous joke about social relations.
Not that Marlowe had a monopoly on brutality: the cruelty of man's fate could not be more painfully expressed than it is by Shakespeare in King Lear or by Sophocles in Oedipus Rex. The Jew of Malta is patterned along the same lines as those plays, but it diverges from the pattern in three ways that combine to undermine the hero pattern. One divergence, as we have seen, is the utter unwillingness of the hero-victim to accept the role. This is related
THE JEW OF MALTA
to the second difference, which is that Barabas is a surrogate victim, a stand-in for the real thing. The true tragic hero is born to the task (or at least elected), as Hamlet's complaint about his role implies. The structure of Oedipus Rex centers on the process by which the leader of the community comes to realize that only his own sacrifice can save the polis from the disease that is destroying it. Oedipus would like to fix the blame elsewhere; his heroism consists in his refusal to take the easy way out by ending the search or making Teiresias into a scapegoat.
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.'0 In the first episode, as we have seen, Barabas is used to stave off the threat of war. Here the Iphigeneia allusion sets up a special irony, for whereas the Greek maiden's aptitude for the scapegoat role presumably has to do with her innocence and her connection with a ruling family, Barabas's great qualification is his wealth. Too cowardly to go to war against the Turks and too avaricious to pay the tribute money, Ferneze finds a perfect goat in the Jew. Moreover, since this goat may be milked more than once, Ferneze does not rid the community of this alleged source of its "taxes and afflictions," but rather invites him to stay on and continue to ply his money-making trade:
Yet, Barabas, we will not banish thee,
But here in Malta, where thou got'st thy wealth Live still; and if thou canst, get more.
(I.ii. 101-103) Barabas does prove serviceable to Ferneze once again, although this time the substitution functions on a subtler level. When Barabas betrays his Turkish allies into the hands of the Christians, he not only hands Ferneze an effortless victory over his enemies, but he also takes upon himself all the guilt for perfidy in international politics. Ferneze takes full advantage of the trap that Barabas has prepared for the Turks. At the same time he manages, with a slick hypocrisy that puts me in mind of other politicians I have known, to deflect the responsibility for what he is doing onto Barabas. "Now, Selim, note the unhallowed deeds ofJews" (V.v.92), he pontificates just before informing Calymath that the Sultan's troops have been massacred and that he, Calymath, is to be held for ransom. From the lofty eminence of his triumph over his enemies, an eminence that facilitates passing on "due praise" for the victory to "heaven" (V.v. 122-23), Ferneze dissociates himself 238
from what Stephen Greenblatt calls the "vast 'protection' racket"
that constitutes international relations in this play." Ferneze's posturing gains verisimilitude through the fire-and-water punishment of Barabas, whose extermination visually suggests some sort of purification of the state. But the purgation is a sham;
nothing changes.
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.'2 Malta itself has suffered invasion by a foreign army, not to mention the damage caused by the conflict between Barabas and Ferneze. But Ferneze and his boys end up unscathed and on top, and even more arrogant and racist than they were at the beginning of the play. Unlike Oedipus and Hamlet, Ferneze is not impelled to uncover the corruption at the core, because he is not really committed to the community. In this respect Ferneze and Barabas are brothers under the skin.
III
As Marlowe plays with the hero-scapegoat pattern of myth that is central to both Christian theology and secular tragedy, he desacramentalizes it. Ritual suffering is not seen as expiation by a heroic protagonist or an innocent victim. The allusion to "Iphigen"
is in a way a false lead; for the suffering of Abigail, who is Iphigeneia's counterpart in the play, turns out to be a minor event, her death one among many and barely noticed in the world of Malta, except as the occasion for a lewd joke. The scapegoat in Malta is not Abigail but Barabas, and he has not been chosen for his innocence but rather for his wealth, and for one other quality:
his alienness. For it is the fact that Barabas is an outsider that enables Ferneze to use him as he does and get away with it.
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. (For spectators less inclined to analysis, Marlowe provides the fun and games served up by a first-rate bogeyman). In fact, in some of its essential features, Marlowe's play would serve very well to illustrate the theory of sacrifice propounded by Rene Girard. Arguing against anthropologists who
THE JEW OF MALTA
have explained sacrifice in terms of rites of fructification in ancient agricultural communities, as well as against those who see sacrifice as expiation, Girard sees all sacrifice as a mechanism by which the community attempts to save itself from its own violence by inflicting that violence on a scapegoat. The choice of victim, says Girard, cannot be understood "in terms of innocence or guilt.
There is no question of 'expiation.' Rather, society is seeking to deflect upon a relatively indifferent victim, a 'sacrificeable' victim, the violence that would otherwise be vented on its own members, the people it most desires to protect."13 What makes people
"sacrificeable" is their marginality, the fact that they are not fully integrated into the community, whether due to "their status as foreigners or enemies, their servile condition, or simply their age."14 There is nothing mysterious about this choice of marginal victims: it is dictated by the practical consideration that the suffering of a person who is not truly bonded into the community will not bring about retaliation in the form of further violence.
The function of the victim is to provide an end to the "universal onslaught of reciprocal violence"15 that is tearing the social fabric to shreds:
the rites of sacrifice serve to polarize the community's aggressive impulses and redirect them toward victims that may be actual or figurative, animate or inanimate, but that are always incapable of propagating further vengeance.'6 According to Girard, then, sacrifice is to be seen as an essentially political phenomenon, whatever mysteries may be suggested by its decor. This seems to me to be a pretty fair summary of what Marlowe shows in The Jew of Malta. By making Barabas into "the repository of all the community's ills" (Girard's description of the role of Oedipus),'7 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. Ferneze's only mistake can probably be attributed to greed. He is so taken with Barabas as a method of financing his government that he fails to perceive that this particular outsider will not accept his fate passively. The humble submission of the rest of the Jewish community represents what Ferneze is accustomed to expect. It is Barabas's unwillingness to accept the victim role that generates the main action of the play.
But in the long run Ferneze is right. The more Barabas struggles to escape the role in which he has been cast, the more he is suited to play it. The details of this struggle and of Barabas's evolution 240
into an incarnation of the more spectacular aspects of evil are well worth examining. What interests me here, though, is that at least one moral of the story would seem to be that once you have been chosen to play the scapegoat, there is no way out of it.
It may be objected that the laws of history do not allow for such a comparison between a sixteenth-century playwright and a contemporary social scientist. But with all due respect to Girard and Marlowe for their intellectual hard-headedness, there is nothing very recondite about the insight they share. The politics of scapegoatism may be observed in many schoolyards and family gatherings. This is not to say that I personally endorse Girard's insistence that scapegoatism is the essence of all sacrifice, but only that the phenomenon is extremely widespread. Marlowe's time was perhaps especially rich in examples. 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.
What is more, there was a certain tendency to accept specifically material sacrifice as an effective anti-pollutant. This had long been the case with respect to Jews. For example, Charles V ordered the expulsion of the Jews from Naples in 1533, but changed his mind when the Jewish community offered him ten thousand ducats in exchange for a ten-year respite. Typically, Charles reneged on the agreement in 1540.18 Another example that Marlowe would probably have heard about had to do with a Jewish family converted to Christianity under threat of the Spanish Inquisition.
Donna Gracia, head of the Mendes family, was of that order of wealth that Barabas boasts of, a money-lender to the noble families of Europe. When word got around that Donna Gracia was practicingJudaism in secret, the French king Henry II, whose debt to her was kingly, decided that he was under no obligation to repay the loan.19 Not only did these heads of Christian states behave like Ferneze, they talked like him too. A Papal Bull of 1555 begins with moral asperity-
Since it is utterly absurd and inadmissible that Jews, whom God has condemned for their sin to eternal slavery, should enjoy our Christian love and tolerance, while these ungrateful
THE JEW OF MALTA
reply with insults to grace and, instead of humble submission they aspire to power-
and ends by orderingJews in the Papal states to sell their property.
No doubt it was a buyer's market, a situation that must have been reversed when shortly after this the Jews were allowed to buy property again.20
But this traffic in pollution was not confined to dealings between Christians and Jews. In England, the punishment for recusancy was forfeiture of property. On the continent, according to Scot's The Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584), the Inquisition was extorting money from the accused:
There is no waie in the world for these poore women to escape the inquisitors hands, and so consequentlie burning:
but to gild their hands with monie, wherby oftentimes they take pitie upon them, and deliver them, as sufficientlie purged. For they have authoritie to exchange the punishment of the bodie with the punishment of the pursse.2l
Whether Scot was right or wrong about the Inquisitors, his statement expresses an ironic perception of the widespread practice of putting a price on sin. This was nowhere more evident than in European rationalizations of their dealings with native Africans and inhabitants of the newly discovered continent.
Although the discourse on this subject was complex and many- sided, one dominant tendency was to justify material exploitation on the grounds of spiritual ascendancy. Sir George Pecham voiced a common opinion when he wrote of the native Americans that
if in respect of all the commodities they can yeeld us (were they many moe) that they should but receive this only benefit of Christianity, they were more than fully recompenced.
And he rests his case with a quotation from St. Paul: "If we have sowen unto you heavenly things, do you thinke it much that we should reape your carnall things?"22
That there were many who did not care for this type of cant is evident from Pecham's care to answer their objections.
Elizabethans would have found a particularly eloquent indictment of persecution in the name of piety in the writings of Bartolomeo de Las Casas, the Spanish bishop who struggled to put a stop to the abuse of natives by the Conquistadores. I quote from a translation published in London in 1583:
242
The report is untrue that the Indians did yerely sacrifice in newe Spaine 20000 persons: either one 100, or 50. . . the Tyrants have invented it, thereby to excuse andjustifie their tyrannies.... But we may more truely say, that the Spaniards during their aboade in the Indies, have yeerely sacrificed to their so dearely beloved and reverende Goddesse Covetousnes more people, then the Indians have done in a 100 yeeres.23 The linking of sacrifice and covetousness returns us to The Jew of Malta, with the suggestion that the play can best be appreciated in such a context as has been briefly sketched here. Whether Girard would accept economic exploitation as a form of the scapegoat phenomenon I do not know. For Marlowe, with his keen eye on social relations in early modern Europe, the economic and the political were inseparable.
IV
In 1964 the Tulane Drama Review celebrated Marlowe's birthday with a very good issue devoted to his work. The article by Alfred Harbage entitled "Innocent Barabas" reveals the scholar in a state of irritability toward those who would treat Barabas as a sympathetic protagonist:
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.24
Harbage's insistence on the relevance of native sports to The Jew of Malta is suggestive. Marlowe created this play by tapping into the extraordinary energy flow of basic ritual, the ritual in question being the one in which we human beings try like hell to externalize our malaise by isolating, alienating, and tormenting it. 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. But like T.S. Eliot, whose familiar words are quoted by Harbage, I find something terribly serious about all of this. As Barabas boils to death in the cauldron, perhaps in the very same hall where on another day of the week a blind bear suffered
THE JEW OF MA L TA
miserably to entertain the customers, the audience is required to take a position with respect to the ritual. I suspect that the reaction would have to do with the degree of the spectator's empathy with Barabas in the first place; to the extent that the spectator has enjoyed the anti-establishment pranks of this malevolent trickster, he may now have to expiate his own vicarious rebellion by reveling in the trickster's just deserts. For the spectator who has responded to the play's laughter by distancing himself from the action, Barabas's death-the play's epiphany-becomes an icon not of hell- fire, but of the hell that we humans create for one another on earth. After all, with the protagonist suffering hell in plain view, eternal damnation becomes a little superfluous.
By placing the Jew in the station normally occupied by the bear, the devil, or the savior, Marlowe invites the spectator to make a connection between myth and ritual, on the one hand, and the phenomena of political history on the other. The Jew is experienced by the audience as ritual scapegoat at the same time as he is seen as mimetic representation of a historical scapegoat. This is brillant theatrical strategy, working from gut reaction outward to perception, as Chaplin and other specialists in slapstick often do.
Like Chaplin, too, Marlowe had something for everybody. Those members of the audience who were unwilling to go through the strenuous process that full attention to the play exacts probably left the theater with the pleasant feeling that they had been thoroughly entertained. And that put sack and sugar on the playwright's table.
NOTES
'References are to the edition by N.W. Bawcutt for The Revels Plays (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 1978).
2Christopher Marlowe, The Complete Plays, ed. J.B. Steane (Middlesex:
Penguin Books, 1969).
3Francis Fergusson, The Idea of a Theater: The Art of Drama in Changing Perspective (Garden City, NY: Doubleday-Anchor Books, 1949), p. 41.
4Thomas Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy, ed. J.R. Mulryne, The New Mermaids (London: Ernest Benn, 1970).
5William Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. Willard Farnham (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1957).
6See Cecil Roth, A History of the Jews in England, 2nd edn. (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1949), pp. 55-57.
244
7J.B. Steane, Marlowe: A Critical Study (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1974), p. 179.
8See Bertrand Bronson, The Singing Tradition of Child's Popular Ballads (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1976), pp. 294-98.
9Fergusson, p. 46.
10I do not mean to imply that Marlowe was consciously employing parody, in the manner of neo-classical writers, although I tend to agree with Nicholas Brooke that Marlowe had a greater awareness of form and genre than critics usually grant him ("Marlowe the Dramatist," in Elizabethan Theatre, ed. John Russell Brown and Bernard Harris, Stratford-upon-Avon Studies 9 (London:
Arnold, 1966). But parody need not be conscious.
"Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioningfrom More to Shakespeare (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 206.
'2Ibid., p. 209. Compare Peter Hulme: "Boundaries of community are often created by accusing those outside the boundary of the very practice on which the integrity of that community is founded. . . . This is ... the central regulating mechanism of colonial discourse" (Colonial Encounters, Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492-1797 [London: Methuen, 1986], p. 85).
'3Rene Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1977), p. 4.
4Ibid., p. 12.
5Ibid., p. 77.
'6Ibid., p. 18.
'7Ibid., p. 77.
'8Simon Dubnov, History of the Jews from the Later Middle Ages to the Renaissance, rev. edn., trans. Moshe Spiegel, 5 vols. (London: Thomas Yoseloff, 1969), 3:530.
'9Ibid., p. 486. See also The Jewish Encyclopedia, ed. Isidore Singer et al., 12 vols. (New York: Funk and Wagnalls), 8:488-89.
20Dubnov, pp. 54145.
21Reginald Scot, The Discoverie of Witchcraft (Arundel: Centaur Press, 1964), p. 51, my emphasis.
22"A true Reporte of the late discoveries, and possession taken in the right of the Crowne of England of the Newfound Lands . . .," in Richard Hakluyt, The Principall Navigations, Voiages And Discoveries Of The English Nation (London, 1589), p. 713.
"The Spanish Colonie (London, 1583. Facsimile published by The English Experience, Amsterdam, 1977), p. R2.
"Alfred Harbage, "Innocent Barabas," Tulane Drama Review 8, 4 (Summer 1964): 47-58, 53.
