The Jew of Malta and the Development of City Comedy: “The Mean Passage of a History”

Sarah K. Scott

A Thredbare Sharke.  One that neuer was Soldior, yet liues vpon lendings.  His profession is skeldring and odling, his Banke Poules, and his Ware-house Pict-hatch.  Takes vp single Testons vpon Oths till dooms day. Fals vnder Executions of three shillings, & enters into fiue groat Bonds.  He way-layes the reports of services, and cons them without booke, damning himselfe he came new from them, when all the while hee was taking the diet in the bawdie house, or lay pawn’d in his chamber for rent and victuals. Hee is of that admirable and happie Memory, that hee will salute one for an old acquaintance, that hee neuer saw in his life before.

         So Ben Jonson delineates the appropriately named Shift in Every Man out of His Humour (1600), an urban character with a likely Marlovian lineage.[1] This is why Alfred Harbage’s observation that Barabas should “have read the city comedies of the Stuart and Caroline stage” so that “he would have learned right ways of hoarding up filthy lucre” is a curious one indeed. He seems to have missed the point completely, because the playwrights working in this genre almost certainly knew The Jew of Malta and relished it in performance.[2] It is surprising that no one has written an article discussing its unnerving similarity to what would later be described as city comedy and analyzing the possibility of its actual influence on the development of this type of play. Many of Jonson’s prologues, in fact, seem to describe what Marlowe had already accomplished, especially as they outline most of the conventions now familiar to us. And, as T. S. Eliot remarked, one playwright was the heir of the other.[3]

         Jonson’s description of Shift certainly bears some resemblance to Barabas. In Marlowe’s play, we have a villainous Mammon consumed completely by the accumulation of wealth. It presents audiences with “a rich and famous Jew” (Prologue at Court 6) and a usurping “sound Machevill” (8) who delights “to see how full his bags are crammed” (Prologue 31) with “plenty” poured into his “lap” from “Ripping the bowels of the earth” (1.1.107-08).[4]As he locates honor in the hoarding of money, he realizes his motto “Ego mihimet sum semper proximus” (188) [I am always nearest to myself]. His riches are his sex, his religion, his power, his family—his all.

         Barabas also resembles Henry Condell-as-character in John Webster’s Induction to Marston’s The Malcontent:

Sly. Do you hear, sir? This play is a bitter play.
Condell. Why, sir, ‘tis neither satire nor moral, but the mean passage of a history; yet there are a sort of discontented creatures that bear a stingless envy to great ones, and these will wrest the doings of any man to their base, malicious applyment. But should their interpretation come to the test, like your marmoset they presently turn their teeth to their tail and eat it.
Sly. I will not go so far with you; but I say, any man that hath wit may censure if he sit in the twelve-penny room; and I say again, the play is bitter. [5]

Such a passage not only defines his own play but also outlines the contours of city comedy with its radically vengeful, self-interested characters propelled by myriad forms of consumption and greed who exhibit complexes of idiom and allusion, sometimes to the bedevilment of their audiences.

         When Brian Gibbons outlined the generic aspects of the form four decades ago, he found such striking similarities between Middleton’s Michelmas Term and The Jew of Malta that he considered categorizing Marlowe’s play as the first city comedy. He resisted this impulse, however, because its darkly ambiguous theology and morality would seem to preclude this innovative perspective, especially as articulated by G. K. Hunter’s 1964 essay that attempted to make sense of its ironic structure.[6] Both critics, like many before and since, avoid or rationalize the play’s anti-Semitism.[7] Although we do not know what particular aspects of Hunter’s argument convinced Gibbons that the play should not be generically associated with Michelmas Term, he was obviously persuaded that it was not appropriately comic, an attitude that persists. Still, he seems to accept Eliot’s idea that this type of “fictive life,” at least in Jonson’s version, “is not to be circumscribed by a reference to ‘comedy’ or ‘farce’ . . . but it is something that distinguishes Barabas from Shylock.”[8]

         Two definitions of the genre will serve to describe the lineaments of its primary features. Gibbons offers the following criteria: a timeline of 1597-1616; satiric, with urban settings and the requisite characters; an eschewing of “material appropriate to romance, fairy tale, sentimental legend or patriotic chronicle”; and an inclusion of “trickery episodes.”[9] Eighteen years later, Wendy Griswold offered some variations on these conventions:

City comedy presents wily, ambitious characters pursuing fortune, status, and love. The genre celebrates the adventures of urban and urbane rascals operating in the wide-open economic milieu of Renaissance London. Its characters demonstrate skills appropriate to an age of expanding opportunities, as they unblushingly lie, scheme, take risks, ignore propriety, flout conventional morality, fleece the gullible, and enjoy themselves hugely all the while.[10]

This play, possibly more than any other blockbuster that survives from the early 1590s, embodies all of the hallmarks of the genre as outlined by Gibbons, Griswold, and others.[11] In The Jew of Malta, audiences are presented with the moral depravity of urban Malta; an array of deceitful, self-centered, socially heterogeneous characters in pursuit of material gain or other forms of advancement that includes Jews, friars, nuns, a governor, a Turkish leader, a vice-admiral, a slave, and slave owners; an obsession with money; multiple thematic layers of conspicuous consumption, corrupt commerce, and religious pretense; an exclusion of romance, sentiment, and jingoism; and an ironic, “comic” conclusion with the Machiavellian policy of the Maltese Christian authorities “winning out” over the scheming of Barabas, unsettling audiences as it embeds further the idea of satire by excoriating something societal in a sometimes elevated way for the purpose of exposing and correcting it. Here we may be reminded of the tragicomic conclusion to the “vpside downe” world of The Honest Whore, Part I: the Duke’s declaration of Bellafront’s “conversion” by way of marriage to sleazy Matheo and his release of Candido from the insane asylum, initiating the tragic return to his cruel, waspish wife Viola.[12]

         To acknowledge the play’s comic and homiletic qualities as enunciated by Hunter would not bar it from functioning as scathing satire: mindless and inflexible Christianity and its hypocritical adherents in Malta and elsewhere whose use of the world-flesh-devil triad perpetuates unjustifiable and illegitimate authority. According to Isidore of Seville, the core idea of allegory, alienoloquium, is “the saying of things that do not belong to the matter in hand.”[13] It is sincere or didactic allegory that Hunter presumes of the play. But insincere alienoloquium defines ironia as well, and it is this reading of ironic allegory that allows Marlowe’s drama to be read as city comedy, providing audiences with a perverse burlesque that completely violates normative morality, just as it does in A New Way to Pay Old Debts (Sir Giles Overreach) or Women Beware Women (Livia and Bianca). It serves as a spirited exemplum of how not to act, offering a satirical portrait of Barabas’s tragedy and Catholic mercy. This essay will consider some of the general characteristics of the genre as they appear, specifically, in The Jew of Malta, especially the use of direct address. I will also demonstrate how its performance history reflects its comic intent and roots—in the theater, it has hardly been the generic mishmash that Eliot and others have defined it to be.[14] 

        Eliot’s description of the play (1919), “the farce of the old English humour, the terribly serious, even savage comic humour,” describes many of the predecessors of The Jew of Malta.[15] John Heywood’s A Mery Play Betwene Johan Johan the Husbande, Tib His Wife, and Sir Johan the Preest (1520-33) requires similar comic invention in performance. Influenced by the farce and fabliau traditions, the interlude mercilessly ridicules all of the characters involved—the cuckolded husband, his concupiscent wife, Tib, and her lover, a sybaritic priest—by offering a series of clever devices that invite audiences to revel in adulterous exploits, aided by inventions to distract Johan Johan. As he struggles in vain to mend a cleft water bucket with the wax of a lighted candle, the priest devours the warm pie that he and Tib offer. Sexual innuendo saturates the play. Like so many others of the period, it participates in a rich clowning tradition common to both sacred and secular dramatic forms. Much of the comedy depends upon the title character’s numerous asides, which signal both his sexual inadequacies and the knowledge of his wife’s enthusiastic infidelity: “And I chafe it so hard that my fingers krakkes!”; “Loke how the pil’d preest crammith in.” Audiences are almost compelled to laugh at the dynamic of abuse, jealousy, and sexual pleasure.[16] Barabas’s forebears from this period may also include the figure of the miles gloriosus and the trickster in, for example, Ralph Royster Doyster and Jacke Jugler, Worldly Man in Enough is as Good as a Feast, or the Vice in Horestes, named Newfangle in Like Will to Like.[17]

        The principal elements of city comedy appear in the first several lines of Marlowe’s play, and all by the end of the first act, with the exception of the comic conclusion. The urban setting is the polyglot, culturally cosmopolitan island of Malta, controlled by Catholic Christians and soon to be under siege by Muslim Turks. The energy of London and its environs intrudes even before the first scene, when Machevill announces to the audience that he has come to “frolic with his friends” while “here in Britaine” to deliver a lesson on “the tragedy of a Jew, / Who smiles” (Prologue 4, 29, 30-31). The verb “frolic” establishes that from the outset, audiences expect “To make merry . . . to play pranks, gambol, caper about” (OED frolic v.1) while witnessing an alien Jew’s downfall precipitated by a miscalculated confidence in the ruling authority. [18] The first scene opens abruptly, even beginning in mid-sentence to introduce the theme of commercial trade as both avaricious and voracious. Barabas is discovered in his counting-house assessing the returns on his investments through his fellow aliens and outcasts, such as Egyptians and Persians, while daydreaming of exotic enticements. His taxonomic description says as much about his greed as it does about the values of the world he inhabits: “Bags of fiery opals, sapphires, amethysts, / Jacinths, hard topaz, grass-green emeralds, / Beauteous rubies, sparkling diamonds / And seldseen costly stones of so great price” (1.1.25-28). Moreover, even before Barabas learns that his accounts have been seized by Ferneze, his pose is clearly that of the satirist scourging the human folly of his subjects in a speech functioning much like one of Jonson’s epigrams:

           Who hateth me but for my happiness?
           Or who is honoured now but for his wealth?
           Rather had I a Jew be hated thus,
           Then pittied in a Christian pouerty:
           For I can see no fruits in all their faith,
           But malice, falshood, and excessive pride,
           Which me thinkes fits not their profession. (1.1.111-17)

In this address to the audience, his rhetorical questioning sharply ridicules those who rule him and criticizes his subject’s hypocrisy, and as he concludes he is not suited to their Machiavellian policy, he disparages not only their behaviors but also indicates his own attempts at duplicity.[19] Certainly by this moment in the play an audience expects to be exposed to outrageous transgressions and manipulations, for “As with the self distortions of Mak, or later in The Alchemist with Subtle and Face, Barabas radically, obnoxiously, truthfully, and self-consciously, performs himself.”[20] By the end of the second scene, Marlowe introduces elements of corrupt commerce, religious pretense, and sexual innuendo: Ferneze levies the Turks’s tributes against the Jews by ordering over half of their estates unless they convert to Christianity—and all of their holdings if they refuse; Barabas’s house is turned into a nunnery out of spite, and his daughter feigns conversion to retrieve the wealth hidden therein. The friars reveal that their interest in saving her is sexual rather than spiritual when Bernardine estimates Abigail’s value as “a moving spirit”:  that is, worthy of the sort of sexual congress that causes the nuns to “swell” with pregnancy and, when poisoned, makes the friars “die with grief” (1.2.28; 4.1.6; 4.1.16). Thus, the city comedy stage is set with a portrait of the social, political, and religious corruption meet for satire.

        One approach to examining The Jew of Malta as a text suited for the performance of city comedy is to consider a range of Barabas’s direct addresses to the audience—especially his reactions in the form of character asides to persuade or compel the spectators to adopt his perspective, which are nearly always for humorous effect. They demonstrate the verbal facility and comic, fleering tone of the city comedy protagonist, often a figure from the social margins. In many instances, he shifts to the perspective of the satirist, sharing his amusement with and disdain for his surroundings with his auditors surrounding the platform stage.[21] These direct addresses contribute to the patently implausible, “non-illusory” drama of farce, allowing for a mode of “infinite flexibility” by denying an audience perspective that would allow it to “believe in the images on the stage.”[22] As in the thirteenth century, when “farce” was used to indicate “the extemporaneous amplification or ‘gag,’ or the interposing of impromptu buffoonery, which the actors in the religious dramas were accustomed to interpolate into their text,” the notion of farce as black comedy relies on the interpolation of opposing elements generating the tensions of antithesis.[23] Instances of direct address in The Jew of Malta rely strongly on the energy created by such tension, allowing for a sort of double vision resembling Marston’s notorious puns.[24] For many, it’s the difference between what one does and what one thinks one would like to do—perhaps especially when feeling wronged.

        Barabas’s enormous nose, sideways looks, or arched eyebrows are easily identified as conventions for the audience to process as farcical, but identifying forms of direct address in farce or city comedy depends upon the predispositions of the reader. Still, a conservative examination of the text yields over one hundred moments when a character speaks directly to the audience. This count includes one- or two-line commentaries, such as Barabas’s Machiavellian aphorisms that ironically comment on his own end, “Thus every villain ambles after wealth / Although he ne’er be richer than in hope: But husht” (3.4.25-54); Ithamore’s resolve to rob him, “I’ll go steal some money from my master to make me handsome” (4.2.51-2); and longer, reflective speeches spoken by a character solus, such as the opening to 3.4 when Barabas curses as he reads Abigail’s conversion letter: “Repentance? Spurca.” It also includes those moments when other characters on stage may or may not hear the speaker, as in the balcony scene of 2.1. A study of direct address in the play reveals a theater of cruel comedy by offering audiences multi-faceted perspectives from a conflated villain and clown figure and his targets.

        The 1633 quarto marks twenty-four asides and one “whisper,” all of which are assigned to Barabas, an indication that the audience is to privilege his social critique, which would have been ironic in itself during the drama’s initial performances.[25] This is true whether he shows outrage (“How liberally the villain gives me mine own gold”) (4.4.46); criticizes the social rot (“Nay, let ’em combat, conquer, and kill all”) (1.1.151); or responds to the present action (“but I must dissemble”) (4.1.47). Many demonstrate the verbal facility of the Janus-faced, socially marginalized protagonist who attempts to lure audiences into ironic conspiracy.

        The most concentrated number of lines identified in the 1633 quarto as “aside” appears, fittingly, at the slave market in 2.3, where “Every one’s price is written on his back” (2.3.3). Here, Lodowick and Barabas negotiate the exchange of the chaste virgin Abigail, the “bright and fair” diamond that “Outshine’s Cynthia’s rays” (2.3.59, 63) in a manner resembling George’s description of the shop’s finest lawn in The Honest Whore, Part I: “looke how euen she is, look how cleane she is, ha, as euen as the browe of Cinthia” (1.5.25-6). This sequence, laden with jocose innuendo as it commodifies Barabas’s daughter with puns on “jewel” and “foil,” and as it privileges verbal facility and wit over sentiment, is a hallmark of city comedy. Its multiple, shifting perspectives symbolize an intensely materialistic world where practically everything is for sale. Much of the dialogue that Barabas speaks while negotiating with Lodowick for his so-called jewel contains a marked aside: the quarto, for instance, indicates seven asides from “canst helpe me to a Diamond?” to “But now I must be gone to buy a slave” (2.3.49, 96).

        Other jokes abound, such as “Fornication? / But that was in another country; / And besides the wench is dead” (4.1.40-2); “What has he crucified a child? / No, but a worse thing” (3.4.49-50); and “That kiss again; she runs division of my lips. / What an eye she casts on me!” (4.3.131-32), alluding to or anticipating the Helen episode at 5.1 in Doctor Faustus. In recent productions, Barabas’s artfully inventive murders have provided the most laughter, especially that of the poisoning of the nuns and his “How sweet the bells ring” frisson that follows (4.1.2), and his French musician’s serenade as he delivers poisoned flowers (4.4). Such moments of carefully calibrated Schadenfreude with their sardonic wit and hyperbolic slapstick allow for a release of laughter at death and admiration for Barabas’s theatrical bravura. Their forward moving momentum exposes the sharp, clear, unforgiving edge of comedy, providing a fuller and more immediate release than similar episodes in tragedy.

        Although accounts from the first recorded performances of Marlowe’s satire do not indicate whether companies presented the play as comedy or tragedy, productions that privileged the idea of “Tragedy” generically in accordance with the title of the 1633 quarto surely would incur unintentional laughter.[26] It is far easier for twenty-first century readers or theatergoers to envision Strange’s or the Admiral’s Men catering to the popular Protestant audiences who relished the native dramatic tradition by interspersing a play like Doctor Faustus with comic scenes such as the Vatican episode. The revival of the play at the Cockpit in the 1630’s—a time characterized even more by fears of the Catholic menace, given the large number of plays ridiculing Continental strangers—also suggests The Jew of Malta would have been a logical fit with the popular city comedies in repertory at the time, many of which exhibited acute xenophobia.[27]

        A complex allusion in Thomas Heywood’s “Prologue to the Stage, at the Cock-Pit [The Phoenix]” suggests that his company may have intended Marlowe’s play for comic performance. The couplets praise the superior acting abilities of Edward Alleyn, the first Barabas, by commemorating his facility to construct a range of personae and characters: “by the best of poets in that age / The Malta Jew had being, and was made;  / And he, then by the best of actors played” (2-4).[28] Heywood then significantly compares this “peerless” thespian to an ancient Roman actor: “a man / Whom we may rank with (doing no one wrong) / Proteus for shapes, and Roscius for a tongue, / So could he speak” (8-11). This reference to the celebrated Quintus Roscius Gallus clearly aligns Alleyn with his legendary ancient counterpart and praises him for the same reason: verbal and theatrical artistry that observed the classical mean, in this case between kairos and decorum. The more important idea that Heywood encodes in his allusion, which he clearly expected his audiences to recognize, is that Roscius was best known for his exceptional acting abilities in comedy, just as he assumed that the spectators would recollect the theatrical milieu of the 1590s by his mention of the fabulously talented Alleyn.[29] Hamlet’s arbitrary and comic outburst at the entrance of the risible and doddering Polonius, “When Roscius was an actor in Rome” (2.2), suggests that we can locate Shakespeare’s reference within the same generic context. Thomas Nashe, among others, had made a similar equation between Alleyn and the Roman actor in the year before Marlowe’s death, 1592.[30] Cicero admired Roscius and mentioned him in De oratore. His most celebrated role was Ballio, the slave dealer and King of Pimps in Plautus’smost overtly theatrical comedy Pseudolus, a part that challenged him to play “a reprehensible character” who was completely unsympathetic and utterly believable without violating decorum. Therefore, a link between Roscius’s Ballio and Alleyn’s Barabas is not only easy but entirely natural to make, indecorous comic villains both.[31] Like Marlowe’s alien in Malta, Ballio is a self-reflexive, morally relativistic character acutely aware of his own necessities and inventiveness. For example, Pseudolus cries out against the bawd’s morally unsound suggestion that Callidorus should have cheated his own father in order to purchase his prostitute girlfriend Phoenicium from him. Obviously, the slave continues, no one should heed Ballio’s counsel. The perfidious procurer of women agrees. Indeed, given his profession, it is not his role to dispense sound moral advice: “that’s simply not in the Pimp’s Code of Ethics” (3.289). An analogous example is Barabas’s sententious comment to Abigail: “Tush, / As good dissemble that thou never mean’st / As first mean truth and then dissemble it; / A counterfeit profession is better / Than unseen hypocrisy” (1.2.289-93). The procurer’s religious attitudes also resemble those of Barabas: “If I were in the middle / Of a sacrifice to mighty Jove and suddenly the chance / to Grab some cash arose—end of sacrifice right then and there! / Cash! Under any and all circumstances, that’s my higher calling” (3.265-68). Moreover, thinking he’s outsmarted Pseudolus’s efforts to acquire Phoenicium for his master’s son, Ballio cries “I’d rather solemnly perjure myself a thousand times / Than let him make a laughingstock out of me once! / I’ll have the last laugh, the next time we meet— / Which, I do believe, should be in the [slave labor] mill” (16.1057-60).[32] Barabas attitude toward his faith is ironic: his fortunes are divine gifts, “blessings promised to the Jews,” riches of “old Abram’s happiness.” (1.1.104, 5). Vowing retributive justice and endeavoring to be “more a knave than fool,” Barabas promises to “be revenged on this accursèd town; / For by my means Calymath shall enter in”; “I hope to see the Governor a slave, / And, rowing in a galley, whipped to death” (2.3.37; 5.1.62-68). Both Ballio and Barabas exhibit a form of ethics resembling the secularism of early modern conceptions of the Machiavel. Given this interesting material and Heywood’s usefully complex message to his audience, N.W. Bawcutt’s claim that the prologue anticipated the play’s failure seems unfounded. Laurie Maguire’s response is most fitting in this case. Since “in the theatre one apologizes only for one’s most reliable offerings,” it would be “inconceivable that the Caroline company resurrected an anticipated failure.”[33]

        That The Jew of Malta was also considered popular in the saturnalian season of Shrovetide further suggests that its audiences must have perceived it as comic as well as tragic, regardless of the genre-specific habits that the actors are alleged to have worn. Edmund Gayton’s account in his commentary on Cervantes, Pleasant Notes upon Don Quixot (1654), explains how the play may have been received:

I have known upon one of these Festivals, but especially at Shrove-tide, where the Players have been appointed, notwithstanding their bils to the contrary, to act what the major part of the company had a mind to; sometimes Tamerlane, sometimes Jugurth, sometimes the Jew of Malta, and sometimes parts of all of these, and at last, none of the three taking, they were forc’d to undresse and put off their Tragick habits, and conclude the day with the merry milk-maides.[34]

The passage clearly alludes to the company of the exiled prince, the future Charles II, but whether it refers to its tenure at the Red Bull or Fortune theatres is inconclusive.[35] Both public playhouses were, according to James Wright (1699), “mostly frequented by Citizens, and the meaner sort of People.”[36]  These theaters also catered to popular tastes in the 1630’s, which were for the “old-fashioned” in their “preference for the manner of Alleyn, Marlowe and their contemporaries, a style festive, ranting, traditional, nostalgic and Elizabethan—the old ‘national’ taste, in fact.”[37] This native tradition was, generally, comic, and the Red Bull, known especially for its outrageous and scandalous productions, could well have considered The Jew of Malta to have been a naturally irreverent choice.[38]

        Thus, Marlowe’s play almost certainly functioned as part of a greatly anticipated comic release, one that, even in a Protestant country in the seventeenth century, participated in customs hundreds of years old that “promote social solidarity or communal spirit,” including “the keeping of markets” and “the giving of alms,” which were, according to John Stow, “celebrated in the summer months.” Susan Wells discusses the relationship of city comedy’s bacchanalian traditions:
Such a distanced evocation of the norms of the marketplace allowed the writers of city comedy to subdue the motions of trade to the misrule of the feast, either by celebrating the freedom of exchange, its endless circulation, its possibilities for rapid shifting of roles and reversals of fortune, or by using the norms of the festival as a corrective to the norms of commerce—the voracity of misers and usurers can be educated by the rules of the feast.  Strangely, she finds that the Jew of Malta does not fit within this festival world: the play’s “intensity” and “ambiguity” are too strong. However, her fine analysis describes this aspect of Marlowe’s play with uncanny precision. For example, her contention that city comedy develops and emerges “through unbridled accumulation, as various characters try to outwit and swindle each other” could be a recruiting poster for any potential Barabas, as could her idea that greed is “the central ethical problem,” unmediated by “charity and contentment.”[39]

        The unforgiving satirical edge, the spectacle of cupiditas when one would expect caritas, is what Edmund Kean and Samson Penley apparently resisted when they presented a significantly revised version of the play at Drury Lane.  For Kean to render a somber, sympathetic portrait of Barabas, the decision was made to eliminate many of the most violent (and thus potentially most comic) scenes, including, for instance, the poisoning of the nuns; they also cut lines thought too grossly anti-Semitic. Although Kean’s performance was praised by many, the production yielded mixed results and lasted for eleven performances. According to one anonymous critic (probably Charles Bucke), “‘Mr. Kean is the person who introduced that barbarous production to the present stage.’”[40]

         In the 146 years that followed Keane’s 1818 staging, James L. Smith finds that most productions tended to emphasize the play’s satirical qualities. The 1922 Phoenix Society production at Daly’s Theatre in London (dir. Allan Wade) was apparently influenced by Eliot’s reading but did not follow his interpretation to its logical end. Baliol Holloway as Barabas engaged in “sportive asides” with “a curl of the lip and a wink at the house,” but the sponsoring body “did Marlowe a grave disservice.” Although “Kean squeezed all of the tragedy out of his partial reading of the play,” Wade “left much of Eliot’s savage farce untouched,” resulting in “a limited private success at Marlowe’s expense.” A more successful revival later in the century, one that emphasized satire, was Ian Calder’s 1954 production for Marlowe Players of Reading University (later transferred to Toynbee Hall, London). The play was performed with “farcical effects . . . utilized for larger and more savage ends,” with Barabas rendered as a villainous caricature. Ten years following, both the Victoria Theatre (VT) and Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) produced performances “juxtaposing tragedy and comedy, violence and humor, implying not primarily farce or satire, but rather … pantomime noir of Orton or Giles Cooper” to highlight a psychologically unstable Barabas. Directors Peter Cheeseman (VT) and Clifford Williams (RSC) created comic effects relying upon quick, calculated reversals. Of the two, William’s production received more critical attention with its black comedy calibrated for effect “in direct proportion to the threatened violence of the action it anaesthetizes.” The poisoning of the nuns episode was met with “howls of uncontrollable laughter,” making “clear that the entire play is built upon the concept of the sick joke.”[41]

        The adage “death is easy; comedy is hard” characterizes the most of the productions based on reviews by critics in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.[42] Although the pendulum has swung occasionally to sentimental tragedy, overall the most successful productions have been comic.[43] Barry Kyle’s 1987 RSC interpretation was a standout. Resembling a fictional “strip-cartoon,” Alun Armstrong as Barabas performed unsympathetically to an audience unable to suppress its ironic “cataclysmic laughs” as he indulged in “farcical massacres” to the play’s conclusion, which featured a “diabolical drawbridge” transforming into a cathedral to “sardonic variations” of “Ave Maria” and Ferneze revealing himself as Machevill as he removes his wig.[44] Another noteworthy performance was that of Phil Daniels who played the “rodent-like pet” Ithamore.[45] For Jeremy Kingston, RSC’s combination of “laughter and death” created “a sort of pantomime noire.”[46] Michael Grandage’s production for the Almeida Theatre Company in 1999 was another well-received production. Ian McDiarmid played Barabas with “sardonic glitter” and “bravura display.”[47] His ironic, over-the-top humor, “frisky and flouncing, and brimming with silky contempt,” created a cartoonlike “universal snarl” to realize Grandage’s vision of the drama as “‘a very, very funny play . . . a farce.’”[48] New York’s Theatre for a New Audience staged The Jew of Malta (dir. David Herskovits) alongside Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice in 2007(dir. Darko Tresnjak). Charles Isherwood panned the production, finding it a failed postmodern farce, “an absurdist romp.” F. Murray Abraham’s Barabas resembled, for instance, “a harmless cartoon” from a Scooby-Doo episode, and even though the production drew “plenty of humor from Barabas’s sardonic asides to the audience,” Charles Isherwood found that Abraham’s portrayal “vitiates the character’s power.”[49] This brief survey of performance reviews over the past two centuries demonstrates a pronounced tendency to stage The Jew of Malta as comedy, as well as the difficulty in staging it at all, lending credence to Maguire’s claim that the play was “obviously valued in the 1630s for the superb city comedy it is.”[50]

         The evidentiary material from the first known revival to its last offers ample reasons to believe that initial performances of The Jew of Malta predicted city comedy, and must have informed its development. Moreover, the 1633 date of the quarto during the great age of the genre situates the play in the same milieu as many of its fellows, as well as others outrageous, bizarre, and mixed in form, such as Ford’s ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, Heywood’s Londini Emporia, Massinger’s A New Way to Pay Old Debts, Marmion’s Holland’s Leaguer,and Rowley’s A Match at Mid-night, all of which were published or performed between 1632 and 1633. Surely Marlowe’s intended Barabas to resemble the ridiculous Vice figure derived from the moral plays, an object of derisive laughter as well as a satiric and subversive provocateur of it, and therefore theatre audiences, attracted to his vitality and sinister humor, witnesseda forerunner to city comedy, “So neatly plotted, and so well performed” (3.3.2).