Renaissance Forum: Volume 5, Number 1, 2000: David Webb

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'Pageants truly played':

Self-dramatization and naturalistic character in The Jew of Malta

DAVID WEBB
ST MARTIN'S COLLEGE, LANCASTER

Marlowe, it seems, rebelled against the limitations of the Early Modern Theatre (among other things). He vaulted over its hurdles, and often soared as a result. In Tamburlaine, for instance, unable to use real horses, he used kings to drag Tamburlaine's chariot. This daring opportunism created an emblematic spectacle that added brilliantly to the audience's sense of Tamburlaine's triumph and cruelty. Marlowe wrote for a theatre which went in for uncomplicated, functional characters (it had a taste for the descendants of the Vice), for big speeches written in obtrusively patterned regular verse, and for a style of acting to match. I am going to argue that Marlowe's plays imply a writer who regarded these conventions as hurdles, because, with a naturalistic eye, he saw that such speechifying off the stage would be seen as exaggerated self-dramatization.
Accordingly, self-dramatization is a feature of his plays. Obtrusively regular speeches, popular with audiences, are 'placed' as self-dramatization by puncturing contrasts with speeches round about, and by contradictions which signal their inauthenticity. (For my purposes I shall assume that the version of Marlowe's The Jew of Malta is largely the work of one author because the features that I see as signalling self-dramatization are so consistently used in the play.) By portraying self-dramatization, these plays (pace New Historicists and Cultural Materialists) succeed in containing characters that invite imaginative exploration as 'real people' do.
Totus mundus agit histrionem was chosen as the motto for the new Globe Theatre in 1599. 1 The familiar topos, 'All the World's A Stage', had taken on a new precision. In the 1590s, despite limited rehearsal time, professional theatres could afford improved acting and writing talent, and that made some of them into forcing houses for the exploration of character and rôle-play in life. As is sometimes argued with Courtly Love, literary conventions impacted on thoughts and feeling in 'real' life 2. The beginnings of this process are evident in Marlowe's treatment of self-dramatization.
In Marlowe's plays there is a steady emphasis on the way characters play parts. Critics have mentioned self-dramatization, but no one, as far as I can discover, has written about its centrality to Marlowe's plays. 3 Self-dramatizing heroes go some way to explain the emphatic diversity of mid twentieth century Marlowe criticism, when critics were seeking a unified message from them. There 4 the unusually sharp contradictions of interpretation point to gaps, discrepancies, or contradictions at the heart of Marlowe's major plays. Those gaps mesh with and are partly generated by self-dramatizing characters. Tamburlaine's 'high astounding terms', as the Prologue calls them, encompass
... the wondrous architecture of the world:
And measure every wandering planet's course. (2.7.22-23) 5

His actions are rather less elevated. Similarly, Dr. Faustus makes speeches that place him as a Renaissance intellectual, but he uses his pact with the devil to live 'in all voluptuousness' and to perform pointless tricks. 6 In Edward II, audience sympathy shifts completely from the Queen and perhaps Mortimer at the beginning to Edward at the end. Barabas, in The Jew of Malta is a Machiavel, a gleeful plotter with a lineage which goes back to the Morality Vice, so a gap between his words and deeds is not unexpected. All the same, the gap between his Vice-like evil speeches, and some of his other behaviour is surprising.
Such gaps do not bother critics who revel in the disunity of texts, 7 but, as there is a consistent pattern of features in these texts pointing in that direction, a better explanation is the concept formulated by T. S. Eliot (1927), and taken up by F. R. Leavis (1952), when he argued that Othello was a self-dramatizer in his last great speech. 8 In everyday life people self-dramatize; they construct and perform versions of themselves that are more inauthentic than the norm. We recognise this when we say someone is 'showing off' or 'playing the stern father'. There is a spectrum. At one end we are close to the self-dramatization which is the subtle and inevitable. 'I am large, I contain multitudes', wrote Walt Whitman (1856, 40 994). We contain rich, eddying complexities which no one utterance or episode fully encapsulates, so we offer selections of ourselves. A little self-awareness shows us the slightly (and sometimes more than slightly) false faces we wear in life, the different persons we present to colleagues, parents, shopkeepers and lovers. At the other end of the spectrum is noticeable self-dramatization, when we say someone is 'stagy' or 'indulging in histrionics', or detect a pose calculated to deceive. In Marlowe's plays this is imitated, and what is happening is drawn attention to repeatedly by stylistic and other means, and repeated instances of self-dramatization sensitise us to it, clarify what is going on and confirm each other. Of course, to talk of self-dramatization is to talk in terms of character, of selves who have a self to dramatize. As Tom McAlindon (1995a, 315) wrote in an article in which he does exactly that, to write about characters in a naturalistic way is to risk 'critical damnation as a politically naïve humanist'. Darryll Grantley (1996, 225-6), writing of The Jew of Malta, discusses the 'complications' that arise because of 'the history of the subject' in drama. He notes discussions of this by Belsey (1985, 223) and Barker (1984, 29-40), which repudiate 'essentialist humanism', the assumption that there is a 'human condition' or human nature that is universally shared, and locate the emergence of 'the essentialist humanist subject' with its 'interiority' and 'subjectivity' as occurring later in the seventeenth century. He goes on to observe that even New Historicists/Cultural materialists like Jonathon Dollimore and Stephen Greenblatt
who accept this, and are fully aware of the weight of the discursive determinants of the dramatic persona in Marlowe, have some difficulty in restraining the impulse to respond to Marlowe's heroes as psychological entities (1996, 227).

Grantley's conclusion is that:
what we see in Marlowe ... is effectively a simultaneity and coexistence of what might be termed the figural impulse, i.e. towards dramatic persona as paradigm or discursive category, and the subjective impulse, i.e. towards interiority and psychological integrity, in short that the dramatic persona in Marlowe operates as both figure and character. I would further suggest that the theatrical design and strategies in Marlowe's plays ... involve a negotiation between these two representational modes (227).

I would argue that the self-dramatization of Barabas greatly encourages his reception as both figure and character. To put it too simply, the character often plays a version of the figure, making the play work figurally in complex ways. This links with the interplay between the mostly socially constructed rôles which he plays, and other aspects of his character, which illuminates those discourses which have helped to form him, and which he draws upon. Like Grantley, I see no need to be deterred in this view by New Historicist/Cultural Materialist arguments that Early Modern people did not have selves of this sort.
Similarly, Robert Jones's (1986) lucid account of the Jew's function in standing between the audience and the play, steering it towards a 'point of view' and thus shaping its reactions, does not preclude it from also responding to him in psychologically naturalistic terms. Likewise, Burns's (1990) illuminating exploration of the term 'character' emphasises a model of character which is 'external' in terms of what he calls 'banally colloquial accounts of human subjecthood' in that it depends 'on an idea of construction and perception, of writing and reading, impression and acknowledgement', but he then adds 'this does not mean these texts function without an idea of 'interiority' (139).
It is odd how rarely psychology, the discipline which is expert on selves, is cited in these debates. Recent work on evolutionary psychology has helped to explain why actors persist so heroically with Stanislavskian approaches to character (Burns 1990, 124) in Early Modern plays, and why students and playgoers kept on empathizing and identifying away obstinately and heretically when the trend of criticism was preaching otherwise. Evolutionary psychology teaches that the thin surface of cultural construction is made possible by the infinitely more powerful processes of evolved species-typical cognitive construction. Scientific work on 'alien minds' like computer artificial intelligences and autistic children, whose unexpected incapacities drew attention to the problems people solve routinely and effortlessly, led researchers to believe that the mind imposes on the world its own already-formed kinds of organisation which are products of the evolutionary process. As is explained in the foreword to a book which was short listed for the British Psychological Society Book Award in 1996 (Baron-Cohen 1995) our worlds are filled by the computational products of hordes of evolved, specialised 'neural automata' (Tooby and Cosmides 1995, xii). These make up what are often called 'modules', which are like computers each given over to a particular function. They make us perceive separate words out of an unbroken flow of sounds, for instance, and objects out of two-dimensional retinal arrays. They also make us feel by tiny clues the unfavourable response of someone to whom we are talking, and spot an aim to co-operate among a group of people from joint attention and similar emotional responses.
Nicholas Humphrey (1984, 3, 5-8) even characterises our species as homo psychologicus. In effect, we have a 'theory of mind' module that recognises emotions from the face, interprets the language of the eyes, and adds this to other data. It speaks to us of other people as selves in the same way as traditional character criticism and essentialist humanism conceives of selves, that is as agents, with their own thoughts, intentions, beliefs and desires. We are compelled to 'mind-read' in this way, feeling our interpretations as just as real as the objects we touch, by means of these modules which as a species we have evolved:
Because these devices are present in all human minds, much of what they construct is the same for all people, from whatever culture; the representations produced by these universal mechanisms thereby constitute the foundation of our shared reality and our ability to communicate (Tooby and Cosmides 1995, xii).
So selves may be partly socially constructed, but that is not how they will feel to themselves. Early Modern selves cannot have felt like those selves believed in by the New Historicists, 'unfree', entirely socially constructed, and lacking modern 'interiority'. All the same, it follows that when selves were represented on the stage inevitably it would be to an initially 'essentialist' audience. [Tom McAlindon (1993, 504) has explored Coriolanus, a political play that ignores metaphysics, and focuses on power and class conflict in a realistically portrayed particular society, where, if anywhere, one would look to find a New Historicist sense of self. He has found the play to be, like all Shakespearean tragedy, 'informed throughout with an essentialist view of human and universal nature.' 9] Of course, an essentialist audience might come to see that the selves it was interpreting were not as free as they seemed at first. No doubt a play can signal that a character is not to be seen 'realistically' or may contain implausible characters too, but, to sum up, evolutionary psychology is telling us that the 'naive realist' version of the self, the one typical of traditional character criticism, is the inevitable and universal starting point for perceiving people and the likely default mode for responding to representations of people. 10
It is no longer necessary to go outside the English domain, however, to recuperate the possibility of character criticism. Lorna Hutson (1999) has drawn attention to ethopoeia, the imitation of another person's characteristics, as part of the Elizabethan schoolboy's training in composition. Katharine Eisaman Maus (1995, 27-8) has reminded us of how much evidence there is for a focus on interiority in the period. She discusses the widespread belief then that God sees into the hidden self, which is hidden from the world. As she has argued, modern critics often fail to take this seriously. For many of them religion is implicated in what seem now obvious mystifications of power politics which most in the period were too naïve to see, and its language and attitudes are thus discredited. To many Early Modern people it would seem just as obtuse to underestimate their sense of self because of its religious links; they would feel that the secular foundations of twentieth century interpretations blind us to their own limitations.
Indeed there was a medieval preoccupation with subjectivity which David Aers (1991, 20) evidences, which appears to become an obsession in the Early Modern period, and one that is very evident in the playhouse. Hamlet's outburst, when his mother uses the word 'seems' about his grief for his father, is typical.
Seems, madam! Nay, it is; I know not seems.
'Tis not alone my inky cloak, good mother,
Nor customary suits of solemn black
Nor windy suspiration of forc'd breath,
... ... ... ... ...
These indeed seem;
For they are actions that a man might play;
But I have that within which passes show -
These but the trappings and the suits of woe.
(1.2.76-86)

The possible discrepancy between inner ('that within') and outer ('trappings and suits of woe') is repeatedly probed in texts of the period. Furthermore, the most often cited instance of this disparity is in the theatre ('actions that a man might play'); the blatant falsities of the playhouse are used to exemplify what is feared to be opaque off-stage.
This focus on the hidden self is central to the new, rapidly developing, professional theatre. In some playhouses at least, an increasingly naturalistic style of acting seems to have developed by 1600, as Hamlet's speech to the actors (3.2.1-34) seems to imply. Andrew Gurr notes that a new term, 'personation', had to be found to label this new art of naturalistic 'individual characterisation, an art distinct from the orator's display of passions or the academic actor's portrayal of the character-types described by Jonson in Cynthia's Revels.' 11 This new style of acting would have fed (as well as been fed by) the preoccupation with the inner life. So in the theatre the less naturalistic aspects of earlier plays were soon mocked. The contemptuous reference to the 'jigging veins of rhyming mother wits' in the Prologue to Tamburlaine, Hamlet's speech to the actors and Pistol's pastiches of earlier drama imply a self-conscious, stylistically critical theatre, sensitive to the relationship between the way things were presented on stage and 'reality'. How early that awareness developed is uncertain, but, interestingly, Peter Thomson specifically picks out The Jew of Malta for mention in his account of acting in the Early Modern theatre. He argues that the part of the Jew gave Edward Alleyn, an experienced tragic actor, the chance to perform as both a boisterous, histrionic Vice figure and more naturalistically, and thus to 'demonstrate the range and versatility of the professional player (1997, 334-5). This fits the account of Alleyn's acting in the 1633 edition's Prologue to the play, in which Thomas Heywood wrote of Alleyn
Proteus for shapes, and Roscius for a tongue,
So could speak, so vary. (10-11)

Mention of the self-metamorphosing God, and of the Roman actor famous for delivering speeches tellingly (and for naturalistic 'personation' too) reinforces the case that Early Modern people would identify self-dramatization in this text.
The Jew of Malta is not called Barabas, despite the way Marlowe's plays usually have a character's name in their title. It is a suitably tough test-bed to assess the plausibility of any kind of character criticism. Charles Lamb did not see the Jew as 'a man', in remarks which are representative of a time when writing about Renaissance Drama was mostly character criticism:
Shylock, in the midst of his savage purpose, is a man. His motives, feelings, resentments, have something human in them: 'If you wrong us, shall we not revenge?' Barabas is a mere monster, brought in with a large painted nose, to please the rabble. 12

Barabas is partly as he is because of the conventions that Marlowe inherited, writing for a commercial theatre, where the audience had a taste for exaggerated villainies and for what Wolfgang Clemen calls 'set' speeches (1961, 141-143). He finds them in this play but mixed, with more dialogue and shorter speeches, compared with other plays of the same period. Richard III is from about the same date. Both heroes are descendants of the Vice in the Morality Plays, who flaunts his cunning histrionically, making, as Douglas Cole says, 'an exhibition of his villainies which are brought about by artful deception' (1962, 141).
Barabas is a flamboyant self-dramatizer. Hear him boasting to Ithamore, his slave, in 2.3:
As for myself, I walk abroad o' nights,
And kill sick people groaning under walls:
Sometimes I go about and poison wells;
And now and then, to cherish Christian thieves,
I am content to lose some of my crowns;
That I may, walking in my gallery,
See `em go pinioned along by my door.
Being young I studied physic, and began
To practise first upon the Italian;
There I enriched the priests with burials,
And always kept the sexton's arms in ure
With digging graves and ringing dead men's knells:
And after that was I an engineer,
And in the wars `twixt France and Germany,
Under pretence of helping Charles the Fifth,
Slew friend and enemy with my stratagems.
Then after that was I an usurer,
And with extorting, cozening, forfeiting,
And tricks belonging unto brokery,
I filled the jails with bankrouts in a year,
And with young orphans planted hospitals,
And every moon made some or other mad,
And now and then one hang himself for grief,
Pinning upon his breast a long great scroll
How I with interest tormented him.
But mark how I am blest for plaguing them,
I have as much coin as will buy the town.
But tell me now, how thou hast spent thy time? (2.3.178-205)

In a long speech written in regular end-stopped verse, here is the heir of the Vice flaunting his misdeeds. This goes with the exaggerated, stereotypically Jewish nose to which Ithamore has just drawn attention (at 2.3.175). 13 The reason for taking this speech as more than the product of popular conventions, for taking it as self-dramatization, is that techniques which are also familiar from Tamburlaine expose its histrionic falsity. As in that play, the contrast between this speech and the speeches that frame it 'place' it. There is a contrast in length of speech, in register, in metrics (the speeches which frame these big speeches are usually shorter, and often prose or irregular verse) as well as in tone or content. Barabas's speech is framed at the beginning by conversation with Ithamore. His humble, colloquial, compliant first words are in contrasting prose:
Faith, sir, my birth is but mean, my name's Ithamore, my profession what you please. (169-170)

The quibble on 'profession', a word used again and again in the play, also alerts the audience to self-dramatization; it can mean job or faith, but significantly, it stresses the act of professing. It insists that words may be just words, and that fits Ithamore's willingness to say what is required, and the Jew's speechifying. Barabas is showing off, performing to the hilt the exaggerated self he is presenting. The self-dramatizer's preoccupation with self is clear; it's 'my words' and ' I will teach thee'. After his slave's plain language, we notice his excessive list of affections, the contrived 'smile/moan' antithesis, and the neatly rhymed conclusion.
Hast thou no trade? then listen to my words,
And I will teach thee that shall stick by thee:
First, be thou void of these affections,
Compassion, love, vain hope, and heartless fear,
Be moved at nothing see thou pity none,
But to thyself smile when Christians moan. (2.3.171-176)

It is then that Ithamore says:
O brave, master, I worship your nose for this. (177)

Both the joke and its expression in colloquial prose (or unmetrical verse) undercuts Barabas's pose. It pushes the audience to identify the stereotype it is built on. So perhaps the audience giggles; it is not impressed or outraged.
This framing makes us detect histrionics in features of the speech. The easy ordinariness of 'I walk abroad o' nights' and 'I go about' is set against melodramatic murders, and seems like assumed nonchalance. The ready supply of 'sick people groaning under walls' is comically unconvincing, and the list of crimes is too long. The smirking self-congratulation of the 'practice' quibble (meaning both doing medicine and deceiving), and the patterning ('And after that....' 'Then after that....' 'And....' 'And....' beginning successive lines) contribute to the effect. Self-dramatization is confirmed by the ersatz sang-froid of
And now and then one hang himself for grief

with its mock specificity, and by the flaunted appropriation of religious language (reminiscent of Tamburlaine) in
But mark how I am blessed for plaguing them.

The playground challenge
But tell me now, how thou hast spent thy time?

clinches the matter; it is an invitation to join a competition in self-dramatizing boasts which Barabas has begun.
The usual technique of framing self-dramatizing speeches with a contrast is used again. Ithamore's reply begins as prose (or an irregular short verse line) to contrast significantly with Barabas's regular verse, but he has accepted Barabas's challenge, and so next he has a shot at matching Barabas's speechifying in verse. His list of crimes, even cruder and sillier than those of Barabas, (powder to make Christian knees 'rankle' indeed!) shows up the nature of Barabas's speech, this time by imitation:
Faith, master,
In setting Christian villages on fire,
Chaining of eunuchs, binding of galley-slaves.
One time I was an hostler in an inn,
And in the night-time secretly would I steal
To travellers' chambers, and there cut their throats:
Once at Jerusalem, where the pilgrims kneeled,
I strowed powder on the marble stones,
And therewithal their knees would rankle so,
That I have laughed a-good to see the cripples
Go limping home to Christendom on stilts. (206-216)

This is a parody of Barabas's parody of the stage villain's speech, packed with all the crimes Jews and Machiavellians were supposed to commit. It may have thrilled those who loved to hiss the villain, but they are nudged into hearing it naturalistically too as self-dramatization.
So an audience is nudged towards imagining some psychological depth, a self behind the masks, to explain these poses. Barabas must be lonely. He is an outsider, excluded from Maltese Christian society. Of course he would seize any respect, even from the humblest and even if it is for criminality. He would be delighted at a chance to flourish his normally hidden ingenuity in evil. Yet these feelings are the seeds of his downfall; concealment is vital to the Machiavellian 'policy' he professes; this is a hint that he is not the villain he plays.
The boasting match between Ithamore and Barabas is perhaps the clearest instance of self-dramatization (apart from overt lying) in the play, but self-dramatization occurs often elsewhere; the case for self-dramatization does not rest on one passage. In the opening episode, for instance, we meet Barabas using a list of exotic place names, and 'talking big', as Tamburlaine did, with his catalogue of riches where the words are close-packed like the wealth:
Bags of fiery opals, sapphires, amethysts,
Jacinths, hard topaz, grass-green emeralds,
Beauteous rubies, sparkling diamonds. (1.1.25-27)

He parades his riches as Tamburlaine paraded his conquests, but many of his self-dramatizations, unlike Tamburlaine's, are cast not in the form of large statements but in contemptuous understatements:
Here have I pursed their paltry silverlings.
Fie; what a trouble 'tis to count this trash! (1.1.6-7)

He is playing a shaped version of himself. Although the language is more colloquial than Tamburlaine's, the style confirms this impression. It is metrically regular, inevitably end-stopped, with long sentences, so that it seems polished and prepared. [Clemen (1961, 145) sees this as a 'set' speech, but no 'mere footlight-soliloquy', noting the naturalistic effect of the speech being attended by visible activity, 'the counting of the money and the stowing away of the treasures'.] Further, the speech starts naturalistically in mid-line. All this points to Marlowe having taken the unnaturalistic convention of the set speech and 'naturalised' it by transferring its inauthenticity to the self-dramatizing disposition of the speaker. So it can do all that a traditional 'set' speech does, including give necessary information to the audience, but its most important function is to display the histrionic personality of Barabas.
Barabas's conversations that follow confirm this view of him. He stage-manages his chat with the first merchant to flaunt his own greatness and to extort a tribute from the merchant's remark about the relative poverty of the others. This gained, he can fire off a colloquial, self-dramatizing throwaway line:
Go tell 'em the Jew of Malta sent thee, man;
Tush, who amongst 'em knows not Barabas? (1.1.67-68)

After the merchants have gone, Barabas delivers a soliloquy that includes again that word 'profession'. He flaunts his rejection of the Christian faith, and mockingly defines the unchristian values which actually dominate the Christian world (I i 105-140). When the three worried Jews come to Barabas, he again adopts a pose although there is no practical need to deceive them. He expresses a superior confidence that the Jews have nothing to fear, while revealing in asides his quite contrary thoughts.
If anything shall there concern our state
Assure yourself I'll look unto (aside) myself. (1.1.175-6)

Asides are common in the play, though naming them as such may be the work of modern editors. They signpost self-dramatization and duplicity, deflate high-sounding speeches, and draw attention to a world of false professions. Barabas's asides and soliloquies, moments of direct contact with the audience, are important for how the play handles self-dramatization. Such moments are metadramatic. They create a bond of complicity that unites Barabas and the audience. They underline the playfulness with which he plays his parts. This makes them tolerant knowing spectators of his performances of himself and of his stage-managed scenes (Simkin 1999).
In the previous soliloquy (1.1.105-141) Barabas expressed pride in his race, but now he is deceiving fellow Jews, and calling them 'silly' (that is pitiable or foolish) men'. It is clear that Barabas is still given to playing parts, and significantly does so with no on-stage audience to deceive or impress.
1.2 gives further instances of Barabas's part-playing, with attendant inconsistencies. Ferneze, the Governor of Malta, intends to have the Jews to pay the Turkish tribute, but when he begins to explain, Barabas interrupts when he reaches this threatening line:
FERNEZE Now then, here know that it concerneth us -
BARABAS Then good my lord, to keep your quiet still.
Your lordship shall do well to let them have it. (1.2.42-44)

He repeats this tactic of comic misunderstanding several times. It is a tactic, not obliviousness; his asides ('Hum, what's here to do?') reassure us that his 'politic' mind is in action behind the mask. The despised Jew is teasing the powerful Governor. This is amusing, yet it is likely to provoke Ferneze, and to prove the opposite of the Machiavellian 'policy' which Barabas professes. So we expect some cunning stratagem, but get instead a serious and powerful rebuke to the other Jews who have capitulated so easily to Ferneze's demands:
O earth-mettled villains, and no Hebrews born!
And will you basely thus submit yourselves
To leave your goods to their arbitrement? (1.2.81-83)

The theatrical effectiveness of this stance too is evident. His previous cheekiness and this speech together could make sense if they both turned out to spring from his outrage that the Jews were being expected to collude with injustice, and were doing so, but that is not what emerges. Barabas later reveals that he had a contingency plan (his buried treasure) all along, and was not really as vulnerable as the others.
So Barabas adopts a sequence of personae which contradict each other. That is one of the major ways in which self-dramatization is revealed. Each rôle Barabas adopts is revealed as a rôle because he shifts so soon to another. And these speedy transformations imply a figure addicted to playing parts. He has, in effect, stage-managed a situation where he can play the tragic hero, and then played the part with energetic eloquence:
Well then my lord, say, are you satisfied?
You have my goods, my money, and my wealth,
My ships, my store, and all that I enjoyed... (1.2.140-146)

He continues in this vein even when the Christians have gone, roaring a fearful and lengthy curse upon them as he kneels:
The plagues of Egypt, and the curse of heaven,
Earth's barrenness, and all men's hatred,
Inflict upon them, thou great Primus Motor! (1.2.165-7)

T. W. Craik suggested that the obtrusive patterning in the last speech was learnt from Kyd. 14 It is not certain that Kyd's play came first, but either way this similarity underlines again that the play uses the period's conventional theatrical phraseology to help convey self-dramatization. The speech must be inauthentic; he has his hidden treasure so there is no tragedy and no need to curse.
Later Barabas again delivers a speech which belongs in a familiar theatrical category, 'What tell you me of Job?...'(1.2.184-201). It fits precisely one of Wolfgang Clemen's types of 'set' speech, the one based on the formula 'Can there be any sorrow more hard to bear than mine?' 15 Again a familiar convention serves to convey self-dramatization. Barabas says his suffering is worse than Job's on the absurd grounds that he had more property to lose. Job may have raged against God, but he is proverbially known for patience; this irony helps underline how histrionic Barabas's own railing is. 16 So does the abrupt tone change, as he moves towards saying that he has riches hidden away.
Self-dramatization is important in the play's treatment of religion and political power, and of the self and society, and many other characters are self-dramatizers too. How smoothly Don Lodowick improvises his part in a collaborative playlet (1.3), for instance, ostensibly about buying a diamond, but really about Abigail, Barabas's jewel of a daughter. This is part of the Jew's scheme to murder him, and Ithamore's comment uses theatrical language, which underlines the self-dramatization:
Why, was there ever seen such villainy,
So neatly plotted and so well performed? (3.3.1-2)

Self-dramatization occurs again in Ithamore's affair with Bellamira. He offers her an extended verse speech of ringing splendour, beginning:
Content, but we will leave this paltry land,
And sail from hence to Greece, to lovely Greece:
I'll be thy Jason, thou my golden fleece; (4.2.86-96)
Ithamore is talking explicitly about self-dramatization, about the great classical rôles that he will play, using the Marlovian high classical vein of Faustus's address to Helen. The inauthenticity of both speeches is brought out by erroneous allusions. Like Barabas's big speeches, it is also 'placed' by a following short prose exchange, which punctures the pose.
ITHAMORE How now? hast thou the gold?
PILIA-BORZA Yes. (4.2.98-9)
Suitable performances are, presumably, the stock-in-trade of prostitutes and their protectors, and Bellamira performs fluently with Ithamore. When Barabas, responding to their blackmail, goes to them disguised as a French musician and presents them with a poisoned nosegay, all present are similar figures, all deceivers, all plotters, and all going about their plots histrionically. The only difference between Barabas and the others is his superior verve and artistry. That Barabas has to endure Ithamore's insults and watch his own gold being wasted is a good joke which prefigures the way Barabas will be trapped by his addiction to self-dramatization. (This insight is central to Volpone, a play in which Jonson's debt to Marlowe is everywhere apparent. That play starts with flaunted worship of Mammon like The Jew of Malta in parody Marlovian blank verse, and its hero plays part after part with consummate skill, but is repeatedly trapped in his rôle to his discomfiture, and eventual downfall.)
The most effective self-dramatizer in The Jew of Malta is Ferneze, and his practice of it offers insights about self-dramatization and power, and the use of religion. His performances are different: low-key and unobtrusive. With surprising gentleness he tells the Jews that he has to 'request' their 'aid' with the Turkish tribute (1.2.49). It sounds pleasant and voluntary. As we saw, Barabas used intentional misunderstanding to break through this smoothness. For a time, a silent Ferneze leaves the knights to express the nasty realities of the situation. However, Barabas's provocations (he asks if strangers will contribute equally with natives) make Ferneze speak again, and his tone changes:
No, Jew, like infidels.
For through our sufferance of your hateful lives,
Who stand accursed in the sight of heaven,
These taxes and afflictions are befallen, (1.2.65-70)

Anti-Semitic outrage has replaced smooth words, underpinned by a reference to 'heaven', a word often on his lips. Religion is always useful if you need to sound justified. Then on to another rationalisation:
No, Jew, we take particularly thine
To save the ruin of the multitude:
And better one want for a common good,
Than many perish for a private man. (1.2.99-102)

[His words ironically echo those used by the High Priest to justify the crucifixion of Christ (John XI 50).] These speeches must be inauthentic because the justifications do not fit together. The first civil request implies that the Jews are part of the Maltese community. Then his rant sees the Jews as outsiders, who should pay because the tribute is a punishment on Malta for harbouring infidels. Then Barabas becomes part of the community again, a Christ figure, suffering that others might live. A few lines later and Ferneze is attacking Barabas for his 'profession'. (That word again; here it could be referring to the Jew's job, money lending, or his religion, and so it allows Ferneze to hover unchallengeably between religious bigotry and moral outrage.) Then Ferneze shifts on rapidly again, as self-dramatizers can because they are not committed to any one attitude. Any idea that the Jew is evil disappears:
If thou rely upon thy righteousness,
Be patient and thy riches will increase.
Excess of wealth is cause of covetousness:
And covetousness, oh `tis a monstrous sin. (1.2.124-127)

This is a marvellously oily, sanctimonious script; the pious little 'oh' to give vent to an excess of fervour is a fine touch.
Ferneze operates like this throughout. First, he went for an unheroic solution, squeezing money from the Jews to pay off the Turks. Then Del Bosco, the Vice Admiral of Spain, offers military help. Ferneze does not say 'Right chaps, we'll fight. The odds have changed'. He launches into improbable heroics:
Proud-daring Calymath, instead of gold,
We'll send thee bullets wrapped in smoke and fire.
... ... ... ... ... ... ...
Honour is bought with blood and not with gold. (1.2.53-56)

None of Ferneze's poses are just narcissism. An effective leader needs to sound justified, heroic, or moral, as required, to hearten his followers and to avoid debilitating self-questioning, but a play which foregrounds self-dramatization makes these processes especially visible. Interestingly, when the Turks have defeated Ferneze, what he says has none of the characteristics of self-dramatizing speeches. Instead of a speech, he delivers a one-line comment. It is prose, or unmetrical verse, and in the simplest language.
What should I say? We are captives and must yield. (5.5.6)

For Ferneze, unlike Barabas, speechifying is normally only done to some practical end.
The last words of the play are Ferneze's, and they are a fitting culmination of his performances throughout. Barabas had betrayed Malta to the Turks, but then had trusted Ferneze and planned with him to lure the Turks to feast in a monastery, which will then be blown up. Calymath was to be dropped into a boiling cauldron by a device that Barabas has designed. Ferneze, of course, grabs the chance to revenge his son's murder and casts Barabas into the cauldron instead. Then comes Ferneze's final speech:
So march away, and let due praise be given
Neither to fate nor fortune, but to heaven. (5.5.127-8)

Punishments in Elizabethan England were staged theatrical spectacles designed to teach moral and political lessons and to reinforce the dangers of disobedience (Sales 1991, 89-91). Similarly, the death of Barabas is staged with an on-stage audience, and Ferneze, the ruler, insists 'See his end first...'(5.5.70). Ferneze, then, is staging an exemplary spectacle, and his final rhyming couplet is drawing one strand of the moral. This speech corresponds to those near the end of tragedies that affirm that order is restored and the land cleansed. But Marlowe's plays often look as if they are going to teach orthodox lessons but somehow teasingly fail to do so in any simple way. Blasphemous Tamburlaine keeps on triumphing, Edward II seems an unsatisfactory monarch for use in a homily on obedience, and Faustus is not just the presumptuous mage who gets his comeuppance. Barabas and Ferneze are more than self-dramatizers; they both devise their own plays as well as act in them. Their two simultaneous productions are competing on the same stage for the same audience, and this will not allow Ferneze's summing-up to be accepted at face value. We are used to Ferneze's pious self-dramatizations so the spectacle of Barabas in the pot and Ferneze's last words, the kind of speech usually associated with closure, produces an ironic, dynamically open ending. It is an effect similar to the endings of Jane Austen novels, where everything is tied up so deftly, yet so obtrusively with pretty ribbon. ['Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery...'(1966, 446).] Such endings are the more provocative because they imply that they settle matters. So these lines raise a theological and political question. If it is not 'heaven', what really has led to this outcome?
One reason why Barabas loses and Ferneze wins is clear when we compare them, as the ending makes us do. Both are self-dramatizers, but, though Barabas speechifies about his Machiavellian 'policy', this turns out to be another inauthentic pose. As the Prologue would lead us to expect, the successful Machiavel, Ferneze, who says nothing about plotting or self-interest, and is not showy in his performances, dupes the would-be Machiavel with great ease, giving the praise to heaven, without, as far as we can tell, a flicker of awareness of his own sanctimoniousness. Ferneze may seem to fit the New Historicist/Cultural Materialist thesis that in this period there is no 'essential' self, only sequences of self-projections designed to assert power relations in given situations, because we are never shown a self behind his masks. Barabas seems a person partly constructed by the ideological discourses of that society, because the rôles he adopts are built from what society offers him. In particular he often plays the racist stereotype of the Jew which society expects of him. Stephen Greenblatt, in the most interesting New Historicist account of the play (1980), would see him as no more than that. He observes how much Barabas is addicted to worldly proverbs, cynical aphorisms and tags - 'all the neatly packaged nastiness of his society'(207) - and adds that
as the essence of proverbs is their anonymity, the effect of their recurrent use by Barabas is to render him more and more typical, to de-individualize him (208).

One of Barabas's tags which Greenblatt cites (208, 217) however, is provocative about how his self should be understood:
Ego mihimet sum semper proximus. (1.1.192)

Versions of it in English and Latin were common as proverbs of selfishness. Editors offer various translations: 'I am my own dearest friend' (Craik), or 'best friend' (Steane), or the most literal, 'I am always nearest to myself' meaning 'I always put my own interests first' (Bawcutt). Another translation is 'I am my nearest neighbour,' making it a cheeky answer to Christ's injunction to 'love thy neighbour as thyself' and to His question 'And who is my neighbour?' which led Christ to tell the story of another despised foreigner, the Good Samaritan. Because it is a proverb, and because of its selfish sentiments, it is a self-description which reminds us how much the discourses of society contributed to forming the self of Barabas. However, the line also reminds us eerily of how Barabas lacks a single certain identity. There is always a Barabas next to Barabas, either another rôle waiting in the wings or himself as audience appreciative of his own histrionic efforts. Furthermore, the line asks to be delivered with self-dramatizing relish and that underlines that part of his selfhood is not just derived from society. The zest and artistry with which he plays the Cunning Jew and his addiction to self-dramatization work against any simple understanding of him as a self entirely or largely determined by society. So his use of the proverb insists that there is in Barabas a self partly constructed by the stereotyping discourses of society, and a part of the self who is not easy with that identity. These two do not cohere, and the rôle society offers is hurtful, so Barabas responds to his unease by throwing himself addictively into part playing.
That connects with the sadness, which oozes from the line despite its cocky tone. Famously, writing of love and pity, Machiavelli advised those that would get and keep power that
Both dowbtlesse are necessarie, but seeinge it is hard to make them drawe both in one yoake, I think it more safetie (seeinge one must needes be wantinge) to be feared then lovede, for this maybe boldlie sayde of men, that they are vvngratefull, inconstante, discemblers, fearfull of dayngers, covetous of gayne (Craig 1944, 72).

(There is scholarly dispute as to whether Marlowe would have had access to Machiavelli's own words. The whole play can certainly seem as if it was built round this passage. It exemplifies and exposes the limitations of Machiavelli's doctrine.) If Barabas is his own nearest and dearest then he is an isolated loveless figure indeed. This line, and an exploration of self-dramatization in the play generally, confirm Harry Levin's thesis that Barabas is not the perfect villain he plays because, a despised outsider, he especially needs love, and admiration or respect from others (1954, 99); his self-dramatization and his desire for wealth and power are driven by that. When Abigail, whose love and uncritical support he relied on, turns against him, he races to fill the gap, saying to Ithamore 'Come near, my love, come near...' (3.4.14). Love leads to trust, and trust always leads to betrayal in this play. Barabas trusts Ithamore with his secrets, and is betrayed. Later he is driven to trust Ferneze.
Barabas's addiction to self-dramatization obscures from him the obvious truth about Ferneze. His slide towards his downfall is lubricated by his playing the noble liberator of Malta. His words imply a steady natural process rather than the scheming persecuted scramble that we have seen:
And in this city still have had success,
And now at length am grown your Governor. (5.2.70-71)

In other rôles Barabas would laugh at the notion of a deal with Ferneze, especially one done in this take-the-chap's-word-for-it way, but he and Ferneze shake hands, and with a grand gesture he even refuses to take the money, Ferneze's part of the bargain, straight away. These actions go with the part he is playing. Just before Calymath and the Bashaws walk into his trap, he adds
Now tell me, worldlings, underneath the sun,
If greater falsehood ever has been done. (5.5.50-1)

The lines show us his need for admiration. Yet in Machiavellian terms the enterprise he glories in is foolish; he is doing it because he is not a single-minded Machiavellian, not a 'worldling'. So he is destroyed by the need for love and respect, by the addiction to self-dramatization that seems connected with those needs, and specifically because he is not the Machiavel he plays.
It is possible to write about Barabas in these terms for two reasons. Firstly, theatre is always a two-fold experience. We can be absorbed by the action, sometimes almost forgetting that it is a play but never quite forgetting. We always know that it is a play and that we are in the theatre. Evolutionary psychology seems to explain and validate the tendency to deduce selves from slender or even unpropitious evidence, and the part of us which is absorbed by the action will do this. Combined with evidence of an increased focus on interiority in the period, evolutionary psychology justifies the impulse to respond to the dramatis personae of Early Modern plays as psychological entities. This does not prevent us also from being aware of the 'dramatic persona as paradigm or discursive category' (Grantley 1996, 227). However, traditional character criticism found Barabas unsuitable grist to its mill. Nonetheless, there is a second reason why Barabas can be responded to in naturalistic psychological terms. It seems likely that Marlowe, endowed by evolution with the same 'theory of mind' modules (Humphrey 1984) as the rest of us, and touched by the interest in interiority of the age, opportunistically seized and systematically used the popular but unnaturalistic theatrical conventions he inherited in ways that turn them into features which suggest self-dramatization. This produces characters that invite imaginative exploration as 'real people' do. So these plays are notable precursors of those works like Hamlet which featured naturalistic exploration of character and rôle-play in 'real life' performed in playhouses by the end of the century. It seems likely that, as the theatre developed, its conventions fostered a more sharply focussed awareness of the ways in which 'all the world's a stage.'

Notes

According to the eighteenth century antiquarian Sir William Oldys. Dutton (1989) makes this sound plausible.
The cowardly inverted commas round 'real' are intended to signal that the nature of the real is problematic, but there is no space for that kind of philosophical discussion here.
See, for instance, Hattaway l968, 102; Kelsall l98l, 135; Steane l964, 178, 221, 232; Rothstein l96l, 137; Bawcutt l978, 22-23; Levin l954, 94, 118, 126; Bradbrook 1935, 133; Maxwell, 1956, 171, 173; Sanders 1968, 238; Hattaway l982, 56; Goldman 1977; Goldman 1989; Simkin 1999. Of course, the whole preoccupation with self and identity in post-modernist criticism has led to discussions that are relevant but operate in different terms. See Greenblatt 1980, especially 193-221. Again, though he comes at it from a different angle, much that meshes with my argument is to be found in Lindley 1989.
For instance, Ellis Fermor (1927) saw a fierce onslaught on christianity, while Battenhouse (1941) found in Tamburlaine an orthodox repudiation of the anti-Christian attitudes. Kocher (1946) saw in Dr Faustus Marlowe's unceasing battle with Christianity, while Kirschbaum (1943) argued that if the work were anonymous it would be obvious that it was the most Christian play in all Elizabethan Drama.
Marlowe quotations from New Mermaid editions
For the case for self-dramatization in Doctor Faustus, see Webb 1999.
Such as Eagleton 1983, 80-81, Barker and Hulme 1985, 191-205 For a fuller attempt to refute the New Historicist insistence on the disunitedness of texts see Levin 1992, 39-56.
Eliot l927. Following Eliot, Leavis argues that 'a habit of self-approving self-dramatization an essential element in Othello's make-up, and remains so at the very end' (l952).
McAlindon makes the same case for philosophy that I would make for psychology, suggesting that New Historicists are curiously silent about the work of Saul Kripke, Hilary Putnam and Scott Meikle, all essentialist thinkers.
Richard Dutton (1992, Postscript) summarises the objections which have been raised to New Historicism and its view of the self, and where the ensuing pre-1992 debates can be found. Vickers (1993) criticises New Historicism, and offers a list of other objectors (462, n4). Other relevant items not noted (often because more recent) by Dutton include Aers (1991, 20-34), Levin (1992) Levin (1995, 425-48; 1995a, 1995b) McAlindon's two articles, (1995a; 1995b), and Maus (1995). Recent Levin and McAlindon pieces are helpfully analysed by Coyle (1996). See also Murray 1996.
Gurr 1970, 73. The term 'personation' first gets into print in the Induction to Marston's Antonio and Mellida.
1808; reprinted by Russell Brown (1982, 28).
Probably artificial, though James Shapiro has doubts about this (1996, 240, n. 96.)
T. W. Craik, New Mermaid edition, I ii 174-6n.
Clemen 1961, 230f. See also Steane 1964, 181n.
For the view that the allusion to Job has a more complex destabilising effect see Ian McAdam (1996, 46-74)

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'Pageants truly played':

Self-dramatization and naturalistic character in The Jew of Malta

DAVID WEBBST MARTIN'S COLLEGE, LANCASTER

Notes

List of Works Cited

DAVID WEBB
ST MARTIN'S COLLEGE, LANCASTER