English Renaissance Drama and the Specter of Spain: Ethnopoetics and Empire

FOUR: Marlowe Among the Machevills

c h a p t e r f o u r Marlowe Among the Machevills But so truly he loveth, imbraceth, and nourisheth the Gospell, as he burneth and bannisheth out of his territories, infinite swarmes of rich Jewes, sworne enemies to the Gospel. . . . so he loveth, imbraceth, and nourisheth the Gospel, that he maketh his Jesuits, and Shavelings forget all Gospel, and mangleth, and massacreth all true professors of the Gospell. —G.B., A Fig for the Spaniard, or Spanish Spirits, 1591, 1592 Ye strangers yt doe inhabite in this lande Note this same writing doe it understand Conceit it well for savegard of your lyves Your goods, your children, & your dearest wives Your Machiavellian Marchant spoyles the state, Your usery doth leave us all for deade Your Artifex, & craftsment works our fate, And like the Jewes, you eat us up as bread. —“A Libell, fixte upon the French Church Wall,” 1593 Marano. A Jew, an Infidell, a renagado, a nickname for a Spaniard. —John Florio, A World of Wordes, 1598 No other elizabethan play explores and exploits English attitudes toward ethnic outsiders so thoroughly as The famouse tragedie of the Riche Jewe of Malta (c. 1589–91).1 Projecting England’s nascent colonialist and mercantilist 98 chapter four desires into the Mediterranean, Marlowe unfolds a tableau of early modern anxieties concerning the reflexive effects of empire’s outward energies on the inner lives of its subjects. By embodying contemporary fears about “impurities ” of ethos and ethnos, his representation draws upon a range of contemporary discourses in order to picture a Maltese community that resembles Elizabethan England as much as it does the island evoked in its title. The various rhetorics of nationhood and ethnicity in which Marlowe’s play partakes enable us, in turn, to audit some of the ways in which international history could be enlisted in the service of nationalist aims. As he plays upon England’s figural identification with the island of Malta, Marlowe’s typological orchestration looks toward a vision of community solidarity by offering a brutally nationalistic perspective on the exercise of force. At the same time, The Jew of Malta demonstrates how ambiguous signs of ethnicity may be remade in such a way as to signify absolute and irredeemable otherness. Raising a Spanish specter that is at once religiopolitical, geographic, economic , and linguistic, the play’s argument expresses a worldview as supportive of the darker inclinations of early modern statecraft as it was potentially devastating to those unlucky enough to find themselves on the receiving end of power. If Kyd’s generative tragedy declines the low road of essentialization, Marlowe’s generically mixed drama revels in ethnopoesis. Given the kind of “humour” in which Marlowe indulges—in essence, a humor of kind—it is not surprising that audiences have found the play increasingly difficult to abide. T. S. Eliot may have accurately expressed the nature of the gap between modern and Elizabethan tastes. Betraying, as it does, a “terribly serious , even savage comic humour,” Eliot concluded that we should read The Jew of Malta “not as a tragedy, or as a ‘tragedy of blood,’ but as a farce.”2 To rehearse Marlowe’s drama in this register is to enter the confused, disturbing, and often contradictory climate in which English nationhood was shaped; it is also to explain something of the playwright’s power to command contemporary audiences. Strangers Christopher Marlowe unleashed The Jew of Malta upon a community of theatergoers whose attitudes toward London’s growing immigrant community were characterized by profound ambivalences and anxieties. Oscillating between sympathetic identification and outright contempt, English men and Marlowe Among the Machevills 99 women were discomfited by the presence of “strangers” in their midst, even when they understood why they ought to be offering support. As the 1590s unfolded, England began to experience a time of dearth and high unemployment, which brought many “foreigners” (that is, native inhabitants of distant English shires) to an already crowded London in search of relief. Once there, they jostled with émigrés who were busily establishing an economic block of their own. Shopkeepers especially complained that London’s resident aliens had been “illegally trading in the retail of foreign goods.”3 It was a situation fraught with difficulty, all the more so because the Elizabethans had come to rely on their stranger community, to whom they often turned for assistance, whether...