The Jew of Malta

Before his brief life came to its shockingly violent end, Shakespeare’s contemporary Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593) wrote four daring, outrageous masterpieces of verse drama. The Jew of Malta, the most startling of them (and perhaps for that reason the least frequently revived) tells the story of Barabas, the wealthiest man on the island of Malta: Cheated out of his fortune by the government after he has saved Malta from the Turks, Barabas dedicates his life to wholesale revenge in ways that are terrifying and often terrifyingly funny. A super-hero who is also a super-villain, in what some have thought of as the blank verse equivalent of a comic book, he is a figure for the ages, in a black comedy played out on an epic scale.