7 - The Jew of Malta and the Diabolic Power of Theatrics

Summary

The beginning of The Jew of Malta highlights Barabas’ demonic ambition and thirst for monetary power. Unreasonably forced to forfeit his property, Barabas goes into a frenzy of rage against Christians. His Jewish fellows add fuel to the fire, acting like Job's comforters. After a while, however, the audience realizes that Barabas is not a sufferer like Job, but only pretends to be. After his friends have left the stage, he says with admirable composure:

See the simplicity of these base slaves,

Who for the villains have no wit themselves

Think me to be a senseless lump of clay

That will with every water wash to dirt!

No, Barabas is born to better chance

And framed of finer mould than common men,

That measure naught but by the present time.

A reaching thought will search his deepest wits,

And cast with cunning for the time to come,

For evils are apt to happen every day.

Here Barabas defines his new personality. According to him, humanity can be divided into two types: ‘base slaves’ who ‘have no wit themselves’, and those ‘framed of finer mould than common men’. His admiration for the ‘finer mould’ brings us back to his famous soliloquy at the beginning of the play. Barabas feels disgusted with the ‘silverings’, or Jewish silver coins called shekels, and it is on the ‘metal of the purest mould’ from the New World that he sets a higher value (i.i.6, 20). As Sandra K. Fischer comments, Barabas ‘throws off his heritage and becomes representative of the modern mercantilist’. In the same way, he rejects the simplicity of the Jewish ‘earth-mettled villains’, turning himself into a representative of emergent villains having metal/mettle of finer mould (i.ii.79). What makes him so distinctively modern is the wit with which he casts schemes ‘with cunning for the time to come’, referring not only to the ability to plan ahead, as will be evident throughout the play, but also to his talent for devising fictions with tricks and disguises that ‘shall be cunningly performed’ (ii.iii.369). His strategy to survive thus consists of his wit to ‘cast’ a variety of plots and ‘like a cunning spirit feign some lie’ (ii.iii.384). I will term this strategy ‘theatrics’, with a connotation of theatrical tricks or theatricks.