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and influential community. This worshipful company was formerly much celebrated for a burlesque procession it made annually from Deptford to Greenwich, in which each person wore some ornament of horn upon his head. This festival was supposed to have originated in a compulsory grant wrung from King John when he was detected in an adventure of gallantry at Eltham.101

Marlowe's next drama was The Jew of Malta. Stephen Gosson, an old scholar of the King's School at Canterbury, in his work entitled The Schoole of Abuse, published in 1579, and, in somewhat contradictory terms, called 'a pleasant invective against Poets, Pipers, Plaiers, Jesters, and such like Caterpillers of a Commonwealth,' expressly exempts from his otherwise almost universal denunciation of dramatic writings a play called The Jew. Nothing is known of this play, but the early date of the reference to it precludes it from any possibility of having been Marlowe's. This being so it has been assumed that it furnished the groundwork for the later Jew of Malta, but as no copy of this earlier piece has come to light the suggestion, as mere unsupported supposition, may be neglected.

Although the earliest known edition of Marlowe's Jew of Malta is that of 1633, the play itself was produced on the stage about the early part of 1589. The drama was brought out by Lord Strange's players, for whom Marlowe was still writing, and who continued to act at the Cross-Keys, notwith

standing the incessant opposition of the corporation. As the introductory lines contain a reference to the death of the Duke of Guise, who was assassinated in 1588, the drama could not have been written earlier than that year, unless the allusion was a later interpolation, which is not improbable, seeing how corrupt the text is.

In The Jew of Malta Marlowe sought once more to depict the attempt of a strong mind to domineer over his fellowmen. As Tamburlaine attempted to gain his ends by force of arms, as Faustus did by means of Learning's golden gifts,' so did Barabbas seek supremacy by the power of wealth. In this Jew the greed for riches is sublimated and even ennobled; his longing for inexhaustible wealth is not the vulgar avarice of a Shylock, heaping up riches for riches' sake, but an intense lust for gold as a means for the acquisition of power, and as a tangible evidence of his supremacy over the rabble. The grandeur of his passion for wealth, his grandiose efforts to heap up 'infinite riches in a little room,' exhalt Barabbas to heroic proportions, so that Shylock is a pigmy in comparison. The treatment the Maltese Jew receives excites our pity; the magnitude of his crimes-of his revenge-almost compels our admiration.

If the conception of this drama be not so original as that of Faustus, the execution of it, at least so far as the two first acts are concerned, is more artistic. The hand of a mature workman is now apparent, and

the glow of youth which permeated every fibre of Tamburlaine is now seen restrained, the weird aspirations of a Faustus subdued and replaced by the practical knowledge of a man of the world. The two first acts of this drama are regarded by Hallam as 'more vigorously conceived, both as to character and to circumstance, than any other Elizabethan play, except those of Shakespeare'; 102 and it must be averred that not only is Shakespeare's indebtedness to it strongly marked, but that instances can be cited to show that he did not always improve what he adapted from his contemporary.

Yet The Jew of Malta is regarded as the most unequal of Marlowe's known plays. The masterful grasp that marks the opening scene was a new thing in English tragedy,' is the opinion of his latest editor. 'Language so strong, so terse, so dramatic, had never been heard before on the English stage. In the two first acts there is not a trace of juvenility; all is conceived largely and worked out in firm, bold strokes.' 103 How it came about that the firm hand was fettered and the potent stroke grew feeble may not be known, although it is easy to imagine. In all probability the success of his previous productions had been so phenomenal that he was urged to further efforts; his brain, weary and exhausted by the demands made upon it, could not continue to engender masterpieces to order, so that the work he had started upon so grandly was scamped. Instead of carving out a peerless statue for the admiration of

posterity, he has left nothing more than a partially hewn bust; yet the fact must not be overlooked that the work has evidently been tampered with by hack revisers.

It is the opinion of a perplexed commentator that in the last three acts of The Jew of Malta, 'vigorous drawing is exchanged for caricature; for a sinister lifelike figure we have a grotesque stage-villain,' but this seems going further than facts justify. Great as the falling-off in characterisation may be, it must not be overlooked that Barabbas has had terrible provocation, and that if he were transformed to a demon, with a ghoulish monomania for murder, the transformation is due to the unbearable wrongs which had been inflicted upon him.

Haste in execution has decidedly injured the play; but although Marlowe may not be 'quite guiltless of the extravagance and buffoonery of the last three acts of The Jew of Malta,' it is possible that some later interpolations may have been made to suit popular taste, and that despite the fiendish ferocity which the hero ultimately displays, he is after all the most natural and lifelike of his author's creations. Barabbas is no shadowy prototype of Shylock, but a being of flesh and blood and dowered with the passions of humanity. Like his Venetian brother, notwithstanding his overweening ambition, he does not disdain to stoop to conquer, for 'we Jews,' he explains,

'We Jews can fawn like spaniels when we please:
And when we grin we bite, yet are our looks

As innocent and harmless as a lamb's.
I learned in Florence how to kiss my hand,
Heave up my shoulders when they call me dog,
And duck as low as any barefoot friar;
Hoping to see them starve upon a stall,
Or else be gathered for in our synagogue,
That, when the offering basin comes to me,
Even for charity I may spit into 't.'

The superlatively rich Jew of Malta, although defrauded like his successor of Venice, is of a hardier and more vigorous mind than Shylock. With a few subtle touches the strength of his character is displayed; when, for instance, finding himself bereft of all his beloved treasure, instead of giving way to despair, or succumbing to self-murder, to

'Vanish o'er the earth in air

And leave no memory that e'er I was,'

he sets to work to reap riches anew, and to plot dire vengeance on his cruel foes.

The Jew of Malta possesses a nearer approach to a plot than either of its predecessors from Marlowe's pen; and yet the story is made up of nothing more than the schemes of Barabbas to counteract his Christian adversaries and revenge himself upon them for their cruel and unjust treatment. The opening

scene depicts the Jew seated in his counting-house. In a masterly monologue he describes his untold wealth, and after referring with scorn to the petty coins, the 'paltry silverlings,' he has just been paid by the men who bought his 'Spanish oils and winęs of Greece,' he continues:

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