The Famous Tragedy of the Rich Jew [Ievv] of Malta

Marlowe, Christopher (1564-1593)

Edité par Printed by I.B. for Nicholas Vavasour, and are to be sold at his Shop in the Inner Temple, neere the Church, London, 1633

A propos de cet article

Bound in modern full dark brown morocco circa 1984, in a custom box. A fine copy, lightly washed, unpressed, the paper preserving its rattle. All edges gilt. Provenance: Ximenes (sold 1993), with receipt and scan of a note from Steve Weissman regarding the sale. "Although written about 1589 and entered in the Stationers' Registers in 1594, no earlier edition than the present is known. The fact that the 1594 entry (Arber II 650) entitles the play, 'The famous tragedie' seems to indicate some relation with the present for which Vavasour made an original entry in 1632. However, the text here printed has been edited and revised by Heywood at a date which does not admit of this being a reprint of a 1594 edition while the use of the world 'famous' in the title of this edition may be from the tradition of the play-bills, as was the case in Cooke's Greenes Tu Quoque, and not from the usage of an earlier printed title." (Pforzheimer) ?The first recorded performance of play took place at the Rose Theatre on 26 February 1592. ?Whether Marlowe could have been present at the play's opening in February is uncertain, for a month earlier he had been arrested for 'coynage'?coining money?in Flushing, or Vlissingen, in the Netherlands, and deported back to England 'to be tryed'.?(DNB) ?Christopher Marlowe?s controversial career was abruptly curtailed when he was stabbed to death at the age of 29. His reputation as the greatest of the pre-Shakespearean dramatists rests on just seven plays written in the late 1580s and early 1590s. The best known of these is ?Doctor Faustus? a thunderous study of magic and damnation. But perhaps the bleakest and most challenging of his works is ?The Jew of Malta? now at the Swan theatre in Stratford in a new production by the Royal Shakespeare Company directed by Justin Audibert. ?The timing of this revival is almost uncanny. While ?Doctor Faustus? scared its early audiences with visions of hellfire, ?The Jew of Malta? seems tailor-made for more topical fears. Its chief theme is antisemitism. It is a story of religious tensions and racist violence, of tangled motives and shifting sympathies, played out against the backdrop of a cynical society whose true creed is neither religion nor ideology but grasping materialist greed. A searchable online text reveals the play?s keywords to be ?gold?, which occurs 38 times, followed by ?death? (25), ?villain? and ?villainy? (24), ?money? (23), ?poison? (18), ?slave? (16) and ?policy? (13) ? the last in its Elizabethan sense of cunning machiavellian stratagems. The presentation of the eponymous Jew, Barabas, veers between victim, anti-hero and monster. Brutalised ? or as we now say ?radicalised? ? by ill treatment, he goes on a spree of cold-blooded killings. His victims are mostly Christians, but they also include his own daughter Abigail, who has fled to a nunnery, and a troop of Turkish soldiers burned alive in their garrison. He sums up his code of conduct, or survival, thus: First, be thou void of these affections: Compassion, love, vain hope, and heartless fear; Be moved at nothing; see thou pity none. ?All this might suggest an uncomfortable evening in store, but with Marlowe such expectations are there to be upended, and this toxic cocktail of alienation and murder is laced throughout with deadpan black comedy. Think ?Wolf Hall? reimagined by Quentin Tarantino, and you begin to get the feel of it. The title page of the first extant edition (1633) describes the play as a tragedy, but as TS Eliot observed nearly a century ago, it becomes more ?intelligible? if one takes it ?not as a tragedy ? but as a farce?, written in a tone of ?serious, even savage comic humour? Eliot also enjoyed the equivocating shrug of Barabas?s response to a charge of fornication ? ?But that was in another country, / And besides the wench is dead? ? and took it for the epigraph for his poem ?Portrait of a Lady? ?The play is sometimes dated to around 1589, as it mentions the death of the Duke of G.

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Détails bibliographiques

• Titre: The Famous Tragedy of the Rich Jew [Ievv] of Malta
• Éditeur: Printed by I.B. for Nicholas Vavasour, and are to be sold at his Shop in the Inner Temple, neere the Church, London
• Date de parution: 1633
• Reliure: Hardcover
• Édition: FIRST EXTANT EDITION.
• État de l'article: Fine
• Catalogues du vendeur:
  • Drama
  • England