The Jew of Malta

by Christopher Marlowe

Overview

"One of the best editions for undergraduates. . . . All the editorial material is kept brief, unobtrusive, relevant, and crisp in style. The introduction is informative, sound, and suggestive rather than dogmatic. . . . [Van Fossen] is especially skillful in summarizing in a graceful and interesting manner the issues that have stirred critics and editors. . . . The whole publication seems almost perfect in design and presentation; it invites one to read the play." -Choice

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9788827565254
Publisher:	Studium Legis
Publication date:	02/06/2018
Sold by:	StreetLib SRL
Format:	eBook
File size:	578 KB

About the Author

Christopher Marlowe (1564-93) was an English playwright and poet, who through his establishment of blank verse as a medium for drama did much to free the Elizabethan theatre from the constraints of the medieval and Tudor dramatic tradition. His first play Tamburlaine the Great, was performed that same year, probably by the Admiral's Men with Edward Alleyn in the lead. Marlowe's most famous play, The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus, based on the medieval German legend of the scholar who sold his soul to the devil, was probably written and produced by 1590, although it was not published until 1604. Marlowe was killed in a London tavern in May 1593. Although Marlowe's writing career lasted for only six years, his four major plays make him easily the most important predecessor of Shakespeare.

Chloe Kathleen Preedy is a Senior Lecturer in Shakespeare and Renaissance Literature at the University of Exeter, UK. She is the author of Marlowe's Literary Scepticism: Politic Religion and Post-Reformation Polemic (2013), which won the Roma Gill Prize 2015, and sits on the editorial board for the jourbanal Marlowe Studies. She is a principal investigator for the AHRC-funded project Atmospheric Theatre: Open-Air Performance and the Environment (2018-21) and her related monograph, Theatres of the Air: Representing Aerial Environments on the Early Modern Stage, 1576-1609, is forthcoming with Oxford University Press.

William H. Sherman is Director of the Warburg Institute and Professor of Cultural History in the University of London's School of Advanced Study, UK. He was founding director of the Centre for Renaissance & Early Modern Studies (CREMS) at the University of York, UK and of the V&A Research Institute (VARI) at the Victoria and Albert Museum, UK. His work on the history of books and readers includes John Dee: The Politics of Reading and Writing in the English Renaissance (1995) and Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England (2008). He has edited plays by Shakespeare and his contemporaries and books about them, including 'The Tempest' and its Travels (co-edited with Peter Hulme, 2000), and served as Associate Editor of Shakespeare Quarterly for more than a decade.

Table of Contents

List of illustrations viii

General editors' preface x

Preface xiv

Introduction 1

Christopher Marlowe's life and works 5

Religious and political discourse 11

Malta and the early modern Mediterranean 21

Jews in early modern Europe 37

Genre and dramatic form 49

Performance history 61

The Jew of Malta and The Merchant of Venice 76

Quarto paratext 89

The Jew of Malta 97

Appendix: The text 269

Commentary on Q (1633), sig. H2^v 286

Abbreviations and references 289

Abbreviations used in notes 289

Short titles for works by Marlowe 289

Works by and partly by Shakespeare 290

Abbreviations for journals 290

Editions of The Jew of Malta collated 291

Other works cited 292

Index 321

Editorial Reviews

A farce of terribly serious, even savage comic humour.” —T.S Eliot

From the Publisher

"The Jew of Malta is one of early modern England's most controversial plays on its most controversial topic—the collision of world religions. Martin's terrific new edition brilliantly captures the gist of its cut-and-thrust. The introduction offers readers a sophisticated entrée into Anglo-Ottoman relations, European anti-Semitism, theatre history, and Machiavellianism. The edition is elegantly edited, with many resources for readers who want to understand one of Marlowe's greatest plays in its historical milieu."

Alan Shepard

"The great strength of Mathew Martin's edition is the ease of access it gives scholars and students to one of Marlowe's strangest and most disturbing plays. He achieves this not simply by exemplary annotations, but by framing Marlowe's text within an introduction and richly informative appendices that place the play securely in its contemporary social, cultural, and political contexts, enabling readers to negotiate complexities of tone and racial attitudes with subtle insight. The effect is precisely to highlight the daring originality of Marlowe's dramatic artistry and his exacting control of both the arts of performance and his audience's responses."

Richard Allen Cave