The Jew of Malta: A Norton Critical Edition

by Christopher Marlowe, Lloyd Kermode (Editor)

Overview

“Lloyd Kermode’s Norton Critical Edition of The Jew of Malta succeeds in making this challenging play eminently teachable by providing a carefully edited, modernized text complete with clear annotations and a judicious selection of contextual and critical materials. Particularly valuable is the way that the volume allows students to see how understandings of the play and its depiction of Jews have changed over time. Kermode’s gathering of contextual materials offers a convenient and much-needed resource for getting to grips with the challenges of ‘otherness’ both in the early modern world and in our own.” - Dympna C. Callaghan, Syracuse University

This Norton Critical Edition includes:

• The 1633 quarto (Q) text—the only authoritative version—with modernized spelling and detailed explanatory annotations.

• An unusually rich selection of sixteenth- and seventeenth century contexts, thematically organized to promote classroom discussion. Topics include “Theater and Marlowe,” “Machiavelli and Mediterranean Identities,” and “Ideas of the Jew.”

• Twenty-eight critical interpretations spanning three centuries, including several considerations of The Jew of Malta in performance and new scholarly perspectives on text and culture.

• Editorial prefaces and a Textual Notes section.

• Six illustrations and one map.

• A chronology and a selected bibliography.

 

About the Series

Read by more than 12 million students over fifty-five years, Norton Critical Editions set the standard for apparatus that is right for undergraduate readers. The three-part format—annotated text, contexts, and criticism—helps students to better understand, analyze, and appreciate the literature, while opening a wide range of teaching possibilities for instructors. Whether in print or in digital format, Norton Critical Editions provide all the resources students need.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393643350
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	11/30/2020
Series:	Norton Critical Editions Series
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	576
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 8.50(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

LLOYD EDWARD KERMODE is Professor of English at California State University, Long Beach. He edited Three Renaissance Usury Plays for the Revels Companion series (2009) and coedited Tudor Drama before Shakespeare (2004) and the collection “Space and Place in Early Modern Drama” for the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies (2013). He is the author of Aliens and Englishness in Elizabethan Drama (2009), and of a number of essays on cultural identity in literature and on the theory and experience of space in early modern England.

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

"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

"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

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

From the Publisher