Marlowe’s sacred city and the walls in The Jew of Malta

The walls and the city

European cities were developed in order to drive out diseases such as leprosy and the bubonic plague from the community, and the spatial constructions of cities can be used to embody discipline and governmentality. ¹ The brick and mortar boundaries of early modern cities illustrated the operation of power over life, and London was not an exception. During Christopher Marlowe’s time, London’s walls were vanishing. John Stow, the city’s chorographer, records in The Survey of London that ‘the ditch’ of the walls was already ‘filled up’ by leaving a ‘small channel’ because the city margins were ‘let out for garden-plots, carpenters’ yards, bowling allies, and diverse houses’. ² The city’s walls and their ruins, nonetheless, like vanishing traces on parchment, recorded the history of London divided into intra- and extramural spaces.

As Steven Mullaney convincingly demonstrates, in Marlowe’s time, lazar houses were located along London’s outskirts. They were ‘licensed by the Crown’, and before the Reformation ‘they were jointly administered by the city and the church’. ³ The irony of this social phenomenon emerging in the 16th century is that the walls of the city embodied a governing discipline of the city community, but they were punctuated simultaneously by lazar houses that defined the urban space by ringing the city’s boundary. Still today, in French, a mouldering stone-wall is called ‘lépreuse’, evoking the traces of leprosaria lurking at the city wall. ⁴ The city walls were, therefore, a symbol that distinguished the normal from the diseased, by functioning as boundaries of immunity for society.

Early modern city walls, at the same time, were a juridical phenomenon. They functioned metaphorically as a juridical shield for the intramural space; in particular, pre- and early modern London walls symbolised legal justice by containing the prisons themselves. Poet John Taylor (1580–1653) praised the ‘Vertue of a Jayle and Jaylers’ that describes a prison as a ‘School of virtue’, ‘a house of study and of contemplation’, ‘a place of discipline and reformation’, and considers it an immunity device by regarding the city’s prisons as a ‘Physicke that preserves a common wealth’. ⁵ As Taylor describes, early modern London had eighteen prisons. Among them, major institutions such as Newgate, Ludgate, and the Tower formed parts of the city walls, and some others were adjacent to the city walls. ⁶

London walls, in this light, comprised the limen of the city community and represented an immunity function par excellence in both medical and legal senses by quarantining the city from diseases and foreign invasions. Italian biopolitical philosopher Roberto Esposito claims that ‘the first nomos – which was sovereign over life and death’ – is situated at the point of ‘indistinction between the preservation and exclusion’, and London’s walls played such a role by remaining simultaneously inclusive and exclusive. ⁷ To meditate upon the very function of the city walls is inseparable from the philosophy of immunity – one of the key issues of biopolitics that binds legal, religious, and biomedical issues together. The concept of immunity is conterminous with Carl Schmitt’s concept of sovereignty – at once inside and outside of the communal-constitutional body – in that it belongs to community, but at the same time, it is independent from it. Its basic function is to preserve the ‘common’, but it belongs to the community by an exception. ⁸ This paradoxical concept is easy to grasp when we think of the exceptional legal status that high state officials such as the president enjoy, as it is similar to sovereignty. Immunity is an interesting concept with which to conceive a community because it decides the level of tolerance; for this reason, the term is widely appropriated to understand issues of immigration and cultural hybridity as well as biomedicine. ⁹

Immunity is useful for grasping Marlowe’s philosophy in The Jew of Malta by analysing the figurative operation of city walls, because the play’s discussion of corpus politicum is at once a biological and legal construction. My discussion will revolve around the walls of Malta in the play as a rhetorical entity, performing the role of the city’s immunity. Marlowe’s play is set in Malta, but Machiavelli’s opening speech notes pointedly that the real cultural geography of the play lies in London: ‘I come not, I, / To read a lecture here in Britany, / But to present the tragedy of a Jew’ (Prologue 28–30). ¹⁰ In this sense, the Maltese walls, as a definition of the political community, form an allegory of the walls encircling London.

Marlowe is arguably the early modern playwright who is most obsessed with cartography. He situates his Jew in Malta, a multi-racial and multicultural island, which does not have any official indigenous culture. Marlowe’s Malta is, as Emily Bartels has shown, a no man’s land in the Mediterranean area where identity is extremely mercurial, and it is ‘the Other’s other’ with no fixed or homogeneous communal identity. ¹¹ Marlowe’s play only shows this small island’s constant struggle between the Spanish Empire and Ottoman Empire. Yet still we read Malta as a society or community – a geographical, legal, and political entity even though we hardly discern the island’s proper indigenous culture. Why? What gives Malta a governing polity that is differentiated from the sea, which, as Schmitt observes, is ‘free of any type of state spatial sovereignty’? ¹² The answer is relevant to the city’s mural enclosure:

Bashaw, in brief, shalt have no tribute here,

Nor shall the heathens live upon our spoil.

First will we raze the city walls ourselves,

Lay waste the island, hew the temples down,

And, shipping off our goods to Sicily,

Open an entrance for the wasteful sea,

Whose billows, beating the resistless banks,

Shall overflow it with their refluence. (3.5.11–18)

Ferneze knows the significance of the walls, and his resolution is to ‘die before the walls’ (5.1.5) with his soldiers because the walls, as opposed to the Maltese island, delineate the political body to be protected. What Ferneze wants to do is to define Malta as a sacred Christian koinonia immune from the Islamo-Turks. Thus, the walls function as a mark of separation between what could be allowed into the community and what should be expelled from the city. Émile Benveniste distinguishes the word ‘sanctus’ from the word ‘sacer’: ‘What is sanctus is the wall and not the domain enclosed by it, which is said to be sacer’. ¹³ His point is that what is sanctus, as an immunity shield, is the borderline and limen of the sacrum as it divides the sacred community from all that is unholy outside of it. Thus, if the town of Malta as a Christian community is sacred, its protective borderline – the walls – is sanctus. This spatial logic is maintained throughout Marlowe’s play.

Interestingly, Marlowe’s imaginary cartography of Malta fully explores city spaces, not inside but outside of the walls. The area between the sea and the city’s mural enclosure is not void but is complete with lives; this liminal space includes places such as Barabas’s house (later converted to a nunnery) and monasteries, as well as citadels or prisons that form parts of the walls. Marlowe loves to depict extramural space only to imagine the communal life within the city; this area is in the Maltese island by being excluded from it at the same time. Similar to early modern London, this exclusive inclusion is necessary because the city needs rooms to host alien bodies such as Jews and Turks along with nuns and friars (subject to cenobitic lives), and lumpens (courtesans and pimps). They are all excluded from the city proper, only to be found at the peripheries of the city. In fact, the issue raised by the Mediterranean city-state is an immunity crisis, and the conflict is formed around the borderline, the walls.

Considering the corporeal and biological metaphor of the city-state along with the immune function of the walls, I wish to situate Marlowe’s work within the framework of early modern medical discourses that understood the body politic as a living organism operating to dispel invading pathogens. Whereas Girolamo Fracastoro, an Italian Renaissance physician, gradually shifted medical science from the Gallenic concept of humours to his own theory of semina to explain social phenomena brought by the plague, Paracelsus founded his own medical discourse on the chemical principle of homoeopathy. ¹⁴ The old Gallenic humoural theory formed a frequent topic for English Renaissance stages by claiming that the humoural imbalance should be restored by a counterpoising humour. Paracelsus instead claimed that only poison cures poison and the same pathogen that caused illness could cure the disease; thus, the very illness or invasive pathogen is instrumental in maintaining the immune system of the body. ¹⁵

Early modern medical thoughts were inseparable from religious and political discourses at the same time. For example, Thomas Starkey’s Dialogue between Reginald Pole and Thomas Lupset (1535), a Tudor discussion of ideal commonwealth, deploys a discourse of medicine to explain the body politic of the nation and the health of the state coterminous with its internal balance. William Averell’s A Meruailous Combat of Contrarieties (1588), a discussion of commonwealth contemporary with Marlowe, is not entirely different, but it tends to understand the body politic as an enclosure that should be protected from infiltrating pathogens. ¹⁶ In particular, Averell says,

If there be a breach in a wall, the boar will break in, and spoil the whole vineyard […] if there be a breach in a fort, the enemy will enter and suck the town […] if there be a breach of love in the hearts of a people, the enemy will take advantage for the invasion of the kingdom. ¹⁷

The walls and the wells

The London walls raise the Jewish question in a peculiar way. John Stow records proudly that parts of the walls were made of the Jews’ demolished houses after their expulsion by Edward I. ¹⁸ Thus, the walls are a manifest sign of the Jews’ absence, and the imaginary fantasy of ethnic purity of London as a symbol of the city’s repulsive mechanism. The lingering irony, however, is that because of the walls, Jews were symbolically ever-present within the city boundary by being a talismanic sign of exorcism. In other words, the walls of the city are a fascinating physical metaphor that suggests the medical function of homoeopathy, where the illness – in this case, the Jews with their so-called ‘first curse’ – becomes protection against that same illness. This symbolic operation, as we shall observe, is not entirely different from a vaccination in the modern sense, used to produce immunity. I would argue that the logic of London’s city walls is inseparable from Marlowe’s racial politics. In his narrative, when read from the biomedical perspective, Jews are pathogenic bodies that should be kept outside of the mural enclosure.

Even though the play’s first scene depicts Barabas holding a conference with his fellow Jews concerning the present political situation of Malta, historically, the Maltese Jewish community, Universitas Judeorum, was dissolved in 1492 as Jewish expulsion was carried out in Spain, the country that governed Malta at that time. ¹⁹ Given that the play’s historical setting self-evidently stages the Mediterranean world after the Ottoman occupation of the Isle of Rhodes in 1522, the play’s framework is somewhat ahistorical as it evokes ‘virtual Jews’ that did not exist officially in Malta. ²⁰ In Marlowe’s fiction, therefore, the Jews in Maltese society are present rhetorically only to be expelled again.

Marlowe’s Jew, Barabas, is enormously rich, and his mansion technically serves as a Jewish synagogue – a locus of the political and religious lives of Malta’s Jews. This centre of ethnic solidarity, however, was seated outside of the city’s mural circumscription. Later in the play, the First Knight – one of the Hospitallers – proposes that the Christians ‘Convert [Barabas’s] mansion to a nunnery’ so that ‘His house will harbor many holy nuns’ (1.2.130–1). In the blueprint of Marlowe’s Malta, religious houses such as nunneries and monasteries are located outside of the city’s fortification. When Barabas suggests a splendid banquet for the Ottoman soldiers, Calymath says, ‘I cannot feast my men in Malta walls, / Except he place his tables in the streets’ (5.3.34–5). The only alternative for this spatial limitation is to host all of his soldiers at a ‘monastery / Which standeth as an outhouse to the town’ (5.3.36–7). Here, the word ‘outhouse’ refers to the extramural space. Logically, it follows that the Jew’s house could be converted to a religious house because both Jews’ houses and monasteries are outside of the city’s civitas. Although Barabas’s house is not like one in a ghetto or a concentration camp, it fully evokes the legal issue of the play.

When Barabas confesses, ‘for myself, I walk abroad a-nights, / And kill sick people groaning under walls’ (2.3.178–9), he is a stock character embodying all the conventional anti-Semitic discourses, but at the same time he is unique, given that his favourite haunting place is the city walls. Historically, an extensive community for resident aliens was formed outside of London, adjacent to the city proper. In particular, Bankside, as a liberty, was identified with areas for unfranchised aliens. Its loose state and juridical controls invited a variety of alien bodies. Even brothels there were called ‘Britannica Hollandia’ or ‘Hollands Leaguer’, evoking their lawlessness and multicultural backdrops that alienated them from Englishness. ²¹ Barabas’s house, whether transforming into a brothel or convent – both were called ‘nunneries’ in Marlowe’s own time – is located outside of the city’s proper jurisdiction. If the walls both in Marlowe’s Malta and in London were symbols of ethnic cleansing and expulsion, they raise a peculiar legal issue. Ferneze specifies how Barabas’s body should be dealt with following his death:

Wonder not at it, sir; the heavens are just.

Their deaths were like their lives. Then think not of ’em.

Since they are dead, let them be buried.

For the Jew’s body, throw that o’er the walls,

To be a prey for vultures and wild beasts.

[Barabas is thrown to one side.]

So, now away and fortify the town. (5.1.55–60)

Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice allows for comparison as it also deals with the question of civitas and the legal status of Jews. Shakespeare depicts Venice as a multicultural and cosmopolitan venue made up of multiple ethnic identities, but unlike Marlowe, Shakespeare does not envision Venice as an enclosed, walled space. Instead, in The Merchant of Venice, the city space is permeable, and Shylock’s liminal presence is depicted in Rialto, a bridge area. Formed around the floating bridge over the Grand Canal that connects the city’s inner and outer spaces, Rialto – as an international mercantile venue – signifies the city’s multiculturalism. Rialto is where Shylock’s life fuses with that of the Venetian Christians. In Shakespeare’s imagination, a more inclusive – although still exclusive – threshold, the bridge area, replaces Marlowe’s city walls, which strictly distinguish the inner from the outer space. Thus, the depiction of the city space as an immune shield of walls is Marlowe’s own unique idea.

The scene of expulsion in The Jew of Malta represents Barabas’s legal status on the island, which is foreshadowed in the scene of expropriation:

Barabas.

Are strangers with your tribute to be taxed?

Of course, Barabas is not ‘equal’ to Christian citizens in Malta: he defines himself as one of the ‘strangers’, meaning he is a disenfranchised, resident alien. Yet, as the Second Knight claims, he should be taxed because he accumulated his wealth from his economic activities in Malta. Stephen Greenblatt and Julia Lupton analyse this division insightfully by using the Hegelian opposition between civic society (‘political participation of citizens in the official life of the polis’) and civil society (‘social, economic, and domestic associations, civilisation rather than properly civic’) – a distinction that raises the issue of the legal expulsion of the Jew’s life. ²³

There are, of course, more complicated religious, legal, and biopolitical issues revolving around this division. Western political philosophers tend to define religious lives as a domain of civil society, but in the play, Barabas’s Judaism is in line with his estrangement from his civic life; thus, the narrative indicates that civic identity is inseparable from one’s practised religion. ²⁴ In fact, the first option the Knights Hospitallers and the secular government of Malta offer to Barabas is conversion to Christianity. As long as he practices his Jewish belief, his political existence within the society is disallowed. Thus, the walled enclosure signifies the boundary of the sumpolites of a Christian community as well as the parameter that dictates whether one is acknowledged as a proper civic and legal subject. Barabas’s absence in the juridical sphere is conspicuous when compared to Shylock’s more inclusive legal status. In Shakespeare’s Venice, Shylock is already a legal subject, and if the state ignores the ‘bond’ he made with Antonio, this would only demonstrate that ‘There is no force in the decrees of Venice’ (4.1.101), and this exception would be ‘recorded for a precedent, / And many an error by the same example / Will rush into the state’ (4.1.215–17). ²⁵ As such, the Venetian Christians cannot characterise Shylock as a subject existing outside of the legal community as Marlowe’s Maltese Christians do to Barabas. Thus, what they can do, as Portia orders to Shylock, is execute the law literally and precisely: cut a pound of flesh without shedding one drop of blood. This rigid interpretation of the bond destroys only the contract between the Jew and Antonio, not the legal system or Shylock’s legal right as such. Thus, ‘let me have law’ (5.1.38) is the indelible claim of Barabas, who is excluded from the city’s space and legal boundaries, whereas ‘Is that the law?’ (4.1.309) is Shylock’s question as he is exploited by the Christians through the existing legal system.

Nonetheless, the exclusive boundary of Malta, which represents the law and religious identity, exhibits more tolerance when Barabas is considered an economic subject. After the play’s initial appropriation scene, even when he loses his property rights, Barabas is not expelled from the island. Instead, he is encouraged to work in Malta: after the expropriation, Ferneze orders him, ‘Live still [in Malta]; and, if thou canst, get more’ (1.2.103). He is only expelled from one city space to another. Furthermore, his residence is not permitted in the intramural space as a citizen or proper legal subject, but his presence in the market is allowed. The marketplace becomes a melting pot, where Christian and alien lives mix with each other because there is only one logic: ‘Every one’s price is written on his back’ (2.3.3). ²⁶ The market is a place of society’s gift-exchange (munus) par excellence as the symbolic locus of a community. Thus, we find the irony of the play: while the city’s immune shield is pushing Barabas away, its economic society is simultaneously admitting him to the city space as a part of its body. Barabas’s own paradoxical presence therefore becomes the rupture formed within the city’s exclusive community.

Perhaps Barabas’s liminal subjectivity is best allegorised by the ‘common channels’ (5.2.89) that connect the city and its outside:

Fear not, my lord; for here, against the sluice,

The rock is hollow, and of purpose digged

To make a passage for the running streams

And common channels of the city.

Now whilst you give assault unto the walls,

I’ll lead five hundred soldiers through the vault

And rise with them i’th’middle of the town,

Open the gates for you to enter in,

And by this means the city is your own. (5.2.86–94)

In the Marlovian imagination, Barabas is in fact a sort of excrement or miasma that the city should properly release through the sewer drains for its health. In European prejudiced fantasy, Jews were an unhealthy social body subject to a eugenic selection. In the Middle Ages and well into early modernity, people believed that Jewish men menstruated because of the alleged horrible-smelling bodily secretion (foetor judaicus), which was considered to be a source of epidemic outbreaks. ²⁸ Thus, Jews’ bodies were considered the source of unwholesome contamination that should be dispelled from the city. In addition, Jews were identified with the ‘plague’ because of their inseparable connection with the so-called the ‘first curse’: the scourge caused by Jews’ crucifixion of Christ recorded in Mathew 27:25. People also believed that Jews invited the plague or disease itself, and Marlowe’s narrative repeats it. Insofar as Barabas is identified with a raven that ‘Doth shake contagion from her sable wings’ (2.1.4), his entrance should be screened by the city walls, the immune shield of the community. In addition, it would not be a new insight if one argues that Barabas is considered a poison in the play: he invites the Turkish plague over the city, and he destroys an entire nunnery by circulating poisonous porridge. The most repetitious and ruling image of this play is infringement of corporeal borders by poison. This biopolitical metaphor formed the most common alibi for Jewish scapegoating, as they were considered to be the ultimate reason for biocalypse.

As such, the geographical trajectory of Barabas is coterminous with the leprosy against which the European city communities were planned. Marlowe’s Barabas decides to use ‘white leprosy’ (2.3.55) to punish the Christians by associating his own images with a contagious disease. Lepers with their disfigured bodies and half-rotting faces were images of the living dead, and indeed their lives were like their deaths. Early modern discourse frequently related Jews with lepers, alluding to allegations that they disseminated poison through the community. For instance, Pierre Boaistuau believed the Jews ‘allied themselves in consort with diverse lepers’ and that the plague came about through this alliance. Boaistuau believed that the plague was caused by ‘an ointment with a confection of the blood of man’s urine composed with certain venomous herbs, wrapped within a little lined cloth, tying a stone to the same to make it sink to the bottom’ of wells. ²⁹ Barabas’s identity as a poison should be understood in this light, and this deeply seated cultural fear is observed when he confesses, ‘Sometimes I go about and poison wells’ (2.3.180).

Marlowe’s play nonetheless does not reduce the Jew to a simple poison. What is notable is that Barabas is a physician with knowledge of medical science, and he practises it ‘upon the Italian’; his medicine is not to heal, but to kill: ‘There I enriched the priests with burials’ (2.3.186–7). His practice as a physician shows that medical science as a body of knowledge negotiates a nebulous boundary between life and death. Ferneze’s speech towards the end of the play is most relevant to this semantic ambiguity:

A Jew’s courtesy;

For he that did by treason work our fall

By treason hath delivered thee to us.

Know, therefore, till thy father hath made good

The ruins done to Malta and to us,

Thou canst not part; for Malta shall be freed,

Or Selim ne’er return to Ottoman. (5.5.107–13)

It is intriguing to explain the function of city walls in terms of ‘katechon’. This enigmatic Pauline concept is presented in 2 Thessalonians Chapter 2: it is a power that restrains anomos (lawlessness and disorder) by holding and containing it within, thereby forming the rules and norms of Christianity. For Schmitt, this political enigma is an allegory for nomos of the Third Reich; using katechon, he explains how retaining anomie can create a powerful state order. ³¹ Of course, for him, it is a biblical idea to mediate Christian eschatology with historical empires, allowing Schmitt to interpret the development of the nomos of the Third Reich as a war against anti-Christ figures, the Jews. St Paul’s riddle is never clear, but what is certain is that he believes even retaining an anti-Christ figure contributes to the Christian Empire. Barabas as a personified anomos is allowed to live in Maltese society, but his presence within the walls ultimately builds Ferneze’s state.

The cenobites

In Marlowe’s Malta, the Catholics form the governing body: with the Governor, the Christian Knights, who relocated from Rhodes after the island became occupied by the Turks, are significant political players. The fact that the Jews and the Catholics in The Jew of Malta are similarly portrayed is a well-established critical insight. ³² In particular, the play, as a post-Reformation narrative, considers both Jews and Catholics as a pathogenic threat to Protestant society. There are ample historical examples. ³³ The Babington plot (1586), for instance, was considered a regicidal attempt, wherein Catholics and Jews were allied. Lord Burghley reported to Francis Walsingham that during the event, one of the regicidal suspects, possibly a Jew, had a ‘hooked nose’, which is echoed in Barabas’s prominent nose and noted by Ithamore, who exclaims, ‘I worship your nose’ (2.3.177). ³⁴ It was a common interpretation of privy councils to associate the Catholic plot with a Jewish one. The Jewish and the Catholic issues are interrelated, insofar as they raise the question of the level of immune tolerance allowed within the body politic.

My focus, however, is less about Catholic religion per se, or its affinity to Judaism in Marlowe’s play. Rather, I would like to pay attention to a special sort of life: cenoby, or communal living in religious convents. The unlikely connection between monasterial lives and Jews as two different bodies of the city’s juridical exception could be easily grasped when we consider their geographical locations on the island. In fact, few critics have discussed the fact that Jews, nuns, and friars are not entirely different from one another, given that their lives are formed outside of the city’s walls. This physical exclusion suggests their juridical and biopolitical exclusion from the city community. We have already discussed the fact that monasteries in Malta are built outside of the city’s mural enclosure, and how this spatial construction of the city is comparable to that of Marlowe’s London. In Marlowe’s play, not only Jews but also cenobitic lives raise the question of the juridical order formed around the walls.

Early modern London’s religious houses, like leprosaria, were located outside of the city walls. Familiar place names such as Whitefriars and Blackfriars were, for example, sites of Catholic priories, and their ruins after the dissolution of monasteries became visual signs of the cultural conflicts of the Reformation. These two priories were immediately adjacent to the city walls, being narrowly located outside of them. Whitefriars, as the site of the Carmelite priory that stood until 1538, became the beginning point of the West End, a prosperous area in London today. Blackfriars, as a site of the Dominican priory, was attached to London’s mural enclosure from outside. It has an interesting history in relation to London’s walls. As Stow records, Blackfriars was outside of the city, but in 1282, Edward I granted the Archbishop of Canterbury the ‘license for the enlarging of the Blackfriars Church, to break and take down a part of the wall of the city, from Ludgate to the river of Thames’. ³⁵ Blackfriars’s inclusion within the city’s juridical authority happened only when the City Charter of 1608 was propagated by King James I. ³⁶ The Blackfriars priory was included as a part of the city’s inner space only to expand it; originally, like other priories, it stood outside of the walls. There are, of course, juridical implications: people believed that monks and nuns in convents belonged to a different politico-religious order independent from the city-state. If the city walls symbolised the city’s communal boundary, then as a sign of exclusion, these monasteries were expelled from the city.

When we consider the play’s politico-spatial metaphor revolving around the walls, the character of Abigail looks to be a well-devised narrative device, due to the crossing of her Jewishness with her monasterial life – two forms of life excluded from the city community. Although Marlowe’s play stigmatises Barabas as the ultimate source of social disorder, he is briefly included within the city’s governing body as he is appointed as the Governor when the Turks seize the town. Yet Abigail, as symbolic of the flimsy moral vision of the play, is never accepted within the city’s political body, considering her trajectory continually vacillates between a Jewry and a convent. Interestingly, Barabas’s first house, which Christians convert to a nunnery, represents Abigail’s subjectivity. ³⁷ Insofar as Barabas’s house is used as a Jewish gathering place like a synagogue, it follows logically that it could be converted to a Catholic monastery uncontained by the secular juridical order. Recently, Julia Lupton pointed out that a synagogue turned into a church was a common cultural phenomenon, and the Virgin’s presence in particular before a synagogue’s ruin was a symbol of passage ‘from the Old to the New Dispensation’ – a trajectory that the Virgin Mary followed. ³⁸ Thus, whether Abigail is subjected to the Jewish law or the Pauline doctrine that liberates her from the ‘law’, her presence remains outside of Malta’s civic order.

In Abigail’s entrance to a nunnery, Marlowe’s play portrays religious lives similar to those of English monasticism before the Reformation: in the 1530s, nunneries and monasteries were being dissolved under Tudor rule. In fact, when it is considered from the legal perspective, a cenobitic life (koinos bios) has an ambiguous state. Whereas city walls represent a legal boundary within which a communal life is protected, entering a convent means that one must abandon such protection by selecting a different form of life. This legal exception is why the cloistered lives of monks and friars, like those of Jews and Turks, were placed outside of the city walls. The etymological root of cenoby, ceno, fully signifies another ‘communal’ life independent from the civic ‘community’.

Moreover, Giorgio Agamben recently attempted to define monasterial life as a peculiar ‘form-of-life’, where ‘a human life is entirely removed from the grasp of the law’. ³⁹ In Agamben’s discussion, it is impossible to decipher whether the Christian monasterial rules are a type of law or not: cloistered lives completely merge with the rule, and life in a monastery is strictly regulated by horologia. The cenobitic rules and the liturgies are not simply acts the monks and friars perform; rather, they are their lives. In so doing, they form a paradoxically normative life with no law. In particular, Agamben observes that St Francis entirely divested himself of his own juridico-political life, to the extent that he reduced himself to an animal. Thus, the Franciscans’ decision to lead a life of ‘highest poverty’ meant their complete surrender of property right by confining their economic acts to the simplex usus facti only for their bare necessity. ⁴⁰ Perhaps this logic of exclusion explains the formation of their lives in the marginal spaces excluded from the city. Yet, the monasterial lives depicted in the play are quite contrary to real Franciscan lives: in Marlowe’s Malta, the friars’ poverty is merely a cover, and like other Christians, their sole aim is to accumulate more property.

Whereas in England religious houses were razed, in Marlowe’s Malta, the Jew’s mansion is raised as a monastery by reversing the process of the Reformation. The play ironically repeats a Reformation narrative that shows the dissolution of monasteries. Marlowe introduces two friars that did not exist in post-Reformation England – Jacomo and Bernardine – whose rough representations of Dominicans and Franciscans demonstrate Marlowe’s understanding of cenobitic lives. Their lives in Malta are allowed outside of the walls, but their geographical route shifts from the extra- to the intramural spaces by crossing the city boundary. In the process, they are met with the law, and the result is their deaths. Friar Jacomo’s first words are ‘Sisters, we now / Are almost at the new-made nunnery’ (1.2.304–5): although a convent is a female-only space, in Marlowe’s dark satire, these two friars’ main locus is Barabas’s former mansion as converted into a nunnery. These two corrupt friars are creations of an English Protestant fantasy, through whom Marlowe questions the system of confession as a way of controlling power. Bernardine says,

Know that confession must not be revealed;

The canon law forbids it, and the priest

That makes it known, being degraded first,

Shall be condemned and then sent to the fire.

(3.6.33–6)

As his name suggests, Jacomo is presumably a Blackfriar who belongs to the Dominican order. Yet, as a friar going ‘barefoot’ (4.1.88), like Friar Lawrence in Romeo and Juliet, he demonstrates the Franciscan attribute of extreme self-denial. He illustrates, hypocritically, what Agamben calls Franciscans’ ‘highest poverty’, which suggests that a monastic life is entirely subject to the rule or liturgy to the extent life vanishes in monastic rule. This overlapping of liturgical rule and life indicates his exclusion from any kind of civic right or law that belongs to the secular state. Thus, cenobitic life is a type of life that Agamben calls homo sacer – a timeless figura of excluded lives from politico-communal realms. ⁴² When Jacomo says to Barabas and Ithamore, ‘Villains, I am a sacred person, touch me not’ (4.1.203) after he is framed for the murder of Bernardine, in fact he is claiming an exceptional legal state independent from secular order. Yet, his cenobitic self-denial is only a deceptive appearance: as a hypocrite, he is far from practicing a real monasterial life. As a result, he is incorporated into the city’s law and punitive authority. The following scene most satirically depicts the juridical status of a clergy:

Ironically, when Pilia-Borzar recounts the death of Jacomo, we hear from him that it was the Turk, Ithamore, not the friar, who was reciting the ‘neck verse’. By memorising a verse from Psalm 51 in Latin, one with clerical learning could escape hanging. It is well known that Ben Jonson pleaded the benefit after he killed Gabriel Spencer and narrowly escaped hanging; as Jonson’s biographer David Riggs comments, it was ‘a loophole for educated male felons’. ⁴³ The scene informs us that Malta allows a legal liberty to churchmen by saving one in religious life from the secular law enforcement. Admittedly, this sort of exemption from the state’s legal control is not irrelevant to the geographical locations of convents, formed outside of the city’s secular order.

Although it is not certain whether Jacomo abandoned such a chance for pleading, or as an impostor and depraved friar with no clerical learning, he was unable to recite even the neck verse, in the end he confesses and is hanged. He belongs to the religious order and community formed outside of the city walls, but to abandon such a claim would mean that he would be subject to the secular order. The new Tudor state wanted to restrict the scope of the clerical benefit, since that caused frequent conflicts between the state and the church, or a limbo status between the two. This liberty was a stumbling block for the Tudor state that wanted to monopolise punitive power, especially when one of the political aims of the Reformation was totalisation of the juridical authority that was bifurcated into the church and the state. In particular, with the act proclaimed in 1576, the Elizabethan Parliament minimised the scope of clerical benefit, and the fact that Marlowe’s play features a Turk canting the neck verse is a satire with regard to monastic exceptionalism. ⁴⁴ This phenomenon was thus in line with the gradual disappearance of London liberties outside of the city’s jurisdiction. Marlowe’s ahistorical Malta mirrors post-Reformation London, where Catholic privilege in the suburban areas was gradually subsumed within the intramural jurisdiction. In Marlowe’s narrative, Catholics are more Machiavellian than Jews, and friars are no less poisonous to the society than the Jews and the Turks. In particular, the freewheeling friars, unlike cloistered monks, could easily mix the extra- and intramural Christian lifestyles. In the Marlovian imagination, the dangerous proximity of cenobitic lives that form an orifice by connecting the city and its outside should be demolished.

The greatest paradox, nonetheless, is that this sort of reformation is carried out by none other than the Jew. Barabas reveals his plot:

And, Governor, now partake my policy.

First, for his army: they are sent before,

Entered the monastery, and underneath

In several places are field-pieces pitched,

Bombards, whole barrels full of gunpowder,

That on the sudden shall dissever it

And batter all the stones about their ears,

Whence none can possibly escape alive. (5.5.24–31)

Again, Marlowe’s Mediterranean narrative displays a biopolitical crisis in a small city-state, and it forms its discursive axis around poison and disease. Its diagnosis follows the method of Paracelsus as it understands a body that should be protected from any infiltration. However, its solution is entirely that of Paracelsus, who believes that the traditional method of curing, epitomised by the phrase ‘contraria contrariis curantur’, is already old-fashioned; the logic is that ‘a scorpion’s venom cures scorpion poisoning, arsenic cures disease due to an exaltation of the arsenal quality in man’. ⁴⁵ The Marlovian rendering of the play is homoeopathic, in which alien pathogens, the Turks and Catholics, are demolished by another invasive alien body, a Jew. The logic of this play is morte mortuos liberavit, in which even deadly evil is invited within the city space as a remedy.

Epilogue

I would like to conclude by returning to Foucault’s understanding of city space described in the opening of this essay. As his analysis of Alexandre Le Maítre’s La Métropolitée shows, in medieval and early modern cities, the metropolis in particular enjoyed a privileged status due to ‘a particular legal and administrative definition’, as well as to the fact that it was ‘confined within a tight, walled space, which had much more than just a military function’. ⁴⁶ The city embodies discipline to control life, but at the same time, it should be a representation of the sovereignty. Thus, the physical construction of a city considers circulations of good morals and voices of eloquent orators; it should be a site for the academies and science. ⁴⁷ More importantly, the way the city controls disease must be considered: the essential function of a good street is its ability to control and release ‘miasmas’ and ‘disease’. ⁴⁸ The art of governmentality, therefore, does not reside in its airtight insulation of community; rather, it is a matter of the proper release of poisons and pathogens.

What Marlowe surveys through his creation of a walled city in a Mediterranean island is to explore such a rule. The mural enclosure of Malta is porous and frequently invaded, and the boundary is open to poisons and miasmas. Yet, what his play explores well is the way it releases them and restores the city to its original state of sanity and safety – now perhaps better fortified than before. Both Marlowe and Shakespeare produced their Jewish plays roughly three centuries after the edict of expulsion proclaimed by Edward I, but their ‘virtual Jews’ were produced more than three centuries before the Third Reich’s ethnic cleansing that was carried out by suspending the juridical order. In Shakespeare’s Venice, the walls do not form an immune shield, and although Shylock is excluded from the festive ending of the play, he is still present within the state of Venice. Marlowe’s Barabas, nonetheless, perishes and disappears from Malta, only offering ‘A Jew’s courtesy’ (5.5.107) – exterminating the Turkish plague. Certainly, Marlowe’s singular contributions include imagining and defining the Jewish existence in terms of city walls that function as the society’s immunity, as well as applying the medical discourse of homoeopathy in order to understand the absent presence of Jews within a Christian community.