Ideological Containment and Subversive Resistance in Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta: A New Historicist and Cultural Materialist Reading

Abstract

Literary texts can serve as vehicles through which ideology is disseminated, negotiated, and sometimes challenged. In this framework, Christopher Marlowe’s popular play The Jew of Malta, published in 1588, offers fertile ground for critical analysis because it is deeply embedded in the religious, political, and economic tensions of early modern England. The play draws upon contemporary representations of Jews, Christians, Muslims, Machiavellianism, religious conflict, commerce, and political authority, while simultaneously exposing contradictions within the ideological structures that it appears to sustain. The present article applies New Historicist and Cultural Materialist approaches to The Jew of Malta by situating the play within its historical context and examining how ideology circulates through its representations of religion, power, economic interests, and Otherness. Although previous scholarship has variously interpreted Barabas as an embodiment of antisemitic stereotypes, a satirical exposure of Christian hypocrisy, and a figure destabilizing dominant cultural assumptions, this article argues that the play is most productively understood through the tension between ideological containment and subversive resistance. Barabas is simultaneously constructed by the dominant Christian imagination and made to expose its contradictions. Similarly, the Christian characters who claim religious and political superiority repeatedly reproduce the Machiavellian practices and material interests that they condemn in the Jew. The juxtaposition of New Historicism and Cultural Materialism therefore permits us to perceive the play as inherently dialogic in relation to its historical context. It participates in the ideological structures of its culture while also producing moments in which those structures become visible, ambivalent, and potentially unstable.

Keywords: The Jew of Malta, New Historicism, Cultural Materialism, History, Ideology, Marlow

DOI: 10.7176/JLLL/111-08

Publication date: August 30^th 2026