Professor David Peimer
Marlowe: The Jew of Malta
Summary
Christopher Marlowe (1564–1593) was a remarkable, reckless, energetic, passionate playwright, poet, and translator who died at the age of 29. His play, “The Jew of Malta”, was a prime influence on Shakespeare’s “Merchant of Venice”, both using the Jewish character as their main protagonist. Professor David Peimer looks at the life of Marlowe and discusses the significance of “The Jew of Malta” in the bigger picture.
Professor David Peimer
David Peimer is a professor of theatre and performance studies in the UK. He has taught at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, and New York University (Global Division), and was a Fulbright Scholar at Columbia University. Born in South Africa, David has won numerous awards for playwriting and directing. He has written eleven plays and directed forty in places like South Africa, New York, Brussels, London, Berlin, Zulu Kingdom, Athens, and more. His writing has been published widely and he is the editor of Armed Response: Plays from South Africa (2009) and the interactive digital book Theatre in the Camps (2012). He is on the board of the Pinter Centre in London.
That’s a great question. I think everybody would love to know. I don’t know, it might have been a setup. The claim is it was a drunken brawl over who was going to pay the bill in the pub. Was it a setup because he was worth forcing him and the secret service of the times? Was it a set up by one of the other religious groups? Possibly. Who knows?
I don’t think he was, I really don’t. I think he was anti the way religion is used. I don’t know if he’s anti-religious, but I think he’s anti the way religious ideas are used. Yeah, it could have been to make a lot of money, use the Jew as the victim. It’s a perfect way of criticizing Christianity. But I think because they, both Marlowe and Shakespeare throw this empathy, once you have human empathy for a character on stage, you can understand the character much more and why they do what they do. So once you understand how they’ve been so badly persecuted or mistreated on a stage, you get the audience’s empathy, more than feeling. You get their empathy and from there they can hopefully understand why you behave as you do. They may not agree with you, but you can understand. And I think that’s for me the brilliance of insight of Marlowe and Shakespeare in how to use theatre and how human nature works and how theatre works.