“To Cast with Cunning”; or, Marlowe’s Market Players

Abstract

The spirit here is not one of felicitous or recreative play but of competitive rivalry, the disposition Barabas had already brought into the play even before the extortion of his wealth by the Christian governor of Malta: “We [Jews] have scambled up / More wealth by far than those that brag of faith,” he avers, naming all the wealthy European Jews he knows (1.1.121–22). However, the turn to “wits” and “cunning,”mobilized around the ludic verb “cast” (to throw dice, to cast lots), emphasizes that this act of self-assertion is, in a sense, a playful one, even amid its spitefulness and Barabas’s resolve for revenge. Barabas articulates his desire to recover his wealth and to reassert his standing in Malta in terms of a risky futural projection, consistent with his trade as a merchant venturer with business dealings all over the Mediterranean. In other words, he is a figure of risk, challenging the early modern typology of the Jew in terms of fixity and thrall to the law, and presenting