ABSTRACT
In reading The Jew of Malta as a crude incitement to anti-Semitism, New Historicists were reacting to the sour suspicion of the Western canon in multi-ethnic America. Del Bosco’s attempts to define Malta as the Establishment are actually attempts to enforce the authority of Spain. In giving Spain the defining voice over Malta, Christopher Marlowe’s play exposes and undermines the strategies enabling imperialistic power – strategies which depend upon discursive assertions of absolute difference between an ‘ours’ and a ‘theirs’, an Establishment and an Outsider. Despite Ferneze’s attempts to define Barabas through an absolute binarism and as a stereotypical other, the Jew emerges, like Malta, as a different term outside the dominant opposition. The fictions which Barabas constructs to hide himself and his ‘many mischiefs’ from the onstage audiences occlude the view of Marlowe’s audiences; for the play refuses its spectators a privileged position of knowledge.
