that Henry Duke of Guise-le Balafré, planner of the Massacre of Paris-was assassinated with connivance of the King of France, last of the House of Valois, two days before Christmas, 1588. Philip Henslowe's Diary does not begin till the nineteenth of February, 1592, and it notes, seven days after that date, fifty shillings taken at the acting of "The Jew of Malta." The piece was popular, for it was acted thirty-six times in the first four years covered by Henslowe's Diary, during which time it brought to the players twelve hundred and forty-four shillings and sixpence. The reference to the death of the Duke of Guise, as leaving the spirit of Machiavelli free to seek new fields, would probably have been made when the event was recent. As the prologue for the theatre might have been written after the play, it is just possible that the date of the writing might be in the latter part of 1588, at earliest.

The purpose of the play was, not to paint character, but to please an audience with the popular presentment of a Jew, rich, avaricious, pitiless, hater of Christians, skilled in drugs and poisons-a Jew physician was the poisoner in "Selimus" *—ambitious, but at last caught in his own trap, a cruel trap set visibly with board and cord.

"The Jew of Malta."

Barabas is in his counting-house counting out his money. Coins are so small that it is tedious to reckon them. Wedges of gold, pearls heaped like pebble stones

'Bags of fiery opals, sapphires, amethysts,
Jacints, hard topaz, grass-green emeralds,
Beauteous rubies, sparkling diamonds,

And seld-seen costly stones of so great price
As one of them, indifferently rated
And of a carat of this quantity,

May serve in peril of calamity

To ransom great kings from captivity,

This is the ware wherein consists my wealth."

* "E. W." x. 86.

I-VOL. X.

The wind blows favourably for his argosies. Captains come in to tell him of the safe arrival of ships containing merchandise of his, whose

"Very customs barely come to more

Than many merchants of the town are worth."

The second captain's ship was sheltered by a Spanish fleet "that had the galleys of the Turks in chase." He exults in the wealth that is the blessing promised to the Jews. They grow wealthier than Christians, though they come not to be kings. Let Christians be kings

"I have no charge, nor many children,

But one sole daughter, whom I hold as dear

As Agamemnon did his Iphigen :

And all I have is hers."

Her age is scarce fourteen. The other Jews then come for counsel to Barabas. A Turkish fleet is in the roadstead. There is a meeting in the senate house, and all the Jews of Malta must be there. The Turks claim of the Knights of Malta ten years' arrears of tribute. The Knights decree that it shall all be levied from the Jews. A month's time is allowed for payment of the Turks. Money enough can be obtained by taking half the possessions of every Jew. Because Barabas demurs, his all is seized and his house made into a nunnery.

Under a plank in his house, for safeguard against such ruin as now threatens to overwhelm him, Barabas has concealed great treasure of gold and jewels. Now he persuades his daughter Abigail to profess herself a nun, and, being inside the house, get opportunity to lift the treasure at night and pass it out to him. He helps her by professing wrath at her apostasy

"Child of perdition, and thy father's shame!

What wilt thou do among those hateful fiends?
I charge thee on my blessing that thou leave
Those devils and their damnéd heresy.

Nay, back, Abigail !

(Aside.] And think upon the jewels and the gold,
The board is marked thus that covers it.)
Away, accursed, from thy father's sight.
Friar. Barabas, although thou art in misbelief
And wilt not see thine own afflictions,
Yet let thy daughter be no longer blind.

Barabas. Blind Friar, I reck not thy persuasions!

(The board is marked thus that covers it.)
For I had rather die than see her thus.
Wilt thou forsake me too in my distress,
Seducéd daughter! (Go, forget it not.)
Becomes it Jews to be so credulous?
(To morrow early I'll be at the door.)
No, come not at me; if thou wilt be damned,
Forget me, see me not, and so be gone.

(Farewell. Remember-to morrow morning.)
Out, out, thou wretch!"

Barabas was represented on the stage with a large Jewish nose, the actor being Edward Alleyn, who had played also Marlowe's Tamburlaine and Greene's Orlando. Mathias, a widow's son, who loves Abigail, is sad at seeing her become a nun. He sounds her praises in the ear of Lodowick, son to the Governor of Malta, who desires, therefore, to see her. So the First Act ends, without any remarkable extravagance of incident.

In the Second Act Abigail has found, and throws out at night to Barabas, the hidden bags of wealth. Martin del Bosco, Vice-Admiral of the King of Spain, now lands at Malta, his ships laden with prisoners from the Turkish galleys to be sold as slaves. He persuades the Governor against obedience to the Turks, whom the Knights of St. John, when driven from Rhodes, were placed at Malta to resist. The Governor then keeps the money taken from the Jews, resolves to refuse tribute to the Turks, will be allied with Spain. The prisoners taken from the Turks are sold in the market-place. Barabas comes to the market-place. There Lodowick, the Governor's son, seeks him out that he may have a sight of Abigail, for Don Mathias tells him she is fair. Mathias enters afterwards. The Jew of Malta feeds them both with hopes, entices them by fair words to his house for their destruction. Barabas buys a Moorish villain, Ithimore, for slave, who is to assist him in all evil deeds. When he comes home, Lodowick is at the street door. Within is Abigail, who left the nunnery when she had done her errand there. Barabas bids his daughter give encouragement to Lodowick, although she pleads love for Mathias. Ithimore admires the design of his new master for the destruction of the two young men by raising enmity between them.

The Third Act opens with a courtesan and her bully, Pi(g)lia-borsa, pick-purse, who has found his way to the bags of Barabas, but has been disturbed in rifling them-has brought only some silver. Ithimore, as

he returns from carrying forged challenges to Mathias from Lodowick and to Lodowick from Mathias, catches the eye of the courtesan. The young men fight, and Barabas, with exultation, sees them kill each other. The widowed mother of Mathias joins in lament with the Governor of Malta, Lodowick's father. The lament of Abigail for her Mathias is touched by the brutal laughter of Ithimore at the issue of her father's trick. When Abigail thus learns how the deaths of the young men were caused, she sends for a friar from the nunnery. She will forsake her father and her faith, and be a nun indeed.

After Abigail is gone, Barabas turns his love from her. He invokes death upon her while he stirs a subtle poison into the pot of rice prepared for supper. Ithimore is bidden take the poisoned rice to the dark entry where each offering to the nuns is laid, and whence they take it without seeing the messenger or asking whence it came.

The Turks send for their tribute. It is denied them, and they threaten to turn Malta into a wilderness. Ver is prepared. The Third Act then ends with outcry of the friars that the nuns are dead. Among them Abigail, in shrift when dying-having been first assured that secrets of confession never are betrayed-tells a friar of her father's practice against the lives of Mathias and Lodowick.

In the Fourth Act Barabas finds two friars, of different houses, who cannot conceal the fact that one of them has learnt something, in confession, of the Jew's practice against the lives of the young men. He angers the two friars against each other by setting them in competition for his gift as a repentant man who will leave all his wealth to a religious house. Friar Bernardine sleeps in the Jew's house, and is strangled on the stage by Barabas and Ithimore. They set up the dead body by the door of the house, as if alive and watching. Friar Jocomo comes later by appointment, thinks that he sees his rival watching, strikes hard, and the body falls. Barabas then delivers Friar Jocomo to justice as Bernardine's murderer, and gets him hanged.

Ithimore, enticed into the house of the courtesan, is flattered, feasted, and tells tales. He sends Pilia-borsa, the bully, to demand money again and again of Barabas, who thereby knows himself to be betrayed. Barabas goes with a lute to the house of the courtesan, disguised as a French musician, with a posy of flowers in his hat, so drugged that it is death to smell them. While he beguiles Ithimore, the courtesan, and Pilia-borsa, they rejoice together in their power over Barabas; they smell the flowers.

In the Fifth Act the Turks besiege the Governor in Malta. The courtesan and Pilia-borsa live long enough to bear witness against Barabas and Ithimore. Ithimore himself, while tortured by the poison,

A

confesses and confirms their evidence. Fires, irons, racks are sent for. The Widow enters with lament, wishing to see that murderer of her son. Then comes an officer to tell that the courtesan and her man and the Moor, Ithimore, are dead. So is the Jew. The body of Barabas, only seeming dead, is thrown over the walls. He had but drunk "of poppy and cold mandrake juice "-mandragora. When he wakes among the

Turks, he offers to their leader, Selim Calymath, possession of the citadel

"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 citadel.
Now, whilst you give assault unto the walls,
I'll lead five hundred soldiers through this 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.

Calymath. If this be true, I'll make thee governor."

The plot succeeds, and Barabas is Governor of Malta. He offers to feast Selim Calymath and his chief Bassas at his house, and feast their soldiers in a large monastery outside the walls. Arrangements are made for a gunpowder plot. The monastery and the Turkish soldiers in it, at a given signal, actually are destroyed, before the other part of the Jew's plot is turned against himself. He had arranged a floor with cranes and pulleys that would fall when a cord was cut, and would throw those who stood on it into a boiling cauldron placed below. He showed his contrivance to the old governor for Spain, Fernese, after bargain of his price-a hundred thousand pounds-for getting rid of Selim and the Turks. In the hands of the old governor himself Barabas placed the knife that was to cut the cord when Selim and his bashaws had come to the feast and stood on the trap-floor. But Fernese sees his opportunity. He cuts the cord when no one stands upon the floor but Barabas, whose last cries of hatred against "damned Christian dogs and Turkish infidels" are uttered from the boiling cauldron. But the Turkish men have been destroyed. Selim, their leader, is therefore a prisoner in Malta till the Ottomans have ceased to claim their tribute from the Christian knights.

It was of the essence of this play to be extravagant in setting forth the hateful image of a Jew. There was an