「マキアヴェリ」の神（１）－『マルタ島のユダヤ人』における反カトリック主義－

Abstract

Over the four centuries of critical traditions on Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta(1592), the main instigator of the play, Barabas, a Sephardic Jew, was considered to be an arch-Machiavellian villain, together with Shylock, an Ashkenazic counterpart in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. Another widely accepted critical tradition told us that both Barabas and Shylock were the focuses of the anti-Semitic prejudices projected onto the Elizabethan dramas. In this paper, I will refute those two propositions and support Stanic’s (2013) view that the real Machiavellian schemer in The Jew of Malta is Ferneze, the Roman Catholic Governor of Malta. I will demonstrate that Marlowe used an equivocating casuist, Barabas to caricature the Elizabethan church-papists, who outwardly conformed to the official Church of England but internally gave their pledges to the Roman Catholic Church. After comparing the anti-Catholic to anti-Islamic prejudices recorded in the Mediterranean captivity narratives around the same period, I will argue that through the persona of ‘Machavill’ staged in the Prologue of The Jew of Malta, the anti-Catholicism in The Jew of Malta paves the way to his next work, The Massacre at Paris, a controversial drama with highly anti-Catholic overtones.