The Jew of Malta by Christopher Marlowe
Published 1590 · 27,000 words · about 2 hours at an average pace · tragedy, Elizabethan drama, blank verse drama, revenge tragedy
How hard is The Jew of Malta to read?
The Jew of Malta scores 47 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it moderately challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 58 out of 100
- Marlowe writes in elevated Elizabethan diction laced with mercantile terms (argosies, bills of exchange, ducats, pearls and diamonds by the caratage) and classical/biblical allusion. It sits below Tamburlaine's barrage of exotic geographic proper nouns and well below Moby-Dick's specialized jargon, closer to a commercially-flavored history-play register than to genuinely archaic or invented language.
- Sentence structure: 52 out of 100
- The play alternates Marlowe's blank verse 'mighty line' in Barabas's soliloquies with brisker, more colloquial exchanges in the comic scenes with Ithamore. It demands more of a reader than Orwell's flat declaratives but is more navigable than Tamburlaine's cumulative rhetorical periods, since dialogue scenes move quickly and each line tends to complete a single thought.
- Abstraction: 44 out of 100
- The play stays close to the concrete mechanics of scheming — forged letters, poisoned porridge, staged duels — rather than pausing for philosophical meditation. It sits below Tamburlaine's set-piece speeches on ambition and kingship, closer to Gatsby's social observation delivered through plot than to sustained abstract argument.
- Information density: 46 out of 100
- Marlowe packs in a moderate cast of conspirators and counter-conspirators (Barabas, Ithamore, Bellamira, Pilia-Borza, two friars) and several interlocking plots, but the intrigue is plot-driven and easy to follow scene by scene. It carries more reference load than a straightforward page-turner but nothing like the historical layering of a novel such as 2666.
- Narrative indirection: 32 out of 100
- Barabas confides his schemes directly to the audience in asides and soliloquies before he executes them, so readers are rarely asked to infer motive. This direct, presentational mode sits close to Tamburlaine's open self-declaration and far from a text built on withheld interiority.
- Symbolic density: 47 out of 100
- Gold and hoarded treasure recur as a symbol of a wealth-worship the play insists Christians and Turks share as fully as the Jew they persecute for it, and the closing cauldron trap functions as a concentrated image of poetic justice. It falls short of Gatsby-level symbolic patterning but exceeds a purely literal revenge chronicle.
- Ironic distance: 74 out of 100
- The play's blackest joke is that its Machiavellian villain-hero is also its wittiest, most self-aware character, inviting audiences to relish his cunning even as his crimes escalate toward atrocity. Scholars still debate whether Marlowe is satirizing Christian hypocrisy through Barabas or simply indulging in stage villainy, a gap between surface delight and moral judgment that puts it nearer The Sellout's satirical recalibration than a sincerely one-voiced tragedy.
- Resolution withholding: 28 out of 100
- The plot resolves cleanly and punitively: Barabas dies in the very cauldron he built to kill others, Calymath is taken hostage, and Ferneze is restored to power. The moral question of who is truly more venal — Jew, Christian, or Turk — is left for the audience to weigh, but the plot mechanics themselves close with conventional, almost fairy-tale certainty.
- Structural complexity: 44 out of 100
- Three schemes escalate in parallel — the forged duel between Lodowick and Mathias, the poisoning of the nunnery, and the courtesan blackmail plot that exposes Ithamore — within a straightforward five-act chronology with no flashback or nonlinear time. Complexity comes from tracking overlapping conspiracies rather than from formal experiment, putting it below Tamburlaine's two-part scale but above a single-thread chronicle play.
How The Jew of Malta is regarded
The Jew of Malta holds a literary regard score of 71 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.