/ Both circumcisèd, we hate Christians both’, 3.217–18), we watch Barabas being dehumanized, becoming the anti-Semitic mask he wears (‘O brave, master, I worship your nose for this!’, 3.176). From now on, he is alienated even from Abigail – eventually, he kills her – and creates a mock-family by promising, falsely, to adopt Ithamore as his heir. There is a huge comic relish in his murder of a whole convent along with his daughter in an act of poisonous charity, and as his murderousness gets funnier, it gets steadily less and less human, as in his response to the passing bells that sound for the nuns (compare the bells in The Massacre at Paris):

There is no music to a Christian’s knell.
How sweet the bells ring, now the nuns are dead,
That sound at other times like tinkers’ pans! (4.1.1–3)

He suffers a further symbolic loss of identity when he goes to poison Ithamore disguised as a French lutanist. And when he ‘dies’, his dehumanization is completed by having his corpse thrown out over the city-walls like rubbish.

Those who deplore this un-charactering of Barabas also feel the play tails off in its later acts into unmotivated intrigue. Certainly, The Jew of Malta is Marlowe’s only play to make such extensive use of intrigue, and its characters share Barabas’s delight in ‘crossbiting’ (4.3.13): Ithamore wonders,

Why, was there ever seen such villainy,
So neatly plotted and so well performed?
Both held in hand, and flatly both beguiled? (3.3.1–3)

This delight in symmetry is present in individual scenes – Shakespeare found the germ of Romeo and Juliet’s balcony-scene in the antithetically constructed 2.1 – and in the plot at large. For the ending brings Barabas full circle. In the opening scenes, he had recognized the exclusion of the Jews from political power, and was content not only to leave such power to Christian ‘policy’ (1.1.138), but to relish his own separation from the ‘polity’. At the end, when he is made governor, he rashly forgets Ferneze’s unscrupulousness, and is therefore caught in his own trap, dropped into the burning cauldron he has prepared for the Turks. If this has the too-neat symmetry of poetic justice, it also makes Ferneze’s closing Te Deum seem all the more ironic.

Edward the Second too is markedly symmetrical. In charting the king’s decline, from his coronation to abjection and murder, the play also frames the rise and fall of his lover Gaveston, in the first half, and, in the second, the rise and fall of his enemy Mortimer. Looked at more closely, its symmetries are those of irreconcilable conflict, the civil war that breaks out to the cries,

WARWICK

Saint George for England and the barons’ right!

EDWARD

Saint George for England and King Edward’s right! (12.35–6)

This pattern of verbal contest is everywhere. Characters measure lines like swords:

MORTIMER

Why should you love him whom the world hates so?

EDWARD

Because he loves me more than all the world. (4.76–7)

The barons’ hatred of Edward’s love is less homophobia than class-antagonism. Gaveston is an upstart on whom the king showers favours at the expense of the old nobility. From his first appearance, he is a Marlovian overreacher, who, while Edward loves him, thinks himself

as great
As Caesar riding in the Roman street
With captive kings at his triumphant car. (1.171–3)

Unlike Tamburlaine, however, or Shakespeare’s history-plays, Edward the Second is strikingly unceremonious. ‘Triumphs’ here often mean ‘idle triumphs, masques, lascivious shows’ (6.156), erotic courtly entertainments of the kind with which Gaveston intends to manipulate ‘the pliant king’ (1.52), lavish tournaments without the substance of military power. Edward and Gaveston’s love looks like a hopeless fantasy in the face of the barons’ armed muscle:

EDWARD

Lay hands on that traitor Mortimer!

MORTIMER SENIOR

Lay hands on that traitor Gaveston!

[They seize GAVESTON.]

KENT

Is this the duty that you owe your king?

WARWICK

We know our duties. Let him know his peers. (4.20–23)

This manhandling is symptomatic. In this brutally pragmatic world, physical proximity, bodily intimacy, is the key to political influence. Gaveston is exiled and returned; Edward embraces him and pushes Isabel his queen aside. The first half of the action is literally fought out over the possession of Gaveston’s body, ‘That, like the Greekish strumpet [Helen], trained to arms / And bloody wars so many valiant knights’ (9.15–16). When the barons get hold of him, they bundle him round the stage and the country, and then treacherously cut off his head. Beheadings and references to beheadings are unnervingly abundant. They point forward to the play’s final tableau, in which Mortimer’s head is placed on top of the coffin of the recently murdered king, whose own death – on a bed, with a red-hot spit forced up into his bowels – is an obscene parody of sexual penetration.

The middle scenes are confusing, filled with sudden shifts of allegiance and unexpected reversals of fortune. Mortimer emerges as a full-blown Machiavellian and seduces the queen, who changes from wronged wife into her more historically traditional role of ‘she-wolf of France’. But the biggest changes are in Edward. Almost imperceptibly, as he is separated from Gaveston, his affections are transferred to the younger Spencer, to whom he is introduced, pointedly, on Gaveston’s wedding-day, and with whom, rather than with Gaveston, he flees from Tynemouth. More importantly, he is now a pathetic victim, and it is his body that is moved passively about the stage.