Discuss the theme of alienation in Shakespeare(TM)s King Lear and in Marlowe(TM)s The Jew of Malta.

           

        The psychological alienation of King Lear is something very crucial to the text. His increasing madness in the play is what makes him psychologically alienated. This begins to take place when he is rejected and deceived by his two unscrupulous and cruel daughters, Regan and Goneril. When Lear realises that Regan and Goneril plan to frustrate his desires and remaining power, he seems to begin to question his own identity and he asks,“Doth any here know me? This is not Lear. /Doth Lear walk thus? Speak thus? (…) / Who is it that can tell me who I am?” Here, it is as if Goneril’s insistence that Lear is now senile makes him wonder whether he is really himself anymore or whether he has lost his mind. Driven to despair, he says, “O let me not be mad, not mad, sweet heaven!” – a foreshadowing of his eventual psychological alienation, namely his insanity.

 

        Lear’s psychological alienation is deepened when Lear wanders around in the storm. We find Lear plodding across a deserted heath with winds howling around him and rain drenching him. Lear, being a king, is unused to such harsh conditions, and he soon finds himself symbolically stripped bare. He has already discovered that his cruel daughters can victimise him; now he learns that a king caught in storm is as much subject to the power of nature as any man. The significance of himself as a man, rather than a king as he reworks the significance of his destiny within this psychological “valley of tears” is what contributes to his mental alienation. He is trying to face down the powers of nature, an attempt that seems to indicate both his despair and his increasingly confused sense of reality. Both of these strains appear in Lear’s speech to the storm, in which he commands, “Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! Rage! Blow! / You cataracts and hirricanoes, spout / Till you have drenched our steeples, drowned the cocks!” Lear’s attempt to speak to the storm suggests that he has lost touch with the natural world and his relation to it, or, at least, that he has lost touch with the ordinary human understanding of nature. In a sense, though, his diatribe against the weather embodies one of the central questions posed by King Lear: namely, whether the universe is fundamentally friendly or hostile to man. Lear asks whether nature and the gods are actually good, and, if so, how life can have treated him so badly. Finally, we see strange shifts beginning to occur inside Lear’s mind which keep on deepening Lear’s psychological alienation. He starts to realise that he is going mad, a terrifying realisation for anyone.

        It is when Lear encounters the destitute and near naked form of Edgar, that we witness the full manifestation of his alienation. Like Gloucester's, Edgar's own character is analogous to Lear's in several respects. Just as Lear is the victim of his daughters' treachery, Edgar is the victim of the treachery of Edmund. Moreover, his betrayal, like Lear's, has left him in a state of almost complete alienation – alone, unprotected, and almost entirely dependent on his own resources for his physical survival. The similarity between their respective conditions is not lost on Lear. In fact, while several characters in the play function as analogues of Lear himself, Edgar is the one in whom Lear most clearly sees a reflection of his own condition. At first glance, the encounter between the two men suggests one of those moments of self-recognition that often mark the tragic hero's difficult journey towards restored dignity and honour. Lear, as we have seen, is a man who inhabits a world that is essentially a projection of the ideal order that resides in his own heart; he does not, in other words, know the world as something other than himself. But when, at the lowest ebb of his existence, he meets the forlorn and destitute figure of Edgar, Lear appears to begin to know himself through the world when before he had only known the world as a reflection of himself. His immediate response to Edgar's appearance is to ask him if he has also been the victim of the treachery of ungrateful daughters: "Didst thou give all to thy daughters? / And art thou come to this?" But if at first Lear wonders if Edgar might also be a victim of familial betrayal, he eventually insists and despite the attempt of Kent to tell him otherwise – that Edgar could only be such a victim: "Nothing could have subdued nature / To such a lowness but his unkind daughters." His unwillingness to see otherwise is, in part, a reflection of the depth of grief that his daughters' treachery has caused him; he is so overwhelmed by that grief, in other words, that it has become his only reality.

  

        We can also see the theme of alienation in Regan and Goneril’s rejection and betrayal of their old father. They take no pity at all in alienating their father away from them. Lear, who has given them all his riches and power, gets nothing but this feeling of alienation from his daughters in return. They alienate him both from their castles and from their lives. When Gloucester begs Goneril and Regan to bring Lear back inside, the daughters prove unyielding and state that it is best to let him do as he wills. They go even so far as to order that the doors be shut and locked, leaving their father outside in the threatening storm. Since, as stated previously, alienation implies causing somebody to become unfriendly or indifferent by means of unpopular and distasteful action, it means that Lear too alienates his daughters, Regan and Goneril away from his life and heart. It is only then that his eyes are opened and he realises his mistakes and the injustice done to Cordelia, who is the only one who really loves him. Outraged, Lear curses Regan and Goneril and goes away in the storm.

        Edmund also contributes to promoting the theme of alienation in the play. Indeed, he feels alienated from the society in which he lives in since he is not like every one. He is a bastard. We can describe the alienation he feels as a kind of emotional alienation, that is, feeling alienated because of what one feels. Edmund’s serial treachery is not merely self-interested; it is a conscious rebellion against the social order which makes him worthless in the eyes of the world and which has denied him the same status as Gloucester’s legitimate son, Edgar. He rejects the “plague of custom”that makes society disdain him so much.

        Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta also contains interesting ideas which are fundamental to the theme of alienation. To begin with, we have what we may call as material alienation in the play. Material alienation implies to be alienated from one’s wealth by the transfer of ownership. Certainly, we have this very material alienation in this play. We can see this when Barabas is alienated from his wealth and when his mansion is seized. This happens when Barabas attempts to stall Ferneze’s inevitable request for money by pointing out that Jews cannot help him. Barabas is so attached to his wealth that he cannot accept and does not want to give any of his wealth to Ferneze. Because of this, he goes even so far as to commit blasphemy against Christianity. This blasphemy will lead to still another type of alienation, namely social alienation which will be discussed later. Thus, this material alienation of Barabas is what will lead to all the villainy he is going to commit in the course of the play.

        As stated before, social alienation refers to being alienated from people similar to oneself. Firstly, Barabas suffers from social alienation and is alienated from the Maltese society mainly because he is rich, Jewish and secretive. Throughout the play, characters use Barabas’s faith as an excuse to cheat him out of his money. Instead of being a “childish toy”, as Machevill points out in the prologue, Marlowe shows how religion may be used as a tool to earn a profit. So, when Barabas, at the beginning of the play asks Ferneze, “are strangers with your tribute to be taxed?” , the governor replies that Jews are damned in the sight of heaven and thus, subject to heavy penalties:

        “No, Jew, like infidels.

        For through our sufferance of your hateful lives,

        Who stand accursed in the sight of heaven,

        These taxes and afflictions are befallen,

And therefore thus we are determined;

Read there the articles of our decrees”

Despite the hard work that has gone into earning his fortune, Barabas’s estate is taken from him on the basis of faith alone. While this is not the most moving of sentiments, it nonetheless inspires us with a sense of how harshly Barabas is treated.

        Then, Barabas also suffers from social alienation because he never hesitates to say what he thinks of Christianity and all the religious hypocrites that exist in this religion. Being a Jew, he takes a pleasure at criticising Christianity. In other words, Barabas also is trying to alienate this religion and its people from him. It is a mutual feeling of alienation. At the beginning of the play, Barabas blasphemes Christianity. He queries whether “theft is the ground of [Christianity]”. The protagonist rails against the “policy” of the Christian leaders, which is shrewd strategy in the guise of moral superiority. Certainly, Barabas can afford to be outspoken in his blasphemies, and Barabas frequently rails against Christianity, both in the ideas he voices and the words he uses to express them. For example, exclamations such as “Corpo di Dio” meaning “Body of God” in Italian are clearly something the Maltese Cathoics would not use. Therefore, in his words and actions, Barabas is estranged from this society as defined by its religious parameters. While his Judaism brands him as a “stranger” or foreigner in Malta, it also allows him the freedom to criticise the values of that society.

        In the play, what is also crucial is spiritual alienation. The world in The Jew of Malta is a materialistic one rather than spiritual and if it happens to be spiritual, it is only out of hypocrisy. Due to money, every character in the play is alienated from their religion. Every character displays an ability to strategise all that is alien to the ideals of religious sincerity. Barabas himself, being a Jew, seems to be more interested in his profits than in his religion and this is clearly seen in the opening scene:

        “They say we are a scattered nation:

        I cannot tell, but we have scambled up

        More wealth by far than those that brag of faith.

However, in a society of religious hypocrites, the protagonist is refreshingly honest about his own motives.

In addition, through the other characters in the play, we get an interesting portrayal of this spiritual alienation and religious hypocrisy. For instance, Ferneze is a character who is morally bankrupt and Machiavellian and he tries to hide it from the eyes of his society by pretending to be an agent of morality. We find this when he says, “No, Barabas, to stain our hands with blood / Is far from us and our profession.”As the governor of Malta, he is presented as the merchant’s moral opponent – he is Christian, law-abiding, and anti Machiavellian. However, he schemes and is dishonest about his motives. This is shown by his decision to tax the Maltese Jews in order to pay the tribute and later, when he breaks his alliance with the Turks. Essentially, Ferneze is a religious hypocrite who hides his lust for power behind the ideals of Christian morality.

        The two priests are other examples of spiritual alienation. Generally, priests ought to be representatives of God, leading a straight and honest life. However, the two priests presented in this play, namely Jocomo and Bernardine are the very opposite of what priests ought to be. They are flawed priests, who, Marlowe implies, sleep with nuns. In Act III Scene vi, Marlowe makes several jibes against the celibacy of priests. Bernardine rues the fact that Abigail died a virgin, and both friars are on intimate terms with the nuns – for example, Jacomo leaves to visit “fair Maria” in her lodgings. Moreover, even they are materialistic rather than spiritual. We see their religious hypocrisy in their attempts to outmanoeuvre each other to win Barabas’s money. We come across those clergymen as highly flawed individuals who care more about earthly riches than heavenly concerns. In the play, the only character who seems to display a little genuineness is Abigail. Although at the beginning she uses religion to serve to the ends of her father, she nevertheless comes out a character who remains unmotivated by money and who appears to have some kind of moral code. But still, the audience asks itself if Abigail does not convert to Christianity in a bid to reject her heritage, rather than through true religious belief.

        Another type of alienation we find in this play is emotional alienation, suffered by Abigail when she learns what her “hard-hearted” father has done to Mathias, Lodowick and herself. Barabas has inevitably alienated his daughter away from him by valuing vengeance over his daughter’s felicity. Abigail’s feelings towards Mathias are downplayed by Barabas. Despite her promptings to stand by Mathias and reconcile him with Lodowick, Abigail displays a strong sense of duty as she does what Barabas instructs. However, her alienation deepens beyond measure when later, she discovers what her father has done, that is, he has been the cause for the death of both Mathias and Lodowick. It becomes clear that her love for her father cannot override the disgust she feels for his crimes. She becomes so much alienated from her father that she decides to convert to Christianity.

Finally, we have been able to see how the theme of alienation is crucial to both King Lear and The Jew of Malta. Indeed, with different types of alienation found in both plays, they increase the audience’s interest. In King Lear, the issues attached to the theme of alienation, namely, madness, appearance versus reality, family betrayal, the symbolic meaning of the storm and the heath all add together to make of the play a success. Similarly, in The Jew of Malta, issues such as religious hypocrisy, racial discrimination, materialism and lust for money, as shown,  all in one way or another, tie up to the theme of alienation to make of the play an interesting and rich one.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Marlowe, Christopher, The Jew of Malta, New Mermaids Edition.

Shakespeare, William, King Lear, Longman Literature.

Flower, Celeste, Cambridge Student Guide: King Lear, Cambridge University Press 2002.

Lecture Notes

Analysis of King Lear,  March 2005)

Emily C. Bartels. Spectacles of Strangeness: Imperialism, Alienation and Marlowe, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993.   (19 March 2005)

        

        

        

        

        

 

     

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