Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture

Front Cover
Routledge, 1990 - History - 188 pages
In the essay on pp. 40-58, "Marlowe, Marx, and Anti-Semitism, " proposes a comparative reading of Marlowe's "The Jew of Malta" and Marx's essay "On the Jewish Question." Both works use the stereotype of the perfidious Jew, showing a link between the Renaissance and modern thought. The Jew, linked in the popular imagination with usury or cunning, is depicted by these writers as paradoxically alien and a distilled representative of a society obsessed with the power of money. This contrasts with Shakespeare's "The Merchant of Venice, " which presents the Jew as an outsider. Argues that Marlowe has a buried identification with the Jewish protagonist Barabas (e.g. both scorn society and have no hope for its future). Marx, however, maintained hope for a better society.

From inside the book

Contents

INTRODUCTION
1
MARLOWE MARX AND ANTISEMITISM
40
FILTHY RITES
59
Copyright

1 other sections not shown

Other editions - View all

Common terms and phrases

About the author (1990)

Stephen Greenblatt is a literary critic, theorist and scholar. He is the author of Three Modern Satirists: Waugh, Orwell, and Huxley (1965); Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (1980); Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture (1990); Redrawing the Boundaries: The Transformation of English and American Literary Studies (1992); The Norton Shakespeare (1997); Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (2004); Shakespeare's Freedom (2010); and The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (2011).

Bibliographic information