Marlowe’s sacred city and the walls in The Jew of Malta

Jaecheol Kim

doi:10.1177/0184767819897367

Marlowe’s sacred city and the walls in The Jew of Malta

Jaecheol Kim

Department of English Language and Literature

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

Abstract

This essay surveys the juridical and biopolitical significance of the city walls in Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta. Early modern cities were designed to control the spread of diseases, and the city space embodied discipline and governmentality. The function of Malta’s walls is to protect the corpus politicum against pathogens, marking the distinction between physis and nomos. Marlowe defines this function by representing lives without: the national body is conceived as a living organism threatened by alien bodies. In the play’s medicinal rhetoric, pathogenic infiltrations of Turks and Catholics are destroyed by another invasive body, a Jew.

Original language	English
Pages (from-to)	26-44
Number of pages	19
Journal	Cahiers Elisabethains
Volume	101
Issue number	1
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1177/0184767819897367
Publication status	Published - 2020 Apr 1

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was supported by the Yonsei University research fund of 2019 (2019-22-0067).

Publisher Copyright:
© The Author(s) 2020.

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

History
Literature and Literary Theory

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10.1177/0184767819897367

Cite this

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Marlowe’s sacred city and the walls in The Jew of Malta

Abstract

Bibliographical note

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