This is fascinating
play about the life and death of a Jewish merchant on the island of Malta. The hero-villain is a
Jew
named Barnabas. At the beginning of the
play, he is counting his money and anticipating the arrival of one of his merchant ships from Egypt -- minding his own business and getting richer and richer. An envoy comes to Malta from the Sultan of Turkey, demanding the last ten years of tribute. The (Christian) governour decided to tax the Jews of Malta half their worldly goods to pay it. Barnabas protested (he and the others could have escaped paying at all by converting to Christianity, but they would not--they were faithful), so the govenour took ALL of his wealth, including his house (where he had hidden some gold and jewels "just in case," for his daughter Abigail's marriage portion); they turned the house into a nunnery. His daughter pretended to convert to Christianity and to wish to join the convent. She gets him the wealth he had hidden. In time, he prospers and he had even more money than he had had before.
Meanwhile, a ship had come from Spain (with Turkish slaves for sale -- Barnabas buys one) and the captain convinces the Govenour and the Knights of Malta to fight the Turks instead of paying the tribute.
Barnabas sends his slave with false challenges to two men -- they fight each other (over Abigail) and both are killed. Abigail finds out that she has lost her true love, and goes to become a nun for real. Her father sends his slave with a pot of poisoned rice pudding as a donation to the convent in order to punish his daughter for her faithlessness. All the nuns die, but his daughter confesses the truth to a friar with her dying breath. He and another friar go to blackmail Barnabas about this evildoing. He promises to both of them to join their respective convents and make them his heirs in penance, but he kills the one friar in the monk's bed and then props him up outside, as though he were alive. The slave and his master, Barnabas, then come out and turn the second friar in to the sheriff as the true killer. He is hanged and dies thinking he killed his friend.
Barnabas's slave falls in love with a courtesan, and has her pimp demand more and more money from his master by letters, blackmailing him. The old
Jew pretends to be a French musician and lets them smell a
flower that he has poisoned. They all accuse him to the Govenour whose son's death Barnabas had brought about. They all die and are buried, but Barnabas, appearing dead, is thrown over the walls of the city, where he revives and meets the Turks, and helps them conquer the city. He is made Govenour, but not wanting to rule himself, he makes a deal with the former Govenour. He talks the Turkish leader into sending his men into one building while he and his officers come to Barnabas's place. The Govenour betrays the old man, however, and he is killed in the trap he had set for the Turks. The building the Turkish soldiers went to is blown up, and they all die. So the Govenour tells the young Turkish man that he is captive until his father, the Turkish ruler, sends ransom and more men -- he is (albeit unwillingly) the Govenour's guest.
This is a play which opens wide the wounds of the Christian and Jewish faiths in conflict in the Middle Ages. Because his daughter was in love with a Christian man, Barnabas felt he had to bring about the deaths of her suitors to keep her from the apostasy of marrying a Gentile, and when she abandoned her faith, he felt it was his duty to kill her for her sin of deserting the worship of the true God. His bitterness is sparked by the unfairness of the Govenour's decree that ALL his wealth be confiscated; his faithfulness to Judaism is rewarded, however, by even greater riches later on. It was NOT his duty, by the wildest stretch of the imagination, however, to kill the nuns with whom his daughter Abigail had taken refuge, and it is this act, and the actions he takes to cover up his crime, that begin him on the long trail to destruction. He may be forgiven some of his acts of vengeance, but his ultimate disloyalty to everyone he comes in contact with is the cause of his downfall -- that and his refusal to take the reins of government and his rightful responsibilities once he had won them. This is a deep and bitter play that bears reading and rereading, as the layers of meaning reveal themselves slowly.