Marlowe - all of it

Ignoring Faust here as I've been over it roughly 12,000 times since I first read it. Things to keep in mind: Faust idolizes the contract he's signed, and places primacy of those words over the boundlessness of God's mercy - this is what constitutes his fall and his inability to rise again, not that the contract itself actually has efficacy. He gives it efficacy through his belief in it only. He also believes in the autonomous power of signs, aka magic, which constitutes both his initial downfall and why he gives the contract such power. This also seems to be why he believes in the sign of Helen and treats it like Helen herself rather than the devil everyone knows the vision of her to be. Etc.

Tamburlaine: This play is great because it chronicles the meteoric RISE of someone to power. This is self-fashioning if ever anyone could do it - he takes himself from Scythian shepherd to king. Everything he says about himself is a boast he eventually manages to accomplish, though the note that he makes that the future tense is the proper way to refer to him is equally true - until the very end of the play, all of his boasts remain future things, not things accomplished. People fall behind him and follow his lead because of the sheer force of his rhetoric, his speaking ability, etc. If no one's done it yet, this would be a phenomenal play to do set in Nazi Germany featuring Hitler as Tamburlaine. I'll have to flip through and find some postcolonial criticism on this play, since the setting, the Turkish kings he overthrows, and the general orientalizing tendency are screaming out for some good post-col theory... The other big thing to keep in mind with Tamburlaine is that he's a tyrant, rather than a good leader: like Faust (and Barnabas, for that matter), he is a powerful figure who gains followers by his brilliance and linguistic cunning and yet commands them based on his personal whims, rather than on what might actually be good for the country at large. Tamburlaine p. 101 is great for this - he describes being a king as being a crown, power over life and death, the ability to have whatever one might wish, to be always obeyed and to create love in all who see one. Not a good king and the type of guy that would send shivers down the spine of most later political thinkers. He seems to be particularly good for Marlowe and even more interesting to think about in light of several of the attacks on Charles I - it would be interesting to find out if the play was performed much then and to what sorts of reactions. Marlowe is great for power dynamics because he so constantly bucked the system himself...

The Jew of Malta - The entire play revolves so closely around Barnabas that it's almost pointless to talk about anyone else. Barnabas sees himself as somehow separate from the entirety of the social world around him, and seems to claim this position as one of power, only to have that illusion taken from him when the government takes his belongings. At first he is concerned about his daughter and his wealth, but losing his wealth, he seems to distance himself from his daughter too. She is sent into the convent to pretend to become a nun so that she can recover the wealth he'd hidden in his (former) house (now nunnery), but that seems to take her away from him in that she then becomes the unwilling and mostly unknowing pawn in his revenge attempts against the governor. When she finds out that she has been used to help egg on a mortal duel between the man she loves and his would-be rival for her, she re-enters the convent and becomes Christian. Barnabas then uses Ithamore, his newly purchased Turkish slave, to deliver poison to the nunnery under the auspices of charity, thus killing both Abigall and all the other nuns. As a reward for his villany, Barnabas promises to make Ithamore his heir, and does seem to, to the point where he falls for Ithamore's extortion attempts and eventually kills Ithamore, the whore he's fallen for, and her pimp. He then manages to turn traitor to the city and let the Turks invade (for which they make him governor), and then decides to turn on the Turks for shits and giggles and try and come up with a way to live in Malta unmolested (knowing rightfully that as long as he's governor and powerful for treachery, his life is at risk every time he's near any other person).

Barnabas defines himself by two things: his religion and his money. His money is definitely the trump card, and he has a lot of it - even after they've taken everything and he just gets the little bit of leftover money he'd hidden in his house before it was seized, he still has enough to buy a house the size of the governors and pay for a slave to boot. He considers that without his money, he has nothing and is nothing at all - his daughter has significantly less importance to him than does his wealth, and his wealth in a sense becomes his family - it is because of his gold that he's willing to commit the varying acts of vengence. He calls himself a Jew, but mostly just to distinguish himself from Christians, whom he hates as much as they hate him. What role his religion actually plays in his life really isn't talked about too much, other than when he makes up little customs to excuse his behavior - claiming to have to breathe away so that he doesn't breathe the air of a Christian man is one example. Anyway, the play is horribly anti-semitic, but most interesting in that Barnabas is never allowed inside the social circle regardless of whether the Turks or the Christians are in charge - even as governor he is betrayed, and finally killed at the hands of his adversaries. He glories in revenge for revenge's sake, even when there's no point to his vengence. He seems to become a self-characature.