From “Villain” to “Heretic”: Identity Politics and the Roots of Tragedy in *The Jew of Malta*

Abstract

Christopher Marlowe’s *The Jew of Malta* profoundly reflects the value reconstruction and social upheaval of the Renaissance through its unique “villain-hero” narrative .Grounded in the social context of the Elizabethan era, a deconstruction of the characters of the Jew Barabbas and the Governor Funnes reveals that, compared to Barabbas’s explicit quest for vengeance, Funnes’s use of religious rhetoric to mask political plunder constitutes a more covert and profound form of Machiavellianism. This exposes the hypocritical nature of the Christian world, which commits injustice in the name of the sacred. Building on this, by introducing the theory of binary oppositions, the analysis delves from the superficial identity conflict between “Jews and Christians” to the deeper struggle between “humanist desires and religious authoritarian order”—Barabbas’s tragedy is not merely the moral ruin of an individual, but an epochal metaphor for the sharp conflict between the awakening of human nature and the traditional theocratic order during the era of primitive accumulation of capital.