“Come to My House”: The Architecture of Conversion and Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta

Abstract

Highlighting the importance of the architecture of conversion for Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta, this article situates the play within the context of Reformation adaptations, including the founding of playhouses and stranger churches within ex-monastic buildings. Foregrounding fascination with the mercurial and protean energies of architectural conversion, rather than charting more familiar processes of ruination, nostalgia, and loss, the article emphasizes the religious polyvalency of Barabas’s converted house and connects its thresholds to the performance of conversion in different contexts. The Jew of Malta, I argue, makes imaginative use of the complex dilemmas posed by converted structures, making visible the uncomfortable and inconvenient instabilities that they manifest.