Marlowe’s Queer Jew

nlike many of Christopher Marlowe’s works, The Jew of Malta contains no clear presentation of same-sex relations, and, as a result, it is not often thought of as homoerotic. Nevertheless, I will argue, it presents us with as queer a protagonist, a play, and an aesthetic as any of Marlowe’s texts. The play repeatedly destabilizes narrative linearity, which is productive ofmeaning, as well as undermining the related notions of familial lineage, reproduction, and inheritance. It resonates eerily with Lee Edelman’s influential construction, “sinthomosexuality,” the denial of meaning and futurity identified in the current cultural imaginary with the homosexual, who is seen as embodying “an antisocial force that queerness might better name.” The sinthomosexual, Edelman explains, “speak[s] . . . for the death drive and its disarticulation of forms.” InNo Future, he calls on those whom society aligns with this figure of negativity (in an attempt to bestow meaning and coherence upon itself ) to embrace rather than to distance themselves from it. Such an embrace occurs in The Jew of Malta.