re
serious adjective.

Marlowe's "Jew of Malta" appeared about 1589. As the author announces in
the prologue, it is based upon Machiavel's theory of life--pure
selfishness. The Jew makes war upon all the world, for the gratification
of his passion for revenge; he poisons his daughter "and the entire
nunnery in which she had taken refuge"; he kills, he betrays, he
prepares a burning caldron for a whole garrison,--"tragedy such as this
is simply revolting. The characters of Barabas and of his servant, and
the motives by which they are stimulated, are the mere coinage of
extravagance; and the effect is as essentially undramatic as the
personification is unreal." The conduct of the drama is in keeping with
the character of this incomprehensible monster of vindictiveness; he is
"without shame or fear, and bloodthirsty even to madness." His bad
schemes are always successful; but the action proceeds without
connection, the characters come and go without apparent cause; the three
Jews, the monks and nuns, the mother of Don Mathias "appear and
disappear so unexpectedly, and are interwoven with the action in so
entirely an external manner, that the defects of the composition are at
once apparent."

If this seems a good model for Shakspere's Shylock, it will seem
impossible, when Barabas shows us his own portrait:

"As for myself, I walk abroad a-nights,
And kill sick people groaning under walls;
Sometimes I go about and poison wells;
And now and then, to cherish Christian thieves
I am content to lose some of my crowns;
That I may, walking in my gallery,
See 'em go pinion'd along by my door.
Being young, I studied physic, and began
To practice first upon the Italian;
There I enriched the priest with burials,
And always kept the sexton's arms in use,
With digging graves and ringing dead men's knells;
And after that was I an engineer,
And in the wars 'twixt France and Germany,
Under pretence of helping Charles the Fifth,
Slew friend and enemy with my stratagems.
And after that was I an usurer,
And with extorting, cozening, forfeiting,
And tricks belonging unto brokery,
I filled the jails with bankrupts in a year,
And with young orphans planted hospitals,
And every moon made some or other mad,
And now and then one hung himself for grief,
Pinning upon his breast a long great scroll,