The representations of the archetypal Jew in Christopher Marlowe's Jew of Malta and William Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice

William Shakespeare is one of the most popular authors, not only in England but worldwide. He was greatly influenced by his contemporary Christopher Marlowe. The similarity is witnessed in their themes, motifs, devices, and plots. During my research, these two writers' works respectively The Merchant of Venice and The Jew of Malta, are first broadly compared in order to explore the various differences and specific embellishment that each author adds and later closely examining their main characters, namely Barabas and Shylock in order to deconstruct the Jewish archetype. The following paper aims to also elaborately examine the archetypes, treatment, status, rights and the connotations revolved around Jews starting from Medieval literature, tracing its metamorphic progress through Renaissance and Victorianism till Modernism. An elaboration on the metamorphoses of the Jewish archetypal characters, previously recognised as stubborn, malicious, villain and hatred by God to the modernist alienated Jew striving to find his authentic identity in a socially constructed environment facing ambiguous personality threat, will also be encountered. Specifically, this paper analyses both authors' artistic recreations and embellishments of the archetype Jew as a satire on anti-Semitism.