I Count Religion But A Childish

Spoken by Machiavel in the Prologue to The Jew of Malta (c. 1590), where the ghost of Niccolò Machiavelli introduces the play's protagonist Barabas as one of his disciples. Marlowe gives Machiavel a deliberately provocative voice to signal the play's amoral universe from the outset. Elizabethan audiences associated "Machiavel" with ruthless political cunning; by having him dismiss religion as a toy and ignorance as the only sin, Marlowe sets up a world in which Christians, Jews, and Turks alike will prove equally hypocritical.