So popular in its time that impresario Philip Henslowe staged it during the plague years of 1592 and '93, this 'tragical farce', as it is best described, is hard for modern audiences to swallow. The rich Jew Barabas fulfils all of the anti-semitic prejudices that had been current in Christian Europe for centuries, but the Christians are equally viciously exposed as vicious despots and hypocrites. This edition sets the play in the cultural, religious and political context of Elizabethan London to show that what Marlowe presented to his audience was a shrewd, perhaps cynical, analysis of aggression and xenophobia; it collapses ideological structures of all kinds.