It's great to see a lot of love for Marlowe and Jonson on this thread. I very much believe that, had he not been killed so young, Marlowe could have at least had equal stature to Shakespeare in the eyes of literary history. As it stands, his works have more influence than many might suspect. Whenever I read Marlowe, I'm always struck by the feeling of danger in his plays. For most other playwrights, the buildup to an event is crucial -- foreshadowing, plot development that contextualizes the event etc. But in Marlowe, surprising things happen at seemingly random. As a reader, they shock you...so I can only imagine how they would have played out on stage. All of his plays have this quality, though The Jew of Malta is the most extreme. Marlowe's supposed atheism is on full display as Jews, Turks, and Christians are all derided relatively equally. The titular Jew (Barabas) is naturally the focal point and commits the most wickedness (including killing his newly-converted daughter and her fellow nuns in a nunnery), but the schism and anarchy throughout the play is remarkable. I've often felt that Titus Andronicus feels far more like a Marlowe play than a Shakespeare play, and I chalk it up to Marlowe's influence on his colleague and collaborator.
One of my pedagogical hopes is to someday be able to teach The Jew of Malta in tandem with The Merchant of Venice (probably in an upper-level class). The plays are simultaneously extremely similar and extremely different, and exploring those stasis points would be fascinating.
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