In his ‘The St Angelo experience’ (November 5) Lino Bugeja makes the controversial proposal of having a production of Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta staged in Fort St Angelo (or is it Birgu?).

Perhaps Bugeja has forgotten how utterly hostile Marlowe was in this play to Jewish people, and therefore how upsetting a performance would be not just to Jews but to all those people, presumably Bugeja included, who find racism obnoxious.

It is true that Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, with its portrait of a vengeful Jew, has been performed quite recently in Malta, but the richly poetical and three-dimensional portrait of Shylock makes it palatable to contemporary audiences, whereas Marlow’s Barabas is depicted two-dimensionally as a villain of the deepest dye.