The Massacre at Paris is the most topical of Marlowe's plays. As Paul Kocher has carefully demonstrated, Marlowe often relies on current sources – anti-Catholic pamphlets and histories designed to arouse the indignation of English Protestants. We might expect that because his play encourages this indignation, it would be less ironic than, The few of Malta or Doctor Faustus, dark satires which betray the follies of the audience as well as those of the mocking heroes. Yet irony pervades The Massacre at Paris, an irony dependent less upon ‘hard’ allusions, more upon dramatic structure and implicit ideas.

Because Marlowe's irony functions so obliquely in The Massacre at Paris, it is easy to understand why J. B. Steane dismissed his own inclination to regard the play as a satire: ‘One would like to think that Marlowe was intending, or at least sensing, an irony; that with all the noise and savagery, a satire existed safe in the knowledge that a knavish speech sleeps safe in a foolish ear.’ Although knavish speeches abound in The Massacre at Paris, they never achieve the plausibility we have observed in the soliloquies of Barabas and Faustus. Had he so wished, Marlowe could have glorified knavery and created a relationship with an audience like that established in The few of Malta, He could have exaggerated French bloodshed as a means of saying, ‘My show is aimed at foolish hypocrites who criticize the Catholics, but not themselves.’