Friar Barnadine: Thou hast committed—
Barabas: Fornication—but that was in another country;
And besides, the wench is dead.

The exchange is a mordant piece of gallows humor: Barabas treats a moral accusation as if it were a minor procedural matter, dismissing guilt by appealing to distance (“another country”) and finality (“the wench is dead”). The line crystallizes a cynical, self-exculpating logic—wrongdoing is rendered irrelevant once its immediate consequences are out of sight or its victim cannot speak. In dramatic terms, it sharpens Barabas’s characterization as rhetorically agile and morally unrepentant, using wit to deflect judgment. The joke’s coldness also exposes how easily language can be used to launder conscience, a theme that resonates with Marlowe’s broader interest in transgression and the theatricality of confession.