For whatever actually happened between Shakespeare and the young man—whether they only stared longingly at one another or embraced, kissed passionately, went to bed together—was almost certainly shaped by an overwhelming sense of transience. This sense did not only, or even principally, derive from the age and class differences that intensified their desires; it derived from the period’s understanding of male homosexual love. Elizabethans acknowledged the existence of same-sex desire; indeed, it was in a certain sense easier for them to justify than heterosexual desire. That men were inherently superior to women was widely preached; why then wouldn’t men naturally be drawn to love other men? Sodomy was strictly prohibited by religious teaching and the law, but that prohibition aside, it was perfectly understandable that men would love and desire men.
Shakespeare’s contemporary Edmund Spenser, a poet celebrated for his moral seriousness, wrote a pastoral poem in which a shepherd declares his passionate love for a youth. Attached to the poem is a commentary by Spenser himself or someone very close to him that notes uneasily that the relationship has some savor of the “disorderly love” that the Greeks called “paederastice.” But after all, the commentary continues, from the right perspective “paederastice” is “much to be preferred before gynerastice, that is, the love which enflameth men with lust toward womankind.” And then, as if alarmed by what he has just said, the commentator adds a final disclaimer: let no man think that he is defending the “execrable and horrible sins of forbidden and execrable fleshliness.”
It is in the context of this seesaw game of acknowledgment and denial that Shakespeare stages his sexual desire for the young man: it is explicitly accepted and ardently expressed as if it were the most natural thing in the world, and at the same time it is deflected, disavowed, or defeated, as if it could never be fully realized. The young man, in sonnet 20, has a woman’s face and a woman’s gentle heart, but he is better, truer, and more steadfast than any woman. He is, the poet writes, “the master-mistress of my passion.” Nature indeed intended to create a woman when she made the young man, but, doting on her own creation, she added something—“she pricked thee out” (20.2, 13)—and therefore defeated the poet of his long-term sexual fulfillment. Shakespeare does not adopt the outraged moralizing tone of Spenser’s commentator, but he plays with the same materials—misogyny, intense homosexual desire, disavowal—to which he adds a sense of transience. For even if in the actual relationship half-hidden in the sonnets Shakespeare fulfilled his erotic longings, he knew that this love would never be allowed to stand in the way of the social imperative to marry and produce heirs, precisely that imperative to which Shakespeare gave voice in the opening sonnets.
It was possible for the adolescent Southampton to declare that he was not ready to marry, provided he was prepared to accept the huge financial sacrifice that his refusal entailed. It was possible too for him to have an affair with one or more of the men—and there must have been many—who courted him. It would have been quite another thing for him to abjure marriage altogether. A few men of high rank (though not as high as Southampton’s) did indeed refuse to marry—Francis Bacon is a notable example—but quite apart from sexual orientation, most were committed to passing along their name, title, and wealth. In 1598, shortly before his twenty-fifth birthday, Southampton secretly wed one of the queen’s maids of honor, Elizabeth Vernon, who was pregnant with his child. The queen was enraged: her maids of honor were meant actually to be maids, and she hated clandestine marriages among her followers. Still, this marriage seems to have been a happy one, sustaining the earl through a long, turbulent, and on occasion extremely dangerous career.
As for the poet, if there is one thing that the sonnets, taken as biographical documents, strongly suggest, it is that he could not find what he craved, emotionally or sexually, within his marriage. Part of the problem may have been the evident mismatch with Anne Hathaway; but perhaps the sonnets suggest too that no single person could ever have satisfied Shakespeare’s longings or made him happy. It is not as if he found, outside of his marriage, someone who fulfilled him completely. He focused, it seems, his capacity for ecstatic idealization largely on the young man and his capacity for desire largely on his mistress. And in both cases, there is an obstacle to fulfillment. The poet adores a man whom he cannot possess and desires a woman whom he cannot admire. The beautiful young man, the sonnets ruefully acknowledge, cannot ultimately be his, while the dark lady, even if he could securely possess her, is everything that should arouse revulsion in him. Dishonest, unchaste, and faithless, she has, according to the last sonnets in the sequence, given him something more than revulsion; she has infected him with venereal disease. But still he cannot give her up: “My love is as a fever, longing still / For that which longer nurseth the disease”(147.1–2). That he cannot do so has everything to do with the compulsions of “lust in action” (129.2), the rhythm of tumescence and detumescence that defines for him what it means to be with her: “I call / Her ‘love’ for whose dear love I rise and fall” (151.13–14). This sexual rhythm, yoking vitality and death, pleasure and disgust, longing and loathing, is not a mere recreation or an escape. As the sonnets insist again and again, the poet’s witty, anxious, self-conscious embrace of his own desires defines what it means to be “Will.”
There is no room, in the way in which Shakespeare represents himself in the sonnets, for his wife or his children. It does not matter, in this regard, whether the poems were written in the mid-1590s or a decade later: since no one thinks that they were written before Shakespeare married and became a father, all of the sonnets are in effect acts of erasure. There are perhaps a few small exceptions: the possible glimpse of the bygone courtship of his wife in a pun on “hate away” and “Hathaway” in sonnet 145; a very indirect acknowledgment of his infidelity in the opening line of sonnet 152—“In loving thee thou know’st I am forsworn.” The sonnet characteristically goes on to berate his mistress for breaking her “bed-vow,” but at least for a moment he recognizes that he too has broken his vow. For the most part, he seems to forget. Or rather, the figures of the young man and the dark lady seem to displace and absorb emotions that we might have conventionally expected Shakespeare to feel in and for his family. About Anne Shakespeare he is silent; it is to his beautiful male friend that he writes his most celebrated words about love: “Let me not to the marriage of true minds / Admit impediments” (116.1–2).
CHAPTER 9
Laughter at the Scaffold
HOWEVER GENEROUSLY HE may have been rewarded for the sonnets, Venus and Adonis, and The Rape of Lucrece, Shakespeare did not choose to stake his fortunes, financial or artistic, on his relation to a patron. He chose instead, when the plague abated, to return to the theater, where he rose to preeminence as a playwright remarkably quickly. The playing companies needed to please many different tastes, and they had a huge appetite for new scripts. Hardworking hacks could make good money grinding out dozens of plays: Three Ladies of London, Peddler’s Prophecy, Fair Em, A Sackful of News, The Tragical History of the Tartarian Cripple, Emperor of Constantinople. But until the impressive, boisterous arrival on the scene of Ben Jonson in 1597, Shakespeare had only one serious rival, Christopher Marlowe. The two immensely talented young poets, exactly the same age, were evidently locked in mutual emulation and contest. They circled warily, watching with intense attention, imitating, and then attempting to surpass each other. The contest extended beyond the momentous early works, Tamburlaine and Henry VI, to a brilliant pair of strikingly similar history plays, Shakespeare’s Richard II and Marlowe’s Edward II, and an equally brilliant pair of long erotic poems, Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis and Marlowe’s Hero and Leander. Marlowe would not have made the mistake of underestimating Shakespeare. He would have immediately understood that in the words of the hunchback duke of Gloucester, in the third part of Henry VI—“I’ll make my heaven to dream upon the crown” (3.2.168)—Shakespeare was at once invoking and slyly mocking Tamburlaine’s dream of “The sweet
fruition of an earthly crown” (2.7.29). Shakespeare, for his part, was in no danger of underestimating Marlowe. Marlowe was the only one of the university wits whose talent Shakespeare might have seriously envied, whose aesthetic judgment he might have feared, whose admiration he might have earnestly wanted to win, and whose achievements he certainly attempted to equal and outdo.
One of Marlowe’s achievements might have seemed to Shakespeare, at this early point in his career, beyond his grasp. Doctor Faustus, the powerful tragedy of the scholar who sells his soul to the devil, drew deeply on Marlowe’s theological education at Cambridge. Though years later, in Hamlet, Shakespeare depicted a bookish prince who has been abruptly pulled away from his university studies, and in The Tempest he explored the fate of a prince who becomes rapt in his occult reading, he never attempted, early or late, to make the scholar’s study the center of the theatrical scene. His fullest answer to Marlowe came on neutral ground, that is, in the depiction of a person whom neither of them is likely ever to have encountered, a Jew.
But how did Marlowe and Shakespeare come to write two of their most memorable plays, The Jew of Malta and The Merchant of Venice, about Jews? Or rather, in the case of Shakespeare, why did the character of Shylock the Jew take over the comedy in which he appears? For almost everyone thinks that the merchant of Venice of the play’s title is Shylock. Even when you realize that the merchant is not the Jew, even when you know that the title is referring to the Christian Antonio, you still instinctively make the mistake. And it is not exactly a mistake: the Jew is at the play’s center. The Merchant of Venice has a host of characters who compete for the audience’s attention: a handsome, impecunious young man in search of a wealthy wife; a melancholy, rich merchant who is hopelessly in love with the young man; women—three of them, no less—who dress themselves as men; a mischievous clown; an irrepressible sidekick; an exotic Moroccan; an absurd Spaniard. The list could be extended. But it is the Jewish villain everyone remembers, and not simply as villain. Shylock seems to have a stronger claim to attention, quite simply more life, than anyone else. The same can be said for Marlowe’s Jewish villain, Barabas. Why were the imaginations of Shakespeare and Marlowe set on fire by the figure of the Jew?
The fire glowed against the darkness of almost complete erasure: in 1290, two hundred years before the momentous expulsion from Spain, the entire Jewish community of England had been expelled and forbidden on pain of death to return. The act of expulsion, in the reign of Edward I, was unprecedented; England was the first nation in medieval Christendom to rid itself by law of its entire Jewish population. There was no precipitating crisis, as far as is known, no state of emergency, not even any public explanation. No jurist seems to have thought it necessary to justify the deportations; no chronicler bothered to record the official reasons. Perhaps no one, Jew or Christian, thought reasons needed to be given. For decades the Jewish population in England had been in desperate trouble: accused of Host desecration and the ritual murder of Christian children, hated as moneylenders, reviled as Christ killers, beaten and lynched by mobs whipped into anti-Jewish frenzy by the incendiary sermons of itinerant friars.
By the time of Marlowe and Shakespeare, three centuries later, the Jewish population of England was ancient history. London had a small population of Spanish and Portuguese converts from Judaism, and some of these may have been Marranos, secretly maintaining Jewish practices. But the Jewish community in England had long vanished, and there were no Jews who openly practiced their religion. Yet in fact the Jews left traces far more difficult to eradicate than people, and the English brooded on these traces—stories circulated, reiterated, and elaborated—continually and virtually obsessively. There were Jewish fables and Jewish jokes and Jewish nightmares: Jews lured little children into their clutches, murdered them, and took their blood to make bread for Passover. Jews were immensely wealthy—even when they looked like paupers—and covertly pulled the strings of an enormous international network of capital and goods. Jews poisoned wells and were responsible for spreading the bubonic plague. Jews secretly plotted an apocalyptic war against the Christians. Jews had a peculiar stink. Jewish men menstruated.
Even though almost no one had actually laid eyes on one for generations, the Jews, like wolves in modern children’s stories, played a powerful symbolic role in the country’s imaginative economy. Not surprisingly, they found their way into the ordinary language that theatrical characters, including Shakespeare’s, speak. “If I do not take pity of her I am a villain,” says Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing, tricked by his friends into declaring a passion for Beatrice. “If I do not love her, I am a Jew” (2.3.231–32). Everyone knew what that meant: Jews were by nature villainous, unnatural, coldhearted. England’s royal kings, says the dying John of Gaunt, are renowned for their deeds as far from home “As is the sepulchre, in stubborn Jewry, / Of the world’s ransom, blessèd Mary’s son” (Richard II, 2.1.55–56). Everyone knew what that meant: even in the wake of the Messiah’s presence in their midst, Jews stubbornly and perversely clung to their old beliefs, beliefs that could not cleanse and hence ransom them from sin. “No, no, they were not bound,” says Peto, contradicting Gadshill’s brazen lie that they had bound the men with whom Falstaff says he had fought. “You rogue,” rejoins Falstaff, “they were bound every man of them, or I am a Jew else, an Hebrew Jew” (1 Henry IV, 2.5.163–65). Everyone knew what that meant: a Jew—here, in Falstaff’s comic turn, a Jew squared—was a person without valor and without honor, the very antithesis of what the fat braggart is claiming to be.
Shakespeare and his contemporaries found Jews, along with Ethopians, Turks, witches, hunchbacks, and others, useful conceptual tools. These feared and despised figures provided quick, easy orientation, clear boundaries, limit cases. “I think Crab, my dog, be the sourest-natured dog that lives,” says the clown Lance in The Two Gentlemen of Verona. Everyone in his household weeps at Lance’s departure, but the “cruel-hearted cur” does not shed a tear: “He is a stone, a very pebble-stone, and has no more pity in him than a dog. A Jew would have wept to have seen our parting” (2.3.4–5, 8–10). The Jew was a measuring device—here of degrees of heartlessness. He was also an identity marker, as another remark by the merry Lance makes clear: “If thou wilt, go with me to the alehouse. If not, thou art an Hebrew, a Jew, and not worth the name of a Christian” (2.5.44–45). The dog is real, at least in the special sense in which stage animals are real; Lance is real, at least in the special sense in which theatrical characters are real; but the Jew has no comparable reality. Perhaps the most casually devastating sign of the disappearance of real Jews is a quiet joke, rather than an insult: “Signor Costard, adieu,” says the diminutive page Mote in Love’s Labour’s Lost, and the clownish Costard replies, “My sweet ounce of man’s flesh, my incony Jew!” (3.1.123–24). “Incony,” meaning “fine,” was a piece of Elizabethan slang. But what is “Jew” doing here? The answer: nothing. Perhaps Costard has simply misheard “adieu” (presumably pronounced “a-Jew”); perhaps in a slangy way he is calling Mote a “jewel” or a “juvenile.” Whatever he is saying, he is not referring to actual Jews; Shakespeare calculated, probably correctly, that the accidental reference would make his audience chuckle.
So, some three hundred years after their expulsion from England, the Jews were in circulation as despised figures in stories and in everyday speech, and Shakespeare, particularly early in his career, reflected and furthered this circulation, apparently without moral reservation. For though the audience is meant to feel various degrees of detachment from Benedick, Falstaff, Lance, and Costard, it is not distanced from a casual anti-Semitism that is simply an incidental feature of their comic energy. Jews do not actually appear in these plays, nor do they occupy a significant place in the language the characters speak; on the contrary, they are all but invisible, even in those few minor instances when they are invoked. Shakespeare was being a man of his times. Jews in England in the late sixteenth century had virtually no claim on reality;
they had been subject to what the German language so eloquently calls Vernichtung, being made nothing.
Yet that is not quite right, for Jews were also constantly and more substantially present to all Christians as “the People of the Book.” Without the Hebrew Bible, whose prophesies he fulfills, no Christ. It is possible to be unclear or evasive about whether Jesus was a Jew, but, conceptually at least, it is not possible for Christianity to do without Jews. Every Sunday, in a society in which weekly church attendance was obligatory for everyone, ministers edified their parishioners with passages, in translation, from the sacred Scriptures of the ancient Israelites. A people utterly despised and degraded, a people who had been deported en masse from England in the late thirteenth century and had never been allowed to return, an invisible people who functioned as symbolic tokens of all that was heartless, vicious, rapacious, and unnatural also functioned as the source of the most exalted spiritual poetry in the English language and as the necessary conduit through which the Redeemer came to all Christians.
This conceptual necessity—this historical interlacing of the destiny of Jews and Christians—had, of course, nothing to do with toleration for actual Jews. Certain cities—Venice among them—permitted Jews to reside relatively unmolested for extended periods of time, forbidding them, to be sure, to own land or practice most “honest” trades but allowing, even encouraging, them to lend money at interest. Such fiscal liquidity was highly useful in a society where canon law prohibited Christians from taking interest, but it made the Jews predictable objects of popular loathing and upper-class exploitation. Medieval popes periodically voiced a wish to protect Jews against those more radical Christian voices that called for their complete extinction, man, woman, and child, but the protection was only for the purposes of preserving an object lesson in misery. The papal argument was that an unhappy, impoverished, weak, and insecure remnant was a useful reminder of the consequences of rejecting Christ. Protestants had a somewhat greater interest in exploring the historical reality of ancient Judaism. The drive to return to the practices and beliefs of early Christianity led to a scholarly investigation of Hebrew prayer, the Passover, atonement, general confession, funeral customs, and the like. For a brief time Luther even felt kindly disposed toward contemporary Jews, who had, he thought, refused to convert to a corrupt and magical Catholicism. But when they stubbornly refused to convert to the purified, reformed Christianity he was championing, Luther’s muted respect turned to rage, and in terms rivaling those of the most bigoted medieval friar, he called upon Christians to burn the Jews to death in their synagogues.
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