Luther’s On the Jews and Their Lies probably had little currency in Elizabethan England. There were, after all, no synagogues left in England to burn, no Jewish community to hate or to protect. Marlowe and Shakespeare encountered “strangers,” vulnerable to attack, but these were men and women belonging to the small communities of Flemish, Dutch, French, and Italian artisans, mostly Protestant exiles, who lived in London. In economic hard times, these aliens were the victims of resentment, targeted by gangs of drunken, loudmouthed, club-wielding idlers baying for blood.
The evidence that Marlowe and Shakespeare personally concerned themselves with this xenophobic violence is, in both cases, suggestive but ambiguous. In 1593 someone nailed up, on the Dutch Church wall in London, an incendiary placard against the resident aliens, one of a series of attacks that the authorities feared would incite violence. The authorities, launching a sweep against the troublemakers, apparently suspected that the author of the placard was Marlowe. Informed that Marlowe had been living with Thomas Kyd, officers went to Kyd’s rooms. They did not find Marlowe there, but they searched the rooms and found heretical and blasphemous papers. Kyd, subjected to a brutal interrogation, said that the papers were all Marlowe’s. Marlowe was called before the Privy Council, questioned, and released only under orders to report daily in person to the Palace of Westminster.
The suspicion that Marlowe wrote the Dutch Church libel was probably baseless, but it was not motivated by idle paranoia. The author or authors of the toxic words that worried the authorities complained that “like the Jews” the aliens “eat us up as bread”—the image may well have been drawn from a popular play like The Jew of Malta—and the nasty placard not only alluded to Marlowe’s play The Massacre at Paris but was also signed “Tamburlaine.” The allusions show that Marlowe’s fantasies were current in the minds of some aggrieved people, that his plays had excited them, that his famous eloquence had helped them give their feelings a voice.
Shakespeare’s very different response to the xenophobia was signaled in a play that he apparently collaborated in writing with several other playwrights, including Anthony Munday (the probable originator), Henry Chettle, Thomas Heywood, and Thomas Dekker. Before its first performance, the script, Sir Thomas More, ran afoul of the censor, Edmund Tilney, Master of the Revels. Tilney did not reject the play outright, but he demanded substantial revisions in several scenes depicting the hatred of “strangers,” and he called for the complete elimination of a scene showing the 1517 riots against their presence in England. The reason for this demand seems clear: intensifying tensions culminated in periodic outbursts of rioting. There were particularly ugly episodes in 1592–93 and again in 1595. The authors of Sir Thomas More obviously wanted to capitalize on the tensions—everyone in the audience would understand that the scenes from the past were a thinly disguised representation of the world just outside the playhouse walls. The censor evidently was afraid that the play, even if it formally disapproved of the riots it staged, could stir up more trouble.
Though alterations were made and new scenes were written, possibly in response to the censor’s demands, the script does not seem to have received official approval, and the play was apparently never performed. But the manuscript, written in multiple hands, somehow survived (it is now in the British Library) and has been pored over for more than a century with extraordinary attention. For though many puzzles about it remain unsolved, including the year the play was first drafted and the year or years when the revisions were made, the manuscript contains what most scholars agree are passages Shakespeare himself penned, the only such autograph manuscript to have been discovered.
One of the passages in Shakespeare’s hand—Hand D, as it is more cautiously called—depicts Thomas More, as sheriff of London, successfully persuading the antialien rioters to abandon their rebellious violence and submit themselves to the king. Shakespeare wrote lines that seem exceptionally alert to the human misery and political dangers of forced expulsions. “Grant them removed,” Shakespeare’s More tells the mob that is demanding that the strangers be driven out of the kingdom,
and grant that this your noise
Hath chid down all the majesty of England.
Imagine that you see the wretched strangers,
Their babies at their backs, with their poor luggage
Plodding to th’ ports and coasts for transportation,
And that you sit as kings in your desires,
Authority quite silenced by your brawl
And you in ruff of your opinions clothed:
What had you got? I’ll tell you. You had taught
How insolence and strong hand should prevail,
How order should be quelled—and by this pattern
Not one of you should live an agèd man,
For other ruffians as their fancies wrought
With selfsame hand, self reasons, and self right
Would shark on you, and men like ravenous fishes
Would feed on one another.
The overarching point here is a traditional argument for obedience to higher authority, an argument Shakespeare had Ulysses make with even greater eloquence in Troilus and Cressida. Once the rabble take matters into their own hands, the warning goes, once the chain of due deference is broken, all civil protections immediately vanish, and the world is given over to the whims of the strong. But it is striking that the point was made through an exercise of sympathetic imagination, and that the scene most vividly conjured up was the moment of collective exile:
Imagine that you see the wretched strangers,
Their babies at their backs, with their poor luggage
Plodding to th’ ports and coasts for transportation.
Shakespeare was not writing about the deported Jews of England; it is overwhelmingly unlikely that he was even thinking about Jews. But his lines convey a glimpse of scenes that must have occurred centuries earlier when, as the documentary record shows, at least 1,335 of the Jews expelled from England plodded to the ports and paid for passage to France.
Here is a certain capacity to conjure up the lives of others, an ability to identify even with despised and degraded humanity that sits uncomfortably in Shakespeare’s work with “If I do not love her I am a Jew,” and other moments of impulsive, unself-conscious Jew-baiting. These latter obviously cannot be taken as the expression of the playwright’s considered “opinion” about Jews or other strangers, nor are they sufficiently individuated or detailed to tell us much about the characters in whose mouths they appear. They are simply instances of lively or amusing speech, rhetorically enhanced no doubt, but close enough to ordinary usage to count as realistic representation. Such realism was the medium in which Shakespeare frequently worked, particularly in the comedies and histories. He seemed quite comfortable with it; that is, there was little or no sense of strain, no signal that he wished to rise above and judge the language of the crowd, no moral revulsion. But there was a different principle at work in the lines he gave More, a current of feeling that Shakespeare attributed to the capacity of the imagination. The effect is like a quick sketch by Dürer or Rembrandt: a few black lines on a blank page and suddenly a whole scene, charged with pain and loss, surges up. Since the “wretched strangers” in Sir Thomas More are not Jews, there was no inherent reason for the two impulses—mockery and identification—to come into tension or to contradict one another. They could have just sat there side by side. But they did in fact come into conflict for Shakespeare, and the remarkable record of the conflict is The Merchant of Venice.
To understand how this conflict came about, we must return to the play that Christopher Marlowe had written about a Jew. A black comedy, brilliant but exceptionally cynical and cruel, The Jew of Malta was probably first performed in 1589, near the beginning of Shakespeare’s career as a playwright, and it was an immediate success. Marlowe’s antihero, the Jew Barabas, with his Muslim slave Ithamore, exposes the rottenness of Malta’s Christian world, but in the course of the gleeful exposure, t
he play gives voice to a full range of the worst anti-Jewish fantasies. “I walk abroad a-nights,” Barabas declares,
And kill sick people groaning under walls.
Sometimes I go about and poison wells;
And now and then, to cherish Christian thieves,
I am content to lose some of my crowns,
That I may, walking in my gallery,
See ’em go pinioned along by my door.
(2.3.178–84)
Barabas’s love of money is surpassed by his hatred of Christians, his pleasure in contriving and savoring as many of their deaths as he can possibly bring about. The Jew may speak cordially to his Christian neighbors, he may seem to allow his daughter to convert to Christianity, he may even imply his own interest in conversion, but in his heart he is always hatching murder. His homicidal career began, he explains, in the practice of medicine, and he then turned to other professions, always with the same malevolent motive:
Being young, I studied physic, and began
To practice first upon the Italian;
There I enriched the priests with burials,
And always kept the sexton’s arms in ure
With digging graves and ringing dead men’s knells.
And after that was I an engineer,
And in the wars ’twixt France and Germany,
Under pretense of helping Charles the Fifth,
Slew friend and enemy with my stratagems.
Then after that was I an usurer,
And with extorting, cozening, forfeiting,
And tricks belonging unto brokery,
I filled the jails with bankrupts in a year,
And with young orphans planted hospitals,
And every moon made some or other mad,
And now and then one hang himself for grief,
Pinning upon his breast a long great scroll
How I with interest tormented him.
(2.3.185–202)
Where was Marlowe in all of this? Where was his audience? The spectators were invited to share imaginatively in the homicidal reverie, a reverie built out of the recycled religious hatreds of centuries, but then what? What happened to the poison after it had been vented on the public stage? Perhaps it evaporated; perhaps precisely by venting it, by giving the grotesque libel a full airing, it was exposed as the murderous daydream that it was. No one was ever like Barbaras or Ithamore; no one ever could be, and staging the impossible would have made clear to the audience the absurdity of its fantasy.
The Jew of Malta may indeed have produced such a liberating effect, but probably only among those in the audience already disposed to be liberated. In any case, successful playwrights were in the business of exciting their audiences—the point was to bring crowds of paying customers into the theater—and whatever playing company had the rights to the script must have been pleased to have, in The Jew of Malta, a licensed play they could repeatedly dust off and revive profitably at moments of popular agitation. The group of playwrights who wrote Sir Thomas More also hoped to profit from the excitement of the crowd—the censor who struck the depiction of the popular riot saw very clearly what was going on. But the lines Shakespeare gave to More, in facing down the antialien rioters, pull so sharply against the work of the irresponsible, bloody-minded, cynical Marlowe as to constitute a deliberate reproach. “Imagine that you see the wretched strangers, / Their babies at their backs.”
Current scholarly consensus holds that Shakespeare probably wrote his contribution to Sir Thomas More sometime between 1600 and 1605. Like his response to Greene’s insults, his response to Marlowe, then, probably came many years after his rival’s death. For on May 30, 1593, a few weeks after the posting of the placard on the Dutch Church wall, Marlowe, not yet thirty years old, had gone to Deptford, down by the shipyards east of London, to meet with three men, Ingram Frizer, Nicholas Skeres, and Robert Poley. They spent the day quietly, eating, drinking, and smoking at the house of Eleanor Bull, a bailiff’s widow. In the evening after supper, there was a fight, allegedly over the “reckoning,” that is, the bill. Frizer claimed that an enraged Marlowe had snatched Frizer’s own weapon—a dagger, as the inquest carefully put it, “of the value of twelve pence”—and attacked him. In the ensuing struggle, Marlowe was killed, stabbed through the right eye. Frizer’s account was corroborated by the other two men in the room, and the inquest concurred in its report. A month later the queen formally pardoned Frizer, on the grounds of self-defense. Only in the twentieth century did scholarly detective work disclose that the widow Bull’s house was not an ordinary tavern but a place with links to the government’s spy network, and that Frizer, Skeres, and Poley all had sinister connections to that network, as did Marlowe himself, connections not mentioned, of course, in the inquest. The murder, then, was quite possibly an assassination, though the precise motive has remained obscure.
Already before he left Cambridge, Marlowe had demonstrated not only his power as a poet but also his penchant for risk-taking. Spectacularly ill suited for the life of a country parson or a sober academic, he early became involved in the murky world of conspiracy and spying, the world that Shakespeare may have briefly glimpsed and fled from in Lancashire. The precise circumstances would have been strictly secret at the time and are still more obscure after four hundred years, but it seems that Marlowe was recruited, while still a student, into the intelligence service run by Elizabeth’s spymaster, her secretary of state Sir Francis Walsingham. Marlowe was apparently sent to Reims, where he mingled with the English Catholics living in France. Such information as he could ferret out—or provoke—about plots to mount a foreign invasion or assassinate the heretic queen he would have passed along to his superiors. He must have been reasonably good at his nasty work, since the Privy Council wrote to the Cambridge authorities instructing them to award Marlowe his M.A. degree, despite his unexplained absences during term time.
When he came to London to try his hand at playwriting, Marlowe had already begun a move from the artisan class to which his father belonged to the status of a gentleman—he had his university degree in hand—but he was hardly following a conventional life course. His overt sexual interest in men made that course still less conventional, while his opinions—according to the report of the intelligence agent who was assigned to spy on him and the testimony of his roommate Kyd—pushed him to the most dangerous frontiers of freethinking. He used to declare (or so the spy claimed) that Jesus was a bastard and his mother a whore; that Moses was a “juggler,” that is, a trickster, who had deceived the ignorant Jews; that the existence of the American Indians disproved Old Testament chronology; that the New Testament was “filthily written” and that he, Marlowe, could do better; that Jesus and St. John were homosexual lovers; and so on. If Marlowe said even a fraction of what was attributed to him, then he could only have survived—and that not for very long—in a social and professional sphere that winked at views that would elsewhere have been instantly and ferociously punished.
At the time of the death, at the age of twenty-nine, of his greatest professional rival, Shakespeare had already shown considerable promise, but his actual achievements could not begin to match the astonishing succession of plays and poems written by Marlowe. They must have known each other personally; the world they inhabited was far too small for anonymity. They may have liked each other, but there were as many grounds for suspicion and dislike as for affection and admiration. Some five years after Marlowe’s death, in As You Like It, Shakespeare obliquely paid tribute to his rival by quoting one of his most famous lines. A lovesick character, invoking Marlowe as a “dead shepherd,” says she now finds his “saw of might” (that is, she finds that his saying is powerful):
Dead shepherd, now I find thy saw of might:
“Who ever loved that loved not at first sight?”
(3.5.82–83)
But elsewhere in the same play there may be a less generous glance at Marlowe. “When a man’s verses cannot be understood,” complains the clown Touchsto
ne, “nor a man’s good wit seconded with the forward child, understanding, it strikes a man more dead than a great reckoning in a little room” (3.3.9–12). These words were not exactly an attack on Marlowe, but insofar as they may have alluded to his murder over a “reckoning,” they did so with a complete absence of sentimental feeling.
Beyond the trace of personal competitiveness that had outlasted even the rival’s death and beyond the commercial competitiveness of rival playing companies vying for the same audience, there was a disagreement about the nature of the theater, which was also a disagreement about human imagination and human values. Shakespeare saw what was marvelous in Marlowe (there is much more evidence than the passing tribute in As You Like It), but he also seems to have disliked quite deeply something in Marlowe’s language and imagination. Shakespeare left no programmatic statement of this difference, only his responses in the playhouse. And the most sustained of these responses involved the representation of Jews, the marked difference, that is, between Barabas in The Jew of Malta and Shylock in The Merchant of Venice.
Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare Page 29