Marlowe was already dead when Shakespeare began, some time after 1594 and before 1598, to write The Merchant of Venice. Though a successful revival of The Jew of Malta probably prompted him to try his hand at a play about Jews, Shakespeare was not only glancing over his shoulder at his erstwhile rival. He did not even need Marlowe’s play to give him his subject; he may, for example, have seen and remembered an old play entitled The Jew that was in vogue when he was still a boy and could well have been performed in the provinces. The play is now lost, but in 1579 a man who generally hated and attacked the theater, Stephen Gosson, went out of his way to praise The Jew for exposing “the greediness of worldly choosers” and the “bloody minds of usurers.”
But something other than this old play or even Marlowe’s newer one must serve to explain why Shakespeare’s play turned out to be the peculiarly disturbing achievement that it is. The explanation does not lie in the plot, which is not original to Shakespeare and is highly conventional. At some point in his restless, voluminous reading, Shakespeare came across an Italian story about a Jewish usurer, Ser Giovanni’s Il Pecarone, which must have struck him as good material for a comedy. (It is worth noting, in passing, that Shakespeare’s reading, and indeed the entire Elizabethan book trade, was conspicuously international. The reading public, by modern standards, may have been fairly small, but its interests were strikingly cosmopolitan.) As he often did with texts he liked, Shakespeare lifted the plot wholesale from Il Pecarone: the merchant of Venice who borrows money for someone (here, not his friend but his “godson”) from a Jewish moneylender; the terrible bond with its forfeit of a pound of the merchant’s flesh; the successful wooing of a lady of “Belmonte” who comes to Venice disguised as a lawyer; her clever solution to the threat of the bond by pointing out that the legal right to take a pound of flesh does not include the legal right to take a drop of blood; the slightly nervous comic business of the rings. There was nothing original, then, in the shape of Shakespeare’s play; even the Belmont plot of the caskets and the suitors, which did not come from Ser Giovanni, was lifted from elsewhere and thoroughly shopworn. There is exquisite poetry in the scene of Bassanio’s successful wooing and, still more so, in the throwaway scene near the end of the play between Jessica and Lorenzo, sitting on the moonlit bank; there is a memorable depiction in Antonio of a state of depression, an unshakable melancholy that seems linked to his frustrated love for Bassanio. But the play would not count for much—it would seem roughly comparable to, say, The Two Gentlemen of Verona and other lesser efforts—were it not for the stupendous power of Shylock.
Shakespeare may have long had it in mind that he would write a play about a usurer. He may not have known any Jews, but he would certainly have known usurers, beginning with his own father, who had twice been accused of violating the law by charging usurious interest. The regulations against moneylending had been eased in 1591, and after he grew wealthy from the theater, Shakespeare himself seems to have been involved in at least one such transaction, either on his own or as a middleman. A letter has survived by chance, in the archives of the Stratford Corporation, to Shakespeare from Richard Quiney, a prominent Stratford tradesman. Quiney’s letter, dated October 25, 1598, was written from his inn in London, where he had evidently come in the hope of borrowing money for himself and another Stratford citizen, Abraham Sturley, from their “Loveing good ffrend & contreymann mr wm Shackespere.” On the same day, Quiney wrote to Sturley with the terms of the proposed loan—a rate of thirty or forty shillings on a loan of thrity or forty pounds—and ten days later Sturley replied. He was pleased to hear “that our countryman Mr. Wm. Shak. would procure us money.”
It is only the fact that Shakespeare wrote The Merchant of Venice that makes these transactions surprising. For though officially the English declared by statute that usury was illegal under the law of God and had driven out the only people who were exempt, by reason of being Jews, from this prohibition, the realm’s mercantile economy could not function without the possibility of moneylending. In the absence of a banking system, in our sense of the term, the English tried at least to hold lending rates down to 10 percent, and many individuals devised clever means, legal and illegal, to get around the official constraints. Even John Shakespeare’s robustly illegal dealings—interest rates of 20 and 25 percent—were fairly standard.
Christian usurers, even when they were not directly called by that name, occupied a position roughly comparable to the one held by the Jews: officially, they were despised, harassed, condemned from the pulpit and the stage, but they also played a key role, a role that could not be conveniently eliminated. It was possible for usurers to live more or less respectable lives, as Shakespeare’s father did, but the deep contradiction between stigma and esteem, contempt and centrality, was probably always there in the shadows, ready to emerge. Shakespeare loved contradictions of this kind; his art greedily pounced upon them and played with them. But there is still the question of how he got to Shylock.
Something set Shakespeare’s imagination on fire, something enabled him to discover in his stock villain a certain music—the sounds of a tense psychological inwardness, a soul under siege—that no one, not even Marlowe, had been able to call forth from the despised figure of the Jew. Very little is understood about the life experiences, either then or now, that make such creative leaps possible, but one can at least imagine a set of plausible triggering events in the everyday world Shakespeare inhabited.
Shakespeare was in London for at least part of 1594. In that year the bubonic plague, which had caused the theaters to be shut down for much of the season, abated enough to allow the players to perform once again in the city. The closing of the theaters had taken a severe toll on the playing companies. The Queen’s Men were tottering; the Earl of Hertford’s Men called it quits; the Earl of Pembroke’s Men went bankrupt and had to sell their costumes; the Earl of Sussex’s Men were forced to disband when their patron died; and the same fate befell the Earl of Derby’s Men upon the mysterious death—by poison, it was rumored—of their patron, Ferdinando, Lord Strange. Out of this ruinous situation, two companies, absorbing the best talent, emerged to dominate the London theater scene: the Lord Admiral’s Men, under the protection of Charles Howard, Lord Howard of Effingham, and the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, under the protection of Howard’s father-in-law, Henry Carey, Lord Hunsdon. The Lord Admiral’s Men had, above all, the celebrated actor Edward Alleyn and the great impresario Philip Henslowe; they performed south of the river, in the handsome Rose playhouse. The Lord Chamberlain’s Men performed at Shoreditch, in Burbage’s Theater. Their leading actor was Richard Burbage, and they picked up, from the ruins of the Earl of Derby’s Men, the celebrated clown Will Kempe, along with John Heminges, Augustine Phillips, George Bryan, and Thomas Pope. All of these men, and one more besides, were “sharers”—that is, shareholders in the enterprise, managing affairs, bearing the costs, and splitting the profits. The additional sharer was William Shakespeare.
Shakespeare’s company was poised to take advantage of the renewed opportunities, provided that the plague deaths did not once again soar. Mercifully, the death rates remained relatively low, and the populace could once again begin to look for amusements. London, however, was by no means completely calm: though the famous “Protestant wind” had scuttled the Spanish Armada in 1588, there were recurrent fears of invasion and constant rumors of plots against the life of Queen Elizabeth. The threat was real enough to be taken seriously by sober people; government spies, penetrating swirling, murky intrigues in embassies and at court, found ample reason to be jittery. One group, the fiercely anti-Spanish, militantly Protestant faction around the queen’s ambitious favorite, the Earl of Essex, was particularly exercised about actual or potential plots. On January 21, 1594, the Essex faction got what it wanted: the queen’s personal physician, Portuguese-born Roderigo (or Ruy) Lopez, was arrested on the charge that he was intriguing with the king of Spain, who had, according to intercepted letters, agreed to send
him an enormous sum of money—50,000 crowns, equal to 18,800 pounds—to do some important service.
Essex had tried some years before to recruit Lopez as a secret agent. Lopez’s refusal—he chose instead directly to inform the queen—may have been prudent, but it created in the powerful earl a very dangerous enemy. After his arrest, he was initially imprisoned at Essex House and interrogated by the earl himself. But Lopez had powerful allies in the rival faction of the queen’s senior adviser William Cecil, Lord Burghley, and his son, Robert Cecil, who also participated in the interrogation and reported to the queen that the charges against her physician were baseless. According to court observers, Elizabeth gave Essex a tongue-lashing, “calling him rash and temerarious youth, to enter into a matter against the poor man, which he could not prove, and whose innocence she knew well enough; but malice against him, and no other, hatch’d all this matter, which displeas’d her much, and the more, for that, she said, her honor was interested herein.” Now, of course, Essex’s own honor was at stake, and he and his allies moved quickly to find evidence to substantiate their charges. The complex tangle of spies and sleazy informers and the laborious sifting of documents—what the rival Cecils grudgingly describe as “all the Confessions, Examinations, Depositions, Declarations, Messages, Letters, Tickets, Tokens, Conferences, Plots and Practices”—need not detain us. Suffice it to say that at the trial that took place in London on February 28, 1594, Dr. Ruy Lopez was charged and promptly convicted of conspiring to poison his royal patient. According to informers, Lopez had agreed to undertake the poisoning in exchange for 50,000 crowns to be paid by Philip II of Spain. Strangely enough, the supposed agent of this Catholic conspiracy, Lopez, was not a secret Catholic. He was—or rather, since he now professed to be a good Protestant, he had once been—a Jew. Many suspected, as Essex’s ally Francis Bacon wrote, that he was still “in sect secretly a Jew (though here he conformed himself to the rites of Christian religion).”
It is difficult to say whether Lopez was actually guilty of high treason. Once the case came to trial, the result was almost a foregone conclusion, so there is no certainty to be drawn from the conviction. That it came to trial is testimony to the power of Essex, whose prestige was on the line, but it is also testimony to Lopez’s taste for international and domestic intrigue, to his unsavory acquaintances, and to his venality—he was evidently taking bribes from many different sources. These qualities, however, only bear witness to the fact that the royal physician was a man of the court, with privileged access to the queen herself and therefore in a position to profit. He may have gone still further: after maintaining his innocence, he confessed, perhaps in earnest or perhaps only to avoid being tortured, that he had indeed entered into a treasonous-sounding negotiation with the king of Spain, but he insisted that he had done so only in order to cozen the king out of his money. Whatever else he was—scoundrel, confidence man, or traitor—Lopez was a pawn in tense factional rivalries of the kind that Elizabeth manipulated adroitly. As long as the Cecils saw fit to support him, in the hope that Essex would be embarrassed, the physician was safe; as soon as that support vanished—as soon as his dubious associations made him a liability—he was as good as dead.
In the prosecutor’s summary, Roderigo Lopez was not only a greedy villain; he was, like the sly Jesuits he so much resembled, the sinister agent of wicked Catholic powers determined to destroy the Protestant queen. At the same time, he was a Jewish villain:
Lopez, a perjured murdering traitor, and Jewish doctor, worse than Judas himself, undertook to poison her, which was a plot more wicked, dangerous, and detestable than all the former. He was Her Majesty’s sworn servant, graced and advanced with many princely favors, used in special places of credit, permitted often access to her person, and so not suspected, especially by her, who never fears her enemies nor suspects her servants. The bargain was made, and the price agreed upon, and the fact only deferred until payment of the money was assured; the letters of credit for his assurance were sent, but before they came into his hands, God most wonderfully and miraculously revealed and prevented it.
Lopez was, by all accounts, a practicing Christian, an observant Protestant, thoroughly assimilated into high society, and the English generally contented themselves with outward religious conformity. But the particular profile of his wickedness—the greed, perfidiousness, secret malice, ingratitude, and murderousness—seemed to call for a special explanation, one that would also reinforce the sense that the queen had been miraculously saved by divine intervention. Traditional hatred of Jews and the particular topicality of Marlowe’s Jew of Malta (whose antihero, one might recall, began his career as a doctor who poisoned his patients) gave Lopez’s Jewish origins an important place in the narrative of his conspiracy.
Lopez and the two Portuguese agents who allegedly were his intermediaries were quickly convicted, but the queen unaccountably delayed the approval needed to carry out the death sentence, a delay that provoked what government officials described as “the general discontent of the people, who much expected this execution.” Finally, on June 7, 1594, the people—or, in any case, the factions who were pressing for execution—got what they wanted. Lopez and the others were taken from the Tower of London, where they had been held. Asked if he could declare any reason why the sentence should not be carried out, Lopez replied that he appealed to the queen’s own knowledge and goodness. After legal formalities were concluded, the three prisoners were carried on a hurdle past jeering spectators to the execution ground at Tyburn, where a crowd was awaiting them.
Was William Shakespeare in this crowd? The trial of Lopez, with its factional infighting and lurid charges, had generated intense interest. Shakespeare, in any case, was interested in executions: his early farce, The Comedy of Errors, is structured around the countdown to an execution, and the executioner’s ax casts a grim shadow across Richard III and other histories. He was fascinated professionally by the behavior of mobs and fascinated too by the comportment of men and women facing the end. His most famous lines on the subject come in Macbeth, in the description of the last moments in the life of a thane who had betrayed the king:
Nothing in his life
Became him like the leaving it. He died
As one that had been studied in his death
To throw away the dearest thing he owed
As ’twere a careless trifle.
(1.4.7–11)
It is reasonable to suppose that the dramatist who wrote those lines had witnessed executions for himself, events that occurred in the capital city with horrifying frequency. Indeed, the lines betray a certain connoisseurship.
The execution of Dr. Lopez was a public event. If Shakespeare did personally witness it, he would have seen and heard something beyond the ordinary, ghastly display of fear and ferocious cruelty. In the wake of his conviction, Lopez evidently had sunk into a deep depression, but on the scaffold he roused himself and declared, according to the Elizabethan historian William Camden, that “he loved the Queen as well as he loved Jesus Christ.” “Which coming from a man of the Jewish profession,” Camden adds, “moved no small Laughter in the Standers-by.”
This laughter, welling up from the crowd at the foot of the scaffold, could well have triggered Shakespeare’s achievement in The Merchant of Venice. It was, for a start, exceptionally cruel: in a matter of moments, a living man would be hanged and his body torn into pieces. The crowd’s laughter denied the solemnity of the event and treated violent death as an occasion for amusement. More specifically, it denied Lopez the end he was attempting to make, an end in which he hoped to reassert his faith as the queen’s loyal subject and as a Christian soul. The last words a person spoke were ordinarily charged with the presumption of absolute honesty: there was no longer any room for equivocation, no longer any hope of deferral, no longer any distance between the self and whatever judgment lies beyond the grave. This was, in the most literal sense, the moment of truth. Those who stood and laughed made it clear—clear to one a
nother and clear to Lopez himself—that they did not believe him. “Coming from a man of the Jewish profession”: Lopez did not profess Judaism; he publicly adhered to Protestantism and invoked Jesus Christ. The laughter turned Lopez’s last words from a profession of faith into a sly joke, a carefully crafted double entendre: “he loved the Queen as well as he loved Jesus Christ.” Precisely: since, in the eyes of the crowd, Lopez was a Jew and a Jew does not in fact love Jesus Christ, his real meaning was that he tried to do to the queen what his accursed race did to Jesus. His words took the form of a declaration of innocence, but the crowd’s response turned them into an ambiguous admission of guilt. Some in the crowd could have thought that the admission was inadvertent, a hypocritical overreaching that had toppled unwittingly into confession. Others, still more amused, could have concluded that the ambiguity was deliberate. Lopez the Jew was practicing an art perfected, it was said, by the Jesuits: equivocation. He was trying to protect his family and reputation by fraudulently insisting on his innocence while at the same time subtly telling the truth.
These laughing spectators, in other words, thought they were watching a real-life version of The Jew of Malta.
Early in Marlowe’s play, the villainous Jew persuades his daughter to pretend that she wishes to convert to Christianity and enter a nunnery. He tells her that “A counterfeit profession,” that is, a falsely pretended belief, a mendacious performance, “is better / Than unseen hypocrisy” (1.2.292–93). On this dubious moral principle—that it is better deliberately to dissemble than to be an unconscious hypocrite—Barabas fashions his own performance, crafting a string of double entendres delivered with a wink or a sly aside to the audience. Plotting murder, he lures the governor’s lovesick son Lodowick to his house by offering him a precious “diamond”—his daughter Abigail. When Lodowick, continuing the metaphor, asks, “And what’s the price?” Barabas mutters as an aside, “Your life.” “Come to my house,” he adds aloud, “And I will giv’t Your Honor”; then again, the murderous aside, “with a vengeance.” To reassure his intended Christian victim, Barabas speaks of his “burning zeal” for the nunnery, and then adds, for the audience’s amusement, “Hoping ere long to set the house afire!” (2.3.65–68, 88–89). That is precisely the kind of joke that the crowd thought it heard when Lopez made his last speech.
Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare Page 30