by Simon Hawke
"It begins tonight!" said Burbage. "Tonight?" they all said at once.
"We must move swiftly, like the wind!" Burbage said. "We must have the building completely torn down by the morning, and the timbers loaded up on boats and floated 'cross the river afore our landlord can seize the property! The carpenters are standing by! What do you say, my friends? Are you with me?"
"We are with you!" Smythe replied at once, getting up from his seat.
"We are your very men!" said Shakespeare, rising to join him.
"Come then, my friends, and let us all away!" said Burbage.
"And together we shall confound the landlord come the break of day!"
Afterword
THE MERCHANT OF VENICE, upon which this novel is rather loosely based, is without a doubt the most controversial of Shakespeare's plays. It is difficult, even for those who seem willing to excuse Shakespeare anything, to get around its anti-Semitic content. In the words of Harold Bloom, "One would have to be blind, deaf, and dumb not to recognize that Shakespeare's grand, equivocal comedy The Merchant of Venice is nevertheless a profoundly anti-Semitic work." Bloom does go on to say, however, that the question of whether or not Shakespeare was personally anti-Semitic is open to reasonable doubt. This sort of thing is not uncommon among Shakespearean scholars, actually. Most of them do it, this bet-hedging, talking out of both sides of their mouth. It's as if they want to have their cake and eat it, too.
They wouldn't be caught dead trying to assert that the portrayal of Shylock is not anti-Semitic (one can only imagine the academic tarring-and-feathering that would follow, the vituperation in the "little magazines," the howling and clothes-rending at teach-ers' conferences, the sudden denials of tenure, and so forth), but at the same time, they can't quite bring themselves to say that Shakespeare actually hated Jews, because then they would leave themselves open to the charge of having an anti-Semitic writer in their curriculum, and we certainly couldn't have that. (Look what happened to Mark Twain.) Of course, this leaves them in a rather awkward position—somewhere between a rock and a hard place, intellectually speaking. Even Jewish academics seem to suffer from this problem. They seem to want to say, "Well, all right, the play was anti-Semitic, or at least the character of Shylock was, but just because Shakespeare may have written an anti-Semitic play or character does not necessarily mean he was personally anti-Semitic." Well, in a word… bull.
Not being an academic type, I don't have any problem saying what I think. And what I think is that Shakespeare was probably no more and no less anti-Semitic than any other Englishman of his time. Which is to say, yes, he was. I think that could probably safely be said of most Elizabethans. And it could also safely be said that most Elizabethans wouldn't have known any more about a Jew than they would about a Martian. As Isaac Asimov has pointed out in his outstanding Asimov’s Guide to Shakespeare (which should really be a required text in any course on Shakespeare), neither Shakespeare nor his audience had any firsthand knowledge of Jews, because the Jews were kicked out of England by Edward I — well before Shakespeare's time—and they were not allowed to return until the time of Oliver Cromwell, which was well after Shakespeare's death. So in this case, at least, Shakespeare was not writing what he knew. He was writing what the people of his time thought and believed.
To a modern audience, the play certainly has unsettling aspects. The portrayal of Shylock is a classic example—perhaps the classic example—of cultUral stereotyping. To refer to Dc. Asimov once more: Shylock is not a Jewish name; there never was a Jew named Shylock that anyone has heard of; the name is an invention of Shakespeare's which has entered the common language (because of the power of the characterization of the man) to represent any grasping, greedy, hard-hearted creditor. I have heard Jews themselves use the word with exactly this meaning, referring back to Shakespeare's character.
Asimov goes on to speculate as to where Shakespeare actUally got the name. He mentions an old Hebrew word, shalach, which appears in the Bible and refers to a bird of prey. It is unclear exactly which bird this is a reference to, but it seems quite possible that Shakespeare used a form of the word as the name for his predatory moneylender, for while he probably knew next to nothing about Jews, Shakespeare would certainly have known his Bible.
So, what could Shakespeare's motive have been in creating title character of Shylock? Since he did not leave behind any diaries (or at least, none that anyone has ever found), we are reduced to guess-work. However, we can make what I dunk are some fairly logical and educated guesses. And my best guess is the one that I have portrayed here in this book, namely, that he ,vas trying to compete with Marlowe.
In an afterward to an earlier novel in this series, I said that I believed that if Shakespeare were alive today, he would probably be writing for television. I could easily see him sitting around over lattes at Starbucks with the likes of Steven J. Cannell and Harlan Ellison, talking shop. Or perhaps 'working with Lucas or Spielberg. And the responses to that comment were predictable. "Shakespeare? Writing for television?" (You have to say that with your upper lip curling in an aristocratic sneer.) Yes, Virginia, writing for television. Because, much as the literati might blanch at the idea, Shakespeare was a commercial writer.
He was not writing for the academic, literary writers of his day (in fact, most of them probably hated his guts because he was successful and was not a university man, as witness Robert Greene). He was writing for the groundlings, the average working stiffs who paid a penny apiece to stand in the yard and watch a play, which was their era's version of television. And in this regard, a rather hideous modern TV neologism comes to mind that could well be used to describe the work of Christopher Marlowe: "a motion picture event." Apparently, no one makes movies anymore, or even motion pictures. They make "motion picture events." (I always thought a motion picture "event" was what happened when the film broke in the projector at the movie theatre.) Well, in Marlowe's case, the silly term actually seems to fit. Marlowe did not simply write dramas. He wrote "drama events." His plays were something completely new to the Elizabethan audiences, spectacles full of lurid violence and bombastic speeches, every bit as over-the-top and overwhelming to the senses as the grisly bear-baiting at the Paris Gardens. And the people ate them up. Shakespeare had to compete with that. He was, of course, to surpass Marlowe and leave behind a far more lasting impact, but at the time he could not possibly have known that. If he was a cocky young Turk, he might easily have believed himself capable of it, but somehow that does not quite seem to fit his personality. Confident, perhaps. Cocky? I suppose it's possible, but I don't think so.
He had to measure himself against Marlowe. How could he not? They were close to the same age, but Marlowe's career was at its zenith when Shakespeare was just arriving on the scene. Marlowe was the big gun. And, while Shakespeare was probably not a cocky sort, Marlowe absolutely was. Marlowe was completely over-the-top in nearly every respect. And if Shakespeare might have been a television writer had he lived today, it would not be much of a stretch to imagine that Marlowe might have been a rock star. Marlowe does not stand up as well as Shakespeare, though.
His dramatic work today seems comical, his characters cartoonish. Consider what Shakespeare wrote at nearly the same time, however, and suddenly it becomes clear that it's not simply a matter of Marlowe's work not standing up as well because of the passage of the years. Shakespeare was his contemporary, and Shakespeare was demonstrably better. This is not to say that Marlowe was a hack. Far from it. He was capable of letting rip with some pretty damned good stuff. But he clearly lacked Shakespeare's depth. And Shakespeare, if he did not know he could do better, at the very least had to think he could. And that meant he had to try.
When considered in the context in which it was written, The Merchant of Venice begins to reveal its author's motivation. Marlowe's play The Jew of Malta was a big hit, and its lead character, Barabas, is a scenery-chewing, melodramatic villain who gets his in the end. Marlowe's formula was similar to that used by many screenwri
ters today. With Barabas, he created a character who was so evil and violent and excessive that by the time he gets his comeuppance in the end, the audience is cheering as he gets boiled alive in oil. Marlowe resorted to every trick at his disposal. He made his villain a Jew, a rich merchant, the sort of character who would immediately seem dislikable to his audience, and on top of that, he gave him the biblically evocative name of Barabas. Then, to revenge himself upon the Christians—because the Knights of Malta took away his money— Barabas sets out upon a course of violence that would do justice to the most satanic serial killer, so that by the time he gets what's coming to him, the audience is primed for it. I find myself picturing Shakespeare watching the play and thinking, "Oh, come on!"
The Jew of Malta had its debut in 1589. Four years later, Marlowe was dead, murdered in an appropriately Marlovian manner—he was stabbed in the forehead in a room above a bar. (It has been suggested that Marlowe's murder might in fact have been a political assassination, because Marlowe was supposedly a spy who knew too mnch. Hey, who said literature was boring?) One year after Marlowe's death, there was a sensational trial in London in which Queen Elizabeth's physician, a Portuguese doctor named Roderigo Lopez, was accused of trying to poison her. Lopez was a Jew who had converted to Christianity, but he was still seen as a Jew and a foreigner, which made him doubly damned. He was probably innocent, but given the temper of the times, it would probably have been impossible for a foreigner and a Jew to receive a fair trial. Lopez was convicted and executed. And following the sensational trial and execution of a Jewish villain, Marlowe's Jew of Malta was naturally revived, with great success. Once again, to quote Isaac Asimov:
Shakespeare, who always had his finger on the popular pulse, and who was nothing if not a "commercial" writer, at once realized the value of writing a play of his own about a villainous Jew, and The Merchant of Venice was the result.
It had to be almost impossible to pass up. There was Shakespeare, just beginning to make his mark, and here comes Marlowe once more, this time from beyond the grave, to bedevil him again. It was an opportunity for the audiences to make a direct comparison: Marlowe's Jewish villain vs. Shakespeare's Jewish villain. And if there was one thing Shakespeare knew he could do better than Marlowe—he had to know it, or at least believe it—it was creating characters who seemed real, who had motivations that went beyond their simply being heroes or villains. It was not enough for Shakespeare to present the audience with a villain and say, "Look, here is the villain! See how he does villainous things?" Shakespeare wanted the audience to understand the villain.
Therein lies the problem, of course, because Shakespeare managed to create in Shylock a character who was not only a comic villain, but a tragic villain at the same time. And the fact that Shakespeare's characters can be played with so many different interpretations (Hamlet being perhaps the classic case in point) demonstrates why his work has lived on for so long, while nobody remembers the literary university men of his time (except the literary university men of his time, perhaps). Shakespeare wrote Shylock with all the prejudices and preconceptions of his age. He didn't know any better. It would have been nicer, and more convenient, if he could have, but he didn't. In creating Shylock, he succeeded so well that the unfortunate cultural stereotype lives on, sadly, to this day. That's why the play, and the character, remain controversial. Ironically, it was something he could never have intended. He almost certainly did not have any personal stake in taking down the Jews.
He just wanted to take down another writer.
[The End]
Simon Hawke Greensboro, N.C.