by Park Honan
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There is an odd difficulty in the author's treatment of a Jewish villain, a problem no easier for modern directors and audiences after the Holocaust. This is not the only art-work to have been used for a vicious purpose, but if we dismissed all works of art that have appealed to lunatics, we should have little art left. Shylock is radically paradoxical, and -- despite his villainy -- he can morally shrivel his weary Christian enemies; he is not in dramatic balance with a hazily seen Antonio or with a slightly saccharine, pertly competent Portia.
Lawyers and law students -- among others in Elizabethan London -- were bound to be riveted by the trial scene in Act IV, when, before Duke and Magnificoes, Antonio bares his breast for the villain's knife, and Portia, in a legal gown as the advocate Bellario, wins Shylock's praise before breaking him. At the play's heart is a conflict between Tudor common law and the mitigating equity of the Chancery courts. Shylock's bond, stipulating a pound of Antonio's flesh, has the rigidity of statute law at its worst, whereas Portia at first represents the fairness of equity. In legal and other aspects, the drama is a folk-tale: no English law permitted anyone to put his or her life in jeopardy, as Antonio has done. The author is not legalistic, but, given his story's bizarre features, he treats them with stunning effect before Act V.
Shakespeare often worked with a large 'given'. In this instance, he used a ready-made medieval tale in Ser Giovanni Il Pecorone (The Dunce) printed at Milan in 1558, in which a merchant of Venice borrows money for his 'godson', Giannetto, from a Jewish lender. The play closely follows this tale's line. In the Italian version, if the debt is not repaid on time, the Jew may take a pound of the merchant's flesh. Giannetto courts a lovely 'Lady of Belmonte'; and the Jew is undone when the lady, having come to Venice in disguise as a lawyer, shows the bond does not permit the Jew to shed one drop of blood or to take more than exactly a pound of flesh. The Jew tears up his bond; the lawyer begs a ring the lady had given to young Giannetto, who, on his return to Belmonte, is accused of having given the ring to a mistress, until his lady reveals her stratagem, the ring is restored, and all ends happily. That story was strong in outline, and Shakespeare developed an active heroine who solves a dilemma, a motif in Two Gentlemen,
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men, and later in All's Well and Measure for Measure. He puts Portia at the mercy of caskets, obnoxious suitors, and her dead father's will at Belmont, before she goes confidently to Venice. Another attraction for him in the Italian tale was its villain-Jew.
No doubt this figure of the Jew as a moneylender touched deep wellsprings in his imagination. Shylock appears in five scenes, but dominates the play. Shakespeare had a good source (not that he closely followed it) in Marlowe's half-comical but villainous hero Barabas in The Jew of Malta. Lately, Henslowe had revived the Jew in the wake of public feeling about the converted Portuguese Jew, Roderigo or Ruy Lopez, one of the Queen's physicians, found guilty in 1594 of trying to poison her. However, the poet focuses on the stereotype of the Jew as usurer: this is what he found in an Italian tale.
Persecuted, squeezed into ghettos, marked out by unique taxes, beaten, and sometimes killed, European Jews had turned to moneybroking as one of the few means permitted for their livelihoods. They were associated with usury, or lending out money at interest-- especially at exorbitant, illegal rates -- but usury was no longer a moral problem when the Merchant was written. Sturley was in debt to a money-broker, and Quiney may have met one through the poet's good offices. Attitudes to usury, however, were evolving. An older communal, theological approach to moneylending was giving way to one that would be defined by economic needs in the Jacobean era. 15 John Shakespeare had been guilty of stiff usury, and his charging 20 per cent interest on two loans might be a feat worthy of the Rialto. Shakespeare had a chance to meet Jewish court musicians, but again the city's Jewish population was very small, and it is only too plain that he had no personal prejudice against Jews or moneylenders. He befriended the wealthy money-broker John Combe, and had dealings with a bolder one in Francis Langley, who at Paris Garden built the Swan playhouse which opened in 1596. Langley is called a 'draper' in Schoenbaum's mainly accurate account of him, 16 but this neglects the fact that Langley had the office of alnager, or sealer and inspector of woollen cloth, in London; he had useful connections and a minor, but potent, civic office; and with broking and other enterprises, he was
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wealthy enough to buy the manor of Paris Garden in 1589. Seven years later, as Leslie Hotson discovered, William Wayte petitioned 'ob metum mortis' (for fear of death) in a suit for sureties of the peace against ' Willelmum Shakspere', Francis Langley, Dorothy Soer wife of John Soer, and Anne Lee. Hotson's suppositions about these persons have obscured the value of Hotson's facts, and he notes for example that Wayte's stepfather, William Gardiner, was a justice of the peace with jurisdiction over Paris Garden and Southwark. Just why Shakespeare was drawn into the fray is unknown, but he appears in a retaliatory law-suit on the side of an aggressive investor and money-broker. 17
All of this casts only a small amount of light on the vigour and empathy of his portrayal of the moneylender, Shylock. In an unsentimental production, the villain can seem better than his adversaries, such as his daughter Jessica who lies, steals from him, and squanders the 'turquoise' his dead wife Leah has given him, or worthier than Antonio, who reviles him, or Portia, who defeats him. 'The seeds of sympathy are there', John Gross writes; 'Actors who have portrayed a tragic or sorely misused Shylock may often have gone too far, but it is Shakespeare himself who gave them their opening'. 18 Shylock is given sensitivity, emotional complexity, religious dignity, and incisive speech (as in his remarks to Bassanio at the start of this chapter): it is most unlikely that a Chamberlain's clown often acted him as a simple buffoon with red beard and a foreign accent. He does not speak in dialect, and the play's title-page in 1600 suggests no comic butt: 'The most excellent Historie of the Merchant of Venice. With the extreame crueltie of Shylocke the Iewe towards the sayd Merchant, in cutting a just pound of his flesh: and the obtayning of Portia by the choyse of three chests.'
Antonio -- importantly -- hates the moneylender partly because he is Jewish. A disease of the Christian's mind leads to a despising of the Jew's traits, his whole being: the Jew-as-dog. It is a very comforting notion of critics that Antonio shows religious, not racial, prejudice, but Shakespeare's time was not that simple; the boundary was not so clear. 'You call me misbeliever', Shylock reminds Antonio, and that is unrefuted. 'You called me dog', and the Christian responds:
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I am as like to call thee so again,
To spit on thee again, to spurn thee too.
(I. iii. 110-29)
This occurs before Shylock has violated any Venetian law, or threatened a life. It is true that, later on, his daughter Jessica is embraced by Shylock's enemies as a Christian, not as a Jew. But by then she has denied her Jewish heritage, the Jewish nation, and stolen her father's jewels; her character might be wholly despicable if her brain were not so inert and empty. In a drama of psychological questioning, Shakespeare depicts a deep malaise of inertia and prejudice. Critics such as Leo Salingar, or Avraham Oz, who edits the Hebrew edition of Shakespeare's works, point to the depth of that malaise, to the inability of merchants and aristocrats to cope with it, and to themes from myth and folklore that complicate it. The director Peter Hall finds that the story shows 'the perils of racism, and how it can poison the persecutor as well as the persecuted'. 19 Shylock's exit in Act IV, in effect, brands his victors, leaving the sets of lovers as obtuse, forgetful, or hypocritical in the muted resolution of Act V. Tensions are hardly smoothed over by the beauty of a magical night, music's harmonies, or the frail comedy of Portia's and Nerissa's rings. 'I live', says the lethargic, selfpitying hero of Richard II,
with bread, like you; feel want,
Taste grief, need ffiends. Subjected thus,
How can you say to me I am a king?
(III. ii. 171-3)
Shylock's humane protest is more powerful than that, as when he evokes the crucified Jew his enemies worship, 'If you prick us, do we not bleed?' He also lusts for his enemy's blood, and here the author reverts to the materialism, prejudice, and self-righteousness that destroy.
Nonetheless there are unreconciled impulses in Shakespeare's treatment of mercantile Venice and romantic Belmont, just as there are in his dramatically evasive and unconvincing handling of the themes of mercy and justice which his characters evoke. Portia's
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ennui, the tired absurdity of her pretending to obey her father's will, the smugness of Christian aristocrats, Antonio's amorality, and Jessica's shallowness -- all of these are out of balance with the faith, integrity, and nerve of Shylock, whose dignity is not lessened even by his maddened bargain for Antonio's flesh. Intentionally or not, the poet appears to subvert his design with figures such as Hotspur, Falstaff, Shylock, and Malvolio, who beat with an intenser life than do their associates. In this case, a revulsion at his affluence in the wake of his son's death seems to have affected Shakespeare's dramaturgy. His outlay for a large Chapel Street house was striking at a time when frightful scarcities and high prices did not allow the poor to buy enough barley, beans, oats, or rye. 20 The attempts of the towns to look after the hungry accused the well-to-do, and Shakespeare highlights the evils of moneylending and turns against materialism. Shylock is thoroughly punished, but the drama's chief interest exits with him -he leaves behind a thematic gap never again filled.
Less paradoxical and on the whole more objectively written, Much Ado about Nothing and Twelfth Night display a mature wit, pace, and deftness of portraiture developed through Shakespeare's series of romantic comedies, and both plays have an intellectual edge in their attacks on social complacency. The testing of suitors in the Merchant has a parallel in the role-playing duels of Beatrice and Benedick. The love plots in Much Ado and Twelfth Night relate to popular Italian or French tales by writers such as Matteo Bandello and François de Belleforest, and one of Shakespeare's innovations is to impart to the changed, dramatized tale a psychological dimension, so as to use 'love' as a means of exploring a capacity for self-deception. Twelfth Night, written soon after Hamlet, is deliberately like an overripe plum in its comic scenes; a critic such as Richard Hillman is even oppressed by an entropic, muggy aspect of its imagined Illyria, and by the 'fantasy-ridden self-indulgence of its inhabitants'. Philip Edwards finds the author exposing 'his comedy to questioning at every point'. 21 Implicitly, the authorial self is also in question, and, as different as the stiff, toadying Malvolio is from Shylock, the author again sympathizes excessively with an aggrieved, self-deluding outcast.
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His own reputation had been setting Shakespeare apart from all other theatre-poets. A few of his plays had been issued in quarto anonymously before an auspicious change in 1598. Not only were second quartos of Richard II and Richard III printed with his name that year, but Love's Labour's Lost (as 'By W. Shakespere') appeared in its first extant edition. Publication of his love plays whetted interest in their author. John Manningham, a law student at the Middle Temple where Twelfth Night was staged in 1602, jots in that same year, in his Diary, an anecdote which perhaps fittingly bedevils Shakespeare's biographers to this day. An assumption has been made that Manningham heard it from his room-mate Edward Curle, but the informant's name is too obscurely written to be positively identifiable. One student of the Diary's handwriting plausibly holds that Manningham in all likelihood wrote '(Mr. Towse)' just after this anecdote. 22 William Towes, or Towse, of Hingham, Norfolk, was a member of the Inner Temple, a purveyor of stories about the illustrious, and one of the diarist's chief informants. In its mild scurrilousness and historical allusiveness the story, at any rate, is in tune with wry, fictive anecdotes told at the Inns of Court Christmas revels which lasted into January. Recorded in March 1602, the story is that once, after playing Richard III, Richard Burbage arranged a tryst with a lady besotted by him; but they must have talked too loudly, for Will Shakespeare overheard their talk, reached the lady first, and was 'entertained, and at his game ere Burbidge came'. When a message arrived to say Richard III was at the door, the poet slyly sent word that William the Conqueror had preceded Richard III. 23 Students relished the idea of a poet's outwitting the famous actor Burbage, and the tale was retold, embellished with new details, and printed in Thomas Wilkes A General View of the Stage in 1759, long before Manningham Diary came to light.
More soberly indicative of Shakespeare's fame is a work by an enthusiastic clergyman, Francis Meres, which appeared in 1598 as Palladis Tamia. Wits Treasury. Being the Second part of Wits Common wealth. Born a year after Shakespeare and hailing from Lincolnshire, Meres describes himself in this stubby octavo (and also in his first
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printed sermon, God's Arithmetic) as a 'Master of Arts of both Universities'. As a scholar, he is lazy. He lifts his classical allusions mainly from a handbook known as the Officina by J. Ravisius Textor, but in a section entitled 'Poetrie' he is keen to show, in a style laden with similitudes, what was felt at the time about living English poets.
Meres's value, for us, lies in his lack of originality and his reflection of popular views. Most of his panegyrics are undiscriminating, and he flatters Michael Drayton with more words and mentions than anyone else. Yet he writes two significant paragraphs, in the first of which an Elizabethan view of Shakespeare's relationship with Ovid is well given. 'As the soule of Euphorbus was thought to live in Pythagoras', Meres offers with a show of erudition, 'so the sweete wittie soule of Ovid lives in mellifluous & hony-tongued Shakespeare, witnes his Venus and Adonis, his Lucrece, his sugred Sonnets among his private friends, ȧc'. 24 The 'sugred Sonnets', it might be thought, represent a few of the poems printed in the Sonnets ( 1609). So one assumes, although Meres could be referring to some fourteen-line poems and other amatory lyrics by Shakespeare now lost. His second paragraph has other mysteries. 'As Plautus and Seneca are accounted the best for Comedy and Tragedy among the Latines', he writes,
so Shakespeare among ye English is the most excellent in both kinds for the stage; for Comedy, witnes his Gentlemen of Verona, his Errors, his Love labors lost, his Love labours wonne, his Midsummers night dreame, ∧ his Merchant of Venice: for Tragedy his Richard the 2. Richard the 3. Henry the 4. King John, Titus Andronicus and his Romeo and juliet. 25
That list invaluably tells us about dramas which must have existed by 7 September 1598, when Meres's book was registered. He was in London in 1597 and 1598, and his survey is up to date, since he mentions Everard Guilpin Skialetheia, registered eight days after Palladis Tamia; but he does not produce exhaustive lists. He omits Henry VI for instance, and names six comedies and six 'tragedies' to illustrate Shakespeare's double superiority. If Much Ado, then, was not yet acted, could it be the same play Meres calls Love's Labour's Won? The latter became less of a ghost in 1953 when a London bookseller found a scrap of paper, used to make a hinge for a volume of sermons, which
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turned out to show a stationer's notes on books stocked in August 1603. Under "Love's Labour Lost" is the manuscript entry, "Love's Labour Won". Meres, then, was not mistaken to list that title, but whether Love's Labour's Won describes a missing work, or is an alternative title for an existing drama such as Taming of the Shrew, Much Ado, or All's Well, is still unknown.
For a poet involved in writing scripts for actors, Palladis Tamia was likely to be only a naïve amusing irrelevance. The theatre was concerned with practices of the day and the tastes of contemporary audiences, and very little with supposed literary values. In Hamlet Shakespeare may lightly mock the pretensions of Palladis Tamia. Meres's verdict, 'Plautus and Seneca are accounted the best for Comedy and Tragedy', seems to be echoed by Polonius just after his fantastic catalogue of the stage-play genres. 'Seneca cannot be too heavy, nor Plautus too light', he weightily instructs Prince Hamlet, as if the latter were a kind of dim grammar-school bo
y who could hardly tell the difference between dark tragedy and bright comedy. 26
At all events, the earnest criticism which attends Shakespeare's fame had begun.
Julius Caesar at the Globe
To some extent the successful revival of Marlowe ne Jew of Malta -- which with Kyd The Spanish Tragedy had been one of Henslowe's two most profitable works at the Rose -- would have alerted the Chamberlain's men to the potential of their own Merchant of Venice. We lack a diary to tell us how often the latter was played at the Theater or the Curtain but Shylock was a success, and there are signs that the Merchant did uncommonly well in a public amphitheatre and at court. Hence it can seem surprising that the Chamberlain's men found themselves in deep trouble by 1597, and that their repertoire did not save them: their survival was in question. The troupe lacked cash, they lacked a secure theatre, they lacked a safe venue, and, facing bankruptcy, they began to sell off their playbooks. The extent of their difficulties by the middle of 1597 has been considerably underestimated.
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Ironically it was a far-sighted plan of James Burbage which led to a disaster for Shakespeare's group. A year earlier, the old man had sunk £600 of his reserves in the 'upper frater' chamber of a former priory at Blackfriars. This large room, conveniently near a well-heeled clientele in the city's west would, he hoped, serve as an indoor venue. All playgoers, according to Burbage's plan, would have seats, and this would allow for a minimum entry price of 6d. with cheap seats in high balconies at the rear, and costlier ones in the pit or stalls, or in boxes flanking the stage (this roughly anticipated the pricing and seating patterns of our modern theatres). 27 In November however, thirty-one residents of Blackfriars petitioned the Privy Council against having a common public theatre in their midst -- and signing the petition as if to deserve a reply of 'Et tu, Brute' was the company's new patron, George Carey, the second Lord Hunsdon. The project collapsed.