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 screenwriters 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.
Simon Hawke - Shakespeare and Smythe 04 - Merchant of Vengeance (v1. html). Page 24