By the late sixteenth century the Rialto was frequented by merchants from all over the world. There were Turks, Persians, Jews, Armenians, Germans, Flemish and English merchants, and ships coming from as far as Mexico and India would bring news of international markets. This complex system was well organized by the government, in some cases using the ideas they had learned from the Islamic world, confining the merchants in places where they could trade with brokers and translators, but also giving them privileges and religious and political freedom. So even in Padua, which is the city where the Venetians had their university, they accepted Lutheran students without problems. There was an Ottoman community at the Rialto in the late sixteenth century. And while officially these people were not supposed to be practising Muslims, they were given a warehouse in 1621, where they were allowed to have a mosque inside. And there were many synagogues in the ghetto; there were something like four synagogues open to the public between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Shakespeare’s London was a more cosmopolitan city than it had ever been before, but it was still nothing compared to Venice. One of the many differences between the two was that in London there were no synagogues, no visible Jewish community. The Jews had been expelled from England about 300 years earlier, so virtually no Englishman would ever have seen a practising Jew when they came to watch The Merchant of Venice. Venice, by contrast, had a whole quarter reserved for its Jewish inhabitants. In principle, Jews were supposed to be confined to the Ghetto, and theoretically they were locked in there every night, but the reality was much freer, and Venice’s reputation for tolerant government (especially to people of different religions) was well deserved. Shakespeare drew upon this reputation. Shylock, for example, complains that he has been the butt of Antonio’s anti-Jewish abuse, but when both of them come into court, Shylock and Antonio stand before the law on exactly the same footing, as Antonio himself makes clear:
The Levantine Synagogue, in the Jewish ghetto of Venice, founded in 1538.
ANTONIO: The Duke cannot deny the course of law,
For the commodity that strangers have
With us in Venice, if it be denied,
Will much impeach the justice of the state,
Since that the trade and profit of the city
Consisteth of all nations.
This was a city that treated its immigrants well and fairly; it understood that prosperity depended on having lots of foreigners living happily together. And to ensure this, it guaranteed them all equal treatment under the law – the essential pre-condition of successful easy commerce in Venice, as it would later be in London. As a city-state Venice’s model of government was much commented on and highly regarded.
The great poet Edmund Spenser praised Venice as successor to Babylon and Rome, superior in laws and justice:
Fayre Venice, flower of the last worlds delight;
And next to them in beauty draweth neare,
But farre exceedes in policie of right.
*
If you look at the back of our glass, there is a riotously florid coat of arms in red, blue and gold, topped by a saucy, very Venetian lion poking out its long red tongue. It is not, however, a Venetian coat of arms. It is almost certainly German, and this glass was probably one of a set made in Venice specifically for the very large German export market. Looking at the coat of arms on a glass like this, we should not be surprised that one of the few references to a drinking glass actually being used in Shakespeare involves a German – or that it comes in The Merchant of Venice. When the suitors are competing to marry the wealthy heiress Portia, the unwelcome German candidate is, inevitably, caricatured as a heavy drinker. So Portia, declaring she would as soon be married to a sponge, plans to decoy him to the wrong casket with ‘a deep glass of Rhenish wine’. We can be pretty certain that she served it in a glass like ours.
Interestingly, Shakespeare makes Venice even more tolerant than it actually was, a place where Christians and Jews could mingle in a way unimaginable in any other part of Europe. Venice for Shakespeare and his public is not just a rich Italian city, it is a laboratory of new social possibilities that were only being hinted at in contemporary London. Venice becomes the place of the audience’s imagining – rich and cosmopolitan, free and enticing; a happy vision of London’s freewheeling commercial future, perhaps, but also a place where the rules that govern society are alarmingly fluid. In Othello, Shakespeare’s other great play about Venice, the city offers the ideal setting in which the boundaries of belonging can be tested and uncomfortable ideas of race and religion explored at a safe distance. Here, in Venice, a Jewish girl might well elope with a Christian, and a successful black general could marry the daughter of a white Venetian nobleman.
Venice’s reputation for relaxing the rules went much further than mixed marriages. For Shakespeare’s audience, it is the place where anything goes, and commerce and cosmopolitanism were only a part of what made it such a dizzying site of fantasy. Beauty and seduction were potently associated with the city – both its buildings and its inhabitants – especially, perhaps, in the collective mind of the more puritanical, post-Reformation parts of Europe. If the coat of arms and the gold band along the top tell a story of a Venice aristocratic and commercial, the lady on our goblet plays to the darker side of the city’s allure. Her thick yellow hair is teased up provocatively into two towering horns, and her racy outfit highlights a considerable cleavage. She also carries a circular black fan and – strikingly – a white handkerchief. Looking at her, it is hard not to think of another rich Venetian lady, Desdemona, with the fateful handkerchief that will be brandished as evidence of her sexual infidelity.
The florid coat of arms and dragon on one side of the goblet
Intriguingly, it is not at all obvious from looking at this glass whether the woman painted on it is a patrician or a prostitute, grande dame or grande horizontale. Lots of seventeenth-century tourists found a similar ambiguity about Venetian women – even women as irreproachably pure as Desdemona – that suggested all kinds of possibilities and pleasurable deceits. Venetian courtesans were brilliant at what Iago calls ‘a seeming’, which meant emulating respectable women in their dress and manner to attract and deceive potential customers. These are the very uncertainties which unsettle and finally undo Othello.
For a theatre-goer in a London playhouse audience watching Othello, this idea of beautiful women and questionable virtue was something indissolubly associated with the city. Sixteenth-century Venice was famous across Europe for its prostitutes, something to which Thomas Coryate, again, refers: ‘So infinite are the allurements of the most famous Calypsos, that the fame of them hath drawn many to Venice from some of the remotest parts of Christendom, to contemplate their beauties, and enjoy their pleasing dalliances.’ The risky entrepreneurship that flourished in Venice’s red light district was merely another dimension of Venetian freedom. This was the city of swiftly shifting values and easily manipulated stereotypes, where young Desdemona, entirely chaste, could wind up being accused by Othello, her own husband, of being ‘that cunning whore of Venice’.
A couple embracing in a gondola, from Vere imagini et descritioni delle piu nobili citta del mondo, by Donato Bertelli, Venice, 1578, with liftable flap.
Beneath the admiration for the watery city, there was the suspicion of corruption, dangerous sensuality and, like the rest of Italy, poison. In 1616 the translator and writer Robert Johnson described the corruption he saw behind the beauty of Venice: ‘It surpasseth for Cities, buildings and outward magnificence; yet when you come to examine particulers, you shall finde it like a rotten post gilded on the out-side.’ Already in Shakespearean England we can detect the later stereotype of a sinister, decadent Venice, what in Otway’s 1682 play Venice Preserved was called the ‘Adriatique whore’.
Othello and The Merchant of Venice could not have worked, could not have been imagined, if they had been set in London. Venice then, as now, was the city of dreams, a place where the limits
of the possible were endlessly extendable, the metropolis of intoxicating potentiality.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
From London to Marrakesh
AFRICAN TREASURE
Elizabeth I was a monarch of many names – Good Queen Bess, Gloriana, the Virgin Queen and occasionally something much more exotic: ‘The Sultana Isabel, who has high position and majestic glory, constancy and steadiness, a rank which all her co-religionists, far and near, recognise, whose stature among the Christian people continues to be mighty and lofty’. The Sultana Isabel is, of course, Queen Elizabeth I as seen from far away – from Africa in 1600. This flattering description of her majestic glory, constancy and steadiness was given by one of her new allies on the world stage, Sharif Ahmad al-Mansur, the wealthy king of Morocco – far richer than Elizabeth herself – and a force to be reckoned with in both the Mediterranean and the Atlantic.
Sharif Al-Mansur’s comment on their Queen is a reminder that English play-goers in Shakespeare’s time were just beginning to be global citizens. They were proud of Francis Drake’s circumnavigation of the earth, credulous, willing listeners to tall stories of the sort of lands filled with ‘cannibals that each other eat / the Anthropophagi and men whose heads / do grow beneath their shoulders’, and eager readers of a new genre of thriller – traveller’s tales like Sir Walter Raleigh’s book of 1596, The Discovery of Guiana, possibly Shakespeare’s source for Othello’s stories.
This curiosity about an expanding, unsettling world was played out in the theatre. In The Merchant of Venice, a richly dressed, exotic figure sweeps on to the stage to woo the Italian heiress, Portia.
MOROCCO: Mislike me not for my complexion,
The shadowed livery of the burnished sun,
To whom I am a neighbour and near bred.
This eloquent sun-burnished man is the Prince of Morocco. He is the first of Shakespeare’s noble Moors and, what is more, the first non-villainous Moor to appear on the English stage. Even more surprising than his skin colour is that this man, whom Portia calls a ‘gentle’ Moor, is totally at ease with English currency:
MOROCCO: They have in England
A coin that bears the figure of an angel
Stampèd in gold – but that’s insculped upon;
But here an angel in a golden bed
Lies all within. Deliver me the key.
Here do I choose, and thrive I as I may!
Shakespeare reassuringly suggests that, even if the English know little of Morocco, this sympathetic prince already knows something about England – and quite a lot about its money.
This prince was a character entirely of Shakespeare’s invention – he does not appear in any of the earlier material that The Merchant of Venice drew on – and was probably inspired by England’s intensifying trading relations with Morocco in the 1590s. The divide between Christianity and Islam would have made his marriage to Portia unthinkable in the real world of sixteenth-century Europe, but on Shakespeare’s stage, Moorish royalty is associated not so much with an alien or hostile faith as with luxury and exotic riches: sugar, the finest horses and dizzying quantities of gold.
Nobody watching The Merchant of Venice would be the least bit surprised that the Prince of Morocco, asked to choose one of three caskets to win Portia’s hand in marriage, would go for the gold. West Africa was, as everybody knew, quite simply where gold came from: it was the source of pretty well every gold coin minted in England. Sharif al-Mansur controlled access to these huge gold supplies. From Timbuktu alone he took 600 kilograms of gold a year: predictably, he was dubbed al-dhahabi, the Golden One, and it was reported that ‘fourteen thousand hammers continuously struck coins at his palace gate’. While this is clearly a poetic exaggeration, one can nonetheless almost hear in that phrase the sound of al-Mansur’s money being minted.
The ‘Armada Portrait’ of Elizabeth I, by George Gower, 1588–1600. England’s defeat of the Spanish Armada inspired this portrait and raised Elizabeth’s international status.
OVERLEAF: Map of North Africa showing Marrakesh (Marocho), from Abraham Ortelius’s Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, 1570. Morocco, at the western end of the North African coastline, was always independent of the Ottoman Empire and played a role in the Atlantic as well as the Mediterranean.
This particular coin of Al-Mansur’s, now in the British Museum, is almost exactly the same size as a modern two-pence piece, although it is thinner and is, of course, made of solid gold. Both sides are covered with beautifully calligraphed Arabic script: ‘In the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate,’ the central panel begins, then describes al-Mansur as ‘Commander of the Faithful’. The coin tells us both the place and the Islamic year of issue: ‘Struck in the city of Marrakesh, may God protect it, in the year one thousand and eight.’ That is the year we call 1600, by which time The Merchant of Venice had been playing for about five years.
Morocco was rich in saltpetre, the main raw material of gunpowder, as well as in sugar and gold, and in 1585 London merchants had established the Barbary Company to trade in north Africa. By the 1620s the English immigrant community in Morocco and neighbouring lands was substantial. English merchants and artisans took advantage of the region’s wealth and global trade links to make a good living, and there was a growing flow of people and goods going both ways between north Africa and England. But it was an unequal relationship: England paid more attention to rich Morocco than Morocco to England. Sharif al-Mansur began to take English power seriously only after the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588. Morocco also was in a state of more or less permanent war with Spain, and England had suddenly emerged as a useful ally: to celebrate the Queen’s victory over their common enemy, the Sharif encouraged the English residents of Morocco to light festive bonfires.
To foster the new alliance between the two countries, Al-Mansur also sent emissaries to England. Londoners were particularly struck by the splendid processions of the Moroccan ambassador, Abd al-Wahid bin Masoud bin Muhammad al-Annuri, and his retinue in 1600. For many it would have been their first glimpse not just of Africa, but of Islam. Kate Lowe, Renaissance historian at Queen Mary, University of London, explains:
That 1600 embassy was the first time that lots of Londoners would have seen Muslims in a group behaving as Muslims. It must have created an enormous impetus to understand more. There would have been a difference too between popular opinion and the official foreign policy line held at Court, because these people were allies against Spain. So at Court there was an acceptance of them, probably in a way that the people in the street did not see.
The Moroccan ambassador Abd Al-Wahid bin Masoud bin Muhammad Al-Annuri led an embassy to Elizabeth I in 1600. (Portrait by an unknown artist, 1600)
The street was potentially a great deal less friendly to foreigners, and treatment of Moors in England could be hostile – for there were some Moors on the London street. In 1595, English and Moroccan forces together had rescued north African galley-slaves from Spanish ships. Some were sent home to Morocco, but others were allowed to come to England. Despite the Queen’s interest in protecting her Moorish allies, Londoners protested, and the Moors eventually had to be expelled.
Shakespeare never actually uses the words Moroccan or Muslim. The standard Elizabethan word for a north African is ‘Moor’. Kate Lowe explains:
The word Moor sounds impressive, but it actually signifies very little. Originally it was the classical word to describe somebody that lived in Mauritania, the Roman province across the top of north Africa. After that it gained other meanings, one of which was black. It also later gained the meaning of a Muslim, but when it is used in Elizabethan England it is imprecise. That is in itself one of the reasons why that term ‘the Moor’ is used so much: it has resonance but not much substance, and you can hang so much off it.
One of the things you could easily hang off it was the popular xenophobic hostility that forced Elizabeth to expel the Moroccan galley-slaves, and Shakespeare does not shy away from this kind of racial antago
nism. In Othello, not for the first time, he explores a contemporary London phenomenon by setting it in Venice. The villain Iago and the angry father of Desdemona – Othello’s white Venetian bride – indeed anyone hostile to Othello, use racial insults against the Moor: ‘thicklips’, ‘barbarian’ and ‘sooty’. These still shock today, as they were surely meant to then. Iago does not mince his words. Here he is telling Desdemona’s father that his daughter has eloped with Othello:
‘Recollection of Titus Andronicus’ attributed to Henry Peacham, around 1594. This is an impressionistic depiction rather than an actual moment in a performance, but it shows some conventions of stagecraft, including costume and Aaron the Moor’s extreme black makeup.
IAGO: Even now, now, very now, an old black ram
Is tupping your white ewe. Arise, arise,
Awake the snorting citizens with the bell,
Or else the devil will make a grandsire of you.
For Iago, Othello is not just black and oversexed, but diabolical, and, as the play goes on, Shakespeare accentuates Othello’s blackness. Yet for all the times he is associated with darkness, Othello is also praised: this general is ‘brave’, ‘noble’, ‘valiant’. The blacker his antagonists paint him, the more Shakespeare forces his audience to acknowledge Othello’s honour and integrity.
Desdemona falls for Othello as he is telling exotic stories of his African youth. One episode is particularly designed to win the young girl’s sympathy:
OTHELLO: Wherein I spake of most disastrous chances,
Of moving accidents by flood and field,
Of hair-breadth scapes i’th’imminent deadly breach,
Of being taken by the insolent foe,
And sold to slavery…
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