This Is Shakespeare

by Emma Smith

  The spectacular success of Bassanio’s investment is coupled with the failure of Antonio’s. ‘What, not one hit?’ Bassanio asks, disbelieving, ‘From Tripolis, from Mexico, and England, / From Lisbon, Barbary, and India’ (3.2.265–7)? But there are other connections between the worlds of romance and trade. Just as the merchant is a middleman in buying wholesale and selling retail, so too this merchant Antonio is a romantic intermediary, in the curiously triangulated relationship he has with Bassanio and Portia. Antonio’s unexplained sadness at the beginning of the play has seemed to many critics and theatre directors all too explicable: he cannot speak his love for his beloved Bassanio (see the chapter on Twelfth Night for more on male homosexuality and same-sex desire in the plays, particularly related to characters called Antonio). He is both the enabler of their relationship – in taking out the fateful loan – and the impediment to it – in immediately intervening, at a distance, in their intimacy. Antonio’s letter to his friend is a brief masterpiece in the passive-aggressive genre: ‘all debts are cleared between you and I if I might but see you at my death. Notwithstanding, use your pleasure. If your love do not persuade you to come, let not my letter’ (3.2.316-19). Bassanio does indeed come, armed with his new wife’s treasury.

  The wealthy Portia is astute – ‘First go with me to church and call me wife, / And then away to Venice to your friend’ (3.2.301–2) – and also munificent. The precise terms of her generosity are so tied to that initial debt of 3,000 ducats that her response to the summons reads as a fabulous return on an investment: ‘Pay him six thousand and deface the bond. /Double six thousand, and then treble that’ (3.2.297). 6,000 × 2 × 3 = 36,000 ducats. If the initial 3,000 was worth about £300,000, then this new sum approaches £3.6 million. These inflated sums are incredible – literally. The prudent calibration of investment and return so crucial to Bassanio’s success with Portia has now become a bubble, in which the expansiveness of romantic love and the calculation of debts and bonds do not compute. The play is rapidly recalibrating exchange values, to prepare us for a new ethical vocabulary in the courtroom scene. The moral aim seems to be negatively to caricature Shylock in the play’s fourth act as the sole figure driven by money. Having established all its characters and relationships as deeply and literally transactional, the play now changes course to pin this greedy self-interest on the Jew.

  The play’s financial entanglements come to their climax in the Venetian courtroom of Act 4. Unbeknown to Bassanio, Portia has presented herself disguised as the lawyer Balthasar, and she takes charge of the trial in which the plaintiff Shylock demands his bond, the pound of flesh agreed as guarantee for the loan. Shylock is implacable in claiming his due. In a bravura speech on ‘the quality of mercy’ (4.1.181), Portia uses her rhetoric to displace the financial self-interest of the Christian community and substitute a more rarefied glossary of abstract ethical terms. Mercy is a hyper-currency, above the earthly ledger of debit and credit, because it ‘blesseth him that gives, and him that takes’ (4.1.184) as ‘an attribute to God himself’ (192). Portia’s intervention serves to establish the Christian community on the moral high ground and to back Shylock into a corner. He obliges, helpfully (for her plan) stereotyping himself as the vengeful Jew, stropping his knife blade on the sole of his shoe. Shylock is here completely isolated on ethnic, religious and legal grounds, as if he alone in the play was interested in money, profit and speculation, and is now being punished for it. It’s striking that in the first printed text of The Merchant of Venice, dating from 1600, the speech prefixes – those abbreviated names that indicate to us who is speaking in a play text – change at this point in the play from ‘Shylock’ to ‘Jew’. The character has lost his personal identity, or been robbed of it, under the pressure of the racial and ethnic stereotype. Some critics have read the courtroom scene as a kind of allegory of the defeat of Old Testament vengeance through Christ-like self-sacrifice. But for modern audiences, this court represents something simpler and more sickeningly familiar: a system of justice rigged on racial grounds, revealing the true limits of Venetian tolerance for religious difference. A Jew who sheds ‘one drop of Christian blood’ (4.1.307) must have his lands and goods confiscated, according to the laws of the state, and if there is a suggestion he plots to kill a Venetian citizen, his life can be ended on the Duke of Venice’s command. Portia’s disquisition on mercy starts to look a bit hollow. Shylock’s life is saved, but barely: his money is confiscated, partly to fund his renegade daughter and her husband, and he is forced to convert to Christianity.

  Like the moneylender, the merchant struggles to find a place in the play’s whitewashed romantic world of Act 5: as so often, these adversaries are more similar than they initially appear. There is no place for Antonio at the end of the play, no marriage partner to book-end his opening declarations of sadness with contentment. One reason that there is no resolution of the play’s central triangle may indeed be unrequited homosexuality in the character of Antonio – and perhaps of Bassanio too. Another might be the structure of mercantilism itself. Throughout the play its titular merchant adds middleman value to Bassanio, sold at a profit to the wealthy heiress Portia, just as Bassanio’s credit-fuelled courtship of Portia lays out 3,000 ducats to win a fortune many times that sum. At the end of the play, Portia has the upper hand. Bassanio has learned, and earned, his lesson: his first allegiance must henceforth be to his wife, not his friend. But Antonio cannot quite accept his demoted role in Bassanio’s life. He immediately offers himself again, in the play’s closing lines, as physical surety: ‘I once did lend my body for his wealth … I dare be bound again, / My soul upon the forfeit, that your lord / Will never more break faith advisedly’ (5.1.249–53). The language of forfeit, credit and trust is, as we have come to expect, a vocabulary of financial transaction only imperfectly translated into the emotional realm. The Merchant of Venice emerges as a strikingly contemporary play about commodified relationships, romantic and business entrepreneurialism, and the obscure transactional networks of credit finance.

  CHAPTER 8

  1 Henry IV

  1 Henry IV is a history play that would prefer not to be. It has scant patience with heroics, fighting and politics, and little investment in its eponymous central character, the king. It is cavalier with historical facts and chronicles. It would rather be joking in the tavern than politicking in the court. These preferences create a new and compelling version of the history play. 1 Henry IV tells the story of the king who, having taken the throne from his cousin Richard II, is now beset by conspiracy, civil war and insubordination. These take two substantive forms. The first is an insurgency led by the charismatic and chivalric Hotspur, supported by his father Northumberland, his brother-in-law Mortimer, who has a claim to be the rightful heir to the throne, the Welshman Glendower, and Douglas, a Scot. This political threat to Henry is a coalition of noblemen, representing constituent parts of the nation and its neighbours, who do not accept his right to the throne. But perhaps the more pressing challenge is the second, the rebelliousness of Henry’s son, Prince Hal, who ignores the court and his obligations, preferring instead the company of a disreputable knight, Falstaff, in the taverns of London’s Eastcheap. The play tells the story of the gradual reconciliation of father and son, culminating at the Battle of Shrewsbury, where Hal protects his father from attack and kills Hotspur in single combat.

  The extended title of the first edition covers some of its appeal: ‘The History of Henry the Fourth, with the battle at Shrewsbury, between the king and Lord Henry Percy, surnamed Henry Hotspur of the North. With the humorous conceits of Sir John Falstaff’. ‘Humorous conceits’ (meaning clever, entertaining ideas and expressions; wit) here, as in the play, threaten to undermine the high seriousness of political and military conflict. This play was one of Shakespeare’s most popular in print, with seven editions in the following twenty-five years. More significantly, it generated two distinct sequels. One, entitled ‘the second part of Henry the fourth’, was published
two years later, producing in its turn the designation of the previous play as ‘Part 1’. For audiences and early readers the play we now call Part 1 was experienced as a stand-alone entertainment, although it looks backwards, to the reign of Richard II, as well as forwards, to the future reign of Prince Henry. We can judge that 1 Henry IV was popular because, like a modern film, it produced a sequel that essentially tried to repeat the success of the original (and again, like many modern equivalents, failed, because what we liked so much about the first one was that we had never seen anything like it before). But ‘Part 2’ is not the only spin-off from this popular play. Shakespeare turned away from the restrictions of the historical play to recast its non-aristocratic characters in the unexpectedly bourgeois milieu of Windsor, in the romp The Merry Wives of Windsor.

  These opportunistic sequels tell us something about the way the early modern theatre industry was developing responsive, and recognizable, marketing techniques to cash in on successful productions. But they also tell us something more particular about the star quality of 1 Henry IV. The sequels share only one element. Not the king, not even the prince; not the battles or rebellions or disquisitions on the nature of government. Their common denominator is Falstaff. Fat, dodgy, cash-strapped, self-interested Falstaff. In inventing this anti-hero, Shakespeare had launched a cultural phenomenon that he milked in two further plays: the success of 1 Henry IV was the success of Falstaff.

  So what made Falstaff so compelling? Why did Elizabethans recognize Falstaffs in the world around them, when they did not, for example, see Hamlets? Why did this character come alive for audiences in a way that no other Shakespearean character did? Crucial to Falstaff’s characterization is his morbid obesity. Hal’s first words to him in the play’s second scene call him ‘fat-witted’ (1.2.2), and there is constant banter about his appetite for food and drink. Other names for Falstaff reiterate his size: ‘fat-guts’ (2.2.31), ‘whoreson round man’ (2.5.140), ‘fat rogue’ (2.5.548), ‘a gross fat man’ ‘as fat as butter’ (2.5.517). ‘How long is’t ago, Jack, since thou sawest thine own knee?’ goads Hal, as Falstaff blames sighs and griefs for blowing him up like a bladder (2.5.330–31). When Hal advises him to hide on the ground during a trick, Falstaff asks if he has ‘any levers to lift me up again’ (2.2.34). In an important sequence in 2.5 where Hal and Falstaff rehearse in the tavern an interview between the prince and his father, Falstaff’s fatness and its interpretation is their main topic of conversation. Ventriloquizing his father’s disapproval, Hal (playing the king) addresses Falstaff (as if he were the prince): ‘There is a devil haunts thee in the likeness of an old fat man; a tun of man is thy companion’ (2.5.452–3). He extemporizes an extravagant sequence of similes for Falstaff’s size: ‘that trunk of humours, that bolting-hutch of beastliness, that swollen parcel of dropsies, that huge bombard of sack, that stuffed cloak-beg of guts, that roasted Manningtree ox with the pudding in his belly’ (2.5.454–8). Falstaff sticks up for himself against this fat-shaming: ‘If to be fat be to be hated, then Pharaoh’s lean kine are to be loved’ (2.5.477–8), referring to the cattle that are the biblical symbols of famine in Joseph’s dream. Images of bulk, size and, above all, fatness, pepper the play. It is impossible to get away from the fact that Falstaff is fat.

  It’s worth stepping back a moment to see how unusual this level of physical description is in Shakespeare’s writing. Very few characters in Shakespeare are given specific physical characteristics. We hear that Cassius in Julius Caesar has a ‘lean and hungry look’ (1.2.195), just as the apothecary in Romeo and Juliet has been worn to the bones by misery; we know that Juliet is just shy of fourteen years old; we know that one of Helena and Hermia is fair and the other dark and one is tall and the other short (but as with everything in A Midsummer Night’s Dream who can possibly remember which is which?). Beyond this handful of immediate examples, most of which have thematic rather than specifically personal resonances, there isn’t much more. On some rare occasions a physical description is so at odds with the image we have of a character – Gertrude’s description of Hamlet in the final fencing match with Laertes as ‘fat and scant of breath’ (5.2.240) is an example, or the idea that Caliban’s witchlike mother Sycorax had blue eyes – that editors have tried to manipulate the reference away as a misreading of some sort. But for the most part, Shakespeare does not give his characters extensive physical descriptions, nor is their appearance of particular interest. While we know that Shakespeare writes with a definite group of actors in mind – the Lord Chamberlain’s Men where he was actor, resident playwright and shareholder – he seems more interested in their acting ability than their physical appearance. So what? Well, Falstaff’s fatness is the most thoroughgoing physical designation we ever get in Shakespeare, or, to put it another way, Falstaff is the most insistently physical character Shakespeare ever wrote.

  The density of all these inventive signifiers of fatness is also significant when compared to Shakespeare’s sources. Although Falstaff as he appears in the play seems to be an ahistorical character enjoyably adrift from the serious political and military business we associate with history plays, he does have a real and controversial historical source, the Lollard knight Sir John Oldcastle. Oldcastle was a soldier and companion to the young Henry V who was executed as a heretic in the early fifteenth century. His life was included in John Foxe’s extensive prehistory of English Protestantism, Acts and Monuments (known as the Book of Martyrs), and he was understood by Elizabethan England to be a heroic religious man who died for those beliefs. There is firm evidence that in the play’s first incarnation, and possibly in its early performances, Falstaff’s name was Oldcastle. Hal’s phrase ‘my old lad of the castle’ (1.2.41–2) doesn’t make sense without this name, for instance, and the Epilogue added to the end of 2 Henry IV teases the audience with the sense that Falstaff both is and is not Oldcastle: ‘for anything I know, Falstaff shall die of a sweat – unless already a be killed with your hard opinions. For Oldcastle died a martyr, and this is not the man’ (Epilogue 27–30). So the historical Oldcastle was a devout and principled man (nothing suggests that he was fat), and it is clear that his Elizabethan successors took exception to seeing their noble ancestor pilloried by Shakespeare, forcing the change of name. (The Oxford Shakespeare reinstates the name ‘Oldcastle’, which reminds us of the author’s original association – but I’ve emended quotations to ‘Falstaff’ because I think that’s how the character was known to audiences.) The Chamberlain’s Men’s great dramatic rivals, the Admiral’s Men, capitalized on this tactlessness by producing a more acceptable and sycophantic version of the story in their own play, Sir John Oldcastle.

  In part, then, Falstaff’s fatness laughs in the face of Oldcastle’s piety, presenting a figure who is self-indulgent rather than ascetic, carnal rather than spiritual. He is a figure of feasting rather than fasting. In a joyous moment his itemized bar bill is winkled out of his snoring pocket and brandished for hilarity: ‘O monstrous! But one halfpennyworth of bread to this intolerable deal of sack!’ (2.5.543–4). And there’s been a long history of criticism that has seen his insistent physicality as a marker of personality itself. In the history of Shakespearean character study – even of Shakespearean criticism altogether – Falstaff is the weighty foundation stone. In 1777 Maurice Morgann’s An Essay on the Dramatic Character of Sir John Falstaff, the first book-length study of Shakespeare, was published. Morgann attempted to defend his subject against Dr Johnson’s withering moral judgement: ‘[T]he fat knight has never uttered one sentiment of generosity, and for all his power of exciting mirth, has nothing in him that can be esteemed’ (1765). In responding to this character assassination, Morgann inaugurated an interpretative tradition that has informed actors from Henry Irving to Laurence Olivier and implicated critics from William Hazlitt to Harold Bloom. Claiming that Shakespeare invents what it is to be human, Bloom develops two characters as extended examples. Hamlet is a predictable enough choice, but the other is Falstaff. In an interview a
bout his work, Bloom describes Falstaff as ‘the most intelligent person in all of literature’, but he also suggests something less personal and more general: ‘Falstaff is life! Falstaff is the blessing.’

  Falstaff’s fatness is less an individualizing characteristic of his personality and more metaphorical, as if his bulk makes him exceed the individually human and take on a kind of symbolic function. That expansive meaning is something Falstaff himself aspires to. As he and Hal each pretend to be the disapproving king, they brandish different meanings. Is Falstaff ‘reverend Vice … grey Iniquity’ (2.5.458–9), the ‘abominable misleader of youth’ (467–8), or is he simply ‘old and merry’ (476)? Does he love the prince – one reading of the play sees him as an alternative father-figure providing the human affection so lacking from the cold, troubled king – or is he merely exploiting him in expectation of later preferment and advantage? Falstaff-playing-Hal defends Falstaff against the charges: ‘sweet Jack Falstaff, kind Jack Falstaff, true Jack Falstaff, valiant Jack Falstaff … Banish not him thy Harry’s company. / Banish plump Jack, and banish all the world’ (2.5.480–85).