Shakespeare: A Life (44 page)

audacity than to an imaginative meeting of a troupe's needs. Fashions
in play-writing changed, and he tried to stay ahead. Yet Jonson's
cutting edge, his free, attacking mind, his trenchant mockery and
tireless intellectual zeal for demolition might implicitly have
accused the older poet of tameness. Shakespeare was repeating himself
in new romantic comedies, doing so with exceptional artistry, but
relying on his own older, well-tried situations, on worn devices, and
mild versions of often Tarltonesque clowns. It is not that he
sedulously imitated Jonson or anyone else, though he plucked twigs off a
forest of trees. But his new, lying or boasting railers such as
Thersites in
Troilus and Cressida
, Lucio in Measure for
Measure, or Parolles in All's Well have a relation to such a depraved
clown as Carlo Buffone in Jonson's Every Man Out of his Humour. The
intellectual quotient rises, and Jonson's example and influence, among
other factors, led Shakespeare to such a difficult, self-trapping, self
-- challenging exploit as inventing a Prince Hamlet whose mind holds
the stage for five acts in which 'revenge' is suspended. Jonson's
examples also encouraged a new, hard-edged realism in Shakespeare's
so-called 'problem comedies' and other new works ahead.

Anecdotes of their friendship say little of the poets' awarenesses,
and Jonson was competitive, restless, nervily ambitious. His
Sejanus
implicitly attacks
Julius Caesar,
and in condemning heroic action and exposing a state's pervasive
corruption Jonson's play was surely remembered by the author of
King Lear.
Jonson saved most of his outright criticism of his rival for
prologues, prefatory verses, or reminiscences dating from about 1614. In
retrospect, he implies that 'three rusty swords' and 'Lancaster's
long jars' are not enough to show political realities in
Henry VI,
or that a chorus as in
Henry Vthat
'wafts you o'er the seas' is foolishly artificial. As for
Shakespeare's stage properties and the imitation of nature an audience
needs neither

rolled bullet heard
To say, it thunders; nor tempestuous drum
Rumbles, to tell you when the storm doth come.
¹¹

For Jonson,
Pericles
is a glib, mouldy tale that wants art. As for
The Winter's Tale or The Tempest
, a good neo-classical poet must be

-256-

'loath to make Nature afraid in his plays, like those that beget
Tales, Tempests
, and such like
Drolleries
'.
¹²
And Jonson is loose enough with a notion of dates in the
Bartholomew Fair
Induction to show how outmoded his rival is. Those souls who praise
Titus Andronicus
have a taste which has stood still 'these five and twenty, or thirty years', he says in 1614.
¹³
All of this is offset by his critical views in the elegy of 1623,
when Shakespeare is judged without an inhibiting sense of the
troubling, creating presence of the living man; there is scant attention
to the man in this intelligent elegy. But in these years Jonson's
main struggle to adjust his own views lay ahead, and in new works the
Stratford poet, though by no means oblivious to Jonson and Marston, and
in fact learning from them, sharply impressed and irked a man of
'humours'.

Just before Hamnet Shakespeare died, Londoners had had bracing news
from the sea. An English attack on Cadiz harbour resulted in the
capture of two opulently laden Spanish galleons. One of them, the
San Andrés
-- renamed the
Andrew
, becomes a byword for sea-wealth in The Merchant of Venice in Salerio's phrase, 'my wealthy
Andrew
docks in sand' (I. i. 27).
¹⁴
That helps to date the
Merchant
,
which Shakespeare appears to have written after July 1596, when news
of the ship's capture reached London, and before 22 July 1598 when the
play was registered.

In the
Midlands this was a period of harvest dearth, famine, and widespread
social unrest; it was also a period in which the poet lost his only
son, and made a large, showy investment in New Place. For all the
claims on his energies and the financial exigencies of his troupe, one
might expect that his mood, at times, was more introverted than usual
in these months. There is a committed inwardness in the
Merchant
with its emphatic moral themes, its pictures of a spiritual malaise,
and its remarkable characterization. The play has compelling
argumentative speeches, but its last act is evasively aestheticized --
so that issues of justice and mercy, raised earlier, are left
unresolved.

-257-

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
,

-258-

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

-259-

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:

-260-

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

-261-