The Lodger Shakespeare: His Life on Silver Street (26 page)

Why, he hath a horse better than the Neapolitan’s, a better bad habit of frowning than the Count Palatine’s - he is every man in no man. If a throstle sing, he falls straight a-capering. He will fence with his own shadow. If I should marry him I should marry twenty husbands. (1.2.55-60)

Shakespeare has more extensive fun with the Frenchman Dr Caius in
The Merry Wives of Windsor
. He is a blustery, touchy, belligerent character, as the French were said to be (and as Christopher Mountjoy seems to have been). He is also lecherous, or at least overheated, in his pursuit of the pretty young citizen’s daughter Anne Page. Lechery is another stock association with the French (and again relevant to Mountjoy, at least as described by the elders of the French Church). On a more sociological note, he is a medical man: ‘Master Doctor Caius, the renowned French physician’. He has an upmarket English clientele - ‘de earl, de knight, de lords, de gentlemen’ - to whom he administers ‘the potions and the motions’ (purgatives to move their bowels). This accurately reflects a fashion for French physicians, though the most famous of them, James’s physician Theodore Turquet de Mayerne, had not yet arrived in England. A quack doctor satirically portrayed by Nashe in
Terrors of the Night
(1594) ‘speaks nothing but broken English like a French doctor’.
¹²

The comedy of Dr Caius, such as it is, lies mostly in his broken English (thus parallel with the other comic foreigner of the play, the Welshman Hugh Evans). Before his first entry his house-keeper Mistress Quickly whets the audience’s appetite for this - ‘Here will be an old abusing of God’s patience and the King’s English.’ Caius’ accent leads to double entendres, such as ‘by my trot’, where ‘troth’ becomes ‘trot’ = prostitute, and ‘if there be one or two I shall make-a the turd’ (3.3.219). He switches erratically from French to English, and has that hurrying tone which imperfect speakers of a language affect to cover their deficiencies - ‘Vetch me in my closet
une boitine verde
- a box, a green-a box. Do intend vat I speak? A green-a box’; ‘
Mette le au mon
pocket -
depeche
, quickly’; ‘ ’Ods me,
que ai-je oublie’?
’ (1.4.41-58).

Possibly one heard this sort of immigrant patois in the Mountjoy household, though to suggest this is to collude in a stereotyping of them. In general the dialect of these Elizabethan stage-foreigners, with its impenetrable oaths and me-have-got syntax, is more comic convention than realistic representation. Caius’ Franglais is echoed by later French characters like Delion in Haughton’s
Englishmen for my Money,
John Fotheking in Marston’s
Jack Drum’s Entertainment
(1600), and Bullaker in Chapman’s
Sir Giles Goosecap
(
c
. 1601). It is a stylized routine, equivalent to the surreal Italian-American of Chico Marx.

Dr Caius is a mere caper, in a play which (according to tradition) was cooked up in a few weeks for performance before the Queen. Traces of hurry are evident in this minor character. The speech characteristics which define him in the opening scene soon slacken off, leaving little but a funny accent. And when the play went on tour, even Caius’ Frenchness becomes vague. In the 1602 quarto of
Merry Wives
, which is based on an abridged touring version of the play, Caius slips into German as well as French, suggesting that any old foreign accent or lexicon was sufficient when playing to provincial audiences. He is just ‘Johnny Foreigner’.
¹³

There are further comments and jokes about the French in
Henry V
(1599), though the context is historical and patriotic. Notably the play contains the only Shakespeare scene written entirely in French, and has liberal quantities of French in other scenes. His basic command of the language is clear, and at least some of the errors in the text are demonstrably the fault of incompetent copyists or compositors. The opinion of J. Dover Wilson on the French dialogue in
Henry V
is probably right: ‘If we allow for Shakespeare’s handwriting, for the Folio compositor’s ignorance of French, for phonetic spellings to help the boy players, and for the occurrence of early modern French forms, it is doubtful whether there was originally very much wrong with Shakespeare’s French.’
¹⁴
He may well have had some help from a native speaker, not impossibly Marie Mountjoy, though all that can be said for sure is that he consulted a language manual - John Eliot’s lively
Ortho-epia Gallica
(1593) - when writing some of the scenes.
¹⁵
In choosing to use ‘proper’ French, Shakespeare departs from stage convention. It is a calculated theatrical risk - a good proportion of his audience knew no French at all - but it adds a new dimension of realism to this chronicle of events in the ‘vasty fields of France’.

In one of his last plays,
Henry VIII
, written in collaboration with John Fletcher, there is a witty take on French affectations among the English - ‘our travelled gallants’, who come back home all Frenchified, and ‘fill the court with quarrels, talk and tailors’. This is discussed by the Chamberlain and Sir Thomas Lovell. They wish ‘our messieurs’ would ‘leave those remnants / Of fool and feather that they got in France’. Among these imported fads are enumerated ‘fights and fireworks’, ‘tennis and tall stockings’ and ‘short blistered breeches’ (1.2.19-31).
Henry VIII
premiered at the Globe in 1613, so this brief sally against French frivolities may have been written around the time Shakespeare was testifying on behalf of a Frenchman at the Court of Requests. ‘Quarrels, talk and tailors’ may just about sum up his view of the protracted wrangles of the Belott-Mountjoy case.

In these plays Shakespeare jogs along with jocular prejudice against the French - they are vain, frivolous, quarrelsome and lecherous, and they talk funny - but he does not seem to have engaged in it with much enthusiasm. In the history plays the context is jingoistic; in the comedies it is an easy laugh. What is more interesting is his tendency to challenge prejudices against immigrant aliens. We have seen it in the ‘More’ fragment, and we see it even more in his portrayal of Shylock the Jew.

The Merchant of Venice
was written in about 1596, a time when anti-Semitism was on the public agenda. One of the
causes c’lèbres
of the 1590s was the execution of the Portuguese Jew Dr Roderigo Lopez on a charge of conspiring to poison the Queen. The trial featured, in default of hard evidence, a good deal of anti-Jewish propaganda.
¹⁶
It is no coincidence that the Admiral’s Men played Marlowe’s black tragi-farce
The Jew of Malta
so frequently at this time - a play that can be read as anti-Semitic, though full also of Marlovian undercurrents of irony which challenge that reading. In a later play by William Rowley an old usurer is described as wearing a ‘visage [vizard or mask] like the artificial Jew of Malta’s nose’, suggesting that the actor playing Barabas wore a false nose.
¹⁷
Some have wondered if Shylock was similarly accoutred, but it seems unlikely.
The Merchant of Venice
is innovative in presenting the Jew not as a pantomime villain but as a rounded character with a mix of virtues and flaws. In a famous speech Shylock appeals to a common humanity deeper than the divide between Jew and Christian -

Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian is? If you prick us do we not bleed? If you tickle us do we not laugh? If you poison us do we not die? And if you wrong us shall we not revenge? (3.1.52-60)

Our sympathy is evoked by the contemptuous treatment Shylock has received, but the effect of the play, the effect of his implacable thirst for revenge, is to stretch that sympathy taut - whether or not to breaking-point is up to each member of the audience.
¹⁸

The apotheosis of the outsider in the Elizabethan mind was not the Jew - essentially a familiar presence - but the more exotic figure of the black African or ‘blackamoor’, and the apotheosis of Shakespeare’s treatment of the racial outsider is
Othello
. The description of Othello as a ‘Moor’ has led to uncertainty about his ethnic origins - the word correctly refers to the Berber-Arab races of the Maghreb, then called Mauretania. These to the Elizabethans were ‘tawny Moors’ (as the Prince of Morocco is called in
The Merchant of Venice
), while black Africans were ‘black Moors’. In recent times Othello has been played as an Arab by Anthony Hopkins and by Ben Kingsley, but the language of the play, with its derogatory references to his ‘thick lips’ and ‘sooty bosom’, suggests that his ethnicity is African. (His speech beginning ‘Haply for I am black’, often mentioned in this context, does not actually give any ethnic clue, as ‘black’ was then used to mean dark or swarthy. Queen Elizabeth called Archbishop Whitgift her ‘little black husband’.)
¹⁹

Black Africans were to be seen in Elizabethan London and other port cities. They were mostly West African, their presence a by-product of the transatlantic slave-trade. The slaver John Hawkins landed 300 captives from West Africa in England in the 1560s. ‘Blackamoor’ servants were a fashionable novelty. Alderman Paul Bayning had three black maids in his house; in a London parish register we hear of ‘John Come-quicke, a blacke-more’, servant to Capt Thomas Love, and of ‘a Negar [negro] whose name was supposed to be Frauncis’, working for a brewer in West Smithfield. Only occasionally are their African names recorded - ‘Cassangoe’, ‘Easfanyyo’. In 1596 the Queen told the Privy Council, ‘There are lately divers blackamoores brought into this realme, of which kind of people there are allready here too manie.’
²⁰
Another word used for them was ‘Ethiops’, usually in a generic sense (from the Greek root meaning ‘burnt skins’), occasionally with some notion of the internal geography of Africa.

Othello is not the first of Shakespeare’s Africans: there is the ‘blackamoor’ Aaron in
Titus Andronicus
, one of his earliest plays, perhaps composed in the late 1580s. There the equation is conventional: Aaron is black and he is a villain. His blackness is not in doubt - he is ‘coal-black’ and has a ‘fleece of woolly hair’ - and nor is his wickedness. The emblematic moment is when he holds up Titus’ severed hand, gloating:

O how this villainy
Doth fat me with the very thoughts of it!
Let fools do good and fair men call for grace,
Aaron will have his soul black like his face. (3.1.201-4)

‘Fat me’ has an overtone of sexual arousal, and Aaron is throughout a figure of powerful erotic energy.
Titus
is virtually a homage to Marlowe - the bloodbath of the story, the fierce clarity of the treatment - and the magnetism of the evil Aaron is a typical Marlovian twist. He is the charismatic transgressor, the climbing ‘over-reacher’. We get a graphic instance of his stage presence from the Peacham drawing of
Titus Andronicus
(see Plate 22), where his vividly inked-in figure draws the eye straight away.

In
Titus
the black man is the villain, exotic and evil, but a dozen or more years later, as he begins to think about
Othello
, Shakespeare’s approach is more complex. Departing radically with convention, he will make the black man the hero, a ‘noble Moor’, and his white subordinate the villain. And it will be the hidden purpose of Iago’s villainy to drag Othello back down into barbarity, to chain him once again to the ‘blackamoor’ stereotype. Through deceptions and stratagems - almost directorial in a theatrical sense - Iago presents Othello to the audience, and to himself, as a murderous monster.
²¹

Othello has achieved prestige and status in his adopted European home, but the status is fragile. Iago works against that process of integration: he is of the class which feels embittered and excluded by the immigrant’s success. Iago’s is the persuasive voice of racism, and is echoed by those he influences - Desdemona’s father, Brabantio, and her failed suitor, the fop Roderigo. In the opening scene Othello is denigrated (precisely the word) as ‘the thick lips’, ‘old black ram’, a ‘barbary horse’, a ‘devil’. All this in contrast to the ‘wealthy curlèd darlings’ of Venice, of whom Roderigo is one. We hear of the ‘rank disproportion’ of a mixed marriage: Desdemona is ‘in love with that she feared to look upon’. The mere formality of marriage cannot, they think, paper over this anomaly - it is ‘a frail vow betwixt an erring barbarian and a super-subtle Venetian’. ‘Erring’ here means wandering (Latin
errare
), thus rootless, of no fixed abode. This idea is also in Iago’s insinuating description of Othello as ‘an extravagant and wheeling stranger / Of here and everywhere’, in which ‘extravagant’ is also used in its Latinate sense of straying beyond bounds, while ‘wheeling’ conveys an idea of circling back - that return to primitivism and savagery which Iago seeks to effect in Othello. This looping retrogression is an ancient trope of tragedy. It is found in the name of Oedipus, the primal tragic hero, which is from Greek
oedipod
-, ‘club-footed’, a physical emblem of his heinous backward turn.

Shakespeare was at work on
Othello
in 1603-4, the years he was living in the Mountjoy household. There are many differences between a French tiremaker in Cripplegate and an African condottiere in Venice, but they share a social identity as immigrants or ‘strangers’. Their status, however high, is tenuous. Their presence, however settled, remains essentially transient; they are ‘strangers of here and everywhere’. Trapped in a world of stereotypes - the lecherous Frenchman, the greedy Jew, the savage African - they sometimes feel they are actors playing a part, comic or monstrous according to requirements.