Merchant of Venice: Part 1

William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice,

Or The Jew of Venice

Part 1

Every few years someone decided to mount a production of Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, and when they do—be it in London, New York or elsewhere—the same discussion comes up, with the same arguments about whether or not the playwright was an anti-Semite, the play worthy of being seen by a modern general audience, and the status of old works of art in a politically-correct world. Many times I have tried to explain the historical background, the cultural forces at work in Shakespeare’s day, the likelihood that the playwright was close to a group of resident Italian Jewish musicians living in London,  and the difference between misreadings of the play, deliberate racist productions, and more accurate interpretations of the text; but, even though I am not the only person ever to have brought up these points, it is as though journalists and scare-mongers never learn.  Anyway, for what it’s worth, here is another summing up of my point of view.

Introduction

The full title of this play as published between 1596 and 1598 is The Comical History of the Merchant of Venice[1], and the merchant referred to in the title is Antonio, while most people, not just today, but in the years contemporary to the comedy’s first production felt justified in thinking of it as The Jew of Venice, on the model of Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta (1594).   Thinking of the play that way, however, puts into very stark relief the difference between Kit Marlowe’s grotesquely caricatured Jew in a play that lacks almost all subtlety and Shakespeare’s Shylock in a comedy of extremely complex and deep nuances of meaning.  In a certain way, one can think of The Merchant of Venice as a direct response to the bigotry in The Jew of Malta.[2]

This does not mean that Shakespeare’s play should not be viewed as a comedy, but it does mean that we have to approach it as something more than a bigoted display of anti-Semitism, with Shylock as an almost perfect figure of Jewish perfidy and greed.  Shylock is too often played this way, or, in a twist of politically-correct guilt feelings, as a perfect victim of Christian prejudices.  Either way, I suggest, misses the point of the play.

Historical Background

Because The Merchant of Venice is also an occasion, whenever it is produced, in modern times for a debate on whether or not Shakespeare was an anti-Semite (a term not invented until the nineteenth century) or rather Jew-hater (a term that emphasizes the religious bigotry rather than the racial pseudo-sciences of modern times) any discussion of the comedy must take into account both the critical history grown up alongside it and contemporary audience responses.  After all, it would be absurd to think that Shakespeare and his audiences might be able to bring to mind American Yiddish-speaking Jews from Eastern Europe, let alone characters in Victorian fiction or off the vaudeville stage or projected on the cinematic or television screens, with all the comic shtick we are familiar with.  Nor could they be imbued with a sense of loss or guilt associated with the mid-twentieth-century Holocaust.  What would be recognizable are Jews from Sephardic tradition, refugees from the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions, and Italian Jews as musicians, dancing masters and silk merchants.  Yet at the core of these images would be the prejudicial views of the nation depicted in the New Testament and later mocked and harassed by the iconography of the medieval Catholic Church; and this distorted version would be modified by a somewhat corrected vision produced in Protestant sermons sicne the start of the Reformation. 

Directors and actors also shape the way in which the character of Shylock is  perceived, either sympathetically or scorned with all his tribe; yet that means we would have to understand what kind of Jew might be imagined at the end of the sixteenth century in London, and from that what is the actual, rather than the fanciful or mythical tale purveyed in most standard accounts—namely, the usual view that all Jews, all Jewish culture, and all awareness of Jews, Judaism and Jewishness disappeared with  the expulsion of the Hebrew nation from England in 1390, not to reappear until Cromwell’s lifting of the ban at the end of his Commonwealth in 1660, and the real  facts of the case, that not all Jews went into formal exile, that some stayed, others returned, and a few came to live openly or under disguise, that English travellers to the Continent saw, traded with, and became interested in Jews and Judaism for a variety of reasons, and that there was no formal rescinding of the expulsion orders by the Lord Protector or his Parliament, but rather an informal recognition that Jews were already living and trading in the realm and that their presence could be tolerated. In brief, a complex situation, probably truer in Shakespeare’s mind than almost any other writer in English until well into the twentieth century.[3] 

What is to be done?

We can approach The Merchant of Venice in a number of ways, and I hope these several ways of approach will help you prepare to write cogently and insightfully about the comedy on your examinations.  From one perspective, the play is an English comedy about English characters, themes, and events, and the setting in Venice is just part of an exotic distancing of the characters and events to help point out their foibles and failures, as well as their ideals and ambitions.  From another perspective, the setting in Venice is no accident or mere ornament for exotic interest: it is of the essence.  Venice was a special kind of a place, and what happens there cuts away the local baggage of a comedy set in London and about people whose behavior is really quite farcical, that is, of no real significance.  Still another way to look at the play, though, is to take the tensions between the Christians and Jews very seriously, and particular to look at the bad feelings between Shylock and the Venetian gentry from a Jewish point of view.

---

NOTES

[1] Unless otherwise noted, all references are to William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, edited by W. Moelwyn Merchant (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981; orig. ed. 1967).

[2] The question of Shakespesre’s Merchant of Venice is discussed inter alia in Norman Simms, A New Midrashic Reading of Geoffrey Chaucer: His Life and Works.  Lewiston, NY, Queenston, Ont. and Lampeter, UK: Edwin Mellen Press, 2004.   

[3] Background matters are discussed in Norman Simms, Crypto-Judaism, Madness, and the Female Quixote: Charlotte Lennox as Marrana in Mid-Eighteenth-Century England.  Lewiston, NY, Queenston, Ontario, and Lampeter, UK: Edwin Mellen Press, 2004.   xi + 372 pp.