Settings of the Play
On Shakespeare’s stage without formal sets and few props, how does one
know where action takes place.
Aristocratic and Christian Venice, ambiguous and devious Belmont or the
mysterious Jewish and Crypto-Jewish Ghetto.
Characters must identify places when they arrive and those settings may
disappear and shift elsewhere as the actors walk off stage. The scene announced to the audience may also
be two or more places sequentially, alternatively or simultaneously or, when a
character withdraws into a monologue, nowhere at all, the nowhere of a
timeless, geographically blank interior of the mind. It is also always a public theatre in
contemporary Elizabethan London but metaphorically representing Venice in some
vague but perhaps not too distant past.
Venice
Though the historical situation at the end of the sixteenth century was
such that the glory days of Venice were over and much of its great imperial
ambitions had faded into decadence, in this play, when viewed from an English
perspective, Venice is a glittering city of riches, to be sure, but also of
friendship, loyalty, and law; it is a golden ideal, or so it appears.[1] Venice is also a city of carnival,
masquerade, and deception.[2] The Carnival of Venice is a time of revelry,
masks, and secret intrigue: below the gaudy colours and raucous music lurks
hypocrisy, ruthless ambition, and greed.[3] Shylock knows that carnival time is dangerous
for Jews and it is best that, while he is away having dinner with Antonio and
Bassanio, his motherless daughter keep the doors and windows locked. Little does he suspect—or at least, little
does he want anyone watching and listening to him to suspect that he knows—that
Jessica is planning to escape from his house dressed as a boy to be torchbearer
to the young men in Lorenzo’s gang and that she will steal a casket of his
wealth and elope to marry a Christian and herself convert from Judaism. But
everyone wears masks in this festival, and no one can be sure of who or what
they are during the games that are played.
Also at home in the city of canals is the Commedia dell’arte,
with its stereotypical characters and events, hides the private machinations of
scheming politicians, businessmen and lovers.
One must suspect as well that Shylock has his own plots and
counter-plots. We shall come back to
them in a while. Because of its dark and
smelly canals, the city glides through the imagination of the play unmentioned
but its odors—physical and moral—remind us it is there. For there is another side to the bright, witty
and optimistic side to the Baroque world in this make-believe Venice; there is
the melancholy, darker side that opens the play, where Antonio, the merchant of
Venice, moons about without being to decide the cause—his friends assume he is
worried about his business ventures or that he is in love—but he rejects all
their suggestions. He is sad because he
is sad. As Ruderman puts it concerning this
intricate, conceited world:
Beyond the glitter and
ornamentation of this earthly existence…lies a darker and more introspective
side to the baroque mentality: a disillusionment with human achievement, a pessimistic
mood of withdrawal, of disenchantment and brooding anxiety, a concerted effort
to escape in order to deflect one’s gaze from the vicissitudes of earthly
existence.[4]
Moreover, though he seems a good and generous friend to his aristocratic
associates and promises far more than he can properly offer to help them
achieve their goals of love and riches, he is a bigot, a resentful fool who
miscalculates both his friends and his adversaries.
In this sense, Venice is not quite the golden, glittering city of the
Renaissance. Rather it is the place where Jews are at best a tolerated
minority, necessary but despised for their role in commerce and banking. For many of its Jews have been and may still
be conversos or New Christians from
Iberia, even one or two generations away from their origins, Crypto-Jews hiding
their true identities, and Marranos never sure of what they should believe or
how they should appear to others. As
with the Golden Casket, Venice is deceptive in its appearance; and all that
glitters is not gold, not real gold anyway.
As Como puts it:
Like the leads casket, the
play itself is ugly on the outside but, perhaps, beautiful on the inside. In this, the casket and play reflect what is
best and worst in the imaginary society that is Venice on the outside and
Belmont on the inside.[5]
The modification I make to this paradigm is that there is another kind
of inside, the Ghetto actually in Venice, whereas Belmont is another form of
outside
When the original audiences at the Globe saw The Merchant of Venice, for them Venice was at once many places: it
was a representation of the Republic of Saint Mark in their own day, as well as
some centuries earlier, and thus they would see a version of a Renaissance
Italian city; it was also a familiar version of the London they knew from
personal experience where men and women they could recognize spoke, acted and
confronted the forces of fate. What it
was not, though, was the Venice of Romantic ideals, the palaces, squares and
canals of John Ruskin and later of Marcel Proust or Thomas Mann. It was nonetheless something else as well: a
dream world of comic actions, near tragic disasters, and strange mythical
events.
Belmont
A short ferry ride away, across from the Lido, perhaps on the other side
of the Aegean Sea, is Belmont, the Fair Mountain or Elevated Look-Out Place,
the rural estate of Portia where there are many scenes of love, where the
Casket Contest takes place, and where all the supposedly loyal and beautiful
lovers retire in the last act, is bathed in silvery moonlight and with the
soft, soothing sounds of erotic music. It is second to or distorted refraction
of the glittering golden city, a hazy reflection in private, domestic, and
romantic matters of the city’s political, commercial, legal and masculine
ideals. But it is also a place outside
the jurisdiction of the Venetian civil and ecclesiastical authorities, the
Senate and the Inquisition, and set within the territory of the Turks and under
Islamic law.
However, Belmont is also where the Venetians go to hide from the law and
the commerce of the city, in a pretend rural paradise, bathed in the silvery
beams of moonlight—all romantic poetry and music. Here is where Lorenzo takes Jessica to transform
her into a Christian bride. Like the
Silver Casket, though, this poetic vision is flawed, although, from a comic
perspective, those foibles can be laughed away, or at least so it seems: the
problems of hypocrisy and deceit leave a nasty after-taste.
There is a real Belmonte, however.[6] It is in Portugal, near the mountainous
border with Spain, “high in the Sierra da Estrela”. and here even to our own
day there remain Crypto-Jews who hid to escape the persecutions of the
Inquisition and the discrimination of the laws of purity of blood. Many Marranos from Portugal—and all Jews were
forced to convert suddenly on one day in Portugal in 1496—escaped to Italy and
settled in Venice. As Steven Plaut
explains,
The Jews of Belmonte had lived
as secret Jews, not for a month or two but for five whole centuries. For half a millennium they had hidden their
identity from curious eyes and busybodies, keeping traditions quietly alive,
passing down from generation to generation the prayers whose Hebrew they could
no longer read or understand.
If Shakespeare had an inkling of the historical Iberian place when he
named the rural estate of Portia Belmont, the implications are terribly
ironic. This is where the young
Christians come to celebrate their triumph over Shylock, both in the law court
and in the elopement of Jessica. Anyone
hiding their Jewish identity here would truly be a Crypto-Jew or a
Marrano. And perhaps in the strange
magic of the place, as in the play where lead hides gold and gold hides lead,
the silver moonlit Belmont hides something that is neither one thing nor
another.
The Ghetto
In 1555 a papal bull called Cum Nimis Absurdum forced Jews to
live in filthy ghettoes, set apart from the rest of humanity because of the
absurdity of the Hebrew religion.[7] Another bull, Hebreorum Gens,
virtually denied Jews the right to live as all other people could, where and
with whom they wanted, to work at any job they wished and had a talent for, and
directed them to be persecuted as much as possible.[8]
This is the Ghetto where Shylock lives along with his fellow Jews in the play.[9] To the Christians, it seems a leaden place:
dark, heavy, mysterious, ominous and dangerous place, and Jessica keeps saying
she can’t wait to leave it. Though today
the word “ghetto” has become a generic term for an inner-city slum, usually
with a minority population that feel discriminated against, the word has a
historical specificity that pertains only to the area in Venice set aside for
the Jewish population.[10] While
Jews could leave the Ghetto during the day, they had to return to their little
closed world at night, and it was locked tight.
During the day Christians could walk through the Jewish quarter and
conduct business, but they were forbidden to be there at night. There were also restrictions on movement in
and out during specific Christian holidays.
The Ghetto was established in response to papal decree that mandated
increased social separation of Christians and Jews. It would be an absurd world if the two
peoples lived together—did business amicably or married for love. The Ghetto in Venice was the first of many in
Italy, and only much later in other parts of Europe. From the outside, the life
of the Jews appears to be vicious, malicious, puritanically strict and
ascetic. For their own reasons Jews have
always tried to live close to one another—the Sabbath rules, the needs of
special dietary taboos, and the functioning of an autonomous legal system—but
what the Ghetto added was exclusion and humiliation, and the sense that Jews
were an inferior, untrustworthy people. At the same time, however, for those
who lived in the Ghetto, it was not a dark and gloomy prison. Instead, inside the buildings, unseen by
Christian eyes, there was a vibrant Jewish life, and that life included music,
art, and intense learning, both in traditional rabbinical books and in the new
philosophies and sciences of the Renaissance. So perhaps in Shakespeare’s Merchant
of Venice, just maybe, as with the caskets, the Ghetto is some dreamy
vision of a place where true beauty of character and spirit resides. One needs only look inside at the synagogues
remaining in the Venetian Ghetto to see how they shine and glitter, with a
beauty that is all for the sake of Heaven, and to honour the Law displayed in
the ark and to be read out for all to hear and learn.
That Jewish reality within would be shocking to the official Christian
sensibioity, and it would upset all the expectations of Shakespeare’s audience,[11] as
it would the refined Venetian ladies and gentlemen of the play were they to
become aware of it. The logic of the
Lead Casket leads us to the shocking secrets: (a) that though Jews had a
monopoly on money-lending, there were also other bankers and loan-sharks in the
city, and not all Jews took part in the trade of usury; (b) rather, most Jews
were more involved in the arts and culture of the city, such as music and
dance, as well as jewellery-making and metal-crafts, along with the new silk
industry. From this perspective, the
Christians in Venice seem to be hypocrites, self-deluded fools, and
idol-worshippers—their idols being mercy, love and honour, or at least what
they mean by these terms.
But the Ghetto was, at rthe same time as it would dark despised otherness
which could weigh heavily on the hearts and souls of those who were forced to live
within it and feel threatened by the daily insults from great men such as Antonio
and from the officers of the Inquisition—with their informers and familiars—it was
nonetheless a place of Jewish dreams and visions, and of rabbinical and
kabbalistic knowledge, as well as a meeting place of Jews from different
communities and traditions in Europe and around the Mediterranean world, the
Levant and deeper into the Orient.[12] How much Shakespeare could have known of
these currents and counter-currents cannot be proved with great exactitude, so
that at best we can be alert and sensitive to hints, suggestions and distant
echoes of debates from the other side of the wall.
[1] This is not the city celebrated by the great writers of the
nineteenth century, like John Ruskin in his The
Stones of Venice, but smacks of the decadence and subversive forces at work
in Proust’s visit described in A la
recherché de temps perdu and inThomas Mann’s Death in Venice.
[2] But also see Bronwen
Wilson, The World in Venice: Print, the
City and Early Modern Identity (Toronto, Buffalo and Londn: University of
Toronto Press, 2005).
[3] Carnival (carni + vale Farewell to Flesh) celebrates the end of the festive season of
plenty and the season of fasting, Lent, before the arrival of Easter, and the
Passion and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
It is, in other words, a final fling of carnal licentiousness and a ecstatic
joy trying to push away the sense of impending dearth and grief.
[5] Como, pp. 315-316.
[6] See for
instance Steven Plaut, “The Secret of Belmonte”, ChronWatch (11 October
2003) online at
http://www.chronwatch.com/featured/contentDisplay.asp?aid=4663&mode=print.
[7] Ruderman, “Introduction” p. 3.
[9] For Shakespeare, the absurdity of the Jews is not just a given in Christian
icjon0graphy and religious drama, but a source of a further series of
absurdities: those of the Christian society which fails to see itself in the
same light, thus making the whole world not just a stage—that is, a theatre of
the absurd.
[10] Mario Zilio, ”Venezia minore: il Ghetto
Ebraico” online at http://nauticlub11.com/Htm-hn-art?HN-I-1e2-ghettoebraico.
[11] Abraham ben Hananiah
Yagel, A Valley of Vision: The Heavenly
Journey of Abraham ben Haniniah Yagel, trans. and ed. David B. Ruderman (Philadelphia,
PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990).
[12] Ruderman says that
Yagel shows in his Gei Hizzayon (A Valley of Vision) “that he was fully aware of
popular emblematic handbooks of his day and clearly knowledgeable in the art of
devising symbolic images” (“Introduction” p. 50). Hence, Italian Jews were as capable as
Shakespeare of imaging the symbolic worlds of the Italian Renaissance. For further discussion on these emblem books,
see Ruderman, “Introduction,” p. 51-54.
But for the Jewish understanding and construction of these formal
Baroque conceits—poetry, images and mottoes.,” see pp.55-56.
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