More on the Minor Characters
When we turn to the minor characters in The Merchant of Venice, we find them
less real and dynamic than the major figures in the play, and they may be best
understood in terms of the masks and disguises of both the Commedia
dell’arte and the Carnival of Venice.
It might even be possible to imagine them as articulated puppets,
shadow-figures on sticks manipulated as shadows on a screen in the Turkish
style. We could also find them similar
to the figures in a game of chess that move about the board to set and
formulaic patterns. Yet there are some
set pieces in the Venetian tradition made of glass so that, while recognizable
as two sides, Jews versus the Goyim, they are also see-through or at least
translucent enough to allow for a sense of dynamic inner existences.[1]
There is no direct match between the stock
characters of the commedia dell’arte and the chief actors in The Merchant of Venice, but there do
seem to be striking points of contact. Shylock, for instance, looks and is
treated often as though he were the Pantalone character, supposedly a
Venetian merchant who is rich, greedy and naïve, or at least overly confidant
of his skills. His daughter Jessica
would at first blush appear to be related to Columbine, beautiful and
clever. She and Portia are versions of
the Inamorata, the Woman in
Love. We might also see Antonio as a
type of Pulcinella who is described
by Robert Delpiano as “Philosophical, eternally melancholic” and a
dreamer. When Portia dresses as a man
and presents herself as a young jurist from Padua she seems a version of the
mask known as the Notaio, the Notary
Public. Bassanio strangely enough
reminds us of Arlecchino, “the
shape-shifter.” But whereas Harlequin is
usually the servant of Pantalone or Il Dottore—and that would make us think
of Lancelet Gobbo—in Shakespeare’s play he is like Bassanio. Gobbo and his father seem to combine elements
of the Zanni, “the poorest, stupidest
and hungriest servant imaginable….Zanni cannot do what he told very well at
all.” But then Bassanio is also a Scaramouche or Il Capitano, a dashing young aristocrat—or so he wants Portia’s to
think of him at first. In other words,
Shakespeare is inspired by the commedia
but he is not imitating the formulaic persons and actions of the Italian genre. In his game of chess, the glass characters
can reflect, refract and obtrude vision altogether.
Three minor characters are listed in the Dramtis
Personnae as friends of Bassanio and Antonio: they are Gratiano, Salerio
and Solanio. The latter two—sometimes
even divided into a third character or mask as well named Salarino[2]—are
so similar it is hard to keep them apart.
The three names indicate some range of their function, both on the
manifest and glittering surface of the play as comedy and on a deeper, more
hidden level of the drama’s leaden meanings.
Gratiano seems to come from the Italian word gracchiare, to caw,
chatter, or squawk like a bird. Salerio
means salary or wage in Italian.
Solanio hints at something to do with a nightshade or a duck or
gannet. All names seem to indicate low
characters, comic roles, and something subversive and dangerous. It has been suggested that Salario and
Solanio are paid agents of the Venetian Holy Office of the Inquisition, that
is, familiares or professional spies; and we see them popping up and
down, like stick puppets in a fairground peepshow, literally, listening to the
conversations of others, some of whom, like Shylock, Jessica, and Tubal—that
is, the three Jews—seem aware of their presence and guard their speech
accordingly. Gratiano, who has a more
significant role in the comedy—he marries Nerissa, and is a close servant and
associate of Bassanio’s—seems to be a different kind of spy, what was called a malsine,
that is, an informer, a busybody community member with a grudge to bear and an
ambition to serve. In Venice, the Holy
Office was nominally part of the Roman Inquisition but in reality a blending of
state intelligence service and ecclesiastical monitor on heretical and other
anti-Christian activities. In the late
years of the sixteenth century, Venice became a centre of intrigue, not just
for Lutherans and other Protestants seeking to influence the state, but also of
Marranos—converted Jews seeking to escape from the Spanish and Portuguese
Inquisitions, often to engage in conspiracies against their former homelands,
and yet usually to regroup their broken communities, return to Judaism, and
move further to the east, in the Ottoman Empire which offered them toleration
not to be found in most of Europe. The
Republic of Venice proved worrisome for the Pope and his policies because of
its ambiguous stand on heresy and the Jewish question, the city fathers often
being more concerned with commercial opportunities and merchant ventures than
with religious purity.[3] Antonio, who might be part of the ruling
council or Suprema of the Venetian Inquisition, would prove troublesome
for the Duke or Doge by his public anti-Semitism: excess bigotry could lose the
republic business with those cities and states that welcomed Jewish
entrepreneurs and merchants.
Lorenzo, the young man who runs off with
Jessica, seems at first to be one of the lesser versions of Bassanio in the
play: a virile, ambitious, and immoral or at least amoral representative of
Venetian nobility. Like Bassanio, he
comes with his new wife to Belmont after the trial against Antonio that turns
out so disastrously for Shylock. He like
Bassanio is easily prevailed upon to give up the ring he had vowed he would
treasure on his wife’s behalf, and so is bamboozled into a subordinate role in
marriage when the women reveal what really happened during and after the
trial.
Lancelot Gobbo and his father Old Gobbo are the
clowns in the play. Clown or clod [of earth] here means a country bumpkin who comes to
town and makes a fool of himself, both by his misunderstanding of the
sophisticated ways of court and city, and also by his curious and confusing
language, especially the malaprops—his gob’s mispronunciations and misuse of
one word for another more appropriate term. Gobbo in Italian means hunchback or
hook-nose, while gabbai refers in Hebrew to an official in the synagogue
like a verger. Young Lancelot[4]
begins the play as Shylock’s servant and a kind of witty-servant friend of
Jessica’s, but when we first see him he is on his way to become the servant of
Lorenzo, a position it seems his old master Shylock has arranged for him. Why should Shylock do this? From what we hear Lancelot saying on the
street, he has absorbed all sorts of anti-Jewish slanders and seems glad to be
away from the devil. However, if you
listen closely to his speech and put aside the comic malapropisms, the bumbling
clod is not complaining about Shylock as a master at all. In fact, when the youth’s father, Old Gobbo,
comes on the scene, he is bringing gifts for Shylock to thank and honour him as
a good master to his son.
So why should the Jew organize for Lancelot to
work for Lorenzo? First of all, we have
to assume, before the elopement of Jessica takes place, Shylock already
suspects the plot, and he wants to place a friend in the employ of the
Christian who may be planning to run off with his daughter, someone who could
report back to Shylock and look after the interests of Jessica. Second, there is a possibility that Shylock
also wishes to protect his servant from whatever nasty business is being
planned against the old Jew, not only because of the conspiracy to rob him of
his wealth and his daughter, but also because of what he may suspect will
happen because of the loan so inadvisably made to Antonio.[5] In addition, this provision for Lancelot may
also support the view that Shylock realizes he is near death and his servant
will need a new job. In all of this, we
see that Shylock is more aware of what is going on in the city than the
Christians consider in their various plans and plots against him, and that
nevertheless he acts to protect his daughter, despite her betrayal of him, and
his servant Lancelot Gobbo, despite his mouthing of anti-Semitic slurs, just as
Shylock offered to loan money to Antonio without charging interest because that
was the right thing to do, according to Talmudic principles—and maybe just to
show up the ignorance and bigotry of his worst public enemy.
My final words in this part of the essay come
from Jo Ann Cavallo who is actually writing about a near contemporary of
Shakespeare in Italy, the romance-epic poet Torquato Tasso, whose Gerusalemme
Liberta was popular in England at the end of the sixteenth century.[6] In
the face of increased state and ecclesiastical censorship brought about by the
Catholic Counter-Reformation and the regulations of the Council of Trent, to
protect themselves there was “a wholesale spread of dissimulation throughout
all aspects of life”, public and private.
More than that, as Tasso himself wrote that he lives in an age “in which
simulation is one of the greatest virtues.”
Moreover, Cavallo points out that “[i]n Tasso’s Liberata,
dissimulation permeates the entire plot and becomes a philosophy of life.”[7]
In Shakespeare, something very similar
happens, but it is a matter of comedy, the meaning of which we will come to in
the next few sections where, thanks to the impetus of these new expansions I have been working on, I will turn in some newer directions--and do what I had not intended to do at all when the essay began, to wit, turn to some recent critical writings on the play and its historical backgrounds. However a short brek may be necessary before I come back with that.
[1] Rhonda Spivak, “Checkmate: The ‘Christians’ vs. the ‘Jews’ Chess
Set,” Winnipeg Jewish Review (28 July
2013) online at hhtp://www.winnipegjewishrev iew.com/article_detail.cfm?id=3699&sec=1&title=
CHECKMATE:_The… Spivak recounts her discovery of this chess set in the Jewish
Museum in Belgium and describes the pieces, as well as printing photographs of
the Christian and Jewish figures.
[2] John Russell Brown, ed.,
The Merchant of Venice: The Arden Edition of the Works of William
Shakespeare (London: Methuen & Co., n.d.) p. 2.
[3] Venice also was problematic insofar as it inched its way towards an
English-style Reformation with a national version of the Catholic Church being mooted, and indeed towards the end of
Elizabeth I’s reign there was talk—and negotiations—of establishing a kind of
Protestant alliance of England, Holland and Venice. Though where there is smoke there is not
necessarily a fire, in this instance these rumors were sufficient to raise
suspicions against Venice and its almost autonomous Church. There is enough smoke to suggest that
Shakespeare ‘s use of Venice as a metaphor for London was more than for the
nonce.
[4] On the one hand, Lancelot is a name from Arthurian romance and
thoroughly inappropriate for this rural clown, yet in another—insofar as lance is a kind of a spear, and
Shakespeare’s jealous rivals spoke of him as an upstart, the only shake-spear
in town, then perhaps young Master Gobbo is a stand-in for Shakespeare himself,
the rural boy from Stratford come to London to find his fortune in the theatre.
[5] That is, of course, if the loan was orchestrated by Bassanio, as a
Crypto-Jew, with Shylock, as a practicing Jew but somewhat outside the
rabbinical community, as evidenced by his social interactions with the
Christians—and New Christians—as a way of taking advantage of Antonio, a converso who has attempted to ingratiate
himself in Venetian society by a kind of rabid self-hating anti-Semitism, along
with a plot to bring the merchant to his senses.
[6] Jo Ann Cavallo, The Romance Epics of
Boiardo, Ariosto, and Tasso: From Public Duty to Private Pleasure (Toronto,
Buffalo and London: University of Toronto Press, 2004) p. 226.
[7] Cavallo, Boiardo, Ariosto and Tasso,
p. 227.
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