More Dramatis Personae
The essay continues slowly, with my own corrections, emendations and
additions to the original brief lecture given at an Open Day for prospective
students and their parents at the university several years ago. While what emerges is somewhat disjointed and
probably raises more questions than it answers, the writing is interesting for
me, if for no one else.
Lorenzo
In a superficial examination of the text and most productions of The Merchant of Venice, Lorenzo and his
gang of young Christian Venetians prevail upon Jessica to elope with her young
lover. For her to marry a Christian like
Lorenzo would mean, first, that she rejects Judaism and her father—and that she
has internalized fully all the anti-Jewish venom that flows through the streets
of Venice. Second, what the action in
the comedy shows is that she doesn’t just abscond in the middle of the night
during a masquerade—and these carnivals were times when it was most likely for
violence against Jews to be perpetrated (pogroms)—but she also steals a
great deal of money and jewelery from her father’s house, thus gaining the
wherewithal to bribe her way into Christian society by her sexual favors and
illegal dowry. But third, and most
painful of all, for this is what for a moment breaks apart the façade of pure
romantic comedy in which the trickster-Jew is outwitted by the young, innocent
and loving revellrs—among the jewels Jessica takes from her father’s house is
the ring which her mother, Leah, gave to Shylock when they were married, and
which has been his one real momento mori of
his departed but still beloved wife.
However, when he hears that Jessica has run off with Lorenzo through
second-hand reports and rumours. Shylock seems to equate her loss with the loss
of his ducats. He wails, whines and
confuses what he most values—and this echoes the crazy speeches in Kit Marlowe’s
Jew of Malta, which in turn seem to
parody Shakespeare’s own earlier tragi-comedy of Romeo and Juliet. The reports broadcast in these rumours and
gossipy sources[1] is hear-say
from malicious, biased witnesses. This
seeming breakdown in true communications, like the severing of the ties of love
between father and daughter, can be understood eventually in another way, once,
that is, the character of Lorenzo fits more clearly into the scheme of history
that is always throbbing away in the under-text of the comedy. If the young
man, rather than just one more of the feckless and selfish youth of Venice,
with their gormless attempt to inveigle a Jewish girl out of her father’s
house, take over her enormous wealth, and integrate her into the empty
platitudes that dwell in the gardens of Belmonte, is a recently arrived Marrano
from Iberia and in transit to the more tolerant lands under the laws of Islam
across the sea, then the love between him and Jessica, the elaborate carnival
plot to sneak her out of the Ghetto at night, and the role of the cunning
father to sacrifice himself before the Venetian judicial system to provide
cover and time for the scheme to work, is, to the very least, an ingenious
baroque conceit.
But such an intricate piece of fine craftsmanship might be too much for
the rollicking laughter of the play’s original popular audience to sustain, let
alone overly-serious modern criticism. It
does seem as though Shylock is driven to despair when he learns that Jessica
sold that ring of her mother’s to buy a monkey.
It is this act, the grindings of the plot seem to suggest, is more than
any other that determines Shylock to pursue his bond to the extreme of the
letter of the law. In a way, as we shall
show in a later section, the demand for the pound of flesh does not come out of
the blue. But is an old anti-Semitic trope of confounding circumcision with
castration, the loss of an entire male member—the pound of flesh.—a deep-seated
fear in goyish men’s hearts.
But there are, as always when we examine
Shakespeare’s speeches closely, mitigating factors in Shylock’s words and deeds
that we shall touch on later. It is
enough to add that his name is ambiguous.
In Italian scialaque from scialaquare, which means to
waste or squander, suggests a spendthrift, which is a quite ironic designation
for a supposed miser. In Hebrew, as we remarked
in the last section of this essay, his name could be heard as shaliach,
a delegate, emissary or agent, usually someone who represents a Jewish school
or charitable organization or community’ that is, an expert in diplomacy, in
manipulating the surfaces and insinuating extra dimensions of meaning into
casual conversations on behalf of the Jewish communities he serves—for he
represents as well the secret settlers, refugees, and transitory individuals on
their way through Christian Europe from Iberia and iots territories (known as
the lands of darkness) and between various sectarian and legal jurisdictions. Like the man himself, the name he bears—not
merely a given appellation or an allusion to possible characteristics of
personality—but Shylock gives a title to a theatrical mask, a social type or a
moral character in literature from the time of the play into our own day, and
thus runs in several contradictory directions, round and round in the
kaleidoscope of history. It would
therefore be distorting the Elizabethan comedy to accept one indicator of a
Shylock at the expense of all the others.
Lorenzo, with the or of light in Hebrrew and the gold of Latinate
tongues hidden within himself, would be, if he were what is hinted at in the
under-text of the play, the Crypto-Jew, the perfect—or at least adequate—husband
for Jessica; and the means by which Shylock’s daughter can re=establish herself
”on the other side,” with all the ambiguities that expression bears.
Portia
What about the women in the play?
Portia, her name resonant with Roman dignity, is the most important role
for an actress in the comedy. As we have
pointed out, her role in the Casket
Contest is full of cunning, deceit and hypocrisy, and she prompts most of the
suitors towards making the wrong choices, making extremely derogatory comments
about their ethnic and religious identities as she goes along. This is more than a farcical play of racial
stereotypes and national bigotry. She
does not want to marry a man merely on the grounds that he solved the riddle
set in her father’s will: she wants to subvert the terms of that testament and
thus her father’s wishes. She seeks, in
other words, to escape from the patriarchal constraints of Venice and the rest
of Christendom in which females, as a consequence of their biology and birth,
must always submit to the dominant male in their lives and thus to have her
portion of happiness in this world. If
she cannot outwardly flout Venetian law, she must undermine its intentions and
rob it of its force, twist it to her own ends and force it to serve her
desires, her will. As in the courtroom scene
where she pretends to be a youthful young lawyer from outside of the Republic,
she pits the letter of the law against the spirit of justice, and yet as with
the Caskets everything she does smells a bit fishy.
In romantic comedies, from classical antiquity through to the
Renaissance, one of the great sources of laughter comes from the way young men
and women break the chains of authority imposed on them by their elders,
particularly their parents, and with young ladies especially by their rebellion
against paternal wishes to control access to their bodies and their freedom of
movement in domestic and public space.
Women, who are traditionally seen as inferior in intellect and strength,
become heroines of the moment when they outwit their doddering fathers and
perform spectacular deeds of valor dressed as young men. The normative structures of the theatre or
the carnival parameters of holiday in which these females seem to turn the
world of authority upside down return in fact or implication because the passions
of the heart place these women back into the control of their lovers¸ and thus
the iron gates of matrimony, child-bearing and domestic responsibility shut
them back into their rightful prisons—as legal infants (those without a voice
of their own) and defective versions of the human species (monkeys, shrews and
tarts).
This is both evident from the first appearances of Portia in the play
and ominously subverted by the words and gestures that mark her out for what
she is—words, that is, that mean more and other than she intends, or she can
hear herself speaking, or the superficial auditors can hear in the performance
of the play. Among all the various
exotic suitors who visit her with the intention of gaining her hand and her
inherited fortune, only with Bassanio—perhaps because she is besotted with him
even before she has done more than glimpse him—does she use both verbal and
musical cues to point him towards choosing the leaden casket and thus winning
the wager. She also becomes the active
figure in securing Antonio’s release from his bond with Shylock and in turning
the national law against the Jew.
Dressed as a young lawyer, thus disguising her gender and her education,
she plays two contradictory games in the courtroom scene. In one, she makes the beautiful speech on the
quality of mercy as a constraint on the misuse of justice as an agency of cruel
and inhumane punishment; in the other she insists on the letter of the law in
order to strip Shylock of his assets and to force him to become a Christian. She emerges to even superficial scrutiny as a
knotted (or spotted to fit with the
underlining allusion to the way Jacob cheats his father Laban while adhering to
the letter of the contract he entered into of service and reward) figure of
contradictions, and to closer reading as a conceit of ambiguous intentions and
implications.
In regard to mercy, a major theme in the play, without saying so, she
insists on a Christian understanding of the term, as something contrary to and
mitigating of the law, the spirit versus the letter; but while she appeals for Christian
mercy in regard to Antonio, she shows none when it comes to the supposedly
alazonic and pharisaic Shylock. She
seems to have entrapped him in his own devious web of intrigue. When
Portia in her guise as a legalist points out that Shylock cannot have his pound
of flesh because it would force him to shed Christian blood, she exposes the
racial basis of the law.[2] She indicates too that the very intention of
seeking to have his bond literally makes Shylock subject to the provisions of
that strict code. Putting aside here the
question of whether such a particular law existed in Venice or whether she was
simply bluffing to win her point, the question is never raised by the Duke or
other officials of the court as to what purpose Shylock might have in taking
his case to such an extreme: it simply never enters their minds that he was
trying to force an apology out of them for their contemptuous treatment of him
and maybe even an expression of sympathy for the way his daughter behaved and
was taken from him. They barely acknowledge
that if all his worldly goods are forfeit to the state he is deprived of any
means of livelihood—a key consideration in a Jewish court of law—since he is an
old man and probably very ill, as he hints several times.
From a Jewish perspective, however, mercy and justice are not opposite
forces, mutually exclusive terms, but aspects of each other in the dispensation
of divine Providence, so that mercy is the condition in which the law is
applied and justice the articulation in society of mercy. Moreover, rabbinical wit has to come into
play, as a law is not a law merely because someone says so, and even less o if
a court decides unanimously, without argument: it must be interpreted in the
course of argument, weighed up in the circumstances of the occasion, and
applied with deft distribution of portions due to all parties in a
contract. If Portia’s intentions are bad
ones—as she claims Shylock’s were in her legalistic argument—then she forfeits
her right to plead the cause of her client.
Nerissa
In addition to this deceitful play with the incompatible discourses of
mercy and strict justice, Portia has other tricks up her misplaced masculine sleeve. Like Nerissa, her lady-in-waiting and fellow
conspirator in the courtroom intrigue, after the conclusion of the trial with
the judgment seemingly granted against the plaintive, Portia also demands from
Bassanio a gift in payment for her services, namely, the ring on his finger
which she, as his wife, had made him promise never to give away. Nerissa plays the same game with
Gratiano. The women force their husbands
to do what they had sworn their love oaths upon—never giving away the
rings. Later, back in the locus amoenus or jardin agréable of Belmont, Portia and Nerissa force their husbands
to own up to their weakness and bad faith, and say they will hold the men
accountable from then on for these lapses in their loyalty. While we may try to view these little teasing
games as trivial and take the words of the wives as parts of the war of the
sexes, it is not easy to bring into the equation the ring which Leah had given
to her groom Shylock and which Jessica had stolen and traded for a monkey. Again, while Portia, like Bassanio and the
other Christians in the play, use deceit and dishonesty to gain their
ends—power and influence, riches and sexual favours—it is only Shylock who has
spoken honestly and shown any mercy.
If we look again at Portia’s name for some guidance to see if we are
heading in the right direction in our interpretation of the play, we find that
in one acceptation her name is based on the Italian word porzione,
portion or share, a just amount in the division of something, or, just as
likely, the disproportionate amount in a sharing out of things. The allusion could also go out to the Talmud
precept found in the Pirqe Avot, the
Moral Chapters of the Fathers, that “all Israel has a portion in the world to
come,” a share in the accumulated superabundance of good works stored away in
the divine memory by the forefathers and foremothers of ancient times.
In another acceptation, her name
is based on the Italian porca, pig’s flesh, pork, an unclean meat to
Jews and therefore, in the nasty language of Italians when they want to mock a
Jew, Marrano, a pig-eater or a swine. In
the text of Shakespeare’s comedy, however, there is an allusion to an
historical Portia, the daughter of Cato of Utica. This Portia became the wife of Marcus Brutus,
one of the conspirators who assassinated Julius Caesar on the Ides of
March. In fact, it was Portia who goaded
Brutus into joining the plot; she showed how serious and committed she was to
the cause by stabbing herself in the thigh, the sight of the blood winning over
her husband. When Brutus died, Portia
committed suicide. Her function as an
historical allusion is thus ambiguous again: in one way pointing towards
loyalty and strength of commitment; in the other, towards treachery and
betrayal. Similarly, Portia’s maid
servant Nerissa has a name drawn from the Italian nerezza, blackness, at
once a negative marker, as in black and foul deeds, and a positive marker, as
in “I am black but beautiful”: from the Shir
ha-Shirim, or Song of Songs.[3]
In the darkness—“on such a night as this”—“why is this night different
from all others?”—Nerissa, the candle, nir,
maybe the eternal light (nir tamid)
or the flickering flame of reason as a madness blows through the world (the ruach shtout)—in the confused and
contradictpory messages of Christian or Romantic love collapsing into disorder
and foolishness: for, as we shall see, all the great lovers of literature and
myth the young people swear by in the opening scened of Act V, are betrayers
and victims of such passions.
Jessica
Of Jessica we have said a few things already that make her seem to be a
very unsavoury character, and yet a beautiful and exotic Jewess who enchants
Lorenzo and the other young bucks of Venice.
It is a commonplace of European literature that the daughters of nasty
Jews are luscious and ripe lovers ripe for the plucking and eager to be
converted[4]—who
are, in fact, already Christian before the fact of their conversion simply on
the basis of their beauty. If her name
is the masculine version of Yishai or Jesse, the father of King David
and so already the ancestor of Jesus who sprang from the Tree of Jesse, it also
recalls two other words: one, jess, the jet or gush that metaphorically
describes the way a hawk or falcon flies off the wrist of a hunter to capture
its prey, and from that to the leather strap that ties the bird to the hunter’s
wrist, thus a term for a sudden motion upwards and for the restraint on that movement;
and the word, jest, the joke or trick that traps, humiliates, and
ridicules the object of the game. But
the reference to this strap reminds a Jewish imagination of the other leather
thongs bound about the forehead and the left arm close to the heart, the
phylacteries, or tefillin, the
physical mnemonic of prayer itself. She
may be seen in one way as flying the
coop of heavy-handed Jewish authority, as Portia does in her insider trading
schemes in the Casket Scene, but as we have had to point out many times—and
will continue to do so in later sections of this essay—things aren’t what they
appear to be: words have to be interpreted, letters manipulated, riddles solved
and intentions fathomed.
NOTES
[1] It is important to keep in mind the distinction between rumor,
gossip and incomplete or inadequate news reports. Rumors are non-authenticated
pieces of information that pass from one unofficial source to another, each
time shifting and changing in contents, tone and import, as in the party game
of “Chinese Whispers”. Gossip, while related
and perhaps at times overlapping with rumor, belongs to a different category of
unauthorized information passing through vague channels; from the term for
“godsib” (godparent or god-sibling, that is, a person who does not belong to
the family but who is given the function by the church of ensuring the proper
Christian education of a new-born child and also monitoring the behaviour of
the parents, gossip comes to mean any intrusive observations on the actions,
words and conditions of people who have not authorized the publication of such
data; and thus, while much that passes for news—objective and verifiable
journalistic reports—often turns out to be no more than mere rumor or gossip,
given the nature of journalism—a daily or at best weekly account of what has
happened and what it means to the on-going flow of local or national or
international history—news has to be subject to correction, completion and
re-interpretation before it can pass over into the category of historical
facts. Because of this, as many literary
historians have pointed out, novels and the new kind of drama based on a
novelistic sense of reality, is constituted by rumor and gossip rather than
historical facts: in other words, by pieces of information that fugitive,
ephemeral and vague or deliberately misleading.
In comedy such misinformation leads to witty misunderstandings,
cross-purposes, and mistaken identities that eventually are cleared up; while
in tragedy these faults and failures lead towards serious consequences, such as
loss of dignity, exile and death, all of which are beyond repair or
reconciliation. In satire, they create
situations that expose hypocrisy, ignorance, and other forms of
unreliability. In the novel and “drama”
without classical generic form, the rumor and gossip remains as the very muddle
of ordinary life.
[2] It is unlikely that at
first Shylock means literally to have a pound of flesh cut from Antonio’s
chest. The “merry prank” turns sour
later, however, after Jessica has run away with much of Shylock’s wealth. It has been suggested that in a missing
Hebrew original of the play, the forfeit of flesh was not even meant as human
but rather from some animal, and that it was the Portia-character (under
another name, of course) who made the slide from the two Hebrew words for
“bond” and “chest” that sound the same.
The idea first appears in Schelomo Jehuda Schöenfeld, (1892-1951) “A
Hebrew Source for ‘The Merchant of Venice’”, summarized by Yehuda T. Radday in Shakespeare
Survey 32 (1979) and made available online by Florence Amit at http://tmov-caskets.org/schoenfeld. The
original appeared as Eine Jüdische Quelle in “Kaufman von Venedig” (Jerusalem:
Shikmann, 1976).For Amit’s own discussion, see her two-part essay, “Apples of
Gold Encased in Silver: Hebrew in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice”,
Part I, Mentalities/Mentalités 17:1 (2002) 45-51; and Part 2, “Shylock’s
Benign Hebrew Musings”, Mentalities/Mentalitités 17:2 (2002) 27-32.
[4] Think of Sir Walter
Scott’s 1820 romance Ivanhoe where
the beautiful Jewess Rebecca loves the heroic English knight sufficiently to
give over everything about herself to be with him.
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