Visions of Venice in Shakespeare

Visions of Venice in Shakespeare

Edited by Laura Tosi and Shaul Bassi

VISIONS OF VENICE IN SHAKESPEARE

ANGLO-ITALIAN RENAISSANCE STUDIES SERIES Series Editors General Editor: Michele Marrapodi, University of Palermo, Italy Advisory Editors: Keir Elam, University of Bologna, Italy Robert Henke, Washington University, USA This series aims to place early modern English drama within the context of the (XURSHDQ5HQDLVVDQFHDQGPRUHVSHFL¿FDOO\ZLWKLQWKHFRQWH[WRI,WDOLDQFXOWXUDO GUDPDWLFDQGOLWHUDU\WUDGLWLRQVZLWKUHIHUHQFHWRWKHLPSDFWDQGLQÀXHQFHRIERWK FODVVLFDO DQG FRQWHPSRUDU\ FXOWXUH$PRQJ WKH YDULRXV IRUPV RI LQÀXHQFH WKH series considers early modern Italian novellas, theatre, and discourses as direct or indirect sources, analogues and paralogues for the construction of Shakespeare’s drama, particularly in the comedies, romances, and other Italianate plays. Critical analysis focusing on other cultural transactions, such as travel and courtesy books, the arts, fencing, dancing, and fashion, will also be encompassed within the scope of the series. Special attention is paid to the manner in which early modern English dramatists adapted Italian materials to suit their theatrical agendas, creating new forms, and stretching the Renaissance practice of contaminatio to achieve, even if unconsciously, a process of rewriting, remaking, and refashioning of ‘alien’ cultures. The series welcomes both single-author studies and collections of essays and invites proposals that take into account the transition of cultures between the two countries as a bilateral process, paying attention also to the penetration of early modern English culture into the Italian world. OTHER TITLES IN THE SERIES A Bibliographical Catalogue of Italian Books Printed in England, 1558–1603 Compiled by Soko Tomita Shakespeare, Politics, and Italy: Intertextuality on the Jacobean Stage Michael J. Redmond Courtesans, Shakespeare, and Early Modern Drama Duncan James Salkeld Italian Culture in the Drama of Shakespeare & His Contemporaries Edited by Michele Marrapodi Machiavelli in the British Isles Alessandra Petrina

Visions of Venice in Shakespeare

Edited by Laura Tosi Ca’ Foscari University of Venice Shaul Bassi Ca’ Foscari University of Venice

© Laura Tosi and Shaul Bassi 2011 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Laura Tosi and Shaul Bassi have asserted their rights under the Copyright, Designs and 3DWHQWV$FWWREHLGHQWL¿HGDVWKHHGLWRUVRIWKLVZRUN Published by Ashgate Publishing Limited Wey Court East Union Road Farnham Surrey, GU9 7PT England

Ashgate Publishing Company Suite 420 101 Cherry Street Burlington VT 05401-4405 USA

www.ashgate.com British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Visions of Venice in Shakespeare. – (Anglo-Italian Renaissance studies) 1. Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616 – Knowledge – Venice. 2. Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616 – Settings. 3. Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616. Merchant of Venice. 4. Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616. Othello. 5. Venice (Italy) – In literature. I. Series 822.3’3–dc22 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Visions of Venice in Shakespeare / edited by Laura Tosi and Shaul Bassi. p. cm. — (Anglo-Italian Renaissance studies) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Venice (Italy)—In literature. 2. Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616—Knowledge— Venice (Italy) 3. Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616. Merchant of Venice. 4. Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616. Othello. I. Tosi, Laura, 1966– II. Bassi, Shaul. PR3069.I8V57 2011 822.3’3—dc22 2010025850 ISBN 9781409405474 (hbk) ISBN 9781409405481 (ebk) II

Contents List of Figures List of Contributors Acknowledgements

vii ix xiii

Foreword Stanley Wells

xv

Introduction: Visions of Venice in Shakespeare Laura Tosi and Shaul Bassi

1

Part 1 Sources 1

Supersubtle Venetians: Richard Knolles and the Geopolitics of Shakespeare’s Othello Virginia Mason Vaughan

19

2

Venice, Shakespeare and the Italian Novella Daria Perocco

33

3

Genealogy of a Character: A Reading of Giraldi’s Moor Karina Feliciano Attar

47

Part 2 Political Culture and Religious Policy in Venice and England 4

Shakespeare and Republican Venice $QGUHZ+DG¿HOd

5

‘Self-sovereignty’ and Religion in Love’s Labour’s Lost: From London to Venice via Navarre Gilberto Sacerdoti

6

Job in Venice: Shakespeare and the Travails of Universalism Julia Reinhard Lupton

67

83 105

Part 3 Crossing Boundaries and the Play of Identity 7

‘Strangers … with vs in Venice’ Graham Holderness

8

Shakespeare, Jonson and Venice: Crossing Boundaries in the City Laura Tosi

125

143

vi

Visions of Venice in Shakespeare

9

The Return from the Dead in The Merchant of Venice Kent Cartwright

167

10

Othello and Venice: Discrimination and Projection Alessandro Serpieri

185

Part 4 Venetian Plays and their Afterlife 11

12

13

Index

Merchant of Where? The Venetian Plays in English Visual Culture Stuart Sillars Rewriting Venice and Radicalizing Shylock: Nineteenth-Century French and Romanian Adaptations of The Merchant of Venice Madalina Nicolaescu Barefoot to Palestine: The Failed Meetings of Shylock and Othello Shaul Bassi

197

215

231 251

List of Figures 6.1

Vittore Carpaccio, Meditation on the Passion. Job sits on the right; St. Jerome on the left. Oil and tempera on wood, c. 1510. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, John Stewart Kennedy Fund 11.118. © The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

106

11.1

Francois Boitard, engraved by Elisha Kirkall: Frontispiece to The Merchant of Venice, from The Works of Mr William Shakespear; in six volumes. Adorn’d with Cuts. Revis’d and Corrected, with an Account of the Life and Writings of the Author. By N. Rowe, Esq. (London: Jacob Tonson, 1709). By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library. 200

11.2

Charles Knight: Frontispiece to The Merchant of Venice from The Pictorial Edition of the Works of Shakspere. Edited by Charles Knight (London: Charles Knight and Co., 56 monthly parts, 1838–1843). Author’s collection.

202

Henry Courtney Selous: title-page to Othello from Cassell’s Illustrated Shakespeare: The Plays of Shakespeare. Edited and Annotated by Charles and Mary Cowden Clarke (London: Cassell, Peter, and Galpin, 1864). Author’s collection.

204

William Hodges, engraved by John Browne: The Merchant of Venice, Act V, Scene 1, published 1 December 1795. Author’s collection.

207

Unsigned engraving of a scene from Charles Kean’s production of The Merchant of Venice (1858), published in the Illustrated London News, 7 August 1858. Author’s collection.

210

11.3

11.4

11.5

This page has been left blank intentionally

List of Contributors Karina Feliciano Attar (Ph.D., Italian, Columbia University, 2005) is Assistant Professor of Italian at Queens College of the City University of New York. She has published essays on Masuccio Salernitano and Pietro Fortini, and is currently completing a book on Christian–Jewish and Christian–Muslim liaisons in the fourteenth- to sixteenth-century Italian novella. Shaul Bassi is Associate Professor of English Literature at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. His research, teaching and publications are divided between Shakespeare, postcolonial studies and Jewish studies. His publications include Le metamorfosi di Otello. Storia di un’etnicità immaginaria (2000) and Poeti indiani del Novecento di lingua inglese (1998). He is the editor of a new Italian edition of Othello (translated by Alessandro Serpieri, 2009) and co-author (with Alberto Toso Fei) of Shakespeare in Venice. Exploring the City with Shylock and Othello (2007). Kent Cartwright is Professor of English and chair of the Department of English at the University of Maryland. He is the author of Shakespearean Tragedy and Its Double: The Rhythms of Audience Response (Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991) and Theatre and Humanism: English Drama in the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge University Press, 1991). He has recently edited A Companion to Tudor Literature (Blackwell, 2010), and he is currently editing The Comedy of Errors for the Arden Shakespeare, 3rd series. $QGUHZ+DG¿HOG is Professor of English at the University of Sussex. He is the author and editor of over 20 books, including Literature, Politics, and National Identity: Reformation to Renaissance (1994), Literature, Travel, and Colonial Writing in the English Renaissance, 1545–1625 (1998), Amazons, Savages and Machiavels: An Anthology of Travel and Colonial Writing, 1550–1650 (2001), and Shakespeare and Republicanism (2005). He is the editor of Renaissance Studies and is currently writing a new biography of Spenser. Graham Holderness is Professor of English at the University of Hertfordshire, and author or editor of numerous studies in early modern and modern literature, drama and theology. Recent books include Shakespeare and Venice (Ashgate, 2010) and Shrews: Gender and Power in Shrew-Taming Narratives 1500–1700 ZLWK'DYLG:RRWWRQ +HLVDOVRDZULWHURI¿FWLRQDQGSRHWU\&XUUHQWSURMHFWV include Shakespeare and the Middle East, and the representation of Christ in OLWHUDWXUHDQG¿OP+HLVFXUUHQWO\ZRUNLQJRQDQHZELRJUDSK\RI6KDNHVSHDUH

x

Visions of Venice in Shakespeare

Julia Reinhard Lupton is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine. She is author of Citizen-Saints: Shakespeare and Political Theology and Afterlives of the Saints: Hagiography, Typology and Renaissance Literature and co-author with Kenneth Reinhard of After Oedipus: Shakespeare in Psychoanalysis. Her latest book, Thinking with Shakespeare: Essays on Politics and Life, is forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press. She has started work on a new project on Shakespeare and designs for living. Madalina Nicolaescu is Professor of English Literature at the University of Bucharest. She is author of Eccentric Mappings of the Renaissance (1997) and Meanings of Violence in Shakespeare’s Plays (2002). Further recent publications include ‘Religion and War in Henry V’ in Shakespeare and War, edited by Paul Fransen and Ros King (2008); ‘Mixing and Mingling: Bodin and Shakespeare’s Coriolanus’ in Shakespeare in Europe: History and Memory, edited by Marta Gibinska (Kraków, 2007); and ‘Undoing Nationalist Leanings in Teaching Shakespeare’ in Shifting the Scene: Shakespeare in European Culture (2003). Daria Perocco is Professor of Italian Literature at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. Her work focuses mainly on literary and cultural history of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, especially drama (Machiavelli), treatises (Bembo, Castelvetro, Amadi), travel literature (Viaggiare e raccontare, 1997), women’s writing and narrative (Bandello, Straparola). She recently published a book with WKHFULWLFDOHGLWLRQRIWKH¿UVWVRXUFHVRIRomeo and Juliet (La prima Giulietta, 2008) and edited previously unknown texts dedicated to Venetian rowing races (Poesie per le regate, 2006). Gilberto Sacerdoti is Professor of English Literature at Università Roma Tre. He is the author of two books on Shakespeare: Nuovo cielo, nuova terra. La rivelazione Copernicana di Antonio e Cleopatra di Shakespeare (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1990, reprint Roma: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2008), and 6DFUL¿FLRHVRYUDQLWj Teologia e politica nell’Europa di Shakespeare e Bruno (Torino, Einaudi, 2002). He has also written a number of essays on Ralegh, Pico della Mirandola, Machiavelli, Bacon, and Toland. Alessandro Serpieri, Professor Emeritus of English Literature at the University of Florence, has carried out extensive research on dramatic language as well DV RQ SRHWU\ DQG SURVH +LV PDLQ ¿HOGV RI LQWHUHVW DUH WKH (OL]DEHWKDQ WKHDWUH (particularly Shakespeare), the poetry of John Donne, romantic poetry, nineteenthand twentieth-century poetry, aspects of the novel, and twentieth-century theatre. His rich bibliography includes: John Webster (1966), the Epistolario of Joseph Conrad (1966), Hopkins – Eliot – Auden (1969), T.S. Eliot: le strutture profonde (1973), I sonetti dell’immortalità (1975), Otello: l’Eros negato (1978, 3rd revised edition, 2003), Retorica e immaginario (1986), On the Language of Drama (1989), and Polifonia shakespeariana (2002).

List of Contributors

xi

Stuart Sillars is Professor of English at the University of Bergen, having previously been a member of the Faculty of English, University of Cambridge. His most recent books are Painting Shakespeare: The Artist as Critic, 1720–1820 (Cambridge University Press, 2006) and The Illustrated Shakespeare, 1709–1875 (Cambridge University Press, 2008), and his other books discuss literature and YLVXDO DUW LQ WKH WZR ZRUOG ZDUV DQG YLVXDO UHODWLRQV LQ SRSXODU ¿FWLRQ +H LV a member of the Norwegian Academy of Arts and Letters, a Visiting Fellow of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge and an Honorary Research Fellow of the Shakespeare Institute, Stratford-Upon-Avon. Laura Tosi is Associate Professor of English Literature at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. She has researched and written articles on Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, women’s studies, eighteenth-century mock-heroic poetry, postmodernist ¿FWLRQ DQG FKLOGUHQ¶V OLWHUDWXUH 6KH KDV ZULWWHQ PRQRJUDSKV RQ %HQ -RQVRQ¶V plays (Comunicazione e aggressione, Milan 1998) and John Webster (La memoria del testo, Pisa, 2001) and has edited and translated a collection of Victorian fairy tales (Draghi e Principesse, Venice, 2003). Her latest book is on the literary fairy tale in England (/D ¿DED OHWWHUDULD LQJOHVH, Venice, 2007). She is currently editing (with Alessandra Petrina) a collection of essays on Elizabeth I: Representations of Elizabeth I in Early Modern Culture, for Palgrave Macmillan (April 2011). Virginia Mason Vaughan is Professor of English at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. With Alden T. Vaughan she co-authored Shakespeare’s Caliban: A Cultural History and co-edited The Tempest for the Third Arden Series. She is also the author of Othello: A Contextual History and Performing Blackness on English Stages, 1500–1800. Stanley Wells is a renowned authority on Shakespeare and other writers of his time. He is Chair of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, Stratford-upon-Avon and Emeritus Professor of Shakespeare Studies at the University of Birmingham. He is also the General Editor of the Oxford Shakespeare series, of the Oxford Complete Works of Shakespeare, and of the Penguin edition. He was formerly Professor of Shakespeare Studies and Director of the Shakespeare Institute at the University of Birmingham. He holds honorary doctorates from Furman University and from the Universities of Munich, Hull, Durham, Warwick, and Craiova. He edited the annual Shakespeare Survey for Cambridge University Press for 19 years and has written many books and articles on Shakespeare and his contemporaries. In 2007 he was awarded a CBE for services to literature.

This page has been left blank intentionally

Acknowledgements We wish to thank the general editor of the series in which this book is published, Michele Marrapodi, and our commissioning editor, Erika Gaffney, who took a generous and friendly interest in it, as well as many friends and colleagues with whom we have discussed, on different occasions, the topic of this book: Gil Anidjar, Palmira Brummett, Fernando Cioni, Paul Edmondson, Flavio Gregori, Joshua Holo, Farah Karim-Cooper, Loretta Innocenti, Patricia Parker, Elizabeth Pentland, Dorit Raines, Susanne Wofford, and Daniel Vitkus. Thanks to John Moore and David Newbold for their precious linguistic advice. We are grateful to our friend Patrick Spottiswoode, director of Globe Education, Shakespeare’s Globe, London, and his staff for co-hosting the conference that inspired the present book (Shakespeare in Venice, Venice, 12–13 October 2007) and for allowing us to test and discuss ideas regarding the complex relationship between Shakespeare’s ‘Venetian’ plays and their location on several occasions in the Globe lecture season of 2007–2008. Without Patrick’s support and enthusiasm we believe that none of this would have happened. We also express our gratitude to the Dipartimento di Studi Europei e Postcoloniali – Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia and Ateneo Veneto di Scienze Lettere e Arti for hosting the conference. We would also like to thank the Banca Cariparo for a generous contribution towards the Venice conference organization, as part of the research project ‘Queen and Country’, directed by Alessandra Petrina, to whom we extend heartfelt appreciation of her advice and friendship. And last, but by no means least, to our spouses, Susanne and Renato, we give much thanks for conversations and advice about the project, but most of all for keeping up our spirits at occasional moments of uncertainty or crisis. This book is dedicated to the memory of Janet Adelman, a very special friend with a very special vision of Shakespeare.

This page has been left blank intentionally

Foreword Stanley Wells

From an early age, Shakespeare was steeped in early Italian culture, above all through study of its language and its literature. The Roman classics were drilled into him at the grammar school in Stratford-upon-Avon. The extent to which this kind of education permeated the culture of his time is not easy for us to imagine, but it is illuminated by a passage in the diaries of the law student John Manningham, who saw an early performance of Twelfth Night at the Middle Temple in 1602 (and who told the scurrilous anecdote about Shakespeare anticipating Burbage in an assignation with a woman of easy virtue: ‘William the conqueror was before Richard III’). Manningham records that his ‘cousin,’ as he calls him, one day UHSHDWHGIURPPHPRU\DOPRVWWKHZKROHRIWKH¿UVWERRN±RYHUOLQHVORQJ± of Virgil’s Aeneid, and that two days later the same man ‘rehearsed without book very near the whole of the second book of the Aeneid, viz. 630 verses without missing one word.’ This was, as Manningham dryly notes, ‘A singular memory in DPDQRIKLVDJH¶$QGRIDQ\DJHDWDQ\WLPHZHPLJKWZHOOUHÀHFW It’s clear that Shakespeare developed a deep fondness for especially Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which he read both in the original and in Arthur Golding’s translation, but also that he knew and made use of such writers as Virgil, Cicero, Plautus, Terence, and Seneca. It was probably only after he left school that he EHJDQWRH[SHULHQFHWRRWKHLQÀXHQFHRI,WDOLDQ5HQDLVVDQFHZULWHUV±3HWUDUFK Boccaccio, Castiglione and Bandello among them. Italians living and working in (QJODQGLQÀXHQFHGKLVZRUN0LFKDHO:\DWW¶V¿QHERRNThe Italian Encounter with Tudor England: A Cultural Politics of Translation (2005),1 offers a fascinating study of Anglo-Italian relations of the period. John Florio plays a major role in the story, and Shakespeare undoubtedly knew some of Florio’s work, including his translation of Montaigne, and may well have been acquainted with him personally, through his membership of the circle of Shakespeare’s patron the Earl of Southampton. Jonathan Bate has even conjectured that Florio’s wife – curiously ZHGRQ¶WNQRZZKDWKHU¿UVWQDPHZDV±PD\EHLGHQWL¿HGZLWKWKHVRFDOOHGGDUN lady of the Sonnets.2 English attitudes toward Italy during the period were ambivalent. Maybe they can be characterized by the contrast between Machiavelli and Castiglione. At times the country was thought of as a sink of antiquity and an Italianate Englishman 1 Cambridge series of Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 2 Jonathan Bate, The Genius of Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 57–8.

Visions of Venice in Shakespeare

xvi

was spoken of as a ‘diablo incarnato.’ In Piers Penniless (1592) Thomas Nashe apostrophizes the country in vivid terms: ‘O Italy, the academy of manslaughter, the sporting place of murder, the apothecary–shop of poison for all nations.’3 And in The Unfortunate Traveller (1594) he writes of it as a land from which a traveller may bring ‘the art of atheism, the art of epicurizing, the art of whoring, the art of poisoning, the art of sodomitry.’4 His traveller visits Venice, where he has lurid adventures – he and his master are taken to the house of ‘a pernicious courtesan’ alluringly named Tabitha the Temptress, and as a result of her wiles they land up in prison. There is however no evidence that Nashe himself ever visited the country. 7KHQHJDWLYHYLHZRI,WDO\LVUHÀHFWHGODWHULQDERRNSXEOLVKHGLQE\ the historian Peter Heylyn, who writes of Italian men that ‘in their lust they are unnatural, in their malice unappeasable, and in their actions deceitful. They will blaspheme sooner than swear, and murder a man rather than slander him. They are exceeding jealous over their wives.’ And he describes the women only a little more favourably, quoting a proverb which Shakespeare had cited in Othello: ‘The women are generally witty in speech, modest in outward carriage, and bountiful where they bear affection; and it is proverbially said that they are magpies at the door, saints in the church, goats in the garden, devils in the house, angels in the street, and sirens in the windows.’ This is the dark view of Italy, the one that is UHÀHFWHGLQIRUH[DPSOHWKHWUDJHGLHVRI7KRPDV0LGGOHWRQDQG-RKQ:HEVWHU Shakespeare knew and adopted this perspective on the country, but for him Italy was above all a land of romance. It is not too much to say that if Italy had not existed, he would have had to invent it – even that in some respects he did. Plots of many of his most delightful comedies derive, directly or indirectly, from Italian literature. In The Taming of the Shrew, he writes of ‘great Italy’ and praises ‘fruitful Lombardy’ as the country’s ‘pleasant garden.’5 And in Love’s Labour’s Lost the pedant Holofernes quotes the proverb ‘Venetia, Venetia,/chi non ti vede, non ti pretia.’6 Bandello’s novelle LQÀXHQFHGMuch Ado About Nothing and Twelfth Night, Boccaccio’s Il Decamerone lies behind All’s Well That Ends Well, set partly in Florence, The Merchant of Venice is anticipated in the Florentine writer Ser Giovanni’s Il Pecorone, and the manners of Castiglione’s Il libro del cortegiano provided Shakespeare (and many of his contemporaries) with models of courtly behaviour and speech. There is even reason to suppose that we have underestimated the number of his plays originally set in Italy. It has always seemed odd that though the action of the Folio text of Measure for Measure is set in Vienna, most of the characters have Italian names – Isabella, Lucio, Claudio, Angelo, and so on. 3

Thomas Nashe, The Unfortunate Traveller and Other works, ed. J.B. Steane (London: Penguin, 1985), p. 83. 4 Nashe, p. 345. 5 William Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew, 2nd rev. ed., ed. Brian Morris (The Arden Shakespeare, London: Routledge, 1981), 1.1.3–4. 6 William Shakespeare, Love’s Labour’s Lost, ed. H.R. Woudhuysen (The Arden Shakespeare, Walton-on-Thames: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1998), 4.2.95–6.

Foreword

xvii

In an important article, John Jowett has made a strong case for the belief that the surviving text represents an adaptation by Thomas Middleton of a play originally VHWLQ,WDO\VSHFL¿FDOO\OLNH0LGGOHWRQ¶VThe Phoenix – which has a similar theme – in Ferrara.7 Though it is unlikely that Shakespeare would have learned Italian at school, he certainly appears to have been able to read the language. In this he would have been helped by his training in Latin and his familiarity with French, witnessed most obviously by the Princess of France scenes in Henry V. Cinthio’s tale on which Othello is based had not been translated into English when Shakespeare based his great tragedy on it, and Naseeb Shaheen demonstrates that he was undoubtedly LQÀXHQFHG E\ WKH RULJLQDO UDWKHU WKDQ E\ D )UHQFK WUDQVODWLRQ8 Interestingly, a speech of Portia’s in The Merchant of Venice shows that a command of Italian was regarded as a necessary accomplishment of an English gentleman. Speaking of her would-be suitor ‘Falconbridge, the young baron of England,’ she complains that he ‘hath neither Latin, French, nor Italian.’9 I like to think that Shakespeare would QRWKDYHZULWWHQWKLVLIKHKLPVHOIGLGQRWKDYHDWOHDVWDUHDVRQDEOHÀXHQF\LQDOO three languages. Whether Shakespeare ever travelled to Italy himself has been endlessly debated. It has been an especially favoured subject of those who like to suppose that someone other than Shakespeare wrote his works. How, they ask, could he have known as much as he appears to have known if he had not visited the country? Well, one can reply that, as the editors of this volume point out in their Introduction, he could have learned about it from ‘innumerable written and oral sources’ including conversations with those who had. And there is such a thing as the power of the imagination. Many of Shakespeare’s contemporaries, such as Ben Jonson, John Webster, and many others wrote plays and other works of literature set in Italy without being known to have visited it. Of Venice, E.H. Sugden, in his invaluable Topographical Dictionary to the Works of Shakespeare and his Fellow Dramatists (1925), remarks that ‘none of our dramatists show any personal knowledge of’ the city-state, and that ‘the local references to it are of the most general character. Ben Jonson, in Volpone, mentions more details than any other of them, but even they are meagre and derived from hearsay.’10 At least one English theatre practitioner did, however, visit the country, and that is Shakespeare’s close colleague Will Kemp, who was a shareholder in the Lord Chamberlain’s Men and for whom Shakespeare wrote a sequence of roles 7

John Jowett, ‘The Audacity of Measure for Measure in 1621,’ Ben Jonson Journal 8 (2001): pp. 229–47. 8 Naseeb Shaheen, ‘Shakespeare’s Knowledge of Italian,’ Shakespeare Survey 47 (1994): pp. 161–9. 9 William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, 10th rpt., ed. John Russell Brown (The Arden Shakespeare, London and New York: Methuen, 1984), 1.2.64–6. 10 E.H. Sugden, Topographical Dictionary to the Works of Shakespeare and his Fellow Dramatists (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1925), p. 543.

xviii

Visions of Venice in Shakespeare

including Dogberry and possibly Falstaff. After leaving the company in or around 1599, Kemp visited both Germany and Italy. In Rome he met up with the English traveller Sir Anthony Shirley, and the encounter is dramatized in a comic episode in a curious play, The Travels of the Three English Brothers, written by William Rowley, John Day and George Wilkins a few years later. In this play Kemp has a mildly bawdy conversation with an Italian Harlequin and his wife. Thomas Nashe, in An Almond for a Parrot (1590) also associates Kemp with Harlequin, suggesting WKDWFRQWHPSRUDULHVOLNHVFKRODUVODWHUVDZDI¿QLWLHVEHWZHHQWKHWHFKQLTXHVRI English clowns and the Italian commedia dell’arte. Whether or not Shakespeare travelled to Italy, writers have often enough LPDJLQHG KLV SUHVHQFH LQ WKH FRXQWU\ DQG VSHFL¿FDOO\ LQ 9HQLFH 2QH RI WKH more preposterous examples comes in a book called The Real Shakespeare, A Counterblast to Commentators, published in 1947 by an 82-year-old gentleman named William Bliss, who was known as ‘the father of English canoeing.’ (We must not hold this against him.) In this book Bliss proposes that when Shakespeare was aged 13 he left home to join Sir Francis Drake on his voyage round the world on the Golden Hind, and that in 1585 he went to sea again, was shipwrecked on the coast of Illyria, and found his way from there to Venice where he met and fell in love with the Earl of Southampton. Romance between 6KDNHVSHDUHDQG6RXWKDPSWRQDOVR¿JXUHVSURPLQHQWO\LQ(ULFD-RQJ¶VUDF\QRYHO Serenissima, of 1987, later issued in America under the new title of Shylock’s Daughter: A Novel of Love in Venice ,WV FHQWUDO FKDUDFWHU LV DQ$PHULFDQ ¿OP star named Jessica who takes a journey backward in time in the course of which she meets up with Shakespeare, Southampton, and a courtesan posing as a boy. Steamy scenes ensue; the three were, she writes, ‘a three-backed beast that pants and screams and begs for mercy.’11 Venice has also of course provided wonderful ORFDWLRQVHWWLQJVIRU6KDNHVSHDULDQ¿OPV,WUHDVXUHWKHVLOHQW¿OPRIThe Merchant of Venice starring Ermete Novelli and his matronly wife (she plays Portia) of 1910, ODVWLQJVRPHWHQPLQXWHVRUVRZKLFKIDVFLQDWLQJO\KDVVFHQHV¿OPHGRQORFDWLRQ in the city a century ago. The story of Shakespeare and Italy, centering on the international city-state of Venice, is inexhaustible. This volume, appropriately written by a distinguished international and multi-disciplinary team of scholars, offers sophisticated and learned expositions of the relationship between the dramatist and the city, centering DVLV¿WWLQJRQ6KDNHVSHDUH¶VWZR9HQHWLDQSOD\VOthello and The Merchant of Venice 7KH ¿UVW LQGHSWK VWXG\ IRU PDQ\ \HDUV LW RIIHUV QHZ DQG LOOXPLQDWLQJ insights into a fascinatingly diverse topic.

11 Erica Jong, Shylock’s Daughter: A Novel of Love in Venice (New York: Norton, 2003), p. 120.

Introduction: Visions of Venice in Shakespeare Laura Tosi and Shaul Bassi

Around the time Shakespeare was writing about the city, Venice was undergoing a ‘shift from a center of information about the world (especially the East) to a center of information about itself.’1 It was the beginning of an ongoing process that turned, as has often been remarked, a real city into a myth. Having accumulated over the centuries an immense amount of economic, social and cultural capital while at the same time becoming less and less competitive in an expanding world market, Venetians started investing in symbolic capital and made of their name a currency that circulated throughout Europe and beyond, exerting its LQÀXHQFH LQ VXFK GLVSDUDWH DUHQDV DV SROLWLFDO WKHRU\ SDLQWLQJ WUDYHO OLWHUDWXUH and global tourism. The myth of Venice, ‘that nearly inexhaustible repertoire of stories the Venetians told themselves about themselves,’2 was quickly adopted by non-Venetians, so that the longevity and persistence of this city of fantasy and imagination has to be credited now to foreigners, visitors, strangers, with William Shakespeare prominent among them. We hardly need to be reminded that Shakespeare, like Venice, has long become a far-reaching myth, which today we may call ‘global’ rather than ‘universal,’ because we have learned that its unequalled planetary reach was not only caused E\ LWV LQWULQVLF FXOWXUDO YDOXH EXW DOVR E\ WKH IDFW WKDW KLV ZRUNV ÀHZ IDU DQG wide on the wings of powerful economic and political forces linked to British colonization. The existence of myths, while claiming eternity, depends on their being perpetually reinvented, endlessly reproduced, casually recycled, remolded into new artistic masterpieces (whether a classical Venetian painting or a new Shakespearean staging) or debased into trite clichés. Myths are myths because we periodically revisit them, or to be more precise, because they invite periodic reconsideration, drawing attention to themselves as they speak to broader cultural and political concerns. Our brief opening quotation also implies that before it started disseminating in profusion idealized and virtual Venices, the real city had based its fortunes on 1

Peter Burke, ‘Early Modern Venice as a Centre of Communication and Information,’ in Venice Reconsidered: The History and Civilization of an Italian City-State, 1297– 1797, ed. John Martin and Dennis Romano (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), p. 391. 2 Martin and Romano, p. x.

2

Visions of Venice in Shakespeare

diversity (of people, merchandise, political forms, information, etc.), a diversity that has been alternatively (and sometimes, perhaps even in Shakespeare, simultaneously) interpreted positively or negatively as opulence, confusion, SDUDGR[ PL[WXUH ,Q WKLV OLJKW ZH PD\ GH¿QH WKH SUHVHQW FROOHFWLRQ RI HVVD\V as a book that relies on an academic cultural mix in the same way as Venice was represented as a mixed city. Setting out to offer new perspectives to a traditional topic, it deliberately tries to bring together different critical outlooks informed by different cultural and academic traditions. Philology and theory, history and politics, and the visual and performing arts all intersect here and prove to be complementary tools to broach such a complex and engrossing subject. Shakespeare’s appropriation and re-creation of the Venetian symbolic landscape is here investigated and explored through a variety of perspectives by an academic equivalent of that ‘famous concourse and meetings of so many distinct and sundry nations’3 that was so typical of Venice and that the English traveller Thomas Coryat described in 1608 in such fascinating terms. A Symbolic Landscape Venice is possibly the most enduring of all symbolic landscapes of the Renaissance. In the last three decades research on the relationship between landscape and national identity suggests that landscape is less real and physical and more ideologically charged than we can imagine – a country of the mind, mediated through culture. As Meinig has noted, ‘we regard all landscapes as symbolic, as expressions of cultural values, social behaviours, and individual actions worked upon particular localities over a span of time. Every landscape is an accumulation … and every landscape is a code, and its study may be undertaken as a deciphering of meaning.’4 The cultural geography of the Republic can indeed be perceived as an accumulation of traditions, myths, values and anti-values which is constructed along primarily narrative lines (as in travellers’ reports for example) as well as dramatic ones, with the extraordinary impact of early modern plays set in Venice (as in Thomas Platter’s much-quoted observation, ‘the English pass their time, learning at the play what is happening abroad … since for the most part the English do not much use to travel, but prefer to learn of foreign matters and take their pleasures at home’).5 If landscapes are indeed part of the iconography 3 Thomas Coryat, Coryat’s Crudities (1611), vol. 1 (Glasgow: James MacLehose and Sons, 1905), p. 318. 4 David W. Meinig, ‘Introduction,’ in The Interpretation of Ordinary Landscapes: Geographical Essays, ed. D.W. Meinig (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 6. 5 Thomas Platter’s Travels in England, ed. Clare Williams (London: Jonathan Cape, 1937), p. 170, cit. in Ania Loomba, ‘Outsiders in Shakespeare’s England,’ in The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare, ed. Margareta de Grazia and Stanley Wells (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 160.

Introduction

3

of nationhood,69HQLFHLVFRQVWUXHGDVWKHXOWLPDWH¿FWLRQDOODQGVFDSHRIRWKHUQHVV a representation that resembles reality in its being inescapably bound up with the sea. In the association with the city, the sea appears both as a geographical feature of protection (from land invasions) and vulnerability (to the intrusiveness of tides, then as today) and is strongly felt to be a key factor in the extent of the commercial and political domination of the Republic in the Mediterranean. One often wonders about the impact of the early modern experience of approaching the city from the sea, which must have been central to the perception of the Venetian landscape. The traveller would have been exposed to a most peculiar variety of paradoxical cityscape that established a very close and inescapable connection with the surrounding environment of the lagoon, a place of mediation between urban spaces and the spaces of travel and commerce. As Denis Cosgrove has succinctly put it, ‘The sixteenth-century myth of Venice was at once geographical and historical, and it found expression in the constitution of Venice as a symbolic landscape.’7 Brabantio’s words, ‘This is Venice: my house is not a grange’ (1.1.105–6)8 are there to remind us that Venice is the city par excellence, the open space where a multitude of nationalities, religions and ethnicities made their way through the centuries right into the heart of the symbolic landscape of early modern JOREDOL]DWLRQµDFRPPRQDQGJHQHUDOPDUNHWWRWKHZKROHZRUOG¶LQWKHGH¿QLWLRQ given by Lewes Lewkenor.9 It is a landscape that Shakespeare found described in innumerable written and oral sources, ranging from travellers’ reports to maps, from translations of Venetian political treaties to possibile conversations with the Anglo-Italian cultural mediators of the time such as John Florio and Philip Sidney, and perhaps even with the Venetian merchants living in London.10 It is not easy to determine with certainty what the educated view of Venice was in England and contrast it with its theatrical counterpart.11 Both fantasies and projections combine sophistication with corruption, sameness and alterity, often producing a powerful vision which blurs the boundaries between historical 6 D.W. Meinig, ‘Symbolic Landscapes. Some Idealizations of American Communities,’ in Interpretation of Ordinary Landscapes, p. 164. 7 Denis Cosgrove, Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1998 [1984]), p. 109. 8 William Shakespeare, Othello, ed. Michael Neill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). 9 Gasparo Contarini, The Commonwealth and Government of Venice, trans. Lewes Lewkenor (London, 1599; reprinted Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum; New York: Da Capo Press, 1969), p. 132. 10 See, among others, David C. McPherson, Shakespeare, Jonson and the Myth of Venice (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1990) and John R. Mulryne, ‘Between Myth and Fact: The Merchant of Venice as Docu-Drama,’ in Italian Culture in the Drama of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries, ed. Michele Marrapodi (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), pp. 111–26. 11 See the chapter ‘“I had read Contarine”: Sources for Shakespeare and Jonson,’ in McPherson, pp. 17–26.

Visions of Venice in Shakespeare

4

IDFW DQG LPDJLQDU\ ¿FWLRQ 2EYLRXVO\ WKH (OL]DEHWKDQ YLHZ RI 9HQLFH LV QRW entirely dissimilar to that of the whole of Italy in some respects, that of the most DGYDQFHGFLYLOL]DWLRQRIWKHWLPHLQWKH¿HOGVRIDUWPXVLFOLWHUDWXUHDQGIHQFLQJ as well as banking, political science,12HWFWKLVLVWKHIDQWDV\ZH¿QGLQPDQ\ of Shakespeare’s comedies) but also the cradle of political, religious and sexual FRUUXSWLRQ$VPDQ\RIWKHHVVD\VLQWKLVERRNVHHPWRFRQ¿UPWKHSOD\ZULJKW worked most of this available information into his oeuvre, and, as John Drakakis has eloquently put it, ‘Shakespeare’s two Venetian plays both represent, and maintain a critical distance from, Venice, and … in different ways they interrogate and challenge existing elements of the received “myth.”’13 It is certainly worth asking why, as mentioned before, Shakespeare and Venice seem to call for our attention in the present moment. A century ago the Scottish historian and Venice resident Horatio Brown wrote: ‘the scattered allusions to be collected from [Shakespeare’s] plays prove an intimacy with Venice which is surprising in a man who probably was never out of England.’14 There was a distinct note of nostalgia in this suggestion, a longing to follow the footsteps of a mythical journey by Shakespeare to Italy, an antiquarian pursuit of a long-gone past at a time when, probably, clever gondoliers and romantic expatriates were inventing Desdemona’s houses and Shylock’s banks to quench the thirst for authenticity of enthusiastic bardolaters. Back then, and for a long time afterwards, whether Shakespeare ever set foot to Venice (or the rest of Italy) was a vexed question. Today it appears more fruitful to investigate the Venetian plays as intellectual sites of interacting voices and discourses from the most diverse cultural collocations. We NQRZWKDWVXI¿FLHQWLQIRUPDWLRQZRXOGKDYHEHHQDYDLODEOHWR/RQGRQUHVLGHQWVWR ‘picture’ a believable version of Venice on page or stage. Perhaps these exchanges took place at the Oliphant, a Bankside inn that catered to Italian customers and that is mentioned in Twelfth Night or, near the Tower and Bishopsgate where, as Michael Wyatt has recently shown in his book on the cultural exchanges between Italy and England, Venetian merchants used to meet, nostalgically referring to these places in London as the Rialto and San Marco.15 Hence we can safely compare Shakespeare to Lewes Lewkenor, the English translator of Gasparo Contarini’s The Commonwealth and Gouernment of Venice (1599), a famous book that Shakespeare probably read. In his note ‘To the Reader,’ Lewkenor writes: I was not so fortunate as to be a beholder of the glory [of Venice], yet I have not omitted from time to time to gather such observations as well by reading the best and choicest authors entreating thereof, as also by conference with sundry well 12

Murray J. Levith, Shakespeare’s Italian Settings and Plays (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989), pp. 4–5. 13 John Drakakis, ‘Shakespeare and Venice,’ in Marrapodi, Italian Culture, p. 172. 14 Horatio Brown, Studies in the History of Venice, vol. 2 (London: John Murray, 1907), p. 160. 15 Michael Wyatt, The Italian Encounter with Tudor England: A Cultural Politics of Translation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 187.

Introduction

5

experienced gentlemen, as might not only satisfy the curiosity of my own desire, but also deliver unto others a clear and exact knowledge of every particularities worthy of note.16

Some of ‘the best and choicest authors’ may well be among those analyzed in the present book – see Mason Vaughan’s chapter on historical narratives of the Ottoman empire or Attar’s chapter on the Italian novella. Gradually abandoning the projective fantasy that the playwright visited the Serenissima and walked its teeming piazzas and calles, drawing inspiration for Shylock and Othello, critics started leaning toward the view that Venice was to EH VHHQ OHVV DV RQH VSHFLDO DQG VSHFL¿F FLW\ WKDQ DV WKH HSLWRPH RI WKH &LW\ D summa of the urban and civic qualities that fascinated and troubled early modern Europe. In this light Shakespeare’s Venice could be utilized without bothering with Italian sources, at a time when in fact the historical background of literary works was at best taken for granted. Such a metaphorical view could then be taken to the anglocentric extreme of suggesting that if you scratched the surface RI 6KDNHVSHDUH¶V 9HQLFH \RX FRXOG HDVLO\ ¿QG 6KDNHVSHDUH¶V /RQGRQ ,Q  David McPherson’s seminal book Shakespeare, Jonson, and the Myth of Venice criticized the widely held view that the Venice of Shakespeare’s plays was London in thin disguise and turned to actual Venetian history, and crucially to the historical construction of the Myth of Venice. In the following decade, such works as Michele Marrapodi’s Shakespeare’s Italy: Functions of Italian Locations in Renaissance Drama (1993) reconsidered in a more critically and historically nuanced way the whole relationship between Shakespeare and Italy. In the same period a growing bibliography, and in particular two important books such as John Gross’s Shylock: Four Hundred Years in the Life of a Legend (1992)17 and Virginia Mason Vaughan’s Othello: A Contextual History (1994),18WHVWL¿HGWRWKHQHZUHOHYDQFH attributed to the Venetian plays and to their rich critical and theatrical afterlives. If, DV,DQ.RWW¶VROGDGDJHJRHVµHYHU\KLVWRULFDOSHULRG¿QGVLQKLP>6KDNHVSHDUH@ what it is looking for and what it wants to see’19 and if for most of the twentieth century, Hamlet and Lear contended for the title of ‘the best, the great, or the chief masterpiece of Shakespeare,’20 at the turn of the third millenium it seems easier to mirror ourselves in plays where tormented rulers and medieval monarchies give way to citizens of multireligious societies and a teeming metropolis. As John Drakakis cogently writes:

16

Lewkenor, in Contarini, p. 12. John Gross, Shylock: Four Hundred Years in the Life of a Legend (London: Chatto and Windus, 1992). 18 Virginia Mason Vaughan, Othello: A Contextual History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 19 Ian Kott, Shakespeare Our Contemporary (London: Routledge, 1994 [1965]), p. 5. 20 R.A. Foakes, Hamlet Versus Lear: Cultural Politics and Shakespeare’s Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 1. 17

Visions of Venice in Shakespeare

6

Our sense of what Venice might have meant to the Elizabethans and early Jacobeans is sharpened by our own pressing – one might almost say, apocalyptic – JOREDO FRQFHUQ ZLWK W\SHV RI JRYHUQPHQW UHOLJLRXV FRQÀLFW WKH RSHUDWLRQDO ethics and morality of political power, and doubts about what is now beginning to look like the premature victory of a liberal consumer capitalism.21

In other words, The Merchant of Venice and Othello, the plays where Shakespeare is at his most local and contemporary, have become his most distinctly global and topical works. Venice as city state appears to embody the Renaissance culture of SDUDGR[LQWKHZD\LWERWKÀDXQWVDQGFRQWDLQVRSSRVLWHYLHZVZLWKRXWRIIHULQJ a solution based on commonly held opinions and/or orthodoxies. Peter Platt has recently explored ‘how a geographical site could do the work of a verbal paradox’:22 on the paradoxical Venetian stage we watch Shylock and Othello negotiating their complex identities as aliens and citizens, in a deliberately ‘double’ setting where even apparently similar constructions of ethnicity, like Morocco and Othello, HQFRXUDJHERWKLGHQWL¿FDWLRQDQGGLIIHUHQWLDWLRQ9HQLFHLVLQGHHGµDSODFHZKHUH doubleness makes plainness all but impossible.’23 7KHHVVD\VSUHVHQWHGLQWKLVFROOHFWLRQWKH¿UVWERRNWREURDFKWKHVXEMHFWIRU QHDUO\WZRGHFDGHVFRQVLGHU9HQLFHDFXOWXUDOO\FKDUJHGVLJQL¿HUWKDWQHHGVWREH explored in its multiple resonances, both in Shakespeare’s historical context and LQWKHODWHUWUDGLWLRQRIUHFRQ¿JXULQJ9HQLFHDVRQHRIWKHFLWLHVPRVWUHSUHVHQWHG in Western culture. Sources The section devoted to the sources pays tribute to Shakespeare’s exceptional transformational powers and his position as cultural mediator of many crucial cultural discourses of early modern Europe. Elsewhere Keir Elam has usefully labelled Italy as a mega-source, ‘a generative machine producing powerful models,’ an intertext which is produced by the constant exchange of interconnected literary as well as cultural texts.24 Venice is indeed one of the main strands of the Italian intertext, a discursive and imaginative space which creates and is in its turn created and enriched by the eclectic use of a number of ‘sources proximate,’ in Robert Miola’s words,25 or the so-called ‘books on the desk’ that we imagine Shakespeare consulted, plundered, digested and ultimately appropriated when writing the 21

Drakakis, p. 170. Peter G. Platt, Shakespeare and the Culture of Paradox (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009), p. 9. 23 Platt, p. 10. 24 Keir Elam, ‘Afterword: Italy as Intertext,’ in Shakespeare, Italy and Intertextuality, ed. Michele Marrapodi (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), p. 255. 25 Robert S. Miola, ‘Seven Types of Intertextuality,’ in Marrapodi, Shakespeare, Italy and Intertextuality, p. 19. 22

Introduction

7

Venetian plays. Virginia Mason Vaughan opens the debate with her discussion of Richard Knolles’s Generall Historie of the Turkes (1603), a narrative of the Ottoman empire which centres on the Cyprus Wars as a backdrop for Othello. Vaughan’s chapter broadens the traditional notion of setting as simply the place where a play is located, to consider the implications of placing a tragedy based on Giraldi Cinthio’s novella within the historical and geographical framework of the contentious earlymodern Mediterranean world. When Othello is examined in the intertextual context of Knolles’s Generall Historie, we see a shift in the representation of Venice, moving from the military prowess embodied in Othello to the Machiavellian diplomacy suggested by Iago. This trajectory was deeply rooted in Europe’s cultural memory of the Cyprus Wars as well as its perception of the Venetian Empire. The subsequent history of Venice, well known to many in Shakespeare’s original audience, followed the path of Iago, the supersubtle Venetian. Both Daria Perocco and Karina Attar have studied Shakespeare’s reshaping of his novella sources within its more immediate literary and historical contexts, suggesting that this tradition offers so much more than a pedestrian reformulation of stereotypes or even a set of narremes26 ready to be elevated to the Bard’s superior dramatizing skills. Perocco’s essay is as much a philological as a cultural investigation of the sources that Shakespeare may have consulted for his Venetian plays, from the various revised editions of Ser Giovanni Fiorentino’s Il Pecorone, which contains the novella which inspired The Merchant of Venice, to Giraldi Cinthio’s novella featuring Disdemona and the Moor. Attar’s reading of Giraldi revises most existing scholarship, which tends to view the tale as a pale antecedent for the Elizabethan tragedy. A close study of the novella within its most immediate literary and historical contexts suggests that it offers far from pedestrian reformulations of stereotypes. This essay also incorporates the growing body of research on sixteenth-century Venetian–Ottoman and Venetian–Ferrarese UHODWLRQV DV ZHOO DV &\SUXV¶V UROH LQ 0HGLWHUUDQHDQ FRQÀLFWV 9LHZHG IURP WKH perspective of its diverse literary antecedents and through the contentious earlymodern Mediterranean world of cross-cultural relations, Giraldi’s novella emerges as a powerful and innovative narrative. An avid and attentive reader of novellas (whether in the original or in translation), Shakespeare himself found Giraldi’s tale to be a compelling basis for one of his most poignant and violent love-stories, and it EHKRRYHVWKHWZHQW\¿UVWFHQWXU\UHDGHUWRUHFRQVLGHUWKHQRYHOODLQLWVRZQULJKW Political Culture and Religious Policy in Venice and England The second section analyzes the role of Venetian politics and religion in Shakespeare. The degree of political interest that Venice was generating in the English at the time was indeed remarkable and their cultural construct of Italy can 26 Louise George Clubb, ‘Italian Stories on Stage,’ in The Cambridge Companion to Shakespearean Comedy, ed. Alexander Leggatt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 35.

Visions of Venice in Shakespeare

8

also be seen as the projection of English fears of political instability and political aspirations. In the plays under examination, Venice is constructed as a puzzle of utopian and dystopian qualites that gives a hint of what England might become and the way in which it could deal or was already dealing with internal and external FRQÀLFWV7KHSROLWLFDOP\WKRIWKHSerenissima had been created by a substantial body of celebratory writing and cultivated in England by writers such as Lewes Lewkenor and travellers like William Thomas, who had praised the republic’s mixed goverment as combining the best elements of monarchy, aristocracy and democracy.27According to the supporters of the ‘myth,’ the welfare of the Venetian people was guaranteed by a system of checks and balances between the political bodies as well as an elective monarch whose reduced authority would prevent his rule from turning into tyranny. Renaissance politics was never divorced from religious matters and Venice played a special role in this scene. A devoutly Catholic city whose identity and civic rituals were imbued with religious symbols and myths, Venice was proudly DQG VRPHWLPHV GH¿DQWO\ LQGHSHQGHQW RI 5RPH WKH RWKHU IDYRULWH FLW\ LQ HDUO\ modern English drama), to the point of incurring the Interdict in 1606–07. It did not hesitate to host and tolerate communities of Protestants, Jews, heretics DQGHYHQWKHLU¿HUFHHQHPLHVDQGULYDOVWKH7XUNV6KDNHVSHDUH¶V9HQLFHZKLFK PDQ\ FRPPHQWDWRUV KDYH VHHQ DV WRR YDJXH DQG QRQVSHFL¿F QHYHUWKHOHVV interrogates and mobilizes some of the most topical early modern religious and political discourses. Addressing the European debate about the superiority of the republican RYHUWKHPRQDUFKLFDOV\VWHP$QGUHZ+DG¿HOGHODERUDWHVRQKLVVHPLQDOZRUN RQ6KDNHVSHDUHDQGUHSXEOLFDQLVPE\ORRNLQJDWWZRWH[WVZKRVHLQÀXHQFHRQ 6KDNHVSHDUHKDVQRWEHHQVXI¿FLHQWO\LQYHVWLJDWHG%\FRQWHQGLQJWKDWKHPDGH use of the popular treatise A Mirror for Magistrates when composing his history SOD\V+DG¿HOGVXJJHVWVWKDW6KDNHVSHDUHDOVRGUHZRQ7KRPDV¶VHistory of Italy (1549), arguably the main English source of information on Italian culture in the Tudor age, when writing The Merchant of Venice.28 It is Thomas’s popular text that would have logically provided the detailed and balanced description RI WKH9HQHWLDQ OHJDO V\VWHP WKDW LV GUDPDWL]HG LQ ZKDW DSSHDUV WR EH WKH ¿UVW Elizabethan play set in Venice. Creating unexpected links between the coeval debate on the merits of the old Anglo-Saxon legal system versus the Roman /DZLQWURGXFHGE\WKH1RUPDQFRQTXHVW+DG¿HOGVHHV6KDNHVSHDUHFRQFXUULQJ ZLWK7KRPDVLQVKRZLQJµWKH9HQHWLDQFLWL]HQVDEOHWRGH¿QHWKHLURZQZD\VRI thinking about the law, and that what they argue can then become law.’ On the other hand, it is the subsequent reading of Lewkenor’s translation of Contarini, a 27

See the chapter “‘How harmful be the errors of Princes.” English Travellers in :HVWHUQ (XURSH±¶LQ$QGUHZ+DG¿HOGLiterature, Travel, and Colonial Writing in the English Renaissance 1545–1625 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), pp. 17–68. 28 William Thomas, The History of Italy (1549), ed. George B. Parks (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1963.

Introduction

9

IDUPRUHXQTXDOL¿HGFHOHEUDWLRQRI9HQLFH¶VSROLWLFDOVWDELOLW\WKDWVHHPVWRKDYH inspired Shakespeare to stage in Othello a Venetian republican system that works better as a whole than the individual citizens that constitute its parts. *LOEHUWR6DFHUGRWLGHSDUWVIURPWKH¿FWLRQDO9HQLFHRI2WKHOORDQG6K\ORFN to show how the real city was a real arena of political experimentation that may ZHOO KDYH LQÀXHQFHG 6KDNHVSHDUH WKURXJK VXFK LPSRUWDQW ¿JXUHV DV *LRUGDQR %UXQRZKRVHDUUHVWLQ9HQLFHLVWKHPRVWVLJQL¿FDQWH[FHSWLRQWRWKHWUDGLWLRQDO vision of a city tolerant of dissident views. By a closely argued reading of a short passage from Love’s Labour’s Lost (a puzzling play where Venice is mentioned in passing for reasons that have never been fully accounted for), Sacerdoti constructs a complex intellectual genealogy that positions Shakespeare in the fraught debate on the relationship between the state and the church that had caused bloody wars of religion in France and elsewhere in Europe. The focus of his analysis is the word ‘self-sovereignty,’ which Shakespeare uses in a cryptic riddle within the play. It was a key concept in political theories that were promoted in England by Giordano Bruno and certainly captured the interest of Elizabeth I, who ORRNHGDWWKH)UHQFKVLWXDWLRQDQGDWWKHLQÀXHQFHRI5RPHRQSROLWLFVZLWKGHHS SUHRFFXSDWLRQ6XSHUVHGLQJWKHLQÀXHQWLDOLQWHUSUHWDWLRQVRI)UDQFHV
Visions of Venice in Shakespeare

10

Crossing Boundaries and the Play of Identity The essays included in the third section are inspired by the Republic’s necessity to create and police boundaries, which was connected to the unique geographical DQGHFRQRPLFFRQ¿JXUDWLRQRIWKHFLW\$WWKHWLPHRIWKHGHFOLQHRILWVPDULWLPH vocation, the sea still acted as a protective line of demarcation and defense from invasion, ‘most safe and secure both by land and sea from all violence’29 and at the same time keeping the city in a state of mutability (‘every day altering and changing according to the tides of the sea’).30 Venice is perceived by travellers, dramatists, historians and audiences in ambivalent terms: as the virgin-city31 whose myth of inviolability co-exists with its international reputation for licentiousness, in the best interest of economy and trade, la Serenissima was dependant on those who by doing business made its citizens rich. As Antonio recognizes, ‘the trade DQGSUR¿WRIWKHFLW\FRQVLVWHWKRIDOOQDWLRQV¶± 32 Graham Holderness provides an ideal introduction to this section as his chapter concentrates on both Venice the myth and Venice as a reservoir of mythologies, a city of fantasy and imagination which is not, admittedly, produced by Venetian themselves but rather, created and imagined, then as now, by foreigners, visitors, VWUDQJHUV7KLVHVVD\¿UVWDGGUHVVHVWKHPRGHUQP\WKRORJ\RI9HQLFHDVGHYHORSHG IURPWKHODWHHLJKWHHQWKFHQWXU\LQ¿FWLRQGUDPDDQGFXOWXUDOFULWLFLVP9HQLFHLV DOZD\V WKH XQUHSUHVHQWDEOH WKH LQH[SOLFDEOH WKH DOOXULQJ ¿QDOO\ GLVDSSRLQWLQJ often fatal, unattainable object of desire. Holderness discusses the way these modern myths began very early, in the Renaissance, and ran in parallel with the political mythology of Venice as the great democratic republic and site of liberty. This chapter shows that the source of these complex and contradictory representations lies largely in Venice’s multi-cultural population, and in its liminal position between the distinct worlds of Christian Europe and the Islamic Ottoman Empire. As such Venice is a natural home, in Shakespeare’s two Venetian plays, to the archetypal strangers Shylock and Othello, who are associated with Christianity, Judaism and Islam. Laura Tosi includes in her discussion another early modern ‘Venetian’ play, Jonson’s Volpone, in the attempt to assess how much of a cultural context can be ‘imported’ into the actual texts and their dramatic setting. Venice appears to be an ideal battleground where the traditional differences between Shakespeare and 29

Contarini, p. 2. Contarini, p. 3. For a discussion of Venice as a paradox, see Platt, Shakespeare and the Culture of Paradox. On the geographical foundation of the myth of Venetian liberty and longevity, see Denis Cosgrove, ‘The Myth and the Stones of Venice: An Historical Geography of a Symbolic Language,’ Journal of Historical Geography 8, 2 (1982): pp. 142–69. 31 For the Venetian Republic’s self-fashioning both as sea-born Venus and Virgin Queen of Heaven see David Rosand, Myth of Venice: The Figuration of a State (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2001). 32 William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, 10th rpt., ed. John Russell Brown (The Arden Shakespeare. London and New York: Methuen, 1984). 30

Introduction

11

Jonson can be played out in full, as both dramatists were obviously interested in exploring the issues of hybridity, the aggressive nature of institutions and individuals in an acquisitive society, as well as the uncertain and permeable boundaries that are drawn between what is authentically Venetian and what is regarded as Other. Tosi’s essay explores the way these boundaries can relate to the social conditions of historical Venice at the turn of the seventeenth century, highlighting the fact that 6KDNHVSHDUH¶VDQG-RQVRQ¶VYLVLRQVRI9HQLFHRIWHQDSSHDUWRFRQÀDWHZLWKWKHUHDO city: regular policing of borders is both historically documented and dramatized in the Venetian plays. As the Venetian plays are discussed in the several chapters of the book, Shakespeare’s exceptional transformational powers appear to sketch a symbolical landscape of negotiation which highlights unexpected connections between The Merchant and Othello, between the European political debate and Renaissance Venice, representations of ethnicity and acts of projection, contemporary appropriations and translation. The intrinsic liminality of Venice is investigated by Kent Cartwright in his chapter on the motif of the return from the dead in The Merchant of Venice in relation to the play’s Venetian setting. This motif, which recurs in Shakespeare’s early comedies, displays elements of historical recidivism; mysterious and anachronistic, it points to a pseudo-Catholic and Medieval world. In broader terms, this essay suggests that the ‘medieval’ can sometimes constitute an aspect of what we think of as ‘Renaissance.’ Kent Cartwright focuses on Portia, ZKRRIIHUVERXQW\DQGPXQL¿FHQFHEXWDOVRSDUDGR[LFDOO\EULQJVGHDWK,QWKH peculiar symbolic economy of The Merchant of Venice, rescuing her from her death-in-life state must be ‘paid for,’ if not by Bassanio’s death then by the demise of his substitute, Antonio, whose imminent peril is announced immediately upon %DVVDQLR¶V VXFFHVV 7KH ¿QDO VXEVWLWXWLRQ DQG V\PEROLF GHDWK LV SURYLGHG E\ Shylock, who exchanges places with Antonio and is, in a sense, killed off. With its complex in-betweenness, posed between old and new, ‘hybrid Venice is the very image of Shakespeare’s Renaissance.’ The Merchant and Othello may be said to constitute the loci classici of problematic early modern assimilation where values current in the homeland are absorbed, appropriated and distorted by the Outsider. As happens with mirrors, µWKHULJKWKDQGRIWKHPLUURULVWKHOHIWRIWKHRQHZKRLVUHÀHFWHG¶33 By means of a thorough semantic investigation of the words ‘bond’ and ‘bound’ in the Venetian plays, Alessandro Serpieri analyzes Othello as a pseudo-anthropological intrigue, in which Iago’s dissimulation is the outward face of an inward Otherness. The damnation of the Other is staged in the context of ‘a perverse mentality, which removes and expels the “monsters” of one’s own imaginary … by means of projection¶7KHERQGVODYH,DJRLVERWKWKHDUWL¿FHURIWKHSORWDQGWKHVFDSHJRDW of a form of estrangement enacted by his civilized world. Serpieri’s essay argues WKDWFRVPRSROLWDQ9HQLFHLVWKHLGHDODUHQDIRUVXFKDGLVWXUELQJDQG¿QDOO\WUDJLF 33 Jean Delumeau, ‘Preface,’ in Sabine Melchior-Bonnet, The Mirror. A History, trans. Katharine H. Jewett (New York and London: Routledge, 2002), p. xi.

12

Visions of Venice in Shakespeare

interplay of phantasms of discrimination and projection: Iago’s bond uncovers ‘what was all the time latent in white European civilization, whose bonds, both social and familiar, could not admit any kind of downright intrusion of the Other into its network of superior relationships.’ Venetian Plays and their Afterlife In an innovative, tradition-defying rethinking of one of the greatest comedies in the English language, Morristown Community Players director Kevin Hiles announced Monday his bold intention to set his theater’s production of William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice in sixteenth-century Venice.34

This recent satirical quip is the best introduction to our fourth and last section. One of the clearest symptoms of the new relevance of Shakespeare’s Venetian plays is WKHÀXUU\RIVWDJLQJVDGDSWDWLRQVDQGUHZULWHVWKDWKDYHEHHQSURGXFHGLQWKHODVW two decades, often removing the plot from its original setting. But this is hardly a new phenomenon and the essays in this section show to what diverse aesthetic and cultural ends Othello and Shylock have been put in different times and places, and through different generic translations. Dealing with an important dimension of Shakespeare’s reception history, Stuart Sillars explores the visual representation of Venice in English culture, reminding us that if the city was primarily known abroad ‘through print or repute,’ Shakespeare’s Venetian characters became essential elements of this mythography in constant elaboration, in a long gallery ‘unrolling like a theatrical diorama over WKHWKUHHFHQWXULHVVLQFHWKH¿UVWYLVXDOWUHDWPHQWVRIWKHSOD\VLQ1LFKRODV5RZH¶V edition of 1709.’ It is especially after the fall of the Serenissima and the literary reinvention of the city by Byron and other Romantic writers that the setting of The Merchant of Venice and Othello is turned into a more recognizable and historically accurate scenario, reproduced in paintings, stage scenery and book illustrations. Following these developments, Sillars guides the reader well into the twentieth century, showing a complex interaction between writers, painters, DQGDFWRUVZKRVHUHFRQ¿JXUDWLRQVRI9HQLFHLQÀXHQFHRQHDQRWKHUDQVZHULQJWR a taste for exoticism, a new kind of material knowledge fostered by Victorian popular education, and new ideologies of tourism. Madalina Nicolaescu takes us back to early nineteenth-century France to examine three French theatrical adaptations of The Merchant of Venice and their political relevance. This case study raises the vexed question of the relationship between theater and politics by considering the role of Shakespeare in the heart of Europe at a time of intense political turmoil. In the second part, the essay follows the further translation of one of these French versions into a Romanian adaptation 34 ‘Unconventional Director Sets Shakespeare Play In Time, Place Shakespeare Intended,’ The Onion 43, 22 (2007) (http://www.theonion.com/content/news/ unconventional_director_sets). Thanks to Julia Reinhard Lupton for the reference.

Introduction

13

performed in Bucharest in 1854, shedding light on the way in which Shakespeare was disseminated trans-nationally and even trans-culturally in the mid-nineteenth century. The essay considers the implication of a cultural and geographical ‘translation’ of Shakespeare’s play in an adapted form to marginal areas such as the Romanian principalities, which at that time belonged to the Ottoman Empire. In Central and Eastern Europe, as Nicolaescu reminds us, Shakespeare played an important role in the fashioning of nascent national cultures and identities. The French Shakespeare adapted to the Romanian stage becomes then a telling H[DPSOH RI PXOWLSOH SURFHVVHV WKDW ¿QDOO\ OHDG WR µD SURJUHVVLYH VXSSUHVVLRQ of its more subversive and disconcerting aspects and its enlisting in a militant political agenda.’ Looking at the stage history and literary afterlives of the two Venetian plays, Shaul Bassi suggests some historical analogies between Shylock and Othello that single them out in the constellation of Shakespearean characters, and uses them to reframe some aspects of the critical commonplace of the two Venetian strangers, who have been more frequently discussed independently of each other than one might expect. Bassi shows the way Othello and Shylock seem, historically, to manifest an ‘excess of reality’ that triggers deep anxieties about ethnic and UHOLJLRXV GLIIHUHQFH EXW DOVR SURIRXQG IRUPV RI FURVVFXOWXUDO LGHQWL¿FDWLRQ +H describes the strategies adopted by critics, actors and directors to address this peculiar status, some of which aim at defusing the power of the plays to blur the boundaries between the stage and the world, while others question the dominant ethnic and religious discourses and power relations in their respective societies. Thus Much of the Glorious City of Venice We hope this book will be a starting point for further explorations and boundarycrossings in the sea of cultural discourses, literary echoes and cross-fertilizations. We would like to give the last word to Thomas Coryat, who voices the traveller’s desire to cross the borders of nationality and choose Venice over a life of luxury in native England. These words of longing are written at the end of his journey and his entertaining, witty, fascinated – albeit often critical – description of Venice’s history, monuments and social customs: had there bin an offer made unto me before I took my journey to Venice, eyther that foure of the richest mannors of Somerset-shire (wherein I was borne) should be gratis bestowed upon me if I never saw Venice, or neither of them if I should see it; … then the sight of Venice: … I will ever say while I live, that the sight of Venice and her resplendent beauty … hath by many degrees more contented P\PLQGHDQGVDWLV¿HGP\GHVLUHVWKHQWKRVHIRXUH/RUGVKLSSHVFRXOGSRVVLEO\ have done. Thus much of the glorious city of Venice.35

35

Coryat, p. 427–8.

14

Visions of Venice in Shakespeare

As Coryat gives us an example of the fascination that a foreigner experiences at KLV¿UVWHQFRXQWHUZLWK9HQLFHKHQHYHUZHQWEDFNDIWHUWKLVYLVLW 6KDNHVSHDUH¶V plays are there to remind us of the dark sides of the myth of Venice, and of the inescapable fact that the issues raised in the Venetian plays are tremendously topical: we are still haunted by Shylock and Othello and we still respond, instinctively as well as imaginatively, to these theatrical casualties of early modern multiculturalism. Works Cited Brown, Horatio. Studies in the History of Venice. Vol. 2. London: John Murray, 1907. Burke, Peter. ‘Early Modern Venice as a Centre of Communication and Information.’ In Venice Reconsidered: The History and Civilization of an Italian City-State, 1297–1797, edited by John Martin and Dennis Romano. 389–419. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000. Clubb, Louise George. ‘Italian Stories on Stage.’ In The Cambridge Companion to Shakespearean Comedy, edited by Alexander Leggatt. 32–46. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Contarini, Gasparo. The Commonwealth and Government of Venice. Translated by Lewes Lewkenor. London, 1599. Reprinted Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum; New York: Da Capo Press, 1969. Coryat, Thomas. Coryat’s Crudities (1611). Vol. 1. Glasgow: James MacLehose and Sons, 1905. Cosgrove, Denis. ‘The myth and the stones of Venice: an historical geography of a symbolic language.’ Journal of Historical Geography 8, 2 (1982): 142–69. ———. Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1998 [1984]. Delumeau, Jean. ‘Preface.’ In The Mirror. A History, edited by Sabine MelchiorBonnet. ix–x. Translated by Katharine H. Jewett. New York and London: Routledge, 2002. Drakakis, John. ‘Shakespeare and Venice.’ In Italian Culture in the Drama of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries, edited by Michele Marrapodi. 169–86. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007. Elam, Keir. ‘Afterword: Italy as Intertext.’ In Shakespeare, Italy and Intertextuality, edited by Michele Marrapodi. 253–8. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004. Foakes, R.A. Hamlet Versus Lear: Cultural Politics and Shakespeare’s Art. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Gross, John. Shylock: Four Hundred Years in the Life of a Legend. London: Chatto and Windus, 1992. +DG¿HOG $QGUHZ Literature, Travel, and Colonial Writing in the English Renaissance 1545–1625. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998.

Introduction

15

Kott, Ian. Shakespeare Our Contemporary. London: Routledge, 1994 [1965]. Levith, Murray J. Shakespeare’s Italian Settings and Plays. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989. Loomba, Ania. ‘Outsiders in Shakespeare’s England.’ In The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare, edited by Margareta de Grazia and Stanley Wells. 147–66. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Mason Vaughan, Virginia. Othello: A Contextual History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. McPherson, David C. Shakespeare, Jonson and the Myth of Venice. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1990. Meinig, David W. (ed.). The Interpretation of Ordinary Landscapes: Geographical Essays. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979. Miola, Robert S. ‘Seven Types of Intertextuality.’ In Shakespeare, Italy and Intertextuality, edited by Michele Marrapodi. 13–25. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004. Mulryne, John R. ‘Between Myth and Fact. The Merchant of Venice as Docu-Drama.’ In Italian Culture in the Drama of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries, edited by Michele Marrapodi. 111–26. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007. Platt, Peter G. Shakespeare and the Culture of Paradox. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009. Rosand, David. Myth of Venice. The Figuration of a State. Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2001. Shakespeare, William. The Merchant of Venice, 10th rpt. Edited by John Russell Brown. The Arden Shakespeare. London and New York: Methuen, 1984. ———. Othello. Edited by Michael Neill. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Thomas, William. The History of Italy. Edited and abridged by George B. Parks. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1963. ‘Unconventional Director Sets Shakespeare Play In Time, Place Shakespeare Intended,’ The Onion 43, 22 (2007). (http://www.theonion.com/content/news/ unconventional_director_sets). Wyatt, Michael. The Italian Encounter with Tudor England: A Cultural Politics of Translation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

This page has been left blank intentionally

PART 1 Sources

This page has been left blank intentionally

Chapter 1

Supersubtle Venetians: Richard Knolles and the Geopolitics of Shakespeare’s Othello1 Virginia Mason Vaughan

Had Shakespeare traveled to Venice, he would have experienced the city’s vibrant WUDI¿FEHWZHHQSHRSOHVIURPDOOSDUWVRIWKH0HGLWHUUDQHDQ2 Instead, at least so far as we know, the dramatist gleaned impressions of Venice from the texts he consulted and from conversations with friends and acquaintances who had visited the famed city. Using bits and pieces of information to craft Othello, in particular, Shakespeare created a representation of Venice. Presumably this representation was calculated to appeal to the audience he knew, drawing upon their prejudices and cultural memories. References to the ‘myth of Venice’ as a well-ordered state would likely have resonated not just with those who had read Lewes Lewkenor’s translation of Gasparo Contarini’s The Commonwealth and Government of Venice,3 but with those who knew of the city’s reputation for good government. Brabantio’s indignant response to the brawling below his window, ‘This is Venice: / My house is not a grange’ (1.1.105–6), highlights the city’s insistence on civil order. Shakespeare’s Act 1, scene 3 before the Doge and Venetian Senate with its fair and thoughtful sifting of testimony from Brabantio, Othello and Desdemona underscores Venice’s reputation as a location where justice is meted fairly to all petitioners. Shakespeare’s text also highlights the opposition of Venice and the Ottoman Empire. Othello is sent to defend Cyprus from the threat of a Turkish takeover, and throughout the play, the characters repeatedly reference the ‘Turks.’ To ‘turn Turk,’ as Othello suggests in the aftermath of the drunken brawl of Act 2, scene 2,

1 Quotations from Shakespeare’s Othello are taken from the Oxford edition, ed. Michael Neill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). In citations from early modern texts I have modernized the usage of i, j, u, and v for the reader’s convenience. 2 See Shaul Bassi and Alberto Toso Fei, Shakespeare in Venice: Exploring the City with Shylock and Othello (Treviso: Elzeviro, 2007), for an overview of what Shakespeare would have experienced had he, indeed, visited late sixteenth-century Venice. 3 Gasparo Contarini, The Commonwealth and Government of Venice, trans. Lewes Lewkenor (London, 1599; reprinted Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum; New York: Da Capo Press, 1969).

20

Visions of Venice in Shakespeare

is to reject Venetian rationality and succumb to heathenish barbarism.4 Such phrases were shorthand references, distinguishing the good guys from the bad guys in ways the audience would have understood. 6SHFL¿FUHIHUHQFHVWR9HQLFHJRQGRODVWKH'XNHLQ&RXQFLOWKH6HQDWH DQGWR the underlying Turkish threat that moves Othello from Venice to Cyprus – details, which have frequently been noted in Othello commentaries – seem to lend the play a Manichean pattern, opposing virtuous Venetian Christians against barbaric Ottoman Turks. At the same time, although the play’s notorious villain has an Iberian name, he speaks as a Venetian and his work of destruction comes from within. Shakespeare’s technique, here as in other plays, is to reinforce audience expectations and simultaneously undercut them. Such contradictions frequently occur in his representation of racial or cultural others: Aaron in Titus Andronicus, Shylock in The Merchant of Venice, and, of course, Othello himself. In Othello, what is true of the dramatist’s treatment of characters – the toying with audience stereotypes and expectations – is equally true of his representation of Venice and Cyprus, settings that had strong cultural and geopolitical associations for many in his audience. In a change from his major source, Shakespeare deliberately situated his play in Venice during the period of its Cyprus wars. Giraldi Cinthio had set his tale of a jealous Moorish captain and his wife on Cyprus, sometime before his collection of stories was printed in 1565. At that time Venice included Cyprus in its sprawling Mediterranean Empire. Cinthio explains, ‘It happened that the Venetian lords made a change in the forces that they used to maintain in Cyprus; and they chose the Moor as Commandant of the soldiers whom they sent there.’5 Cinthio makes no mention of a Turkish threat because at the time he was writing there was no Ottoman crisis. Venice had governed the island since 1470, and it wasn’t until 1569 (four years after the publication of Cinthio’s Hecatommiti) that the Ottoman Sultan Selim the Second, vexed by Christian pirates using Cyprus as a haven for their depredations on Turkish shipping, demanded that the Venetians turn over control of the island to him. In contrast, Shakespeare begins his Senate scene (Act 1, scene 3 of Othello) ZLWK&\SUXVXQGHUDWWDFN:KHQWKH6HQDWHUHFHLYHVUHSRUWVWKDWWKH7XUNLVKÀHHW is on the way to attack Venetian outposts, they initially think the target is Cyprus; then a messenger from Signior Angelo claims they head for Rhodes; the second PHVVHQJHUUHSRUWVWKDWWZRÀHHWVKDYHMRLQHGDQGQRZVDLOWRZDUG&\SUXV7KH KXUO\EXUO\RIPHVVHQJHUV¶FRQÀLFWLQJUHSRUWVFRQYH\VDVHQVHRILPPLQHQWFULVLV 4 See Daniel Vitkus, Turning Turk: English Theater and the Multicultural Mediterranean, 1570–1630 (New York: Palgrave, 2003), passim. 5 Giovanni Battista Giraldi Cinthio, Gli Hecatommiti cit. in Geoffrey Bullough (ed.), Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, vol. 7 (London: Routledge, 1973), p. 242. For Cinthio’s novella as a source for Othello see Daria Perocco’s chapter ‘Venice, Shakespeare and the Italian novella,’ pp. 33–46 and Karina Attar’s chapter ‘Genealogy of a Character: A Reading of Giraldi’s Moor,’ pp. 47–64 in this volume.

Supersubtle Venetians

21

Commentators generally agree that Signior Angelo’s name is taken from Angelo Soriano, the commander of the Venetian navy and frequent bearer of messages between the Turks and Venetians.6 ,Q WKHVH ÀHHWLQJ PRPHQWV 6KDNHVSHDUH VHWV KLVWUDJHG\GXULQJ±DWWKHEHJLQQLQJRI9HQLFH¶VIRXU\HDUFRQÀLFWZLWK Ottoman forces that was marked by the loss of Cyprus, the establishment of a Holy League with Spain and the Papacy, and the battle of Lepanto, ending in 1574 with the signing of a separate peace between Venice and the Sultan Selim II. Although E.A.J. Honigmann argued in his edition for the Third Arden Series that Shakespeare composed Othello sometime during 1601–1602, most scholars DJUHH WKDW WKH OLNHO\ GDWH RI FRPSRVLWLRQ LV  ZLWK WKH ¿UVW SHUIRUPDQFHV occurring sometime in 1604.7 Sparked by his new position as a King’s Man after the accession of James I, Shakespeare would have been aware of the new sovereign’s interest in the Battle of Lepanto8 and of the poem James had written to celebrate the Christian victory, which was reprinted in 1603 to capitalize on public interest in anything concerning James. Certainly the Kentish schoolmaster Richard Knolles was cognizant of royal interests, for he dedicated his mammoth folio – another putative source for Othello – The Generall Historie of the Turkes, published in 1603 – to King James; ‘with your learned Muse,’ he wrote, you adorned ‘and set forth the greatest and most glorious victorie that ever was by any the Christian confederate princes obtained against these Othoman Kings or Emperors.’9 Several details of Shakespeare’s Act 1, scene 3 convey information also found in Knolles’s lengthy account of the Cyprus wars, particularly the Senate’s original LQGHFLVLRQDVWRZKHWKHUWKH7XUNLVKÀHHWZDVERXQGIRU&\SUXVRUIRU5KRGHV Knolles recounts that Mustapha Bassa (Lala Mustafa) ‘together with Haly Bassa DQGWKHUHVWRIWKHÀHHWGHSDUWHGIURP&2167$17,123/(WKHVL[DQGWZHQWLHWKRI May, and at the RHODES met with Piall [Piali Bassa] as he had before appointed.’ .QROOHVFRQWLQXHVZLWKDGHVFULSWLRQRIWKHÀHHWZKLFKFRQVLVWHGRIJDOOH\V µZLWKGLYHUVRWKHUYHVVHOVSUHSDUHGIRUWKHWUDQVSRUWDWLRQRIKRUVHVZLWKWKLVÀHHW

6

Angelus Sorianus is mentioned in Richard Knolles, General Historie of the Turkes (London: 1603), pp. 839, 891. Bullough also notes that the text’s reference in 1.3.45 to Marcos Luccicos, who is in Florence but must be informed of the news, has no resonance with Knolles, but that a ‘“Marco Luchese” owned an Italian ordinary in London in Shakespeare’s day’ (p. 213). Was this ‘product placement’ Shakespeare’s way of paying his bill? 7 Honigmann’s dating of the play rules out any consultation on Shakespeare’s part with Richard Knolles’s Generall Historie of the Turkes, which was published in 1603 (but might have circulated in manuscript somewhat earlier, albeit not as early as 1601). +RQLJPDQQ¶V LQWURGXFWLRQ DGPLWV WKDW µ6KDNHVSHDUH LGHQWL¿HG WKH 7XUNV DV WKH WKUHDW WR Cyprus’ (Othello, ed. E.A.J. Honigmann, The Arden Shakespeare, Third Series [Walton-onThames: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1997], p. 11), but argues that the details are sketchy; KHPDNHVQRVSHFL¿FFRQQHFWLRQWRWKH&\SUXVZDUV 8 For a lively account of the battle of Lepanto and the wars of Cyprus, see Hugh Bicheno, Crescent and Cross: The Battle of Lepanto 1571 (London: Cassell, 2003). 9 Knolles, Sig. A3r.

Visions of Venice in Shakespeare

22

Mustapha kept on his course for CYPRUS.’10 In Shakespeare’s Act 1, scene 3, the 6HQDWH LQLWLDOO\ UHFHLYHV FRQÀLFWLQJ UHSRUWV RI WKH QXPEHU RI7XUNLVK VKLSV EXW VHWWOHVRQWKHVDPH¿JXUH 7KHVHVSHFL¿FUHIHUHQFHVUHSHDWHGO\FLWHGLQFRPPHQWDU\QRWHVWRHGLWLRQVRI Othello, are well known and – Honigmann aside – most commentators readily accept Knolles as a source. They suggest that Shakespeare consulted Knolles’s account of the Cyprus wars either in manuscript or soon after it was published, and that in his usual eclectic method of composition, he chose to place a tragedy based on Cinthio within that historical and geopolitical framework. His motivation may indeed have been to cater to his new patron, King James’s interest in the battle of Lepanto.11 Or, as Geoffrey Bullough argues, he may have wanted to dignify his hero and give his story greater political import.12%XWZKDWVSHFL¿FDOO\ZRXOGWKDWLPSRUWEH" My previous work on Othello13 assumed that the tragedy’s political impact VWHPPHGIURPLWVVLWXDWLRQZLWKLQWKHJOREDOFRQÀLFWEHWZHHQWKHµ7XUN¶PHDQLQJ the Ottoman Empire that controlled most of the eastern Mediterranean, and the ‘Christian,’ represented in the play by Venice, a bastion against the perceived depredations of Islamic military might. Cyprus, the easternmost outpost of Venice’s IDUÀXQJHPSLUHZDVFDXJKWEHWZHHQ2WWRPDQ7XUNDQG9HQHWLDQ&KULVWLDQLWV location meant that the Venetian rule of law could be easily subverted. Yet Venice’s geopolitical position in the sixteenth-century Mediterranean was much more complex than this simple pattern would allow. Venice maintained a substantial presence, both diplomatic and mercantile, in Istanbul14; the Republic frequently negotiated trading agreements with the Ottoman Empire, and within Venice itself, Islamic Turks mingled freely with Christian Europeans. Although the narratives that circulated throughout Europe in the aftermath of the Christian naval victory at Lepanto underscored the ineluctable opposition of Turk and European, real life alliances frequently shifted, and in many cases, Venice seemed more allied with the Ottomans than the rest of Europe. To understand the assumptions and associations audiences brought to Shakespeare’s plays – and upon which he no doubt capitalized – we have to go beyond traditional source studies that tend to identify snippets of borrowed material. For the purposes of this essay, I will re-examine Richard Knolles’s 60-page account of the Cyprus wars, a substantial section of The General Historie of the Turks, which we know Shakespeare consulted. Knolles’s massive narrative 10

Knolles, p. 846. Emrys Jones argues the connection between James’s Lepanto and Shakespeare’s tragedy in ‘“Othello”, “Lepanto” and the Cyprus Wars,’ Shakespeare Survey 21 (1969): pp. 47–52, but he pays scant attention to the situation on Cyprus. 12 Bullough, 7:214. 13 See my Othello: A Contextual History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), esp. chapter 1. 14 See Eric R. Dursteler, Venetians in Constantinople: Nation, Identity and Coexistence in the Early Modern Mediterranean (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 2006), esp. pp. 1–27. 11

Supersubtle Venetians

23

provided not simply a few details for the opening of Shakespeare Act 1, scene 3; read in full, his commentary offers an astute analysis of the events leading up to and following the loss of Cyprus. A careful reading of Knolles’s account of the Cyprus wars may also tell us something about the expectations of Shakespeare’s audience. The Generall Historie may have been well known to its literate and more well-to-do members, and that familiarity, in turn, may have shaped a more complicated response to the tragedy than common folk knowledge about the cruel and barbarous Turk. After its initial publication in 1603, The Generall HistorieZHQWWKURXJK¿YHVXEVHTXHQWHGLWLRQV supplemented by other writers, and the condition of extant copies suggests that it was well read.15$W¿UVWJODQFH.QROOHVVHHPVWRWRH-DPHV¶VQHJDWLYHOLQHRQWKH Turks. Matthew Dimmock argues that Knolles’s ‘authoritative and antagonistic UHÀHFWLRQXSRQ³WKHVFRXUJHRI*RGDQGSUHVHQWWHUURURIWKHZRUOG«WKXQGHULQJ out nothing but still bloud and warre” seems … to denote the closure of a moment of Anglo-Ottoman interaction and its complex of associated representations,’16 and establish a clear-cut binary between savage Turk and civilized Christian. This FRQFOXVLRQZRXOGEHMXVWL¿HGLIEDVHGVLPSO\RQWKHIURQWPDWWHUDQGWKHFRQFOXGLQJ essay, Discourse of the Greatnesse of the Turkish Empire, which frame the treatise in accord with James I’s anti-Turk prejudices. But inside this scaffolding Knolles chronicles the lives of 13 Ottoman sultans, highlighting their admirable qualities as well as their stereotypical cruelty. Linda McJannet’s meticulous study of Knolles’s use of eastern, particularly Turkish, sources demonstrates that the Generall Historie is often comparatively even-handed, granting ‘the Turks their valor, their military excellence, and the “order” (in several senses) of their state.’17 Most important here, within Knolles’s lengthy description of the Cyprus wars, alongside his excoriation of Turkish atrocities, we see a nuanced and complicated analysis of Mediterranean geopolitics, including extended explanations of diplomatic maneuvering within the League and strategic discussions in the Venetian Senate, which in ways – some REYLRXVEXWRWKHUVTXLWHVXEWOH±PD\KDYHLQÀXHQFHG6KDNHVSHDUH¶VWUHDWPHQWRI Cinthio’s sordid story, especially his representation of Venice. *** It is hardly surprising that Selim II wanted the Venetians out of Cyprus. Located DWWKHHDVWHUQHQGRIWKH0HGLWHUUDQHDQVPDFNLQWKH2WWRPDQVSKHUHRILQÀXHQFH the island was a thorn in the Sultan’s side. From the port of Famagusta Venetian ships could harass Turkish shipping. In letters written to the Doge early in 1570, Selim claimed, according to Knolles, 15 See Linda McJannet, The Sultan Speaks: Dialogue in English Plays and Histories About the Ottoman Turks (New York: Palgrave, 2006), p. 119. 16 Matthew Dimmock, New Turkes: Dramatizing Islam and the Ottomans in Early Modern England (Aldershot, Hampshire and Burlington: Ashgate, 2005), p. 201. 17 McJannet, p. 140.

Visions of Venice in Shakespeare

24

That the Venetians had in warlike manner entred into the frontiers of his empire in DALMATIA, and there had done great harme; that they had put to death certaine Turkish pirats whom they had taken alive; that their island of CYPRUS was an harbour for the pirats of the West, and that from thence they robbed his peaceable countries; and surprised his subjects travelling that way for devotion unto the temple of MECHA, or otherwise about their affaires.18

Selim demanded that Venice yield Cyprus to him or he would take it by force. So began what Knolles describes as a ‘bloudie tragedie’ enacted upon the stage of Cyprus.19 The Venetians called upon the Christian princes of Europe for aid, but only Philip II of Spain and Pope Pius V actually committed ships and men. Knolles reports the view of many Venetian Senators that Philip delayed because he preferred to have the Turks tied down in the eastern Mediterranean so they would be less likely to menace his holdings in the west. Whether or not this is indeed the case, Ottoman forces had the capital city of Nicosia under siege before a relief expedition could be organized and, on 9 September 1570, the city fell. Knolles bemoans that ‘There was not in the citie any valiant or renowmed captaine, who as the danger of the time required, should have taken upon him the charge; neither any strong armie in the island to oppose against the enemie.’20 Without the leadership of a warlike OthelloW\SH1LFRVLDWKHLQODQGFDSLWDOFLW\RI&\SUXVZKLFKKDGQRWEHHQIRUWL¿HGZDV doomed. Despite pleas for mercy, at least as Knolles describes the event, the Turks spared none: and having slaine such as they found abroad in the streets, brake into the houses, where they made havocke of all things: yong babes were violently taken out of the armes of their mothers, virgins were shamefully ravished, and honest matrones before their husbands faces dispightfully abused, churches stained with bloud, for in the citie was slaine that day foureteene thousand eight hundred three score and six persons.21

3KLOLS¶VLOOHJLWLPDWHEURWKHU'RQ-RKQRI$XVWULDDVVHPEOHGDÀHHWLQWKHVXPPHU of 1570, but he was reluctant to commit his forces without certainty of success. In the meantime negotiations to establish a league among Philip II, Pope Pius V, DQG9HQLFHFRQWLQXHGEXWWKH\ZHUHQRW¿QDOL]HGXQWLO0D\WRRODWHIRU the relief of Cyprus. The League was beset by tactical quarrels, and as a result, µWKLV PLJKWLH ÀHHW ZKLFK KDG DOO WKLV 6RPPHU ¿OOHG WKH 0HGLWHUUDQHDQ ZLWK DOO the countries thereabout with the expectation of some great matter,’ as Knolles observes, ‘was by the discord of the Generals dissolved, having done nothing at all worth the remembrance.’22 18 19 20 21 22

Knolles, p. 841. Knolles, p. 843. Knolles, p. 847. Knolles, p. 852. Knolles, p. 854.

Supersubtle Venetians

25

,QFRQWUDVWWR1LFRVLDWKHKDUERUFLW\RI)DPDJXVWDKDGVWURQJIRUWL¿FDWLRQV and it held out until 19 May 1571. According to Knolles, the Ottoman forces promised the Venetians mercy, but once they surrendered, the Turks treacherously killed or enslaved all Christians on the island. The Turks, reports Knolles in grisly detail, tore off the ears of the commander Bragadin and tortured him ‘with the most extreamest kind of torture that tyrannie itselfe could have devised: for GHVSRLOHGRIKLVMHZHOVDQGDWWLUHDQGDEDVNHWOD\HGXSRQKLVVKRXOGHUV¿OOHG with earth, he was enforced oftentimes to carrie the same to repaire the rampiers that were overthrowne.’ After treating Bragadin despicably, ‘the forsworne Bassa, not onely forgetfull of all humanitie, but enraged rather with extreame cruelty, caused that noble and woorthie Bragadinus to be set in a chaire, and his skin to be ÀDLQHRIIIURPKLPTXLFN¶7KHQWKH\VWXIIHGKLVVNLQZLWKFKDIIDQGKDGLWKXQJ up at the yard arm, ‘so to bee carried about: not so true a trophie of his victorie, DVDWHVWLPRQLHRIKLVSHU¿GLRXVDQG7XUNLVKFUXHOWLH¶µ7KLV¶.QROOHVFRQFOXGHV ‘was the fatall ruine of CYPRUS, one of the most fruitfull and beautifull islands of the Mediterranean.’23 To be sure, Knolles dwells on Turkish atrocities, but he also assigns some responsibility for the carnage to the European alliance, whose disorganization and delay guaranteed the fall of Cyprus. Knolles recounts in some detail the League’s complex balancing act between Spain’s geopolitical interests in the western Mediterranean and Venetian calls for relief in the east. While the European powers quarreled, Ottoman forces ravished Venetian outposts along the coast of Dalmatia. At long last, on 7 October 1571, 'RQ-RKQZDVUHDG\WR¿JKW7KHRSSRVLQJÀHHWVPHWLQWKH*XOIRI&RULQWKDQG HQJDJHGLQ¿HUFH¿JKWLQJ$OWKRXJKWKH%DWWOHRI/HSDQWRDVLWZDVODWHUNQRZQ lasted only 5 hours, the Christian victory was decisive. ‘The battell was like unto WKH HEELQJ DQG ÀRZLQJ RI WKH VHD¶ UHFRXQWV .QROOHV µ7KULVH WKH 7XUNHV ZHUH driven even unto the maine mast, and thrise strengthened with new supplies, they with great slaughter repulsed the Christians backe againe.’24 He continues: Divers and doubtfull was the whole face of the battell; as fortune offered unto HYHU\PDQKLVHQHPLHVRKHIRXJKW«0DQ\¿JKWVZHUHLQVXQGULHSODFHVVHHQH mingled together. Some gallies whiles they run to stemme others, are themselves E\RWKHUVVWHPPHG6RPHZKLFK\RXZRXOGWKLQNHZHUHÀ\LQJDZD\IDOOLQJE\ fortune upon one victorious gallie or other, suddenly take them. … All was full of terrour, errour, sorrow, and confusion.25

)OXVKZLWKVXFFHVVWKH/HDJXH¶VÀHHWUHWLUHGIRUWKHZLQWHUEXWLWVSDUWLHVSURPLVHG each other that they would continue the campaign against the Turk every summer. The summer of 1572 demonstrated, however, that such talk was mere bravado. 'RQ-RKQNHSWKLVÀHHWLQWKHZHVWHUQ0HGLWHUUDQHDQZKHUHKHFODLPHGLWZDV needed to protect Spain. When he arrived in the east late in the summer, the 23 24 25

Knolles, p. 869. Knolles, pp. 878–9. Knolles, p. 880.

Visions of Venice in Shakespeare

26

Venetians urged immediate action. Little happened. As winter approached, reports Knolles, ‘the Spaniards were so resolutely set downe for their departure, that not only without the consent of the Venetians, but even without their privitie, their departing was resolved upon, and secret commandement given to the master of the gallies.’26 The Venetians complained, but to no avail. Knolles sympathizes with the Venetians and dwells at great length on the perils of dissension, observing that, ‘So the expectation of great matters to have been this yeare done, came to nought but vanished into smoake: and nothing performed worth so long a discourse, more WKDQWRVHHZLWKZKDWGLI¿FXOWLHJUHDWDFWLRQVDUHPDQDJHGZKHUHLQWKHKDQGVRI many great ones are required.’27 Frustrated by the failure of the League to actively counter the Turkish threat, the Venetian government began to reconsider its position. ‘The Venetians,’ Knolles UXHIXOO\FRPPHQWVµHQWDQJOHGZLWKVRPDQ\GLI¿FXOWLHVZHUHHYHQDWWKHLUZLWV end, and day by day the Senat sat from the rising of the Sunne unto the going downe of the same, consulting how all these mischiefes were to be remedied.’28 He continues, long were the discourses and effectual the persuasions, that the Venetians had amongst themselves, to induce one another, and in all generall more circumspectly to consider, not onely what had already passed, or was presently in hand; but also right warily to foresee, what would be the course and what the event of a matter so important; and betimes to breake off the confederation, which they had alwayes found to have stood them in small stead.29

The Venetian Senate’s reputation as a deliberative body was well known, but such hints from Knolles may have induced Shakespeare’s decision to showcase its PHWKRGRIVLIWLQJWKURXJKFRQÀLFWLQJPHVVDJHVDQGWHVWLPRQ\LQ$FWVFHQH A peace treaty between Venice and Selim was negotiated on 11 February 1574 DQG FRQ¿UPHG E\ WKH 6HQDWH WKH IROORZLQJ$SULO PXFK WR WKH FKDJULQ RI RWKHU members of the League who bemoaned a separate peace signed without their knowledge or permission. Despite occasional rhetorical bursts of Turk bashing, Knolles’s 60-page narrative of the Cyprus wars, as these citations demonstrate, provided a thoughtful account of the complexity of Mediterranean geopolitical relationships during this period. Shakespeare may not have read every word Knolles wrote, but it is GLI¿FXOWWREHOLHYHWKDWVXFKDQDYLGDEVRUEHURIQDUUDWLYHZRXOGQRWKDYHEHHQ intrigued by this compelling and ‘bloudie tragedie.’

26 27 28 29

Knolles, p. 900. Knolles, p. 901. Knolles, p. 889. Knolles, p. 903.

Supersubtle Venetians

27

*** Whether or not the Cyprus wars were a watershed in the history of Venice – I leave it to historians to determine that – they were perceived as a major transition in Venice’s identity in early modern geographical treatises that circulated in England. In Andrew Borde’s The Fyrst Boke of the Introduction of Knowledge, a survey of the world’s cultural practices published in England during Mary Tudor’s reign, Venice had been represented as a major military power: Venys is one of the chefest portes of al the world[;] the Venycions hath great provision of war for they have ever in a redines timber readie make to make a hondred gale[y]s or more[;] at a time thei have al maner of artillery in a redynes. They have great possessions … with other Isles & portes cites & landes [that] be under their dominion.30

To Borde, Venice was not simply a mercantile center but also a formidable military power. Some 50 years later, the perception of Venice, at least in texts circulating in England, had changed. In 1603 Lazzaro Soranzo’s The Ottoman, translated by Abraham Hartwell, maintained that the state of Venice, ‘accounting peace to be the end wherat, it shooteth, it should seeme that the people is timorous and cowardly, and by their ancient ordinances and customes, do never prepare themselves to war, but when they are drawne unto it by force … as it fell out with them for the kingdome of Cyprus.’31 In the same year Giovanni Botero’s An historical description of the most famous kingdoms and Commonweales in the Worlde claimed that the Venetians µPDLQWDLQHWKHLUHVWDWHE\WUHDWLHVRISHDFHE\WUDI¿NHDQGSUHVHQWVUDWKHUWKHQ by open hostilitie, providing very strongly for their places exposed to danger, and avoiding all charges and hazard of warre, yea refusing no conditions, if not dishonourable, rather than willing to trie their fortune in battell.’32 John Speed’s Prospect of the Most Famous Parts of the World, ¿UVWSXEOLVKHGLQVXPVLW up: ‘The Common-wealth of Venice … is a large Territorie, and is, now as famous for state policie as it hath been heretofore glorious for warlike achievements.’33 Venice’s loss of Cyprus and subsequent peace treaty with Selim surely contributed to the perception that Venice had abandoned military confrontation

30

Andrew Borde, The Fyrst Boke of the Introduction of Knowledge (London, n.d. [1555?]), I2v. 31 Lazzaro Soranzo, The Ottoman, trans. Abraham Hartwell (London: John Windet, 1603), 47a. 32 Giovanni Botero, An historical description of the most famous kingdoms and Commonweales in the Worlde (London, 1603), p. 60. 33 John Speed, A Prospect of the Most Famous Parts of the World (London: George Humble, 1631), p. 16.

Visions of Venice in Shakespeare

28

with the Ottomans and now depended on secret, even Machiavellian, diplomacy to maintain its commonwealth. The shift from military prowess to supersubtle maneuvering is, of course, the trajectory of Shakespeare’s Othello, and as Dimmock observes, the drama is ‘set against a well known background of Christian defeat and destruction.’34 In the WUDJHG\¶V¿UVWDFW9HQLFHUHOLHVRQWKHZDUOLNH2WKHOORWROHDGWKHLUIRUFHVDJDLQVW the Turk, who is bound for Cyprus. Othello is – for the purposes of Shakespeare’s play – Venice’s military might. Iago says as much in the opening scene, when he FRQ¿GHVWR5RGHULJRWKDW2WKHOORKDVEHHQFRPPLVVLRQHGIRUWKH&\SUXVZDUV ‘Another of his fathom they have none, to lead their business’ (1.1.151–2). Othello knows the ‘fortitude’ (in a line used by the Oxford English Dictionary to exemplify the obsolete meaning, ‘physical or structural strength,’ and perhaps also a pun RQIRUWL¿FDWLRQ RIWKHSODFHDQGDVWKH'XNHDI¿UPVLQ±WKHJHQHUDO opinion is that Othello is the safest choice to lead the island’s defense. $OWKRXJKWKH7XUNLVKÀHHWLVGLVSHUVHGLQWKHWHPSHVWWKDWEHJLQV$FWWKHSOD\¶V VHWWLQJ±DIRUWL¿HGKDUERURQ&\SUXVRVWHQVLEO\)DPDJXVWD±UHPDLQVXQGHUVLHJH Hence Othello’s anger in Act 2, scene 3 when a riot breaks out among his men: What, in a town of war Yet wild, the people’s hearts brim-full of fear, To manage private and domestic quarrel? In night, and on the court and guard of safety? ’Tis monstrous! (2.3.204–8)

Dissension among the Christians, as Knolles frequently reminds his reader, is the surest way to guarantee a Turkish victory. As the Commander of Venetian forces, Othello is understandably outraged that his Lieutenant should instigate a riot. Othello’s Act 3 shifts the focus to Iago’s insidious destruction of the Moor’s WUXVW LQ 'HVGHPRQD QRW VXUSULVLQJO\ WKH WUDJHG\¶V JHRSROLWLFDO UDPL¿FDWLRQV no longer take center stage. Lodovico’s arrival in Act 4, scene 1 indicates that Venetian concerns have not disappeared entirely. The government’s decision to remove Othello from command of the Cyprian fortress and put Cassio in his place is consistent with Venetian policy, which dictated that no foreign mercenary should remain in power once a particular military threat had passed lest he be tempted to use his forces to usurp governmental powers.35 He would be kept waiting, as Othello was when he courted Desdemona, until needed again. Othello’s denouement brings Venice to the fore again, leaving its forces in a precarious position. The person it depended upon to lead its forces against the Turk is dead; command of the Cyprian fortress is in the hands of Cassio, an LQH[SHULHQFHG RI¿FHU DQG WKH 7XUNLVK WKUHDW OXUNV EH\RQG WKH FLWDGHO¶V ZDOOV No wonder Lodovico will relate this heavy act with heavy heart to the Venetian state. Those in the original audience who were familiar with the history of the 34 35

Dimmock, p. 205. See Contarini, p. 131.

Supersubtle Venetians

29

&\SUXV ZDUV ZRXOG ¿QG DGGHG WUDJLF UHVRQDQFH LQ WKH NQRZOHGJH WKDW &\SUXV itself would soon fall, changing forever Venice’s international status. Furthermore, WKHUDPL¿FDWLRQVRIWKHIDOORI&\SUXVZHQWIDUEH\RQG9HQLFHEHFDXVHWKHHQVXLQJ Ottoman domination of the Adriatic coast threatened any European ship that sailed into the eastern Mediterranean. Shakespeare’s reading of Knolles might also have reinforced the dramatist’s LQWHUHVWLQWKHÀXLGLW\RILGHQWLW\:KDWKDSSHQVZKHQWKH9HQHWLDQ±ZKRLVQRWUHDOO\ a Venetian but a Moorish mercenary – turns Turk? Or is Iago, the master of deceit, the real Turk? Or the real Venetian? And what was it to be Venetian? Venice was the site of cultural exchange where European Christians of disparate nationalities traded with Jews and Turks. As Desdemona’s elopement with a ‘wheeling and extravagant stranger’ demonstrates, the aristocracy’s attempts to keep their bloodlines pure were not always successful. Moreover, as many commentators, most prominently Stephen Greenblatt, have argued,36 Othello’s identity is self-constructed. Racially LGHQWL¿HGDVD0RRUDIRUPHUVODYHSUHVXPDEO\DFRQYHUWWR&KULVWLDQLW\DQGD PHUFHQDU\IRUWKH9HQHWLDQVWDWH2WKHOORGRHVQ¶WVTXDUHO\¿WLQDQ\ZHOOGH¿QHG category. He is, after all, the Moor of Venice and, rejecting racial and national LGHQWLWLHVKHFUDIWVDUROHIRUKLPVHOIDVWKH&KULVWLDQFUXVDGHU¿JKWLQJDJDLQVWWKH 7XUN+LVPRQRORJEHIRUHKLVVXLFLGHVXJJHVWVD¿QDOUHFRJQLWLRQWKDWKHLVERWK Turk and crusader. Rather than resolving the ‘ambiguity that haunts the play,’ as Dimmock suggests, Othello’s death raises as many questions as it answers.37 Is he a noble hero – the warlike Othello – or is he cruel and murderous Turk? Iago’s identity is also multi-layered. Ostensibly he is Venetian born. He refers WR&DVVLRDVD)ORUHQWLQHFODLPVDI¿QLW\ZLWK5RGHULJRDVDFRXQWU\PDQDQGWHOOV Roderigo that he is an old campaigner who has fought at Rhodes and Cyprus. At the same time, Iago’s name suggests the Spanish killer of Moors, St. Jago. $VKHWHOOVXVKLPVHOIµ,DPQRWZKDW,DP¶ ,QWKHSOD\¶V¿QDOPRPHQWV he seems more Turk – or perhaps more devil – than Christian. In addition, his fate is left ambiguous. Lodovico promises that Iago will be taken back to Venice to be tortured, but nothing is said about his ultimate fate. Could the wily villain survive to deceive someone else? Othello’s destruction by a Venetian villain breaks down the ‘clash of FLYLOL]DWLRQV¶PRGHORIFRQÀLFWEHWZHHQ7XUNDQG&KULVWLDQDQGVXJJHVWVWKDWWKHUH is little substantial difference between Turk and Venetian. Venice could identify with Christian Europe when it wished, representing itself in art and rhetoric in opposition to the Turk, but located as it was on the frontier between Christian Europe and Selim’s Ottoman Empire, Venice broke down the binary between East and West. As historian Eric R. Dursteler contends, ‘In the early modern era, the Venetian Empire was uniquely situated to function as both boundary and cultural middle ground, “a place of transition” in which people from throughout the 36 See Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-fashioning from More to Shakespeare (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1980), pp. 222–57. 37 See Dimmock, p. 205.

Visions of Venice in Shakespeare

30

Mediterranean and from every corner of Europe came together.’ In its diplomatic LQLWLDWLYHVµWKH6LJQRULDZDVLQYROYHGLQDGLI¿FXOWDQGVHQVLWLYH³JDPHRIEDODQFH´ and “equivocation,” trying to play one power off the other.’38 Shakespeare’s greatest expert in equivocation is, of course, the Venetian Iago. In his desperate quest to gain wealth and social status, is he not a true Venetian? Much of Othello’s theatrical power comes from the text’s uncanny ability to draw on stereotypes – racial, gender, cultural – and undercut them at the same time. Othello is and is not black; Desdemona is and is not obedient; Iago is and is not a devil; Venice is and is not ‘civilized;’ the Turk is the enemy without but also the enemy within. A close reading of Knolles’s account of the Cyprus wars creates similar ambiguities, albeit on an international scale: Don John is a valiant Admiral, but repeatedly appears UHOXFWDQW WR ¿JKW WKH &DWKROLF .LQJ 3KLOLS LV D VWURQJ DOO\ EXW RQO\ VXSSRUWV KLV own national interests; Sultan Selim is a vicious enemy but also a trading partner. Whatever particular details Shakespeare took from his reading of Knolles, he may also have absorbed a more complex world view that occasionally contradicted the General Historie¶VUKHWRULFDOÀRXULVKHVDJDLQVWWKHEDUEDURXV7XUN39 Whether or not he saw Othello’s fate as a synecdoche for early modern Mediterranean geopolitics in general and the Venetian shift from war to diplomacy in particular, the details he added to Cinthio’s narrative set the story of a husband and wife within a larger context, moving his drama away from melodrama toward genuine tragedy. *** Geoffrey Bullough, who knew Shakespeare’s sources better than anyone else, contended that although Shakespeare wrote fast, he prepared his ground well, and while hatching a plot or considering how to add details to a major source, he read URXQGKLVVXEMHFWPD\EHLQDGHVXOWRU\ZD\EXWZLWKDQH\HIRUWKHXVHIXOWULÀH often dipping into books published in the last few years and recalling what he KDGORQJVLQFHUHDGFRQÀDWLQJPDWHULDOIURPPDQ\SODFHV40

38

Dursteler, pp. 2–3, 5. Recent criticism of early modern English attitudes toward the Ottoman Empire concludes that there existed a more nuanced understanding of Turkish culture and politics than previous studies, including my own, realized. See esp. Richmond Barbour, Before Orientalism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Jonathan Burton, 7UDI¿FDQG Turning: Islam and English Drama, 1579–1624 (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2005); Dimmock, New Turkes; McJannet, The Sultan Speaks; Nabil Matar, Turks, Moors and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999); Benedict S. Robinson, Islam and Early Modern English Literature: The Politics of Romance from Spenser to Milton (New York: Palgrave, 2007); and Vitkus, Turning Turk. 40 Bullough, 7:211. 39

Supersubtle Venetians

31

This image of Shakespeare as a sort of early modern internet surfer is most DSSHDOLQJ EXW LW GRHVQ¶W ¿W ZLWK P\ FRQWHQWLRQ WKDW 6KDNHVSHDUH UHDG .QROOHV – at least the section on the Cyprus wars – carefully and at length. Shakespeare FOHDUO\ DVVXPHG WKDW WKH UHIHUHQFHV WR WKH 7XUNLVK ÀHHW DW 5KRGHV WKH FLWDGHO on Cyprus, and the turban’d Turk had some purchase with his audience. If they thought of Lepanto and Christian victory, must they not also have remembered the loss of Cyprus and Christian defeat? Shakespeare’s decision to set Othello within the context of the Cyprus wars – at least to those in the audience familiar with Knolles’s Generall Historie – helped to shape a representation of the Venetian Empire that was simultaneously sympathetic and damning. Works Cited Barbour, Richmond. Before Orientalism. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Bassi, Shaul, and Alberto Toso Fei. Shakespeare in Venice: Exploring the City with Shylock and Othello. Treviso: Elzeviro, 2007. Bicheno, Hugh. Crescent and Cross: The Battle of Lepanto, 1571. London: Cassell, 2003. Borde, Andrew. The Fyrst Boke of the Introduction of Knowledge. London, n.d. [1555?]. Botero, Giovanni. An historical description of the most famous kingdoms and Commonweales in the Worlde. London, 1603. Bullough, Geoffrey (ed.). Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare. Vol. 7. London: Routledge, 1973. Burton, Jonathan. 7UDI¿F DQG 7XUQLQJ ,VODP DQG (QJOLVK 'UDPD ±. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2005. Contarini, Gasparo. The Commonwealth and Government of Venice. Translated by Lewes Lewkenor. London, 1599. Reprinted Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum; New York: Da Capo Press, 1969. Dimmock, Matthew. New Turkes: Dramatizing Islam and the Ottomans in Early Modern England. Aldershot, Hampshire and Burlington: Ashgate, 2005. Dursteler, Eric R. Venetians in Constantinople: Nation, Identity, and Coexistence in the Early Modern Mediterranean. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 2006. Greenblatt, Stephen. Renaissance Self-fashioning from More to Shakespeare. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1980. Jones, Emrys. ‘“Othello”, “Lepanto” and the Cyprus Wars.’ Shakespeare Survey 21 (1969): 47–52. Knolles, Richard. Generall Historie of the Turkes. London,1603. McJannet, Linda. The Sultan Speaks: Dialogue in English Plays and Histories About the The Ottoman Turks. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Matar, Nabil. Turks, Moors and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999.

32

Visions of Venice in Shakespeare

Robinson, Benedict. S. Islam and Early Modern English Literature: The Politics of Romance from Spenser to Milton. New York: Palgrave, 2007. Shakespeare, William. Othello. Edited by E.A.J. Honigmann. The Arden Shakespeare (Third Series). Walton-on-Thames: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1997. ———. Othello. Edited by Michael Neill. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Soranzo, Lazzaro. The Ottoman. Translated by Abraham Hartwell. London: John Windet, 1603. Speed, John. A Prospect of the Most Famous Parts of the World. London: George Humble, 1631. Vaughan, Virginia Mason. Othello: A Contextual History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Vitkus, Daniel. Turning Turk: English Theater and the Multicultural Mediterranean, 1570–1630. New York: Palgrave, 2003.

Chapter 2

Venice, Shakespeare and the Italian Novella Daria Perocco

,QWKHWH[WVSXEOLVKHGWRZDUGVWKHHQGRIWKHVL[WHHQWKFHQWXU\LWLVQRWGLI¿FXOWWR see the main and oft-repeated conviction in Venetian public historiography that Venice was the center of the world – its literary, political and commercial heart. Although by then this was no longer true, Venice has stayed in our imagination as the ideal city, where contradictions can happily rub along together. This makes LWDFLW\RIGUHDPVDXWRSLDIXO¿OOHGWKHIDVFLQDWLRQZLWKDOOWKDWLVLPSRVVLEOH and different turned into reality. This starts with its urban structure (which in WKHVL[WHHQWKFHQWXU\WRRNRQWKHFRPSOH[LRQZKLFKKDVQRZEHFRPHGH¿QLWLYH  where things happened that only later would become normal or customary in the rest of the world. It is not hard to imagine that this fame lies everywhere, fed by legends which the Venetian ambassadors, well used to celebrating the wonders of their homeland (and as a consequence celebrating their own selves), aided and abetted considerably.1 Elizabeth I felt the recognition on the part of the Serenissima Republic of her kingdom to be particularly important. She constantly requested that ambassadors be sent following a break caused by the ill-starred adventures of English politics. As the reputation of Venice as a mythical place can be found in historical works, we should not be surprised at the frequency with which works of the imagination refer to the myth; several novellas choose Venice as a unique and ideal setting for exceptional stories. In my chapter I shall try to prove how a number of Italian novellas set in Venice inspired Shakespeare with the charms of this city, leading KLPWRHPSKDVL]HLQFRPSDULVRQZLWKWKHQRYHOODVWKHLPSRUWDQFHDQGWKHÀDYRU of the Venetian setting in his plays. It is not strange, then, that beyond all literary writings that may constitute a source of inspiration, in Shakespeare and in other writers of the period we have the memory of that aura of fable surrounding the city. It is certainly important to pick out the individual sources which inspired the various works where Venice is present or plays a role, but it is of the highest consequence to remember what Italian culture meant in late sixteenth-century English culture, the importance of the name John Wolfe and the fact that he

1 Cfr. Gino Benzoni, ‘Introduzione,’ in Storici e politici veneti del Cinquecento e del Seicento, ed. Gino Benzoni and Tiziano Zanato (Milan-Naples: Ricciardi, 1982), pp. XV–XCVIII.

Visions of Venice in Shakespeare

34

published so many texts in Italian, including works by Venetian authors. As tradition goes, the proverb, quoted by Holofernes in Italian, in Love’s Labour’s Lost with the words ‘Venetia, Venetia, chi non ti vede non ti pretia’ (4.2.95–6) was taken directly from Florio himself, who was represented in Holofernes.2 I do not wish to dwell here on the spread of Italian culture but there is no escaping the reputation that things Italian (and in particular Venetian) enjoyed at this time. Not only do those favoring Italianization quote and draw on Italian texts but even an opponent of Italian ways such as Roger Ascham tells us in 1570 that London booksellers were so up-to-date on texts translated from Italian into English that they could easily satisfy any request.3 In 1598, Francis Meres in Palladis Tamia makes a comparison between English men of letters and those universally held to be classical;4 beyond the Greeks and the Romans, Italians are in great evidence (Boccaccio, Petrarca, Sannazaro, Ariosto, Bembo, and Bibbiena). England saw Italian as a stylistically complete language requiring understanding before being reproduced. The proof of this is in the numerous translations which Elizabethan culture can count on. Translating from Italian (that is to say from a language likened more and more to the great languages of culture) meant importing culturally successful mechanisms which had for a long time proved fruitful. Translations became so many training grounds where European languages gauged their ability to reach those stylistic and rhetorical goals already achieved by the original great languages. After the two dead classical languages came French and Italian, albeit some way behind. Europe conceived of Italian as a language rich in stylistic features which needed to be reproduced and re-worked in the language RIWKH¿QDOWUDQVODWLRQ7KLVLVSUREDEO\WKHUHDVRQ%RDLVWXDXZDVVRDQJHUHGE\ Bandello. The former, when translating some of the latter’s Historie tragiche (Tragic Histories), criticizes the fact that ‘sa phrase m’a semblé tant rude, ses termes impropres, ses propos tant mal liez et ses sentences tant maigres, que j’ay eu plus cher la refondre tout de neuf et la remettre en nouvelle forme … .’5 Bandello enjoyed widespread fame; his language does not follow the Tuscan patterns set 2

Frances A. Yates, John Florio. The Life of an Italian in Shakespeare’s England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1934), p. 335. See also p. 38. For the debated issue of Shakespeare’s knowing Italian, see Naseeb Shaheen, ‘Shakespeare’s Knowledge of Italian,’ Shakespeare Studies 47 (1994): pp. 161–9, as well as Mario Praz, ‘Shakespeare e l’Italia,’ in Caleidoscopio Shakespeariano (Bari: Adriatica, 1969), pp. 75–107. See also Jason Lawrence, ‘Who the devil taught thee so much Italian?’ Italian Language Learning and Literary Imitation in Early Modern England (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2005). 3 See Riccardo Drusi, ‘Traduzioni cinquecentesche dall’italiano nelle lingue europee,’ in Il Rinascimento italiano e l’Europa, vol. 2, Umanesimo ed educazione, ed. Gino Belloni and Riccardo Drusi (Costabissara: A. Colla, 2007), p. 436. 4 Francis Meres, Palladis Tamia: Wit’s Treasury (London: P. Short for Cuthbert Burbie, 1598). 5 ‘His turn of phrase seemed so uncouth, his terms so inappropriate, his ideas so badly connected, and his sentences so poor, that I thought it best to rewrite everything, and

Venice, Shakespeare and the Italian Novella

35

down by Bembo and indeed moves away from them through its harshness (the fear of being taken for a non-Tuscan because he spoke too Tuscan means he displays all his ‘Lombard’ nature). His language is courtly par excellence, the organization of his collection is not that of the Decameron, the very high number of tales (which could happily multiply as they were not structured unless on the basis of each single dedicatory letter) meant that anthologizing began in Italy, in Milan, when the author was still alive. However, the moralization inherent and deeply rooted in his writings made them most appealing to the French and English reading public. Matteo Bandello is an especially important author for us. Not only and not so much for the tragedies he inspired, perhaps with third-party intervention (and the chain Da Porto-Bandello-Boaistuau-Brooke comes straight to mind, being obviously fundamental to Romeo and Juliet) but rather, particularly for his tragic writings, because he is an author who has been copied most and most often in individual moments, single developments or even single phrases as well as in those plots enjoying prominence within the story.6 The fact that the tragic tales in SDUWLFXODUZHUHWDNHQXSE\RWKHUVZDVMXVWL¿HGERWKE\DWDVWHIRUKRUURUSUHYDOHQW at the time and also because his comic tales, which did not include the cathartic hilarity of the practical joke and the deceptions of love, were forced into patterns which were extremely limited and repetitive in their narrative structure. The presence in France of the author in the latter part of his life as the Bishop of Agen may partially explain, again in terms of the tales with a tragic ending, the number of translations and also his French success; the fourth part of his tales had seen its inception in Lyon where, still with the same publisher, the partially censured French translation was printed.7 Out of the success of this series of translations came the following one from French into English with a date close to that of the original text. Certain tragical discourses of Bandello, translated into English by Geffraie Fenton, printed in London in 1567, is clear proof of this.8 Bandello is the source of 24 (if not 26, with two added whose source is uncertain) of the 101 tales which make up The Palace of Pleasure, a collection of tales translated into English by William Painter and published in 1566–67.9 put it in a new shape.’ Pierre Boaistuau, Histoires tragiques, édition critique publiée par Richard A. Carr (Paris: Nizet, 1977), p. 7. 6 For Da Porto and Bandello see Daria Perocco, La prima Giulietta (Bari: Palomar, 2008); Boaistuau, Histoires tragiques, and Arthur Brooke, Romeus and Juliet (London: R. Tattil, 1562). 7 Matteo Maria Bandello, La quarta parte de le Novelle del Bandello (Lyon: Alessandro Marsilii, 1573, Dernier volume des nouvelles de Bandel, 1577). 8 See Certain tragical discourses of Bandello translated into English by Geffraie Fenton anno 1597, with an introduction by Robert Langton Douglas (2 vols, London, David Nutt: 1898). 9 7KH¿UVWSDUWZDVSXEOLVKHGLQDQGWKHVHFRQGLQ$VKDGRFFXUUHGLQ ,WDO\ZLWK6WUDSDUROD¶VFROOHFWLRQWKHVXFFHVVRIWKH¿UVWYROXPHOHGWRWKHUDSLGSURGXFWLRQ of a second in order to satisfy the tastes of a public which had already ensured publishing success. See the edition The Palace of Pleasure. Elizabethan versions of Italian and French

36

Visions of Venice in Shakespeare

All in all, despite French accusations of poor style, it seems that Bandello stirred the Elizabethans. Joseph Jacobs, in the Introduction to the quoted edition, highlights how in reality Painter’s is the ‘earliest volume of prose translations from a modern language into English in the true Elizabethan period.’10 It is not just the appeal of ‘foreignness,’ despite its great strength in the literary world of the latter half of the sixteenth century, which drew the public towards the tragic, horror stories of Bandello: it was his uniqueness. As Jacob remarks, As a matter of fact, not a single one of the Elizabethan dramatists, as far as I know, was personally acquainted with Italy. This knowledge of Italian life and crime was almost entirely derived from the works of Painter and his school. If there had been anything corresponding to them dealing with the tragic aspects of English life, the Elizabethan dramatists would have been equally ready to tell of English vice and criminality. They used Holinshed and Fabyan readily enough for their ‘Histoires.’ They would have used an English Bandello with equal readiness had he existed. But an English Bandello could not have existed at a time when the English folk had not arrived at self-consciousness, and had besides no regular school of tale-tellers like the Italians.11

:KDW LV GLI¿FXOW DW WLPHV LQ WKH WUDQVODWLRQV LV ZRUNLQJ RXW ZKDW UHPDLQV RI the original style and what is left of the pure narrative plot. Take for example one of those pivotal scenes, of sure theatrical effect, which is made up of the trick of introducing surreptitiously a man into the house of the future bride and then have the future groom see him, in order to persuade him that his beloved has been unfaithful. Is this a rewriting of the episode of Ariodante and Ginevra12 or of the tale of Timbreo and Fenicia13 where, among other things, there appears one of the not uncommon ‘apparent deaths’ in Bandello’s work? This tale was translated into French by %HOOHIRUHVWZLWKVLJQL¿FDQWYDULDWLRQVFRPSDUHGWRWKHRULJLQDOWH[W14 Yet Ariosto too was translated, and Bandello also knew Ariosto. In this light, we can understand certain oversights and distortions of names as well as errors of interpretation appearing already in the titles of the tales and even committed by Painter himself. An analysis of Italian short-story writing and of its spread allows us to deduce a clear diversity of approach to the texts. The greatest philological problem lies in the fact that tale collections were considered in Italy to be a self-contained work novels from Boccaccio, Bandello, Cinthio, Straparola, Queen Margaret of Navarre, and others done into English by William Painter, now again edited for the fourth time by Joseph Jacobs (London: D. Nutt in the Strand, 1890). 10 Painter, pp. XXVII–XXVIII. 11 The Palace of Pleasure, p. XXX. 12 Ludovico Ariosto, Orlando furioso, canto V, ed. Lanfranco Caretti (Turin: Einaudi, 1966). 13 Matteo Maria Bandello, Novelle, part 1, tale 22. 14 François de Belleforest, Histoires tragiques, translation of Matteo M. Bandello, 7 vols (Paris, 1566–1583).

Venice, Shakespeare and the Italian Novella

37

which must not, on pain even of being misunderstood, be split up or separated from the contextual framework supporting them; in translation they can be broken XS DOWKRXJK ZLWK VRPH GLI¿FXOW\ DQG WKH RULJLQDO VWUXFWXUH RI WKH FROOHFWLRQ may be changed or lost. The case of La sfortunata morte di due infelicissimi amanti che l’uno di veleno e l’altro di dolore morirono, con varii accidenti is exemplary. The story of Romeo and Juliet had been written by Luigi Da Porto. A few years later Matteo Bandello rewrote it and turned it into an example of the negative consequence of passion. This most famous love story, which has moved generations, had in fact been written, in Bandello’s words, ‘perché mi parve degna di compassione e d’esser consacrata a la posterità, per ammonir i giovini che imparino moderatamente a governarsi e non correr a furia.’15 Boiastuau translated the novella into French, eliminating the moral note above and transforming Juliet’s death from a broken heart (in the sixteenth century LW ZDV FRPPRQO\ EHOLHYHG WKDW VRPHRQH ZKR KDG WDNHQ D ¿UP GHFLVLRQ WR GLH could wilfully bring about their own death by thinking about their suffering) into suicide, using Romeo’s poniard (and Brooke had followed the French text). The QHJDWLYHDWWLWXGHWRZDUGVDEDQGRQLQJRQHVHOIWRWKH¿UHRIORYHUHSUHVHQWVZLWK the contrasting manner of Juliet’s end, the great difference in content between the Italian novella and the theater version. The death of the heroine is necessary to stage business (how can we represent on stage her decision to die from a broken heart when the act of stabbing herself is decidedly more explicit?); it already appears, if not in the title, in the content of Boiastuau’s translation.16 The genre of the novella was widespread in sixteenth-century Italy. It enjoyed great elevation after the Prose by Bembo indicated the Decameron as a linguistic model and continued to rely on the traditional sources which oral narrative had always drawn on. It is both a high (in imitation of Boccaccio) and popular genre, using in parallel fashion the moral tales deriving from the Latin classics and the tradition of the fairy tale. The case of Straparola (who appears in Painter’s collection and was in all probability known by Shakespeare) is quite exemplary.17 Yet Bembo’s conditioning weighed on the use made of novellas. In Italy, from the formation of the genre and for the whole of the sixteenth century, novellas were read as a part of a sole corpus, held together by the frame. The genre did not change

15

‘because it seemed to me worthy of compassion and of being saved for posterity, to LQIRUPWKH\RXQJVRWKDWWKH\PLJKWOHDUQWREHKDYHZLWKPRGHUDWLRQDQGQRWOLYHLQD¿WRI passion’ in Perocco, La prima Giulietta, p. 87. 16 Boaistuau, Histoires tragiques, p. 113; on translations of the novella see Perocco, La prima Giulietta. 17 Giovan Francesco Straparola da Caravaggio (ca. 1480–1558) is the author of a collection of novellas, Le piacevoli notti (1550–1554), which was extremely successful DQGZHQWWKURXJKDKXJHQXPEHURIUHSULQWV+HZDVWKH¿UVWWRLQFOXGHIDLU\WDOHVLQKLV collection, which had a similar structure to Boccaccio’s Decameron, namely, a frame which incorporated novellas grouped around themes. Translations often selected individual novellas independently from the context in which they were originally narrated in the collection.

38

Visions of Venice in Shakespeare

and indeed perhaps grew, following the directives of the Council of Trent when a ODUJHQXPEHURIWDOHVZHUHVXEWO\PRGL¿HGE\GLOLJHQW&DWKROLFUHYLVHUV18 Following the theme of these ‘corrections and rewritings,’ one text that underwent wide revision is of particular interest here: Il Pecorone by Ser Giovanni )LRUHQWLQR,WLVLQWKLVFROOHFWLRQWKDWZH¿QGWKHQRYHOODWKDWSURYLGHGThe Merchant of Venice with a plot-line and character psychologies. Hardly anything is known about the author, who collected the novellas around 1378. The author relates that a young man, having fallen in love with a young nun, decides to become a monk and eventually ends up as a chaplain of the convent where the nun is locked up, in order to be near her. They meet every day for 25 days and tell each other a story. It is evident that the convent setting (and the content of some novellas) could not be acceptable to the post-Tridentine church, which had the work rewritten to include moral teachings. Before publication, the work underwent extensive revision at the hands of /XGRYLFR'RPHQLFKL7KLVLQYROYHGUHPRYLQJWKHODWHIRXUWHHQWKFHQWXU\ÀDYRU and especially working on content with the elimination of subjects which might have been considered dangerous or negative during the Counter-Reformation (for example, the two narrators, who in the original text are a nun and a young man taking orders, become in the version edited by Domenichi a young man and a maiden). Yet it is the text edited and manipulated by Domenichi that was SXEOLVKHGIRUWKH¿UVWWLPHLQ0LODQE\$QWRQLR'HJOL$QWRQLLQDQGLWLVWKLV very text which was always reprinted until the early seventies of the last century in the admittedly rare editions which this short-story collection enjoyed.19 It is important therefore to remember that Shakespeare discovered the stories of the -HZ GHPDQGLQJ KLV SRXQG RI ÀHVK DQG RI WKH ODG\ RI %HOPRQWH ZLWK WKH SRVW Tridentine sixteenth-century version in front of him and not the fourteenth-century original to which critics tend to refer.20 ,QWKH¿UVWWDOHRIWKHIRXUWKGD\RIIl Pecorone, Venice is not only a special setting of that part of the narration centred on mercantile life (while the courtly/ IDEOHSDUWLVVHWLQ%HOPRQWH EXWDOUHDG\FRQVWLWXWHVWKH¿UVWGHVWLQDWLRQRIWKH itinerary created by the narration. In fact, the story begins in Florence where a PHUFKDQWLGHQWL¿HGE\QDPHDQGSDWURQ\PLF%LQGR6FDOL DQGZKRIRUPDQ\ years has traded in the Orient, sends his youngest son Giannetto to Venice. From the start of the narration, therefore, Venice is a place of arrival and dream, where the hero makes his fortune through his godfather Ansaldo, towards whom his 18 See Carlo Dionisotti, ‘La letteratura italiana nell’età del Concilio di Trento,’ in *HRJUD¿D H VWRULD GHOOD OHWWHUDWXUD LWDOLDQD (Turin: Einaudi, 1971), pp. 227–54; Paul Grendler, Culture and Censorship in Late Renaissance Italy and France (London: Variorum Reprints, 1981). 19 7KHSRRUIRUWXQHRIWKHWH[WZDVFRPSRXQGHGWRQRVPDOOGHJUHHE\LWVGH¿QLWLYH inclusion in the Index librorum prohibitorum of 1601. 20 See Ser Giovanni Fiorentino, Il Pecorone, ed. Enzo Esposito (Ravenna: Longo, 1974).

Venice, Shakespeare and the Italian Novella

39

dying father steered him. In order to oblige his favourite son to go to Venice, the merchant had divided his fortune between his other two sons, leaving the third apparently without inheritance but in reality entrusting him to the love and protection of a proper friend: a very rich Venetian merchant. Already this beginning to the tale holds the fanciful tones and features typical of fairy tale – the number of brothers (three), the fact that Giannetto is the youngest, the death of the father, the need to travel and a journey that leads him towards the place which will form the centripetal nucleus of his adventures. As we can see, these are all features belonging to folk-tale tradition (and here we must necessarily refer to the Aarne-Thompson Index),21 some of which had already been absorbed into the literary tale. In a digression typical of the folk or fairy tale, the hero is so ‘savio e con tanta piacevolezza’22 that he becomes the most adored by the whole community and not simply by his new father, who dotes on him. Certain members of the company of young men Giannetto frequents decide to go and do business LQ WKH 2ULHQW DQG WKH\ LQYLWH KLP WR JR ZLWK WKHP7KH ROG PDQ ¿WV RXW D VKLS and orders the hands to do anything Giannetto wishes, stating ‘non lo mando per guadagno che io voglia ch’e’ faccia, ma perch’egli vada a suo diletto veggendo il mondo.’23 Here we see in Ser Giovanni’s narration reality forcing itself upon the courtly, rather fabled world described up to that moment – a business voyage for economic gain to the Orient, following the routes to Alexandria in Egypt and Tana. This is the same journey habitually undertaken by the Venetian merchant and which old Ansaldo, who has already successfully followed these routes, uses and makes a priority so that his young protégé can see and learn about the world.24 When the three friends leave, in three different ships, the people converge on the port, amazed at how well-appointed Giannetto’s ship is and sorry that he should be leaving the city. During the voyage (which proceeds in all tranquillity), the charm of the unknown forces its way in. In a quiet bay there lies the kingdom of a beautiful young widow who promises marriage to anyone who will sleep with her and make love successfully but with the loss of all possessions as the price for failing to deliver. ,QLWLDOIDLOXUHLVDSDUWRIWKHQDUUDWLYHÀRZRIWKHIDLU\WDOHEXWWKLVIDLOXUHLVGXH to deception – before going to bed the woman offers Giannetto wine containing a sleeping potion which makes the man fall asleep. During the night he cannot

21 Antti Aarne and Stith Thompson, The Types of the Folktale (Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakademia, 1981). 22 ‘wise and agreeable’: Ser Giovanni Fiorentino, Il Pecorone, vol. I (London: R. Bancker, 1793), p. 76. 23 ‘I am not sending him to gain wealth but so he can take pleasure from seeing the world’: Ser Giovanni, Il Pecorone, p. 78. 24 For Venetian journeys to the East see Viaggi fatti da Vinetia, alla Tana, in Persia, in India, et in Costantinopoli: con la descrittione particolare di città, luoghi, siti, costumi, et della porta del gran Turco: e di tutte le intrate, spese, e modo di governo suo, e della ultima impresa contra Portoghesi9HQLFH&DVHGHL¿JOLXROLG¶$OGR 

40

Visions of Venice in Shakespeare

oblige the lady and as a result loses everything he has. The theme of the initiatory challenge is most certainly an old one; it should be noted that within this scenario the consequence of not overcoming the test is not the loss of one’s life but of one’s wealth (most serious in mercantile circles). The forced return to Venice of the hero and his hiding himself away because he lacks the courage to present himself before the elderly merchant marks in a certain sense the narration’s return to the real world. 7KHVHWWLQJRI9HQLFHUHÀHFWVWKDWRIWDOHVVHWLQWKHWUDGLQJZRUOGZLWKWKH Decameron¿UVWDQGIRUHPRVW ZKHUHWKHORVVRIJRRGVLVSHUFHLYHGDVDIRUPRI GLVKRQRUZKLFKFDQRQO\SDUWLDOO\EHMXVWL¿HGE\LOOIRUWXQH%HOPRQWHVHHPVWR EHWKHUHÀHFWLRQRIWKHVHWWLQJIRXQGLQWKHIUDPHZRUNRI6WUDSDUROD¶VWDOHV7KH old merchant (who knows nothing of the amorous incident and attributes the loss RIWKH¿UVWVKLSWRDVWRUP ¿WVRXWDQRWKHUYHVVHOZKLFKPHHWVWKHVDPHIDWH$W the third attempt, however, the money is almost at an end and so the merchant has to turn to the Jewish usurer. We are not at Rialto and the Jew lives in Mestre, a WRZQRQWKHPDLQODQGEXWWKHDJUHHPHQWRQWKHSRXQGRIÀHVKVKRXOGVHWWOHPHQW of the debt be delayed (here the date is quite precise: by ‘il San Giovanni di giugno prossimo’)25LVWKHVDPHDVZH¿QGLQ6KDNHVSHDUH7KHH[SODQDWLRQDQG MXVWL¿FDWLRQRIWKHQHFHVVLW\WRFRQWUDFWDGHEWDWVXFKKLJKULVNDUHJLYHQRQWKH one hand by fatherly love and on the other by the desire and necessity on the part of Giannetto to recover all he has lost in his attempt to win the heart of the woman he loves. On the third attempt Giannetto is saved by his charm; not only has he enchanted Belmonte’s courtiers who, on witnessing his grace and ability, wish him as their lord, but also a chambermaid who, foreshadowing in a certain sense Puccini’s Liù in Turandot, warns him of the potion hidden in a drink offered to him before retiring. The happy ending to the evening and the marriage celebrations which follow play a double role: on the fairy-tale side of the narration they stand for the transformation which follows the rite of passage to adulthood;26 on the ‘mercantile’ side they justify, with the pleasure and ecstasy of not only recovering lost goods but augmenting them, the momentary forgetting of grief endured, of shame felt

25 ‘St John’s day next June’ and so, to be precise, June 24th. Ser Giovanni, Il Pecorone, p. 88. The date was immediately grasped by all because it was a custom of the times to indicate the day by the name of the saint being celebrated and also because Saint John the Baptist is a very well-known and venerated saint in Italy, the protector of many Italian cities and his feast day coincides with the start of summer. 26 7KHFRQ¿UPDWLRQWKDW*LDQQHWWRKDVRYHUFRPHWKHQLJKWRIORYHWHVWDVDQLQLWLDWLRQ into adult life is shown by the change in attitude in the days following the wedding: ‘e diventò virile e fecesi temere a mantenere ragione e giustizia a ogni maniera di gente’ [He became virile and made all manners of people fear to maintain their reason and their sense of justice]; Ser Giovanni, Il Pecorone, p. 93. The quotations from Ser Giovanni are taken from a reprint of the sixteenth century edition, which includes Domenichi’s corrections (see above).

Venice, Shakespeare and the Italian Novella

41

in Venice but above all of debts incurred there.27 In the world of Venetian society, however, the fairy-tale enchantment is completely dissolved by the passage of time which has a quite different dimension to that of the fairy tale where thought and decisions are already action and where there is no hindrance from reality in overcoming space and time. On the appointed day the Jew demands payment of the debt. He allows the due date to be put forward but will not accept payment by other Venetian merchants ZKRKDYHRIIHUHGWRSD\LQFDVK±KLVKDWHUHPDLQV¿HUFHDQGLQÀH[LEOHHYHQZKHQ on Giannetto’s arrival the sum offered to extinguish the debt is multiplied by ten. In the Pecorone tale, the need not to draw away from reality and to offer motivations which do not offend our concept of verisimilitude appears with greater force than in the English transposition. Giannetto, as a fairy-tale character returned to the world of trade, has with him a hundred thousand pieces of gold to pay the debt of ten thousand and tries to negotiate their restitution,28 strong in the knowledge that such enormous economic gain will halt any opposition and stop the money-hungry Jew in his tracks. Loved by everybody throughout the story, Giannetto seems to ignore the power of hate and the satisfaction of revenge. Other realistic elements support the mercantile dimension with precise references and attention to detail: the woman loved, the lady from Belmonte who saves the situation, is described as a judge arriving from Bologna (where the famous university with its renowned law IDFXOW\ZDVVXI¿FLHQWO\GLVWDQWIURP9HQLFHIRUHYHQWKHPRVWIDPRXVSURWDJRQLVWV to be unknown to the characters involved), while the chambermaid who warned Giannetto is rewarded with a rich marriage. While some features recur equally in the two texts, taken up again by topoi already present in the preceding narrative such as the disguising of the woman who in male clothes resolves desperate situations and offers herself as a pledge which the man would never otherwise have made (although the whole narrative tradition is fully present in Boccaccio), other incidents and motives are only present in Shakespeare. An interesting example is provided by the theme of the GDXJKWHUWDNLQJRIIZLWKKHUIDWKHU¶VZHDOWK,QWKH,WDOLDQWDOHZH¿QGWKHQDUUDWLRQ RIWKHJLUO¶VÀLJKWIURPDPHDQIDWKHUQRWD-HZ VRPHDQDVQRWWRZLVKWRPDUU\ off his daughter to avoid paying a dowry. The father, realizing what has happened, regrets the riches lost through his daughter’s escape rather than the absence of the daughter herself (not unlike Shylock in this). From Tale XIV of the Novellino 27

On the issue of time in fairy and folk tales see Vladimir Propp, Morphology of the Folktale (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1968) and Mikhail Bakhtin, ‘Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel,’ in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays (Austin and London: University of Texas Press, 1982), pp. 84–258. 28 We could remark that, while in Ser Giovanni the ‘modes’ of negotiation are extremely realistic, the negative reply on the part of the hero (in this case the Jew) is in line with fairy-tale conventions. However, in contrast to what happens in the fairy tale, where a refusal corresponds to a rejection of an attempt to corrupt, the motivation driving the Jew is linked solely to his hate for all Christian traders and a generic desire to take revenge on one in order to take revenge on all.

Visions of Venice in Shakespeare

42

by Masuccio Salernitano (1410?–1475) the theme moves to the Jew of Malta by Marlowe but does not appear in Pecorone where, in contrast, the Venetian merchants, variously wealthy, show to one another all the qualities of generosity and friendship, loyalty and support. These ‘good’ merchants seem to reappear in Othello, where Venice is depicted in a form which is only mythicized in a different fashion from The Merchant of Venice. The tale of Ser Giovanni, ‘mercantile’ again in this respect, contains a narration which is more choral than in Shakespeare, where every character has peculiar features (while in Ser Giovanni, for example, all merchants are depicted in the same way – they are all generous and willing to pay Ansaldo’s debt). The Venetian merchant does business with the Jews and the Turks; in other words, with those who are feared and hated but always frequented because QHFHVVDU\ IRU WUDGH ,W LV QRW E\ FKDQFH WKDW ERWK DUH GH¿QHG ZLWK GHHS VFRUQ µFLUFXPFLVHGGRJ>V@¶7KHGH¿QLWLRQERWKRIWKH-HZDQGWKH7XUNLVSXWLQWRWKH mouths of two ‘positive heroes,’ two protagonists who lend their names to the titles of the respective Venetian pièces and two victims of their trusting and generous nature: Antonio and Othello. Both in turn strike with means that are the symbol of their strength: Antonio by defamatory words – lethal in business – (and how much his words wound Shylock is shown in the famous monologue in Act 3, scene 1), and Othello with the sword he uses to kill himself as in Aleppo he had done with the Turk who spoke ill of the Republic. What characterizes Venice and makes it different from any other state, as claimed by Ser Giovanni, is the fact that it is a ‘terra di ragione, e il giudeo aveva le sue ragioni piene e in pubblica forma, non si gli osava di dire il contrario per nessuno, se non pregarlo’;29 this respect for agreements and the impossibility of modifying them leads one representative of the people (the innkeeper where Portia is lodged) to reply to the lady disguised as the Bologna judge who was asking him about how the town lived, with the words ‘Messere, faccisi troppa ragione.’30 The absolute adherence to the law may lead to a case of apparent injustice, but the law had to be enforced in every instance. It is sticking to the letter of the law that will FRQGHPQWKH-HZIRUFHGWRWDNHDSRXQGRIÀHVKQRPRUHDQGQROHVV DQGZKDW is more with no spilling of blood, under the express terms of the contract. In the end the law is strictly observed (and this is emphasized by the author) because it is the Jew himself who in a rage destroys all the papers which led him to demand justice in the Senate and in doing so annuls the loan and its return. In the Republic where even the Moor could rise to the highest ranks, where WKHRUHWLFDOO\RI¿FHGLGQRWGHSHQGRQELUWK*LUDOGL¶V2WKHOORLVDVRYHUFRPHE\ WKHWHUURURIORVLQJKLVKRQRUDVE\MHDORXV\+HDSSHDUVWREHWKH¿UVWYLFWLPRIWKH 29

Translated into modern terms: ‘A land where law was respected and the Jew had his rights recorded in a written and signed contract and nobody, not for anybody, would dare impose anything on him against his wishes. One could only beg the writer of the contract to modify it.’ Ed. quot. p. 96. 30 Translated into modern terms: ‘They split hairs over legal niceties’: Ed. quot. p. 96.

Venice, Shakespeare and the Italian Novella

43

‘society of gentlemen’of which Donisotti speaks, in which ‘the word which grows most, in use and in meaning, is Honour. The place which Love occupied between WKH¿IWHHQWKDQGVL[WHHQWKFHQWXULHVZDVWDNHQLQWKHVHFRQGKDOIRIWKHVL[WHHQWKE\ Honour.’31 Aside from this, Giraldi had ‘una mente da untorello messa al servizio d’un’immaginazione da Erode,’32 which makes him lose the main threads of the story: Giraldi’s added details and digressions from the main plot, only to fall into the Counter-Reformist respectability which beset him, cause the narration to lose strength and momentum, as well as the typical distress suffered by Shakespeare’s audiences/readers when they follow Othello’s catastrophic precipitation into the consequences of jealousy. Even though without question Shakespeare drew inspiration from the tragedy of tale III, 7 of the Hecatommiti by Giraldi (and it must be noted that perhaps never more than in this case the poor thing is unworthy of the nickname Cinzio – Cinzio is one of Apollo’s titles, the God of Poetry – which he had chosen for himself and which he had added to his family name and which English criticism uses much more often than his real name), the differences between the two texts are considerable and not only from the point of view of content. In Giraldi the predominant feature is the desire to produce a morally committed work bringing EHQH¿WWRWKHUHDGHUDQGZKLFKLVXVHIXOQRWRQO\LQWKHDUHDRISULYDWHEHKDYLRUEXW also in the administration of public justice. Indeed it is not by chance that between WKH¿IWKDQGVL[WKJURXSVRIWHQWDOHVRIWKHHecatommiti are inserted three Dialoghi della vita civile (Dialogues of Civil Life) which constitute an integral part of the WH[WXDOSODQQLQJDQGZKLFKRQWKHLURZQVXI¿FHWRVKRZWKHJDSEHWZHHQ*LUDOGL and the tradition of the genre. The tale of the Moor aims to show that just as can sometimes happen in well-ordered states so in ordinary life, despite concern over her modesty, ‘avviene talora che … fedele ed amorevole donna, per insidie tesele da animo malvagio […] da fedel marito riceve morte.’33 Giraldi’s ‘Iago’ (who does not have a name of his own in the novella), the lover rejected by Disdemona,34 turns love into hate, and decides that ‘se non potesse goder della donna, il Moro anco non ne godesse.’35 Disdemona then fears that the trouble gripping her husband depends on ‘troppa copia che egli aveva avuto di lei, non gli fosse venuta a noia.’36

31

Dionisotti, p. 253. ‘the mind of a little muck-raker serving an imagination like that of Herod’: Arnaldo Momigliano, quoted in Carlo Dionisotti, ‘Review of The Tragedies of Giambattista Cinthio Giraldi, by Philip R. Horne,’ Giornale storico della letteratura italiana, 140 (1963): p. 115. 33 ‘It can occasionally happen that a faithful and loving woman … by the lure of an evil mind … may meet death at the hand of a faithful husband,’ Giovan Battista Giraldi Cinzio, Hecatommiti, vol 2 (Turin: Pomba, 1853), p. 65. 34 'LVGHPRQDZLWKWKHOHWWHUµL¶LQSODFHRIWKH¿UVWYRZHOLVLQGLFDWHGE\*LUDOGLDV the name of the Moor’s wife. 35 ‘If he cannot delight in the woman, the Moor shall not delight in her either,’ Giraldi, p. 67. 36 ‘Over-indulging his desire and that he had grown bored with her,’ Giraldi, p. 71. 32

44

Visions of Venice in Shakespeare

Examples of this kind, which are numerous, demonstrate Giraldi’s intention of presenting a survey to encourage the reader to be virtuous both privately and above all in civil and public life. In his tale there appear no explicit threats by Turks and there is no war with them; the move to Cyprus is the result of normal rotation of troops on foreign service; the Moor’s initial anguish and agitation are caused by the alternatives of having Disdemona face the dangers of the sea or leaving her in Venice and depriving himself of her company. Above all it is the motive which drives the lieutenant (who in Shakespeare will become Iago) to plant suspicion and which makes the two tales different; the lieutenant is sexually obsessed by Disdemona while she does not even perceive his advances. His hatred grows towards her and not towards Othello, who is merely the instrument of his revenge; it is she whom he wishes to destroy and annihilate. Proof of this is the fact that the lieutenant not only propitiates the woman’s death but is an active accomplice. Only when the Moor, in whom the presence of the lieutenant only sharpens his regret over the loss of Disdemona, eventually discharges Iago by removing him from the army, will he have him reported to the ‘Venetian Gentlemen.’ The ending RIWKH6KDNHVSHDULDQWUDJHG\ZKLFKKDVIXHOHGFULWLFDOGHEDWHLQQRZD\UHÀHFWV the Italian tale: in Giraldi’s novella the Moor, dragged to Venice, undergoes all forms of torture but confesses nothing. It is the woman’s relatives who reach him and avenge her death.37 The lieutenant, back in Venice, is not put on trial for Disdemona’s death but for a false accusation that he had made towards a comrade earlier on; in other words, for another story of falsehood and wickedness. Giraldi’s ending is an effort to show that even the perfect crime is always followed by divine punishment. Shakespeare’s ending is totally different not only for its time-scale but because it is conceived for the theatrical effect that Emilia’s words, her death and the following suicide of Othello will have on the audience. Hence in the novella Venice is but a name, replaceable by that of any other city. Paradoxically, the presence of Venice, that very city and Republic with its laws and lands, makes itself felt more in Shakespeare than in Giraldi. %\WKHWLPH7XUQHUVWDUWHGKLVFDUHHUDVDSDLQWHU9HQLFHKDGEHHQLGHQWL¿HG so almost totally with Shylock that Turner called one of his paintings, a reZRUNLQJRIWKHGUDZLQJVKHKDGPDGHGXULQJKLV¿UVWYLVLWWR9HQLFHThe Grand Canal and Venice. Scene. Shylock, where two lines of The Merchant of Venice H[SODLQWKHLQWHQWLRQRIWKHSDLQWLQJ9HQLFHFRPHVWREHLGHQWL¿HGZLWK6K\ORFN a character who, while representing the negative pole of the tale, does not succeed in raising the loathing his part would suggest.38 His words on the stage give rise 37 At the time family revenge was no rare thing and achieved what the Venetian republic could not. There comes to mind, in the very years when the novella was written, the ÀLJKWRI0DUF¶$QWRQLR3LJDIHWWDWRDYRLGWKHUHODWLYHVRIWKHPDQKHKDGNLOOHGVHHRQWKLV subject the Introduction to Marc’Antonio Pigafetta, Itinerario da Vienna a Costantinopoli, ed. Daria Perocco (Padova: Il Poligrafo, 2008), pp. 14–15. 38 See Gabriele Baldini, Manualetto shakespeariano (Turin: Einaudi, 1962), pp. 247–8.

Venice, Shakespeare and the Italian Novella

45

WRFRQÀLFWLQJHPRWLRQVZKLFKLQWKHH\HVRIKLV¿UVWFUHDWRUVKRXOGKDYHKDGQR reason to present themselves. The same occurs with the character of Othello who, after Shakespeare’s creation, will be forever linked to the name of Venice, but is far from raising in readers those feelings which Giraldi hoped would be invoked in his Counter-Reformation moralizing. Shylock and Othello are decidedly different from the characters that inspired them. It is not for nothing that it will be they and they alone who will become part of that myth of Venice which has no need of any elements of truth to be famous, credible and well loved in the world. The myth of Venice, a city towards which all forms of freedom appear to converge, open to different cultures and trade with different peoples, an enduring myth sustained by the Serenissima, had produced a powerful echo in Elizabethan England, and had been clearly acknowledged and cultivated by the Bard. And Shakespeare was one of the authors who were going to contribute the most to make this myth even more powerful in the collective imagination of the centuries to come. Works Cited Aarne, Antti, and Stith Thompson. The Types of the Folktale. Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakademia, 1981. Ariosto, Ludovico. Orlando furioso. Edited by Lanfranco Caretti. Turin: Einaudi, 1966. Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Austin and London: University of Texas Press, 1982. Baldini, Gabriele. Manualetto shakespeariano. Turin: Einaudi, 1962. Bandello, Matteo Maria. Certain tragical discourses of Bandello translated into English by Geffraie Fenton anno 1597. Introduction by Robert Langton Douglas. London: David Nutt, 1898, 2 vols. ———. La quarta parte de le Novelle del Bandello. Lyon: Alessandro Marsilii, 1573 (Dernier volume des nouvelles de Bandel, 1577). ———. Novelle. Edited by Francesco Flora. Milan: Mondadori, 2 vols, 1966 and 1972. Belleforest, François de. Histoires tragiques, translation of Matteo M. Bandello. 7 vols. Paris: 1566–1583. Bembo, Pietro. ‘Prose della volgar lingua.’ In Prose e rime. Edited by Carlo Dionisotti. 71–309. Turin: UTET, 1966. Benzoni, Gino. ‘Introduzione.’ In Storici e politici veneti del Cinquecento e del Seicento. Edited by Gino Benzoni and Tiziano Zanato. XV–XCVIII. MilanNaples: Ricciardi, 1982. Boaistuau, Pierre. Histoires tragiques. Edited by Richard A. Carr. Paris: Nizet, 1977. Boccaccio, Giovanni. Decameron. Edited by Vittore Branca. Milan: Mondadori, 1976. Brooke, Arthur. Romeus and Juliet. London: R. Tattil, 1562.

46

Visions of Venice in Shakespeare

Dionisotti, Carlo. *HRJUD¿D H VWRULD GHOOD OHWWHUDWXUD LWDOLDQD. Turin: Einaudi, 1971. ———. Review of The Tragedies of Giambattista Cinthio Giraldi, by Philip Russel Horne. Giornale storico della letteratura italiana 140 (1963): 114–21. Drusi, Riccardo. ‘Traduzioni cinquecentesche dall’italiano nelle lingue europee.’ In Il Rinascimento italiano e l’Europa. Vol. 2, Umanesimo ed educazione, edited by Gino Belloni and Riccardo Drusi. 435–84. Costabissara: A. Colla, 2007. Fiorentino, Giovanni. Il Pecorone. 4th ed. London: R. Bancker, 1793. ———. Il Pecorone. Edited by Enzo Esposito. Ravenna: Longo, 1974. Giraldi Cinzio, Giovan Battista. Hecatommiti. Turin: Pomba, 1853, 2 vols. Grendler, Paul. Culture and Censorship in Late Renaissance Italy and France. London: Variorum Reprints, 1981. Lawrence, Jason. ‘Who the devil taught thee so much Italian’? Italian Language Learning and Literary Imitation in Early Modern England. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2005. Marlowe, Christopher. Jew of Malta. Edited by Roma Gill. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995. Masuccio, Salernitano. Novellino. Edited by Giorgio Petrocchi. Florence: Sansoni, 1957. Meres, Francis. Palladis Tamia: Wit’s Treasury. London: P. Short for Cuthbert Burbie, 1598. Painter, William. The Palace of Pleasure. Elizabethan versions of Italian and French novels from Boccaccio, Bandello, Cinthio, Straparola, Queen Margaret of Navarre, and others done into English by William Painter. Edited by Joseph Jacobs. London: D. Nutt in the Strand, 1890. Perocco, Daria. La prima Giulietta. Bari: Palomar, 2008. Pigafetta, Marc’Antonio. Itinerario da Vienna a Costantinopoli. Edited by Daria Perocco. Padova: Il Poligrafo, 2008. Praz, Mario. ‘Shakespeare e l’Italia.’ In Caleidoscopio Shakespeariano. 75–107. Bari: Adriatica, 1969. Propp, Vladimir. Morphology of the Folktale. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1968. Shaheen, Naseeb. ‘Shakespeare’s Knowledge of Italian.’ Shakespeare Studies 47 (1994): 161–9. Straparola, Giovan Francesco. Le piacevoli notti. Edited by Manlio Pastore Stocchi. Bari: Laterza, 1979, 2 vols. Viaggi fatti da Vinetia, alla Tana, in Persia, in India, et in Costantinopoli: con la descrittione particolare di città, luoghi, siti, costumi, et della porta del gran Turco: e di tutte le intrate, spese, e modo di governo suo, e della ultima impresa contra Portoghesi9HQLFH&DVHGHL¿JOLXROLG¶$OGR Yates, Frances A. John Florio. The Life of an Italian in Shakespeare’s England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1934.

Chapter 3

Genealogy of a Character: A Reading of Giraldi’s Moor Karina Feliciano Attar

Among the numerous and diverse texts Shakespeare drew upon in writing Othello, scholars generally agree that Giovanni Battista Giraldi’s tale of Disdemona and the Moor (Hecatommithi III, 7) served as the direct source for plot and character. Yet, the novella has never been the object of in-depth and contextualized critical analysis. Studies of Giraldi’s works have focused on his many theoretical and theatrical texts, while the Hecatommithi (1565) as a whole is commonly relegated to the margins of Italian literature.1 Shakespeare scholars have dedicated more DWWHQWLRQWRWKHWDOHIRFXVLQJRQVSHFL¿FSKUDVHVDFWLRQVDQGFKDUDFWHUVGUDZQ upon or discarded in the tragedy. Such comparative analyses routinely dismiss the novella as an unimaginative model for what is deemed Shakespeare’s far superior dramatization. Since at least the early 1960s, Giraldi’s tale has been read as a clichéd narrative about justice, honor, and loyalty that recycles one-dimensional characters. Kenneth Muir’s judgment that Shakespeare was ‘challenged by the magnitude RI WKH GLI¿FXOWLHV LQYROYHG LQ PDNLQJ D WUDJHG\ RI >WKH QRYHOOD@¶ EHFDXVH µWKH colorless heroine, the melodramatic villain, the sordid crime passionel, the clumsy nemesis which overtakes villain and hero, and the leisurely tempo of the story are all obstacles to dramatic treatment,’ remains largely the norm.2$QGUHZ+DG¿HOG 1

On Giraldi’s plays, see Philip R. Horne, Tragedies of Giambattista Cinthio Giraldi (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), and Horne’s editions of several of Giraldi’s plays for the Edwin Mellen Press; Riccardo Bruscagli, G.B. Giraldi: Drammaturgia ed esperienza teatrale (Ferrara: SATE, 1972); Corinne Lucas, 'HO¶KRQQHXUDXµOLHWR¿QH¶OH contrôle du discours tragique dans le théâtre de Giraldi Cinzio (Rome: Bonacci, 1984); Mary Morrison, The tragedies of G.B. Giraldi Cinthio: the transformation of narrative source into stage play (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 1997); and Fabio Bertini, ‘Havere a la giustizia sodisfatto:’ tragedie giudiziarie di Giovan Battista Giraldi Cinzio nel ventennio conciliare)ORUHQFH6RFLHWjHGLWULFH¿RUHQWLQD )RU*LUDOGL¶VWUHDWLVHRQ epic romance, see Giambattista Giraldi Cinzio, Discorso dei romanzi, ed. Laura Benedetti et al. (Bologna: Millenium, 1999) and Scritti critici, ed. Camillo Crocetti (Milan: Marzorati, 1973). The name most Shakespeare scholars employ for Giraldi is Cinthio (or Cinzio), his self-appointed penname in reference to the god of poetry Apollo. 2 Shakespeare’s Sources: Comedies and Tragedies (1961; reprint, London: Routledge, 2005), p. 126. See also William Shakespeare, Othello, ed. E.A.J. Honigmann (The Arden Shakespeare. Walton-on-Thames: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1997, rpt. 2004), p. 386; G.K. Hunter, ‘Othello and Colour Prejudice,’ and Helen Gardner, ‘The Noble Moor,’

48

Visions of Venice in Shakespeare

in his recent overview of sources for and interpretations of Othello, summarizes and asserts the prevailing attitude, arguing that Shakespeare transforms ‘a vicious morality tale into a tragedy that acknowledges the issues of race, place, and gender’ and that Othello ‘bears little resemblance to the unpleasant and violent character’ in the novella.3 Giraldi’s plot certainly seems to supply some evidence for such readings. A valorous Moorish captain and Disdemona, a beautiful Venetian woman, live happily married in Venice for some time. When the Venetian Republic elects to send the Moor to lead its new garrison in Cyprus, the couple travels to the island LQWKHFRPSDQ\RIWKUHHFORVHFRQ¿GDQWVDVWDQGDUGEHDUHUKLVZLIHDQGDKHDG of the guard. In Cyprus, the standard-bearer becomes enamored of Disdemona, but failing to attract her romantic attentions, he imagines that she must already have another lover – the head of the guard. The standard-bearer then convinces WKH0RRURI'LVGHPRQD¶VLQ¿GHOLW\FRPHVXSZLWKDSORWWRNLOOKHUDQGFDUULHV it out with the Moor’s help. Both the Moor and the standard-bearer are ultimately brought to justice, albeit in fundamentally different ways. While many of these narrative developments are noted in studies of Shakespeare’s refashioning of the tale,4 there has been no attempt to read the novella closely and on its own terms. This essay reconsiders Giraldi’s narrative within its immediate historical and literary contexts in order to show that it offers far more than a straightforward recapitulation of conventional motifs already present in the preceding novella tradition. The history of sixteenth-century Venetian-Ottoman relations frequently brought to bear in discussions of OthelloLVDVLJQL¿FDQWIUDPH of reference for a more nuanced understanding of how Giraldi’s novella registers contemporary anxieties about cross-cultural encounters. In what follows, I argue that Giraldi’s novella challenges cultural expectations about race and gender by originally combining several character types common to the novella tradition: bestial Moors, noble Moors, unjustly accused women, and jilted or cuckolded men. Reading the tale against other comparable novellas reveals the complexity of Giraldi’s project and suggests that Shakespeare’s own interest in the narrative went beyond the basic elements of plot and character. While Shakespeare wrote Othello GXULQJ WKH ¿UVW \HDUV RI WKH VHYHQWHHQWK century, and set his tragedy on the eve of the 1570 Ottoman conquest of Cyprus, Giraldi wrote his novella earlier (at least before 1565 when the Hecatommithi was published). When Giraldi began composing and compiling his collection in the late 1520s, the Ottomans had already seized several key territories east and south of Italy, including Constantinople (1453); parts of Dalmatia, Albania, Bosnia, Herzegovina, and Greece; Negropont (1470); the Morea (1460 and 1503); and in Interpretations of Shakespeare, ed. Kenneth Muir (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. 180 and 176, respectively. 3 William Shakespeare’s Othello: A Sourcebook (Routledge: London, 2003), p. 7. 4 For Shakespeare’s use of novella sources see Daria Perocco’s chapter ‘Venice, Shakespeare and the Italian Novella’ in this volume (pp. 33–46).

Genealogy of a Character

49

2WUDQWREULHÀ\LQ 0HKPHW,,¶VSODQVWRLQYDGH,WDO\ZHUHRQO\DEDQGRQHG upon his death in 1481. His son and successor, Bayezid II, waged a successful war against Venice (1499–1503) for control of lands in the Aegean, Ionian, and Adriatic Seas.5 Under Suleiman I (1520–1566), Ottoman forces continued to seize QXPHURXV&KULVWLDQVWURQJKROGVLQ(DVWHUQ(XURSHDVZHOODVVLJQL¿FDQWSRUWLRQV of land in the Middle East and North Africa. The Ottoman conquest of Belgrade in 1521, as well as its sieges of Vienna (in 1529 and 1532), signaled the Empire’s most ambitious plans for western territorial expansion and brought Muslim forces to the doorstep of continental Europe.6 During Suleiman I’s reign, a period almost exactly coterminous with the Hecatommithi’s composition (1527–1565), the Ottoman Empire was at the height of its power. The Venetian Republic, on the other hand, had begun its slow decline, due not only to the rise of Turkish power, but also to the newly discovered trade routes and markets across the Atlantic and around the coast of Africa. In the mid-sixteenth century, however, the outcome of Venetian-Ottoman rivalries for commercial and military dominance in the Mediterranean had yet WREHGHWHUPLQHG9HQLFHIDFHGDVLJQL¿FDQWFRQWUDFWLRQRILWVPDULWLPHSRZHUV but this was a time of decline and profound instability, not of certain defeat, for the Republic. For sixteenth-century Italian readers whose concerns about current HYHQWV LQFOXGHG YLFWRULHV DQG ORVVHV DJDLQVW 2WWRPDQ ÀHHWV DQG ZKR OLYHG LQ D state of heightened alert vis-à-vis their Eastern neighbors, a story about the tragic union between a Venetian woman and a Moorish captain would have conjured this perilous political, economic, and cultural context. *LUDOGL¿UVWVXJJHVWLYHO\HYRNHVDQ[LHWLHVDERXWFURVVFXOWXUDOHQFRXQWHUVLQ his paratextual dedicatory letter at the beginning of the third deca, a portion of the collection often overlooked in studies of the tale.7 In this letter, Giraldi prompts his addressee and readers at large to bear in mind the aesthetic conventions of visual art through which light or white hues could be further illuminated by their proximity to dark or black ones. Giraldi also explicitly notes the long-established Christian tradition of assigning the opposing moral values of virtue/vice to light/ dark: ‘Egli è commune parere de più saggi del mondo, Illustrissima Signora, che un 5 This was the third of eight wars between the Venetian Republic and the Ottoman (PSLUHWKDWVSDQQHGWKHHDUO\¿IWHHQWKWRWKHHDUO\HLJKWHHQWKFHQWXU\ 6 )RU D FRPSUHKHQVLYH RYHUYLHZ RI WKHVH FRQÀLFWV VHH 3DOPLUD %UXPPHW Ottoman Seapower and Levantine Diplomacy in the Age of Discovery (New York: SUNY Press, 1994). 7 This oversight is partly explained by the print history of the collection. Although the Hecatommithi was an instant “bestseller,” with seven editions published between 1565 and 1608, there are no modern editions of the collection. The dedicatory letters to members of the contemporary aristocracy that precede each deca, moreover, are not included in any of these early editions, but can be found in Susanna Villari’s Per l’edizione critica degli Ecatommiti (Messina: Sicania, 1988). The collection is structurally modeled on both Boccaccio’s Decameron and Masuccio Salernitano’s Novellino. The Hecatommithi’s frame narrative is set in the aftermath of the 1527 Sack of Rome, as a group of noblemen and ODGLHVÀHHE\VKLSWR0DUVHLOOHDQGVSHQGWKHMRXUQH\WHOOLQJWDOHV

Visions of Venice in Shakespeare

50

contrario posto appresso all’altro più chiaramente si conosca, che s’egli da sé solo è considerato. Et nel vero la esperienza mostra che così è appunto, perché il bianco appresso al nero si scuopre vie più chiaro, & l’oscuro, che porta con lui il vitio, fa vie più comparere i raggi lucentissimi della virtù, che, senza così fatto paragone, non comparirebbero.’8 Overall, the third deca illustrates this binary opposition through stories of either faithful or unfaithful spouses. Yet, the dedicatory letter resonates particularly with the story of Disdemona and the Moorish captain, the only tale in the collection that explicitly foregrounds racial, religious, and cultural difference through a black-white sexual union.9 The thematic links between the letter and the novella may suggest that Giraldi wished to warn readers of the dangers of associating with those of a different race. Conversely, the frame characters that narrate and offer commentary on the tale, guiding the actual reader, resist viewing the protagonists according to the categories set up in the letter. The novella’s narrator, Curzio (who in the opening section of the Hecatommithi’s frame story sanctions marriage as the only legitimate avenue for love), introduces his narrative as a counterpoint to stories of truly adulterous women, and cites the ‘insidie tesele da animo selvaggio’ and the ‘leggerezza di chi più crede’ (65) as the combined causes of the couple’s tragic demise.10 Curzio does not present his narrative as a story about race. Nor does he HQGRUVHWKHFRUUHVSRQGHQFHRIVLJQL¿HUZLWKVLJQL¿HGDVVHUWHGLQWKHGHGLFDWRU\ letter. Instead, the tale’s narrator calls attention to the nefarious schemes of evildoers (the standard-bearer) and the exploitable weakness of credulous minds (the Moor). Following Curzio’s preamble, the novella offers an ironic contrast WRWKHOHWWHU¶VSUHPLVHE\H[SORULQJWKHGLI¿FXOW\RIMXGJLQJSHRSOHDFFRUGLQJWR external markers of identity in a complicated world where such values are at once endemic and deceptive. 8

Villari, p. 56. The letter is dedicated to Laura Eustochia di Dianti, the lover (or, according to some scholars, third wife) of Giraldi’s patron, Duke Alfonso I d’Este. ‘Most Illustrious Lady, it is the general opinion of the world’s wisest men that when something is placed beside its opposite it becomes more clearly knowable than if it is considered in isolation. And in truth experience shows that this is so, because white becomes lighter when it is next to black, and what is dark, which is accompanied by vice, illuminates the very bright rays of virtue, which, without such a comparison, would not be apparent.’ (Unless otherwise noted, all emphases and translations from Giraldi’s text and other sources are mine.) 9 Interestingly, a portrait attributed to Titian and generally thought to represent Laura di Dianti with a black page was produced in Ferrara in the 1520s, when Giraldi was an almost constant presence at the Este court as tutor to Alfonsino (one of Laura’s and the Duke’s two sons). See Paul H.D. Kaplan, ‘Titian’s Laura Dianti and the Origins of the Motif of the Black Page in Portraiture,’ Antichità Viva 21, 1 (1982): pp. 11–18, and 21, 4 (1982): pp. 10–18 and Jane Fair Bestor, ‘Titian’s Portrait of Laura Eustochia: the Decorum of Female Beauty and the Motif of the Black Page,’ Renaissance Studies 17, 4 (2003): pp. 628–73. 10 ‘insidious plots orchestrated against [Disdemona] by a savage mind’ and ‘lightness of one who believes too readily.’

Genealogy of a Character

51

Throughout the novella, Giraldi exploits anxieties about reading white against EODFNDQGYLUWXHDJDLQVWYLFHE\LQÀHFWLQJGLVFRXUVHVDQGUHSUHVHQWDWLRQVZLWK deliberate ambiguity. While Shakespeare’s Othello offers much biographical information about its protagonists, we know very little about the prehistory of the characters in the source story. Giraldi follows the long-standing novelistic convention of omitting identifying particulars about most of his protagonists, including their names. Disdemona, the single exception to this rule, is named after the Greek for ‘ill-fated spirit’ (dysdaimon) suggesting that the novella should be read primarily as a story about fate, an issue I will return to in my conclusions.11 The other principal characters, those transformed into Othello, Iago, Emilia, and Cassio in the Elizabethan tragedy, are instead initially apparently stripped of identifying labels beyond their military or social status: captain, standard-bearer, standard-bearer’s wife, head of the guard. Cultural, racial, and religious difference is certainly signaled in the rubric that precedes the novella: ‘Un capitano Moro piglia per mogliera una cittadina Veneziana.’12 Yet, the tale begins with a highly unconventional assertion of double cultural assimilation: the Moorish captain is employed by the Venetian Republic and married to a Venetian citizen. Fully integrated into Venetian society both SURIHVVLRQDOO\ DQG SHUVRQDOO\ WKH 0RRU LV DQ H[HPSODU\ ¿JXUH ZKRVH DFWLRQV UHÀHFW ZHOO RQ KLV SDWURQV µXQ 0RUR PROWR YDORURVR LO TXDOH SHU HVVHUH SUR¶ della persona, e per avere dato segno, nelle cose della guerra, di gran prudenza e di vivace ingegno, era molto caro a que’ signori, i quali, nel dar premio agli atti virtuosi, avanzano quante repubbliche fur mai’ (65).137KH¿JXUHRIWKHQREOH0RRU ZDVD¿[WXUHLQWKHFDVWRIFKDUDFWHUVFRPPRQWRWKHIRXUWHHQWK¿IWHHQWKDQG sixteenth-century novella. Brave and magnanimous Moors, to whom Giraldi’s is partly heir, feature in several tales from Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron (1351) and Masuccio Salernitano’s Novellino (1476). Giraldi’s valorous Moor clearly evokes this tradition, in turn derived from chivalric romance models. However, the noble Moors in other collections are never linked romantically to Christian women. Moors who engage in sexual relations with Italian women elsewhere in the novella tradition are in fact antithetical to such images of noble Moors: they are invariably portrayed as overly sexual, sometimes sadistic, and often illiterate slaves.

11

In their analysis of the etymologies of Disdemona, Henry and Renée Kahane note that the Greek ‘dysdaimon’ could mean cursed with an evil destiny, ill-starred and unhappy, or God-fearing and religious. ‘Disdemona: A Star-Crossed Name,’ Names: Journal of the American Name Society 35, 3–4 (1987): pp. 232–5. 12 ‘A Moorish captain takes as his wife a Venetian citizen.’ Giambattista Giraldi Cinzio, De gli hecatommithi di M. Giovanbattista Gyraldi Cinthio nobile ferrarese (Nel Monte Regale: Appresso Lionardo Torrentino, 1565), p. 64. Citations of the novella in the body of this essay are from this edition. 13 ‘A very valiant Moor, who because he was personally courageous and had given proof in warfare of great prudence and skillful energy, was very dear to those [Venetian] lords, who in rewarding virtuous actions advance the interests of any republic.’

Visions of Venice in Shakespeare

52

Matteo Bandello’s Novelle (1575), widely acknowledged for having provided the source stories for Romeo and Juliet, Twelfth Night, and Much Ado About Nothing (either directly or through translations), includes a particularly brutal tale of Moorish violence. In novella III, 21, a Moorish servant, seeking revenge for the beating he received, brutally rapes his master’s wife in front of their FKLOGUHQPXUGHUVWKHPDOOEHIRUHWKHPDVWHU¶VDQJXLVKHGJD]HDQG¿QDOO\NLOOV himself. Bandello repeatedly characterizes the Moorish slave as a cruel and VLQLVWHUIRHµLOSHU¿GRPRUR¶µORVOHDOPRUR¶µLOFUXGHOPRUR¶µVFHOOHUDWLVVLPR barbaro.’14 Salernitano’s Novellino, as well as the Proverbi (1470), by his contemporary Antonio Cornazano, include equally graphic tales, although the context for Christian-Moorish encounters is quite different. Both collections were produced in the wake of the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453, and both narrate tales of Christian-Moorish adultery that characterize women and Moors in highly derogatory terms.15 The adulterous women are cast as H[FHVVLYHO\OXVWIXOEHDVWVµ¿HUDVLOYDQDGLYRUDWULFH¶µVFHOOHUDWDHOLELGLQRVVLVVLPD lupa,’ ‘pazza, insensata, ribalda, temeraria, e prosuntuosa bestia.’ Similarly, the Moorish slaves are described as ugly and monstrous brutes: ‘l’orribilissimo moro,’ ‘bruttissimo oltre misura,’ ‘nero veltro,’ ‘irrationale animale,’ ‘mostro terreno,’ ‘nero corbacchione,’ ‘can moro,’ ‘boia.’ Their inter-racial sexual act is DOVRGH¿QHGLQEHVWLDOWHUPVµLQIHWWDHSXWULGDFDUQH¶µODFRPLQFLzDODFDQLQDD martellare,’ ‘col tuo caro moro la tua foiosa rabbia sfocare,’ ‘inspedava carne,’ ‘sgunucando, rancognando.’16 Salernitano’s and Cornazano’s collections have yet to be fully explored by Shakespeare studies, but the language of sexual H[FHVV FRQWDPLQDWLRQ GH¿OHPHQW DQG EHVWLDOLW\ LQ WKHVH H[FHUSWV DQWLFLSDWHV some of the images that open Othello in intriguing ways: ‘an old black ram /

14

‘The treacherous Moor,’ the disloyal Moor,’ ‘the cruel Moor,’ ‘the most wicked Moor.’ Matteo Bandello, Tutte le opere di Matteo Bandello, vol. 2, ed. Francesco Flora (Milan: Mondadori, 1943), pp. 675–6. Hunter notes this novella as further evidence of the images of Moors that Elizabethans familiar with Giraldi’s tale might have anticipated seeing on stage (Othello and Colour Prejudice, pp. 193–4). Here, I wish to highlight the difference between Bandello’s representation of Moorish identity and Giraldi’s. 15 Nevertheless, as I argue in my book in progress, Scandalous Liaisons: Jews, Christians, and Muslims in the Italian Novella, in Salernitano tales of Christian-Moorish liaisons, the Moorish slaves are also occasionally portrayed in positive terms, revealing the complexity and ambivalence inherent in contemporary Christian notions of Muslim identity. 16 The women: ‘savage devouring beast,’ ‘wicked and most wanton she-wolf,’ ‘crazy, LUUDWLRQDO ¿OWK\ LPSXGHQW DQG SUHVXPSWXRXV EHDVW¶ 7KH 0RRULVK VODYHV µWKH PRVW horrendous Moor,’ ‘immeasurably ugly,’ ‘black hunting dog,’ ‘irrational animal,’ ‘earthly monster,’ ‘black carrion crow,’ ‘black dog,’ ‘executioner.’ Their copulation: ‘corrupt and LQIHFWHG ÀHVK¶ µEHJDQ WR KDPPHU DW KHU OLNH D GRJ¶ µWR TXHQFK \RXU KRW OXVW ZLWK \RXU dear Moor,’ ‘he was skewering meat,’ ‘grunting, snorting.’ See Masuccio Salernitano, Il novellino, ed. Salvatore Nigro (Milan: Rizzoli, 2000) novelle 22, 24, and 25; and the third story in Proverbii di Messer Antonio Cornazano in facetie (Catania: Guaitolini, 1929).

Genealogy of a Character

53

Is tupping your white ewe’ (1.1.87–8), ‘covered with a Barbary horse’ (1.1.110), ‘the gross clasps of a lascivious Moor’ (1.1.124).17 6LJQL¿FDQWO\*LUDOGLGRHVQRWIROORZDQ\RIWKHVHPRGHOV$OWKRXJKKLV0RRU weds and therefore beds a Christian woman, he is not viewed as repugnant on this account. Disdemona falls in love with him because he is virtuous, and not out of lust: ‘tratta non da appetito donnesco, ma dalla virtù del Moro, s’innamorò di lui’ (65).18 For his part, the Moor ‘vinto dalla bellezza e dal nobile pensiero della donna, similmente di lei si accese’ (65).19 The two live together, and for quite some time ‘di sì concorde volere, ed in tanta tranquillità, mentre furono a Venezia, che mai tra loro non fu, non dirò cosa, ma parola men che amorevole’ (65).20 Their resolve to travel to Cyprus together reinforces the impression that their marriage is built on mutual trust, affection, and respect. Domestic harmony is rare in the novella tradition, even among Christian couples, and unheard of in tales of black-white unions. While Giraldi clearly eschews the virulent language for representing ChristianMoorish unions employed by Salernitano, Cornazano, and Bandello, a passing reference to the objections raised by Disdemona’s family to the marriage implicitly signals the instability of their union.21 Their disapproval neither prevents the marriage, nor hinders the couple’s initial happiness, and Venice is cast as a place where cross-cultural, inter-religious, and inter-racial relations might not only H[LVW EXW HYHQ ÀRXULVK LQ ERWK WKH SXEOLF DQG SULYDWHV VSKHUHV +RZHYHU WKH geographical shift from Venice to Cyprus promises further harassment of the happy couple. Cyprus becomes the setting for a series of personal vendettas (by the standard-bearer and Moor), tragic misreadings (by the Moor and Disdemona), and stereotypically negative views of Moors (by Disdemona and the standard-bearer). The narrative relocation to Cyprus is far from accidental. The island, arguably RQH WKH PRVW ¿HUFHO\ FRQWHVWHG VLWHV LQ WKH VL[WHHQWKFHQWXU\ 0HGLWHUUDQHDQ ZDVVWUDWHJLFDOO\VLJQL¿FDQWIRUFRPPHUFLDODQGPLOLWDU\GRPLQDQFH9HQLFHKDG struggled to maintain its control of Cyprus since claiming it from the Lusignan dynasty in 1489. Over the course of the following decades, Cyprus suffered frequent raids by Ottoman forces, as well as by the numerous pirates and corsairs of 17

Quotations from Othello are from the Arden edition, ed. by E.A.J. Honigmann (Walton-on-Thames: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1997, rpt. 2004). 18 ‘attracted to the Moor by his virtues, rather than from any female appetite, she fell in love with him.’ 19 ‘won over by the beauty and noble mind of the lady, his love was similarly kindled.’ 20 ‘[The couple] was so united and lived in such serenity while in Venice, that between them there was never a word, much less I will say, an action, that was less than loving.’ 21 ‘si congiunsero insieme per matrimonio, ancora che i parenti della donna facessero ciò che poterono, perché ella altro marito si prendesse che lui’ (65). ‘They joined together in marriage, even though the woman’s relatives did what they could for her to take a different husband than him.’

Visions of Venice in Shakespeare

54

GLYHUVHUHOLJLRXVDI¿OLDWLRQDQGJHRJUDSKLFDOSURYHQDQFHWKDWUHJXODUO\VFRXUHGWKH Mediterranean in search of booty and prisoners. In 1539, the Ottomans destroyed Limassol (today one the largest commercial ports on the Mediterranean trade route, situated on the southern coast of Cyprus). These threats repeatedly forced Venice to fortify its bases on the island at Nicosia, Famagusta, and Kyrenia. Moreover, while from 1489 to 1570 Cyprus was technically Venetian territory, it remained under the suzerainty of the Egyptian Mamluks until 1517. When the Ottomans expanded their empire by capturing Egypt and Syria in that year, they considered Cyprus an integral part of their empire and Venice began to send to Constantinople the annual tribute it had formerly sent to Cairo.22 If Giraldi’s novella seems to foreshadow the 1570 Ottoman-Venetian battle for Cyprus, it is because when the HecatommithiZDVSXEOLVKHGWKHRXWFRPHRIFRQÀLFWVRYHUFRQWURORIWKHLVODQG still hung in the balance. The move from Venice (‘la Serenissima’) to this isolated Venetian outpost in the then-fraught Mediterranean conjures Venetian-Ottoman tensions and suggests that the Moor’s commitment to defending Venice’s interests should be scrutinized. Despite the initial presentation of the Moor as virtuous and brave, contemporary readers would likely have wondered whether the Moor could be trusted to defend the island, or whether he would turn into a threatening internal antagonist – and LI VR E\ ZKDW PHDQV 8QLGHQWL¿HG E\ QDPH RU FRXQWU\ *LUDOGL¶V 0RRU LV DQ unknown entity – all we know at the outset is that he is courageous, virtuous, and black. Should the Moor be seen as a former slave; a Turkish or North African soldier captured in battle; an ex-diplomat from distant lands; a foreign mercenary hired to aid the Venetian Republic in its military ventures? The last suggestion is perhaps the most likely, since throughout the sixteenth century the Ottomans frequently offered Venice military aid through mercenaries. Although this was RIWHQ D SUR¿WDEOH HQWHUSULVH IRU 9HQLFH LW ZDV DOVR YLHZHG DV D KD]DUGRXV DQG ‘un-Christian’ policy by the Church, which repeatedly and publicly condemned such alliances.23 The four passages in the tale that have garnered the most critical attention are precisely those that signal contemporary apprehensions about Moorish identity by highlighting society’s tendency to view Moors according to negative stereotypes:

22

For the history of Cyprus in this period, see Benjamin Arbel, Cyprus, the Franks, and Venice, 13th–16th Centuries (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000). Today, it remains the only Mediterranean territory still nationally divided between two entities, Turkish Cypriot and Greek Cypriot. 23 For the history of Venetian-Ottoman alliances, and of foreign mercenaries serving in Venice’s forces, see Marie F. Viallon, Venise et la porte Ottomane (1453–1566): un siècle de relations vénéto-ottomanes, de la prise de Constantinople à la mort de Soliman (Paris: Economica, 1995), pp. 202–3; see also Eric Dursteler, Venetians in Constantinople: Nation, Identity, and Coexistence in the Early Modern Mediterranean (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006).

Genealogy of a Character

55

1. 7KH VWDQGDUGEHDUHU DWWHPSWV WR LQÀDPH WKH 0RRU DJDLQVW KLV ZLIH E\ attacking his racial identity: ‘Dovete adunque sapere che non per altro è grave alla donna vostra il veder il capo di squadra in disgrazia vostra, che per lo piacere che ella si piglia con lui: qualora egli in casa vostra viene, come colei a cui è già venuta a noia questa vostra nerezza’ (68).24 2. Disdemona, bewildered by her husband’s uncharacteristic anger, accuses him of being true to his ethnic roots: ‘Ma voi Mori siete di natura tanto caldi che ogni poco di cosa vi move ad ira ed a vendetta’ (68).25 3. Disdemona, ignorant of the root causes of her husband’s changed attitude towards her, assumes her family’s reservations were well-founded: ‘E temo molto di non essere io quella che dia esempio alle giovani, di non maritarsi contra il voler de’ suoi; a che da me le donne italiane imparino di non si accompagnare con uomo, cui la natura, e il Cielo, e il modo della vita disgiunge da noi’ (71).26 4. The Venetian authorities, hearing of ‘the barbarian’s cruelty against one of its citizens’ (‘intesa la crudeltà usata dal barbaro in una lor cittadina,’ 74) from the standard-bearer and the head of the guard, seize the Moor in Cyprus, bring him back to Venice, interrogate and torture him at length, DQG ¿QDOO\ VHQWHQFH KLP WR H[LOH ZKHUH KH LV SXUVXHG DQG NLOOHG E\ Disdemona’s relatives. Critics have taken the views expressed in these passages at face value. In other words, the protagonists’ opinions have been read against each other, rather than within the context of the rest of the novella, and of the literary antecedents and analogues with which Giraldi and his readers would have been familiar. Geoffrey Bullough, for instance, argues that there is no inconsistency in Cinthio’s account between the Moor’s nobility and his vindictiveness. The Moor’s virtù … rests in his determination and strength of purpose. Therefore, once the Moor has been tricked by the Ensign into an illusion about Disdemona’s guilt and a conviction of her merited punishment, the cruel, barbaric murder plan is entirely in keeping with the earlier portrait of a hot-blooded and vengeful Moor.27

24

‘You must therefore know that the only reason your wife is troubled at seeing the head of the guard in your disfavor, is that she has been taking pleasure with him whenever he comes to your house, like someone to whom your blackness has become distasteful.’ ‘Venuta a noia’ might also be translated as ‘has become boring.’ 25 ‘But you Moors are so hot by nature that any little thing moves you to anger and vengeance.’ 26 ‘I fear greatly that I shall be a warning to young girls not to marry against their parents’ wishes; and Italian ladies will learn by my example not to tie themselves to a man whom nature, Heaven, and manner of life separate from us.’ 27 Geoffrey Bullough (ed.), Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, Vol. VII (New York: Routledge, 1973), p. 236.

Visions of Venice in Shakespeare

56

Disdemona’s reading of her husband according to stereotypes of Moorish identity KDVWKXVEHHQUHL¿HG7KHVWHUHRW\SHLVVWHUHRW\SHG6XFKYLHZVVLPSOLI\*LUDOGL¶V complex approach to questions of loyalty, honor, and race, overlooking key narrative developments, as well as the striking absence of racial, cultural, and religious bias elsewhere in the novella. Furthermore, scholars routinely disregard the explicit moral appended to the tale, and instead identify the fears Disdemona expresses in the third passage cited above as the moral message revealed in the tale’s tragic ending.28 Each of the perspectives articulated in the four passages above can in fact be countered through a close reading of other textual moments and narrative GHYHORSPHQWV 7KH ¿UVW SDVVDJH LPSOLHV WKDW ¿FNOH ZRPHQ PD\ LQLWLDOO\ ¿QG Moors exotic and sexually enticing, but will quickly tire of them and/or become repulsed, implicitly recalling the xenophobic and misogynist views articulated in Salernitano’s and Cornazano’s novellas of adulterous Christian-Moorish encounters. Like the rest of the standard-bearer’s allegations against Disdemona, the slur against the Moor’s ethnicity is intended to persuade him of her adultery by reinforcing conventional assumptions and preventing Disdemona from presenting herself on her own terms. Yet, as the novella repeatedly emphasizes, Disdemona is anything but an inconstant bride. As the all too credulous Moor should remember, moreover, she fell in love with his virtuous character, not out of any capricious sexual interest in his exoticism. While the Moor tragically falls into the standardbearer’s trap, attentive readers are mindful that the comment is an example of malicious and ultimately destructive slander at odds with Giraldi’s representation of Disdemona’s love for her husband. In the second passage, Disdemona’s claim that all Moors (the implication being only Moors) are naturally quick to anger and revenge explicitly invokes the trope illustrated in Bandello’s graphic tale of the Moorish slave’s cruel retribution. Leo Africanus’s Descrittione dell’Africa, a work often cited as a source for Othello through John Pory’s 1600 translation, also describes Moors as prone to jealousy and savage vengeance. Africanus’s work circulated in manuscript form as soon as it was completed in 1526 and, like Shakespeare, Giraldi may well have drawn inspiration from the Descrittione for Disdemona’s statement. Yet the narrative sets XSDFOHDURSSRVLWLRQEHWZHHQWKH0RRUDQGKLVVWDQGDUGEHDUHUWKDWFRQÀLFWVERWK with Disdemona’s stereotyping of her husband and with the binary oppositions set up in the dedicatory letter.

28

For this reading, see Shaul Bassi, Le metamorfosi di Otello: storia di un’etnicità immaginaria (Bari: Edizioni BA Graphis, 2000), p. 22; Leslie Fielder, The Stranger in Shakespeare (New York: Stein and Day, 1972), pp. 146 and 173; and Bullough, p. 200. This view is so broadly accepted that The Royal Shakespeare Company’s online summary of the tale concludes: ‘Cinthio’s melodramatic tale seems to have been intended as a warning to daughters not to marry a man so different to themselves and a warning to obey their parents’ wishes,’ ‘Shakespeare’s Sources for Othello.’ http://www.rsc.org.uk/othello/about/sources. html (accessed October 25, 2009).

Genealogy of a Character

57

When Disdemona accuses her husband of reacting according to his naturally ‘heated’ Moorish nature, he becomes even angrier and vows to avenge the affronts to his cultural identity and virility.29 Rather than recognizing her husband’s words as proof of his ‘heated’ nature, however, Disdemona ‘rimase … tutta isbigottita a queste parole, … veduto, fuor del suo costume, il suo marito contra lei riscaldato’ (68).30 Although she initially employs a racial stereotype to characterize the Moor’s anger, she also immediately acknowledges that his reaction is quite out of character. The Moor thus acts ‘fuor del suo costume,’ even according to the woman who knows him best. On the other hand, at the end of the novella the standardbearer is said to act entirely according to his custom when he treacherously accuses a colleague of another crime he himself committed: ‘non volendo egli mancare del suo costume, accusò uno compagno’ (74–5).31 Moreover, while the Moor is introduced as a valorous and loyal soldier, friend, colleague, and KXVEDQGWKHVWDQGDUGEHDUHULVFDVWDVWKHSHUVRQL¿FDWLRQRIHYLOFRZDUGLFHDQG cunning: ‘della più scellerata natura, che mai fosse uomo del mondo’; and later: ‘quantunque egli fosse di vilissimo animo, copriva nondimeno coll’alte e superbe parole, e colla sua presenza di modo la viltà ch’egli chiudea nel cuore, che si scopriva nel sembiante un Ettore, od uno Achille’ (66).32 True to his changeable and wicked nature, the standard-bearer becomes jealous and vindictive when he fails to attract Disdemona’s romantic attentions: ‘ma mutò l’amore, ch’egli portava alla donna, in acerbissimo odio’ (67).33 The standard-bearer is thus clearly portrayed as more innately hot-blooded and prone to jealousy, vengeance, and violence than the Moor, who is instead driven to suspicion and murder by the insinuations and ‘proofs’ the standard-bearer brings before him, and by his own weakly credulous nature. Contrary to the premise announced in the dedicatory letter, the novella suggests that appearances can be tragically deceptive. Rather than simply viewing the story as an unambiguous illustration of Moorish barbarity, contemporary readers would likely also have recognized it as an original variation on the motif of unjustly accused women and gullible men. A common subject of both narratives and paintings (we need only remember 29 ‘A queste parole più irato, rispose il Moro: Tale lo potrebbe provare, che non sel crede; vedrò tal vendetta delle ingiurie che mi son fatte, che ne resterò sazio’ (68). ‘At these words, the Moor became even more angry, and replied: Anyone who does not believe it could easily prove it; I shall have such vengeance of the injuries against me as will satisfy me.’ 30 Disdemona ‘was bewildered by these words …, seeing her husband heated against her in a manner contrary to his habit.’ 31 ‘Not wanting to be defective in his custom, he accused one of his companions.’ 32 ‘[The standard-bearer had] the most evil nature of any man on earth,’ and ‘although he had an extremely cowardly soul, nevertheless he disguised the cowardice that he enclosed in his heart through high and lofty words and acts, so that he seemed on the surface to be another Hector, or an Achilles.’ 33 ‘the love he bore the woman transformed itself into the bitterest hatred.’ Unlike Othello’s arguably motiveless villain, Iago, Giraldi’s standard-bearer schemes to kill Disdemona precisely because she does not notice his amorous advances.

Visions of Venice in Shakespeare

58

the myth of Lucrece so popular throughout the early-modern period), unjustly DFFXVHG ZRPHQ IHDWXUH LQ WZR UHODWHG YDULDQWV RI SDUWLFXODU VLJQL¿FDQFH IRU Giraldi’s tale: the novella of Bernabò, Ambrogiuolo and Zinevra in Decameron ,,DQGWKHµQRYHOOD¶RI3ROLQHVVR$ULRGDQWHDQG*LQHYUDLQVHUWHGLQWRWKH¿IWK canto of Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso (1532). In both narratives, credulous men are persuaded of their beloveds’ adultery by the cunning insinuations of a wicked rival whose attentions have been spurned by the women in question.34 Giraldi would have been familiar with both texts, and the almost verbatim parallels between parts of his novella and these precedents suggest that he derived several images and phrases from them. Just as the standard-bearer’s love for Disdemona turns to hate, so too the would-be suitor in Ariosto’s narrative, Polinesso, rapidly begins to hate Ginevra: ‘tutto in ira e in odio si converse.’35 The Moor’s heartbroken reaction to the allegations of Disdemona’s adultery also echoes the reactions of Ariodante and Bernabò in Ariosto’s and Boccaccio’s stories, respectively. In Giraldi’s tale we read that: ‘lasciarono tali parole così pungente spina nell’animo del Moro … che se ne stava tutto maninconioso’ (67).36 When the standard-bearer alleges that Disdemona is sleeping with the head of the guard because she is bored/disgusted with his blackness, ‘queste parole passarono il core al Moro insino alle radici’ (68).37 When the Moor then returns home to Disdemona, tormented by the thought of her adultery, he is described as ‘Il misero Moro, come tocco da pungentissimo strale’ (69).38 In Boccaccio’s novella, Bernabò reacts in exactly the same way to WKHWKRXJKWRI=LQHYUD¶VLQ¿GHOLW\µTXDQGR«XGuTXHVWRSDUYHFKHJOLIRVVHGDWR

34

Ariosto’s variant was likely inspired not only by Boccaccio’s novella, but also by an HSLVRGHLQWKHODWH¿IWHHQWKFHQWXU\&DWDODQSRHPTirant lo Blanc by Joanot Martorell and Martí Joan de Galba: in chapters 267–8 and 283, a servant (la Viuda Reposada) disguised as a black gardener contributes to a false accusation of adultery against her mistress Carmesina, instigating her lover’s wrath. See Tirant lo blanc, trans. David H. Rosenthal (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), pp. 412–14 and 427–9. For a discussion of the analogies between these episodes, see Paolo Valesio, ‘Genealogy of a Staged Scene (Orlando Furioso V),’ Yale Italian Studies 1 (1980): pp. 5–31. Ariosto’s refashioning in WKH¿IWKFDQWRRIWKHFurioso itself served as a source for the story of Hero and Claudio in Much Ado About Nothing, either directly, through Bandello’s variant set in Messina (novella I, 22), or through one of the many English translations and transformations of the story in circulation in Elizabethan England. See Claire McEachern’s discussion of sources in her Arden edition of Much Ado (London: Thomson, 2006), pp. 4–12. 35 ‘[his love] was completely converted to anger and hatred.’ Orlando Furioso, ed. Marcello Turchi (Milan: Garzanti, 1994), V.21.8. All other quotations from the Furioso will appear parenthetically in the text. 36 ‘[the standard-bearer’s] words left such a sharp thorn in the Moor’s mind … that he became very melancholy.’ 37 ‘these words drove through the Moor’s heart down to its roots.’ 38 ‘The wretched Moor [was] as if struck by the sharpest of darts.’

Genealogy of a Character

59

d’un coltello al cuore, sì fatto dolore sentì.’39 Similarly, Ariodante in Ariosto’s text is described as ‘misero’ when he sees Ginevra with Polinesso (in reality it is her servant in disguise), and suicidal: ‘cade in tanto dolor, che si dispone / allora allora di voler morire: / e il pome de la spada in terra pone, / che su la punta si volea ferire’ (V.51.8–52.4).40 Perhaps most interesting for students of Othello are the precedents in Boccaccio’s, Ariosto’s, and Giraldi’s narratives for Othello’s famous exhortation – ‘Give me the ocular proof’ (3.3.368). In Giraldi’s tale, the Moor demands that the standard-bearer display the evidence before his eye: ‘se non mi fai … vedere cogli occhi quello che detto mi hai’ (69),41 a phrase often cited as evidence that Shakespeare knew Giraldi’s tale in the original Italian rather than through Gabriel Chappuys’s 1584 translation.42 In Boccaccio’s novella, Ambrogiuolo makes a bet with Bernabò that he will be able to show him proofRIKLVZLIH¶VLQ¿GHOLW\ ‘se tu hai voglia di vedere pruova di ciò che io ho già ragionato’ (II, 9, 22).43 When Ambrogiuolo shows Bernabò the items he stole from Zinevra’s room, claiming them as love tokens, and describes the room itself, Bernabò argues that such ‘proof’ might have been obtained in any number of innocent ways and asks for more evidence. It is only when Ambrogiuolo relates intimate details of Zinevra’s body (she has a mole beneath her left breast surrounded by six gold-colored hairs) that Bernabò believes his wife must have slept with him. Elaborating on the trope of visible evidence even more explicitly, Ariosto’s Polinesso offers to make Ginevra’s adultery manifest before Ariodante’s eyes: ‘di quel che t’offerisco manifesto, / quando ti piaccia, inanzi agli occhi porre’ (V.40.3–4). Ariodante likewise demands to see with his own eyes: ‘Quando sia che tu mi faccia / veder questa aventura tua sì rara, / prometto di costei lasciar la traccia, / a te sì liberale, a me sì avara: / ma ch’io tel voglia creder, non far stima, / s’io non lo veggio con questi occhi prima’ (V.41.3–8).44 Ariodante is only convinced after he thinks he witnesses Ginevra (in fact it is her servant Dalinda in disguise) embracing Polinesso. 39 Decameron, ed. Vittore Branca (Milan: Mondadori, 1985), II.9, 33. ‘When Bernabò heard this, he felt as though he had been stabbed through the heart, such was the pain that assailed him.’ All other quotations from the Decameron will appear parenthetically in the text. 40 ‘Wretchedly he sees everything from afar, and falls into such anguish, that he immediately resolves to die, and plants the pommel of his sword in the ground, wanting to wound himself with its point.’ 41 ‘If you do not make me see with my own eyes what you have told me.’ 42 Giraldi Cinzio, Giambattista. Premier volume des cent excellentes nouvelles de M. Jean Baptiste Giraldy Cinthien, trans. Gabriel Chappuys (Paris, 1584). 43 ‘if you want to see proof of what I have told you.’ 44 Polinesso: ‘That which I pledge to offer you, whenever you like, I will place before your eyes.’ Ariodante: ‘With a wounded heart, pale face, trembling voice, and bitter mouth, [he] answered: “Whenever you show me proof of this rare adventure of yours, I promise to forego the chase of one so kind to thee, and cold to me, but don’t think that I will believe you, XQOHVV,VHHLWZLWKPLQHRZQH\HV¿UVW.’”

60

Visions of Venice in Shakespeare

As in Othello, in all three Italian variants on this stock narrative of deception and intrigue, unscrupulous jilted men (Ambrogiuolo, Polinesso, and the standardbearer) fabricate misleading evidence in order to trick foolish men (Bernabò, Ariodante, and the Moor). In all three variants, the men who believe they have been cuckolded are prepared to kill their women in revenge. In Ariosto’s refashioning of Boccaccio’s narrative, an entire kingdom is in fact willing to execute Zinevra, following a local monarchical law punishing women who have sex outside of (or before) marriage. There are notable differences in the narrative dénouements of each variant, however. In Boccaccio’s novella, Bernabò orders a servant to kill his wife Zinevra in the woods. The servant takes pity on her and sets her free. Zinevra escapes into a series of Mediterranean adventures, by turn fantastic and UHDOLVWLFDQGLV¿QDOO\YLQGLFDWHGDQGUHXQLWHGZLWKKHUKXVEDQGLQWKHWDOH¶Vlieto ¿QH. For his treachery, Ambruogiuolo is apprehended, tied to a pillar, covered in honey, and left to die devoured by the stings of bees and wasps. In Ariosto’s variant, Ariodante initially considers suicide, but ultimately chooses to return to the Scottish kingdom where Ginevra’s fate is being decided in a joust in order to ¿JKWQREO\IRUKHUOLIHDQGKRQRUGHVSLWHEHOLHYLQJKHUWREHXQWUXH2QFHDJDLQ a happily-ever-after ending is brought about, in this case with the aid of one of Ariosto’s chivalric heroes, Rinaldo. In Giraldi’s tale, on the other hand, events unfold with tragic consequences. There is no opportunity to vindicate Disdemona’s character in the Moor’s eyes (as happens at the end of Othello with Emilia’s confession). It is important to note that the standard-bearer single-handedly devises and executes the plot, while the Moor stands by, railing against his wife, and then helps to cover up the murder and make it look like an accident. Whereas in OthelloWKHKHURLVJXLOW\RIPXUGHULQWKH¿UVW degree, in Giraldi’s tale the standard-bearer shoulders this responsibility, while WKH0RRUPD\RQO\EHDFFXVHGRIEHLQJDQDFFHVVRU\WRWKHFULPH6LJQL¿FDQWO\ DIWHUWKHFULPHWKH0RRULVQHLWKHUJOHHIXOQRUVDWLV¿HGE\UHYHQJH,QVWHDGKH is rather empathetically portrayed as almost insane with grief: ‘il Moro, che la donna aveva amata più che gli occhi suoi, veggendosene privo, cominciò ad avere tanto desiderio di lei, che l’andava, come fuori di sé, cercando per tutti i luoghi della casa’ (74).45 The punishments meted out to the standard-bearer and the Moor similarly suggest that Giraldi wished to cast his hero in a sympathetic light, rather than as a stereotypically vicious Moor. The standard-bearer is apprehended and tortured by the Venetian authorities for another crime, and dies when his inner RUJDQVUXSWXUH,QWKH¿QDOSDVVDJHVRIWKHWDOHWKHVWDQGDUGEHDUHULVGHVFULEHGDV worse than all wicked men (‘peggiore di tutti i scellerati,’ 74). The Moor is similarly apprehended by the Venetian Republic (following the standard-bearer and head of the guard’s false accusations that he single-handedly killed Disdemona), brought EDFNWR9HQLFHWRUWXUHGDWOHQJWKDQG¿QDOO\VHQWLQWRH[LOH*LUDOGLZULWHVWKDWWKH 45 ‘The Moor, who had loved the lady more than his own eyes, seeing himself deprived of her, began to desire her presence so much that he went about, as though out of his mind, looking for her all over the house.’

Genealogy of a Character

61

Moor endured physical torture and interrogation with his ‘valorous soul’ (‘valor dell’animo,’ 74), a characterization that brings us back full circle to the initial presentation of the Moor as ‘molto valoroso’ and ‘pro della persona’ (65). It is the constancy of his character (‘la sua costanza,’ 74), and the absence of a confession that force the Venetian authorities to condemn him to exile rather than death. Even though a Moor – an alien stranger, a ‘barbaro’ different in nature, religion, and culture – is (as far as Venice’s authorities know) responsible for the death of a Venetian citizen on Venetian soil, in the absence of a confession, banishment is the only legal penalty. Disdemona’s murder is instead vindicated through a lex talionis: her relatives track the Moor down in exile and execute him, as he deserved.46 Just UHWULEXWLRQHQVXUHVWKDWWKH0RRUDQGVWDQGDUGEHDUHU¶VGHDWKV¿WQRWRQO\WKHLU deeds but also their natures. Just as in introducing his tale its narrator, Curzio, had steered clear of racial bias, so too at the beginning of the next narrative the other frame characters eschew stereotypically negative readings of the Moor’s actions qua Moor. Instead, they marvel at the excessive malevolence in a human heart, the standard-bearer’s (‘Parve meravigliosa cosa ad ognuno, che tanta malignità fosse ritrovata in uman cuore,’ 75), chastise Disdemona’s father’s choice of her ill-fated name,47 and blame the Moor for having believed too foolishly (‘fu biasimato il Moro, che troppo follemente avesse creduto,’ 75). The reproach aimed at the Moor recalls the words Zinevra directs at her gullible husband, Bernabò, at the end of Boccaccio’s tale: ‘più credulo alle altrui falsità che alla verità da lui per lunga esperienza potuta conoscere’ (Decameron, II, 9, 64).48 In Giraldi’s novella, it is certainly possible to infer a moral message, as many critics have done, from Disdemona’s earlier comment that women should learn to obey their parents and not marry a man different in nature, religion, and culture. While the frame characters’ concluding remarks do not unequivocally negate this reading, they do leave the question of the tale’s overarching moral message open to debate. 46 ‘Ma vincendo egli, col valore dell’animo, ogni martorio, il tutto negò così costantemente, che non se ne potè mai trarre cosa alcuna. Ma sebbene, per la sua costanza, egli schifò la morte, non fu però che, dopo lo essere stato molti giorni in prigione, non IRVVHGDQQDWRDSHUSHWXRHVLOLRQHOTXDOH¿QDOPHQWHIXGD¶SDUHQWLGHOODGRQQDFRPHHJOL meritava, ucciso’ (74). ‘But overcoming, with the courage of his soul, every torture, [the Moor] denied everything with such constancy, that nothing could be drawn from him. But even though he scorned death with his constancy, he was nevertheless condemned to SHUSHWXDOH[LOHDIWHUKDYLQJVSHQWPDQ\GD\VLQSULVRQDQGZDV¿QDOO\NLOOHGE\UHODWLYHVRI the woman, as he deserved.’ 47 ‘si determinò tra la brigata, che essendo il nome il primo dono che dà padre al ¿JOLXRORGHYUHEEHLPSRUJOLHOHHPDJQL¿FRHIRUWXQDWRFRPHFKHEHQHHJUDQGH]]DFRVuJOL volesse indovinare’ (75). ‘It was determined by the frame characters, that since the name is WKH¿UVWJLIWDIDWKHUPDNHVWRDFKLOGKHVKRXOGLPSRVHRQKHUDPDJQL¿FHQWDQGIRUWXQDWH one, as though wishing to foretell good and greatness.’ 48 ‘paying more attention to another man’s falsehoods than to the truth that years of experience should have taught him.’

Visions of Venice in Shakespeare

62

Rather than producing the conventional narrative anticipated in the dedicatory letter and rubric that precede the third deca and seventh novella, respectively, Giraldi seems to strive to challenge gender and ethnic stereotypes that circulated in the sixteenth-century cultural imaginary. In his reading of Othello, G.K. Hunter argues that the play manipulates our sympathies, supposing that we will have brought to the theatre DVHWRIFDUHOHVVDVVXPSWLRQVDERXWµ0RRUV¶,WDVVXPHVDOVRWKDWZHZLOO¿QG LWHDV\WRDEDQGRQWKHVHDVWKHSOD\EULQJVWKHPLQWRIRFXVDQGLGHQWL¿HVWKHP with Iago, draws its elaborate distinction between the external appearance of the devilishness and the inner reality.49

5HVWRUHG WR LWV KLVWRULFDO DQG OLWHUDU\ VSHFL¿FLW\ *LUDOGL¶V WDOH FDQ EH UHDG LQ similar ways as a narrative that explores the consequences on human relationships of culturally-shaped prejudices about women and Moors. On the one hand, this Renaissance tale of black-white, Moorish-Venetian, Muslim-Christian romance, intrigue, and murder exploits contemporary anxieties about cross-cultural encounters in the context of Ottoman military, economic, and cultural expansion in the sixteenth-century Mediterranean and the concurrent changing fortunes of the Venetian Republic. On the other hand, rather than only warning against the irreconcilable differences which make religious, cultural, and ethnic difference seem de facto dangerous, the narrative puts us on guard against those that are closest to us, most like ourselves, even those who bear our ‘standards,’ those who are the guardians of our own identities. The novella thus questions our assumptions and our aversions, plays into them and then destabilizes them by showing us a Moor who is noble, honorable, and heroic, and also capable of acting out our negative fantasies – fantasies focused as much (if not more) on avenging wounded male honor, as on the potential of ‘barbarous aliens’ for violence. Giraldi’s novella subverts the trope advertised by the dedicatory letter, revealing the wicked underside of outwardly virtuous (white) characters and the noble, albeit weak, nature of outwardly fearsome (black) characters. Read within its immediate historical and literary contexts, Giraldi’s tale emerges as one of the most intriguing and original variations on the theme of black-white sexual encounters in the Italian novella. Works Cited Arbel, Benjamin. Cyprus, the Franks, and Venice, 13th–16th Centuries. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000. Ariosto, Ludovico. Orlando Furioso. Edited by Marcello Turchi. Milan: Garzanti, 1994. Bandello, Matteo. Tutte le opere di Matteo Bandello, vol. 2. Edited by Francesco Flora. Milan: Mondadori, 1943. 49

Hunter, p. 195.

Genealogy of a Character

63

Bassi, Shaul. Le metamorfosi di Otello: storia di un’etnicità immaginaria. Bari: Edizioni BA Graphis, 2000. Bertini, Fabio. ‘Havere a la giustizia sodisfatto:’ tragedie giudiziarie di Giovan Battista Giraldi Cinzio nel ventennio conciliare. Florence: Società editrice ¿RUHQWLQD Bestor, Jane Fair. ‘Titian’s Portrait of Laura Eustochia: The Decorum of Female Beauty and the Motif of the Black Page.’ Renaissance Studies 17, 4 (2003): 628–73. Boccaccio, Giovanni. Decameron. Edited by Vittore Branca. Milan: Mondadori, 1985. Brummet, Palmira. Ottoman Seapower and Levantine Diplomacy in the Age of Discovery. New York: SUNY Press, 1994. Bruscagli, Riccardo. G.B. Giraldi: Drammaturgia ed esperienza teatrale. Ferrara: SATE, 1972. Bullough, Geoffrey (ed.). Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, vol. VII. New York: Routledge, 1973. Cornazano, Antonio. Proverbii di Messer Antonio Cornazano in facetie. Catania: Guaitolini, 1929. Dursteler, Eric. Venetians in Constantinople: Nation, Identity, and Coexistence in the Early Modern Mediterranean. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006. Fielder, Leslie. The Stranger in Shakespeare. New York: Stein and Day, 1972. Gardner, Helen. ‘The Noble Moor.’ Proceedings of the British Academy 41 (1955). Reprint in Interpretations of Shakespeare, edited by Kenneth Muir. 161–79. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. Giraldi Cinzio, Giambattista. De gli hecatommithi di M. Giovanbattista Gyraldi Cinthio nobile ferrarese. Nel Monte Regale: Appresso Lionardo Torrentino, 1565. ———. Discorso dei romanzi. Edited by Laura Benedetti et al. Bologna: Millenium, 1999. ———. Premier volume des cent excellentes nouvelles de M. Jean Baptiste Giraldy Cinthien. Translated by Gabriel Chappuys. Paris, 1584. ———. Scritti critici. Edited by Camillo Crocetti. Milan: Marzorati, 1973. +DG¿HOG$QGUHZHG William Shakespeare’s Othello: A Sourcebook. Routledge: London, 2003. Horne, Philip R. Tragedies of Giambattista Cinthio Giraldi. London: Oxford University Press, 1962. Hunter, G.K. ‘Othello and Colour Prejudice.’ Proceedings of the British Academy 53 (1967). Reprint in Interpretations of Shakespeare, edited by Kenneth Muir. 180–207. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. Kahane, Henry and Renée. ‘Disdemona: A Star-Crossed Name.’ Names: Journal of the American Name Society 35, 3–4 (1987): 232–5. Kaplan, Paul H.D. ‘Titian’s Laura Dianti and the Origins of the Motif of the Black Page in Portraiture.’ Antichità Viva 21, 1 (1982): 11–18, and 21, 4 (1982): 10–18.

64

Visions of Venice in Shakespeare

Lucas, Corinne. 'HO¶KRQQHXUDXµOLHWR¿QH¶OHFRQWU{OHGXGLVFRXUVWUDJLTXHGDQV le théâtre de Giraldi Cinzio. Rome: Bonacci, 1984. Martorell, Joanot and Martí Joan de Galba. Tirant lo Blanc. Translated by David H. Rosenthal. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984. Morrison, Mary. The Tragedies of G.B. Giraldi Cinthio: The Transformation of Narrative Source into Stage Play. Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 1997. Muir, Kenneth (ed.). Interpretations of Shakespeare. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. ———. Shakespeare’s Sources: Comedies and Tragedies. 1961. Reprint, London: Routledge, 2005. Salernitano, Masuccio. Il novellino. Edited by Salvatore Nigro. Milan: Rizzoli, 2000. Shakespeare, William. Much Ado About Nothing. The Arden Shakespeare. Edited by Claire McEachern. London: Thomson, 2006. ———. Othello. Edited by E.A.J. Honigmann. The Arden Shakespeare. Waltonon-Thames: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1997, rpt. 2004. Valesio, Paolo. ‘Genealogy of a Staged Scene (Orlando Furioso V).’ Yale Italian Studies 1 (1980): 5–31. Viallon, Marie F. Venise et la porte Ottomane (1453–1566): un siècle de relations vénéto-ottomanes, de la prise de Constantinople à la mort de Soliman. Paris: Economica, 1995. Villari, Susanna. Per l’edizione critica degli Ecatommiti. Messina: Sicania, 1988.

PART 2 Political Culture and Religious Policy in Venice and England

This page has been left blank intentionally

Chapter 4

Shakespeare and Republican Venice $QGUHZ+DG¿HOG

Venice occupied a central place in the English imagination in the sixteenth century. There was, of course, the prospect of sex, whether imagined or real, most famously illustrated in Thomas Coryat’s descriptions of Venetian courtesans.1 As we are coming to realize, one of the key reasons behind the development of the Grand Tour was the sowing of wild oats, what many would now call sex tourism. Venice’s reputation as the home of the world’s most desirable and available women was one reason for English enthusiasm.2 There was also the wealth, the cosmopolitanism, and its pivotal role as gateway to the East.3%XWSHUKDSVWKHPRVWVLJQL¿FDQWUHDVRQV that Englishmen admired Venice were political. Venice was often an ally against the papacy, and a whole section of the Calendar of State Papers, when archived in the nineteenth century, collect the voluminous correspondence and diplomatic contact with Venice.4 Venice also served as an intriguing political example, a stable republican city-state that formed a pointed and instructive contrast to the uncertainties and exclusive hierarchical order of Tudor England.5 David Riggs, in his recent biography of Christopher Marlowe, has argued that many intelligent and restless young men in London, especially writers, cut off from the stability of 1 5HSURGXFHG LQ $QGUHZ +DG¿HOG HG  Amazons, Savages and Machiavels: An Anthology of Travel and Colonial Writing, 1550–1650 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 53. 2 Jeremy Black, The Grand Tour in the Eighteenth Century (Stroud: Sutton, 1992), p. 196; Virginia Mason Vaughan, Othello: A Contextual History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 16–17. More generally see Ian Littlewood, Sultry Climes: Travel and Sex (Cambridge: Da Capo Press, 2003). See also Laura Tosi’s chapter ‘Shakespeare, Jonson and Venice: Crossing Boundaries in the City’ in this collection, pp. 143–65. 3 David McPherson, Shakespeare, Jonson, and the Myth of Venice (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1990); Lisa Jardine, Worldly Goods: A New History of the Renaissance (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996), passim; Vaughan, pp. 13–34. 4 See Jonathan Bate, ‘The Elizabethans and Italy,’ in Travel and Drama in Shakespeare’s Time, ed. Jean-Pierre Maquerlot and Michèle Willems (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 59. 5 For discussion, see John Grenville Agard Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University 3UHVV   SS ± ± 6HH DOVR$QGUHZ +DG¿HOG Literature, Travel and Colonialism in the English Renaissance, 1540–1625 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), pp. 17–68, 200–264.

Visions of Venice in Shakespeare

68

inherited wealth, were desperate for a means of attacking the status quo, opening a space for themselves to think and so asserting their value and originality. Riggs argues that Marlowe turned to the classics as a means of establishing his identity as a thinker and writer.6 But, for others, notably Shakespeare, representing Venice was an equally obvious means of thinking about the problems and opportunities of Elizabethan England. %HIRUHWKHSXEOLFDWLRQRI/HZHV/HZNHQRU¶VLQÀXHQWLDOWUDQVODWLRQRI*DVSDUR Contarini’s The Commonwealth and Government of Venice in 1599, the principal source that informed English men and women about Venice was William Thomas’s History of Italy (1549, reprinted 1561, 1562).7 Thomas’s work was undoubtedly WKHFHQWUDOLQÀXHQFHRQ(QJOLVKSHUFHSWLRQVRI,WDO\DQGLWVHIIHFWRQWKHLUSROLWLFDO and cultural universe, certainly outside diplomatic circles, and, at last, the impact of this major work is being recognized.8 Thomas was the main English conduit of Italian culture after the mid-Tudor period until the death of Elizabeth, and virtually DOO UHSUHVHQWDWLRQV RI ,WDO\ WKDW DUH QRW EDVHG RQ ¿UVWKDQG REVHUYDWLRQ FDQ EH traced back to his work. Thomas’s success happened, in part, by accident. He appears to have led a rather dissolute early life and by his own admission he did QRWSODQWRWUDYHOWR,WDO\EXWÀHGWKHUHDIWHUKHKDGEHHQLQYROYHGLQDQDWWHPSWHG embezzlement. He returned after the death of Henry VIII and the accession of Edward VI, probably at some point in 1548. Thomas was either an astute politician or a skilful political opportunist – probably both – who recognized what interested the new regime and was ready to use his talents and the knowledge he had acquired in Italy. After the moribund political tyranny of Henry VIII’s last years there was hope that a rosy new English era might dawn with the committed Protestant boy king, and there would be a chance of forging a more dynamic and politically liberal culture.9 Edward’s reign witnessed the production of numerous political, cultural and literary experiments, including A Mirror for Magistrates, probably the most popular work of the sixteenth century.10 Although, like Thomas’s History of Italy, 6

David Riggs, The World of Christopher Marlowe (London: Faber, 2004), pp. 54–60, passim. 7 On Lewkenor, see David McPherson, ‘Lewkenor’s Venice and its Sources,’ Renaissance Quarterly 41 (1988): pp. 459–66. On Thomas see William Thomas, The History of Italy (1549), ed. George B. Parks (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1963), pp. IX–XXVIII; ODNB entry (by Dakota L. Hamilton). 8 Angelo Deidda, Maria Grazia Dongu, and Laura Sanna (eds.), Lezioni ai Potenti: William Thomas e l’Italia, con una selezione da The Historie of Italie (Cagliari: CUEC,   /DXUD 6DQQD µ³$ ERNH H[FHG\QJ SUR¿WDEOH WR EH UHGGH´ :LOOLDP 7KRPDV¶V Italy,’ in Una civile conversazione: Lo scambio letterario e culturale anglo-italiano nel Rinascimento, ed. Keir Elam and Fernando Cioni (Bologna: CLUEB, 2003), pp. 159–80. 9 W.K. Jordan, Edward VI: The Threshold of Power, the dominance of the Duke of Northumberland (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1970), pp. 28–44. 10 Lily B. Campbell (ed.), The Mirror for Magistrates, edited from original texts in the Huntington Library (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1938). For analysis, see John N. King, English Reformation Literature: The Tudor Origins of the Protestant Tradition

Shakespeare and Republican Venice

69

the Mirror has largely been ignored and read only as background material, it played a dominant role in establishing the literary and political culture of Elizabethan England – again, like Thomas’s work. The Mirror is a radical adaptation of the familiar genre of ‘mirrors for princes,’ signalling the focus was not the crown but WKRVHZKRDFWXDOO\JRYHUQHGLQLWVHOIDVLJQL¿FDQWVKLIWRIHPSKDVLVDQGVLJQDO of intent.11 The confessions of the ghosts of powerful men who misgoverned and PLVPDQDJHGWKHFRXQWU\¶VDIIDLUVDQG¿QDQFHVDUHGHVLJQHGWRSHUVXDGHUHDGHUVWR learn from their mistakes and so avoid the terrible errors that they made, whether as governors (magistrates) themselves, or as an articulate public who keep an eye on the magistrates (‘mirrors for princes’ literature was never simply for princes, but about princes). The MirrorWULHVWRHQFRXUDJHDQGLQÀXHQFHWKHGHYHORSPHQW of a ‘public sphere,’ a Protestant ideal of a more participatory political culture that can include far more people than has hitherto been imagined, giving readers the chance to think about English history in ways that enable them to help shape its past and future. The impact of the Mirror on William Shakespeare, who used it throughout his writing career, has yet to be adequately investigated. Thomas’s work developed out of the same cultural and literary milieu that produced the Mirror. His History, which owed a great deal to Machiavelli’s sceptical history of Florence, and his devotion to Livy as a political analyst and historian, is designed to show readers a series of political examples so that they can be informed about the effects of different political systems.12 Thomas expects English readers to make different judgements about the various Italian states and so to learn very different lessons from each one (again, just like the Mirror). Naples is the worst of all states, where corruption has seeped into every aspect of everyday OLIHSROLWLFDOFXOWXUHLVGRPLQDWHGE\DJJUHVVLRQDQGFRQÀLFWDQGSRLVRQLQJKDV become the normal means of resolving domestic and public problems; Rome is little better, dominated by the rule of the self-interested papacy, and its citizens also run a considerable risk of ending their days prematurely through the secret application of poison; Milan, Florence and Genoa are still corrupt but have redeeming elements and so provide more nuanced examples for their English readers, their histories containing varied lessons of the triumphs of political LQGHSHQGHQFH VNLOIXOO\ SUHVHUYHG DQG PDJQL¿FHQW FXOWXUDO DFKLHYHPHQWV DORQJ with grotesque tales of self-interested ruthlessness and the abuse of others.13

3ULQFHWRQ3ULQFHWRQ8QLYHUVLW\3UHVV $QGUHZ+DG¿HOGLiterature, Politics and National Identity: Reformation to Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,  SS±6FRWW/XFDVµ³/HWQRQHVXFKRI¿FHWDNHVDYHKHWKDWFDQULJKWKLVSULQFH forsake”: A Mirror for Magistrates, Resistance Theory and the Elizabethan Monarchical Republic,’ in The Monarchical Republic of Early Modern England: Essays in Response to Patrick Collinson, ed. John F. McDairmid (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), pp. 91–107. 11 On ‘mirrors for princes’ literature see Lester Kruger Born, ‘The Perfect Prince: A Study in Thirteenth- and Fourteenth-Century Ideals,’ Speculum 3 (1928): 470–504. 12 Sanna, ‘A boke,’ pp. 163, 166–74. 13 )RUDQDO\VLVVHH+DG¿HOGLiterature, Travel and Colonialism, pp. 24–32, passim.

Visions of Venice in Shakespeare

70

The best state in Italy is Venice, which has all the advantages of stability and liberty, the wealth to be able to absorb and tolerate legions of disparate strangers and an active political system that encourages its citizens to get involved in public affairs. Thomas argues, with what would appear to be scarcely TXDOL¿HGDSSURYDO For their principal profession is liberty, and he that should usurp upon another should incontinently be reputed a tyrant, which name of all things they cannot abide. For when a subject of theirs says, ‘Sir, you are my lord, you are my master,’ he takes it for the greatest villainy of the world.14

If we bear in mind the political charge that the word ‘tyrant’ possessed in this period, a description that no political leader could ever accept, then we should realize the radical statement that Thomas is making here.15 For Venetians, tyranny is a present danger, and they have to be constantly on guard against threats to their liberty, in itself a true sign of virtue, and something that promotes virtue, suggesting that Thomas was aware of the nature of political debate in sixteenthcentury Italy.16 If we also consider that the most commonly made criticism of Henry VIII in his last years was that he had become a tyrant and had deprived the English of their traditional liberties, then we can see how Thomas’s comment about Venice might have been designed to impress an English audience eager to learn from Italy and transform a native political landscape.17 A key point that Thomas makes is that there is hardly any corruption in Venice EHFDXVH RI¿FHV DUH QRW DOORZHG WR EHFRPH VLQHFXUHV UHPDLQLQJ IRUHYHU LQ WKH hands of one family, and then distributed to their wider network and clients, a FRPPRQFRPSODLQWDERXWRI¿FHKROGLQJLQHDUO\PRGHUQ(QJODQG182I¿FHVFDQEH given to one holder for life, but the governing class are under great pains to make sure that they are evenly and fairly distributed: 14

Deidda et al (eds.), Lezioni ai Potenti, p. 244. All subsequent references to Thomas’s History in parentheses in the text. 15 On ‘tyranny’ in the early modern period, see Robert M. Kingdon, ‘Calvinism and Resistance Theory, 1550–1580,’ in The Cambridge History of Political Thought, 1450– 1700, ed. J.H. Burns and Mark Goldie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 193–218; Rebecca Bushnell, Tragedies of Tyrants: Political Thought and Theater in the English Renaissance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990). 16 On the concept of liberty, see Quentin Skinner, Liberty Before Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). On Italian political debate, see James Hankins (ed.), Renaissance Civic Humanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Peter Stacey, Roman Monarchy and the Renaissance Prince (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 17 See Greg Walker, Writing Under Tyranny: English Literature and the Henrician Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). 18 See the excellent discussion in Mark Goldie, ‘The Unacknowledged Republic: 2I¿FHKROGLQJ LQ (DUO\ 0RGHUQ (QJODQG¶ LQ The Politics of the Excluded, c.1500–1850, ed. Tim Harris (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), pp. 153–94.

Shakespeare and Republican Venice

71

Amongst all other, this notable order they have, that two gentlemen of one IDPLO\FDQQRWEHLQRQHPDJLVWUDWHRUKLJKRI¿FHWRJHWKHUDWRQFH%\UHDVRQ whereof, those gentlemen that of one name are fewest in number grow a great deal sooner and oftener to authority than they that be of the most, which is thought a wonderful help of their unity and concord. For if many of one name should rule at once, they might happen so to agree that it should be an undoing of their commonwealth (248).

It is easy to see why Thomas places such emphasis on the relative equality of Venice’s republican principles and why it seemed such an intriguing and often attractive political model in contrast to the limitations of hierarchically-structured England, especially for those who hoped for dramatic change in the early years of the reign of Edward VI. It is also clear just why such descriptions appealed to DVSLUDWLRQDO\RXQJPHQRQWKHPDNHVXFKDVWKHZULWHUVZKRÀRFNHGWR/RQGRQDV the city grew exponentially in the late sixteenth century.19 Thomas’s account of Venice is measured, often subtle and balanced, but also carefully leading the reader to accept his conclusions. He is eager to show that, while the city-state has much to teach the English, many of its virtues also produce concomitant vices. Venetian liberty leads to sexual vice and excessive indulgence RIWKHVLQVRIWKHÀHVKDQGZRUVWRIDOOWKHSHUYHUVLRQRIFKLOGUHQ But surely many of them trade and bring up their children in so much liberty that one is no sooner out of the shell but he is hail fellow with father and friend, and by that time he comes to twenty years of age, he knows as much lewdness as is possible to be imagined. For his greatest exercise is to go amongst his companions to this good woman’s house and that, of which in Venice are many thousands of ordinary, less than honest … . And the bastards that they beget become most commonly monks, friars, or nuns, who by their friends’ means are SUHIHUUHGWRWKHRI¿FHVRIPRVWSUR¿WDVDEERWVSULRUVDQGVRIRUWK

This is an ingenious and important passage, which connects Italian sex and Catholicism, much as Roger Ascham was to achieve later in his famous strictures against Italian travel.20 But it also looks back to the vehement anti-Catholic writings RIVXFKNH\3URWHVWDQW¿JXUHVDV-RKQ%DOHZKRVHActs of English Votaries (1546) is a long list of the sexual crimes and corruption of monks and other religious clergy.21 Thomas’s point would appear to be less a warning against Italian vice than a means of verifying what he suggests is worth imitating in Venice. Edward VI,

19

On writers and young men on the make, see Richard Helgerson, The Elizabethan Prodigals (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976); on London’s population rise, see Steve Rappaport, Worlds Within Worlds: Structures of life in Sixteenth-Century London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 1–24. 20 6HH+DG¿HOGAmazons, pp. 20–23. 21 John Bale, The actes of Englysh votaryes comprehendynge their vnchast practyses and examples by all ages, from the worldes begynnynge to thys present yeare (1546).

Visions of Venice in Shakespeare

72

a well-educated radical Protestant, and a solemn and rather priggish young man, was hardly likely to permit sexual vice or restore the religious houses.22 Moreover, Venetians were reputed to be greedy and to possess an excessive love of money, a result of the wealth of the city-state and the liberties permitted LQGLYLGXDOVWREHWWHUWKHPVHOYHV:ULWLQJDERXWFXVWRPVRI¿FLDOV7KRPDVREVHUYHV ‘as they come to and fro … I think that Cerebus was never so greedy at the gates of hell as they be in the channels about Venice. And though they in searching a ERDW¿QGQRIRUIHLWXUH\HWWKH\ZLOOQRWGHSDUWZLWKRXWGULQNLQJPRQH\¶  To supply this love and need of trade, the Venetians make great use of the Jews: ‘It is almost incredible what gain the Venetians receive by the usury of the Jews, both privately and in common’ (242). The love of money has infected and limited the great achievements of the republic itself, ‘money (as some say) has entered in more reputation than virtue’ (250). The republican system in public life, which is based on the encouragement of virtue, is balanced by the dominance of greed and self-interest in trade.23 The place where these two halves of Venetian life collide is the law. Thomas encourages his readers to pay particular attention to this aspect of Venetian life and to see how it binds their society together. Judges in Venice enjoy particular freedoms, which mark their legal system out as distinctive within Europe: ‘But he that substantially considers the manner of their proceeding shall plainly see that all matters are determined by the judges’ consciences and not by the civil, nor yet by their own laws’ (252). In Venice, the legal system is almost LQ¿QLWHO\PDOOHDEOHDQGLVEDVHGRQWKHSULQFLSOHWKDWWKHODZLVOHVVDFRGHWKDQ a practice. On the one hand, Thomas is probably encouraging the reader to think about Venetian law in relation to cherished English beliefs in the common law and its importance as a guardian of English liberty. As John Grenville Pocock argued long ago, the native practice of case-based law was regarded by many in England as a peculiarly English feature, a means of distinguishing England from the rest of Europe. In the famous story of the ‘Norman Yoke,’ the ancient Saxon laws of England had been swept away by the Norman invasion and an alien system of Roman law imposed as a means of enslaving a once free population. Many learned antiquaries did their best to make the Anglo-Saxon laws visible once again so that they could be reinstated and the English legal system overhauled and restored to its former glory as a means of guarding and promoting liberty. 7KHPRYHPHQWJDWKHUHGPRUHVHULRXVPRPHQWXPODWHUEXW7KRPDVLQGH¿QLQJ Venetian law in these terms, is making connections to a series of legal practices WKDW GH¿QH D IRUP RI OLEHUW\ WKDW WKH (QJOLVK SDUWLFXODUO\ YDOXH DQG VR IRUJLQJ strong links between Venice and England.24 22

Jordan, Edward VI, pp. 17–27. On republicanism and virtue, see Quentin Skinner, Visions of Politics: Renaissance Virtues (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 24 John Granville Agard Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law: A Study of English Historical Thought in the Seventeenth Century (rev. ed., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). 23

Shakespeare and Republican Venice

73

On the other hand, Thomas’s understanding of Venetian law reveals a much darker side: One day the Avogadori comes into the court and lays against the felon that, that either by examination, by torture, or by witness has been proved, and another day comes in the advocate and defends the felon with the best answer he can devise, so that many times the prisoner tarries two, three, and sometime four years ere ever he come unto his trial of life and death. (252)

In Venice, liberty can all too easily turn into its opposite, tyranny, a point made in important histories of political forms such as Polybius’s history of the rise of the Roman Empire.25 Thomas leaves a balanced picture so that the English reader can decide what is the right way of reading Venetian law: ‘But this is clear: there can be no better order of Justice in a commonwealth than theirs, if it were duly observed. Howbeit corruption (by the advocates’ means) is so crept in amongst the judges that poor men many times can want no delays in the process of their matters’ (252). The Venetian legal system works well enough, but it requires good men of proper public virtue to administer it effectively. Thomas leaves the ball in the reader’s court, a familiar conundrum of republican theory. Are Englishmen good enough to adopt a desirable system? Can they control the institutions they establish? Or will they allow them to decay so that men and institutions become mutually corrupting rather than mutually ennobling?26 My contention is that just as Shakespeare made use of A Mirror for Magistrates when composing his history plays, which gives us a sense of their political direction and edge, he also made use of Thomas’s History of Italy when writing The Merchant of Venice SUREDEO\ WKH ¿UVW SOD\ WKDW UHSUHVHQWHG 9HQLFH RQ WKH English stage. Even though Thomas’s History has not featured prominently in discussions of Shakespeare’s play, it is hard to see what other source he could have used. The passages quoted on Venetian law are, I think, at the heart of the representation of the law in The Merchant of Venice, the key feature of its plot. Critics have argued ever since whether what we see in the trial scene in the play LVDQH[DPSOHRIMXVWLFHRUDGHYLRXVFRQWULFNWKDWDI¿UPVD&KULVWLDQLGHQWLW\DQG excludes the outsider.27 Shakespeare, like Thomas, shows the Venetian citizens DEOHWRGH¿QHWKHLURZQZD\VRIWKLQNLQJDERXWWKHODZDQGWKDWZKDWWKH\DUJXH 25

Polybius, The Rise of the Roman Empire, trans. Ian Scott-Kilvert (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979). 26 )RUGLVFXVVLRQVHH$QGUHZ+DG¿HOGShakespeare and Republicanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 17–53. 27 For discussion, see Jane Donawerth, Shakespeare and the Sixteenth-Century Study of Language (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1984), pp. 189–218; Warren Chernaik, William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice (Plymouth: Northcote House, 2005); Julia Reinhard Lupton, Citizen-Saints: Shakespeare and Political Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); Janet Adelman, Blood Relations: Christian and Jew in The Merchant of Venice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).

74

Visions of Venice in Shakespeare

can then become law. This is as true of Shylock as it is of Portia. The bond which unites the characters in the plot is the crucial feature. Note how it is imagined and GH¿QHG¿UVWE\6K\ORFNLQDQH[WHQGHGGLVFXVVLRQWKDWQHHGVWREHFLWHGDWOHQJWK Antonio and Shylock agree on the sum that the former will borrow and we then witness them working out the terms and conditions of repayment: Shy. Ay, ay, three thousand ducats. Ant. And for three months. Shy. I had forgot, – three months – [To Bassiano.] you told me so. Well then, your bond: and let me see,– but hear you, Me thoughts you said, you neither lend nor borrow Upon advantage. Ant. I do never use it. Shy. When Jacob grazed his uncle Laban’s sheep,– This Jacob from our holy Abram was (As his wise mother wrought in his behalf) The third possessor: ay, he was the third. Ant. And what of him? did he take interest? Shy. No, not take interest, not, as you would say, Directly int’rest,– mark what Jacob did,– When Laban and himself were compromis’d That all the eanlings which were streak’d and pied Should fall as Jacob’s hire, the ewes being rank In the end of autumn turned to the rams, And when the work of generation was Between these woolly breeders in the act, The skilful shepherd pill’d me certain wands, And in the doing of the deed of kind He stuck them up before the fulsome ewes, Who then conceiving, did in eaning time Fall parti-colour’d lambs, and those were Jacob’s. This was a way to thrive, and he was blest: And thrift is blessing, if men steal it not. Ant. This was a venture sir that Jacob served for, A thing not in his power to bring to pass, But sway’d and fashion’d by the hand of heaven. Was this inserted to make interest good? Or is your gold and silver ewes and rams? Shy. I cannot tell, I make it breed as fast, – But note me, signior. Ant. Mark you this, Bassanio, The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose, – An evil soul, producing holy witness Is like a villain with a smiling cheek, A goodly apple rotten at the heart. O, what a goodly outside falsehood hath! Shy. Three thousand ducats, ’tis a good round sum.

Shakespeare and Republican Venice

75

Three months from twelve, then, let me see; the rate. Ant. Well Shylock, shall we be beholding to you? … Shy. This kindness will I show, Go with me to a notary, seal me there Your single bond, and (in a merry sport) If you repay me not on such a day In such a place, such sum or sums as are Express’d in the condition, let the forfeit Be nominated for an equal pound 2I\RXUIDLUÀHVKWREHFXWRIIDQGWDNHQ In what part of your body pleaseth me. Ant. Content, i’faith, I’ll seal to such a bond, And say there is much kindness in the Jew.28

7KH GHYLFH RI WKH ERQG RI ÀHVK KDV D FOHDUO\ GH¿QHG VRXUFH *LRYDQQL Fiorentino’s Il Pecorone (1558).29 This Biblical discussion, based on Genesis 30, is Shakespeare’s own contribution to the story. Why has the tale of Jacob and Laban been added to the play? What cultural work is taking place here? The point, I think, LV WKDW ZH VHH WKH SODQ RI WKH ERQG DV D SRXQG RI ÀHVK GHYHORSLQJ LQ 6K\ORFN¶V mind as the scene progresses, as the staccato syntax of Shylock at the start of the exchange and the deliberate use of pauses signifying thought (‘I had forgot,’ ‘let me see,’ ‘mark’) indicate. Shylock then turns to the story of Jacob and Laban as a means of justifying – and thinking about – the practice of usury. Jacob, sent away from his family for safety after he has deceived his father, Isaac, into giving him the blessing that should have gone to his elder brother, Esau, works for his uncle, Laban, tending his sheep. Jacob persuades Laban to let him keep the speckled, spotted and brown sheep, cattle and goats that are conceived while he looks after the animals, instead of paying him wages. What Shylock does not add is that Jacob cunningly places the VWURQJHUEHDVWVWRJHWKHUVRWKDWKHLVDEOHWREXLOGXSDODUJHUVHULHVRIÀRFNVWKDQKLV uncle and so appropriates his wealth and becomes by far the richer of the two. What seems like an innocent and generous gesture by a family member is, in fact, a piece RIVHO¿VKFRQQLYDQFH7KHVWRU\PD\ZHOOVD\PRUHWKDQ6K\ORFNUHDOL]HV The story shows that work based on lending/borrowing can be properly rewarded without the actual exchange of money – although the Bible story is not quite what Shylock makes it seem. In this way Shylock appears to circumvent the problem of usury, which Christians avoided but only by allowing Jews to practice what they needed to trade.30 This was a key issue in Venice of all places, 28

William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, ed. John Russell Brown (London: Methuen, 1979, rpt. of 1959), 1.3.60–100; 139–49. All subsequent references to this edition in parentheses in the text. 29 Geoffrey Bullough (ed.), Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, vol. 1 (London: Routledge, 1957), pp. 463–76. 30 The most important Tudor treatise on usury is Thomas Wilson’s A Discourse upon Usury (London, 1572), which denounces the practice. Charging a fair price was allowed,

76

Visions of Venice in Shakespeare

of course. Shylock, as the end of this exchange makes clear, is able to beat the Christians at their own game through this scriptural example. The plan of the bond RIDSRXQGRIÀHVKIRUPVDVKHUHKHDUVHVWKHDQWLVHPLWLFWDXQWVKHKDVVXIIHUHG for so long, as his comments make clear. It is important that although Shylock articulates the racist insults, Antonio does not deny them. For Antonio, Shylock is simply citing Scripture for his own malign purpose. The audience is faced with a dilemma, one that has proved stubbornly resistant to any generally accepted VROXWLRQIRUJHQHUDWLRQVRIFRPPHQWDWRUV7KHµIDLUÀHVK¶WKDW6K\ORFNGHPDQGV LQUHWXUQIRUWKHORDQRIWKUHHWKRXVDQGGXFDWVVWHPVIURPKLVUHÀHFWLRQVXSRQWKH VWRU\RI-DFREDQG/DEDQDWZLVWHGLQWHUSUHWDWLRQRIWKHSURGXFWLRQRIÀHVK-DFRE PDNHVÀHVKJURZEULQJVIRUWKOLIHWRFUHDWHKLVRZQUHZDUG6K\ORFNLQWHQGVWR kill, or, at least, force his co-signatory to risk death, as a means of escaping from Christian/Venetian laws and practices). Antonio accepts the bond, partly because he has no choice, partly because, as the play demonstrates, this is what happens in Venice. Shakespeare is showing us a society that enables its citizens – Shylock is not properly equal but he is not without certain freedoms and the ability to act – to make the law themselves, one based on an understanding that Venice is where this can happen. Of course, the court scene reverses this verdict and we are again given a dramatic rendering of the process of law taking place before our eyes. Por. Tarry a little; there is something else, – This bond doth give thee here no jot of blood, 7KHZRUGVH[SUHVVO\DUHµDSRXQGRIÀHVK¶ 7DNHWKHQWK\ERQGWDNHWKRXWK\SRXQGRIÀHVK But, in the cutting it, if thou dost shed One drop of Christian blood, thy lands and goods $UHE\WKHODZVRI9HQLFH FRQ¿VFDWH Unto the state of Venice. Gra. O upright judge! Mark, Jew, – O learned judge! Shy. Is that the law? Por. Thyself shalt see the act: For, as thou urgest justice, be assur’d Thou shalt have justice, more than thou desir’st. Gra. O learned judge! – Mark, Jew, a learned judge. Shy. I take this offer then, – pay the bond thrice And let the Christian go. Bass. Here is the money. Por. Soft! The Jew shall have all justice, – soft no haste! He shall have nothing but the penalty. but usury was seen as a means of exploiting honest labour and so was condemned: see Craig Muldrew, The Economy of Obligation: The Culture of Credit and Social Relations in Early Modern England (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 1998), p. 46.

Shakespeare and Republican Venice

77

Gra. O Jew! an upright judge, a learned judge! Por7KHUHIRUHSUHSDUHWKHHWRFXWRIIWKHÀHVK± Shed thou no blood, nor cut thou less nor more %XWMXVWDSRXQGRIÀHVKLIWKRXWDN¶VWPRUH Or less than a just pound, be it but so much As makes it light or heavy in the substance, Or the division of the twentieth part Of one poor scruple, nay, if the scale do turn But in the estimation of a hair, 7KRXGLHVWDQGDOOWK\JRRGVDUHFRQ¿VFDWH Gra. A second Daniel, a Daniel, Jew! – 1RZLQ¿GHO,KDYH\RXRQWKHKLS Por. Why doth the Jew pause? take thy forfeiture. Shy. Give me my principal, and let me go. (4.1.301–32)

We now see that the game is up. Shylock’s trickery is outmanoeuvred by Portia. Perhaps the key line in this exchange is Shylock’s incredulous question, ‘Is that the law?’ It is clear that there is no shared understanding among Venetian citizens of what laws they are to uphold and obey. What began through a series of thoughts DERXWD%LEOLFDOVWRU\UHODWLQJWRXVXU\HQGVLQFRXUWZKHQDQXQTXDOL¿HGODZ\HU intervenes to deliver a novel and absurd, but technically plausible, interpretation of the law. The law is a battleground in Shakespeare’s representation of Venice, one that undoubtedly had lessons for an English audience which was steeped in a knowledge of legal practices, and which undoubtedly knew the variety of courts and their different claims as well as the debates over the history of the law that GH¿QHG(QJOLVKSROLWLFDOOLIH31 Read one way, the law in republican Venice must have looked refreshing and enticing. Read another it must have appeared terrifying. %XWHLWKHUZD\9HQHWLDQODZUHSUHVHQWHGIRUWKH¿UVWWLPHRQWKH(QJOLVKVWDJH presented a challenging prospect. The Merchant of Venice is a problematic play that makes use of its location to pose a series of complex questions. Othello is, I would suggest, a play that represents Venice in a far more obviously positive light (which is not to say that it is straightforward, just that Venice plays a very different role). Venice again displays both positive and negative features, only this time far more positive than negative. On the one hand, there is a much more politically sophisticated conception of Venetian institutions and political practice; on the other, a more obviously negative perception of Venetian sexual practices.32 Venice only appears LQ WKH ¿UVW DFW RI WKH SOD\ DQG D JUHDW GHDO LV PDGH RI LWV LQVWLWXWLRQV DQG WKHLU ability to sort out problems. Othello appears before the duke and the senate and defends his marriage to Desdemona: all goes well and the case is treated with 31 See B.J. Sokol and Mary Sokol, Shakespeare’s Legal Language: A Dictionary (London: Athlone, 2000). 32 Vaughan, Othello SS ± +DG¿HOG Literature, Travel and Colonialism, pp. 226–42.

Visions of Venice in Shakespeare

78

exemplary reason and the right verdict is reached. Brabantio is seen off – but with considerable courtesy, his advice valued – and the racist taunts of Iago and Roderigo – so prominent in the opening scene – seem a world away from the due process that takes place here. It is hard not to see the play as an endorsement of Venetian values. It is only when the protagonists move to the Venetian garrison on Cyprus that events unravel so tragically. In this masculine world without checks and balances, Iago is able to play on Othello’s fears and persuade him that his wife has behaved disloyally, i.e., not like a true soldier. The negative reputation of Venice as a place of sexual licence is important in the way in which Iago undermines Othello’s FRQ¿GHQFHLQ'HVGHPRQDDQGZHQRZVHHDZRUOGRIFDVXDOPLVRJ\Q\LQZKLFK all the women – Desdemona, Emilia, and Bianca – are abused by men. But is this 9HQHWLDQVSHFL¿FDOO\"2UDUHZHQRZLQDZRUOGUXOHGE\PLOLWDU\SRZHUOLIHDQG expectations? It is not clear. Iago does indeed play on the reputation of Venetian women for promiscuity and makes Othello believe in a world where secret – and not so secret – affairs dominate everyone’s love life. And Bianca is a courtesan, a central feature of Venetian life (it is at least arguable that the very mention of a courtesan in early modern England would lead to an association with Venice). But Cassio is a Florentine, Iago and Roderigo are Spanish, not Venetian, names which certainly complicates an English audience’s sense of place; and Othello is not Venetian either, of course.33 In fact, none of the leading men are Venetian, only the women, Desdemona, Emilia and Bianca (all of whom suffer from being represented as whores). Only the relatively minor characters, Brabantio, Montano and Lodovico, are actually Venetian. The implication of Shakespeare’s second representation of Venice is that Venice can tolerate and absorb a number of strangers, but that in the end such cosmopolitanism may well prove problematic and perhaps even undermine the social fabric. It is not only too much sexual liberty that is bad for you, but a liberty that compromises your identity and brings with it certain threats. It might be worth noting that Shakespeare had a hand in the play Thomas More, which deals with the issue of strangers within the realm of England and the May Day riots associated with the fear of foreigners, a detail that probably attracted the unwelcome attention of the authorities.34 This issue also connects Othello and The Merchant. Nevertheless, Othello seems to have much greater faith in the institutions of Venice than The Merchant – after all, it is the powerful Venetian citizens, absent for the rest of the play, who sort out the problems at the start, who mop up the SLHFHVDWWKHHQGDQGUHVWRUHRUGHUTXLFNO\DQGHI¿FLHQWO\:K\"7KHDQVZHUDV David McPherson and others have pointed out, is that in between writing the two 33

Barbara Everett, ‘“Spanish Othello”: The Making of Shakespeare’s Moor,’ in Shakespeare and Race, ed. Catherine M.S. Alexander and Stanley Wells (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 64–8. 34 Anthony Munday and others, Sir Thomas More, ed. Vittorio Gabrieli and Giorgio Melchiori (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990).

Shakespeare and Republican Venice

79

plays Shakespeare read Lewes Lewkenor’s translation of Gasparo Contarini’s The Commonwealth and Government of Venice, published in 1599. According to McPherson, when writing The Merchant Shakespeare concentrated on the fabulous wealth of Venice, but turned his attention to its republican political system and ethos after he read Lewkenor’s translation.35 If my sense that Shakespeare knew Thomas’s History well is correct, we need to be careful of this rather neat and schematic reading, but, even so, Shakespeare undoubtedly found that Lewkenor’s translation further highlighted the success and wonder of Venice’s institutions and the city’s fabled stability.36 Thomas had praised Venice fulsomely enough, but, as I have argued above, with some reservations and a certain amount of unease that Shakespeare had developed in The Merchant. Contarini sees Venice possessing the ideal constitution precisely because it exists as a participatory political society that bonds together all its citizens. Contarini describes the city as ‘an excellent contrived mixture of the best and justest governments’ and makes prominent mention of the fact that ordinary citizens have the chance to overturn the decisions of the good and the great (33–4). When the Duke is elected, his name is read out before the assembled Venetians so that if anyone thinks that the chosen candidate LVµXQ¿WRUXQFDSDEOHRUXQZRUWK\RIVRJUHDWDGLJQLW\RUIRUDQ\RWKHUFDXVH shall not thinke his creation to bee for the good of the commonwealth, he riseth up, and with an honest modestie speaketh his opinion, declaring the cause why he thinketh it unmeet that he should be chosen’ (57–8). The objections are then put to the Duke who gets a chance to respond. In this way the state remains stable and, as Contarini argues elsewhere, it is monarchies that depend on the vagaries of dynastic succession that are the really unstable political forms. This is exactly what we see happening in Othello. The tragic action takes place but in the end Venice remains steadfast while the human actors perish in various ways (although we are aware that it is threatened by the Ottoman Empire, a force that may well sweep away its power eventually).37 Shakespeare was evidently interested in republicanism, especially Venetian republicanism, perhaps even seeing its robust political system as a viable alternative to the vicious wars that dynastic succession clearly threw up, and which he chronicled so fully in his history plays.38 The plot of Othello demonstrates the success of Venice, opening with the Duke (Doge) and his council intervening to prevent a problematic and distasteful event, followed by nearly four acts of ever mounting chaos on Cyprus, 35 McPherson, Shakespeare, Jonson, pp. 69–90; Mark Matheson, ‘Venetian Culture and the Politics of Othello,’ Shakespeare. Survey 48 (1995): pp. 123–33. 36 Gasparo Contarini, The Commonwealth and Government of Venice, trans. Lewes Lewkenor (London, 1599. Reprinted Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum; New York: Da Capo Press, 1969), pp. 33–58. Subsequent references to this edition in parentheses in the text. For commentary, see Pocock, Machiavellian Moment, ch. 9, pp. 272–332. 37 On Venice’s struggle with the Ottoman Empire, see John Julius Norwich, A History of Venice (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2003, rpt. of 1982), pp. 449–517. 38 +DG¿HOGShakespeare and Republicanism, passim.

80

Visions of Venice in Shakespeare

and ending with the governing class intervening swiftly at the end to restore order.39 The play shows a state working better than many of the citizens it adopts, who misunderstand or abuse its institutions, especially when not contained within the safety of its borders. If The Merchant explores the politics and culture of Venice for an English audience to consider, Othello represents it, perhaps with conscious provocation, as a model to copy. Works Cited Adelman, Janet. Blood Relations: Christian and Jew in The Merchant of Venice. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. Bale, John. The actes of Englysh votaryes comprehendynge their vnchast practyses and examples by all ages, from the worldes begynnynge to thys present yeare (1546). Bate, Jonathan. ‘The Elizabethans and Italy.’ In Travel and Drama in Shakespeare’s Time, edited by Jean-Pierre Maquerlot and Michèle Willems. 55–74. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Black, Jeremy. The Grand Tour in the Eighteenth Century. Stroud: Sutton, 1992. Born, Lester Kruger. ‘The Perfect Prince: A Study in Thirteenth- and FourteenthCentury Ideals.’ Speculum 3 (1928): 470–504. Bullough, Geoffrey (ed.). Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, 8 vols. London: Routledge, 1957. Bushnell, Rebecca. Tragedies of Tyrants: Political Thought and Theater in the English Renaissance. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990. Campbell, Lily B. (ed.). The Mirror for Magistrates, edited from original texts in the Huntington Library. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1938. Chernaik, Warren. William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. Plymouth: Northcote House, 2005. Contarini, Gasparo. The Commonwealth and Government of Venice. Translated by Lewes Lewkenor. London, 1599. Reprinted Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum; New York: Da Capo Press, 1969. Deidda, Angelo, Maria Grazia Dongu and Laura Sanna (eds.). Lezioni ai potenti: William Thomas e l’Italia, con una selezione da The Historie of Italie. Cagliari: CUEC, 2002. Donawerth, Jane. Shakespeare and the Sixteenth-Century Study of Language. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1984. 39 It is possible that this is an excessively positive reading of the opening act. Daniel Vitkus (private communication) reminds me that a contemporary audience would have been shocked by Desdemona’s elopement and the prospect of miscegenation, and would QRWKDYHVHHQ%UDEDQWLRDVDW\SLFDORYHUEHDULQJIDWKHU¿JXUHDVKHZRXOGXQGRXEWHGO\ be in other plays. This may well be the case, but it still seems to me that even if we make such allowances, Othello represents Venice as a city-state which can sort out its problems TXLFNO\DQGHI¿FLHQWO\

Shakespeare and Republican Venice

81

Everett, Barbara. ‘“Spanish Othello”: The Making of Shakespeare’s Moor.’ In Shakespeare and Race, edited by Catherine M.S. Alexander and Stanley Wells. 64–8. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. *ROGLH0DUNµ7KH8QDFNQRZOHGJHG5HSXEOLF2I¿FHKROGLQJLQ(DUO\0RGHUQ England.’ In The Politics of the Excluded, c.1500–1850, edited by Tim Harris. 153–94. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001. +DG¿HOG $QGUHZ Literature, Politics and National Identity: Reformation to Renaissance. Cambridge University Press, 1994. ———. Literature, Travel and Colonialism in the English Renaissance 1540– 1625. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998. ———. Shakespeare and Republicanism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. ——— (ed.). Amazons, Savages and Machiavels: An Anthology of Travel and Colonial Writing, 1550–1650. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Hankins, James (ed.). Renaissance Civic Humanism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Helgerson, Richard. The Elizabethan Prodigals. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976. Jardine, Lisa. Worldly Goods: A New History of the Renaissance. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996. Jordan, W.K. Edward VI: The Threshold of Power, the Dominance of the Duke of Northumberland. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1970. King, John N. English Reformation Literature: The Tudor Origins of the Protestant Tradition. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982. Kingdon, Robert M. ‘Calvinism and Resistance Theory, 1550–1580.’ In The Cambridge History of Political Thought, 1450–1700, edited by J.H. Burns and Mark Goldie. 193–218. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Littlewood, Ian. Sultry Climes: Travel and Sex. Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2003. /XFDV6FRWWµ³/HWQRQHVXFKRI¿FHWDNHVDYHKHWKDWFDQULJKWKLVSULQFHIRUVDNH´ A Mirror for Magistrates, Resistance Theory and the Elizabethan Monarchical Republic.’ In The Monarchical Republic of Early Modern England: Essays in Response to Patrick Collinson, edited by John F. McDairmid. 91–107. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007. Lupton, Julia Reinhard. Citizen-Saints: Shakespeare and Political Theology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. McPherson, David. ‘Lewkenor’s Venice and its Sources,’ Renaissance Quarterly 41 (1988): 459–66. ———. Shakespeare, Jonson, and the Myth of Venice. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1990. Matheson, Mark. ‘Venetian Culture and the Politics of Othello,’ Shakespeare Survey 48 (1995): 123–33. Muldrew, Craig. The Economy of Obligation: The Culture of Credit and Social Relations in Early Modern England. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 1998.

82

Visions of Venice in Shakespeare

Munday, Anthony and others. Sir Thomas More. Edited by Vittorio Gabrieli and Giorgio Melchiori. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990. Norwich, John Julius. A History of Venice. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2003, rpt. of 1982. Pocock, John Greville Agard. The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Tradition. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975. ———. The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law: A Study of English Historical Thought in the Seventeenth Century. Rev. ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Polybius, The Rise of the Roman Empire. Translated by Ian Scott-Kilvert. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979. Rappaport, Steve. Worlds Within Worlds: Structures of Life in Sixteenth-Century London. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Riggs, David. The World of Christopher Marlowe. London: Faber, 2004. 6DQQD/DXUDµ³$ERNHH[FHG\QJSUR¿WDEOHWREHUHGGH´:LOOLDP7KRPDV¶V,WDO\¶ In Una civile conversazione: Lo scambio letterario e culturale anglo-italiano nel Rinascimento, edited by Keir Elam and Fernando Cioni. 159–80. Bologna: CLUEB, 2003. Shakespeare, William. The Merchant of Venice. Edited by John Russell Brown. London: Methuen, 1979, rpt. 1959. Skinner, Quentin. Liberty Before Liberalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. ———. Visions of Politics: Renaissance Virtues. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Sokol, B.J. and Mary Sokol. Shakespeare’s Legal Language: A Dictionary. London: Athlone, 2000. Stacey, Peter. Roman Monarchy and the Renaissance Prince. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Thomas, William. The History of Italy (1549). Edited and abridged by George B. Parks. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1963. Vaughan, Virginia Mason. Othello: A Contextual History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Walker, Gregory. Writing Under Tyranny: English Literature and the Henrician Revolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.

Chapter 5

‘Self-sovereignty’ and Religion in Love’s Labour’s Lost: From London to Venice via Navarre Gilberto Sacerdoti

‘I may speak of thee as the traveller doth of Venice:/– Venetia, Venetia,/Chi non te vede, non te pretia’ (4.2.95–8).1 Editors of Love’s Labour’s Lost have been quick to locate the source of this Italian proverb in John Florio’s Second Frutes (1591), but have not paused to ask why the name of Venice should appear in the play. This may be explained away as yet another little conundrum in a notoriously puzzling play; however, a more articulated answer might be suggested by way of a journey (long and circuitous, as is the nature of the play) that connects London to Venice via Navarre and makes this passing allusion quite topical.2 Love’s Labour’s Lost is a comedy which is disconcerting even before it starts. 7KH ¿UVW RQ WKH OLVW RI WKH dramatis personae is a King of Navarre, while his courtiers (Berowne, Longaville and Dumain) bear, as Frances Yates writes, ‘names representing opposite sides in the French wars of religion’ – and we can certainly agree with her that ‘the choice of such opposing names was not muddle or ignorance on Shakespeare’s part but a deliberate allusion to the wars.’3 In fact, while the Duc de Biron (Berowne) and the Duc de Longueville (Longaville) had fought alongside the Protestant Henri of Navarre (supported by England), the Duc de Mayenne (Dumain) was the Guise leader of the Catholic Holy League (supported by Spain), and in real history he had been Navarre’s ‘bitterest enemy.’4 What are they doing all together in ‘a little academe,/Still and contemplative in living art,’ which must make of Navarre ‘the wonder of the world’ (1.1.12–14)? 1

Quotations of Love’s Labour’s Lost, which appear parenthetically in the text, follow Richard David’s 1951 edition of the play for The Arden Shakespeare (Second Series). 2 For a far more complete treatment of the same subject, see Gilberto Sacerdoti, 6DFUL¿FLR H VRYUDQLWj 7HRORJLD H SROLWLFD QHOO¶(XURSD GL 6KDNHVSHDUH H %UXQR (Turin: Einaudi, 2002). 3 Frances Yates, Astraea: the Imperial Theme in the Sixteenth Century (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975), p. 211. 4 See Richard David’s ‘Introduction’: ‘The Duc de Biron and the Duc de Longueville were his faithful supporters; … the Duc de Mayenne was not a supporter, but his bitterest enemy,’ Love’s Labour’s Lost, The Arden Shakespeare, Second Series (London: Methuen, 1951), p. xxv.

84

Visions of Venice in Shakespeare

The French religious war was ‘the longest and most dreadful civil war that ever was known in any nation,’ as Edmund Burke called it.5 And according to Burckhardt ‘on the course and the result of the French religious wars depended the religious fate of the entire West.’6 While this dreadful civil war between the Catholic zealots of the Holy League and the Calvinist party of the Huguenots ZDV IRPHQWHG E\ UHOLJLRXV KDWUHG LWV ¿QDO SHDFHIXO UHVXOW ZDV ODUJHO\ GXH WR D third, more secular force: the monarchic party of the politiques, the party of all those Catholics, Protestants, or neither, for whom civil peace, and allegiance to the King, were more important than any allegiance to a religious party or authority. The politiques were simply, as de Thou calls them, ‘tous ceux qui étoient attachés au Roi et qui vouloient la paix.’7 Through its very strangeness, the academic setting of the play cannot but remind us of the far from academic character of this most fateful moment of French and European history. Moreover, if the names in the play point to historical reality, so do the dates. We know from the First Quarto that Love’s Labour’s Lost was presented before Queen Elizabeth and the diplomatic corps at Christmas 1598. That was a momentous year, since in April 1598 the ex-Protestant Henri of Navarre, having EHFRPH+HQUL,9RI)UDQFHKDGLVVXHGWKDW(GLFWRI1DQWHVZKLFKIRUWKH¿UVWWLPH granted Protestants substantial rights in a Catholic state, thus opening a path for secularism, tolerance and freedom of conscience. In fact, ‘neither Protestantism nor Catholicism engendered the spirit of toleration within themselves, but only WKURXJKWKHLUPXWXDOFRQÀLFW¶DQGµWKHRULJLQVRIWKDW$JHRI(QOLJKWHQPHQWZKLFK established the criteria of modern liberalism’ are therefore to be sought in ‘the ideas of the Politiques at the close of the Religious Wars.’8 As for the date of composition, ‘the likeliest,’ according to the Oxford edition, is ‘1594–1595.’9 7KHVH DUH DOVR VLJQL¿FDQW \HDUV ,Q -XO\  +HQUL KDYLQJ discovered that Paris vaut bien une messe, abjured Protestantism and attended Mass in Saint-Denis. His entrance into the Roman Catholic Church secured for him the allegiance of the vast majority of his subjects, and he was crowned King of France at the Cathedral of Chartres on 27 February 1594. These events caused an enormous international sensation. ‘The conversion of Henry IV,’ writes Yates, ‘aroused hopes that some universal solution of both political and religious problems would be found through this French monarch’: since in France ‘the monarchy did 5 Edmund Burke, 5HÀHFWLRQVRQWKH5HYROXWLRQLQ)UDQFH, ed. Connor Cruise O’Brien (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), p. 137. 6 Jacob Burckhardt, Judgements on History and Historians, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Routledge, 2007), p. 162; the italics are in the text. 7 Jacques Auguste de Thou, Histoire universelle, vol. 6 (La Haye: H. Scheurleer, 1740), p. 593. 8 John H.M. Salmon, The French Religious Wars in English Political Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959), pp. 13–14. 9 George R. Hibbard, ‘Introduction,’ in Love’s Labour’s Lost, The Oxford Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 45.

‘Self-sovereignty’ and Religion in Love’s Labour’s Lost

85

develop in the direction of liberal solutions of the religious problems,’ it seemed that monarchy could indeed be ‘used as a means of conciliating the opposite religious parties by bringing them together in common loyalty to the crown,’ and there was a ‘widespread belief’ that the sensational news from France ‘signalized a new and more liberal era dawning in the religious history of Europe.’10 But the sensation was perhaps nowhere so great and complex as in England (Navarre’s main ally during the war), where there was a widespread ‘detailed NQRZOHGJH RI )UHQFK HYHQWV¶ DQG ZKHUH WKH µDIÀLFWLRQV RI )UDQFH¶ ZHUH RIWHQ perceived as a ‘looking glasse’ of the dangers that threatened England itself.11 $FFRUGLQJWRWKH&DOYLQLVWOH[LFRQRIWKH7KLUW\¿UVWRIWKHThirty-nine Articles RIWKH&KXUFKRI(QJODQGWKHµVDFUL¿FHRIWKH0DVV¶LVµDEODVSKHPRXVIDEOHDQG a dangerous deceit,’ and Navarre’s attendance of it was therefore duly called by Elizabeth herself an ‘abominable act.’12 Nonetheless it was quite clear that, thanks to this abomination, Navarre had put an end to those civil wars in which four million French – out of a total population of 12–15 million – had lost their lives.13 Therefore his act did not seem so very abominable to everyone – not even to all those who thought it necessary to call it so in public. ‘The Wars of Religion,’ writes Trevor-Roper, quoting Voltaire, ‘destroyed all, or nearly all, the intellectual achievements of the recent past, making the second half of the century frightful and bringing upon Europe “une èspece de barbarie que les Hérules, les Vandales et les Huns n’avaient jamais connue.”’14 Not, then, DSULPLWLYHRUXQFLYLOL]HGEDUEDULVPEXWDVSHFL¿FDOO\&KULVWLDQQHREDUEDULVP LQZKLFKIRUWKH¿UVWWLPHUHOLJLRXVSLHW\KDGPDQLIHVWHGDQDSSDOOLQJSRWHQWLDO to cause the worst of social evils: and ‘it was not till the end of the sixteenth century, till the reign of Voltaire’s constant hero, Henry IV, that the progress of mankind, which those wars had interrupted, could be resumed.’15 And so Navarre, who placed the bonum publicum above religious piety, became for Voltaire the

10

Yates, pp. 124, 210. ‘One contemporary English analysis of the French scene [The Mutable and Wavering Estate of France … with an Ample Declaration of the Seditious and Treacherous Practises of that Viperous Brood of Hispaniolized Leaguers, 1597, Preface] expressed the KRSH³WKDWWKHDIÀLFWLRQVRI)UDQFHPD\EH(QJODQGVORRNLQJJODVVHDQGWKHLUQHJOHFWRI peace our continued labour and studie how to preserve it.”’ Salmon, pp. 16, 38. 12 See David, p. 60n. 13 See Jean-Hippolyte Mariéjol, La Réforme et la Ligue. L’Edit de Nantes (Paris: Hachette, 1908), p. 413. 14 See Hugh R. Trevor-Roper, Religion, the Reformation and Social Change (London: Macmillan, 1967), p. 199, who (wrongly) refers to ‘Essai sur le moeurs, ch. cxxi, clxxix, clxxxvii.’ But in 1563 Ronsard had already written that ‘sous ombre de l’Evangile’ the French ‘ont commis des actes tels, que les Scythes n’oseroyent ni ne voudroyent seulement avoir pensé’ (Pierre de Ronsard, Discours des Misères de ce temps, vol. 2, Oeuvres Complètes, ed. Jean Céard, Daniel Ménager, Michel Simonin [Paris: Gallimard, 1994], p. 1042). 15 Trevor-Roper, p. 199. 11

86

Visions of Venice in Shakespeare

proto-enlightened ideal sovereign, worthy of being sung about by his (rather modest) epical Muse in the Henriade. But Voltaire was simply echoing at a distance the enthusiasm of the so called politiques – those contemporaries of Navarre’s who thought that political peace was the most important aim, and that only an autonomous civil power, freed from submission to any ecclesiastical power, and superior to confessional factions, was able to bring it about. Therefore Catholic politiques recognized Navarre’s legitimacy even before he attended Mass, and Calvinist politiques continued to recognize it even after he had attended it. As for Navarre, while it was well known that his conversion to Catholicism had been a matter of policy and not of inward faith, neither had his previous Protestant faith been a model of piety. According to the Venetian ambassadors, it was widely known that he had no faith at all, that he used to laugh at his Calvinist ministers even when they were on the pulpit, and that he used to throw cherry-stones at them while they were preaching.16 As for Elizabeth’s sanctimonious reaction to his conversion: ‘Ah! que douleurs, oh! quel regrets, oh! que gemissements je sentois en mon âme par le son de telles nouvelles … Mon Dieu! est-il possible que mondain respect aulcun deut effacer le terreur que la crainte divine nous ménace?’[‘Ah, what pains, oh! what regrets, oh! how my soul moaned when I heard the sound of such news … My God! Is it possible that worldly respect should erase fear of God?’]17 We may or may not agree with Voltaire that ‘when the murderer of Mary Stuart spoke of the fear of God, it is highly probable that she “faisait la comédienne” as she was often accused of being.’18 But it is certainly true that a fair amount of mondain respect or worldly regard had never been absent from her own way of dealing with religion. ‘Her conduct of Church affairs,’ writes Patrick Collinson, ‘was DERYHDOODQDFWRIVWDWHVPDQVKLS¶DQGKHU¿UVWDFWKDGEHHQµWRH[FOXGHWKH3RSH and assume supreme powers over the Church.’19 As for her Protestant piety, Sir John Neale thought that while in ’93 Navarre found out that Paris was well worth

16 See Howell A. Lloyd, The Rouen Campaign 1590–1592. Politics, Warfare and the Early-Modern State (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), p. 16. The anecdote comes from Niccolò Tommaseo (ed.), Relations des ambassadeurs vénitiens sur les affaires de France au XVIe siècle, vol. 2 (Paris: Imprimerie royale, 1838), p. 632. See also Quentin Hurst, Henry of Navarre (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1937), p. 9, where Navarre’s religious tolerance is seen as a result of his inward rationalism and agnosticism. 17 Cecil Manuscripts (H.M.C.), 4:404; quoted in John B. Black, Elizabeth & Henry IV: being a short study in Anglo-French relations, 1589–1603 (Oxford: B.H. Blackwell, 1914), pp. 65–6. 18 Voltaire, Essai sur les moeurs et l’esprit des nations et sur les principaux faits de l’histoire depuis Charlemagne jusqu’à Louis XIII, ed. René Pomeau, vol. 2 (Paris: Éditions Garnier, 1963), p. 539. 19 Patrick Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), pp. 29–30.

‘Self-sovereignty’ and Religion in Love’s Labour’s Lost

87

a Mass, she had long before realized that London was well worth a sermon.20 But let us go back to the play. Having made clear that both names and dates in the play seem to point to crucial events in European history, I shall focus on a single, apparently minor, merely ‘sporting’ detail. In the play there is a strange deer-hunting scene where the hunter is a Princess – a Princess who, though French, has quite a lot in common (in this scene at least) with Queen Elizabeth of England, who was herself a keen deer-huntress.21 ‘The description of the “hunt,”’ writes Dover Wilson, ‘is generally assumed to be connected with Queen Elizabeth’s visit on 15–17 August 1591 to Cowdray, the house of Lord Montague, grandfather to the Earl of Southampton, DQGVKRUWO\DIWHUWR7LWFK¿HOG6RXWKDPSWRQ¶VRZQKRXVHDWERWKRIZKLFKSODFHV ‘standings’ were prepared for her to shoot from at deer in a paddock.’22 And so similar is this French hunt to the hunts of Elizabeth, that H.C. Hart thinks that Shakespeare had actually read The Queen’s Entertainment at Cowdray, printed in 1591.23 The scene might well then be a sort of obsequious reference to the Queen’s favorite sport, but this does not make it any less disconcerting. Unlike the English Queen, in fact, the French Princess is not so very keen on deer-hunting; before starting she asks the Forester: ‘where is the bush / That we must stand and play the murderer in?’ (4.1.7–8)24 ‘Play the murderer,’ we must admit, are strange words, in the context of an encomium. Nonetheless they hint at the whole of the Princess’s attitude to hunting deer, somewhere between frank disgust and disdainful tolerance due to force majeur. Neither disdain nor disgust, however, are strong enough to prevent her from committing what she herself calls a ‘detested crime’; after a theological joke ZLWKWKH)RUHVWHURQVDOYDWLRQµE\PHULW¶D&DWKROLFµKHUHV\«¿WIRUWKHVHGD\V¶ [4.1.21–2]), in fact, the Princess does proceed to murder the deer, but she makes clear that if she does ‘spill the poor deer’s blood’ making herself ‘guilty’ of this ‘detested crime,’ it is only for the ‘outward’ reason of gaining ‘glory,’ ‘praise’ and ‘fame.’25 20 See John E. Neale, The Age of Catherine de Medici (London: Jonathan Cape, 1943), p. 16. 21 See Fritz Levy, ‘The Theatre and the Court in the 1590s,’ in The Reign of Elizabeth I. Court and Culture in the last decade, ed. John Guy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 283–4. 22 John Dover Wilson (ed.), Love’s Labour’s Lost (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962), p. 153n. 23 H.C. Hart, ‘Introduction,’ Love’s Labour’s Lost (London: Methuen, 1906), pp. xlviii–xlix. 24 For ‘the Princess’s evident distaste for hunting,’ see Henry R. Woudhuysen (ed.), Love’s Labour’s Lost (Walton-on-Thames: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1998), p. 174n. 25 ±)RUWKHµKHUHV\«¿WIRUWKHVHGD\V¶VHH'DYLGQµ7KH3ULQFHVVLV referring to her “tip” to the forester [see ll. 18–19: “Here, good my glass, take this for telling true: / Fair payment for foul words is more than due.”], and likening it to the good works which the Catholics held would alone procure salvation, whereas the Protestants believed

88

Visions of Venice in Shakespeare

This is truly strange. As Dover Wilson points out, if ‘“merit” refers to the 5RPDQGRFWULQHRIMXVWL¿FDWLRQE\ZRUNV¶LWLVDOVRFOHDUWKDWµWKH³KHUHV\LQIDLU ¿WIRUWKHVHGD\V´DQGWKH³GHWHVWHGFULPHV´RIZKLFK³JORU\JURZV JXLOW\´IRU “fame’s sake, for praise, an outward part” point unmistakably to the “abominable act” as Elizabeth described it, by which Henry bought Paris at the price of a Mass’ – a Catholic heresy which ‘became an accomplished and publicly acknowledged fact in July 1593,’ when ‘England received the news with consternation.’26 Indeed, apart from the consternation of Protestant England, his heresy was so shrewdly ¿WIRUWKH)UHQFKSROLWLFDOQHFHVVLWLHVRIWKHWLPHWKDWLWUHFDOOVZHPD\DGGWKH greatest of Machiavelli’s princely virtues. For the abominable Florentine believed that the prince ‘who adapts his policy to the times prospers, and likewise that the one whose policy clashes with the demands of the times does not.’27 But, as David remarks, if the passage does obviously allude to what Elizabeth called the ‘abominable act,’ then we must admit that ‘the Princess’s moralizings must … be also aimed at Henri.’28 This is certainly true; indeed the Princess’s PRUDOL]LQJV ¿W 1DYDUUH¶V EHKDYLRU LQ UHDO KLVWRU\ PXFK PRUH FOHDUO\ WKDQ KHU own on the stage. It was Navarre, in fact, who, for outward political reasons, had committed the abominable act or detested crime of converting to Catholicism and attending Mass. But by so cheaply buying the praise of the Catholics, he had also gained the durable fame and glory of putting an end to the worst tragedy that his country had ever known. And if these were the practical effects of his immoral abjure, we might almost say, as Biron says in the play, that ‘it is religion to be thus forsworn’ (4.3.359). Indeed, if we were Navarre’s French ambassador attending the play, along with the Queen and the other European ambassadors, during the court festivities of &KULVWPDVZKDWHOVHFRXOGZHWKLQNKHDULQJDERXW&DWKROLFKHUHVLHV¿WIRUWKH WLPHV"%XWLIWKHVHPRUDOL]LQJV¿Wboth Navarre’s abominable act and the Princess’s detested crime, then these two actions must have something in common. And, since Navarre’s abominable act was attending Mass, and the Princess’s detested crime was the spilling of a poor deer’s blood, we are forced to ask: can Masses have anything to do with spilling a deer’s blood? As we shall see, it all depends on the kind of deer whose blood you spill. But luckily for us the text generously provides, in the following scene, a full scholarly commentary on the hunt. The commentary has two authors, a Curate and a Schoolmaster, both of them pedants, as most commentators are, or should be. First of all, quoting Paul’s Second Letter to the Corinthians, the Curate explains that what the Princess called the detested crime of spilling a poor deer’s blood was nonetheless a ‘very reverend sport, truly: and done in the testimony of a good conscience’ (4.2.1–2). IDLWKRQO\ZDVQHFHVVDU\³-XVWL¿FDWLRQE\IDLWK´EHFDPHRQHRIWKHVWDQGDUGWHVWVE\ZKLFK Protestant orthodoxy was tried – hence “heresy” of l. 22.’ 26 Dover Wilson, pp. 153–4n. 27 Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, trans. George Bull (London: Penguin, 2003), p. 80. 28 David, p. 60n.

‘Self-sovereignty’ and Religion in Love’s Labour’s Lost

89

Dover Wilson’s note is certainly right: ‘The curate gives the sport his blessing; it is a godly one.’29 But the problem is: what is so reverend and godly, in this bloody sport, and why does it deserve a Curate’s blessing? As for the blood that has been spilt, we learn from the Schoolmaster that the Latin word ‘sanguis’ is somewhat more appropriate for it, and that this sanguis is similar to a ‘ripe’ apple, ‘who now hangeth like a jewel in the ear of coelo, the sky, the welkin, the heaven; and anon falleth … on the face of terra, the soil, the land, the earth’ (4.2.3–7). Doesn’t this recall something, this sanguisWKDW¿UVWLVLQKHDYHQEXWWKHQZKHQULSHIDOOVRQ the earth? Well, to my mind it does recall something, but before saying what, let us take a look at the real climax of the pedants’ commentary, which is an alliterated riddle on the precise age (or ripeness) of the murdered deer.30 So exceedingly strange and grotesque is this ‘extemporal epitaph on the death of the deer’ (4.2.47–8) that, according to Mario Praz, the prince of Italian English Studies, its absurdity has no equal in Western literatures.31 Of course, since its author is the pedantic Schoolmaster Holofernes (with the same name and profession as the grand docteur sophiste who in Rabelais teaches Gargantua Latin), David may be wise when he warns that ‘to explain the logical connection’ of the riddle ‘may be a piece of pedantry worthy the man himself.’32 In the Renaissance, nonetheless, outward absurdity could be, and sometimes was, a way of conveying inward meanings of an importance directly proportionate to their outward absurdity. This esoteric literary technique was known as Sileni Alcibiadis, and its main examples are to be found, among others, in Erasmus, Giordano Bruno and Rabelais. Two thirds of the Gargantua’s Prologue, in fact, are dedicated to these Sileni, and Rabelais promises that if the readers are able to imitate ‘the most philosophic beast in the world’ (i.e., the dog, whose teeth are strong enough to break bones and suck the marrow), then the absurdities of the text that follows might disclose certain µP\VWqUHVKRUUL¿FTXHV¶ZKLFKKHVD\VGHDOERWKZLWKµQRVWUHUHOLJLRQ¶DQGµO¶HVWDW politicq.’33 Should Holofernes’s riddle belong to this kind of absurdity, it would certainly be wise to run the risk of pedantry and look for an explanation. Otherwise ZHPLJKWUXQWKHJUHDWHUULVNRIPLVVLQJVRPHH[FLWLQJKRUUL¿FP\VWHU\

29

Dover Wilson, p. 156n. ‘The preyful princess pierc’d and prick’d a pretty pleasing pricket; / Some say a sore; but not a sore, till now made sore with shooting: / The dogs did yell; put ’ell to sore, then sorel jumps from thicket; / Or pricket sore, or else sore’ll the people fall a-hooting. / ,IVRUHEHVRUHWKHQ¶HOOWRVRUHPDNHV¿IW\VRUHV±2±VRUHO2IRQHVRUH,DQKXQGUHG make, by adding but one more l’ (4.2.55–60). 31 See Mario Praz, Dizionario Bompiani delle opere e dei personaggi di tutti i tempi e di tutte le letterature (Milan: Bompiani, 1983), p. 466 (sub voce ‘Oloferne’). 32 David, p. 77n. According to Woudhuysen, Holofernes may ‘owe something to Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel (ll. 14 and 19), in which Thubal Holofernes is made Gargantua’s tutor,’ p. 3. 33 François Rabelais, Gargantua. Première édition critique faite sur l’Editio princeps, ed. Ruth Calder (Genève: Droz, 1970), pp. 9–14. 30

Visions of Venice in Shakespeare

90

7KHULGGOHVROXWLRQLQWKHHQGLVQRWVRKDUGWR¿QG,IZHWUHDWLWDVLILWZHUH for example, an advanced level Sudoku, we cannot but reach the conclusion that when the deer’s blood falls, like a ripe apple, from heaven to earth, the deer is a ‘sorel’ (4.2.59) – i.e., ‘a buck in its third year.’34 But what has this got to do with the 5DEHODLVLDQKRUUL¿FWKHRORJLFR±SROLWLFDOP\VWHU\PHQWLRQHGDERYH"1RWPXFK perhaps; nonetheless, when a deer is three years old, each of its antlers divides into WKUHHEUDQFKHV±DVZDVFRQ¿UPHGWRPHE\DUHWLUHG7\UROHDQIRUHVWHU±ZKLFK means that when the Princess spilled the poor deer’s blood, it had a 33 on its forehead. But Someone Else, of course, was 33 when His heavenly blood was spilt on the face of the earth – and via the Song of Songs, of course, the deer was and is a fairly common emblematic image of Christ himself. Before attempting an overall interpretation, let me confess that, when relating WKH¿UVWSDUWRIWKLVP\VWHU\WKHSULQFHO\KXQWLWVHOI ,RPLWWHGWKHPRVWJODPRURXV of its results. As already mentioned, the Princess makes clear that if she does spill the poor deer’s blood and makes herself guilty of this detested crime, it is only for the outward reason of squeezing out of it glory, praise and fame. But then Boyet, one of the Lords attending the Princess, observes: ‘Do not curst wives hold that self-sovereignty / Only for praise’s sake, when they strive to be / Lords o’er their ORUGV"¶± $QGWKH3ULQFHVVFRQ¿UPVµ2QO\IRUSUDLVHDQGSUDLVHZHPD\ afford / To any lady that subdues a lord’ (4.1.39–40). The relation between the act of spilling a poor deer’s blood and the fact of holding a ‘self-sovereignty’ that allows certain ‘curst’ ladies to ‘subdue’ their lords and become ‘Lords o’er their lords’ may well be a P\VWqUHKRUUL¿FTXH, but it most certainly deals with nostre religion and l’estat politicq. For self-sovereignty is an exquisitely technical political term, and its practical conquest was the greatest problem of the early modern states. In order to obtain and maintain a fully DXWRQRPRXVVRYHUHLJQW\HDUO\PRGHUQSULQFHVKDGLQIDFW¿UVWRIDOOWRJHWULGRI ecclesiastical superiority, or overlordship.35 From Bartolo da Sassoferrato down to Jean Bodin (whose De Republica was a textbook both in Cambridge and London, and had been printed cum privilegiis of both the ‘Most Christian’ King of France and the ‘Most Serene Queen of England’) self-sovereigntyPHDQW¿UVWRIDOOWKDWDVRYHUHLJQLQRUGHUWREHsibi princeps, i.e., self-sovereign) and superiorem non recognoscens, had to be independent of any other power: Bodin’s souveraineté absolue, for instance, concerns above all the sovereign’s relations not to the subjects below, but to those theocratic religious powers who thought they had the divine right and duty to be above him (or her).36 In practical 34

Hibbard, p. 155n. For a full discussion of the riddle, see Sacerdoti, pp. 37–8. See the classic study of John N. Figgis, The Divine Right of Kings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1914). 36 See Margherita Isnardi Parente, ‘Introduzione,’ in Jean Bodin, I sei libri dello Stato (Turin: UTET, 1964), pp. 28–9. For the De Republica as a textbook, see Kenneth D. McRae, ‘Introduction,’ in Jean Bodin, The six Bookes of a Commonweal. A facsimile reprint of the English translation of 1606 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962), p. A62. 35

‘Self-sovereignty’ and Religion in Love’s Labour’s Lost

91

terms this meant that early modern princes, in order to acquire self-sovereignty, had ¿UVWRIDOOWRVXEGXHWKHVHRYHUORUGVDQGVREHFRPHORUGVRYHUWKHLUORUGV Which, of course, is precisely what the Princess does on stage. But when, in real history, the Most Serene Queen in the audience did exclude the Pope and assume supreme powers over the Church, what else had she de facto done, with her ¿UVWDFWRIVWDWHVPDQVKLS"$QGRIFRXUVHZKDWHOVHFRXOGWKH3RSHGREXWcurse the self-sovereign Lady that had excluded him, claiming for herself his supreme powers? When in 1534, her father, Henry VIII, declared himself Supreme Head of the Anglican Church, did not Pope Clement VII answer with a ‘terrible bull’ which ‘excommunicated, anathematized and cursed’ him?37 His daughter’s second Act of Supremacy, passed by Parliament in 1559, revived the antipapal statutes of Henry VIII and declared the Queen Supreme Governor of the Church of England, to which Pope Pius V responded in 1570 with the bull Regnans in excelsis, which excommunicated Elizabeth from the universal Church, declared her a heretic and a usurper, and absolved her subjects from any oath of allegiance that they might have taken. But then, qua Pope, what else could the Roman Lord do – give the Queen his blessing, as the Curate does with the Princess? So much, then, for this ‘sudden reference’ to curst (and self-sovereign) Ladies who subdue their lords, which, according to Dover Wilson, ‘is curious and seems to have no relation to the context.’38 $ ¿UVW VROXWLRQ IRU WKLV P\VWHULRXV VFHQH LV SHUKDSV DW KDQG 7KH RI¿FLDO position of the Church of England vis-à-vis the Catholic Mass comes straight from &DOYLQ DQG LV IDLWKIXOO\ H[SRVHG LQ WKH7KLUW\¿UVW RI The Thirty-nine Articles, whose title is 2IWKHRQH2EODWLRQRI&KULVW¿QLVKHGXSRQWKH&URVV. As for the text, it runs: ‘The Offering of Christ once made is the perfect redemption, propitiation, and satisfaction, for all the sins of the whole world, both original and actual; and WKHUHLVQRQHRWKHUVDWLVIDFWLRQIRUVLQEXWWKDWDORQH:KHUHIRUHWKHVDFUL¿FHVRI Masses, in the which it was commonly said, that the Priest did offer Christ for the quick and the dead, to have remission of pain or guilt, were blasphemous fables, and dangerous deceits.’ 6LQFHWKHRQHDQGRQO\VDFUL¿FHULV&KULVWKLPVHOIZKRVHREODWLRQRI+LVRZQ EORRGZDV¿QLVKHGXSRQWKH&URVVWKH&DWKROLF0DVVIURPWKLVSRLQWRIYLHZ cannot but be an abominable act, a detested crime, and a bloody and deceitful blasphemy. And since at every Mass the Pope and Catholic priests claim to offer Christ and to repeat with their own hands the unrepeatable oblation of His blood, they are nothing but, as Calvin calls them in his Institution chrétienneµFDUQL¿FHV¶ The Latin edition – Io. Bodini, De Republica libri sex (Parisiis: apud Jacobum Du Puys sub signo Samaritanae, 1586) – was printed Cum privilegiis Caesareae Maiestatis et Regis Christianissimi, Serenissimaeque Angliae Reginae. Les six livres de la République were ¿UVWSXEOLVKHGLQ)UHQFK3DULV-DFTXHV'X3X\V  37 See Paolo Sarpi, Istoria del Concilio Tridentino, ed. Corrado Vivanti, vol. 1 (Turin: Einaudi, 1974), pp. 145, 178. 38 Dover Wilson, p. 154n.

92

Visions of Venice in Shakespeare

µERXUUHDX[¶µPXUWULHUV¶±LHµH[HFXWLRQHUV¶ZKRDWHYHU\FODLPHGVDFUL¿FHDFW as sacrilegious ‘butchers’ and cruel ‘murderers’ of Christ.39 Let us go back once more to Navarre’s abominable act and the princely murderess’s detested crime. From a Calvinist point of view, Navarre’s attending Mass was certainly abominable, although, by buying the praise of the Catholics, he gained the fame and glory of putting an end to civil war. While it is true that, from the point of view of raison d’État, his merely outward conversion could be considered a fairly cheap price for such a brilliant political result, it is also true that, in order to buy Paris, Navarre had to attend Mass. And his attendance was an implicit but undeniable recognition that his sovereignty was not really VHOIVXI¿FLHQWIRUKLVFDSDFLW\WRH[HUFLVHLWGHSHQGHGRQKLVNQHHOLQJEHIRUHWKDW authority which, having the capacity to offer Christ, celebrates Mass, rather than just attending it. Unlike the Princess, then, he had not subdued these kinds of lords, and therefore his civil authority was still dependent on their spiritual authority. Of course, by attending Mass, Navarre did buy his right to the throne of Catholic France, but by so doing he certainly paid something for it. So much so that, in order to be formally absolved by the Pope, the ex-heretic had to wait two more years, and then send to Rome two lieutenants representing him who in 1595, amid a jubilant crowd, had to kneel before the Pope and receive by proxy that ceremonial beating without which a heretic King could not be absolved. Once beaten, the two ex-Calvinists representing the King of France were then admitted LQWR6DLQW3HWHU¶VZKHUHWKH\ZHUH¿QDOO\JUDQWHGWKHULJKWWRYHQHUDWHWKHH[SRVHG Sacrament of the Corpus Christi.40 Of course, the beating was symbolic, but this does not make the show of a King of France beaten by a Roman Pontiff any less emblematically conspicuous. So much, then, for the political consequences of merely attending WKH VDFUL¿FH RI WKH 0DVV ,I RQO\ &DWKROLF SULHVWV DUH DOORZHG WRRIIHUWKHÀHVKDQGEORRGRI&KULVW¶VERG\WKHQLWPD\EHKDUGIRUD&DWKROLF prince, to be a hundred percent self-sovereign. But by now we should also be able to understand why, on the contrary, the Princess, by playing the murderer and spilling the deer’s blood with her own princely hands, has been able to subdue certain lords and gain full self-sovereignty. From a certain point of view, this clearly recalls the exceptional prerogatives of the Queen of England, who, in order to exercise her sovereignty, never had to be beaten up by a Roman Pontiff – and for the good reason that, unlike the King of )UDQFHKHU¿UVWDFWRIVWDWHVPDQVKLSKDGQRWEHHQWRDWWHQG0DVVEXWWRH[FOXGH the Pope and assume supreme power over the Church. This summa potestas was 39 Giovanni Calvino, Istituzione della religione cristiana, ed. Giorgio Tourn, vol. 2 (Turin: UTET, 1971), pp. 1658, 1667. See Ioannes Calvinus, Institutio Christianae religionis, 4, 18, 5, in Corpus Reformatorum, Ioannis Calvini Opera quae supersunt omnia, ed. Guilielmus Baum, Eduardus Cunitz, Eduardus Reuss, vol. 2 (Brunsvigae: Berolini, 1866), p. 1055. 40 See Saverio Ricci, Giordano Bruno e l’Europa del Cinquecento (Rome: Salerno Editrice, 2000), pp. 520–21.

‘Self-sovereignty’ and Religion in Love’s Labour’s Lost

93

FOHDUO\ JUDQWHG E\ WKH ¿UVW SDUW RI WKH 7KLUW\VHYHQWK$UWLFOH ZKLFK VWDWHV WKDW in England ‘the chief Government of all Estates of this Realm, whether they be Ecclesiastical or Civil, in all causes doth appertain’ to the monarch, who ‘is not, nor ought to be, subject to any foreign jurisdiction.’ Yet, could the Queen of England do in real life what the Princess does on the stage? Certainly not, for the second part of that same Article proceeds to state that ‘where we attribute to the King’s Majesty the chief government, by which titles we understand the minds of some slanderous folks to be offended; we give not to our Princes the ministering either of God’s Word, or of the Sacraments.’ If the Queen of England did not have the right to minister either God’s Word or the Sacraments, then she could neither preach sermons nor celebrate Masses. And since these prerogatives still belonged to the clergy, the Queen in the audience was not, and could not be, as self-sovereign as the Princess on the stage. As for heresies, if Navarre’s abominable DWWHQGDQFHDWWKHVDFUL¿FHRIWKH0DVVZDV¿WIRUKLVGD\VWKH3ULQFHVV¶VGHWHVWHG FULPH RI FHOHEUDWLQJ LW ZLWK KHU RZQ KDQGV LV DQ HYHQ ¿WWHU 0DFKLDYHOOLDQ DFW RI statesmanship, since it entails a far more complete self-sovereignty. For all its mysterious strangeness, then, the hunting scene of Love’s Labour’s Lost is nothing but an emblem or hieroglyph which represents on the stage a model of arch-self-sovereignty that not even the English Queen, certainly the most sovereign of European sovereigns, was entitled to. This model, of course, was utterly blasphemous and unacceptable to both Catholic and Calvinist authorities. Nonetheless, there is no doubt that an authority in worldly politics such as Thomas Hobbes would have readily accepted it. ‘In all Common-wealths of the Heathen,’ he writes in Leviathan, ‘the Soveraigns have had the name of Pastors of the People,’ and Christian Sovereigns, according to Hobbes, had not lost, by becoming Christian, the self-sovereignty their predecessors once possessed. And so, since ‘this Right of the Heathen Kings, cannot be thought taken from them by their conversion to the Faith of Christ; who never ordained, that Kings for beleeving in him, should be deposed, that is, subjected to any but himself,’ it is most certain that ‘in every Christian Common-wealth, the Civill Soveraign is the Supreme Pastor.’ This means, in particular, that the Civil Sovereign ‘hath also the authority, not only to preach, … but also to baptize, and to administer the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper.’41 Nor could it be otherwise. For ‘the making the /RUG¶V6XSSHUDVDFUL¿FH¶ZULWHV+REEHVµVHUYHWKWRPDNHWKHSHRSOHEHOLHYHWKH Pope hath the same power over all Christians that Moses and Aaron had over the Jews; that is to say, all power, both civil and ecclesiastical, as the high priest then had.’42

41 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Crawford B. Macpherson (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981), pp. 567–70. According to Richard Tuck, ‘it should be said that Hobbes was not tremendously unusual in espousing a position of this kind,’ for Grotius, in his De imperio summarum potestatum circa sacraFLUFD KDVµDQHTXDOO\FRQ¿GHQWDVVHUWLRQWKDWWKH civil magistrate has, in all times and places, had ultimate responsibility for religious matters’ (‘Hobbes’s “Christian Atheism,”’ in Atheism from the Reformation to the Enlightenment, ed. Michael Hunter and David Wootton [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992], pp. 116–17). 42 Hobbes, p. 707.

94

Visions of Venice in Shakespeare

7KXV HLWKHU WKH &LYLO 6RYHUHLJQ LV DEOH WR VHL]H WKH VDFUL¿FLDO DQG VDFUDPHQWDO competences of the High Priest, or the High Priest will sooner or later seize all power, both civil and ecclesiastical. Hobbes, of course, was writing in the middle of the English civil war, and 58 years after the end of the French civil wars, he was still convinced that the theocratic ambitions of both the ‘Papacy’ and the Presbyterian ‘Assembly’ (which form together ‘the Kingdom of Darkness’) continued to be the main danger for that absolute self-sovereignty without which civil power could not perform its main duty: to grant the peace of the commonwealth. ‘For,’ as he writes at the very end of Leviathan, ‘it is not the Romane Clergy onely, that pretends the Kingdome of God to be of this World, and thereby to have a Power therein, distinct from that of the Civill State.’ And so, if ‘Qu. Elizabeth,’ by her ‘Exorcism,’ had been able to cast out ‘the Spirituall Power of the Pope,’ and all his ‘Kingdome of Fairies,’ the danger, for England, was far from over. For, if ‘the Spirit of Rome’ had gone out, ‘who knows that … an Assembly of Spirits worse than he, enter, and inhabit this clean swept house, and make the End thereof worse than the Beginning?’43 But while advocating such an exemplary subordination of spiritual power to temporal power comes as no surprise from the absolutist Hobbes, we should remember that the liberal Spinoza, in the draught of a republican constitution which is his last political work, continued to feel just the same. For ‘it is vitally important,’ he states in the Tractatus politicus, that in the ‘churches dedicated to the state religion … only patricians or senators should be permitted to perform its principal rites. Thus only patricians should be allowed to baptize, to solemnize marriages, and to lay on hands; in short, they alone should be recognized as the ministers of churches, and the guardians and interpreters of the state religion.’44 But then the ‘political cause’ that both the Tractatus politicus and the Tractatus theologico-politicus were intended to serve was ‘the establishment of a tolerant liberal State,’ and such a State could not EHHQYLVDJHGZLWKRXW¿UVWFXUELQJWKHWKHRFUDWLFSUHWHQVLRQVRIDOOWKRVHµVXEYHUVLYH elements’ who wanted to ‘restrict the autonomy of the sovereign political power’: elements which ‘clearly included most zealous Calvinists and many adherents to other Protestant sects, not to speak of zealous Catholics.’ Of course, ‘man being a superstitious animal, religion could not be eliminated, but it could be rendered politically harmless; it could even be pressed into the service of a democratic secular State, being used to strengthen people’s loyalty towards the political authorities.’45

43 Hobbes, pp. 714–15. It is certainly ‘worth reminding ourselves that the last words of the main body of Leviathan are directed expressly against the possibility of a Presbyterian take-over in England’ (Tuck, p. 129). 44 Benedict de Spinoza, A Treatise on Politics, in The political works: the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus in Part and the Tractatus Politicus in Full, ed. Archibald G. Wernham (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958), p. 411. See Sylvain Zac, Spinoza et l’interpretation de l’Écriture (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1965), pp. 155–60. 45 Shlomo Pines, ‘Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-politicus, Maimonides and Kant,’ in Further Studies in Philosophy, ed. Ora Segal (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1968), pp. 11, 44.

‘Self-sovereignty’ and Religion in Love’s Labour’s Lost

95

I must confess that if I have been able, as I hope I have, to clarify some aspects of this mysterious Anglo-French hunting scene, it is because an identical and equally mysterious hunt is to be found in the Spaccio de la bestia trionfante, the most audacious of the Italian Dialogues published by Giordano Bruno in England – and since Alfonso Ingegno, an ingenious Italian scholar, has been able WRWKURZVRPHOLJKWRQLW,KDYHEHHQDEOHWRSUR¿WIURPLW46 Bruno left Paris at the height of the wars of religion, and went to London in the retinue of the French ambassador, the politique Michel de Castelnau de la Mauvissière, at whose house he resided, and with whom he ‘went continually to Court.’47 While in England (where he became a close friend of John Florio, the translator of Montaigne), he published his masterpieces, which fall into two categories – cosmological and moral – which are nonetheless intimately connected. Since in his new, physically LQ¿QLWHXQLYHUVHWKHUHLVQRSODFHIRUWKH-XGHR&KULVWLDQLGHDRIDWUDQVFHQGHQW God superior to nature, Christianity was for him, strictly speaking, a fable – which in no way means that he was unaware of the Platonic importance of such fables. And if Christianity could only be for him, at best, an instrumentum regni of a Machiavellian-Averroistic kind that had nothing to do with any truth concerning God or nature, he was also keenly aware that different fables told by different &KULVWLDQFKXUFKHVKDGGLIIHULQJSROLWLFDOYDOXHVDQG¿WQHVVIRUWKHWLPHV Dedicated to Sir Philip Sidney, the Spaccio de la bestia trionfante (where the dispatched beast is Christianity itself, whose wars of religion marked, for him, the bloody end of its historical cycle) was published in 1584 – i.e., one year after Elizabeth had nominated the relentlessly anti-Puritan John Whitgift, Primate of England, and right in the middle of the turmoil and deluge of theologico– political pamphlets caused by the Archbishop’s ruthless onslaught on growing Puritan dissent. To the Puritans, in fact, the Elizabethan Church was scandalously inadequate, and they pressed for a drastic reform of its hierarchical structure, a purging of residual Catholic elements in the Prayer Book and ritual, and a more vigorous persecution of Catholic recusants. So increasingly strong was the Puritan opposition that by the 1580s it had become clear that Calvinist fundamentalism was (and was going to be) a greater menace, for the English Crown, than any Pope had ever been. And since the appointment of the new Archbishop marks the beginning of Elizabeth’s counterattack, ‘the date of Whitgift’s election – September 23rd, 1583 – was a decisive climacteric in the history of the reformed Church of England.’48 46 See Alfonso Ingegno, Regia pazzia. Bruno lettore di Calvino (Urbino: QuattroVenti, 1987). 47 In 1592 Bruno declared to the Venetian Inquisitors: ‘Ella [Elizabeth] me conosceva, andando io continuamente con l’ambasciator in corte’ (Vittorio Spampanato, Vita di Giordano Bruno: con documenti editi e inediti [Messina: Giuseppe Principato, 1921], p. 734). For Castelnau, see: Gustave Hubault, Michel de Castelnau, ambassadeur en Angleterre, 1575–1585 (Genève: Slatkine, 1970); Ricci, pp. 190–92. 48 Collinson, p. 243.

Visions of Venice in Shakespeare

96

For all its exceptionality, Bruno’s book, published just one year after this climacteric date, is also, and above all, an anti-Calvinist and pro-monarchic SDPSKOHW¿WIRUKLVWLPHVLHDpolitique pamphlet, though of an exceptionally radical kind.49 In the second Dialogue of the Spaccio Bruno extols the natural, pantheistic and pre-Spinozistic religion of the ancient Egyptians, for whom God was inside nature, and not outside or above it.50 And then in the third Dialogue, LHWKHODVWSDUWRIWKHZRUNZKHUHKHGUDZVWKH¿QDOFRQFOXVLRQVKHSURFHHGV to mock, in a highly Silenic style, the ‘extra-natural,’ ‘super-natural’ and ‘contranatural’ ‘nice fable’ of the Christian religion, but not without making distinctions between its different historical versions.51 Calvinist fables have, for Bruno, necessarily pernicious civil effects, and for WZRUHDVRQV)LUVWEHFDXVHWKHGRFWULQHRIMXVWL¿FDWLRQE\IDLWKDQGQRWE\PHULW DQGJRRGZRUNVXWWHUO\GHVWUR\VZKDWZDVIRUKLPWKHRQO\SRVVLEOHEHQH¿FLDO effect of Christianity: by telling the multitude supernatural fables on ‘the other life,’ to encourage good social behaviour ‘in this life.’52 Second, because the democratic structure of the Presbyterian church tended to ‘turn the world upside down.’53 ‘Presbyterianism,’ in fact, as James I went on to write, ‘agreeth as well with Monarchy, as God and the Devil.’54 And since Bruno had no use for a democratic theocracy or a theocratic democracy, civil authority, he declares, must repress Calvinism by force.55 Which was precisely what Elizabeth (with the aid of Whitgift) had started doing in 1583. As for the Catholic fables which immediately follow, Bruno’s position is far more nuanced.56 For, he slyly suggests, if ministered by ‘un prencipe,’ and QRW E\ WKH 5RPDQ µVRPPR VDFHUGRWH¶ WKH\ FDQ EH EHQH¿FLDO WR WKH PRQDUFK\ itself.57 More than a suggestion, this is a description of the political reasons that had led Elizabeth to exclude the Pope and assume supreme powers over the Church. Of course, since London was well worth a sermon, she had tolerated, in The Thirty-nine Articles of the Church of England, a substantial amount of Calvinist theology. Article Ten, for instance, resolutely denies free will. For Article Eleven it LVµDPRVWZKROHVRPH'RFWULQHDQGYHU\IXOORIFRPIRUW¶WKDWZHDUHMXVWL¿HGµRQO\ for the merit of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ by Faith, and not for our own 49

See Michele Ciliberto, Giordano Bruno (Bari: Laterza, 1990), pp. 167–8. Giordano Bruno, Dialoghi italiani, ed. Giovanni Aquilecchia (Florence: Sansoni, 1985), pp. 776–7, 783. 51 Bruno, pp. 771, 802. 52 Bruno, pp. 623–5. 53 Bruno, p. 807. 54 Charles H. McIlwain, ‘Introduction,’ in The Political Works of James I, reprinted from the edition of 1616 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1918), p. xc. 55 Bruno, p. 807. 56 See Bruno, pp. 808–14, and Alfonso Ingegno, La sommersa nave della religione: studio sulla polemica anticristiana del Bruno (Naples: Bibliopolis, 1985), pp. 119–20. 57 See Bruno, pp. 812–14. 50

‘Self-sovereignty’ and Religion in Love’s Labour’s Lost

97

works or deservings.’ Article Twelve tolerates ‘Good Works’ only if they ‘are the IUXLWVRI)DLWKDQGIROORZDIWHU-XVWL¿FDWLRQ¶%XW$UWLFOH7KLUWHHQKDVQRGRXEWV that ‘Works done before the grace of Christ, and the Inspiration of his Spirit, are not pleasant to God.’ Actually, ‘for that they are not done as God hath willed and commanded them to be done, we doubt not but they have the nature of sin.’ Regarding the hierarchical and Episcopal structure of her Church, nonetheless, Elizabeth, to the outrage of the Puritans, took great care to hold fast to the Catholic pattern – so much so that, by the end of her reign, England had ‘a national, or at least a state faith as well as a state church, to which it is entirely proper to apply the term Anglo-Catholicism.’58 Unlike Presbyterianism, in fact, Catholicism can agree very well with Monarchy – especially if the Monarch subdues the Roman Lord, and takes religious prerogatives into his own hands. In this case it can EHFRPHDPRVWSRZHUIXODQGHI¿FLHQWinstrumentum regni, granting the Monarch all power, both civil and ecclesiastical. Accordingly, Bruno proceeds to hint at FHUWDLQ(XFKDULVWLFDQGVDFUL¿FLDOIDEOHVZKLFKZLWKµYHU\OLWWOHH[SHQVH¶PLJKW SURGXFHDµYHU\JRRGSUR¿W¶59$SUR¿WZKLFKLVPRVWFRQVSLFXRXVO\GHSLFWHGLQD scene dedicated to the ‘royal craziness’ of deer hunting.60 Though crazy, in fact, this royal sport is celebrated in such extravagant terms that according to Bruno’s ¿UVWELRJUDSKHU%DUWKROPqVVLWVSUDLVHFRXOGQRWEXWEHPHDQWDVDQHQFRPLXPRI the huntress Queen of England.61 This is what Dover Wilson and others thought of the Shakespearean princely hunt – a hunt which nonetheless had something strange about it. On the one hand, the spilling of the poor deer’s blood was a detested crime and a murder, but on the other it was a godly, blessed and most reverend sport which conferred on the murderess ‘praise,’ ‘glory’ and ‘fame.’62 This is just as true of Bruno’s royal hunt, for, if ‘butchering,’ ‘killing’ and ‘quartering’ a ‘poor beast’ is an activity fully as ‘ignoble and vile’ as that of the ‘executioner,’ nonetheless, for a king, the ‘pursuit of a deer’ and the killing of ‘a poor beast’ are ‘a virtue, a religion, a sanctity’ which bestow on him ‘onore, riputazion buona e gloria.’63 Since the effects of the two hunts are literally the same (‘praise,’ ‘glory’ and ‘fame’ in English, ‘onore, riputazion buona e gloria’ in Italian) we can somehow agree with Bartholmèss that Bruno’s praise of the ‘royal craziness’ of deer hunting can be taken as a eulogy of Elizabeth – exactly in the same way as the Shakespearian scene is both an encomium of the royal huntress’s actual sovereignty, and a subtly emblematic way of hinting at an even greater self-sovereignty and 58

McIlwain, p. xlvi. Bruno, p. 808. 60 ‘Regia pazzia’ (Bruno, p. 811). 61 See Christian Bartholmèss, Jordano Bruno, vol. 2 (Paris: Ladrange, 1846– 1847), p. 104. 62 ‘Praise’ is repeated seven times (4.1.23, 29, 32, 34, 37, 39 [twice]); ‘glory’ (4.1.31); ‘fame’ (4.1.32). 63 Bruno, pp. 811–12. 59

98

Visions of Venice in Shakespeare

plenitudo potestatis. As he makes use of the same bloody lexicon used by 6KDNHVSHDUH %UXQR ¿UVW PRFNV WKH &DWKROLF VDFUL¿FH RI WKH PDVV HPSOR\LQJ the very words used by Calvin for the Pope and the Catholic priests: FDUQL¿FHV, bourreaux, murtriers), and then obliquely suggests that, for merely outward and political reasons, the Queen, and princes in general, would do well to KROG WKHLU QRVH DQG FHOHEUDWH ZLWK WKHLU RZQ KDQGV WKDW VDPH VDFUL¿FH WKDW KDV been mocked. As for the mocking, far from being merely blasphemous, it has the crucial political IXQFWLRQRIHQOLJKWHQLQJWKHUR\DOVDFUL¿FHUDVWRWKHIDEXORXVDQGFUD]\ QDWXUHRIWKHYHU\LGHDRIVDFUL¿FHNot to believe in the ‘Christian religious myth’ was in fact, for Bruno, a ‘political necessity.’64 Since in times of religious civil strife, in order to grant the peace and unity of the commonwealth, princes should be, like philosophers, above any IDLWK RU FRQIHVVLRQDO DOOHJLDQFH WKH ¿UVW SROLWLFDO GXW\ of a philosopher is to disabuse the prince of the fallacy of the Christian religious myth. But once he has done this, he must also instruct him as to the necessity of maintaining certain religious structures and ceremonies, and teach him the best ways to make use of them for his own good as well as that of the commonwealth. And while Calvinism, as we have seen, could only be, for Bruno, a ‘Favola disutile e perniziosa,’ Catholicism could somehow temporarily work as a ‘Favola morale.’65 But only if its rites and ceremonies are administered by a self-sovereign prince who has been made fully aware of their fabulous, even crazy, nature. This was by no means an original idea, since Machiavelli, in the famous 12th FKDSWHURIWKH¿UVWERRNRIKLVDiscourses (entitled How Important it is to take Account of Religion), had already taught that those princes or those republics which desire to maintain themselves free from corruption, should above else maintain incorrupt the ceremonies of their religion, and should hold them always in veneration; for there can be no surer indication of the decline of a country than to see the divine worship neglected…. The rulers of a republic or of a kingdom, therefore, should uphold the basic principles of the religion which they practise in, and, if this be done, it will be easy for them to keep their commonwealth religious, and, in consequence, good and united.

For this same reason ‘they should also foster and encourage everything likely to be of help to this end, even if they be convinced that it is quite fallacious.’ And indeed, ‘the more should they do this the greater their prudence and the more they know of natural laws.’66 That is exactly what Bruno’s prince does: for the good of the commonwealth he is obliged to consent to the royal craziness of the hunt, and must perform with his 64 See Nicola Badaloni, Giordano Bruno. Tra cosmologia ed etica (Bari: De Donato, 1988), pp. 128–30. 65 Bruno, p. 825. 66 Niccolò Machiavelli, The Discourses, ed. Bernard Crick, trans. Leslie J. Walker S.J. with revisions by Brian Richardson (London: Penguin, 2003), pp. 142–3.

‘Self-sovereignty’ and Religion in Love’s Labour’s Lost

99

own hands this kind of ‘ceremonies’ and ‘sacrosante bagatelle.’67 Not because he is convinced that they are inherently sacred or holy, but merely out of prudence: for, if he himself did not perform those fallacious, crazy and absurd rites, somebody else would do it – and in that case, adieu self-sovereign ladies who subdue their lords. So meticulously identical are these two hunting scenes that we can safely state that the extravagant emblem of self-sovereignty presented by Shakespeare to Elizabeth in 1598 is a faithful repetition of what Bruno had suggested to the ‘unica Diana’ of England, ‘la diva Elizabetta,’ in 1584.68 If that political emblem of Love’s Labour’s LostVRLQFLVLYHO\¿JXUHGLQWKHJRU\ZRUGVDQGJHVWXUHVRIWKHVWDJH were transformed into an engraving, the incisione should bear the caption: William Shakespeare pinxit, Giordano Bruno invenit.69 $QG QRZ D IHZ ¿QDO ZRUGV RQ 9HQLFH :KLOH (QJOLVK PRQDUFKV WKDQNV WR their summa potestas in religious matters, had fuller sovereignty than any other European monarch, it is also true that the Republic of Venice was the only other European state which consciously aspired to, and partly practiced, such an exemplary self-sovereignty. So much so that, as is well known, when the 5HSXEOLF¶V ¿JKW ZLWK 5RPH GXULQJ WKH ,QWHUGLFW &ULVLV UHDFKHG LWV FOLPD[ DQG Venice (whose whole Senate had been excommunicated by the Pope) seemed on the verge of breaking with Roman Catholicism, William Bedell, the chaplain of the English ambassador in Venice, translated for Paolo Sarpi The Book of Common Prayer, with its Thirty-nine Articles.70 Sarpi, who was the actual leader of the Republic’s policy, cherished the idea of DVRUWRI$QJOLFDQUHIRUPLQ9HQLFHZKLFKKHWKRXJKWYHU\¿WIRULWVPRVWGLI¿FXOW days. And if he was interested in the Thirty-nine Articles of the Church of England, LW ZDV FHUWDLQO\ QRW IRU WKHLU &DOYLQLVW WKHRORJ\ RQ VXFK PDWWHUV DV MXVWL¿FDWLRQ by faith, the sinful nature of good works done before the grace of Christ, or the EODVSKHPRXV QDWXUH RI WKH VDFUL¿FH RI WKH 0DVV EXW EHFDXVH WKH\ JDYH FLYLO authority that supremacy over the Church without which a State could not be self-sovereign, as in Venice it was only too clear in those days. To any Venetian observer of English affairs, and to any English observer of Venetian affairs, it was quite apparent that Venetian and English interests coincided. Both states, one a monarchy and the other a republic, pursued, as Frajese writes, ‘the common aim of a European order based upon a league of sovereign States superiorem non recognoscentes.’71 The pursuit and defence of self-sovereignty was thus one of the strongest ties between Venice and England, whose very institutions had something in common. If the Primate of All England was appointed by the King, the Venetian Patriarch 67

Bruno, p. 814. Bruno, pp. 222, 936. 69 For a full treatment of the two hunts, see Sacerdoti, pp. 37–67, 183–228. 70 See Gaetano Cozzi, ‘Note introduttive,’ in Paolo Sarpi, Pensieri, ed. Gaetano and Luisa Cozzi (Turin: Einaudi, 1976), pp. xlviii, lxix–lxxi, lxxx. 71 Vittorio Frajese, Sarpi scettico (Bologna: il Mulino, 1994), p. 252. 68

Visions of Venice in Shakespeare

100

was elected by the Serenissimi Signori. Much as in England, the hierarchies and WKHRUJDQL]DWLRQRIWKH9HQHWLDQGLRFHVHVKDGDOPRVWWKHFKDUDFWHURIFLYLORI¿FHV and structures subjected to the doge. Since the doge sported St. Mark’s Episcopal ring, his power seemed to be linked to priestly powers, and indeed, when in St. Mark’s, he sat in loco di vescovo. In England, the Anglican bishop, Jewel, in order to justify the Queen’s supremacy, had recourse to the prerogatives of the early Christian and Byzantine emperors, who combined in their person both regal and priestly powers, and could celebrate liturgical functions.72 But so did Sarpi in Venice, who repeatedly exhorted the Serenissimi Signori to have no fear, and boldly claim for themselves the rights once owned by the Greek emperors. For ‘the Greek Church,’ he writes, ‘never claimed to be exempted from the authority given by God to temporal princes, but always recognized their supremacy.’73 2QH¿QDOUHPDUN:KLOHLWLVFHUWDLQWKDWWKH6KDNHVSHDULDQVHOIVRYHUHLJQW\ of 1598 (which repeats Bruno’s model of 1584) would still have met Hobbes’s approval in 1651, there is no doubt that in 1607 Sarpi would also have thought LWYHU\¿WIRUKLVWLPHV%XWWKHQ6DUSLOLNH+REEHVZDVFRQYLQFHGWKDWDVORQJ as political power was thought to derive from God, either civil power subdues religious power, or religious power would subdue civil power and seize, in Hobbes’s words, ‘all power, both civil and ecclesiastical.’ In ‘these most turbulent times of ours,’ he reminds one of his French Gallican friends, no other coexistence is possible, between these two powers, ‘nisi alter sub altero.’74 And so, for Sarpi, civil authority not only had the right, but the duty to subdue religious authority – and since, of course, it could not fully do so without seizing the greatest possible number of its priestly prerogatives, Sarpi’s ecclesiastical policy is ‘surprisingly analogous’ to Hobbes’s absolutist ‘solutions’ both in Leviathan and in Behemoth.75 But again, we should remember that the liberal and republican Spinoza held exactly the same view. In fact, if in his 1677 Tractatus politicus only patricians or senators were to be recognized as ministers of churches, and they alone were permitted to perform the principal rites of the state religion, in 1670 the lengthy 19th chapter of his Tractatus theologico-politicus bore the title That the sovereign has full right to control religion.76

72

See Yates, pp. 39–42, 48; Figgis, pp. 96–9. Biblioteca Braidense di Milano, Consulti in iure, vol. 1, Consiglio del Padre Maestro Paolo sopra l’appellatione di un prete greco…, 5 maggio 1610, f. 103v.; see Frajese, pp. 283, 439–40, 442–3. 74 Paolo Sarpi, Lettere ai Gallicani, ed. Boris Ulianich (Wiesbaden: Steiner Verlag, 1961), p. 141. See also Corrado Pin, ‘Progetti e abbozzi sarpiani sul governo dello stato “in questi nostri tempi assai turbolenti,”’ in Paolo Sarpi, Della potestà de’ principi, ed. Nina Cannizzaro (Venice: Marsilio Editori, 2006), pp. 100–101. 75 See Pin, pp. 103, 110, 110n. 76 Spinoza, pp. 205, 217–19. See Geneviève Brykman, La judéité de Spinoza (Paris: Vrin, 1972), p. 68. 73

‘Self-sovereignty’ and Religion in Love’s Labour’s Lost

101

For all its outward sacredness, then, this model pointed inwardly towards secularism and laicism. And in fact ‘the essential feature of the process of laicization,’ writes Frajese, ‘lies not in the abolition of the sacred scene, but in its displacement’ onto the public scene.77 As for ‘secularization,’ one of the main IHDWXUHV RI µWKH FLYLF UHOLJLRXV SKHQRPHQRQ¶ LW HQWDLOV ¿UVW RI DOO DFFRUGLQJ to Weinstein, ‘the transfer of the scene of religious ritual from reserved … ecclesiastical space to public, civic space.’78 Such a model of self-sovereignty, of course, is not easily compatible with Christian piety of any denomination. While we know little about Shakespeare’s faith we do know something, of course, of Bruno’s and Hobbes’s faith, or lack of it. As for Sarpi, after the discovery of his private writings on religion, nobody can still think of him, as was the fashion in the Fifties, as a crypto-Protestant. Recently, Pin has prudently spoken of a ‘problematic position’ in between ‘Christianity and a deistical, if not atheistical, proto-enlightenment.’79 But then Tuck, writing of 6DUSL¶V LQÀXHQFH RQ WKH \RXQJ +REEHV UHPLQGV XV WKDW 6DUSL ZDV DORQJ ZLWK Francis Bacon, the only political thinker of his times who dared to suggest that atheism could be as good a foundation, for civil society, as Christianity.80 ,W LV GLI¿FXOW WR LPDJLQH ZKDW D 9HQHWLDQ DXGLHQFH ZRXOG KDYH WKRXJKW RI 6KDNHVSHDUH¶V9HQHWLDQ SOD\V %XW , DP TXLWH FRQ¿GHQW D SDUWLFXODU FRPPXQLW\ of intellectuals, in Venice, would have greatly appreciated Love’s Labour’s Lost. Works Cited Badaloni, Nicola. Giordano Bruno. Tra cosmologia ed etica. Bari: De Donato, 1988. Bartholmèss, Christian. Jordano Bruno. Paris: Ladrange, 1846–1847. Black, John B. Elizabeth & Henry IV: being a short study in Anglo-French relations, 1589–1603. Oxford: B.H. Blackwell, 1914. Bodin, Jean. Les six livres de la République. Paris: Jacques Du Puys, 1576. ———. De Republica libri sex. Parisiis: apud Jacobum Du Puys sub signo Samaritanae, 1586. 77

Frajese, 54. Donald Weinstein, ‘Critical Issues in the Study of Civic Religion in Renaissance Florence,’ in The Pursuit of Holiness in Late Medieval and Renaissance Religion, ed. Charles Trinkaus (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1974), p. 267. 79 Pin, p. 90. 80 ‘Paolo Sarpi, leader of the Republic during the Interdict Crisis, was a keen reader of Montaigne and a clear sceptic in his own right.’ In fact ‘Sarpi, despite being a servite friar, went so far as to argue that a community of atheists could function perfectly well as a civil society, and he and his fellows were impressed when they read Francis Bacon’s Essays … Accordingly, they urged the translation of Bacon’s Essays into Latin so that a wider European audience could read them, and were keen to keep in touch with Cavendish and Hobbes in order to use them as a channel of communication with Bacon’ (Richard Tuck, Hobbes [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989], p. 10). 78

102

Visions of Venice in Shakespeare

———. I sei libri dello Stato. Edited by Margherita Isnardi Parente. Turin: UTET, 1964. ———. The six Bookes of a Commonweal. A facsimile reprint of the English translation of 1606. Edited by Kenneth D. McRae. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962. Bruno, Giordano. Dialoghi italiani. Edited by Giovanni Aquilecchia. Florence: Sansoni, 1985. Brykman, Geneviève. La judéité de Spinoza. Paris: Vrin, 1972. Burckhardt, Jacob. Judgements on History and Historians. Translated by Harry Zohn. London: Routledge, 2007. Burke, Edmund. 5HÀHFWLRQVRQWKH5HYROXWLRQLQ)UDQFH. Edited by Connor Cruise O’Brien. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968. Calvino, Giovanni. Istituzione della religione cristiana. Edited by Giorgio Tourn. Turin: UTET, 1971. Calvinus, Ioannes. Institutio Christianae religionis. In Corpus Reformatorium. Ioannis Calvini Opera quae supersunt omnia. Edited by Guilielmus Baum, Eduardus Cunitz and Eduardus Reuss. Brunsvigae: Berolini, 1866. Ciliberto, Michele. Giordano Bruno. Bari: Laterza, 1990. Collinson, Patrick. The Elizabethan Puritan Movement. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967. Figgis, John N. The Divine Right of Kings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1914. Frajese, Vittorio. Sarpi scettico. Bologna: il Mulino, 1994. Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan. Edited by Crawford B. Macpherson. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981. Hubault, Gustave. Michel de Castelnau, ambassadeur en Angleterre, 1575–1585. Genève: Slatkine, 1970. Hurst, Quentin. Henry of Navarre. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1937. Ingegno, Alfonso. Regia pazzia. Bruno lettore di Calvino. Urbino: QuattroVenti, 1987. ———. La sommersa nave della religione: studio sulla polemica anticristiana del Bruno. Naples: Bibliopolis, 1985. Levy, Fritz. ‘The Theatre and the Court in the 1590s.’ In The Reign of Elizabeth I. Court and Culture in the Last Decade, edited by John Guy. 274– 300. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Lloyd, Howell A. The Rouen Campaign 1590–1592. Politics, Warfare and the Early-Modern State. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973. Machiavelli, Niccolò. The Discourses. Edited by Bernard Crick. Translated by Leslie J. Walker with revisions by Brian Richardson. London: Penguin, 2003. ———. The Prince. Translated by George Bull. London: Penguin, 2003. McIlwain, Charles H. (ed.). The Political Works of James I, reprinted from the edition of 1616. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1918. Mariéjol, Jean-Hippolyte. La Réforme et la Ligue. L’Edit de Nantes. Paris: Hachette, 1908.

‘Self-sovereignty’ and Religion in Love’s Labour’s Lost

103

Neale, John E. The Age of Catherine de Medici. London: Jonathan Cape, 1943. Pin, Corrado. ‘Progetti e abbozzi sarpiani sul governo dello stato “in questi nostri tempi assai turbolenti.”’ In Paolo Sarpi, Della potestà de’ principi, edited by Nina Cannizzaro. 89–120. Venice: Marsilio Editori, 2006. Pines, Shlomo. ‘Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-politicus, Maimonides and Kant.’ In Further Studies in Philosophy, edited by Ora Segal. 3–54. Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1968. Praz, Mario. Dizionario Bompiani delle opere e dei personaggi di tutti i tempi e di tutte le letterature. Milan: Bompiani, 1983. Rabelais, François. Gargantua. Première édition critique faite sur l’Editio princeps. Edited by Ruth Calder. Genève: Droz, 1970. Ricci, Saverio. Giordano Bruno e l’Europa del Cinquecento. Rome: Salerno Editrice, 2000. de Ronsard, Pierre. Discours des Misères de ce temps. Vol. 2, Oeuvres Complètes. Edited by Jean Céard, Daniel Ménager and Michel Simonin. 991–1097. Paris: Gallimard, 1994. Sacerdoti, Gilberto. 6DFUL¿FLR H VRYUDQLWj 7HRORJLD H SROLWLFD QHOO¶(XURSD GL Shakespeare e Bruno. Turin: Einaudi, 2002. Salmon, John H.M. The French Religious Wars in English Political Thought. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959. Sarpi, Paolo. Istoria del Concilio Tridentino. Edited by Corrado Vivanti. Turin: Einaudi, 1974. ———. Lettere ai Gallicani. Edited by Boris Ulianich. Wiesbaden: Steiner Verlag, 1961. ———. Pensieri. Edited by Gaetano and Luisa Cozzi. Turin: Einaudi, 1976. Shakespeare, William. Love’s Labour’s Lost. Edited by George R. Hibbard. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990. ———. Love’s Labour’s Lost. Edited by H.C. Hart. London: Methuen, 1906. ———. Love’s Labour’s Lost. Edited by Henry R. Woudhuysen. The Arden Shakespeare (Third Series). Walton-on-Thames: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1998. ———. Love’s Labour’s Lost. Edited by John Dover Wilson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962. ———. Love’s Labour’s Lost. Edited by Richard David. London: Methuen, 1951. Spampanato, Vittorio. Vita di Giordano Bruno: con documenti editi e inediti. Messina: Giuseppe Principato, 1921. Spinoza, Benedict de. The Political Works: The Tractatus Theologico-Politicus in Part and the Tractatus Politicus in Full. Edited by Archibald G. Wernham. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958. de Thou, Jacques A. Histoire universelle. La Haye: H. Scheurleer, 1740. Tommaseo, Niccolò (ed.). Relations des ambassadeurs vénitiens sur les affaires de France au XVIe siècle. Paris: Imprimerie royale, 1838.

104

Visions of Venice in Shakespeare

Trevor-Roper, Hugh R. Religion, the Reformation and Social Change. London: Macmillan, 1967. Tuck, Richard. Hobbes. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989. ———. ‘Hobbes’s “Christian Atheism.”’ In Atheism from the Reformation to the Enlightenment, edited by Michael Hunter and David Wootton. 580–98. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992. Voltaire. Essai sur les moeurs et l’esprit des nations et sur les principaux faits de l’histoire depuis Charlemagne jusqu’à Louis XIII. Edited by René Pomeau. Paris: Éditions Garnier, 1963. Weinstein, Donald. ‘Critical Issues in the Study of Civic Religion in Renaissance Florence.’ In The Pursuit of Holiness in Late Medieval and Renaissance Religion, edited by Charles Trinkaus. 265–70. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1974. Yates, Frances. Astraea: the Imperial Theme in the Sixteenth Century. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975. Zac, Sylvain. Spinoza et l’interpretation de l’Écriture. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1965.

Chapter 6

Job in Venice: Shakespeare and the Travails of Universalism Julia Reinhard Lupton

In Venice, as in other parts of both Western and Eastern Christendom, Job was venerated as a saint, associated above all with the succor of the poor and the miracle of healing. A complex of sacred institutions devoted to San Giobbe, including an oratory, a church, a hospital, and three scuole or confraternities, began to take shape in the Sestiere di Cannaregio in 1372, with major renovations and expansions undertaken in 1470, after a major endowment by the Doge Cristoforo Moro, who was buried there in 1471.1 In Giovanni Bellini’s San Giobbe altarpiece, possibly FRPPLVVLRQHGLQUHVSRQVHWRWKHSODJXHRI-REDQG6W6HEDVWLDQÀDQNWKH Virgin and Child in a sacra conversazione along with other saints; Job, standing LQWKHIRUHJURXQGMXVWWRWKHOHIWRI0DU\DSSHDUVDVDKHUPLWOLNH¿JXUHZKRVH UHVXUUHFWHGÀHVK KDV EHHQKHDOHGRI LWV WHUULEOHVRUHV %HOOLQL¶V LQFRUSRUDWLRQRI various references to the Republic of Venice (the Byzantine seraphs, for example, recall the ducal chapel of San Marco), place this ambitious altarpiece in the high tradition of the Serenissima’s political-theological iconography, which operated above all by crossing liturgical and civic themes, branding its public spaces, and freely mixing Greek and Roman traditions.2 A similar hermit-like Job reappears in two linked paintings of Christ’s Passion by Vittore Carpaccio, The Meditation on the Passion (Fig. 6.1) and The Preparation of Christ’s Tomb, both probably commissioned by the Scuola di San Giobbe for the hospital chapel in 1504.3 Carpaccio’s cadaverous Christs, ruinous landscapes, natural-historical detailing, 1

Rona Geffen, ‘Bellini, S. Giobbe, and Altar Egos,’ Artibus et Historiae 7, 14 (1986): p. 62. See also Brigit Blass-Simmen, ‘“Povero Giopo”: Carpaccios “Grabbereitung Christi” und die “Scuola di San Giobbe in Venedig,”’ Jahrbuch der Berliner Museen 35 (1993): p. 120. 2 The painting’s civic elements include the balduchin above the Virgin Mary, the use of Annunciation references that would have linked the painting to the mythic founding of the Republic on March 25, and the architectural evocations of San Marco in the detailing of the space (Geffen). In her classic study of ‘Venice and the Two Romes,’ Debra Pincus notes that the painting systematically combines Byzantine and Roman elements, ‘Venice and the Two Romes: Byzantium and Rome as a Double Heritage in Venetian Cultural Politics,’ Artibus et Historiae 13, 26 (1991): p. 113. 3 Blass-Simmen, pp. 124–5.

Fig. 6.1

Vittore Carpaccio, Meditation on the Passion. Job sits on the right; St. Jerome on the left. c. 1510. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, John Stewart Kennedy Fund, 11.118. Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Reproduction of any kind is prohibited without express written permission in advance from The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Job in Venice

107

and memento mori elements lend these paintings an elegiac mood, heightened in each painting by the melancholic posture, head resting in hand, assumed by &DUSDFFLR¶VSHQVLYH-RE¿JXUHVZKRSURYLGHW\SRORJLFDOJORVVHVWRWKHSDLQWLQJV¶ themes of penitence, mortality, and resurrection. Shakespeare was most likely unfamiliar with the Venetian cult of Job, though he might have enjoyed the fact that ‘povero Giopo’ means something like ‘poor schmuck’ in Venetian dialect.4 Yet it is striking that Shakespeare’s two major Venetian plays both pay homage to the Book of Job. Most recent readings of Othello and The Merchant of Venice use scriptural references in these plays as a means of grasping the particular: allusions to circumcision, for example, mark the culture of the Jews in Renaissance Venice, or of Moors and Turks in the Venetian Mediterranean, or of all of these groups as processed through the biases of Elizabethan Englishmen.5 I argue that these two plays, far from celebrating WKH FXOWXUDO VSHFL¿FLW\ DQG RWKHUQHVV RI 6K\ORFN DQG 2WKHOOR GUDPDWL]H WKH process by which these character fall out of particularized regimes of belonging, LQWKHSURFHVVDFWXDOL]LQJXQLYHUVDOSRVVLELOLWLHVIRUGLVLGHQWL¿FDWLRQLQKHUHQWLQ UHOLJLRXVDI¿OLDWLRQDVVXFK,QERWKFDVHV6KDNHVSHDUHGRHVQRWVHFXODUL]HRU negate religious content so much as identify the very heart of religious experience with the event of its own disarticulation. Both plays perform their de-joinings via the Book of Job, which records the extraordinary subjective effects of social and divine violence in order to render those effects transferable among persons, SODFHVDQGHSRFKV-REHQWHUVWKH9HQHWLDQSOD\VDVD¿JXUHRIWUDQVODWDELOLW\ between traditions, including ancient Wisdom cults, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. It is no accident that these restagings of Job occur in Venice, Europe’s favorite laboratory for the exchange and transmutation of religions and cultures into goods and values transferable across places and periods. Job’s appearances in Shakespeare’s Venice, I argue, can help us recover the travails of universalism – the travels, the labors and the trials – as this ancient text reverberates and remixes in the singular enunciations and global addresses effected by Merchant and Othello.

4 Blass-Simmen, p. 120; she cites Giuseppe Boerio, Dizionario del dialetto veneziano (Venice: 1829). 5 Strong examples of this particularizing approach include Janet Adelman’s PDJQL¿FHQWUHFHQWVWXG\Blood Relations: Christian and Jew in The Merchant of Venice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008) and M. Lindsay Kaplan, ‘Jessica’s Mother: Medieval Constructions of Jewish Race and Gender in The Merchant of Venice,’ Shakespeare Quarterly 58, 1 (2007): pp. 1–30. In Shylock Is Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), Kenneth Gross does not eschew historicism, but his approach is more broadly humanistic, and he sets himself the challenge of determining ‘what it means WRNHHSIDLWKZLWK6KDNHVSHDUH¶V¿FWLRQ¶S ,WLVQRDFFLGHQWWKHQWKDWKHLVRQHRIWKH strongest contemporary readers of Merchant’s Joban subtexts.

Visions of Venice in Shakespeare

108

Job of Uz The shell of the Book of Job is an ancient prose narrative, its framing folktale of patience rewarded broken up by a long poetic and dramatic section in which Job refuses comforts of his friends, culminating in the sublime appearance of God himself from the whirlwind to both chastise and exonerate his servant. The prose narrative has spawned many legendary retellings and saintly cults, while the poetic sequence has tended to carry its more plaintive energy into liturgy, especially rites of the dead. Whereas the miraculous restorations of the prose frame imply a VLPSOHHWKLFVRIYLUWXHH[RQHUDWHGDQGUHZDUGHGWKHPRUHGLI¿FXOWDQGVXEVWDQWLDO interior sections grapple with the fact that good people can suffer without cause – the position put forth by Job himself, in the form of argument, but also through the gestural genres of lament, complaint, oath and curse, whose orchestrated pathos tests the limits of discourse. In the prose frame, Job suffers a cascade of losses, beginning with the destruction of his substance (sheep, cattle, camels, servants), followed by the FDWDVWURSKLFGHDWKRIKLVFKLOGUHQDQGHQGLQJLQ-RE¶VRZQDIÀLFWLRQZLWKDWHUULEOH skin disease. Property, posterity, health: these are the pillars of happiness in the patriarchal economy of Job’s world, systematically destroyed under the direction of Ha Satán (the Adversary) and with God’s permission. Job bears the loss of his property and his children with proverbial patience, turning to the routines of ritual for support: ‘Then Job arose, and rent his garment, and shaved his head, and fel downe upon the grounde, and worshiped’ (1:21).6 What catapults Job from prose into poetry, from patience into complaint, is not the death of his children, but, SHUKDSVVXUSULVLQJO\KLVDIÀLFWLRQZLWKVNLQGLVHDVHµ6R6DWiQGHSDUWHGIURPWKH presence of the Lord, and smote Job with sore boyels, from the sole of his fote unto his crowne. And he took a potsharde to scrape him, and he sate down among the ashes’ (2:6–8). After mourning with his wife and friends for seven days and seven nights, ‘Job opened his mouthe, and cursed his day,’ unleashing the central dialogue of the text. His bodily stigmata deliver a secondary wound, or rather a swarm of wounds, that both circles around and aggravates his earlier privations. -RE¶VVRUHVPRUHRYHUDUHQRWRQO\DSHUVRQDODIÀLFWLRQWKH\DOVRVHDOKLVORVVRI status in the community in which he had once been a master. He who had greeted WKH VWUDQJHU ± WKH SDWULDUFKDO RI¿FH RI KRVSLWDOLW\ SDU H[FHOOHQFH ± KDV KLPVHOI now become a pariah in his own household and in the alliance of households that make up the land of Uz (19:14–16). The sores of Job are a mappa mundi, indexing not only the sublime seriality of his suffering but also the abscessed corpus of the community itself, riven by privations that both require and repel social action.7 6

Unless otherwise noted, all references from the Bible are from the Geneva Bible, 1560 edition, facsimile prepared by Lloyd E. Berry (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969). 7 Sara Wheaton has argued that the Book’s ‘existential and philosophical concerns are … [always] subject to its rhetorical, historical, and literary conditions.’ Sara Wheaton,

Job in Venice

109

The book opens like a fairy tale: ‘There was a man in the land of Uz called Job, and this man was an uprighte and juste man, one that feared God, and eschewed evil’ (1:1). Although commentators debate the location of Uz (‘Uz’ is notoriously ‘fuzzy’), they pretty much all agree that Uz is not in Israel, and that Job was not a Jew. For Jewish commentators, Job could become an emblem of suffering available to all people and peoples, while still subject to more particular DOOHJRUL]DWLRQDVD¿JXUHRI-HZLVKWULEXODWLRQV8 A secondary tradition casts Job as the son of Jacob and Dinah, and thus an Israelite, and we will see signs of a Jewish Job in Shakespeare’s Shylock. In Christianity, Job’s nativity outside Judaism as well as his references to a Redeemer and to resurrection (Job 19:25–6) made him LQWRD¿JXUHIRU*HQWLOHFRQYHUVLRQ)RU0XVOLPV-RERUµ$\\XE¶ EHORQJHGWRD canon of holy prophets shared by all three religions of the Book. If Job like Abraham is a type of patriarchal hospitality, Job hails even further back to Noah. Noah and Job are both described as WƗP, ‘perfect,’ ‘blameless,’ DZRUGXVHGLQWKH7RUDKWRLGHQWLI\VDFUL¿FLDODQLPDOVLQDULWXDOFRQWH[W9 Like Noah, moreover, Job is associated with a minimal yet universal covenant: if the God of this text speaks of the wonders of Creation, he is also a God of Covenant, and Job appears to follow the Noahide laws established for all peoples after the Flood.10 Like Noah, Job belongs to a world of creatures: ‘Remember, I pray thee, that thou hast made me as the clay, and wilt thou bring me into dust again? Hast thou not powred me out as mylke? And turned me to [curds] like chese?’ ± 7KHPRVWSURYRFDWLYH¿JXUHRIWKHFUHDWXUHLQWKHWH[WKRZHYHULVWKH worm, whose supine body binds disease with creatureliness and with the life of the multitude; slimy and swarming, the worm breeds at the slippery threshold of life and death. In a passage that would spawn whole ecologies of cult and commentary, -REUHSUHVHQWVKLVOLYLQJÀHVKDVWHHPLQJZLWKZRUPVµ0\ÀHVKLVFORWKHGZLWK worms and clods of dust; my skin is broken, and become loathsome’ (7:5; KJV). Later legends from rabbinic, Christian and Muslim traditions would recount that the transformation of Job’s sores extruded worms from their ulcerated openings. Humanly Persuading: George Herbert’s Rhetorical Lyrics (PhD diss., University of California, Irvine, 2008). 8 Robert Eisen examines the universalist and particularist dimensions of Jewish medieval commentators in a separate subsection of each chapter of his excellent study, The Book of Job in Medieval Jewish Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). 9 JPS Torah Commentary, ed. Chaim Potok (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1989), Vol. I, Genesis 6:9, note, p. 50. Robert S. Fyall notes the association of Job DQG1RDKDVZHOODVWKHVDFUL¿FLDOODQJXDJHµ+HLV³EODPHOHVV´WƗP), a word used of clean DQLPDOVRIIHUHGIRUVDFUL¿FHHJ/HYLWLFXV± DZRUGZLWKRPLQRXVQXDQFHVLQ light of what follows.’ Now My Eyes Have Seen You: Images of Creation and Evil in the Book of Job (Downers Grove: Inter-Varsity Press, 2002), p. 35. 10 In both rabbinic and Christian commentaries, Job was conceived as a ‘virtuous Gentile who kept the Noahide laws,’ the seven commandments given to Noah after the Flood as the legal requirements for all humanity. See Jason Rosenblatt, Renaissance England’s Chief Rabbi: John Selden (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 154–7.

110

Visions of Venice in Shakespeare

These worms remind us to never lose sight of Job’s genuinely repulsive character, a feature essential to the medieval cults, with their dung heaps, plague sores, and worm mills. Moreover, it is not because Job suffers that his case becomes universal, but because he protests. Cranky, itchy, aggravated, and litigious, he insists on the injustice of his condition. Job is he who subjectivizes his sufferings without symbolizing them, turning them into a political possibility for others. Covenant gives Job something to fall back on when he makes his case. What covenant means for him is the fact that an agreement exists, he has maintained his side of the bargain, and that he has a case in court. Whether covenant is written on the body, in the form of circumcision, or on the tablets of the Law, as in the Decalogue and the Torah, or only in the rainbow that hovers above the UHFHGLQJÀRRGFRYHQDQWPHDQVWKDW*RGWRRLVDFFRXQWDEOHDQGVRWRRLVWKH community. Covenant invites protest. In Merchant, Shakespeare will focus on Job as the litigious subject of covenant (Shylock is Shakespeare’s ‘Jewish Job’), but DJDLQVWWKHEDFNGURSRIDFRPPRQFUHDWLRQGH¿QHGE\YXOQHUDELOLW\WRQHHGDQG to the Joban call to answer privation without rendering it meaningful. In Othello, Shakespeare will testify to the possibility of a Black Job, an Ayyub who is a Semite but not a Jew, and who suffers the passion of chesed or covenant-love perplexed to the extreme. The Merchant of Venice Shakespeare’s Venice colors the landscape of many of the major statements on the relation between religion, civil society and the state, including Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Marx’s ‘On the Jewish Question,’ and their resolute rejoinder in Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism.11 In its own eyes and in the eyes of Europe, Venice ZDV¿UVWDQGIRUHPRVWDUHSXEOLFLWVFRQVWLWXWLRQDOLVPGRFXPHQWHGDQGGHEDWHG in various political writings of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The Commonwealth and Government of Venice, written by Gasparo Contarini in 1544 and translated by Lewes Lewkenor in 1599, is often taken as an indicator of the kinds of political knowledge concerning Venice disseminated in the London of the 1590s.12 Presenting Venice as a model of civil justice, Contarini uses the language 11 On Shakespeare, Venice, and German letters, see Julia Reinhard Lupton, ‘Shakespeare’s Other Europe: Venice, the Jews, and Civil Society,’ Social Identities 7, 4 (2001): pp. 479–92. On Shakespeare, Marx and Merchant, see especially Richard Halpern, Shakespeare among the Moderns (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), pp. 159–86, and Stephen Greenblatt, ‘Marlowe, Marx, and Anti-Semitism,’ Critical Inquiry 5 (1978): pp. 40–58. 12 Gasparo Contarini, The Commonwealth and Government of Venice. Trans. Lewes Lewkenor (London, 1599. Reprinted Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum; New York: Da Capo Press, 1969). For a use of the Lewkenor/Contarini text in order to elucidate the world of Merchant, see for example Thomas H. Luxon, ‘A Second Daniel: The Jew and the “True Jew” in The Merchant of Venice,’ Early Modern Literary Studies 4, 3 (1999): pp. 31–7.

Job in Venice

111

of consent to describe the founding of the republic. Citizens on the mainland, scattered by the invading Huns, took refuge in the lagoons, seeking there a safe abode for their wives and children, and as I may say their household gods. Afterwards, in the time of the kings, Charles and Pepin, all such as scatteringly inhabited these places, by common consent retired themselves into the Ryalta«RXUDQFHVWRUVIURPZKRPZHKDYHUHFHLYHGVRÀRXULVKLQJ a commonwealth, all in one did unite themselves in a consenting desire to HVWDEOLVKKRQRXUDQGDPSOL¿HWKHLUFRXQWU\13

Contarini’s discourse on Venice is distinctively humanist in its reliance on Aristotelian descriptions of the political life, its Virgilian echoes, and its resolute eschewal of Biblical references. Lacking both an Aeneas and a Moses, Contarini’s Venice leaps into republicanism through an act of constitutive self-assembly. The evocative phrase ‘consenting desire’ designates the civic-humanist scene of political consensus; its image of full harmony (of ‘concent’ in the musical sense) avoids the problem of divergent interests addressed in later contract theory, implying instead WKHULWXDOIRUPVRIDVVHQWDI¿UPDWLRQDQGHOHFWLRQSHUIRUPHGE\PHGLHYDOFLYLF and ecclesiastical bodies at moments of foundation and reconsecration. The Duke or Doge of Venice was elected from the ruling noble families HOLJLEOHIRUSXEOLFRI¿FHDQGKLVPDLQSRZHUZDVWRVHUYHH[RI¿FLRon all the major committees; although elected for life, his residence in the Ducal Palace was considered temporary, and he had no power to redecorate!14 Lewkenor’s translation captures the virtual and theatrical quality of the Ducal person: ‘The exterior shew of the prince in the Cittie of Venice delivereth to the eyes of the beholders the person of a king, and the very resemblance of a monarchie.’15 7KLV VSHFWUDOL]DWLRQ RI 'XFDO SULQFHOLQHVV ¿QGV LWV PRUWDO FRXQWHUSDUW LQ Lewkenor’s description of the rites surrounding the death of the Duke (one of several ‘Diverse Observations’ appended to Contarini’s text). Although marked 13

Contarini, pp. 4–5. On Renaissance Venice in English literature, see especially David McPherson, Shakespeare, Jonson, and the Myth of Venice (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1990). On political structures and civil ritual in Renaissance Venice, see especially Dennis Romano, Patricians and Popolani: The Social Foundations of the Venetian Renaissance State (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987); Edward Muir, Civic Ritual in Renaissance Venice (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981); and Oliver Logan, Culture and Society in Venice, 1470–1790: The Renaissance and Its Heritage (New York: Scribner, 1972). On the Jews of Venice, see David Malkiel, ‘The Ghetto Republic,’ in The Jews of Early Modern Venice, ed. Robert C. Davis and Benjamin Ravid (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), pp. 117–42; and Riccardo Calimani, The Ghetto of Venice, trans. Katherine Silberblatt Wolfthal (New York: M. Evans, 1987). Contarini notes that ‘this authoritie of his by lawes retracted, that alone hee may not doe any thing … the Duke of Venice is deprived of all means, whereby he might abuse his authoritie, or become a tyrant’ (p. 42). 15 Contarini, p. 37. 14

Visions of Venice in Shakespeare

112

by various ceremonies, ‘there is in the Cittie of Venice no greater alteration at the death of their Duke, than at the death of any other private gentlemen.’ The dead Duke, moreover, is subjected to a post-mortem trial in order to determine ZKHWKHU µKH KDG REVHUYHG WKHLU FRXQWULHV ODZHV¶ ZLWK ¿QHV SDVVHG RQ WR KLV heirs if any infringements are found.16 The Duke may ‘shew’ like a prince, but he inhabits a single body only and he remains accountable to the law even in death, marking the republican difference between the Venetian constitution and the political theologies of neighboring monarchies, including Lewkenor’s own. Lewkenor, clearly seeing Contarini’s portrait of a mixed constitution headed by a limited prince as potentially compromising Elizabethan forms of rule, notes in a side gloss: Howsoever the successe hath allowed the government of Venice, either in regard of the smalnesse of their territory, or the strong situation of their cittie; yet there was never any example of any other great commonwealth but that did soone SHULVKE\WKHSOXUDOLWLHRIFRPPDQGHUVDOOJUHDWSKLORVRSKHUVFKLHÀ\H[WROOLQJ WKHPRQDUFK\DQGDOOFRXUVHRIWLPHVDQGH[DPSOHVFRQ¿UPLQJWKHLURSLQLRQ17

In Contarini’s text, Venice consistently emerges as a fundamentally ‘mixed’ body: constitutionally, it tempers monarchic, aristocratic, and democratic institutions, and demographically, its parti-colored ranks are swelled by migrants, merchants, and mercenaries from several nations and coasts. The residents of Venice include WKHQRELOLW\ZKRPRQRSROL]HWKHRI¿FHVRIJRYHUQPHQWWKHcittadini, who share LQ PLQRU RI¿FHV DQG WKH HODERUDWH FLYLF SDJHDQWU\ RI9HQHWLDQ VHOIJRYHUQPHQW on display, and a mixed multitude of artisans, servants, laborers and resident aliens.18 Although nativity into the city’s founding families was a prerequisite for nobility, naturalization into the middle and even the highest class was possible. As Contarini notes, ‘yea and some forrain men and strangers have been adopted into this number of citizens, eyther in regard of their great nobility, or that they had beene dutifull towards the state, or els had done unto them some notable service.’ If naturalization into the nobility was uncommon within the city proper, it was practiced freely in Venetian colonies: our ancesters held it a better course to defend their dominions upon the continent, with forreyn mercenarie souldiers, than with their homeborn citizens …. Some of which have attained to the highest degree of commandement in our army, and for the excedingnes of their deserts been enabled, with the title of citizens and gentlemen of Venice.19

16

Contarini, pp. 156–7. Contarini, p. 10. 18 Contarini uses the metaphor of the body politic to conceptualize both the constitutional and the demographic hybridization of Venice: pp. 16; 148–9. 19 Contarini, pp. 18, 131–2. 17

Job in Venice

113

Such passages evoke the civic crossings of Othello and Shylock, though full naturalization was apparently reserved for merchants and mercenaries of Catholic birth, not for Protestants or conversos. Trading privileges were, however, granted to New Christian, Jewish and Muslim subjects of the Ottoman Republic and later to Iberian Jews, allowing economic but not political equality among the mixed merchant classes of Venice.20 The Merchant of Venice has long been linked to the Book of Job. Like Job, Shylock has lost both property and posterity, his daughter and his ducats. In the Jewish tradition, children who marry out are symbolically dead, and parents sit shiva (ritually mourn) for them to mark their permanent exclusion from the circle of the living. ‘I would my daughter were dead at my foot, and the jewels in her ear!’ Shylock exclaims in a fantasy of restitution that serves to literalize rather than reverse the symbolic death of Jessica (3.1.80–81).21 Kenneth Gross associates Shylock’s cry at the realization of his daughter’s loss, ‘the curse never fell upon our nation till now, I never felt it till now … loss upon loss!’ (3.1.78–84) with the cascade of privations suffered by Job and their signifying logic, building on each other without equating forms of loss.22 Of all his Joban experiments, Shylock is Shakespeare’s most distinctively Jewish Job, signaling not only Job’s origins in the Hebrew Bible, but also the effective de-patriarching, the fall from a position of originary prestige and foundational hospitality that Israel has suffered in the European diaspora. By apprehending Job as a narrative of Jewish travails, 6KDNHVSHDUHGHOLYHUV6K\ORFNDVD¿JXUHRIKLVWRULFDODVZHOODVFRPPXQDODQG subjective suffering. Like Noah and Job, Shylock considers himself tam, blameless; modern audiences, especially Protestant ones, are, I think, inclined to acknowledge the power of Shylock’s claim, but also to see that assertion as a form of moral limit. (As Hamlet says, ‘use every man after his desert, and who shall scape whipping?’)23 Both Shylock’s blamelessness and its constraints are drawn most clearly in the ‘Hath not a Jew eyes’ speech, which we can read with and against Job’s passionate self-defenses. When Shylock queries, ‘Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions?’ (3.1.44–5) he asserts life itself, the life of the creature, as the ground he shares with those who humiliate him. This creaturely universalism does not simply belong to Christianity, as the higher truth that Christendom both owns and forgets, but rather functions as a common horizon of createdness shared by Jews, Christians and Muslims alike. (We should not forget that Shylock’s query, ‘If you prick us, do we not bleed?’ echoes an earlier 20

Benjamin Ravid, Studies on the Jews of Venice, 1382–1797 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), p. 152. 21 Line quotations from The Merchant of Venice, which appear parenthetically in the text, are taken from the Arden edition, edited by John Russell Brown (London: Methuen, 1955). 22 Kenneth Gross, Shylock Is Shakespeare, p. 24. 23 William Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor, The Arden Shakespeare (London: Thomson, 2006), 2.2.468.

Visions of Venice in Shakespeare

114

claim by the Prince of Morocco, suitor to one Portia of Belmont.) Yet Shylock’s defense is also spiked with allusions to covenant – the pricking of circumcision and the hunger regulated by dietary laws, two fundamental symbols of covenant in the Hebrew and Christian Bibles. Bare life is always bound up with forms of life, which require cults and culture, a local habitation and a name, in order to be exercised or expressed at all. We cannot simply extract the creaturely moment from the covenantal one – bare life from the forms it bears – in order to distill the promise of Jewish humanism from the straitjacket of Jewish particularism. Saving Judaism from the Jews is no salvation at all. Like Job, Shylock is a creature of covenant, voicing from within the law both the conditions of his own substantial belonging to the nation of Israel and a universality born from disjunction to which the Christian characters in the play remain deaf. As Merchant moves forward, this Jewish Job progressively falls out of covenant, beginning with his decision to dine with Antonio and ending with his forced conversion to Christianity. Initially he refuses to eat, drink or pray with the Christians, agreeing only to walk and talk with them, asserting the segregating function of dietary laws – a separation sought by the Jews in order to maintain the lines of their own community as much as enforced by the Christians threatened by the specter of excessive contact.24 Later, however, Shylock agrees to attend the dinner party at Antonio’s, a possible violation of covenant (we don’t know whether he eats or not) that begins to expose, reduce and materialize Judaism as PHUH FXOWXUHZKLOHDOVRUHÀHFWLQJ6K\ORFN¶VRZQVXEMHFWLYHDQGFRPPXQDOGULIW While Shylock is at supper, Jessica elopes with her Christian boyfriend Lorenzo. It is as if the coincidence of these two events – the simultaneous crossing of Shylock and of Jessica from the ghetto into Christian territory – bore a causal relationship to each other: because Shylock leaves the house, Jessica abandons Judaism, and the patriarch loses his daughter, his ducats, and the forms of prestige and belonging they represent. Whereas Jessica’s passage traces an irreversible exodus, Shylock’s passage draws a loop. Crossing from the ghetto to the city and then back again,25 Shylock’s travails trace a ring that, like Job’s wounds, bears ZLWKLQLWWKHOLYLG¿JXUHRIKLVGHSDWULDUFKLQJµWKHFXUVHRI>KLV@QDWLRQ«QHYHU felt till now’ (3.1.78). There is actually a character named Job in the play: the clown Launcelot Gobbo (or Iobbe).26 Patricia Parker traces an intricate network of allusions and translations WKDW OLQN WKH QDPH RI /DXQFHORW RU /DQFHW  *REER WR ¿JXUHV RI FDVWUDWLRQ DQG circumcision, and hence of violence and community, in the play. She notes that: 24

See the argument by Joshua Holo, ‘Jews in the Ghetto and the Ghetto in Venice,’ presented at a conference on Shakespeare in Venice, hosted by the Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia at the Ateneo Veneto in Venice, October, 2007. 25 For a different discussion of boundary-crossing in Merchant see Laura Tosi’s chapter ‘Shakespeare, Jonson and Venice’ in this volume (pp. 143–65). 26 See the Folio: ‘Iobbe, Launcelet Iobbe, good Launcelet, or good Iobbe, or good Launcelet Iobbe’ (for 1.2.3–6). Q1 and F both read ‘Iobbe’; Q2 reads ‘Gobbo.’

Job in Venice

115

the lancelet or lancet used for lancing apostumations or boils was at the same WLPH WKH PDWHULDO LQVWUXPHQW LGHQWL¿HG ZLWK WKH ODQFLQJ RI WKH ERLOV RI -RE D SLYRWDO¿JXUHDVD*HQWLOHIURPWKH+HEUHZVFULSWXUHV IRUWKHPRYHPHQWIURP the Old Testament to the New – one of the reasons that Lancelet himself bears the surname ‘Iobbe’ or Job.27

/RZHOO*DOODJKHUVXJJHVWVWKDW*REER¶VJLIWRIWZRGRYHVµ¿JXUHFRQVSLFXRXVO\ as covenantal signs of divine care,’28 an image that once more binds Job and Noah as participants in a primitive universality, its horizon traced by the sideways burrowings of the worm and its vertical dimension marked by the singular cut of a God who covenants with creation itself. Although Gallagher and Parker approach the play from very different portals, Gallagher addressing the theology of the gift and Parker practicing a more culturalist philology, both critics unveil Shakespeare’s Venice as a scene in which religion shifts between the particular habitations of cult and neighborhood and the universal names of God, creation and the stigmata of citizenship. In both Shakespearean drama and Western political theory, Venice exists at the crossroads of the universal and the particular, a scene of cosmopolitan exchange enabled by geographical exceptionalism. Venice’s constitution, admired and dissected by European observers, could become a light onto the nations, replicating the role of Israel itself in Western political theology. The dénouement of the trial scene proffers a cruel parody of the comic ending that resolves the Book of Job. The court has exacted Shylock’s wealth from him as a penalty, and then partially restores it, but on the condition that he convert to Christianity, and that his money go to Jessica and Lorenzo upon his death. The ruling UHFRQVWLWXWHV6K\ORFN¶VKRXVHKROGLQERWKLWVKXPDQDQGLWV¿GXFLDU\GLPHQVLRQV comically translating the story of Job from its Hebrew site of enunciation to its IXO¿OOPHQW LQ &KULVWLDQ VDOYDWLRQ KLVWRU\
Patricia Parker, ‘Cutting Both Ways: Bloodletting, Castration/Circumcision, and the “Lancelet” of The Merchant of Venice,’ in Alternative Shakespeares 3, ed. Diana Henderson (London: Routledge, 2008): p. 108. 28 Lowell Gallagher, ‘Waiting for Gobbo,’ in Spiritual Shakespeares, ed. Ewan Fernie (London: Routledge, 2005): p. 77.

Visions of Venice in Shakespeare

116

voices when he says at the conclusion of the trial scene, ‘I pray you give me leave to go from hence, / I am not well’ (4.1.391–2). By acknowledging Shylock’s discontent with the solution offered to him in the play, Shakespeare keeps open a wound in Job’s textual passage from the Hebrew to the Christian Bible. Through the rim of that wound, perhaps we can begin to glimpse a more inclusive universe, one bearing the impress of a common creator yet still marked by covenantal communities and the disjointings they shelter, a covenantal creation that pulses and trembles just beyond the solution offered by Venice at the play’s close. The Moor of Venice Othello is also riven by crises in covenant in the republic of Venice. Othello’s ambiguous prehistory is divided between an Islamic alliance that would place him on the side of the People of the Book, and a pagan origin that would have placed him outside monotheism. One of Job’s symptoms was the blackening of his skin: ‘I am a brother to the dragons, and a companion to the ostriches. My skinne is blacke upon me, and my bones are burnt with heat’ (30:30; emphasis added). 7KH*HQHYDFRPPHQWDU\FRPSDUHV-RE¶VDIÀLFWLRQWRWKHSODJXHRIERLOVYLVLWHG against the Egyptians. Indeed, we could say that Job’s situation smacks of Egypt, since he suffers the death of his cattle and his children as well as a plague of boils, placing him once again at the suburbs of Sinai, both outside and prior to its bonds. Othello, too, suffers the edges of covenant, insecurely included within Christianity and hailing from an ambiguous ancestry of Semitic cults. Othello, I argue, is 6KDNHVSHDUH¶VEODFN-RED¿JXUHZKRKDLOVIURPWKH$EUDKDPLFFURVVURDGVRIWKH three monotheisms, against the backdrop of Near Eastern paganism, as Shakespeare once again samples the sources and tests the limits of Joban translatability. Othello breaks into Joban complaint in Act Four, in the course of Desdemona’s desperate attempt to comprehend Othello’s terrible turn:29 Had it pleased heaven 7RWU\PHZLWKDIÀLFWLRQKDGWKH\UDLQ¶G All kinds of sores and shames on my bare head, Steep’d me in poverty to the very lips, Given to captivity me and my utmost hopes, I should have found in some place of my soul A drop of patience: but, alas, to make me $¿[HG¿JXUHIRUWKHWLPHRIVFRUQ 7RSRLQWKLVVORZXQPRYLQJ¿QJHUDW Yet could I bear that too; well, very well: But there, where I have garner’d up my heart, Where either I must live, or bear no life; 29 Richmond S.H. Noble notes the allusion in Shakespeare’s Biblical Knowledge and Use of the Book of Common Prayer (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1935), p. 219.

Job in Venice

117

The fountain from the which my current runs, Or else dries up; to be discarded thence! Or keep it as a cistern for foul toads To knot and gender in! Turn thy complexion there, Patience, thou young and rose-lipp’d cherubin, – Ay, there, look grim as hell! (4.2.49–66)30

7KH µVRUHV DQG VKDPHV¶ QDPH -RE¶V GRXEOH VWLJPDWL]DWLRQ WKH HQÀDPLQJ RI KLV body and the shaming of his person in the eyes of the community. Such horrors, Othello claims, he could have endured. The inner festering of jealous ecstasy, however – plague sores sunk inward – push him beyond the bounds set by the propriety of patience.31 We expect worms to speak from those wounds, but we get WRDGVLQVWHDG7KH-REDQUHIHUHQFHWKDWJRYHUQVWKH¿UVWKDOIRIWKHVSHHFKÀRZV into a rewriting of Proverbs 5:15–19: Drinke the water of thy cisterne, and of the rivers out of the middes of thine RZQ ZHOO /HW WK\ IRXQWDLQH ÀRZH IRRUWKH DQG WKH ULYHUV RI ZDWHUV LQ WKH streetes. But them be thine, even thine onely, and not the strangers with thee. Let thy fountaine bee blessed, and reioyce with the wife of thy youth. (Proverbs 5:15–18; Geneva Bible)

The bounteous image of the fountain recalls the courtship of Rebecca at the well. Yet the locus amoenus is immediately muddied by the threat of ‘the stranger’ – both the erotic tempter to forbidden dalliance, and the cultic tempter to forbidden rites, picking up on the deep bond between idolatry and adultery in the Hebrew Bible, as recently argued in an excellent dissertation by Catherine Winiarski.32 When Job declares, ‘I made a covenant [brit] with mine eyes; why then should I WKLQNHRQDPDLG"¶ KHLVVLPXOWDQHRXVO\DVVHUWLQJKLVPDULWDO¿GHOLW\DQG KLVFXOWLF¿GHOLW\WRWKH*RGRIchesed, covenant-love. In the passionate circuits of Othello’s scriptural imaginings, the ‘sores and VKDPHV¶RI-RE¶VWHVWHGÀHVKPRUSKLQWRWKHEXPS\VNLQRIDPSKLELDQFRSXODWLRQ For Othello is himself a visitor at the well, an extravagant and wheeling stranger uncomfortably naturalized in the Venetian republic. Throughout the play, Iago’s strategy has been to play on Othello’s insecurities, to ‘blacken’ him not only in the eyes of Brabantio and Roderigo, but, more devastatingly, in Othello’s own 30

Line quotations from Othello, which appear parenthetically in the text, are taken from the Arden version edited by E.A.J. Honigmann (Walton-on-Thames: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1997). 31 Peter Milward also notes the allusion to Job, %LEOLFDO,QÀXHQFHVLQ6KDNHVSHDUH¶V Great Tragedies (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1987), p. 94. On Job’s sense RILPSULVRQPHQWVHHWKH*HQHYDJORVVWR-REµ%\DIÀLFWLRQWKRXNHSHVWPHDVLQD prison, and restraynest me from doing evil, neither can any set me at libertie.’ 32 See Catherine Winiarski, Adulterers, Idolaters, and Emperors: The Politics of Iconoclasm in English Renaissance Literature (PhD diss., University of California, Irvine, 2007).

118

Visions of Venice in Shakespeare

eyes, to make him a brother to the dragons and a companion to the ostriches, to burn his bones with the heat of a jealousy intimately linked to the possibility of social ridicule and abandonment at the edges of community and of the human as such. If the image from Proverbs threatens to push Othello beyond the pale of Christianity, identifying him with a promiscuous paganism, the force of the Joban allusion secures his place in the canon of monotheism’s saints, retaining KLVGLJQLW\DVRQHZKRLV¿HUFHO\IDLWKIXOWRERWKGLYLQHDQGGRPHVWLFFRYHQDQWV When perplexed to the extreme, however, Othello’s chesed or covenant-love turns into murderous jealousy. There is something Gnostic about Othello’s increasingly EUXWDO LGHQWL¿FDWLRQ ZLWK D *RG ZKRVH QDPH LV -HDORXV ([RGXV  33 The Gnostics could not reconcile themselves with the idea of a god as vengeful and as mired in the imperfections of creation as the God of the Jews, and so they posited a better God above and beyond him. Othello, by incarnating the jealous God of the Semites in all his violence, promotes a kind of Gnostic thinking about a divinity that would avoid the errors of Judaism. ,IZHZDQWWRVSHOORXWWKH-REDQVFHQDULRRIWKHSOD\DVLWRYHUÀRZVWKHFLVWHUQRI allusion into the surrounding play, we would cast Iago as Ha Satán, the Adversary, the archetypal tempter in a morality play with its sources not only in medieval theater but in Scriptural dialogue. And we might compare Desdemona to the wife of Job. In the prose narrative, Job is tested not only by Satan but also by his own wife, who confronts him with the following demand: ‘Doest thou continue yet in thine uprightness? Blaspheme God, and dye’ (2:9). Later legendary material will develop this wife into a negative foil for Job, an accidental adversary.34 Though Desdemona does not tempt Othello in the manner of Job’s wife, she does become the most terrible instrument, as well as the penultimate victim, of Othello’s trial, as the word ‘Demon’ encrypted in her name suggests. One of the most famous passages in the Book of Job begins with the declaration, ‘Man is borne of woman, is of short continuance, and ful of trouble’ (14:1). A touchstone in the history of Western misogyny, Job’s statement maps out the ages of man, initiated by the stinking transit from the birth canal, ending in the diet of worms, and not worth living in any case. Once he gives himself over to FRPSODLQWKLVYHU\¿UVWDFWLVWRµFXUVHKLVGD\¶±KLVELUWKGD\KLVRZQGDWHRI HQWU\LQWRWKHZRUOGEXWDOVRµWKHGD\¶LWVHOIDVWKH¿UVWLVVXHRI*RG¶VFUHDWLRQ Job re-possesses the fact of birth by de-possessing himself of it, such that the negative energy of his speech, echoing and rewriting Genesis, itself gives birth to that generative discourse of protest and complaint that we call ‘Joban.’ 33 On gnosticism and the jealous God, see Alastair H.B. Logan, Gnostic Truth and Christian Doctrine (New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 1996), pp.142–3. The Gnostics could not reconcile themselves with the idea of a god as vengeful and as mired in the imperfections of creation as the God of the Jews, and so they posited a better God above and beyond him. 34 Lawrence L. Besserman, The Legend of Job in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979), pp. 43–5.

Job in Venice

119

The irreparably dark side of this discourse may lie in the absoluteness of its rejection of the feminine and the maternal. Like Hamlet, Job’s protest against existence becomes focalized in a rage against women and the forms of life they represent. If Hamlet’s battle cry is ‘Let there be no more marriages!’ Job’s response is, ‘Let there be no more birthdays.’ Yet the feminine returns to Job in and as the oozing openings in his weeping skin, his de-patriarched manhood, the milk pails of God, and the eminently passive virtue of patience for which he comes to stand.35 At the extreme verge of his de-patriarching, Job returns as Griselda and Cinderella, sitting with them LQWKHDVKHVRIKLVWRU\LQRUGHUWRWHOOVWRULHVRIGHDGNLQJV7KH%RRNRI-RELGHQWL¿HV natality not with birthright, genealogy or nationhood, but rather with the minimal FRQGLWLRQV RI D KXPDQ EHLQJ GH¿QHG E\ LWV GLIIHUHQFH IURP WKH VRFLDO IRUPV LQWR which it had been born. Job’s is a de-naturalizing natality and thus an opening onto a form of freedom distinct from the liberty regulated by sovereignty. Othello, like Lear, shares Job’s fear of the feminine, but, unlike Job, he does not survive his passage through it. If Shakespeare offers Shylock a partial restoration of his patriarchal standing, Shakespeare’s Othello is condemned to recircumcise himself in death, returning to the Venetian fold only by cutting himself off forever from all creaturely existence. Dying on a kiss, he reasserts covenant, but only as an act of violence. If the Venetian polity grudgingly holds open a place for the Jewish Job, no such place appears to exist for the black Job. Nonetheless, Othello’s travails – in the form of the ‘traveler’s history’ that opens his courtship of Desdemona DQG WKH µWUDYDLOV¶ KH XQGHUJRHV LQ KLV ¿QDO VSHHFK ± VHUYH WR SODFH WKH /DQG RI Uz somewhere on Shakespeare’s Venetian map. This Land of Uz is a district of regional universalisms, criss-crossed by the plurality of paths into monotheism as well as their proximity to pagan fountains of wisdom. In both The Merchant of Venice and Othello, Shakespeare uses the Book of Job in order to test the limits of &KULVWLDQLQFOXVLRQWRLQÀDPHLWVRSHQLQJVLQRUGHUWRSUREHLWVGHSWKV,QWKH/DQG of Uz, which lies oddly close to the City of Venice, wounds speak in the tongues of worms in order to recall Christianity to its own inclusive promises. In both plays, Shakespeare’s goal, I would suggest, is neither to demonize Christianity’s others as a means of supporting Christian hegemony, nor to expose or ironize Christianity’s claims as mere ideology. Instead, I would argue that Shakespeare recovers in the Land of Uz, which in these two plays is unexpectedly covalent with the Republic of Venice, the traces of a universe that extends beyond Christianity while still being implied by, indeed necessary to, its messages and motives. In the Joban transactions of Shakespeare’s Venetian plays, we could say that Shakespeare aims at universality but settles for universalism. That is, Shakespeare’s Shylock and Othello, like the Scriptural Job, undergo a series of subjective falls 35

Thus the most popular secular avatar of Job is not a man, but a woman: ‘Patient Griselda.’ Griselda and Job both share features with Cinderella (Job also sits down ‘among the ashes’). Jonathan Lamb emphasized the feminized features of Job in the theological and literary traditions that follow him (The Rhetoric of Suffering: Reading the Book of Job in the Eighteenth Century. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995).

120

Visions of Venice in Shakespeare

from scenes of substantial belonging, but end up converted to a Christianity rendered cynical by the violence of their inclusion. The aim that misses its mark, however, still traces a negative space held open for future occupants, as witnessed in the continued effectivity of these plays on world stages. In this sense the plays DFKLHYHWKHXQLYHUVDOLW\WKH\VRGH¿QLWLYHO\IDOOVKRUWRI Works Cited Adelman, Janet. Blood Relations: Christian and Jew in The Merchant of Venice. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. Besserman, Lawrence L. The Legend of Job in the Middle Ages. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979. Blass-Simmen, Brigit. ‘“Povero Giopo”: Carpaccios “Grabbereitung Cristi” und die “Scuola di San Giobbe” in Venedig.’ Jahrbuch der Berliner Museen 35 (1993): 111–28. Calimani, Riccardo. The Ghetto of Venice. Translated by Katherine Silberblatt Wolfthal. New York: M. Evans, 1987. Contarini, Gasparo. The Commonwealth and Government of Venice. Translated by Lewes Lewkenor. London, 1599. Reprinted Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum; New York: Da Capo Press, 1969. Eisen, Robert. The Book of Job in Medieval Jewish Philosophy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. Fernie, Ewan (ed.). Spiritual Shakespeares. London: Routledge, 2005. Fyall, Robert. Now My Eyes Have Seen You: Images of Creation and Evil in the Book of Job. Downers Grove: Inter-Varsity Press, 2002. Gallagher, Lowell. ‘Waiting for Gobbo.’ In Spiritual Shakespeares, edited by Ewan Fernie. 72–93. London: Routledge, 2005. Geffen, Rona. ‘Bellini, S. Giobbe, and Altar Egos.’ Artibus et Historiae 7, 14 (1986): 57–70. Greenblatt, Stephen. ‘Marlowe, Marx, and Anti-Semitism.’ Critical Inquiry 5 (1978): 40–58. Gross, Kenneth. Shylock Is Shakespeare. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Halpern, Richard. Shakespeare among the Moderns. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997. Kaplan, M. Lindsay. ‘Jessica’s Mother: Medieval Constructions of Jewish Race and Gender in The Merchant of Venice.’ Shakespeare Quarterly 58, 1 (2007): 1–30. Lamb, Jonathan. The Rhetoric of Suffering: Reading the Book of Job in the Eighteenth Century. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995. Logan, Alastair H.B. Gnostic Truth and Christian Doctrine. New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 1996. Logan, Oliver. Culture and Society in Venice, 1470–1790: The Renaissance and Its Heritage. New York: Scribner, 1972.

Job in Venice

121

Lupton, Julia Reinhard. ‘Shakespeare’s Other Europe: Venice, the Jews, and Civil Society.’ Social Identities 7, 4 (2001): 479–92. Luxon, Thomas H. ‘A Second Daniel: The Jew and the “True Jew” in The Merchant of Venice,’ Early Modern Literary Studies 4, 3 (1999): 31–7. McPherson, David. Shakespeare, Jonson, and the Myth of Venice. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1990. Malkiel, David. ‘The Ghetto Republic.’ In The Jews of Early Modern Venice, edited by Robert C. Davis and Benjamin Ravid. 117–42. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. Marx, Steven. Shakespeare and the Bible. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Milward, Peter. %LEOLFDO,QÀXHQFHVLQ6KDNHVSHDUH¶V*UHDW7UDJHGLHV. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1987. Muir, Edward. Civic Ritual in Renaissance Venice. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981. Noble, Richmond S.H. Shakespeare’s Biblical Knowledge and Use of the Book of Common Prayer. London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1935. Parker, Patricia. ‘Cutting Both Ways: Bloodletting, Castration/Circumcision, and the “Lancelet” of The Merchant of Venice.’ In Alternative Shakespeares 3, edited by Diana Henderson. 95–118. London: Routledge, 2008. Pincus, Debra. ‘Venice and the Two Romes: Byzantium and Rome as a Double Heritage in Venetian Cultural Politics.’ Artibus et Historiae 13, 26 (1991): 101–14. Ravid, Benjamin. Studies on the Jews of Venice, 1382–1797. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003. Romano, Dennis. Patricians and Popolani: The Social Foundations of the Venetian Renaissance State. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987. Rosenblatt, Jason. Renaissance England’s Chief Rabbi: John Selden. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Sarna, Nahum (ed.). Genesis/Be-reshit: Hebrew Text with JPS Translation. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1989. Shaheen, Naseeb. Biblical References in Shakespeare’s Plays. Cranbury: Associated University Presses, 1999. Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Edited by Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor. The Arden Shakespeare. London: Thomson, 2006. ———. The Merchant of Venice. Edited by John Russell Brown. The Arden Shakespeare. London: Methuen, 1955. ———. The Merchant of Venice: Texts and Contexts. Edited by M. Lindsay Kaplan. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2002. ———. Othello. Edited by E.A.J. Honigmann. The Arden Shakespeare (Third Series). Walton-on-Thames: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1997. Wheaton, Sara. Humanly Persuading: George Herbert’s Rhetorical Lyrics. PhD diss., University of California, Irvine, 2008. Winiarski, Catherine. Adulterers, Idolaters, and Emperors: The Politics of Iconoclasm in English Renaissance Drama. PhD diss., University of California, Irvine, 2007.

This page has been left blank intentionally

PART 3 Crossing Boundaries and the Play of Identity

This page has been left blank intentionally

Chapter 7

‘Strangers … with vs in Venice’ Graham Holderness

‘Ogni volta che descrivo una città dico qualcosa di Venezia.’1

If Marco Polo, in his imagined conversations with Kublai Khan, really was speaking, as Italo Calvino insists, always and only of Venice, he cannot have been talking about his real home town, that city of Venice that stretches across numerous small islands in the marshy Venetian Lagoon, along the Adriatic Sea in Northeast Italy. He must have been speaking, as writers tend to do, of Venice the myth, Venice the fertile reservoir of mythologies. The word ‘Venice’ denotes the real place, familiar, on the map, easily accessible; but connotes a kind of virtual city, a city of fantasy and imagination. This Venice is composed from a vast multiplicity of texts and images: a cornucopia RILPDJHVIURPSDLQWLQJVPDSVSKRWRJUDSKV¿OPVDµSDOLPSVHVW¶2 of texts from KLVWRULHV WUDYHO ZULWLQJ SRHWU\ GUDPD QRYHOV9HQLFH 0DQIUHG 3¿VWHU VD\V LV always ‘inscribed with the traces of previous texts’; ‘one of the most frequently and “thickly” represented places on earth.’3 ‘Nothing in Venice has not been written about, and written over, again and again.’4 ‘Venice,’ concurs Tony Tanner, ‘is always the already written, as well as the already seen, the already read.’5 Yet LW LV D FRPPRQSODFH WKDW DV 3¿VWHU VD\V 9HQLFH LV µXQUHSUHVHQWDEOH¶ µEH\RQG representation,’ or in Tony Tanner’s nicely clumsy English word, ‘unhandleable.’6 None of these texts and images take us to the heart of a real Venice. Instead they all depict something fascinating but elusive, enchanting but dissipating, alluring but ultimately ungraspable. Georg Simmel wrote compellingly of the city in terms of a fundamental disconnect between its appearance and its underlying meaning or reality, ‘a surface which has been left by its foundations,’ ‘a foreground which has no background.’ The observer senses the hidden presence of a ‘dark and violent, 1

‘Every time I describe a city I am saying something about Venice,’ Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, trans. William Weaver (London: Vintage, Secker and Warburg, 1997), p. 86. 2 ‘Introduction,’ in Venetian Views, Venetian Blinds: English Fantasies of Venice, ed. 0DQIUHG3¿VWHUDQG%DUEDUD6FKDII$PVWHUGDP5RGRSL S 3 0DQIUHG3¿VWHUµ7KHRULD7R*R$EURDGWR6HHWKH:RUOG¶LQThe Fatal Gift of Beauty: the Italies of British TravellersHG0DQIUHG3¿VWHU (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996), p. 4. 4 0DQIUHG3¿VWHUµThe PassionIURP:LQWHUVRQWR&RU\DWH¶LQ3¿VWHUDQG6FKDIIS 5 Tony Tanner, Venice Desired (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), p. 17. 6 Tanner, p. 6.

Visions of Venice in Shakespeare

126

remorselessly purposeful life’ which seems to have deserted the city’s appearance, leaving only ‘a soulless theatrical set, the false beauty of the mask.’ Simmel sees this lacuna as ‘the tragedy of Venice,’ which in turn sums up what Schopenhauer called the ‘absolute ambiguity’ of life itself : ‘It is as if everything had collected on its surface all the beauty which it could for itself, and then withdrawn from it, so that it is left as if fossilized.’7 This virtual Venice is also of course not produced by Venetians themselves but by visitors, tourists, foreigners, ‘strangers’: Venice is ‘not really ever written from the inside, but variously appropriated from without.’8 Virtual Venice is not a place to dwell in, but a place to visit: ‘never a home,’ says Simmel, only ‘an adventure for our souls.’9 It is not a place you can get to the heart of, but a place to view from the outside; not a place to live in but a place in which to stage your death. Byron’s Childe Harold sees Venice emerging from the sea: I saw from out the wave her structures rise As from the stroke of the enchanter’s wand … .10

Here the poet himself is the enchanter, creating his own Venice, which then becomes part of the Venice of history. This virtual or textual Venice is the Venice of Byron, of Mary Shelley’s The Last Man,11 of the Gothic novel; the Venice of Henry James and Thomas Mann; the Venice of Nicholas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now and Luchino Visconti’s Death in Venice; WKH9HQLFH RI PRGHUQ ¿FWLRQV VXFK DV Ian McEwan’s The Comfort of Strangers, and Jeanette Winterson’s The Passion.12 Even the most recent text in this list, Winterson’s novel, reproduces many of the traditional features of virtual Venice as a place of transgression, mystery, selfabandon. Her Venice is a ‘city of mazes,’ where ‘there is no such thing as straight ahead’; a city ‘of the interior,’ of ‘disguises,’ ‘of uncertainty’; a city ‘enchanted,’ ‘mercurial,’ ‘changeable.’ It is ‘a watery city that is never the same.’13 Winterson is drawing here on a traditional nineteenth-century language about Venice, in which the city is always metamorphic, always in some process of change, evolution or decline. John Ruskin called it ‘amphibious,’ a hybrid creature, one that belongs, as Simmel puts it, ‘to neither water or land.’14 Venice is always emerging from the primeval slime, or sinking back into it: a Venus rising from the waves, ‘Cybele, fresh from ocean,’15 or ‘a moribund spot of civilization being 7

Georg Simmel, ‘Venice,’ trans. Jayne Barret, quoted in Tanner, p. 368. Tanner, p. 17. 9 Simmel, p. 368. 10 George Gordon, Lord Byron, ‘Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage,’ in Byron. Poetical Works, ed. Frederick Page, rev. John Jump (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 227. 11 Mary Shelley, The Last Man (1826, London: Wordsworth Editions, 2004). 12 Ian McEwan, The Comfort of Strangers (London: Jonathan Cape, 1981); Jeanette Winterson, The Passion (London: Bloomsbury, 1987). 13 Winterson, p. 49. 14 Simmel in Tanner, p. 368. 15 Byron, p. 227. 8

‘Strangers … with vs in Venice’

127

sucked in by the surrounding marsh.’16 Venice lies on a shifty border between land and sea, ‘a border city between two deserts’;17 Ruskin called it ‘a petrifying sea.’18 It lies between muddy swamp and bright air: Proust wrote of the ‘Venetian air, that marine atmosphere.’19 It lies somewhere between nature and art, composed of µSHWUL¿HGZDWHU¶DQGµOLTXH¿HGPDUEOH¶20 It lies between darkness and light: ‘A dark city,’ Ruskin called it, ‘washed white by the sea foam.’21 It lies between life and death: in Byron’s phrase, of course, a ‘dying glory’;22 or as Henry James called it, ‘This most beautiful of tombs.’23 Venice is always changing, yet always remaining the same; always dying, yet always living on; always turning into something else, that turns out after all to be ‘Venice.’ $VDFRQVHTXHQFHRIWKLVKXJHO\LQÀXHQWLDOGLVFRXUVHRI9HQLFHDVPHWDPRUSKLF always newly emergent, yet ‘forever on the brink of dissolving, disappearing,’24 the literature of Venice seems to be all about losing yourself, in the city’s maze of streets and squares and waterways; losing your bearings in mystery and uncertainty, bewildered by masks and transvestite costumes; losing your moral compass in the ‘transgressive passions’ that Venice seems to have made possible, at least imaginatively, for so many writers: passions ‘of love and madness, of sensuality, licentiousness, prostitution and sexual perversion’;25 RU ¿QDOO\ ORVLQJ \RXU OLIH altogether, like Daphne du Maurier’s John Baxter or Thomas Mann’s Aschenbach. Of course this is only one of the myths of Venice, Venice the city of carnival, sexual licence, moral transgression. There are many others. David Rosand studied Venice’s own self-construction of a civic mythology in its art.26 David McPherson suggests that historically there have been four key myths of Venice: Venice the ‘città galante,’ city of partying and passion; but also Venice the Rich, Venice the Wise, and Venice the Just.27 Venice the Wise and Just belong to history, to the time

16 Werner von Koppenfels, ‘Sunset City – City of the Dead: Venice and the 19thFHQWXU\$SRFDO\SWLF,PDJLQDWLRQ¶LQ3¿VWHUDQG6FKDII p. 100. 17 Calvino, p. 16. 18 John Ruskin, Complete Works, ed. Edward T. Cook, Vol. IX (London: Wedderburn, 1903–12), p. 323. 19 Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way: Book One of Remembrance of Things Past, trans. C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin (London: Penguin, 1983), p. 427. 20 von Koppenfels, p. 109. 21 Ruskin, p. 323. 22 Byron, p. 227. 23 Henry James, ‘The Grand Canal,’ in Italian Hours (New York: Grove Press, 1959), p. 32. 24 6HUJLR3HURVDµ/LWHUDU\'HDWKVLQ9HQLFH¶LQ3¿VWHUDQG6FKDII p. 125. 25 3¿VWHUµ7KH3DVVLRQ¶S 26 David Rosand, Myths of Venice: The Figuration of a State (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2001). 27 David McPherson, Shakespeare, Jonson and the Myth of Venice (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1990), p. 27.

128

Visions of Venice in Shakespeare

before the Venetian republic lost its autonomy to France and then Austria: we see them strongly represented in Shakespeare’s Venetian plays. Venice the Rich, IROORZLQJ HFRQRPLF GHFOLQH IURP WKH VL[WHHQWK FHQWXU\ KDV EHHQ UHGH¿QHG LQ terms of a wealthy artistic and cultural heritage. All these are part of the traditions of the real Venice, but also very much part of the history and heritage of the virtual Venice of text and image, of fantasy and imagination. Through the cycles of history these features change, but remain active in the myths, and there take on the power of reality. People continue to encounter in their transactions with Venice passion, luxury, wisdom and justice. There is another border on which we need to place this restlessly shape-shifting liminal city, one of particular importance for Shakespeare, and that is the border between West and East. Once did she hold the gorgeous east in fee And was the safeguard of the west … .28

So wrote Wordsworth, of Venice, in 1802. Here Venice is both the limit of Christian Western Europe, and the economic instrument by which Europe exercised power over the East. But like all borders, this one was never free from ambiguity and FRQÀLFW7REHDWWKHOLPLWRIWKH:HVWLVDOVRWREHRQWKHHGJHRIWKH(DVWDQG 9HQLFHKDVORQJIXQFWLRQHGDVZKDW3¿VWHUFDOOVµDQLQQHU(XURSHDQRULHQW¶DVLWH of orientalist fantasy displaced from the orient back into Italy.29 From the very early stages of Western exploration Venice has seemed to the traveller oriental: for the FUXVDGHUVD(XURSHDQ&RQVWDQWLQRSOHRU-HUXVDOHPIRU0DQGHYLOOHLQWKH¿IWHHQWK century a ‘Cathay.’ Yet this internal orientalism remains within Europe, the focus RIZKDW3¿VWHUKDVFDOOHGµDQLQWUD(XURSHDQ³0HULGLRQLVP´¶PLFURFRVPLFRIWKH global phenomenon of orientalism. Everywhere in the representation of Venice we are presented with this condition of liminality, of being on a border between oppositions, often extreme and irreconcileable antinomies: paradoxes, oxymorons, extremes that are impossible WRFRQFHLYHRIDVHOHPHQWVRIDXQL¿HGWRWDOLW\µDEVROXWHDPELJXLW\¶7RQ\7DQQHU ¿QHO\VXPVXSWKHVHSDUDGR[HV A Western city saturated with the East; a city of land and stone everywhere penetrated by water; a city of great piety and ruthless mercantilism; a city where HQOLJKWHQPHQWDQGOLFHQWLRXVQHVVUHDVRQDQGGHVLUHLQGHHGDUWDQGQDWXUHÀRZ DQGÀRZHUWRJHWKHU±9HQLFHLVLQGHHGµWKHVXUSDVVLQJDOORWKHUHPERGLPHQWRI that “absolute ambiguity” which is radiant life containing certain death.’30

28 William Wordsworth, ‘On the Extinction of the Venetian Republic,’ in The Poetical Works, ed. Ernest de Selincourt (London: Oxford University Press, 1950), p. 242. 29 Proust wrote of ‘cette ville d’Orient,’ Marcel Proust, La Fugitive (Albertine disparue) (Paris: Jean Milly, 1986), p. 283. 30 Tanner, p. 368, quoting Simmel who in turn was quoting Schopenhauer.

‘Strangers … with vs in Venice’

129

Now these are obviously modern myths of Venice: much of the textual and visual material I have been citing was generated in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. What do these myths have to do with Shakespeare, writing back in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries? Shakespeare who probably never visited Venice, and certainly did not know as much about it as did, for instance, Ben Jonson (Shakespeare’s Venetian details being relatively sketchy, and sometimes wrong).31 A standard historicist approach, wedded to chronology as the organizing principle of historical development, would insist WKDW WKH UHOHYDQW DQG VLJQL¿FDQW 9HQHWLDQ FRQWHQW DQG FKDUDFWHU RI WKHVH SOD\V must have been restricted to such knowledge as the dramatist could, at the time, have been capable of acquiring. But objective historicism can have only a limited value when approaching cultural artefacts that remain as living and contemporary as do the plays of Shakespeare. Shakespeare could not have known about the Holocaust, or about the eighteenth-century slave trade (though he knew of course about both persecution and slavery); but in the present day, no reader who cons the pages of a play, no actor who speaks lines from The Merchant of Venice or Othello, no spectator who hears them spoken, and no critic who attempts yet again to reinterpret ‘I am a Jew’ or ‘Soft, you, a word or two,’ can disown such knowledge, or attend to these plays as if innocent of those great historical tragedies of religion and ‘race.’ Nor can any of us occlude, from our response to these Venetian plays, our modern acquaintance with Venice, which in turn subsumes the entire history of the city, and as many of the innumerable visual and textual representations of Venice as we have had time to see and to read. The Venice that Shakespeare never saw is thus inevitably introduced, as constitutive memory (if not explicitly represented as cinematic context) for every reader, spectator, actor and critic, every time one of Shakespeare’s Venetian plays is mobilized in some form of cultural activity. As Marco Polo discovers in Calvino’s fantasy, the past LVQRW¿[HGDQGLPPRYDEOHEXWDOWHUVDFFRUGLQJWRWKHWUDMHFWRU\RIWKHWUDYHOOHU¶V journey: ‘… what he sought was always something lying ahead, and even if it was a matter of the past it was a past that changed gradually as he advanced on his journey … .’32 In any case, the key myths of Venice were formulated very early on in its history, and have remained remarkably consistent to the present day. William 7KRPDVLQWKH¿UVW(QJOLVKKLVWRU\RI9HQLFHVSRNHRIWKHFLW\¶VORFDWLRQDVµWKH rudest, unmeetest, and unwholesomest place to build upon or to inhabit that were again to be found throughout an whole world.’33 Yet Venice was, according to

31

Not that there is any evidence that Jonson ever set foot in Italy either. For a discussion of Shakespeare’s Venice vs. Jonson’s Venice and liminality see Laura Tosi’s chapter ‘Shakespeare, Jonson and Venice: Crossing Boundaries in the City,’ in this volume (pp. 143–65). 32 Calvino, p. 28. 33 William Thomas, The History of Italy (London, 1549), p. 64.

Visions of Venice in Shakespeare

130

Thomas Coryate, indescribable, a place of ‘admirable and incomparable beauty.’34 Reference to Venice as the seat of good government can be found as early as WKH ¿IWHHQWK FHQWXU\ 5RJHU$VFKDP VDZ 9HQLFH DV µWKH VHDW RI MXVW ODZV ZLVH rulers and free citizens.’35 Fynes Moryson praised the Venetian Senate for its ‘strict observation of justice.’36 James I was praising Venice to the Venetian ambassadors for its ‘government and laws’ around the time Othello was being written. Yet Venice was also regarded as a seething cauldron of licentiousness and immorality. After the fall of the Venetian republic to the armies of Napoleon, this political myth faded into the past; but the stage was then re-set for the great eighteenthcentury carnival of Venice, the city of Casanova. Venice presented to the English observer kinds of liberty that could be admired and feared, freedoms that were attractive and yet reprehensible: ‘the promise and danger of a more open society.’37 Thus Venice was considered remarkably tolerant in politics and religion. There was ‘no danger … at all in the state of Venice’ said Moryson, ‘to him that can hold his peace.’38 ‘If thou be a Jew, a Turk, or believest in the devil’ wrote Thomas, ‘(so thou spread not thine opinions abroad) thou art free from all controlment.’39 That toleration went with tolerance of a highly multicultural population. For an early modern city it was unusually modern, international, FRVPRSROLWDQ ,Q9HQLFH \RX FRXOG ¿QG SHRSOH RI DOO QDWLRQV FRH[LVWLQJ LQ WKH one place. Coryate observed ‘Polonians, Slavonians, Persians, Grecians, Turks, Jewes, Christians of all the famousest regions in Christendome.’ You could hear ‘all the languages of Christendom,’ but also tongues spoken by what he calls ‘the barbarous Ethnickes.’40 This free mixing of ‘exotic strangers’41 could be colourful or threatening. Such freedom was exciting, but also intimidating; it destabilized convention and undermined tradition. Borderlines got confused; distinctions blurred; things seemed to turn into something else. In Venice, it seems, identity itself was always at risk. ‘Metamorphic Venice is the cause of metamorphoses in those who come into too close contact with her.’42 One of the ways in which Venice achieved this ability to confuse and disturb identity was by appearing to be a center, and turning out to be a margin: ‘At the

34

Thomas Coryate, Coryats Crudities: Hastily Gobbled Up in Five Months Travels (London, 1611), p. 171. 35 Roger Ascham, The Scholemaster (London: Iohn Daye, 1570), p. 24. 36 Fynes Moryson, An Itinerary (London, 1617), p. 80. 37 Jack d’Amico, Shakespeare and Italy: The City and the Stage (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2001), p. 1. 38 Moryson, p. 80. 39 Thomas, p. 83. 40 Coryate, p. 175. 41 Murray J. Levith, Shakespeare’s Italian Plays and Settings (London: Macmillan, 1989), p. 17. 42 3¿VWHUµ7KH3DVVLRQ¶S

‘Strangers … with vs in Venice’

131

margins of Christendom and yet at the center of civilization.’43 Thus Venice was thought of as ‘the eye of Italy’ and ‘the Jerusalem of Christendom’ (Jerusalem was of course thought of in the middle ages in Christian Europe as the center of the world).44 But countless people seem to have felt, as they approached those borderlines between civilization and depravity, between beauty and corruption, between western self-control and oriental licentiousness, that they had already unwittingly crossed it and were already ‘lost’: ‘[f]rom the beginning, Venice has appeared to the foreign traveller as liminal to Italy, as the place where Italy and with it Europe intermingled with its Oriental and African Other.’45 So where is Venice then? And where was it in Shakespeare’s day? We think of it as in the heart of the Mediterranean. In the early seventeenth century it was on the extreme edge of the Ottoman Empire. Cyprus, on which much of the action of Othello takes place, a Venetian possession lost by Shakespeare’s time to the Turks, was deep inside the space of Ottoman Muslim power. Among those many nationalities who thronged the crowded streets of early modern Venice we are particularly concerned here with two: the Jew and the Moor. Othello, ‘the Moor of Venice’; Shylock (as the play was called ‘otherwise’ in the Stationers Register for 1598) ‘the Jew of Venice.’ Both are aliens in Venice: ‘the Jew and the Moor are aliens, “strangers” to Venice and Venetian manners.’46 But Venice LVVWUDQJHWRXVWKDWLVµZH¶GH¿QHGDVWKH(QJOLVKWUDYHOOHUUHDGHURUWKHDWHUJRHU So these two ‘strangers’ might be more at home in Venice than we are. If Venice was thought of in the early modern period as a Jerusalem, perhaps it was a kind of diasporic home to the Jew; and if Venice was an outpost on the fringes of the Ottoman Empire, perhaps it was a kind of displaced home to the Moor. ‘Until recently’ says Daniel Vitkus in a seminal essay: historicist analyses of Shakespeare’s texts have tended to read representations of the Other according to a teleological historiography of Western domination and colonization. Stephen Greenblatt’s location of Shakespearean drama in the FRQWH[WRIDQDVFHQWFRORQLDOLVPFORVHO\IROORZHGE\WKHÀRRGRIµ1HZ:RUOG¶ VFKRODUVKLSWKDWPDUNHGWKH¿YHKXQGUHGWKDQQLYHUVDU\RI&ROXPEXV¶YR\DJHWR the Indies, established and maintained the critical practice of reading all English Renaissance texts as the products of a strictly proto-imperialist culture that looked across the Atlantic towards its American colonies-to-be.47

43

Virginia Mason Vaughan, Othello: A Contextual History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 27. 44 Francesco Sansovino calls Venice ‘the eye of Italy’ in the dedication of his book Delle cose notabili che sono in Venetia libri due. etc. (Venice: Comin da Trino, 1561). µ-HUXVDOHPRI&KULVWHQGRP¶LVDGH¿QLWLRQXVHGE\&RU\DWHS  45 3¿VWHUµ7KH3DVVLRQ¶S 46 Levith, p. 17. 47 Daniel Vitkus, ‘Turning Turk in Othello: The Conversion and Damnation of the Moor,’ Shakespeare Quarterly 48, 2 (1997): p. 146.

Visions of Venice in Shakespeare

132

We’ve grown accustomed to thinking of Othello not just in terms of a blackness associated with sub-Saharan Africa, but also with the transatlantic slave trade. In the course of the play’s history, Othello became indelibly associated with WKH$IULFDQ WKURXJK GH¿QLQJ SHUIRUPDQFHV E\ EODFN$IULFDQ$PHULFDQ DFWRUV Because Othello himself talks about having been a slave, the play became caught up, anachronistically, with the subsequent history of the slave trade to the Americas and the West Indies. Virginia Mason Vaughan says that Othello’s accounts of his own enslavement, ‘set against the context of the English slave trade, resonate with meaning.’48 Laurence Olivier even gave Othello a West Indian accent, suggesting he went a very long way round to reach Venice. In Shakespeare’s time the term ‘Moor’ could mean a number of things. A Moor could be, generically, an African: as Michael Neill observed, the term could be ‘extended to refer to Africans generally (whether white, black or “tawny” Moors),’ RULQDPRUHOLPLWHGVHQVHGH¿QHµWKHLQKDELWDQWVRIWKHZKROH1RUWK$IULFDQOLWWRUDO¶ It could be used very loosely, by ‘promiscuous extension,’ to signify ‘almost any darker-skinned peoples – even, on occasion, those of the New World’; or used in LWVPRVWSUHFLVHWRSLFDODSSOLFDWLRQWRµUHIHUTXLWHVSHFL¿FDOO\WRWKH%HUEHU$UDE people of the part of North Africa then rather vaguely denominated as “Morocco,” “ Mauritania,” or “Barbary.”’49 Othello could have come from Mauritania, in northwest Africa, a descendant therefore of the Muslim Berber tribes that dominated North Africa and conquered Spain in the Middle Ages (hence the name ‘Barbary’ to describe north-west Africa). By Shakespeare’s time, of course, Muslim power had passed to the Ottoman Turks: What has often been forgotten is that while Spanish, Portuguese, English, and Dutch ships sailed to the New World and beyond, beginning the exploration and conquest of foreign lands, the Ottoman Turks were rapidly colonizing European territory. Thus, in the sixteenth century, the Europeans were both colonizers and colonized, and even the English felt the power of the Turkish threat to Christendom.50

In the West, Othello’s identity became mapped along the slave-trading routes between Europe and the Americas. Meanwhile, in the Middle East, Othello is, DQG DOZD\V KDV EHHQ DQ µ$UDE¶ 7KH YHU\ ¿UVW WUDQVODWLRQ DQG SURGXFWLRQ RI D Shakespeare play in Arabic was of Othello in Egypt in 1884. The Arab Othello (At-Allah, or ‘Utayl,’ as he is called in different translations) has never taken that journey to the West.51

48

Vaughan, Othello, p. 69. Michael Neill, ‘“Mulattos,” “Blacks,” and “Indian Moors”: Othello and Early Modern Constructions of Difference,’ Shakespeare Quarterly 49, 4 (1998): p. 364. 50 Vitkus, p. 146. 51 Ferial J. Ghazoul, ‘The Arabization of Othello,’ Comparative Literature 50, 1 (1998): p. 1. 49

‘Strangers … with vs in Venice’

133

-XVW DV 9HQLFH LWVHOI KDG WKLV VXVSLFLRXV RSHQQHVV WR 2WWRPDQ LQÀXHQFH VR 2WKHOORVWDQGVLQDSHFXOLDUUHODWLRQVKLSZLWKWKH7XUNVKHLVKLUHGWR¿JKW6HYHUDO early modern commentators observe that the Venetians preferred to hire foreign military leaders rather than do it themselves, to avoid military success bringing SROLWLFDOLQÀXHQFHWKH\IHDUHGWKHH[DPSOHRIDQRWKHU&DHVDU2WKHOOR¶VSRVLWLRQ vis-à-vis the Venetian state is therefore explicitly one of acknowledged alienation: he is there because he is different. He is respected, honored, trusted, treated as the ‘noble Moor’; but he is not accepted as a Venetian. &RQVLGHU2WKHOOR¶V¿QDOVSHHFKKLVVXLFLGHQRWH I pray you in your Letters, When you shall these vnluckie deeds relate, Speake of me, as I am. Nothing extenuate, Nor set downe ought in malice. Then must you speake, Of one that lou’d not wisely, but too well: Of one, not easily Iealious, but being wrought, Perplexed in the extreame: Of one, whose hand (Like the base Iudean) threw a Pearle away Richer then all his Tribe: Of one, whose subdu’d Eyes, Albeit vn-vsed to the melting moode, Drops teares as fast as the Arabian Trees Their Medicinable gumme. Set you downe this: And say besides, that in Aleppo once, Where a malignant, and a Turbond-Turke Beate a Venetian, and traduc’d the State, I tooke by th’throat the circumcised Dogge, And smoate him, thus.52

To say he has done the state some service links him to Venice, but also separates him from it: he has assisted, from the outside, a state that is not wholly his, of which he is not a citizen. This is the Folio text, so here Othello compares himself not to a base ‘Indean’ but a base ‘Judean.’ Most modern editions, though following the Folio, choose the Quarto reading ‘Indean,’ which means American Indian, by a general agreement based on a range of sources, going back to the correspondence of Amerigo Vespucci.53 A turn of the letter gives a spin to the globe. Othello is comparing himself not to some anonymous Amerindian, but to Judas, the only Judean among the disciples; Judas who betrayed Jesus, ‘the pearl of great price,’ and lost the kingdom of heaven; Judas who killed himself, as Othello is about to do. In his image of the Arabian tree ‘weeping Medicinable gum’ Othello associates himself with the Arabic Middle East, but at the same time continues the Christian 52 The Tragedie of Othello, the Moore of Venice (London: Shakespeare’s Globe and the British Library, 2007), p. 338. 53 Rodney Poisson, ‘Othello’s “Base Indian”: A Better Source for the Allusion,’ Shakespeare Quarterly 26, 4 (1975): pp. 462–6.

Visions of Venice in Shakespeare

134

references: the secretion referred to is myrrh, one of the gifts of the Magi to the Christ child and intended as anointment for burial. Othello’s speech closes on an ‘absolute ambiguity’ when he describes himself killing a Turk who was beating a Venetian and slandering the Venetian state. The Turk is malignant, turbaned and circumcised. This is exactly the kind of ‘service’ Othello has been employed for by the Venetian state: killing the malignant, turbaned and circumcised. But then Othello kills himself, and thereby indelibly associates himself with the Other, the enemy of Venice, the stranger, the alien, the malignant, turbaned, and circumcised: the Muslim. In this one speech Othello associates himself with Christianity, Judaism and Islam. His words point not to the West, but to the East: towards Jerusalem and Mekkah. Like Venice itself then, Othello’s identity is unstable, metamorphic. ‘Are we WXUQHG7XUN"¶2WKHOORDVNVZKHQKH¿QGV&DVVLRGUXQNDQGEUDZOLQJ7KHSKUDVH speaks of a widespread racial and cultural anxiety, that was partly about fear of Islamic power, the expanding Ottoman Empire; but also (and more so) about the fear of people turning into the enemy. Turning Turk is not just fraternization, but actual conversion to Islam, which of course was happening, forced, opportunistic or genuine, wherever the Muslims met with military success. Othello has often been read as a play about ‘turning.’ Othello’s love for Desdemona turns to hate; he sees her as having turned from virgin to whore; Iago’s apparent honesty turns to malice; Othello’s own nobility turns to jealous rage. We tend to think of this rhythm of conversion as an oscillation between ¿[HGSRLQWVRQDPRUDORUUDFLDOFRPSDVVDµELIXUFDWHG¶54 Manichean universe of moral absolutes (good and evil), racial stereotypes (white and black) or colonial antinomies (empire and its victims). But in a world in which there is a genuine multiplicity of powers – the Ottoman Empire as well as Protestant England, Catholic Spain, Portugal – and a real choice of religions – not just Protestantism or Catholicism, but also Islam and Judaism – then conversion, changing allegiance, accepting and rejecting, turning towards and away from, becomes a much more complex matter. In practice people could turn; they could turn and turn and yet go on and turn again, as Christians accepted and discarded Islam, or as converted -HZV LQ 9HQLFH UHYHUWHG WR -XGDLVP µGRI¿QJ WKHLU UHOLJLRQ DV WKH\ GR WKHLU clothes.’ Iago imagines Othello losing his Christian signature, ‘renouncing his EDSWLVP¶DQGFRQYHUWLQJRUUHYHUWLQJWRDSUH&KULVWLDQ0XVOLPµLQ¿GHOLW\¶,QThe Merchant both Jessica and Shylock undergo conversion, voluntary and forced, to Christianity. By 1635 the Church of England found the need for a ‘Form of Penance and Reconciliation for a Renegado’ so that Muslim converts could be received back into the church.55

54

Vaughan, p. 32. Joseph Hall, Form of Penance and Reconciliation of a Renegado, or Apostate from the Christian Church to Turcism, in The Works of Joseph Hall (Oxford: D.A. Talboys, 1837–39), Vol. 12, pp. 346–50. 55

‘Strangers … with vs in Venice’

135

Which is Othello? Loyal Venetian Christian; treacherous Judean betrayer; Islamic enemy of the state? How can he be all three? The question echoes one asked in The Merchant of Venice: Which is the Merchant heere? And which the Iew?56

This is Portia, of course, entering the Venetian court-room to defend Antonio. It is a very strange question. From the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 Jews had to be ‘distinguishable’ from Christians; and early modern reports on the Venetian Jews all describe the fact that they were required to wear some distinguishing dress or headgear. The play itself is full of such references to Shylock’s ‘Jewish gabardine.’ Why does Portia have to ask? Again we seem to be confronted with things that appear to be opposites, and yet can easily change places or turn into one another. The Merchant of Venice has also been read as a play about turning, transformation, conversion. After agreeing to Shylock’s bond Antonio says ‘Hie thee, gentle Iew,’ then explains ‘This Hebrew will turne Christian, he growes kind.’57 ‘Gentle’ puns of course on ‘Gentile,’ nonJew or Christian. Portia, Nerissa and Jessica are all transformed by love and disguise. Jessica says her husband has ‘made [her] a Christian,’58 and her father is forced to follow suit. Portia says of her love for Bassanio, ‘My selfe, and what is mine, to you and yours / is now conuerted.’59 So often in the play, things and people present themselves as ‘marvellously changed.’60 But surely the polarities here – Jews v. Christians; Old v. New Testaments; Law v. Love; Vengeance v. Forgiveness – really are binary oppositions, on which the play is structured? The Merchant of Venice has been read in diametrically opposite ways: by James Shapiro as effectively (not necessarily intentionally) anti-Semitic; by Martin Yaffe as pro-Jewish but anti-Shylock. Adjudicating these interpretations, Thomas Luxon concludes that ‘Shakespeare lends his astonishing imaginative power to support some very sophisticated and elaborate versions of Protestant anti-Jewish polemic.’61 The play offers support to such opposed readings. Shylock rejects Christian salvation, even echoing the notorious blood-libel from the gospel of St Matthew (‘His blood be upon us, and upon our children,’ 25, 27) when he says ‘My deeds upon my head!’; he is mercenary, a usurer, and treacherous, tricking Antonio into WKHÀHVKERQGKHLVDVVRFLDWHGLQMHVWDQGHDUQHVWZLWKWKHGHYLODQGKLVSODQ 56

The Merchant of Venice (London: Shakespeare’s Globe and the British Library, 2007), p. 179. 57 The Merchant of Venice, p. 167. 58 The Merchant of Venice, p. 177. 59 The Merchant of Venice, p. 175. 60 The Merchant of Venice, p. 163. 61 Martin Yaffe, Shylock and the Jewish Question (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997); James Shapiro, Shakespeare and the Jews (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996); Thomas H. Luxon, ‘“A Second Daniel”: The Jew and the “True Jew” in The Merchant of Venice,’ Early Modern Literary Studies 4, 3 (1999): pp. 1–37.

Visions of Venice in Shakespeare

136

LVQRWMXVWWRNLOO$QWRQLREXWWRULWXDOLVWLFDOO\FDUYHRXWKLVÀHVKLQDQREVFHQH sacrament that recalls all the bizarre fantasies of Jews murdering Christian children to sprinkle their blood on the Passover bread. Shylock’s cruelty is also a kind of forced conversion of Antonio, as Shapiro has shown, a circumcision, taking literally what St Paul says about circumcising the heart rather than the body. Another version of the same idea from the possible source The Orator (1596) VKRZV WKH -HZ FDOFXODWLQJ KLV SRXQG RI ÀHVK DV WKH ZHLJKW RI WKH &KULVWLDQ¶V ‘privie members,’ ‘supposing that the same would altogether weigh a just pound.’ Circumcision by extension becomes castration as well as ritual murder. When 6K\ORFNVD\VEHIRUHWKHÀHVKERQGLVVHDOHGµ,ZLOOIHHGHIDWWKHDQFLHQWJUXGJH I beare him,’62 he links Old Testament language and imagery, the Mosaic Law, vengeance, cannibalism and ritual murder. ,Q WKH FRXUWURRP 6K\ORFN IXO¿OV WKH FODVVLF UROH RI WKH GHYLOLVK VFKHPLQJ vindictive, bloodthirsty Jew. Though this is not a trial, Antonio stands on trial like Christ before Pilate, offering to lay down his life for a friend. Ecce homo. But in practice the laws of Venice can be turned back against Shylock, under Portia’s guidance. Suddenly Shylock is an alien conspiring against a Venetian citizen, and meriting the full penalty of an intolerant law. Everything turns round, everything becomes clear. The man on trial is Shylock the Jew, attempting to re-stage the &UXFL¿[LRQ+LVRIIHQFHVDUHWKHOHJHQGDU\FULPHVRIKLVUDFHµ+LVEORRGEHXSRQ us, and upon our children.’ All this is consistent with tradition. In the Middle Ages the Jews were conceived RIDVWKHPXUGHUHUVRI-HVXVDVLQ¿GHOVZKRVWXEERUQO\UHVLVWHGWKHUHYHODWLRQRI God in Christ; as treacherous and mercenary, every Jew being a Judas; as evil, associated with the devil; and as capable of sacrilegious atrocity such as the abduction and ritual cannibalism of Christian children. Three Jews were publicly burned in the Piazza San Marco in Venice in 1480 for allegedly murdering a Christian youth. Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta reproduced all those stereotypes a few years before Shakespeare’s play. But of course Shylock is not a Jew from a mediaeval Passion Play: he is the Jew of Venice. Though not a citizen of Venice, his profession is an integral part of the Venetian economy, and he can amass substantial wealth. He can openly profess his ethnic identity as a Jew, and openly practice his faith, worshipping in his synagogue. Above all, he can claim the same legal right to enforce his side of a contract as could any Venetian citizen. An. The Duke cannot deny the course of law: For the commoditie that strangers haue With vs in Venice, if it be denied, Will much impeach the iustice of the State, 6LQFHWKDWWKHWUDGHDQGSUR¿WRIWKHFLWW\ Consisteth of all Nations.63 62 63

The Merchant of Venice, p. 166. The Merchant of Venice, p. 176.

‘Strangers … with vs in Venice’

137

The apparent universality of Venetian justice in practice permits Shylock to VWDQGIRUMXVWLFHDJDLQVWWKH'RJHWKH0DJQL¿FRHVWKHHQWLUH&KULVWLDQPHUFKDQW community. Iew. … by our holy Sabbath haue I sworne To haue the due and forfeit of my bond. If you denie it, let the danger light Vpon your charter, and your Cities freedome.64

In the course of the play’s action Shylock is permitted to speak on behalf of what we would now regard as basic human rights and liberties: freedom of conscience and faith, the rights to equality, dignity and respect. He is placed in a position where he is able to expose Christian hypocrisy, and to confer dignity on Judaic culture and tradition, as when he speaks of the ring given to him by his betrothed, Leah. He pronounces a striking and unheard-of challenge to slavery, and upholds the cosmopolitan law of Venice (‘Venice the Just’) that was so much admired at the time. Above all, he is given a speech that has become an adopted Jewish manifesto: I am a Iewe: Hath not a Iew eyes?65

And in this way the play is continually questioning the very oppositions on which it seems to depend, by showing Christians as mercenary, full of hate, vindictive, intolerant, merciless; and Jews as capable of affection and pain, worthy of both respect and compassion. Things and people seem to change places. Everything is transformed, converted. Which is the merchant here? And which the Jew? +HUHWKHQZHKDYHWKHWZRPDMRU¿JXUHVRI6KDNHVSHDUH¶V9HQLFH2WKHOORDQG Shylock. Both are strangers within a European Christian commonwealth. But this is no ordinary European city, but a place that is itself strange and estranging. Venice, as we have seen, in Shakespeare’s time and right up to the present, is a metamorphic place, continually changing and continually fostering change.66 It presents the traveller with apparently accessible fantasies of unlimited freedom, social, sexual, political, religious; but it is also devious, shifty, unreliable. It is a SODFHLQZKLFKSHRSOHGUHDPRI¿QGLQJWKHPVHOYHVDQG¿QGWKHPVHOYHVORVW9HQLFH was a liminal place, on the very edge of Europe, contingent with and penetrated by the alien cultures of the Middle East, Islam and Judaism. Venice stands always for the ‘absolute ambiguity’ of incomprehensible opposites inextricably linked and inexplicably interchangeable. Othello and Shylock, the ‘noble Moor’ and the ‘gentle Jew,’ though very different from one another, share many of the characteristics of their diasporic 64

The Merchant of Venice, p. 178. The Merchant of Venice, p. 173. 66 This identity is a strange inversion of the parallel myth of Venice as an eternal city, unchanging and undisturbed, La Serenissima. 65

Visions of Venice in Shakespeare

138

Venetian home. They both stand for kinds of freedom that turn into forms of oppression; they both function as polarized opposites to a norm of Eurocentric Christian culture, yet they continually shift location so as to seem on one side or another of a penetrable border: just outside (the enemy at the gates), or even inside (the enemy within). One of the reasons why Shylock and Othello display such immense ambivalence is that they represent what the Qur’an calls the ‘People of the Book.’ The People of the Book are Christians, Jews and Muslims, all of whom worship one God, all of whom claim spiritual descent from Abraham, all of whom place a written scripture, understood as the Word of God, at the heart of the faith. And to a surprising extent, all three versions of this scripture have much in common. The Christian Bible subsumes the Jewish scripture as the ‘Old Testament’; the Qur’an incorporates material from the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. $V ZH KDYH VHHQ 2WKHOOR LGHQWL¿HV KLPVHOI ZLWK DOO WKUHH PRQRWKHLVPV ,Q The Merchant of Venice Shylock quotes from the New Testament, and Antonio echoes the Old. Portia appeals to a common Judaeo-Christian intercession when she says: ‘we do pray for mercie, / And that same prayer, doth teach vs all to render / The deeds of mercie.’67 Portia’s words here have an exact counterpart in the apocryphal book of Sirach: ‘One man beareth hatred against another, and doth he seek pardon from the Lord? He sheweth no mercy to a man, which is like himself: and doth he ask forgiveness of his own sins?’ (Ecclesiasticus 28, 4–5). Portia gives her great speech on the quality of mercy as a Christian manifesto to challenge Jewish legalism. Where does she get it from? From sources such as Ecclesiasticus and Deuteronomy, the Hebrew scriptures, where God’s mercy ‘drops as the rain,’ ‘distils as the dew’ (Ecclesiasticus 35, 20–21; Deuteronomy 32, 2). It is the Jewish concept of mercy, rachamim, she is celebrating. When told he is to inherit Shylock’s wealth, Lorenzo says: You drop Manna in the way Of starued people.68

If this is serious, then the absent Shylock has mysteriously become YHWH feeding the children of Israel in the wilderness. If it is a Christian joke at the Jew’s expense, it is an uncomfortable one, as this story is hugely important in Christian WKHRORJ\WKH([RGXVSUH¿JXUHVWKH5HGHPSWLRQDQGWKHEUHDGRIKHDYHQWKHOLYLQJ bread of the Last Supper and the Eucharist. The story is mentioned in the Qur’an (Sura 2.54), and the idea of food delivered from heaven is at the centre of one of its chapters, ‘The Table.’ The People of the Book cannot help speaking this common language, even when they speak of enmity and hatred. Both Venice and Shakespeare’s theater show just how much commonality lies in difference, how the other is invariably connected 67 68

The Merchant of Venice, p. 179. The Merchant of Venice, p. 184.

‘Strangers … with vs in Venice’

139

to the self. In Shakespeare’s time the People of the Book were implacable enemies, despite their common heritage and scripture. Today Christians and Muslims are killing one another in Iraq and Afghanistan; Muslims and Jews are killing one another in Palestine. Enemies. Yet members of the same religious family. Every war between these faiths is a civil war. Venice and Shakespeare’s Globe Theater both present us with paradoxes of continuity through change; disintegration and reintegration of identity; difference WKDW UHVROYHV LQWR JUHDWHU FRPPRQDOLW\ ,Q9HQLFH DV 0DQIUHG 3¿VWHU VD\V µWKH Other is not only out there, it is present within one’s own culture.’69 In Shakespeare’s plays, as Jack d’Amico puts it, ‘the alien is imaginatively understood,’ and thus ‘mirrors those desires and energies that work from within.’70 ‘Strangely,’ Kristeva said, ‘the foreigner lives within us: he is the hidden face of our identity.’71 Works Cited d’Amico, Jack. The Moor in English Renaissance Drama. Tampa: University of South Florida Press, 1992. ———. Shakespeare and Italy: the City and the Stage. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2001. Ascham, Roger. The Scholemaster. London: Iohn Daye, 1570. Byron, George Gordon. Poetical Works. Edited by Frederick Page and revised by John Jump. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970. Calvino, Italo. Invisible Cities. Translated by William Weaver. London: Vintage, Secker and Warburg, 1997. Coryate, Thomas. Coryats Crudities: Hastily Gobbled Up in Five Months Travels. London, 1611. Ghazoul, Ferial J. ‘The Arabization of Othello.’ Comparative Literature 50, 1 (1998): 1–31. Hall, Joseph. Form of Penance and Reconciliation of a Renegado, or Apostate from the Christian Church to Turcism. Vol. 12, The Works of Joseph Hall, by Joseph Hall, 346–50. Oxford: D.A. Talboys, 1837–39. James, Henry. ‘The Grand Canal.’ In Italian Hours. New York: Grove Press, 1959. Kristeva, Julia. Strangers to Ourselves. Translated by Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991. Levith, Murray J. Shakespeare’s Italian Plays and Settings. London: Macmillan, 1989. Luxon, Thomas H. ‘“A Second Daniel”: The Jew and the “True Jew” in The Merchant of Venice.’ Early Modern Literary Studies 4, 3 (1999): 1–37. 69

3¿VWHUµ7KHRULD¶S Jack d’Amico, The Moor in English Renaissance Drama (Tampa: University of South Florida Press, 1992), p. 2. 71 Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), p. 1. 70

140

Visions of Venice in Shakespeare

McEwan, Ian. The Comfort of Strangers. London: Jonathan Cape, 1981. McPherson, David. Shakespeare, Jonson and the Myth of Venice. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1990. Moryson, Fynes. An Itinerary. London, 1617. Mullini, Roberta. ‘Streets, Squares and Courts: Venice as a Stage in Shakespeare and Ben Jonson.’ In Shakespeare’s Italy: Functions of Italian Location in Renaissance Drama, edited by Michele Marrapodi et al. 158–70. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993. Neill, Michael. ‘“Mulattos”, “Blacks” and “Indian Moors”: Othello and Early Modern Constructions of Difference.’ Shakespeare Quarterly, 49, 4 (1998): 361–74. Perosa, Sergio. ‘Literary Deaths in Venice.’ In Venetian Views, Venetian Blinds: English Fantasies of Venice HGLWHG E\ 0DQIUHG 3¿VWHU DQG %DUEDUD 6FKDII 115–28. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999. 3¿VWHU 0DQIUHG µThe Passion from Winterson to Coryate.’ In Venetian Views, Venetian Blinds: English Fantasies of VeniceHGLWHGE\0DQIUHG3¿VWHUDQG Barbara Schaff. 15–28. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999. ———. ‘Theoria: To Go Abroad to See the World.’ In The Fatal Gift of Beauty: The Italies of British TravellersHGLWHGE\0DQIUHG3¿VWHU±$PVWHUGDP Rodopi, 1996. ———. and Barbara Schaff. ‘Introduction.’ In Venetian Views, Venetian Blinds: English Fantasies of Venice HGLWHG E\ 0DQIUHG 3¿VWHU DQG %DUEDUD 6FKDII 1–14. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999. Poisson, Rodney. ‘Othello’s “Base Indian”: A Better Source for the Allusion.’ Shakespeare Quarterly 26, 4 (1975): 462–6. Proust, Marcel. La Fugitive (Albertine disparue). Paris: Jean Milly, 1986. ———. Swann’s Way: Book One of Remembrance of Things Past. Translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin. London: Penguin, 1983. Rosand, David. Myths of Venice: The Figuration of a State. Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2001. Ruskin, John. Complete Works. Edited by Edward T. Cook. Vol. IX. London: Wedderburn, 1903–12. Sansovino, Francesco. Delle cose notabili che sono in Venetia libri due. etc. Venice: Comin da Trino, 1561. Shakespeare, William. The Merchant of Venice. A Facsimile from the First Folio. London: Shakespeare’s Globe and the British Library, 2007. ———. The Tragedie of Othello, the Moore of Venice. A Facsimile from the First Folio. London: Shakespeare’s Globe and the British Library, 2007. Shapiro, James. Shakespeare and the Jews. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. Shelley, Mary. The Last Man. 1826; London: Wordsworth Editions, 2004. Tanner, Tony. Venice Desired. Oxford: Blackwell, 1992. ———. ‘“Which is the Merchant here? And which the Jew?” The Venice of Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice.’ In Venetian Views, Venetian Blinds:

‘Strangers … with vs in Venice’

141

English Fantasies of Venice HGLWHG E\ 0DQIUHG 3¿VWHU DQG %DUEDUD 6FKDII 45–62. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999. Thomas, William. The History of Italy. London, 1549. Vaughan, Virginia Mason. Othello: A Contextual History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Vitkus, Daniel. ‘Turning Turk in Othello: The Conversion and Damnation of the Moor.’ Shakespeare Quarterly 48, 2 (1997): 145–76. von Koppenfels, Werner. ‘Sunset City – City of the Dead: Venice and the 19th Century Apocalyptic Imagination.’ In Venetian Views, Venetian Blinds: English Fantasies of Venice HGLWHG E\ 0DQIUHG 3¿VWHU DQG %DUEDUD 6FKDII ± Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999. Winterson, Jeanette. The Passion. London: Bloomsbury, Vintage, 1987. ‘The Wisdom of Jesus the Son of Sirach, or Ecclesiasticus.’ In The Bible: Authorized King James Version and Apocrypha, edited by Robert Carrol and Stephen Prickett. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. Wordsworth, William. ‘On the Extinction of the Venetian Republic.’ In The Poetical Works, edited by Ernest de Selincourt. London: Oxford University Press, 1950. Yaffe, Martin. Shylock and the Jewish Question. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.

This page has been left blank intentionally

Chapter 8

Shakespeare, Jonson and Venice: Crossing Boundaries in the City Laura Tosi

The Venice of Shakespeare and Jonson is a city whose traditional openness to trade, foreign visitors, merchants, and religious beliefs is counterbalanced by the establishment of geographical, social, and psychological boundaries. This chapter investigates the way these boundaries are related to the social conditions of Venice at the end of the sixteenth century, highlighting the fact that Venice as DSLHFHRILPDJLQDU\JHRJUDSK\DQGFRXQWU\RIWKHPLQGRIWHQFRQÀDWHVZLWKWKH ‘real’ place since the setting and crossing of borders of the city is both historically documented and dramatically transposed. The discussion of some aspects of the cultural geography of Venice and their impact on the three plays The Merchant of Venice, Othello, and Volpone, is an attempt to assess how much of a cultural context can be alluded to and even ‘imported’ into the actual texts. Shakespeare and Jonson were fascinated by the dramatic possibilities that such a setting could provide, although the well-grounded and established ‘difference’ between them is not erased in the treatment of the Serenissima.1 Even if Venice is an ideal battleground where their differences can be played out in full, both dramatists were obviously interested in exploring the issues of complex identities, the aggressive nature of institutions and individuals in an acquisitive society, as well as the uncertain and permeable boundaries that are drawn between what is authentically Venetian and what is regarded as alien. Among the areas on which Venetian control is exercised both in the dramatic and historical landscape of the Republic, special attention will be devoted to the following: 1. Travel as the typical early modern boundary-crossing experience in the increasingly ‘global’ world of trade; 2. The mixed identity of the Venetian gentleman-merchant and of the multiple roles patricians were able to play in their lives and careers, both on and off stage. The boundaries between the patriciate and outsiders will also be investigated, as the laws enforced by the Republic to protect the integrity 1

See contemporary discussions of the Shakespeare/Jonson polarity in Richard Dutton, Ben Jonson Authority Criticism (London: Macmillan, 1996) and Mick Jardine, ‘Jonson as Shakespeare’s Other,’ in Ben Jonson and Theatre. Performance, Practice and Theory, ed. Richard Cave et al. (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), pp. 104–15.

144

Visions of Venice in Shakespeare

of the nobility against mixed marriages are compared to the issue of ethnic hybridity and contamination in the plays. 3. The Republic’s ambivalent toleration and segregation of Jews and prostitutes and the creation of enclosures to contain these spiritual yet necessary outcasts. It appears that the myth of Venetian impregnability (as the only Italian state that was spared foreign invasion), its reputation for political wisdom and stability and its impartial judicial system, are constantly threatened by its very condition of propensity to the necessities of trade. Shakespeare’s vengeful Republic responds to the Alien’s attack to its body politic (evoked by Antonio’s vulnerable body)2 through the enforcement of a law which protects Venetian citizens from foreign assault (‘It is enacted in the laws of Venice, / If it be proved against an alien, / That by direct, or indirect attempts/he seek the life of any citizen’).3 An invisible protective wall is thus built around the lawful citizen, which excludes the Jew. Catholic, but ready to defy Rome, this prototype of a commercial metropolis built its Jewish Ghetto in 1516 and gave its Venetian name to this notorious enclave, at the same time allowing liberty of confession to its many foreign residents so that in the 1590s the Pope twice complained about ‘heretics’ congesting the city.4 As William Thomas wrote in his History of Italy (1549) under the heading ‘The liberty of strangers’: No man there marketh another’s doings, or that meddleth with another man’s living. If thou be a papist, there shalt thou want no kind of superstition to feed upon. If thou be a gospeler, no man shall ask why thou comest not to church. If thou be a Jew, a Turk, or believest in the devil (so thou spread not thine opinions abroad), thou art free from all controlment. To live married or unmarried, no man shall ask thee why … And generally, of all other things, so thou offend no man privately, no man shall offend thee, which undoubtedly is one principal cause that draweth so many strangers thither.5

2 Janet Adelman, ‘Her Father’s Blood: Race, Conversion, and Nation in The Merchant of Venice,’ Representations 81 (2003): p. 22 ‘The exigencies of trade are a threat to the national body, epitomized here by Antonio’s body, which must be subject to Shylock’s knife precisely to keep open the trade routes by which he and the state thrive.’ See also Philippa Berry, ‘Incising Venice: The Violence of Cultural Incorporation in The Merchant of Venice,’ in Renaissance Go-Betweens. Cultural Exchanges in Early Modern Europe, ed. Andreas Höfele et al. (Berlin and New York: W. de Gruyter, 2005), pp. 248–61. 3 William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, 10th rpt., ed. John Russell Brown (The Arden Shakespeare, London and New York: Methuen, 1984), 4.1.344–7. All other quotations from The Merchant will appear parenthetically in the text. 4 Murray J. Levith, Shakespeare’s Italian Settings and Plays (London: Macmillan, 1989), p. 4. 5 William Thomas, The History of Italy (1549), ed. George B. Parks (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1963), p. 83.

Shakespeare, Jonson and Venice

145

Trade and Travel Possibly the main area where England could see itself and its vocation in the mirror image of Venice was trade. If Venice was perceived as a construction of Mediterranean Otherness, which had to deal with the consequences of cultural encounters, the impulse given to English travels in the Mediterranean and America between the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth century may have reminded the English that international trade was indeed becoming an increasingly familiar phenomenon.6 Although it is impossible to know about the original audience’s awareness of the destinations of either English or Venetian ships in the Mediterranean, when we hear that Antonio’s argosies are bound for Mexico, or the Indies, places where Venetian ships would have never been able to go even at the height of the Republic’s sea power, it is an imaginary geography of desire that is drawn KHUHIRUWKHEHQH¿WRIDIXWXUHSRZHUIXO(QJODQGHPSUHVVRIWKHVHDV7 Similarly, when Shylock mentions pirates as a source of concern for the merchant, would the DXGLHQFHKDYHNQRZQWKDWDWWKHWXUQRIWKHFHQWXU\µWKH¿QDOEORZWR9HQHWLDQVHD SRZHUZDVXQGRXEWHGO\GHDOWE\WKH1RUWKHUQÀHHWVDQGHVSHFLDOO\E\WKH(QJOLVK¶ who ‘as soon as they entered the Mediterranean, immediately combined piracy with trade’?8 Of these depredations Venetian ambassadors complained to James I after the re-establishment of diplomatic relations with Venice and even managed to obtain the restitution of some of the stolen goods that had reached England.9 Some critics have argued that it was precisely English rivalry with the Venetians in the Mediterranean that fueled xenofobia around 1604 in England, and which helped to shape the mentality of Othello’s audience.10 As for English attitudes towards the Jews, encounters between Jewish and English merchants could have been the result of conditions of trade in the Eastern Mediterranean, as has been suggested by Daniel Vitkus’s works.11 International trade required travelling and by crossing the safe frontiers of one’s country, the PHUFKDQWRUWUDYHOOHUEHFDPHSHUPHDEOHWRFXOWXUDOLQÀXHQFHVRIDOONLQGV,QWKH 6

As Daniel Vitkus has recently put it, ‘The English were anxiously “turning” into a more open commercial society, and … in theatrical representations they could observe DQGUHÀHFWXSRQWKHLUQHZVWDWXVDVPHUFKDQWDGYHQWXUHUVFRPSHWLQJIRUSUR¿W¶Turning Turk: English Theater and the Multicultural Mediterranean 1570–1630 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), p. 163. 7 As cleverly investigated by John Gillies, Shakespeare and the Geography of Difference (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 65–6. 8 Alberto Tenenti, Piracy and the Decline of Venice 1580–1615 (London: Longmans, 1967. Trans. of Venezia e i corsari, Bari: Laterza, 1961), pp. 56, 61. 9 Tenenti, p. 72. 10 Pamela Brown, ‘Othello and Italophobia,’ in Shakespeare and Intertextuality. The Transition of Cultures Between Italy and England in the Early Modern Period, ed. Michele Marrapodi (Rome: Bulzoni, 2000), pp. 179–92. 11 See note 6.

Visions of Venice in Shakespeare

146

late sixteenth century, those who believed in the corrupting power of ‘abroad’ (Italy in particular) join travellers’ reports, from Ascham’s famous attacks in The Schoolmaster (1570) on the Italianate Englishman who would bring home ‘for religion, papistrie or worse … a factious hart, a mind to meddle in all men’s matters … plenty of new mischiefs never knowne in England before’12 to Thomas Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveller (1594): ‘It is not a privy note amongst the better sort of men, when they would set a singular mark or brand on a notorious villain, to say he hath been in Italy.’13 'DQJHU EHLQJ ORFDWHG FRQYHQLHQWO\ EH\RQG WKH FRQ¿QHV RI (QJODQG ERWK Shakespeare and Jonson offer mirror images of the English invading the space of the Serenissima: the English baron Falconbridge, one of Portia’s suitors in The Merchant of Venice, and the English traveller Sir Politic Would-Be in Volpone. Their inadequacy in understanding the sophisticated ways of the Venetians in such different areas of fashion and political science is exposed with equal irony. In a way Falconbridge, who ‘hath neither Latin, French or Italian’ (1.2.66) could be a close relative of of Sir Politic Would Be in Volpone, newly come to Venice not to follow ‘that idle, antique, stale, grey-headed project / Of knowing men’s minds and manners … but to follow a peculiar humour of my [his] wife.’14 He plays the subtle politician µ,GRORYHWRQRWHDQGREVHUYH«DQGNQRZWKHHEEV$QGÀRZVRIVWDWH¶  and systematically misinterprets and misjudges whatever happens around him (for him mountebanks are ‘the only knowing men in Europe’ 2.2.9), boasting of a political expertise that derives from hasty reading15 rather than experience. The apparent cynicism and callousness of his advice to his countryman Peregrine concerning religion (‘profess none, / But wonder at the diversity of all; … protest were there no other / But simply the laws of the land’ 4.1.22–5) is undermined by the incongruity of the advice he imparts immediately after: ‘must you learn the use / And handling of your silver fork at meals, / … – these are main matters / With your Italian – and to NQRZWKHKRXU:KHQ\RXPXVWHDW\RXUPHORQVDQG\RXU¿JV¶±  Both the English baron Falconbridge and Sir Politic embody an ingrained (comical) difference, the unbridgeable distance that exists between English travellers and those born and bred in Venice. This way of constructing alterity shows that there are certain cultural boundaries that it is indeed impossible, even 12

Roger Ascham, The Schoolmaster (Menston: The Scolar Press Limited, 1967), p. 27. Thomas Nashe, The Unfortunate Traveller and Other Works (London: Penguin, 1981), p. 345. 14 Ben Jonson, Volpone, ‘The Revels Plays,’ ed. Brian Parker (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, rev. ed., 1999), 2.1.9–11. All other quotations from Volpone will appear parenthetically in the text. 15 ‘To satisfy the fascination of their compatriots with Italian culture, without exposing them to dangers of the country itself, English writers advocated reading as a textual alternative to travel,’ Michael J. Redmond, ‘“I have read them all”: Jonson’s Volpone and the Discourse of the Italianate Gentleman,’ in The Italian World of English Renaissance Drama: Cultural Exchange and Intertextuality, ed. Michele Marrapodi (Newark, London: University of Delaware Press, Associated University Presses, 1998), p. 123. 13

Shakespeare, Jonson and Venice

147

ridiculous, to cross, at least, on stage. This is also a classic case in which both Shakespeare and Jonson’s projections of Otherness over ‘national stereotypes from home’ serve similar purposes. While Shakespeare in both plays provides an alternative location, and Belmont can indeed be perceived as a typically 6KDNHVSHDUHDQ $UFDGLD -RQVRQ KDV KLV FKDUDFWHUV ¿UPO\ URRWHG LQ WKH RIWHQ claustrophobic and labyrinthian urban space, with the classical plot of the legacy KXQWHUV FURZGLQJ DURXQG WKH VXSSRVHG GHDWK EHG RI 9ROSRQH WKH 0DJQL¿FR RI Venice, in the hope of being made the heirs of his fortune. As should only be expected by the pedantic Jonson who criticized Shakespeare’s blunders in setting the shipwreck of The Winter’s Tale in Bohemia,16 Venice in Volpone is extremely detailed in its topography, and in references to such things DV FRLQV  NLQGV RI FRLQV DUH PHQWLRQHG  VSHFL¿FDOO\ 9HQHWLDQ 17 places, institutions and events, like the visit of the Duke of Anjou on his way to be crowned king of France in 1574.18 As has often been noted, Shakespeare’s Venice, in contrast, is not so rich in detail; in The Merchant the focus is Rialto, the centre of trade and a major concern in the characters’ minds. If we imagine the plays in succession, however, from the Merchant (1596–1598) to Othello (1602–1604) to Volpone (1606), we can detect a progressive movement towards a more dystopic view of the city,19 and this is particularly evident when it comes to the treatment of love: from the multiple romantic pairs of The Merchant of Venice to the tragedy of jealousy in Othello (a jealousy which derives from having ‘loved not wisely but too well’)20 to the Jonsonian satire where love has no place and Corvino’s jealousy is the rage of the merchant who is afraid his merchandise may have been interfered with and lost its original value. If we compare themes and characters in the three Venetian plays, the Shakespeare–Jonson polarity DSSHDUVOHVVGH¿QHGDQGLWEHFRPHVTXLWHHDV\WRSDLUDQG¿QGFRUUHVSRQGHQFHV between a Shakespeare play and Volpone.21 As Paster has convincingly suggested, 16

See Dutton, pp. 168–70. Ralph Cohen, ‘The Setting of Volpone,’ Renaissance Papers (1978): pp. 65–75. 18 ‘The play is not only replete with authentic Venetian detail, but also, it seems to me, catches the essence of contemporary Venetian decadence with an accuracy that would be surprising in anyone, but is astounding from one who was never actually there to experience it in person,’ Brian Parker, ‘An English View of Venice: Ben Jonson’s Volpone 1606,’ in Italy and the English Renaissance, ed. Sergio Rossi and Dianella Savoia (Milan: Unicopli, 1989), p. 199. 19 $QGUHZ+DG¿HOG¶VFKDSWHUµ6KDNHVSHDUHDQG5HSXEOLFDQ9HQLFH¶LQWKLVFROOHFWLRQ (pp. 67–82) argues the opposite view (‘Othello is, I would suggest, a play that represents Venice in a far more obviously positive light,’ p. 11), when referring to Venetian institutions. 20 William Shakespeare, Othello, ed. Michael Neill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 5.2.343. All other quotations from Othello will appear parenthetically in the text. 21 The connections between Othello and Volpone have been investigated in several essays. See, among others, Brian F. Tyson, ‘Ben Jonson’s Black Comedy: A Connection Between Othello and Volpone,’ Shakespeare Quarterly 29 (1978): pp. 60–66; Leo Salingar, 17

148

Visions of Venice in Shakespeare

WKH 9HQHWLDQ SOD\V DUH FRQFHUQHG ZLWK XUEDQ FRQÀLFW WKH DJJUHVVLYH QDWXUH RI institutions and individuals in an acquisitive society, especially couples of friends/ enemies (Iago/Othello, Mosca/Volpone) which act out the ‘fraternal rivalry’ which can be connected with the idea of the city.22 The Merchant and Volpone in particular explore the meanings of trade and commercial transactions in the city, a common ground in which the Shakespearean and the Jonsonian cities ‘co-exist in a composite meditation on the nature of urban existence.’23 If Shakespeare has an outsider clash with society, Jonson has a dangerous insider at odds with the city that has given him birth, so that if Shylock and Othello are condemned because they have internalized Venetian ‘virtues’ in such a way that Venice cannot bear to look at herself in their mirror,24 Volpone has appropriated the mercantile ethos of a city and turned into a predator himself. The complexity and multiplication of identity, the blurring of the difference between human relationships and economic transactions, the uncertain boundaries that are drawn between what is Venetian and what is regarded as Alien; all this is of equal concern to Shakespeare and Jonson. Patricians and Outsiders The strong resistance to cultural hybridity in the form of interracial unions is not only dramatized in the star-crossed marriage of the ‘erring barbarian’ Othello and the ‘super-subtle Venetian’ (1.3.348–9) Desdemona (although we should not forget the potentially happier cross-cultural marriage of Jessica and Lorenzo) EXW¿QGVLWVKLVWRULFDOFRXQWHUSDUWLQPDUULDJHUHJXODWLRQVLQ9HQLFHVXFKDVWKH law passed in 1506 instituting the register of noble male births, the Libro d’Oro, and in 1526 registers of noble marriages.25 The reason for the intrusion of the ‘The Idea of Venice in Shakespeare and Ben Jonson,’ in Shakespeare’s Italy. Functions of Italian Locations in Renaissance Drama, ed. Michele Marrapodi (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1993), pp. 171–84; and James Tulip, ‘The Intertextualities of Ben Jonson’s Volpone,’ Sydney Studies 20 (1994–1995): p. 28. 22 Gail Kern Paster, The Idea of the City in the Age of Shakespeare (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1985), p. 3. 23 Andrew Hiscock, ‘Urban Dystopia: The Colonising of Jonson’s Venice in Volpone,’ Proceedings of the 6th International Conference of Region and Nation, ed. Winifred Bogaards (St. John, Canada: New Brunswick University Press, 1998), p. 62. 24 µ6K\ORFN LV FRQYHQWLRQDOO\ LGHQWL¿HG DV DQ RXWVLGHU LQ The Merchant of Venice, though generally as a prelude to observing how he also embodies all the essential Venetian qualities,’ Stephen Orgel, Imagining Shakespeare. A History of Texts and Visions (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), p. 144. For Antonio and Shylock as mirror images of each other see Harold C. Goddard: ‘Antonio abhors Shylock because he catches his own UHÀHFWLRQLQKLVIDFH¶µ7KH7KUHH&DVNHWV¶ UHSULQShakespeare. The Merchant of Venice, ed. John Wilders (London: Macmillan, 1969), p. 148. 25 See the chapter ‘Marriage Regulations in Venice 1420–1535,’ in Stanley Chojnacki, Women and Men in Renaissance Venice. Twelve Essays in Patrician Society (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), pp. 53–75.

Shakespeare, Jonson and Venice

149

State into the private sphere of marriage was mainly to protect the integrity of the nobility against illegitimate offspring and interlopers but it is typical of the way private concerns became public in Venice.26 Even if the Doge and senators are highly unlikely to have discussed the marriage of a patrician with a non-Venetian as happens in Othello (‘Brabantio: Mine is not an idle cause: the Duke himsel, / Or any of my brothers of the state, / Cannot but feel the wrong as ‘twere their own’ 1.2.95–7), Brabantio’s worry that his daughter and issue might be tainted E\SK\VLFDOFRQWDFWZLWKWKHVDYDJHLVQRWHQWLUHO\D¿FWLRQDOFRQVWUXFW7KHP\WK of the perfect constitution required a continuous effort in self-fashioning, as studies of early seventeenth-century political thought have proved:27 the utopia of a shared government paradoxically co-existed with the policies of exclusiveness implemented by the patriciate, while membership in the Great Council itself, which could be adapted to ensure a form of relative representativeness if not equality, became more and more restricted across the centuries.28 Shakespeare and Jonson were interested in the composite nature of the Venetian patrician-merchant and the way he negotiates his contradictory nature in the city of riches. It is a fact that in the Venetian plays sooner or later everybody gets deeply and personally involved in money matters, trade, precious objects and SUR¿Wµ9HQLFHWKHULFK¶LVRQHLPSRUWDQWDVSHFWRIWKHP\WK29 from the abundance of fairs in the city (contemporaries boasted that the city’s weekly markets – like the Wednesday market in St Polo and the Saturday market in St Mark’s – could rival annual fairs in other cities)30 to the availability and abundance of every kind RI IRRG µWKH PDUYHLORXV DIÀXHQFH DQG H[XEHUDQF\ RI DOO WKLQJV WHQGLQJ WR WKH sustentation of mans life.’31 The interest of Venetian noblemen in shopping, the least prestigious and most domestic of all trading activities, is remarked upon by both Thomas in 1549 (‘he [the Venetian gentleman] will go to the market himself, and spend so miserably that many a mean man shall fare better than he’)32 and the traveller Thomas Coryat in his visit in1608: 26 As Sandra Logan has succinctly put it, ‘The staged tensions between paternal rights and state interests emphasize the breakdown of the domestic realm and of the family/state homology, produced by the state’s focus on nationalist concerns,’ ‘Domestic Disturbance and the Disordered State in Shakespeare’s Othello,’ Textual Practice 18, 3 (2004): p. 359. 27 See Daria Perocco, ‘Prose Production in Venice in the Early Seicento,’ in Arcangela Tarabotti. A Literary Nun in Baroque Venice, ed. Elissa B. Weaver (Ravenna: Longo, 2006), pp. 75–7. 28 See James Cushman Davis, The Decline of the Venetian Nobility as a Ruling Class (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1962), pp. 15–33. 29 See David McPherson, Shakespeare, Jonson, and the Myth of Venice (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1990). 30 Evelyn Welch, Shopping in the Renaissance. Consumer Cultures in Italy 1400– 1600 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2005), p. 166. 31 Thomas Coryat, Coryat’s Crudities (1611), vol. 1 (Glasgow: James MacLehose and Sons, 1905), p. 395. 32 Thomas, pp. 80–81.

Visions of Venice in Shakespeare

150

I have observed a thing amongst the Venetians, that I have not a little wondred at, that their Gentlemen and greatest Senators, a man worth perhaps two PLOOLRQVRIGXFNDWVZLOOFRPHLQWRWKHPDUNHWDQGEX\WKHLUÀHVK¿VKIUXLWHV and such other things as are necessary for the maintenance of their family: a token indeed of frugality, which is commendable in all men; but me thinkes it is not an argument of true generosity, that a noble spirit should deject it selfe to WKHVHSHWW\DQGEDVHPDWWHUVWKDWDUH¿WWHUWREHGRQHE\VHUYDQWVWKHQPHQRI generous parentage.33

The curiosity of the Venetian gentlemen’s involvement in these ‘petty and base matters,’ for which English gentlemen employ cooks and housekeepers, can serve as an introduction to the way the Venetian gentleman appears to have blurred WKHFRQ¿QHVEHWZHHQWZRVRFLDOJURXSVWKHJHQWOHPHQDQGWKHPHUFKDQWVWKXV creating a composite and complex identity, that of the gentleman-merchant, which is represented in the Venetian plays as problematic and highly unstable, always dangerously close to crossing the boundaries of decorum. The involvement in trade was the distinguishing mark of the Venetian nobility of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, an anomaly noted, among others, by Machiavelli, who wrote in his Discorsi sopra la prima Deca di Tito Livio (1515–1517) that the Venetian was an aristocracy more in name than in fact, and that its wealth is not founded on estates and castles but rather on riches based on the merchant’s trade.34 The identity of the Venetian merchant-gentleman could be further complicated by other roles and vocations; Daria Perocco draws fascinating sketches of the merchant-humanist-ambassador-traveller-linguist gentlemen of the age:35 the cursus honorum of the young Venetian gentleman would have traditionally entailed a sound education in his youth, followed by a ‘viaggio di mercatura’ (a trading voyage), often with an experienced member of his family. His ‘business training’ would have been followed by a period of political apprenticeship at home which eventually would turn into an active career in Venetian institutions, a career that could be easily combined with trading activities. However, historians agree that at the beginning of the sixteenth century the tendency of a progressive detachment from trade on the part of the nobility, which had started in the previous century, became more noticeable and the aristocracy felt, for various reasons, more inclined

33

Coryat, pp. 396–7. Niccolò Machiavelli, Discorsi sopra la prima Deca di Tito Livio, ed. Corrado Vivanti (Turin: Einaudi, 1983). Book one, Chapter 55, p. 193. It is interesting to notice that William Thomas believes that this is a characteristic of all Italian nobility: ‘The principal merchants are for the most part gentlemen … And because these merchants have nothing the less reputation of nobility for their trade of merchandise, therefore follows that there be such numbers of wealthy men in the country as the like is not to be found elsewhere,’ Thomas, p. 176. 35 Daria Perocco, Viaggiare e raccontare. Narrazione di viaggio ed esperienze di racconto tra Cinque e Seicento (Alessandria: Edizioni dell’Orso, 1997), p. 17. 34

Shakespeare, Jonson and Venice

151

WRLQYHVWWUDGLQJSUR¿WVLQHVWDWHVDQGIDUPVUDWKHUWKDQLQLQWHUQDWLRQDOWUDGH36 The Venetian historian Gino Benzoni provides an illuminating example of the way two generations of the noble family Bragadin chose to make their investments. In 1570, Marco Bragadin père appealed to the Republic for tax exemption on the grounds of having lost 1,000 ducats following the wreck of a ship (which he had not insured). In his ‘income-tax return,’ he mentioned owning some useless ¿HOGVLQDVZDPSQHDU7UHYLVR+LVVRQ$QJHORZKRVHSROLWLFDOFDUHHUZDVWREH more successful than his father’s, decided to buy more land in the area, reclaiming the marshes and limiting his trade to small investments in silk. Bearing in mind Antonio’s debt of 3,000 ducats, and his three argosies that are safely back at the end of the play, we can appreciate Angelo Bragadin’s wealth, divided into lands worth 30,000 ducats, estates in town worth 20,000 ducats and a comparatively negligible 600 ducats invested in trade with the Levant.37 Even if the temptation to read literary texts as mechanically validating historical documents (and vice versa) should be resisted, the exploration of this grey area between the ‘businessman’ and the gentleman was of great dramatic LQWHUHVWWR6KDNHVSHDUHDQG-RQVRQ,Q$QWRQLRDQG9ROSRQHLQSDUWLFXODUGH¿QLQJ the merchant’s space becomes problematic as it often interferes with the socially superior role of the gentleman. $QWRQLR¶VLGHQWLW\DSSHDUVWREHHVWDEOLVKHGIURPWKHWLWOH±KHLVGH¿QHGE\ his social status although at the same time other characters in the play appear to be ‘tampering with his identity.’38 Historically speaking, the merchant and Bassanio, ‘a scholar and a soldier’ (1.2.109), would have been hardly distinguishable in 9HQLFH%DVVDQLRSRVVLEO\VKRZLQJWKDWH[WUDYDJDQFHZKLFKFKDUDFWHUL]HGWKH¿UVW generation of gentlemen to experience fully the break in mercantile tradition.39 Salerio and Solanio immediately attribute his melancholy to problems related to his chosen calling (‘Antonio is sad to think upon his merchandise’ 1.1.40) and expand this concept considerably before resorting to a second cause (‘why then you are in love’ 1.1.46), that of love melancholia, a more aristocratic feeling altogether. But Antonio also fails in his role as Venetian merchant: by losing his money, he loses his reputation so that Shylock can rightly exclaim that he is ‘a bankrupt, a prodigal, who dare scarce show his head on the Rialto, a beggar’ (3.1.39–40) (it is interesting to compare Shylock’s words with the punishments imposed for

36 Ugo Tucci, ‘The Psychology of the Venetian Merchant in the Sixteenth Century,’ in Renaissance Venice, ed. John R. Hale (London: Faber & Faber, 1973), pp. 346–78. 37 Gino Benzoni, Venezia nell’età della Controriforma (Milan: Mursia, 1973), p. 35. 38 ‘What we get here is a play about human subjects tampering with identities, attempting LQFHVVDQWO\ WR FRQWHPSODWH GH¿QH DQG IDVKLRQ WKHPVHOYHV DQG WKH RWKHUV¶$YUDKDP 2] ‘“Which is the Merchant Here? And Which the Jew?” Riddles of Identity in The Merchant of Venice,’ in Shakespeare and Cultural Traditions, ed. Tstsuo Kishi et al. (Newark: University of Delaware Press and London: Associated University Presses, 1994), p. 156. 39 Tucci, p. 349.

152

Visions of Venice in Shakespeare

¿QDQFLDO FULPHV LQ 9HQLFH ± GHQLDO RI DFFHVV WR WKH 5LDOWR RU ULWXDOV RI SXEOLF humiliation in the area).40 A merchant’s identity clearly depends on his wealth, his credit, and his reliability as a trading partner:41 having risked everything for his friend’s equally ULVN\ZRRLQJEXVLQHVVDQGORVW$QWRQLRLQ6K\ORFN¶VZRUGVLVQRWµVXI¿FLHQW¶ and consequently not a ‘good’ man either. The lowest point in Antonio’s descent from a gentleman-like status is reached when Portia enters the courtroom and asks: ‘Which is the merchant here? And which the Jew?’ (4.1.171), thus highlighting the similarity of two characters who trade money and underlining their extraneity from WKHVSDFHRIWKHDULVWRFUDF\7KHLGHQWL¿FDWLRQZLWKWKH-HZWKHXVXUHUWKHRXWVLGHU to whom Antonio has shown all his revulsion may sound like the ultimate insult which comes, incidentally, from the aristocratic lady of Belmont, the place where money does not have to be earned but is produced effortlessly. The merchant’s SURJUHVVLYH DOLHQDWLRQ DQG PDUJLQDOL]DWLRQ IURP WKH ¿QDQFLDO FRPPXQLW\ WKH Rialto as the trading center of the city, a quintessentially male world based on values like trust and honour) is soon to be repeated in the emotional exclusion from the enclosure of marriage. One can argue that Antonio has turned into an outsider because ‘he is an unconscious homosexual in a predominantly … heterosexual society’42EXWRQHZRQGHUVZKHWKHUD¿UVWLQVWDQFHRI$QWRQLR¶VHPDVFXODWLRQKDV already taken place in the exclusion from Rialto, which ‘represented in symbolic terms an even more distinctly male locale.’43 If at the end Antonio has to cling to his newly-restored merchant identity as events of the play have crushed any gentleman’s vocation he may have had, 9ROSRQHWKH0DJQL¿FRLVYHU\DQ[LRXVWRGLVDVVRFLDWHKLPVHOIIURPWKHPHUFKDQW and usurer’s identities: … I glory More in the cunning purchase of my wealth Than in the glad possession, since I gain No common way: I use no trade, no venture; I … expose no ships To threat’nings of the furrow-facèd sea; I turn no monies in the public bank Nor usure private – (1.1.30–33, 37–9)

40 Dennis Romano, ‘Gender and the Urban Geography of Renaissance Venice,’ Journal of Social History 23, 2 (1989): p. 342. 41 I am relying here on Mariangela Tempera’s highly perceptive analysis of the merchant’s identity in her article, ‘“Now I play a merchant’s part”: The Space of the Merchant in Shakespeare’s Early Comedies,’ in Italian Studies in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries, ed. Michele Marrapodi et al. (Newark: University of Delaware Press and London: Associated University Presses, 1999), pp. 152–64. 42 Graham Midgley, ‘The Merchant of Venice: A Reconsideration,’ (1960) repr. in Shakespeare. The Merchant of Venice, ed. John Wilders (London: Macmillan, 1969), p. 199. 43 Romano, p. 340.

Shakespeare, Jonson and Venice

153

$OWKRXJK LW ZDV IDU IURP XQFRPPRQ WKDW D PDJQL¿FR µE\ EORRG DQG UDQN D gentleman,’ (5.12.117) should pursue trade, his servant Mosca validates his selfpresentation by adding You are not … […] «OLNHWKHPHUFKDQWZKRKDWK¿OOHGKLVYDXOWV With Romagnia and rich Candian wines, Yet drinks the lees of Lombard’s vinegar. You will not lie in straw whilst moths and worms Feed on your sumptuous hangings and soft beds. (1.1.53, 57–61)

With Mosca’s help, Volpone makes it clear that he is neither a miser nor a PHUFKDQW QRWH WKDW DOO WKHVH GH¿QLWLRQV DUH LQ WKH QHJDWLYH  +RZHYHU KLV obsession for amassing gold and precious objects betrays a desire for yet more PRQH\DQGPRUHSUR¿WVRPXFKWKDWKHZRXOGOLNHWRµFRLQ¶KLVµFOLHQWV¶µLQWR SUR¿W¶ DQGHYHQWXUQKLPVHOILQWRJROGµFRLQPHWRR6RWKRXLQWKLVEXW FURZQP\ORQJLQJV¶± %HFDXVHRIKLVVHOIFRQ¿QHPHQWLQEHGLQVWHDG of travelling towards exotic lands for trade, Volpone has precious goods (a gold plate, a ‘pearl orient’1.5.6, a diamond, and ‘a bag of bright chequins’ 1.4.69) ¿QGWKHLUZD\WRZDUGVKLVLQFUHDVLQJO\FODXVWURSKRELFVLFNURRPDWKLVSDOD]]R in a cynical ritual of pretending (to be ill) and receiving presents which have the effect of increasing his wealth (as Mosca tells the plate he is putting away: ‘stand there and multiply’ 1.4.2). It is Mosca, who, by answering the door and taking visitors to his bed, negotiates the threshold with the prospective heirs.44 Every time Volpone decides to step over the boundaries of the enclosed space of his room, and move in the area near St Mark and Rialto, he is taking a risk and needs to assume a fake identity. In order to attract the beautiful Celia’s attention, a lady kept ‘as warily as is your [Volpone’s] gold’ (1.5.118) by her possessive husband Corvino, Volpone must dress up as a mountebank and sell his elixir in a corner of the Piazza, and have his performance commented on by the English travellers. Celia will eventually be taken to Volpone’s room by her own husband to be seduced (‘The Turk is not more sensual in his pleasure / Than will Volpone’ 1.5.88). The legacy hunters take increasingly high risks to ‘buy’ Volpone’s inheritance – the merchant Corvino is ready to offer his wife despite his jealousy while the old gentleman Corbaccio disinherits his son. In parallel, Volpone’s venture is becoming increasingly risky – as he encroaches upon more public spaces, like the courtroom, the web of lies becomes more intricate, the freedom of operation smaller and sustaining a role more dangerous.45 After failing to seduce Celia and having spread the news that he is dead and Mosca the heir, 44 See Julie Sanders, Ben Jonson’s Theatrical Republics (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998) esp. pp. 35, 40–43. 45 ‘Like other enclosed Jonsonian characters, Volpone and Mosca fail to understand WKHLQKHUHQWOLPLWVRIWKHVSDFHLQZKLFKWKH\RSHUDWHDQGLQVWHDG¿QGFDXVHWRUHMRLFHLQ

154

Visions of Venice in Shakespeare

9ROSRQHLVFRQ¿QHGWRKLVRZQ¿FWLRQZLWK0RVFDKROGLQJRQWRKLVQHZIRXQG identity of Clarissimo. After tormenting the disappointed trio in the disguise of a commendatore, Volpone realizes that his servant has betrayed him and intends to enjoy his new status (‘When I provoked him, then I lost myself’ 5.11.22). It is only through Volpone’s revelation in the second courtroom scene that the truth comes out, which means, incidentally, that the famously fair judicial system of the Serenissima has been almost taken in twice by a couple of swindlers. It is precisely when Volpone hears that one of the avocatori is willing to bestow his daughter on Mosca that he decides to take off his disguise: My ruins shall not come alone. Your match I’ll hinder sure; my substance shall not glue you, Nor screw you, into a family. (5.12.85–7)

It is Volpone’s unattached condition (not unlike Antonio’s) that starts the action in Volpone: I have no wife, parent, children, ally, To give my substance to: but whom I make Must be my heir: … This draws new clients, daily, to my house. (1.1.73–6)

The private crimes of cheating are here subsumed in the public crime against the Republic and its values, starting with the attempted intrusion of a ‘parasite’ into the highly selective patriciate of Venice, and continuing with the similarly unseemly procedure of disinheriting a legitimate son or prostituting one’s lawful wife. The sentence pronounced on Volpone, who is responsible for these attempts to undermine WKHIDPLO\DVDIRXQGDWLRQRIWKH6WDWHLVSHUSHWXDOFRQ¿QHPHQWLQSULVRQµFUDPSHG ZLWKLURQV¶ WLOOWKH¿FWLRQRIEHLQJVLFNDQGODPHWXUQVLQWRUHDOLW\,QDZD\ Volpone has come full circle, from the prison-like atmosphere of his sick bedroom to a real prison cell. The privileged insider, the MDJQL¿FRZKRVHQDPHLVUHFRUGHGLQWKH *ROGHQ%RRNZLOOGLHSRRUZLWKDOOKLVVXEVWDQFHFRQ¿VFDWHGDIDWHZRUVHWKDQWKDW of the outsider Shylock. A virtual alien, Volpone becomes the prototype of the internal enemy,46 whose disregard of social boundaries endangers the very nature of the State. Outcasts and Enclosures There is often a sense of correspondence between the dramatic function of boundaries in the Venetian plays and the way the Venetian republic asserted the control they exercise over that space’; Gail Kern Paster, ‘Ben Jonson’s Comedy of Limitation,’ Studies in Philology 72 (1975): p. 66. 46 For notions of the ‘internal’ and ‘external’ enemy applied to Othello and Shylock DVMRLQW¿JXUHVRIH[FOXVLRQVHH*LO$QLGMDUThe Jew, the Arab. A History of the Enemy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003).

Shakespeare, Jonson and Venice

155

public control over urban space and its ‘minorities.’ In the sixteenth century for example laws were passed to encourage foreign merchants to reside within their ‘nations,’ control of foreigners became stricter,47 attempts to regulate and relegate prostitution to certain areas of the city (near Rialto) were repeated and compulsory enclosure became the norm for all nuns. The enclosure which is most interesting for readers/spectators of The Merchant of Venice is obviously the Venetian Ghetto. Its residents were prevented from moving freely through the city without a badge and had a curfew; access points were closed at night (in Fynes Moryson’s words ‘a Court yearde closed with gates and capable of great Numbers’).48 A physical border which is conspicuous for its absence in Shakespeare’s Venice, in which there is no place of either protection or segregation for aliens, the ghetto also accommodated merchant Jews who participated in international trade, RIWHQ¿OOLQJWKHYRLGOHIWE\QREOHPHQZKRZHUHQRORQJHULQWHUHVWHGLQLQYHVWLQJ in maritime trade.49 What Shakespeare seems to have grasped, whatever his sources were, is the ambivalent attitude of the Republic towards the Jews, a form of suspicious tolerance grounded on commercial convenience (such as the availability of Jewish banks or moneylenders for loans) which produced an insecurity ‘which was always hanging over a community that resided in Venice on sufferance and not by right … their fate hanging in the balance each time the Senate decreed an expulsion, failed to UHQHZDFKDUWHURUDVKDSSHQHGPXFKPRUHIUHTXHQWO\IDLOHGWRUHQHZLWRQWKH¿UVW ballot.’50 After Portia’s failure to distinguish between the Venetian merchant and the -HZWKH¿QDOKROGRI9HQHWLDQMXVWLFHRYHU6K\ORFNGHSHQGVRQKLVEHLQJDQDOLHQ Antonio’s hatred for Shylock is unpleasantly voiced in the Jew’s resentful words: You call me misbeliever, cut-throat dog, And spet upon my Jewish gaberdine, […] You that did void your rheum upon my beard, And foot me as you spurn a stranger cur, […] What should I say to you? Should I not say ‘Hath a dog money? Is it possible A cur can lend three thousand ducats? (1.3.106–7, 112–13, 115–17) 47

See Renzo Derosas, ‘Moralità e giustizia a Venezia nel ’500–’`600. Gli esecutori contro la bestemmia,’ in Stato, società e giustizia nella repubblica veneta (sec. XV–XVIII), ed. Gaetano Cozzi (Rome: Società Editoriale Jouvence: 1980), pp. 450–52. 48 Fynes Moryson, Shakespeare’s Europe. Unpublished Chapters of Fynes Moryson’s Itinerary, Being a Survey of the Condition of Europe at the end of the 16th century, ed. Charles Hughes (London: Sherratt & Hughes, 1903), p. 488. 49 Brian Pullan, The Jews of Europe and the Inquisition of Venice 1550–1670 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983). See also his ‘Charity and Usury: Jewish and Christian Lending in Renaissance and Early Modern Italy,’ Proceedings of the British Academy 125 (2003): pp. 19–40. 50 Benjamin Ravid, ‘The Venetian Government and the Jews,’ in The Jews of Early Modern Venice, ed. Robert C. Davis and Benjamin Ravid (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), p. 30.

Visions of Venice in Shakespeare

156

Antonio’s distasteful attitude can be compared to William Thomas’s description of the character of the Venetian gentleman: strangers use to report that the gentleman Venetian is proud, disdainful, covetous, DJUHDWQLJJDUGDPRUHOHFKHUVSDUHRIOLYLQJW\UDQWWRKLVWHQDQW¿QDOO\QHYHU VDWLV¿HGZLWKKRDUGLQJXSRIPRQH\«%HVLGHVDOOWKLVKHKDWKWZRRUWKUHH Jews that chop and change with him daily, by whose usury he gaineth out of measure. … It is almost incredible what gain the Venetians receive by the usury of the Jews, both privately and in common.51

Thomas’s perception is echoed by Coryat’s almost picaresque adventure in the Ghetto where he met ‘goodly and proper men’ and beautiful Jewesses, ‘so gorgeous in their apparel, jewels, chaines of gold, and rings with special stones, that some of our English Countesses do scarce exceed them.’52 We are reminded of Jessica adorning herself for Lorenzo (‘I will gild myself / … with some moe ducats’ 2.6.49–50), although in Venice sexual contact between Christian and Jews was prohibited. It was a matter for the Inquisition, like in general questions of religious ambivalence or uncertainty (we know of a Giorgio Moretto who was sentenced to three years at the oars in the Venetian galleys in 1589 because of his romantic relationship with a Jewess, Rachel, and because he had repeately entered the ghetto and participated in Jewish festivities. He claimed in his defence that he only wanted to convert her but the inquisitors were not persuaded).53 The Inquisition in Venice tended to prosecute people on the frontier between Christian and Jew, ‘marranos,’ or crypto-Jews who had reverted to their original faith or dubious conversions to Christianity. As Brian Pullan has conveniently summarized, ‘The recipe for peace was to stay within the limits, both social and physical, assigned to the Jews by society and the state.’54 Shylock plays on Venetian fears of contamination when he mentions the slaves Venetians ‘use in abject and in slavish parts’ (4.1.92): ‘Because you bought them – shall I say to you, / Let them be free, marry them to your heirs?’(4.1.93–5). Here of course it is impossible not to be reminded of Othello, the ex-slave who has crossed the boundaries of property and married a senator’s daughter. On a similar note, 9ROSRQH LV DOVR WKH HPEOHP RI JURWHVTXH K\EULGLW\ RI¿FLDOO\ DV XQDWWDFKHG DV Othello, he is reported by Mosca to have generated a monstruous issue by mixing KLV µSXUH¶ 0DJQL¿FR¶V EORRG ZLWK D FRPSHQGLXP RI WKH PDUJLQDOL]HG DQG DOLHQ nations of Venice: Corvino: Has he children? Mosca: Bastards, Some dozen or more that he begot on beggars,

51

Thomas, pp. 80–81, 69. Coryat, p. 372. 53 Pier Cesare Ioly Zorattini, ‘Jews, Crypto Jews and the Inquisition,’ in Davis and Ravid, p. 101. 54 Pullan, p. 145–6. 52

Shakespeare, Jonson and Venice

157

Gypsies, and Jews, and blackamoors, when he was drunk. Knew you not that, sir? ’Tis the common fable. The dwarf, the fool, the eunuch are all his; He’s the true father of his family. (1.5.43–8, my emphasis)

$QDORJLHVFDQEHGUDZQEHWZHHQWROHUDWLRQDQGFRQ¿QHPHQWRIWKH-HZVDQG prostitutes in their double status of outcasts from a spiritual point of view and a necessary evil for social and economic purposes.55 From the fourteenth century the FLW\FRXQFLOKDGWULHGWRFRQ¿QHSURVWLWXWHVWRDGHVLJQDWHGDUHDDW5LDOWRJLYLQJ WRWKHVHFLW\OLFHQVHGEURWKHOVWKHQDPH&DVWHOOHWWR5HJXODWLRQVLQWHQVL¿HGLQWKH ¿IWHHQWK FHQWXU\ UHTXLULQJ WKH femine de peccato to return to their lodgings at WKH&DVWHOOHWWRWRZKLFK-HZVZHUHQRWDGPLWWHG E\DVSHFL¿FKRXUDQGZHDUDQ identity badge.56 It is interesting to notice that, unlike many similar institutions in the rest of Italy, which were generally placed outside the city walls,57 at the margins of urban geography, the Venetian red-light district was at the center of the city,58 right within its commercial heart, a male site where women of honour would not go. Rialto was therefore characterized as a center of trade, usury, banking and prostitution, the very place where Venice città mercatrice, the merchant town, coincided with la città meretrice, the whore town.59 However, the Venetian attempts to centralize prostitution were not successful in the long run (after a second Castelletto was closed in 1498, the city council tried WRFRQ¿QHSURVWLWXWLRQWRDQRWKHUDUHDQRWIDUIURP5LDOWR&D¶5DPSDQL DQGLQ the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries prostitutes started to establish themselves in other areas of the city, with the exception of St Mark. The number of Venetian prostitutes, including the high-class type of the cortegiana onesta (Coryat: ‘the 55

‘To maintain order, it was essential that such outcasts should be separated from the UHVWRIVRFLHW\ERWKE\EDGJHVRIVKDPHDQGZKHUHSUDFWLFDEOHE\FRQ¿QHPHQWWRWKHLU own allotted space, to ghettos or red-light districts,’ Brian Pullan, ‘Jewish Banks and Monti di Pietà,’ in Davis and Ravid, p. 71. 56 See Paul Larivaille, La vita quotidiana delle cortigiane nell’Italia del Rinascimento (Milan: Rizzoli, 1983), p. 204. 57 See Marino Berengo, L’europa delle città. Il volto della società urbana europea tra Medioevo ed Età Moderna (Turin: Einaudi, 1999), esp. pp. 521–645. 58 ‘Altrove, le autorità imponevano che il pubblico bordello fosse collocato ai margini del contesto urbano. Non così a Venezia dove si volle il Castelletto collocato nel centro cittadino,’ Giovanni Scarabello, ‘Per una storia della prostituzione a Venezia tra il XIII e il XVIII sec.,’ Studi veneziani n.s. XLVII (2004): p. 26. The city’s control and regulation of prostitution was noticeably different from that of London. Prostitution had been tolerated in the suburbs, like 6RXWKZDUNDQG6PLWK¿HOGEXWE\QRPHDQVOLPLWHGWRWKHVHDUHDV XQWLOWKHSURFODPDWLRQRI 1546, which closed all brothels, had the effect of spreading prostitution everywhere in the city. See Wallace Shugg, ‘Prostitution in Shakespeare’s London,’ Shakespeare Studies 10 (1977): pp. 291–313, and Gustav Ungerer, ‘Prostitution in Late Elizabethan London: the Case of Mary Newborough,’ Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 15 (2004): pp. 138–223. 59 Pope Pius II had used the pun on merchant/whore town to insult Florence: ‘La città mercatrice, ma che dico, la città meretrice,’ cit. in Welch, p. 33.

Visions of Venice in Shakespeare

158

name of a courtezan of Venice is famoused all over Christendome’),60 appeared to have been substantial: Coryat makes an estimate of at least 20,000 (out of a total SRSXODWLRQRI± ZKLOHWKHVL[WHHQWKFHQWXU\9HQHWLDQSRHW0DI¿R Venier, a rejected suitor of the famous courtesan Veronica Franco, could well write: ‘No’ ghe casa che no gabbia putane.’61 Catalogues of prostitutes recorded names, addresses and prices, with entries like ‘Chiaretta Padovana, al Ponte dell’Aseo, bater a la porta, parlar a so mare, dare quel che si vol.’62 In the tirades against and satires on the immorality of Venetian society, it was customary to compare nunneries to brothels. There were astonishing numbers of forced conversions of patrician women at the time (it is estimated that in 1581 at least 3/5 of all noblewomen in Venice were nuns),63 since by restricting the number of daughters in the marriage market greaters dowries could be provided in order to ensure better marriage connections.64 In 1629 the Patriarch Giovanni Tiepolo tried to justify to the Doge his attempt to soften the regulations that disciplined convents. ,QKLVZRUGVRQHSHUFHLYHVWKHDZDUHQHVVRIWKHHQRUPRXVVDFUL¿FHWKHVHQREOH ladies were making, ‘che se fossero d’altro sesso ad esse toccarebbe il comendare e governare il Mondo.’ When he describes their state, Tiepolo uses an unexpected simile: ‘duemilla e più Nobili … in questa città vivono rinserate nei monasteri quasi come in publico deposito.’65 Was the Patriarch’s assumption shared by other eminent Venetians? Economic concerns appear to have been deeply ingrained in the patriarchal structures of the city (in The Merchant of Venice Portia’s and Jessica’s ‘dowries’ make the fortunes of their empoverished suitors). It is not surprising, given the coercive nature of taking vows, that convents should have frequently been prone to scandals of all sorts. Often enjoying a special status, especially before the restrictions imposed by the Counter-reformation, aristocratic nuns in the convent could entertain visitors, enjoy special food and wine and wear elegant clothes and jewels. Mary Laven reports of astonishing contacts between prostitutes and nuns, enjoying conversations and laughter in convents and cloister churches visited by prostitutes.66 In the 1520s, the Republic created 60

Coryat, p. 401. ‘There is no house without its whores,’ cit. in Scarabello, p. 53 (my translation). 62 ‘Chiaretta Padovana, at the Ponte dell’Aseo, knock on her door, talk to her mother, pay her what you wish,’ cit. in Scarabello, p. 66 (my translation). 63 Chojnacki, p. 39. 64 ‘As a consequence, a married woman became the link between the separate economic destinies of two lineages, pulling them together into a sort of suprafamilial, supralineage economic association,’ Stanley Chojnacki, ‘Patrician Women in Early Renaissance Venice,’ Studies in the Renaissance 21 (1974): p. 201. 65 ‘If they had been of the opposite sex they would have been destined to govern the world. … Two thousand and more noblewomen in this city live stored in monasteries almost as though in a public warehouse,’ cit. in Virginia Cox, ‘The Single Self: Feminist Thought and the Marriage Market in Early Modern Venice,’ Renaissance Quarterly 48, 3 (1995): p. 540. 66 Mary Laven, Virgins of Venice (London: Penguin, 2002). 61

Shakespeare, Jonson and Venice

159

an investigative and judicial body called ‘Provveditori sopra i Monasteri’ who persecuted nuns’ sexual transgressions, but other political bodies were involved in prosecuting these crimes which fell into the category of ‘sex crimes against God’67 (which also included sexual activities with Jews). In a city in which nuns and prostitutes were possibly two of the most popular ‘careers’ for women, the status of the married gentlewoman could dangerously waver between either end of this polarity. Travellers consistently remarked that the married ladies of Venice were closely watched by their husbands; according to Moryson, who was in Venice in 1594, 7KH ZHPHQ RI KRQRXU LQ ,WDO\ « DUH PXFK VRRQHU LQÀDPHG ZLWK ORXH EH LW lawfull or unlawfull, then the wemen of other nations. For being locked up at home, and covered with vayles when they go abroade … they are more stirred YSZLWKWKHVLJKWDQGPXFKPRUHZLWKWKHÀDWWHULQJDQGGLVVHPEOLQJVSHHFKHVRI men … then the wemen of other nations hauing free conversations with men.68

Sumptuary laws were devised to make courtesans clearly distinguishable from ladies of rank, although this turned out to be virtually impossible. Cesare Vecellio’s De gli habiti antichi et moderni di diverse parti del mondo (Venice, 1590), a collection of social types in their costumes with commentary, notes that it was GLI¿FXOWWRGLVWLQJXLVKFRXUWHVDQVIURPQREOHZRPHQRQWKHEDVLVRIGUHVVDORQH69 In the 1580 denunciation to the Inquisition of the courtesan-poet Veronica Franco, among such allegations as performing incantations to demons, eating PHDWRQD)ULGD\DQGQRWJRLQJWR0DVVUHJXODUO\RQH¿QGVWKHZHDULQJRISHDUOV which were prohibited to courtesans by Venetian sumptuary laws70 (pearls were associated with chastity, as in many portraits of Elizabeth I). Another charge against prostitutes which could have blurred the boundaries between honorable ladies and ‘these amorous Calypsos’71 was wearing the white silk veil that unmarried patrician girls had to wear on their heads in public. The so-called ‘honest courtesans,’ however, were distinguishable from gentlewomen (with few exceptions) because of their superior education and wit and their accomplishments in music, poetry and VRQJ,Q&RU\DW¶VZRUGVµ$OVRWKRXZLOW¿QGHWKH9HQHWLDQ&RUWH]DQ«DJRRG Rhetorician, and a most elegant discourser.’72 67 See Guido Ruggiero, The Boundaries of Eros. Sex Crime and Sexuality in Renaissance Venice (New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1985), esp. pp. 70–88. 68 Moryson, p. 409. 69 See Margaret Rosenthal, The Honest Courtesan. Veronica Franco, Citizen and Writer in Sixteenth-Century Venice (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 70. 70 Rosenthal, p. 167. On sumptuary laws and their effect on Venetian prostitutes see also Rita Casagrande di Villaviera, Le cortigiane veneziane nel Cinquecento (Milan: Longanesi, 1968), esp. pp. 47–84. 71 Coryat, p. 403. 72 Coryat, p. 405.

Visions of Venice in Shakespeare

160

Both Shakespeare and Jonson may have been aware of the reputation of Venetian courtesans and prostitutes. In the Venetian plays the palazzo is imposed on female characters thus creating a convent-like boundary that means to prevent the integrity of the female body from being polluted by contact with the outside world. In Othello and VolponeLQSDUWLFXODUWKHFRQ¿QHVEHWZHHQOLFLWDQGLOOLFLWEHKDYLRU in women, the facility with which an ‘honest, chaste and true’ wife (Othello 4.2.17) can turn into a ‘subtle whore’ (4.2.21) as soon as she trespasses over the threshold of the palazzo are indeed remarkable. When Portia and Nerissa leave the virginal seclusion of Belmont for the city, for a moment even their husbands believe that they are ‘cuckolds’ before they ‘have deserv’d it’ (5.1.265). Iago’s temptation builds on a shared culture of misogynism where aristocratic ladies in Venice ‘let God see the pranks / They dare not show their husbands’ (3.3.205–6). In Othello’s mind Desdemona’s degradation is represented as the polarization of opposed images, from ‘Dian’s visage’ to a ‘begrimed and black’ face (3.3.390), from a lady who ‘will kneel and pray’ (4.2.23) to ‘false as hell’ (4.2.39), a ‘fair devil’ (3.3.478) (which recalls the title of John Webster’s play of 1612 The White Devil, where the protagonist, Vittoria Accoramboni, is changed from the historical noblewoman from Gubbio of the sources to a high-class Venetian courtesan). By Act 4 the senator’s daughter, ‘a maid, so tender, fair and happy’ (1.2.66) has changed into ‘That cunning whore of Venice’ (4.2.90), a term of abuse that is repeated with mantra-like implacability in the last two acts of the play and which Desdemona is not even able to pronounce: ‘I cannot say ‘whore’: / It does abhor me now I speak the word’ (4.2.161–2). To confuse the boundaries between honest lady and prostitute even more, Bianca, described as ‘courtesan’ in the dramatis personae of OthelloDQG&DVVLR¶VPLVWUHVVUHSOLHVWR(PLOLD¶VLQVXOWVµ¿HXSRQ WKHHVWUXPSHW¶ ZLWKD¿UPGHQLDOµ,DPQRVWUXPSHWEXWRIOLIHDVKRQHVWDV\RX that thus abuse me’ (5.1.119–20). In a play where all the women (Desdemona, Emilia, Bianca) are at some point accused of being prostitutes, the fact that the only one that could technically be called such refuses to be considered one, has the effect of challenging and complicating the dichotomy between chaste lady and whore.73 In Volpone, Celia, the merchant’s wife who has dared throw her handkerchief from her prison/palazzo to the mountebank, is treated with equally outrageous verbal violence. In Corvino’s mind, it is her actress-like behavior that paves the way to her degradation (the courtesan–actress link being commonplace): Death of mine honour, with the city’s fool? A juggling, tooth-drawing, prating mountebank? And at a public window? … and you smile Most graciously! and fan your favours forth, To give your hot spectators satisfaction! […] … You whore … 73

See Michael Neill’s Introduction to the Oxford edition of Othello, p. 194.

Shakespeare, Jonson and Venice

161

You were an actor, with your handkerchief! Which he most sweetly kissed in the receipt. (2.5.1–3, 7–9, 26, 40–41)

Act 2, scene 5 ends with Corvino compelling her to wear a chastity belt and UHVWULFWLQJ KHU DOUHDG\ QDUURZ FRQ¿QHV µZKHQ GR , « HYHU VWLU DEURDG EXW WR church?’ 2.2.161) with the imposition of a new physical boundary: … some two or thee yards off I’ll chalk a line, o’er which if thou but chance To set thy desp’rate foot, more hell, more horror, More wild, remorseless rage shall seize on thee Than on a conjuror that had heedless left His circle’s safety ere his devil was laid. (2.5.51–6)

The irony is that later on Corvino will decide to prostitute his wife in the hope that a grateful Volpone will make him his heir, her honour becoming ‘a breath. / … a mere term / Invented to awe fools’ (3.7.38–40). If the lady, his ‘property,’ does not comply with this commercial transaction, Corvino will call her ‘a strumpet through the streets’ (3.7.97). One of the reasons why Volpone fails to charm Celia may be his explicit desire to love her in the form and attire of a prostitute: a Sultan’s mistress, ‘one of our most artful courtesans’ (3.7.230) or even in the exotic shape of ‘some quick Negro’ (3.7.231). It appears that the representation of Venice as the capital of European sexual vice and courtesans inevitably affects the reputation of Desdemona and Celia alike. A satiric portrait of a would-be courtesan is provided by the Italianate Englishwoman of Volpone, Sir Politic Would-Be’s wife. Again, Jonson may or may not have known of learned courtesans in Venice. This character offers a striking contrast to the segregated Venetian lady (the English lady is free to roam the city and consequently endanger her reputation, as Volpone remarks ‘I wonder at the desperate valour / Of the bold English, that they dare let loose / Their wives to all encounters’ 1.5.101–2), and combines the courtesan’s concern for fashion with an interest for learning (‘… seeing what a curious nation / Th’Italians are, ZKDWZLOOWKH\VD\RIPH"µ7KH(QJOLVKODG\FDQQRWGUHVVKHUVHOI¶+HUH¶VD¿QH imputation to our country!’ 3.4.32–5). She is not shy of exhibiting a wide range of accomplishments, to Volpone’s dismay: Lady Politic: I have, a little, studied physic; but now I am all for music, save in the forenoons An hour or two for painting. I would have A lady, indeed, t’have all letters and arts, Be able to discourse, to write, to paint, But principal, as Plato holds your music. (3.4.66–72)

/DG\ :RXOG%H DV D WUDGLWLRQDO FRQÀDWLRQ RI ZDQWRQQHVV DQG LQWHOOHFWXDO DVSLUDWLRQVFDQEHSHUFHLYHGERWKDVDQDʀYHWUDYHOOHUFRUUXSWHGE\WKHDUWVDQGZLOHV of the super-subtle Venetian ladies and as a parody of the learned courtesan.

162

Visions of Venice in Shakespeare

While in the city’s symbolic landscape the Virgin unconquered nation can coexist with its multicultural, licentious reputation and as a meeting point of Western civilization and the Orient, historical Venice and its dramatic counterpart DSSHDU WR VKDUH VLPLODU FRQÀLFWLQJ FXOWXUDO FRQGLWLRQV DQG GLYLGHG LGHQWLWLHV What appears to hold together boundaries and enclosures in the city is indeed a strong degree of economic expediency which turns gentlemen into merchants, noblewomen into commodities to be stored in a warehouse, and the assuredly damned into providers of services to the Republic. For the necessities of global WUDGHDQGSUR¿WERXQGDULHVDUHHUHFWHGSROLFHGDQGRFFDVLRQDOO\OHIWXQJXDUGHGWR contemplate the apparently irreconciliable categories of toleration and segregation, foreignness and domesticity, transgression and law enforcement. Brabantio’s initial faith that his property, his daughter, his city, and his little world are safe from intrusion (‘What tell’st thou me of robbing? This is Venice: my house is not a grange’ 1.1.105–6) after the encounter with the alien, turns into ‘naught but bitterness’ (1.1.161). Brabantio’s attitude is highly emblematic of the city’s desire to control and contain the forces that overstep the boundaries of self, family, state, and religion. It appears that social negotiations in the Venetian plays of Shakespeare and Jonson bear remarkable similarities to the Republic’s FRQWUDGLFWRU\DWWHPSWVWRFRQ¿QHLVRODWHDQGXOWLPDWHO\WDNHHFRQRPLFDGYDQWDJH of social groups, unorthodox religious beliefs, and women in the urban space of Renaissance Venice. Works Cited Adelman, Janet. ‘Her Father’s Blood: Race, Conversion, and Nation in The Merchant of Venice.’ Representations 81 (2003): 4–30. Anidjar, Gil. The Jew, the Arab. A History of the Enemy. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003. Ascham, Roger. The Schoolmaster. Menston: The Scolar Press Limited, 1967. Benzoni, Gino. Venezia nell’età della Controriforma. Milan: Mursia, 1973. Berengo, Marino. L’europa delle città. Il volto della società urbana europea tra Medioevo ed Età Moderna. Turin: Einaudi, 1999. Berry, Philippa. ‘Incising Venice: The Violence of Cultural Incorporation in The Merchant of Venice.’ In Renaissance Go-Betweens. Cultural Exchanges in Early Modern Europe, edited by Andreas Höfele et al. 248–61. Berlin and New York: W. de Gruyter, 2005. Brown, Pamela. ‘Othello and Italophobia.’ In Shakespeare and Intertextuality. The Transition of Cultures Between Italy and England in the Early Modern Period, edited by Michele Marrapodi. 179–92. Rome: Bulzoni, 2000. Casagrande di Villaviera, Rita. Le cortigiane veneziane nel Cinquecento. Milan: Longanesi, 1968. Chojnacki, Stanley. ‘Patrician Women in Early Renaissance Venice.’ Studies in the Renaissance 21 (1974): 176–203.

Shakespeare, Jonson and Venice

163

———. Women and Men in Renaissance Venice. Twelve Essays in Patrician Society. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000. Cohen, Ralph. ‘The Setting of Volpone.’ Renaissance Papers (1978): 65–75. Coryat, Thomas. Coryat’s Crudities (1611), vol. I. Glasgow: James MacLehose and Sons, 1905. Cox, Virginia. ‘The Single Self: Feminist Thought and the Marriage Market in Early Modern Venice.’ Renaissance Quarterly 48, 3 (1995): 513–81. Davis, James Cushman. The Decline of the Venetian Nobility as a Ruling Class. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1962. Derosas, Renzo. ‘Moralità e giustizia a Venezia nel ‘500–‘600. Gli esecutori contro la bestemmia.’ In Stato, società e giustizia nella repubblica veneta (sec. XV–XVIII), edited by Gaetano Cozzi. 435–528. Rome: Società Editoriale Jouvence, 1980. Dutton, Richard. Ben Jonson Authority Criticism. London: Macmillan, 1996. Gillies, John. Shakespeare and the Geography of Difference. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Goddard, Harold C. ‘The Three Caskets.’ In Shakespeare. The Merchant of Venice, edited by John Wilders. 142–62. London: Macmillan, 1969. Hiscock, Andrew. ‘Urban Dystopia: the Colonising of Jonson’s Venice in Volpone.’ In Proceedings of the 6th International Conference of Region and Nation, edited by Winnifred Bogaards. 58–84. St John: New Brunswick University Press, 1998. Jardine, Mick. ‘Jonson as Shakespeare’s Other.’ In Ben Jonson and Theatre. Performance, Practice and Theory, edited by Richard Cave et al. 104–15. London and New York: Routledge, 1999. Jonson, Ben. Volpone. Rev. ed. Edited by Brian Parker. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1999. Larivaille, Paul. La vita quotidiana delle cortigiane nell’Italia del Rinascimento. Milan: Rizzoli, 1983. Laven, Mary. Virgins of Venice. London: Penguin, 2002. Levith, Murray J. Shakespeare’s Italian Settings and Plays. London: Macmillan, 1989. Logan, Sandra. ‘Domestic Disturbance and the Disordered State in Shakespeare’s Othello.’ Textual Practice 18, 3 (2004): 351–75. Machiavelli, Niccolò. Discorsi sopra la prima Deca di Tito Livio. Edited by Corrado Vivanti. Turin: Einaudi, 1983. McPherson, David. Shakespeare, Jonson, and the Myth of Venice. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1990. Midgley, Graham. ‘The Merchant of Venice: A Reconsideration.’ In Shakespeare. The Merchant of Venice, edited by John Wilders. 193–207. London: Macmillan, 1969. Moryson, Fynes. Shakespeare’s Europe. Unpublished Chapters of Fynes Moryson’s Itinerary, Being a Survey of the Condition of Europe at the end of the 16th century. Edited by Charles Hughes. London: Sherratt & Hughes, 1903. Nashe, Thomas. The Unfortunate Traveller and Other Works. London: Penguin, 1981.

164

Visions of Venice in Shakespeare

Orgel, Stephen. Imagining Shakespeare. A History of Texts and Visions. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Oz, Avraham. ‘“Which is the Merchant Here? And Which the Jew?” Riddles of Identity in The Merchant of Venice.’ In Shakespeare and Cultural Traditions, edited by Tstsuo Kishi et al. 155–73. Newark: University of Delaware Press, and London: Associated University Presses, 1994. Parker, Brian. ‘An English View of Venice: Ben Jonson’s Volpone 1606.’ In Italy and the English Renaissance, edited by Sergio Rossi and Dianella Savoia. 188–201. Milan: Unicopli, 1989. Paster, Gail Kern. ‘Ben Jonson’s Comedy of Limitation.’ Studies in Philology 72 (1975): 51–71. ———. The Idea of the City in the Age of Shakespeare. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985. Perocco, Daria. Viaggiare e raccontare. Narrazione di viaggio ed esperienze di racconto tra Cinque e Seicento. Alessandria: Edizioni dell’Orso, 1997. ———. ‘Prose Production in Venice in the Early Seicento.’ In Arcangela Tarabotti. A Literary Nun in Baroque Venice, edited by Elissa B. Weaver. 73–87. Ravenna: Longo, 2006. Pullan, Brian. The Jews of Europe and the Inquisition of Venice 1550–1670. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983. ———. ‘Jewish Banks and Monti di Pietà.’ In The Jews of Early Modern Venice, edited by Robert C. Davis and Benjamin Ravid. 53–72. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. ———. ‘Charity and Usury: Jewish and Christian Lending in Renaissance and Early Modern Italy.’ Proceedings of the British Academy 125 (2003): 19–40. Ravid, Benjamin. ‘The Venetian Government and the Jews.’ In The Jews of Early Modern Venice, edited by Robert C. Davis and Benjamin Ravid. 4–30. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. Redmond, Michael J. ‘“I have read them all”: Jonson’s Volpone and the Discourse of the Italianate Gentleman.’ In The Italian World of English Renaissance Drama: Cultural Exchange and Intertextuality, edited by Michele Marrapodi. 122–40. Newark: University of Delaware Press, and London: Associated University Presses, 1998. Romano, Dennis. ‘Gender and the Urban Geography of Renaissance Venice.’ Journal of Social History 23, 2 (1989): 339–53. Rosenthal, Margaret. The Honest Courtesan. Veronica Franco, Citizen and Writer in Sixteenth–Century Venice. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Ruggiero, Guido. The Boundaries of Eros. Sex Crime and Sexuality in Renaissance Venice. New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1985. Salingar, Leo. ‘The Idea of Venice in Shakespeare and Ben Jonson.’ In Shakespeare’s Italy. Functions of Italian Locations in Renaissance Drama, edited by Michele Marrapodi. 171–84. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1993.

Shakespeare, Jonson and Venice

165

Sanders, Julie. Ben Jonson’s Theatrical Republics. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998. Scarabello, Giovanni. ‘Per una storia della prostituzione a Venezia tra il XIII e il XVIII sec.’ Studi veneziani 47 (2004): 17–101. Shakespeare, William. The Merchant of Venice. 10th rpt. Edited by John Russell Brown. The Arden Shakespeare. London and New York: Methuen, 1984. ———. Othello. Edited by Michael Neill. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Shugg, Wallace. ‘Prostitution in Shakespeare’s London.’ Shakespeare Studies 10 (1977): 291–313. Tempera, Mariangela. ‘“Now I play a merchant’s part”: The Space of the Merchant in Shakespeare’s Early Comedies.’ In Italian Studies in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries, edited by Michele Marrapodi et al. 152–64. Newark: University of Delaware Press, and London: Associated University Presses, 1999. Tenenti, Alberto. Piracy and the Decline of Venice 1580–1615. London: Longmans, 1967. (Trans. of Venezia e i corsari, Bari: Laterza, 1961). Thomas, William. The History of Italy (1549). Edited and abridged by George B. Parks. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1963. Tucci, Ugo. ‘The Psychology of the Venetian Merchant in the Sixteenth Century.’ In Renaissance Venice, edited by John R. Hale. 346–78. London: Faber & Faber, 1973. Tulip, James. ‘The Intertextualities of Ben Jonson’s Volpone.’ Sydney Studies 20 (1994–1995): 20–35. Tyson, Brian F. ‘Ben Jonson’s Black Comedy: A Connection Between Othello and Volpone.’ Shakespeare Quarterly 29 (1978): 60–66. Ungerer, Gustav. ‘Prostitution in Late Elizabethan London: The Case of Mary Newborough.’ Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 15 (2004): 138–223. Vitkus, Daniel. Turning Turk: English Theater and the Multicultural Mediterranean 1570–1630. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Welch, Evelyn. Shopping in the Renaissance. Consumer Cultures in Italy 1400– 1600. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2005. Zorattini, Pier Cesare Ioly. ‘Jews, Crypto Jews and the Inquisition.’ In The Jews of Early Modern Venice, edited by Robert C. Davis and Benjamin Ravid. 99–116. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001.

This page has been left blank intentionally

Chapter 9

The Return from the Dead in The Merchant of Venice Kent Cartwright1

In Shakespeare’s plays, characters keep returning from the dead. In the late romances, for example, Thaisa in Pericles and Hermione in The Winter’s Tale are quasi-mystical revenants, characters who come back from beyond the grave, or at least seem to do so. Likewise in the tragedies and histories, the dead return again and again, sometimes literally, sometimes psychologically or metaphorically: the Ghost of Hamlet’s father; Juliet in the tomb; Caesar’s spirit at Philippi; Richard III’s dream-ghosts; the shade of Banquo that disorders Macbeth’s banquet; Gloucester DIWHUWKHIDOO7KHURPDQFHVJLYHXVUHYLYL¿FDWLRQVWKHWUDJHGLHVPRUHRIWHQJKRVWV± EXWLQHLWKHUFDVHWKH¿JXUHRIWKHUHYHQDQWZRUNVLQWLPDWHO\ZLWKJHQUHLQWKH romances, it holds out the possibility of redemption; in the tragedies, it may symbolize the burden of the past or make manifest the ‘law’ that governs a tragedy. The ghost of Hamlet’s father, for example, stands for the return of the repressed, the law of exposure for hidden sins, and the inevitable destiny of Hamlet himself. But such fatalistic ideas would hardly seem to apply to Shakespeare’s comedies. After all, comedy as a genre tends to emphasize contingency and escape from necessity rather than some tragic haunting by the gory-locked past; its characters are rogues and lovers, and its reigning values erotic and communal. The revenant bears no necessary or obvious relationship to comedy as a genre; in terms of form, it seems supplemental. Notwithstanding, in Shakespeare’s romantic comedies, all sorts of characters are imagined as refunded from the dead: Egeon and Emilia in The Comedy of Errors, Julia in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Hero in Much Ado about Nothing, Viola and Sebastian in Twelfth Night, Claudio in Measure for Measure, Helena in All’s Well that Ends Well among others. Comedy, to be sure, GHDOVLQ¿QGLQJZKDWKDVEHHQORVWEXWZLWK6KDNHVSHDUHWKDWDFWLRQRIWHQHPHUJHV through a highly calibrated and uncanny motif of return from the dead. Whence comes this interest? If the revenant cannot be conclusively explained in terms of genre, then it may express some pressures that derive from culture. This essay explores the return-motif in The Merchant of Venice ¿UVW ZLWK regard to Portia and the life-and-death economy that she entails, and, second,

1 For opportunities to present this essay and for helpful comments, I am indebted to Shaul Bassi, Joan Holmer, Bernice Kliman, Steve Mentz, Jeanne Addison Roberts, Laura Tosi, and especially Pamela Allen Brown.

Visions of Venice in Shakespeare

168

with regard to the return-motif’s relationship to the play’s Venetian setting and environment. The study is part of an investigation of Shakespeare’s romantic comedies for elements that might seem unexpectedly mysterious, quasi-Catholic, anachronistic, even medieval. Underlying that investigation is the conjecture that, although Shakespeare’s tragedies and histories ring with ‘early modernity’ and represent, in Raymond Williams’s useful terminology, ‘emergent’ culture, Shakespeare’s comedies, by contrast, display elements of what Williams calls older, ‘residual’ culture.2 Much recent discussion of early modernity in Shakespeare studies has been driven by an interest in subjectivity, for which the tragedies and histories have emerged as especially apt – but less so the comedies. What is the cultural role of the comedies? In its broadest terms, this project investigates a particular residual comic anachronism, with the thought that, in some cases, the ‘medieval’ may constitute an aspect of what we think of as ‘Renaissance.’ Such a culture must be understood as historically layered and striated, hybrid. The Return of Portia and the Economy of Mortality Even though no one actually dies in The Merchant of Venice, the motif of the return from the dead touches many of its characters. Jessica regards Shylock’s house as ‘hell’ and seeks new life with Lorenzo;3 later Shylock will imagine her as dead. Antonio, by the time of the trial, seems to have lost his desire to live, and he will eventually come back from near death. Lorenzo accepts the inheritance from Shylock as relief from starvation. Even Launcelot Gobbo cruelly convinces his blind father of his death for the pleasure of rejuvenating the old man’s spirits by resurrecting himself. But if this motif applies to many characters in the play, it attaches with a special complexity to Portia. Her return from the dead assumes VLJQDOLPSRUWDQFHIRULWLGHQWL¿HVDFXULRXV9HQHWLDQHFRQRP\RIOLIHDQGGHDWKRI debt and payment that underlies and darkens the play. Indeed, Portia’s beginning life-in-death status, her subsequent redemption by Bassanio, and her demand IRUVDFUL¿FHGULYHPXFKRIWKHDFWLRQ+HUHDQGLQRWKHURI6KDNHVSHDUH¶VHDUO\ comedies, the return-motif avoids the startling theatrical spectacle of, say, a statue coming to life, as in The Winter’s Tale. Rather, it operates metaphorically and symbolically, and shows itself subtly, like tilts of a scale. It is, however, not less suggestive for being slightly below the surface. 2

Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977); see esp. ‘Dominant, Residual, Emergent,’ pp. 121–7. For a discussion in The Merchant of Venice of ‘recursion’ (a desire to retreat into the past from a present that one has helped to create) and its association with death-wish, see Theodore B. Leinwand, Theatre Finance and Society in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 13–19. 3 William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, ed. Jay L. Halio (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 2.3.2. All other quotations from The Merchant will appear parenthetically in the text.

The Return from the Dead in The Merchant of Venice

169

To focus on Portia’s symbolic role is to offer a perspective rather different from current approaches, which tend to analyze the play primarily in relation to Shylock.4 But this is not an essay about Shylock. Indeed, in the present reading, he ZLOOHPHUJHDVWRVRPHH[WHQW3RUWLD¶VQHFHVVDU\VDFUL¿FLDOYLFWLP&RQYHUVHO\ Portia will not be treated here in early-modernist terms as the avatar of feminism, the domesticatrix of desire, or the saleswoman for companionate marriage. Rather, our question will be, what are the implications if we consider Portia as a revenant, D¿JXUHZKRUHWXUQVIURPWKHGHDG" Portia is sometimes understood as a fairy-tale or mythic character entrapped in a castle by a kind of spell, the will of her dead father, to be released when exactly the right prince or knight undertakes the adventure of choosing the right FDVNHW6KHLVWKHµJROGHQÀHHFH¶%DVVDQLRLVKHU-DVRQ %XWMXVWDV fairy tales can have a dreamlike and macabre quality, something about Portia’s story is a little disturbing. Portia bears a foundational association with death. Such an association is hinted generally in the source material for The Merchant of Venice. Merchant’s casket love-test derives from a similar story in the medieval Latin compilation, Gesta Romanorum (published in English translation in 1577 and 1595). In that story, in which a King’s daughter must choose among three YHVVHOVWKH¿UVWYHVVHOLVPDGHRISXUHJROGHQFUXVWHGZLWKSUHFLRXVJHPVEXWLV ‘within, full of dead mens bones’; the second vessel is of silver but ‘fylled with earth and wormes’: beauty without, death within.5 By choosing the third, leaden YHVVHO±OHDGDVVRFLDWHGZLWKGHDWK±WKHSULQFHVV¿QGVJROGDQGSUHFLRXVJHPV and wins a joyful marriage: foreboding without, but beauty, abundance, and life within. A more personal association of Portia with death derives from Merchant’s main source narrative, one of the stories collected in Ser Giovanni Fiorentino’s Il Pecorone (Milan, 1558).6,QWKLVVWRU\WKH3RUWLD¿JXUHDP\VWHULRXVµODG\¶ requires each stranger to undertake ‘to sleep with her, and if he can enjoy, he must take her for wife … But if he cannot enjoy her, he loses everything he has.’7 By means of deception, the lady twice drugs the Venetian Giannetto with a sleeping potion at bedtime so that he is incapable of love-making and fails WKH WHVW WKH VOHHSLQJ SRWLRQ VWDQGLQJ IRU WKH ¿JXUDWLYH GHDWK WKDW SUHFLSLWDWHV

4

‘It is a critical commonplace regarding this play that although he appears in only ¿YHVFHQHV6K\ORFNGRPLQDWHVWKHDFWLRQ¶+DOLRµ*HQHUDO,QWURGXFWLRQ¶The Merchant of Venice, p. 38. 5 This extract from Gesta Romanorum, translated by Richard Robinson (London, 1595), appears in Appendix V of John Russell Brown, ed., The Merchant of Venice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1955), p. 172. On Merchant’s sources, see Halio, ‘General Introduction,’ pp. 13–21. 6 A translation may be found in Appendix I of Brown, pp. 140–53; subsequent references will be made to this edition. For a discussion of Il Pecorone as a source for Merchant see Daria Perocco’s chapter ‘Venice, Shakespeare and the Italian Novella’ in this volume (pp. 33–46). 7 Pecorone, p. 142.

170

Visions of Venice in Shakespeare

his forfeiture of all his possessions and, temporarily, of his identity. This lady delivers symbolic death as much as life. The most famous meditation on the mythic analogues of Portia’s love-test is, of course, Sigmund Freud’s essay, ‘The Theme of the Three Caskets.’8 For Freud, Merchant’s caskets (like baskets or containers) represent women’s bodies. They evoke the recurrent story in myth in which a man must choose between three women or goddesses, as in the judgment of Paris. Portia’s leaden casket, because of its silence and dumbness, would suggest, in particular, the Angel of Death. But how could the right choice for Bassanio be associated with death? Freud argues that Shakespeare subverts that association by making the leaden casket stand ironically for a female whose beauty, wealth, and wisdom proffer life and love: 3RUWLD 7KLV UHPDUNDEOH UHYHUVDO H[HPSOL¿HV WKH SV\FKRORJLFDO VXEVWLWXWLRQ RI opposites that Freud calls the ‘reaction-formation.’ Man employs his imagination to rebel against the knowledge that he is part of nature and subject to its laws. 7KXVE\WKHDJHQF\RIKXPDQZLVKIXO¿OOPHQWZHGLVSODFHWKHIDWDOLVWLFUHDOLW\ of death with its fantasy opposite, and through this psychological mechanism, argues Freud, necessity is converted into choice, nothingness into a surfeit of love: µ1R JUHDWHU WULXPSK RI ZLVKIXO¿OOPHQW LV FRQFHLYDEOH¶9 Freud’s reactionformation notwithstanding, I would argue that, although Portia may function as a life-giver and symbolic replacement for the Angel of Death, she nonetheless SHUVLVWVLQWKHSOD\DVD¿JXUHKHUVHOIDVVRFLDWHGZLWKGHDWK10 She may be, that LV WKH ZLVKIXO¿OOPHQW IDQWDV\ RI WKH UHDFWLRQIRUPDWLRQ RQO\ LQ SDUW 3RUWLD represents, paradoxically, both the escapist, cornucopian goddess that criticism acknowledges and also a shadowy agent in the economy of death. To understand that shadow existence, we need to explore Portia’s associations with death. One of the main points that will emerge – a feature absent from the source stories or from Freud’s account – is that Shakespeare’s Portia is herself PHWDSKRULFDOO\D¿JXUHZKRFRPHVEDFNIURPGHDWK6KH¿UVWDSSHDUVLQDVWDWH of withdrawal. In her opening line, Portia announces, ‘my little body is aweary of this great world’ (1.1.1–2). That speech bespeaks something other than the sadness associated with Antonio (see 1.1.1): physical enervation, ennui. Soon enough, Portia’s claim will sound feigned and exorbitant, but an association has been made. To the extent that Portia is starved of life, it is because ‘the will of a living daughter’ has been ‘curbed by the will of a dead father’ (23–4); the dead father lives, that is, in the debilitating restraints that he has put upon his daughter. 8 Sigmund Freud, ‘The Theme of the Three Caskets’ (1913), in Character and Culture, ed. Philip Rief, vol. 9 of The Collected Papers of Sigmund Freud (New York: Collier Books, 1963), pp. 67–79. 9 Freud, p. 76. 10 In discussing myth and fairy tales, Freud observes, ‘The fairest and the best, she who has stepped into the place of the Death-angel, has kept certain characteristics that border on the uncanny, so that from them we might guess what lay beneath’; ‘Three Caskets,’ p. 77. The present essay pursues such characteristics and uncanny associations in the case of Portia.

The Return from the Dead in The Merchant of Venice

171

If the will of the father constitutes a ‘bond,’ then we have here an early association of ‘bond’ with death.113RUWLDWKXVLGHQWL¿HVKHUVHOIZLWKWKHOLYLQJGHDGDVWDWXV emphasized by her emblem, the ‘casket’ – a word that Shakespeare substitutes for the term ‘vessel’ that occurs in the Elizabethan translation of his source, the Gesta Romanorum. For Elizabethans, ‘casket’ meant primarily a small jewel-box, and the Oxford English Dictionary treats the emergence of ‘casket’ as a synonym IRU µFRI¿Q¶ DV D PLGQLQHWHHQWK FHQWXU\ $PHULFDQ LQQRYDWLRQ 6KDNHVSHDUH nonetheless, did use ‘casket’ ironically as a container of the dead, a corpse or FRI¿QDVKHGRHVLQKing John: ‘They found him dead … / An empty casket, where the jewel of life … was rob’d and ta’en away’ (5.1.40–41; cited in the OED).12 In that image, Shakespeare combines the primary Elizabethan sense of the casket as a jewel-case with an ironic sense of it as the empty repository for what had been the jewel of life.137KXV3RUWLD¶VFDVNHWUHSUHVHQWVERWKDMHZHOFDVHDQGDFRI¿Q± ERWKEHDXW\DQGGHDWKDQGWKH¿UVWVXLWRU0RURFFRPDNHVWKDWFRQQHFWLRQFOHDU In his choosing-scene, Morocco contemplates the golden casket as a treasure chest containing a ‘rich … gem’ (2.7.54), while he rejects the leaden casket precisely because of its connotations of death: ‘It were too gross / To rib her cerecloth in the obscure grave’ (50–51). In these last lines, Morocco refers to the common Renaissance practice of enshrouding corpses in wax-impregnated cloth, FHUHFORWKDQGWKHQSODFLQJWKRVHERGLHVLQVLGHFRI¿QVOLQHGZLWKOHDGVHHOED cerecloth n. 1.). As an example, the 1515 will of the Venetian aristocrat Pietro Bernardo called for his remains to be ‘laid with aloes and other spices’ in an HVSHFLDOO\URRP\µFRI¿QRIOHDG¶14 Morocco’s preference for the golden casket, editors note, likely alludes to Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, Part 2, where Tamburlaine decides that Zenocrate’s dead body shall not be ‘lapped in lead, but in a sheet

11 For an investigation of the terms ‘bond’ and ‘bound’ in the Venetian plays, see Alessandro Serpieri’s chapter ‘Othello and Venice: Discrimination and Projection’ in this volume (pp. 185–93). 12 References to Shakespeare’s works, exclusive of The Merchant of Venice, are taken from Gwynne Blakemore Evans, ed., The Riverside Shakespeare 2nd ed. (Boston: +RXJKWRQ0LIÀLQ  13 See also ‘The Rape of Lucrece,’ 151:7. A related association functions in Pericles, when Pericles repudiates the daughter of Antiochus, beautiful outside, but polluted inside: ‘Fair glass of light, I lov’d you, and could still, / Were not this glorious casket stor’d with LOO¶± 6LPLODUO\DOWKRXJKµFRI¿Q¶ZDVDFFRUGLQJWRWKHOED, already a Tudor term applied to a box in which a corpse was enclosed for burial, Shakespeare sometimes plays LURQLFDOO\ZLWKµFRI¿Q¶DVµMHZHOFDVH¶6K\ORFNZLOOVD\RI-HVVLFDIRUH[DPSOHµ:RXOGVKH ZHUHKHDUVHGDWP\IRRWDQGWKHGXFDWVLQKHUFRI¿Q¶MV 3.1.84–5). In Pericles, Cerimon describes his discovery of the seeming-dead but still-living body of Thaisa: ‘I op’d the FRI¿Q)RXQGWKHUHULFKMHZHOVUHFRYHUHGKHU¶Per 5.3.23–4). 14 From Giuseppe Tassini, Curiosità Veneziane, 9th ed. (Venice, 1988; orig. pub. 1863), p. 75; cited in Ian Littlewood, A Literary Companion to Venice (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991), p. 38.

Visions of Venice in Shakespeare

172

RI JROG¶ WKDW LV LQ D JROGHQ UDWKHU WKDQ D OHDGHQ FRI¿Q  15 The irony of this Tamburlainian echo notwithstanding, it reinforces the image of a casket DV D FRI¿Q ERXQG ZLWK FRQQRWDWLRQV RI GHDWK16 Likewise, during the scene of Morocco’s choice, the audience learns that one of the three caskets contains Portia’s ‘heavenly picture’ (2.7.48). Curiously, however, the ‘heavenly picture’ is quickly transformed metaphorically into the lady herself: ‘Is it like that lead contains her? … / … or in silver she’s immured’ (49–52), with ‘immured’ enhancing the sense of a person entombed. This image of an entombed Portia will be later recalled, as Kenneth Gross notes, in Shylock’s wish that his eloped daughter Jessica might be µKHDUVHGDWP\IRRWDQGWKHGXFDWVLQKHUFRI¿Q¶ 17 As Morocco chooses the golden casket, his own fantasy reaches an aroused height: ‘But here an angel LQDJROGHQEHG/LHVDOOZLWKLQ¶± 7KHODQJXDJHRIWKLV¿UVWFDVNHWFKRRVLQJ scene is key to establishing the audience’s impressions. In some sense, Portia is imagined as a corpse buried in a casket, a living dead person, and a heavenly angel to be reborn into erotic life by the right suitor. Morocco’s choice, of course, earns him the opposite of what he had hoped. ‘Choice’: in this play, the mere act of choosing has implications. For Freud, one of the functions of the reaction-formation is to refashion destiny as contingency; from among the Fates, one can select life. But in The Merchant of Venice that is perhaps not exactly how it works. There, as it turns out, to choose a casket, as Morocco does – to choose any casket – is to choose death.18 Such a dilemma of choice has already been illustrated by Launcelot and will be recapitulated in his conversation with Jessica. To remain with Shylock, Launcelot contends, is for him to stay with ‘a kind of devil,’ while to run away is to be ruled ‘by the devil himself’ (2.2.22, 23). Likewise, Launcelot insists that Jessica is damned if she is the daughter of Shylock and damned if she is not (see 3.5.1–16). This Scylla and Charybdis of choice (the image occurs at 3.5.14–15) also pertains to the suitors, for whom each casket opens a portal to the underworld. The losing suitors suffer metaphoric death; the winner must be replaced by a substitute victim. Suitors who undergo the casket-test are required to pledge, as does Morocco, ‘Never to speak to lady afterward / In way of marriage’ (2.1.41–2). Thus, losers are denied the condition for having progeny and, through them, afterlife. Morocco fears that he may fail and ‘die with grieving’ (2.1.38), and, when he does choose, 15

Cited from Joseph Sandy Cunningham and Eithne Henson (eds.), Tamburlaine the Great (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1998). On the allusion to Tamburlaine, see, among others, Brown, 2.7.51n. 16 Marlowe’s Tamburlaine also carries the portrait of the dead Zenocrate with him DQG¿[HVLWWRKLVUR\DOWHQWDVDWDOLVPDQDJDLQVWKLVHQHPLHVVHH± LQMerchant, Portia’s picture lies within one of the boxes and must be released. 17 Kenneth Gross, Shylock is Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), p. 22. 18 As Pamela Allen Brown has suggested to me, the association of choosing with GHDWKLQWKHSOD\DQGLQWKHVRXUFHQDUUDWLYHV PD\UHÀHFWIURPDJHQGHUHGSRLQWRIYLHZ a subliminal male fear that female sexuality and heterosexual marriage pose a fatal threat.

The Return from the Dead in The Merchant of Venice

173

he is rewarded with a death’s-head, a ‘carrion Death’ with ‘empty eyes’ (2.7.63). In the accompanying scroll, the golden casket is likened to a gilded tomb (see 69), and Morocco is told that his ‘suit is cold’ (73). Morocco responds by emphasizing that imagery: ‘Cold indeed … / Then farewell heat, and welcome frost!’ (74–5). Morocco is a decidedly hot-blooded character from a warm climate; for him to bid farewell to heat and to embrace cold and frost is, in a symbolic sense, for him to die. Thus, he departs precipitously, having ‘too grieved a heart,’ in a self-mourning that marks him as now one of Portia’s victims, as himself now one of the living dead (76). A comparable fate befalls the defeated Arragon, of whom Portia says destructively, ‘Thus hath the candle singed the moth’ (2.9.78). If the losing suitors are condemned to a version of life-in-death, what happens when someone wins? For an answer, we can turn to Bassanio’s casket scene. Here the action is manifestly structured by the threat of death, by Portia’s own return from the dead, and by the implications of choosing. Bassanio experiences himself as tortured ‘upon the rack’ before he can make his selection (3.2.25). As he chooses a casket, Portia has music played so that if he loses he can imitate the creature who dies in song and thus make ‘a swanlike end’ (44); her own weeping eyes will be, she says, ‘the stream / And wat’ry death-bed for him’ (46–7). Likewise, the song from Portia’s train may imitate the sound of a death knell (see 67–72). Bassanio discusses the caskets as if the wrong choice threatened death; he invokes images of the Gorgon’s hair of venomous snakes, a skull in a sepulchre, and a ‘dangerous sea’ (98; see 93–8). The leaden casket itself ‘threaten’st’ (105). The tone of the VFHQHIXO¿OOVWKH0RURFFDQHSLVRGH¶VLPSOLFDWLRQWKDWWRORVHLVWRGLHDQG3RUWLD¶V DPELJXRXVSKUDVHµ,VWDQGIRUVDFUL¿FH¶ PD\ZHOOLQFOXGHWKHLGHDWKDWWKH VXLWRUDVZHOODVVKHWDNHVRQWKHUROHRIVDFUL¿FLDOYLFWLP The suitor’s choice will determine Portia’s resurrection from the dead. Portia likens Bassanio to Herakles charged with rescuing Hesione, who is threatened by a sea monster, and thus Portia cries out to him, ‘Live thou, I live’ (3.2.61).19 With this scene, the sense that Portia herself hovers between life and death has LQWHQVL¿HG DQG WKDW HQGDQJHUPHQW ZLOO KHLJKWHQ WKH HPRWLRQDO FDWKDUVLV RI KHU return from the dead. As a kind of revenant, Portia endures a divided existence; Morocco had referred to her as both ‘mortal breathing saint’ and inanimate ‘shrine’ (2.7.40).20 She seems both dead and alive. That dualistic status turns uncanny as Bassanio makes his choice and opens the leaden casket to discover Portia’s picture. %DVVDQLR¶VVSHFL¿FWHUPV±µFRXQWHUIHLW¶RUµVKDGRZ¶ ±UHLQIRUFHWKH

19 :RUWKQRWLQJ+HVLRQHWKHGDXJKWHURIWKHNLQJRI7UR\ZDVWREHVDFUL¿FHGIRU her father’s refusal to pay a debt incurred to the gods; after Herakles rescued her, her father likewise denied him reward, for which Herakles stormed Troy. 20 In the Middle Ages, the graves of saints were thought to have ‘thaumaturgical powers’ and were capable of inspiring revelations and dream-apparitions; Jean-Claude Schmitt, Ghosts in the Middle Ages: The Living and the Dead in Medieval Society, trans. Teresa Lavender Fagan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998; orig. pub. in French 1994), p. 11.

Visions of Venice in Shakespeare

174

impression, given also by Morocco, that Portia herself, or her double, is somehow hidden within the casket. And, indeed, Portia’s simulacrum now comes strangely to life, for the picture’s eyes seem to Bassanio to move and its lips to part with ‘sugar breath,’ as if the picture could, in its vividness, entrap hearts and rob men’s sight: ‘What demi-god / Hath come so near creation?’ (119, 115–16; see 116–26). Bassanio’s language suggests the key classical and Renaissance rhetorical concept of ‘enargia,’ used to denote a visual description so self-authenticating that the image seems to breathe with life.21 Indeed, ‘counterfeit’ in the Renaissance had a meaning closer to ‘representation’ than to ‘fake,’ and, in a form of reciprocity WKDWVHHPVVOLJKWO\PDJLFDO%DVVDQLRGHVFULEHVLQWKHVKDGRZDYLYL¿FDWLRQWKDW is now re-enacted in the ‘substance’ (127). The doubling of Portia as both picture and self portrays her as an object, a shrine, or a portrait that is capable of coming alive. And, responsively, Portia now experiences in herself a sudden infusion of energy and vitality, so sudden and extreme as to be threatening: ‘O love,’ she says, ‘be moderate! Allay thy ecstasy, / … scant this excess! / I feel too much thy blessing. Make it less, / For fear I surfeit’ (111–14).22 The casket opened, the picture awakened, Portia herself now comes fully, erotically, dangerously to life, inspirited. That kinesthetic transformation is made authentic on another level. Although the scroll inside the casket invites Bassanio to ‘turn’ to Portia and ‘claim’ her, %DVVDQLRLQVWHDGDVNV3RUWLDWRPDNHKLVVXFFHVVµWUXH¶E\FRQ¿UPLQJVLJQLQJ and ratifying it (137, 138, 147; see 148). She responds by committing herself to him and by converting all that is hers to his (see 163–7). Beneath the mannered decorousness of this occasion, Bassanio has, in fact, surrendered his prize and returned it to Portia for her disposal; that is, he gives her choice. That gift of choice renders back to Portia what her father had taken away, her human volition, her individuality, ‘the will of a living daughter.’ Thus, the gift of choice completes DQGFRQ¿UPV3RUWLD¶VUHWXUQIURPWKHGHDGEHFDXVHVKHFDQFKRRVHVKHLVQRZ fully alive. In an important essay, Karen Newman relates the ‘gift’ of Portia by her father to the deep cultural practices of gift exchange in the Renaissance.23 3RUWLDLVFRPPRGL¿HGWRVRPHH[WHQWDVDQREMHFWRIH[FKDQJHLQDKRPRVRFLDO gift economy; yet, Newman argues, she is also empowered and masculinized by her capacity to give beyond the possibility of reciprocity. Bassanio’s surrender of choice to Portia activates her empowerment and agency in the gift economy. 21

On ‘enargia’ (and its similarity to ‘energia’), see Richard A. Lanham, A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms, 2nd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), pp. 64–5. For a discussion of these terms for their classical and Renaissance contexts, see S.K. Heninger, Jr., Sidney and Spenser: The Poet as Maker (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1989), pp. 261–2 passim. 22 Portia’s apostrophe has a suggestively sexual quality: ‘ecstasy,’ ‘rain thy joy,’ ‘I feel too much thy blessing’ (111, 112, 113), as if she were suffused with love or even penetrated by its god. 23 Karen Newman, ‘Portia’s Ring: Unruly Women and Structures of Exchange in The Merchant of Venice,’ Shakespeare Quarterly 38, 2 (1987): pp. 19–33.

The Return from the Dead in The Merchant of Venice

175

That economy also sheds light on Portia’s return from the dead, for, as Lewis Hyde argues in his analysis of tribal gift cultures, a gift is perceived as gaining animate qualities as it is given and re-given: Portia, and perhaps Bassanio, acquire increased vitality, come to life, as they give and receive gifts.24 That all sounds very nice. But in this play, the Gorgon and the dragon guarding WKHÀHHFHGRQRWGLVDSSHDUIRUWKH\DUHLQVRPHVHQVHDOVR3RUWLDZKRLVQRW RQO\WKHVRXUFHRIORYHEHDXW\DQGPXQL¿FHQFHEXWDOVRWKH³$QJHORI'HDWK´,Q her recent book on The Merchant of Venice, Janet Adelman calls attention to a dark VLGHRI3RUWLD¿JXUHGIRUWKLQKHUDVVRFLDWLRQZLWKHPDVFXODWLRQDQGZLWKLPDJHVRI Medea (see 1.1.170–72), ship-rending ocean-wind, and ‘dangerous sea.’25 While on the narrative level Portia brings bounty, on a symbolic level she entails loss. As he studies the deceptive golden casket, Bassanio muses on ‘those crispèd, snaky, golden locks’ that adorn the living but are really ‘the dowry of a second head,’ shorn from a ‘skull’ in a ‘sepulcher’ (3.2.95, 96). That curled golden hair, he says, leads ‘To a most dangerous sea’ (98). But exactly such hair has been the emblem of 3RUWLDZKRVHµVXQQ\ORFNV+DQJRQKHUWHPSOHVOLNHDJROGHQÀHHFH¶±  Indeed, there is something unsettlingly ambiguous in Bassanio’s comment on the painting of Portia’s hair: ‘A golden mesh t’entrap the hearts of men’ (3.2.122). 3RUWLD¶VKDLULVERWKWKHJROGHQÀHHFHDQGWKHGHFHSWLYHGRZU\RIDGHDWK¶VKHDG Indeed, if, at an extreme, Portia’s hair stands for a poisonous spider’s web, her demi-god’s eyes have the power to blind men. The casket-choosing has activated both Portia’s bountifulness and her threat. In The Merchant of Venice, nothing occurs singularly or in isolation. Indeed, WKH SOD\¶V SRVVLELOLWLHV IRU DFWLRQ DUH FRQ¿JXUHG E\ LWV GLVFRXUVH DQG D NH\ characteristic of that discourse is its contrastive pairings: sad and merry; a hot temper and a cold decree; to offend and to judge; things more chased than enjoyed; WUHDVRQDQGORYHVQRZDQG¿UHVLFNDQGZHOOFDQGOHDQGPRRQDJRRGGHHGLQD QDXJKW\ZRUOGJROGHQÀHHFHDQGGHDWK¶VKHDGGRZU\DQGSDUDGLJPDWLFDOO\OLIH and death. Even more, these pairs, like the faces of Janus (recalled at 1.1.50) – Janus, the god of tragedy and comedy, of exits and entrances – are often linked by reciprocity: ‘Then let us say you are sad / Because you are not merry’ (1.1.47–8); ‘Whiles we shut the gate upon one wooer, / Another knocks at the door’ (1.2.130–31). $QHQWUDQFHRUDVXUSOXVLQRQHGLUHFWLRQEHFRPHVDQH[LWRUDGH¿FLWLQDQRWKHU as if qualities were part of a zero-sum symbolic economy. This symbolic economy centers most prominently on the subject of debt: Bassanio borrows from Antonio, who borrows from Shylock, who borrows from Tubal. In this world of reciprocity, RQHSHUVRQ¶VJDLQLVDOZD\VDQRWKHU¶VORVV3RUWLDVWDQGVIRUVDFUL¿FHDQGKHUGHEW must be paid, if not by Bassanio then by a substitute.

24 Lewis Hyde, The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World, 2nd ed. (New York: Vintage Books, 2007; originally published 1979); see especially pp. 32–50. 25 Janet Adelman, Blood Relations: Christians and Jews in The Merchant of Venice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), p. 130.

176

Visions of Venice in Shakespeare

-XVW DW WKH PRPHQW WKDW WKH EHWURWKDO RI 3RUWLD DQG %DVVDQLR LV FRQ¿UPHG messengers arrive with a letter from Antonio saying that his ‘bond is forfeit,’ that ‘in paying it, it is impossible I should live’ (315–17), and that he wishes only to see Bassanio at his death. It is plausible to think that Antonio has become enervated because Portia has replaced him in Bassanio’s affections; if Bassanio is his beloved, then Antonio’s reason for living has been taken away. Yet the intrusive news of $QWRQLRDOVRIXO¿OOVDGLIIHUHQWNLQGRIVXEVWLWXWLRQWKHFORVHIULHQGVXEVWLWXWHG IRU VDFUL¿FH LQ SODFH RI WKH VXLWRU ZKR KDV VDYHG KLV RZQ OLIH 6XFK VDFUL¿FLDO substitution helps to make clear the structural relationship between Antonio and Bassanio as symbolic doubles. As the play’s imagery and action show, the two mirror each other. While Bassanio has likened himself to Jason (see 1.1.169–72, 3.2.239), Antonio’s ships are described as ‘argosies’ (5.1.276; see also 1.3.18, 3.1.95). Similarly, the term ‘prodigal’ has been applied to each (1.1.129, 2.4.15, 3.1.42), DQGZKHQ*UD]LDQRLPDJLQHVWKHµSURGLJDO¶µVFDUIqGEDUN¶WKDWLV¿UVWµHPEUDFqG¶ and then ‘rent’ and ‘beggared’ by the ‘strumpet wind,’ he recalls aspects of both Bassanio’s and Antonio’s undertakings (2.6.14–19). In his choosing scene, Bassanio claims that Portia is his ‘torturer’ (3.2.25, 37); likewise, moments before, Antonio has been placed in danger of ‘torture’ by Shylock (3.1.109). Shakespeare stresses the symbolic doubleness of the kinsmen, furthermore, by dramaturgically aligning Bassanio’s successful advances with subsequent and parallel losses by Antonio. The Messenger’s announcement of Bassanio’s arrival at Belmont with ‘gifts of rich value’ (2.9.90) is followed immediately by Salarino’s announcement that ‘Antonio hath a ship of rich lading wrecked on the narrow sea,’ on a ‘dangerous’ and ‘fatal’ shoal (3.1.2–3, 5). In such ways, the play suggests that Bassanio’s progress toward Portia engenders Antonio’s failure, or – to put it in present terms – that Antonio, as substitute, makes it possible for Bassanio to avoid disaster by suffering for him the ruin that Portia entails. Antonio functions here as the alternate who must lose everything to pay the debt for Portia’s return to fullness of life. In the schema of Freud’s reactionIRUPDWLRQ WKH$QJHO RI 'HDWK LV FRQYHUWHG E\ KXPDQ ZLVKIXO¿OOPHQW LQWR WKH Goddess of Life, but in The Merchant of Venice Portia retains a certain dualism, for she is associated not only with the symbolic deaths of losing suitors but also now with the prospective real death of the victorious suitor’s substitute. Shakespeare’s comedies take a special interest in substitution, that is, in the way that characters resemble, replace, and mediate for each other, as evidenced by plays such as The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Comedy of Errors, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In the reciprocal dualisms and the symbolic economy of The Merchant of Venice, the death of the substitute can pay for Portia’s reanimation. Indeed, substitution seems integral to the play’s complex issues of borrowing, debt, transference, and debt payment. The Merchant of Venice, of course, has further substitutions in store, for $QWRQLR¶VSODFHDVVDFUL¿FLDOYLFWLPZLOOXOWLPDWHO\EHWDNHQE\6K\ORFN$QWRQLR¶V reversal of fortune and salvation in the trial scene are so well known that they need no detailed rehearsal here. One might note, however, that the judge who

The Return from the Dead in The Merchant of Venice

177

puts retributive law in the place of mercy and the avenger in the place of the victim is Portia. Given the argument above, Portia’s reversal of positions becomes more than just a clever turning of the tables on Shylock, for it also expresses her residual nature as death-giver and enacter of the law of victimhood. Shylock as D YLFWLP EHDUV DVVRFLDWLRQ 3DXOD %ODQN KDV UHFHQWO\ DUJXHG ZLWK 3RUWLD¶V ¿UVW victim, Morocco; indeed, Moors, Turks, and Jews are so linked in the Renaissance imagination, observes Blank, that when a Moor or a Turk appears, a Jew cannot be far behind.26 As the comic Morocco’s more tragic double, Shylock thus slips into the role of victim preordained for him. But one should not step too easily away from the subject of Shylock. If he so towers over the play, so dominates the trial scene, as critics suggest, is it right to sum him up simply as Portia’s victim? No, and yes. Kenneth Gross argues that in the trial scene Shylock illustrates a ‘poetics of repugnancy’ as he performs the outsized rage and hatred that he himself recognizes as inexplicable. That self-celebrated repugnancy makes him theatrically incandescent and yet fundamentally opaque.27 He becomes a spectacle. $WLWVH[WUHPHRQHPLJKWDUJXHWKHVSHFWDFXODU¿QDOO\FUHDWHVLWVRZQPHDQLQJ and, in so doing, makes itself inaccessible to further analysis. Shylock can become Portia’s victim, because he has turned himself into a horrifying object beyond the bounds of our understanding – of our obligation to understand. He has rendered himself, as Portia now calls him, ‘alien’ (4.1.345).28 Yet it is worth observing, too, how defeat transforms Shylock. The Venetian Christians have the forfeit of Shylock’s life and goods, but the Duke pardons him from execution and hints at the restoration of half his fortune. It looks as if Shylock will have his own return from the dead. But there is a price: the Jew must make Lorenzo his heir and turn Christian. ‘Art thou contented, Jew?’ asks Portia. Shylock does not immediately answer, because she must ask again, ‘What dost thou say?’ (4.1.389). Finally he responds, ‘I am content,’ words that actors, such as Sir Laurence Olivier, have sometimes rightly delivered in a weak and failing voice (390). Like Portia’s earlier victims, Shylock is losing energy, vitality. ‘I pray you, give me leave to go from hence. / I am not well,’ he says in his last speech of the play; ‘Send the deed after me, / And I will sign it’ (391–3). For this parting impression of Shylock, why does Shakespeare emphasize the deed and the business of its signing, a detail that he might have easily ignored? Rather than omitting it, he foregrounds it: ‘Get thee gone, but do it,’ answers the Duke, referring to the signing of the deed (393). In the next scene, Portia will enter and ostentatiously hand Nerissa the deed for Shylock to sign: ‘Inquire the Jew’s house out, give him this deed, / And let him sign it … / … / … This deed will be well welcome to Lorenzo’ (4.2.1–2, 4). Graziano interrupts this action by arriving with Bassanio’s ring, but the business of Shylock’s signing of the deed 26 Paula Blank, Shakespeare and the Mismeasure of Renaissance Man (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006), pp. 111, 100–101; see pp. 80–117. 27 See Gross, pp. 65–74. 28 See Gross, p. 102.

Visions of Venice in Shakespeare

178

will not be allowed to fade away, for Portia now asks Graziano to ‘show my youth old Shylock’s house’ (4.2.11), and she speeds them on with ‘Away! Make haste’ (18). ‘My youth … old Shylock’: the signing of the deed stands for the passing of something – sustenance, right to life – from old to young. Shylock, of course, is never again named. He is recalled in the last act, but only as ‘the wealthy Jew’ and, more metaphorically, as ‘The man that hath no music LQKLP¶DQGZKRLVWKXVµ¿WIRUWUHDVRQVVWUDWDJHPVDQGVSRLOV¶  Shylock’s persona has disappeared into his caricature. All that remains of him is the document, his deed of will to Lorenzo. In a reprise of the ostentatious action between Portia and Nerissa in the previous scene, the deed is once again brought forward and handed physically to Lorenzo: ‘From the rich Jew a special deed of gift, / After his death, of all he dies possessed of’ (292–3). Lorenzo responds as if Shylock were already dead: ‘Fair ladies, you drop manna in the way / Of starvèd people’ (294–5). As with so much in The Merchant of Venice, these few lines are rich with irony. First, Lorenzo likens himself and Jessica to ‘starvèd people’; they are among the near-dead, now redeemed to life by Portia, and they take their place in the little band of the resurrected in Belmont, including Portia, Antonio, and Bassanio. Second, by contrast, Shylock is as good as dead. He has been drained of vitality, and the manifest enervation in his last lines, ‘I am not well,’ may distantly echo Portia’s opening claim of world-weariness. As Portia had once been displaced by her symbol, the casket, Shylock is now displaced by his symbol, the legal agreement – the bond. Portia has returned from the dead; Shylock will not; all that is left of him is his last will and testament. His transformation into an object counterpoints Portia’s earlier transformation out of an object. Shylock has become, like Portia at the beginning, one of the living dead – or, more likely, worse. A profound reversal has completed itself, for the will of the living daughter now entirely subsumes the will of a ‘dead’ father. Indeed, Jay Halio calls Shylock ‘the true spirit of deathliness’ in the play,29 and one might infer that the association with death has now transferred from Portia to Shylock. Third, although the will or deed stands as a legal document, it has also transformed, profoundly and ironically, into a gift from the gods, manna from heaven – and one is tempted to see in this transformation the working of Freud’s reaction-formation. Such manna had been provided miraculously by a benign Lord to his wilderness-wandering people, the Jews; here those tribes have been entirely displaced by their ironic substitutes, the prodigal Venetians, taking gifts at the hand of their strange deity, Portia (see Exodus 16:15). The Hybridity of Venice In the curious economy of this play, Shylock, through a series of substitutions, pays the debt owed for Portia’s coming alive. That linkage brings us to Venice DQGLQWURGXFHVWKHTXHVWLRQRIWKHUROHRI¿FWLRQDO9HQLFHLQWKHSOD\IRU6K\ORFN

29

Halio, ‘General Introduction,’ p. 19.

The Return from the Dead in The Merchant of Venice

179

stands at the heart of that city. It ought not be remarkable, as we have suggested, WKDW$QWRQLRSURYLGHVD¿WWLQJVXEVWLWXWHIRU%DVVDQLR%XWLIWKDWVXEVWLWXWLRQLV EDVHGRQDI¿QLW\RUUHVHPEODQFHFDQWKHHWKQLFRXWVLGHU6K\ORFNEHVXEVWLWXWHG for Antonio? The two businessmen are locked, through enmity, in a special and exclusive relationship – but I do not wish to make a characterological argument KHUH7KHFKDLQRIVDFUL¿FHFDOOVIRUD¿QDOVFDSHJRDWDKDOIYLOODLQRIFRPSOH[ PRUDOSURPSWLQJVDQGDPELJXRXVVRFLDOVWDWXVIHDWXUHVSHUIHFWO\IXO¿OOHGE\WKH Venetian Jew. Socially, Shylock is at least as much an outsider as are Arragon RU 0RURFFR -DPHV 6KDSLUR KDV GHVFULEHG WKH ¿JXUH RI WKH -HZ LQ 5HQDLVVDQFH England as the consummate outsider, ‘the Other of Others,’ marginalized as androgynous, monstrous, criminal, heretical, and necromantic.30 Some other critics have argued against the view that Elizabethans were entirely hostile toward the ¿JXUHRIWKH-HZDWOHDVWRQVWDJH31 – and, certainly, Shylock has his sympathetic moments. Although few Jews played a part in Shakespeare’s England, in Venice, by contrast, they held a tense but tolerated role in public life not only as moneylenders but also as international merchants.32 Writing in 1611 about his travels, the Englishman Thomas Coryat, for example, describes some of the Jews whom he KDGHQFRXQWHUHGLQ9HQLFHKHQRWHVWKDW¿YHRUVL[WKRXVDQGOLYHLQWKH*KHWWR DV ‘goodly and proper men’ and ‘elegant and sweet featured persons,’ utterly unlike the stereotypes of Jews that he reports prevailing in England.33 +H ¿QGV PDQ\ Jewish women to be ‘as beautiful as any I ever saw, and so gorgeous in their apparel, jewels, chaines of gold, and rings adorned with precious stones, that some of our English Countesses do scare exceede them’ (372). Although Coryat deplores FHUWDLQRIWKHLUSUDFWLFHVKH¿QGV9HQHWLDQ-HZVSUDLVHZRUWK\LQWKHLUUHMHFWLRQ of image-worship and admirably devout in their observances of the Sabbath and feast days, noteworthy approval at a time when Protestants were rejecting Catholic iconophilia and looking for devotional models in ancient practices. ‘I would to God our Christians would imitate the Jewes herein,’ he declares (373).34 As these comments suggest, Venice would have appeared to Elizabethans as a place of both ethnic diversity and relative tolerance for Protestants. Even though Venice was ¿UPO\&DWKROLFLWVUHVLVWDQFHWRWKH3DSDF\ZDVZHOONQRZQ$OWKRXJKWKHFLW\ 30

James Shapiro, ‘Shakespeare and the Jews,’ in The Merchant of Venice: New Casebooks, ed. Martin Coyle (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998), pp. 73–91, on p. 76; see also p. 89. 31 For a summary of such views, see Charles Edelman, ‘Recent Critical and Stage Interpretations,’ in The Merchant of Venice, ed. Molly Maureen Mahood, updated edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 55–6. 32 On Venetian Jews as merchants and moneylenders, see Walter Cohen, ‘The Merchant of Venice and the Possibilities of Historical Criticism,’ English Literary History, 49, 4 (1982): pp. 769–71. 33 Thomas Coryat, Coryat’s Crudities (1611), vol. 1. (Glasgow: James MacLehose and Sons, 1905), p. 372. Henceforth quoted parenthetically in the text. 34 Nonetheless, Coryat deplores the obstinacy of the Jews in adhering to anachronistic ‘Mosaicall ceremonies’ and out-dated ‘observations of Moyses Law’ (pp. 373, 375).

180

Visions of Venice in Shakespeare

had an active, albeit small, Protestant minority, heresy was generally treated with less severity in Venice than it was elsewhere in Europe, as John Jeffries Martin’s superb study of Protestantism in sixteenth-century Venice demonstrates.35 Venice offers the kind of apparently hybrid locale, then, where Shylock the Jew, the Elizabethan ‘Outsider of Outsiders,’ could be partially recuperated as a legitimate EXVLQHVVPDQDQGPHPEHURIVRFLHW\,Q3RUWLD¶VHFRQRP\RIVDFUL¿FH6K\ORFNLV acceptable enough in Venice’s mercantile and social world to replace Antonio, but VXI¿FLHQWO\DQRXWVLGHUOLNH0RURFFRDQG$UUDJRQ±DQGVXI¿FLHQWO\VHOIGHJUDGHG± to cost the audience little sympathy. Shylock is disposable, furthermore, because he represents what is not only old but also anachronistic. For all his praise of the Venetian Jews, Coryat emphasizes that his conversations with them revealed their superstitious, obstinate, and vehement adherence to a Mosaic law that had long since passed its expiration date (372–6). Likewise, Walter Cohen analyzes the Venetian Jew as, from one angle, a modern international merchant, and as, from DQRWKHUDQJOHDXVXUHUUHSUHVHQWDWLYHRIGHFOLQLQJIHXGDOLVPµD¿JXUHIURPWKH past,’ ‘archaic, medieval … an old man with obsolete values.’36 With such a hybrid LPDJHWKH¿JXUHRIWKH9HQHWLDQ-HZVHUYHVDSWO\DVERWKVXEVWLWXWHDQGYLFWLP37 9HQLFHVDWLV¿HVWKHWKHPDWLFQHHGVRIThe Merchant of Venice in other ways, too. Venice’s reputation as a world center for mercantile trade made it obviously perfect for the themes of contract, bond, money, and debt that saturate the play. In the Renaissance ‘Myth of Venice,’ according to David McPherson, the city’s fame rested not only on its wealth, wisdom, and liberty, but also on its indulgence of pleasure and its licentiousness.38 Shakespeare comprehends this image, but also takes a deeper and more expansive view of Venice, the city becoming for him the manifestation of a historical moment. Venice is a hybrid locale, and fundamental to Shakespeare’s dramatic conception is just such a city. It is a place where, Thomas Coryat says, one may ‘see all manner of fashions of attire, and heare all the languages of Christendome, besides those that are spoken by the barbarous Ethnickes’ (314). It is, he adds, ‘not a city’ but ‘a market place of the world’ (314) – a commonplace phrase also used in the English translation of Gasparo Contarini’s The Commonwealth and Government of Venice.39 Perhaps alone in the world, Venice is Christian but receptive to Jews, Turks, and Asians; Catholic

35 John Jeffries Martin, Venice’s Hidden Enemies: Italian Heretics in a Renaissance City (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993). 36 Cohen, p. 771. 37 There is also an apposite irony in Shylock becoming a replacement victim, since he has himself engaged in scapegoating when he displaced his anger over his daughter’s elopement with Lorenzo onto a substitute, Bassanio. 38 David McPherson, Shakespeare, Jonson, and the Myth of Venice (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1990), pp. 27–50. 39 Gasparo Contarini, The Commonwealth and Government of Venice, trans. Lewes Lewkenor (London, 1599; reprinted Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum; New York: Da Capo Press, 1969), p. 1.

The Return from the Dead in The Merchant of Venice

181

EXWUHODWLYHO\WROHUDQWRI3URWHVWDQWKHUHV\SRVVHVVHGRIµPDUYHORXVDIÀXHQFHDQG exuberancy in all things,’ as Coryat notes, but containing a gentry restrained in displays of wealth (119, 120); republican but also oligarchic; Renaissance in its entrepreneurial capitalism but medieval in its power structure. It is a city where DPXQL¿FHQWDULVWRFUDWFDQDOVREHDPHUFKDQWZKHUHWKHJLIWHFRQRP\DQGWKH market economy interpenetrate. In these paradoxes, I would suggest, hybrid Venice is the very image of Shakespeare’s Renaissance. Those kinds of contradictions are mirrored in The Merchant of Venice – and they often take the form of layers and striations of old and new, ambivalences that GUDZXVWRZDUGWKH¿QDOSRLQWRIWKLVHVVD\3RUWLDLQWKHGXDOUROHRI$QJHORI'HDWK and Lady Bountiful suggests a tension between values medieval and early modern. One of the characteristic associations of the early modern is with abundance, with copia and dilation as rhetorical values (as Patricia Parker has shown),40 and with a new world of international trade and commercial plenitude. Portia, in this respect, WHVWL¿HV WR WKH PHUF\ RI *RG VR SOHQWHRXV WKDW LW µGURSSHWK DV WKH JHQWOH UDLQ from heaven,’ just as her rhetoric swells with its vision of mercy (4.1.189); she possesses wealth so abundant that to repay the bond she can double the three thousand ducats, and then ‘double six thousand and then treble that’ (3.2.309). Yet equally real – and perhaps more real because woven so deeply into the symbolic VWUXFWXUH±LV3RUWLD¶VDVVRFLDWLRQZLWKVDFUL¿FLDOGHEWDQGDQHFRQRPLFVRIGHDWK At this level, the play suggests the symbolic, dark, and plague-tinged colorations of a medieval narrative such as Chaucer’s ‘The Pardoner’s Tale.’ Curiously, the Portia who, as death-angel, stands for a kind of quasi-medieval and Mosaic law is the judge who sends the medievalized Shylock into oblivion. The character who exorcises the past is herself something of a remnant of that past, as if an aspect of the Renaissance might be its simultaneous rejection and incorporation RIDQDFKURQLVP,QGHHGWKHLGHDRID¿JXUHWKDWUHWXUQVIURPWKHGHDGVXJJHVWV FU\SWR&DWKROLF YDOXHV DW RGGV ZLWK RI¿FLDO (OL]DEHWKDQ 3URWHVWDQWLVP YDOXHV recurrent in notions such as purgatory, intercessory prayer, curses, and the imminence of the ghosts of our ancestors (Portia, after all, visits shrines on her way back to Belmont). Such values, one could argue, are perhaps contained and diminished by being secularized and then relegated to the dark side of Portia. But they are there, nonetheless. And to that extent, The Merchant of Venice speaks with an echo of medievalism, anachronism, and mysticism that cannot quite be stilled. That echo might return us to Raymond Williams’s terms and to a sense of medieval ‘residual’ culture posed in disturbing tension with the ‘emergent’ early modern. If the image of Shakespeare’s Renaissance can be captured in hybrid Venice, then medievalism, like Portia, may constitute the psycho-cultural uncanny, the residual presence that makes itself felt as if it, too, had returned from the dead.

40 See, for example, Patricia Parker, Shakespeare from the Margins: Language, Culture, Context (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), passim.

182

Visions of Venice in Shakespeare

Works Cited Adelman, Janet. Blood Relations: Christians and Jews in The Merchant of Venice. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. Blank, Paula. Shakespeare and the Mismeasure of Renaissance Man. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006. Cohen, Walter. ‘The Merchant of Venice and the Possibilities of Historical Criticism.’ English Literary History 49: 4 (1982): 765–89. Contarini, Gasparo. The Commonwealth and Government of Venice. Translated by Lewes Lewkenor, London, 1599. Reprinted Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum; New York: Da Capo Press, 1969. Coryat, Thomas. Coryat’s Crudities (1611), vol. 1. Glasgow: James MacLehose and Sons, 1905. Edelman, Charles. ‘Recent Critical and Stage Interpretations.’ In William Shakespeare. The Merchant of Venice, edited by Molly Maureen Mahood. 54–65. Updated edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Freud, Sigmund. ‘The Theme of the Three Caskets’ (1913). In Character and Culture, edited by Philip Rief. Vol. 9 of The Collected Papers of Sigmund Freud. 67–79. New York: Collier Books, 1963. Gross, Kenneth. Shakespeare is Shylock. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Heninger, Jr., S.K. Sidney and Spenser: The Poet as Maker. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1989. Hyde, Lewis. The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World. 2nd ed. New York: Vintage Books, 2007. Lanham, Richard A. A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms. 2nd ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. Leinwand, Theodore B. Theatre Finance and Society in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Littlewood, Ian. A Literary Companion to Venice. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991. McPherson, David. Shakespeare, Jonson, and the Myth of Venice. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1990. Marlowe, Christopher. Tamburlaine the Great. Edited by Joseph Sandy Cunningham and Eithne Henson. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998. Martin, John Jeffries. Venice’s Hidden Enemies: Italian Heretics in a Renaissance City. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993. Newman, Karen. ‘Portia’s Ring: Unruly Women and Structures of Exchange in The Merchant of Venice.’ Shakespeare Quarterly 38, 2 (1987): 19–33. Parker, Patricia. Shakespeare from the Margins: Language, Culture, Context. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Schmitt, Jean-Claude. Ghosts in the Middle Ages: The Living and the Dead in Medieval Society. Translated by Teresa Lavender Fagan. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998 (orig. pub. in French 1994).

The Return from the Dead in The Merchant of Venice

183

Shakespeare, William. The Merchant of Venice. Edited by John Russell Brown. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1955. ———. The Merchant of Venice. Edited by Jay L. Halio. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993. ———. The Riverside Shakespeare. 2nd ed. Edited by Gwynne Blakemore Evans. %RVWRQ+RXJKWRQ0LIÀLQ ———. The Merchant of Venice. Updated edition. Edited by Molly Maureen Mahood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Shapiro, James. ‘Shakespeare and the Jews.’ In The Merchant of Venice: New Casebooks, edited by Martin Coyle. 73–91. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998. Williams, Raymond. Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977.

This page has been left blank intentionally

Chapter 10

Othello and Venice: Discrimination and Projection Alessandro Serpieri

Discrimination and projection, the words used in my title, had not yet assumed in Shakespeare’s time the sociological and psychological meaning which is now current. Discrimination LV GH¿QHG E\ OED 1 as ‘The action of discriminating; the perceiving, noting, or making a distinction or difference between things; DGLVWLQFWLRQPDGHZLWKWKHPLQGRULQDFWLRQ ¶DQGLWV¿UVWTXRWHGXVHGDWHG 1648, refers to religious debates: Eikon Basilike, ‘Take heed of abetting any factions, of applying to any publique discriminations in matters of religion, contrary to what is, in your judgement, and the Church well setled.’ Its racial VHQVHLVGH¿QHGLQFDVµ7KHPDNLQJRIGLVWLQFWLRQVSUHMXGLFLDOWRSHRSOHRID different race or color from oneself, racial discrimination,’ but quotes start only from 1866. Projection enters the language at the end of the sixteenth century both in alchemy (OED, 2.a) and in mathematics and cartography (OED, 7.a and b). It takes on a metaphorical meaning, again in connection with alchemy, in Ben Jonson’s New Inn, Act 3, scene 2 (OED, 2.b). Its psychoanalytic meaning dates from 1909: ‘The unconscious process or fact of projecting one’s fears, feelings, desires, or fantasies on to other persons, things, or situations, in order to avoid recognizing them as one’s own and so to justify one’s behaviour’ (OED, 9.b). In IDFWLWLVWKDQNVWR)UHXGWKDWWKHFRQFHSWRISURMHFWLRQZDVDFFXUDWHO\GH¿QHG starting from his studies of paranoiac processes of expulsion and localization in the other of rejected inner drives. Nonetheless, the two processes were certainly at play in the ideological depths of post-Renaissance (and post-Reformation) civilization. Shakespeare tackled such thorny issues with the greatest dramatic subtlety in The Merchant of Venice and Othello, which not by chance are located in Venice, a place which epitomized the complexity and the contradictions of the age, thus proving a particularly appropriate setting for the dramatic representation of both processes. In fact, despite its incipient decline, Venice was still for all Europeans the Republic of great traditions, the western gate to the East, the crossroads of commerce and adventure, the splendid seat of extraordinary wealth and fertile cosmopolitan culture: Italian, but also German, English, Flemish, Jewish, and Oriental. In VXFKDFRVPRSROLWDQVRFLHW\FRQÀLFWVZHUHDOZD\VEURRGLQJDQGFRQVHTXHQWO\ Venice was the most appropriate place where a dramatist like Shakespeare could best represent contemporary tensions and discriminations (racial, ethnic, and

Visions of Venice in Shakespeare

186

religious), taking it, in a certain sense, as a transposed image of his mercantile London, the new gate to the West. Since its wealth came from trade, and from the accumulation of capital, its laws had to enforce legal tolerance; but social, ideological, and psychological forms of intolerance were always lurking under the surface of its new bourgeois society. I assume that the main lexical and conceptual clusters on which Shakespeare constructed both the Merchant and Othello PLJKW EH LGHQWL¿HG LQ WKH KLJK RU highly pregnant, recurrence of the words bond and bound, in which various shades of meaning may be conveyed according to the contexts. The legal sense of bond is ‘debenture or obligation’ (OED n1, III.9.a), and, as such, it constitutes the pivotal element in the plot of The Merchant of Venice. But there is much more than this LQ WKH WZR SOD\V7KH UHIHUHQWLDO DV ZHOO DV WKH ¿JXUDWLYH DPELJXLW\ RI bond is concisely summed up by OED n1, II as ‘A restraining or uniting force.’ How and in how many ways may it restrain or unite?1 Shakespeare ingeniously explored all the ambiguous implications inherent in the term in the two plays, since it is against the backdrop of complex and contradictory bonds or contracts that their dramatic plots develop, starting from the overt bond between the merchant Antonio and the usurer Shylock in the comedy, and from the secret bond imposed upon Othello’s mind by Iago in the tragedy. The ambiguous comedy is entirely built on an intricate knot of bonds in which all the characters are more or less directly entrapped: 1. the initial bond between Antonio and Shylock – the merry bond, as the latter calls it with tragic irony in 1.3.169 – which is sealed despite, or according to, mutual hatred; 2. the love bond between Bassanio and Portia (in turn, an ambiguous one, since it is clear HQRXJKWKDW%DVVDQLRPHDQV¿UVWRIDOOWRPDUU\PRQH\ WKHERQGRIGHDWK which Shylock claims without condition by equating body as a commodity to PRQH\DVDFRPPRGLW\DQGWKH¿QDOERQGVRI6K\ORFN¶VIRUFHGFRQYHUVLRQ to Christianity and of Antonio’s exclusion from the lovers’ community. The far 1

A selection of the acceptations of to bind and bond listed by OED may illuminate the rich vein of their occurrences in the two plays. Apart from its physical sense, ‘to tie fast,’ etc., the verb to bindKDVDUHOHYDQW¿JXUDWLYHVHQVHµ6DLGRIVLFNQHVVVLQSDVVLRQ affection, intellectual embarrassment, a magic spell etc.’ (OED 2.b); which, as we shall see, applies to Desdemona’s enchantment – according to Brabantio – and even more to Iago’s temptation of Othello. As for bond, both as a social and sentimental contract or union, it LVµ$XQLWLQJRUFHPHQWLQJIRUFHRULQÀXHQFHE\ZKLFKDXQLRQRIDQ\NLQGLVPDLQWDLQHG¶ as in the case of ‘bonds of wedlock or matrimony’ (OED n1 II, 7.a and 7.b): against this bond Iago’s effort is directed right from the beginning of the play. The negative sense of bond is either physical (OED n1, I.1.a: ‘Anything with which one’s body or limbs are bound in restraint of personal liberty’), or physical and / or psychological (OED n1, II.5: ‘Any circumstance that trammels or takes away freedom of action; a force which enslaves the mind etc.’); a meaning which well applies to Iago’s intrigue. Moreover, OED n2, 2 and 3 present obsolete meanings of bond, which could stand both for the ‘Householder, or master of the house,’ and for a ‘Base vassal, serf … one in bondage to a superior,’ meanings which FRQFHUQWKHPDVWHU±VODYHFRQÀLFWZKLFKSHUPHDWHV,DJR¶VVXEYHUVLRQRIUROHV

Othello and Venice

187

from comic irony of the play is that, at the end, the two parties contracting the ¿UVWERQGZKLFKWULJJHUHGWKHZKROHVWRU\UHPDLQDOLHQDWHGERXQGDVWKH\DUH to an analogous bond of isolation. Their function is no longer pertinent to the values of a mercantile-bourgeois society in its positive self-representation, which requires the repression of usury (which, under another name, interest, and a lower rate, is essential to capitalism), and of platonic homosexuality, which disturbs the marriage bond (as a contract partly based on private property and a fusion of economic fortunes). In the end, success goes to the union of Bassanio and Portia, which represents the historical bond between the new mercantile bourgeoisie and the surviving feudal structure, and between Venice and Belmont, a bond that is also a metaphor of the turbulent social and cultural transformation of Elizabethan England. In a different way from the Merchant, Othello displays other kinds of bonds, but once again mostly in their negative acceptations. Even though the lexeme bond does not appear in the drama, bondage, bondslave, and, above all, bound VLJQL¿FDQWO\UHFXULQFUXFLDOSDVVDJHV7KLVLVSUREDEO\WKH¿UVWSOD\LQZKLFKD tragic plot develops out of a non-existent story, the betrayal which Desdemona is accused of after contracting her scandalous love-bond with the Moor Othello. ‘This may be a caution to all Maidens of Quality how, without their Parents’ consent, they run away with Blackamoors,’2 Thomas Rymer wrote, not many years later, in his devastating critique of the tragedy. He reads it from the point of view of Brabantio, when he vehemently argues to the Duke and the Senators that Desdemona must have been ‘bound’ to such a ‘sooty bosom’ (1.2.70) only by µFKDLQVRIPDJLF¶ DFULPHZKLFKPLJKW¿QDOO\VXEYHUWWKHVRFLDORUGHU itself of the state of Venice.3 Iago is the character who aims at getting free from his own servile bond, since KHIHHOVWKDWKHKDVEHHQGLVFULPLQDWHGDJDLQVWLQKLVRI¿FHWRWKHDGYDQWDJHRI Cassio, and plans to retaliate against the Moor who has just contracted a monstrous love-bond with the white Venetian. From the very beginning all his actions are meant to ruin both Othello and Desdemona, who appears to him to have been seduced to marriage only out of beastly lust. Thus the drama unfolds as a deeply psychic, or better psycho-anthropological, intrigue, which amounts to a disturbing staging of the damnation of the Other in the context of a perverse mentality, which removes and expels the ‘monsters’ of one’s own imaginary (or, in French, imaginaire) by means of projection.4 In the context of the post-Reformation issue of predestination, the opposition between identity (which amounts to self-assurance: ‘I am’) and otherness (which 2

Thomas Rymer, A Short View of Tragedy (1693), in The Critical Works of Thomas Rymer, ed. Curt A. Zimansky. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1956, p. 132. 3 My quotations are from Othello, ed. E.A.J. Honigmann (The Arden Shakespeare [Third Series]. Walton-on-Thames: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1997). 4 For a thorough analysis of Othello according to this interpretation, I refer the readers to my volume Otello: l’Eros negato (Naples: Liguori, 2003).

188

Visions of Venice in Shakespeare

imports alienation: ‘You are not’) came to be closely linked to the opposition between election (‘I am saved’) and damnation (‘You are damned’). This dramatic dichotomy emerges – it seems to me – right from the outset of the play, when Iago explains to Roderigo the reason (which at the moment appears to be his only one) for the hatred he has conceived against the Moor, who has ‘elected’ Cassio his lieutenant, despite his being the latter’s senior and more experienced in the art of warfare. To the ‘three great ones of the city,’ who pleaded for him, Othello had blurted out and shortly concluded: ‘I have already choseP\RI¿FHU¶ (l.1.16). But, only a few lines later, Iago revealingly stresses the same point: ‘but he, sir, had the election’ (l.1.26).5 This lexical choice does not seem to be just a redundant repetition, since the paradigm of being elected through predestination will explicitly emerge in Act 2, scene 3. Here Iago has worked out a plan to have Cassio dismissed. During a typically military drinking party, dominated by his highly vulgar songs and quips, he intends WR JHW &DVVLR LQYROYHG LQ D ¿JKW IRU ZKLFK 2WKHOOR PLJKW ZHOO FRQVLGHU KLP responsible. In order to do so, he must keep the spirits up and get Cassio helplessly drunk. This soon happens, and Cassio feels guilty over a sin severely criticized by the strict Puritan code of conduct to which he evidently adheres.6 Nevertheless, in accordance with the selfsame ideology, he feels somehow protected by a promise of metaphysical election. When Iago asks him if he wants to listen to another of his songs, he answers: CASSIO No, for I hold him to be unworthy of his place that does … those things. Well, God’s above all, and there be souls must be saved, and there be souls must not be saved. IAGO It’s true, good lieutenant.

5 Commentators do not really look into this: Dover Wilson (Othello, ed. Alice Walker and John Dover Wilson [London: Cambridge University Press, 1957]), Ridley (Othello, ed. M.R. Ridley, Arden Shakespeare [London: Methuen, 1965]), and Pechter (Othello, ed. Edward Pechter [New York and London: Norton & Company, 2004]). Ridley and Pechter make no annotations on ‘had the election.’ Sanders (Othello, ed. Norman Sanders [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984]) glosses: ‘was selected’ (note 27, p. 66); +RQLJPDQQ QRWHV LQ JUHDWHU OLWHUDO GHWDLO µIRUPDO FKRRVLQJ RI D SHUVRQ IRU DQ RI¿FH (OED 1a, c). Whether or not others voted, Iago believes that it was Othello’s decision’ (Honigmann, note 26, p. 117). 6 Cf. how, in a series of self-critical remarks, he will later see the Devil in the bottle: ‘Drunk? and speak parrot? and squabble? swagger? swear? and discourse fustian with one’s own shadow? O thou invisible spirit of wine, if thou hast no name to be known by, let us call thee devil,’ and, a bit later, ‘It hath pleased the devil drunkenness to give place to the devil wrath,’ and again: ‘To be now a sensible man, by and by a fool, and presently a beast! O strange! Every inordinate cup is unblest, and the ingredience is a devil’ (2.3.275–9, 291–2, 300–301). The italics are mine.

Othello and Venice

189

CASSIO For mine own part, no offence to the general nor any man of quality, I hope to be saved. IAGO And so do I too, lieutenant. CASSIO Ay, but, by your leave, not before me. The lieutenant is to be saved before the ancient. Let’s have no more of this, let’s to our affairs. God forgive us our sins! (2.2.97–108)

Even though drinking, or singing and listening to non religious songs, are damned things, salvation remains independent of good or bad actions, or works, as Luther and Calvin had decreed. From this viewpoint, Cassio’s election to the post of lieutenant, to the detriment of Iago, looks like a sign of God’s grace. This correlation between earthly and metaphysical good fortune is explicitly referred to in this exchange. In his revealing drunkenness, Cassio discriminates against Iago, according to the Puritan paradigm which runs through the play in various ways. Consequently, Iago’s non election WRWKHRI¿FHRIOLHXWHQDQWPD\DOVREH considered as a sign of his perdition. Such perdition consists in a bondage which he is determined to turn upside down by becoming the master of his mercenary master, as he announces to 5RGHULJRLQWKH¿UVWVFHQH O sir, content you! I follow him to serve my turn upon him. We cannot all be masters, nor all masters Cannot be truly followed. You shall mark Many a duteous and knee-crooking knave That, doting on his own obsequious bondage, Wears out his time much like his master’s ass For naught but provender, and when he’s old, cashiered. Whip me such honest knaves. … I am not what I am. (1.1.40–48, 64; the italics are mine)

But that is not all, since Iago’s is a schizophrenic mentality, in which dissimulation (‘I am not what I am’) is the outer face of an inward otherness. His doubleness needs projection: a projection onto the Other, the Moor, of whatever is disguised, or repressed, in his white European mind. A bestial sexuality is his main obsession. From the outset he thinks, and tries to make others think, of sex in a voyeuristic way as of a monstrous copulation. He urges Brabantio, Desdemona’s father, to intervene by making him see the horrid intercourse which is in the meantime taking place: ‘Even now, very now, an old black ram / Is tupping your white ewe; arise, arise …’ (1.1.87–8). Throughout most of the play he enjoys, with a secret and vicarious satisfaction, the prospect of an unbridled sexuality, while playing the part of he who observes and condemns it. His perversion seems to spring out of an unconscious repression, as we can see in his soliloquy at the end of Act 2, Scene 1:

190

Visions of Venice in Shakespeare That Cassio loves her, I do well believe it, That she loves him, ’tis apt and of great credit. The Moor, howbeit that I endure him not, Is of a constant, loving, noble nature, And I dare think he’ll prove to Desdemona A most dear husband. Now I do love her too, Not out of absolute lust – though peradventure I stand accountant for as great a sin – But partly led to diet my revenge, For that I do suspect the lusty Moor Hath leaped into my seat, the thought whereof Doth, like a poisonous mineral, gnaw my inwards … . (2.1.284–95)

,IQHJDWLRQPDLQO\HQWUXVWHGWRWKHUKHWRULFDO¿JXUHRIlitotes, will be his chief device during the temptation of Othello, here negation evidently results from repression. In fact, while producing yet another motive for his hatred of Othello, his love for Desdemona (which is the only motive mentioned in Cinthio’s novella!), he soon hastens to specify, through negation, that his love is not out of absolute lust, which amounts to admitting that it lies in his breast. This opaque rendering of sense is also due to the apparently incongruous metaphor that follows: ‘I stand accountant.’ He feels he is being accused ‘for as great a sin’ in the courtroom of his schizophrenic (obscene/censuring) mind. Love is tainted with obscenity, and the affair between Desdemona and Othello amounts only to lechery, as he tells Roderigo: ‘It is merely a lust of the blood and a permission of the will’ (1.3.335–6). When Desdemona is sick of sex with WKLVEHDVWO\DOLHQµKHUGHOLFDWHWHQGHUQHVVZLOO¿QGLWVHOIDEXVHGEHJLQWRKHDYH the gorge, disrelish and abhor the Moor’ (2.1.229–31). Their aim is only sexual intercourse, the ‘incorporate conclusion’ (2.1.260–61): a libidinous introjection and a bestial expulsion, for, quite appropriately, the exhausted Desdemona will ¿QDOO\vomit Othello. It is on these themes, posited obliquely, that Iago’s temptation of the Moor develops. All his speeches hinge on suspicion, since it is in the very nature of human beings to hide what cannot be confessed. In accordance with his proclaimed, and acknowledged, ‘honesty,’ he proceeds to denounce Desdemona’s betrayal with Cassio; but since he cannot speak directly, and jealousy is the realm of the imaginaire, he works on simulacra rather than signs, on the phantasmal rather than the real. His subtle verbal weapons are those of reticence, litotes, negation, hypothesis, equivoque, and suspension. He says things while pretending that he is not saying anything important. By denying or delaying his own saying, he aims at making Othello think on and elaborate on Desdemona’s obscene behavior. 3UHWW\HDUO\LQWKH¿UVWWHPSWDWLRQVFHQH2WKHOORLVWKXVGULYHQWREHJKLPWR disclose what is shut up in his brain: ‘If thou dost love me / Show me thy thought’ (3.3.118–19). A few lines later he insists: ‘I prithee speak to me as to thy thinkings, / As thou dost ruminate, and give thy worst of thoughts / The worst of words’ (3.3.134–6). Iago’s answer is a masterpiece of indirection:

Othello and Venice

191

Good my lord, pardon me; Though I am bound to every act of duty I am not bound to that all slaves are free to – Utter my thoughts? Why, say they are vile and false? As where’s that palace whereinto foul things Sometimes intrude not? Who has a breast so pure But some uncleanly apprehensions Keep leets and law-days and in session sit With meditations lawful? (3.3.135–44: the italics are mine)

He begins by asking forgiveness, as a servant to his master (a relationship he is about to overturn by becoming the master of the soul of this slave), and then he excludes such an obligation, or bond, that is unforeseen in any subordinate relationship, i.e., that of revealing one’s own thoughts. He then adds, though only hypothetically, that his thoughts might be base and false: his own, like everybody’s, since the human PLQGLVSRVLWHGPHWDSKRULFDOO\DVDSDODFHXQGHUZKRVHPDJQL¿FHQFHWKHUHOXUN rotten areas penetrated by foul things. A second, court-like image follows, whose purpose is to point to the inner debate of conscience, in which any pure being must take account of ‘uncleanly apprehensions’ lingering in the depth of his soul. In this way, he refuses to comply with the request to make words and thoughts coincide, ZKLOHDQVZHULQJDI¿UPDWLYHO\WRWKHTXHVWLRQRQWKHmonstrosity of what he might have to say (Othello had previously said to him: ‘thou echo’st me / As if there were some monster in thy thought / Too hideous to be shown,’ 3.3.109–10). It is an occult strategy through which Iago obliges the Moor to his secret bond, while impudently manifesting, albeit through a general hypothesis, the mischief which is his plot for binding him. A few lines later, since Othello has declared that, if he has the proof, he will PDNHµ$ZD\DWRQFHZLWKORYHRUMHDORXV\¶ ,DJRWDNHVKLV¿QDOVWHS I am glad of this, for now I shall have reason To show the love and duty that I bear you With franker spirit. Therefore, as I am bound, Receive it from me. I speak not yet of proof. Look to your wife. Observe her well with Cassio … . (3.3.196–200; the italics are mine)

With a perverse irony he attributes to Othello’s order – as I am bound – what he is imposing onto his mind. The reversal of roles between the two is now accomplished, since Othello replies curtly, ‘I am bound to thee for ever’ (3.3.217), where he employs the same verb of submission which Iago had just ironically exhibited and dismissed, as far as his secret thoughts were concerned. Othello has become the slave of Iago’s secret thoughts and will soon be driven to murder and suicide. To conclude, cosmopolitan Venice is the right place for such a disturbing, and ultimately tragic, interplay of phantasms of discrimination and projection. If in The Merchant of VeniceVXFKDQLQWHUSOD\FRPHVWRD¿QDOVWDQGVWLOODFFRUGLQJWR the requirements of the comic genre, in OthelloLWHQGVXSLQD¿QDOFDWDVWURSKH

192

Visions of Venice in Shakespeare

The bond of Iago brings out into the open what was all the time latent in white European civilization, whose bonds, both social and familiar, could not admit any kind of downright intrusion of the Other into its network of superior relationships. %UDEDQWLRPDNHVWKLVFOHDUZKHQLQWKH¿UVWDFWKHDWWDFNVWKH0RRUIRUKDYLQJ bound his daughter not as a lover, but as a magician: O thou foul thief, where hast thou stowed my daughter? Damned as thou art, thou hast enchanted her, For I’ll refer me to all things of sense, If she in chains of magic were not bound, Whether a maid so tender, fair, and happy, So opposite to marriage that she shunned The wealthy curlèd darlings of our nation, Would ever have, t’ incur a general mock, Run from her guardage to the sooty bosom Of such a thing as thou – to fear, not to delight. (1.3.62–71; the italics are mine)

This monstrous marriage is the result of a secret bond imposed on Desdemona by the Moor through witchcraft in line with his savage ancestry. If authorized, Brabantio goes on to say, such a breakdown of familiar and racial obligations could only amount to a breakdown of the social and political structure of Venice: Mine’s not an idle cause, the Duke himself, Or any of my brothers of the state, Cannot but feel this wrong as ’twere their own; For if such actions may have passage free, Bondslaves and pagans shall our statesmen be. (1.2.95–9; the italics are mine)

'HVGHPRQDKRZHYHUZKHQFDOOHGWRWKH6HQDWHKDOOFRQ¿UPVKHUFKRLFHE\ making a clear distinction between her familiar bond (‘My noble father, / I do perceive here a divided duty. / To you I am bound for life and education,’ 1.3.180–82) DQGKHUORYHERQGDERQGRIZKRVHGDQJHURXVLPSRUWVKHLVGH¿DQWO\DZDUHµ7KDW I did love the Moor to live with him / My downright violence and scorn of fortunes / May trumpet to the world’ (1.3.249–51). Such ‘scorn of fortunes’ will soon take revenge on her and on the Moor through the plot of the ‘bondslave’ Iago, who is WKHDUWL¿FHUEXWDOVRLQDFHUWDLQVHQVHWKHVFDSHJRDWRIDQestrangement which lurks in the unresolved contradictions of this civilized world. In fact, one of the most striking effects of this tragedy of the imaginaire is ,DJR¶V¿QDOGHQLDOWRUHYHDOWKHUHDOUHDVRQZK\KHKDVHQVQDUHG2WKHOOR¶VVRXO and body: ‘Demand me nothing. What you know, you know. / From this time forth I never will speak word’ (5.2.300–301). A typical villain – such as, for example, Aaron in Titus Andronicus – would instead have boasted about his capacity to do evil. But Iago is not a typical villain and is not a lucid Machiavellian, such as Gloucester in Richard III. He is doomed to the inexpressible and the inexplicable,

Othello and Venice

193

since he has been created to act a part, i.e., to bring into the open the processes of discrimination and projection which were – and are – always latent in social and personal relationships. This latency explains the trouble with which this play has been regarded for centuries. H.H. Furness, the late nineteenth-century founder of the ‘New Variorum’ edition of Shakespeare’s plays, admired it, but felt so emotionally uneasy with its tragic subversion of codes that he declared: ‘I do not shrink from saying that I wish this Tragedy had never been written.’7 Of the same opinion was A.C. Bradley: ‘Of all Shakespeare’s tragedies, not even excepting King Lear, Othello is the most painfully exciting and the most terrible.’8 And even nowadays E.A.J. Honigmann, the editor of the New Arden Shakespeare Othello, introduces it as ‘the most exciting of the tragedies – even the most unbearably exciting.’9 It still seems to alarm as if it might break down one’s own psychic defenses and force one’s mind to explore the obscure implications of unconscious bonds that lie below the overt bonds on which a society is built. Works Cited Bradley, A.C. Shakespearean Tragedy. London: Macmillan, 1964; 1st ed., 1904. Rymer, Thomas. A Short View of Tragedy (1693), in The Critical Works of Thomas Rymer, edited by Curt A. Zimansky. 132–64. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1956. Serpieri, Alessandro. Otello: l’Eros negato. Naples: Liguori, 2003. Shakespeare, William. Othello. Edited by Alice Walker and John Dover Wilson. The New Shakespeare, London: Cambridge University Press, 1957. ———. Othello, A New Variorum Edition. Edited by Horace H. Furness. New
7 Othello, A New Variorum Edition, ed. Horace H. Furness (New York: Dover Publications, 1963; 1st edition, Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1886), p. 300. 8 A.C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy (London: Macmillan, 1964; 1st edition 1904), p. 143. 9 Othello, ed. Honigmann, p. 1.

This page has been left blank intentionally

PART 4 Venetian Plays and their Afterlife

This page has been left blank intentionally

Chapter 11

Merchant of Where? The Venetian Plays in English Visual Culture Stuart Sillars

The visitor to Venice, gliding lazily or attentively along the Canal Grande, will have realized, perhaps with a mixture of shock, disappointment and mild outrage, that many of the palazzi that she or he passes show to the world not their actual façades but screens, resting on scaffolding, painted to represent their onceglorious frontages, imposed to conceal the work of restoration that is continuing beneath. Artfully framed to give an appearance of actuality, and easily confused with the structures they project, these simulacra offer an appropriate metaphor of the treatment of Venice within English visual culture, in constructing a form as beguiling as it is misleading, an elaborate trompe l’œil that both represents and conceals the fabric itself. Visiting Venice had been popular among the English since the time of Shakespeare, when it offered sophistications of aesthetic splendour and erotic corruption, absorbed within the idea of a sea-girt republic splendidly independent of its neighbours, that made its living through trade, mirroring the Englishman’s ideal of his own nation’s identity. In the eighteenth century, it became the resort of wealthy young scions completing their education in the Grand Tour; in the nineteenth, aided by the coruscating sensuality of Turner’s paintings, an aesthetic ideal of warmth and colour. Ruskin’s writing about the city, which began to appear in the 1850s, gave it the moral force of truth in stone, and gave a further impetus to a Grand Tour that had now greatly extended its franchise. For all these visitors, and for the many others who knew of the city-state only through print or repute, Shakespeare’s merchant was an essential element of the fabled identity, the P\WKRJUDSK\WKDWZDVHUHFWHGDURXQGWKHFLW\VFUHHQLQJDQGUHFRQ¿JXULQJLW The metaphor fails in one key element, however. While the screens conceal the fractures and decay of the waterfront buildings, the English imagination of the nineteenth century revelled in them, as an extension of the idea of the Picturesque UXLQ WKDW IHG ERWK D SUHYDLOLQJ DHVWKHWLF WDVWH DQG DV 9LFWRULDQ VHOIFRQ¿GHQFH swelled, a national superiority. The fall of Venice to Napoleon in 1797 matched the decay of its buildings with the city’s loss of independence, and this was further strengthened by its colonization by Austria in 1815. First Byron, and then Samuel 5RJHUVZURWHSRHPVLQLWVSUDLVHLQWKH\RXQJ-RKQ5XVNLQ¿UVWVDZWKH city. Above and within all of this, the presence of Shakespeare animated the city for the visitor from England, who came to the city with, as it were, Portia-tinted

Visions of Venice in Shakespeare

198

spectacles. Richness, decay, past splendour – all were absorbed into a view that offered a series of reconstructions dominating the visual treatment of the plays to a degree varying between the distortive and the genuinely sympathetic. The visual histories of The Merchant of Venice and Othello, particularly the former, offer a chronicle of changing stances towards Venice, more Samuel Rogers’s ‘glorious City in the Sea’ than its inhabitants’ la Serenissima. They reveal an involvement of Shakespeare’s plays within a larger conspectus, unrolling like a theatrical diorama RYHUWKHWKUHHFHQWXULHVVLQFHWKH¿UVWYLVXDOWUHDWPHQWVRIWKHSOD\VLQ1LFKRODV Rowe’s edition of 1709. The Venetian plays were not, of course, the only ones to have a forceful and continuous tradition of visual treatment, in both painting and illustration, as well as stage design. Elsewhere, I have argued that, certainly but not exclusively in the nineteenth century, the illustrated edition of the plays had far wider currency than the scholarly works that are more often the subject of academic discussion. With circulations that far outstripped their scholarly equivalents, they offered a reading experience that combined word and image for a great number of readers HQFRXQWHULQJWKHSOD\VIRUWKH¿UVWWLPHDQGLWLVKDUGWRDYRLGWKHFRQFOXVLRQWKDW the images were thus bonded strongly to the plays’ actions. A parallel tradition, especially strong in the eighteenth century, was of self-contained paintings of the plays, many of which offered subtle, sensitive readings at a time when critical writing was concerned largely with the discussion of character and performance review. These two traditions, intersecting as they do with each other and the larger currents of artistic theory and practice, are a major dimension of Shakespeare’s reception, of which the visual treatments of Othello and The Merchant form a VWURQJDQGVLJQL¿FDQWSDUW1 The earliest illustrator, however, was probably the most European in style and outlook, and perhaps for this reason his designs for the plays that appear in Rowe’s edition2UHVLVWUHFRQ¿JXUDWLRQVRIWKHNLQGWKDWZLOOODWHUFRPHWRGRPLQDWH)UDQoRLV Boitard, who undertook the frontispiece drawings shortly after arriving in London from his native France, may or may not have seen the play when he produced his OthelloDQGVRLWFDQQRWEHUHJDUGHGDVLQHYLWDEO\UHÀHFWLYHRISHUIRUPDQFH practice. Yet his presentation of the murder scene resists the exoticism that later treatments invest in the play’s setting and its central character. There is no trace of Venetian identity in the rather limited depiction of the bedchamber, and Othello is not shown in any kind of Moorish costume, invented or authentic. Instead, he wears the court dress that was the standard costume for tragic heroes on the contemporary stage, and is nearly identical to that worn by Garrick as Macbeth in 1

For more complete discussions of these traditions, see my earlier Painting Shakespeare: The Artist as Critic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006) and The Illustrated Shakespeare, 1709–1875 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 2 The works of Mr. William Shakespear; in six volumes. Adorn’d with Cuts. Revis’d and Corrected, with an Account of the Life and Writings of the Author. By N. Rowe, Esq. (London: Jacob Tonson, 1709).

Merchant of Where?

199

the famous images by Johan Zoffany.3 The effect is remarkable, suggesting a parity between the two as tragic heroes and rejecting any notion of the topographical or KLVWRULFDO ¿GHOLW\ WKDW ZRXOG EH WKH DLP DQG VRPHWLPHV WKH REVHVVLRQ RI ODWHU imaging and performance. The result is to turn both costumes into metaphorical enactments. Macbeth is, quite simply, dressed in borrowed robes, visualizing the repeated imagery of inappropriate clothing that runs through the play; Othello becomes effectively the Moor of London, the move stressing the character’s displacement at the Venetian court by providing a parallel relocation which, for the contemporary audience, would have been far more immediate. Boitard’s treatment of The Merchant (see Fig. 11.1) similarly sidesteps representation of the play’s locale. Certainly, the interior of the courtroom follows in proportion and detail the Italian models familiar from the Architettura of Sebastiano Serlio,4EXWWKHUHLVQRWKLQJVSHFL¿FWR9HQLFHKHUHDQGWKHIRUPVDUH those of a wider, generic Italianate identity. The design also takes from Serlio the essential perspective device of Italian staging, a directed recession that leads WKHH\HWRDFHQWUDOFKDUDFWHUZKRWKXVEHFRPHVWKHPDMRU¿JXUH+HUHLWLVWKH Duke, seated in a porticoed niche, who dominates the composition and thus the action: neither the feminized sacralization of Portia nor the comic demonization of Shylock, both features of later treatments, is apparent here. As the image of Othello invites concentration on character, so the treatment of The Merchant focuses attention on the process of justice that the scene enacts. These images are important as interpretations that omit any reference to the Venetian setting and the associations that it would later attract. As the tradition of visual treatment develops, in both independent images and the dual text of illustrated editions, the approach changes. The exploration that results is an index of changing readings of the plays and of the social frames, in particular an increasingly aestheticized attitude towards an actual and imagined Venice, in different English social groups. Boitard’s images differ from this in being the product of an essentially European imagination, but perhaps also because of the physical shape of the volume in which they appeared. Rowe’s Shakespeare was a small duodecimo quite distinct from the impressive folio Paradise Lost that Tonson had produced a few years earlier. It is aimed at readers for whom Venice had not yet become part of an actual grand tour or a place of imagined intoxication. This is, perhaps, the essential feature of the visualization of the two plays: once Venice becomes, for the English imagination, the shabby-exotic mirror of itself, LWV YLVXDO UHFRQ¿JXUDWLRQV EHFRPH VXERUGLQDWH WR WKLV SDUDGR[LFDO P\VWHU\ DQG approaches to the play’s themes and movement exist wholly within its magical, intoxicating light.

3 Most notably David Garrick and Hannah Pritchard as Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, 1768; oil on canvas, 102 x 127.5 cm. (40” x 50”), Garrick Club, London. 4 Sebastian Serlio, The Five Books of Architecture (London: Printed for Robert Peake, 1611).

200

Fig. 11.1

Visions of Venice in Shakespeare

Francois Boitard, engraved by Elisha Kirkall: Frontispiece to The Merchant of Venice, from The Works of Mr William Shakespear; in six volumes. Adorn’d with Cuts. Revis’d and Corrected, with an Account of the Life and Writings of the Author. By N. Rowe, Esq. (London: Jacob Tonson, 1709). By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

Merchant of Where?

201

3UREDEO\ WKH PRVW VLJQL¿FDQW FKDQJH LQ GLUHFWLRQ RFFXUV LQ WKH HGLWLRQ RI The Merchant prepared by Charles Knight for his Pictorial Shakspere of over a century later.5 The timing is important, the edition coming after the political reorganizations of the city and its poetic reinvention by Byron and others. Knight’s declared aim was to present each play’s historical and material basis, through illustrations both visual and annotative of its settings, costumes, artefacts and larger topographies. The volumes were an example of a new kind of publishing that, working from a strongly educational basis, attempted to present every kind of printable matter as a form of factual information. This has been attacked as an attempt to foist on the working classes middle-class values and tastes – the two FDWHJRULHVLQWKHPVHOYHVGDQJHURXVO\FRQÀDWHGEXWVXFKDUHDGLQJPDNHVPXFK too simple the exchange between a group eager for advancement through learning of all kinds and another anxious to preserve and extend what it thought were proper moral and religious standards. Perhaps, in visually stressing the plays’ distant settings, the edition appealed to a desire in the readers to share in the aristocratic delight of exotic locations, in the middle-class aping of aristocratic mores of the kind satirized in the journey to ‘foring parts’ of Thackeray’s Yellowplush Papers,6 which appeared during the serial publication of Knight’s Shakspere. The double contextualizing of the play within a taste for exoticism and the new kind of material knowledge fostered by Victorian popular education is evident from WKH¿UVWSDJHRIWKHSOD\¶VWH[WVHH)LJ %HIRUHDVLQJOHZRUGRIGLDORJXH appears, there is an image of the Piazza San Marco. On the same page, there is a footnote several lines in length that discusses the old textual problem of Solanio and Solarino, an approach to the restoration of accuracy in the text which mirrors the factualism of the image. But this latter is not of an order that can be related GLUHFWO\WRWKHHYHQWVRIWKHSOD\7KH¿JXUHVLQWKHHQJUDYLQJDUHLQQRZD\UHODWHG to those in the play’s action, and the Piazza is not mentioned in the text. Both are VLJQL¿FDQW VKLIWV +DG WKH LPDJH EHHQ RI WKH 5LDOWR LW PLJKW KDYH SURYLGHG DQ important link to the opening of Act 3. Here, Solanio’s question ‘Now, what news on the Rialto?’ elicits the news that ‘Antonio hath a ship of rich lading wrecked on the Narrow Seas’ (3.1.1–3).7 The presentation of that location would have offered a foreshadowing of the failure of Antonio’s enterprise, leading to the forfeiture of the bond, and thus would have provided a dynamic propellant for the reader. 5

The Pictorial Edition of the Works of Shakspere. Edited by Charles Knight (London: Charles Knight and Co., 56 monthly parts, 1838–43). Issued in 1843 as 7 volumes, with an additional supplementary volume containing the life of Shakespeare. Subsequent versions included ‘The National Edition.’ 3 vols. (London: Routledge, 1858). 6 Master Humphrey’s Clock by Charles Dickens (Boz); to which are added Papers by Mr. Yellowplush (Paris: A. and W. Galignani and Co., 1841). The work’s appearance in France, in the same volume as a work by Dickens, is in itself an intriguing indication of the gradual increase in the accessibility of the continent to readers who would now be described as coming from the middle class. 7 All quotations are from the edition by Molly Maureen Mahood (2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

202

Fig. 11. 2

Visions of Venice in Shakespeare

Charles Knight: Frontispiece to The Merchant of Venice from The Pictorial Edition of the Works of Shakspere. Edited by Charles Knight (London: Charles Knight and Co., 56 monthly parts, 1838–43). Author’s collection.

Merchant of Where?

203

But the Piazza is chosen because it is the aspect of Venice that has become the single representative feature, the metonym of the city as experienced by the Englishman abroad. The choice of image proclaims that this is primarily a play about Venice, and that the reading experience it offers will involve being drawn into that setting in the manner of an actual visitor. This does not necessarily deny the importance of the play’s movement or the concepts that it addresses; but it does frame it in a quite new way, the setting adding a new tonality to its presentation. In WKLVZD\WKHZKROHLGHQWLW\RIWKHSOD\LVFRQVLGHUDEO\UHGH¿QHG Once begun, this tendency rapidly becomes an orthodoxy, and extends to both Venetian plays. William Powell Frith’s image of Othello recounting his travels to Desdemona8 places the scene before a limited view of the Piazza, the ULFK9HQHWLDQOLJKWÀRRGLQJDFURVVWKHOLVWHQHUV¶IDFHVZKLOHOHDYLQJ2WKHOORLQ FRQWUDVWLQJGDUNQHVVWRWKHGHJUHHWKDWLWLVKDUGWRGLVFHUQZKHWKHUWKH¿JXUHLV shown as dark-skinned or the coloration is the result of the shadow. Certainly, his features in no way suggest a Moorish identity, caricatured or otherwise. The overall result is a combination of conversation piece and topographical veduta, the movement of the play suggested only by the fall of light, and then by comparatively subtle implication. A similar composition is used by Henry Courtney Selous for the title page of the edition prepared by the Cowden Clarkes (see Fig. 11.3).9 The background is extended to show the Piazza from exactly the same viewpoint as that in Knight’s opening engraving to The Merchant of Venice, so that, while the events of the play are incorporated into the scene, they are still presented very much within the conspectus of the city seen as a distanced, aesthetic object. %RWK WKHVH LPDJHV SHUIRUP DQRWKHU DFW RI UHFRQ¿JXUDWLRQ RQ WKH SOD\ LQ showing an event that is recorded, not enacted, in the text itself, in Othello’s defence to the Venetian senate in Act 1, scene 3. Its presentation as an easel painting, DQGDVWKH¿UVWYLVXDOHOHPHQWRIWKHWH[WLQWKHWLWOHSDJHJLYHLWFRQVLGHUDEOH LPSDFW SULYLOHJLQJ DQG UHGH¿QLQJ WKH VFHQH LQ GLIIHUHQW EXW HTXLYDOHQW ZD\V offering probably the single most incisive visual impression of the play for the reader. This shift is in itself important enough as a critical statement about the play’s main values, but the relocation within the Venetian setting adds a further redirection away from the play’s own trajectory. The words of Othello about the exotic places he has visited become almost a caption to the exotic scene that lies behind him while he speaks, radically changing the impact of the scene. Placing the events before the Piazza San Marco, using the same positioning as Knight’s opening page image, shows the genres of comedy and tragedy being 8

Othello and Desdemona. 1856; oil on canvas, 55.9 x 48.3 cm (22” x 19”), Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. 9 Cassell’s Illustrated Shakespeare. The Plays of Shakespeare. Edited and Annotated by Charles and Mary Cowden Clarke, authors of ‘Shakespeare Characters’, ‘Complete Concordance to Shakespeare’, ‘Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines’, &c. 3 vols. (London: Cassell, Petter, and Galpin, 1864).

204

Fig. 11.3

Visions of Venice in Shakespeare

Henry Courtney Selous: title-page to Othello from Cassell’s Illustrated Shakespeare: The Plays of Shakespeare. Edited and Annotated by Charles and Mary Cowden Clarke (London: Cassell, Petter, and Galpin, 1864). Author’s collection.

Merchant of Where?

205

drawn together into topography, revealing the immense, yet unstated, power of attraction exerted on the English psyche by the image, visual and conceptual, of the Venetian townscape. This is not the only measure of the elision between plays and place. In 1837 – a year before Knight began issuing his serial edition of the plays – J.M.W. Turner exhibited a canvas titled Scene – a Street in Venice (c 1837).10 The picture was shown with a short text taken from The Merchant of Venice: Antonio: Hear me yet, good Shylock – Shylock: I’ll have my bond. (3.3.3–4)

The practice of exhibiting paintings with quotations had been sanctioned by the 5R\DO$FDGHP\LQDQG7XUQHUZDVRQHRIWKH¿UVWDQGPRVWHQWKXVLDVWLF of regular exhibitors to adopt it. But most often his quotations were from James 7KRPVRQ RU IURP KLV RZQ XQ¿QLVKHG HSLF Fallacies of Hope, with only a handful coming from Shakespeare.11 What makes the allusion more forceful in this instance is the peripheral relevance the painting has to the play. In the ERWWRPULJKWKDQGRIWKHSDLQWLQJLVDVPDOO¿JXUHRI6K\ORFNKROGLQJDGDJJHU and a pair of scales; the whole remaining image is a canal scene reminiscent of the large number of other Venetian scenes from Turner’s output in this period. 7KDW WKH ¿JXUH GRHV QRW UHVHPEOH WKH FDULFDWXUH 6K\ORFNV WKHQ IRXQG RQ WKH VWDJH JLYHV D IXUWKHU OHYHO RI VXJJHVWLRQ ,V WKH ¿JXUH PRUH OLNH D SRUWUDLW of Shakespeare? If the resemblance is there, it takes to a different level the elision of the plays, the dramatist and the exotic location: now, place, plays and playwright form a single, interwoven fabric of the literary and topographical imagination. Another of Turner’s paintings shows perhaps the most extreme UHFRQ¿JXUDWLRQRIRQHRI6KDNHVSHDUH¶VSOD\VZLWKLQWKH(QJOLVKSHUFHSWLRQRI Venice. This is Juliet and her Nurse,12 which simply and boldly relocates the SOD\ IURP 0DQWXD WR 9HQLFH DQG SUHVHQWV WKH WZR ¿JXUHV RI WKH WLWOH DV WLQ\ ¿JXUHVWKUXVWULJKWGRZQWRWKHIRUHJURXQGEHIRUHDYLHZ±RQFHPRUH±RIWKH SLD]]DKHUHHQULFKHGE\DVSHFWDFXODUGLVSOD\RI¿UHZRUNVThe Times (11 May 1836) disapproved of its handling of the play:

10 Now known as The Grand Canal, Venice. Oil on Canvas, 150.5 x 112.4 cm (59-1/4” x 44-1/4”), Huntingdon Art Gallery, San Marino, California. A reproduction of the painting may be found at the following website, correct at 4 November 2009: http://commons. wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Turner,_J._M._W._-_The_Grand_Canal_-_Scene_-_A_Street_In_ Venice.jpg. 11 See Andrew Wilton, Painting and Poetry: Turner’s ‘Verse Book’ and his Work of 1804–1812; with Transcriptions by Rosalind Mallord Turner (London: Tate Gallery, 1990). 12 Oil on canvas, 89 x 120.6 cm (35” x 47-1/2”), collection of Mrs Flora Whitney Miller, New York.

206

Visions of Venice in Shakespeare Shakespeare’s Juliet! Why it is the tawdry Miss Porringer, the brazier’s daughter of Lambeth and the Nurse is that twaddling old body Mrs MacSneeze who keeps the snuff-shop at the corner of Oakley Street.13

7XUQHU¶V ¿JXUHV RIWHQ FDPH LQ IRU KDUVK FULWLFLVP EXW WKLV VHHPV WR FRQWDLQ something more. In its contemptuous references to a common young woman and KHUORZHUPLGGOHFODVVFRPSDQLRQERWKµLQWUDGH¶DQGGH¿QLWHO\IURPWKHORZHU orders, is there perhaps a hint of despair at the thought of Venice, the resort of the aristocrat and the wealthy, being invaded by people of the wrong sort? Already, the idea of the exotic places being overrun by common tourists seems audible, and the comment paradoxically reveals the very appropriation of the plays into a larger social register that it avowedly rejects within the object of its criticism. The Morning Post’s comment (25 May 1836) that the painting is ‘a perfect scene of enchantment,’ while placed after a comment about its painterly richness, seems to echo the mystical exoticism of the city rather than its depiction in paint. The image was reproduced as a line engraving by George Hollis in 1842.14 This in itself is not unusual, and too much should not be made of it; but the idea of its being used as a kind of surrogate picture postcard is not too hard to credit. The complex of assimilation into larger frames of English identity, especially those surrounding the aristocracy and those aspiring to join it, also works in a completely opposite direction, and manifests itself rather earlier than the varieties of touristic imaging. An outstanding example of the coming together of the Grand Tour, the English country house and the Venetian plays is provided by the painting produced by William Hodges for the Boydell Shakespeare Gallery to illustrate the ¿QDODFWRIThe Merchant of Venice.15 Like most of the paintings commissioned for the gallery, it achieved wider accessibility in the engraved version, by John Browne (see Fig. 11.4). The image presents the scene in the garden of Portia’s house in Belmont where Lorenzo explains to Jessica the harmony of the spheres. The setting is not Italian, but an English Palladian country house; Stowe, perhaps, or Stourhead, complete with lake and temple. It has taken a long, circuitous path from Venice to the English shires, but the shift is one that has occurred through a process made inevitable by social and aesthetic moves. The borrowing of Palladian architectural styles begun by the Earl of Burlington in the early years RIWKHFHQWXU\UHVXOWHG¿UVWLQKLVRZQFRXQWU\KRXVHDQGWKHQLQLPLWDWLRQVE\ many others. The design, and the notion, grew from a yearning for the houses and

13 Oakley St., London SW 3 is part of the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, linking the King’s Rd. to the Albert Bridge across the River Thames. A row of stately town houses, still standing, was built in the 1850s, but in the 1830s it was a far less fashionable area, as its linking with Lambeth in the passage suggests. 14 St. Mark’s Place, Venice: Juliet and her Nurse. 42.3 x 56.4 cm (16½” x 22¼”), Tate Britain, London. 15 Untraced; engraved by John Browne, published 1 December 1795. 49.5 x 63 cm (19½” x 24-8/10”).

Fig. 11.4

William Hodges, engraved by John Browne: The Merchant of Venice, Act V, Scene 1, published 1 December 1795. A

Visions of Venice in Shakespeare

208

gardens that aristocratic travellers had seen in Italy: the transposition of the isle of %HOPRQWZDVD¿QDOVWDJHLQWKHSURFHVVRIFXOWXUDODEVRUSWLRQ The appropriation of Shakespeare into the national culture constructed in negotiation with the European nation largely as an instrument of differentiation from it, is a further component of this ideology. So, too, is the notion of hierarchy given voice by Lorenzo, placed within the system of local feudalism practiced by the great country house estates. It thus becomes almost inevitable that this ideological and pragmatic fabric be given visual statement, in the need to provide markers of aesthetic and cultural maturity for the estate owners, that resulted in country house paintings. The most celebrated is probably Mr and Mrs Robert Andrews, by Thomas Gainsborough,16 which shows the landowner and his wife VXUURXQGHG E\ KLV SRVVHVVLRQV ± WKH FRUQ¿HOGV WKH JDPH WKH FKXUFK LQ DQ iconography that asserts either benevolent rural capitalism or the darker aspects of paternalism and enclosure. The form itself spawned many imitations. Placing the Belmont speech within this frame in a sense completes the circle of annexation. Not only does it equate the splendors of the English country house with those of renaissance Italy: simultaneously it reveals the taste of the owner, and makes clear the inevitable rightness of the order that Lorenzo enunciates – an order, of course, shortly to be deeply and darkly undermined by the return of Portia and the ensuing ‘ring conceit’ before the play’s ending. Shakespeare, Venice, England: all are woven into a close textual fabric that paradoxically reveals a great deal about the English love affair with the Italian city. If to this already complex weave is added the visual nature of performance, WKH UHVXOW UHYHDOV HYHQ JUHDWHU UHFRQ¿JXUDWLRQV RI WKH SOD\V PRVW HVSHFLDOO\ The Merchant, in direct response to the notion of place. A central departure here is the production by Charles Kean in 1858. This took the Shakespearean text as the point of departure for a series of interludes that presented aspects of what was seen as Venetian life. What is new here is that, as well as the stress on the visual splendors of the city, an element of anthropology is introduced in the re-enactment of ritual and celebration that aims at representing the nature and practices of its inhabitants. This suggests a shift towards what, in more modern terms, would be an ideology of tourism, in which the local events are seen as a further dimension of the exotic coloration of the sky and the richness of the buildings. Something of this is made clear in Kean’s own account of the production, given in a ‘Fly-leaf’ to the playbill, precursor to a present-day programme note: The historical importance of Venice has passed away for ever; her palaces are crumbling, her gondolas glide silently through the canals unenlivened by song; the haunt of merchants is no longer on the Rialto; – but the immortal verse of Shakespeare has invested the fair city of the sea with a charm for Englishmen which cannot perish with passing events, but which lives and blooms despite of political or national changes.

16

c. 1750; oil on canvas, 69.8 x 119.4 cm (27½” x 47”), National Gallery, London.

Merchant of Where?

209

For unto us she hath a spell beyond Her name in story … … though all were o’er, For us re-peopled were the solitary shore.17

This is probably one of the earliest, and fullest, statements of the great appeal of Venice to the English viewer of the mid century, explicit in its conjunction of exoticism and Picturesque ruin. Into this is closely woven the power of Shakespeare to construct the romantic and commercial centre of the past, in a manner directly and closely parallel to his presentation of the history of England, as both were conceived by mid-nineteenth century readers. Much of this is a consequence of Ruskin’s writing – The Stones of Venice had appeared only a few years before18 – but the view of the city-state that it presents is far simpler. Whereas Ruskin is concerned with architecture and morality, Kean ULJKWO\VHHVLQKLVDXGLHQFHDGHVLUHIRUDYHU\VSHFL¿FVNHLQRIWKHQRVWDOJLDWKDW is a recurrent element of Victorian aesthetics, perhaps heightened by a note of superiority implicit in the membership of an Empire on which the sun never sets. Venetian sunsets are unequalled in their beauty; but they simultaneously symbolize, and are enriched by, the physical and political decline of the landscape over which they occur. Kean develops this physically in the play’s staging. Following the lead of Charles Knight, he stages the play’s opening in the Piazza San Marco, a shift that is more than coincidental since, here and in his other printed editions of the plays sold during the performance, Kean cites Knight’s editions as historical sources for his designs. This is more than a production decision: for the audience it is a statement of cultural continuity, subliminally reinforcing a concept of the city in a PDQQHUWKDWDQWLFLSDWHVWKHUDSLGHVWDEOLVKPHQWRIVHWWLQJVWKURXJKWKHXVHLQ¿OP of Piccadilly Circus or the Eiffel Tower to establish not only a city, but a shared conceptualization of it. The elopement of Jessica and Lorenzo is presented after a scene in which the characters enter a setting that replicates a stretch of the Grand Canal, complete with real water and real gondolas. Fig. 11.5 shows an engraving of this scene published in the Illustrated London News of 7 August 1858. The buildings, the bridge and canal are all practicable objects, inhabited during the production by a large cast of supernumeraries, and the canal used by the eloping couple for their escape. All are picturesque in their shabbiness, and in the stage version brightly coloured, an incarnation of the English view of Venice in perhaps its most direct form. That this 17 7KHµ)O\OHDI¶FRQVWLWXWHGWKH¿UVWSDJHRIDSRVWHUVL]HSXEOLFDWLRQWKDWJDYHGHWDLOV of the cast and main features of the performance. Copies are now scarce, but the full text is quoted in The life and theatrical times of Charles Kean, F.S.A. including a summary of WKH(QJOLVKVWDJHIRUWKHODVW¿IW\\HDUVDQGDGHWDLOHGDFFRXQWRIWKHPDQDJHPHQWRIWKH Princess’s Theatre from 1850–1859 (London: Richard Bentley, 1859), p. 263. 18 The Stones of Venice … With illustrations drawn by the author, 3 vols. (London: Smith, Elder, and Co., 1851–53).

Fig. 11.5

Unsigned engraving of a scene from Charles Kean’s production of The Merchant of Venice (1858), published in the Illustrated London News, 7 August 1858. Author’s collection.

Merchant of Where?

211

is the basis of both the elopement and of a carnival masque complements the exotic with a note of romantic danger. The view of Venice has come to dominate the view of Shakespeare, both heavily adjusted to meet the social assumptions, and perhaps psychological needs, of performers and audience. But it is also, of course, safe. The central passage of the scene is a canal that recedes directly into the distance, but it is never explored or exploited, giving physical statement to the appealing, but never threatening, element of the exotic that the city, and in consequence its presentation in the play, have now become. The appearance of the engraving in a journal whose readers were of the social group likely to visit Venice completes the circular relationship between theatrical presentation and personal experience. 7KHVFHQHZDVQRWKRZHYHUPHWZLWKXQTXDOL¿HGDFFODLPDVLVVXJJHVWHGE\ Henry Crabb Robinson’s comment that he went to see the production ‘More for the sake of the getting up by Kean – Scenery etc rather than for the Shakespeare play – which in spite of its exquisite beauties of sentiment is intolerably absurd even ridiculous.’19 But even here there is a curious duality: although the scenery is ‘ridiculous,’ it is also ‘exquisitely beautiful,’ and was the major reason for his attending the theatre. The remainder of the paragraph that discusses the play has little positive to say about the acting, but uses the expression ‘well managed’ twice, about the procession of cardinals in the opening scene and the trial scene. The dualism is an apt record of the mingled responses the production evoked, and perhaps of the confused motives that drove it. A similar response is found in Dutton Cook’s review of Squire Bancroft’s production, with Ellen Terry, in 1875. The scenery is ‘admirably painted and contrived’; ‘the costumes and accessories are remarkable for their picturesqueness not less than for their richness and appropriateness.’ This would seem to suggest that the visual text follows the play’s action and ideas, but Cook then continues: Since Mr Kean, in 1858, converted the play into a pageant and a spectacle, The Merchant of Venice has not been so handsomely cared for by upholsterers, dressmakers, scene-painters, and ‘property’ manufacturers.20

To achieve this, Bancroft and his actor wife travelled to Venice with George Gordon, who made sketches for the designs of the play, which was now rearranged into seven VFHQHV7KLVZDVWRDOORZ¿YHVHWVWREHXVHGZLWKRXWH[WHQVLYHLQWHUYDOVIRUFKDQJHV showing the prevalence of visual over dramatic continuity. For those set changes that remained, three ‘Views of Venice,’ painted on drop curtains, were displayed. One of these was the Campanile of San Marco, continuing the visual thread begun in Charles Knight’s edition. The performance, even with extensive cuts, lasted for nearly four hours: its visual impact was not popular with all viewers, including Clement Scott 19

The London Theatre 1811–1866. Selections for the Diary of Henry Crabb Robinson, ed. Eluned Brown (London: Society for Theatre Research, 1966). Diary entry from August 17, 1858, p. 206. 20 Dutton Cook, Nights at the Play: A View of the English Stage (London: Chatto and Windus, 1883). Originally published in April 1875; quotations from p. 282.

Visions of Venice in Shakespeare

212

in the Daily Telegraph, who commented: ‘there is a higher value in “The Merchant of Venice” than in Venetian pictures and the perfection of Venetian costume.’21 The public were not convinced, and the play closed after three weeks. This was probably not the result of a move away from visual splendours, but at least in part a response to Charles Coghlan’s Shylock, which even at the start gave the Bancrofts misgivings: ‘our hearts were heavy when the curtain rose upon the venture.’22 Much more successful in the part was Henry Irving, whose portrayal was hailed for its sympathy; but the visual construction of an English Venice if anything reached even greater complexities in his version of four years later. Irving visited Venice, bringing back drawings for his designer, Hawes Craven. The scenes, both exterior and interior, followed precedent in their richness and avowed faith to their Italian originals, in actual architecture and its painted representation. But the production was important for other reasons, gaining wide praise for Irving’s sympathetic treatment of Shylock; this was perhaps the start of a move away from presentations of the play that privileged spectacle. In a few years’ time, the work of William Poel, Gordon Craig and Granville Barker would reject the lavish sets that made the play so popular through its annexation into larger social and cultural arenas: ,UYLQJ¶VZDVSHUKDSVWKH¿QDOYHUVLRQRIWKHSOD\WRUHVHPEOHLQVLJQL¿FDQWPHDVXUHD theatrical ritual of aesthetic tourism. But there is a strong relation, if a more abstract one, between an English concept and one idea of a Venetian actuality: some have DUJXHGWKDWWKHJUHDWHULPSRUWDQFHRI¿QDQFLDOGHDOLQJVDQGWKHJURZLQJVWDWXUHRI the City of London in international exchange, lay behind Irving’s characterization, so that the visual screen is displaced by a more subtle way of seeing.23 Looking back at these acts of annexation, it is easy to reject the extremes of accuracy to the material settings in painting, illustrated edition and staging, as another symptom of the obsessive materialism of nineteenth-century culture. The Merchant, in particular, plays with a preconceived (or pre-experienced), notion of the city, a Venice of the mind that draws the onlooker in through its corruption as much as its splendour. Too easy. Productions from more recent times, LQFOXGLQJWKH%%&WHOHYLVLRQYHUVLRQDQGWKH¿OPE\0LFKDHO5DGIRUG  have made equally full use of the setting, extended by the greater possibilities of the media they employ. As far as we know, Shakespeare never visited the city; it was, to him, an imagined exotic world. Then, as now, the power of the city in the sea was strong; then, as now, the English see the city through a sophisticated visual screen.

21

Monday 14 June 1858. Mr. and Mrs. Bancroft On and Off the Stage. Written by Themselves. 6th ed. (London: Richard Bentley, 1889), p. 211. 23 The view began with Lord Houghton’s speech at the dinner celebrating Irving’s 100th performance in the role on 14 February 1880, which described Irving as having ‘a voice very like a Rothschild.’ The speech is recorded in Austin Brereton, The Life of Henry Irving (London: Longmans, Green, 1908, vol. 1), p. 315. 22

Merchant of Where?

213

Coda On 5 October 1938, in the Royal Albert Hall, London, Ralph Vaughan Williams conducted his Serenade to Music, a setting of passages from Lorenzo’s speech to Jessica on the harmony of the spheres. Dedicated to Sir Henry Wood to celebrate his 50 years as a conductor, it was written for 16 individual singers who had all worked closely with him. It introduces a level of shared endeavours and fellowship that, in its unfolding, perhaps parallels the journey undertaken in the play, singers constructing a musical text alongside actors constructing a dramatic one, characters undergoing a journey that develops and expands the notional passage to selfknowledge of the romance comedy. It is, in a sense, an equivalent of the closing debate from Castiglione’s Il Cortegiano. The richness presented in the play will, of course, be undermined by the exchanges in the scene that follows, and the idea of harmonia mundi was, even at the time of the play’s writing, a concept under threat. Vaughan Williams’s setting presents it as a serene completion, a statement of resolution given further force by the heritage of shared creativity, shared labour, of its initial performers. It is written in the composer’s mature style, in which the melodic patterns and the modal harmonic progressions of English folk song are absorbed into the lush orchestral textures of late Romanticism. In this it presents a kind of apogee of an idiom uniquely English, already outmoded at the date of its completion. This, and its own act of commemoration and tribute, give it a UHWURVSHFWLYHQRWWRVD\QRVWDOJLFLQÀHFWLRQ,WLVSHUKDSVWKHODVWVWDWHPHQWRIWKH UHFRQ¿JXUDWLRQRIWKHSOD\WKURXJKWKHOHQVRIWKHVHQWLPHQWDOWRXULVWRXWPRGHG selective and distortive, but with its own deep, sensual richness that is a parallel of the very city that it seeks to maintain as the main focus of the plays. Works Cited %DQFURIW6TXLUHDQG0DULH(I¿H%DQFURIWMr. and Mrs. Bancroft On and Off the Stage. Written by Themselves. 6th ed. London: Richard Bentley, 1889. Brereton, Austin. The Life of Henry Irving. London: Longmans, Green, 1908. Cole, John William. The life and theatrical times of Charles Kean, F.S.A. including DVXPPDU\RIWKH(QJOLVKVWDJHIRUWKHODVW¿IW\\HDUVDQGDGHWDLOHGDFFRXQWRI the management of the Princess’s Theatre from 1850–1859. London: Richard Bentley, 1859. Cook, Dutton. Nights at the Play: A View of the English Stage. London: Chatto and Windus, 1883. Robinson, Henry Crabb. The London Theatre 1811–1866. Selections from the Diary of Henry Crabb Robinson. Edited by Eluned Brown. London: Society for Theatre Research, 1966. Ruskin, John. The Stones of Venice. With illustrations drawn by the author. 3 Vols. London: Smith, Elder, and Co., 1851–53. Serlio, Sebastian. The Five Books of Architecture. London: Printed for Robert Peake, 1611.

214

Visions of Venice in Shakespeare

Shakespeare, William. The works of Mr. William Shakespear; in six volumes. Adorn’d with Cuts. Revis’d and Corrected, with an Account of the Life and Writings of the Author. By N. Rowe, Esq. London: Jacob Tonson, 1709. ———. The Pictorial Edition of the Works of Shakspere. Edited by Charles Knight. London: Charles Knight and Co., 56 monthly parts, 1838–43. ———. Cassell’s Illustrated Shakespeare. The Plays of Shakespeare. Edited and Annotated by Charles and Mary Cowden Clarke, authors of ‘Shakespeare Characters’, ‘Complete Concordance to Shakespeare’, ‘Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines,’ &c. 3 vols. London: Cassell, Petter, and Galpin, 1864. ———. The Merchant of Venice. 2nd ed. Edited by Molly Maureen Mahood. The New Cambridge Shakespeare. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Sillars, Stuart. Painting Shakespeare: The Artist as Critic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. ———. The Illustrated Shakespeare, 1709–1875. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Thackeray, William Makepeace. Master Humphrey’s Clock by Charles Dickens (Boz); to which are added Papers by Mr. Yellowplush. Paris: A. and W. Galignani and Co., 1841. Wilton, Andrew. Painting and Poetry: Turner’s ‘Verse Book’ and his Work of 1804–1812; with Transcriptions by Rosalind Mallord Turner. London: Tate Gallery, 1990.

Chapter 12

Rewriting Venice and Radicalizing Shylock: Nineteenth-Century French and Romanian Adaptations of The Merchant of Venice Madalina Nicolaescu1

On Translating Adaptations The Doge: I have promised you justice. You shall have it. Now Shylock execute WKHFRQWUDFWEXW¿UVWPDNHVXUH\RXKDYHIXOO\FRQVLGHUHGWKHKROGWKHODZKDV on you. Shylock: Good heavens! … He will get away and I will not be revenged. Here he is, his chest is bared, I am armed, and shall I not dare? [He takes a few steps, then stops.] Jessica [pulling at his coat]: Father! Nerisca: Shylock! Shylock: Let me take at least a glance at him, hear him beg me for mercy and Jacob’s God will advise me! [Shylock looks around. The ‘people’s’ murmur gets louder and louder as they try to get past the guard. Nerisca and Jessica kneel before him.] Nerisca: May God disarm his anger! FINAL TABLEAU The judges get up, looking round with apprehension. There is a moan. Shylock, his hair all disheveled, steps forward and drops the knife. The henchman grabs him by the neck. The ‘people’ break through onto the stage all up in arms. Jessica crawls between her father and the ‘people.’ Nerisca faints in Lorenzo’s arms.2

1

Research for this article has been partially supported by UEFISCSU grant no. 905/2009 [code 1978] for a research project titled The European Dimension of Shakespeare’s Plays: Romanian Perspectives. 2 D’Alboaz, Seilok evreul sau invoiala de singe. Drama in 4 acte, The Library of the Romanian Academy. MS. 5864. 1854 (my translation).

216

Visions of Venice in Shakespeare

This is the end of an adaptation of The Merchant of Venice, performed in Bucharest in 1854, and called Seilok evreul sau invoiala de singe. Drama in 4 acte. Imitata de pe faimoasa bucata a lui Shakespeare de d-l D’Alboaz si tradusa de d-l Teulescu [Shylock the Jew or the Blood-Bargain. Drama in 4 Acts. Fashioned on the Famous Play by Shakespeare by Mr. D’Alboaz and translated by Mr. Teulescu]. The French original, which does not have one author but two – Du Lac and Alboise – and whose title differs slightly: Shylock, drame en trois actes, imité de Shakespeare,3 ZDV¿UVWSHUIRUPHGRQQG$SULODWWKH7KpkWUHGHOD3RUWH6DLQW0DUWLQLQ Paris and was printed here in the same month. The Romanian version, a loose WUDQVODWLRQ RI WKH )UHQFK DGDSWDWLRQ FRQÀDWHV WKH QDPHV RI WKH )UHQFK DXWKRUV Du Lac and Alboise and foregrounds Shakespeare’s ‘famous’ play in its title. The title suggests that the audience is well familiar with the play and shares the high appreciation it receives in Western Europe. Given the fact that the text represents WKH VFULSW IRU WKH ¿UVW SHUIRUPDQFH LQ 5RPDQLD RI D 6KDNHVSHDUH SOD\ DQG WKDW no other Romanian translations of The Merchant of Venice had been previously SXEOLVKHGWKHSUHVXSSRVLWLRQWKHWLWOHPDNHVLVGH¿QLWHO\ÀDWWHULQJWRWKH5RPDQLDQ audience. In Romania, as in other East European countries, Shakespeare enjoyed high cultural prestige before his works had either been performed or even read.4 Translations or adaptations of French adaptations represented, in fact, the way Shakespeare was introduced in this culture.5 The large gap between Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice and the adapted version, as is obvious from the passage quoted above, raises interesting issues regarding the kind of Shakespeare that was disseminated trans-nationally and even trans-culturally in the mid-nineteenth century. The issues are all the more important as translations from Shakespeare are generally credited with having played an important role in the construction of the emerging national cultures and national identities in Central and Eastern Europe at that time. 3 M. Du Lac and Jules-Edmond Alboise, Shylock, drame en trois actes, imité de Shakespeare (Paris: Bezou Libraire, 1830). 4 Péter Davidházi, ‘Providing texts for a Literary Cult. Early Translations of Shakespeare in Hungary,’ in European Shakespeares. Translating Shakespeare in the Romantic Age, ed. Dirk Delabastita and Lieven D’Hulst (Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1993), p. 158. See also Peter Davidhazi, The Romantic Cult of Shakespeare: Literary Reception in Anthropological Perspective (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998), p. 180. 5 7KH ¿UVW SHUIRUPDQFH RI Hamlet in 1861 was also based on the translation of Dumas and Meurice’s adaptation: Alexandre Dumas and Paul Meurice, Hamlet Prince de Danemark: (Shakespeare’s Hamlet Prince of Denmark): drame en cinq actes et huit parties, en vers / par Mm. Alexandre Dumas et Paul Meurice (Paris: Michel Lévy Frères, rue Vivienne, 1, 1848). Previous Romanian translations of Shakespeare’s plays, published in 1845, Julius Caesar, and in 1848, Romeo and Juliet and Othello, were also indirect translations, using Letourneur’s version. See William Shakespeare, Œuvres complètes de Shakspeare, traduites de l’Anglais par Pierre Letourneur, Nouv. éd., rev. et corr. / par François Guizot et Amédée Pichot (Paris: Chez Ladvocat, 1821–27).

Rewriting Venice and Radicalizing Shylock

217

In an essay on the translation of The Merchant of Venice into French, ‘What is a relevant translation?’ (Que’est-ce qu’ une traduction ‘relévante’?),6 Derrida argues that there is no relevant translation, in the sense that no translation can be truly hospitable to the otherness of the original text.7 One can counter this position and make allowance for the ‘betrayal’ any translation involves, showing that a certain degree of ‘ethnocentric violence,’ as Venuti calls it, is inevitable in the process of the cultural transfer that translations produce.8 The recontextualization of the original text inherent in the translation process necessarily involves a rewriting of the text. Can, however, translations-adaptations (or ‘tradaptations’) that radically UHZULWHWKHWH[WDQGWKHUHIRUHVHULRXVO\WUDQVJUHVVDJDLQVWLWVRWKHUQHVVEHMXVWL¿HG" If so, on what grounds? Recent work on adaptations has discussed these in terms of cultural reworking and intertextuality, of intercultural or even transcultural movements and of cultural encounters, and of the (re)localization of globally circulated texts such as Shakespeare’s plays.9 This essay sets out to address some of these questions by looking into the process of cultural and political negotiations that were involved in the production in 1830 of three French adaptations of The Merchant of Venice. At the same time, my chapter will consider the politics of further ‘relocating’ Shakespeare’s play in an adapted form to marginal areas such as the Romanian principalities, which at that time were still part of the Ottoman Empire. Alfred de Vigny’s Le Marchand de Venise The year 1830 is an important one for French Romantic drama: the battle over Hugo’s play Hernani was fought at the Théâtre Français, one of the most conservative and at the same time most prestigious cultural institutions in France. This is also the year of the July Revolution, which put an end to the French Restoration and re-established a large number of the rights and liberties ushered in by the great 1789 Revolution. Battles in the theater and on the barricades were closely related –

6 Jacques Derrida, Qu’est-ce qu’une traduction ‘relevante’? (Paris: L’Herne, 2005), pp. 64–73. 7 Derrida discusses the relation between the translation, the act of pardoning in The Merchant of Venice, and Hegel’s notion of Aufhebung. He points out the extent to which a translation is an act of Aufhebung, a term which he translates into French by using the word ‘relève,’ hence the title ‘une traduction relevante.’ 8 Lawrence Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility. A History of Translation (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), p. 22. 9 See Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation (London and New York: Routledge, 2006); Daniel Fischlin and Mark Fortier, Adaptations of Shakespeare: A Critical Anthology of Plays from the Seventeenth Century to the Present (London and New York: Routledge, 2000) and Sonia Massai, World-Wide Shakespeare. Local Appropriations in Film and Performance (London and New York: Routledge, 2006).

Visions of Venice in Shakespeare

218

to be a Romantic meant to be against the government.10$WWLPHVRI¿HUFHSROLWLFDO FHQVRUVKLS DQG UHSUHVVLRQ ZKDW ¿QDOO\ WULJJHUHG WKH -XO\ UHYROXWLRQ ZDV WKH suppression of the liberty of the press), political issues were fought indirectly on the stage in the form of clashes over literary and theatrical norms and institutions. At the same time, one of the most hotly contested places of the July Revolution was the neighborhood of the Théâtre de la Porte Saint-Martin with many theater SHRSOH ¿JKWLQJ RQ WKH EDUULFDGHV11 Etienne Arago, director of the Théâtre de 9DULHWpZHQWVRIDUDVWRFORVHKLVWKHDWHUGXULQJDSHUIRUPDQFHKRLVWWKHÀDJRI the French republic and join the revolutionaries in the streets nearby.12 The Shakespeare staged in Paris in 1830 was inevitably placed at the intersection of Romanticism, theater and revolution. Hugo’s famous Preface to Cromwell, published in 1827, had already established the relationship between Romantic drama (le drame), Shakespeare and emancipation, understood as freedom in both art and politics.13 To the French Academy this was nothing short of revolutionary effrontery. Jonathan Bate sees the storming of the barricades of the French Academy with Shakespeare in the avant-garde as a prelude to the 1830 Revolution.14 Alfred de Vigny describes the impact of the performance of his translation of Othello – Le More de Venise in similar terms.15 Nonetheless, the three versions of The Merchant of Venice submitted to the Parisian theaters in the spring of 1830 were all adaptations of the play which, though they enlisted Shakespeare to contest the neo-classical paradigm, bowed to the dominant norms to varying degrees. Lambert suggests that the Shakespeare of the French romantics had a limited impact on the revision of French theater.16 Apparently, it would take more than a revolution to change the taste prevailing in the Théâtre Français.17 10

Anne Uebersfeld, ‘Introduction’ in Victor Hugo, ‘Préface,’ Cromwell (Paris: Flammarion, 1968), p. 20. 11 George Duby and Robert Mandrou, A History of French Civilization, trans. James B. Atkinson (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1964), p. 462. 12 Alexandre Dumas, Mes Mémoires (Paris: Editions Denoel, 1942), p. 351. 13 Hugo’s statement that ‘Shakespeare, c’est le drame; et le drame, qui fond sous un PrPHVRXIÀHOHJURWHVTXHHWOHVXEOLPHOHWHUULEOHHWOHERXIIRQODWUDJpGLHHWODFRPpGLH le drame est le charactère propre de la troisième époque de la poésie, de la littérature actuelle’ became a slogan of French romantic theater (Victor Hugo, ‘Préface,’ Cromwell, Paris: Flammarion, 1968), p. 75. 14 Jonathan Bate, The Romantics on Shakespeare (London: Penguin, 1992), p. 26. 15 Alfred de Vigny, ‘Avant Propos,’ Théâtre. Vol 2. (Paris: Flammarion, 1920), p. 2. (Le More de Venise, pp. 31–219). 16 José Lambert, ‘Shakespeare en France au tournant du XVIII-ème siècle. Un dossier européen,’ in European Shakespeares. Translating Shakespeare in the Romantic Age, ed. Dirk Delabastita and Lieven D’Hulst (Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1993), pp. 35–6. 17 Lambert considers that the neoclassical taste’s resistance to change should be put down to the relative autonomy of the French theater in relation to the literature of the time, which was more responsive to the Romantic movement (Lambert, p. 36).

Rewriting Venice and Radicalizing Shylock

219

A closer view at the rewriting of Venice in these plays can show how adaptations negotiate between cultures and ideologies, more or less reconciling Shakespeare’s text with dominant French theatrical formulas and at the same time appropriating the former to a liberal, revolutionary agenda. Alfred de Vigny’s Le Marchand de Venise was written in 1827, the same year as his reputed translation of Othello – Le More de Venise.18 In his preface to the printed version of the play, Vigny admits that he submitted Le Marchand in 1830 to the Théâtre Français but that it was rejected.19 Vigny did not hesitate to call his compressed, three-act version of The Merchant of Venice a ‘faithful translation’ and rejected any suggestion that it might be merely an ‘imitation,’ i.e., an adaptation. +HHYHQFRPSDUHGKLVWUDQVODWLRQVZLWKWKRVHRI6FKOHJHODQGZDVFRQ¿GHQWWKH\ would initiate a large-scale project of poetic translations of Shakespeare similar to the one undertaken in Germany.20 ,QIDFW9LJQ\UHZULWHVWKHWH[WUHVKXIÀLQJVFHQHVOHDYLQJRXWFKDUDFWHUVDQG slightly changing the plot in order to preserve as much as possible the unities of time, place and action. The money is lent for a period of three days instead of three months; the shifts from Venice to Belmont are cut in number and organized so that they coincide with the alternation of acts. The plot unfolding in Belmont around the suitors’ choice of the casket is cut down to the bone. Only Bassanio is shown to choose; the other suitors do not appear on the stage and even he is given a restricted number of lines. The resolution of this plot in Act 5 is condensed into two relatively short scenes. Vigny’s rewriting imposes on the Shakespearean text the homogeneity of the ‘noble style’ of neoclassical drama, thus disregarding the romantic ‘norm’ of mixing ‘the sublime and the grotesque’ that Hugo had derived from Shakespeare.21 Everything that smacked of low comedy to the French audience is excised: the two Gobbos, as well as Solanio and Salerio. There is no alternation between prose and verse either, as everything is translated in noble alexandrines. Vigny expurgates the text of all racy linguistic expressions or even of references to body parts that the French audience might have rated as ‘common’ or ‘low’ and replaces them with abstract-sounding paraphrases. 18 Vigny’s Le More de Venise was produced at the Théâtre Français in 1829 and enjoyed considerable success, even if not as great as he describes it in the preface to the play. 19 Bassan considers Vigny’s assertion that he had contacted the Théâtre Français over this play to be unsubstantiated: Fernande Bassan, Alfred de Vigny et la Comédie Française (Tubingen and Paris: Gunter Narr Verlag and Editions Jean Michel Place, 1984), pp. 40–41. According to him the play was submitted to the Théâtre Ambigu Comique, but the authorities censured it on the grounds that it was in verse and only the two élite theaters – the Théâtre Français and the Odéon – were allowed to stage plays in verse. Vigny’s Le Marchand de Venise was not performed until 70 years on, in 1905. 20 Vigny also added an afterword explaining what critical apparatus he had used as well as footnotes with the lines in the original and his own comments on them. Vigny, Le More de Venise, p. 2. 21 Hugo, ‘Préface,’ p. 75.

Visions of Venice in Shakespeare

220

A comparison of Shylock’s speeches in Vigny’s22 and Guizot’s versions23 is fully indicative of the difference in the margins allowed for in stage versions of Shakespeare as opposed to those allowed for in ‘armchair versions’ or what the Germans called Lesedrama (drama to be read). For instance, unlike in Guizot’s or in Letourneur’s previous translations, in Vigny’s text Shylock does not use terms such as ‘spit on my Jewish gaberdine’ (1.3.104), ‘void your rheum upon my beard’ (1.3.109) or ‘cut-throat dog’ (1.3.103), ‘stranger cur’ (1.3.110).24 Shylock’s diction is polished by means of bland vague paraphrases, such as ‘Vous qui m’avez toujours mis au-dessous d’un homme!’25 Left out are also the powerful physical references Shylock uses to argue for the similarity between Jews and Christians: ‘If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh?’ (3.1.50–51).26 As Vigny compresses his speeches (he cuts 25 lines from his reply to Antonio’s request for money), the audience’s sympathy for Shylock is undercut. This, however, was GH¿QLWHO\QRW9LJQ\¶VJRDODVKHZDQWHGWRFDSLWDOL]HRQWKHURPDQWLFDWWUDFWLRQRI Shylock as a persecuted ‘Other.’ If one applies Schleiermacher’s distinction between translations that take the reader to the text and those that take the text to the reader,27 one should LQFOXGH9LJQ\¶VWUDQVODWLRQLQWKH¿UVWFDWHJRU\DVLWREYLRXVO\GRPHVWLFDWHVWKH text, making it comply with his or her values and norms. The prose versions of Letourneur and in particular of Guizot, by following Shakespeare’s text closely, confront the reader with a target-oriented translation of an ‘exotic,’ ‘barbarian’ text. These versions were, however, treated as literature to be enjoyed in the private sphere and were not subjected to the same kind of policing and censorship 22

Alfred de Vigny, Le Marchand de Venise, in Théâtre. Vol 2, pp. 219–324. Francois P.G. Guizot, ‘Notice sur Le Marchand de Venise,’ in Œuvres complètes de Shakespeare. Traduction de M. Guizot, vol 6 (Paris: Librairie Académique Didier, 1873), pp. 7–91. 24 William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, ed. Molly Maureen Mahood. The New Cambridge Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). All quotations from Shakespeare’s Merchant will appear parenthetically in the text. 25 Vigny, Marchand, p. 235. 26 His translation of Othello similarly complied with neoclassical norms: he did not hesitate to leave out Bianca and even to erase all reference to her. Given the rigid neoclassical norms that the public and critics alike employed at the time, his erasure of Bianca and the clown was considered to be an astute strategy to promote Shakespeare in France. Le Figaro, one of the journals favourable to Vigny and to the new drama, complained about Vigny’s use of the word ‘handkerchief’ (left out in Leturneur’s version). Critics objected to the inclusion in the stage version of Othello’s order to Desdemona ‘Get you to bed on th’instant’ (4.3.5). Desdemona’s words to Emilia ‘Unpin me here’ (4.3.33) also had to go as Vigny did not hesitate to make such cuts as would placate the audience (see Bassan, p. 28). William Shakespeare, Othello, ed. Michael Neill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). 27 Friedrich Schleiermacher, ‘On the Different Methods of Translating,’ in The Translation Studies Reader, ed. Lawrence Venuti (New York and London: Routledge, 2004), p. 49. 23

Rewriting Venice and Radicalizing Shylock

221

as the stage versions.28 The result of Vigny’s negotiation between Shakespeare and the neo-classical paradigm is a charming comedy that shares much with Granville’s eighteenth-century English adaptation. Nevertheless, the changes he introduced failed to iron out the deeper threats that the interlocking of romance and material concerns as well as Shakespeare’s treatment of women posed to the ultraconservative patriarchal values of Restoration France. As such, the play was too transgressive for the Théâtre Français or for any other Parisian stage. A French Shylock on the Eve of the July Revolution Lamarche’s adaptation Le Marchand de Venise. Comédie en 3 actes et en vers, imitée de Shakespeare par M. Lamarche was performed on the eve of the July Revolution, on June 5, 1830, at the Odéon theater.29 As the author himself admits, one segment of the audience booed the play, whereas the ‘young Romantics’ gave their full support.30 The reception of the play as Lamarche describes it, suggests a comparison with the battle waged around Hugo’s famous Hernani, staged the same year.31 Lamarche’s imitation stylistically conforms to the pattern imposed by a theater like the Odéon or the Théâtre Français and at the same time injects topical revolutionary meanings into the play. Lamarche focuses the action on Shylock as both a victim and a protestor against discrimination and injustice. The play starts with a dumb-show in which Shylock tries to interact with several groups of merchants but is repeatedly rebuffed and physically abused. The play ends with Shylock’s trial as the last act is dropped. Lamarche further introduces a narration of Shylock’s previous sufferings which recognizably foreshadows the history of WKHSHUVHFXWLRQVRIWKH-HZVLQ(XURSH6K\ORFNZDV¿UVWH[SHOOHGIURP6SDLQKLV eldest son was burned alive in Rome and when he came to Venice, famous for its tolerance towards whoever brings money – Turks, Moors and Jews – he suffered further persecution and insults, which caused his wife’s death. Antonio’s gross anti-Semitic contempt (‘un juif, rebut de la nature …’)32 and Jessica’s impassionate defense of her father (‘Mon père a répondu par haine au mépris / On l’attaque

28 All of the Shakespeare staged in France in the early nineteenth century was grossly bowdlerized and rewritten, including the texts the English actors performed in 1828 and the bilingual books the audience was provided with in order to be able to follow their performance. Jean Jaquot, Shakespeare en France. Mises en scène d’hier et d’aujourd’hui (Paris: Le Temps, 1964), pp. 28–30. 29 M. Lamarche, Le marchand de Venise. Comédie en 4 actes et en vers (Paris: Barba, 1830). Barba was a small publishing house situated behind the Théâtre Français. 30 Vigny, however, did not fully approve of the play, considering that Lamarche had left out the most beautiful parts of the original. Bassan, p. 45. 31 Lamarche, p. 1. 32 Lamarche, p. 20.

Visions of Venice in Shakespeare

222

partout, il cherche à se défendre’)33 further enhance the projection of a romantic, quasi-tragic version of Shylock as a man more sinned against than sinning.34 The reading of Shylock as a victim of religious persecution was the dominant perspective in France until the late nineteenth century. It was reinforced by the awareness of the universal right to religious freedom enshrined in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen (Déclaration de droits de l’Homme et du citoyen) of 1789 and assimilated in the Civil Code. The popular Galerie des personnages de Shakspeare,35 an illustrated collection of excerpts from Shakespeare in both English and French issued in 1844, also insisted on Shylock’s tragic dignity, whereas Mézières, an important mid-century Shakespearean scholar, considered Shakespeare’s play a plea for religious and racial tolerance made well before WKHVH QRWLRQV ZHUH GH¿QHG WKHRUHWLFDOO\36 Later nineteenth-century adaptations, such as Haraucourt’s highly successful vaudeville,37 reverted to the treatment of Shylock as an unsympathetic, comic villain, possibly in keeping with increased anti-Semitism in French society. /DPDUFKH¶VSOD\DGGVDIXUWKHUWZLVWWRWKH¿JXUHRI6K\ORFNWKHPDUW\UDQG protester, which increases the relevance of the play to the social and political climate on the eve of the July Revolution. At the end of the trial Shylock accepts neither the Duke’s pardon nor Antonio’s offer to sell him back half of his fortune. Shylock rejects the economic exchange proposed to him and in the elevated tone of the heroic pathos of the neo-classical tragedy, he re-asserts his right to revenge and hatred: Shylock (sortant de l’abattement où il était tombé): Ce serait me trahir, Et te vendre le droit que j’ai de te haïr. Adieu. Damnation sur la race de chrétiens! Et si l’enfer me veut à présent, qu’il me prenne.

33

Lamarche, p. 18. Lamarche explains in his dedication to the leading actor, Ligier, that he has tried to retain some of the negative stereotypical traces of the ‘medieval Jew,’ but has insisted on ‘the dignity that suffering and a strong passion confer upon anyone.’ Lamarche, p. 1. 35 Amédée Pichot, Galerie des personnages de Shakspeare reproduits dans les SULQFLSDOHV VFqQHV GH VHV SLqFHV DYHF XQH DQDO\VH VXFFLQFWH GH FKDFXQH GHV SLH̖FHV GH 6KDNVSHDUHHWODUHSURGXFWLRQHQDQJODLVHWHQIUDQoDLVGHVVFH̖QHVDX[TXHOOHVVHUDSSRUWHQW OHVTXDWUHYLQJWVJUDYXUHVGRQWFHWRXYUDJHHVWRUQH̗«3UH̗FH̗GH̗HG¶XQHQRWLFHELRJUDSKLTXH de Shakspear par Old Nick [pseud., i.e., Paul Émile Daurand Forgues] (Paris: Baudry, Librarie Européenne, 1844). 36 ‘Le poète réclame sur la scène l’égalité de tous cultes; bien avant qu’elle était reconnu par la loi; Shakespeare était tolérant et il ne partage sur les questions religieuses aucun des préjugés de son siècle et de sa nation,’ Alfred Mezières, Shakespeare: ses œuvres et ses critiques (Paris: Hachette, 1854, 3rd edition), p. 165. 37 Edmond Haraucourt, Shylock: comédie en trois actes et sept tableaux après Shakespeare (Paris: G. Charpentier, 1889). 34

Rewriting Venice and Radicalizing Shylock

223

[Shylock (shaking off the despondency he had fallen in): This would mean betraying myself And selling you the right I have to hate you. Adieu. Damnation upon the race of Christians! And if hell wants me now, let it have me.]38

Shylock’s action was thus re-read from the perspective of the right to resistance, also included in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen of 1789 along with the right to liberty, property and security. The theory underpinning the legitimacy of resistance against oppression, if the 1789 basic rights of human and civil liberty are violated by the state, was further developed by Benjamin &RQVWDQWLQWKHSHULRGSUHFHGLQJWKH-XO\5HYROXWLRQ7KHWRSLFDOVLJQL¿FDQFHRI the articulation of this right on the stage of the Odéon, a month before the July Revolution, is obvious. Shylock’s otherness as well as his refusal to yield to power EHFRPHVHPEOHPDWLFRIWKH)UHQFKSRSXODWLRQZKRRQFHDJDLQZDVJRLQJWR¿JKW for its civil liberties and rights. Shylock – A Melodrama at the Théâtre de la Porte de Saint-Martin The ending in Lamarche’s adaptation comes close to the ending of Du Lac and Alboise’s adaptation, quoted at the beginning of the essay, where not only does 6K\ORFNUHIXVHWKH'XNH¶VSDUGRQEXWKHDOVRWDNHVKLVSRXQGRIÀHVK The adaptation performed at the Théâtre de la Porte de Saint-Martin subjects both the cast and the plot of Shakespeare’s play to radical rewriting: Antonio is %DVVDQLR¶VIDWKHUKHGRHVQRWDSSHDULQWKHSOD\\HWKHLVLGHQWL¿HGDVWKHPDMRU VRXUFHRI6K\ORFN¶VSHUVHFXWLRQ6K\ORFNLVWRKDYHDSRXQGRI%DVVDQLR¶VÀHVK instead of Antonio’s. Portia is replaced by Nerisca, no longer a wealthy heiress but a poor Venetian poetess who depends on Bassanio’s generosity; Nerisca does not appear in court disguised; the role of Balthasar is split between Lorenzo, who GHIHQGV%DVVDQLRLQFRXUWDQGUHYHDOVWKHXQH[SHFWHGÀDZLQ6K\ORFN¶VFRQWUDFW and the Duke, who delivers Portia’s speech on mercy. The play is a ‘drama’ (meaning a melodrama) and not a comedy so that characters such as Launcelot Gobbo, Salanio, Salerino, and even Graziano are left out. There is, however, a new and important character – the ‘people’ – represented by gondoliers, sailors and paupers. Shylock at the Théâtre de la Porte de Saint-Martin carries further the classicizing tendency in the rewriting of Shakespeare. The three unities are observed most rigidly – the action takes place only in one location, Venice, the term of the bond is 24 hours and there is basically a single plot centered around the bond. The play, however, is no longer in verse but in prose and adopts many of the ingredients (such as the motif of persecuted virtue) that made romantic dramas and melodramas highly successful at the Théâtre de la Porte Saint-Martin. 38

Lamarche, Le marchand, p. 74 (my translation).

Visions of Venice in Shakespeare

224

The format of the melodrama imposed on characters and plot enhances the ‘corrective’ thrust of the adaptation and brings the moral and ideological values of Shakespeare’s play in line with the norms prevailing in Restoration France. Highly FRQVHUYDWLYH SDWULDUFKDO YDOXHV DQG UROH GH¿QLWLRQV UHSODFH WKH PRUH GLVWXUELQJ positions adopted in Shakespeare’s text. In the preface to his translation published in 1821, Guizot almost ignores Shylock in order to focus on arguments that can justify 3RUWLD¶VDQG-HVVLFD¶VDFWLRQVDQGPDNHWKHPWDOO\ZLWKWKHWUDGLWLRQDOGH¿QLWLRQRI femininity imposed in the post-revolutionary period.39 Lamarche shows a similar anxiety not to have the patriarchal authority that Shylock embodies challenged on the stage.40 His Jessica is less transgressive, is reluctant to elope, no longer guilds herself with ducats and appears disguised in court only to plead for her father’s pardon. Du Lac and Alboise go further: there is no more need for disguise as the heroine’s agency is narrowly restricted and does not transgress beyond the boundaries of the private sphere and the norm of passive femininity. Jessica does not willingly betray her father to elope with Lorenzo but is carried away while she LVXQFRQVFLRXV,QWKHHQGVKHSURYHVWREHWKHHPERGLPHQWRI¿OLDOSLHW\UHDG\WR VDFUL¿FHKHUVHOIWRGHIHQGKHUIDWKHUDJDLQVWWKHUDJLQJµSHRSOH¶ What they further expunge from Shakespeare’s play is the pervasive effect of the market producing the linkage of love and commodity that is at the heart of the play’s darkness. In the nostalgically traditional world of the melodrama, commerce no longer provides the frame of reference for all pursuits, including romance and revenge.41 Bassanio’s and Lorenzo’s love is untainted by any material interests (the roles are inverted as it is Bassanio who sponsors his future wife) and even Shylock is not motivated by greed: he helps the needy and is ready to spend any DPRXQWRIPRQH\WR¿QGKLVGDXJKWHU 39

After the revolutionary 1792, when women could dress like men and demand to go to the front and when a law on divorce was also passed, successive laws starting with Napoleon’s Code Civile reinforced the authority and the powers of the father and of the husband. The husband was given absolute superiority in a marriage, and the married wife stopped being a responsible individual. The father was given full power in the private sphere, whereas the public sphere was exclusive to men. The resurgence of ‘family values’ promoted by the traditionalists was coupled with the religious campaign during the Restoration that led to the further segregation of women in the private sphere and the reinforcement of WUDGLWLRQDO GH¿QLWLRQV RI IHPLQLQLW\ WKDW ZDV SUHGLFDWHG RQ ZRPHQ¶V GHSHQGHQFH RQ WKH husband and father. See Michelle Perrot, ‘La famille triomphante,’ in Histoire de la vie privée. Vol 4. De la Révolution à la Grande guerre, ed. Philippe Ariès and George Duby (Paris: Seuil, 1994), pp. 93–103. 40 For the challenge that Jessica’s behavior poses to patriarchal hierarchy see John Drakakis, ‘Jessica,’ in The Merchant of Venice: New Critical Essays, ed. John Mahon (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), pp. 145–64. 41 For the relationship between revenge and commerce see Linda Woodbridge, ‘Payback Time: On the Economic Rhetoric of Revenge in the Merchant of Venice,’ in Shakespeare and the Cultures of Performance, ed. Paul Yachin and Patricia Badir (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), pp. 29–40.

Rewriting Venice and Radicalizing Shylock

225

For all the conservative accents, this adaptation foregrounds the urgency of revisionist political action. Shylock is overtly refashioned as a champion of ‘the rights of man and citizen.’ In this respect, the production at the Théâtre of the Porte de la Saint-Martin is the most audacious of the three adaptations, well suited to the revolutionary spirit that theater and its environment harbored. The play amply vindicates Shylock’s desire for revenge, introducing a heartrending narration of abuses, a narration that legitimizes Shylock’s claim to be granted his human and civil rights, including the right to obtain redress if injured by another. Shakespeare’s famous speech ‘Hath not a Jew eyes’ (3.1.46) is rewritten WRHFKRWKH¿UVWDUWLFOHLQWKH'HFODUDWLRQRIWKH5LJKWVRI0DQDQG&LWL]HQµ0HQ are born and remain free and equal in rights. Social distinctions may be founded upon the general good.’ In the narration of his sufferings Shylock confesses : J’étais né avec une âme tendre et généreuse … et le juif comme le chrétien était XQIUqUHjPHV\HX[«MHFUR\DLVTX¶XQHkPHJUDQGHXQH¿JXUHKXPDLQHPH rendait l’égal des autres hommes; je ne savais pas que le titre d’esclave était attaché aux vêtements de ma nation. [I was born with a loving and generous soul … and the Jew just like the Christian was a brother to me … I believed that a large soul and a human appearance would render me the equal of other men; I did not know that the label ‘slave’ had been attached to the clothes of my nation.]42

'X/DFDQG$OERLVHFRQÀDWH6KDNHVSHDUH¶VThe Merchant of Venice and Othello (successfully produced at the Théâtre Français in Vigny’s version) to provide Shylock with greater scope in the pursuit of his rights. Shylock is given economic DQGSROLWLFDOSRZHUWR¿JKWWKHGLVFULPLQDWLQJODZVDQGSURWHFWWKHULJKWWRHTXDOLW\ of the Jewish population. The third act of the play begins with a radical reversal of roles in which Shylock, very much like Othello, becomes the alien who is called upon to save the Venetian republic. The Duke and the Senate have asked Shylock as the leader of the Jewish community for a loan that alone can save the depleted state from collapsing in the face of the enemy’s renewed attack. As Shylock sums it up in his speech to his brethern: … le ciel remet encore une fois le destin de Venise en nos mains. Ces patriciens VL¿HUVFHVpQDWVLVXSHUEHOHGRJHOXLPrPHLPSORUHQWDXMRXUG¶KXLQRWUHDSSXL Esclaves soumis, hier nous courbions humblement nos fronts devant eux. Les rôles ont changé. Ce sont les maîtres qui prient maintenant, et qui attendent avec anxiété que nous leur tendions une main secourable. Que faut-il faire? Laisser consommer leur ruine, et fuir avec nos trésors loin d’un pays où chacun de nos services est payé par une persécution nouvelle; ou bien oublier le passé, les sauver encore, mais en assurant cette fois et pour toujours les franchises de notre nation! Parlez, mes frères, que décidez vous?

42

Du Lac and Alboise, Shylock, 1.4, p. 14 (my translation).

Visions of Venice in Shakespeare

226

[The heavens have once again put the fate of Venice into our hands. These proud patricians, this great senate, the doge himself beg us to come to their help. Yesterday we were still humble slaves who bowed down before them, today the roles have changed. Now the masters beg us and wait anxiously for us to give them a helping hand. What shall we do? Shall we let them be ruined and run away with our fortunes far away from a country where our charitable acts are rewarded with renewed persecutions, or shall we forget the past, forgive them, yet this time take action to secure once and for all the freedoms/rights of our nation? Say brethren, what is your decision?]43

Shylock’s proposal is to grant the Venetian state the requested loan in exchange for a new set of laws that would guarantee their basic rights to equal and nondiscriminating treatment, to individual liberty and the inviolability of property. One of the conditions attached to this loan is Shylock’s personal request for justice related to his bond with Bassanio. This is the way that Du Luc and Alboise’s adaptation re-establishes the link with the plot in Shakespeare’s play. The Doge’s appearance incognito at the gathering of the Jewish merchants to plead the desperate cause of the Venetian state as well as the display of their wealth on stage are symbolic actions that strengthen the impression of power that Shylock can wield. At the same time, they place him in the ambivalent position of both victim and menace. As his relentless pursuit of justice for and revenge on the innocent Bassanio turns into a scapegoating action (Shylock is given the choice DQGWDNHVKLVSRXQGRIÀHVK WKHDXGLHQFHVLGHVZLWKWKHµSHRSOH¶ZKRUDOO\XSLQ defence of Bassanio and rebel against the state authorities.447KH¿QDOWDEOHDXZLWK ‘the people’ breaking through the Duke’s guard and invading the courtroom is both LGHRORJLFDOO\FRQWURYHUVLDODQGSROLWLFDOO\LQÀDPPDWRU\ A Romanian Version of Shylock and its Revolutionary Context Supposing that the translator could have found all three stage versions of 6KDNHVSHDUH¶V SOD\ LQ 3DULV LQ WKH ODWH IRUWLHV RU HDUO\ ¿IWLHV ZKDW PLJKW KDYH determined his choosing the last version? To begin with, practical reasons; Du Luc and Alboise’s adaptation was in prose, hence easier and faster to translate. An important reason must have been the success of melodramas on the 43

Du Lac and Alboise, Shylock, 3.1, pp. 50–51 (my emphasis, my translation). Mention must be made of the heroic investment and idealization of the ‘people,’ represented by the lower classes, by the French Romantics. The people were dressed up LQ DOO WKH WUDGLWLRQDO YLUWXHV WKH 5RPDQWLFV GHVSDLUHG RI ¿QGLQJ LQ WKH DFTXLVLWLYH DQG complacent bourgeoisie. Duby and Mandrou, A History of French Civilization, 1964, p. 457. See also George Duby (ed.), Histoire de la France des origines a nos jours (Paris: Larousse, 1995), p. 600. At the same time, it is a fact that the brunt of the July Revolution was borne by ‘the people’ of Paris, printers, and blue-collar workers who had immediately joined the students and the Romantic intellectuals. Jean Carpentier and François Lebrun, Histoire de France (Paris: Seuil, 1987), p. 26. 44

Rewriting Venice and Radicalizing Shylock

227

Romanian stage. The tendency to assimilate Shakespeare’s plays into melodrama can also be noticed in the choice of the adaptation of Hamlet by Meurice and 'XPDVDVWKHYHUVLRQWREHXVHGIRUWKH¿UVW5RPDQLDQSHUIRUPDQFHRIWKHSOD\45 Shakespeare gained ground in the Romanian theaters via the translation of French melodramatic adaptations. The conservative insistence on patriarchal values and the evacuation of Shakespeare’s linkage of romance and commerce must also have made for the easy reception of the adaptation, given the largely pre-capitalist structure of Romanian society at the time. Last but not least, what might have appealed to the audience was the play’s radical, revolutionary thrust, its insistence on rights and liberties in a highly democratic Venice. While Teulescu, the translator, is only known for translating Eugene Sue’s novels, the authorized persons who recommended the text for performance and introduced changes to it (I. Voinescu and G. Alexandrescu) were important literary DQGSROLWLFDO¿JXUHVRIWKHµIRUW\HLJKWJHQHUDWLRQ¶LHHQOLJKWHQHGLQWHOOHFWXDOV educated in France and participating in the 1848 Revolution). In the 1853–54 period, preceding the production of Shylock, the ‘forty-eighters’ at home and in exile in France and England were organizing a follow-up to the 1848 action of national and political liberation.46 The revolutionaries were determined to use the Crimean War for the opportunities it opened up to liberate the country from the Russian protectorate and to negotiate a greater autonomy for the two Romanian principalities from the Ottoman Empire. They were hoping that a rebellion of the Romanian population against Russia would determine the Porte to acknowledge their republican government as well as extend political rights for the Romanian population.47 In spring 1854, a series of uprisings against the Russians (the ‘barbarians from the North’)48 broke out. Although General Magheru recruited an army in the southern part of the country, and a republican government was in the making, the revolutionaries’ plans fell through when Austria invaded the country and made a 45

Economu’s translation of Dumas’ Hamlet was published in 1855, one year after the performance of Shylock: Dumitru Petre Economu, (trans.), Hamlet principele Danemarcei; drama in cinci acte si optu parti de la Shakespeare, tradusa de D.P. Economu [Hamlet, SULQFH RI 'HQPDUN GUDPD LQ ¿YH DFWV DQG  SDUWV E\ 6KDNHVSHDUH WUDQVODWHG E\ '3 Economu], (Bucuresti: Imprimeria lui Ferdinant Om, 1855). 46 Many of the expatriates had joined radical movements like Mazzini’s European Democratic Committee and a number of them were arrested for subversive acts. See Radu Florescu, The Struggle against Russia in the Romanian Principalities 1821–1854 (Iasi: The Centre for Romanian Studies, 1997), p. 307, and Paul Emanoil Barbu, ‘Studiu introductiv,’ in Actiuni sociale si politice romanesti in anii 1853–54 [Romanian Social and Political Documents in the Years 1853–54] (Bucuresti: Editura Academiei Romane, 2003), pp. 5–21. 47 General Magheru, who was in charge of organizing the military insurrection, makes explicit reference to ‘a new Constitution of the Romanian Principalities, drawn up on the basis of the desires of the Romanian people, the progress of time and the security of the Ottoman Empire,’ Barbu, p. 76. 48 Barbu, p. 77.

Visions of Venice in Shakespeare

228

separate settlement with the Ottoman Empire. Given this political context, Shylock’s negotiation of rights for his people must have resonated deeply with the Romanian audience, eager to be liberated from both the Russian and the Ottoman Empire. Mention should be made that in the Romanian translation of Shylock’s speech to the Jewish merchants, the French word ‘franchises,’ which can mean freedom, immunity, sanctuary or asylum, was translated by the word ‘eliberarea’ (the liberation). The Romanian equivalent gives a national dimension to Shylock’s efforts, which is added to his pursuit of civil rights. Just as appealing was the human rights vocabulary that was smuggled onto the Romanian stage via an adaptation of Shakespeare with references to equality, the rights of the individual, and protection against unjust laws. The use of modern (western) legal terms like contract, convention, warrant, and protection of the individual must have been highly inspiring to the audience. The changes the Romanian translation made to the text of the French adaptation softened the stridency of the religious opposition. The term ‘Christian’ was often UHSODFHGE\WKHWHUPµ9HQHWLDQ¶WRVXJJHVWWKDWWKHFRQÀLFWZDVQRWDUHOLJLRXVEXW a social and political one. The role of the people was endorsed without any of the TXDOL¿FDWLRQVLQWKHRULJLQDO7KHWZRFHQVRUVFURVVHGRXWPLVJLYLQJVLQWKH)UHQFK text about the anarchy that a popular uprising might produce. Such changes clearly suggest the appropriation of the ‘imitation’ of Shakespeare to the revolutionary agenda that the Romanian Romantics were pursuing in their turn. The Merchant of Venice, in more or less radically adapted versions, was also DPRQJ WKH ¿UVW SOD\V WR EH SHUIRUPHG LQ %XOJDULD7KH UHDVRQV 6KXUEDQRY DQG Sokolova give for its appeal to the nineteenth-century Bulgarian audience are KLJKO\VLPLODUWRWKRVHLGHQWL¿HGLQWKH5RPDQLDQUHFHSWLRQRIWKHSOD\ The chief attraction of Othello, as well as The Merchant of Venice, is the possibility they offer for highlighting a family problem. … The historical experience [of the struggle for independence from the Ottoman Empire] enabled the Bulgarians to empathize fully with racially slighted characters like Othello and Shylock, seen as sad victims of outer forces.49

The Shakespearean Venice that crossed cultural boundaries in the nineteenth century was subjected to multiple recontextualization and radical rewriting. The several processes of ‘domestication’ that it was subjected to involved both a progressive suppression of its more subversive and disconcerting aspects and its enlisting in a militant political agenda. It was at a great remove from the sixteenthcentury Shakespeare and even from his reinvention in nineteenth-century Britain; WKLV9HQLFHUHLQIRUFHGWKH)UHQFKFXOWXUDODQGSROLWLFDOLQÀXHQFHLQ(DVW(XURSHDQ countries like the Romanian principalities.50 49

Alexander Shurbanov and Boika Sokolova, Painting Shakespeare Red. An EastEuropean Appropriation (Newark: University of Delaware Press/London: Associated University Press, 2001), p. 47. 50 Compare Lambert’s conclusions on the indirect translations of Shakespeare in nineteenth-century Europe (Lambert, p. 31).

Rewriting Venice and Radicalizing Shylock

229

Works Cited Barbu, Paul Emanoil. ‘Studiu introductiv.’ In Actiuni sociale si politice romanesti in anii 1853–54 [Romanian Social and Political Documents in the Years 1853–54]. 5–25. Bucuresti: Editura Academiei Romane, 2003. Bassan, Fernande. Alfred de Vigny et la Comédie Française. Tubingen and Paris: Gunter Narr Verlag and Editions Jean Michel Place, 1984. Bate, Jonathan. The Romantics on Shakespeare. London: Penguin, 1992. Carpentier, Jean and François Lebrun. Histoire de France. Paris: Seuil, 1987. D’Alboaz. Seilok evreul sau invoiala de singe. Drama in 4 acte. Teulescu (trs.) The Library of the Romanian Academy. MS. 5864. 1854. Davidházi, Péter. ‘Providing Texts for a Literary Cult. Early Translations of Shakespeare in Hungary.’ In European Shakespeares. Translating Shakespeare in the Romantic Age, ed. Dirk Delabastita and Lieven D’Hulst. 147–62. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1993. ———. The Romantic Cult of Shakespeare: Literary Reception in Anthropological Perspective. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998. Derrida, Jacques. Qu’est-ce qu’une traduction ‘relevante’? Paris: L’Herne, 2005. Drakakis, John. ‘Jessica.’ In The Merchant of Venice: New Critical Essays, edited by John Mahon. 145–64. London and New York: Routledge, 2002. Du Lac, M. and Jules-Edmond Alboise. Shylock, drame en trois actes, imité de Shakespeare. Paris: Bezou Libraire, 1830. Duby, George and Robert Mandrou. A History of French Civilization. Translated by James B. Atkinson. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1964. ——— (ed.). Histoire de la France des origines a nos jours. Paris: Larousse 1995. Dumas, Alexandre. Mes Mémoires. Paris: Editions Denoel, 1942. ——— and Paul Meurice. Hamlet Prince of Danemark (Shakespeare’s Hamlet Prince de Denmark): drame en cinq actes et huit parties, en vers par Mm. Alexandre Dumas et Paul Meurice. Paris: Michel Lévy Frères, rue Vivienne, 1, 1848. Economu, Dumitru Petre (trans.). Hamlet principele Danemarcei; drama in cinci acte si optu parti de la Shakespeare, tradusa de D.P. Economu [Hamlet, prince RI'HQPDUNGUDPDLQ¿YHDFWVDQGSDUWVE\6KDNHVSHDUHWUDQVODWHGE\'3 Economu]. Bucuresti: Imprimeria lui Ferdinant Om, 1855. Fischlin, Daniel and Mark Fortier (eds.). Adaptations of Shakespeare: A Critical Anthology of Plays from the Seventeenth Century to the Present. London and New York: Routledge, 2000. Florescu, Radu. The Struggle against Russia in the Romanian Principalities 1821–1854. Iasi: The Centre for Romanian Studies, 1997. Guizot, Francois P.G. ‘Notice sur le Marchand de Venise.’ In Œuvres complètes de Shakespeare. Traduction de M. Guizot, vol. 6. 2–3. Paris: Librairie Académique Didier, 1873 (Le Marchand de Venise. 7–91). Haraucourt, Edmond. Shylock: comédie en trois actes et sept tableaux après Shakespeare. Paris: G. Charpentier, 1889. Hugo, Victor. ‘Préface.’ Cromwell. 62–108. Paris: Flammarion, 1968.

230

Visions of Venice in Shakespeare

Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Adaptation. London and New York: Routledge, 2006. Jaquot, Jean. Shakespeare en France. Mises en scène d’hier et d’aujourd’hui. Paris: Le Temps, 1964. Lamarche. M. Le marchand de Venise. Comédie en 4 actes et en vers. Paris: Barba, 1830. Lambert, José. ‘Shakespeare en France au tournant du XVIII-ème siècle. Un dossier européen.’ In European Shakespeares. Translating Shakespeare in the Romantic Age, edited by Dirk Delabastita and Lieven D’Hulst. 25–44. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1993. Massai, Sonia. World-Wide Shakespeare. Local Appropriations in Film and Performance. London and New York: Routledge, 2006. Mézières. Alfred. Shakespeare: ses oeuvres et ses critiques. Paris: Hachette, 1854. Perrot, Michele. ‘La famille triomphante.’ In Histoire de la vie privée. Vol 4. De la Révolution à la Grande guerre, edited by Philippe Ariès and George Duby. 93–103. Paris: Seuil, 1994. Pichot, Amédée. Galerie des personnages de Shakspeare reproduits dans les principales scènes de ses pièces, avec une analyse succincte de chacune des SLH̖FHVGH6KDNVSHDUHHWODUHSURGXFWLRQHQDQJODLVHWHQIUDQoDLVGHVVFH̖QHV auxquelles se rapportent les quatre-vingts gravures dont cet ouvrage est RUQH̗«3UH̗FH̗GH̗HG¶XQHQRWLFHELRJUDSKLTXHGH6KDNVSHDUSDU2OG1LFN [pseud., i.e., Paul Émile Daurand Forgues]. Paris: Baudry, Librarie Européenne, 1844. Schleiermacher, Friedrich. ‘On the Different Methods of Translating.’ In The Translation Studies Reader, edited by Lawrence Venuti. 43–63. New York and London: Routledge, 2004. Shakespeare, William. ¯XYUHV FRPSOH̖WHV GH 6KDNVSHDUH WUDGXLWHV GH O¶$QJODLV par Pierre Letourneur1RXYHғGUHYHWFRUUSDU)UDQoRLV*XL]RWHW$PHғGHғH Pichot. Paris: Chez Ladvocat, 1821–27. ———. The Merchant of Venice. Edited by Molly Maureen Mahood. The New Cambridge Shakespeare. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. ———. Othello. Edited by Michael Neill. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Shurbanov, Alexander and Boika Sokolova. Painting Shakespeare Red. An EastEuropean Appropriation. Newark: University of Delaware Press/London: Associated University Press, 2001. Uebersfeld, Anne. ‘Introduction.’ In Victor Hugo. ‘Préface.’ Cromwell. 17–51. Paris: Flammarion, 1968. Venuti, Lawrence. The Translator’s Invisibility. A History of Translation. London and New York: Routledge, 2002. Vigny, Alfred de. Théâtre. Vol 2. Paris: Flammarion, 1920 (Le More de Venise 31–219; Le Marchand de Venise 219–324). Woodbridge, Linda. ‘Payback Time: On the Economic Rhetoric of Revenge in the Merchant of Venice.’ In Shakespeare and the Cultures of Performance, edited by Paul Yachin and Patricia Badir. 29–40. Aldershot, Ashgate, 2008.

Chapter 13

Barefoot to Palestine: The Failed Meetings of Shylock and Othello Shaul Bassi

And so it went. Talented mimics, the two seminarians used a small but wellchosen assortment of props to skip merrily from target to target, now a Palestinian one and now an Israeli one, each turning into and emerging from the others until DOO¿QDOO\MRLQHGLQRQHPRQVWURXVSLWLDEO\FRQÀLFWHG¿JXUH±ZKLFKPXPEOLQJ and grumbling in Hebrew and Arabic, sobbed and simpered as it struck and stroked itself and the audience called for more. A.B. Yehoshua, The Liberated Bride1

The reader familiar with the rich tradition of rewriting Shakespeare will not be surprised to come across the early nineteenth-century play Hassan, the XVICentury Arab, ‘translated’ into Italian by Luigi Marchionni from a French version by Victor Ducange, but attributed to William Shakespeare himself. She or he may be more surprised that a title which seems to promise an adaptation of Othello, preludes to the revision of a different play. Hassan is an Arab moneylender, whose compassionate nature is turned bitter after the Christian Antonio has abused his father, driving him to issue a cruel threat: ‘If at the sixth hour your debt is not paid \RXUEORRGZLOOEHÀRZLQJDQGWKHNQLIHRIWKH$UDEZLOOWHDUDSRXQGRIÀHVK from your palpitating breast.’2 It is plausible that in an age of increasing Jewish assimilation into European society, the cruelty of Shylock was conveniently projected onto Islamic culture, with a manifestation of displaced antisemitism of alarming relevance today.3 Approximately in the same period, during his walking tour to Scotland in 1818, John Keats described in a letter to his brother Tom his encounter with an eccentric traveler who had seen Edmund Kean play Shakespeare in Glasgow: ‘in Othello in 1

A.B. Yehoshua, The Liberated Bride, trans. Hillel Halkin (New York: Harcourt, 2003), p. 233. 2 Guglielmo [sic] Shakespeare, Hassan o l’arabo del secolo XVI, tradotto da Vettor Ducange e accomodato alle scene italiane da Luigi Marchionni, in Il magazzino teatrale 2, 2 (1836): p. 9. 3 One may remember here Edward Said’s view that Orientalism, the quintessential VWHUHRW\SL¿FDWLRQRI,VODPLVDµVHFUHWVKDUHURI:HVWHUQDQWL6HPLWLVP¶Orientalism, New York: Vintage, 1979, p. 27). See also: Sander Gilman, ‘Can the Experience of Diaspora Judaism serve as a Model for Islam in Today’s Multicultural Europe?’ in Multiculturalism and the Jews (London: Routledge 2006), pp. 1–22.

232

Visions of Venice in Shakespeare

the Jew, I mean, er, er, er, er the Jew in Shylock! He got bother’d completely in vague ideas of the Jew in Othello, Shylock in the Jew, Shylock in Othello, Othello in Shylock, the Jew in Othello, &c &c &c he left himself in a mess at last.’4 Bearing witness to the relevance of the two best known Shakespearean outsiders for a social outsider such as Kean, the confusion of this anonymous spectator matches the Ducange/Marchionni adaptation in suggesting a closer kinship between the two Venetian plays than it has traditionally been acknowledged. As Gil Anidjar has observed, the common theme of the stranger in Venice appears to have been considered less compelling than a series of powerful critical categories that have traditionally set The Merchant of Venice and The Moor of Venice apart: comedy vs. tragedy, religion vs. race, theology vs. politics, and, crucially, Jew vs. Muslim.5 It is deeply ironic that the overlapping or confusion of the characters in the two examples given above (obviously marginal in the history of Shakespearean culture) was probably facilitated by the ‘toning down’ of Othello’s color that was typical of Romantic criticism: Samuel Taylor Coleridge was literally obsessed with the character’s ‘real’ identity, which he stubbornly envisioned as a Spanish Moor as opposed to the black African that Othello had conventionally been hitherto taken to represent.6 The irony lies in the fact that in our post-9/11 era, with the ¿UVW$IULFDQ$PHULFDQ3UHVLGHQWDWWKH:KLWH+RXVHDQ$UDE0XVOLP2WKHOORKDV probably become, in mainstream Western culture, a far more unsettling possibility than the black African so feared by the British Romantics in the age of the slave trade and rising colonialism.7 What we may call an Orientalist interpretation of Othello conditioned by Romantic criticism, dominated throughout the nineteenth century (the century that invented the notion of ‘Semites’) and the early part RI WKH WZHQWLHWK FHQWXU\ HYHQ DV WKH ¿UVW IDPRXV $IULFDQ $PHULFDQ DFWRUV (Ira Aldridge in Europe and Paul Robeson in the United States) were celebrated (and simultaneously attacked) for their performances in the role of the Moor. In the 1960s a new critical sensibility emerged, especially in the United States, which recognized the importance of Othello and Shylock as icons of cultural difference, but the widening social gap between Jews and African Americans after the common struggles of the civil rights era and the different trajectories of integration of Jews 4 John Keats to Tom Keats, 1818, in The Letters of John Keats, ed. Maurice Buxton Forman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1935), p. 184. 5 Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab. A History of the Enemy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), p. 102. 6 For Coleridge on Othello’s ethnicity see Shaul Bassi, Le metamorfosi di Otello. Storia di un’etnicità immaginaria (Bari: Graphis, 2000), pp. 68–81. 7 The hypothesis that Othello may be a Muslim convert has been persuasively argued by Daniel Vitkus in Turning Turk: English Theater and the Multicultural Mediterranean, 1570–1630 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). For Muslim and Arab interpretations of Othello see: Simone Rovida, ‘Shakespeare in Medio Oriente: la percezione dell’alterità di Otello nel mondo arabo,’ in Saggi di anglistica e americanistica: temi e prospettive di ricerca, ed. Ornella De Zordo (Florence: Firenze University Press, 2008), pp. 231–82; Ferial J. Ghazoul, ‘The Arabization of Othello,’ Comparative Literature 50, 1 (1998): pp. 1–31.

Barefoot to Palestine

233

and black communities in Great Britain may have kept Shylock and Othello at a distance, even as critics started producing ever more astute and historically nuanced political interpretations of the two characters.8,QWKHHDUO\WZHQW\¿UVWFHQWXU\LW is now ‘Jew’ and ‘Arab’ that have become synecdoches of the alleged clash of civilizations between the ‘West’ and ‘Islam,’ in a new historical twist of the old strategy of constructing the ‘Jew’ and the ‘Arab/Muslim’ as constitutive enemies to the ‘West’ and enemies to one another.9 With religion taking center stage in the public arena, and a renewed awareness of the political theology (or theological politics) of the present moment, The Merchant of Venice and Othello have turned into even more politically charged texts, implicated in the (anti)semitic discourses of our time.10 But while an unprecedented number of studies have accordingly made of Shylock and Othello Shakespeare’s most topical characters, it remains XQTXHVWLRQDEO\GLI¿FXOWWRDQDO\]HWKHPLQWKHVDPHEUHDWK The present attempt to think together the destinies of Shylock and Othello is inspired by two extraordinary novels, Emile Habiby’s The Secret Life of Saeed: The Pessoptimist (1974),11 whose treatment of Othello will be discussed later in this essay, and A.B. Yehoshua’s The Liberated Bride (2001), a text that bears no evident intertextual relation with Shakespeare. In the latter, an aging Israeli Jewish SURIHVVRUZKRKDVVWXGLHG$UDELFFXOWXUHDOOKLVOLIH¿QGVKLPVHOILQD3DOHVWLQLDQ village where the ethnic borders and boundaries that separate the two communities are symbolically blurred in the short span of an amateur theater show, in which the DFWRUVFUHDWHDVWUDQJHK\EULGFUHDWXUHWKDWUHVRQDWHVZLWKWKHKLVWRULFDOFRQÀDWLRQ DQGFRQIXVLRQRI2WKHOORDQG6K\ORFNµRQHPRQVWURXVSLWLDEO\FRQÀLFWHG¿JXUH± which, mumbling and grumbling in Hebrew and Arabic, sobbed and simpered as it struck and stroked itself and the audience called for more.’ By suggesting for a 8

For Shylock’s stage and critical history, the most accurate study is: John Gross, Shylock: Four Hundred Years in the Life of a Legend (London: Chatto and Windus, 1992). See also: Kenneth Gross, Shylock is Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). Earlier accounts are: Toby Lelyveld, Shylock on the Stage (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961); Bernard Grebanier, The Truth about Shylock (New York: Random House, 1962); Hermann Sinsheimer, Shylock: The History of a Character (New York: Benjamin Blom, 1963). For Othello: Virginia Mason Vaughan, Othello. A Contextual History (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1994); Marvin Rosenberg, The Masks of Othello: The Search for the Identity of Othello, Iago, and Desdemona by Three Centuries of Actors and Critics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1961). 9 Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab. 10 For the concept of semitic discourse see: Bryan Cheyette, Constructions of ‘The Jew’ in English Literature and Society. Racial Representations, 1875–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). See also: Gil Anidjar, Semites. Race, Religion, Literature (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007); Julia Reinhard Lupton, CitizenSaints. Shakespeare and Political Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), pp. 73–101. 11 Emile Habiby, The Secret Life of Saeed: The Pessoptimist, trans. Salma Khadra Jayyusi (Northampton: Interlink Books, 2001).

234

Visions of Venice in Shakespeare

PRPHQWE\DÀLJKWRIIDQF\WKDWWKHVSHFWUHVRIWKHWZR6KDNHVSHDUHDQFKDUDFWHUV KDXQWWKLVDOOHJRULFDO¿JXUH,¶PUHSHDWLQJDJHVWXUHWKDWKDVEHHQPDGHQXPEHUOHVV WLPHVLQWKHSDVW¿OOLQJWKHJDSVOHIWLQ6KDNHVSHDUH¶V9HQHWLDQWH[WVZLWKLPDJLQDU\ KLVWRULFDO UHFRQVWUXFWLRQV DQG ÀHVKLQJ RXW WKHLU PDLQ FKDUDFWHUV ZLWK LQYHQWHG biographies in order to link them to contemporary topical events. This, I propose, is one of a set of similarities between Othello and Shylock that single them out in the constellation of Shakespearean characters, in spite of their prolonged dissociation. I will accordingly use some lines from Yehoshua’s excerpt to introduce these analogies by looking at the incomparably rich afterlives of the two plays. ‘Talented mimics, the two seminarians used a small but well-chosen assortment of props to skip merrily from target to target …’ 7KH¿UVWDQDORJ\FDQEHGH¿QHGDVDQHWKQRJUDSKLFDSSURDFKWRWKHFKDUDFWHUV7R the best of my knowledge, we have no popular reports of actors going to Padua or Copenhagen to develop a more authentically Italian Kate or a more convincingly Danish Hamlet. Conversely, the records of theater history tell us that, well before historical realism became a stage convention, actors invested a great deal of energy into substantiating ethnographically their Othellos and Shylocks. This consisted in a detailed preparatory work that was then translated into a set of ‘reality effects,’ ranging from the choice of theatrical costumes to the insertion of ethnic markers in the performances, to more substantial interpolations in the plays. Charles Macklin decided that his Shylock should wear a red hat and explained to a curious Alexander Pope that he had read about it. ‘Do players in general take such pains?’ – asked Pope – ‘I do not know, sir, that they do; –was Macklin’s reply– but as I had staked my reputation on the character, I was determined to spare no trouble in getting at the best information.’12 His notes indicate that the actor read extensively in Jewish history and a contemporary magazine reported that he ‘made daily visits to the centre of business, the Change and the adjacent Coffee-houses, that by a frequent intercourse and conversation with the “unforeskinned race” he might habituate himself to their air and deportment.’13 In the next century, Henry Irving changed his view of Shylock when he came across a group of North African Jews on a cruise in the summer of 1861. As a biographer writes, ‘he had been struck by a Jewish merchant whom he had seen going about his business in Tunis, at one moment calm and self-possessed, then in a helpless rage over a dispute about money, WKHQ IDZQLQJ WKHQ ³H[SUHVVLQJ UHDO JUDWLWXGH IRU D WULÀLQJ PRQH\ FRXUWHV\¶´14 On a different cruise, some ten years later, Irving’s rival Tommaso Salvini stopped at Gibraltar, where he met ‘a splendid moor’ who came to represent in his eyes 12 Quoted in William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice. A New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare, ed. Horace Howard Furness (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1888), pp. 372–3. 13 The Connoisseur, 31 January 1754, quoted in Lelyveld, p. 26. 14 Laurence Irving, Henry Irving. The Actor and His World (London: Columbus, 1989), pp. 127–8.

Barefoot to Palestine

235

‘the true type of the Shakespearean hero’ Othello.15 The Italian actor studied hard in preparation for the performance: I read the history of the Venetian republic, the invasion of Spain by the Moors, their passions, their warfare science and their religious beliefs; nor did I neglect Cinthio Giraldi’s [sic] novella in order to better master that sublime character. It ZDVQRORQJHUWKHVXSHU¿FLDOVWXG\RIZRUGVRURIVRPHVFHQLFHIIHFWRURIPRUH RUOHVVVWUHVVHGVHQWHQFHVWRREWDLQDÀHHWLQJDSSODXVHLWZDVDYDVWHUKRUL]RQ WKDWZDVRSHQLQJWRP\VLJKWDQLQ¿QLWHVHDZKHUHP\VKLSQDYLJDWHGVDIHO\ ZLWKQRIHDURI¿QGLQJURFNV16

Theater historians warn us that actors’ biographies and autobiographies should be taken with a grain of salt,17 but even if we assume that some of these anecdotes are spurious, they still testify to the craving for authenticity experienced by actors (and spectators) as regards these roles. In other words, to become Romeo or Hamlet, actors have primarily looked inward; to become Othello or Shylock they have also HQJDJHGLQDSHFXOLDUNLQGRIKLVWRULFDOLQYHVWLJDWLRQDQGWKHDWULFDOµ¿HOGZRUN¶ In the case of The Merchant of Venice, this search for authenticity has produced a continuous oscillation between Ashkenazi and Sephardic Shylocks. Since the last century it has become an established Anglo-American tradition to model Shylock after the early Ostjuden immigrant communities, making him speak, even in productions with Italian Renaissance settings, with London East End or New York Lower East Side Jewish intonations.18 Another typical reality effect is the insertion of dialogues in Yiddish between Shylock and Jessica, or bits of Jewish liturgy in the mouth of Shylock.19/HVVGUDVWLFEXWPRUHLQÀXHQWLDO PDQLSXODWLRQV of the play are the dramaturgical additions and/or excisions of particular SURGXFWLRQV +HQU\ ,UYLQJ ZKR RIIHUHG WKH ¿UVW RSHQO\ V\PSDWKHWLF SRUWUDLW RI the character, interpolated the silent scene of ‘Shylock’s Return’ (Act 2, scene 6) to poignantly illustrate for a Victorian, family-oriented audience the moment when WKH PHUFKDQW UHWXUQV WR KLV KRPH WR ¿QG RXW KH KDV EHHQ GHVHUWHG E\ -HVVLFD Laurence Olivier’s genteel Victorian Jew was not allowed to say ‘I hate Antonio because he is a Christian,’ a gratuitous expression of Medieval malevolence that 15

Tommaso Salvini, Aneddoti, ricordi, impressioni (Milano: Fratelli Dumolard, 1895), p. 260. Translation mine. 16 Salvini, Aneddoti, p. 119. 17 Textual and Theatrical Shakespeare: Questions of Evidence, ed. Edward Pechter (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1996). 18 Stephen Orgel, ‘Imagining Shylock,’ in Imagining Shakespeare. A History of Texts and Visions (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), pp. 144–62. 19 I elaborate on this point in ‘“The Christian will turn Hebrew”: Converting Shylock on Stage,’ in Jewish Theatre: A Global View, ed. Edna Nahshon (Leiden: Brill, 2009), pp. 113–32. The present essay reworks some material of that essay, where I offer a ¿UVW YHUVLRQ RI WKH DQDORJLHV EHWZHHQ 6K\ORFN DQG 2WKHOOR EXW DSSO\ WKHP RQO\ WR WKH former character.

236

Visions of Venice in Shakespeare

jarred with the bourgeois milieu of Jonathan Miller’s production (1970). But these light cosmetic alterations are nothing compared to a procedure that has remained unique for a Shakespearean play: the cutting of a whole act. The deletion of Act 5, which characterized for instance the celebrated Yiddish production of Jakob Adler, disabled the comic resolution of the plot, made of Shylock the undisputed protagonist and of his conversion the real tragic ending of the play.20 In the case of Othello the ethnographic approach has generated an interminable and vehement controversy over his exact provenance, over the ‘real’ meaning of the word ‘Moor’ (a characteristically polysemic word in the early modern period) and, particularly, over the shade of his skin. Intent on challenging Thomas Rymer’s racist critique of the play (‘shall a Poet fancy that they will set a Negro to be their General; or trust a Moor to defend them against the Turk? With us a black-amoor might rise to be a Trumpeter’), Charles Gildon imagined Othello as ‘the Son or Nephew of the Emperor of Monomotopa, Æthiopia or Congo, forc’d to leave his Country for Religion (or any other occasion), coming to Europe by the convenience of the Portugueze Ships.’21 As mentioned above, Coleridge is the most notorious and authoritative advocate of a non-black Othello, as his many notes reveal and a report of his lecture on the play usefully summarizes: ‘Mr. C. ridiculed the idea of making Othello a negro, he was a gallant Moor, of royal blood, combining a high sense of Spanish and Italian feeling, and whose noble nature was wrought on.’22 Since Othello’s identity is overdetermined in the text and cannot be easily SLQQHGGRZQWRDVSHFL¿FHWKQLFLW\RUFXOWXUHLWKDVDOORZHGIRUDEURDGUDQJHRI interpretations on page as well as on stage. Tommaso Salvini became famous for performing Othello’s suicide by a gruesome cutting of his own throat, a decision KHPDGHLQWKHQDPHRIDVXSSRVHGHWKQRJUDSKLF¿GHOLW\23 Nowadays, Othello’s ethnic characterization can become even more caricatural than Shylock’s, so that WKHUK\WKPRIQRQVSHFL¿F$IULFDQGUXPVKDVEHFRPHLQPRUHWKDQRQHVWDJLQJWKH soundtrack of choice for the killing of Desdemona, playing into the quintessentially colonial stereotype that the ‘noble moor’ is eventually overcome by the ‘wild savage’ who breaks through the thin veneer of civilization.24 20 Joel Berkowitz, ‘“A True Jewish Jew:” Three Yiddish Shylocks,’ Theatre Survey 37, 1 (1996): pp. 78–82. 21 Thomas Rymer, A Short View of Tragedy (1693), in The Critical Works of Thomas Rymer, ed. Curt A. Zimansky (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1956), p. 134; Charles *LOGRQ µ6RPH 5HÀHFWLRQV RQ 0U 5\PHU¶V 6KRUW9LHZ RI7UDJHG\ DQG DQ$WWHPSW DW D Vindication of Shakespeare’ (1694), in Shakespeare. The Critical Heritage. Vol. 2: 1693–1733, ed. Brian Vickers (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974), p. 74. 22 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lectures 1808–1819. On Literature, vol. 5–I, The Collected Works of S.T. Coleridge, ed. R.A. Foakes (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987), p. 555. 23 Shaul Bassi, ‘Heroes of Two Worlds: Tommaso Salvini, Henry James and Othello’s Ethnicity,’ in William Shakespeare and Italy. Shakespeare Yearbook X, 1999, ed. Holger Klein and Michele Marrapodi (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 1999), pp. 38–69. 24 Bassi, ‘Heroes,’ pp. 42–7.

Barefoot to Palestine

237

µ«DOO¿QDOO\MRLQHGLQRQHPRQVWURXVSLWLDEO\FRQÀLFWHG¿JXUH«¶ The ultimate paradox is that this emphasis on authenticity and ethnographic realism in the representation of Shylock and Othello often ends up reproducing deep-seated antisemitic, racist or colonial stereotypes. This is particularly manifest in the foregrounding of the bodies of the two characters, a factor already inscribed in the Shakespearean texts and continuously highlighted in their performance histories. Hayden White has argued that no history of the body is possible unless via the postulation of a monstrous, deviant body which ‘marks the limit or horizon of the normative body.’25 While he points to Richard III as an example, I would argue that, once more, Othello and Shylock stand out as the two Shakespearean ‘antibodies’ par excellence, in consideration of the powerful discourses on the Jewish body and on the black/Oriental body in Western culture. Shylock’s body is connoted as unnatural, recalcitrant matter. As Gil Anidjar has noticed, not only is Shylock reminded by Salarino that there is more difference EHWZHHQKLVÀHVKDQGKLVGDXJKWHU¶VWKDQEHWZHHQMHWDQGLYRU\± EXW he himself needs to insist, in his most acclaimed speech, ‘Hath not a Jew eyes?’ that he does have a body, eyes, hands, organs.26 The monstrous Jewish body has a long history, from the Middle Ages when Jewish males were believed to have menstruating genitalia to the nineteenth century, in which they scored 100 percent in the ‘Index of Nigrescence’ calculated by John Beddoe in Races of Britain.27 And when the external appearance of assimilating Jews became gradually indistinguishable, the yellow badge of early modern Jews was replaced by differences inscribed in the body: the visible sign of Jewishness became the nose. If Sander Gilman situates the origin of cosmetic rhinoplasty in turn-of-the-century Berlin when the cultural pressure to reduce Jewish noses to ‘gentile contours’ was very strong,28 for Shylock impersonators the ‘nose job’ has meant providing him ZLWK VRPH VRUW RI HOHSKDQWLQH SURVWKHVLV /DXUHQFH 2OLYLHU¶V ¿UVW SHUIRUPDQFH as Shylock included a prominent hooknose which, in a modern dress production where the businessman’s frock coat had replaced the Jewish gabardine, made still quite easy to tell which was the merchant and which the Jew. The stereotype was so persistent that Harley Erdman tells the anecdote of the Jewish actor David :DU¿HOG ZKR FKRVH WR DUWL¿FLDOO\ HORQJDWH KLV QRVH WR EHWWHU SOD\ WKH UROH RI D Jewish character because he felt physically unconvincing.29

25

Hayden White, ‘Bodies and Their Plots,’ in Choreographing History, ed. Susan Leigh Foster (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), p. 232. 26 Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab, p. 109. 27 Shearer West, ‘The Construction of Racial Type: Caricature, Ethnography, and Jewish Physiognomy in Fin-de-Siècle Melodrama,’ Nineteenth-Century Theatre 21, 1 (1993): p. 8. 28 Sander Gilman, The Jew’s Body (London: Routledge, 1991), pp. 169–93. 29 Harley Erdman, Staging the Jew: The Performance of an American Ethnicity, 1860–1920 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1997), pp. 1–2.

Visions of Venice in Shakespeare

238

As far as the corporeality of Othello is concerned, the skin, color and sexuality of the Moor are obsessive themes in the play and vexed issues in its critical and performance history. It can be observed from the point of view of the black actor who struggles with the expectations of his white audiences, or from the point of view of the white actor who strives to turn himself into a Moor. In the former FDVHRQHFDQWDNHWKHH[HPSODU\YLFLVVLWXGHVRI3DXO5REHVRQZKRZDVWKH¿UVW African American star actor to play the role in the United States. Looking back to the ground-breaking production where he had played next to Peggy Ashcroft, he recalled his bodily self-consciousness: )RUWKH¿UVWWZRZHHNVLQHYHU\VFHQH,SOD\HGZLWK'HVGHPRQDWKDWJLUOFRXOGQ¶W get near to me, I was backin’ away from her all the time. I was like a plantation hand in the parlor, that clumsy.30 … I never frothed a great deal but I did froth a little, and you know that if someone like Salvini frothed at the mouth everybody would say ‘Boy,’ he’s wonderful, a wonderful actor.’ But when I did it was just too distasteful to too many people. I can understand.31

Conversely, it is the same Laurence Olivier who provides the model of the white actor who turned the typical Victorian fear of ‘going native’ into a triumph of impersonation, celebrated in his legendary Othello makeup: Black … I had to be black. I had to feel black down my soul. I had to look out from a black man’s world. Not one of repression, for Othello would have felt superior to white man. If I peeled my skin, underneath would be another layer of black skin. I was beautiful. Quite beautiful. … Black all over my body, Max Factor 2880, then a lighter brown, then Negro No. 2, a stronger brown. Brown or black to give a rich mahogany. Then the great trick: that glorious half-yard of chiffon with which I polished myself all over until I shone. Pancake makeup looks powdery, and when you sweat it is apt if you’re not careful to break out in little rivulets, but if you use this wonderful bit of chiffon, it gleams a smooth ebony. The lips blueberry, the tight curled wig, the white of the eyes, whiter than HYHUDQGWKHEODFNEODFNVKHHQWKDWFRYHUHGP\ÀHVKDQGERQHVJOLVWHQLQJLQ the dressing-room lights.32

Thirty years later, in the age of multiculturalism and color-blind casting, the novelist Paul Beatty satirized both the long tradition of blackfaced Othellos and the forced association of black actors not just with the role but with the play itself. In 7KH:KLWH%R\6KXIÀH (1997) the black protagonist Gunnar Kaufmann, sophisticated poet and basketball prodigy from L.A., is involved in a school performance of Shakespeare. When his well-meaning teacher suggests that the class should stage Othello (what else!) ‘to show that her impoverished Negro thespians’ could compete 30

Martin Bauml Duberman, Paul Robeson (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988), p. 135. Richard Dyer, Heavenly Bodies. Film Stars and Society (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1986), p. 153. 32 Laurence Olivier, On Acting (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986), pp. 153, 158–9. 31

Barefoot to Palestine

239

ZLWKXSSHUFODVVNLGV*XQQDUDW¿UVWPDQDJHVWRDYRLGWKHUROHRIµWKHQREOHEXW paranoid blackamoor’ (which spares him ‘having to place any necromantic kisses’ on the cheek of two unattractive Desdemonas),33 but at the crucial moment of the performance, called out to perform Iago, his rebellion extends to the whole play: ‘Next up, Manischewitz’s Gunnar Kaufman as Iago, Othello, act two, scene one.’ I sauntered onto the stage and squinted into the spotlight, never feeling PRUHPLVSODFHGPRUHEXUGHQLVKPR¶QLJJHULVK,IRXQGLWGLI¿FXOWWREUHDWKH I was growing allergic to the powdery mask of Elizabethan whiteface. … ‘I’m junking Iago’s envy-laden speech what a stupid moor-ronic nigger Othello is for a less traditional bit from King Lear, act two, scene two … .’ Gazing directly at the judges, I grabbed my dick and ripped into my makeshift dialogue.34

In conclusion, certain cultural constructions of the Jewish body and of the black body become patterns which, paradoxically, the non-Jewish and non-black actors aspire to and the Jewish and black actors uneasily grapple with. In the realm of Shakespeare criticism, it could be observed that recent literature devoted to the subject of Shakespeare and ‘race’ has tended to bring together Shylock and Othello, but, as I have argued elsewhere, this ‘racialization’ of the characters is an historically ambivalent gesture that tends to isolate them from other personages, while still keeping them apart in discrete essays within critical anthologies on the topic.35 A remarkable exception is provided by scholars such as Gil Anidjar and Julia Reinhardt Lupton, who have engaged with the plays less from an anthropological than from a philosophical/theological perspective and have shown how the intertwined themes of blood and circumcision, which powerfully bind together Othello and Shylock, have a relevance in the history of Western racism (and culture in general) that has not been hitherto fully recognized.36 ‘… and the audience called for more.’ This unparalleled accumulation of authenticity on stage may account for that anomalous relationship with the audience that seems to have characterized the performance histories of Othello and The Merchant of Venice from the outset, constituting another analogy between the plays. The most striking product of this anomalous response is the recurrent impression that Shylock and Othello generate a confusion between person and personage. In both cases we have numerous records of spectators complaining that the actor (especially the Jewish and the black actor)

33

Paul Beatty, 7KH:KLWH%R\6KXIÀH (New York: Picador, 1997), p. 66. Beatty, p. 71. 35 Bassi, ‘Country Dispositions: Ethnic Fallacies in Shakespeare Criticism,’ in The Shakespearean International Yearbook III, ed. Graham Bradshaw, Angus Fletcher and John Mucciolo (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2003), pp. 59–76. 36 Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab; Lupton, Citizen-Saints. 34

Visions of Venice in Shakespeare

240

was being the part instead of playing it. It is reported of Macklin that ‘[s]o malignant was his Shylock that the spectators, unaccustomed to such a display of passion on the stage, could not distinguish between the actor and his role and believed that in private life, Macklin was some sort of devil.’37:KHQ,UD$OGULGJHEHFDPHWKH¿UVW black actor to interpret Othello to remarkable European success, the blurring of boundaries between life and drama became a leitmotiv of the reviews: ‘We soon forgot that we were at the theater, and we began to follow the action of the drama as if it were real history’; ‘I had not the actor before my eyes, but Othello himself.’38 When Jakob Adler gained success with his Yiddish Shylock, his triumph was characterized as an expression of reality and not of art: ‘Adler’s heart speaks where Irving’s art paints … his Shylock is a true Jewish Jew.’39 No surprise, then, to read of spectators jumping to the rescue of Desdemona, fainting when Shylock whets his knife, or bursting in roars of delighted applause when Portia stops his armed hand.40 In 1660 Samuel Pepys went to see The Moor of Venice at the Cockpit Theatre, where ‘a very pretty lady that sat by me, called out, to see Desdemona smothered.’41 And on the background of these reactions, we should recall the feelings of fear, shame and pain experienced by many Jewish and black viewers. An excellent example is provided by the poignant meditation by Ben Okri, who records his attempt to hush three chattering girls during a performance of Othello at the Barbican Theatre in London, and realizes that he is the only black member of the audience (and in the whole theater, since Othello is played by Ben Kingsley): ‘When I spoke, what I feared happened. Faces turned, eyes lit up in recognition. My skin glowed. I felt myself illuminated, unable to hide. … As a Black man it hurts to watch Othello.’42 7KLV EOXUULQJ RI ERXQGDULHV EHWZHHQ WUXWK DQG ¿FWLRQ KDV RIWHQ EHHQ thematized in a series of metatheatrical plays where the political implications of staging The Merchant of Venice or Othello becomes the dramatic subject. In Gareth Armstrong’s solo play Shylock (1998) the eponymous character’s story is apologetically and humorously told by his Jewish friend Tubal.43 In Mark Leiren-Young’s Shylock (1996), he is defended as a legitimate role against the boycott of a contemporary North American Jewish community.44 In Murray 37

Quoted in Lelyveld, p. 27. Quoted in Herbert Marshall and Mildred Stock, Ira Aldridge. The Negro Tragedian (Washington: Howard University Press, 1993), pp. 226–8. 39 Berkowitz, p. 80. 40 That most of these stories are probably apocryphal still speaks to the gripping power of these fantasies. Again, we don’t read much of people who try to stop Romeo from killing himself. 41 Samuel Pepys, The Diary, Vol. 1 (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1920), pp. 259–60. 42 Ben Okri, ‘Leaping Out of Shakespeare’s Terror. Five Meditations on Othello,’ in A Way of Being Free (London: Phoenix, 1997), p. 87. 43 Gareth Armstrong, Shylock (London: Players’ Account, 1999). 44 Mark Leiren-Young, Shylock: A Play (Vancouver: Anvil Press, 1996). 38

Barefoot to Palestine

241

Carlin’s Not Now, Sweet Desdemona¿UVWVWDJHGLQ8JDQGDLQWKHSOD\WDNHV the form of a rehearsal of Othello where a black West Indian actor and a white South African actress in the roles of Othello and Desdemona discuss the politics of Shakespeare’s work.45 In Othello in Wonderland (1985) by the exiled Iranian playwright Ghulam Husayn Sa’idi, the ideological battleground is the new regime installed by the Khomeinist revolution, which tries to impose a religiously correct interpretation to the performance.46 7KLVWKLUGDQDORJ\EHWZHHQ2WKHOORDQG6K\ORFNLVFRQ¿UPHGE\ZKDWPD\EH understood as a critical antidote aimed at neutralizing such excessive proximity between life and theater: it is the rhetoric of dissociation adopted by numerous critics and actors in their commentaries on both plays. The Merchant of Venice is not a play on a race theme [… it] is about love.47 He is hateful not because he is a Jew but because he is Shylock. … Shylock’s Jewishness is thus, in Aristotelian terms, an ‘accident’; his substance is his spiritual deadness or leadenness. Hence the endless discussions of Shylock as a Jew are singularly fruitless.48 Jewishness could become a smoke-screen which might conceal both the particular DQGWKHXQLYHUVDOLQWKHUROH6HHKLPDVD-HZ¿UVWDQGIRUHPRVWDQGKHLVLQ danger of becoming only a symbol … . But however important Jewishness and anti-semitism are in the play they are secondary to the consideration of Shylock, the man: unhappy, unloved, lonely, frightened and angry.49 ‘[Othello is not] about colour but … about jealousy … . When a black actor does the part, it offsets the play, puts it out of balance. It makes it a play about blackness, which is not.’50 Othello: If the play Othello isn’t about race and colour – then tell me – can you tell me, what the hell is it about? Desdemona: Marriage.51

45 Murray Carlin, Not Now, Sweet Desdemona. A Duologue for Black and White within the Realm of Shakespeare’s Othello (Nairobi: Oxford University Press, 1969). 46 Ghulam Husayn Sa’idi, Othello in Wonderland, trans. M. Phillips, in Bibliotheca Iranica – Performing Arts Series 2 (Huntington Beach: Mazda Publishers, 1996), pp. 1–48. 47 Peter G. Phialas, Shakespeare’s Romantic Comedies. The Development of Their Form and Meaning (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1966), p. 149. 48 Thomas H. Fujimura, ‘Mode and Structure in The Merchant of Venice,’ PMLA 81, 7 (1966): p. 504. 49 Patrick Stewart, ‘Shylock in The Merchant of Venice,’ in Players of Shakespeare 1, ed. Philip Brockbank (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 18–19. 50 Jonathan Miller, Subsequent Performances (New York: Viking, 1986), p. 157. 51 Carlin, Not Now, Sweet Desdemona, p. 33.

Visions of Venice in Shakespeare

242

The Jewish component of The Merchant of Venice or Othello’s ethnicity is abstracted, allegorized, wished away, considered accidental versus other essential themes, dissociated from other elements that are conceptualized as universal versus the narrow particularity of Jewishness and blackness. Like Shylock’s fake nose or Othello’s blackface, Jewishness and Africanness (or any other ethnicity associated with the moor) become a prosthesis of the play. Othello the black is different from Othello the man; Shylock the Jew is different from Shylock the man. This sometimes well-meaning rhetoric implicitly endorses the notion of an unmarked, universal subject whose supposedly basic humanity implicitly excludes blackness and Jewishness or any interpretation of Othello’s ethnicity. ,QWHUHVWLQJO\HQRXJKWKH¿UVWIDPRXVFULWLFZKRDSSOLHGWKHVDPHDUJXPHQWDWLYH pattern to The Merchant of Venice was Heinrich Heine, who wrote (in 1839) that the ‘play does not actually represent either Jews or Christians but oppressors and oppressed.’52 That the convert Heine embodies the vicissitudes of the failed attempt at integration of Jews into German society by way of a cultural self-effacement further demonstrates that, as Freud has taught us, all the critics who have claimed that The Merchant of Venice and Othello are not about Jews and Moors end up DI¿UPLQJSUHFLVHO\ZKDWWKH\WU\WRGHQ\ ‘… mumbling and grumbling in Hebrew and Arabic, sobbed and simpered as it struck and stroked itself …’ Many of the examples I have used to illustrate the previous analogies already SRLQWWRWKHODVWRQH6K\ORFNDQG2WKHOORLQYLWHSRWHQWLGHQWL¿FDWLRQVDQGFUHDWLYH elaborations like few other characters in the Shakespearean canon.53 Since the last century, The Merchant of Venice and Othello have ranked with Hamlet and The Tempest as the most adapted plays, a clear index of their recurrent topicality. And yet, in spite of their countless rewritings, no major production or adaptation has managed to bring both characters together, as if Shakespeare’s Venice was too small for their simultaneous presence. 52

Heinrich Heine, Heine on Shakespeare: A Translation of His Notes on Shakespeare’s Heroines, trans. Ida Benecke (London: Constable, 1895), p. 126. 53 John Gross, Shylock, Fernando Cioni, ‘Visualizing and Performing Jewishness: Jews and “Shylocks” on Stage from the Restoration to late Romanticism,’ in Speaking Pictures: The Visual/Verbal Nexus of Dramatic Performance, ed. Virginia Mason Vaughan, Fernando Cioni, Jacquelyn Bessell (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2010); James R. Andreas, ‘Othello’s African American Progeny,’ South Atlantic Review, 57, 4 (1992): pp. 39–57. Othello. New Essays by Black Writers, ed. Mythili Kaul (Washington: Howard University Press, 1997); Lemuel A. Johnson, Shakespeare in Africa (and Other Venues) (Trenton: Africa World Press, 1998), pp. 160–62; Jyotsna Singh, ‘Othello’s Identity, Postcolonial Theory, and Contemporary African Rewritings of Othello,’ in Women, ‘Race’ and Writing in the Early Modern Period, ed. Margo Hendricks and Patricia Parker (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 293–5.

Barefoot to Palestine

243

Can Shylock ever meet Othello? If the two ever came face to face, it must have been in St Mark’s square, that sumptuous stage where you may both see all manner of fashions of attire, and heare all the languages of Christendome, besides those that are spoken by the barbarous Ethnickes; … There you may see many Polonians, Slavonians, Persians, Grecians, Turks, Jewes, Christians of all the famousest regions of Christendome, and each nation distinguished from another by their proper and peculiar habits.54

Or near Rialto, where in Salman Rushdie’s novel The Enchantress of Florence (2008), the story of a magic garment ideally juxtaposes the two characters: ‘The merchant, a bearded and ringleted Jew named Shalakh Cormorano, had had the coat specially made at the most famous tailor’s shop in Venice, known as Il Moro Invidioso because of the picture of a green-eyed Arab on the shingle over its door.’55 Or in the Ghetto, where in Caryl Phillips’s The Nature of Blood (1997), a novel WKDW LQWHUZHDYHV WKH ¿FWLRQDO VWRU\ RI 2WKHOOR DQG WKH WUXH KLVWRU\ RI 9HQHWLDQ Jews, the unnamed character based on Shakespeare’s moor walks into the Jewish quarter to seek the help of a scribe: And then, my letter complete, I asked my Jew if he would be good enough to convey it to the lady in question, but again he seemed to have already understood. The good scholar refused to take extra money for this task, and I judged by the way he looked upon me that he felt a certain sympathy for my predicament. Indeed, as I left, I am sure that I noticed a smile play around his thin lips.56

2QHFRXOGYHQWXUHLQ\HWDQRWKHUÀLJKWRILQWHUWH[WXDOIDQF\WKDWWKLVEHQHYROHQW DQGGLVLQWHUHVWHG-HZZKRIXO¿OOVWKHWUDGLWLRQDOOLWHUDU\WURSHRIWKHJREHWZHHQ and who (perhaps in a zealous note of anti-antisemitism) refuses to be charged more than his due, resembles the eponymous protagonist of Arnold Wesker’s Shylock (1990), a moneylender but also an erudite bibliophile friend to Antonio.57 But, though legitimized by a rich tradition of elaborating on the lives of Othello and Shylock, we remain in the realm of speculation: even Phillips, who more boldly than anyone before has drawn the two parallel worlds of Jews and Moors closer WKDQHYHUVWRSVVKRUWRIFUHDWLQJD¿FWLRQDOGLPHQVLRQLQKDELWHGVLPXOWDQHRXVO\ by both of them. After all, if Othello is a text haunted by textual and thematic echoes from The Merchant of Venice, the closest Shylock and Othello can come is ZKHQWKHRQHPHHWVDQHI¿J\5XVKGLH RU¿JXUH3KLOOLSV RIWKHRWKHUEXWWKH\ ultimately fail to meet in person.

54 Thomas Coryat, Coryat’s Crudities (1611), vol. 1 (Glasgow: James MacLehose and Sons, 1905), p. 318. 55 Salman Rushdie, The Enchantress of Florence (London: Jonathan Cape, 2008), p. 19. 56 Caryl Phillips, The Nature of Blood (London: Faber and Faber, 1997), p. 143. 57 Arnold Wesker, Shylock (London: Penguin Books, 1990).

Visions of Venice in Shakespeare

244

Yet there is another place where the two may cross paths one day, a place that Shakespeare mentions only twice in his oeuvre, and that was famously reached by ship departing from Venice. ‘I know a lady in Venice would have walked / barefoot to Palestine for a touch of his nether lip’ (4.3.37–8), says Emilia to Desdemona, talking about the young Venetian Lodovico. If in King John Palestine is more predictably the theater of war of the crusaders, in Othello it is evoked as a site of love and longing, in a hyperbolic and slightly blasphemous image where the purpose of the holiest pilgrimage is erotic. Palestine is the open wound of the 0LGGOH (DVW WKH VFHQH RI FRQÀLFW WKDW KDV EHFRPH D EDWWOH¿HOG RI V\PEROV D land where several divisive ideologies (orientalism, occidentalism, colonialism, nationalism, Zionism, Islamism, Pan-Arabism …) have been projected, tested, violently forced on its actual inhabitants, a land that continues to be a theater of war and a land of longings. It is appropriate that Shylock and Othello, the West’s archetypal strangers, should make their appearance here. In 1796 Richard Hole imagined a distant future where the Jews have settled in Palestine and read reviews of the late theater shows in the Jerusalem Daily Advertiser: 2QWKHIRXUWKGD\RIWKH¿UVWZHHNLQWKHPRQWKRI1LVDQZDVUHSUHVHQWHGWKH tragedy of ‘Shylock,’ written by Nathan Ben Boaz. The plot is borrowed from an ROG%ULWLVKEDUGZKRÀRXULVKHGDERXWWKHEHJLQQLQJRIWKHWKFHQWXU\RIWKHLU HUDDQGZKRFRPSRVHGLWXQGHUWKHLQÀXHQFHRIWKHVSLULWRILQYHWHUDWHPDOLFH against our nation for which, in that many preceding ages, the Europeans were notorious … .58

7KHSURSKHF\ZDVIXO¿OOHGLQ/XGZLJ/HZLVRKQ¶VQRYHOThe Last Days of Shylock (1931), where the Jewish merchant escapes from Venice, is rejoined by Jessica and her children who revert to Judaism, and they all move to the Promised Land.59 A few years later Shylock would appear on German stages as an instrument of Nazi propaganda, paving the ground for the annihilation of European Jewry. But even the creation of the state of Israel in 1948 did not lead to that state of peace and redemption envisioned by many ardent Zionists like Lewisohn, and Shylock XQGHUZHQW DQ XQH[SHFWHG PHWDPRUSKRVLV ,Q WKH ,VUDHOL GLUHFWRU 5D¿ %XNDHH¶V ¿OP Avanti popolo (1986), the Egyptian soldier Haled, sent to the front of the 1967 war the day before he is expected to debut as Shylock in a performance of The Merchant of Venice in Cairo, meets a group of Israeli reserve soldiers, banding together for survival. In order to get some water from them Haled (played by an actor who speaks in Palestinian Arabic, a choice that allowed the director to present Palestinian identity with an Egyptian mask to his Israeli audience) delivers Shylock’s monologue ‘Hath not a Jew eyes … .’ As one of the soldiers exclaims: ‘What the hell is he talking about?’, his comrade-in-arms glosses: ‘He’s got his 58

Cit. in J. Gross, Shylock, p. 106. Ludwig Lewisohn, The Last Days of Shylock (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1931). See K. Gross, Shylock, pp. 124–30. 59

Barefoot to Palestine

245

roles confused.’60 A century and a half after Hassan, the Shylock turned Arab, it is now an Arab who becomes Shylock, coming to no happy ending. In the middle of the desert, this unlikely band of soldiers for a short while unwittingly come together as one people (the ‘popolo’ of the old Italian revolutionary song that they sing WRJHWKHUDQGWKDWJLYHVWKH¿OPLWVWLWOH EXWWKH\DOOHYHQWXDOO\GLHDYLROHQWGHDWK Even Othello reaches Palestine through circuituous routes. Emile Habiby’s picaresque novel The Secret Life of Saeed: The Pessoptimist tells the story of Saeed, an artless and simple-minded Palestinian who works as an informer for the Israeli government in the aftermath of the 1967 war and occupation of the West Bank. When Saeed is sent to a mission in a jail where he is supposed to pass as a Palestinian militant to spy on other detainees, he meets a prison guard who challenges him to recite Shakespeare and starts playing the part of Othello. 6DHHG WKH LQIRUPHU SOD\LQJ WKH DFWLYLVW ¿QGV KLPVHOI SOD\LQJ \HW DQRWKHU UROH that of Desdemona, which eventually leads to his being brutalized by the other MDLOHUV7KLVVKRFNLQJHSLVRGHDQGKLVLPSURPSWXLGHQWL¿FDWLRQZLWK'HVGHPRQD will allow Saeed to become conscious of his position as victim vis-à-vis the powerful Othello represented by Israel, the male and militaristic oppressor. As Simone Rovida points out, after an initial stage when various Arab intellectuals had projected their identities on Othello to celebrate an Arab ‘Self,’ in the historical and cultural atmosphere following 1967 the Moor came to represent an alterity that houses the fears, anxieties and phobias of a cultural and ideological system: µ,WLVDVLID¿UVWSKDVHRIDVVLPLODWLRQLVIROORZHGE\DSKDVHRIH[SXOVLRQZKHUH Othello comes to represent a projection of what is repressed by the Self, like in the West.’61 The surprising metamorphoses of Shylock and Othello on Palestinian/Israeli VRLOUHFDSLWXODWHWKHXQLTXHO\ZLGHUDQJLQJDQGDPELYDOHQWSRZHURILGHQWL¿FDWLRQ of these two characters. On the one hand the imitation of blacks, Muslims and Jews on the part of white Christian actors suggests a gradual overcoming of the IHDURILGHQWL¿FDWLRQZLWKWKH:HVW¶VWUDGLWLRQDOµHQHPLHV¶2QWKHRWKHUKDQGLW epitomizes the omnipotence complex of the ‘white’ impersonator, who can turn himself into anybody, and, as psychoanalysis teaches us, usurp him. But, we have DOVR VHHQ FRPSOH[ IRUPV RI FURVVFXOWXUDO LGHQWL¿FDWLRQV DW VWDNH ZKLFK KDYHDOORZHG-HZLVKDQG0XVOLP$IULFDQDQG$UDELQWHOOHFWXDOVWRUHÀHFWRQWKHLU own cultural and political identities through Shylock and Othello. In ‘Job in Venice: Shakespeare and the Travails of Universalism,’ Julia Reinhard Lupton takes issue with ‘recent readings of Othello and The Merchant of Venice [that] use scriptural references in these plays as a means of grasping the particular,’ a critical strategy that resembles what we have designated the 60

Avanti Popolo, ed. R. Schorr and O. Lubin (Jerusalem: Kinneret, 1990). For a more general study of Shylock in Israel see Avraham Oz, ‘Transformations of Authenticity: The Merchant of Venice in Israel,’ in Foreign Shakespeare: Contemporary Performance, ed. Dennis Kennedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 58–9. 61 Rovida, ‘Shakespeare in Medio Oriente,’ p. 255. Translation is mine.

Visions of Venice in Shakespeare

246

‘ethnographic approach’ to the characters.62 But she also departs from the abstract universalism of the humanist tradition (evinced in the ‘rhetoric of dissociation’ that we have described) that disavows the Christian foundations of its putatively secularist position: , DUJXH WKDW WKHVH WZR SOD\V IDU IURP FHOHEUDWLQJ WKH FXOWXUDO VSHFL¿FLW\ DQG otherness of Shylock and Othello, dramatize the process by which these characters fall out of particularized regimes of belonging, in the process actualizing XQLYHUVDO SRVVLELOLWLHV IRU GLVLGHQWL¿FDWLRQ LQKHUHQW LQ UHOLJLRXV DI¿OLDWLRQ DV such. … Shakespeare’s Shylock and Othello, like the Scriptural Job, undergo a series of subjective disarticulations from scenes of substantial belonging, but end up converted to a Christianity rendered cynical by the violence of the inclusion. The aim that misses its mark, however, still traces a negative space held open for future occupants, as witnessed in the continued effectivity of these plays on world stages, and in this sense the plays achieve the universality they VRGH¿QLWLYHO\IDOOVKRUWRI 63

The present essay can only be the beginning of an investigation into that ‘negative space,’ into the strangely parallel afterlives of the two characters and their compelling analogies, as we still wait for new bold ‘future occupants’ capable of LPDJLQLQJDQHZ9HQLFHZKHUH6K\ORFNDQG2WKHOOR¿QDOO\PHHW Works Cited Andreas, James R. ‘Othello’s African American Progeny.’ South Atlantic Review 57, 4 (1992): 39–57. Anidjar, Gil. The Jew, the Arab. A History of the Enemy. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003. ———. Semites. Race, Religion, Literature. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007. Armstrong, Gareth. Shylock. London: Players’ Account, 1999. Bassi, Shaul. ‘Heroes of Two Worlds: Tommaso Salvini, Henry James and Othello’s Ethnicity.’ In William Shakespeare and Italy. Shakespeare Yearbook X, edited by Holger Klein and Michele Marrapodi. 38–69. Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 1999. ———. Le metamorfosi di Otello. Storia di un’etnicità immaginaria. Bari: Graphis, 2000. ———. ‘Country Dispositions: Ethnic Fallacies in Shakespeare Criticism.’ In The Shakespearean International Yearbook III, edited by Graham Bradshaw, Angus Fletcher and John Mucciolo. 59–76. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2003.

62 63

Chapter 6, p. 107. Chapter 6, pp. 107, 119–20.

Barefoot to Palestine

247

———. ‘“The Christian will turn Hebrew”: Converting Shylock on Stage.’ In Jewish Theatre: A Global View, edited by Edna Nahshon. 113–32. Leiden: Brill, 2009. Beatty, Paul. 7KH:KLWH%R\6KXIÀH. New York: Picador, 1997. Berkowitz, Joel. ‘“A True Jewish Jew”: Three Yiddish Shylocks.’ Theatre Survey 37, 1 (1996): 75–98. Carlin, Murray. Not Now, Sweet Desdemona. A Duologue for Black and White within the Realm of Shakespeare’s Othello. Nairobi: Oxford University Press, 1969. Cheyette, Bryan. Constructions of ‘The Jew’ in English Literature and Society. Racial Representations, 1875–1945. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1993. Cioni, Fernando. ‘Visualizing and performing Jewishness: Jews and “Shylocks” on Stage from the Restoration to late Romanticism.’ In Speaking Pictures: The Visual/Verbal Nexus of Dramatic Performance, edited by Virginia Mason Vaughan, Fernando Cioni and Jacquelyn Bessell. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2010. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Lectures 1808–1819. On Literature. Vol. 5–I, The Collected Works of S.T. Coleridge. Edited by R.A. Foakes. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987. Coryat, Thomas. Coryat’s Crudities (1611), vol. 1. Glasgow: James MacLehose and Sons, 1905. Duberman, Martin Bauml. Paul Robeson. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988. Dyer, Richard. Heavenly Bodies. Film Stars and Society. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1986. Erdman, Harley. Staging the Jew: The Performance of an American Ethnicity, 1860–1920. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1997. Fujimura, Thomas H. ‘Mode and Structure in The Merchant of Venice.’ PMLA 81, 7 (1966): 499–511. Ghazoul, Ferial J. ‘The Arabization of Othello.’ Comparative Literature 50, 1 (1998): 1–31. *LOGRQ&KDUOHVµ6RPH5HÀHFWLRQVRQ0U5\PHU¶V6KRUW9LHZRI7UDJHG\DQG an Attempt at a Vindication of Shakespeare’ (1694). In Shakespeare. The Critical Heritage. Vol. 2: 1693–1733, edited by Brian Vickers. 63–85. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974. Gilman, Sander. The Jew’s Body. London: Routledge, 1991. ———. ‘Can the Experience of Diaspora Judaism serve as a Model for Islam in Today’s Multicultural Europe?’ In Multiculturalism and the Jews. 1–22. London: Routledge, 2006. Grebanier, Bernard. The Truth about Shylock. New York: Random House, 1962. Gross, John. Shylock: Four Hundred Years in the Life of a Legend. London: Chatto and Windus, 1992. Gross, Kenneth. Shylock is Shakespeare. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006.

248

Visions of Venice in Shakespeare

Habiby, Emile. The Secret Life of Saeed: The Pessoptimist. Translated by Salma Khadra Jayyusi. Northampton: Interlink Books, 2001. Heine, Heinrich. Heine on Shakespeare: A Translation of His Notes on Shakespeare’s Heoines. Translated by Ida Benecke. London: Constable, 1895. Irving, Laurence. Henry Irving. The Actor and His World. London: Columbus, 1989. Johnson, Lemuel A. Shakespeare in Africa (and Other Venues). Trenton: Africa World Press, 1998. Kaul, Mythili (ed.). Othello. New Essays by Black Writers. Washington: Howard University Press, 1997. Keats, John. The Letters of John Keats. Edited by Maurice Buxton Forman. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1935. Leiren-Young, Mark. Shylock: A Play. Vancouver: Anvil Press, 1996. Lelyveld, Toby. Shylock on the Stage. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961. Lewisohn, Ludwig. The Last Days of Shylock. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1931. Lupton, Julia Reinhard. Citizen-Saints. Shakespeare and Political Theology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Marshall, Herbert, and Mildred Stock. Ira Aldridge. The Negro Tragedian. Washington: Howard University Press, 1993. Miller, Jonathan. Subsequent Performances. New York: Viking, 1986. Okri, Ben. ‘Leaping Out of Shakespeare’s Terror. Five Meditations on Othello.’ In A Way of Being Free. 71–87. London: Phoenix, 1997. Olivier, Laurence. On Acting. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986. Orgel, Stephen. ‘Imagining Shylock,’ in Imagining Shakespeare. A History of Texts and Visions. 144–62. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Oz, Avraham. ‘Transformations of Authenticity: The Merchant of Venice in Israel.’ In Foreign Shakespeare: Contemporary Performance, edited by Dennis Kennedy. 56–75. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Pechter, Edward (ed.). Textual and Theatrical Shakespeare: Questions of Evidence. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1996. Pepys, Samuel. The Diary. Vol. 1. London: G. Bell and Sons, 1920. Phialas, Peter G. Shakespeare’s Romantic Comedies. The Development of Their Form and Meaning. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1966. Phillips, Caryl. The Nature of Blood. London: Faber and Faber, 1997. Rosenberg, Marvin. The Masks of Othello: The Search for the Identity of Othello, Iago, and Desdemona by Three Centuries of Actors and Critics. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1961. Rovida, Simone. ‘Shakespeare in Medio Oriente: la percezione dell’alterità di Otello nel mondo arabo.’ In Saggi di anglistica e americanistica: temi e prospettive di ricerca, edited by Ornella De Zordo. 231–82. Florence: Firenze University Press, 2008. Rushdie, Salman. The Enchantress of Florence. London: Jonathan Cape, 2008.

Barefoot to Palestine

249

Rymer, Thomas. A Short View of Tragedy (1693). In The Critical Works of Thomas Rymer, edited by Curt A. Zimansky. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1956. Sa‘idi, Ghulam Husayn. Othello in Wonderland. Translated by M. Phillips. In Bibliotheca Iranica – Performing Arts Series 2. Huntington Beach: Mazda Publishers, 1996. 1–48. Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Vintage, 1979. Salvini, Tommaso. Aneddoti, ricordi, impressioni. Milano: Fratelli Dumolard, 1895. Schorr, R. and O. Lubin (eds.). Avanti Popolo. Jerusalem: Kinneret, 1990. Shakespeare, Guglielmo [sic]. Hassan o l’arabo del secolo XVI, tradotto da Vettor Ducange e accomodato alle scene italiane da Luigi Marchionni. Il magazzino teatrale 2, 2 (1836). Shakespeare, William. The Merchant of Venice. A New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare. Edited by Horace Howard Furness. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1888. Singh, Jyotsna. ‘Othello’s Identity, Postcolonial Theory, and Contemporary African Rewritings of Othello.’ In Women, ‘Race’ and Writing in the Early Modern Period, edited by Margo Hendricks and Patricia Parker. 287–99. London: Routledge, 1994. Sinsheimer, Hermann. Shylock: The History of a Character. New York: Benjamin Blom, 1963. Stewart, Patrick. ‘Shylock in The Merchant of Venice.’ In Players of Shakespeare 1, edited by Philip Brockbank. 11–28. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Vaughan, Virginia Mason. Othello. A Contextual History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Vitkus, Daniel. Turning Turk: English Theater and the Multicultural Mediterranean, 1570–1630. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Wesker, Arnold. Shylock. London: Penguin Books, 1990. West, Shearer. ‘The Construction of Racial Type: Caricature, Ethnography, and Jewish Physiognomy in Fin-de-Siècle Melodrama.’ Nineteenth-Century Theatre 21, 1 (1993): 5–40. White, Hayden. ‘Bodies and Their Plots.’ In Choreographing History, edited by Susan Leigh Foster. 229–34. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995. Yehoshua, A.B. The Liberated Bride. Translated by Hillel Halkin. New York: Harcourt, 2003.

This page has been left blank intentionally

Index

Aarne-Thompson Index, 39 acting, character research and stereotypes, 234, 235–6, 237, 239–40, 241–2 adaptations see translations and adaptations Adelman, Janet, 73n, 107n, 144n, 175 Adler, Jakob, 236, 240 Africanus, Leo, 56 Agen, Bishop of see Bandello, Matteo Alboise, Jules-Edmond, 216, 223, 224, 225–7 Aldridge, Ira, 232, 240 All’s Well that Ends Well, xvi, 167 d’Amico, Jack, 139 $QJOR2WWRPDQFRQÀLFWsee the Ottoman Empire Anidjar, Gil, 232, 237, 239 Antonio and Bassanio, 176, 223 and the bond, 74–6, 135–6, 138, 151, 174, 176, 186, 201, 220 in the courtroom, 135–6, 222 and death, 11, 114, 168, 176–9 and the merchant’s trade, 10, 42, 145, 151–2 and Portia, 170 and Shylock, 114, 148n, 155–6, 221, 235 and Volpone, 154 Ariosto, Ludovico Orlando Furioso, 58–60 Armstrong, Gareth Shylock, 240 Ascham, Roger, 34, 71–2, 130, 146 Avanti popolo, 244 Bacon, Francis, 101 Bale, John Acts of English Votaries, 71 Bancroft, Squire, 211–12 Bandello, Matteo, 34–7, 52, 53, 56, 57, 58n Barbican Theatre, 240 Barker, Granville, 212

Bassi, Shaul, 13 Bate, Jonathan, xv, 218 Beatty, Paul 7KH:KLWH%R\6KXIÀH, 238 Beddoe, John Races of Britain, 237 Bedell, William, 99 Bellini, Giovanni, 105 Bembo, Pietro, 35, 37–8 Blank, Paula, 177 Bliss, William The Real Shakespeare, A Counterblast to Commentators, xviii Boaistuau, Pierre, 34–5, 37 Boccaccio, Giovanni Decameron, xvi, 34, 37, 40, 41, 49n, 51, 58–60, 61 Bodin, Jean De Republica, 90–91 Boitard, François, vii, 198, 199, 200 The Book of Common Prayer, 85, 91, 95, 96, 99, 116, 134 Borde, Andrew The Fyrst Boke of the Introduction of Knowledge, 27 Botero, Giovanni, 27 Bradley, A.C., 193 Bragadin, family, 151 Bragadin, Marc’Antonio, commander, 25 Bruno, Giordano, 9, 89, 95–9, 100, 101 Spaccio de la bestia trionfante, 95–6 %XNDHH5D¿ Avanti popolo, 244 Bullough, Geoffrey, 21n, 22, 30–31, 55 Byron, George Gordon, 12, 126–7, 197, 201 Calvin and Calvinism, 70, 84–5, 86, 91–2, 94–6, 98, 99, 189 Calvino, Italo, 125, 129 Carlin, Murray Not Now, Sweet Desdemona, 241

252

Visions of Venice

Carpaccio, Vittore, 105–7 Cassell, Peter Cassell’s Illustrated Shakespeare, vii, 204 the Castelletto, 157 Castiglione, xv–xvi, 213 Catholicism see religious issues Church of England, 85, 91, 95, 96, 99, 134 Cinthio, Giraldi see Giraldi, Giovanni Battista Clarke, Mary Cowden Cassell’s Illustrated Shakespeare, 203, 204 Cockpit Theatre, 240 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 232, 236 The Comedy of Errors, 167, 176 commedia dell’arte, xviii conquest see under the Ottoman Empire Contarini, Gasparo The Commonwealth and Government of Venice, 4–5, 8–9, 19, 68, 79, 110–12, 180 Conversion; see also religious issues forced, on noblewomen, 158 of Henri IV of France, 84–8, 92, 93 in The Merchant of Venice, 115–16, 134–5, 136 and Shylock (character), 9, 114, 177 Cook, Dutton, 211 Cornazano, Antonio, 52–3, 56 Coryat, Thomas, 2, 13–14, 67, 129–30, 131n, 149–50, 156, 157–8, 159–60, 179–80, 181, 243 covenant, 109–10, 114–18, 119 Craven, Hawes, 212 Cyprus Wars, 7, 19–24, 27–9, 30–31, 53–4; see also Mediterranean geopolitics; Othello da Porto, Luigi Romeo and Juliet, 35, 37, 52 Daily Telegraph review of Merchant of Venice, 1858, 212 ‘dark lady’ of the Sonnets, xv Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, 222, 223, 225 Derrida, 217 Desdemona and the culture of misogynism, 160–61, 190

and Iago, 190 and Othello, 19, 28–30, 77–8, 80n, 116, 119, 134, 148, 187, 192, 203, 220n and the wife of Job, 118 Dimmock, Matthew, 23, 28, 29 Domenichi, Ludovico, 38 Don John of Austria, 24–6, 30 Drakakis, John, 4, 5–6 Drake, Sir Francis, xviii Du Lac, 216–17, 223, 224, 225–7 Ducange, Victor Hassan, the XVI-Century Arab, 231–2 Dursteler, Eric R., 29–30 economy, symbolic in Merchant of Venice, 11, 167–8, 175–7, 179 Edict of Nantes, 84 Edward VI, 68, 71–72 election, metaphysical in Othello, 188–9 Elizabeth I, xi, 33, 85–8, 91, 92–3, 95, 96, 152, 162, enclosure, 144, 154–6, 157–8, 160 the English; see also Calvin and Calvinism; Elizabeth I; Mediterranean geopolitics; Italy; sovereignty and self-sovereignty as corrupting, xv–xvi, 71, 146 and English piracy in the Mediterranean, 145 and Italian, xvii, 34 and theater in England, 2–3 and Venice, 3–4, 7–8, 27–8, 33–4, 146–7, 208–12 Erdman, Harley, 237–8 fairy tale, 37, 39–40, 109, 169 Fenton, Geffraie Certain tragical discourses of Bandello, translation, 35 Fiorentino, Ser Giovanni Il Pecorone, xvi, 7, 38–42, 75, 169 Florio, John, xv, 3, 34, 83, 95 Frajese, Vittorio, 99, 101 France; see also Mediterranean geopolitics; theater and politics and the French religious war, 83–7 and the July Revolution, 217–19, 225–7 Franco, Veronica, 158, 159 French Academy, 218

Index Freud, Sigmund and projection, 11–12, 185, 187, 189, 192–3, 245 and reaction-formation, 170, 172, 178 ‘The Theme of the Three Caskets,’ 170 Furness, H.H. New Variorum edition, Shakespeare, 193 Gainsborough, Thomas, 208 Galerie des personnages de Shakspeare, 222 Gallagher, Lowell, 115 Geneva commentary, 116 Gesta Romanorum, 169, 171 gift exchange, Renaissance, 174–5 Giovanni see Fiorentino, Ser Giovanni Giraldi, Giovanni Battista, 43, 45, 49, 51, 57–8; see also Hecatommiti Globe Theater, 139 Gobbo, Launcelot (character), 114–15, 168, 172, 219, 223 the Grand Tour, 67, 197, 199, 206 Greenblatt, Stephen, 29, 110n, 131 Gross, John Shylock: Four Hundred Years in the Life of a Legend, 5, 244 Gross, Kenneth, 113, 172, 177 Guizot, François, 220, 224 Habiby, Emile The Secret Life of Saeed the Pessoptimist, 233–4, 245 +DG¿HOG$QGUHZ8, 47–8 Hamlet, 5, 113, 119, 167, 227, 242 Hartwell, Abraham, 27 Hassan, the XVI-Century Arab, 231–2, 245 Hecatommiti and Giraldi’s Othello, 20, 30, 42–3, 47, 48, 49–50, 51–3, 54–8, 60–62, 190 as Othello, literary source, xvii, 7, 22, 23, 43–4, 47, 53, 56, 59 and Venetian-Ottoman relations, 48–9, 53–4 Heine, Heinrich, 242 Henri IV of France; see also France conversion of, 85–8, 92, 93 and the French religious war, 83–6 Henri of Navarre see Henri IV of France Henry V, xvii

253

Henry VIII, 68, 70, 91 history plays, 8, 9, 73, 79, 129 Hobbes, Thomas, 93–4, 100 Holderness, Graham, 10 Holy League, 21, 23, 24–6, 83–4; see also Mediterranean geopolitics; religious issues Honigmann, E.A.J New Arden edition, Othello, 21, 22, 188n, 193 Hugo, Victor, 217–18, 219, 221 Iago (character); see also Othello; Othello (character); projection; the ‘Other’ and bond, 186n, 191–3 and election, metaphysical, 188–9 and Giraldi’s, 43–4, 57n and Othello, manipulation of, 7, 11–12, 28, 29–30, 78, 117–18, 160 Illustrated London News, vii, 209, 210 the Inquisition, 156, 159 the Interdict, 8, 99, 101n Irving, Henry, 212, 234, 235 Israel, 244–5 Italy; see also Mediterranean geopolitics; Venice in The Commonwealth and Government of Venice, 67–8 as corrupting, xvi, 34, 71, 130, 146 in Coryat, Thomas, 2, 13–14, 67, 130, 149–50, 156, 157–8, 159–60, 179–81 in History of Italy, 8, 68–73, 79, 129–30, 144–5, 149, 156 and tale collections, 36–7 travel to, warnings, 71–2, 145–6 James, King, 21, 22, 23, 96, 130, 145 Jewish Ghetto, 114, 144, 155–6, 157n, 179, 243 Jews and Judaism see religious issues Job Book of, 108–10, 118–19 and covenant, and suffering, 109–10 Othello as, 110, 116–18 Shylock as, 107, 109, 113–14, 115 and universalism, 9, 107, 113–14, 118–19, 245–6 visual treatment of, 105–7

254

Visions of Venice

Jong, Erica Shylock’s Daughter: A Novel of Love in Venice, xviii Jonson, Ben, xvii, xi, 129, 146, 147; see also Volpone Judaism see Jews and Judaism under religious issues Juliet and her Nurse, 205 July Revolution, 217–19, 222–7 Kean, Charles, vii, 208, 209, 210, 211 Kean, Edmund, 208–11, 231–2 Keats, John, 231–2 Kemp, Will, xvii–xviii King John, 171, 244 King Lear, 193, 239 Kirkall, Elisha, vii, 200 Knight, Charles Pictorial Shakspere, vii, 201–5, 209, 211–12 Knolles, Richard, 7, 21–6, 28, 29, 30–31 Lamarche, 221–4 Laven, Mary, 158 the League see the Holy League Lepanto, Battle of, 21, 22, 25, 31 Lewisohn, Ludwig The Last Days of Shylock, 244 Lewkenor, Lewes, 3, 4, 8–9, 19, 68, 79, 110–12 Libro d’Oro, 148–9, 154 (as Golden Book) Lord Chamberlain’s Men, xvii–xviii Love’s Labour’s Lost composition of, 84–5 and the French wars of religion, 83–4 literary source for, 34, 84, 87, 95–6, 99 and Mass, signifying, 87–9, 90, 91–3, 97–8 and self–sovereignty, 90–91, 92–4, 97–101 Lupton, Julia Reinhard, 9, 239, 245–6 Machiavelli, Niccolò, xv, 69, 88, 93, 98, 150 Macklin, Charles, 234–5, 239–40 McPherson, David, 5, 78–9, 111n, 127, 180 Manningham, John, xv Marchionni, Luigi, 231–2

Marlowe, Christopher biography, 67–68 The Jew of Malta, 42, 136 Tamburlaine, Part 2, 171–2 Marrapodi, Michele Shakespeare’s Italy: Function of Italian Locations in Renaissance Drama, 5 marriage regulation in Venice, 148–9 Martin, John Jeffries, 180 the Mass; see also religious issues and anti-Catholicism, 85–8, 91–3, 98, 99 signifying of, in Love’s Labour’s Lost, 87–9, 90, 91–3, 97–8 May Day riots, 78 Measure for Measure, xvi–xvii, 167 Mediterranean geopolitics; see also Cyprus Wars; France; Henri IV; the Holy League; the Ottoman Empire; Venice; see also under Othello and international trade, 145–6 and Richard Knolles account of, 22–7 and Spain, 25, 26 The Merchant of Venice; see also the individual characters; see also conversion; religious issues; the revenant; translations and adaptations; visual treatment of plays and bond, 75–6, 110, 171, 186–7 and the Book of Job, 107, 113 and the casket love-test, 169, 170, 171–5 and covenant, 110, 114–16 and literary sources, xvi, 7–8, 38, 42, 73, 75, 79, 169, 171–2 and the marriage market, 158–9 and ‘reaction-formation,’ 170, 172, 178 and the revenant, 11, 168–9, 170–71, 173–6 revisions, rewrites and referents of, 243–4 DQGVDFUL¿FHDQGVXEVWLWXWLRQ170, 173, 175–80, 179 DQGVLOHQW¿OPYHUVLRQxviii and the symbolic economy, 11, 167–8, 175–7 and trade, 40–41, 148–9, 151–3, 180–81 and universalism, 119–20, 135–7 and Venice, 147–8, 149–52, 154–9, 179–81

Index merit, salvation by, 87–8, 96–8 Middleton, Thomas, xvi–xvii A Midsummer’s Night Dream, 176 Miller, Jonathan, 236 Miola, Robert, 6–7 A Mirror for Magistrates, 8, 68–9 ‘mirrors for princes’ literature, 68–9, 73 Moor, meaning of, 132 The ‘Moor of Venice,’ 232, 240; see also Othello (character) Moretto, Giorgio, 156 The Morning Post, 206 Moryson, Fynes, 130, 155, 159 Much Ado About Nothing, xvi, 52, 58n, 167 Muir, Kenneth, 47 Nashe, Thomas An Almond for a Parrot, xviii Piers Penniless, xvi The Unfortunate Traveller, xvi, 146 The Nature of Blood, 243 Navarre, Henri of see Henri IV of France Neale, Sir John, 86–7 Nicolaescu, Madalina, 12–13 the Norman conquest, 8, 72 Not Now, Sweet Desdemona, 240–41 the novella, 7, 33, 36–8, 44, 51, 52–5, 57–8, 62 Odéon theater, 221, 223 Olivier, Laurence, 132, 177, 235, 237, 238 Othello; see also Iago (character); Othello (character); projection; setting, sources, in Venice; Shakespeare; the ‘Other’; translations and adaptations; visual treatment of plays; women and bond, 186–7, 186n1, 189, 191–2, 193 and Christian references, 49–50, 107, 109–10, 116–19, 188–9 and Giraldi’s Moor, 20, 30, 42–3, 48, 49–50, 51–3, 54–8, 60–62, 190 literary sources for, xvii, 7, 21–22, 21n7, 23, 43–4, 47–8, 52–3, 56, 59 and the Mediterranean geopolitics, 7, 19–22, 30–31 and The Merchant of Venice, 232 Moor, meaning of, 132 and Palestine, 244–5 prostitution in, 160

255

revisions, rewrites and referents, 220n26, 231, 240–42, 243 and universalism, 6, 9, 107, 119–20 and Venice, 19–20, 27–8, 42, 147–51 Othello (character); see also Iago (character); Job; Othello; Shylock (character); stereotype; the ‘Other’ acting, character research and stereotypes, 234–5, 236–7, 238–40, 241–2 ancestry and identity, 13, 29, 132–4, 241–2 revisions, rewrites, referents, 231, 243 DQGVH[XDOGH¿OHPHQW52–3, 5 2n16, 149 and Shylock (character), 232–4 and the slave trade, future, 132 and Venetian military, 28–9 9HQLFHLGHQWL¿HGZLWK45 Othello in Wonderland, 241 the ‘Other’ as damnation, 188 Iago as, 11–12, 29, 62, 134, 187–8, 189–90 the Jew/Shylock as, 10–11, 78, 137–8, 179, 220, 223, 246 Othello (character) as, 10–11, 29, 61, 78, 117, 131–2, 134, 137–8, 149, 189, 192, 246 and Venice, 3, 11, 78–79, 112, 117, 126, 130–31, 139, 144–5, 156–7 Ottoman Empire; see also Cyprus Wars; Henry IV; Mediterranean geopolitics and conquest, 8, 48–9, 52–4, 132 and Russia, 227–28 and Venice, 20–22, 23–8, 48–9, 53–4, 133 Ovid Metamorphoses, xv Painter, William, 35, 36, 37 Palestine, 244–5 Parker, Patricia, 114–15, 181 Paster, Gail Kern, 147–8 Pepys, Samuel, 240 Perocco, Daria, 7, 150 3¿VWHU0DQIUHG125, 128, 139 Philip II, of Spain, 24, 30

256

Visions of Venice

Pichot, Amédeé Galerie des personnages de Shakspeare, 222 plague, of 1478, 105 Platt, Peter, 6 Platter, Thomas, 2–3 politiques, 84, 86 Polo, Marco, 125, 129 Pope Pius V, 24, 86–7, 91–4, 96, 98, 99, 144 Portia (character); see also Merchant of Venice; Shylock (character) and association with death, 169, 170–73, 176, 177 and association with Medea, 175 and economy, symbolic, 11, 167–8, 175–7, 179 and ethnic stereotypes, 138, 152 as revenant, 168–9, 173–6, 177–8 and Shylock, substitution and reversal, 178 Pory, John Descrittione dell’Africa, translation of, 56 projection (Freudian), 8, 11–12, 185, 187, 189, 192–3, 245 prostitution in Venice, 67, 144, 155, 157–61; see also enclosure Protestantism see under religious issues Queen Elizabeth see Elizabeth I The Queen’s Entertainment at Cowdray, 87 Rabelais, François, 89–90 race and ethnicity, 47, 48, 50–53, 55–7, 134, 185, 228, 232–4, 237, 239, 241 religious issues; see also Calvin and Calvinism; Church of England; covenant; French religious war under France; Holy League; Job; the Inquisition; the Mass; Venice and Catholicism, 38, 71–2, 95, 96–8, 134, 144, 179–81 and the conversion of Henry IV, 84–8, 92 and Jews and Judaism, 135–9, 155–6, 179–80, 237, 240, 243 in Merchant of Venice, 107, 109, 113, 135, 136–9, 179–80, 255–6 in Othello, 49–50, 107, 109–10, 116–19, 188–9 and People of the Book, 138–9

and Pope Pius V, 19, 24, 86–7, 91–4, 96, 99, 144 and Protestantism, 8, 68–9, 71–2, 83, 84, 86–7, 179–81 the revenant; see also Portia (character) in The Merchant of Venice, 11, 167, 168–9 and Portia as, 169, 170–71, 173–5, 176 in Shakespeare’s plays, 167 Richard III, 167, 192, 237 Riggs, David, 67–8 Robeson, Paul, 232, 238 Rogers, Samuel, 197–8 Romeo and Juliet, 35, 37, 52 Rowe, Nicholas The Works of Mr. William Shakespear, 12, 198, 199, 200 Royal Academy, 205 Rushdie, Salman The Enchantress of Florence, 243 Ruskin, John, 126–7, 197 The Stones of Venice, 209 Russia, 227–28 Rymer, Thomas, 187, 236 Sa’idi, Ghulam Husayn, 241 Salernitano, Masuccio, 41–2, 51, 52–3, 56 Salvini, Tommaso, 234–5, 236, 238 San Giobbe see Job Sarpi, Paolo, 99, 100, 101, 101n Scott, Clement, 211–12 self-sovereignty see sovereignty and self-sovereignty Selim, Sultan the Second, 20, 21, 23–4, 26, 27, 29–30 Selous, Henry Courtney, 203, 204 Serenissima see Venice (novel) see Shylock’s Daughter Serlio, Sebastiano Architettura, 199 Serpieri, Alessandro, 11–12 setting, sources, in Venice, xv–xviii, 3–8, 6, 22–3, 29–31, 77–8, 143–4, 201–3 Shakespeare; see also history plays; religious issues; revenants; setting, sources, in Venice; translations and adaptations; Venice; visual treatment of plays

Index comedies of, 176 DQGFRQWHPSRUDULHVLQÀXHQFHVxv, xvii–xviii and editions and versions, 193, 198, 199, 200, 203, 204, 212, 222 and Italian (language), xvi–xvii as myth, 1 and the novella, 7, 33 and the occult, 9 Palestine in, 244–5 and revisions, rewrites, referents, 12–13, 37, 215–17, 219–21, 221n28, 224–8 and self-sovereignty, 100 and universalism, 9, 107, 108–9, 113–15, 119–20, 241–2, 245–6 as vaudeville, 222 and Venice, knowledge of, xviii, 3–5, 19, 129, 146–7 Shapiro, James, 135–6, 179 Shirley, Sir Anthony and The Travels of the Three English Brothers, xviii Shylock, 240, 243 Shylock (character); see also conversion; Job; The Merchant of Venice; Othello; Othello (character); the ‘Other’; Portia (character); stereotype; translations and adaptations and acting, character research and stereotypes, 234, 235–6, 237, 239–40, 241–2 and covenant, 110, 114–16 and the deed, 177–8 as Jewish Job, 113–16 and Jews in Venice, 136–7 and Othello (character), 232–3 and revisions, rewrites and referents, xviii, 243, 244 and universalism, 107, 108–9, 113–14, 241–2 and usury, 75, 77 9HQLFHLGHQWL¿HGZLWK44 Shylock’s Daughter, xviii Sidney, Philip, 3, 95 Sileni Alcibiadis, 89, 96 Simmel, Georg, 125–6 Soranzo, Lazzaro The Ottoman, translated by Abraham Hartwell, 27

257

Southampton, Earl, xv, xviii, 87 sovereignty and self-sovereignty, 9, 90–94, 96, 97–101 Speed, John Prospect of the Most Famous Parts of the World, 27 Spinoza, Benedict de, 94, 100 Stereotype; see also enclosure; Jewish Ghetto; women and acting, character research, 234, 235–6, 237, 239–40, 241–7 and Othello (character), 52–3, 52n16, 54–8, 60–62 and Shylock (character), 20, 30, 135–9, 152, 160 the Stranger see the ‘Other’ Sugden, E.H. Topographical Dictionary to the Works of Shakespeare …, xvii sumptuary laws, 135, 159 The Taming of the Shrew, xvi Tanner, Tony, 125, 128 Teulescu, 216, 227 theater and politics, 68–9, 73, 216, 217–19, 218n, 221–2, 225–7 Théâtre de la Porte de Saint-Martin, 218, 223, 225 Théâtre Français, 219, 219n, 225 Théâtre Varieté, 218 The Thirty-nine Articles, 85, 91, 95, 96, 99 Thomas, William History of Italy, 8, 68–73, 79, 129–30, 144–5, 149, 156 Tiepolo, Giovanni, 158 The Times, 205–6 Titus Andronicus, 20, 192 Tosi, Laura, 10, 11 translations and adaptations The Book of Common Prayer, 99 Certain tragical discourses of Bandello, 35 The Commonwealth and Government of Venice, 8–9, 19 and domestication of the text, 219–21, 224 Florio, translation of Montaigne, xv Historie tragiche, 34–5

258

Visions of Venice

from Italian, 34 The Merchant of Venice, xviii, 12–13, 216–17, 218–23, 228, 242 Othello, 218 The Ottoman, 27 Shylock (character), 222, 223, 225–6 The Travels of the Three English Brothers, xviii Trent, Council of, 38 Tuck, Richard, 93n, 101 Tudor, Mary, 27 Turner, J.M.W., 44, 197, 205–6 Twelfth Night, xv, xvi, 4, 52, 167 The Two Gentlemen of Verona, 167, 176 Vaughan, Virginia Mason, 5, 7, 132 Venice; see also Cyprus Wars; enclosure; Othello; setting, sources, in Venice; the English, and Italy; the Merchant of Venice; Othello; Othello (character); the ‘Other’; the Ottoman Empire; Shakespeare and as dystopic (Volpone), 147–8 early modern plays set in, 2–3 and English attitudes, xv–xvi, 3–4, 7–8, 27–8, 33–4, 68, 206–12 and future, 129 and geopolitics, 22–9, 99, 133, 197 in Il Pecorone, 38–42 and Italian novellas set in, 33 and Job, as Saint, 105 and liminality and borders, 10, 11, 13–14, 127–31, 138, 143–4, 233–4 and marriage regulation, 148–9 as metamorphic, 10, 125–7, 130, 137–8 and myth or the Symbolic Venice, 1–6, 8, 33–4, 125–30, 144, 197–8 and the nobility, 112–13, 143–4, 149–51, 152–4, 158 and philosophy, 110–11 and politics and government, 4–5, 7–8, 67, 70–73, 79–80, 99–100, 105, 110–12, 113, 130, 149, 180–81 and religious issues, 8, 107, 130, 136–7, 144, 155–6, 179–81, 243 and rule of law, 19, 69–73, 74–7, 112, 130, 137, 186 and the sea, 3, 10, 127, 145

and sumptuary laws, 135, 159 and trade, 27, 49, 113, 144–6, 150–51 as transitional, 3, 29–30, 115, 128 and women, 67, 144, 148–9, 156, 157–61 Vigny, Alfred de Le Marchand de Venise, 217, 219, 220–21 Othello – Le More de Venise, 218 Virgil Aeneid, xv visual treatment of plays The Merchant of Venice, 198, 199, 200, 201–3, 208, 210 Othello, 198–9, 203, 204, 218 DVUHFRQ¿JXUDWLRQ198–9, 201–6, 208–9, 211–12 Vitkus, Daniel, 131, 145 Volpone; see also Jonson, Ben and the dystopic Venice, 147–8 and the English traveler in Venice, 146–7 hybridity and liminality, 10–11 and the patrician–merchant in Venice, 149–51, 152–4 prostitution in, 160–61 Voltaire, 85–6 Webster, John, xvi, xvii The White Devil, 160 Wesker, Arnold, 243 7KH:KLWH%R\6KXIÀH, 238 The White Devil, 160 Whitgift, John, 95, 96 William, Ralph Vaughan Serenade to Music, 213 Williams, Raymond, 168, 181 Wilson, John Dover, 87, 88, 89, 91, 97 The Winter’s Tale, 147, 167, 168 Winterson, Jeanette, 126–7 Wolfe, John, 33–4 Women; see also enclosure and marriage, 148–9, 156, 158, 158n64, 224n39 and misogynism, 52n16, 160–61 in novellas, 57–58 and Othello, fear of in, 118–19 and prostitution, 67, 144, 157–61

Index Wyatt, Michael cultural exchanges between Italy and England, 4 The Italian Encounter with Tudor England: A Cultural Politics of Translation, xv

Yaffe, Martin, 135 Yates, Frances, 9, 83, 84–5 Yehoshua, A.B. The Liberated Bride, 231, 233, 234 Zoffany, Johan, 199

259