All the Bloody Shakespeare: The Merchant of Venice

 

The Merchant of Venice

The Merchant of Venice has a lot going on, so you’ll have to excuse how long this post is.  Don’t worry though, the next one up is The Merry Wives of Windsor and there’s almost nothing going on in that.   Also, given the sensitivity of the material, I did actually have to do some research into this one.

There is a theory called moral self-licensing that suggests doing a good thing gives a person psychological leeway to commit future infractions.  This might explain why after having made it through a Midsummer Night's Dream without a single antisemitic comment Shakespeare then felt he had free rein to give us five full acts of hate crime.

Now, it ought to be said that whilst lots of people feel TMV is antisemitic.  Some disagree and say that a few sympathetic moments redeem the play.  It is also worth noting that Hitler wasn't one of them.  He loved it and thought it was the tops.

Here is a review of how TMV was used as Nazi propaganda that I feel is somewhat important to a modern reading of the play:

https://www.nytimes.com/1993/04/04/theater/theater-shylock-and-nazi-propaganda.html

 

Let me set up the basics:

The Merchant of Venice is only called a comedy because it ends in a wedding and no one dies.  There are some folio copies in which it's called a history, but it has no basis in any real event, so it's best called a drama. There are some sporadic half-hearted attempts at humour but Shakespeare’s main intent does not seem to be to provoke laughter.

Now, there are contrived plots and then there is this.  Antonio is a rich merchant who wants to borrow money to help his friend Bassanio ruin his life by marrying a woman called Portia.  Shylock is a Jewish moneylender who Antonio has routinely insulted and humiliated with antisemitic slander and false accusations.  So, of course, he goes to him.   

Instead of charging interest, Shylock offers the loan with the contractual proviso that if it isn't paid in time he can cut a pound of flesh from any part of Antonio's body he chooses.  Antonio, rather than pausing to think about how much the average male genitals weigh and ignoring all pleas for reason from Bassanio, immediately accepts.  After all, he's an Elizabethan shipping merchant and absolutely nothing could stop his fleet of wooden sailboats from their usual punctual return.   They, of course, don't return and he owes Shylock a pound of flesh.  Luckily for him, Shylock only wants to cut out his heart.

Rather than apologising, and being nice Antonio keeps up his hate campaign against Shylock and Shylock (who is getting shat on from just about every direction) demands that the contract be fulfilled.

This is where Portia becomes important to the play.  Portia is annoyingly like Katy Holmes' character from Dawson's Creek: everything she says is a verbose essay on the nature of human existence, that takes about a half a second of thought to dismiss as shallow self-aggrandising bullshit.  She is, granted, a positive portrayal of women and Shakers gets some points for that.  But let's not pretend he's made her sympathetic, she's both completely intolerable and a racist.  At Portia’s first appearance Shakers drops his tight rhythmic lines, and instead opts for giving her huge paragraphs of waffling prose.   There is an implied sense of, “this is what happens when you let women have opinions – they never shut up.”  So, I’m detracting the initial point I gave Shakespeare and withholding it indefinitely.

A lot of the play is taken up with her marriage.  Her father has created a puzzle and solving it wins you Portia and, all of her wealth and land like she was a goldfish at the fair.  If this is the kind of bullshit that Portia has had to put up with all her life, no wonder she ends up so awful.  There are three chests, one gold, one silver and one lead.  If you haven't guessed, the correct box is the lead one.  Indiana Jones would have figured it out easily but for reasons of plot progression, Portia’s suitors don’t.

The first is The Duke of Morocco who is wealthy, polite and, seems to genuinely like and respect Portia.  He spends a little time talking about how he would become white to please her if he could.   A heartbreaking presentation of the psychological damage caused by racism and xenophobia that utterly fails to move Portia.  The Duke is by far the most sympathetic character in the whole play.  He chooses the gold box using the logic that undervaluing Portia would be an insult to her.  Which, you know, is quite charming.

He opens the box to find a rhyme beginning, “All that glisters is not gold.”  Tolkien would later rip this off and correct the spelling, though it does seem to have been a popular idiom even prior to Shakers’ usage.  The Duke of Morrocco is so gutted he can barely speak and leaves quietly.  Portia responds by saying:

“A gentle riddance.  Draw the curtains, go.

May all of his complexion choose me so.”

So, her only beef with him is, in fact, his skin colour.   In this play, Portia is the heroic saviour who frees white Christians from the tyranny of one oppressive Jewish man.  Yes, it’s progressive to give that much power to a female character, but I’ve already touched on moral self-licensing and I don’t think it really forgives the rest of the play.

The silver chest goes much the same (but without the racism from Portia).  Finally, Bossano shows up and picks the bronze chest.  He explains his money problems and the problem with Antonio and Shylock.  And she agrees to marry him and give him the money to pay off Antonio’s debt twice.   Bassano's worries would now be over, were it not that Shylock cares far more about killing Antonio than he does about getting his money back and that he’s just agreed to marry Portia. Bossano is about to discover that Portia is the sort of woman who will give you a ring to look after, crossdress as a doctor, demand that ring to save your friend’s life and then threaten to cheat on you in revenge for giving the ring away.  Which is exactly the crazy manipulative stunt that she pulls.

Anyway, she also uses her cross-dressed disguised to get Antonio off the hook, giving a big speech about mercy and using a similar logic that Loki uses to stop the dwarves beheading him.  Shylock can take his pound of flesh but he may not spill even a drop of blood without being punished.  Then, Shylock is convicted of attempted murder.  Shylock is then forced to convert to Christianity and agree to give away most of his wealth when he dies.  Then some more people get married.  The end!

Whilst all this is going on, Launce shows up again.  This time called Launcelot Gobbo but replete with Jew jokes, staff jokes and bad observational comedy.  He does this time become a more developed character, he is in love with Shylock’s daughter Jessica and helps her steal a bunch of his belongings and run off to convert to Christianity and get married. 

Overall, there is a greater complexity of character and plot than we generally see in Shakespeare’s comedies, but it’s all rather marred by its central thematic premise.

So, back to antisemitism:

As I said, there are many defenders of TMV and if you want a positive outlook on the play, check out this rather excellent one written by Jewish poet and critic Aviva Dautch.

https://www.bl.uk/shakespeare/articles/a-jewish-reading-of-the-merchant-of-venice

You won’t be getting any of that from me.  I’ll do my best to be as even-handed as possible, but I don’t really think Shakespeare is doing anything but playing to the prejudice of his time, culture and audience.   Many critics seem to miss the point that this is based more in theological prejudice than it is ethnic prejudice.   Perhaps because there is also so much ethnic prejudice in Shakespeare’s plays.

The most damning thing that stands against Shakespeare is his entire body of work.  We’re six comedies in and all of them but Midsummer Night’s Dream had at least one negative thing to say about Jewish people.  I can tell you now that the next play up The Merry Wives of Windsor has one too.  That on its own ought to be a compelling enough case, but I have more.

Now in Shakespeare’s defence, he lived at a time when Jewish people were just beginning to return to England and it was still technically illegal for them to live here.  So nobody would have cared at the time.  As Professor Teofilo Ruiz has pointed out in The Terror of History, the Elizabethan time was a period of upheaval, and everyone thought of the devil and witches in much the same way they thought about terrorism in the 2000-2010s.  it was a time of panic and panic breeds prejudice.  And Shakers was unlikely to have met a lot of Jewish people.  It’s not that much of a defence, I know, but you can read Phillip Zimbardo’s Lucifer Effect if you want an explanation of how it is psychologically normal to be a complete prick under such circumstances.

There are only two plays written in the Elizabethan period with a Jewish protagonist and TMV happens to be one of them.  The other is Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta.  Defenders of Shakers will claim that TMV (sometimes referred to at The Jew of Venice in early folios) is way less antisemitic than The Jew of Malta.  So, I had to read the bloody thing.

It’s bad, The Jew of Malta isn’t fucking around.  But there seems to be a consensus that Shakespeare’s version was inspired by Marlowe’s and here are the things the protagonists of the two plays have in common.

  -            Both protagonists hate Christians and give speeches about the subject.  In both cases, these reminded me of the sort of “death to the infidels” speeches you get from Muslim villains in Hollywood films.

  -            Both seek revenge. 

  -            Both have some cause for revenge.

The big difference is focus.  Shylock wants Revenge on just the antisemite who has made his life miserable and is willing to go through the law.  Whilst Barabas (Yes, Marlowe named him after the villain the Jewish crowd chose to save instead of Jesus.  Yes, Marlowe was a Catholic) kills people all willy nilly, a bunch of nuns poisoned here, a priest strangled there, an attempt to start a war over that way.  

So, yes.  The Jew of Malta is much more antisemitic.   I could do a whole post on it, but I'll save that for the complete Marlowe.   But I’ll say this, Barabas’ rampage is so unrepenting that he does kind of go all the way back around to being a badass.  I mean check out these lines:

“My gold, my fortune, my felicity

Strength to my soul, and death to mine enemy.”

Now imagine The Rock saying them, or Michael Douglas or, Denzel Washington.  Admit it, you just got half a stiffy.  That’s some world-class badassery.  And whether it was Marlowe’s intention or not, you can’t help but want Barabas to win.  He’s like Milton’s Lucifer, the effort to vilify him only makes him even more badass.

Shylock's nuanced persona is potentially a more dangerous approach.  Whilst Barabas is a straight out no-holds-barred psycho, Shylock is portrayed as a cowardly sneak.  He does everything by the book, and no amount of reasoning will steer him from his course.  He hasn’t even been wronged as much as Barabas, Barabas is stripped of all his belongings, every single penny.  Shylock is insulted and bullied which is bad but it’s not in the same league.   And there is a more significant difference, Barabas is on a revenge rampage, whereas Shylock is just incapable of forgiveness.   This is a recurring motif and it stems from the theological premise that Christianity is about forgiveness and mercy, whereas Judaism is only about Exodus 21:24 (that’s the eye for an eye bit, one sentence in the volumes and volumes of competing ideas that represent the actual Jewish tradition).

The theme is evident in both plays and almost certainly had passed into Christian thinking via St Augustine’s Contra Faustum. 

Even the most famously sympathetic passage is only sympathetic when read out of context:

Here it is, looking all sympathetic:

“Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die?”

It’s a beautiful argument for an egalitarian world.  When reading it you can imagine Shylock commnading the rapt attention of a crowded courtroom, that had been set on damning him but on hearing the beauty and truth of his words cast their eyes to the ground in shame.  A scene in which Ode for Joy plays triumphantly and fellow human feeling unites one and all, asking us to transcend our petty differences and realise that we are all fundamentally alike. 

But, that only works if you read it out of context.  Let’s read the whole thing:

“To bait fish withal; if it will feed nothing else, it will feed my revenge. He hath disgrac’d me and hind’red me half a million, laugh’d at my losses, mock’d at my gains, scorned my nation, thwarted my bargains, cooled my friends, heated mine enemies. And what’s his reason? I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that. If a Jew wrong a Christian, what is his humility? Revenge. If a Christian wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be by Christian example? Why, revenge! The villainy you teach me I will execute, and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction.”

Now, it’s worth noting that this is a soliloquy, not a speech.  And Shylock is muttering it to himself after being humiliated by his oppressors yet again.  It’s a murderous rant and the implication is that Shylock sees revenge as being as natural a part of his composition as sensation and physiognomy.  The Jew, as he’s called in stage directions, is evoking a most powerful fear in his audience: That given a chance, Jewish people might treat them as badly as they treat Jewish people.  It has the same political foundation as the rape scenes in Birth of a Nation, the same fear that led to the far-right of Britain and America to fear Islamic invasion.  The idea that we did it to them, now they’re going to try to do it to us.  The fear that the oppressed are as inhuman as the oppressors.  Shakespeare is not trying to convince his audience that Jewish people are the same as them, he's trying to convince them that Jewish people would murder them and kick them out of their homes, given the chance.  It’s a brilliant piece of propaganda, subtle, willfully one sided, emotive and deadly.  Small wonder Hitler was so fond of it.

It is worth noting again, that whilst in modern versions of the play good-intentioned editors have fixed the stage directions to include Shylock’s name, in the older versions that keep Shakespeare’s spellings, Shylock doesn’t have a name in the stage directions and he is simply called “the Jew.” Furthermore, in this play, even the character who would usually be called “the clown” (Launcelot Gobbo) gets his own name.  So, I am not being unfair here; Shylock isn’t a developed character he’s a cardboard representation of an entire race.  And he is painted as a serious threat.

The other famous speech of the play is Portia’s big courtroom speech, which she delivers in the guise of a male doctor.  Again, without context, the speech can seem as if it’s well-intentioned.  But the context in which it is given is Portia explaining why Christians are nicer than Jews.  It’s not even that good of a speech.  The simile of mercy falling from the heavens like gentle rain is not only the most obvious allusion for anything being in abundance, it’s also dramatically at odds to the treatment of Shylock by every other character in the play.

 People love to quote, “The quality of mercy is not strained,” but tend to get a bit quiet on the part that reads “Therefore, Jew, / Though justice be thy plea, consider this, / That in the course of justice none of us / Should see salvation.”  The whole speech beginning to end is an appeal to Christians to think they’re better than Jews.  Because, although the Jews have certainly never invaded the British homeland (or the Italian homeland for that matter), or ejected any European from Jerusalem let alone all of them; Christians are better at forgiving people.

I emphasise: the outcome of the trial is that Shylock is only allowed to survive by being stripped of his identity.  He goes from being the representative of an entire culture to being nothing at all.  It’s as bleak an outcome as possible. 

 There are many people I respect and admire that consider TMV to be, despite its flaws, a masterpiece.  Reading it I saw Shakespeare marching down the street like the cultural emperor that he is robed in the finest threads of a literary canon.  But the play is threadbare: A forced concept in which no character gets a gratifying conclusion.  The only purpose of the play is for Shakespeare to cash in on a wave of anti-Jewish sentiment.  The great bard is bollocko, and he’s an ugly nude.

 

2/5 Go buy the Merchant of Venus board game instead.

 

Postus scriptum:  For the sake of brevity, I largely overlooked the Jessica subplot.  Jessica is portrayed as a much more sympathetic Jew than Shylock.  But this being the case she converts to Christianity of her own accord.  I’m afraid there is little to redeem Shakespeare.  I had genuinely hoped there would be too.