The Venetian Virulence

May 1, 2000

This commentary is sparked by an article e-mailed me by my daughter, Marjorie. The following summary of the article started my thinking: From Ken Albers’ article:

“The director Ken Albers noted that of all the plays in the canon, the two that seemed to cause the most problems, create the most controversy and carry the most “baggage” are The Merchant of Venice and The Taming of the Shrew.

“For Merchant, because it presents us with an atmosphere clearly rife with anti-Semitism, with protagonists who clearly embrace an anti-Semitic point of view, and with a Jewish antagonist as a figure of usury and venality that openly challenges our desire for a sympathetic anti-hero.”

Almost all of the article is devoted to Albers’ belief that The Taming of the Shrew is Shakespeare’s second-best love story, next to Romeo and Juliet. I disagree when I recall Rosalind and Orlando (As You Like It) and Beatrice and Benedict (Much Ado). The “baggage” in the Taming is our modern recognitions of male chauvinism and domination and the rise of Feminism.

I want to comment on the “baggage” that The Merchant of Venice must carry. That “baggage” is our present-day repudiation of anti-Semitism. The Merchant is rife with anti-Semitism. Co-incidentally, The Merchant was the first Shakespeare both my daughter and I attended. I was a sophomore in high school; many years later, she was in high school and similarly experienced Shakespeare for the first time. Today, both of us, as well as her husband. Dale, are ardent fans of the Bard. So are son John and [his wife] Renee and daughter Janet and [her husband] Ron. All of them make yearly pilgrimages to Ashland for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.

There were always large measures of anti-Semitism in the Western world, including our own country. If you are old enough, you can recall the anti-Semitic rantings of Father Coughlin and the activities of various semi-fascist and hate groups before World War 2. The Holocaust, when six million Jews died in death camps in Hitler’s insane reign, made most of us keenly aware of the genocidal results results of anti-Semitism. We were made more sensitive to the slanders, lies and discriminations perpetrated against Jewish people.

Shakespeare’s age was different. Jews had been expelled from England in 1290 and not allowed to return until forty years after Shakespeare’s death.

So it would be very unusual if Shakespeare did not share much of the prevailing anti-Semitism. The stereotype of Shylock as the usurer might have made Shakespeare think a little because his father, John Shakespeare, was accused of lending money at 20% interest, which was usury. The prevailing laws did not allow Christians to charge any interest at all. Jews were not allowed to pursue any occupation but money-lending.

In the play, at first glance, Shylock is the villain; Portia the wonderful heroine; Bassanio and Antonio are heroes; Jessica and Lorenzo are the romantic young lovers.

This “Musing” is titled The Venetian Virulence – virulence in the sense of hatred, rancor, animosity. I could have added “hypocrisy” to this.

Let us take a different look at the cast of characters:

Bassanio is a spendthrift, deeply in debt, and believes his financial crisis could be resolved by marrying an heiress, Portia. In other words, Bassanio is a fortune-hunter. His best friend, Antonio, to whom he is already in debt, will help him, but Antonio’s money is all at sea in shipping ventures. So he must borrow from Shylock. Antonio does this although the drama makes plain that he has despised and insulted Shylock.

In Act I, Scene iii, after Antonio has asked for the loan of 3000 ducats (six figures today), Shylock says:

“Signior Antonio, many a time and oft
In the Rialto you have rated me
About my moneys and my usances:
Still have I borne it with a patient shrug,
For sufferance is the badge of all our tribe.
You call me misbeliever, cut-throat dog,
And spit upon my Jewish gaberdine ....

You call’d me dog, and for these courtesies
I’ll lend you thus much moneys?”

Antonio: “I am as like to call thee so again,
To spit on thee again, to spurn thee too...”

The transaction is completed, and the price for nonpayment of the loan is the pound of Antonio’s flesh. After Shylock has exited, Antonio remarks to Bassanio,

“The Hebrew will turn Christian: he grows kind.”

Thus Antonio asserts that Christians are kind and Jewish people are not. Any look at Christian history knows that that is an arrant falsehood. Was Shakespeare being ironic?

Some scholars believe that Antonio and Bassanio are lovers, Bassanio being bi-sexual. The roles could be played that way. In our time, that would just be interesting or “so what.” But in Shakespeare’s time it would have been scandalous.

William Shakespeare may have been somewhat liberated from the pandemic prejudice against Jews when one appreciates Shylock’s famous, passionate plea:

“... 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? ... 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 shall resemble you in that....”

Jessica, Shylock’s daughter, and her lover, Lorenzo, can beguile us with their lilting love poetry, particularly in the opening of Act V. We may overlook her crime in stealing her father’s money and jewels. But she is a thief. Lorenzo is quite willing to prosper too, with the wealth she robbed from her father. A fine romance? Hah!

Then consider Portia, the heroine. Her wonderful speech at the trial:

“The quality of mercy is not strained...” etc.

This has been the recitation at countless elocution events quoted in innumerable sermons; more remembered than any of Shakespeare’s soliloquys, except perhaps for Marc Antony’s obituary eloquence or Hamlet’s, “To be or not to be....”

But Portia’s mercy is a one-way street. She shows no mercy for Shylock, who must forcibly convert to Christianity [and] lose all his possessions.

The incidence of the rings, where Portia, disguised as the lawyer, persuades Bassanio to give her the ring, can only be described as a teasing trick with no worthy motive. In Julius Caesar, the Bard has Brutus say to Lucilius, “There are no tricks in plain and honest faith.”

Because he must become a Christian, Shylock can no longer maintain his money-lending business. Christian laws did not permit him, a Jew, to have been experienced in any other trade, profession or business. He is totally deprived of his daughter, his wealth, his business. His line in Act IV, Scene i, when all this has happened must be one of the saddest and most satirical in the Shakespeare canon, “I am content.”

You might assume from all this that I would not want to see The Merchant again. Quite the contrary. I am eager to watch how these various roles are played. With his dramatic skills and profound knowledge of how we act and what we are, Shakespeare may be saying look below the facades of human behavior and appreciate how we can be shallow or deep, wise or foolish, behave hypocritically or sincerely, act selfishly while seeming otherwise.

To dramatize these emotions, sometimes openly, sometimes subtly, is part of the never-ending genius, charm, and stimulus of Shakespeare’s works.

Sources:

The Merchant of Venice, W. Shakespeare

SHYLOCK, John Gross
SHAKESPEARE, THE INVENTION OF THE HUMAN, H. Bloom
SHAKESPEARE A TO Z, Charles Boyle
ASIMOV’S GUIDE TO SHAKESPEARE, Isaac Asimov
SHAKESPEARE: A LIFE, Park Honan