Gayle's Bard Blog

Academics, Oxfordians, and Agnostics

2012-01-15T15:46:00.000-05:00

This is my last completed authorship post--I left off here over a year ago. After this, I hope to go back to Othello, and finish up the authorship series at some later date. There's obviously a lot more to be said about de Vere and the Oxfordian phenomenon than I was able to do here...but this is it for now.

The last chapter of my authorship series deals with the most recent--and currently most popular--alternative candidate: Edward de Vere, the seventeenth Earl of Oxford. Sounds impressive, doesn't it? Lots better than Will Shakespeare, Country Bumpkin of Humble Origins and Dubious Educational Qualifications.

So right there you see what's up. The Greatest Playwright in English, the Father of English Literature (sorry, Geoffrey, but no one reads Middle English, so you're SOL) must have been, surely has to have been, a nobleman. Now you may wonder why, in this democratic era, we still have a romantic attachment to social hierarchies from which the vast majority of us would have been excluded.

Personally, I chalk it up to the cultural one-two punch of Hollywood and romance novels. We just can't accept the idea that Shakespeare, whose words populate our lamest political speeches and most boring high school English classes, was just some middle-class guy who read a lot of books and had a totally awesome imagination.

No, he must have been...a pirate! Or at least captured by pirates! He must have hobnobbed (or maybe been illegitimately born to!) royalty. He must have had father and inheritance issues. He must have traveled all over the world to get ideas for his plays, because everyone knows you can't tell a story unless it's about something that really happened to you.

I'll say it again: If that were the case, most of the stuff in the fiction section of the library wouldn't exist. Or, if it did, it would be really poorly written.

Okay, you've got me there. A lot of the stuff on library shelves is poorly-written. But seriously, writing is damned hard work, even if you're talented. I myself am a capable writer. And to get even this good required a hell of a lot of toil. I labored in the dark dungeon of academic prose for decades, until I barely knew how to talk, much less write, like a normal person. Then, after barely escaping with my sanity, I frolicked in the forest of fiction for awhile; while I didn't produce any deathless works of imaginative genius, I did manage to remember how real people think and speak. After leaving academics, I did a fair amount of commercial writing--ads, web content, business letters for various folks/firms in need of persuasive verbiage. In short, I've been writing most of my adult life, and occasionally getting paid pretty well for it.

And I still only write this well! But my point is this. A person who lives a thrilling, intrigue-filled life involving pirate capture and dangerous liaisons with capricious people in power would hardly have the time--or probably the inclination--to spend hours, days, weeks and years staining his fingers with ink in order to entertain and educate the rest of the world. With a few exceptions, the nobility have tended to lack the imagination and fortitude necessary to leave a lasting mark on literary culture. They just aren't brought up to work hard.

That's not an argument, by the way. Just an observation.

Well, anyway. On to Oxford. Now it's been my experience that the Oxfordian crowd is a passionate, sometimes angry, and virulently anti-academic bunch. There are tons of books and websites out there promoting the Earl as the real Shakes-peare. Don't get me started on this hyphenation business--it's as annoying as the cipher-hunting, and just as silly. I shall not be discussing it. Not to-day, not to-morrow. Not any-time. Because as a scholar of Middle English, I can't be bothered with silly ideas based on modern notions of orthographic consistency, or a flawed understanding of Renaissance printing. That sub-ject is closed.

In order to fore-stall (okay, I'll stop) any unnecessary unpleasantness, I've prepared a Disclaimer for Oxfordian Readers. I don't imagine I have many, since this blog is really about the plays, not their origins, but just in case, here it is:

Despite my admitted lack of enthusiasm for the whole authorship question, I am not "against" your candidate. It would be thrilling if he were proved to be the actual Bard. I love historical revisionism if it's based on new information rather than ideological fantasy or academic retaliation.

Moreover, despite my fancy-schmancy degree and ivory-tower background, I am not in the "academic camp," either. I've got my own quarrels with the mythology of intellectual freedom and the Great Conversation. It's pretty much all crap. And hypocrisy, too. Many acclaimed academics--Stephen Greenblatt, for example--have written things just as speculative, improbable, and absurd as any anti-Stratfordian out there. And frankly it's just unfair that he's enshrined (intellectually entombed?) at Harvard and you all have only the blogosphere for your kingdom. I am not being sarcastic here--I mean it.

No, my quarrel is only with your logic. Because really, as interesting as they are, there is no evidence to support these claims. There is some coincidence, some correlation of events, and so on. But taking a coincidence for a cause is how people came up with ideas like Spontaneous Generation, remember. As it turns out, the sun doesn't "breed maggots in a dead dog," but for centuries it certainly looked that way.

I have to say, there's more evidence for the Stratford Man than any of these other contenders. Contemporary praise from people like Ben Jonson, Thomas Heywood, John Webster and others certainly argues for Will. As does the power of the signature itself. No one has ever presented a convincing argument for "Shakespeare" as a pseudonym. Or a convincing argument that the use of pseudonyms was common--in the earliest era of printing, there was, if anything, even more anxiety about the veracity of "signatures" than there is today. But none of this is completely unequivocal "proof." It's just strong circumstantial evidence.

So, rather than take sides, I'm going to proclaim myself an Authorship Agnostic. This is not the coward's way. It's a philosophical exercise in something sorely lacking on both sides of this dust-up: humility. Unless one can go back in time, it's impossible to be certain about very much in the way of historical fact. It could all be a conspiracy! Or the work of some Cartesian Evil Demon. I'm willing to concede that evidence may someday make this whole business clearer, perhaps to the advantage of Oxford or someone else. But I haven't seen that evidence yet.

In the meantime, I'm comfortable with uncertainty. Always have been. I have no problem with ambiguity, ambivalence, indeterminacy, and all that. I am, in the face of Universal Unknowables, humble. Because without uncertainty, irony would be impossible. And irony is, hands down, my very favorite trope.

Um, that was meant to be ironic.

Anyway, with this in mind, I'm going to continue my exploration of the authorship controversy as a cultural phenomenon. I'm more interested in what it says about modernity, about our romance with the past, than I am in uncovering some infinitely receding historical truth. In other words, I'm not going to argue here--at least not much. There are lots of Oxfordian sites, and a few devoted to proving that Bacon or Marlowe was the real Bard. I've provided links to those here on the blog, so you can delve into the fray yourself, if you're so inclined. My interests lie elsewhere.

Next: Freud and Looney (and no, I'm not going to make a joke out of it)

No, next is Othello, and the erotic allure of travelogues. Freud, Looney, and the rest of the Oxfordian melodrama will have to wait, at least until we're back from our tragic Cyprian vacation.

Suspicious Minds

2011-12-19T11:49:00.001-05:00

Now that I am reading over these authorship posts, I can see where it all started to Go Wrong. The whole authorship controversy took me too far away from the real reason I started this blog, and it was downhill from there. Authorship people are, for the most part, anti-literary and anti-metaphor. Both of which I hold dear. I have a poet's heart, I guess, not a cryptographer's brain. (Sadly, I don't have a poet's talent). Well, anyway. There's only one more post after this--then we'll see if I still have the desire/will to get back to Othello, a play which, not surprisingly, is seldom if ever mentioned by the authorship folks. I will speculate on why that is...later.

Well, it’s been awhile. I find that more free time is actually having a deleterious effect on my blogging schedule. I inevitably find other, more enticing things to do with my time. Plus, I have another, more personal blog I’m writing under a pseudonym (“Sophia”—get it?), which is more fun right now. I confess that some of the reluctance to sit down in front of this one probably has to do with the subject matter. I feel guilty admitting this, because the authorship question has obviously been very compelling for a great many people, among them minds far more impressive than my own—Mark Twain, Henry James, and Sigmund Freud being the most notable of these doubters. Nevertheless, I just can’t get very excited about this whole thing. There’s no poetry in it at all. It’s an interesting psychodrama, but that’s about it.

Still, I promised to make this a complete narrative arc, and so I shall.

One of the things that does interest me in exploring this issue is the fact that many— perhaps most—of the more celebrated Shakespeare doubters came to this question quite late in life, at a time when they had begun to worry about their own legacies. This cannot have been a coincidence. Mark Twain, for example, became a convert to the Baconian argument partly in writing his own autobiography. Twain was a notorious spendthrift, and had squandered most of his wealth by the time he reached old age. He was forced to keep writing to pay the bills. Having pretty much run out of ideas, he turned to one of his favorite topics—himself. He began publishing his autobiography in installments in The North American Review—interestingly, and perhaps ironically, his autobiography was (according to people who knew him well) as much an imaginative work of fiction as a factual narrative.

This is, I think, true of most autobiographies. Despite the fact that—or perhaps because—they pretend to be the Truth, they are more often the repositories of fantasies we have about ourselves. Our motives are purer, our enemies more malevolent, our courage more enduring in story form. We’re much better as fictional characters than we are as real people.

While Twain had a somewhat liberal attitude toward the writing of his own autobiography, he was convinced that all great fiction derived from life, not imagination, and that, by implication, the facts of an author’s life could be discerned with accuracy from his works. In taking on the Shakespeare question in his last book, he revealed perhaps more than he intended about his own motives. The book was entitled Is Shakespeare Dead? but the subtitle was more telling: From My Autobiography. The question that really worried him was, “Is Mark Twain Dead?” Had he exhausted his creative drive? Was his historical moment over? How will he be remembered? It was, ultimately, all about him.

Greatness is often embarrassing in its old age. Great men have trouble letting go of their own myths, and often squander their last years trying in vain to top the triumphs of their youth. Maybe Shakespeare knew this, and had the good sense to retire before he turned fifty—a ripe old number in those days.

Uh-oh. My attention is wandering. Time for a digression.

There are collateral benefits to these authorship posts. I’ve been finding out interesting trivia about various historical figures and trends. For example, did you know that, late in life, Mark Twain was surrounded by handlers who called him “the King?” For real, he was the early twentieth century Elvis. Twain was a consummate self-promoter, and the first genuine celebrity of the modern era. He dressed in iconic white suits, made sure his hair and eyebrows were suitably cotton-candyish whenever he went out, and had a ready store of folksy sayings to hand out at every public appearance.

Also, Helen Keller first introduced the Japanese Akita dog to the US. Yep, bet you didn’t know that, either.

Anyway, like many very successful, very famous people, Twain viewed the rest of the world through his own mirror. It was inconceivable to him that Shakespeare could have simply walked away from fame and fortune in his forties, and lived out his remaining years in obscurity. A man as desperate for immortality as Twain obviously was simply couldn’t fathom turning his back on the public life. Ergo, the Stratford retiree was not the real Bard.

Twain convinced others, most notably Helen Keller, to take up the Baconian banner. Keller, too, wanted to write a book about the Real Shakespeare, but was strongly dissuaded by her publisher from Tainting Her Brand with weird speculative research. Keller was a real cash cow for her promoters—she had published several inspirational best sellers about her struggles and triumphs. No one was interested in any non-autobiographical books by a blind and deaf author. Ironically, although Keller felt creatively trapped by her own autobiography, and was herself a living testament to the fact that creativity does not depend on sensory experience, she, like Twain, refused to consider that literature is not, on some level, autobiography in code.

Yes, code! The next phase of this story is about encryption. I love code stories, especially 1960’s espionage films. My favorite one is about a code-breaking team of hot girls run by a repressed but sexy guy played by Dirk Bogarde. This gem is called Sebastian, made in 1968. It even has the requisite corny LSD-trip scene in it! Check it out—it’s totally retro-cool-camp.

But I digress. Again.

The late nineteenth/early twentieth century was mad about encryption. Delia Bacon’s friend, Samuel Morse, invented the commercial telegraph machine and, of course, Morse Code. Suddenly, encrypted messages and acrostics were everywhere. In poems, plays, documents, songs. The world was just an encrypted version of a truer reality that lay beneath the surface. It was like that old Police Box in the Doctor Who series. Ordinary on the outside, but teeming with unlikely adventures and mysteries within. If only one could break the code…

Ignatius Donnelly, a popular writer of the late nineteenth century, thought he could unravel the encrypted messages buried in Shakespeare’s plays and thereby prove that Bacon had written them. He’d had a bestseller with his book on Atlantis in 1882, and another about his theories of prehistoric planetary cataclysm--grippingly entitled Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel--a few years later.

Yeah, he was a crackpot. But the late nineteenth century was a golden age for crackpots, and he totally cashed in. It was just a short conceptual leap (for him) from Lost Civilizations to Lost Poets. In 1888, he published The Great Cryptogram: Francis Bacon’s Cipher in the So-Called Shakespeare Plays.

Now, to be fair, Francis Bacon did create some actual ciphers. But it’s a pretty big leap to then assume that he’d embedded a bunch of them in plays with someone else’s signature. Nevertheless, Donnelly insisted that Bacon had slipped into the plays “a cipher story, to be read when the tempest that was about to assail civilization had passed away.” It wasn’t just a story about secret identities, it was about the Coming Apocalypse!

A great marketing scheme, but ultimately unprovable. Even Twain, who published the book, wasn’t convinced by Donnelly’s tortured argument, whereby Bacon was said to have written the code first, and the plays as window dressing! I know, it sounds ridiculous. But pretty much all these anti-Stratfordians see the literature as secondary to the mystery of its composition.

Sad.

Anyway, this whole crazy cipher thing culminated in the invention of a machine that promised to sort it all out. Orville Ward Owen, a Detroit physician, took Donnelly’s argument many steps further in his six-volume study, Francis Bacon’s Cipher Story. The book detailed the results of Owen’s cryptographic research using his famous cipher wheel, pictured on the left. This machine supposedly revealed not only that Bacon wrote Shakespeare’s plays, but that he was the son of Queen Bess herself, by means of an illicit liaison with the Earl of Leicester. Oh, and Bacon also wrote all the works of Christopher Marlowe, Edmund Spenser, Robert Greene, and a few others.

Anyone who’s ever read both The Faerie Queene and anything by Shakespeare can see this is absurd. But none of these guys had even a hint as to how poetry works, or what it means.

The cryptography drama went on for a few more years, but ultimately proved nothing. It did, however, lead to some new inventions that proved quite useful in wartime espionage. Neither Twain, nor Keller, nor Henry James (another, more circumspect anti-Stratfordian), ever came up with a convincing argument. Eventually the Baconian moment fizzled out, yielding to a new, more exciting candidate: The Earl of Oxford.

Next: The Manly Bard—or, old Prospero gets the boot.

An Inconvenient Woman, Part 2

2011-12-17T14:25:00.000-05:00

If you’re one of those readers who’s more interested in the plays than in this whole authorship discussion, rest assured I have only a couple more posts on the authorship controversy. Actually the series wasn't complete when I abandoned it a year or so ago--I never really got to do my De Vere Takedown. I will do that, maybe in conjunction with a review of Anonymous, if I ever get around to seeing it. The film, from what I've read, is positively wild. Yummy Renaissance tabloid fare. I'm sure I'll enjoy it, in a junk-foodish sort of way. But I may try to finish Othello before incurring the wrath of the Oxfordians with that post. We'll see.

In the meantime, back to our Baconian saga.

The Public Intellectual

I realized, upon re-reading my last post, that I may have left readers with the impression that Delia Bacon was a reclusive, Emily Dickinsonian sort of creature—a nineteenth-century “bluestocking” who spent her life with her nose buried in books. That’s not at all the case. Although she retired from public life in 1845, after a particularly nasty—and utterly unjust—scandal ruined her reputation, prior to that she had been a nationally-known lecturer who kept company (I mean intellectual company, not the other kind) with the likes of Hawthorne, Emerson, Whitman, and Samuel Morse, the guy who invented Morse Code. At twenty she anonymously published a trilogy of novellas, Tales of the Puritans, and a year later won a prize for a short story about the Revolutionary War, a rather generic romantic piece entitled “Love’s Martyr,” about a colonial woman who is killed by Indians en route to meet her loyalist lover.

She had many admirers among her contemporaries, and some of them left us pretty gushy assessments of her genius and charisma. She was “graceful and intellectual in appearance, eloquent in speech, marvelously wise, and full of inspiration, she looked and spoke the very muse of history.” A woman, of course, has to be a “muse” of some sort, not a flesh-and-blood historian. But still, it was pretty high praise for an era when most respectable women were banished to parlors and sitting rooms, hunched over needlework while they struggled to breathe through their corsets.

She was, in her youth, interested in the theater and even developed her Revolutionary romance for the stage. The famous actress Ellen Tree was set to play the heroine. While in the process of doing the final edits on her play, however, Delia suffered some kind of a breakdown. Her brother and another male friend had criticized the play harshly—doubtless motivated by horror that she would pursue unfeminine—and un-Puritan—occupation of writing for the stage. The play itself had some brilliant moments, many have said (I honestly haven’t read it, so I can’t confirm or deny these assessments), and was clearly indebted to Shakespeare.

Anyway, it seems clear that Delia’s moralistic/Puritan side couldn’t be reconciled to this theatrical ambition. She decided that plays in general—not just hers—weren’t meant to be performed, only read…this became her take on Shakespeare, too, and helped bolster her case for the bookish Bacon over the Stratford man of the stage.

Like a lot of women frustrated in their career ambitions and banished to the fringes of the public world, Delia allowed her intellectual passion to morph into an obsession—she eventually traveled to England, haunting graveyards, and at one point was determined to dig up Francis Bacon’s remains to see if there were any manuscripts buried with him. The authorities dismissed her as an American crackpot, which is pretty much how history has judged her, too.

I’m pretty sure that, if she were alive today, she’d be an avid blogger.

The Obsession

Delia, like Will Shakespeare, hasn’t left us much in the way of biographical materials, notes, or even a bibliography from which to follow her train of thought. Most of what we know about her comes from others—again, like Shakespeare. Ironic, really, since the dearth of biographical info on Shakespeare is what set her off on her strange quest to begin with.

We do know she was a teacher of young women, and that her classes on Shakespeare were renowned. In many ways, Delia’s approach to teaching Shakespeare was ahead of its time. Her young female charges were taught that every play was thick with hidden significance, that there was “nothing superfluous…every word [was] full of meaning.” This was New Criticism avant la lettre; at a time when most literary essays on Shakespeare were more celebratory than analytic, Delia brought real rigor to the business of interpretation.

At the same time, she was a product of her era in that she—like virtually all early Shakespeareans—envisioned a Renaissance in which the lower and middle classes were incapable of greatness. Her Shakespeare could not have been anything but an aristocrat—no one who belonged to the “unlettered masses” could possibly have written the deeply philosophical and political works he was said to have authored. Although she claimed to be a democrat rather than a monarchist at heart, her project evinced nothing so much as deep nostalgia for social hierarchy.

It made perfect sense to her that someone else, someone with a better pedigree and more education, must have been the “real” Shakespeare. So she went looking around for a suitable candidate—and found Francis Bacon. A man who was, at that time, thought to be fully Shakespeare’s equal as a thinker, rhetorician, and political visionary. Once she had decided on Bacon, she didn’t delve into the archives for proof of her theory. She went, instead, to Shakespeare’s plays themselves, poring over each line for authorial hints that Bacon may—or rather, must—have encrypted in “his” work.
This became the model for all future anti-Stratfordians—lacking any archival evidence for these alternative candidates, their advocates have always looked to the plays themselves. Since Delia’s time, finding the true Bard has been--either literally or figuratively--a matter of code-breaking.

The Crack-Up

Delia’s desire to find the true Shakespeare might have amounted to little more than a passionate intellectual avocation, had her life not taken a turn for the worse in the 1840’s. Delia had become very close to a certain Alexander MacWhorter, a young theology graduate some eleven years her junior. They met in New Haven, at a hotel where both were lodgers. MacWhorter was working on biblical code-breaking himself—something having to do with the letters in Yahveh—so he and Delia had a lot to talk about.

It’s difficult to ascertain what happened between them emotionally. What we do know is that Delia’s brother (a stuffy old Puritan more worried about his own reputation than hers, to my mind) demanded that MacWhorter reveal “his intentions” toward Delia. Mac panicked, I think, and started telling everyone Delia had misread their relationship. He showed her somewhat imprudent, effusive letters around town, mocking her shamefully.

Personal aside: I hate this guy. These days, everyone likes to think that the Internet has made people more cruel and less empathic. But long before Facebook, there were plenty of bullies and soulless, self-serving bastards in all walks of life. Alex MacWhorter was one of these.

Well, it eventually came down to a court case! Leonard Bacon tried to get MacWhorter kicked out of the clergy. Delia had to testify at a trial that went on for weeks and shamed her far beyond New England. People were talking about it all across the country.

I totally know how she must have felt.

Eventually this show trial was decided by a bunch of ministers who ruled…wait for it…for The Man! Delia lost her case—or rather Leonard lost his—and her reputation was in ruins. A vote against her effectively meant she had pursued this little twit and tried to seduce him into marrying her against his will.

After this she seemed to go off the deep end. She took the Shakespeare controversy personally, and seemed to think that Will Shakespeare had actually sinned against her. If she had misinterpreted MacWhorter, she was determined to prove she hadn’t made the same mistake here. She called Shakespeare a “booby,” “the Stratford poacher,” and a “stupid, illiterate, third-rate play-actor.” It was “too gross to be endured” that a man like this could have written all those beautiful, philosophical works. She effectively put Shakespeare on trial; as she herself had been subjected to questions she could not satisfactorily answer, so too was the long-dead playwright.

She grew paranoid, convinced that others were trying to steal her ideas. She went to England and behaved badly. Eventually she was brought back to America, where she ended her life in an insane asylum. We’re talking shackles and straitjackets, people—this was the nineteenth century.

In many was, Delia Bacon was the madwoman who refused to stay in the attic. Once a brilliant teacher and literary scholar, she became a laughingstock—and a living example of the old misogynist assumption that too much thinking and not enough childbearing will drive the weaker sex around the bend.

Next: Further Baconian excesses, and some ways that Mark Twain was like Elvis.

An Inconvenient Woman, Part 1

2011-12-17T13:02:00.003-05:00

Yes, the Bard Blog is back! For how long, I can't be sure...but suffice it to say I am determined to finish posting my authorship series, written all those months ago, and yes--I dare hope--complete Othello as well. Christmas vacation is nearly here, and with it comes lots of leisure time. Sufficient, perhaps, to realize these modest but hitherto unreachable goals. We shall see. Anyway, back to where I left off--Delia Bacon and her seminal role in the (modern) authorship controversy.

Delia Bacon wasn’t the first person to raise the question of Shakespearean authorship, but she was the first to propose an alternative candidate based on qualities which the “true” Bard must have had. Essentially, she conjured up a pair of empty shoes, then went hunting around for someone to fill them. Her Shakespeare had to be a nobleman, a moralist, a contemplative sort who wasn’t sullied by the taint of the theater. Someone, in short, more like herself and less like the “Stratford Man,” who, the evidence suggested, wrote to make money.

Delia had been raised by American Puritans—the same sect, you may remember, to which many of the Pilgrims (I like the grade-school term “pilgrims,” so I’m keeping it) belonged. Puritans hated spectacles, hated celebrations, and really, really hated the theater. In England, Puritans took ideological aim at the stage, and succeeded in closing the theaters in 1642. Puritans weren’t the only folks who were suspicious of the theater and its excesses—anti-theatrical literature existed in ancient Greece, too, as in most societies that produced amazing drama. Transhistorically and cross-culturally, all these responses have been characterized by a few basic assumptions:

--That the theater led to a morally dangerous mixing up of classes and genders—i.e., that it violated boundaries thought to be vital to social order

--That theatrical spectacles encouraged lascivious behavior by igniting sexual urges

--That the theater, like all fictions, was A Lie, and thus Against Truth, be it philosophical or religious

It seems to me that the authorship controversy is still haunted by this anti-fictional prejudice, despite the fact that the anti-Stratfordians must necessarily rely exclusively on the plays for proof of their claims. But it makes sense, really, since they want to see the plays as historical evidence, not (merely) literary fiction. The tension between fiction and history, or literature and fact, underwrites the whole controversy. Which is why many of the advocates of Bacon and de Vere often couch their arguments in terms that disparage literary criticism and literariness altogether.

There is, in other words, still a strong Puritanical strain in all these arguments, a prejudice against literature, and (especially) against the foundation of literariness, i.e., metaphor. If language is excessive in relation to truth—if it’s generated by imagination, and not fact, then the whole authorship question is finally unanswerable.

But back to Delia Bacon.

She decided that the most logical candidate was a man who was revered in the nineteenth century as a thinker, a scientist, and a rhetorician. A man who had never written one syllable of dramatic or poetic literature: Francis Bacon. Most people think that the shared surname is coincidental. Delia and Francis bore no familial relationship, it’s true. But like most of the Shakespeare Doubters who followed her, Delia was looking for someone who reflected her own values and her own ideas about art and its purpose. So the fact that her candidate shared her last name was, perhaps, unconsciously significant to her.

What the hell. I’m going to throw caution to the winds and Go Freudian here. It may have been that she was really looking for an Intellectual Daddy, someone who would return her admiration and see her as his true Heir.

If you think about Delia’s position as a female intellectual in the early to mid-nineteenth century, it’s easy to see how this whole question came to mean so much to her. It was about valorization, about a settling of accounts. Delia Bacon was a woman respected by Emerson and revered by Hawthorne, a woman who competed with Edgar Allan Poe for a literary prize and won. In taking up the cause of that other Bacon--a serene, deeply learned man who (so she thought) had been denied the credit he was due as the true author of Shakespeare’s deathless works--Delia was fighting her own battles as well.

Like most brilliant women of the day, she must have felt completely stifled by the limited opportunities available to her sex, and twisted with jealousy as she watched her brother Leonard, who hadn’t half her abilities, go on to Yale. Delia’s formal education ended when she was fourteen. Fourteen. Imagine how she must have felt—hungry for intellectual dialogue, her mind just beginning to come alive, forced to become a teacher of little girls to help support her family.

Yeah, I identify with her. Is it obvious? I’ve got plenty of formal education (too much to be useful to anyone, I now realize), but it could certainly be said –and, um, was said—that my thoughts and ideas, like Delia’s, proved too weird for the mainstream.

Although in my case, the mainstream consisted of academic medievalists, who are about as intellectually adventurous as lapdogs. But never mind. This is Delia’s story.

In 1855, she published an essay whose modest title belies the decades of thought and imaginative energy that she expended in her quest for the “real” Shakespeare. The essay was entitled “William Shakespeare and His Plays: An Enquiry Concerning Them.” It’s important to remember that she was writing at a time when many literary/historical assumptions were being called into question, if not overturned outright. The so-called Higher Criticism had brought historical inquiry to the study of Scripture and Homer. Higher Critics were true historicists—they used rigorous philological methods to determine, as closely as possible, the historical and authorial origins of works that had previously been seen as the product of individual genius or divine inspiration.

Delia was not a philologist—here, her educational deficit came into play, I think—but she was influenced by the skeptical atmosphere of the day. She was also a brilliant, compelling speaker, by all accounts, and a charismatic personality. Had she been born a hundred and fifty years later, she would have been an intellectual--and perhaps political--force to be reckoned with.

It’s hard, as an intellectual woman, to read her story and not feel a sense of loss. Despite—and also because of—its sad, ignoble ending.

More than anything else, Delia wanted recognition and respect. She was passionate about her theory, which in some respects was ahead of its time. She was the first to propose that some of Shakespeare’s plays were written collaboratively, for example. Philological and historical studies now assume that this was very likely—collaboration was the norm among dramatists of Shakespeare’s day. In Delia’s scenario, Francis Bacon was one among several men who worked together on what was fundamentally a political and moralist project, rather than a theatrical endeavor. Delia saw Bacon as the ringleader of a reformist movement that planted the seeds of the social and political upheavals England experienced in the later seventeenth century.

It was wonderful speculative scholarship, really. But it was also very subversive. Delia paid a high price for her unconventional life and ideas, both personally and professionally. Ultimately, she lost her reason along with her reputation. She was, I think, a tragic figure in the true sense of the word.

Next: Delia cracks up.

Reports Fabulous and False

2011-08-27T19:01:00.004-04:00

Human beings have a long tradition of making stuff up. When these fabrications are straightforward about their fictional status, they’re called literature. When they pretend to be history or fact, they’re called forgeries or hoaxes. Among its other interesting aspects, the Shakespeare authorship controversy forces us to think about this whole problem of fictionality as it relates to history—which, as we all know, is full of fictions.

Since the late eighteenth century, people have been hell-bent on filling in the gaps in Shakespeare’s sketchy biography. This new interest in the Man from Stratford coincided with a new Romantic obsession with The Self. I’m not going to go into a whole mini-history of Romanticism here—instead, I’ll just be super-reductive, as is my wont.

The industrial revolution, which by the late 1700’s was in full swing in England (see William Blake’s poem “London” for early Romantic disgust at dehumanizing effects thereof) sent sensitive, poetic, and sometimes drug-addicted people running to the countryside, where they picked up their quill pens and scratched out self-indulgent lyric poems that metaphorically linked their own neuroses to the workings of Nature. Sort of like the 1960’s in the US, only with better lyrics and no music. Some of these poems were really good, and some were pretty overrated—but in a sense this was the beginning of the Modern, Narcissistic Self—an idea that would culminate in Freud’s theory of the psyche.

That’s probably not the version you heard in your college literature class, but it will do.
While these solipsistic types were beginning to write and think about The Inner Life, the Wonders of Nature, and the Beauty of Childhood, Shakespeare was slowly but inexorably undergoing a metamorphosis—from mere man to Literary God.

Having given a voice to their inner child, the Romantics now needed a literary Daddy, I guess.

Anyway, people flocked to Stratford to worship at the Bard’s shrine. The mulberry tree that once graced the front garden of his humble abode was cut down and made into relics—of dubious authenticity—not unlike pieces of the True Cross. The famous Shakespearean actor, David Garrick, put on a Shakespeare festival in Stratford that effectively turned the Bard into a brand. Although Garrick’s 1769 Jubilee was an abysmal failure as an event—it rained so much that most of the festivities had to be cancelled—it marked Shakespeare’s entry into mass culture. The Bard was a marketing sensation—think commemorative dinnerware, mulberry wood figurines, t-shirts…or the eighteenth-century equivalent, which was probably something like cravats. No longer the property of snooty intellectuals, he now belonged to The People.

So, what does all this have to do with the forgery problem? Well, since Shakespeare was now a brand, it became even more imperative that he have a Life That People Can Relate To. The masses wanted to know the Real Shakespeare. Shakespeare fetishism was rampant, and wealthy collectors began scouring attics and archives for any snippet, any offhand reference to the life of the Great Man.
Now if you think about the history of literary forgery, you can see that this situation practically begged for it. The famous forgeries of the (more recent) past reflect a similar paradigm—a person whose personal life was/is a mystery, a public hungry for details, a writer eager for fame and fortune. Remember the famous “Hitler Diaries?” How about Clifford Irving’s “Autobiography” of Howard Hughes? Irving’s hoax was particularly daring, since Hughes was still alive at the time.

The earliest Shakespeare forgery, however, had a more romantic origin. It was probably motivated by filial devotion. Samuel Ireland was a particularly keen collector, and in 1794 he was touring Stratford-upon-Avon with his adolescent son. He got a hot tip about some possible Shakespeare papers at a certain Clopton House, a few miles outside of town. Of course he rushed over, only to be told by the owner that he was a few weeks too late. “I wish you had arrived sooner,” the man said. “It isn’t a fortnight since I destroyed several baskets-full of letters and papers…there were many bundles with [Shakespeare’s] name wrote upon them…I made a roaring bonfire of them.”

It’s pretty clear that these locals, having been subjected to several decades of Shakespeare tourism, were messing with the poor guy. Anyway, Samuel Ireland was crushed. His son, William Henry, hated to see his dad so bitterly disappointed. A few months after the Stratford tour, young Ireland miraculously came upon a whole cache of stuff in the home of a mysterious country squire.

Or so he said.

Among these priceless finds were the following items:

--A mortgage deed, dated 1610, with Shakespeare’s signature on it
--Shakespeare’s “profession of faith” as a Protestant, which effectively put to rest disturbing suspicions that the Bard, like his parents, was in fact a Papist
--a personal letter to his wife, Anne
--a poorly-executed drawing of an actor, presumably Our Man
--some legal papers concerning publication of his works
--letters to and from the Earl of Southampton, to whom he had (really) dedicated two of his narrative poems

and best of all:

--a letter from Queen Bess herself, thanking him for his “pretty verses.”

All fakes.

But the world took notice, and soon Ireland turned up a long-lost MS of King Lear and, wonder of wonders, an entirely new play called Vortigern, based on the life of a fifth-century king of the Britons (why do I always hear Monty Python when I write those words?) who fell in love with a Saxon Princess. The Lear manuscript seemed to prove that actors and editors had seriously butchered Shakespeare’s text. Note the differences:

Our (real) Lear:

What is’t thou sayst? Her voice was ever soft,
And low, an excellent thing in woman.
I killed the slave that was a-hanging thee.

Ireland’s additions:

What is’t thou sayst? Her voice was ever soft
And low, sweet music o’er the rippling stream,
Quality rare and excellent in woman.
O yes, by Heavens, ‘twas I killed the slave
That did round thy soft neck the murderous
And damned cord entwine. Did I not, sirrah?

Well, this all caused a sensation. No one seemed to notice or care that the additions to Lear made it less of a tragedy and more of a melodrama. But they did care that Vortigern was a piece of crap, if you’ll pardon the vernacular. When the play was put on at Drury Lane in 1795, it was laughed off the stage. This debacle, and the pointed, detailed assessments of Edmond Malone, one of the first great Shakespeare “experts,” ended William Henry Ireland’s brush with fame. He soon retracted the whole thing, admitting that he had forged every single document.

This episode didn’t explicitly call Shakespeare’s authorship into question, but it did open the door to future conspiracy theories. Although Ireland was eventually found out, he proved that people—even scholars like James Boswell (famous for the incredibly tedious Life of Johnson) could be duped. Some forty years later, an eccentric American woman named Delia Bacon would begin her life’s work: trying to prove that the whole world had, indeed, been taken in by the Stratford Myth.

Next: Delia and Me.

The Stratford Man

2011-08-20T16:45:00.002-04:00

This is the second post from the authorship series I wrote for my previous blog, about a year or so ago. Still getting my thoughts together on Othello--more anon.

William Wayne Shakespeare was born in 1564 to a glover—a glove-maker—named John Shakespeare and his wife, Mary.
Okay, kidding about the “Wayne.” Middle names didn’t really catch on among the commercial classes until a couple hundred years later. Did you ever notice how many violent criminals have the middle name “Wayne,” though? It’s interesting.

But not relevant to this post, unless you consider Will Shakespeare to be a criminal. And having read some of the anti-Stratfordian stuff out there, I have to say that the accusation is often implied, if not stated outright. Because if Bacon, or de Vere, or Marlowe is the “real Shakespeare,” then this guy from Stratford is at least complicit in fraud. Even if the fraud was unintentional, he’s definitely guilty of the following crimes:

--not leaving enough biographical evidence for personality-obsessed future generations
--not being an aristocrat
--not going to college
--not visiting Italy, or at least being sneaky about it if he did
--hoarding malt in a time of malt shortage
--being a litigious moneylender, a la Shylock
--not mentioning BOOKS in his will
--retiring to his home town after his theatrical/playwrighting career, and not doing anything else interesting until he died
--being snarky to his wife Anne in his will; (he left her “his second-best bed."

None of these facts—and they are among the few actual facts left to us about William Shakespeare—are that earthshaking in and of themselves, but they add up to a big question mark. This is a problem because Shakespeare is not only a household name, he’s also the closest thing we have to a literary deity in the English tradition. Surely he must have been more than just the sum of these mundane parts. Surely the guy who wrote Othello, Hamlet, and Romeo and Juliet must have traveled widely. Surely he wouldn’t stoop to denying his neighbors the means to make beer. (What a buzzkill, literally). Surely he must have read every book in printed existence in order to learn so many words, with so many allusions. Surely he wouldn’t just leave the Big Town in his middle age and live the life of a country gentleman in some cultural backwater. Surely he wouldn’t just stop writing after he retired, either. That would mean that writing was just (shudder) a JOB to him! Not a divinely-inspired passion! And surely he wouldn’t have been a mean-spirited, litigious moneylender when he obviously hated people like that, as we can see from reading The Merchant of Venice. And most of all, surely he must have been intimately acquainted with Court Life, to have written so tellingly about its hypocrisies and dangers.

The facts just don’t give us a picture of the kind of guy we want Shakespeare to be. And the more important Shakespeare became to English—and later, American—national/cultural identity, the more people freaked out about the disconnect between our desiderata and these dissatisfying biographical hints.

So, it made (a kind of) sense to root around for an alternative candidate. Before I get to that—which I will in subsequent posts—I think it’s worth pointing out what any logician knows. You can’t prove a negative. You can’t prove that something isn’t—only that it is. That said, here’s how I would address, if not answer, some of these objections:

An Unwritten Life

The word “biography” didn’t even enter the language until several decades after Shakespeare (whoever he was) died. Early modern people just weren’t interested in the human psyche, the personal life, and the lurid details of celebrity culture, the way we are. They weren’t self-ish in a modern sense. Shakespeare, however acclaimed he was in his own time (and he was—more on that anon), probably thought his works would be his legacy. Why in the world would anyone care about his travel diary or his reading list?

Why indeed. Unlike our early modern forebears, we’re self-obsessed. I mean, just look at Facebook. Boring biographical minutiae as far as the eye can see and the finger can scroll. I can just imagine Shakespeare’s Status Updates:

Premiere of new play rocked! Check it out at Blackfriars! Tix available at the door or online!

Hamnet and Judith at Disney World! Are they cute or what?

Too much Rhenish wine at Kit Marlowe’s. Dude knows how to party!

Will Shakespeare likes Kick Spain’s Ass and Stratford Brown Ale

Enough said.

An Incomplete Education

Did you know that the average middle-class boy in the Renaissance got the equivalent of an undergraduate education today? Yep, it’s true. Elizabethan grammar schools taught Latin, History, Music, Mathematics and yes, Rhetoric. While my third-grader struggled through his first Harry Potter book, it’s daunting to realize that nine-year-old Will was probably reading Virgil, Ovid, and Plutarch. My kid whines about having to practice his cursive, but little Will probably could write a rudimentary sonnet before he hit the double digits.

People just didn’t have as much time to blow off back then. Childhood didn’t last till eighteen, and adolescence didn’t exist at all—much less until age 30, as it seems to today. No time to watch Phineas and Ferb, go to summer camps, and build Lego starcruisers. Nope, you had to get right down to the business of living and learning, before some disease or other fatal disaster cut you down in the full flower of your early modern youth.

If you read the plays carefully, you’ll see that the kind of knowledge they allude to is not unlike the sort of thing any curious person could find out through reading, conversation, religious sermons, and so on. I mean, how much law is there, really, in The Merchant of Venice? How much theology in Hamlet? I think the fact that it’s all in iambic pentameter makes people think it’s more erudite than it is.

The Missing Library

Interestingly, many Elizabethan/Jacobean writers left no books to anyone in their wills. Why? Because books were considered household items, and were usually bequeathed in an inventory of smaller possessions, rather than mentioned specifically in a will. Early anti-Stratfordians used the absence of books in his will suggest that Shakespeare was illiterate. For real. You know, I doubt Julia Child mentioned measuring cups in her will. But that doesn't mean her cookbooks were written by someone else.

Conduct Unbefitting a Literary Icon

Shakespeare made a fair amount of money as a playwright. He was, after all, quite good at it. There’s evidence that he made loans with some of this filthy lucre, and sued for damages when payment was not forthcoming. Twice! This could not possibly be the same Shakespeare who called Shylock a “damned, inexorable dog” whose “currish spirit/Governed a wolf…hanged for human slaughter.” At least that’s one of the arguments Will’s detractors have used.

Do we need any more evidence that these nay-sayers don’t know how to read the plays? Shakespeare had sympathy for Shylock, even as he condemned him. I just wrote, like, twenty-seven posts on this, so I’m not going to belabor the point.

And besides, we know only too well how the private lives of our heroes can disappoint us, don’t we? That’s why it’s better not to, as Hamlet put it, “think too precisely on the event.” I mean, Hamlet was pretty good at seeing what he wanted to see about his dad, wasn’t he? For all we know, old King Hamlet was mean to his wife and absolutely no fun to be around. The “bloat king” Claudius was clearly more of a party animal….

But I digress.

So, about that bed. Who knows what that was about? Maybe it was a joke between Will and Anne. Like, they did their best naughty stuff on the second-best bed, so they wouldn’t wreck the guest mattress. Or maybe he didn’t like her much, as some have assumed. Many of his detractors have suggested that because Anne was eight years older than her husband, and pregnant when they married, she was both unattractive and unwanted.

Speaking as someone who is nine and a half years older than her spouse, I can tell you right now that I don’t buy this idea, which was doubtless disseminated by creepy old men who want to hook up with twenty-somethings. And, while I will resist drawing parallels between Shakespeare’s life and his works in the remainder of these “authorship” posts, I’ll make an exception here, for personal reasons (far be it from me to eschew hypocrisy when I’m personally invested in something). Venus and Adonis is a very romantic and—if Elizabethan narrative poetry gets you off—pretty hot poem about an older woman and a younger man. Maybe he wrote it about Anne!

We’ll never know. It may be fun to speculate, but it’s kind of sad to make a career out of trying to prove something impossible. Nevertheless, a lot of people did—and continue to do—just that. I’ll be writing about them in the next few posts.

Next: When in doubt, make stuff up! Padding Shakespeare’s vita.

The Eternal Return

2011-08-18T12:46:00.000-04:00

Well, loyal readers--and you must be awfully loyal if you're still reading after almost four months of blog dormancy--the Bard Blogger has returned, to try and make another stab at Othello. I have had, as I said, nearly four months to contemplate why this play is giving me such a hard time. And of course the answer is stunningly simple. It's a major downer. Every other major tragedy has a kind of uplifting resonance, even after the heavy body count. Transcendence. That's what tragedy is supposed to offer. A sense of community born of common suffering, common humanity, and finally common decency. Great tragedies are ennobling, and wrenching without being sentimental. They show us at our best and worst--but we're left with the sense that the best will triumph in the end. In Lear, even nasty guys like Edmund are capable of one good act: "some good I mean to do," he tells Albany, "despite of mine own nature." Laertes forgives Hamlet, Hamlet forgives his mother, and even Claudius shows some remorse. Kingdoms are restored to order--Macbeth is out, Malcolm is in. Cleopatra and Antony are dead, but even Octavius realizes that they are bigger, more heroic characters than he will ever be. None of that happens in Othello--perhaps because this is a tragedy of individual psyches, not of nations. A modern tragedy, with no transcendent bonus at the end. Iago, unrepentant, is consigned to torture. Othello, a stranger to himself, dies because he trusted his bro more than his wife. Desdemona, demonized, murdered, and disturbingly complicit in her own victimization. A tale for our times, not Will's. Or so it seems.

But here I am, anyway. I want to try and make sense of it, I guess. And conquer my own noonday devils, too...my primary recreations the last few months have been rather lacking in intellectual challenge. Mostly I've been reading and playing a cool online game with my son. Here's my wizard avatar. (Except for the purple eyes, pubescent physique and giant frog pet, she's a dead ringer for yours truly!) I've never played any video games before, so this is a new thing. In fact, I only started because my kid had a bad experience with some other unfriendly wizards, and needed some comforting. I never thought I'd really get into it. But the allure of these games is not unlike the allure of the theater and theatricality in general. We get to imagine other worlds, other selves. In the game, we can conquer monsters and rule little duchies of our own. The game world is devoid of tragedies--and if people annoy us, we simply erase them from our so-called "friend list." Simple. Too simple, really. So while I still enjoy my wizardy fantasy, I really need to sink my teeth into something more challenging. Ergo, Othello redux. Once more into the breach.

It may take me a few days to work my way back into the play, however. In the interim, I will post some of my old authorship posts, continuing the series I aborted awhile back. So there will be some old/new stuff up here, while this Bard-blogging wizard tries to recapture some of the old magic.

Wherefore This Blog? (Shakespeare Birthday Edition)

2011-04-23T15:03:00.000-04:00

A few days ago, I was contacted by someone from the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. A lovely surprise! A very nice woman from the Trust asked if I could contribute a post to the Shakespeare Birthday blog-a-thon they're putting together over there in Stratford-upon-Avon, where, pace Oxfordians, the Bard took his first and last breaths, on or close to the very same day--April 23.

This post will be one of fifty or so written by bloggers and Twitterers (tweeters?) all over the world. It's a totally cool idea! If you want to see, hear, and read what other bloggers are thinking about on this Happy Shakespeare Day, check out the project site. There are lots of blogs and Twitter feeds out there I never knew about, so I'm pretty excited to have found them. And really proud to be part of the festivities. I have a strong suspicion whence came the call, since this blog isn't really on the international radar. So thanks, Jonathan, for thinking of me.

When I started this blog in August of 2009, I began by trying to explain why I was embarking on such a weird, time-devouring, and yes, anachronistic project. Why should anyone who isn't a tenured or soon-to-be-tenured Professional Shakespearean want to devote so many man- or woman-hours to reading and commenting on the plays, scene by scene? We live in an era where brevity, in addition to being the soul of wit, is the only sure way to make an impression. Attention spans are shrinking faster than the polar ice shelf, and no one (a well-meaning friend warned me) is going to want to read about Shakespeare's plays in detail, unless they have to for some class paper or exam. Indeed, the list of bloggers on the SBT site are mostly Twitter links. I don't tweet, myself, because I'm basically a long-winded sort who needs time and space to think things through. Besides, whenever I look at anyone's Twitter feed, I invariably feel like I'm listening in on a party I haven't been invited to. Everything looks like a non sequitur. And all those #'s and @'s are off-putting.

But Will, I think, would have loved Twitter. He'd have no trouble with the 140-character limit. In fact, he'd probably take it as a challenge, and make all kinds of clever puns about hash, hashtags, feeds, feeding, etc.

But back to me. I'm not good at writing about myself. I hate confessional writing of any kind. That's why I write about literature. Writing about Shakespeare lets me explore the Big Questions without getting mired in my own contradictions. But I will say this much: this blog has helped me through some rough patches, both large and small. I mean, we've all endured

...the whips and scorns of time
Th'oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The pangs of disprized love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of th'unworthy takes.

Advice columns are full of this kind of thing. My boss is a bastard. I'm getting old and unattractive, and I fear I'll never be loved. My boyfriend dumped me. A patently inferior candidate got the position I wanted. These mundane agonies lead to lawsuits, prayers, and Dark Nights of the Soul, and they're cumulative, too. After years of feeling angry about this kind of stuff, some people go off the deep end. Life isn't fair. The world can be vicious, or just indifferent. Justice is seldom, if ever, accessible to those who have been wronged. People in authority are pompous, callous asses much of the time. And let's face it, the web is Contumely Central. But reading or hearing Hamlet say those beautiful lines helps. Because beauty happens in spite of injustice, cruelty, and loneliness. Yes, it does. And there's nothing those insolent contumelious jerks can do to stop it. Is that enough to make up for all the wrong stuff? Of course not. But it's a good analgesic, for sure.

Now I have friends--actually most of my current friends--who find Shakespeare difficult and not worth the time. This is too bad, but I understand. The language is hard. Who says--or understands--words like "contumely," anyway? But, at the risk of sounding old-school humanist (which is what I am, but never mind), we need Shakespeare. Because basically, he's an optimist. Without being a sentimentalist. Hamlet wonders if life's an unweeded garden, and for a time, he believes it is. But in the end, he's at peace. He feels connected. He's not a misanthrope anymore. Lear's an old fool, a selfish aristocrat who can't see beyond his own vanity. But at the end, he cares about humanity. He sees the looped and windowed raggedness he'd ignored for most of his life, and knows he's no better, and no worse, than the rest of humanity. And knowing this, feeling it at the gut level, makes him (paradoxically) better. More human in the best sense.

Will's not naive, though. This kind of transcendence doesn't happen in every play. The Merchant of Venice ends on a sour note. As does Othello, the play I'm blogging now. Sometimes the badness does swallow up everything good. Sometimes, as in The Merchant, people never escape their smug cocoon, and realize how badly they've messed up. They go on congratulating themselves on their goodness and moral rectitude--and they can, because they've constructed a whole moral system that hides the truth behind some very attractive illusions. But in revealing hypocrisy, making us see the illusion for what it is, Will makes a leap of faith about humanity. He bargains that we'll get it, and learn from it. And that's a kind of optimism, too.

Will has had some bad ideas, as well. They're beautifully-written bad ideas, but bad nonetheless. Romeo and Juliet is, to my mind, a beautiful Bad Idea Play. I wrote a whole post about that, so I won't belabor it here. In all fairness, there were a lot of historical forces behind this bad idea--a desire to shake off the musty notions of the past, to embrace and valorize the Private Life, and so on. But it's still a dangerous play promoting dangerous ideas to Today's Youth.

Ah, my age is showing again.

This blog, I guess, is my own leap of faith. An extended exercise in optimism. I think there's still a place for Shakespeare in our culture. We still ask the same questions, we're still wounded by the same doubts, we're still mad about the same injustices. And the language--it's difficult, sure. I know that, and that's why I do some translating here. Once you understand the words, you can hear the poetry.

The ancient Anglo-Saxon word for "vocabulary" was "word-hoard." I like that, because a hoard can also be a treasure-trove. But Shakespeare's English isn't just a collection of forgotten words--it's a distant music that calls us out of our solipsistic reverie, reminding us that we are speaking creatures, and that language is more than just a tool for making demands. It's an opening to beauty, to empathy, to history, and yes, to possibility. Shakespeare isn't just a voice from the past, to me. His plays give me a sense of continuity, a moral foundation, and a fabulous soundtrack to the little dramas that make up my life.

That's why I'll keep reading and writing about them. Happy Shakespeare Birthday, everyone.

Witchcraft and Warcraft

2011-04-22T00:25:00.006-04:00

I put a spell on you, because you're mine
You better stop the things that you're doin'
I said "watch out, I ain't lyin..."
I ain't gonna take none of your foolin' around
Ain't gonna take none of your puttin' me down...
I put a spell on you, because you're mine.

Well, that's Othello in a nutshell. Okay, just kidding. But that's the soundtrack to today's post. If you want to hear the cheesy 1960's version I grew up with--i.e., the Creedence Clearwater Revival one--you can laugh at a goofy Jurassic-era video here. I love the spinning heads, and the bowl-cut hairdos. Believe it or not, this was the essence of cool back when I was a tween.

Witchcraft, love spells, infatuation. We still think in these terms, don't we? Although it's usually gender-specific. Women put spells on men, rendering them stupid and malleable. Whipped, as my brothers used to say. It's a ancient idea--remember that the witch Circe turned Odysseus' men into pigs, just because she could. Women bewitch men sexually, strip them of their rational armor, and leave them grunting in the mud. Long before the invention of literature, women's witchery--sexual allure--was seen as a threat to civilization itself.

If you make the idea more gender-neutral, i.e., if you concede that women can be as bewitched by sexual desire as men, it makes some sense. How else to explain the fact that so many brilliant, gifted, and hyper-rational people have been known to behave like lunatics when in the throes of infatuation? Infatuation makes us fatuous. Seduction leads us away from the truth, into the land of fantasy. Etymologically, "love" derives from the same root as "belief." Love is an act of faith, a turn away from reason, a leap into the emotional abyss that Freud called the Unconscious. No wonder people thought of it as a kind of enchantment.

Will invokes this idea a lot. In Antony and Cleopatra, Antony and Pompey both refer to Cleo as a seductive "witch." In Much Ado About Nothing, a comedy that's thematically analogous to Othello (in that both deal with irrational jealousy fueled by the poisonous rumors of a malevolent misanthrope), Claudio contends that

...beauty is a witch
Against whose charms faith melteth into blood.

I like that quotation, because it perfectly captures both the magic of sexual attraction and the violence of jealousy. Faith melteth into blood, indeed. A lot of what we call "domestic violence" can be understood in just that way.

In Othello, Brabantio turns the tables, accusing Othello of bewitching his daughter into marriage. As the exotic outsider, Othello takes on the feminine role. He's mysterious, alluring, dangerous. And to a European audience, ugly by virtue of his color. Lacking beauty, he must have used necromancy. Desdemona's way out of his league, so how else could he have won her? Brabantio isn't subtle here--he's sure that Othello must have used some dark arts to make Desdemona overlook his dark skin:

O thou foul thief, where has 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 curled darlings of our nation,
Would ever have, t'incur the general mock,
Run from her guardage to the sooty bosom
Of such a thing as thou--to fear, not to delight.
Judge me the world if 'tis not gross in sense
That thou hast practised on her with foul charms,
Abused her delicate youth with drugs or minerals
That weakens motion. I'll have't disputed on.
'Tis probable, and palpable to thinking.
I therefore apprehend and do attach thee
For an abuser of the world, a practiser
Of arts inhibited and out of warrant.

What did you do with my daughter? Because logically, she has absolutely no reason to want you. You're freakish, and so ugly that people would mock her for choosing you. She's not even interested in marriage--she rejected all the "wealthy curled darlings of our nation," after all.

I love "wealthy curled darlings." It conjures up (so to speak) images of obnoxious prep-school date-rapists in the William Kennedy Smith mold. Like Roderigo. I can definitely see him as captain of some lacrosse team on the East Coast. Date rape isn't a bad analogy here--Brabantio asserts that Othello may have "abused" Des with "drugs or minerals/That weakens motion." Slipped her some roofies, as they say these days. So he's either enchanted her, or he's drugged her. Because that's the only way a good girl of good family could possibly fall for a sooty-bosomed thing like him.

And how does our hero answer these wild accusations? Like a civilized man of reason. Othello's aware that he's too valuable to the Venetian state to be thrown in prison by an irate dad. Public achievement trumps private shenanigans every time--or at least when municipal security is at issue. Othello's services to the state shall, in his own words, "out-tongue" Brabantio's complaints. The Turks are threatening to invade Cyprus, and Venice--as well as Venetian trade--is in peril. Othello, a gifted general, is too valuable to imprison. Brabantio, for his part, is sure that the Duke will be on his side, because

...if such actions may have passage free,
Bondslaves and pagans shall our statesmen be.

If a sooty-bosomed foreigner can steal the daughters of good Venetian aristocrats, then all social hierarchies will surely topple, and mere anarchy will be loosed upon the world. So we have two threats--a military threat, from the outside, and a social threat, from the inside. Venice may fall to the Turks, or to the lower classes. Brabantio is pretty clear about which threat he takes more seriously.

In the midst of this squabble, the Duke and his cabinet--or whatever they called it--arrive in a flurry of anxiety over the impending Turkish invasion. The private world recedes before the threat of war. It's a bit disconcerting, this interruption--but not unlike the structure of Antony and Cleopatra, where the drama shifts continually between the public world of Rome and the erotic, dreamy realm of Egypt. Will plays with a similar opposition here--Venice is the rational, ordered world of public men, while Cyprus will prove to be a far more subversive place, where unconscious fears and desires overwhelm reason and law.

But that's for later. Now, Othello has to answer the charge of kidnapping and witchcraft. Brabantio states his case before the Duke, claiming that his daughter's been enchanted and/or drugged by the Moor:

She is abused, stol'n from me, and corrupted
By spells and medicines bought of mountebanks,
For nature so preposterously to err,
Being not deficient, blind, or lame of sense,
Sans witchcraft could not.

"For nature so preposterously to err..." What does it mean? It means that Desdemona has veered off course, emotionally and, by implication, morally. Maybe even metaphysically--that would be a racist's take on it, for sure. Will uses "err" here (and elsewhere) in the sense of "knight errant," but also in the sense we understand it now--making a mistake. To err was to wander morally, to take the sinister left-hand path. Desdemona has wandered away from her own nature. Since she's not intellectually disabled or mad, she must be bewitched.

So how is this standoff resolved? The way everything unfolds in this play--through storytelling. Othello, though he claims to be a rough, crude man of war, nonetheless promises to tell a story that will answer the charge of sorcery:

...Rude am I in my speech,
And little blessed with the soft phrase of peace,
For since these arms of mine had seven years' pith
Till now some nine moons wasted, they have used
Their dearest action in the tented field,
And little of this great world can I speak
More than pertains to feats and broils of battle.

From the age of seven until nine months ago, I've been a soldier. So I don't know how to talk to fancy, peacetime folks like yourselves. I totally hear an echo of Henry V here, when King Harry is wooing Catherine, and says all that stuff about being a plain soldier who can't talk pretty to ladies. Which is an act, of course. Harry's an actor, and everything he does is contrived.

But Othello isn't. He really is a man's man, a soldier first and a lover second. He doesn't know much about women, or courtship, or any of it. He continues,

Yet, by your gracious patience,
I will a round unvarnished tale deliver
Of my whole course of love, what drugs, what charms,
What conjuration and what mighty magic--
For such proceeding I am charged withal--
I won his daughter.

A round unvarnished tale. That's the witchcraft, of course. Othello wins Desdemona by telling her stories about his adventures. Travel narratives, really. It's a long speech, this unvarnished tale about tale-telling, so I'll save it for next time.

Or rather the time after next. Next time--this Saturday, to be exact, I'll be blogging with about fifty other bloggers in honor of Shakespeare's birthday. Alleged birthday. It's a blog-a-thon sponsored by the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. I'll have a link to the "birthday site," so you can (I think) read what other people are writing, too. It should be fun.

Treason of the Blood, Part 2

2011-04-11T23:00:00.008-04:00

I haven't posted in almost a month, I know. I think the whole weird authorship thing--and some nastiness that hovered around it--sort of derailed me for awhile. Which is why I didn't post any of my remaining authorship stuff. I was the recipient of some mean-spirited, overly-personal diatribes, one of which was delivered by my Oxfordian old friend. Former friend, I guess. So that bummed me out, and I just decided to let the blog go a for a bit. And to (probably) let the authorship posts go forever. Or maybe just for a long while. There seems to be no room for respectful debate among a certain segment of the authorship folks. And frankly, I'm just not all that interested in the subject. I only wrote about it to satisfy my own curiosity, really.

Anyway, back to Othello.

When we last saw Brabantio, Desdemona's dad, he was standing outside in his nightgown, having been awakened by those two gossipy frat boys, Iago and Roderigo. Iago has taken off, the better to maintain his "honest" facade. Brabantio is left to lament his daughter's perfidy with her creepy ex-suitor, Roderigo. Although he rejected Roderigo's suit previously, the white guy now looks pretty good. Because not only has Desdemona run off, she's run off with the Moor.

Now Will's plays are chock-full of disobedient daughters. Desdemona, Hermia, Juliet, Cordelia, Jessica, Rosalind--all face the choice between father and lover, and all turn their backs on Daddy. It's also worth noting that Ophelia, who made the opposite choice, ended up sleeping with the fishes. Okay, floating in a brook...but the point is that Will's a good Protestant. He believes in marriage, believes that a woman's duty to her husband supersedes the loyalty she owes her father. Cordelia captures this idea in a nutshell, just before Lear disowns her:

Good my lord,
You have begot me, bred me, loved me; I
Return those duties back as are right fit,
Obey you, love you, and most honor you.
Why have my sisters husbands, if they say
They love you all? Haply, when I shall wed,
That lord whose hand must take my plight shall carry
Half my love with him, half my care and duty.
Sure, I shall never marry like my sisters,
To love my father all.

The wicked sisters, of course, don't love their father at all. Much less "all." But their pretense is yet another example of how wrong things are in Lear's kingdom, because the very idea of choosing the father over the husband was unnatural to Renaissance Christians. The moral center of Protestant society was the family. At the root of family, the chaste marriage. "Chaste" meaning faithful, not sexless.

Although I can't help remembering this scene from Monty Python's The Meaning of Life. Right after that great "Every Sperm is Sacred" song...

Sorry, silly digression. Anyway, when Brabantio accuses his daughter of betraying her "blood," he's not just talking about race. He's talking about the allegiance he feels a daughter owes to her father, above all others.

...O, treason of the blood!
Fathers, from hence trust not your daughters' minds
By what you see them act.

Fathers, don't trust your daughter's outward behavior, because she likely harbors perverted thoughts and desires underneath all those obedient smiles and nods. This notion of the "false front" is a leitmotif in the play, of course. Don't trust what you see on the surface, because the truth is somewhere else. Black can be white, and white can be black. Fair is foul, and foul is fair...oh, wait, that's Macbeth.

It's a concern of the theater, of course--false fronts, duplicity, masquerades. Because that's what the theater is all about. Pretense. But underneath the makeup, costumes, and crafted speeches, we're vouchsafed (love that word!) a glimpse of the truth, as well. The theater is fundamentally neo-platonic, isn't it? What you see isn't precisely what you get, but if you look below the surface, beneath the mask, you can see what's real, and true, and timeless. But of course there's a lot of anxiety about this, too--especially in Will's plays. That's why you have men playing women playing men in the comedies, for example. Because the "truth" is a slippery business. And masks are seductive.

A topic I'll deal with more when I blog another comedy. Which will probably be after Othello. If, you know, I ever finish this play.

So, when Brabantio finds out about his daughter's love for another man, he calls it betrayal. She chose her own desire over that of her dad. Bad girl. Her desires belong to him--for her to own them, and act on them, is the worst kind of disloyalty. Father knows best. And of course, being a good Protestant didn't mean being a feminist, or even a social liberal. Daughters were supposed to cleave unto their husbands, but Daddy was supposed to pick the guy out and hand her over. That's why we still have that weird "who gives this woman in marriage" thing in the wedding ceremony. Nowadays it seems quaint and old-fashioned, but for a long time, it was serious. The father literally did "give" his daughter--she was his property, and he disposed of her as he saw fit. As Old Capulet tells Juliet, "An you be mine, I'll give you to my friend." I own you, so I'll give you to whomever I please.

Now Will consistently shows us that this kind attitude leads to tragedy. Or, in plays like A Midsummer Night's Dream, improbable comedy. The point is, he's not ambivalent on the subject. Daughters should be allowed to marry for love, not duty. Individual desire trumps outmoded social custom. Needless to say, theater isn't life, however. For several centuries, aristocratic dads doubtless enjoyed a night of Shakespearean theater, then went home and married their daughters off to the richest, oldest creep they could find, her wishes be damned. Will was pretty far ahead of his time on this issue.

Apropos of fathers and daughters, I recently came across this story about the so called "Christian Daughters Movement," which is an offshoot of--what else?--the so-called Christian Patriarchy Movement. Personally, I find the term "Christian Patriarchy" a tad redundant, but never mind. The groups promoting these ideas claim biblical authority--you know, because women in the Bible didn't go to college or marry whomever they wanted, today's religious women shouldn't, either. They should stay at home with Daddy until he says it's okay to get married. To the guy he picks out for them. Just like Juliet's dad, and Hermia's, and Desdemona's. Yep, the Christian Daughters Movement is fertile ground for Shakespearean tragedy. Not to mention creepy abuses of the non-literary sort. I find it interesting that this "return" is romanticized as a "movement." If you read the subtitle of this "manifesto," you'll see that it claims to offer "a vision of victory for single women of the 21st century." Victory over selfhood, I guess. And responsibility. And maturity. All of which goes to show that in some weird pockets of our postmodern, tech-saturated culture, the Old Ideas still live on. Or fester, depending on your perspective.

Next time, Love Spells! Sort of...

Treason of the Blood, Part 1

2011-03-13T19:09:00.119-04:00

Miscegenation. A fancy latinate word for something that our forebears usually thought about in cruder terms: the sexual and/or conjugal mixing of races. It signified the violation of a taboo, the transgression of boundaries. A sin against nature. Mixed-race liaisons in literature have pretty much always ended badly, with one or both parties paying the ultimate price for their transgression. Often in Othello-ish terms, whereby a white woman is murdered by her black lover. William Faulkner's Light in August and Richard Wright's Native Son are two modern works that owe their moral structure to Othello. In both, a demonized black or "racially impure" man kills a white woman in her bed. Both murdered women are "free-thinkers" who are trying to escape from the strictures of class and gender. Both men are socially marginal, oppressed by history, and burdened with the question of race. That's why they all have to die.

Happily, history seems to have overtaken literature on the subject of race-mixing. There are lots of interracial couples now. I can think of four, just among the parents in my son's fourth-grade class. It's no big deal, at least in my part of the world.

But for much of history, interracial marriage was a very big deal. It could get you killed, or at least exiled from your community. It wasn't just distasteful--it smacked of treason, at least from the dominant white perspective. While it was considered acceptable for a powerful white man to have a black mistress (think Jefferson), a white woman who consorted with men of other races was worse than a whore. She was a traitor to her own kind. These liaisons were considered monstrous--in the iconography, the man was often portrayed as almost simian. So the mixing of races became, by implication, a mixing of species as well.

The fact that Shakespeare, our most deified and mythologized dramatist/poet, wrote a play about miscegenation has perplexed, disturbed, and intrigued readers for four centuries. People from all walks of life have weighed in on this most famous literary mesalliance. Check out this quote from well-known Romantic poet and drug addict, Samuel Taylor Coleridge:

...it would be something monstrous to conceive of this beautiful Venetian girl falling in love with a veritable negro. It would argue a disproportionateness, a want of balance, in Desdemona, which Shakespeare does not appear to have in the least contemplated.

Now here's a perfect example of the kind of thing I was talking about in one of my authorship posts. Namely, why I don't want to know anything about the personal lives and political opinions of the authors I admire. I love Coleridge's poems. Love the stately pleasure dome, and the undead romance between Christabel and Geraldine. Love the albatross and the creepy Mariner. Not so enamored of this racist quote--although it is interesting in other ways. Let's have a look.

First, the phrase "veritable negro." As opposed to what, a putative negro? Coleridge implies that Othello's race must be at least ambiguous--otherwise Desdemona is guilty of "disproportionateness." Now there's a word. A neologism, I suspect--why not simply "disproportion?" The "ness," of course, works as an intensifier. Having fallen in love with an unambiguously African man, she must be really disproportionate. Exceedingly, excessively out of balance. Nowadays, we understand "unbalanced" in psychological terms. "After the death of his wife (dog, mother, career) Mr. Smith became unbalanced." He started acting crazy. I think Coleridge understands it differently. He's talking about an aesthetic problem here--Desdemona, despite her beauty, doesn't understand symmetry. Her aesthetic sensibilities are flawed. She doesn't see the balance in nature. She's got a Cubist's perspective on the world.

Coleridge, of course, was a Romantic in the most pathological sense of the term. He liked his women pale and frail, wasting away in some florid Lake Country bower. Not outspoken and rebellious. And definitely not in charge of their own sexual desire. Disproportionateness, indeed. One has to wonder, however, if Coleridge was aware of the irony of his word choice. Because he clearly echoes Iago, who, in Act 3, says similar things about Othello's wife and her odd predilections:

Not to affect many proposed matches
Of her own clime, complexion, and degree,
Whereto we see in all things nature tends--
Foh, one may smell in a such a will most rank,
Foul disproportions, thoughts unnatural!

Iago here plays on Othello's self-hatred, his bone-deep certainty that a woman like Desdemona couldn't possibly love a man of his color and condition, unless there was something really wrong with her. What's that corny old expression? I wouldn't join a club that would have me as a member? Othello secretly feels inferior to his wife, and finds it easy to believe that her affection stems from something pathological. Some excessive, extravagant, and corrupt aspect of her own nature. An unnatural, foul disproportionateness. Notice Iago's crude reference to smell--Desdemona's desires are not only perverted, they're malodorous, too. Iago's comment, insulting as it is, doesn't make Othello angry, because it's what he suspects himself. No one of Desdemona's complexion and degree--skin color and rank--could ever love a guy like him. She must be unbalanced.

Bestial Imaginings

In the last Othello post, we left Iago and Roderigo crouching in the bushes in the dead of night, hoping to scare Brabantio into annulling Othello's marriage. Brabantio, awakened from a sound sleep, comes to the window. "What is the reason of this terrible summons?" he asks. Of course this reminds us of Hamlet--after King Hamlet's ghost does its disappearing act, Horatio remarks that "it started like a guilty thing upon a fearful summons." The fearful summons being, presumably, marching orders from Hell. Brabantio responds to his own summons fearfully--he knows that whatever has awakened him, it's likely nothing good. Sure enough, Iago hisses out the hellish news:

Even now, now, very now, an old black ram
Is tupping your white ewe. Arise, arise!
Awake the snorting citizens with the bell,
Or else the devil will make a grandsire of you.
Arise, I say.

I've always found it jarring that Iago frames this obscene accusation in quasi-biblical language. "Arise, arise!" reminds me of Paul's letter to the Ephesians: "Awake, O sleeper, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give you light," or this one from Isaiah: "Arise, shine, for your light has come...." And even Deborah's song from Judges: "Awake, awake, Deborah...Arise Barak, and lead away your captives...."

Yep, I've got the whole Bible memorized, cover to cover.

Just kidding. But this little speech really is a wolf in sheep's clothing, isn't it? We have this sublime biblical echo, with its prophecies, promises, and divine commands, as well as the disturbing picture of copulating sheep and demonic offspring. Dark doings wrapped in the language of light. Iago claims to be "enlightening" Barbantio, but really he's just making the truth--Desdemona and Othello are married--seem darker and dirtier than it is.

To Iago, everyone's a beast, a smelly, fearful creature driven by foul appetites. Although he often speaks in racist terms, I don't think he's a racist himself. He hates everyone, pretty much equally. He uses racist images and language to his advantage, because that's what gets a rise out of people. Really he doesn't care about race--he's a universalizing nihilist, a moral anarchist, a Machiavel. He's Richard III's more nuanced descendant--racism is just one more tool in his box of dirty tricks.

I guess I'll stop here for today--this post is obviously getting too long. More on sheep, horses, and treasonous blood next time...

A Wounded Name

2011-03-11T19:10:00.003-05:00

I promised to post some of my "authorship" stuff from last summer--from the old blog--when I'm too busy to put up any new Othello material. This has been a busy week, and I've got a cold, so here's the first of my series on authorship. Back to Othello in a day or two.

Oh God, Horatio, what a wounded name,
Things standing thus unknown, shall live behind me!

A prophetic soul, indeed. When Hamlet speaks these lines in Act 5, he’s dying and worried about his reputation. “Report me and my cause aright,” he tells Horatio. Tell them I was a good guy, don’t let them jump to conclusions based on scanty evidence. The proponents of “alternative Shakespeares” have traditionally seized upon this dramatic plea as “proof” that their guy (Bacon, Marlowe, De Vere, or some lesser-known contender) was the real Bard, putting his own worried words in his character’s mouth.

At their worst, these theories reduce Shakespeare’s most famous characters to ventriloquist’s dummies, mere mouthpieces through which the “real” Shakespeare reveals his (hitherto encrypted) identity. As if all literature is really just autobiography in disguise. They kind of have to make that argument, though, since the historical record is absolutely silent on the validity of any of these claims.

No, I’m not going to make a “Stratfordian” argument here. At least not today. I’m going to talk about why this whole controversy confuses me, and makes me sad. Because I don’t think any of these conspiracy theorists really appreciates the plays. In fact, I doubt they’ve really read them as literature—they’re too busy looking for “clues.”

And that’s, well, tragic. Hyperbolically speaking.

The “Truth” is Out There

In some cases, way out there. We’re talking cryptography machines, government cover-ups, incestuously-conceived offspring of putatively virgin queens, and so on. It’s a wild ride, reading through this stuff. Part X-Files, part Jerry Springer. I came unwillingly to the “authorship controversy,” I’ll admit. And even now, when I’ve decided to devote several posts (there’s just too much to write about in just one) to the topic, it still grates a little. Partly because it was never ever discussed in any of my college English classes, so part of me—the snooty academic who still lurks behind my populist facade—really doesn’t think it’s a valid subject for argument.

There, I’ve said it. I always thought it was kind of a fringy topic, like Area 51 or the Chariots of the Gods. Or, more insidiously, the idea that the government caused AIDS, or the moon landing was a fake, or the Bush Administration staged 9/11. And I’ll tell you right now, I don’t believe in any of those things. Not even a little.

Okay, maybe Area 51, a teensy bit. But only because I’m a sci-fi nerd.

But then, a few months ago, an old friend whom I hadn’t heard from in about a decade—a friend who graduated from the same swanky Ph.D. program that ate up my youth—came out of the closet. No, not that one. I mean the Oxfordian closet. At that time I barely knew what “Oxfordian'” meant. My first inclination was to think that he’d become some kind of rabid Anglophile. But then I remembered an article I’d read in the Atlantic, or some similarly prissy scandal sheet, about how some people think a dissolute 16th century aristo really “wrote Shakespeare.” Those people, I should point out, include Sigmund Freud, several Supreme Court justices (past and present) and a handful of pretty famous Shakespearean actors.

So I decided anyone who writes a “Shakespeare blog,” even with as modest a readership as this one boasts, is intellectually—not to say morally—obliged to address the topic.

But where to start? I knew next to nothing about any of this. I decided to start where the whole dispute starts. With biography. And why I just don’t care about it.

Ironically, in order to properly address this topic, I have to write a little bit about my past.

The Abridged Bio of an Anti-Biographist

First, I am born. Later, I went to fourteen, count ‘em, 14 grade schools. That means that sometimes, I changed cities and houses and schools two or three times in one year! It wreaked havoc on my math skills. And, more devastatingly, my interpersonal ones. But I’m a (relatively) sane person who pretty much came out of it okay.

Because of books. I never had many friends, and my four brothers were living in Guyville (a place to which I never gained admission), so I read books. All the time. Everything I learned about life came from books. Of course, this led to some pretty disappointing moments as an adult. You see, in books, justice always triumphs, if only by showing how unjust things are. Love conquers all. Bad people are punished—with scorn and ignominy, if nothing else—and good people are noble, brave, and loyal. There are moral victories in the face of defeats.

I guess you probably know that life is seldom, if ever, like that.

As great as books are, however, they are written by flawed people. Sometimes seriously flawed (Eliot, Pound, Rousseau, Hemingway, etc. etc.). Do I really want to know that Tolstoy treated his wife as a servant? That Coleridge was a drug addict? That Yeats was a fascist?

Not especially. It’s not that I think these guys should remain “innocent,” that they should be revered and protected from history. I’m just not really interested in their personal lives. The wonderful thing about homo sapiens is that we can imagine other, better worlds than the one we currently inhabit. If we’re lucky, our imaginations exceed the more sordid/shameful/unhappy facts of our lives. When I think about Chaucer, scratching out narrative poems by candlelight amid all that nasty, brutish, short-livedness that was medieval England, I think about that. Imagination.

Yep, I’m a card-carrying humanist.

So I have to say, I don’t have a big investment in who the “real” Shakespeare was, except as it touches on this one subject. Because it seems to me that a lot of these conspiracy theorists base their whole argument on the premise that a person can’t write about things he’s never experienced. To me, this disparages the very best thing about literature, and art in general. Imagination. Will Shakespeare wasn’t an aristocrat, so he couldn’t know anything about court life. He wasn’t captured by pirates. He hadn’t been to Italy. He’d never practiced law.

Please. If real-life experience were a prerequisite for story-telling, the vast majority of genres wouldn’t exist. No romance written by the love-starved. No science fiction written by anyone. No vampire stories! No Thousand and One Nights! No crime fiction, unless it was written by criminals.

So that’s a big problem for me. That and, um, the absolute lack of any historical evidence to support these claims. Because I’m not only a humanist, I’m an empiricist, too.

That said, there is a lot that’s interesting about this whole controversy. It really says more about who we are, we modern people, than who “Shakespeare” was. So I’m going to jump right in and take a look at the whole thing, starting from the evidence for “the Stratford man,” next time.

Who knows? Maybe, along the way, I’ll change my mind about everything.

So that was my first authorship post. Expect the next one sometime in the near future--whenever I'm too busy or sniffly to write something new. Next time, back to the play.

Darkness, Darkness

2011-03-04T23:43:00.007-05:00

Othello is a journey to the underworld. At least that's how I've always thought of it. A one-way ticket to the unconscious--the other side of our cheery, open-minded, and rational selves. Because we all know that behind those Martha Stewart centerpieces and Hallmark ornaments there's a dark passageway to moral anarchy. Iago knows it too. He's our ugliest self. The self that thinks the racist, misogynist, elitist, narcissistic, anti-everything-but-me thought before we can censor it. We don't like to admit he exists, but he mumbles in the background when we're feeling vulnerable, or petty, or angry. And if we're really weak, we listen to him.

Yeah, I've read some Freud. He gets a bad rap these days, but he really transformed the way we think. Before Freud, demonic possession was the only way to explain human craziness--our insatiable need to affirm our existence by destroying our own kind. I kill, therefore I am.

What other species does that?

Freud was wrong about a lot of stuff, but he was right about this. There is a part of the human psyche that talks when we want it to shut up. He called it the id, but earlier people called it the Devil. Usually our fear of the law, or sense of morality (okay, those are close to the same thing) keeps that crazy, world-destroying voice under wraps. But sometimes we listen. Sometimes we even do the bad stuff it tells us to do. In Star Wars terms (remember, I have a 10-year-old son), we've crossed over to the Dark Side. We've Executed Order 66, and turned out the lights of reason. The good, rational clones in our head have become killer storm troopers, and all hell breaks loose.

Okay, if you don't have a 10-year-old son, you won't get that. I guess what I mean is that there's a tiny Iago in most of us. If we feed him, he'll grow up into a big, world-eating Iago and do awful stuff. Interestingly, there's a lot of intestinal/digestive imagery in Othello, most of it associated with Iago. Laxatives, enemas, vomiting--he uses all these images to remind the audience that human beings aren't really, as Hamlet put it, "the paragon of animals." We're just animals. Brutes who devour, and regurgitate, and defecate. To Iago, we're rams and ewes and goats and monkeys--beasts who are ruled by appetites, not reason. I always associate Iago with that famous Hieronymus Bosch painting--you know, the one where Hell is a kind of gastrointestinal nightmare:

Iago isn't just anti-rational. He's anti-humanist in the broadest sense. Anti-Renaissance, anti-Enlightenment avant la lettre. What he wants, really, is to turn out the lights. If you've read the whole play, you'll remember Othello's words, just before he smothers his wife in the marriage bed:

Put out the light, and then put out the light.

Let there be darkness. Welcome to Hell.

But as usual, I'm getting ahead of myself. Let's go back to the beginning, back to Venice. Where it's already dark. Yep, the play begins in the middle of the night. In case you don't get the dark/light thing,Will kind of hammers you over the head with it. It's dark, probably after midnight, and everyone is asleep. Except Iago and Roderigo, who are crouching under Brabantio's window, gossiping. "Tush, never tell me" hisses Roderigo. Iago has just told him the news--Othello and Desdemona have secretly married. "No, you're kidding, really?" It's an interesting way to begin the play--with Iago and Roderigo whispering in the dark, like two teenagers out after curfew. They seem silly here, mere pranksters. Ready to TP Brabantio's house, or something.

In fact, the whole plot of Othello would work pretty well in a high school setting--a good girl whose reputation is ruined, an insecure star athlete, a jealous, racist teammate...oh, wait! They made that movie! It's called...wait for it...O. I haven't seen it, but it stars Julia Stiles, who was also in that Taming of the Shrew redaction called 10 Things I Hate About You. I wrote a little about that movie way back when this blog was in its infancy...anyway, I guess Julia made a brief career out of those Shakespeare-goes-to-high-school films. I'm waiting for the Macbeth one, where the editor of the school newspaper and his geeky girlfriend murder the student council president, egged on by three goth girls who hate everyone. It'll have a suitably banal title, like Go for It, or something. Julia Stiles is too old to play the geek girl, but probably one of those Disney robot starlets could do the job just fine.

Okay, back to our dimly-lit story. Iago and Roderigo are hiding, planning to scare the crap out of Brabantio by waking him up in the middle of the night with bad news. Namely, that his pretty white daughter has run off with a sooty-skinned Moor. Roderigo, remember, is Desdemona's spurned suitor.

So what do we find out in these opening lines? Iago hates Othello because the Moor passed him over for promotion, preferring the somewhat foppish pencil-pusher, Cassio, who

...never set a squadron in the field,
nor the division of a battle knows
More than a spinster--unless the bookish theoric,
Wherein the togaed consuls can propose
As masterly as he. Mere prattle without practice
Is all his soldiership; but he, sir, had th'election...

Cassio is all hat and no cattle, a political man who's never led troops into battle. He's a man of words, not deeds--prattle without practice. Funny accusation coming from Iago, who's the master of dangerous prattle. Who never does anything himself, but rather talks others to their doom. As an excuse for everything that follows, it's pretty weak. Cassio himself, after all, isn't really the object of Iago's virulent hatred--Othello and Desdemona are. But Iago's nothing if not a brilliant stage director, and that's what we see here. He gives Roderigo very explicit instructions as to what to say, and what tone of voice to use when he awakens Brabantio from sleep:

Call up her father,
Rouse him, make after him, poison his delight,
Proclaim him in the streets; incense her kinsmen,
And, though he in a fertile climate dwell,
Plague him with flies. Though that his joy be joy,
Yet throw such chances of vexation on't
As it may lose some colour.
....
Do, with like timorous accent and dire yell,
As when, by night and negligence, the fire
Is spied in populous cities.

Wake him up, then harangue him. Spread the word to all his relatives, so that his pleasant world is filled with misery. Although he's got a good life, inject some poison into it. And make sure you scare the hell out of him, so that he thinks his house is on fire or something.

These are pretty obvious stage directions. Use a loud voice with a fearful tremor in it. Use the darkness, and his half-asleep state, to your advantage. Make this private matter into a public one, so that the news of his daughter's miscegenation spreads like wildfire. Significantly, Iago himself remains anonymous throughout the scene. "It is not meet nor wholesome to my place/to be producted." It doesn't suit my purposes to reveal myself. He wants to remain whisper in the darkness, a disembodied, goading voice in the back of the mind. He wants, most of all, to drive people mad.

The devil, indeed.

Iago, like Richard III, is staging a drama, and he's the only one who knows how it's going to end. Like a good director, he hides behind the scenes, whispering prompts from the wings. But make no mistake--this is his play, and his story. Everyone else is still in the dark, waiting for instructions.

Salacious Slanders and Slurs

2011-02-27T23:48:00.002-05:00

Iago would have totally loved the Web. Imagine his Twitter feed:

"Slutty Desdemona sleeping w/ Cassio. Surprised. Thought he was gay."
"@ VenetianCitizens: Othello's a Muslim terrorist pretending 2 be Christian."
"@ PapaBrabantio: Heads up. black ram tupping yr white ewe."
"@Othellothemoor: Trophy wives can't be trusted. ru missing a handkerchief?"

What he would have loved most about it, of course, is the anonymity. The fact that he could say anything, no matter how malicious and/or mendacious, with impunity. He'd like Google rankings even more. Because if he were a particularly savvy Web user--and I'm certain he would be--he'd make sure his slurs made it into the top five search results. Right there under "Othello saves Venice from Infidels Yet Again" would be "Othello's Wife Gives Treasured Keepsake to Boy Toy Cassio," and "Jealous Othello Can't Be Trusted with Venetian Security." Yep, he would have totally grooved on the reputation-wrecking potential of the Internet.

But of course there's a flaw in this scenario. People don't care about reputation the way they once did. The whole idea of a public reputation depends on the existence of a "public sphere" which is clearly distinguishable from the private sphere. And as we all know, that's no longer the case. People reveal the intimate details of their private lives online all the time, eager for comments. They send nude pictures of themselves to virtual strangers. They feel free to give advice to people they've never met, and never will. They have 500 Facebook friends, but don't really know more than a handful of them. These days, there's no such thing as bad publicity.

In fact, reputation only matters if you're a business, a job candidate, or a high school student who wants to get into the Ivies. A libelous review means lost money for business--that's why there are corporate lawyers. And probably you don't want to be posting racy or drunken pics of yourself if you dream of someday being a Supreme Court Justice. But for the rest of today's technologically-immured folks, all the windows and doors are open. In a world of seven billion people, everyone wants to be noticed. Everyone has a fascinating personal story to tell. Everyone thinks his or her own life is Important--and if it's not, well, there's nothing wrong with embellishing the facts to make it so. Check out this short list of some of the most (in)famous fake memoirs of the last century.

Hmm. Now that I think about it, maybe I should just junk this blog and write a fake autobiography myself. It has to have sex, violence, and lots of taboo-smashing details. I'm thinking sexual slavery, rural militias, and maybe cannibalism.

See, you're already interested!

But seriously. You can't understand this play--or a whole lot of early literature, for that matter--if you don't understand the literary/historical importance of reputation. Reputation, or public honor, was a particularly male virtue--in fact that's redundant, since virtue is based on the Latin vir, or "man." To be virtuous, in other words, was to be a man. A public man. Virtuous men nurtured their public reputations, their resume of manly deeds, by keeping the dangerously feminine world of private life far, far away. Sex is important for recreation, or for carrying on one's name, but it should never be an end itself. And love is dangerous--Othello himself realizes it from the beginning of the play:

But that I love the gentle Desdemona
I would not my unhoused free condition
Put into circumscription and confine
For the seas' worth.

If I didn't love Desdemona so much, I wouldn't allow myself to be imprisoned, incarcerated, confined to indoors. Not for all the tea in China. Or rather, for all the water in the ocean. Marriage doesn't sound so good when you put it that way, does it? But it's significant he mentions his "unhoused free condition." Male reputations are put at risk by domestic confinement. In Antony and Cleopatra, a play with similar concerns (more on that in a minute) one of Antony's lieutenants complains that his besotted general "will make no wars out of doors." He won't leave Cleo's bedroom to do his manly (martial) duty. Women are "housed"; men are supposed to live in the greater world of manly deeds. This is a pretty ubiquitous idea in the West. Take a look at these early American portraits of a husband and wife:

If you look out those two windows, you'll see that her world is confined and circumscribed--literally fenced in. His is much bigger, undomesticated. He can leave the house and travel as far as he wants, into the distance. She can only get to the fence--then she has to turn back. My point here is that Othello's fear of being housebound isn't something Will just came up with. It's a transhistorical male fear of being fenced in, limited to a woman's sphere of influence. Notice that the husband is writing--sending his words out into the world. The wife has a book--no doubt written by a man--but she's giving her full attention to the painter. The husband's active, even in repose. She's utterly passive. Imagine how different--okay, how wrong--these portraits would look of the seating were reversed, and the wife were writing to someone while the husband gazed vacantly at the viewer. Something wrong in that marriage, for sure.

So it's pretty clear from the beginning of Othello that danger is lurking on the horizon. Othello isn't exactly embracing the idea of marriage--he loves Desdemona, sure, but he's got a ton of reservations about the whole thing. He's probably read his Virgil and his Homer, and knows that warriors--men of action--run a big risk when they enter the indoor feminine realm, where words, rather than deeds, predominate. Once you get trapped in the wordy indoor world, your reputation is pretty much doomed. Because words are slippery, and equivocal, and just plain tricky. You can't slice through them with a sword, or shoot them. They circulate on their own, in the form of rumors and half-truths. They can trap you as surely as a prison door, and there's no getting out with your honor intact.

The question of reputation in Will's plays takes its cue from the earlier epic tradition, wherein male reputations were built on a warrior ethos--a tribal celebration of valorous acts worthy of being remembered. Specifically, remembered in poetry, song, or, later on, in writing. Those are the only kind of words a valiant warrior is interested in--the kind that celebrate his valiant, warlike deeds. To lose one's reputation meant being obliterated in the etymological sense--that is, being erased from literature/history (the epic world didn't make a distinction). There are several ways to be obliterated from manly military history. You can be a coward, of course. That's the obvious one. Or you can go indoors and never come out. In the plays, as in much of earlier literature, losing one's martial reputation often resulted from a Dangerous Encounter with The Private Life. Usually, of course, this means a dangerous, reputation-ruining run-in with Woman and Sexuality.

I wrote about this in a previous post, back when I was blogging Romeo and Juliet. I'm not going to repeat all the things I wrote there--but you can check it out if you've a mind to.

Will's most famous example of this tragic scenario is Othello--followed closely by Antony and Cleopatra. The latter is a more straightforward example of the "ruined-by-eros" structure, in that Antony allows his own lust to overwhelm his sense of duty. He says it himself, near the end of the play:

I have offended reputation,
A most unnoble swerving.

Swerving. Interesting choice of words. As if he's just junked his macho itinerary and swerved off course. Maybe stopped at a sleazy motel or truck stop on the Moral Highway to Enduring Fame. And once you swerve that far off course, it's hard to get back on the road.

What happens to Othello is a little different, but still structurally similar. He's a military hero to the Venetians, a bulwark against the Turkish threat. But he's also racially and culturally other--more a man of the East than the West. Keeping on that straight and narrow road to Fame and Lasting Honor is even more important--because he already looks like the "easily swerving" type. So he builds and maintains his reputation carefully. He's confident that his deeds will speak louder than any slanderous words. Early in the play he tells Iago that he's not worried about Roderigo's slurs or Brabantio's objections to his marriage. His military heroism will protect him. Let Brabantio "do his spite," he says:

My services which I have done the signory
Shall out-tongue his complaints.

Actions, he insists, speak louder than words. But once he's stuck on Cyprus with no wars to fight, he's trapped in the realm of words, not deeds. And in the wordy arena, he's way out of his league. Iago literally talks him to death.

Words, words words. They're the key to this whole play. Desdemona falls in love with Othello because of his stories. Iago tells another story, of Desdemona's perfidy. Desdemona has a lot to say at the beginning of the play, but Iago's story proves more compelling, and she grows quieter and quieter until finally her very breath is stolen as she lies on her marriage bed. She dies by smothering--a final silencing. Othello, for his part, doesn't understand the importance of words until the end. "Speak of me as I am," he says. Tell the truth about me. Pity he didn't believe Desdemona when she tried to do the same. Instead, he allowed Iago to name her whore, and refused to listen when she tried to tell him who she really was. "Speak of me as I am." Don't lie about me. And yet he lies to himself, even in his final moments, claiming to be "one that loved not wisely but too well."

The abuser, the wife-beater, the uxoricide--if you ask them why they beat, maim, and kill the women in their lives, chances are more than half would offer Othello's excuse. "I just loved her too much."

No, I'm not forgetting that Othello's a victim here, too. And a lot of what I have to say here will be about that. But Desdemona is too often silenced, her story smothered, by the readers of this play. I'm not going to do that.

Well, I meant to really get into Act 1 today. I guess I swerved off course. Next time, back on the straight and narrow, I promise.

Paint It Black

2011-02-21T23:45:00.005-05:00

Othello is an odd play, an "extravagant and wheeling stranger" among the kings, queens, and princes that populate other Shakespearean tragedies. Othello is a noble man, but not a true nobleman. He has risen to a position of power on his own merits--a rarity throughout most of history (and arguably still a rarity today). He's a warrior who doesn't get to fight anyone or anything except his own demons. Desdemona (notice the "demon" embedded in her name) is, like Juliet, a sheltered aristocratic girl who dares to love someone inappropriate. As in Romeo and Juliet, the events of the play happen in only a few days. But even more than R & J, Othello is private tragedy. The fate of nations, of cities, or even of great families, does not rest on its outcome. After the dead are buried, the Venetians will presumably find someone else to fight the Turks, and life will go on. In this sense, it's more a story for our time than Will's.

So what's this play about? These days, it's about race. Back in Will's day, however, Othello was about difference of all kinds--cultural, sexual, social, philosophical. Why didn't I include "racial" in that list? Because I really don't think that the racial angle played the same way to an early modern audience. Othello is black, by his own admission--but like gender, race was just a theatrical construct on the Elizabethan/Jacobean stage. There were no black, or even brown actors to play Othello. They wore makeup. Or maybe they just wore a turban and some colorful robes. Othello, like the "women" on the stage, "is not what he is." He's just an actor, painted black.

So why make him a Moor at all? Could he not just as easily have been a Jew, like Shylock, or an Egyptian, like Cleopatra? Perhaps a bastard, like Edmund--there are number of ways Will could have told this story of a man who marries above his station, who's an outsider, who is ruined because he doubts himself and mistrusts anyone who loves him. The fact that Will chose to tell this story at all--a story so unlike others that lured him, is interesting. His source was a mid-sixteenth-century Italian story by Giovanni Battista Giraldi, a minor writer in the tradition of Boccaccio. Biographical aside: Giraldi clearly understood the importance of image, since he took a nom de plume: Giraldi Cinthio. This name doubtless sounded more poetic to sixteenth-century Italians than Giovanni Giraldi, which was like being called "John Jones" back then. Anyway, Cinthio wrote a short story called "Un Capitano Moro" ("A Moorish Captain") as part of his collection of tales, Gli Hecatommithi. In Cinthio's version, Iago decides to ruin Othello because of his own unrequited passion for Desdemona. In Will's redaction, Iago has no passion for anything but moral mayhem--instead of an angry suitor, he's the Lord of the Flies. A pretty big change.

But I digress. Why does Othello have to be black, African, Moorish--i.e., foreign and dark-skinned? Because his blackness works as a metaphor for the problem of perception in general. And to see him on the stage, his black face surrounded by all those pale English ones, is visually arresting. Disturbing. The audience is drawn to his face, and to Iago's words. We see Othello, but we listen to Iago. This disconnect between the body and the word, between seeing and hearing, is central to the play. It's like having the devil whisper in your ear for the entire performance, even as your eyes are drawn elsewhere.

The play is less interested in race per se than in the disjunction between what seems and what is. How things appear, and how they really are. Othello is dark, but the Duke tells Brabantio that his "son-in-law is more fair than black," by virtue of his service to the state. Othello calls Iago "honest," even up to the moment his betrayal is revealed. Appearance is taken for essence, surface for substance, throughout--Othello even insists, in his despair, that he'd rather Desdemona slept with hundreds of men, if only he hadn't known about it. He demands "ocular proof" from Iago of her perfidy, then falls for a cheap trick with a handkerchief. A magician's sleight of hand, as it were.

Given the play's obsession with appearance and deception, having a white actor portray Othello in blackface is actually thematically appropriate. It works with the language and the structure of the drama. But that's not an option any longer--race can't be seen as a theatrical construct these days. In this era, and especially in this country, with its tragic legacy of slavery and racially-motivated injustice, blackface looks too much like mockery. Like stealing something one hasn't a right to. Olivier's blackface Othello seems like the worst kind of usurpation now.

Even if we accept that the play wants us to see Othello's skin color as superficial, dramatizing it that way still raises the whole uncomfortable issue of "blackness" as a synonym for evil in the European tradition. You know, the Dark Side. Othello looks black (read: evil) but he's really "fair." Iago looks fair (white) but he's really black inside. Desdemona looks fair to Othello, but he fears she's really a black-hearted whore. A whited sepulchre.

In the Middle Ages, devils were regularly portrayed as black. And sometimes with a woman's face, too. Blackness and femininity were linked in Christian mythology--often with the caveat that a fair feminine face hides a devilish interior. Black was not beautiful--remember in The Merchant of Venice, Portia breathes a sigh of relief when her Moroccan suitor chooses the wrong casket. "A gentle riddance," she says with naive bigotry, "let all of his complexion choose me so."

Even dark-haired women were thought to be less beautiful than fair ones--a fair woman with a plain face was prized above a prettier dark one. Blondes, as the old hair color commercial promised, invariably had more fun. Of course there was more at issue than just aesthetic preferences. Darkness was--still is--associated with ignorance, superstition, death. All bad stuff. It's all over our language. "I see," we say when we understand. "Enlighten me." "His lecture really illuminated things." In Will's day these associations were even stronger, because they hadn't disappeared into the language, as they have now. What I mean is, early modern people noticed words like that in ways we no longer do. We've got light whenever we want it now, but if you lived in pre-modern Europe, the night was pretty damned dark. Who knew what lived in the woods at night? You sure didn't want to go in there to find out. It was easy to see--I mean understand--why many people believed in witches and other supernatural beings. It was simply too dark for widespread enlightenment.

We saw how important the light/dark opposition was in Romeo and Juliet. It's equally important here, albeit in a different, more conventional way. In R & J, night was the time when the fakery and facades of the daylight hours fell away, leaving only the "truth" of erotic intimacy. In Othello, nighttime maintains its more traditional association with ignorance, deception, and occulted motives. The play begins in darkness, with Iago and Roderigo whispering slanderous, salacious lies to Brabantio. Roderigo reveals himself as Desdemona's spurned suitor, but Iago remains hidden in the darkness, the unseen "first mover" of the tragedy to come.

Next: Iago's Twitter feed.

The Story of O

2011-02-17T13:54:00.002-05:00

Probably you've never read the original Story of O, a work of "literary pornography" (that phrase may or may not be an oxymoron) written by some pseudonymous Frenchwoman in the 1950's. At least I think it was the 50's. Don't run out and get a copy, unless you're, you know, into that sort of thing. It's about a young woman's kinky S/M adventures, which are described in disturbing, quasi-poetic (hence the "literary" label) detail. My teenage self was shocked and, of course, fascinated by all this transgressive behavior. To this day it's still the naughtiest thing I've ever read.

It has nothing to do with Othello, except in one sense: the letter O. O is a letter, but also a number--zero. The heroine/victim of the novel is called O, because she wants to be erased, to have her will--her entire self--obliterated through some sort of transcendent submission. It's kind of religious, really, except for the sex. I mean, saints and mystics all wanted that too--to transcend desire. To submit utterly to the will of another. Everyone wants a god--but some people want one right here and now. That's what masochism--sexual or political--is all about. O wants not to want. To have no self. To become, ontologically speaking, a zero. That, according to the author, is the mystical end/goal of all submission: to be emptied out by another.

Now Othello isn't a masochist in this sense--but Will was very aware of the O-zero connection. Othello, like that other tragic Shakespearean O, Ophelia, allows someone else to write his story. He's emptied out by another, by a bad guy who understands exactly where his weaknesses are. But Iago, too, is an empty sort. He says it himself: "I am not what I am." This can be understood both psychologically and ontologically--"I am not what I seem," but also, "I have no essence."

It's Hegelian, really. Both the Master and the Slave are empty without the other. A zero-sum game.

Iago's motives for destroying Othello--his stated motives--seem woefully insufficient. He offers two: one public--he was passed over for promotion--and one private--he feared Othello had seduced his wife. Now Othello is far too straight-arrow to ever be an adulterer. That's clear way back in Act 1. He won't even admit he desires his own wife, much less anyone else's. So neither motive is sufficient to explain Iago's actions. Samuel Coleridge famously referred to Iago's "motiveless malignity," which sums it up pretty well. He simply acts, for no reason, creating a tragedy out of nothing.

His name, Iago, is the Spanish form of James, recognizable in the city "Santiago,"--Saint James. But it's worth remembering that "ago" is also Latin for "I act." I-ago. I act. I make things happen. Never mind why.

I guess what I'm getting at here is that Othello is in many ways Will's most modern play--it's obsessed with "image," with racial and sexual difference--but on a deeper level it's just profoundly nihilistic. No one has an essence, really. Othello, philosophically speaking, is not what it is.

Cryptic enough? Well, I'll explain what I mean when I really get into the play, in the next few posts. Today I need to say a few words about that other O. Yes, I mean Barack Obama, our first African-American president. The subject of a recent, thinly-disguised political roman a clef called--you guessed it--O. What does Obama have to do with Othello, besides the O thing? More than nothing, when you think about it. Obama, like Othello, is a charismatic outsider who ascended to a position hitherto closed to people of his race.

And, okay, that's where the obvious similarities end. Obama is unlikely to be seduced into uxoricide. He's unlikely to even lose his temper in public. But like Othello, our president seems to inspire a fair amount of motiveless malignity. And a lot of people on both sides of the political divide would love to see him lose his cool. Even just for a minute. There's a recent book by a conservative commentator called The Roots of Obama's Rage, which I find interesting. Now I confess I haven't read this book--the title sounded too, well, enraged for me. But really, that title says it all. I mean, what rage are we talking about here? The guy never breaks a sweat. Mostly Obama enrages other people, simply by not being enraged, or outraged, or passionate, or anything but cool and controlled. But this book seems more than anything to want people to think of him as enraged. Or maybe to enrage him, I don't know. The book's title argues that Obama is angry at the root. He's radically angry. Or maybe an angry radical. It's hard to reconcile that assertion with the Obama we see, but then that's the point. His coolness is just a facade. In private, below the surface, he's volatile, wrathful, and unpredictable. It's a good attack strategy, because we all know that extreme emotions diminish leaders, make them seem, well, feminine. Un-leaderly. At the same time, a real leader has to seem human and empathetic. It's a delicate balance that few can master.

For Obama, as for Othello, the stakes are even higher. One uncontrolled outburst and a whole bunch of stereotypes kick in. The angry black man. The violent outsider. The dangerous, volatile Primitive. Or as Roderigo puts it, the "extravagant and wheeling stranger." It's simply safer to hide behind a public persona and keep the private (implicitly feminine) world of emotions--even positive emotions--under lock and key. So both O's try hard not to get sucked into the private sphere. Because once a leader gets pulled into that danger zone, there's no getting out.

Look at Bill Clinton, after all.

My point, I guess, is that Obama's insistence on being nothing more than a public man, his refusal to get emotional, to show us anything of his private self, is a lot like the Othello we see in Act 1. Othello's not comfortable with the private sphere at all. In explaining how Desdemona fell in love with him, he paints it as hero-worship, not ardor or even friendship. "She loved me for the dangers I had passed," he insists, "and I loved her that she did pity them." She loved my action-hero adventures, and I loved her for admiring them. This is Othello's version of romance. Desdemona fell in love with him because he was good at his job, essentially.

Significantly, this is not how Desdemona herself sees it:

That I did love the Moor to live with him,
My downright violence and storm of fortunes
May trumpet to the world. My heart's subdued
Even to the very quality of my lord.
I saw Othello's visage in his mind,
And to his honours and his valiant parts
Did I my soul and fortunes consecrate....

To hell with public opinion and authority, she says. I don't care how much public outrage it causes--I love him anyway, and I'm with him all the way. I'm not concerned with appearances--I saw Othello's true face in his mind, not on the surface of his skin. Where Othello sees the relationship in conventional, even superficial terms, Desdemona is having none of it. She's not interested in appearances or surfaces. She sees the truth of the man behind the color of his skin.

This fundamental difference between the two--Othello's obsession with reputation and appearances, and Desdemona's dismissal of public opinion--is more profound than any racial difference could ever be. Because Desdemona chooses love over convention, because she insists that Othello's skin color is irrelevant, she's actually calling Othello's whole world view into question. In philosophical terms, she's a Platonist, while he's an Aristotelian. A true mixed marriage. This philosophical difference--which is also a psychological one--ultimately creates a gap between them, a blank place that Iago fills with his own malign and tragic narrative.

Next: Black is black. Except when it's not.

Renaissance

2011-02-09T22:45:00.007-05:00

That's a pretty hubristic title for my comeback post, but I think I'll use it anyway. Yes, my loyal readers, the Bard Blog is back. Under its old name, too. In the long months of its absence, it hasn't been entirely idle. As some of you may know, it wandered across the web to its own lovely little site, far from its provincial origins here at Blogger. My husband, who is a hotshot web designer, created the new site for me, and it was very cool-looking. But he didn't bother to figure out how to get rid of all the comment spam, so I got like seventy comments a day that said generic stuff like "very cool blog," or "interesting ideas," and embedded a link to another site. This, I realized, was a classic bush-league attempt to raise search rankings...well, never mind.

Anyway, I moaned about this to (read: nagged) said spouse until, in the manner of beleaguered husbands everywhere, he tried to fix it. And proceeded to wreck the interface. No, I don't fully understand what happened, but suffice it to say it was completely FUBAR. Shortly thereafter, our company got a big design/software development contract, and fixing Gayle's blog quickly sank to the bottom of hubby's to-do list. Which I understand--putting food on the table and shoes on the kid must come first. Nevertheless, I didn't give up hope. It seemed certain that a golden window of blog-fixing opportunity was going to open soon, so I waited. And waited. But finally, I realized that--like a failed adventurer--I was going to have to cut my losses and move back home. You know, back to the parents' house--which is sort of what Blogger is, vis a vis my peripatetic blog. I miss my cool new/old site, although I only had it for a little while. But I am happy to have a place to go and continue my musings about the Bard here.

What I Did on My Vacation

While I was away (at the other site) I wrote a bunch of posts about the Authorship Question. By the time I got to the seventh post I was pretty sick of it, and couldn't wait to get back to the plays. I still have those seven posts, all ready to go, but I think I'll hold them back for a bit, maybe let them trickle out here every few weeks, just for something different. Or when I'm too busy to write new stuff. But I have to say, I was kind of weirded out/surprised by how super-passionate some of these anti-Stratfordian types are. Mostly they're people who believe that the Earl of Oxford is the real Shakespeare, and that there's been a black-ops conspiracy going on since the seventeenth century. I'm not going to get into this again now. But I should fess up and say that this kind of thing makes me uncomfortable--conspiracy theories of all kinds are rampant on the web, I know...and maybe it will someday be proved that some of them are true. But until then, I prefer to live in my rationalist fool's paradise.

I did learn a lot writing those posts, though. Academics--a tribe to which, as some of you know, I once belonged--have pretty much no truck with the whole alt-Shakespeare carnival. I never heard much about it at all, in all the Shakespeare classes I took in college and grad school. As a consequence, I never talked about it in any of the many Shakespeare classes I taught, either. But it's really a pretty interesting subject from a historical standpoint. Basically, every era has its own Shakespeare pretender, who more or less reflects the concerns, fantasies, and anxieties of the time. And the conspiracy theorists themselves--whose numbers include Mark Twain, Henry James, Sigmund Freud and several Supreme Court justices--are just as interesting.

But as I said, I'm not going to go back there right now. I need to read a play! Really read it, like for the next few months. And after a lot of ruminations on the subject, I decided to junk my whole "early plays first" scheme and go straight for one of the Biggies. No, not the Ultra-biggies--not Hamlet or Lear. Not quite ready for those yet. But right now, 2011, seems like a good time to read number three on my list of Will's Most Important Works. This play takes up many of the issues we looked at in The Merchant of Venice--outsider vs. insider, race/ethnicity, gender and power.

Yeah, okay--that could be a lot of plays. But I'm talking about Othello. It seems timely, when so many fantasies about race and leadership are playing out in our own political culture. And it's in many ways the most "modern" of all Will's plays--the issues, anxieties, and pathologies it dramatizes are still with us, virtually unchanged in essence.

So let's get started. It's going to be a long one, but I hope it will be fun, too.

Al Pacino's Sad-Dad Eyes

2010-04-24T21:11:00.002-04:00

The 2004 film of The Merchant of Venice, directed by Michael Radford, was better than I expected. I mean, Al Pacino as Shylock. I still shudder whenever I think of the embarrassment that was Looking for Richard, Pacino's documentary about playing Richard III. Godawful. This wasn't anything like that disaster. For one thing, it's a period piece, all velvet and silk and funny hats, and I confess I love those.

Pacino wasn't really Shylock, he was Pacino playing Shylock, but it still kind of worked. Before I go any further, however, I have to fess up about something that completely colored my viewing of this film. Al Pacino with a beard is a dead ringer for my dad. For real, it was freaky. He's got those same sad Italian eyes, and, unfortunately, that same east coast accent. For this film, he kind of gave it a foreign lilt, but it still sounded faintly Lower Manhattan, or maybe East Boston (where my dad grew up). This film really plays up the father-daughter drama, so that kind of weirded me out, too. Many women of Italian-American heritage have ambivalent relationships with their fathers--it's that Catholic, patriarchal culture, I guess--and I'm no exception. So it was pretty wrenching to see Shylock tear up (which he did a lot in the movie) and run around wailing after Jessica leaves. Also, the movie makes Jessica herself more ambivalent about her betrayal of her dad. The very last scene has Jess looking out into the distance, and then at her mother's turquoise ring, which, as the film would have it, she didn't trade for a monkey. That, apparently, was just a rumor, which gives the whole thing--Shylock's rage, Jessica's indifference--a completely different spin. Tubal tells Shylock about the monkey-trade, you see it in Shylock's imagination, but clearly it's just a reflection of what the Jewish community thinks about Christians: they're indifferent to history, mindlessly acquisitive, prodigal in their recreations.

Pacino wasn't equal to the language, but that's to be expected. For the whole first part of the film, before the really dramatic stuff, he speaks his lines in this halting and annoying way--not a trace of the sly, even snide tone you'd expect Will's Shylock to have. And I have to say, when he gets to the "well, then, it appears you need my help" speech in Act 1, he totally channels Brando as The Don, when he says to Bonasera at the beginning of The Godfather I, "you don't offer friendship...you don't even think to call me godfather, and yet you ask my help...".

Yeah, you could say that movie played a part in my family mythology...but we won't go there today.

Pacino even has that raspy voice down. But mostly, it's his eyes that carry this film. Really, those sad, Italian basset hound eyes. They fill the whole screen. And they're so filled with tragedy, with a lifetime of oppression and disappointment, you can totally forgive Pacino for phoning in his lines. This guy has presence! Who cares about poetry?

Okay, I do. But this is a film, not a play. It's visual medium, and words are necessarily secondary. Even without the fabulous poetry, it's still a great story.

A lot of interpretation is possible in film, and this one definitely takes a strong stand on several issues that are only implicit in the original text. I mentioned the liberties the director took with the Shylock/Jessica pathos. He also does a lot of "filling in the blanks" on the homoerotic front. Antonio is unambiguously in love with Bassanio. And Bassanio, while perhaps not as passionate about it as Tony, has obviously not discouraged the sentiments. During Antonio's Act 1 speech about melancholy, he's looking out the window and sees Bassanio arriving, looking young and delectably full of life. Totally hot, in a velvety Renaissance sort of way. Antonio's buddies suggest he's in love, and he protests way too vociferously. As he's gazing longingly out the window.

Subtle.

Jeremy Irons is great as Antonio, I must say. He looks like he should be in Death in Venice, not this play. He's definitely got that Aschenbach thing down. Aging gay man who sees his youth fading, hopelessly in love with a feckless, somewhat selfish youth. Closeted, tragic. If you wanted to explain what "melancholy" means to someone who doesn't speak English, you could just show them this picture.

When Bassanio shows up to ask his friend for a loan, they have their discussion in...you guessed it, Tony's bedroom! And Bassanio lounges on the bed invitingly as he's making his pitch. Then, after Antonio promises to help him--pain etched in every sad line of his face--B. kisses him goodbye. A for-real kiss, not a dry peck.

Playing up the homoerotic hints in the play really works on the screen. It gives the story more psychological--and less philosophical--weight, and thus makes it more modern. Abstract ideas like justice are hard to translate into pictures. Unrequited love and father-daughter pathos are easy, because you can see emotions pretty clearly in camera close-ups. We're not much for abstractions these days, or larger ethical dilemmas. We like feelings, not ideas. Pictures, not words.

We also like simple moral oppositions, and we get lots of those here, too. The movie starts with a little visual history of Renaissance anti-Semitism. Venetian Jews are stigmatized, ghettoized, and even lynched by religious fanatics in the first few minutes of the film. The most gripping image in those first few minutes is that of a lock clanging shut on the gates of the Jewish ghetto/prison. So we're set up to be on Shylock's side from the beginning. Combine that with lots of extended shots of Al/Shylock staring mournfully into the distance, missing the camera's eye--and thus, ours--by only a few feet, and you have a pretty simple morality play.

The excessiveness of the Christian contingent is extravagantly represented by Portia's lavish estate. She owns a whole island, which her suitors row across to--sort of Mystic Isle of Avalon meets Balmoral Castle. The mansion would put any royal palace to shame, and the gardens make Versailles look modest. Portia herself (played someone named Lynn Collins, whom I'd never heard of) is pretty in a Jane Austenish way, Nerissa only slightly less so, as befits a best friend. The movie really plays up the horror of the courtroom scene, so when the Venetians retreat to Belmont afterward for the Return to Romance ending, they seem superficial and soulless.

There are some sensationalizing moments--the aforementioned lynching, for example. When Bassanio seeks out Shylock with the intention of asking for a loan, he finds him slaughtering a lamb. Very graphically. I'm pretty squeamish about animal cruelty, so I had to look away. But in that small, visually arresting scene, we can see all of the play's sheep/lamb imagery sort of compressed into one violent moment.

Venetian hedonism is a visual theme in the film--the creepy Salerio and Solanio are portly middle-aged leches who drink too much and spend a lot of time in whorehouses. These gratuitous scenes gave jobs to a lot of young female extras willing to stand around topless. According to one reviewer, Venetian prostitutes were required by law to walk around showing off the merchandise because of the "rampant homosexuality" of the era. I read that statement over a few times, and still couldn't figure out how it would have worked, if it was indeed some sort of law. I mean, was it because there were lots of men in drag, pretending to be ladies of the evening in the age before surgical implants? Or maybe it was because the authorities thought that a lot of bare-breasted women would deter men from becoming gay? Weird. I suspect that those scenes--and scenery--were just in the film to put a little more sex into a story that was really about other, less titillating things. Like justice, and human community, and loyalty.

I know. Dullsville.

The courtroom scene is the heart of the film, as it is in the play. It really lets Pacino do his moral outrage thing, a la And Justice For All--when Shylock says "Fie upon your law!" (a line that isn't in the play), I couldn't help but hear a younger Al yelling "You're out of order! The whole court is out of order!"

That's the problem with famous actors playing (more) famous roles--their resumes tend to get in the way of the performance.

In the courtroom, everything is literalized. When Bassanio offers Shylock three times the money Antonio borrowed, he brings in a chest full of gold. When Shylock reminds the Christians that they keep slaves, the camera cuts to a rich guy with an African slave. Just in case we don't believe him.

Bassanio, I should point out, is played by Joseph Fiennes--the same guy who played the neurotic Will in the popular, Oscar-winning Shakespeare in Love. I have to confess I really disliked that movie. There was something annoyingly smug about it. And I guess the imagined private lives of my favorite authors just don't interest me much.

I'm in the minority, I realize. More on this in the future, when I tackle the messy Authorship Question.

Anyway, the courtroom scene is set up like a rowdy football (soccer) match, with the Christian and Jewish contingents yelling at one another, and lots of unpleasant cheering when Shylock gets his come-uppance. Portia-as-Balthasar looked pretty good (see pic), but totally sounded like a woman. This reminded me of a funny thing in the play. When Portia gets back from her fake lawyer gig, Lorenzo hears her before he sees her. And recognizes her voice! "That is the voice," he says, "or I am much deceived, of Portia."

And Bassanio, her putative soulmate, didn't notice a thing during the whole trial. Hmm.

I dig the little goatee.

Ms. Collins, as I pointed out earlier, doesn't really get Shakespeare--her Portia looks great, and is clever-seeming, but there's something missing there. The "Quality of Mercy" speech sounds like she's reading it before her high school class--but really, it's so cliched that it's hard to make it sound fresh, I think. Like about a third of Hamlet's speeches. She completely misreads--or mis-speaks--the "tarry a little" part. That should be said with deadly quiet. I about jumped off the couch when she shouted it at the top of her lungs.

The pretended sacrifice of Antonio is done with all the suspense you'd expect in a Hollywood film. Antonio weeps in fear, and later, in relief. It's awful to watch.

But the most moving moments in the film are Shylock's. He crumbles with admirable restraint (for Pacino) when he realizes he's lost the case, and everything else that matters to him. At the end, he's broken and so alone it makes you want to cry. Even if you never cry at movies.

But the dad thing probably played a role in the waterworks, too.

The Venetians retreat to Belmont to forget what bastards they've been. Jessica is subdued, and we later find out why. The "ring game" between the Belmont women and their men seems hollow, and not at all funny. In a pretty big deviation from the play, Antonio never gets his money back. He ends up solitary and excluded at the end, too--and we last see him fishing on Belmont Lake (or whatever it's called), all alone as the happy couples consummate their nuptials. From a modern perspective, he's as alien as Shylock. The Jew and the gay man, left out of the happy Christian-hetero ending. Jess is there, too, looking out over the lake and twisting her mother's ring around her finger. Missing her dad.

I'm still choked up.

The most important thing you can say about this film is that it is in no way a comedy. Nothing funny about it at all. It's tragic, in the way Othello is tragic. That is to say, a modern way. It's a tragedy of a man so oppressed by history, by hypocrisy and bigotry, that he loses his own humanity. It's about the banality of evil (yeah, I know some people hate that phrase, but I think it's because they hate Hannah Arendt), and the ways people can justify just about anything to themselves. It's about the stuff that's left over when all those justifications and exclusions have been nicely knit up and agreed upon.

Human remains.

So, I guess my assessment would be this. The movie isn't Shakespeare--and not only because of the language. It's erased all the ambivalence and irony that inhabits The Merchant. But it's still entertaining on its own terms. And it looks gorgeous. Venice without the reek! I guess one could make an analogy there--the film has cleansed the play of the stink of equivocation...

Well, that's all I have to say about that. I think I'll go call my dad now.

Happy Shakespeare Day

2010-04-23T19:41:00.002-04:00

I feel obliged to point out that today might have been William Shakespeare's birthday. He was baptized on April 26th, 1564. It is assumed by some (and contested by others) that in those days, baptisms in the Church of England took place three days after a child's birth. It's known that Shakespeare did die on April 23rd, 1616, so the symmetry of it all was probably hard to resist. That and the fact that the 23rd is also the Feast of St. George, mythical dragon-slayer and patron saint of England. Lacking any hard evidence for the Bard's birth on this day, and reluctant to celebrate something as morbid as a deathday, I'll just call it Shakespeare Day.

My intention was to get up a long post about The Authorship Controversy today, tracing the whole history of the anti-Stratfordians--supporters of Bacon, Marlowe, or Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford. But I just finished two longish posts this week, and I'm not really ready to get all into it right now. So, I promise this post will be forthcoming, after I finish the two Merchant of Venice films and before I start anything else. Somewhere in there there will also be a hiatus while I--as has become my wont--consider the future of this blog, given its, um, rather modest readership and my limited time.

So, happy Shakespeare day. Even if you don't believe he wrote all these marvelous plays, narrative poems and sonnets, the guy must have had some excellent karma to get the credit, don't you think? Personally, I'm a traditionalist. And the undercurrent of snobbery in the arguments of many of these nay-sayers annoys me. What really seems to bother them is that William Shakespeare simply lacks the proper pedigree. Keats wasn't an aristocrat, either, and his poetry still leaves Byron's in the dust.

Well. I'll get into that later. For now, light a candle for the Bard, whoever he was. His work continues to teach us that evil exists, but courage matters. That pain is unavoidable, but not unendurable. And that our greatest gift is not reason, or even imagination, but love.

Shylock's Ghost

2010-04-22T22:43:00.008-04:00

My last post bugged me. At first I wasn't sure why--but then I realized it was because I had to write it, to finish up the play. I resented leaving Act 4 behind, resented writing about the happy ending--even if, as I claimed, it wasn't happy at all--and felt that I'd been forced to leave the trial scene too soon. My post--or rather my discomfort with it--echoed the whole discordant vibe of Act 5.

And besides that, it was way too long. I've been trying to keep them shorter, but I think I just wanted to deal with Act 5 in one go. Because you know, I've never really liked it as an ending. I hate that the Venetians get to retreat into romantic comedy-land after their unjust, hypocritical actions in Act 4. I'm always reminded, somehow, of Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, that old high school warhorse. At the end, Nick describes Daisy and Tom Buchanan in terms that seem apt here, too:

They were careless people, Tom and Daisy--they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.

Different story, obviously, but that "type" is pretty transhistorical. The Venetians are like that--extravagant, expansive, attractive, bigoted.

And I just don't want to let them have the last word.

Shylock haunts Act 5, although he's never mentioned by name. Because he's more or less erased from the play, I want to give him a voice in the last act. I refuse to let the Venetians off so easily.

The whole discussion of music, for example, seems directed at Shylock the music-hater. Lorenzo's musings on the pacifying power of music make little sense otherwise. Jessica, moreover, seems to have some ambivalence on the subject--a melancholic response that reminds us of her father:

Jessica: I am never merry when I hear sweet music.

Lorenzo: The reason is your spirits are attentive,
For do but note a wild and wanton herd
Or race of youthful and unhandled colts,
Fetching mad bounds, bellowing and neighing loud,
Which is the hot condition of their blood,
If they but hear a trumpet sound,
Or any air of music touch their ears,
You shall perceive them make a mutual stand,
Their savage eyes turned to a modest gaze
By the sweet power of music. Therefore the poet
Did feign than Orpheus drew trees, stones, and floods,
Since naught so stockish, hard, and full of rage
But music for the time doth change his nature.

"Music hath charms to soothe the savage breast, soften rocks, or bend a knotted oak," in other words. That's not Will, by the way. It's William Congreve, a playwright of the late 17th century. But it's the same sentiment. And who but Shylock could be so "stockish, hard, and full of rage" that music can't "change his nature?"

The Venetians are big on nature-changing. As I discussed in previous posts, they're sort of proto-Americans that way. We're a country that's all about re-invention. Capitalism thrives on it, and Christianity promises it. Those two great ideologies of the modern era found fertile ground here, in this land where we wear history so lightly. History's full of moral ambiguities, and we're not big on those. We like change, and memory always seems to get in the way of that, doesn't it? Personally and politically.

The ghost of Shylock, the ghost of history in the modern world. That kind of works for me as an analogy.

If Shylock is hard and immutable, Belmont is a protean place, like the fairy woods in A Midsummer Night's Dream. Portia's rather like Oberon--a stage director and music lover. She's not a real woman, after all--so she might as well be made of fairy dust. "If a woman live to be a man," anything is possible.

That phrase is repeated three times in Act 5, like a magical incantation. It means, "if a woman should grow up to be a man." It's funny, because all these boys who are playing women will grow up to be men. It's supposed to mean something like "when pigs fly," but in Will's theatrical world, pigs can fly. Men can be women and women can be men--sometimes men can be women who pretend to be men. Theatrical Belmont is a place full of possibility.

And infidelity. The dark side of a protean nature. A chameleon never will be true. The last lines of the play--given to the virulent anti-Semite, Graziano--say it all:

...while I live I'll fear no other thing
So sore as keeping safe Nerissa's ring.

Good luck with that. Nerissa, like all the denizens of beautiful Belmont, likes change, so her "ring" may be difficult to keep. It's a creepy way for the play to end, in some ways. It leads into Othello-land--jealous husbands, mythically unfaithful wives. Nothing is certain, no one can truly be trusted.

And Shylock? He's a stony guy. Unmoved by music, unwilling to forgive. A steward of the past--he remembers every slight, every insult, every gob of Christian spit on his beard. But one senses there's loyalty in him--were one able to win it.

Yes, I finally have to admit it. I identify with this guy! Maybe it's because, at this stage of life, shape-shifting holds no appeal for me. Truth be told, it never did. I've kind of always been the same. If you look at pictures of me thirty years ago, I look...the same. Younger, yes. Prettier, certainly. More innocent, naturally. But it's still very recognizably me. I've worn my hair the same since the first grade. I'm like that inside, too. I can read something I wrote in high school, and still hear my own voice. I don't like change. Or surprises. I always read the end of a book first. If I don't like the ending, I won't read the book. I imagine Shylock like that, too.

I don't like this ending, but it's too late to un-read it. I guess I'll just complain about it, instead!

I know he's not a nice guy. He's a master grudge-holder. And guess what? That's one of my major failings, too! It comes with the Sicilian DNA, I guess. Although I don't think I would be capable of cutting a pound of flesh off my enemy's chest--not really into blood and gore. But could Shylock have done it? He stalks around the stage with a butcher knife in his hand, and we're supposed to believe him capable of any ferocity, any barbarism. But I wonder.

At the end of Act 4, Shylock's been--paradoxically--exiled from himself, and assimilated into the Christian community. But really, he's dead. He said it himself. "You do take my life." He's got no future, and he's cut off from his past, his cultural history. So, dead.

I have to say, I know how that feels. When you've been exiled from the tribe you ought to belong to--be it your birth tribe, or your professional one--it's like being dead, at least to the people who are still active tribe members. You might, say, drop them an occasional email--say, about something you've been writing that you're pleased with--and they will, inevitably, be polite, a bit cold, and very uneasy. Because you're supposed to be dead! Don't you know that? How dare you lurk around like some creepy revenant!

And so my sympathies will always be with Shylock, not with Portia. Yes, I see Portia as the enemy, not Antonio. Not because I'm one of those "blame the woman" fake feminists. No, because Portia is totally alienated from her own motives, yet smugly self-righteous about her ill-considered actions. And, unlike Antonio, she's smart enough to know better.

It's not fair she gets the best speech in the play, even if it's ironic. Because no one remembers the context, just the speech. Interestingly, she knows how important context is. "Many things by season seasoned are/To their right praise and true perfection," she says in Act 5. I've never known exactly how to take that, but it seems important. I think it implies something like "things that seem ugly and reprehensible in one context can be really cool in others." A true moral relativist, our Portia.

Shylock, of course, is one of the great Shakespearean roles--right up there with Richard III, Lear, Hamlet, and Othello. He's the one we come to see. He's the one we remember long afterward. And all the pretty music in Belmont can't silence his voice, or erase him from our memory.

Next: Al Pacino, Shylock, and my dad! Yes, the Bard Blog goes to the movies.

For Love or Money

2010-04-20T20:34:00.008-04:00

The final act of The Merchant can't help but be anticlimactic. Act 4 was dominated by Big Issues--justice, mercy, retribution, hypocrisy. Act 5 is pretty straightforward romantic comedy, albeit with a bitter aftertaste. It's hard to downshift so radically--from high drama to light banter. As recently as the 19th century, most productions didn't even include the fifth act, and it's easy to see why. It hangs onto the rest of the play like a tenuous afterthought, a discordant, awkward attempt to gloss over everything that went before. Shylock is gone, but the ugliness of the trial scene lingers, and the questions that were raised earlier in the play--about the relationship between love and commerce, and (by implication) Bassanio's commitment to his heiress wife--return with a vengeance.

The play ends with three ostensibly happy couples, but they all seem doomed to misery. Each woman doubts the quality of her husband's love, and with good reason. Lorenzo and Jessica's marriage was built on betrayal and theft--no wonder all they can think about are tragic analogues to their own situation. Analogues in which the women bear the brunt of the misery. Like some of the couples they invoke--Aeneas and Dido, Jason and Medea--they come from two different cultures. And Jessica--like Portia--has got to wonder how much her erotic allure has been enhanced by Daddy's money. Lorenzo's teasing remark makes it explicit:

In such a night
Did Jessica steal from the wealthy Jew,
And with an unthrift love did run from Venice
As far as Belmont.

It's kind of a creepy thing for him to say--adding Jessica to that list of notorious erotic losers. And bringing money into it, too--although "steal" can mean "run away from," the other meaning is clearly intended as well. Her love is "unthrift"--excessive. Perhaps in relation to his? There's an undercurrent of anxiety in Jess's reply:

In such a night
Did young Lorenzo swear he loved her well,
Stealing her soul with many vows of faith,
And ne'er a true one.

Lorenzo teasingly berates her for the "slander," but the issue has been raised, and it's going to color the entire last movement of the play.

Comedy, remember, is all about community. The happy ending of a comic romance is a social promise, in investment in the future. In other words, comic couples have to live happily ever after so that they can make (legitimate) babies. Communities must be fertile.

But the specter of barrenness haunts all of Will's plays. Remember Juliet's predecessor, Rosaline, and her icy chastity, Hamlet's refusal of Ophelia, the stark lifelessness of Lear's heath, Richard's England, sick and unfruitful. Tragic catharsis--usually involving a lot of dead bodies--is necessary to restore fertility to the land. But it has no place in comedy. Comedy's all about love, and sex, and channeling erotic energies in the right direction. Heterosexual love, as it's understood here, is a stand against sterility.

Um, no naughty pun intended.

I Bought Him, He's Mine.

Both Antonio and Portia can make that claim about Bassanio, can't they? But this whole fruitful community thing leaves Antonio, and his homoerotic passion for the B-boy, out in the frozen tundra. It has to, because this "tainted wether" is a threat to the future. How big a threat? It's pretty clear his love for Bassanio is more than platonic. Whether those feelings are returned or not is open to argument, but Will wants us to wonder. Solanio says in Act 2 that Antonio "loves the world only for" Bassanio. After Shylock calls in the bond, Antonio asks only that "Bassanio come to see" his debt paid--i.e., to see Antonio die for him. And then, most telling of all, Bassanio interrupts the trial to proclaim his loyalty to his friend:

Antonio, I am married to a wife
Which is as dear to me as life itself,
But life itself, my wife, and all the world
Are not with me esteemed above thy life.
I would lose all, ay, sacrifice them all
Here to this devil, to deliver you.

Portia, disguised as Balthasar, is not impressed. She remarks in an aside that

Your wife would give you little thanks for that
If she were by to hear you make the offer.

Graziano, not to be outdone, makes a similar boast, prompting a veiled threat from Nerissa. These imprudent remarks lead into the "ring game" at the end of the play. The ring represents the bond (and I use that word on purpose) between Portia/Nerissa and their husbands, but it also has a more salacious meaning, which is made explicit at the end of the play--a woman's ring on a man's finger represents sexual consummation.

Think about it, and you'll see what I mean.

Bassanio's gushy avowal triggers Portia's rich girl insecurities--so, as Balthasar, she demands the ring she's given her husband as a legal fee. When B. wavers, remembering his promise to his wife (that he'd wear the ring till he dies), Antonio steps in and forces the issue.

It's pretty obvious that the whole joke centers around whether a man or a woman is going to get the ring, which (I think) is now associated with Bassanio, not Portia.

How can I explain this without being too graphic? Hmm. In the interest of maintaining this blog's PG-13 rating, I'll just say that the contest seems to be about where Bassanio's sexual loyalties lie. With a man (Balthasar) or a woman (Portia). That the two are one and the same diffuses a potentially explosive situation, and keeps everything safely within the family-friendly realm of comedy. But really, it's a pretty subversive moment.

As for Bassanio himself, he's pretty much a cipher throughout--a beta male, as we say these days. Even his name has a lowly ring to it, doesn't it? One imagines him to be very good-looking, exceedingly charming, with excellent manners and a lighthearted way about him. A perfect foil to those two melancholic alphas--the rich, aging merchant and the witty but neurotic heiress. He's married Portia for her money--now the only remaining question is who gets his heart. Or, to put it more cynically, he's spent some years as Antonio's boy toy--now he has to decide if he wants to be Portia's exclusively.

I Will Have My Ring

So how does Portia handle this erotic power struggle? Pretty brilliantly, but with a heavy dose of irony, too. Basically she re-enacts the whole trial scene, with the ring, rather than the bond, at the center of it all. And she's pretty mean to Antonio, too, as befits a rival.

From the moment she arrives home to Belmont, it's clear she's in a bitchy mood:

This night, methinks, is but the daylight sick.
It looks a little paler. 'Tis a day
Such as the day is when the sun is hid.

No romantic moonlight for her. The night's no more than a sickly day. When Bassanio arrives with Antonio, she immediately brings up the possibility of her infidelity. Not exactly what a new husband wants to hear, especially after he's given her an effusive compliment linking her radiance to the sun:

We should hold day with the Antipodes
If you would walk in absence of the sun.

You're so radiantly lovely that you could make the sun shine all night and day, he says. Her reply is sour, and even embarrassing, considering Bassanio's brought a guest:

Let me give light but let me be not light;
For a light wife doth make a heavy husband,
And never be Bassanio so for me.
But God sort all. You are welcome home, my lord.

A light wife--a wife of easy virtue--makes her husband sad. I hope never to make Bassanio sad, but it's all in God's hands (not mine). You can almost see Bassanio and Antonio exchange a confused look here. Her greeting to the latter is just short of rude:

Sir, you are very welcome to our house.
It must appear in other ways that words,
Therefore I scant this breathing courtesy.

I'll show you you're welcome by inviting you into my fancy home. I can't be bothered with courtesy.

And then the fun begins. Nerissa opens the "ring question," and Portia follows up with her own query. When it's clear Bassanio doesn't have the ring, she insists that she'll never consummate the marriage until she sees it again. From Bassanio's point of view, the ring becomes the snake in their paradisal garden, a fly in the ointment of love, a spanner in the connubial works...you get the picture.

And speaking of pictures, isn't that a cool snake ring, on the right? I want it. Since the image came from Christie's, however, I'm guessing it's out of my price range. Ah, well.

For Portia, the ring takes on the importance of "the bond" for Shylock; she repeats her magic word over and over, just as Shylock did:

If you had known the virtue of the ring,
Of half her worthiness that gave the ring,
Or your own honour to contain the ring,
You would not then have parted with the ring.

She goes on to interpret the ring literally, as the body part it supposedly signifies. Since you say you gave the ring to a man, she says, I guess I'll just feel free to give him the rest of me, too.

I'll not deny him anything I have,
No, not my body nor my husband's bed.
Antonio, embarrassed, makes the truest statement of the evening:

I am th'unhappy subject of these quarrels.

Damn right. Bassanio begs her forgiveness, and Antonio adds his voice to the plea, in terms that recall the trial once again:

.... I dare be bound again,
My soul upon the forfeit, that your lord
Will never more break faith advisedly.

This time he offers his soul, not his body. It's what Portia's been waiting for--Antonio's promise that he'll step out of the picture:

Then you shall be his surety.

You'll guarantee the payment/fulfillment of his promise. Just as you did for Shylock's loan, only now the stakes are spiritual, and thus much higher.

Game over. Portia's crushed her opponent by tricking him into making a sacred oath--to protect her marriage! This is one smart cookie.

Now that she's got everything the way she wants it, she can afford to be nice. She reveals the masquerade, tells Antonio that, by the way, she has a letter in her possession reporting that all his ships came in, and he's rich again! Ta-da! Happy ending, right? Antonio's response is heavy with irony:

Sweet lady, you have given me life and living...

Surely we're meant to hear an echo of Shylock's lament here: "you take my life/When you do take the means whereby I live."

Portia giveth, and Portia taketh away. Antonio's got his money back, but he's still the odd man out of all this conjugal merriment. And given what Portia's made him promise, one could imagine him saying these grateful words through gritted teeth, not unlike Shylock's "I am content."

In the end, both the Merchant and the Moneylender remain outside the comedic community, exiled from the circle of reconciliation. They're men without progeny, with no purchase on the future. Portia, for all intents and purposes the director of these happy proceedings, has put them both in their place. Brilliantly.

Next: Last thoughts on Shylock, slippery gender roles, and all the rest.

Belmont By Night

2010-04-16T23:20:00.008-04:00

The Merchant of Venice ends in darkness. I'm reminded of the end of Romeo and Juliet--"The sun for sorrow will not show his face." And yet, Act 5 is all about reconciliation--husbands and wives reunited, fortunes recovered, and all the rest of the stuff that constitutes a happy ending. It's all good. So why does Will set this final scene at night?

Night, as we saw in R & J, is the time of fantasy, eroticism, romance. It's when poetry triumphs over history, and love is all that matters. It's a purely theatrical construct, too--remember that Elizabethan dramas were all performed in the afternoon. So "night" was wholly imaginary on the stage--like women.

Not only does the play end at night--it ends in Belmont, which, as we've seen, is supposed to be the "anti-Venice." Where Venice is about deal-making and cutthroat business dealings, Belmont is an altogether softer place, more feminine and less real. Think Manhattan as opposed to, say, Cape Cod. But it's strange that Will decided to end the play here. In other comedies, the fifth act represents a return to the real world. The Forest of Arden in As You Like It, the fairy woods in A Midsummer Night's Dream, and the "little academe" of Love's Labour's Lost are all temporary, somewhat dreamy places. The characters retreat to these magical otherworlds in order to sort out their romantic and social issues, before emerging wiser and properly paired up at the end.

But The Merchant of Venice ends with a retreat from reality. As if the play, and the characters, are hiding in the dark, ashamed to face the daylight.

Act 5 begins with Lorenzo and Jessica, who were completely absent during the trial scene, and thus, presumably, innocent of its excesses. They're in Romeo and Juliet mode, waxing poetical about famous literary lovers. The language is lovely, so let's just listen in for a bit:

Lorenzo: The moon shines bright. In such a night as this,
When the sweet wind did gently kiss the trees
And they did make no noise--in such a night,
Troilus, methinks, mounted the Trojan walls,
And sighed his soul toward the Grecian tents
Where Cresseid lay that night.

Kissing wind and sighing souls. Etymologically, poetic inspiration is a breathy thing. To be "inspired" is to be breathed upon by the gods. Jessica gets into the inspired spirit of things:

Jessica: In such a night
Did Thisbe fearfully o'ertrip the dew,
And saw the Lion's shadow ere himself,
And ran dismayed away.

I see your Ovidian tale, says Lorenzo, and I raise you one Great Latin Epic:

Lorenzo: In such a night
Stood Dido with a willow in her hand
Upon the sea banks, and waft her love
To come again to Carthage.

Well, I see your spurned Queen, and give you--a child-murdering witch!

Jessica: In such a night
Medea gathered the enchanted herbs
That did renew old Aeson.

Funny that Jess would choose a daughter/father-in-law story, since she betrayed her dad and stole his money. Ah, love.

What's odd is that all these stories ended really badly. Cressida was a Trojan noblewoman who was traded to the Greeks during the Trojan war, and cheated on her lover, Troilus, with another guy. The Troilus/Cressida story had been famous since Chaucer's time (late 14th century), and was often invoked as an example of faithlessness in love. So it's odd in this context. Sort of like modern lovers comparing themselves to those legendary exemplars of undying passion, Charles and Diana.

The story of Pyramus and Thisbe is also jarring, since it ends in a bloodbath, a la Romeo and Juliet. In some ways, the story is really about the perils of bad crime scene investigation. Owing to a misinterpretation of evidence--in this case, Thisbe's bloody scarf--the star-crossed lovers commit suicide. Will uses the tale to comic effect in A Midsummer Night's Dream, but it's not supposed to be funny here.

Lorenzo then lauds the fidelity of Queen Dido, who was abandoned by her lover Aeneas, and killed herself in a fit of grief and self-loathing. I wrote a little about this story before beginning my series of posts on Romeo and Juliet. The Dido/Aeneas story was told in Book 4 of Virgil's epic The Aeneid. It was kind of a subplot there--Virgil's tale was really about the founding of Rome. Nevertheless the Dido story is the most "modern" bit in Virgil's epic, and the only part normal people (i.e., those who didn't waste their youth reading dead Latin poets) remember today, thanks to Purcell's opera. It's a great story, but definitely a downer.

The final allusion, to Medea, is off-the-charts weird. Medea is one of those evil sorceress types from classical lore who later, during the "her-story" movement of the 1970's, metamorphosed (yeah, that's an Ovid joke) into a feminist heroine. You know, representing an originary matriarchal culture at war with the Evil World of Men. That kind of silly, delusional feminism has always creeped me out, I have to say. And anyway, I wouldn't pick Medea for my mytho-feminist poster girl. She was a very bad witch and a super bad mom. She appeared in lots of poems and plays, so her wickedness must have had wide appeal. Especially to men, who for several thousand years had sole responsibility for making stuff up and writing it down.

Here's her story, synthesized and abridged. Medea uses her magical powers to help Jason win the golden fleece, on the condition that he marry her. In some versions, the goddess Hera makes her fall in love with him, but no matter. Jason gets the fleece, they marry and have a couple of kids. She further helps Jason by getting rid of an uncle, Pelias, who wanted the fleece for himself. How does she do this? Well, it's pretty grisly. She tricks Pelias's daughters into thinking they can make Daddy young again. The trick works this way: she slits the throat of Jason's dad, Aeson (the guy Jessica mentions), then boils him in a pot, and then, via enchantment, he jumps out, minus about 50 years!

They totally don't make stories like they used to.

Anyway, she tells Pelias's daughters that they can have a youthful dad if they do the same to him. So, to show Daddy how much they love him, they hack him up and toss him in a pot of boiling water. But, uh-oh, Medea has taken her husband and teenage father-in-law and left town. And all the king's daughters can't put Daddy back together again. Later, Jason decides he wants another wife, and dumps Medea. Very bad idea. She's so mad at him, she kills their sons to get back at him. In some versions, she boils them up in a stew and serves them up to Jason with some fava beans and a nice Chianti. Then, after he's told her how great the meal was, she gives him the ingredient list. For real.

Bottom line: none of these couples were really good newlywed role models. They mostly end up dead in bad ways. The stories, like the setting of Act 5, are all pretty dark.

The Medea story does have some resonance for our tale, however. After Bassanio successfully completed the Casket Challenge, back in Act 3, Graziano exulted that "we are the Jasons; we have won the fleece." By which he meant Portia's money.

There's that sheep thing again! This play has a sheep fetish--tainted wethers, sacrificial lambs, and priceless wool. Hmm. Somewhere, a student is probably writing a paper entitled "The Significance of Sheep in Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice."

I will leave it to them to unravel this woolly mystery. I hope it has a biographical angle. Maybe the real Shakespeare was neither Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe, nor Edward de Vere. Maybe he was a shepherd! Maybe if we look closely, we'll find sheepish hints hiding in every play! And a new field of study will be born.

It's clearly time to wrap this up.

Anyway. Lorenzo and Jessica retreat from the real world of commerce, taking refuge in love and literature--but their analogies are all about misreading, betrayal, and death. It's as if all the bad stuff in Act 4 is still lurking somewhere, infiltrating everyone's poetry and casting a pall over the happy ending.

You can run, but you can't hide.

Next: Portia gets mean again, but it's all okay in the end.

Poetic Justice

2010-04-13T00:09:00.008-04:00

I've been thinking about irony. Irony is subtle. Otherwise it wouldn't be irony; it would be, well, obvious. Irony is like the consolation prize you get when something bad happens and you realize that it fits nicely into a rather bleak picture you hadn't seen until that moment. Losers love irony--winners are too busy being successful to sit around and muse about how ironic everything is. That's why irony is the favorite trope of literary critics and other socially marginal types. Overeducated and underemployed people positively wallow in irony. They tend to be politically liberal, these irony-wallowers, and often (but not always) drink a bit too much.

That's why it's good for chronically ironical people to have kids. Kids don't live life at a distance, and thus can't do irony. They remind you that life isn't about pattern recognition. Being a mom totally saved me from a life corroded by irony.

But to be a good reader of literature, it still comes in handy.

The Merchant is chock-full of Ironic Moments. Here's a good one. In Act 3, before Bassanio correctly picks the lead casket and wins the marriage lottery, he reasons through his choice this way:

The world is still deceived with ornament.
In law, what plea is so tainted and corrupt
But, being seasoned with a gracious voice,
Obscures the show of evil?

Yes, what plea indeed? Perhaps one that continually repeats the word "mercy" as a preamble to showing absolutely none. Bassanio's musing on deception becomes ironic in light of Portia's speechifying on mercy's fine qualities. In fact, she even uses some of the same language, when she talks about mercy "seasoning" justice. Her voice is certainly gracious, her words eloquent, their sentiments sublime. But they're a smokescreen, ultimately, obscuring the show of injustice.

So as I'm thinking about this, I realize that I'm assuming, have assumed all along, that Will was fully in control of all this irony. That the play itself is ironic, not just my reading of it. Do you see the difference? The play is either ironic at the root, ironic because Will wanted us to see the hypocrisy of the Christians. Or, it's only ironic from the reader/audience's perspective. If this is the case, then Will really was anti-Semitic, and Shylock is a two-dimensional villain rather than a victim. Either Will made him a scapegoat, to show us something about hypocrisy, or he scapegoated him, for the sake of the drama. And because he didn't like Jews.

Obviously I think it's the former, but the latter reading works, too. The Nazis liked it. But then they weren't big on irony.

Hmm. I'll have to think more about this later. But now, back to the problem of justice. When we left off last time, I was considering the Duke's "pardon," whereby Shylock gets to stay alive and lose everything that's important to him. I'll quote that passage again, in case you haven't been thinking about it constantly the last four days, and have forgotten what he said:

That thou shalt see the difference of our spirit,
I pardon thee thy life before thou ask it.
For half thy wealth, it is Antonio's.
The other half comes to the general state,
Which humbleness may drive unto a fine.

The difference of our spirit. The Duke pardons Shylock to prove that the Christian "spirit" isn't a bit like the Jew's. Because, you know, the Venetians are all about mercy, and Shylock isn't. Now let's think about this. The Duke is being merciful by not executing Shylock. But as I discussed last time, Shylock isn't actually guilty of anything. He said it himself, before Portia successfully cloaked retribution in the robes of justice. "What judgement shall I dread," he asked the Duke, "doing no wrong?"

Literally, he hasn't done anything wrong. But in spirit, he's made a lot of missteps. He's violated the unwritten laws of Venice, which state that an alien doesn't have the same rights as a citizen. That's the real difference here--it's a difference that inhabits the spirit of the law, not the letter. Now that Shylock's taken his place as "tainted wether," i.e., scapegoat, Antonio can afford to be magnanimous. Sort of.

So please my lord the Duke and all the court
To quit the fine for one half of his goods,
I am content, so he will let me have
The other half in use, to render it
Upon his death unto the gentleman
That lately stole his daughter.

I like "stole his daughter"--talk about rubbing salt in the wound. And in the context of effectively "stealing" all Shylock's money, too. I should point out that the language isn't exactly clear here. "Quit the fine" can mean either "make him pay" the fine or "waive" the fine. But "in use" most certainly means something like "to invest." "Use" is the root of "usury," remember. Antonio is going to take Shylock's money and make it breed.

Voila! The merchant and the moneylender are now mirror images of one another. Shylock has become the "tainted wether," threatened with death, and Antonio the money-breeder. Not a usurer, precisely, but a user of other people's money.

Wow. That's ironic.

But Antonio isn't done. No, here's the nail in the (purely symbolic) coffin:

Two things provided more: that for this favour
He presently become a Christian;
The other, that he do record a gift
Here in this court of all he dies possessed
Unto his son, Lorenzo, and his daughter.

To prove there is no difference between us, I shall force you to become me. The Duke likes this idea, and threatens Shylock with death if he doesn't accept. Portia does her mean girl thing and turns to Shylock with (I imagine) ill-concealed glee:

Art thou contented, Jew? What dost thou say?

Here's a real test for an actor. Three simple words that have to convey immeasurable loss:

I am content.

Antonio said these words as well, but how different they must sound now. I am content. You have taken everything from me, and now I have to tell you I'm happy about it.

So, wasn't Portia a good lawyer? She saved Antonio from the knife, forced his creditor to forgive the original debt, and then, got him a fortune in punitive damages to "have in use!" Good grief. She's well worth whatever she charged. Wait! You mean she did all that for free? She's not only a good lawyer, she's an excellent human being!

Or not.

When I first stumbled upon the Bad Lawyer's blog, I wrote him a note asking how he intended his readers to understand its title. Being the decadent intellectual sort I am, I assumed the title was ironic. I.e., that he meant, "I'm an ethical person, and therefore a bad lawyer, because most "good" lawyers are unethical. Which I am not." Or, it could mean that he was, in fact, not a very good (capable) practitioner of the law. Or, it could simply mean that he was an unethical lawyer. If you read the blog--which you should--you'll see that he plays around with all those meanings, although I think only the first is true. In that sense, BL's blog is a lot like The Merchant of Venice. It's ironic, it's earnest, and it's self-conscious of the paradox. Which brings me back to Portia. Is she a bad (fake) lawyer, or a good one? I leave you to ponder that question. I'm off to sleep.

Next: The Venetians have a big party with Shylock's money. And the play tries to be funny again.

Winner Takes All

2010-04-08T11:49:00.013-04:00

Today, a special treat! I've been corresponding with my friend and fellow blogger, the Bad Lawyer, about some of the legal implications of the trial scene. We've agreed to post (more or less) simultaneously on the topic. He's written a fascinating and detailed assessment of the legal aspects of the play, keeping in mind, of course, that this is Renaissance theater and not contemporary litigation. I have, as is my wont, been reading the play from a literary/historical perspective, but I also wanted to explore some of the broader legal issues involved. Alas, I'm not really equipped to do that. Or at least not well. So I prevailed upon the Bad Lawyer (hereafter, BL), to help me out. Check out his blog post--and his blog, which is fabulous. It's part legal/cultural commentary, part quasi-Augustinian confession. He's a brave, honest guy, and an insightful cultural reader. Despite his chosen sobriquet, he's no worse, morally speaking, than the rest of us--and a good deal better than many. The Venetians in the play could take lessons in (genuine) humility from him, it seems to me.

I'll comment on some of his observations as this post unfolds.

The Quibble

Tarry a little. There is something else.

So begins Shylock's reversal of fortune. Before Portia speaks these words, everything has been going his way. Or so it seemed. In fact, she's been messing with him big time, like a cat with a doomed mouse. "You must cut this flesh from off his breast," she tells Shylock. "The law allows it, and the court awards it."

He can hardly contain his joy. "Most learned judge!" he exclaims. And then, to Antonio, "Come, prepare."

But not so fast:

This bond doth give thee here no jot of blood.
The words expressly are 'a pound of flesh.'
Take then thy bond. Take thou thy pound of flesh.
But in the cutting it, if thou dost shed
One drop of Christian blood, thy lands and goods
Are by the laws of Venice confiscate
Unto the state of Venice.

This folkloric loophole is called a "quibble," I recently found out. There's a nice little Wikipedia article about it, which my friend BL alerted me to. Wikipedia is great for these little things--on big issues, not so much. (Don't ever look up, say, "Enlightenment Philosophy." We still need libraries for Big Ideas). The article offers other examples of the quibble motif--stories in which someone escapes a potentially lethal legal predicament through an excessively literal reading of the original agreement. So Portia quibbles with the precise terms of the bond, and Shylock is trapped by his own literalism. The Jew then agrees to take three times the original amount, an offer Bassanio had made earlier. Shylock refused it then, but in light of the quibble, changes his mind. Portia says uh-uh. You wanted the bond, now you shall have it. You can almost hear her feline purr:

Soft, the Jew shall have all justice. Soft, no haste.
He shall have nothing but the penalty.
...
Therefore prepare thee to cut off the flesh.
Shed thou no blood, nor cut thou less nor more
But just a pound of flesh. If thou tak'st more
Or less than just a pound, be it but so much
As makes 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,
Thou diest, and all thy goods are confiscate.

Notice how the stakes are higher now. First, he's going to lose all his "lands and goods." Now, he's going to die, too. She's not the secular authority in Venice, so it's hard to see how she has the right to levy a capital punishment. But she's clearly enjoying the power, and it's gone to her head. Shylock then asks for just the principal, the original amount of the loan, but again she refuses. All he's entitled to is his pound of flesh, to be taken at his peril. Beaten, Shylock then turns to go, giving up the case and his money altogether. But our girl isn't done yet:

Tarry, Jew.
The law hath yet another hold on you.
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,
The party 'gainst which he doth contrive
Shall seize one half his goods; the other half
Comes to the privy coffer of the state,
And the offender's life lies in the mercy
Of the Duke only, 'gainst all other voice--
In which predicament I say thou stand'st,
For it appears by manifest proceeding
That indirectly, and directly, too,
Thou hast contrived against the very life
Of the defendant, and thou has incurred
The danger formerly by me rehearsed.
Down, therefore, and beg mercy of the Duke.

Are there any scarier words than "wait, the law's not done with you yet?" It suggests limitless power, against which an individual can do nothing. Except, of course, beg for mercy. This is the passage that prompted me to write BL and ask for some legal insight. Because what Portia is really saying is that Shylock intended to kill Antonio from the word go. That he "contrived"--plotted--to murder him. I simply don't think that's true. I think Shylock reveres the law. He knows that the laws of Venice and of God prohibit murder. He wanted the law to kill Antonio for him. Most of all, he wanted the law on his side for once.

In short, he wished for Antonio's death, but didn't contrive to get it. "Contriving" would have meant he somehow made all Antonio's investments fail in order to ensure his compliance with the terms of the bond. He obviously didn't--couldn't--do that. So Portia, it seems to me, oversteps again.

But, as BL points out in his post, intention is a pretty slippery thing to nail down. And this makes perfect sense. Personally, I'm often alienated from my own intentions. I think I act for one reason, and much later realize that my motive was something quite different.

"It appears by manifest proceeding," she says. It looks for all the world as if you wanted to kill him. This is interpretation; Portia's very good at that. And I have to admire her as a fellow reader. I'm good at that, too. Sometimes too good, according to my husband. In fact, in our last squabble, he pretty much threw up his hands and told me I should have gone to law school.

Ah, the road not taken.

Again, the issue of intention is central to our understanding of this play. Because we all want to know what William Shakespeare, the Immortal Bard and greatest dramatist in English, intended in writing The Merchant. Did he intend to write an anti-Semitic play? Or did are we supposed to read it ironically?

Well, by now you know what I think about that.

"This Gate Was Made Only For You"

That's not a quotation from the play. It's from Kafka's "Before the Law," a parable I've referred to before in conjunction with the juridical implications of this story. Full disclosure: I'm a real Kafka freak. I've read most of his stuff in German and English (the German is pretty easy), and visited his house in Prague. I've linked to the parable, which is really short, because I think it explains something about what happens to Shylock here. Portia says "if it be proved 'gainst any alien" that he has sought "the life of any citizen," his life and goods are forfeit. Shylock's predicament is the result of an inequity that inhabits the law itself. He's an alien, because he's a Jew. No matter how established he may be in Venice, how many generations his people have lived there, he can never be a citizen because he's a Jew. And there are, obviously, separate laws for Jews.

Kafka's status as a Jew in Prague--a city notable for both its Jewish culture and its tradition of antisemitism--doubtless influenced his writing about the law. In the parable, the "man from the country"--an alien, in other words--waits to be admitted to the law. He waits for justice. He waits his entire life, but he's never admitted. At the end of his life, he wonders why no one else ever sought admission at the gate. The gatekeeper explains that "this gate was made only for you." This is your particular justice. There is no universal justice. All men are not equal. The impartiality of the law is a lie.

What Shylock has been after from the beginning is this: he wants the law to be universally applicable. Because the Christians trade in human flesh--slaves--he sees no problem with his pound of flesh demand. Because slaves are human, as Jews are. They are no different from the Christian aristocracy. What applies in one case should apply in all. There should only be one gate, one justice.

Failing this, he wants to reveal the hypocrisy of his enemies. "If a Jew wrong a Christian," he asks in Act 3, "what is his humility?" Where is the mercy they are always talking about? Where is their vaunted compassion?

It lies dormant in the land of rhetoric. In other words, it's a pose.

As BL points out in his post, Jewish law is much more equitable. In Leviticus 19: 34, God enjoins his chosen people to treat strangers as equals:

When a stranger sojourns with you in your land, you shall not do him wrong. The stranger who sojourns with you shall be to you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself; for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.

Judaism is not a missionary religion. You won't have Jews coming to your door trying to convert you. Jews realized from the beginning that they would have to coexist with people of other customs and beliefs, and so were careful to establish laws for dealing with these others. Christians, on the other hand, have a troubled history on this whole coexistence thing. Christianity is more like the Borg, in the old Star Trek: The Next Generation. All must be assimilated. Resistance is futile.

Exaggeration, but with some truth.

One of the creepiest parts of the play is when the Duke puts on his holier-than-thou hat and addresses the defeated Jew with these sanctimonious and thoroughly hypocritical words:

That thou shalt see the difference of our spirit,
I pardon thee thy life before thou ask it.
For half thy wealth, it is Antonio's.
The other half comes to the general state,
Which humbleness may drive unto a fine.

The difference of our spirit, indeed. This is ironic on so many levels, it's hard to know where to start. So I think I'll save that discussion for next time.

Next: The care and feeding of scapegoats

World Without End

2010-04-04T12:19:00.006-04:00

Today is Easter. It's an old holiday, older than Christianity--the pagan feast honored Ostara, the goddess of spring. Ancient peoples needed to celebrate spring, because winters were hard, and usually one emerged from them having lost a lot. Children born in winter often didn't make it, old people (and for much of history, a person my age was considered old) relinquished their fragile hold on life, and farmers whose fall harvest hadn't measured up to expectations often starved. Things are different now, but we're still grateful when the ice melts. In spring, we celebrate what remains, and begin again. New lambs, new growth, new possibilities.

Passover celebrates this, too. Those who were spared the wrath of God, and of the elements.

But Easter is a Christian holiday, and that's what I wanted to write about today. If you've been reading this blog with any regularity, you'll have ascertained that I've read my Bible, and I've studied religious history. I'm not a theologian, but I am a medievalist, which is sort of like a watered-down religious historian. I've said little about my own faith here, and I'm not going to start now, because I'm a contemplative sort--more Mary than Martha, if you remember that story--and I believe that faith grows best in the quiet places of the human heart.

But I do want to think, and write, about how Shakespeare understands Christianity. Christians come off pretty poorly in The Merchant of Venice, as I've discussed. But I don't think that means Will was anti-Christian, or a secularist. Yes, the Venetian Christians are hypocrites, and they don't practice what they preach. Those of us who grew up Catholic are confronted daily with this spiritual dissonance. About the scandals that are once again shaking the moral foundation of the Vatican, I will say--or rather quote--only this:

But whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea.
Matthew 18:6.

I think we're going to need quite a few of those millstones.

But what do the plays tell us about Christianity? In order to address (but not answer) that question, we have to think about death. Hamlet is perhaps Will's most enduring and explicit meditation on faith, so it's a good place to start. Hamlet worries about death. It cuts into his rationalist world-view and stops time. He's just back from college, full of philosophical rationalizations and scientific questions. He believes in reason.

And then he sees a ghost. Imagine it. You're, say a budding physicist. You believe in what your senses tell you. Empiricism all the way. And then your father dies, and you're wondering about death. What is it? Where do dead people really go? Are we just molecules, or is there something else? You've just about rationalized this whole thing, when...your dead father appears to you, all ghosty-looking and muttering about vengeance. Conjuring up old stories, ancient ideas that you, in your scientific smugness, had dismissed as mere superstition.

There are more things in heaven and earth than are written about in college textbooks. Lots more.

So Hamlet becomes an extended question. Or series of questions. What dreams may come when we've shuffled off this mortal coil? Is sweet religion just a meaningless rhapsody of words? What does social hierarchy mean when a king may go a progress through the guts of a beggar?

In the end, there are no answers. A man's life is no more than to say "one." In the cosmic scheme of things, our lives last as long as one breath. So there isn't enough time for all our questions to be answered. We've gotta just go for it, even without certainty. We have to defy augury--to believe in free will--but also, paradoxically, remember that there's a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. We are free, but we are part of a plan, too. It makes no sense rationally, but it's no less true for all that.

In King Lear, Will worries about community. All the best people end up wandering the heath, homeless, while the worst take over the world. Sometimes things seem like that, don't they? It's a bleak vision, and a paranoid one, too--Lear has trouble distinguishing his own pain from everyone else's. But mostly it's about hierarchy, and what it means. What is honorable service? What is a ruler? A father? There's a lot of angry misogyny in this play--the evils done by Lear's two wicked daughters are linked to the moral failings of Woman. There's a strong thread of antifeminism in Christianity, and Lear makes a whole world out of it. But there's hope, too, and it's a Christian kind of hope. Edmund is a character made in the Machiavellian tradition of Richard, or Iago, or Don John. He's a man who proclaims his own desires as his only god. And yet, at the end of his life, he repents. "Some good I mean to do," he says, dying, "despite of mine own nature."

None of these other evil men--or women--are capable of repentance. It's a radical idea. A Christian idea. The last shall be first.

And then there's that final, sublime image of Lear holding his dead daughter in his arms--a Pieta in reverse. The woman as Christ figure. She won't be resurrected, but he still believes. "Look on her, look, her lips! Look there!"

We need faith. We need to believe in a world without end. We need the expansiveness of the Venetians, their sense of the limitless--even if they can't measure up to it. We need to believe in mercy, un(con)strained. Portia is a poor Virgin Mary, and Antonio a flawed Christ figure. They're fallen people in a fallen world. But they're adventurers, risk-takers, believers in the infinite. And you have to admire that, at least.

Today is a beautiful, sunny day in my part of the globe. It's warm, but the air has that cool edge I always associate with spring. My dog is blissed out, running around like a wild thing. There are ducks on my pond, male and female. Some days life is so good, it can't just be an accident.

Happy Easter, Passover, and Ostara.

Down By Law

2010-04-03T15:55:00.007-04:00

It's been a week since my last post, and this time I can't blame my own health. I've been in Florence Nightingale mode all week, taking care of a sick kid and a sick husband. Things seem to have stabilized, so I hope to post at least a couple more times in the next week. We're really getting to the heart of Act 4 now--two more posts should do it, I think.

In the trial scene, Shylock gets his comeuppance. And then some. As we'll see, the quality of mercy isn't only strained, it's positively suffocated to death.

But first, a few more thoughts on the problem of similarity and difference.

My Enemy, Myself

On the surface, the whole play grows out of a founding opposition between the rapacious, miserly Jew and the generous, spendthrift Christians. On the other hand, one could say that, while Shylock's venality is explicit, that of the Christians is implicit--I've already written about this in conjunction with Bassanio's mercenary motives for courting Portia, and the fact that Jessica and Lorenzo's marriage begins with a robbery. When it comes to trafficking in human flesh, moreover, the slave-owning Venetians haven't a moral leg to stand on. And for all their talk about mercy and charity, they're way better at revenge and retribution.

Nevertheless, the Christians spend a lot of time telling each other that they're different from Shylock. Antonio insists that he doesn't lend money at interest, which is true as far as it goes. He loans money out of love. When one borrows money from a bank, one pays off the principal and the interest, and that's the end of it. Money loaned out of love or friendship exacts a much higher price--the emotional interest, one might say, is potentially infinite.

Again, just ask anyone who's ever borrowed money from family.

In Venice, the lack of precise accounting makes indebtedness measureless. Shylock doesn't understand how this turns money into power. Literalist that he is, he sees money as...money. That's why Jessica feels free to rob him without remorse--because he's attached no other meaning to money in her eyes. She, however, understands that her father's money will buy more than material objects. It buys her a future, and admission to the Christian aristocracy.

I've already written a lot about the differences between Shylock and the Venetians. But it seems to me that Will was more interested in the similarities that inhabit those differences. In the course of Act 4, Shylock and Antonio become mirror images of one another. Initially the victim of Antonio's scorn and harassment, Shylock turns the tables, making Antonio his victim. Then Portia turns them back again. Antonio proves to be just as vengeful as his enemy--arguably more so, because while Shylock wanted Antonio's life, Antonio demands more. He takes the Jew's livelihood and his identity, forcing him to live a lie. He kills him symbolically. After hearing the court's verdict against him, Shylock tells Portia that he'd rather die, because "you take my life when you do take the means whereby I live."

This is a direct paraphrase of Ecclesiasticus 34: "He that taketh away his neighbor's living, slayeth him." But then the Venetian Christians have never seen the Jew as a neighbor.

Unjust as it is, this kind of vengeance appeals to my Sicilian heart. I, too, have an enemy--just one, which, at this point in life, I take to be a triumph. This person, however, did something so bad, so undeserved to me that I used to wish hard for karmic justice. Unfortunately, this evil guy remains at the top of his profession and is unlikely to be karmically punished in this lifetime. And the badness in question was over ten years ago, so I certainly don't think about it on a daily or even monthly basis. But if I could exact some perfect punishment, it wouldn't be the Jew's simple and bloody revenge. It would be Antonio's utter eradication of his enemy's sense of self. Like Antonio, I wouldn't want my enemy's life. I'd want his soul.

Can you tell I had a Catholic education? Too much Dante, I guess.

But morally, I can see that this is a trap. Hatred--real, visceral, gut-twisting hatred--is a parasite. It kills the thing it feeds on. Before it does that, it turns the hater into a mirror image of her own enemy. And since my enemy is a morally desiccated, egocentric bastard, an empty husk corroded by vanity, I really don't want to become him. I have to let my hatred go, or accept the fact that my moral growth ended in southern Indiana sometime in 1997.

This mirroring thing works with ideas as well as individuals. Look at the Cold War. Under McCarthyism, capitalists violated individual freedoms in the name of, well, freedom. Similarly, communists created an oppressive class of overlords that were fully as iniquitous as the monarchs they replaced.

And so it is with Shylock and Antonio. Shylock is at least up front about it. "The villainy you teach me I will execute," he says. Nothing subtle about that. "I'll be as nasty to you as you are to me." Antonio, like all the Christians, is in denial from beginning to end. He's not like Shylock. He's generous, and open-minded. Totally a victim of the Jew's bloodthirsty wolfishness. A sacrificial lamb. A Christ figure. A great guy.

And yet, he makes sure Shylock not only loses all his wealth, but also is forced to convert to a religion he hates. With Portia's help, Antonio exacts a cruel revenge against a man who has committed no crime. It's easy to forget that, but it's true. Shylock has done nothing but demand what the law owes him. Yes, the pound of flesh thing is reprehensible, but Antonio signed the paper. I'm going to say it again: Shylock committed no crime. Remember it.

A Daniel, A Daniel!

Portia is a good lawyer, despite having neither training nor credentials. But this is theater. I don't recommend trying this at home. If you find yourself or someone you love in legal hot water, hire a professional. My fellow blogger the Bad Lawyer has lots of tragi-comic stories about laypeople who think that lawyering is easy, a simple matter of shouting "You're out of order!" or, "Objection, hearsay." Repeat after me: TV and movie trials have nothing to do with reality. Nothing.

And neither do Shakespearean trials. But there's nothing like a fake trial for drama, is there? I'm kind of surprised Will didn't write more of them. He could have been the Elizabethan Jodi Picoult. Every play could have had a trial. Just think of the possibilities. Hamlet vs. Claudius! Desdemona vs. Iago! Juliet vs. her dad! Edgar vs. Edmund! MacDuff vs. Macbeth!

Just kidding.

At first, (as I pointed out last time), Portia pretends to be objective: "Which is the merchant here, and which is the Jew?" Although she asks the question for theatrical reasons--i.e., to pretend to an impartiality she has no intention of showing--it's really the question at the heart of Act 4. You might remember that the play's earliest Elizabethan title was A Book of the Merchant of Venice, or Otherwise Called the Jew of Venice. Of course the actual merchant is Antonio, not Shylock. Jews weren't allowed in trade--that's why they became moneylenders. But Antonio is a moneylender, too. And also an outsider. Maybe that's why he hates Shylock so much. In the alien Jew, he sees something of his own strangeness--his tainted wether-ishness. He's a man who can't ever take part in the patriarchy. No cojones, culturally (and morally) speaking. No wonder he's such a sad sack at the beginning.

But back to Portia. She's also depressed at the beginning of the play, but she perks up in Act 4. She gets to have some social and moral authority, and bossy girls love that. Take it from someone who knows....

She goes over the text of bond, and seems to find no loopholes. When Bassanio asks her to "wrest the law to [her] authority," she shakes her head with mock-regret:

It must not be. There is no power in Venice
Can alter a decree established.
'Twill be recorded for a precedent,
And many an error by the same example
Will rush into the state. It cannot be.

She knows her legalese--and her law. I can't bend the law to suit this case, she says, because otherwise the law itself will suffer. (This never stops real judges, even in the Highest Court of the Land, it seems to me, but never mind).

Shylock's overjoyed. "A Daniel come to judgment, yea, a Daniel!/O wise young judge, how I do honor thee!"

Well, not so fast. Shylock's exclamation turns around to bite him in the derriere, because the biblical Daniel story is about another fake lawyer, a young man who defends a virtuous woman against her prurient accusers--and ends up turning the tables on them. Susanna was a Hebrew wife who was spied upon in the bath by some religious elders. They accosted her while she was still naked and tried to force her to have sex with them, on pain of death--as punishment for promiscuity. Using a lot of puns involving trees (as I recall), Daniel proves that the elders are to blame. And so the accusers are accused.

Like Shylock. You'd think, as a practicing Jew, he'd realize the dangerous irony lurking in his Daniel outburst, but apparently not--he's losing his literalist edge, it seems. In the end, he's out-literalized by a girl.

Next: Portia makes up the law as she goes along.

The Quality of Mercy

2010-03-27T13:53:00.009-04:00

Next to the phrase "a pound of flesh," Portia's lovely paean to mercy is probably the most memorable part of The Merchant. Mercy, whose quality--as we all know--is "not strained." I don't know about you, but when I first read that phrase as a high school student, I assumed that it meant mercy shouldn't be forced, or filtered. You know, pressed through some sort of moral colander. It actually means "constrained," which is to say, held back or limited. This idea of mercy flowing freely, un(con)strained, fits right in with the Venetians' all-out, full-on, prodigal approach to life. And it stands in sharp contrast to Shylock's tight-fisted, ungenerous ways.

Taken out of context, the rhetoric of the speech is sublime, moving, and utterly compelling. It's one of those great Christian Humanist moments that Will's so good at. But in context, it's something else entirely--because only a few lines later, the Christians--and Portia in particular--will prove to be vindictive and merciless. Like Polonius's "to thine own self be true" speech in Hamlet, this one exceeds the moral limits of its speaker. Polonius is a sententious fool who uses his own daughter to curry favor with a corrupt regime, but his advice isn't without wisdom. Similarly, Portia's mercy speech reminds us of her own words in Act 1. "I can easier teach twenty what were good to be done," she tells Nerissa, "than to be one of the twenty to follow mine own teaching."

A lot of us have that problem, don't we? Hypocrisy seems to be one of those quintessentially human things. It's not all bad, really--one could argue that our hypocrisies represent a (failed) moral striving beyond our lesser selves. On the other hand, it's appearance with no substance. Hypocrisy, as the old saying goes, is the homage vice pays to virtue.

Dressed as the "lawyer" Balthasar, Portia bedecks herself in the somber robes of impartiality. "Which is the merchant here," she asks the Duke, "and which the Jew?" Many readers have pointed out that Renaissance Jews were forced to dress in a very distinctive way, and that no one could doubt which of the two men was Shylock. So why does she ask that? Two reasons. Her question serves to foreground a major theme of Act 4--that Shylock and Antonio are really mirror images of one another. It also makes her seem like an impartial judge, which of course she isn't. I won't judge by appearances, she suggests. I'll consider this case on its merits only.

A patent lie. She's come to save her husband's beloved friend, and in some ways, her own marriage. Because Antonio's death would forever taint Bassanio's courtship, and cast a pall over the relationship. Portia's smart enough to know that the best way to defeat her competition is to put both men, her husband and his lover/friend, in her debt.

So let's take a look at her Big Moment:

The quality of mercy is not strained.
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath. It is twice blest:
It blesseth him that gives, and him that takes.
'Tis mightiest in the mightiest. It becomes
The throned monarch better than his crown.
His sceptre shows the force of temporal power,
The attribute to awe and majesty,
Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings;
But mercy is above this sceptred sway.
It is enthroned in the hearts of kings;
It is an attribute of God himself.
And earthly power doth then show likest God's
When mercy seasons justice. Therefore, Jew,
Though justice be thy plea, consider this:
That in the course of justice none of us
Should see salvation. We do pray for mercy,
And that same prayer doth teach us all to render
The deeds of mercy. I have spoke thus much
To mitigate the justice of thy plea,
Which if thou follow, this strict court of Venice
Must needs give sentence 'gainst the merchant there.

Reading this over, I got stuck on that word "quality." What does it mean, exactly? Once I started mulling this over, I was reminded of one my favorite books as a teenager, Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Do you know this book? Then you're at least as old as I am, and were probably a weird hippie bookworm in your youth, too. Anyway, the narrator in the book worries a lot about the word "quality," but to him it's a moral term, an expression of value and valuation. I don't think it's meant that way here. I think Will means something like "active essence." The quality of mercy is what it does. It falls down from above, from greater to lesser beings. From God to man, from kings to subjects. In order to show mercy, you have to have power. Otherwise, it's just sympathy or kindness--a lateral move. Mercy isn't lateral, it's hierarchical. It moves from top to bottom. Not ethical, but political.

Mercy is also a radical, earth-shaking idea. Along with its ethical cousin, forgiveness, it's what made Christianity a revolutionary movement. A transvaluation of all values, as Nietzsche put it. Of course Nietzsche hated Christianity--but I think he mistook the practice for the theory. (Which isn't to say that he wasn't right--just that he was also wrong).

But who's really in favor of mercy these days? Judging by the news (a risky thing to do, I realize), it often seems like the most religious people are the least interested in mercy. Historically, Christianity has more often followed the teachings of Machiavelli than those of Christ. Machiavelli insisted that power is all about perception, and that, far from showing mercy, as effective ruler must be ruthless.

Bring on the Inquisitors.

What Portia's speech seems to suggest is that mercy isn't for everyone. In fact, only God and His immediate family seem to be capable of it. Kings are merciful once in awhile--but let's face it, a ruler can't be merciful very often. He'd be deposed by his enemies in, like, a minute. Mercy can "season" justice, but it's not a meal in itself.

Mercy belongs in the realm of the spirit, really. The power of the Virgin Mary in Catholic theology is precisely this--she intercedes between God and unworthy sinners. Whispering merciful suggestions in God's ear. Arguing our case, as it were. A bit like Portia, who, as we recall, is still a virgin herself.

My favorite part of Portia's speech is when she points out "that in the course of justice,/ none of us should see salvation." Hamlet says something similar: "use every man after his desert, and who shall 'scape whipping?" If we were all judged according to our actions, we'd all be punished.

I guess that's the appeal of the notion of karma--none of us escapes whipping in some form or another. But it also seems to me that many of us are pretty good at whipping ourselves. Or other people in our stead...but that's a discussion for another time.

Well, as you know, this lovely speech moves Shylock not at all. He's not susceptible to the lures of rhetoric or the power of theater. No, he just wants his bond. He has it in writing. He won't "yield to Christian intercessors." He doesn't like interpretation. The written word is etched in stone. End of story.

All legal trials are, in a sense, a battle between speech and writing, aren't they? The law as written, and the voice that tells you what it really means. Lawyers give voice to the law--they try to show that the written word is incomplete in and of itself. It needs to the supplement of the voice. Legal argument reminds us that there was once a time, before writing, when the spoken word had power. Communities were bound by oaths, not by documents. And if you broke an oath, you were ostracized. "Oathbreaker" was a terrible insult. It meant that your words were empty. You were incapable of loyalty.

I like this idea a lot. Oaths should be sacred. Now, however, it's all about writing. Even marriage vows, the last faint vestige of an oathbound culture, are just window dressing. All our promises, to paraphrase Mary Poppins, are constructed of pie-crusts. If you don't have it in writing, you're screwed.

And sometimes, as Shylock finds out, you're screwed even if you do.

Next: Antonio and his Evil Twin

Eat or Be Eaten

2010-03-23T21:08:00.003-04:00

Before getting to Portia's Big Scene, a few words about imagery. For a play that so worries the question of humanity and humane behavior, there are an awful lot of dogs and wolves running around--not to mention sheep, pigs, and (implicitly) scapegoats. On some level, The Merchant asks us to consider what it means to be civilized. Even before the whole drama of "the bond" unfolds, Shylock is called a "dog," "a cur," a creature less than human. The immorality of usury is linked to the trade in and breeding of sheep, and Lancelot makes jokes about Jewish dietary prohibitions, teasing Jessica by asserting that her conversion will "raise the price of hogs." That is, more pork-eaters will cause a shortage of bacon.

Although the play is, on the surface, about the opposition between Jews and Christians, it's also about predators and prey, consumers and consumed.

In Act 4, the melancholy Merchant casts himself in the role of sacrificial lamb. Or rather sheep:

I am a tainted wether of the flock,
Meetest for death. The weakest kind of fruit
Drops earliest to the ground; and so let me.
You cannot be better employed, Bassanio,
Than to live still and write mine epitaph.

What a self-pitying whiner. I can totally see him as someone's Jewish or Italian mama (or in my case, Italian grandma--may she rest in peace): "Don't worry about me, children. I'm not long for this world. You go on, have fun...never mind your poor, worthless mother..."

Please.

A wether, in case you're not up on your ranching terminology, is a castrated sheep or goat. Now you may wonder why sheep and goats need to be castrated...okay, probably you never thought about this at all until right now. But castration is common in sheep ranching, because you only need so many males for breeding. If you don't castrate the others, they'll fight and be generally disruptive. And they smell bad, too. But a "tainted wether" is, one assumes, a castrated sheep that has to be culled from the herd. It can't reproduce, and isn't good for anything else. So that's how Antonio sees himself--he's "tainted," and can't breed.

Hmm. Not very subtle, especially when you remember that Antonio "only loves the world for" Bassanio. When he thinks he's going to be killed, his only wish is to have his friend watch him die:

Pray God Bassanio come
To see me pay his debt, and then I care not.

He wants Bassanio to witness his death, as proof of his love. Which is kind of, I don't know--kinky at worst, disturbing at best. Lots of productions have used these hints to bring out the homoerotic elements of the play, suggesting that Antonio is gay, and thus as much an outsider as Shylock. At the end of the play, he and Shylock are both outsiders, unwanted fifth wheels to the happy couplings that close out the comedy--but more on this anon.

By the time we get to Act 4, Shylock has devolved from a "cur" into a ravenous wolf. Graziano, perhaps the most vocal of the anti-Shylock contingent, makes the transformation explicit:

O, be thou damned, inexorable dog,
And for thy life let justice be accused!
Thou almost mak'st me waver in my faith
To hold opinion with Pythagoras
That souls of animals infuse themselves
Into the trunks of men. Thy currish spirit
Governed a wolf who, hanged for human slaughter,
Even from the gallows did his fell soul fleet,
And, whilst thou lay'st in thy unhallowed dam,
Infused itself in thee; for thy desires
Are wolvish, bloody, starved, and ravenous.

This is some seriously harsh stuff. Graziano says that justice itself was at fault for letting Shylock be born. Then he invokes Pythagoras--yeah, that's the geometry guy--in asserting that Shylock must have been infused with a wolf's spirit while he was in utero. He also insults Shylock's mother, calling her an "unhallowed dam" which basically means a profane beast-mother--"dam" is still the word that dog breeders use to describe the mother of a litter.

That's low.

In Act 1, Shylock was just a dirty stray dog, kicked and spat upon--i.e., victimized--by Christian aristocracy of Venice. In Act 4, he's cast as the predator, the hungry, irrational beast that craves the law of nature--the "law of the jungle," rather than the law of man. The predator/prey imagery reminds us that human laws were created precisely to mitigate this "eat or be eaten" law of the jungle--justice demands that might, be it economic or physical, not determine what is right, or legal. The prey shall be treated as fairly as the predator. Or, to put it in Christian terms, "the last shall be first."

But it's never really clear who's the predator, and who's the prey--who dines, and who's dinner. In Act 3, Solanio sneers at Shylock's anguish about his daughter, calling him "old carrion"-- dead flesh fit only for ravens and wild dogs. Now the tables are turned, and the Jew craves his "weight of carrion flesh" to be butchered from Antonio's body.

This predator and prey imagery also works as a kind of economic metaphor, of course. In a capitalist system, so the old lefty saying goes, it's eat or be eaten. You're the wolf or the sheep. The dinner or the diner. Eat the rich before they eat you.

This fleshy imagery foregrounds the whole problem of people as commodities. Shylock calls the Christians on their hypocrisy by pointing out that they traffic in human flesh, too. I quoted this in an earlier post, but it's worth doing so again:

You have among you many a purchased slave
Which, like your asses and your dogs and mules,
You use in abject and slavish parts
Because you bought them. Shall I say to you,
'Let them be free, marry them to your heirs.
Why sweat they under burdens? Let their beds
Be made as soft as yours, and let their palates
Be seasoned with such viands.' You will answer
'The slaves are ours.' So do I answer you.

When you stop buying and selling human flesh, I will relinquish my demand, he implies. You treat human beings like animals. Why then should I not do the same? Why indeed? It's interesting that he not only calls upon the Venetians to free their slaves, but also to breed with them and to feed them. Let your human "beasts" dine at your table, breed with your kind.

Like that will ever happen. Significantly, no one addresses this point at all. Instead, Antonio and Bassanio quickly shift the argument, making themselves into the victims. Both proclaim their willingness to be scapegoats--to sacrifice themselves to the Jew's rapacious jaws. "The Jew shall have my flesh, blood, bones, and all," gushes Bassanio, before Antonio shall "lose one drop of blood."

Of course there's a religious aspect to all this as well. One can't help but think of the story of Abraham and Isaac, and its Christian analogue, the crucifixion of Christ. The Eucharist is, through the miracle of transubstantiation, supposed to be the body and blood of God's son. Will was obviously thinking about this with the whole pound of flesh motif--Shylock is the Jew/Pharisee who kills the lamb of God, the crucified Christ. Many productions play this up, by having Antonio laid out on stage with his arms outstretched in an echo of the crucifixion. The sacrificed lamb--er, sheep.

The point is simple. In Venice, human flesh is a commodity, and it's delusional to pretend otherwise. Portia is wooed for her money, Jessica finances her marriage with her father's stolen ducats, and Antonio's willing to buy Bassanio's love with his blood. Love, justice, even the much-vaunted mercy are all for sale. As we'll see next time, all the high-flown rhetoric in the world can't disguise the fact that economic and political might still determine who's the winner, and who's for dinner.

I Crave the Law

2010-03-20T22:11:00.002-04:00

Shylock "craves the law." I've always stopped short at that phrase, because it bothers me. The law isn't supposed to be craved. It's supposed to be meted out with impersonal objectivity. Cravings are for things like ice cream (see comments on previous post), sex, a glass of wine you shouldn't have. Cravings are about appetite, and the law is supposed to be about reason. In fact, the law pretty much exists to rein in our appetites, doesn't it? So it's an interesting choice of words.

Sometimes I crave the law. Yes, I do. Except when I'm the guilty party, of course. Then I'm all for mercy. Mercy for me, the law for everyone else!

What Shylock craves is the law at its most literal. As I discussed in an earlier post, he's a fundamentalist. Judeo-Christian history is full of fundamentalists. Remember the Pharisees? Old-time fundamentalists, insisting on the letter, not the spirit, of the law. They were often set up as straw men in the New Testament--puritanical fanatics who had no compassion for sinners. Christ's New Covenant of mercy and love is specifically established in opposition to Pharisaical rigidity. If Shylock is a type of Pharisee, an intransigent and merciless literalist, then the Venetian Christians become, almost by default, types or representatives of Christ. One by one they urge mercy, but are met with stony refusal.

The Duke--as so often in Will's plays--is a well-meaning but impotent secular authority figure. He insists that the Jew not only be merciful, but generous. In fact, he's sure that Shylock's insistence on his "bond" is only a joke:

Shylock, the world thinks--and I think so too--
That thou but lead'st this fashion of thy malice
To the last hour of act, and then 'tis thought
Thou'lt show thy mercy and remorse more strange
Than is thy strange apparent cruelty,
And where thou now exacts the penalty--
Which is a pound of this poor merchant's flesh--
Thou wilt not only loose the forfeiture,
But, touched with human gentleness and love,
Forgive a moiety of the principal,
Glancing an eye of pity on his losses....

"I'm sure," he says, "that you're just pulling our leg here. You just want to surprise us with your generosity at the last minute! Not only will you release Antonio from the bond, but you'll forgive half the original debt! Because you're so cool!"

What planet is this guy from? It's hard to believe that anyone could actually be the ruler of a commercial Babylon like Venice and be this naive. Although I suppose it could be a tactic, an attempt to shame or bully Shylock into relenting. In any case, it doesn't work. Because Shylock craves the law. He wants his pound of flesh.

He refuses to take twice the amount he loaned, then three times, proving that it's not about money at all. Bassanio then entreats the court to

Wrest once the law to your authority.
To do a great right, do a little wrong,
And curb this cruel devil of his will.

This view of the law as malleable, as adaptable to different circumstances, stands in sharp contrast to Shylock's craving for the literal. In fact, these two views of the law still obtain today. Every time there's a Supreme Court seat up for grabs, one hears about "strict constructionists," who believe that the Constitution should be treated as immutable, and those who are willing to--more or less--wrest the document to their authority. My fellow blogger the Bad Lawyer would doubtless be able to offer more explication of this difference as it plays out in today's legal system. In the play, the opposition is structured as a religious and cultural one. The Christians want to find a loophole, but Shylock wants his weight of carrion flesh.

Next: The masquerade of justice. In other words, there's a girl under those robes!

A Stony Adversary

2010-03-08T23:06:00.000-05:00

As I was saying last time, Will sets up a pretty unsubtle opposition between Shylock and the Venetians. While Antonio and Co. are all about far-flung ventures, risky wooing schemes and theatrical transformation, Shylock is implacable, immutable, rigid in his hatred and his demand for justice. He is, as the Duke calls him at the beginning of Act 4

...a stony adversary, an inhuman wretch
Uncapable of pity, void and empty
From any dram of mercy.

A stony adversary. It's a compelling image, isn't it? Strong, invulnerable, almost inanimate. A position of power, usually. Powerless people can't afford to be "stony."

Unless they've lost everything but their pride. Enduring repeated injustices with no recourse can actually turn a person to stone. It's only temporary--but for a time, it keeps the floodwaters at bay.

I know this because, once upon a time, I was temporarily petrified. It's the feeling of frustration solidifying into bone-deep resentment. The heart immured in rage. It passes, especially if you're lucky enough to build a family with someone wonderful. But even now, happy and grateful as I am, I still sometimes slough off little chunks of granite. I guess that's why I can't help feeling some sympathy for Shylock, despite his terroristic rationalizations and narrow puritanism.

Shylock will live up to that stony label--in fact we already saw a preview in Act 3, when he appears onstage with Antonio and the jailer. Antonio begs him to listen to reason, but he's having none of it:

I'll have my bond. Speak not against my bond.
I have sworn an oath that I will have my bond.
Thou called'st me dog before thou hadst a cause,
But since I am a dog, beware my fangs.

Antonio conveniently forgets all the spitting and racial slurs, claiming the moral high ground:

He seeks my life. The reason I well know:
I oft delivered from his forfeitures
Many that have at times made moan to me.
Therefore he hates me.

"He hates me because I'm so nice, so generous, and have helped people escape his evil clutches."

Uh-huh. Let's not mention all the name-calling, expectorating, or daughter-seducing. Okay, that was Lorenzo, not Antonio--but to Shylock they all play for the same team. Antonio's explanation is so self-deluded and dishonest here that it really is impossible to see him as a wholly innocent and injured party.

Antonio's disingenuous speech enrages Shylock even further--as so it should. He refuses to listen to more pleas or seductive explanations. The Christians are as profligate with language as they are with money, and he's had enough. You can almost hear him biting back the fury as he repeats that same phrase, "I will have my bond," over and over. He also speaks almost exclusively in words of one syllable:

I'll have my bond. I will not hear thee speak.
I'll have my bond, and therefore speak no more.
I'll not be made a soft and dull-eyed fool
To shake the head, relent, and sigh, and yield
To Christian intercessors. Follow not.
I'll have no speaking. I will have my bond.

The multisyllabic phrase "Christian intercessors" stands out awkwardly amidst all these declarative and imperative sentences. You almost want to trip over it, it's so out of step with the rest of the speech. It sounds excessive, and really breaks the incantatory rhythm of the rest: I-will-have-my-bond. I-will-not-hear-thee-speak. You could say that to a slow, funereal drum beat.

Solanio then calls Shylock "the most impenetrable cur/that ever kept with men", giving us two powerful images of the Jew's inhumanity. In a play that's all about interpretation, he's "impenetrable," a stony surface without a heart. In an era fascinated with humanity and its possibilities, he's an animal--a vicious dog, a wolf, a carnivorous monster.

This is the Shylock who enters the courtroom, butcher's knife in hand.

Act 4 is really one long scene--there's a short scene after the trial, but it's limited to a few lines. When Shylock enters, the Duke--the highest secular authority in the city-- says he's sure that the Jew isn't serious about his threat. He's confident that he'll relent at the last minute, showing "mercy and remorse more strange" than his present "strange apparent cruelty." "Strange" here means "extraordinary."

The Duke wants a conversion story, a narrative structure familiar to Christians. "The last shall be first," according to the Parable of the Vineyard. He who comes last, at the final hour, to salvation shall enjoy the same spiritual benefits as those who have toiled since sunrise.

Shylock doesn't want to be in that story. He demands his bond, and refuses to give a reason. The law, he thinks, is on his side. He doesn't need to explain himself. He remains willfully "impenetrable":

You'll ask me why I rather choose to have
A weight of carrion flesh than to receive
Three thousand ducats. I'll not answer that,
But say it is my humour. Is it answered?
What if my house be troubled with a rat,
And I be pleased to give ten thousand ducats
To have it baned? What, are you answered yet?
Some men there are love not a gaping pig,
Some that are mad if they behold a cat,
And others when the bagpipe sings i' th' nose
Cannot contain their urine; for affection,
Mistress of passion, sways it to the mood
Of what it likes or loathes. Now for your answer:
There is no firm reason to be rendered
Why he cannot abide a gaping pig,
Why he a harmless necessary cat,
Why he a woollen bagpipe, but of force
Must yield to such inevitable shame
As to offend himself being offended
So I can give no reason, nor will not,
More than a lodged hate and a certain loathing
I bear Antonio, that I follow thus
A losing suit against him. Are you answered?

He refuses to justify what seems to be an irrational desire for worthless flesh over money, except to say that he hates Antonio. But his analogies are interesting. He talks about pigs, which have been mentioned before in conjunction with Jewish dietary prohibitions. He says some might prefer to pay ten thousand ducats to get rid of a rat, rather than get a cat to do the job, simply because they don't like cats. And finally, the weirdest example, a man who pisses himself because he hates bagpipe music. It seems clear that the animal imagery is pointed at Antonio, in retaliation for all the dog-cur-wolf language he's used against Shylock. Both pigs and rats are unclean to Shylock, and so is Antonio. The bagpipe thing seems gratuitous, except we already know Shylock hates music and associated it with Christian revelers. In refusing to give a reason, he's given several. He hates Antonio for treating him as if he's less than human, and hates Christians in general.

It's the argument of a man who's long since realized he can't win arguments. The Venetians are better rhetoricians--Shylock's dialogue throughout the play is often terse and to the point, while the Christians throw poetry around like it grows on trees. Remember Salerio's lovely description of a shipwreck in the first scene of the play? Metaphors to burn. Shylock holds onto his words like he holds onto his money. His "I won't tell you why" speech is one of his longest in the play, and he's really just talking about why he won't talk.

Next: Wolves and sheep.

Change Me

2010-03-05T13:01:00.009-05:00

At the end of Act 3, Portia decides that her hapless, spendthrift fiance needs help saving the life of his friend, Antonio, who's about to be carved up by his enemy, the nasty, miserly Jew. The bold and quick-witted heiress hastily installs Lorenzo and new bride Jessica as caretakers for her estate, then dashes off a note to her cousin, the esteemed lawyer Bellario, demanding fake ID's and lawyerly garb so that she and her faithful sidekick, Nerissa, can pose as the learned Balthasar and his clerk.

It's one of Will's most famous cross-dressing moments. I'm not going to do an extended riff on Shakespearean cross-dressing, because I already wrote about it back when I was blogging The Taming of the Shrew. You can read that post here.

One thing I love about Elizabethan theater is that no one ever sees through these disguises. Having suspended their disbelief in taking a boy for a woman, it's nothing at all to take a woman for a man. But don't you wish it were that easy to dupe people in the real world? I can think of a bunch of situations in which a really effective disguise would have saved me a lot of grief. But I can't imagine anyone taking me for a man. It would be more camp than convincing--like a farm girl channeling Marlene Dietrich. Well, maybe an aging Goth farm girl.

I know. Freaky concept.

Portia takes to cross-dressing with great enthusiasm, as if she'd just been waiting for the chance to cast off her stays and petticoats, or whatever (I'm not an expert on Elizabethan fashion--the little I know comes from old portraits of Queen Bess and The Tudors) and do a man's job. She tells Lorenzo that she and Nerissa are going to enter a convent "to live in prayer and contemplation" while their husbands rush back to Venice to save Antonio.

It's clear she's really given some thought to the whole gender-bending thing. Nerissa is confused, and asks for clarification. Portia replies that their husbands will see them

...in such a habit that they shall think we are accomplished
With that we lack I'll hold thee any wager,
When we are both accoutered like young men
I'll prove the prettier fellow of the two,
And wear my dagger with the braver grace,
And speak between the change of man and boy
With a reed voice, and turn two mincing steps
Into a manly stride, and speak of frays
Like a fine bragging youth, and tell quaint lies
How honourable ladies sought my love,
Which I denying, they fell sick and died.
I could not do withal. Then I'll repent,
And wish for all that I had not killed them;
And twenty of these puny lies I'll tell,
That men shall swear I have discontinued school
Above a twelvemonth. I have within my mind
A thousand raw tricks of these bragging Jacks
Which I will practise.

Of course on the Elizabethan stage this whole speech would drip with irony, since "Portia" was already being played by a boy in drag. The phrase "accomplished with that we lack" would have drawn a big laugh, since it refers to both the "accomplishments" of a lawyer--i.e., professional credentials--and male genitalia, which of course women lack. It's about acting, really, and--to borrow one of those phrases that was popular among academic Shakespeareans a couple of decades ago--"self-fashioning." In addition to being the first risk-takers, Renaissance people were also the first to embrace self-improvement and personal reinvention.

In other words, our American obsession with cosmetic enhancements, dietary regimes, religious transformation, and self-help of all kinds can be traced back to Renaissance theatricality. Because isn't that what we're talking about here? The ability to become "a whole new you" with the right diet, implants, attitude, belief system? Before the Renaissance no one saw him or herself as malleable or fixable. You were born into a class, a gender, a religion, a profession, and you stayed there until you died. Your kids inherited this place, profession, belief system, and they passed it on to their kids. And so on.

The picture on the right is a little crude humor, but I like it because it combines an icon of the Renaissance with (what I would call) the logical consequence of five hundred years of "Renaissance thinking." Mona Lisa, reinvented for the cosmetic surgery age.

And you have to admit, except for the ludicrous balloonish breasts, she does look hotter after the makeover. Although still like a man in drag, in my opinion. Maybe that's what that sneaky smile is about.

I'm not saying that Elizabethan people believed they could transform themselves to the extent we do today. They couldn't have imagined that, several hundred years in the future, men would really be able to metamorphose into women. But they believed that we were theatrical creatures, who could take on a role and cast it off. Add a few centuries of technological and scientific innovation, combine it with a love of risk, change, and newness, and voila! Modern, malleable man (and woman) is born.

This theatrical notion of the self dovetails nicely with a gambler's temperament.

Gamblers are optimists; they're big believers in fresh starts and second (third, fourth...) chances. They believe that they can refashion themselves, that "one big score" can radically change their lives for the better. They tend to collect self-help manuals and/or mantras, to believe that "attitude is everything." These qualities are also quintessentially American. As a culture, Americans embrace risk and shun negativism--more than any other nation, we believe in personal transformation and rebirth. That's why certain forms of ecstatic/evangelical Christianity appeal to us.

Christianity promises that one can be born again into a new life--so it was the perfect religion for this new kind of person. In the Renaissance, the idea of reinvention--the whole-life makeover--took hold in all sorts of other contexts. One could travel to distant lands, get rich, come home and buy oneself a title. One could invest money in far-flung ventures. One could look up into the heavens and see not only eternity, but change. People weren't just waiting for the afterlife anymore. They were remaking this life, envisioning a future that their ancestors couldn't even imagine.

Although life was still nasty, brutish and short for the majority, new things were in the air. And on the stage! On stage, men could become women who could become men again. Actors could become kings, fairies, witches, misers, magicians, Jews, Moors, and madmen. Anything. When Will wrote that "all the world's a stage," he was just pointing out the obvious. If there was a whole world of possibility onstage, then why not in the real world? It's both the ultimate self-actualizing statement--I can become whatever I want--and, in a less optimistic sense, kind of disturbing. Because everything becomes a pose.

Personal aside: that's why I quit Facebook. Weary of staging myself. And not very good at it, either. More of a recalcitrant Shylock type, I guess.

Anyway, it's not a coincidence that Portia's ironic gender-bending speech is followed by a religious version of the same thing. In the last scene of Act 3, Lancelot and Jessica banter about conversion:

Lancelot: Yes, truly; for look you, the sins of the father are to be laid upon the children, therefore I promise you I fear you. I was always plain with you, and so now I speak my agitation of the matter, therefore be o' good cheer, for truly I think you are damned. There is but one hope in it that can do you any good, and that is but a kind of bastard hope, neither.

Jessica: And what hope is that, I pray thee?

Lancelot: Marry, you may partly hope that your father got you not, that you are not the Jew's daughter.

Jessica: That were a kind of bastard hope, indeed. So the sins of my mother shall be visited upon me.

Lancelot: Truly then, I fear you are damned both by father and mother. Thus, when I shun Scylla your father, I fall into Charybdis your mother. Well, you are gone both ways.

Jessica: I shall be saved by my husband. He hath made me a Christian.

Lancelot teases Jessica about being the Jew's daughter, pretending to fear for her salvation. As I pointed out in an earlier post, however, Elizabethan people saw Jewishness as a religious category, not a racial one--although Shylock does talk about his "tribe," there were lots of coverted Jews around, and no one worried about what their parents or grandparents had believed. That line about the "sins of the father" sounds biblical, doesn't it? It isn't. In fact the Bible says the opposite--that sons shall not bear the sins of their fathers. Will, like other modern men of his day, didn't believe that history was destiny. He was, after all, a great re-writer of histories--an accomplished propagandist.

I especially like the reference to Scylla and Charybdis, which brings to mind the one risk-taker in all of Classical literature, Odysseus. But even he had riskiness thrust upon him--he didn't choose to sail around aimlessly for ten years while his wife wove and unraveled tapestries. He was just making the best of some nasty divine meddling. So basically he was a reaction hero, not an action hero.

When Jessica claims that she will be saved through her husband, she's paraphrasing scripture. "The unbelieving wife," writes St. Paul in 1 Corinthians, "is sanctified by the husband." As Portia reinvents herself as a respected legal scholar, so Jessica converts to Christianity, saving herself from the fate that Lancelot jokingly insists is her spiritual destiny.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, the Nazis didn't like this idea. To them, once a Jew, always a Jew. So in the 1944 Viennese production, Jessica was re-imagined as an adopted daughter. I wasn't able to find a copy of the altered text in either language, but I imagine this was the point in the play when they made the switcheroo, violating not only the text, but a central idea of the play--that modern people embrace self-improvement, while "stony" anachronisms like Shylock turn their back on it. Jessica has to be a real Jew so that she can be remade into a real Christian. It just doesn't work any other way.

For Will, the antithesis of Jew and Christian is also an opposition between past and future, intransigence and change. Shylock, like Margaret in Richard III and the older Capulets and Montagues, is yesterday's news. When he's forced to convert at the end of the play, he's both cruelly severed from his own history and, in a less negative sense, dragged unwillingly into the modern world.

Next: The Jew as anti-renaissance man. And yes, the trial scene. For real this time.

Risk Management

2010-02-28T10:51:00.004-05:00

Today I've been thinking about risk, about gambling on an uncertain future. I've been reading an interesting book called Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk, by Peter Bernstein. It's about the historical, social and intellectual changes that transformed Westerners from oracle-reading, past-oriented fatalists into probability-calculating, future-oriented gamblers. So while I'm reading this I'm thinking about The Merchant, of course, since risk or "hazard" plays such a large part in the story.

But, being me, I also started thinking about life, and how we manage uncertainties. Superstitions work this way, especially in childhood. If I don't step on any cracks on the way to school, I'll pass my spelling test. Having succeeded in avoiding cracks, I may in fact sit down to my test feeling all calm and orthographically smug. Instant A! Past experience is also a useful indicator of future outcomes--not only my own experience, but that of my friends. If all my friends speed down a section of interstate without getting caught, I'm likely to do that, too. If one of them gets caught, I'll probably stop speeding--at least for awhile. These, however, are ancient ways of dealing with risk--they aren't scientific, or even future-oriented. They're mystical, passive. The future, in these two scenarios, is either determined by some murky, mysterious power that governs sidewalk cracks, or it's just a mirror of the past. There's no gambling or calculation involved.

I'm kind of a risk-averse person, which is why I initially became an academic. The academy is where many riskophobes go to hide. Think about it--you're surrounded by people exactly like yourself, guaranteed a job for life (if you don't get culled from the herd, as I did) in a business that essentially hasn't changed since the nineteenth century. Not much there would appeal to gamblers--you can take risks, but the stakes are embarrassingly low. In deciding to toil for six years in a well-endowed upstate New York library, making about ten thousand dollars a year (and even back then, this was peanuts), I wagered that I would never have to take any more risks ever!

Uh-huh. Although the odds against my getting denied tenure were quite low, given my publications and the success rates of people with identical track records, I nonetheless lost my job, because of...circumstances that weren't part of my initial calculations (academic politics). The devil, as they say, is in the details. Still, gambling-wise, I made the right choice. It should have turned out differently, but didn't. Similarly, one can live a healthy life, have no known genetic risk factors, and still get some horrible disease. Because, you know, sometimes you do get struck by lightning.

But these outcomes are rare. And we can't go through life acting like they're common, can we? That's called being paranoid, or hypochondriacal, or whatever. We have to believe that the future can be predicted with some reasonable certainty, or we'll never do anything. This is the modern way.

Nevertheless, some people remain confused by these issues of risk and probability, and opt for the old-fashioned oracle approach. This world-view survives in supermarket tabloids, wherein the end of the world, the devolution of species and the death of celebrities are regularly foretold with eye-catching, retro-look visual aids. For millennia, this was the way most people thought about the future--as something arbitrary, dangerous, a whim of the gods.

Btw., I still have one Weekly World News front page from a few years ago, which shows the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse somewhere in Arizona. I'm pretty sure they just cropped out four of the original Magnificent Seven for the picture, and then made it look blurry. But it was still kind of cool.

Although any thinking person knows that the Four Horsemen have their ranch somewhere in Texas, not Arizona.

Anyway, the Bernstein book traces the mathematical history of probability theory--which I admit made me glaze over in parts, since I'm allergic to math--but eventually turns to the more interesting ways in which the mathematical concept of probability informed economics. (That's Pascal's Triangle on the right. I put it there because I'm totally impressed with myself for knowing what it is--a way of explaining odds.)

Because of probability theory, an insurance industry became possible. There was insurance in Will's day--had been for centuries, but it had been mostly unregulated and haphazard. In 1601, Francis Bacon introduced a bill in Parliament to regulate insurance policies, which were said to be "tyme out of mynde an usage amonste merchants, both of this realm and of forraine nacyons."

Will wasn't really interested in the nascent insurance industry--if Antonio had had insurance on his ships, none of the events in Act 4 would have happened--but he was interested in risk. As in so many of his plays, he here makes a clear distinction between old ways and new. The Venetians, as I've mentioned before, are New Men. They live in a multicultural city teeming with international commerce, and they are fully aware that there's money to be made in trade. Global trade was primarily a maritime business, however, and the one thing that couldn't be predicted with any degree of certainty--then as now--was the weather.

The ancient Greeks were pretty hip to this problem, and--if we can believe the stories--didn't hesitate to sacrifice a kid or two to the wind gods when necessary.

Despite the considerable potential for weather-related ruin, Antonio considered his investments safe because they were diversified, spreading the risk over a larger space and time:

My ventures are not in one bottom trusted,
Nor to one place; nor is my whole estate
Upon the fortune of this present year;
Therefore, my merchandise makes me not sad.

And yet, they all failed--at least as far as we know in Act 3. Ironically, Bassanio learns of his friend's loss just as he has, in Graziano's words, "won the fleece," i.e., won the game, the girl, and all her money besides. Remember, he picked the lead casket, which warned that the one who chooses it must be ready to "hazard all he hath." "Hazard," is a gambling word--it comes from the Arabic al zahr, which means "dice." Bassanio's risk paid off.

Or did it? After he receives Antonio's letter, telling him the the Jew is calling in the debt, he confesses to Portia that he hasn't been entirely honest with her:

...When I told you
My state was nothing, I should then have told you
That I was worse than nothing, for indeed
I have engaged myself to a dear friend,
Engaged my friend to his mere enemy,
To feed my means.

It turns out Bassanio hasn't "hazarded" anything at all. Antonio took all the risk. And in freeing Antonio from the bond, Portia will assume another kind of risk by acting the part of a man--the lawyer Balthasar. Bassanio, beloved of both, seems pretty unworthy of all this hazarding, doesn't he? One has to assume that he's really good-looking, or something. Because he's neither as rich as Portia, as entrepreneurial as Antonio, nor even as witty as Graziano. He's kind of a cipher in this whole drama--rather like the lady in a medieval romance. Desired, but devoid of personality.

So what does Portia do? What any rich girl would do--she offers to throw money at the problem to make it go away:

Portia: What sum owes he the Jew?
Bassanio: For me, three thousand ducats.
Portia: What, no more?
Pay him six thousand, and deface the bond.
Double six thousand, and then treble that,
Before a friend of this description
Shall lose a hair through Bassanio's fault.

Although Salerio has said Shylock won't take money to "deface the bond," Portia is sure that her excessive offer will change his mind. Because, after all, he's a Jew. Only concerned with money.

In fact it's the Christians who see money as the means to win and prove love, and to solve virtually any problem. For Shylock it's not about money at all--it's about vengeance. Or as that old Visa commercial puts it:

Winning an heiress: 3,000 ducats
Avenging Yourself on an Enemy: Priceless

Portia's generosity is an insult, really. She has no sense that anything else might be at stake, that it is precisely this prodigality, this expansive and reckless use of capital that Shylock finds abhorrent.

Shylock's understanding of capital is, well, pre-capitalist. He has no interest in global investments or risky ventures. He makes money on the risky behavior of others, but takes few risks himself. In the play, this fiscal conservatism is allied with his religion, which sees the Law in similar terms. You get back what you put in--an eye for an eye. Adherence to the Law defines the Jewish community.

Christians, on the other hand, are all about risk. Leaps of faith. Grace in excess of desert. Forgiveness, not justice. Mercy, whether deserved or not. Religious faith is an investment in the payoff to come, in the next life. Christians are banking on heavenly reward.

During the Renaissance, as Bernstein points out, people became risk-takers. They made perilous journeys to distant lands in hope of financial or spiritual rewards--the missionary industry also took off at this time. They took chances on cures, on machines, on new ways of understanding the world. The future, once opaque and burdened by the past, suddenly beckoned like those heavenly gates. For those with the vision, courage (or maybe foolhardiness) to venture into the unknown, anything became possible.

And this new attitude, more than religion or even ethics, is what separates Shylock from the Venetians. He's yesterday's man, practicing yesterday's religion--the Old Law, like the old ways of managing risk, is outdated and morally irrelevant. The Venetians, despite their hypocrisy, are the wave of the future. They send their capital and their ideas out into the wider world, instead of keeping them locked up in the family safe. Jessica knows which way the wind is blowing--she's a material girl, who's ready to take that leap into the future.

Shylock, wary of change and unwilling to risk, is left to lament the passing of the old ways. In one sense, the fact that he's a Jew is only incidental. He's mired in the past, and that alone is enough to ensure his defeat.

Next: The Courtroom Scene!

"I Will Have the Heart of Him"

2010-02-24T11:43:00.007-05:00

I've gotten a little sidetracked by the Olympics--I'm a big winter games fan--and a big Michigan snow, which has provided hours of wet, cold outdoor fun. Sitting in front of the computer just hasn't made my must do list. But here I am, with another scintillating post on Shakespearean drama! I know, I know. It's hard to contain your excitement. Me too. Be still, my heart.

Actually, that's what I want to talk about today. Having a heart. Having compassion for Shylock, the miser, the proto-terrorist, the literal reader in a land of extravagant metaphors.

And speaking of hearts--this play is partly a romance, too, although the Belmont plot takes a deserved backseat to the Venice one. In bringing up romance today, I'm not really interested in the love story (which is, like everything else in the play, also a money story), but rather in the way romance structure informs the drama.

The traditional structure of romance is pretty straightforward. The lovers endure a test, come together, rejoice in their union (in modern genre fiction this is when you get the first hot sex scene), then face a much more difficult test that threatens to destroy the relationship. The first "resolution" always proves to be false or incomplete--it's the second "test" that matters. Read any grocery-store romance novel and you'll see what I mean.

The Merchant of Venice is structured along these lines, too. Bassanio wins Portia by passing the marriage test, the lovers engage in a lot of high-flown rhetoric (Elizabethan substitute for hot sex), but we know they are headed for a much bigger challenge. Will weaves other conventions into the text as well-- most notably the "rash promise," which you'll recognize from fairytales like Rumpelstilskin. In these stories, the protagonist promises something out of desperation or ignorance, which then proves to be his or her undoing. Antonio's eagerness to prove his love to/for Bassanio leads him to promise something--anything--that will get him the loan from Shylock. These two elements are highly conventional, not really innovative on Will's part.

The Shylock story is something else. It's a romance structure in reverse--instead of two victories, there are two defeats. First, Shylock loses his daughter and part of his wealth to the Christians. Defeat number one. Then, his fortunes seem to rise as Antonio's fall--the ships are supposedly lost, and Shylock has the law on his side. This "victory" unravels in the courtroom scene, where the Christians insist he show mercy, then refuse to show any themselves. The final defeat is absolute, a total symbolic death.

The brilliance of this play lies in the way Will inserts something strange into a familiar structure, and thereby creates a completely new kind of story--a romantic comedy with a tragic heart.

Today I want to think a little about Shylock's rage. The Christians portray him as an animal, an "inhuman wretch/Uncapable of pity, void and empty of any dram of mercy." But Will uses the Jessica/Lorenzo subplot to give Shylock a heart--a human response to the betrayal of his child, a feeling with which any parent could identify.

Parents and Children

Parent/child pathos figures prominently in so many of Will's plays. Juliet's harsh treatment by her parents, the Duchess of York's rejection of her son Richard, Lear's tragic misjudgment of his daughters, Edgar's heart-wrenching recognition of his blinded father, Hamlet's own Oedipal issues (which make his father's vengeful ghost at least partly a reflection of his own guilt), and so on. We can't really separate Shylock from these other, less vilified parents, nor should we. As a parent, Shylock is neither Jew nor Christian--he's just a human being who has suffered one of the most terrible things any human can endure--the loss of a child.

It's true that Jessica isn't dead--but to Shylock, who puts such store in family, in blood, and in "bonds," she is worse than that. She has joined his enemies in rejecting and humiliating him. And that's more painful by far than a physical death, which could be integrated into his theology, mourned with centuries-old rituals. Elizabethan people lived with death--even death of the young--every day. But this other kind of loss, the severing of an emotional bond that is also a foreclosure on the future, is beyond bearing.

After his unpleasant exchange with Sal and Sol in Act 3, Shylock encounters Tubal, "another of the tribe." Tubal has been on the lookout for Jessica since she vanished with a significant portion of her dad's ducats and jewels. Tubal says that he's been unable to find her, although he's heard a lot about her from various merchants in Genoa. Shylock's reply would seem, on the surface, to be yet more evidence that he values his money more than his daughter:

Why, there, there, there, there. A diamond gone cost me two thousand ducats in Frankfurt. The curse never fell upon our nation till now--I never felt it till now. Two thousand ducats in that and other precious, precious jewels. I would my daughter were dead at my foot and the jewels in her ear! Would she were hearsed at my foot and the ducats in her coffin! No news of them? Why, so. And I know not what's spent in the search. Why thou, loss upon loss: the thief gone with so much, and so much to find the thief, and no satisfaction, no revenge, nor no ill luck stirring but what lights o' my shoulders, no sighs but o' my breathing, no tears but o' my shedding.

Things have been stolen--diamonds, ducats, a daughter. "A diamond gone"--it's hard not to see that as a metaphor, isn't it? Jessica was his diamond, his most precious possession. Yes, still a possession, but precious beyond all the others. Shylock sees his personal misery in global terms: "The curse never fell upon our nation till now." The suffering of the Jewish people, the basis of so much Judaic theology, is no longer an abstraction. In the loss of his daughter, Shylock sees the shadow of all the other losses, all the other injustices he and his people have suffered. He's made the leap from the particular to the universal.

I want to think about what this means for a few moments. Yep, it's time for one of my Crazy Philosophical Digressions!

Universal and Particular

I probably don't need to tell you that "global thinking" isn't a recipe for emotional well-being. And I speak as someone who constantly wrestles with this tendency. Just because someone makes a sexist comment doesn't mean he's a raving misogynist. Just because you're enduring a run of bad luck, it doesn't mean you're cursed by fate. If a partner cheats on you, it doesn't mean that all human beings are inherently faithless. The ability to generalize is an intellectual asset, but it can be an emotional liability. That's why intellectual people are often unhappy. They make that leap--which is hard for a lot people--with alacrity. Everything personal becomes political, philosophical, ontological.

And once you make that leap to the universal, you ally yourself with the Law, too. There's a universal, absolute wrong here, and it must be righted in some universal, absolute way. This is the subject of one of my favorite novellas, Heinrich von Kleist's Michael Kohlhaas. In this story,a merchant runs afoul of a corrupt aristocratic legal system, and becomes a terrorist. I'm not going to go into plot details--read it! It's a fabulous story. The point I want to make is that, like Shylock, Kohlhaas has both a literal and a universalist interpretation of the law. His loss must be made right without substitution, without monetary compensation. Kohlhaas's horses are taken from him illegally and abused. When he gets them back, their value has diminished considerably. What does he want? Nothing less than that the horses be restored to their original state. He wants the Law, which owes him restitution, to turn back time. That's a very literal reading of "restitution." But he also sees the crime in terms of a larger social problem of inequality before the Law--aristocrats have claimed rights they have no legal/moral right to. The Law should be governed by universal principles, not particular, class-specific ones.

This is Shylock's conundrum, too. He wants the Venetians to acknowledge a universal common humanity, wants them to see him as one of them. But he also argues for the specificity of his loss, and the literal interpretation of his bond. I am just like you, but I will accept no substitutions for what the Law owes me. I want you to see the world in universal terms, but I refuse to.

It's that terrorist's logic again.

You can't have both. You can't demand that the Law treat people with universal equality, but that your particular case be viewed absolutely literally. The movement from the particular to the universal is a move into metaphor. It has to be. If everything is unique unto itself, Law is impossible. But if everything is subsumed under the general, there can't be justice. Justice is what I demand for my personal loss. The Law will give me justice only to the extent that it can be applied to everyone else in a similar (but not identical) situation.

Hmm. Getting too abstract here. This is a subject I've obviously thought too much about. Time to retreat back to the particular.

Shylock's Heart

Anyway, Shylock is lamenting the loss of his daughter and his ducats, and says something that most of us would naturally find abhorrent--that he'd rather have her dead, and his money back. Why does he say this? Because it's true? Or because her betrayal is so painful that he lashes out in rage? "There, there, there, there..." it's a lament, a disoriented series of monosyllables. Will uses monosyllabic words a lot in the most emotional scenes. "Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks!" wails Lear. I hear the same anguish in that incantatory "there." He doesn't distinguish between the "stealing" of his daughter and the theft of his money because she is a commodity to him--but she's no less valued for all that.

As we've seen throughout the play, the Christians also put a price on human flesh as well as human affections--they're just willing to take bigger financial risks than Shylock is.

Shylock links Jessica and his ducats because they were both his, both hoarded and kept out of circulation. And now his daughter "circulates" like currency and spends extravagantly, like a Christian. "Your daughter spent in Genoa. as I heard, one night fourscore ducats," Tubal tells him. Shylock can't get his head around this: "fourscore ducats in a sitting? Fourscore ducats?" he repeats, incredulous.

In a final insult, he discovers that Jessica has traded away a prized possession for "a monkey,"--a frivolous purchase that makes Jess look like a spoiled brat on a spending spree with daddy's credit cards. Why a monkey? Monkeys are exotic, monkeys appear in Italy because trade is now global. So they represent the outer reaches of commerce, but also materialistic excess--what the hell is Jessica going to do with a monkey? One gets the feeling she bought it just because she knew it would drive her father nuts.

Animals, of course, figure largely in this play. Sheep, dogs, wolves, monkeys. But that's a subject for another post.

Jessica has traded her father's ring--a precious thing whose symbolic value far exceeds its monetary worth. Upon hearing the news from Tubal, Shylock can't contain his grief:

Out upon her! Thou torturest me, Tubal. It was my turquoise. I had it of Leah when I was a bachelor. I would not have given it for a wilderness of monkeys.

Here we see our only real glimpse of Shylock's heart. His wife Leah, Jessica's (presumably dead) mother, gave him the ring when they were both young. This moment looks forward to the other "ring business" in the play--when Bassanio and Graziano "lose" the rings their wives have given them by giving them to their (disguised) wives. But oh, how different this feels. It's not a game. It's Shylock's link to the past, to a time before he became bitter. To his own long-ago romance. In a very real sense, Jessica has traded away what's left of her father's heart.

At the end of this scene, Shylock's revenge takes on new energy. This, he decides, is all Antonio's fault. It's not a coincidence that the bad news about Jessica is accompanied by "good" news about Antonio's financial ruin--his ships, Tubal reports, are said to have been wrecked, all their contents lost. Tubal comforts him by reminding him that, although Jessica is gone, "Antonio is certainly undone." Fueled by the wreckage of his hopes, Shylock's bitterness is now as extravagant as Jessica's spending:

...Go, Tubal, fee me an officer. Bespeak him a fortnight before. I will have the heart of him if he forfeit, for were he out of Venice I can make what merchandise I will. Go, Tubal, and meet me at our synagogue. Go, good Tubal, at our synagogue, Tubal.

Shylock will call upon legal authorities to ensure his bond is honored. But he will also go to the synagogue--because the issues here are not just particular, but also universal. He believes that the laws of Venice will protect him--but the Law of Moses, absolute and uncompromising, is the moral foundation of his demand.

An eye for an eye. Or, in this case, a heart for a heart.

From Shylock's perspective, it's only fair.

Bond of Blood

2010-02-18T22:27:00.006-05:00

I've been reading this fascinating book, which would seem to have nothing to do with Shakespeare or The Merchant, yet I found myself really struck by the ways the two works are intersecting in my mind. So as a preamble to my reading of Act 3, I thought I'd share some of those thoughts with you, my few but faithful readers. The book is called The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. It's nonfiction--despite its title, which makes it sound like one of those dreary Contemporary Fiction Things that's all full of interpersonal angst, magical realism and heavy doses of irony. There's a lot of irony in the story, but it's the real-life kind. You can read a review of the book here.

Essentially, the book is about how the cancer cells of a poor black woman who died in 1951 refused to die themselves, becoming the first cells successfully grown in culture, and the basis for many of the medical advances we now take for granted, like the polio vaccine. The book is so compelling because it interweaves the story of Henrietta Lacks's family, who remained poor and uneducated, with the history of science---her cells revolutionized microbiology, histology, and lots of other ologies. In reading it I confronted my own history a little, too--my father was a high-powered microbiologist in the 1960's, and I'm sure he worked a lot with these cells, called HeLa, after Henrietta Lacks.

Hela, it turns out, is also a goddess of death in Norse mythology. Irony number one.

Since I've been re-reading The Merchant while I read this book, I couldn't help but see a lot of similarities. Not in the plot, of course, but in what I'd call the "ethical subtext" of the stories. One of the things you notice right away in the story of HeLa and Henrietta is that these "magical" cells that have saved so many lives were taken from a woman who was deemed to be so different, so inferior by virtue of her race, that she had to be treated in the "colored ward" of the hospital. And yet her "immortal" cells are the undying testament to a common humanity. Another irony.

A lot of things occurred to me here. Literature, and Shakespeare in particular, is often called "immortal." One of the reasons these plays are still read in high schools and colleges all over the world is because they supposedly speak to and of something "universally human" that transcends time and cultural difference. Like HeLa, they live on long after the being that created them has passed into dust.

I also thought of Shylock, his insistence on similarity in the face of a culture that persists in seeing him as different and inferior. "I will have my bond," he cries, when Antonio proves unable to pay the debt. He means, "I will make you pay me what you promised," but the word "bond" can be taken in another way, too.

I will have my bond. I will, no matter what you say, prove that we share a common humanity, even if I have to cut into your flesh to do it. I will find your heart, even if I have to use a knife.

Henrietta's cells seemed to say that, too. I will have my bond. We are all the same, if you look deep enough under the skin. One of the most touching things about the story is the way Henrietta's children deal with her "immortality." They don't find out about HeLa for many years, but when they do, they fear all kinds of things--she's being cloned, she's being tortured, she's still alive in cellular form, she's been made into a half-human monster. When you read this, you might think--oh, those poor ignorant people, who don't know what a cell is, or what DNA really means.

But then, you might look at your bookshelf, which is full of science fiction, and think again. The freaky things the Lacks family worries about are the speculative fantasies sci fi trades on--cloning, genetic immortality, mutants. And when you realize this, you might feel the tug of that bond again.

Another thing that occurred to me was the way money played into the HeLa drama. Several biotech concerns have made billions on HeLa cells, and yet her family is too poor to afford health insurance. When they found out about HeLa, they made a halfhearted attempt to sue the hospital, or the researcher who took the cell sample, to try and get even a small part of the wealth their mother's cells had generated. The way they saw it, the scientific community had stolen part of their mother, and thus part of themselves, so they were owed something.

Of course this raised all kinds of other legal concerns about science, progress, and who owns genetic material once it leaves a body. I won't go into that here--read the book, it's really interesting--but I was reminded of The Merchant yet again. One of the things the Christians accuse Shylock of is trafficking in human life, because of his refusal to accept Portia's money (more on this next time) in lieu of Antonio's flesh. But Shylock points out that the Venetians are slave owners, who use human beings "in abject and in slavish parts." This charge remains unanswered by the Venetian contingent, but Will wants to make sure we hear it. Along these same lines, Bassanio and Graziano make a substantial wager (presumably also with Portia's money) on which new marriage will produce a son first--a reminder that an heir has an obvious monetary value for any aristocratic family. In a sense, Shylock's "bond" is a failed attempt to force the Venetians to confront their own mercenary attitude toward human life, love, and flesh.

Both texts, it seems to me, ask us to consider what it means to be human. Is a cell human? Is one's genetic material human in and of itself? If so, is it unethical to trade it for money? The Merchant poses similar questions, with similar urgency. Is a Jew as human as a Christian? Are slaves less human than their owners? Can one be human and still inhumane, or does an inhumane act diminish one's humanity? Is it possible to lose one's humanity if one is consistently treated as an animal?

I want to keep those questions open in thinking about the rest of the play.

In the first scene of Act 3, Shylock encounters Salerio and Solanio. Is it an accident that these two have such similar names, and seem interchangeable? Because they are both hateful, cruel men. As the scene opens, they're discussing the rumor that Antonio's ships have been lost, when Shylock enters and accuses them of taking part in his daughter's defection. For all he is portrayed as an unfeeling miser, the loss of his only child has affected him deeply:

Shylock: You knew, none so well, none so well as you, of my daughter's flight.
Salerio: That's certain. I for my part knew the tailor that made the wings she flew withal.
Solanio: And Shylock for his own part knew the bird was fledge, and then it is the complexion of them all to leave the dam.
Shylock: She is damned for it.
Salerio: That's certain, if the devil may be her judge.
Shylock: My own flesh and blood to rebel!
Solanio: Out upon it, old carrion, rebels it at these years?
Shylock: I say my daughter is my flesh and blood.
Salerio: And yet there is more difference between thy flesh and hers than between jet and ivory; more between your bloods than there is between red wine and Rhenish.

Sal and Sol play around with words here, in a way that offends Shylock. Sal takes the notion of Jessica's "flight" literally, and talks about wings (in the current fashion, a tailor makes "wings" on gowns) and fledgling birds. Shylock picks up on their bantering, but his retort is angry and bitter. The fledgling may leave her dam (parent), but she will be "damned" for it.

Shylock must be suffering indeed to let these enemies see his pain. But he does--when he calls Jessica his "flesh and blood," I always imagine his words as a wail of betrayal and loss. Here's where Sal and Sol get really mean. The idea of the flesh "rebelling" refers to one's carnal appetites, too--he's an old piece of dead meat, Sol suggests, who still wants to get laid. It's a cruel, crude, and disgusting thing to say at such a time. Shylock is too angry to play the game anymore, and simply repeats what he literally meant--that Jessica is his offspring. Sal snarls back that Jessica is white to his black--his moral opposite.

This is a kind of interesting moment in terms of the Elizabethan view of Jewishness. Jessica later says that she will be "saved" because of her husband, which suggests--as does Sal's derisive comment--that conversion erased the "Jewish taint." In other words, being Jewish, at least to Renaissance Christians, was a religious and cultural choice, not a racial destiny. When the play was performed in Austria under the auspices of the Nazi propaganda machine, Jessica was recast as an adopted daughter. Because to to the Nazis, Jewishness was something in the blood, and no amount of renunciation could erase that racial stain. In the Nazi fantasy, there was no bond of blood between Jew and Christian; had the Nazis won the war, no one would have dared use a black woman's cells for anything.

Something to think about, for you virtual history buffs.

Well, that's all I've got for today. Oh, and the book on Henrietta Lacks is by Rebecca Skloot. Check it out--it's really thought-provoking.

"If You Poison Us, Do We Not Die?"

2010-02-15T21:51:00.003-05:00

Today's quotation is a pretty famous one:

...--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 suffrance 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.

This speech has often been quoted as a poignant and trenchant defense of human rights. We are all the same species, and should be treated with the same respect, irrespective of superficial differences such as skin color, religion, cultural practices. Shylock argues for similarity, resemblance, bonds of nature or, in the terms established by the play, "kind." We are the same kind, therefore we should treat one another with kindness.

But wait, that's not what he says, is it? No, he says we are the same kind, but you have not treated me with kindness. Therefore I will do my best to destroy you.

It's the terrorist's argument. Look in the mirror and see your own hypocrisy. See how little you live up to your own "democratic" or "Christian" ideals. See "the villainy you teach me." You made me what I am, now you must reap the fruits of that sowing. We are the same, but you have not acknowledged it, so I must kill you. Or, we are not the same, because you are a hypocrite and I am not, so I must kill you. Whatever circuitous path this argument takes, it always ends up in the same place.

There's a powerful and seductive illogic at work there.

These days, our whole relationship to the problem/question of "diversity" is fraught with contradictions. We insist that all people are similar, that there is no difference. This is the basis of democratic ethics. And yet, whenever those differences are elided or erased, some of us get mad. We're asked both to ignore and to celebrate difference. We're proud of our minority status, but resentful if someone else mentions it. We claim special privileges because we're different, but get angry if someone says we've gotten special privileges for being different.

Because this is all so confusing, some parents insist that their children not mention racial or other differences at all. They aren't allowed to remark on the fact that some people have a different skin color, different features, different hair. This, of course, is silly--but it speaks to the anxiety we all have about diversity. Many college applications now have a mandatory "diversity question," which asks students to write about how they might "contribute to the diversity" of the college community. It's a trick question, of course. The only right answer is one that a) asserts and celebrates one's difference, and b) proclaims that differences aren't really relevant.

This, we now believe, is an ethical stance. Ethics as irony.

But what is the ethical subtext of Shylock's speech? See me, he says. Recognize me. See how we are the same--we will both die, the Jew and the Christian. See my suffering and death as the mirror of your own, and know me as part of yourself.

That's a genuine ethical moment, and that's why this speech is so often quoted without its terroristic finale. It's true, and courageous, and urgent. But as soon as Shylock makes this plea--and it is a plea--he closes off the possibility of dialogue. See me and see what you made. I have no responsibility for what I have become, because you, you hypocrite, you who insist on differences and inequalities, have created my hate. See in my rage the mirror of your own. You have killed me already, and now I must kill you.

"The villainy you teach me I will execute." Murderous extremists say that, and school shooters. This is your fault. I bear no responsibility.

But without responsibility, there can be no freedom. It's not enough to be similar, to be equal. We have to be responsible for our choices, too. Personal responsibility is the bedrock of a free and just society. By blaming the racial/religious/political other, we give up our freedom utterly.

Shylock voices what Nietzsche called "slave morality" here--the morality of the victim who defines himself solely against a villainous oppressor. His values aren't his own; he's doomed to forever re-valuing the morality of the master. In some ways, I think that we've all become Shylocks--angry victims of some perceived hegemonic other--the government, the media, the insurance industry, the guy who just cut us off on the freeway.

Which isn't to say Shylock hasn't been wronged--he has. But when his plea for justice becomes a promise of vengeance, he subverts the very notion of common humanity. He becomes the caricature his enemies have created.

Which means, in essence, that they've already won.

Friday Quotation: The Strumpet Wind

2010-02-12T23:24:00.002-05:00

I am starting something new today. I'm finding that I have neither the time nor, to be honest, the will to write three longish posts a week, the way I used to. But I would still like to think of a way to keep the blog going--so my new plan is to write one long post, like the one I did on Wednesday, and a couple short ones that just deal with one passage or speech from the play I'm reading. These short ones will look at Will's lines out of context and muse about their possible relevance, their aesthetic allure, or whatever. Sort of like one of those "quote of the day" calendars. As of now I'm thinking Fridays and Mondays for these, and one long post on Wednesday.

It's worth a try, anyhow. I've given up on a lot of the goals I had for this blog, and right now I'm just trying to sustain my own interest. If what I write catches someone else's interest, too, great. But I am trying to divest myself of expectations here. It's a better, happier way to live, I think.

Today's passage is a pretty appropriate one for me, because it's about losing interest in things. Or rather, about how desire and excitement fades in love, in careers, in blogs, in household maintenance, in nearly everything! It's from Act 2, scene 6, when Graziano and Salerio are waiting for Lorenzo to meet them under Jessica's window. Lorenzo is late, which prompts Graziano, ever the cynic, to assume that his friend has lost interest in Shylock's pretty daughter. Here, he muses about how quickly desire wanes:

...Who riseth from a feast
With that keen appetite that he sits down?
Where is the horse that doth untread again
His tedious measures with the unbated fire
That he did pace them first? All things that are
Are with more spirit chas-ed than enjoyed .
How like a younker or a prodigal
The scarf-ed barque puts from her native bay
Hugged and embrac-ed by the strumpet wind!
How like the prodigal doth she return,
With over-weathered ribs and ragg-ed sails,
Lean, rent, and beggared by the strumpet wind!

I've hyphenated those words that should have an accent on the "ed" for the meter. Basically, he's saying that no one sustains desire for very long. Once you've had your fill of something--implicitly, a woman, but it could be anything--you lose interest. "All things...are with more spirit chased than enjoyed." The ship that leaves port amid fanfare, bedecked with flags and fancy decorations, soon returns bedraggled and looking like hell. "Lean, rent, and beggared by the strumpet wind."

Isn't that a great image for a relationship gone bad? You blow out of port on a high wind, all shiny and full of hope, and return all wrecked and broken. The same high passion that whirled you out into the sea of love blows you back in pieces.

Hmm. Not a good image for Valentine's Day, I guess. But you know what I'm talking about.

Youthful relationships--and immature ones--are more likely to be rent by the wind. They're more fun at the outset, but they run their course pretty fast. After limping into port all wrecked and broken a few times, most of us come to prefer a soft breeze to a high wind.

There's a biblical allusion in there, too--the story of the Prodigal Son. This is from the Gospel of Luke, 15: 11-32. The younger son of a wealthy man takes his inheritance while his father is still living, and wastes it "in riotous living." He loses everything and eventually has to take work as a swineherd, which is pretty low in Jewish culture, since swine are considered unclean. Eventually he returns home, just hoping for a job as a servant. His father welcomes him and kills the fatted calf and all that. The older brother gets mad, since he's been good and no one is killing a fatted calf for him. The father explains that the older brother has "always been with him," but the younger brother had been "dead" and is now again "alive," and this is a cause for celebration.

Obviously Will meant this to refer back to the wasteful habits of Bassanio and the Christians of Venice. But I think it relates to this question of desire, too.We all have trouble waiting for things--that's why there are credit cards. There are emotional credit cards, too--but the fees are pretty high. It's really better to pay up front.

Reading this passage, I thought of other things besides romance--careers, blogs, and just aging in general. How to find contentment when the strumpet wind isn't behind you anymore, pushing you forward. When inspiration--which is etymologically related to wind--is in somewhat shorter supply, and the flags and banners on your ship are somewhat tattered.

I also thought about mountain climbers. Do you know that most climbing fatalities happen on the way back down the mountain? For real. Like the horse in the passage--climbers ascend with "unabated fire," but have trouble with the "tedious measures" of the return trip. They reach the top, experience the rush of attaining a hard-won goal, and then they just...lose focus.

One of the reasons for this blog is to make sure I keep mine. If I were really an optimist, I'd insist that I haven't peaked yet. I'm willing to concede that there may be a summit of sorts ahead. But until I figure out whether I'm ascending or descending, I guess I'll just keep writing.

Have a good weekend.

The Dating Game

2010-02-10T16:15:00.003-05:00

In mythic terms, three is the most powerful of all numbers. Fairytales are full of threes--Cinderella was the third sister, there were three bears, three little pigs, three blind mice. Events happen in threes--Rumplestiltskin gives the queen three days to guess his name, Christ rises on the third day, three strikes and you're out. Usually, threes are auspicious. Third time's a charm.

Twos, on the other hand, can be dangerous. Twos are two-faced, duplicitous. In some cultures, twins are thought to be bad luck. If you see your doppelganger, you're going to die. A dyad is two parents without a child, a good twin and an evil one, two opposing forces that will fight forever, without the possibility of transcendence or change.

That's why three is also a religious number. The third possibility is the one you can't see--the Holy Spirit, the Higher Plane, the Synthesis. Without a third, you have only strife, barrenness, and mortality. The Christian cross symbolizes this transcendent movement--a horizontal line for the earthly plane, a vertical one extending heavenward. There were three crosses on that hill--the good thief, the bad thief, and the son of God who will reconcile the two through the gift of grace. Three is the number of possibility, of hope, of alternatives. Philosophers love threes. Hegel came up with thesis-antithesis-synthesis. Freud had the ego, the superego, and the id. Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite. Of the people, by the people, and for the people. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Etcetera.

Will liked threes as well--three witches, Lear's three daughters, three caskets. Which brings me to today's topic: Portia's marriage game. The idea of a marriage test goes back a long way. If you've read Greek mythology you might remember the story of Atalanta, the fleet-footed maiden who vowed she would only marry the man who could beat her in a footrace. The losers, she got to kill. Now Atalanta's dad had wanted a boy, so he took his infant daughter and left her in the woods, whereupon she was nursed by bears and raised to be a savage huntress type. She had no interest in marriage, and no affection for men. The footrace is a pretty typical example of the "taming of the virgin" motif. A powerful woman guards her virginity, and is a threat to all men. She must be defeated in war, deflowered, and made into a submissive baby-receptacle. The man who defeats Atalanta (I can't remember his name) asked Aphrodite to help him--the goddess of love has always been anti-woman, in my opinion--so she gave him three golden apples to help slow Atalanta down in her race. He throws them out one at a time, she can't resist picking them up, and is eventually beaten.

The other example that comes to mind is that of Siegfried and Brunhild, in the medieval German epic The Nibelungenlied. Brunhild is an Icelandic warrior Queen, and Gunther, a Burgundian prince, wants to marry her. She's super-strong, however, so she sets up a test. Her suitors must defeat her in three Olympic-style events--I think there's javelin-throwing, shot-putting, and some sort of jumping contest. If they fail...you guessed it--they're history. Gunther, being kind of an effete princeling type, hasn't a prayer. But his bud Siegfried is an Arnold-type he-man, who happens to be smitten by Gunther's sister, Kriemhild. Because he's a mythic hero, he's also got lots of cool magical gadgets, like invisibility hats and stuff. So he basically helps Gunther cheat at the game, and wins Brunhild's hand for his future brother-in-law.

The problem returns on the wedding night. Brunhild suspects that this wimp in her bedchamber couldn't possibly be the guy who defeated her in battle, so she ties him up and hangs him on the wall.

I love that part.

Well, Siegfried can't let his good buddy down, so he goes in and puts her in her place. In just the way you imagine. After she's been deflowered (read: raped), she's miraculously weak and submissive. Ta-da! Ziggy then turns her over to her little pissant of a husband. A sad, but somehow typically German story.

The Test

Do you remember that old TV show, The Dating Game? That was a game of threes, as well. It was on when I was about twelve, and that's about the intellectual level it aspired to. A man or woman--I remember there being more female choosers than male--would pick from three potential "dates" who were hidden from view. She would ask them really stupid but somewhat titillating questions (e.g., "if you were a dessert, what would you be?) and eventually pick one of them on the basis of their answers. It was, like Portia's casket test, a game of interpretation--the contestant had to figure out which of the three would be the best match for her without seeing them. Like the casket game, it also attempted to circumvent superficial judgments. Although I remember how obviously disappointed the contestant seemed to be when she realized she had passed up the best-looking one for a less attractive "bachelor."

It's hard to reduce attraction to an algorithm or set of desired qualities. That's why computer dating so often fails--because there's something intangible at work, isn't there? At the same time, we all have "tests," whether we acknowledge them or not. One of mine was driving. If I noticed a guy's driving, he was out. Driving should be background. A person should drive skillfully enough that his driving didn't freak me out, or make me wish I were the one behind the wheel. He also had to handle a manual transmission deftly, since that was what I drove. Any guy who couldn't handle a stick wasn't manly, in my book.

Yes, Dr. Freud, I can figure that one out.

So, Portia. She's rich, everyone wants her, and her dead father has set up this marriage test, to make sure--what? That she marries a poor guy who wants her money? Because that's what happens. Mostly it seems like the test is just a way for her father to exert control over her from beyond the grave--the outcome proves neither strength (as in the German tale), cleverness (as in the Greek one) or integrity. It seems arbitrary. The test has to be her dad's idea, in order to distance good-girl Portia from the mythic archetype of the man-hating, powerful virgin. And it has to be dangerous, too--although it can't involve literal death, since this is a comedy. In this version, the losers have to agree never to marry. Among the nobility this was a kind of symbolic death, because it meant that they would have no legacy, no one to legally bequeath their name and their fortunes to.

It seems to me that this wasn't really a legally-binding condition, but never mind. It's Belmont, where fairytale conventions are fully operational. In keeping with folklore, three men must make their choices, interpreting each casket in turn. The last one will be successful--this descending order accentuates the role of destiny in the outcome. As we'll see, however, Portia isn't above gaming the system a little when she finds a man she really wants.

The Prince of Morocco, whom we met previously, is the first to be dismissed. He has to choose the gold casket because it's the most superficially valuable. Like most tests of this kind, the obvious choice is always the wrong one.

One wonders why the suitors don't realize they're in a folkloric universe and just go for the ugly lead one right off.

But the fairytale is one of the few genres that exhibits no literary irony whatsoever. People in those stories never seem aware that they're stuck in a cycle of repetition--that the golden-haired girl always gets the prince, that the third comer always wins, that the thing that's least valuable on the outside is always the one with the magical, transformative power. All one has to do is inject a little generic self-consciousness into these stories and you have an instant spoof, a la Monty Python.

Bachelor Number One

As the first suitor, Morocco gets to introduce all the quasi-magical items:

This first of gold, who this inscription bears:
'Who chooseth me shall gain what many men desire.'
The second silver, which this promise carries:
'Who chooseth me shall get as much as he deserves.'
This third dull lead, with warning all as blunt:
'Who chooseth me must give and hazard all he hath.'

Morocco reasons it out, dismissing the lead casket first--no one, he reasons, would hazard everything for lead. Of course he mistakes the meaning of the riddle--he's not asked to gamble to get the casket, after all. It's the lady he's after. It's just a symbol that he reads too literally. He contemplates the silver one, deciding that he does in fact deserve Portia because of his high birth, good breeding and fortune. Before deciding he turns to the gold one, this time interpreting the riddle to mean Portia herself, the lady whom "many men desire":

...All the world desires her.
From the four corners of the earth they come
To kiss this shrine, this immortal breathing saint.
The Hyrcanian deserts and the vasty wilds
Of wide Arabia are as thoroughfares now
For Princes to come view fair Portia.
The watery kingdom, whose ambitious head
Spits in the face of heaven, is no bar
To stop the foreign spirits, but they come
As o'er a brook to see fair Portia.

This passage reminds me of a line in Antony and Cleopatra--Antony regrets the hold Cleo has on him and his honor, and wishes he "had never seen her." His loyal lieutenant, Enobarbus, replies that, had he never met her, he would have missed out on some memorable erotic tourism:

"O, sir, you had then left unseen a wonderful piece of work, which not to have been blessed withal would have discredited your travel."

Morocco's vivid description of the men flocking over deserts and waterways to court Portia similarly objectifies her, turning her into a landmark, a natural wonder, a rare commodity. It's almost funny, really, the picture of all these princes clogging the oceans and paving over the deserts to get to her.

In the end, he forgets the riddles and remains fixed on the caskets themselves. He refuses to disparage either Portia or himself by choosing anything less than gold. Inside, he finds "a carrion death."--a skull--a reminder that "all that glisters is not gold," and a rebuke:

Many a man his life hath sold
But my outside to behold.

I'm reminded of Romeo here, throwing money at the apothecary:

There is thy gold--worse poison to men's souls,
Doing more murder in this loathsome world,
Than these poor compounds...

Gold is pretty much always a seductive and dangerous thing in Will's plays, and often a harbinger of doom. Ironically, Morocco is reprimanded for choosing according to the "outside," but Portia bids him farewell with this racist line:

Let all of his complexion choose me so.

I've already written about this creepy moment, so I won't belabor the point. Suffice it to say it's an unequivocal reminder of the hypocrisy of the game, and of the Christians themselves. The winner must prove himself able to see beyond the surface, but Portia, obviously, doesn't hold herself to the same standards.

Bachelor Number Two

Portia's next suitor is the Prince of Aragon, and of course he chooses the silver casket. He, too, dismisses the lead one on the basis of its appearance:

'Who chooseth me must give and hazard all he hath.'
You shall look fairer ere I give or hazard.

In other words, he's not willing to gamble on something that looks so cheap and ugly. He rejects the gold for reasons of snobbery--he doesn't want to be associated with

...the fool multitude, that choose by show,
Not learning more than the fond eye doth teach."

This after he dismissed the lead casket specifically because it's not pleasing to the eye. Because he doesn't want to be ranked "with the barbarous multitudes," he chooses the silver, reasoning that he--unlike many--deserves the lady. He offers a little social commentary, wishing that more high-ranking people actually deserved their privileges, but he's not advocating a democratic meritocracy. He means that only those who have old titles and old wealth should be allowed to rise in society. He seems to be lamenting that although he comes from noble stock, he has no money. He deserves Portia and her fortune because of his heritage, not his actions.

What he finds is a "fool's head," "the portrait of a blinking idiot." The casket also contains a somewhat cryptic explanation of its contents--in this case, a little poem that likens the failed suitor to a narcissistic fool who pretends to wisdom. This pretty much describes Aragon, who's not very smart.

As Aragon leaves, a messenger announces that another suitor has come:

Madam, there is alighted at your gate
A young Venetian, one that comes before
To signify the approaching of his lord
From whom he bringeth sensible regreets
To wit, besides commends and courteous breath,
Gifts of rich value.

Bassanio has sent some fancy packages ahead of his arrival--all bought with Antonio's borrowed money. The messenger is impressed:

...Yet have I not seen
So likely an ambassador of love.

His fine gifts make him a good candidate, in other words. Of course it's all a pose--he's got nothing but his good name. But Nerissa speaks for both women when she hopes that the newcomer is the (doubtless) hot-looking and suave Bassanio.

Bachelor Number Three

I'm skipping a couple of scenes ahead so that I can treat all the suitors in one post. In the second scene of Act 3, Portia entreats Bassanio to "tarry a little" before he "hazards." Using that word is a pretty bald hint, isn't it? It's right there in the lead casket's inscription. She'll give him a few more hints before it's over, too. It's cheating, but as we've seen, the Christian characters make their own rules in this play.

Anyway, she's enjoying his company, and fears he will make the wrong choice. She more or less reveals her feelings; although she insists "it is not love" that makes her feel so funny, the rest of her speech suggests otherwise. She wants him to stick around "a month or two," then considers breaking her oath to her father and telling him the right answer. He insists on taking his chances:

Let me choose,
For as I am, I live upon the rack.

"This not knowing is torture." In fact, I imagine he doesn't have enough money to keep impressing her with his fake wealth for two more months. So he goes for it. Portia points to the caskets, and tells him that she is "locked in one of them." The metaphoric connection between locked boxes and virginal bodies would have been pretty obvious to Will's audience. The right man has the "key" to the untried receptacle. By unlocking it, he will possess her (and her money) completely.

Portia asks for music while he chooses. I'm hearing the "Jeopardy" theme here, but I think it's supposed to be something more melodic. One of her servants sings

Tell me where is fancy bred
Or in the heart, or in the head?
How begot, how nourish-ed?

As you see, all the lines rhyme with...lead.

Bassanio seems to take the hint--his whole "choosing speech" is about how one needs to look behind veil of "ornament" and "outward parts" to see the truth within:

Thus ornament is but the guiled shore
To a most dangerous sea, the beauteous scarf,
Veiling an Indian beauty; in a word,
The seeming truth which cunning times put on
To entrap the wisest.

He associates "ornament" with exotic locales and "Indian" beauties--that's not a compliment. "Indian" here means swarthy or dark-skinned. The veil hides the truth of racial difference--the ugliness of a tawny face. He makes his choice, rejecting "gaudy gold" and the "common drudge/'Tween man and man" that is silver currency, choosing "meagre lead/Which rather threaten'st than doth promise aught."

So let's think about this. Portia says that she's locked in one of the boxes--but really all of them are aspects of her, and aspects of this play. In gold we see fortune and wealth in its idealized state--she was earlier likened to the Golden Fleece of mythology, and Belmont seems, on the surface, to be a "golden" place, untainted by commerce. Silver is money, currency, filthy lucre. The stuff that runs Venice. Lead, of course, is the Christian choice--"the last shall be first," says the Parable of the Vineyard. The meek shall inherit the earth. But if Portia is the Golden Fleece, she's also a sure source of silver. If she and her father imagine they are sifting out the fortune hunters with this game, they are in fact rigging the game in favor of gamblers and big risk-takers. Bassanio--and the Venetian capitalists generally--are more that willing to "hazard all" in the hope of a big win.

That phrase "hazard all he hath" is reminiscent of the New Testament, too--the Christian soul must risk everything, be willing to lose everything, to attain treasures in heaven.

Once Bassanio wins, Portia practically throws herself at his feet, proclaiming that she wishes she had more to give him than her humble self. She wishes she were "ten thousand times more rich, a thousand times more fair..." She seems to know enough about him to raise the number when she's talking about money, doesn't she? But it's pathetic, really. He's come to win her fortune, and she's so damned grateful to have him she's willing to give him even more. Her language is full of commercial metaphors:

...only to stand high in your account,
I might in virtues, beauties, livings, friends,
Exceed account. But the full sum of me
Is sum of something which, to term in gross
Is an unlessoned girl, unschooled, unpractised...

"I'll go in debt to be more of what you value." Interesting choice of words, under the circumstances. She then goes on to proclaim him her "governor" and "king," and essentially gives him all her stuff--house, servants, fortune. Her one (fairytale) condition is that he not take off the ring she gives him, lest it "presage the ruin of [his] love." It's an old motif, and of course he will violate the pact before the play ends.

But for now, he's hit the jackpot. Ka-ching!

Daughters and Ducats

2010-02-03T19:21:00.011-05:00

The Merchant of Venice was the first Shakespeare play I ever read all the way through. I was a freshman in a smallish Catholic girls' high school in a big Midwestern city, and The Merchant was included in the diocese-approved literature anthology we used in my English class. I remember this well because we did a dramatic reading of the play in the class, and I discovered I had some (limited) acting talent. I wasn't Portia--I was Lancelot Gobbo. When I quoted the dialogue between his conscience and "the fiend" in my last post, I did it all from memory. I find that amusing because whenever I hear from old classmates, they invariably tell me about something I did or said in high school that I have no memory of whatsoever. But I remember Lancelot's speech like it was yesterday.

That old movie poster doesn't have much to do with all this, except that The Trouble with Angels was one of my favorite movies as a kid, and it's set in a Catholic girls' school. I still love this movie. It's like the Harry Potter movies, only instead of wizards and witches, there are Catholic nuns and priests!

Okay, it was better than it sounds.

In retrospect, it seems weird that The Merchant should be the play chosen for inclusion in a Catholic high school reader. I suppose one could rationalize this by pointing out that, unlike the tragedies and many of the other comedies, this play doesn't have any sexual language or innuendo--or not much, anyway. But given the thematics--the brutal antipathy between Christians and Jews in the play--I suspect that the editors had other things in mind. It goes without saying that the play didn't make me--or anyone in my class--the least bit uneasy back then. We all took the simple oppositions at face value, and saw the ending as happily comedic.

I'm older now, and I've eaten the forbidden fruit of irony. For better or worse, I've been kicked out of the Garden of Certainty, and shall live out the rest of my days in the windy wilderness of ambivalence. It's a cold, foggy place, but you get used to it.

All this is a preamble to today's post, which could have been subtitled "Mean Girls and the Mercenaries Who Love Them." Yes, today's topic is, once again, romance and commerce--one of Will's favorite themes. Jessica, Shylock's daughter, is about to run away with Lorenzo, one of the young Venetians in Antonio's entourage. Will doesn't really give us any clear reason for her defection--we don't see Shylock mistreating her, or locking her up, or forcing her marry someone against her will. It's nothing like Juliet's situation. Jessica says only that living with her father "is hell," which echoes Lancelot's ramblings about fiends and "the very devil incarnation."

I think she looks sneaky in that painting, don't you?

Of course Will could have given us a reason for Jessica's betrayal of her father. She would have been more sympathetic, and Shylock more contemptible, had he made her more Julietish. But instead, we join the romance in medias res--Jess and Lorenzo have already hooked up, and are just about to elope. It's clear that, on some level, Will expected us to sympathize with Jessica just because her father is a miserly Jew.

Jessica is one of a long line of women in Will's plays who choose husband over father. A rabid matrimonialist, Will was interested in generativity, fertility, the propagation of the species. One of the constant threats to social and psychic order in his plays is the specter of celibacy and barrenness. The husband-wife bond has to take precedence over the father-daughter one. Thus we have Juliet, Cordelia, Desdemona, Hermia, Miranda and Jessica choosing their husbands over their fathers. But there's something else here--Shylock's daughter is his only connection to the future. Through her, his line and his faith live on. When she defects, he loses more than a daughter, and more than the ducats she steals--he loses his legacy, he becomes barren himself. When Jessica chooses husband over father, she also chooses Christianity over Judaism. Typologically, she represents the soul who embraces the New Law of Christian caritas. Thematically, she betrays her father, steals his money and his goods, and buys herself a place on the winning team.

Allegory can be ethically problematic, when you think about it.

When makes his pitch to Antonio in Act 1, Bassanio mentions Portia's wealth first ("a lady richly left), her beauty second, and her virtues last. Similarly, Lorenzo fesses up to his friends about the elopement scheme in decidedly unromantic terms:

...She hath directed
How I shall take her from her father's house,
What gold and jewels she is furnished with,
What page's suit she hath in readiness.

The elopement itself is no less crass. Lorenzo calls up to her window, and she tosses a bag of stolen gold and jewels down first:

Here, catch this casket. It is worth the pains.
I am glad 'tis night, you do not look on me,
For I am much ashamed of my exchange;
But love is blind, and lovers cannot see
The pretty follies that themselves commit;
For if they could, Cupid himself would blush
To see me thus transformed to a boy.

A lot of irony here. First, it's a faint echo of that other balcony scene, isn't it? In R and J, night was the time when love's truth was revealed, when poetry triumphed over meaningless decorum. Here, it's a covering for shame. Jessica says she's ashamed of her "exchange" of clothes--she's dressing as a boy to make her escape--but one has to wonder if maybe the other "exchange" is bugging her too. Jews become Christians, girls become boys. The suggestion is, of course, that they're both theatrical affectations, easily donned and doffed like costumes.

That's not true for Shylock, though. He's one of Will's least theatrical characters. His "tribe" is who and what he is. If Jessica is protean, changeable, her father is "a stony adversary," as the Duke says at the end of the play. He is intractable, but also unchangeable. He is the antithesis of the self-fashioning theatrical man.

It's hard not to read Jessica's elopement cynically: it's one thing to flee her father's house in the interest of True Love. It's another to commit theft along the way. She's not content with just a casket, either:

I will make fast the doors, and gild myself
With some more ducats, and be with you straight.

Gild herself with ducats, indeed. It's almost as if she knows she's buying Lorenzo's affections. I've always found that line particularly creepy.

Like everything that happens to Shylock in this play, this dual betrayal seems excessive. Will didn't make it easy for us to sympathize with the Jew's "gentle daughter."

Which isn't to say that Shylock is a likable guy. He's not. There are a lot of reasons to despise him. He hates music, for one thing--a sure sign that something is spiritually wrong with him. Who doesn't like music?

Okay, since I asked--Puritans don't. Although Will's audience was unlikely to know any practicing Jews, they most certainly knew some practicing Puritans. Puritans saw music, dancing, revelry of all kinds as sinful, and wanted none of it. When Shylock hears the masquers making merry in the streets, he commands Jessica to shut the windows against the noise:

What, are there masques? Hear you me, Jessica,
Lock up my doors; and when you hear the drum
And the vile squealing of the wry-necked fife,
Clamber not you up to the casements then,
Nor thrust your head into the public street
To gaze on Christian fools with varnished faces,
But stop my house's ears--I mean my casements,
Let not the sound of shallow fopp'ry enter
My sober house.

This was surely meant as a dig at those religious "dissenters" who wanted to close the theaters (and eventually would), prohibit festivals, and generally wreck everyone's party. Shylock is a villain in the Scrooge/Grinch tradition, rather than the Joker/Darth Vader one. He's personally affronted by the sound of merriment, hates anything smacking of sentiment or affection. The Venetians, like the Whos down in Whoville, are just having too much fun.

In fact, there's something a little bit Shylocky about the old Grinch, isn't there? He hates Christian holidays and has a heart three sizes too small...but then I can't really see the Venetians joining hands and singing joyfully after they wake up to find their presents all gone. They'd like to think that they value human community over money, but of course they don't. Their values fall pretty far short of Whoville standards, it seems to me.

Once Shylock finds out that Lorenzo has run off with his daughter and his ducats, he raises holy hell, demanding that the Duke find her and arrest her Christian abductor. Interestingly, we only hear about his reaction through hearsay. Salerio and Solanio--the Rosenkranz and Guildenstern of this play--have a good laugh over the story:

Solanio: I never heard a passion so confused,
So strange, outrageous, and so variable
As the dog Jew did utter in the streets.
'My daughter! O, my ducats! O, my daughter!
Fled with a Christian! O, my Christian ducats!
Justice! The law! My ducats and my daughter!
A sealed bag, two sealed bags of ducats,
Of double ducats, stol'n from me by my daughter!
And jewels, two stones, two rich and precious stones,
Stol'n by my daughter! Justice! Find the girl!
She hath the stones upon her, and the ducats!'

Salerio: Why, all the boys in Venice follow him,
Crying, 'His stones, his daughter, and his ducats!'

Moving Shylock's humiliation offstage keeps the comedy from turning tragic--the audience can't sympathize with him when he's just the butt of a joke. "Stones" meant pretty much the same thing as "family jewels" today: testicles. Jessica "hath the stones upon her," i.e., she has gelded him. This is absolutely true. In fact, she's unmanned him twice over--taking away herself, and his money, both of the means he had to "breed," to leave a legacy.

Once again, Will reveals how dangerous it is to have only daughters.

Finally, we don't know if Shylock actually ran through the streets equating his daughter and his ducats. We've only got Solanio and Salerio's word for it. We're forced to trust them, because otherwise, as I said, the whole thing tips over into pathos. Even if he did, he's not the only one to put a price on a human being. One of the commodities to pass through the port city of Venice was, of course, human flesh--Venice was a slave-trading city. And Shylock's materialism is surely matched by that of the Christians, who put a price tag on everything--even love. Ironically, the Venetians seem most outraged by Shylock when he's most like them.

In some ways, the play can be reduced to a simple struggle over this one issue. Shylock insists he's like the Christians, and they like him. They reject that assessment utterly, and destroy him for even suggesting it.

Next: Morocco goes for the gold.

Fathers and Fiends

2010-01-31T11:00:00.008-05:00

What did Shakespeare mean to say when he wrote this play? Did he want us to think that Jews are a rapacious, vengeful race? That Christians are hypocrites who seldom practice what they preach? That the law is arbitrary? That religion is a justification for injustice? One could make all these arguments based on a reading of The Merchant of Venice, but we won't ever know what Will intended. Literature, like any text-based theology, generates interpretation. Interpretation is culturally- and historically-specific. The play was read, performed and understood quite differently in nineteenth-century England, for example, from the way it was understood and performed in 1943 Vienna, under the auspices of the Third Reich.

Because this play is so disturbing, so potentially damaging to Will's reputation as the Father of English Drama and The Greatest Writer in English, interpreting it is a risky business. We don't want him to be an anti-Semite, or a racist, or anything else we now associate with ignorant anti-humanism. Interestingly, interpretation is an issue in the play itself, too. Portia's suitors have to correctly interpret the meaning of the three caskets to win her. Antonio incorrectly interprets Shylock's "bargain" as a change of heart. Portia's literal interpretation of the law eventually restores a kind of order to both Venice and Belmont.

But, wait, no it doesn't.

Now if I were still an academic, I'd have to write something like "this play remains ambivalent on the question of race, as on the question of justice. In its refusal to decide, to cast its lot definitively with either the Christians or the Jew, it can be said to problematize interpretation itself, and by implication, the certainties of both theology and law."

How's that for smart-sounding, cowardly equivocation? Here's what I really think. Will is interested in the problem of justice, for sure. And he wonders how and why bigotry gets started, and how it's justified by people who claim to be "fair." He's interested in the relationship between law and religion because both of them claim to serve a higher ideal--call it God or call it Justice--and both inevitably fall short. He picked Jews and Moroccans because those were the most exotic, scary people to Elizabethans. Most of his countrymen hadn't ever seen either one. He's not an anti-Semite, because that idea just didn't exist then. He's interested in what links people together, and why they all spend so much time and moral energy trying to deny that link, or, if you will, "bond."

I guess I started thinking about this question because the beginning of Act 2 is all about the problem of fathers--dead ones, good ones, bad ones. Shakespeare is a kind of dead father figure too. We want him to be a good daddy, not a bad one. A humanist hero, not a racist fiend. Like a good daughter, I'm going to argue for the former. But we'll see how it goes--I haven't read this play in over 10 years, so it's kind of an adventure for me, too.

So, on to Act 2.

"Let Us Make Incision For Your Love"

Having scared off all her other potential husbands with the casket game, Portia must now entertain the suit of the Prince of Morocco. He's black-skinned. I mention that because Will wants us to remember it. That's Morocco's purpose in the play. To be noble, somewhat arrogant, and black:

Mislike me not for my complexion,
The shadowed livery of the burnished sun,
To whom I am a neighbor and near bred.
Bring me the fairest creature northward born,
Where Phoebus' fire scarce thaws the icicles,
And let us make incision for your love,
To prove whose blood is reddest, his or mine.
I tell thee, lady, this aspect of mine
Hath feared the valiant. By my love I swear,
The best regarded virgins of our clime
Have loved it too. I would not change this hue
Except to steal your thoughts, gentle queen.

Simply put, he's black and proud. But the language is lovely, isn't it? "...my complexion, the shadowed livery of the burnished sun...." "Livery," of course, implies servitude--noble houses had their servants all wear the same colors. But he follows that with a claim of equality--he's the sun's "neighbor, and near bred." He's realistic enough to realize that he can't make a strong argument for beauty, since black skin was considered devilish, so he makes a claim for valor, instead. And in making that claim, returns us to the argument of the previous scene--about what's on the outside, and what's on the inside. "Let us make incision for your love/to prove whose blood is reddest..."--let's look inside and see who's the bravest. We're reminded that we all bleed red, regardless of skin color. We're obviously meant to see Shylock's pound of flesh and Morocco's bloody incision in similar terms--as a way of thinking about the similarities among men, rather than their (superficial) differences. And of course "incision" looks forward to the slicing and dicing that's threatened in the courtroom scene at the end. Antonio is willing to suffer a fatal incision for Bassanio's love--Morocco's metaphor literalized.

But Morocco's different in other ways, too. He reminds me of a bad blind date, where the guy, eager to impress, talks about how tough he is, or how much he can bench-press. Maybe that's alluring in the wilder parts of the world, but in decadent, effete Venice, a guy who boasts about his battle prowess--hinting at other kinds of prowess--is just a freak. Like putting Beowulf in a Noel Coward play, or something. Belmont is a gentle, feminine place, and Morocco's way out of his element.

Portia's next lines are an out-and-out lie, although I suppose one could excuse her on the grounds of decorum:

In terms of choice I am not solely led
By nice direction of a maiden's eyes.
Besides, the lott'ry of my destiny
Bars me the right of voluntary choosing.
But if my father had not scanted me,
And hedged me by his wit to yield myself
His wife who wins me by that means I told you,
Yourself, renowned Prince, then stood as fair
As any comer I have looked on yet
For my affection.

One could split hairs and assume that the line "as any comer I have looked on yet," keeps her from outright mendacity, but when Morocco later fails to choose the right casket, Portia will breathe a sigh of relief, saying

A gentle riddance. Draw the curtains, go.
Let all of his complexion choose me so.

So much for seeing beyond the surface.

Morocco, for his part, misunderstands the game itself, thinking it's just a matter of blind chance:

I would o'erstare the sternest eyes that look,
Outbrave the heart most daring on the earth,
Pluck the young sucking cubs from the she-bear,
Yea, mock the lion when a roars for prey,
To win the lady. But alas the while,
If Hercules and Lichas play at dice
Which is the better man, the greater throw
May turn by fortune from the weaker hand.

"In a game of chance, strength and bravery count for nothing." But of course it's not a game of chance, it's a game of reading and interpreting. There is "hazard," or risk involved, but the winner will be the man who's willing "to hazard all he hath," i.e., to risk everything. It rewards the willingness to risk, but it's not like those old game shows, where you have to choose what's behind door number 3."Who chooses his meaning chooses you," Nerissa says. The emphasis is on meaning, on understanding what the caskets, each in turn, signify.

Portia is a good daughter. Although her father's dead, she's still playing by his rules--her inheritance, apparently, is contingent on this game. She's not above cheating a little bit, as we'll see when it's Bassanio's turn, but she follows the letter of her father's edict. The winner must choose from among the gold, silver, and lead caskets. As a dutiful daughter, Portia provides a contrast to Jessica, who rebels against her father's will, steals from him, and ultimately profits from his humiliation--although not as much as her husband, Lorenzo, does. Jessica is a bad daughter, but her rebellion is justified in the Venetian (and Elizabethan) world, where Jews are forced to turn from the Old Law to the New--i.e, become Christians. Her deed is "fiendish," but it's okay because, as the clown Lancelot Gobbo says, the Jew is "a kind of devil" himself.

Jacob and Esau

Gobbo's comic interlude in the second scene gives Will the opportunity for more religious allegory and analogy. As the scene opens, Shylock's servant is debating whether or not to abandon his master and seek a new, kinder one:

"Certainly my conscience will serve me to run from this Jew my master. The fiend is at mine elbow, and tempts me, saying to me 'Gobbo, Lancelot Gobbo, good Lancelot,' or 'good Gobbo,' or 'good Lancelot Gobbo--use your legs, take the start, run away.' My conscience says 'No, take heed, honest Lancelot, take heed, honest Gobbo,' or, as aforesaid, 'honest Lancelot Gobbo--do not run, scorn running with thy heels.'"

Lancelot's loyalty to or rebellion against his master is structured as a moral dilemma--which it was, in Elizabethan England. The revolt of the serving classes was seen as a threat to the hierarchical order of society, and wasn't something to be taken lightly. The church and the state both saw "knowing one's place" as a virtue. To rebel against one's master was a sin.

Unless, of course, that master is a Jew, and "the very devil incarnation," as Gobbo amusingly malaprops. Ultimately, he decides that when choosing between a devilish act and the devil himself, there's no contest. He runs, seeking employment with a new, younger--albeit poorer--master, the Christian Bassanio.

This little morality play quickly shifts into a theological burlesque. When Gobbo meets his half-blind father, Old Gobbo, on the road, he plays a cruel but funny game with him. Old Gobbo is looking for his son, and is too blind to recognize him. Lancelot insists that the man he seeks in "young Master Lancelot," i.e., not a servant but a gentleman, and is, sadly, "deceased."

At Gobbo's wail of sorrow, he reveals himself: "do you know me, father?"

Old Gobbo says that he's "sand-blind," and can't recognize him. Lancelot then kneels before him, asking for his blessing. An Elizabethan audience, well-versed in biblical lore, would immediately recognize this as an allusion to the story of Jacob and Esau in the Book of Genesis. If you've been to Sunday school, you probably remember this one. Jacob cheats his brother Esau--the older twin--out of his inheritance by dressing up in sheepskins and duping his father, Isaac, into giving him the ritualistic blessing that will make him the heir. Esau, you see, was "a hairy man," and Jacob "a smooth man." Now, to be fair, Esau wasn't too bright. He was really hungry, and let Jacob have this opportunity in exchange for a bowl of soup. Their mom, Rebekah, liked Jacob better, and colluded in this deception.

In the Old Testament, one sibling was always the favorite. It's like a textbook on bad parenting.

Early Christian thinkers saw this as a "typological" moment. Typology is the hermeneutic science of making everything in the Old Testament into an allegory of the coming of Christ. You know--leaving the old master, the Jew, for the new one, the Christian. In a manner of speaking. So for these typologists, Jacob, though younger, inherits the his father's wealth just as the younger Christian church--the New Covenant--will supersede the Old (Jewish) Covenant, the law of Moses. In The Merchant, this is the occasion for comedy, as Old Gobbo pats his son's head blindly:

"Lord worshipped might he be, what a beard has thou got! Thou hast got more hair on thy chin than Dobbin my fill-horse has on his tail."

Finally Gobbo recognizes his son, and says he's brought presents for Shylock, the boy's master. Lancelot tells him to save the presents for Bassanio, the man he now wants to work for because B. "gives rare new liveries," i.e., has cool uniforms for his servants. Meanwhile, as luck would have it, Bassanio comes along. Old Gobbo wants to give him his "dish of doves" (this has metaphoric significance, too--doves signify the coming of the Holy Spirit in the Christian Age of Grace), while Lancelot wants to be hired into his service.

It turns out Shylock was ready to be rid of the rebel, anyway, according to Bassanio:

...Thou hast obtained thy suit.
Shylock thy master spoke with me this day,
And hath preferred thee, if it be preferment
To leave a rich Jew's service to become
The follower of so poor a gentleman.

It turns out the "fiend" isn't above giving his disloyal servant a good recommendation. Lancelot once again makes the religious point:

"The old proverb is very well parted between my master Shylock and you, sir: you have the grace of God, sir, and he hath enough."

The old proverb is "the grace of God is gear enough." In other words, divine grace is more important than material goods. Lancelot points out that Shylock has a lot of money, but Bassanio, as a Christian, has God's grace. But it bears thinking about, doesn't it? Bassanio is borrowing three thousand ducats to "gear himself up" in order to win Portia and her considerable fortune. It seems grace is good to have, but it's hardly enough.

Next: Risky undertakings and broken bonds