Back in the old pre-Euro
days, there were EU discussions as to
which great European figures might be depicted on the future European banknotes. Shakespeare was discounted on the grounds of his anti-semitism.
This may just have been an excuse to try
and sneak in Dante or Goethe in preference; but if it was meant sincerely, then
I am not at all sure that it was fair; for I am not sure that it takes due
account of context. "I have nothing
against Jews," might seem a neutral enough statement. But it might
become heroic if uttered in a Gestapo torture chamber. And I think the portrait
of Shylock is a great deal braver than some of us, with our modern (or
postmodern) perspectives, give Shakespeare credit for.
But
let me try to set the context I am arguing for.
At
the first outbreak of the Black Death, Jews in Germany - as uncertain as anyone
else about the cause, but making shrewd guesses -
suggested to their gentile neighbours they
might try boiling their water. In the hysteria of the time, this message was quickly passed on and distorted. What did the Jews
know about the water that no one else did? From here it was but a step to the
rumours about deliberate poisoning. From an act of altruism arose a set of
German anti-Jewish pogroms, and a lingering reputation
for contaminating the drinking water of Christians.
It
is this tradition, I think, that Marlowe is drawing on in his depiction of
Barabbas: who poisons all the wells of
Malta in his revenge against the Christians.
I know it is bad practice
(forbidden since the days of A C Bradley) to speculate about the psychology of writers,
but here I am going to do so anyway. I think
there were two main stimuli behind the creation of Shylock: apart from the fact
that one of the stories Shakespeare drew on featured a Jew. The one was Shakespeare's intention to counter
- or, at least, broaden - the portrait
of Barabbas. The other was his reaction to the fate of Roderigo Lopez.
With
apologies to those who know the details already, Roderigo Lopez was Queen Elizabeth's
Physician, arrested tried and executed on the grounds of trying to poison her.
Not a blameless figure, but almost certainly innocent of the charges: the main evidence being his own confession obtained under
the same sort of persuasion applied to
Guy Fawkes. Another case of fear-generated hysteria - in this case, of foreign enemies rather than microbes - needing to find a
scapegoat.
And in the
history before that time, Jews had been imprisoned in Clifford's Tower in York by Richard I when he could not repay their loans,
and later expelled from England altogether.
It would have needed a braver dramatist than Shakespeare to come before Elizabethan audiences with an entirely
sympathetic portrait of a Jew.
Shakespeare,
as a writer, is a hedger of bets. He is far less willing to lay his cards on the table than, say, Milton. Galileo recanted on
the Solar System, and survived; Bruno
refused to recant his planetary and other heresies and was burned alive.
Shakespeare is the Galileo, not the Bruno, of literature.
But Galileo recanted knowing that he
had laid the foundations of a truth that would be seen by future generations; and I wonder if Shakespeare is not a
Galileo in this sense as well. There is plenty of evidence that
Shakespeare wrote for his own time, rather
than for posterity: for it was his own Age that paid him. But I like to think, nevertheless,
that he gave in Shylock a portrait he hoped would be grasped by the perceptive among his own audiences; and more
clearly, generally, by those which followed.
I think there is
a deep and ironic ambiguity about the supposed happy ending to The Merchant
of Venice. Shylock becomes a Christian; but the
portraits of Christians are, as a
generality, such that this can hardly be an occasion for rejoicing. Jessica, having run off taking a chunk of her father's
money, romanticises with Lorenzo about celebrated
nights from classical antiquity. But the stories, if you look at them closely, all concern love affairs that ended tragically.
And the abiding image of the final act is the candle in the darkness: like a good deed in a naughty world.
Shakespeare intends us to see, I think, that this sort of ambiguity runs right
though the play: including his least
- or most - sympathetic character.
I
should like to draw on two comparisons: King Lear and Dickens. There is
a great deal of social criticism in King
Lear, but it is almost all veiled. It is spoken either by the King in his madness - never, when he is sane - or
by the Fool, or by Edgar in feigned madness.
Social criticism is all right when safely uttered by idiots.
And yet the power of the language invades the
subconscious...
Fagin is a much
less sympathetic - as well as much funnier - figure than Shylock. At a symbolic level, with his red hair and his toasting
fork, he is the Devil straight out of the medieval mystery plays: tempting the
youthful and innocent soul. But he is also based on the real-life fence Ikey
Solomon: transported, like the Artful Dodger, rather than hanged, like Fagin. If anything, although the portrait is unpleasant,
it is probably less so than the real-life
original. Underage female prostitution is only lightly touched on in the novel; and there is nothing at all about the
rent-boy networks that would have been a
sideline of some of the Victorian pickpocket gangs.
To
suggest that a Jew could not be evil would have been as big a lie as to suggest
a Jew could not be good. And yet Dickens, aware of having given only one side
of the picture, countered with the poignant picture of Riah: the gentle,
gentile-exploited Jew of Our Mutual
Friend.
Now, Shakespeare simply did not have
that option. His audiences would have lapped
up a Fagin, but to give them a portrait of a Jew like Riah would probably not
have been tolerated by the theatre goers of the time: any more than the
authorities would have been pleased
to hear Lear’s, social criticism if uttered by a sane king or a normal
peasant.
So Shakespeare -
unparallelled before or since for tolerance and understanding and depiction of
human diversity - had to compress his Fagin and his Riah together: in the hope that the surface portrait of the one would be
countered by the subconscious power of the
other.
For which, in the
end, is meant to linger more forcibly?
My daughter, my
ducats; my ducats, my daughter!
Or, and with a weight
of twentieth-century experience behind it that Shakespeare could not have anticipated:
If you prick us, do we not bleed?
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