Shakespeare

It was Shakespeare’s practice to combine elements from what would seem irreconcilable sources, and thereby create new forms of harmony. For The Merchant of Venice he no doubt plundered an old stage drama, The Jew, which had been played at the Bull Theatre almost twenty years before; a spectator there described it as representing “the greedinesse of worldly chusers and bloody mindes of Usurers.”³ That itself is a reasonable if brief summary of Shakespeare’s play. It would have been just like Shakespeare’s ordinary practice – to take an ancient “potboiler,” which he must have seen and remembered, and to infuse it with fresh life. He had also witnessed The Jew of Malta, since the role of Shylock is in part based upon that of Marlowe’s Barabas; the instinct for imitation is implicated in the desire to out-write his dead rival. The story of Shylock acted as the catalyst, whereby these two plays came together in new and unusual combination. He also makes use of an Italian story from Ser Giovanni’s Il Pecorone; it had not been translated into English at this time, and so we are led to the conjecture either that Shakespeare could read Italian or that he picked up the story at second hand. He remembered, too, the story of the Argonauts from his schoolboy reading of Ovid. There are of course other sources, many of them now unknown or forgotten, part of the texture of Shakespeare’s mind; but with the plays, the Italian story and the school reading of set texts, we may gain some inkling of the combinatory power of Shakespeare’s imagination.

The character of Shylock has provoked so many different interpretations that he has turned into the Wandering Jew, progressing through a thousand theses and critical studies. He may have been the model for Dickens’s Fagin but, unlike the entrepreneur of Saffron Hill, he could never become a caricature; he is too filled with life and spirit, too linguistically resourceful, to be conventionalised. He is altogether too powerful and perplexing a figure. It is almost as if Shakespeare fully intended to create a character drawing upon conventional prejudices about an alien race, but found that he was unable to sympathise with such a figure. He simply could not write a stereotype. He would later explore the nobility of an alien or “outsider” in Othello. It is likely that the sound and appearance of Shylock led Shakespeare forward, without the dramatist really knowing in which direction he was going. That is why he is perhaps, like so many of Shakespeare’s principal figures, beyond interpretation. He is beyond good and evil. He is simply a magnificent and extravagant stage representation.

But we must never forget the stridency of the Elizabethan theatre. Shy-lock would have been played with a red wig and bottle nose. The play is, after all, entitled the “comicall History.” The play retains strong elements of the commedia dell’arte, and can indeed be seen in part as a grotesque comedy which includes the figures of the Pantaloon, the Dottore, the first and second lovers, and of course the zanies or buffoons. But Shakespeare cannot use any dramatic convention without in some way changing it. In The Merchant of Venice the usual rules of the commedia dell’arte are subverted. The fact that it also incorporates fanciful elements from other sources, such as Portia’s riddle of the caskets, only serves to emphasise the highly theatrical and dream-like world in which it is set. There was perhaps a masque introduced in the course of the narrative, which in turn suggests that at least one version of the play was designed to be performed at Burbage’s newly refurbished Blackfriars; an indoor playhouse was the appropriate setting for an elegant entertainment of that sort. There are, indeed, images of music throughout the play which reach the peak of their crescendo in the last scene at Belmont (2340-4):

… looke how the floore of heauen

Is thick inlayed with pattens of bright gold,

There’s not the smallest orbe which thou beholdst

But in his motion like an Angell sings.

All of the scenes are wrapped in the greater unreality of sixteenth-century theatrical convention, which veered closer towards nineteenth-century melodrama or pantomime than twentieth-century naturalistic theatre.