Lopez’s execution was the last act of a comedy, or so the crowd’s laughter, conditioned by The Jew of Malta, suggested. If it was cruel, it was also perfectly reasonable to laugh. A wicked plot to murder the queen—a plot that combined the hated figure of the Catholic king of Spain and the hated figure of the Jew—had been providentially thwarted. Was Shakespeare attracted or repelled by what went on at the foot of the scaffold? Did he admire the way Marlowe’s dark comedy had helped to shape the crowd’s response, or was he sickened by it? The only evidence is the play that Shakespeare wrote in the wake of Lopez’s death, and the answer it suggests is that he was both intrigued and nauseated. He borrowed heavily from Marlowe—Shakespeare was always a great borrower—but he created a set of characters and a range of emotions utterly alien to Marlowe’s art. He wanted, it seems, to excite laughter at a wicked Jew’s discomfiture—not, to be sure, in a play about international intrigue, but in a play about money and love—and he wanted at the same time to call the laughter into question, to make the amusement excruciatingly uncomfortable.
The Merchant of Venice is full of amused mockery: “I never heard a passion so confused,” chuckles one of the Venetian Christians, Solanio,
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!”
(2.8.12–16)
“Why, all the boys in Venice follow him,” laughs his friend Salerio, giving us a glimpse of the crowd’s raucous amusement, “Crying, ‘His stones, his daughter, and his ducats!’” (2.8.23–24). And when Shylock’s fiendish plot to avenge himself by cutting out a pound of good Antonio’s flesh is defeated in court, the Jew’s discomfiture, as he is forced to convert, is accompanied by a chorus of triumphant mockery from Graziano:
Beg that thou mayst have leave to hang thyself—
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
A halter, gratis. Nothing else, for God’s sake.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
In christ’ning shalt thou have two godfathers.
Had I been judge thou should have had ten more,
To bring thee to the gallows, not the font.
(4.1.359–96)
Shakespeare chose not to bring his Jew to the gallows—in all of his comedies, he carefully avoided killing off his villains, at least onstage—but the mocking voices of Salerio, Solanio, and Graziano are very close to what the playwright would have heard at the foot of the scaffold on which Lopez was hanged. The Merchant of Venice found a way to give the spectators something of what the crowd at the execution enjoyed, but without the blood and gore. Shylock is the traditional killjoy of romantic comedy: deaf to music, the enemy of pleasure, he stands in the way of young love. But he is something worse than the conventional tyrannical, possessive father who must be defeated by budding youth. “Shylock the Jew” is, as the title page of the first quarto puts it, a figure of “extreme cruelty,” the rigid, inflexible representative of the Old Law, an unforgiving, remorseless, embittered, and murderous alien who threatens the happiness of the entire community. Defeated in court—not as a Jew but as a non-Venetian, an “alien”—Shylock is forcibly drawn into that community, but Graziano’s mockery makes it clear that the newly christened convert will always be, as Camden said of the convert Lopez, “a man of the Jewish profession”; that is, Shylock’s conversion is just comedy’s kinder, gentler way of killing him off.
Yet the fact is that the mockers Salerio, Solanio, and Graziano are probably the least likable characters in The Merchant of Venice. They are not depicted as villainous, and their laughter echoes through the play, but their grating words are repeatedly registered as embarrassing, coarse, and unpleasant. “Thou art,” as Bassanio tells Graziano, “too wild, too rude and bold of voice” (2.2.162). Shakespeare did not repudiate their raucous voices—the voices that he may have heard laughing at the Jew Lopez; on the contrary, he wanted his comedy to draw them into the celebration of Shylock’s undoing. But the spirit of the play is not their spirit.
A comic playwright thrives on laughter, but it is as if Shakespeare had looked too closely at the faces of the crowd, as if he were repelled as well as fascinated by the mockery of the vanquished alien, as if he understood the mass appeal of the ancient game he was playing but suddenly felt queasy about the rules. “Imagine that you see the wretched strangers”: When he had such strangers—Lopez or Shylock—fixed in his imagination, Shakespeare was uneasy with what he saw. Shylock’s forced conversion—a plot device not found in Shakespeare’s source—is an attempt to evade the nastier historical alternatives: the grisly execution Shakespeare may have personally witnessed; the mass expulsion of the Jews he could have read about in the chronicles of England. But as the laughter in the courtroom plainly demonstrates, conversion does not actually work to settle the issue of the stranger. Even Shylock’s daughter Jessica, who has eloped and become a Christian of her own volition, is not exempt: the clown Lancelot grumbles that as a Jew’s daughter she is damned, and, besides, “This making of Christians will raise the price of hogs” (3.5.19).
But rising pork prices are the least of the problems that the play explores. Shakespeare chose not to do to Shylock what the Elizabethan state did to Lopez, but he opted for anatomy of a different kind. Unsettling the whole comic structure that he borrowed from his Italian source, he took the risk of dissecting the interior of his villain and probing more deeply than he had ever done before. To be sure, Shylock at moments is something of a puppet, but, even jerked upon his strings, he reveals what Shakespeare has achieved. In one of the more rigidly mechanistic moments in the play, Shylock is pulled in radically different directions: he tries to track down his daughter Jessica, who has robbed him and eloped with the Christian Lorenzo; at the same time Shylock learns that the merchant Antonio, whom he hates and would like to destroy, is suffering serious business reverses. Salerio and Solanio have already mocked the Jew’s frantic outcries—“‘My daughter! O, my ducats! O, my daughter!’”—and now the comic spectacle itself takes place. Shylock impatiently asks for news—of all Shakespeare’s characters, he is the most obsessed with news—from the fellow Jew he has sent to find his daughter.
SHYLOCK: How now, Tubal? What news from Genoa? Hast thou found my daughter?
TUBAL: I often came where I did hear of her, but cannot find her.
SHYLOCK: Why, there, there, there, there.
(3.1.67–71)
Repetition is one of the keys to Shylock’s music. In sound and sense both, “there” seems to spring from Tubal’s “where,” yet it is not really about place, Genoa or anywhere else. It is the register of Shylock’s disappointment, and it is an attempt at consolation, the “there, there” spoken by a friend. But a friend does not speak the words; they are spoken by Shylock himself, and their numb repetition moves beyond frustrated hope and failed consolation to something else. Repeated words of this kind are drained of whatever meaning they may have started with; they become instead placeholders for silent thinking.
How do characters in a play—who are, after all, only jumbles of words upon a page—convey that they have something going on inside them? How do spectators get the impression of depths comparable to those they can barely fathom and understand within themselves? Shakespeare, unrivaled at conveying this impression, in the course of his career developed many means for doing so, including most famously the soliloquy. But his mastery of the soliloquy was gradual, and, along the way, he explored other devices, including repetition. Shylock does not articulate a coherent response to the news that his daughter has not been found; he only mumbles the same, meaningless word. But some emotional and thought process is occurring beneath the surface—the repeated word functions precisely to create such a surface—and we begin to glimpse whatever it is in his next words: “A diamond gone.” The diamond seems for an instant to refer to Jessica (Barabas refers to his daughter Abigail as a
diamond), but the completion of the sentence wrenches us in a different direction: “A diamond gone cost me two thousand ducats in Frankfurt” (3.1.71–72).
At such a moment the audience has in effect seen something invisible: the grieving mind’s queasy, unconscious shift from emotional to monetary loss. Or rather, it has glimpsed the secret passage that links the Jew’s daughter and the Jew’s ducats. For as the next lines make clear, Shakespeare implies that there is something Jewish, something specific to the Jewish “nation,” in this confounding of the familial and the financial: “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.” What curse? For a moment, Shylock seems to accede fully to the Christian belief that the Jews are accursed, a terrible fate he has now for the first time directly experienced. And in his pain and rage he attempts to turn the curse upon his daughter:
I would my daughter were dead at my foot and the jewels in her ear! I 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. (3.1.72–81)
Did Shakespeare know that Orthodox Jews customarily mourn, as if dead, children who have abandoned the faith? Perhaps. He surely believed that moneylenders, Jewish or not, treated money as if it were alive and could breed, and hence could treat lost money as if it were dead. Perhaps Shylock means to say that he would wish his daughter dead if only he could recover his money; perhaps that he wishes both the death of his daughter and the recovery of his money. But his words also express a morbid fantasy of giving daughter and money together a proper burial, “loss upon loss.”
When Tubal contradicts Shylock’s claim that he alone is suffering—“Yes, other men have ill luck too. Antonio, as I heard in Genoa”—Shylock interrupts excitedly, his manic, repetitive phrases now signaling not secret thoughts but excitement, surprise, and stabs of pain:
SHYLOCK: What, what, what? Ill luck, ill luck?
TUBAL: Hath an argosy cast away coming from Tripolis.
SHYLOCK: I thank God, I thank God! Is it true, is it true?
TUBAL: I spoke with some of the sailors that escaped the wreck.
SHYLOCK: I thank thee, good Tubal. Good news, good news! Ha, ha—heard in Geno
TUBAL: Your daughter spent in Genoa, as I heard, one night fourscore ducats.
SHYLOCK: Thou stick’st a dagger in me. I shall never see my gold again. Fourscore ducats at a sitting? Fourscore ducats?
TUBAL: There came divers of Antonio’s creditors in my company to Venice that swear he cannot choose but break.
SHYLOCK: I am very glad of it. I’ll plague him, I’ll torture him. I am glad of it.
(3.1.82–97)
This is the stuff of comedy, and it is certainly possible to play the scene for laughs, but the rising tide of anguish stifles the laughter, even as it forms. The audience is brought in too close for psychological comfort to the suffering figure. Spattered by Shylock’s exclamations, it cannot get to the distance appropriate for detached amusement.
It is possible that Shakespeare lost control of his own imagination here. Apart from “Hand D” of Sir Thomas More, no manuscript record of his writing process survives, but in an anecdote that circulated in the seventeenth century, he is said to have remarked of Romeo and Juliet that he had in the third act to kill Mercutio—the wildly anarchic mocker of romantic love—before Mercutio killed him. Perhaps something of the same kind began to happen with The Merchant of Venice; perhaps Shylock refused to keep his place in the imaginative scheme that had consigned him to the role of comic villain. But Shylock is more central than Mercutio, and there is too much evidence of authorial craft to be comfortable with the notion that the character simply escaped the playwright’s control. Shakespeare could easily have ended the scene between Shylock and Tubal at the point at which the comic spirit makes a strong bid to reassert itself. But instead Tubal continues his report:
TUBAL: One of them showed me a ring that he had of your daughter for a monkey.
SHYLOCK: 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.
TUBAL: But Antonio is certainly undone.
SHYLOCK: Nay, that’s true, that’s very true. 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.
(3.1.98–108)
The words about Jessica’s extravagance seem for a moment simply to continue Shylock’s fretting about his lost jewels, but suddenly the pain deepens and the laughter dries up. It is as if the ring were something more than a piece of the Jew’s wealth, as if it were a piece of his heart.
The Merchant of Venice is a play in which material objects are strangely charged or animated. There is the “Jewish gaberdine” on which Antonio spits (1.3.108); the “vile squealing of the wry-necked fife” that Shylock cannot abide and against which he hopes to “stop my house’s ears—I mean my casements” (2.5.29, 33); the “merry bond” whose physical existence directly threatens Antonio’s life (1.3.169). At first glance this animation might seem solely the malign effect of the Jewish moneylender, who makes barren metal “breed” (1.3.92, 129), but the Christians turn out to be equally involved. Salerio and Solanio imagine
dangerous rocks
Which, touching but my gentle vessel’s side,
Would scatter all her spices on the stream.
(1.1.31–33)
The suitors who seek Portia’s hand in marriage discover their fate by unlocking one of three metal “caskets” that contain emblematic pictures, while the whole last act plays with the symbolic power of rings. But no object has greater power than that turquoise, linked to the name of Shylock’s dead wife and glimpsed for a brief moment of anguish. Shylock immediately turns to plotting against Antonio—“I will have the heart of him if he forfeit, for were he out of Venice I can make what merchandise I will”—but what he has just said about the ring anticipates what the courtroom scene definitively discloses: revenge, not money, is what Shylock is after.
Does this mean that Shakespeare thought that Dr. Lopez—who received a valuable jewel, sent to him by the king of Spain, that figured in his trial and that the queen kept after his execution—was after something other than money when he allegedly plotted to kill the queen for 50,000 crowns? There is no way to know. The Merchant of Venice is not a commentary on a case of treason; it is a romantic comedy with a villainous usurer whose principal resemblances to Lopez are his alien status and the Jewishness that Lopez himself denied. The key link, apart from a general public excitement that may have helped box-office receipts, is the crowd’s laughter, laughter that Shakespeare at once sought to capture and to unsettle. The crowd laughed because it thought it was in on a sly, Marlovian joke: “he loved the Queen as well as he loved Jesus Christ.” This was, or so they understood, the confession of a would-be murderer, a man for whom the word “love” actually meant “hate.”
Though he was in the business of amusing a popular audience, Shakespeare was clearly not altogether comfortable with this laughter. The play that he wrote at once borrows from The Jew of Malta and repudiates its corrosive, merciless irony. Whatever else I am, the playwright seems to be saying, I am not laughing at the foot of the scaffold, and I am not Marlowe. What sprang up in place of Marlovian irony was not tolerance—the play, after all, stages a forced conversion as the price of a pardon—but rather shoots of a strange, irrepressible imaginative generosity. This generosity makes theatrical trouble; it prevents any straightforward amusement at Shylock’s confusion of his daughter and his ducats, and, what is
more disturbing, it undermines the climactic trial scene. That scene is the comedy’s equivalent of the real-world execution: it is meant to reach satisfying legal and moral closure, to punish villainy, and to affirm central values of the dominant culture. All of the elements seem to be in place: a wise duke, an implacable Jewish villain sharpening his knife for slaughter, a supremely eloquent appeal for mercy, a thrilling resolution. Yet this scene, as the experience of both the page and the stage repeatedly demonstrates, is deeply unsettled and unsettling. The resolution depends upon the manipulation of a legal technicality, the appeal for mercy gives way to the staccato imposition of punishments, and the affirmation of values is swamped by a flood of mingled self-righteousness and vindictiveness. Above all, without mitigating Shylock’s vicious nature, without denying the need to thwart his murderous intentions, the play has given us too much insight into his inner life, too much of a stake in his identity and his fate, to enable us to laugh freely and without pain. For Shakespeare did something that Marlowe never chose to do and that the mocking crowd at Lopez’s execution could not do; he wrote out what he imagined such a twisted man, about to be destroyed, would inwardly say: 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? (3.1.49–56)