The Bard a Month Club discussion

Add thoughts and discussion about the play here.

Shakespeare’s portrayal of Shylock is anti-Semitic, but we don’t know if the playwright himself was. For me, it’s not just the play’s anti-Semitism that makes me uncomfortable, but the abject, even gratuitous, cruelty that goes along with it. Shakespeare has a mean streak. We see it over and over again in plays such as Twelfth Night, with the mistreatment of Malvolio, Titus Andronicus, with the grisly horrors inflicted upon its characters, The Winter’s Tale in the the despicable way Leontes treats his wife, Taming of the Shrew, King Lear, the list goes on and on. I guess Elizabeth audiences accepted such cruelty as rather ordinary. After all, this was the time of bear baiting and the drawing and quartering of criminals.

But I see another--and perhaps more interesting--dimension to the villain in The Merchant of Venice, which is that Shylock appears to mirror a real person whom Shakespeare personally knew—and detested. Independent scholars have identified two candidates: Michael Lok, the organizer of a failed 16th century expedition to find gold in North America, a venture in which Shakespeare may have lost a huge sum of money as an investor, and William Cecil, the Crown’s Treasurer during Queen Elizabeth’s reign. Some think Queen Elizabeth herself is represented by the character Portia. As time goes by, research should further tease out hidden allusions to actual people in the text.

One amazing but sometimes overlooked quality of The Merchant of Venice is its attention to details about the city and its people and culture. The details are so uncannily accurate that they force many to conclude that Shakespeare undoubtedly spent a lot of time in Venice. Here’s a short list of examples (taken from The Shakespeare Guide to Italy by Richard Paul Roe):

• Shakespeare describes with particularity the types of foreign ships Antonio uses, showing how long-standing local regulations had been loosened to permit Venetian merchants to use non-Venetian ships in commerce—knowledge that would not have been generally known to Elizabethan audiences. The specific routes and destinations of those ships that Shakespeare describes match those of the time with historical accuracy.

• Shakespeare weaves in particular aspects of Jewish culture, including clothes fashion and rules of conduct, and the concept of different Jewish nations and synagogues in Venice.

• Shakespeare’s description of Belmont matches a villa located exactly in the place one would find it by following the directions Portia gives in the play.

• The Merchant of Venice is the only play in the Shakespeare canon in which no one carries a sword; instead, one carries a dagger. Shakespeare knew that Venetian law banned swords (except for soldiers, which is why swords appear in Othello) but permitted the dagger, which was considered to be more of a defensive weapon.

Many more of Shakespeare's Italian plays include these remarkable kinds of details, convincing proof that he visited Italy.

Buona lettura!