SHAKSPER 2001: Re: Tragic Hero

From: Hardy M. Cook (editor@ws.bowiestate.edu)
Date: 04/04/01 

The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 12.0755  Wednesday, 4 April 2001

[1]     From:   Carol Barton <cbartonphd@earthlink.net>
        Date:   Friday, 30 Mar 2001 15:30:33 -0500
        Subj:   SHK 12.0748 Re: Tragic Hero

[2]     From:   Clifford Stetner <cstetner@worldnet.att.net>
        Date:   Friday, 30 Mar 2001 20:29:39 -0500
        Subj:   Re: SHK 12.0748 Re: Tragic Hero

[3]     From:   Ros King <ROSCKING@aol.com>
        Date:   Sunday, 1 Apr 2001 15:54:28 EDT
        Subj:   Re: SHK 12.0748 Re: Tragic Hero


[1]-----------------------------------------------------------------
From:           Carol Barton <cbartonphd@earthlink.net>
Date:           Friday, 30 Mar 2001 15:30:33 -0500
Subject: Re: Tragic Hero
Comment:        SHK 12.0748 Re: Tragic Hero

Don Bloom writes:

> My concern is with the danger of misunderstanding the play. Shakespeare
> clearly intended Shylock to be a villain -- greedy, malicious, and
> vengeful. In his time, nobody expected Jews to be anything else, so that
> they deserved any punishments they received. To the author, what Lorenzo
> does is part of the general comic mood of the play -- the lovers are
> united against the wicked father's wishes, and the vicious miser gets
> his comeuppance -- and is parallel to the main plot action which has the
> same results worked out with more complexity.

With all due respect, my concern is with the naiveté of such an
interpretation.
Would you reduce all of Shakespeare to literal meaning, and the vogue
(read PC) attitudes of his time? Surely, Don, you jest at scars, that
never felt a wound: there is ample warrant for understanding this
"problem play"--without reading the 20th century into it--as subversive
of its ostensible premise.  What heinous crime has Shylock committed
against these "Christians"--other than to engage in the only enterprise
by which the law would allow him to sustain himself and his family,
because it was ECONOMICALLY CONVENIENT for them to do so (Christians not
being allowed to engage in moneylending)-- to their decided benefit,
that he deserves the return he gets from Antonio and Bassanio and
company? The man ALSO has a right at this time in history to approve or
disapprove of his daughter's marriage choices: and Shylock clearly does
not approve of Beatrice's. I think, rather, that Shakespeare rather
slyly shows us an "us" that is as bad as "them" -- Shylock gives no
worse than he gets, and it is they who provoke him, and not vice versa.
He portrays Shylock as sympathetically as the times will allow: just as
Homer subverts the entire _Iliad_ and its encomia to war when Achilles
not only surrenders Hector's body to Priam, but has it dutifully and
lavishly prepared to lie in state.  What are we to make of the "quality
of mercy" as it is demonstrated to Shylock?  That it applies only to
those who have accepted Jesus in their hearts?

Jesus accepted whores and thieves and tax collectors . . . what a shame
those who profess his discipleship can't seem to do likewise. What do
they do by their brand of Christian exemplum to put Shylock "in the
way," as the expression was used then? How do they demonstrate the
"superiority" of their mercy, as against his justice?

Such things need consideration before you can make a definitive
pronouncement on what the _Merchant of Venice_ does or doesn't
univocally mean.

Best to all,
Carol Barton

[2]-------------------------------------------------------------
From:           Clifford Stetner <cstetner@worldnet.att.net>
Date:           Friday, 30 Mar 2001 20:29:39 -0500
Subject: 12.0748 Re: Tragic Hero
Comment:        Re: SHK 12.0748 Re: Tragic Hero

Don Bloom re "atrocity":

> The noun puzzles me. Does he really consider Lorenzo's action an
> atrocity?  Would he say the same about what Lysander does to Egeus in
> MSND? If Jessica and Lorenzo are truly in love, and he marries her,
> what's the atrocity?
>
> Or was it the theft of the jewel box? We may take a fairly absolute
> moral stance about stealing as a crime (or sin), but most of us have an
> escape clause based on the immorality of the victim of the theft

Yes.  Although, any father must wince at the prospect of Egeus or
Brabantio or Capulet or a dozen hoodwinked fathers in the drama, it is
the theft of the jewel box that makes this elopement different.  This
casket seems to hold a great portion of Shylock's wealth and its theft
is a devastating blow.  Why is Lorenzo is so widely forgiven for this
act?  Are his motives pure?  Is he not really after the gold, with
Jessica's infatuation merely a means and fringe benefit?  Her intimate
play with Launcelot seems to separate her from the Christian crowd at
Belmont, and his jokes about conversion may conceal a real concern for
her future.  Critics have observed that the love play between Jessica
and Lorenzo makes reference only to figures representative of betrayal
and tragedy.

I think it is Shakespeare's skill as an artist that leads us so easily
to see this crime as a moral act.  The immorality of the victim of the
theft has not yet been established, only his oppressiveness as a father
and master and even these do not rise to the level of Cinderella's
stepmother, and of course, his race.  Jessica tells us later that
Shylock said this and that which implies that he never meant to honor
the bond with Antonio, but is this hearsay testimony (in itself a bit
ambiguous) credible from someone seeking asylum with a chest half full
of stolen ducats?  Do we really know that Shylock did not make his
original bargain with Antonio for an interest free loan in a completely
good faith attempt to improve his relations with the Christians despite
their daily spitting on him, and never intending to go for Antonio's
flesh until he is driven to revenge by the theft of daughter and
ducats?  Or are these assumptions we leap to when reading with an
assumption of antisemitism?

The reading is much more complicated in Marlowe's Jew of Malta.  When
the Jew's (Barabas') daughter Abigail tosses bags of gold out of the
window of her father's house, it is to her father with whom she is
plotting against the Christians whom she despises for confiscating the
Jews of Malta's money for their war.  When the Christian (Lodovico) goes
a-wooing, he does so believing that Barabas is acting the pander to his
fourteen-year-old virginal daughter who he believes now to be a nun
(while enjoining the Jew not to look upon "our" nuns).  The Christian is
then ensnared by his own moral corruption, while the daughter, remaining
faithful to her father, is perhaps the only good character in the play.

To an audience familiar with this play, would Jessica's betrayal of
father and religion appear as unambiguously comic?

>In one era, King John and Sheriff of Nottingham justify an array of
>crimes. In
> another era, Hitler and the Nazis, or Stalin and the KGB, or -- well,
> you name it.

Whom I name as the villains of history is not so important as whom the
literary/popular culture names.  Do we now believe that King John and
the Sheriff were unambiguously evil, while Robin and Marian (or the
historical political faction they represent) were unambiguously good?
Robin as Goodfellow was after all added to the roster of fallen angels
by the Catholics.  In problematizing (apologies for newspeak) the
demonization of Shylock, MOV, in response, I believe, to Jew of Malta,
comments on the facility with which literary tradition succeeds in
demonizing people (and peoples).

> My concern is with the danger of misunderstanding the play. Shakespeare
> clearly intended Shylock to be a villain -- greedy, malicious, and
> vengeful.

Why is malicious vengefulness evil in Shylock and not in Hamlet?  Is
Shylock greedier than Lorenzo? Antonio? Bassanio?

> In his time, nobody expected Jews to be anything else, so that
> they deserved any punishments they received.

And yet Tubal is the most noble character in the play (if you agree with
me that Portia's and Antonio's character and motives are also suspect).

> To the author, what Lorenzo
> does is part of the general comic mood of the play -- the lovers are
> united against the wicked father's wishes, and the vicious miser gets
> his comeuppance -- and is parallel to the main plot action which has the
> same results worked out with more complexity.

You have inadvertently opened the question of authorial intention in
interpreting a literary text.  I agree that Lorenzo's act is
incorporated (by the author) into the general comic mood.  But without
access to what it signified "to the author," I question whether the
construction of this mood is a device to seduce me into an antisemitism
that is ultimately indefensible.

> If we -- living in a time a little more capable of seeing the cruelty
> and injustice of all bigotry, and troubled by the shadows of the death
> camps -- read back into the play things that Shakespeare never intended,
> exaggerating the passages that make Shylock sympathetic to the point
> where he becomes a figure a tragedy, we are left with a chaotic bit a
> business that has lots of dramatic scenes and no coherent meaning. If we
> leave it alone, and allow ourselves to accept the underlying bigotry,
> then it all makes perfect sense.

This reference to intention is again problematic.  Antisemitism, then
and now, made perfect sense to a large portion of the human race.  It
was neat and simple on the face of it, but did not stand up to
scrutiny.  Scrutiny involves "exaggerating" elements of history that are
written down as peripheral in order to undo the selective exaggeration
of histories written from politically interested patronage.  In this
way, text of MOV, simple and comic on its face, but fraught with moral
problems, serves as a metaphor for historical antisemitism.  Whether
this was Shakespeare's intention, I am not in a position to say.

> In some cases, this may be too much to endure, and "Merchant" may be one
> of them. But in those cases, it would probably be wise to leave them
> alone.

As to my own wisdom, I likewise am not in a position to say.

> (Personal anecdote: I remember years ago leafing through a National
> Geographic article on the new Spain (post-Franco), and seeing a
> quotation from a man who truly missed the "good old days" of Fascist
> rule and spoke lyrically about how much better they were than the
> current days of freedom.  The man was a retired army sergeant. I
> remembered the type well from days long past when I couldn't -- unlike
> now and for the past thirty years -- shun such people. I could easily
> imagine the sort of person who would much prefer a country ruled like a
> Marine company, for whom the values that I hold dear are irrelevant or
> outright evil, and whose own values are often repugnant to me. But his
> lyrical nostalgia for fascism synthesized for me this problem of
> understanding other ways of thinking and evaluating what we see around
> us.)

If the Russian winter had been a bit more temperate, your sergeant would
be writing history textbooks now, and all an artist could do would be to
attempt to problematize his fascist panegyric under the radar of
Goebbels.

Clifford

[3]-------------------------------------------------------------
From:           Ros King <ROSCKING@aol.com>
Date:           Sunday, 1 Apr 2001 15:54:28 EDT
Subject: 12.0748 Re: Tragic Hero
Comment:        Re: SHK 12.0748 Re: Tragic Hero

Mof V isn't just about race. It is also, and more interestingly in my
view, about making, borrowing and lending money. We know that
Shakespeare and his dad lent money at interest - a very unchristian
thing to do. We also know that Shakespeare senior was twice done for
usury. In those circumstances, it seems to me that Shakespeare may have
'intended' a rather more complex characterisation for Shylock than Don's
' villain - greedy, malicious and vengeful'. Maybe such complexity is
demonstrated by the fact that there are two traditions of Shylock
criticism and performance - tragic hero and villain. And maybe our
criticism should encompass both/and rather than either/or.

Best
Ros


about SHAKSPER | current postings | submitted papers | browse SHAKSPER | search SHAKSPER
  
Copyright © 2002, Hardy M. Cook, design by Eric Luhrs. All rights reserved.