Shakespeare and Venice by Graham Holderness, and: Visions of Venice in Shakespeare ed. by Shaul Bassi, Laura Tosi (review)

Venice is one of the most evocative key locations in Western culture, and its association with Shakespeare has produced a number of publications. Graham Holderness opens his book with a few basic questions: “What did Shakespeare know of Venice? What did Venice mean to Shakespeare? . . .‘How exactly did Venice find its way into Shakespeare?’ What were the sources of knowledge and influencers of opinion that mediated the dramatization of Venice in English culture?” (3). It has been widely written that the Venice of the Renaissance was a political myth, in which Venice was “the ideal republic, perfection of governance, economy, and social organization” (6). Holderness argues that “there is not one myth of Venice, but multiple myths” (7), such as “Venice the Chaste, the Seductive, the Powerful, the Fragile, the Pure, the Imperfect, the Beautiful, the Evanescent, the Decadent” (8). These reputations “were implicit or explicit in early modern literature” and “appear in dramatic and poetic forms in Shakespeare’s Venetian plays” (8). In “Renaissance Venice,” the first chapter of the book, Holderness tries to reconstruct a sort of virtual text from a number of reports about Venice, such as William Thomas’s History of Italy (1549); Francesco Sansovino’s Venetia città nobilissima (1583); and Gasparo Contarini’s Commonwealth and Government of Venice, translated by Lewes Lewkenor in 1599, in order to represent the Venice known by Shakespeare. Looking at Venice from an intertextual perspective, he argues that the best way of considering the relationship between Shakespeare and Venice is that suggested by Michele Marrapodi: “‘a diachronic process of transtextuality, moving across genres and epochs despite national divides’” (21). Throughout the remainder of the book, the Venice of Shakespeare and his contemporaries will be described as “‘a great cultural intertext’” (21), in the words of Keir Elam.

Situated at the crossroads between western and eastern cultures, Venice was “an obvious context in which to place dramatic stories about merchants and usurers” (31), as well as stories about aliens and foreigners belonging to different races, religions, and ethnicities. Holderness explores the Jew and the Moor and their common status as being “alien in Venice” (34). He discusses the origin of the Ghetto, usury, and Venice’s need for the Jews. If we look at Othello in the historical context of Venice, he will appear “less western or central African, less ‘black’, less Atlantic; and more north African, more Arabic, more Muslim—in a word, more Venetian” (49). Venice granted remarkable freedoms to foreigners, but Shylock and Othello abuse these freedoms, incurring retaliation.

The next two chapters are mainly devoted to a close analysis of the central themes of the two Venetian plays. In chapter 3, Holderness focuses on the relationships among the characters in The Merchant of Venice, showing the social, economic, and religious issues involved in the “merry bond” (1.3.185). Shylock is analyzed, sometimes contradictorily, both within the medieval anti-Semitic tradition and as a Jew of Venice, who even though not a citizen is part of the Venetian economy. The Merchant of Venice does not simply reproduce the stereotypes and prejudices of medieval anti-Semitism; neither is it a critique of Venetian Christian culture. Venice should be read as a cultural intertext: “a genuinely cosmopolitan and multi-cultural society in which differences of belief, behavior, custom and morality are broadly tolerated” (85). While Othello apparently has fewer Venetian credentials than Shylock, and the play “can be read as a domestic tragedy of jealousy and betrayal” (89), Othello is strongly connected with the Venetian context and “the cultural intertext of Venice may be deeply implicit in the poetic texture” of the play (90).

Finally, Holderness deals with Shakespeare’s Venice in fiction and cinema. Taking two novels, Erica Jong’s Serenissima...