English Renaissance Drama and the Specter of Spain: Ethnopoetics and Empire

FIVE: Shakespeare's Comical History

c h a p t e r f i v e Shakespeare’s Comical History Messenger. Your honour’s players, hearing your amendment, Are come to play a pleasant comedy. . . . Sly. Marry, . . . Is not a comonty A Christmas gambold or a tumbling trick? Bartholomew. No, my good lord; it is more pleasing stuff. Sly. What, household stuff? Bartholomew. It is a kind of history. —William Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew, c. 1593 Enter two old men: 1. Are you then travelling to the temple of Eliza? 2. Even to her temple are my feeble limmes travelling. Some cal her Pandora: some Gloriana, some Cynthia: some Belphebe, some Astraea : all by severall names to expresse severall loves: Yet all those names make but one celestiall body, as all those loves meete to create but one soule. —Thomas Dekker, The Pleasant Comedie of Old Fortunatus, c. 1599 If comedy can represent a kind of history, history, in turn, may be conceived as a kind of comedy.1 Although his full title has not generated substantial critical comment, Shakespeare marked The Comical History of the Merchant of Venice, or Otherwise Called the Jew of Venice in terms of this generic crossing . In this seminal Elizabethan drama we are led (even as we watch Bassanio 136 chapter five being led) to see the condition of the society it represents as being, in Hayden White’s phrase, “purer, saner, and healthier,” as a result of the onstage conflict we witness;2 the play’s discordant elements, represented most fully by Shylock, Portia’s suitors, and Launcelot’s Moor, “harmonize” only because they have been emasculated in the courtroom of Venice or excised from the green world of Belmont.3 Much in the way that Marlowe’s Malta is exorcised of its troublesome ethnicities, Shakespeare represents a Venetian social body that will be purged of “foreign spirits” in order to clarify who, finally, has earned admittance into the “gentle” society we sense has been English all along.4 While Merchant’s “festive” structure may indeed produce, as C. L. Barber once suggested , “a heightened awareness of the relation between man and nature,”5 to the degree that the Elizabethans constructed their state as England’s “natural” social and political unit, especially insofar as Elizabeth Tudor was the figure around whom that social order was organized, we might also say that Shakespeare ’s first Venetian play brings a heightened awareness of the relationship between man, woman, and nation. I argue here that The Merchant of Venice participates in the writing of English national identity, a process which involved, in Anthony Smith’s formulation , “the reselection, recombination and recodification of previously existing values, symbols, memories and the like, as well as the addition of new cultural elements” by the poets, playwrights, and cultural elites of Shakespeare’s generation .6 By selecting key features from the wealth of flexible iconographic material that had come to be associated with the Elizabethan regime over the course of nearly forty years,7 the play breathes new life into a tired set of cultural codes in ways that made them applicable and attractive to post-Armada contemporaries whose experience of discord made them deeply desirous of social harmony. Produced as it was at a time of intense national stress, with the Spanish war continuing to drain England’s limited resources, a succession crisis looming, and the end of Tudor reign finally in sight, Shakespeare’s Comical History reselects, recombines, and recodifies—much in the manner that Dekker’s contemporary Comedie of Old Fortunatus obviously does in my second epigraph above—key elements of the Elizabethan symbolic economy in an effort to satisfy this wish dramatically. At a moment during which England’s promoters of the Black Legend were recombining the markers of religion, “race,” and miscegenation that they linked discursively with Spain in order to construct that nation’s essential difference , The Merchant of Venice transports tensions that Shakespeare’s countrymen were themselves beginning to feel into a setting at once English and Italian.8 As it does so, the play replicates and reveals the structuration upon Shakespeare’s Comical History 137 which the “official story” of Tudor England had already begun to be erected. Manipulating raw material drawn from extant and emergent discourses of race, nationality, and ethnicity, Shakespeare reveals the racialist underpinnings of an inchoate English structure of feeling.9 At the same time, he...