30 Great Myths about Shakespeare Read Online Free PDF Page A

be strictly necessary were he simply the comic villain. While he does play the conventional role of the blocking figure who must be circumvented in order to get a happily comic ending, he is also the romantic comedy's enabler: at once repressive father figure (to Jessica) and sugar daddy (indirectly to Bassanio). When he talks of Jessica, who has eloped with her Christian lover Lorenzo and is squandering her father's money, he picks out a lost turquoise: “I had it of Leah when I was a bachelor. I would not have given it for a wilderness of monkeys” (3.1.113–15). The tone is sentimental (we never hear of Leah except at this moment, and although editors suggest she is Shylock's dead wife, we are never sure: it's one of those areas of opacity that makes characters seem so lifelike, as discussed in Myth 29).
    Shylock repeatedly exceeds the role appointed him in the play, by occupying the drama's major interpretative space: questions about his motivations and behavior dominate any production or reading of The Merchant of Venice . And while there have been some profoundly anti-semitic readings of the play which rejoice in Shylock's enforced conversion in the fourth act, since the end of the nineteenth century it has been much more common to see Shylock as a figure torn between worlds and to sympathize with his outsider status in the play. And since the Holocaust, of course, it has been, rightly, impossible to present Shylock as a racially typed villain, although the playwright Arnold Wesker is among those who have suggested it is not a play that should be performed. In fact The Merchant of Venice was not a favorite play of the Nazis: while the long association of German writers and thinkers with Shakespeare meant he was somewhat protected from the Third Reich's nationalistic suspicion of foreign art, the marriage of Jessica to an “Aryan” meant that the play was performed only in a complicated adaptation in which Jessica was not really Shylock's daughter (the Nazis seem to have preferred the virile militarism and coldness of Coriolanus ).
    The Merchant of Venice also features a black prince of Morocco who tells Portia “Mislike me not for my complexion” (2.1.1). Othello, also a native of Morocco, has no need to say the same to the citizens of the Venice in which his play is located; the Duke honors and trusts him as a military leader, a protector of Venice to whom the senate turns first in time of threat, and Brabantio, a senator, invites him to his home (“oft”) and listens to the stories of his adventuring life. Yet by Act 5 Emilia can protest that her mistress, Othello's wife Desdemona, was “too fond of her most filthy bargain” (5.2.164). Statements like this are partly responsible for the view that miscegenation is the root of this tragedy.
    In its Mediterranean locations and combination of geo- and sexual politics, Othello shows its links with the contemporary vogue for travel plays in the 1590s and early 1600s. Plays such as the anonymous Sir Thomas Stukeley (1605) and The Travels of the Three English Brothers (1607, by John Day, William Rowley, and George Wilkins) are based on true stories; others, such as Thomas Heywood's The Fair Maid of the West (published 1631 but probably written c.1597–1603) are fictional. All are tales of travel and adventure beyond Europe and of assimilation. In The Travels of Three English Brothers one of the brothers actually marries an Ottoman princess and has a baby girl. These plays explore the threat to identity when Christians turn Turk either literally (changing religion, undergoing circumcision) or metaphorically, living and dying abroad ( A Christian Turned Turk is the title of a play by Robert Daborne in 1612); they explore the physical threat when exotic black women tempt white men sexually and lure them to destruction. In Othello Shakespeare both follows this vogue and inverts it. Othello is a play in which an African travels to Europe and in which a Muslim becomes a