Three Caskets of Interpretation

© 2012 Florence Amit. All Rights Reserved.

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Published by AuthorHouse 07/31/2012

ISBN:    978-1-4685-8633-6 (sc)

ISBN:    978-1-4685-8634-3 (e)

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CONTENTS

I

SEALING A SILVER CASKET

II

SEALING A SILVER CASKET

III

ILLUMINATING

THE LEAD CASKET

In dedication to William Shakespeare

My Bond

I have bid those graphic eyes of lines and dots to see me

The curved, triangle ear to hear my vow:

"It is I, an obscure aged woman calling

From beyond the copper pressed leaves

It is I, a friend, who would present her living brain for use by you."

True, it cannot fill itself with memories that were yours;

Nor your genius; nor your skill.

I cannot bring forth even one short scene like yours,

Nor a sonnet in a trice

Yet, no devise will keep me from devotion to your meanings.

I bend my body’s term to toil your task. (Oh, help me spirit!)

I contend with conceited censors who would nullify that tissue strange

Of delicate forms and tracery of words divergently attached

By unconsidered holy tongue.

Hard minded men, oppose me (save the reverend few) who insist

That the Jew is what he says he is (though he must beguile a preying crew)

While his reason just, a dowry to secure is not discerned, despite the clues.

How to dispel a tight, entrenched proclivity, now, after Vatican Two?

How many old, women reading in obscurity must tell them

About the Hebrew and the law and the logic—vis-à-vis, Inquisitors?

Why will they not apply their lavish learning to appraise

Imagery, stage-craft, plot and yes, a Poet’s true humanity?

Has ever been work of art so poorly perceived?

And for so long; near four hundred years!

Is it for only guileless elder ladies here to see

That Shakespeare put his audience into the play?

They could be his accomplices, his Watson in particulars, like me,

But rather they have chosen to appear as

Buffoons with Antonio: (Ah, he is so clean!)

They are with the blood libelous rabble

In the pit. They belong to a State sanctioned protection racket with Salerio.

And in judgment they will not hear a dying man’s apprehension for his daughter,

Without a bloody bond.

When, old friend, will they become worthy of you?

When will that worthiness that I assay, be made apparent on a stage?

And most worthily of all, acquit you of calumny, most cruel.

For of artists, only you out-faced the fiend and challenged oppression.

But they would say, Though he beheld it, he merely let it stay.

Will I still live at time of comprehension when they complete this play?

If the event can be, I should, like Shylock, let go of life contentedly.

- Florence Amit

Three Caskets of Interpretation

I

SEALING A SILVER CASKET

Come, Come, and sit you down; you shall not budge; You go not till I set you up a glass Where you will see the inmost part of you.

Hamlet III, iv, 21-23

Preface

Hamlet forces the sanguine Gertrude to regard herself in the mirror of his understanding and to compare two sovereigns. She is deeply affected by what she is made to see. Such an experience Shakespeare would have his audience undergo when he presents a Silver casket of Christian zeal to their representative in The Merchant of Venice. Like Gertrude, the Prince of Arragon is so particularly confident that he deserves all that he desires (not least, the consummation of his suit for the heiress Portia) that he fails to notice that a silvered casket is, primarily, a box with a reflective surface. Had he but observed the vain man mirrored there, he might have been saved the embarrassment of finding the idiot inside.

We will investigate the application to the good Antonio, the titled suitors of Reyna Mendes, who is Portia’s model, and to ourselves. Like Arragon, because we have been given to accept superficial productions of The Merchant of Venice as true Shakespeare, most viewers are condemned to see a reflection of their own shallowness and the quality of art that they have evoked. While the presumptions that had permitted their certitude and ARROGance – regarding the Jewish Shylock – is pure affectation.

Unbefitting would be the outspoken revenge of Shylock’s assumed role, were we to regard his every day reality. Not only would a publicly declared scheme to murder a citizen be imprudent for any resident, but for a Jew it would lead to the catastrophic! One need but recall the harassment of subject cultures in recent times, or the ubiquitous threat from age old myths, like the blood libel, parodied here by Shakespeare, to assess its perceived folly. When Shylock vocalizes his ‘evil intentions’ and enacts a farce before on-stage and off-stage onlookers, who mostly regard such behavior possible for Jews, he ostensibly is behaving in a way that is astonishingly reckless. Indeed even the prestigious Gracia Mendes-Nasi, whose enterprises, I will show, are reflected in this play, was opposed by many regional Rabbis when she pursued a policy of active resistance to the perpetrators of the Ancona massacre. That Tubal gives his uncritical support for Shylock’s idiosyncratic behavior is certain proof that it is a charade. Moreover, Shylock’s bond would have been considered profoundly immoral and forbidden according to Rabbinical Law that then governed European Jewry. Here is a telling detail that all Jews should notice. It is the last chance Shylock has to show his real disavowal of the bond. He says, And by our holy Sabbaoth have I sworn/ To have the due and forfeit of my bond. (IV, I, 36-37). No vow or transaction can be undertaken by a religious Jew on the Sabbath.

Exceptionally, ¹ Edna Krane did detect a subterfuge in the play, which, given the political absolutism in England, she names political irony. But her conjectures have little to do with the actual performance and it does seem excessive that such dissimilar milieu should prompt such a severe local ruling.

Beyond Shakespeare’s inclusion of an oblique reference by Gratiano to the execution of the Marrano physician, ² Rodrigo Lopez and more personally, Shakespeare’s colleagues from the Bassano family of musicians, (particularly those close to Aemila Lanier) as a source for the play’s crypto Jewish characters, I see very little connection to England in the play.

Perhaps the play’s authentic message was actually imparted to the king who would then fathom Shakespeare’s intimation that Christians anywhere may be less than wise in their interaction with Jews. Would such a public transgression have caused him to forbid further showings? Or was the play’s closure a way of punishing an unrelated offence?

Customarily a chasm divides layman from ruler. When Prince Hamlet perceives that the peculiarities of Polonius will likely become the recreation for an inconsequential troupe of court players, he does not caution them for political innuendo or irony, although there is a political substratum embedded into the play. Mockery is the term he uses. It is He, the Prince and his close associates who make telling political references, not the humble players. Carried further, The Merchant of Venice features an unobtrusive assembly of Jews and crypto Jews, carrying on with their livelihoods, betrothals and deaths, while trying to escape the harassments of the Italian Inquisition. With far greater reason for restraint than had the Danish actors, they augment their savvy maneuvering with some mockery and veiled innuendo, usually in the form of Hebrew asides, as well as the rare attempt at elucidation. The play’s satiric genre is articulated by insinuation and justifiable deception while revealed feeling make it truly Shakespearean. In this play the dominant culture characters remain subordinate—excepting the Gobbo family and of course, Antonio.

But what of Shylock’s words of animosity? They look real enough. They are not real. Alas, when the usual means are applied the English reader understands very different meanings than he or she who recognizes the obscure Hebrew. Never mind whether it is a student with a text or an actor with a script making an interpretation: English is viewed even though it may not be present. It may be instead a Hebrew speakers’ vocalization: Shylock the Jew’s or Marranos like Portia and Bassanio, speaking and understanding their own language, all be it, stiltedly encrypted into English. (Perhaps to exemplify his method Shakespeare included a significant amount of French in Lancelot’s soliloquy. Through this literary tower of Babel, Shakespeare illustrates how faulty communication can be a source for misrepresentation and prejudice. Shakespeare’s words in Hebrew suitably confirm a correct reading of the character. In order not to undergo ‘Arragon’s’ demeaning treatment readers are obliged to grasp Shylock’s utterly different frame of mind to that which hitherto, they have been persuaded is self evident.

Carefully, Shakespeare laid down his icon of the three caskets to actuate three avenues of critical exploration; three ways to disclose the play’s meaning. Most familiar will be the Silver casket of Christian determinations about Jews. The Golden casket features Jewish wealth and influence through the émigrés who interact with the Ottoman adversaries of the Christians. The Lead casket will reveal a Jewish drama and a Shylock who uses justifiable deception as did Jacob confronting Laban: to establish his kin in a land of sanctuary.

Contents of The silver Casket

(I wrote the following for the Shakespeare Web, Feb. 6, 1996)

What are the differences between the notorious ‘blood libel’ and Shylock’s pound of flesh? The resemblance is all too apparent for most Jews to tolerate. But in a clear reading is there more at variance than supposed? And what conclusions are to be drawn? This is what Geoffrey Chaucer’s Prioress says:

O yonge Hugh of Lincoln, slayn also

With cursed Jewes, as it is notable,

For it nis but a litel whyle ago;

Preye eek for us

Alleged tomb of Hugh of Lincoln, D. Tovey’s Anglia Judaica. Oxford, 1738

( I have included a folk ballad of Hugh in my notes.)

The preposterous Prioress does not say that Hugh’s blood was an ingredient for unleavened bread. Her knowledge had its limitations and her imagination was fixed upon a privy ~ while her agenda for murder remained simplistic. Typically, the libel is by (1) the word of non-Jews as it is notable. (2) It is about Jewish religious practices that allegedly require blood. (3) Murder is to have actually taken place. (4) It is performed in secrecy. (5) An obscure, local person is victim—yonge Hugh of Lincoln. (6) It happened in the past—"a litel

whyle ago".

I do not want to dwell upon these terrible concoctions that have resulted in the torture, murder, and expulsion, of countless Jews, and the misery of insults (Prof. H. Ben Sasson & Prof. Y. Slutsky ³. They may be examined