Venice and the Cultural Imagination

'This Strange Dream upon the Water'

Michael O’Neill, Mark Sandy, Sarah Wootton, Michael O'Neill

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138661561
• eBook ISBN: 9781317322597
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historical Theory & Criticism
• Index: History

In the era of the Grand Tour, Venice was the cultural jewel in the crown of Europe and the epitome of decadence. This edited collection of eleven essays draws on a range of disciplines and approaches to ask how Venice's appeal has affected Western culture since 1800.

1
A ‘More Beloved Existence’: From Shakespeare’s ‘Venice’ to Byron’s Venice

Bernard Beatty

This volume examines the representation of Venice in painting, music and literature since 1800. Byron is rightly placed first in such a volume for he was the harbinger of the cult of Venice as a place of enchantment which naturally belongs to the world of art rather than as an actual polis which belongs to history. But Byron always confounds as well as establishes distinctions; he looks backwards as well as forwards as I will do in this essay. Moreover, Byron engaged with the ‘the far times’ of the thousand-year polis and the recent arrival of Austrian police as much as he did with Venice as some ‘strange dream upon the water’. Yet he is always conscious that he is refashioning previous representations of the city.

Andrea di Robilant argued that ‘Byron gave the city a new life by turning those sinking ruins into an existential landscape–an island of the soul’.¹ Byron called this a ‘more beloved existence’. To make sense of this phrase, we need to read it in its context in the opening stanzas of Canto IV of his Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. Tony Tanner noted that these opening twenty-nine stanzas were ‘crucial and generative for Turner and Ruskin and countless others’.² It will be helpful to set out the first six stanzas in full:

I stood in Venice, on the Bridge of Sighs;
A palace and a prison on each hand:
I saw from out the wave her structures rise
As from the stroke of the enchanter’s wand:
A thousand years their cloudy wings expand Around me, and a dying Glory smiles
O’er the far times, when many a subject land
Look’d to the winged Lion’s marble piles,
Where Venice sate in state, thron’d on her hundred isles!

She looks a sea Cybele, fresh from ocean,
Rising with her tiara of proud towers
At airy distance, with majestic motion,
A ruler of the waters and their powers:
And such she was;–her daughters had their dowers
From spoils of nations, and the exhaustless East
Pour’d in her lap all gems in sparkling showers.
In purple was she robed, and of her feast
Monarchs partook, and deem’d their dignity increas’d.

In Venice Tasso’s echoes are no more,
And silent rows the songless gondolier;
Her palaces are crumbling to the shore,
And music meets not always now the ear:
Those days are gone–but Beauty still is here.
States fall, arts fade–but Nature doth not die,
Nor yet forget how Venice once was dear,
The pleasant place of all festivity,
The revel of the earth, the masque of Italy!

But unto us she hath a spell beyond
Her name in story, and her long array
Of mighty shadows, whose dim forms despond
Above the dogeless city’s vanish’d sway;
Ours is a trophy which will not decay
With the Rialto; Shylock and the Moor,
And Pierre, cannot be swept or worn away –
The keystones of the arch! though all were o’er,
For us repeopl’d were the solitary shore.

The beings of the mind are not of clay;
Essentially immortal, they create
And multiply in us a brighter ray
And more beloved existence: that which Fate
Prohibits to dull life, in this our state
Of mortal bondage, by these spirits supplied,
First exiles, then replaces what we hate;
Watering the heart whose early flowers have died,
And with a fresher growth replenishing the void.

Byron is writing in 1817 so ‘Those days are gone’ can be dated to an exact twenty years.³ In 1797, General Bonaparte’s troops entered Venice and over a thousand years of independent life came to an inglorious end. Interestingly ‘it was as the conqueror of Venice that Napoleon Bonaparte … became generally known in Britain’.⁴ He ceded it to the Austrians soon after, but it was French again from 1805. The French destroyed the gates of the Jewish ghetto, freed the prisoners in the prison by the palace, and burned both patrician robes and Bucintoro, the Doge’s barge. Later the Emperor Napoleon, as he now was, made Venice a tax-free port for which grateful Venetian merchants decreed that a local sculptor, Domenico Banti, should make a large statue of their conqueror wearing an abbreviated toga which stood on St Mark’s piazza from 1811. In general, however, Bonaparte behaved like the late and unlamented President Ceacescu. He looted the city’s treasures, pinched St Mark’s bronze horses for his own capital, started filling in the canals, and pulling down Venetian buildings so that he could make French public parks or nasty neat squares with statues of his sister in them. In 1797, he banned the carnival. He completed the fourth rather heavy side (opposite San Marco) of the piazza, knocking down the beautiful church of San Geminiano in the process, and installed his Governor there in what was grandly known as the Palazzo Reale. Napoleon wished to control both the city and alter its represented image.

By the time Byron came to Venice in 1816, Napoleon’s statue was gone and the bronze horses were back, so was the carnival (Byron attended three); but an Austrian Governor now sat in Napoleon’s Governor’s palace (Byron attended some of his receptions) and there were strategically placed guns in the Doge’s palace directed towards the town. Venice was governed by the Austrians from 1814 onwards for the next half-century apart from a brief declaration of independence in 1848.

‘Those days are gone’ but, in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Venice lives on through memory as a dying glory on the one hand and as a city inhabited by abiding fictions–‘beings of the mind’–on the other. Venice having lost one existence has now a more beloved one. The fictions which accomplish this here are dramatic ones–Shylock and the Moor, from The Merchant of Venice and Othello, and Pierre from Otway’s 1682 tragedy Venice Preserv’d. Twelve stanzas later, he adds two more recent authors:

I lov’d her from my boyhood–she to me
Was as a faery city of the heart,
…
And Otway, Radcliffe, Schiller, Shakespeare’s art,
Had stamp’d her image in me.⁵

These were the first creator’s of Byron’s Venice, but Ruskin tell us that, in turn, ‘My Venice, like Turner’s had chiefly been created for us by Byron’.⁶

Byron’s mind and Venice’s reality are complicated murky places. When Goethe visited Venice in 1786, two years before Byron’s birth, he ‘plunged into this labyrinth of a city’ but he ‘bought a map of the city. After studying it carefully, I climbed to the top of the campanile of San Marco.’⁷ He did so, I presume, in order to regain the control that the labyrinth had taken away from him. Byron (though he, too, once hobbled to the top of the campanile) delighted in entering the labyrinth of Venice, perhaps because, far more than Goethe, he thought of the human heart and human knowledge as labyrinthine.⁸ Labyrinths do not admit the bright rays of sunshine but they may generate what Byron calls ‘a brighter ray’. In the last stanza of the quotation, Byron says that Venetian fictions supply us (‘supplied’ is an odd word here which perhaps glances at Venice’s commercial life) with something that first exiles the hated contents of the human heart, then replaces and replenishes the heart’s void ‘with a fresher growth’. In a parallel movement, this replenishment is not so much a replacement of what we have come to hate in our interiors but of the early flowers of life that have withered. So fictionalized labyrinthine Venice (Shylock, Pierre and Othello are murky figures) is both a beloved replacement of our habitually dull life and yet renews the brightness of lost youth. Imagination is better than reality and restores what we have lost. This is a Romantic prescription and the poet of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, though much less obviously the poet of Don Juan, was a Romantic poet.

Nevertheless, the rest of my title–which puts inverted commas round Shakespeare’s Venice but none round Byron’s–tells a different story. Shakespeare’s Venice is a fiction whereas Byron’s is real. It is a place where he shaved regularly, and made love perhaps even more frequently with those who were manifestly not simply ‘beings of the mind’. One such was Marianna Segati. Her husband who, in the Venetian way, accepted the relationship, told a little story to Byron about a ménage à trois which the poet embroidered into his first comic narrative, Beppo, set during the Venetian carnival in the late eighteenth century. Here, for the first time, a potential Byronic hero is put down by a shamelessly adulterous woman. Such are Venetian not Romantic values. And Byron, arch-Romantic, is also the boldest excoriator of Romantic beliefs. Let us leave complicated Byron for the moment and turn to complicated Shakespeare. Wilson Knight used to argue that there is a real similarity between the complications in the two.⁹

The Merchant of Venice, also entitled The Jew of Venice (probably written 1596–7), is casually thought of as altogether set in Venice but it is not. Nearly half the play is set in Belmont. Both Act I and Act III alternate scenes between the two until in act IV the separate plots of each are brilliantly brought together. Act V is wholly in Belmont. Apart from three references to the Rialto, one reference to a gondola, the name Gobbo, and the importance of Jewish money in Venetian enterprise, there is nothing distinctively Venetian about the play. It could be any Shakespearian city with a port, a Duke that governs it, and characters with Italian names. Shakespeare had not been there and does not seem very interested in it in comparison with Rome for instance which he makes us imagine as a place. Nor does Venetian existence seem to have anything ‘beloved’ or ‘brighter’ about it here any more than it has in Ben Jonson’s Volpone. It is a bitter place dominated by men trying to make money, riven by hatred. Christians hate Jews, Jews hate Christians.

The more beloved existence of Belmont is in direct contrast with Venice. It is gentle, fecund, enchanted, romance-laden, full of music, lit by moonlight and ruled by a woman–Portia–who describes herself as ‘the lord | Of this fair mansion’.¹⁰ It is the Lady of Belmont (as the source text in Il Pecarone calls her¹¹) who, visiting Venice in a costume which conceals her gender, rescues it from itself and enables the main characters, apart from Shylock, to leave it and settle in Belmont. Belmont works as fictions work and should have inverted commas around it but there is a problem here too.

In the source text, Belmont is a long way from Venice in an inlet discernible from the open sea but Shakespeare positions it carefully in real place and time. It is on a river bank, it is ten miles from Venice, and you get to Venice from it by taking a ‘traject’ or ferry boat which comes from Padua.¹² So Belmont is clearly on the Brenta–the river-cum-canal which was already beginning to be lined with beautiful villas in Shakespeare’s time, one of which was eventually to house Lord Byron (he wrote ‘Beppo’ there). Hence we need to remove the inverted commas round ‘Belmont’ again. The play strongly separates Venice’s dark existence from Belmont’s brighter and more beloved one–but the imagination of audience and reader subterraneanly links the two. Venice is both a dark and bright place hostile to, and yet engendering, mercy and the magic of love. It has and has not inverted commas around it.

Shakespeare’s other Venetian play, The Tragedy of Othello the Moor of Venice has historical placing of a different kind. In November, 1603, ambassadors from Venice arrived for the first time in England. James I, unlike cautious Elizabeth, was anti-Ottoman and his poem on the battle of Lepanto where Venetians had beaten the Turks, had been reprinted for his coronation. Venice always put much store by the ceremonial (Goethe commented on it¹³) and the dignity of its embassies. Their arrival must have created a noticeable stir for Venice was a great European power and England was not yet. Othello was first performed almost exactly a year later in front of James I himself. The Merchant of Venice was performed, twice, in front of the king three months later and, in the same year, Jonson’s Volpone. London was having a Venetian season. Donne’s friend Sir Henry Wotton had been sent off to Venice as ambassador in 1604. It seems likely therefore that Shakespeare now knew more about Venice which, if he not been there, had come to him.

Shakespeare changed the simple details in his source text to give a much enlarged sense of the importance of Venetian international politics and especially the threat to Venetian territories from the Turks. Desdemona’s father becomes a senator and senators appear alongside the Duke in his decision-making. There are no senators in The Merchant of Venice. Nevertheless, only one act of the play is set in Venice (in the source Othello returns to Venice but Shakespeare keeps him in Cyprus) and, once again, Shakespeare does not seem particularly interested in Venice, or in making a contrast between Cyprus and Venice analogous to bright Belmont and dark Venice. Nor does Shakespeare seem concerned with a distinctively Venetian model of government which was to become something of an English obsession in the next two centuries as John Eglin has convincingly demonstrated¹⁴. Charles I and William III, for instance, both specifically rejected the model of Doge and republic for English government when it was offered to them¹⁵ but, in effect, the Hanoverians, at least until George III made a bid for greater monarchical power, were content to be doges of England. As Eglin shows, Venice was admired and denounced by both Whigs and Tories as a paradigm of government in itself and as a model for Great Britain. It was lauded as an exemplary example of independence and mixed government or decried as a corrupt oligarchy which rendered ‘the multitude the slaves of the few, by the means of corruption, luxury and effeminacy’.¹⁶

At a popular level this debate was mediated through reactions to the politics of Otway’s Venice Preserv’d. Like Byron’s play Marino Faliero, which is partly based on it, Otway’s drama is concerned with a conspiracy to overthrow patrician rule. It was played to ecstatic Tory applause as a satire on Shaft esbury’s politics at Charles II’s court and to fervent Radical applause as a pro-Revolution play in 1795 so much so that William Pitt’s government forbade further performances for a while.¹⁷ It was the most performed play apart from those of Shakespeare for over a century. Byron both read the play and saw it performed. There were significant differences between the two. The play satirizes Shaft esbury as a Venetian senator who asks Aquilina, a prostitute, whom he calls Nicky Nacky, to trea...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• Acknowledgements
• List of Figures
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• 1 A ‘More Beloved Existence’: From Shakespeare’s ‘Venice’ to Byron‘s Venice–Bernard Beatty
• 2 Reimagining Venice and Visions of Decay in Wordsworth, the Shelleys and Thomas Mann–Mark Sandy
• 3 J. M. W. Turner and the ‘Floating City’–Andrew Wilton
• 4 Venice and Opera: Tradition, Propaganda and Transformation–Jeremy Dibble
• 5 Venice, Dickens, Robert Browning and the Victorian Imagination–Michael O’Neill
• 6 ‘The Lamp of Memory’: Ruskin and Venice–Dinah Birch
• 7 Edith Wharton’s ‘Venetian Backgrounds’–Pamela Knights
• 8 Henry James’s Venice and the Visual Arts–Sarah Wootton
• 9 The Myth of Venice in the Decline of Eliot and Pound–Jason Harding
• 10 Representations of Venice in Daphne du Maurier’s Don’t Look Now and Nicolas Roeg’s Screen Adaptation–Rebecca White
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Index