Visions of Venice in Shakespeare

Laura Tosi,Shaul Bassi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317001294
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Arte dramático antiguo y clásico

Despite the growing critical relevance of Shakespeare's two Venetian plays and a burgeoning bibliography on both The Merchant of Venice and Othello, few books have dealt extensively with the relationship between Shakespeare and Venice. Setting out to offer new perspectives to a traditional topic, this timely collection fills a gap in the literature, addressing the new historical, political and economic questions that have been raised in the last few years. The essays in this volume consider Venice a real as well as symbolic landscape that needs to be explored in its multiple resonances, both in Shakespeare's historical context and in the later tradition of reconfiguring one of the most represented cities in Western culture. Shylock and Othello are there to remind us of the dark sides of the myth of Venice, and of the inescapable fact that the issues raised in the Venetian plays are tremendously topical; we are still haunted by these theatrical casualties of early modern multiculturalism.

PART 1
Sources

Chapter 1
Supersubtle Venetians: Richard Knolles and the Geopolitics of Shakespeare’s Othello1

Virginia Mason Vaughan

Had Shakespeare traveled to Venice, he would have experienced the city’s vibrant traffic between peoples from all parts of the Mediterranean.2 Instead, at least so far as we know, the dramatist gleaned impressions of Venice from the texts he consulted and from conversations with friends and acquaintances who had visited the famed city. Using bits and pieces of information to craft Othello, in particular, Shakespeare created a representation of Venice. Presumably this representation was calculated to appeal to the audience he knew, drawing upon their prejudices and cultural memories. References to the ‘myth of Venice’ as a well-ordered state would likely have resonated not just with those who had read Lewes Lewkenor’s translation of Gasparo Contarini’s The Commonwealth and Government of Venice,3 but with those who knew of the city’s reputation for good government. Brabantio’s indignant response to the brawling below his window, ‘This is Venice: / My house is not a grange’ (1.1.105–6), highlights the city’s insistence on civil order. Shakespeare’s Act 1, scene 3 before the Doge and Venetian Senate with its fair and thoughtful sifting of testimony from Brabantio, Othello and Desdemona underscores Venice’s reputation as a location where justice is meted fairly to all petitioners.

Shakespeare’s text also highlights the opposition of Venice and the Ottoman Empire. Othello is sent to defend Cyprus from the threat of a Turkish takeover, and throughout the play, the characters repeatedly reference the ‘Turks.’ To ‘turn Turk,’ as Othello suggests in the aftermath of the drunken brawl of Act 2, scene 2, is to reject Venetian rationality and succumb to heathenish barbarism.4 Such phrases were shorthand references, distinguishing the good guys from the bad guys in ways the audience would have understood.

Specific references to Venice (gondolas, the Duke in Council, the Senate) and to the underlying Turkish threat that moves Othello from Venice to Cyprus – details, which have frequently been noted in Othello commentaries – seem to lend the play a Manichean pattern, opposing virtuous Venetian Christians against barbaric Ottoman Turks. At the same time, although the play’s notorious villain has an Iberian name, he speaks as a Venetian and his work of destruction comes from within. Shakespeare’s technique, here as in other plays, is to reinforce audience expectations and simultaneously undercut them. Such contradictions frequently occur in his representation of racial or cultural others: Aaron in Titus Andronicus, Shylock in The Merchant of Venice, and, of course, Othello himself. In Othello, what is true of the dramatist’s treatment of characters – the toying with audience stereotypes and expectations – is equally true of his representation of Venice and Cyprus, settings that had strong cultural and geopolitical associations for many in his audience.

In a change from his major source, Shakespeare deliberately situated his play in Venice during the period of its Cyprus wars. Giraldi Cinthio had set his tale of a jealous Moorish captain and his wife on Cyprus, sometime before his collection of stories was printed in 1565. At that time Venice included Cyprus in its sprawling Mediterranean Empire. Cinthio explains, ‘It happened that the Venetian lords made a change in the forces that they used to maintain in Cyprus; and they chose the Moor as Commandant of the soldiers whom they sent there.’5 Cinthio makes no mention of a Turkish threat because at the time he was writing there was no Ottoman crisis. Venice had governed the island since 1470, and it wasn’t until 1569 (four years after the publication of Cinthio’s Hecatommiti) that the Ottoman Sultan Selim the Second, vexed by Christian pirates using Cyprus as a haven for their depredations on Turkish shipping, demanded that the Venetians turn over control of the island to him.

In contrast, Shakespeare begins his Senate scene (Act 1, scene 3 of Othello) with Cyprus under attack. When the Senate receives reports that the Turkish fleet is on the way to attack Venetian outposts, they initially think the target is Cyprus; then a messenger from Signior Angelo claims they head for Rhodes; the second messenger reports that two fleets have joined and now sail toward Cyprus. The hurly burly of messengers’ conflicting reports conveys a sense of imminent crisis. Commentators generally agree that Signior Angelo’s name is taken from Angelo Soriano, the commander of the Venetian navy and frequent bearer of messages between the Turks and Venetians.6 In these fleeting moments, Shakespeare sets his tragedy during 1570–71 at the beginning of Venice’s four-year conflict with Ottoman forces that was marked by the loss of Cyprus, the establishment of a Holy League with Spain and the Papacy, and the battle of Lepanto, ending in 1574 with the signing of a separate peace between Venice and the Sultan Selim II.

Although E.A.J. Honigmann argued in his edition for the Third Arden Series that Shakespeare composed Othello sometime during 1601–1602, most scholars agree that the likely date of composition is 1603, with the first performances occurring sometime in 1604.7 Sparked by his new position as a King’s Man after the accession of James I, Shakespeare would have been aware of the new sovereign’s interest in the Battle of Lepanto8 and of the poem James had written to celebrate the Christian victory, which was reprinted in 1603 to capitalize on public interest in anything concerning James. Certainly the Kentish schoolmaster Richard Knolles was cognizant of royal interests, for he dedicated his mammoth folio – another putative source for Othello – The Generall Historie of the Turkes, published in 1603 – to King James; ‘with your learned Muse,’ he wrote, you adorned ‘and set forth the greatest and most glorious victorie that ever was by any the Christian confederate princes obtained against these Othoman Kings or Emperors.’9

Several details of Shakespeare’s Act 1, scene 3 convey information also found in Knolles’s lengthy account of the Cyprus wars, particularly the Senate’s original indecision as to whether the Turkish fleet was bound for Cyprus or for Rhodes. Knolles recounts that Mustapha Bassa (Lala Mustafa) ‘together with Haly Bassa and the rest of the fleet, departed from CONSTANTINOPLE the six and twentieth of May, and at the RHODES met with Piall [Piali Bassa] as he had before appointed.’ Knolles continues with a description of the fleet, which consisted of 200 galleys ‘with divers other vessels prepared for the transportation of horses: with this fleet Mustapha kept on his course for CYPRUS.’10 In Shakespeare’s Act 1, scene 3, the Senate initially receives conflicting reports of the number of Turkish ships, but settles on the same figure, 200.

These specific references, repeatedly cited in commentary notes to editions of Othello, are well known and – Honigmann aside – most commentators readily accept Knolles as a source. They suggest that Shakespeare consulted Knolles’s account of the Cyprus wars either in manuscript or soon after it was published, and that in his usual eclectic method of composition, he chose to place a tragedy based on Cinthio within that historical and geopolitical framework. His motivation may indeed have been to cater to his new patron, King James’s interest in the battle of Lepanto.11 Or, as Geoffrey Bullough argues, he may have wanted to dignify his hero and give his story greater political import.12 But what, specifically, would that import be?

My previous work on Othello13 assumed that the tragedy’s political impact stemmed from its situation within the global conflict between the ‘Turk,’ meaning the Ottoman Empire that controlled most of the eastern Mediterranean, and the ‘Christian,’ represented in the play by Venice, a bastion against the perceived depredations of Islamic military might. Cyprus, the easternmost outpost of Venice’s far-flung empire, was caught between Ottoman Turk and Venetian Christian; its location meant that the Venetian rule of law could be easily subverted. Yet Venice’s geopolitical position in the sixteenth-century Mediterranean was much more complex than this simple pattern would allow. Venice maintained a substantial presence, both diplomatic and mercantile, in Istanbul14; the Republic frequently negotiated trading agreements with the Ottoman Empire, and within Venice itself, Islamic Turks mingled freely with Christian Europeans. Although the narratives that circulated throughout Europe in the aftermath of the Christian naval victory at Lepanto underscored the ineluctable opposition of Turk and European, real life alliances frequently shifted, and in many cases, Venice seemed more allied with the Ottomans than the rest of Europe.

To understand the assumptions and associations audiences brought to Shakespeare’s plays – and upon which he no doubt capitalized – we have to go beyond traditional source studies that tend to identify snippets of borrowed material. For the purposes of this essay, I will re-examine Richard Knolles’s 60-page account of the Cyprus wars, a substantial section of The General Historie of the Turks, which we know Shakespeare consulted. Knolles’s massive narrative provided not simply a few details for the opening of Shakespeare Act 1, scene 3; read in full, his commentary offers an astute analysis of the events leading up to and following the loss of Cyprus.

A careful reading of Knolles’s account of the Cyprus wars may also tell us something about the expectations of Shakespeare’s audience. The Generall Historie may have been well known to its literate and more well-to-do members, and that familiarity, in turn, may have shaped a more complicated response to the tragedy than common folk knowledge about the cruel and barbarous Turk. After its initial publication in 1603, The Generall Historie went through five subsequent editions, supplemented by other writers, and the condition of extant copies suggests that it was well read.15 At first glance, Knolles seems to toe James’s negative line on the Turks. Matthew Dimmock argues that Knolles’s ‘authoritative and antagonistic reflection upon “the scourge of God and present terror of the world … thundering out nothing but still bloud and warre” seems … to denote the closure of a moment of Anglo-Ottoman interaction and its complex of associated representations,’16 and establish a clear-cut binary between savage Turk and civilized Christian. This conclusion would be justified if based simply on the front matter and the concluding essay, Discourse of the Greatnesse of the Turkish Empire, which frame the treatise in accord with James I’s anti-Turk prejudices. But inside this scaffolding Knolles chronicles the lives of 13 Ottoman sultans, highlighting their admirable qualities as well as their stereotypical cruelty. Linda McJannet’s meticulous study of Knolles’s use of eastern, particularly Turkish, sources demonstrates that the Generall Historie is often comparatively even-handed, granting ‘the Turks their valor, their military excellence, and the “order” (in several senses) of their state.’17 Most important here, within Knolles’s lengthy description of the Cyprus wars, alongside his excoriation of Turkish atrocities, we see a nuanced and complicated analysis of Mediterranean geopolitics, including extended explanations of diplomatic maneuvering within the League and strategic discussions in the Venetian Senate, which in ways – some obvious but others quite subtle – may hav...