Shakespeare and the Italian Renaissance

Appropriation, Transformation, Opposition

Michele Marrapodi

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317056430
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Literature
• Categoria: Literary Criticism of Shakespeare

Shakespeare and the Italian Renaissance investigates the works of Shakespeare and his fellow dramatists from within the context of the European Renaissance and, more specifically, from within the context of Italian cultural, dramatic, and literary traditions, with reference to the impact and influence of classical, coeval, and contemporary culture. In contrast to previous studies, the critical perspectives pursued in this volume's tripartite organization take into account a wider European intertextual dimension and, above all, an ideological interpretation of the 'aesthetics' or 'politics' of intertextuality. Contributors perceive the presence of the Italian world in early modern England not as a traditional treasure trove of influence and imitation, but as a potential cultural force, consonant with complex processes of appropriation, transformation, and ideological opposition through a continuous dialectical interchange of compliance and subversion.

PART I
APPROPRIATIONS OF POETRY AND PROSE

Chapter 1
Sprezzatura and Embarrassment in The Merchant of Venice

Harry Berger, Jr.

In Castiglione’s Libro del Cortegiano (1528), Count Ludovico da Canossa defines sprezzatura as an art that hides art, the ability to display artful artlessness.¹ Killjoys may be inclined to dismiss this art as a culturally legitimated practice of hypocrisy or bad faith, but others would appreciate the suppleness of the high-wire act of definitional balance performed by the Count and his interlocutors. They describe sprezzatura as the ability to perform any act or gesture with a careless mastery that delivers either or both of two messages: (1) “look how artfully I appear to be natural”, and/or (2) “look how naturally I appear to be artful”.

Since sprezzatura is a code, it can be – it has to be – learned. Castiglione’s interlocutors spend a lot of time discussing its behavioral rules or laws. Yet they also insist it should be performed as if it were an inborn grace. Sprezzatura, then, is the ability to show that one is not showing all the effort one obviously put into learning how to show that one is not showing effort.

The term’s edge and edginess are sharpened by their connection to the verb sprezzare (to scorn, despise, disdain) and to the adjective sprezzata, which appears several times in Books 1 and 2. This has suggested to some that sprezzatura designates “an attitude of slightly superior disdain”, and to others that it is a strategy for maintaining class boundaries. They argue for a sprezzatura of elite enclosure in which the actor and his peers reaffirm their superiority to those incapable of learning or deciphering the code.² But sprezzatura also serves a more defensive function. It is a defense against embarrassment.

To embarrass is to make someone feel awkward or uncomfortable, humiliated or ashamed. Such feelings are triggered not only by specific acts of criticism, blame, and accusation, but also by actions like those listed in Larousse under the French verb embarrasser: “to obstruct or block or hamper; to clutter up or weigh down”. “To embarrass” is literally “to embar”: to put up a barrier or deny access.³ People get embarrassed when they are denied access to things, persons, and states of being they desire or feel entitled to.

Shakespeare’s two Venetian plays are dominated by the encroachment of a discourse of embarrassment that threatens performances of sprezzatura. The Merchant of Venice is a comedy of embarrassment and Othello is a tragedy of embarrassment. This nomenclature is admittedly anachronistic, since the term embarrassment didn’t enter the language until the late seventeenth century.⁴ But I use it to mark a phenomenon that differs from both guilt and shame in its expressly social or public character: “shame does not necessarily involve public humiliation while embarrassment does, that is, one can feel shame for an act known only to oneself but in order to be embarrassed one’s actions must be revealed to others”. Shame may respond “to something that is morally wrong”. Embarrassment responds to something that may be “morally neutral but [is] socially unacceptable”.⁵

In Othello, the protagonist’s very entrance into the play is embarrassed by the ridiculous memory of another black man “of royal siege”, the Prince of Morocco in The Merchant of Venice:

Mislike me not for my complexion,

The shadowed livery of the burnish’d sun,

To whom I am a neighbour and near bred.

Bring me the fairest creature northward born,

Where Phoebus’ fire scarce thaws the icicles,

And let us make incision for your love

To prove whose blood is reddest, his or mine.

I tell thee, lady, this aspect of mine

Hath feared the valiant. By my love I swear,

The best-regarded virgins of our clime

Have loved it too: I would not change this hue,

Except to steal your thoughts, my gentle queen.

(The Merchant of Venice, 2.1.1–12)

It isn’t easy for the Moor of Venice to make his proper mark against this backdrop of buffoonery, and matters aren’t helped by the invidious epithets Roderigo and Iago spray at “his Moorship” in 1.1, well before he appears on stage: “thicklips”, “old black ram”, “Barbary horse”, “beast”, “the gross clasps of a lascivious Moor”, “an extravagant and wheeling stranger / Of here and everywhere”.⁶

In The Merchant of Venice, Portia is the Principal Embarrasser. Among the resources of embarrassment she cultivates is the one we call, metaphorically and colloquially, castration. The play directly alludes to it three times, and commentaries tend to focus more on the ritual of circumcision than on the metaphorics of castration.⁷ But Portia’s deployment of this resource is masterful. She practices a kind of motherly boa-constriction. When she learns Antonio is in trouble because of his loan to Bassanio she all but cradles her lover in her arms, even as she’s careful to note that he’s at fault: no one, she proclaims, “Shall lose a hair through Bassanio’s fault” (3.2.300).⁸ Her next sentence makes sure Bassanio has his priorities right: “First go with me to church and call me wife, / And then away to Venice to your friend” (3.2.301–2). “Since you are dear bought”, she tells him a few lines later, “I will love you dear”. Even an offer of love and assistance sounds like a threat: “It’s costing me. It will cost you”.

This is the first move in Portia’s war against Antonio. It anticipates the opening gambit inscribed in the letter from Antonio that Bassanio proceeds to read at her request: “it is impossible I should live, all debts are cleared between you and I if I might but see you at my death. Notwithstanding, use your pleasure. If your love do not persuade you to come, let not my letter” (3.2.317–19). As Portia might say, he seems ready at a moment’s notice to make “a swanlike end, / Fading in music” (3.2.44–5).

Here, as elsewhere in the play, “notwithstanding” empties both barrels. It has passive-aggressive force: “in spite of everything I’ve done for you”.⁹ But Portia sees what Antonio is up to and spoils his game by capitalizing on the ambiguity of “If your love do not persuade you”. She, Bassanio’s love, duly persuades him: “O love, dispatch all business and be gone!” (3.2.320). She meets Antonio’s plaintive demand with an act of generosity: a visit from Bassanio will be her gift, or at least her loan, to Antonio. In this skirmish, the gesture of donation trounces that of self-sacrificial victimization.

Portia’s quiet but persistent warfare continues in 3.4. After Lorenzo commends her for putting up with Bassanio’s absence, he slathers praise on Antonio:

Madam, although I speak it in your presence,

You have a noble and a true conceit

Of godlike amity, which appears most strongly

In bearing thus the absence of your lord.

But if you knew to whom you show this honor,

How true a gentleman you send relief,

How dear a lover of my lord your husband,

I know you would be prouder of the work

Than customary bounty can enforce you. (3.4.1–9)

Portia modestly but happily acknowledges the justice of Lorenzo’s praise of herself, but she ventures a more cautious response to his praise of Antonio:

I never did repent for doing good,

Nor shall not now; for in companions

That do converse and waste the time together,

Whose souls do bear an equal yoke of love,

There must be needs a like proportion

Of lineaments, of manners and of spirit;

Which makes me think that this Antonio,

Being the bosom lover of my lord,

Must needs be like my lord. If it be so,

How little is the cost I have bestowed

In purchasing the semblance of my soul

From out the state of hellish misery! (3.4.10–21)

Editors are quick to Platonize these sentiments by glossing “lover” in line 7 and “bosom lover” in line 17 as “friend”, and they are also careful to remind readers that “waste” in line 12 means “spend” rather than, say, “squander” or “fritter away”. I think their eagerness to sidestep a blurry and mischievous sense of “lover” isn’t warranted by anything the text shows about Portia’s attitude toward Antonio. Nor is it entirely clear to me that she would agree with them about the more benign implication of “waste”. Finally, what “cost” has she “bestowed”? Does she mean she’s “paying” in the sense of giving up Bassanio for a few days? Or is she announcing that she has sent him off to Venice loaded down with moneybags?

The gestural force of “this Antonio” would be that of a neutral demonstrative if he were present. But since he isn’t, and since – as we just saw – Portia is at war with Antonio, the phrase sounds more invidious: “this Antonio” (“whoever he is”). She then conspicuously minimizes her latest good deed (“How little is the cost […]”) and concludes with a self-conscious gesture of embarrassment, uttered as a reflex to her auto-laudatory outburst: “This comes too near the praising of myself; / Therefore no more of it” (3.4.22–3).

Let’s recall that before this scene began Portia had already made her plans to participate in the hearing in Venice. There, as Stephen Orgel trenchantly observes, her “behavior toward Antonio is in fact as cruel as anything Shylock does. The scene is drawn out excruciatingly, and its theatrical power has much less to do with the quality of mercy than with the pleasures of sadism on the one hand and revenge on the other”.¹⁰ Shylock’s bond threatens Antonio with bodily harm and possible death, but Portia quickly neutralizes that threat because Shylock isn’t her real target. Her problem is to overgo Antonio, her competitor in noble deeds, by proving that she can save someone for Bassanio. If she can put Antonio in her debt, she will loosen his powerful hold over Bassanio.

She thus eases into her prosecution of the Jew by throwing a scare at Antonio. Since the bond is forfeit she commands him to bare his bosom to the knife, much to Shylock’s excitement, which she encourages by quibbling over the more gruesome details of the surgery:

PORTIA

Therefore lay bare your bosom.

SHYLOCK

Ay, his breast.

So says the bond, doth it not, noble judge?

“Nearest his heart”, those are the very words.

PORTIA

It is so. Are there balance here

To weigh the flesh?

SHYLOCK

I have them ready.

PORTIA

Have by some surgeon, Shylock, on your charge,

To stop his wounds, lest he do bleed to death.

SHYLOCK

Is it so nominated in the bond?

PORTIA

It is not so expressed, but what of that?

’Twere good you do so much for charity.

SHYLOCK

I cannot find it, ’Tis not in the bond. (4.1.249–59)

Portia then invites Antonio to comment and he obliges by sacrificing himself at some length to the tune of “Don’t worry about me”, whereupon Bassanio jumps in with his competing offer to sacrifice not himself, but his wife (4.1.261–84). From the moment she enters and takes over the inquiry, any observer who views the courtroom event through Portia’s eyes must share her embarrassment – an embarrassment caused not by Shylock, whom she quickly disables, but by the husband with whom she has contracted to share life after happy ending and by the professional scapegoat he is attached to.

During the courtroom scene, Bassanio offers five times to repay Antonio’s debt. Before Portia enters he threatens to give Shylock twice what Antonio owes (4.1.84). He then restates and sweetens his offer four times in her presence and each time she overrules him (4.1.206–19, 279–86, 316–19, 334–6). After his libertine generosity leads him to tender from two to ten times the sum and even more (his hands, his head, his heart), Portia shuts him down, asks to scrutinize the bond, and reminds Shylock that he has been offered thrice the sum he demanded (4.1.206–24). Since 3.2 she has, in effect, been giving Bassanio his allowance. Therefore she fully understands the first principle of Bassanian finance: any cash he eagerly presses on Shylock will be hers. At 4.1.212–13 she watches as Bassanio offers to save Antonio’s life with her money and then beseeches her to cut corners and cheat a little: “Wrest once the law to your authority. / To do a great right, do a little wrong”. She had already expressed her willingness to discharge the debt (3.2.297–306). But although she’s prepared to rescue Antonio and help Bassanio, she refuses to pay and instead draws the process out, as if to tweak them before she saves them.

At the end of the hearing Portia turns down the payment of 3,000 ducats tendered by Bassanio and Antonio: “I, delivering you, am satisfied, / And therein do account myself well paid” (4.1.413–14). She thus stays ahead in the game of imposing obligations. Hers is the charity that wounds. “It wasn’t my fault”, Bassanio whimpers in the final scene, “Antonio made me do it” (5.1.216, 240). And as his glib if musically redundant disclaimer at 5.1.193–8 shows, his capacity for embarrassment protects him from shame. Portia...