II. HOW SHAKESPEARE MANIPULATES THE STORIES IN DRAMATISING THEM. A Study in Dramatic Workmanship. CHAP. II. IN N treating Story as the raw material of the Romantic Drama it has already been shown, in the case of the Two points of Drama- stories utilised for The Merchant of Venice, what natural capatic Mechan- cities these exhibit for dramatic effect. The next step is to ism. Reduction of diffi culties specially im portant in Drama. First difficulty: monstros ity of the show how the artist increases their force for dramatic purposes in the process of working them up. Two points will be illustrated in the present study: first, how Shakespeare meets the difficulties of a story and reduces them to a minimum; secondly, how he adds effectiveness to the two tales by weaving them together so that they assist one another's effect. The avoidance or reduction of difficulties in a story is an obvious element in any kind of artistic handling; it is of special importance in Drama in proportion as we are more sensitive to improbabilities in what is supposed to take place before our eyes than in what we merely hear of by narrative. This branch of art could not be better illustrated than in the Story of the Jew: never perhaps has an artist had to deal with materials so bristling with difficulties of the greatest magnitude, and never, it may be added, have they been met with greater ingenuity. The host of improbabilities gathering about such a detail as the pound of flesh must strike every mind. There is, however, preliminary to these, another difficulty of more general application: the difficulty of painting a character bad enough to be the hero of the Jew's cha racter. story. It might be thought that to paint excess of badness CHAP. II. is comparatively easy, as needing but a coarse brush. On the contrary, there are few severer tests of creative power than the treatment of monstrosity. To be told that there is villainy in the world and tacitly to accept the statement may be easy; it is another thing to be brought into close contact with the villains, to hear them converse, to watch their actions and occasionally to be taken into their confidence. We realise in Drama through our sympathy and our experience: in real life we have not been accustomed to come across monsters and are unfamiliar with their behaviour; in proportion then as the badness of a character is exaggerated it is carried outside the sphere of our experience, the naturalness of the scene is interrupted and its human interest tends to decline. So, in the case of the story under consideration, the dramatist is confronted with this dilemma: he must make the character of Shylock absolutely bad, or the incident of the bond will appear unreal; he must not make the character extraordinarily bad, or there is danger of the whole scene appearing unreal. counter Shakespeare meets a difficulty of this kind by a double Its retreatment. On the one hand, he puts no limits to the pulsiveness blackness of the character itself; on the other hand, he acted by sympathy provides against repulsiveness by giving it a special attraction with his of another kind. In the present case, while painting Shylock wrongs. as a monster, he secures for him a hold upon our sympathy by representing him as a victim of intolerable ill-treatment and injustice. The effect resembles the popular sympathy with criminals. The men themselves and their crimes are highly repulsive; but if some slight irregularity occurs in the process of bringing them to justice-if a counsel shows himself unduly eager, or a judge appears for a moment onesided, a host of volunteer advocates espouse their cause. These are actuated no doubt by sensitiveness to purity of justice; but their protests have a ring that closely resembles e.g. in iii. e.g. iii. i; iv. i, &c. CHAP. II. sympathy with the criminals themselves, whom they not unfrequently end by believing to be innocent and injured. In the same way Shakespeare shows no moderation in the touches of bloodthirstiness, of brutality, of sordid meanness he heaps together in the character of Shylock; but he takes equal pains to rouse our indignation at the treatment he is made to suffer. Personages such as Gratiano, Salanio, Salarino, Tubal, serve to keep before us the mediæval feud between Jew and Gentile, and the persecuting insolence with which the fashionable youth met the moneyi. iii. 107- lenders who ministered to their necessities. Antonio 138. himself has stepped out of his natural character in the iii. i. 57, grossness of his insults to his enemy. Shylock has been injured in pocket as well as in sentiment, Antonio using his wealth to disturb the money-market, and defeat the schemes of the Jew; according to Shylock Antonio has hindered him of half-a-million, and were he out of Venice the usurer could make what merchandise he would. Finally, our sense of deliverance in the Trial Scene cannot hinder a touch of compunction for the crushed plaintiff, as he appeals against the hard justice meted out to him:-the loss of his property, the acceptance of his life as an act of grace, the abandonment of his religion and race, which implies the abandonment of the profession by which he makes his living. 133; iii. iii. 22; and i. iii. 45. iv. i. 374. Nay, take my life and all; pardon not that: By thus making us resent the harsh fate dealt to Shylock the dramatist recovers in our minds the fellow-feeling we have Dramatic lost in contemplating the Jew himself. A name for such Hedging double treatment might be 'Dramatic Hedging': as the better covers a possible loss by a second bet on the opposite side, so, when the necessities of a story involve the creation of a monster, the dramatic artist hedges' against loss of attrac tiveness by finding for the character human interest in some CHAP. II. other direction. So successful has Shakespeare been in the present instance that a respectable minority of readers rise from the play partisans of Shylock. with the We pass on to the crop of difficulties besetting the pound Difficulties of flesh as a detail in the bond. That such a bond should be connected proposed, that when proposed it should be accepted, that it pound of should be seriously entertained by a court of justice, that if flesh. entertained at all it should be upset on so frivolous a pretext as the omission of reference to the shedding of blood: these form a series of impossible circumstances that any dramatist might despair of presenting with even an approach to naturalness. Yet if we follow the course of the story as moulded by Shakespeare we shall find all these impossibilities one after another evaded. i. i. 179. At the end of the first scene Antonio had bidden Bassanio Proposal of go forth and try what his credit could do in Venice. Armed the bond. with this blank commission Bassanio hurries into the city. As a gay young nobleman he knows nothing of the commercial world except the money-lenders; and now proceeds to the best-known of them, apparently unaware of what any gossip on the Rialto could have told him, the unfortunate compare relations between this Shylock and his friend Antonio. At the opening of the Bond Scene we find Bassanio and Shylock in conversation, Bassanio impatient and irritated to find that the famous security he has to offer seems to make so little impression on the usurer. At this juncture Antonio himself i. iii. 41. falls1 in with them, sees at a glance to what his rash friend 1 No commentator has succeeded in making intelligible the line How like a fawning publican he looks! The as it stands in the text at the opening of Shylock's soliloquy. expression 'fawning publican' is so totally the opposite of all the qualities of Antonio that it could have no force even in the mouth of a satirist. It is impossible not to be attracted by the simple change in the text that would not only get over this difficulty, but add a new effect to the scene: the change of assigning this single line to Antonio, i. iii. I-40. i. iii. 42. CHAP. II. has committed him, but is too proud to draw back in sight ? of his enemy. Already a minor difficulty is surmounted, as to how Antonio comes to be in the position of asking an obligation of Shylock. Antonio is as impatient as dignity will permit to bring an awkward business to a conclusion. Shylock, on the contrary, to whom the interview itself is a triumph, in which his persecutor is appearing before him in the position of a client, casts about to prolong the conversation to as great a length as possible. Any topic would serve his purpose; but what topic more natural than the question at the root of the feud between the two, the question of lending money on interest? It is here we reach the very heart of our problem, how the first mention of the pound of flesh is made without a shock of unreality sufficient to ruin the whole scene. Had Shylock asked for a forfeiture of a million per cent., or in any other way thrown into a commercial form his purpose of ruining Antonio, the old feud and the present opportunity would be explanation sufficient: the real difficulty is the total incongruity between such an idea as a pound of human flesh and commercial transactions of any kind. This difficulty Shakespeare has met by one of posal led up his greatest triumphs of mechanical ingenuity; his leading The pro to by the reserving, of course, the rest of the speech for Shylock. The passage would then read thus [the stage direction is my own]: Enter ANTONIO. Bass. This is Signior Antonio. Ant. [Aside]. How like a fawning publican he looks [BASSANIO whispers ANTONIO and brings him to SHYLOCK. Shy. [Aside]. I hate him, for he is a Christian, But more, &c. Both the terms 'fawning' and 'publican' are literally applicable to Shylock, and are just what Antonio would be likely to say of him. It is again a natural effect for the two foes on meeting for the first time in the play to exchange scowling defiance. Antonio's defiance is cut short at the first line by Bassanio's running up to him, explaining what he has done, and bringing Antonio up to where Shylock is standing; the time occupied in doing this gives Shylock scope for his longer soliloquy. |