The Serpent of Venice

To the specific 1298 battle of Curzola, all but twelve of Venice’s ninety-five galleys were lost to Genoa. The admiral, Dandolo (who was the son of a doge), committed suicide in shame. Among the prisoners taken was a Venetian merchant called Marco Polo, who was imprisoned in Genoa. In Serpent, this is the battle from which Venice barely recovered, which puts Othello, a mercenary, in the position of saving the city.

While in prison, Marco Polo would dictate the tales of his travels to another prisoner, called Rusticello. It was easy enough to make this prisoner a beef-brained ninny with the gift of perfect recall, thus Drool becomes the author of The Travels of Marco Polo. In Polo’s book, he describes vicious, man-eating reptiles that live in the Chinese rivers. It’s fairly obvious to us now that he is talking about crocodiles, but at that time he does not use the term, and he also describes a bird large enough to “seize an elephant with its talons, and lift it into the air.” So who is to say he didn’t smuggle out a baby dragon in his rucksack?

CHARACTERS

More than thirty-four named characters appear in The Merchant of Venice and Othello, as well as the four characters I carried over from Fool, and the two characters from The Cask of Amontillado. Most have Italian-sounding names and some of the characters even have identical names (i.e., there is a Gratiano in both plays). There are far too many characters to include them all in a single comic novel and not lose the thread of the story, already made somewhat complex by marrying the three source works. Further, it was an annoying reality that Shakespeare named two of Antonio’s associates Salarino and Salanio. A modern novelist would never do this, as the eye confuses the two similar names almost by habit. (They teach that on the first day in author school.) And in The Merchant of Venice, the two serve exactly the same function and appear to share a personality. One transcription of the play I found even added a third, Solanio, because it just wasn’t confusing enough, I suppose. Thus, I tried to kill off one of the Sals as soon as possible. It should be noted, however, that Shakespeare wrote the plays to be performed and not read, and each of the Sals would have been distinguished by the actor who played him, so having like-sounding names wouldn’t have presented as much of a problem in the theater.

I chose Merchant and Othello, obviously, because they are set in Venice. Early on, as I dissected them to see what parts I could stitch back together to make the abomination that became The Serpent of Venice, I started noting that characters in each of the plays perform similar functions, and although I did not research it, I suspect the parts were written for the same actors. Portia and Desdemona are obviously similar, both smart and beautiful, by the descriptions from the other characters, of high birth, and each with a controlling father (Portia’s, however, deceased). Bassanio and Cassio could be the same character, as could Rodrigo and Gratiano, Lancelot Gobbo and the Clown in Othello, although Gobbo has a much larger part. The Duke of Venice appears in both plays, as well as members of the council; Shylock and Othello, although very different in disposition, are both outsiders to Venetian society. Iago and Antonio are both antagonists to the outsiders. Emilia and Nerissa are both lady’s maids, and Nerissa is more of an attending “lady in waiting,” but they serve similar functions; Emilia helps facilitate the mechanism of the tragedy of Othello, Nerissa the comedy of Merchant. Both have hungry ears for the troubles and plots of their mistresses, the female leads.

Jessica* in Merchant and Bianca in Othello are more or less the girls from the other side of the tracks, true in their love for their respective beaus. Where I could, I consolidated or eliminated characters. Pocket becomes Lancelot Gobbo, Shylock’s servant. The vengeful Montressor, from The Cask of Amontillado, becomes Brabantio, and Pocket also becomes Poe’s boastful harlequin, Fortunato, both bearing nicknames given them by the doge. I might have trimmed Antonio’s entourage a bit, but I felt it only fair to leave a substantial number of “red shirts” in the cast to entertain Viv’s appetites.

The Chorus is a presence in a few of the plays, most notably Henry the Fifth and Romeo and Juliet, where they both get some of the better lines in two very poetic plays with some of my favorite speeches. In other plays (Pericles comes to mind—one of Shakespeare’s lesser-known plays), he uses named characters as onstage narrators. But there is no Chorus in either Othello or The Merchant of Venice. I love the poet’s voice on the stage, walking around, describing the action, appearing invisible to all the other characters, so I thought it might be amusing to shine the spotlight on him. Othello is more or less narrated by Iago, who spends an enormous amount of time in soliloquy, telling the audience what evil shit he is plotting, so it only occurs to me now, with the story finished, that I should have had him accuse the Chorus of sleeping with Emilia.

ATTITUDES

Let me make it clear here that when I’m talking about “attitudes” what I’m talking about are racism and anti-Semitism. Based on criticism I’ve read of The Merchant of Venice, and the criticism of the criticism, it seems that somewhere in the latter end of the twentieth century, academics declared The Merchant of Venice to not be an anti-Semitic play, but a play with anti-Semitic characters. “You have to see it in the context of the time it was written,” we are told. Shylock, next to Hamlet, is probably the most analyzed of Shakespeare’s characters. He is eloquent, although he speaks in a different cadence and manner from everyone else in the play, and he is both greedy and clichéd in the way he is written, but is also a product of much oppression and prejudice, and he makes an eloquent case for his thirst for vengeance.

The play is set as contemporary to the time in which it was written (we know this because in the play, one of the Antonio’s ships is coming from Mexico, so it is necessarily after 1492), a time shortly after the beginning of the Inquisition (also 1492), when Ferdinand and Isabella expelled the Jews from Spain, and many Catholic countries followed suit. Venice, however, as a state, was resistant to the Inquisition, and while Jews were persecuted there, it was to a much lesser extent than in other Catholic countries, another instance of Venice resisting the authority of the church, as was the case in their adventures in the Crusades. Jews from Spain, France, and other parts of Italy fled to Venice. This may be why Shylock speaks strangely and is considered by Portia’s citation of the law to be an “alien.” The play doesn’t say he comes from another place. Perhaps Shakespeare knew about this refugee status, perhaps not.

I suppose it should be noted, as well, that in Shakespeare’s England, anti-Semitism was a crowd-pleaser in the theater, beginning with Christopher Marlowe’s play The Jew of Malta (1590), which is outrightly Jew hating, with his main character Barabbas more or less the blueprint for the clichéd craven money-grubber and scoundrel. (Which endures in English literature even into Dickens. Fagin, in Oliver Twist, is referred to repeatedly as “the Jew.”) A few years after The Jew of Malta appeared on the stage in 1594, Rodrigo Lopez, the queen’s doctor and a Jew, had been tried and beheaded by Queen Elizabeth for plotting to assassinate her. Elizabeth was a very popular monarch (almost by necessity, because she was pretty indiscriminate about cutting off the heads of people who didn’t like her), and so the public was happy to get their anti-Semitism on again with The Merchant of Venice (1596–1598). Compared with Barabbas, Shylock is, as they say, a mensch. (Shakespeare was less of a trendsetter than a trend follower. His King Lear followed a play called King Leir written four years prior by another playwright. It’s his genius for language, not his plotting, that has made his work immortal.)

So yes, in context, Shakespeare’s play is certainly less anti-Semitic than Marlowe’s, but Antonio is the protagonist of Merchant, the hero, if you will. He’s anti-Semitic through the play, and Shakespeare implies he is such because Shylock is practicing “usury,” or charging interest on money he loans. Talented directors and actors have portrayed Shylock as the sympathetic lead, though, in recent times, without altering a word of the text, and it’s really a credit to the craft of acting and directing that it can be done. Al Pacino’s Shylock in the 2006

film version of Merchant is a good example of a sympathetic Shylock, and filmed in Venice, it’s a pretty film to look at.

That said, The Serpent of Venice is set in medieval times, three hundred years before Shakespeare’s play, and conditions were quite different. Jews in Venice were required to wear a yellow hat, and there were stricter controls on what they were able to do with property. Across Europe, Jews were persecuted; the reference to the burning of the Jews at York is true. All Jews were expelled from England in 1290, and from France in 1306. The plagues of the time were often blamed on Jews, as well as the failure of crops, and they were accused of poisoning wells, no doubt an early application of statistical medicine linking cholera to water, with Jews as the scapegoat. In short, it was tough being a Jew in the Middle Ages, so Shylock in my setting would have to be tough, resilient, and resourceful, or at least have an advocate who was.

I also found it interesting to insert a Jew into the context of a holy war between Christians and Muslims, basically over who would occupy Jerusalem. By seniority, of course, the Jews get Jerusalem, but Shylock never inserts himself into that dialogue. He’s just trying to get by, and be faithful. The contrast of vengeance and mercy in the trial of The Merchant of Venice is obviously Shakespeare doing a compare and contrast between the Old Testament God and the New Testament Christ, but he’s completely ducking the religious question of his time, which was between the Catholics and the Protestants. (Elizabeth was adamantly Protestant, while her successor, her cousin James I, was Catholic, and Shakespeare had to write to please both of them, as Elizabeth died at the midpoint of his career.)

So, was Shakespeare an anti-Semite? I don’t think so. I think he was writing for his audience, just as I write for my readers. (Interesting, I think, that Shylock is referred to as “the Jew” twenty-eight times in the play, and by his name only three.) And neither do I think he was racist, but race is definitely an issue in Othello.

The person who mentions Othello’s color most often is Othello himself, referring to himself as “black” a number of times, and professing often how rough his manners and speech are in very poetic prose. Brabantio is completely out of his mind about Othello’s race, and Iago and Rodrigo whip him into a frenzy at the beginning of the play by talking about the “black ram tupping his white ewe” and using other racist ways of saying that a black guy is bonking his daughter. After the play leaves Venice, however, and proceeds to Cyprus, the racism settles down and Iago just hates Othello because he hates everyone. It was very difficult to not put the word sociopath in Pocket’s mouth when referring to Iago, but I had to settle for lunatic. For Iago, Othello’s race pales in comparison to so many other reasons to hate and undermine the Moor.

Yes, there are racist elements to Othello, but Othello is the hero of the play, of high and pure morals, courageous, and an extraordinary commander. (Even Iago concedes this in the play, and Iago does not give a lot of credit to anyone.) In Merchant, however, Portia has the racist lines. When the Prince of Morocco is coming to have a try at the caskets, she says he has the “complexion of a devil,” and when we first meet the prince he apologizes for his color, and asks her to overlook it. When he goes away, she sighs with relief, and says that she hopes that all of his color should meet the same losing circumstance. While Portia has some brilliant speeches later in the play, specifically “The quality of mercy” discourse during the trial, she is a brat in that and other “casket” scenes, so I portrayed her thus through most of my story.

More interesting for me than race, when the story is set in the context of the Crusades, is that a Moor would have been from North Africa, a predominantly Muslim culture, and now he is in command of a force that may lead a major attack on the Muslims. Othello, we are told by Iago, is not a Muslim, but a Christian, but, you know, he might be a secret Muslim. I mean, he’s so African looking, and he has that funny name . . .

Yeah, I went there.

Anyway, I don’t think that Shakespeare was a racist, and his sonnets 127–151 are about the famous mistress he refers to as his “dark-lady” who is, by description, of African descent.

The point of this, I suppose, is that I didn’t intend The Serpent of Venice to be a story about discrimination, although discrimination is manifest among the characters. For me, it’s a story about hypocrisy and greed, courage and grief, anger and revenge. But most important, I wanted it to be a story that shows how cool it would be to have your own dragon, which I have wanted since I was five.†

Christopher Moore

San Francisco, California

January 2013

*Interesting bit of trivia I found: the first time the name “Jessica” appears in print, anywhere, in any language, is in The Merchant of Venice, although it may be derived from the Hebrew name Iscah.

†No, I didn’t and don’t want to have sex with a dragon, I just thought that would be funny.