dumbfoundry

Around 1589, just as the 25-year-old Shakespeare's career as a playwright was beginning, Christopher Marlowe -- exactly the same age and from a similar middle-class, provincial background -- scored a great box-office success with ''The Jew of Malta.'' A black comedy, brilliant but exceptionally cynical and cruel, Marlowe's script was repeatedly dusted off and revived throughout the 1590's. Shakespeare, who was in the business of exciting crowds, undoubtedly noted the way his rival's play drew large audiences, particularly at moments of popular agitation against London's small Flemish, Dutch, French and Italian communities, which were charged with stealing English jobs. [...]

It was probably a successful revival of ''The Jew of Malta'' that prompted Shakespeare, sometime after 1594 and before 1598, to write ''The Merchant of Venice.'' As in our own entertainment industry, one success spawned another: after all, to stay afloat, each of London's theater companies had to draw some 1,500 to 2,000 paying customers a day into the round wooden walls of its playhouse, and competition was fierce. At some point in his restless, voluminous reading, Shakespeare had come across an Italian story about a Jewish usurer in Giovanni Fiorentino's ''Il Pecorone.'' As he often did, Shakespeare lifted the plot wholesale: the merchant of Venice who borrows money from a Jewish moneylender, the terrible bond with its forfeit of a pound of the merchant's flesh, a handsome young Venetian's successful wooing of a lady of ''Belmonte'' who comes to Venice disguised as a lawyer, her clever solution to the threat of the bond by pointing out that the legal right to take a pound of flesh does not include the legal right to take a drop of blood. And in creating the usurer Shylock, Shakespeare borrowed heavily from Marlowe. But he also went far beyond his predecessor. His half-villainous, half-sympathetic moneylender possesses a range of emotions utterly alien to Marlowe's villain Barabas.

This entry was posted by eeksypeeksy on Tuesday, September 14, 2004 at 8:28 AM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.