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Social Anxieties In Shakespeare’s Imagined City Spaces

A critical consideration of the inclusion and manipulation of city spaces in Shakespeare`s work, whether real or imagined, and their impact upon the construction of social order

Date : 11/10/2017

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Sarah

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Uploaded on : 11/10/2017
Subject : English

Social Anxieties in Shakespeare s Imagined City Spaces

Adam Hansen notes that it is due to the factors and conditions of London at the time of his writing that Shakespeare s plays were made possible (2007:822). And yet, of all Shakespeare s plays, only the ten English histories are set in London, with nine of these incorporating other locations (Estill,2014). This is intriguing, immediately implying that Shakespeare s repeated choice of overseas cities for his dramatic settings ground his plays in the municipality of the imagined it is unlikely that his audience, or he himself, were familiar with these places. The city space in Shakespeare, then, is one of projection, often for London s own contemporary social issues to be explored on stage. The Merchant of Venice and Measure for Measure are both plays set in imagined versions of Italian cities, which offer such explorations specifically, of the social anxieties surrounding emerging pecuniary systems in early modern London, and the morality thereof.

Jean E. Howard briefly alludes to this in her claim that in Merchant, Shylock is a symbol of certain anxieties in a cosmopolitan centre for trade (2007:42). These anxieties are palpable in his declaration to Bassino: I will buy with you, sell with you, talk with you, walk with you, and so following, but I will not eat with you, drink with you, nor pray with you (1.3.34-36).[1] Shylock engages with Bassanio superficially and in terms of business, but not in activities leading to deeper connections. This is an act of refusal by Shylock to identify with Bassino s Christian community. Declining non-kosher food ( pork which your prophet the Nazarite conjured the devil into (1.3.32-33)) and Christian prayer is an attempt to preserve his Jewish culture. The shared activities which Shylock consents to buying, selling, talking, and walking are all public ones it is the private, domestic activities of eating and praying which Shylock protects as part of his own cultural practice. Hansen notes that early modern Londoners had a reputation for xenophobia, but argues that reactions to immigrants were in fact varied (2007:833). The authenticity of early modern London is therefore represented more accurately by Shakespeare in the fact that his Venice is deliberately inauthentic there is no ghetto in the play, so the reality of the spatial separation between Jews and other Venetians is omitted (Hansen, 2007:837). By writing Shylock as living and working among the Christians, Shakespeare complicates, rather than segregates, his place in Venetian society given his livelihood, Shylock s place as a moneylender in the emerging pecuniary system is public, but he is anxious of the effect which this may have on his domestic life, and keenly separates the two. Arguably, this is form of xenophobia on Shylock s own part.

A pertinent example comes in act 2:

Shylock: What are there masques? Hear you me Jessica,

Lock up my doors, and when you hear the drum

And the vile squealing of the wry-neck d fife

Clamber not you up to the casements then

Nor thrust your head into the public street

To gaze on Christian fools with varnish d faces

But stop my house s ears, I mean my casements,

Let not the sound of shallow fopp ry enter

My sober house. By Jacob s staff I swear

I have no mind of feasting forth to-night. (2.5.28-39)

Jordi Coral states that Shakespeare characterises the usurer as a householder who is under constant pressure to be vigilant (2015:289). Certainly, Shylock does his utmost to protect his household in this scene, with a heavy focus on the aural rather than visual. Shylock doesn t want his daughter to gaze on Christian fools as the carnival passes their house, but his main concern is what she might hear rather than what she might see, with five aural references ( hear , hear , squealing , ears , sound ). This is due to a conflation of listening and understanding, beginning with hear you me Jessica . Shylock is asking her to listen, understand what he s saying, and act accordingly. He may then be fearful of the same happening with the noise made by Christian masques in the street below, the sounds of a foreign culture infiltrating the Jewish household. It is noteworthy that Shakespeare uses Jewish culture, as well as stereotypes of Jews as anti-Christian, to make Shylock seem unreasonable and unfamiliar to his contemporary audience I swear by Jacob s staff , Christian fools . Pity is elicited for Jessica, who identifies as Christian and wishes to marry a Christian ( I shall end this strife,/ Become a Christian and thy loving wife! (2.3.20-21)). However Shylock s separation of himself from Christianity (1.3) in order to protect his own culture makes his behaviour somewhat understandable having suffered at the hands of Christians with repeated anti-Semitic acts ( You called me misbeliever / And spet upon my Jewish gabardine (1.3.109-110)), he can t imagine his daughter being treated well by them either, and attempts to protect both her and his entire household by removing them from the public display of Venice s Christian culture.

A semantically playful retort from Jessica follows Shylock s demands, heard only by the audience:

Jessica: Farewell, and if my fortune be not crost,

I have a father, and you a daughter, lost. (2.5.52-56.)

Shylock is seeking to preserve his monetary fortune, but is instead about to lose it both in the gems which Jessica takes, and in Jessica herself (if we consider her in the same terms that Shylock does, equated to his property in the instruction to guard both herself and the house). Shakespeare s pecuniary vocabulary must be deliberate here the notion of a fortune as inheritance, particularly when Jessica speaks of my fortune . Jessica sees herself as inheriting a loss but in the other sense of fortune as luck, this is a loss which she desires. Losing a father is also the condition for inheriting monetary fortune. These lines highlight social anxieties over emerging pecuniary systems, and what could be lost in what Coral terms an increasingly commercialised society (2015:286). Shakespeare seems to suggest that the pursuit and guarding of personal wealth could separate families.

The pull between his public role and his domestic beliefs, then, complicates Shylock s character, and the question of xenophobia itself. Shylock and Antonio are both written as displaying unreasonable, xenophobic behaviour Shylock in attempted control of Jessica, Antonio as anti-Semitic with Shakespeare not seeming to reach a conclusion as to who should change. John W. Draper argues that the conflict between Shylock and Antonio is not so much a matter of religion but of mercantile ideals (1935:38). This is supported by one of Shylock s asides: I hate him for he is a Christian:/ But more, for that in low simplicity/ He lends out money gratis (1.3.40-42). The matters of religion and mercantile ideas may be given different weight in Draper s eyes, but they are irrefutably intertwined throughout the play. The xenophobic anxieties which Shakespeare writes into Merchant are those of contemporary London, where, Ian Archer claims, 20 per cent of adults living in the city were born elsewhere (1999:44). By entwining this with anxieties over emerging pecuniary systems, Shakespeare capitalises on real social anxieties in London and projects them onto his imagined city stage space in a new light, ready for his audience s imaginative consideration. This technique is also palpable in Measure for Measure, where Shakespeare explores morality alongside anxieties of pecuniary systems.

He focusses on sex work to unpick the moral implications of free currency. Coral contends that in early modern England, a major effect of the increasingly commercialised society was new systems and instruments of credit, with credit itself becoming a contractual obligation between strangers rather than a bond between two parties who knew and trusted each other he states that this caused considerable moral confusion (2015:286). Coral s summation of the anxieties of emerging pecuniary systems are easily paralleled to age old anxieties around sex work between strangers, morally ambiguous. Reading Measure with this in mind reveals the domestic becoming public in Shakespeare s Vienna, the usually domestic act of sex has become a recognised currency, from sex workers earning money in the brothels, to Isobel s coercion into sex as payment for her brother s legal pardon. Part of Vienna s economy is dependent on sex work, underpinning such dialogue as Pompey and Mistress Overdone s:

Pompey: All houses in the suburbs of Vienna must be plucked down.

Overdone: And what shall become of those in the city?

Pompey: They shall stand for seed: they had gone down too, but that a wise burgher put in for them.

Overdone: But shall all our houses of resort in the suburbs be pulled down?

Pompey: To the ground, mistress.

(1.2.92-104)

The geography of this dialogue is worth consideration. Shakespeare has located Vienna s brothels and nunneries in its suburbs in London, Peter J. Smith notes, theatres existed, both geographically and ideologically, in a liminal zone, on the margins of the city they were outside the jurisdiction of the Lord Mayor, on the South Bank, close to the brothels (2000:516). The nunneries in England had been demolished by the time of Shakespeare s writing, due to perceived corruption of the Catholic Church interestingly, Angelo issues the order to demolish the nunneries for the same reason he views them as institutions which are corrupting the city they encompass. It is significant, then, that when Pompey speaks of the houses , Overdone instantly recognises them as officially being outside the city yet, her question of those in the city reveals that the attempt to locate brothels outside the city boundary hasn t actually worked. There is therefore an issue around whether the suburban brothels should be closed at all. Angelo s philosophy suggests that changing the space of the city will change the people within it. So then, is a city formed of its people or its spaces? An attempt to eradicate brothels is an attempt to eradicate sex workers, a remarkably violent act towards this group of Vienna s inhabitants. Pompey assures Overdone that though you change your place, you need not change your trade (1.2.107-8), recognising that demand for sex work will continue whether the brothels stand or not. Here, Pompey identifies that the will of the people, rather than the will of the state, dictates the continuation of sex work in the city, with the will of the state seemingly divided on the matter too the city brothels shall stand for seed , with the law remaining blind where it benefits the lawmakers (the wise burgher who ensured their protection). The city is the people, not the space. Semantically, standing for seed references a method of farming where grain is left in the field rather than harvested, in order to self-seed and provide the future crop (Gibbons,2003:88). The burgher s decision to allow brothels within the city to remain ensures their ultimate continuation, despite Antonio s attempts to eradicate them. The only people which the law impacts, then, are the workers in the suburban brothels, who lose their livelihood not as part of a greater moral design, but as part of an unthinking, ineffective political move.

The social anxieties which Shakespeare explores in his imagined city spaces complicate rather than dictate their morality prostitution is revealed to be integral to the functioning of a city, and its eradication to be harmful to the citizens xenophobia is made to seem understandable, becoming a reason for empathy with a character. And both of these complications circle back to money. It is the removal of currency in Measure, and the gaining of it in Merchant which damages the cities social relations. Measure and Merchant seem to be criticisms of pecuniary systems which do not reach conclusions. This is worthy of consideration in light of Howard s postulation what the theatre was popular in part because it was not a moralizing institution but an opportunistic one, making fictions from the arenas of life (2007:22). So then, Shakespeare s lack of conclusion around the morality of xenophobia and prostitution makes sense he himself was writing opportunistically, not morally. The production of these plays which criticise pecuniary systems is, ironically, one which ultimately intended to make a profit.

Abbreviations

Measure William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure, eds. Richard Proudfoot et al, The Arden Shakespeare Complete Works, (London: Bloomsbury, 2014).

Merchant William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, eds. Richard Proudfoot et al, The Arden Shakespeare Complete Works, (London: Bloomsbury, 2014).

Overdone Mistress Overdone

Bibliography

Archer, Ian, Shakespeare s London in A Companion to Shakespeare, ed. by Davis Scott Kastan (Blackwell: Oxford, 1999), pp.43-56.

Coral, Jordi, Anxious householders: theft and anti-usury discourse in Shakespeare`s Venetian plays , The Seventeenth Century, 30 (2015), 285-300.

Estill, Laura, List of settings for Shakespeare`s plays, in Folgerpedia (Folger Shakespeare Library, 2014) [accessed 31/01/2017].

Gibbons, Brian ed., Measure for Measure (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

Hansen, Adam, Shakespeare and the City , Blackwell Literature Compass, 4 (2007), 820-850.

Howard, Jean E, Theater of a City: The Places of London Comedy, 1598-1642 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007).

Shakespeare, William, The Arden Shakespeare Complete Works, Richard Proudfoot et al eds., (London: Bloomsbury, 2014).

Smith, Peter J., Tales of the City: The Comedies of Ben Johnson and Thomas Middleton in A Companion to English Renaissance Literature and Culture, ed. by Michael Hattaway (Oxford: Backwell Publishers Ltd., 2000), pp.513-524.

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