Annals of Culture July 10 & 17, 2017 Issue

Shakespeares Cure for Xenophobia

What The Merchant of Venice taught me about ethnic hatred and the literary
imagination.
By Stephen Greenblatt

attended university in a very dierent

I world from the one in which I now teach
and live. For a start, Yale College, which I
Subscribe for $1 a week.
Shop Sign in | Link your subscription
entered in 1961, was all male. Women were
News Culturenot matriculated
Books until
Business "ve years
& Tech HumorafterCartoons
I had Magazine Video Podcasts Archive Goings On Subscribe

received my B.A. degree. Among the

undergraduates, there were only a handful of
students from Asia, Africa, and the Middle
East, and very few African-Americans, Asian-
Shakespeare imagined his way into
Americans, or Hispanics, unless one counted a the humanity even of his villains.
couple of prep-school-educated heirs to grand Illustration by Greg Clarke
South American fortunes.

The Yale that I attended was overwhelmingly North American and white, as
well as largely Protestant. It was dicult for the admissions oce to identify
Catholics, but applicants with conspicuously Irish, Italian, or Polish names were
at a disadvantage. For Jews, there was a numerus clausus, not even disguised by
the convenient excuse of geographical distribution. And the whole system was
upheld by a signi"cant number of legacies, along with a pervasive air of
privilege and clubbiness. To display too much interest in ones studies or a
concern for grades was distinctly uncool. This was still the era of what was
called the gentlemans C.

I picked all this up within days of arriving in New Haven, but Yale was for me
an unfamiliar country whose customs I knew that I could never master. Neither
of my parents had gone to college. My mother, along with the other girls in her
family, was expected to begin work as a secretary directly after high school.
Though my father practiced law, he had attended law school just after serving
in the First World War, when a liberal-arts degree was not yet a prerequisite. A
good thing, too, since my grandfather, a ragpicker, would have had diculty
mustering the will or the means to pay even the modest tuition fees then
required. My grandparents were not indierent to learning, but they were poor,
and for them any learning that was not vocational was necessarily religious. The
highest status in their cultural world came not from wealth or power but from
the possession of Talmudic knowledge. Theirs was an insular community in
which sexual selectionfor Darwin, a central motor of mammalian evolution
had for centuries favored slender, nearsighted, stoop-shouldered young men
rocking back and forth as they pondered the complex, heavily annotated, often
esoteric tractates of Jewish law.

None of this was part of my upbringing: most of it had been abandoned when
my grandparents $ed tsarist Lithuania, in the late eighteen-eighties, and settled
in Boston. But the heavy Talmudic volumes left a residue, an inherited respect
for textual interpretation thatreshaped into secularized formled people like
me to embrace the humanities, an arena in which the English Department held
pride of place. When I began to take classes at Yale, I could not understand, let
alone emulate, the amused indierence of many of my classmates. I felt within
me what in 1904 Henry James, observing immigrants in New York, reproved as
the waiting spring of intelligence, signalling the immensity of the alien
presence climbing higher and higher. I did not feel alienI was born in this
country, as my parents had been, and I donned my Yale sweatshirt without a
sense of imposturebut I seized upon the opportunity Id been granted to learn
with an energy that seemed slightly foreign.

I had a particularly intense engagement with my freshman English-literature

course. Midway through the year, the professor asked me if I would be
interested in being his research assistant, helping him prepare the index for a
book he had just completed. Ecstatic, I immediately agreed. In those days,
research assistants were required to apply for their jobs through the "nancial-
aid oce, where I dutifully made an appointment. I was in for a surprise.

Greenblatt is a Jewish name, isnt it? the "nancial-aid ocer said. I agreed that
it was. Frankly, he went on, we are sick and tired of the number of Jews who
come into this oce after theyre admitted and try to wheedle money out of
Yale University. I stammered, How can you make such a generalization?

Well, Mr. Greenblatt, he replied, what do you think of Sicilians? I answered

that I didnt think I knew any Sicilians. J. Edgar Hoover, he continued, citing
the director of the F.B.I., has statistics that prove that Sicilians have criminal
tendencies. So, too, he explained, Yale had statistics that proved that a
disproportionate number of Jewish students were trying to get money from the
university by becoming research assistants. Then he added, We could people
this whole school with graduates of the Bronx High School of Science, but we
choose not to do so. Pointing out lamely that I had gone to high school in
Newton, Massachusetts, I slunk away without a job.

The conversation left me shaken. Decades later, I recall it with a blend of

outrage and wonder in$ected by my recognition of the fact that African-
American students have had it much worse, and that other ethnic groups and
religions have now replaced Jews as the focus of the anxiety that aicted my
interlocutor. What was particularly upsetting to me at the time was that the
experience appeared to con"rm my parents worst fearsfears that had struck
me, when I was growing up, as absurdly outdated and provincial. For my
parents, the world was rigidly divided between us and them, and they lived
their lives, it seemed to me, as if they were forever hemmed into an ethnic
ghetto.

Shortly after my encounter with the "nancial-aid ocer, T. S. Eliot, the greatest
living poet in the English language and a winner of the Nobel Prize, came to
Yale. Catching the excitement of the impending visit, I began to read him with
an avidity that has continued into the present. But that meant that I quickly
encountered the strain of anti-Semitism in Eliots early poetry and prose, a
strain no less ugly for being typical of his conservative milieu. The population
should be homogeneous, Eliot told an audience at the University of Virginia in
1933, the year that Hitler came to power and the prospect arose of a mass
outpouring of refugees seeking protection from the growing menace. Where
two or more cultures exist in the same place they are likely either to be "ercely
self-conscious or both to become adulterate. Perhaps it occurred to him that it
was already far too late to prevent two or more cultures from existing in the
United States. What is still more important is unity of religious background,
he added, and then made his point more explicitly: Reasons of race and
religion combine to make any large number of free-thinking Jews undesirable.

Eliots powerful early poetry had already made this undesirability clear. In
Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar, he conjured up the primal
ooze from which he saw those creatures emerging:

A lustreless protrusive eye

Stares from the protozoic slime
At a perspective of Canaletto.
The smoky candle end of time

Declines. On the Rialto once.

The rats are underneath the
piles.
The jew is underneath the lot.

On the Rialto once: Eliot did not "nish the thought, but I did. In the course
of that freshman year, I read Shakespeares The Merchant of Venice , with its
echoing question, What news on the Rialto? Encountering the play at the
moment I did, together with T. S. Eliot, seemed only to reinforce my parents
grimmest account of the way things were.

here is something very strange about experiencing The Merchant of

T Venice when you are somehow imaginatively implicated in the character
and actions of its villain. You laugh when Shylocks servant, the clown Gobbo,
contemplates running away from his penny-pinching master. You smile when
Shylocks daughter, Jessica, having escaped from her fathers dark house into the
arms of her beloved, declares, I shall be saved ThebyMerchant
my husband. He hath made
of Venice
me a Christian. You shudder when the implacable Shylock sharpens his knife
on the sole of his boot. You applaud the resolution of the dilemma, when clever
Portia comes up with the legal technicality that confounds Shylocks murderous
plan. The Jew who had insisted upon the letter of the law is undone by the
letter of the law; it is what is called poetic justice. But, all the same, you feel
uneasy.

What, exactly, are you applauding and smiling at? How are you supposed to
view the Jewish daughter who robs her father and bestows the money on her
fortune-hunting Christian suitor? Do you join in the raucous laughter of the
Christians who mock and spit on the Jew? Or do you secretly condone
Shylocks vindictive, malignant rage? Where are you, at the end of the
harrowing scene in the courtroom, when Portia asks the man she has
outmaneuvered and ruined whether he agrees to the terms she has dictated,
terms that include the provision that he immediately become a Christian? Art
thou contented, Jew? she prods. What dost thou say? And what do you think
the Jew actually feels when he answers, I am content?

Back in my undergraduate days, when I began to ask these questions, I came to

a decision. I wasnt going to allow myself to be crushed by the bigoted "nancial-
aid ocer, but I wasnt going to adopt my parents defensive posture, either. I
wouldnt attempt to hide my otherness and pass for what I was not. I wouldnt
turn away from works that caused me pain as well as pleasure. Instead, insofar
as I could, I would pore over the whole vast, messy enterprise of culture as if it
were my birthright.

I was determined to understand this birthright, including what was toxic in it,
as completely as possible. Im now an English professor at Harvard, and in
recent years some of my students have seemed acutely anxious when they are
asked to confront the crueller strains of our cultural legacy. In my own life, that
re$ex would have meant closing many of the books I found most fascinating, or
succumbing to the general melancholy of my parents. They could not look out
at a broad meadow from the windows of our car without sighing and talking
about the number of European Jews who could have been saved from
annihilation and settled in that very space. (For my parents, meadows should
have come with what we now call trigger warnings.) I was eager to expand my
horizons, not to retreat into a defensive crouch. Prowling the stacks of Yales
vast library, I sometimes felt giddy with excitement. I had a right to all of it, or,
at least, to as much of it as I could seize and chew upon. And the same was true
of everyone else.

I already had an inkling of what I now more fully grasp. My experience of

mingled perplexity, pleasure, and discomfort was only a versioninformed by
the accidents of a particular religion, family, identity, and eraof an experience
shared by every thinking person in the course of a lifetime. What you inherit,
what you receive from a world that you did not fashion but that will do its best
to fashion you, is at once beautiful and repellent. You somehow have to come to
terms with what is ugly as well as what is precious.

The task derives from the kind of creatures

indoor
Use your indoor
indoor gun. that we are. We arrive in the world only
partially formed; a culture that has been in the
making for hundreds of thousands of years will
form the rest. And that culture will inevitably
contain much that is noxious as well as bene"cent. No one is exemptnot the
Jew or the Muslim, of course, but also not the Cockney or the earl or the person
whose ancestors came to America on the May$ower or, for that matter, the
person whose ancestors were Algonquins or Laplanders. Our species cultural Most Popular
birthright is a mixed blessing. It is what makes us fully human, but being fully
indoor The Borowitz Report
human is a dicult work in progress. Though xenophobia is part of our
1. Betsy DeVos Heads to North Ko
complex inheritancequickened, no doubt, by the same instinct that causes
to Reverse Its Progress in Math
chimpanzees to try to destroy members of groups not their ownthis Science
inheritance is not our ineluctable fate. Even in the brief span of our recorded By Andy Borowitz
history, some "ve thousand years, we can watch societies and individuals
Daily Cartoon
ceaselessly playing with, reshuing, and on occasion tossing out the cards that
2. Daily Cartoon: Thursday, July 6t
both nature and culture have dealt, and introducing new ones.
By David Sipress
 n seventeenth-century Venice, a Greek poem was published that celebrated
I the elopement of a Jewish heiress with a handsome Greek Orthodox baker
N!s Desk

3. What Russian Journalists Think

who comes to her house to sell bread. The poem ends, after the girls conversion
How American Reporters Cover
and wedding, with a raucous anti-Semitic chorus that mocks her distraught
Putin a
mother. The seventeenth-century poet Eremya Chelebi Kmrjian, an erudite
By Joshua Yaffa
Christian who spent his career in the Ottoman Empire, took up the same plot,
Daily Shouts
which he recast in Armeno-Turkish (that is, Turkish written in Armenian
4. The Startup to End All Startups
characters) and set in Istanbul. In his version, The Jewish Bride, the Jewish
By Dan Rosen
girl, Mrkada, having fallen in love with Dimo, wishes to escape from the
con"nes of her Jewish world: The bed smells like poison, my homeland is as a N!s Desk

prison. The resourceful Dimo arranges for a boat to transport them, and the 5. The Alt-Right Branding War H
Torn the Movement in Two
girl, slipping away under the cover of darkness, disguises herself as a man, with
By Andrew Marantz
her curly golden hair hidden beneath a sable cap. Eluding the Jewish search
parties, the lovers manage to reach the Christian principality of Walachia,
Our Thirty Most Popular
where, in a solemn procession, Mrkada enters the cathedral and formally
converts:

They gave her the name Sophia the Pure.

She renounced the Jewish abracadabra.

In this version, as in the Greek source, the wailing Jewish mother is mocked by
a chorus of Christian girls who invite her to imagine her little grandson:

Your daughter has already become pregnant.

She is already nourishing a grandson for you.
. . . The little half-bred Albanian,
His face is rather on the Jewish side.
Yet his eyes are ocean-blue.
Croak, you jealous witch!

But then something strange happens. The focus shifts to the mothers grief,
which is given remarkably intense expression:

They have torn away from my bosom my only one,

My only daughter, my blossomlike delicate one, my soul.
I have become a childless mother, I, this poor woman.
. . . My life is destroyed, not only my home.
The skies oppress me, heaven, the world are a jail, and likewise my
day.
To others my tears are an amusing sight.

And it is with this threnody of despair and the mothers deathconveying,

with full force, the profound misery of the person and the community
sustaining the lossthat the poem ends.

It is dicult to know how Eremyas transformation of the story came about.

Some scholars have suggested that he released, in the concluding section of his
poem, the grief that he and his fellow-Christians knew they would feel if one of
their own converted to Islam. What I suspect is that Eremya was a gifted poet
who spent his life in an ethnically complex world and that he did what gifted
poets do.

ast year was the "ve-hundredth anniversary of the creation of the Venetian
L ghetto. The Venetians had some uncertainty and disagreement about how
to mark this anniversary, and one could see why. Starting in 1516, Jews, who
had previously lived in the city wherever they chose, were required by law to
reside and to worship in a small, poor area, the site of a former copper foundry.
(The Venetian word for such a foundry was geto.) There they were permitted to
run pawnshops that lent money at interest. They could emerge during the day
to engage in a limited number of occupationsincluding buying and selling
old clothes, laboring on Hebrew books in print workshops, teaching music and
dance, and practicing medicine. But at night they were obliged to scuttle back
to the ghetto, where they were shut in behind locked gates, guarded by men
whose salaries the Jews themselves were required to pay. Jewish physicians were
permitted to go out during the night to attend to their Christian patients; no
one else could leave until morning.

This is hardly an arrangement to celebrate in the twenty-"rst century, but it was

an early attempt in modern history at a form of modus vivendi that would
permit Venetians to live in proximity to an intensely disliked but useful
neighbor. The usefulness was not universally acknowledged. At the time, in
Italy and elsewhere, itinerant preachers were stirring up mobs to demand the
expulsion of the Jews, as had been done recently in Spain and Portugal and,
centuries earlier, in England. A scant generation later, Martin Luther, in
Germany, urged the Protestant faithful to raze the Jews synagogues, schools,
and houses, to forbid their rabbis on pain of death to teach, and to burn all
Jewish prayer books and Talmudic writings. At the time that the ghetto was
created, there were people still living who could remember when three Venetian
Jews, accused of the ritual killing of Christians for their blood, were convicted
of this entirely fantastical crime and burned to death. In Venice, locking the
Jews up at night may have given them a small measure of protection from the
paranoid fears of those with whom they dealt during the day. The ghetto was a
compromise formation, neither absorption nor expulsion. It was a topographical
expression of extreme ambivalence.

Shakespeare could in principle have heard about it, when he sat down to write
his comedy; the ghetto had been in existence for some eighty years and there
had been many English travellers to Venice. Indeed, there is evidence that the
playwright took pains to gather information. For example, he did not have his
Jewish characters swear by Muhammad, as "fteenth-century English
playwrights did. He clearly grasped not only that Jewish dietary laws prohibited
the eating of pork but also that observant Jews often professed to "nd the very
smell of pork disagreeable. He marvellously imagined the way that a Jewish
moneylender might use the Bible to construct a witty Midrashic justi"cation of
his own pro"t margin. He had learned that the Rialto was the site for news and
for trade, and that Shylock would conduct business there.

But Shakespeare seems not to have understood, or perhaps simply not to have
been interested in, the fact that Venice had a ghetto. In whatever he read or
heard about the city, he appears to have been struck far less by the separation of
Jews and Christians than by the extent of their mutual intercourse. Though
Shylock says that he will not pray with the Christians or eat their nonkosher
food, he enumerates the many ways in which he routinely interacts with them.
I will buy with you, talk with you, walk with you, and so following, he
declares. To audiences in Englanda country that had expelled its entire
Jewish population in the year 1290 and had allowed no Jews to returnthose
everyday interactions were the true novelty.
In The History of Italy (1549), the "rst English book on the subject, William
Thomas went out of his way to remark on what he called a liberty of strangers
particular to Venice:

No man there marketh anothers doings, or . . . meddleth with

another mans living. If thou be a papist, there shalt thou want no
kind of superstition to feed upon. If thou be a gospeler, no man
shall ask why thou comest not to [the Catholic] church. If thou be
a Jew, a Turk, or believest in the devil (so thou spread not thine
opinions abroad), thou art free from all controlment. . . . And
generally of all other things, so thou oend no man privately, no
man shall oend thee, which undoubtedly is one principal cause
that draweth so many strangers thither.

By contrast, a Venetian observer in Renaissance London was struck by the

xenophobia of the English. Foreigners in London are little liked, not to say
hated, so those who are wise take care to dress in the English style, Orazio
Busino wrote in his diary, and make themselves understood by signs whenever
they can avoid speaking, and so they avoid mishaps.

For an Elizabethan, Venice signi"ed an astonishing, even bizarre

cosmopolitanism. Hence Shakespeare could not imagine Shylocks house set
apart in a locked ghetto; he emphasized, instead, that it was on a public street.
If the Jews daughter should fail to lock the doors and close the casements, she
would be able to watch the Christians parade by in carnival masks and listen to
the drum / And the vile squealing of the wry-necked "fe. And, when the play
depicts Shylock reluctantly going out at night to dine with the Christians, it
probably did not occur to the playwright that in real life the Jewish usurer
would need a special permit to do so. Such permits were not part of the English
imagination of Venice; they were part of the Venetians attempt to negotiate
with their xenophobic inheritance.

Although he may not have learned about the ghetto, Shakespeare, too,
participated in the attempt to negotiate with a xenophobic inheritance. At the
level of plot, he pursued the idea of equality before the law. Venice, as a
commercial entrept with wide-ranging trading partners, depended upon the
liberty of strangers. In order to protect property rights and preserve con"dence,
its legal system had to treat contracts as equally binding upon Christians and
others, citizens and aliens. The Jew, as we see in the dispute over the lapsed
bond, has to be formally regarded as someone who possesses full legal standing
in the eyes of the court. When Portia, disguised as the learned judge, enters the
courtroom to adjudicate the case between Antonio and Shylock, she begins by
asking, Which is the merchant here? And which the Jew? Though the line
often elicits laughter, from a legal perspective it insists upon the courts
impartiality.

Shylock drives the point home. You have among you many a purchased slave,
he argues in the trial scene, which you treat like animals simply because you
bought them. This sounds like the beginning of an abolitionist manifesto, and
for a brief moment it seems to teeter at the edge of one:

Shall I say to you

Let them be free, marry them to your heirs.
Why sweat they under burdens? Let their beds
 Be made as soft as yours.

Why, yes, modern audiences might want to shoutlet it be so. But the point
here is not liberation from bondage:

You will answer

The slaves are ours. So do I answer you.
The pound of $esh which I demand of him
Is dearly bought. Tis mine, and I will have it.

The legal principle upon which Shylock insists has nothing to do with
tolerance or human rights. It is strictly a defense of property ownership.

The narrowness is important. Outside this carefully demarcated sphere, there is

no underlying trust, no assumption of shared values, and no presumed equality.
As soon as the formal legal issue shifts unexpectedly from a civil to a criminal
matterthat is, to a Jews attempt to take the life of a Venetian Christian
Shylock is no longer regarded in the eyes of the court as Antonios equivalent.
Instead, he is, as the plays dominant society has always viewed him, irreducibly
alien.

The Merchant of Venice seems to oer a

Kinky. pessimistic vision, then, of the prospect of
mutual tolerance. On the city streets and in the
rule-bound arena of the criminal court, the
two faiths are mortal enemies. Shylock tries to
destroy his Christian enemy legally by enforcing the letter of the bond; Portia
succeeds in destroying her Jewish enemy by outwitting him at his own
hairsplitting game. True, she doesnt stick a knife into him, and that is
important, both for the imagined world of the play and for the preservation of
its theatrical genre. The comedys hope is that money, sexual desire, and intense
legal pressure, rather than outright violence, will eventually suce to absorb the
strangers, or at least signi"cant numbers of them, into the surrounding
Christian community. Only conversionin the case of Shylocks daughter, her
marriage to a fortune-hunting Christian; in the case of Shylock himself,
conversion under the threat of executioncan dissipate hatred and save the
play from bloodshed. The Merchant of Venice resists attempts to bring it into
the Enlightenment, let alone to make it recognize the full tragic weight of
centuries of racial and religious hatred. In its formal design, it steadfastly
remains a comedy.

Yet that formal resolution has not de"ned the plays actual impactnot now,
not when I "rst read it as a college freshman, and probably not even in
Shakespeares time. As I grasp more fully after a lifetime of immersion in
Shakespeare, the uncomfortable experience I had when I was seventeenthe
troubled identi"cation with the plays villain, even in the midst of my
pleasurable absorption in its comic plotdid not "nally depend on my
particular identity or history. The cunning magic of the play was the
disturbance it arouses in everyone. If Shylock had behaved himself and
remained a mere comic foillike Don John the Bastard, in Much Much Ado
Ado About
About
Nothingthere would have been no disturbance. But Shakespeare conferred
Nothing
too much energy on his Jewish usurer for the boundaries of native and alien, us
and them, to remain intact.
Shakespeare managed to register Shylocks mordant sense of humor, the pain
that shadowed his malevolence, his pride in his intelligence, his little household
economies, his loneliness. We come to know these qualities for ourselves, not as
mere concepts but as elements of our own experience. Theres good reason that
most people think the Venetian merchant in the plays title is the Jew.

t once aggressive and defensive, punitive and protective, the Venetian

A ghetto proved to be a remarkably durable arrangementit was abolished,
under Napoleon, only with the fall of the Serenissima in 1797. Whats more, it
served as a powerful model throughout Italy, the rest of Europe, and the world,
both in bricks and mortar and, when these were formally pulled down, in the
minds and hearts of those on either side of the towering imaginary walls. My
parents lived much of their lives behind such walls; I have to concede that they
were never happier than when they were safely ensconced there. But the same
Shakespeare who did not grasp that a ghetto existed in Venice had no patience
with walls, real or imaginary, and, even in a play consumed with religious and
ethnic animosity, he tore them down.

He did so not by creating a lovable alienhis Jew is a villain who connives at

legal murderbut by giving Shylock more theatrical vitality, quite simply more
urgent, compelling life, than anyone else in his world has. The lines reverberate
across the centuries: You call me misbeliever, cutthroat dog, / And spit upon
my Jewish gabardine, / And all for use of that which is mine own; This patch
is kind enough, but a huge feeder, / Snail-slow in pro"t, and he sleeps by
day / More than the wildcat; Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands,
organs, dimensions, senses, aections, passions?; If you prick us, do we not
bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh?; I would my daughter were dead at
my foot and the jewels in her ear!; Why there, there, there, there! A diamond
gone cost me two thousand ducats in Frankfort! The curse never fell upon our
nation till now; I never felt it till now; Some men there are love not a gaping
pig, / Some that are mad if they behold a cat, / And others when the bagpipe
sings ithnose / Cannot contain their urine.

The life that sweeps across the stage here includes, as well, sudden glimpses
into parts of an existence that the plot by itself did not demand. When Shylock
learns that his daughter exchanged a turquoise ring for a monkeya turquoise
ring that she stole from him, and that had been a gift from his dead wife, Leah,
his anguish is unmistakable. Thou torturest me, he tells the friend who
brought him the news. It was my turquoise; I had it of Leah when I was a
bachelor. I would not have given it for a wilderness of monkeys. Are such
glimpses enough to do away with hatred of the other? Not at all. But they begin
an unsettling from within. Even now, more than four centuries later, the
unsettling that the play provokes remains a beautiful and disturbing experience.

Shakespeare himself may have found it disturbing. He set out, it seems, to write
a straightforward comedy, borrowed from Giovanni Fiorentinos novella Il
Pecorone (The Big Sheep), only to "nd himself increasingly drawn into the
soul of the despised other. Shylock came perilously close to wrecking the comic
structure of the play, a structure that Shakespeare only barely rescued by making
the moneylender disappear for good at the end of the fourth act.

It wasnt the only time in his work that this excess of life had occurred. The
Romeo and
playwright is said to have remarked that in Romeo and Juliet
Juliet he had to kill
Mercutio before Mercutio killed the play, and he ran a similar risk with
characters like Jack Cade, Aaron the Moor, Malvolio, and Caliban. Indeed, the
ability to enter deeplytoo deeply, for the purposes of the plotinto almost
every character he deployed was a signature. It accounts for the startling
vividness of Adriana, the neglected wife in The Comedy of Errors; Bottom
the Weaver, in A Midsummer Nights Dream; Rosencrantz and Guildenstern,
in Hamlet; Cornwalls brave servant, in King Lear; and many others. It
helps explain the strange illusion that certain of his characters have lives
independent of the play in which they appear. And it contributes to the moral
and aesthetic complexity that characterizes so many of his plays. Consider, for
example, the fact that for centuries critics have debated whether Brutus is the
hero or the villain of Julius Caesar. In Oskar Eustiss controversial production
of the play last month, in Central Park, audiences chortled at a Trump-like
despotbut were then brought up short by the horror of what befalls him, the
carnage born of self-steeling righteousness. What leads to disaster is Brutuss
ideological decision to think of Caesar not as a human being at all but, rather,
as a serpents egg, and therefore to kill him in the shell.

Even after a lifetime of studying Shakespeare, I cannot always tell you precisely
how he achieved this extraordinary life-making. I sometimes picture him
attaching his characters like leeches to his arms and allowing them to suck his
lifeblood. In the case of Shylock, it is wildly unlikely that Shakespeare had ever
encountered a Jewish usurer, but he may have been drawing on his fathers
moneylending and, for that matter, on his own. It is also possible that in his
family there had been a recent, painful, unresolved experience of conversion,
from Catholicism to Protestantism, an experience that would have deepened his
engagement with his characters plight: Art thou contented, Jew? What dost
thou say? I am content.

he conferral of life is one of the essential qualities of the human

T imagination. Since very few of us are endowed with great genius, it is
important to understand that the quality of which I am speaking is to some
degree democratically shared. Ideologies of various kinds contrive to limit our
ability to enter into the experience of another, and there are works of art that
are complicit in these ideologies. More generous works of art serve to arouse,
organize, and enhance that ability. Shakespeares works are a living model not
because they oer practical solutions to the dilemmas they so brilliantly explore
but because they awaken our awareness of the human lives that are at stake.

What Shakespeare bequeathed to us oers the possibility of an escape from the

mental ghettos most of us inhabit. Even in his own world, his imagination
seems to have led him in surprising directions. At a time when alehouses and
inns were full of spies trolling for subversive comments, this is a playwright who
could depict on the public stage a twisted sociopath lying his way to supreme
authority. This is a playwright who could have a character stand up and declare
to the spectators that a dogs obeyed in oce. This is a playwright who could
approvingly depict a servant mortally wounding the realms ruler in order to
stop him from torturing a prisoner in the name of national security. And, "nally,
this is a playwright who almost certainly penned the critical lines we "nd
preserved in the British Librarys manuscript of an Elizabethan play about Sir
Thomas More. (The play was probably banned from performance by the
censor.) The lines speak movingly to one of our most pressing contemporary
dilemmas. Shakespeare depicts Thomas More confronting an angry mob that
demands the expulsion of the strangersthe foreignersfrom England.
Grant them removed, More tells the mob:

Imagine that you see the wretched strangers,

Their babies at their backs and their poor luggage,
Plodding to the ports and coasts for transportation,
And that you sit as kings in your desires . . .
What had you got? Ill tell you: you had taught
How insolence and strong hand should prevail,
How order should be quelled; and by this pattern
Not one of you should live an aged man,
For other ruans, as their fancies wrought,
With self same hand, self reasons, and self right,
Would shark on you, and men like ravenous "shes
Would feed on one another.

Such language isnt a substitute for a coherent, secure, and humane international
refugee policy; for that, we need constitutional lawyers and adroit diplomats
and wise, decent leaders. Yet these words do what they can to keep before our
eyes the sight of the wretched strangers, / Their babies at their backs and their
poor luggage, / Plodding to the ports and coasts for transportation. For a long
moment in dramatic time, the distance between natives and strangers collapses;
walls wobble and fall; a ghetto is razed.

This article appears in other versions of the July 10 & 17, 2017, issue, with the
headline If You Prick Us.

Stephen Greenblatt is the John Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at

Harvard. Read more

More: Drama Literature

Try The New Yorker for a dollar a week. Subscribe now.

Sign up for our daily newsletter: the best of The New Yorker every day.

Enter your e-mail Go

Recommended Stories
 Annals of Culture Annals of Culture

The Answer Man How St. Augustine Invented

An ancient poem was rediscoveredand the world Sex
swerved. He rescued Adam and Eve from obscurity, devised the
By Stephen Greenblatt Aug. 01, 2011 doctrine of original sinand the rest is sexual history.

By Stephen Greenblatt Jun. 12, 2017

Annals of Culture The Bench

The Answer Man Retrial

By Stephen Greenblatt Aug. 01, 2011 By Lizzie Widdicombe Dec. 15, 2008

Listen to the N! Yorker Radio Hour Buy the Cover Play the Jigsaw Puzzle

N!s & Politics Follow Us

Daily Comment
John Cassidy
Amy Davidson
Ryan Lizza
Benjamin Wallace-Wells

2017 Cond Na
reserved. Use of t
acceptance of ou
(eective 1/2/2016
(eective 1/2/2016
privacy rights
site may not be re
distributed, transm
otherwise used, e
Culture written permissio

Cultural Comment
Culture Desk Our sites

Goings On About Town

The Critics
Jia Tolentino
Persons of Interest

Business, Science & Tech

Currency
Elements
Maria Konnikova

Humor

Daily Shouts
Shouts & Murmurs
The Borowitz Report

Cartoons

Daily Cartoon
Cartoon Caption Contest
Cartoon Bank

Books & Fiction

Page-Turner
Books
Literary Lives
Poems
Fiction

Magazine

This Week's Issue

Archive

Photography

Photo Booth
Portfolio

Video

Culture
Humor
Politics
Business
Science & Tech
Books
Sports

Podcasts

The New Yorker Radio Hour

Political Scene
The Writer's Voice
Fiction
Poetry
Out Loud
More

Customer Care
Buy the Cover
Apps
Jigsaw Puzzle
Secure Drop
Store
RSS
Site Map

N!sletters

The Daily
Culture Review
Podcasts
Cartoons
John Cassidy
The Borowitz Report
Fiction
Goings On About Town

About Us

About
Careers
Contact
FAQ
Media Kit
Press