Translator: Raissa Mendes Reviewer: Leonardo Silva
Marlowe and Shakespeare walk into a bar...
(Laughter)
So runs the beginning of the joke
that Tom Stoppard concocted in 1997
about playwriting.
Stoppard was at that point
working on the screenplay for "Shakespeare in Love,"
a film that, to a remarkable degree,
concerns itself with the kind of questions usually left to literary critics.
Why did Shakespeare become a tragic dramatist?
Where did he find his voice?
Where did the idea for "Romeo and Juliet" come from?
In the end, "Shakespeare in Love" answers these questions
along fairly conventional Hollywood lines.
Love, it turns out, is the answer.
Love, it turns out, explains Shakespeare's genius.
But, before the movie gets there,
Marlowe and Shakespeare walk into a bar...
(Video) Shakespeare: And the chinks to show for it.
I insist -- and a beaker for Mr. Marlowe.
I hear you have a new play for the Curtain.
Marlowe: Not new... my "Doctor Faustus."
S: I love your early work.
"Was this the face that launch'd a thousand ships,
and burnt the topless towers of ilium?"
M: I have a new one nearly finished and better:
"The Massacre at Paris."
S: Good title.
M: Hum... yours?
S: "Romeo and Ethel: the Pirate's Daughter."
Yes, I know, I know...
M: What's the story?
S: Well, there's this pirate...
In truth, I have not written a word.
M: Romeo...
Romeo is Italian,
always in and out of love...
S: Yes, that's good... until he meets...
M: Ethel...
S: Do you think?
M: The daughter of his enemy.
S: The daughter of his enemy.
M: His best friend is killed in a duel by Ethel's brother
or something. His name is Mercutio.
S: Mercutio...
Good name.
A man: Will, they're waiting for you.
S: Yes, I'm coming.
Good luck with yours, Kit.
John Kleiner: This fall I ran a tutorial, that was in my own mind at least,
a restaging of Stoppard's joke.
Every week Marlowe and Shakespeare walked into my office.
Every week we brought the two playwrights into contact.
Over the term we read four Shakespeare's plays,
four Marlowe's and their too long narrative love poems:
"Venus and Adonis," "Hero and Leander."
The point of the tutorial
was not to prove anything particular about Marlowe or Shakespeare,
but to run an experiment:
what happens when these two playwrights,
who lived side by side
and who may or may not ever have met each other,
are read side by side?
What happens when Marlowe and Shakespeare walk into a bar?
Today I'm going to restage Stoppard's joke in a slightly different form.
I'm going to put into conversation two passages:
one representing Marlowe, one representing Shakespeare,
and see what they have to say to each other.
The passage on your left comes from Marlowe.
It is from his 1589 play, "The Jew of Malta."
And it features the play's eponymous hero,
a Jewish merchant named Barabas.
Barabas is, when the play begins, fantastically wealthy,
far and away the richest man in all of Malta.
So great is Barabas' accumulated wealth
that, in the play's opening speech,
he says he finds the counting of it tedious.
Then, barely a hundred lines into the play, Barabas loses everything.
His ships, his goods, his wealth,
they're all stripped from him.
He is turned out of his house, which is converted into a nunnery.
This happens because the Christians of Malta
need money to pay off the Turks
and because Barabas, as a Jew, is an easy target.
This is the entire explanation for Barabas' dispossession.
Marlowe makes no effort to disguise or ameliorate the Christians motives.
In the passage on your left,
Barabas gives voice to his loss.
Even as the other Jews urge patience,
Barabas insists on being heard,
insists on expressing himself.
He wants his audience to know what he is feeling,
to share imaginatively in his disgrace.
And so he compares himself to a captain in a field of battle
whose weapons have been stripped from him
and whose soldiers lie dead at his feet.
Shouldn't such a man be allowed to grieve?
What Barabas asks may seem to us unremarkable,
but was hardly so in 1589.
The action that takes place fictively at Malta
echoes the actual dispossession of the English Jews.
Much as Barabas is stripped of his wealth and turned out of his home,
so were the Jews of England
dispossessed and exiled by Edward I,
turned out of their country, as so many strangers and aliens.
In the crowd that Barabas addressed in the Rose Theatre in 1589,
there was not a single Jew to hear him,
not a single Jew to weep,
as the Jews weep in Marlowe's play.
When Marlowe allows those Jews to express their sympathy for Barabas,
as if it were a basic human impulse,
"'tis a misery to see a man in such affliction,"
Marlowe is doing something surprising by the standards of his time,
something bordering on the illegal.
The second passage, the passage on your right, is from "The Merchant of Venice."
Many of you will recognize it as Shylock's famous Rialto speech.
Shylock's idiom is different of course from Barabas'.
Still the influence of Marlowe's play,
which precedes Shakespeare's by some seven or eight years, is hard to miss.
Again, a Jew steps forward to describe his mistreatment.
Again a Jew speaks his pain aloud to an audience
that is asked imaginatively to enter into it.
And again this invitation to empathize exposes a contradiction.
Antonio, the nominal hero of "The Merchant of Venice,"
has with his Christian friends scorned Shylock.
They have laughed at his daughter's Jessica's desertion,
they have spit upon him in the street,
and they have done so without compunction.
Shylock's degradation does not touch them,
as they understand it,
because, as they understand it,
he is different from them,
he is merely a Jew,
an alien,
a stranger.
"Dog Jew"
is one of their favorite epithets for Shylock.
And yet, when Shylock's pain is made visible on the stage,
made alive in his language, this justification fails.
To suffer is not to be a Jew or a Christian,
but to be human.
In his vulnerability,
Shylock is no different from his persecutors:
"If you prick us, do we not bleed?"
"If you poison us, do we not die?"
That Marlowe and Shakespeare both allow their Jews to make this point
suggests, I think, a shared understanding,
on their part,
about the peculiar enterprise they are engaged in.
Both playwrights recognize in theater
singular capacity to make a motion accessible,
a means of dissolving or overcoming difference.
When a character speaks his pain,
when he performs it,
an audience feels it, and in the process becomes like him,
if only momentarily.
Put even a Jew on stage,
and so long as he speaks movingly,
we can recognize ourselves in him.
This is what Marlowe and Shakespeare are telling each other.
This is what Shakespeare takes from Marlowe,
or at least this is part of their conversation
about Jews in the theater.
The easiest and most palatable part of it.
As I noted earlier,
the Jews in Marlowe's play exit with tears in their eyes.
Barabas bids them farewell
and then alone takes possession of the stage.
Once alone,
Barabas steps out further, close to the very edge of the theater,
or at least this is how I picture it.
He moves close to the edge of the stage,
right up to the crowd of theatergoers
gathered at his feet,
and, once there, he taunts them:
"See the simplicity of these base slaves,
who, for the villains have no wit themselves,
think me to be a senseless lump of clay,
that will with every water wash to dirt!"
This is a violent speech,
violent in its contempt.
Baraba's contempt for the Jews who have felt for him,
who have wept for him.
Marlowe's contempt for the members of his audience
who, like the Jews, have been reached by Barabas' words
and moved by his suffering.
All at once, that suffering is revealed to be a sham,
and empty spectacle.
Barabas has not lost everything.
As he subsequently reveals,
he still has a fortune hidden away.
He is not broken or wretched,
he has merely played misery like an actor on the stage.
What he is after is not empathy,
but power,
the power to manipulate an audience
and so in the process degrade it and debase it.
The Jews who pity Barabas
become to Barabas "so many base slaves,
so many witless villains,"
because they misunderstand him
and the nature of human suffering.
That we suffer in common is nothing to be proud of,
just the contrary, says Barabas.
To suffer is a sign of our common dust,
or to use his nastier phrase, "our common dirt."
To suffer is to be dirt.
To empathize with suffering is to be a villain and a slave.
Barabas' treachery and contempt are ugly.
Indeed, much of "The Jew of Malta" is ugly.
Much of Marlowe's art is ugly.
At another moment in the play,
Barabas will wipe out an entire convent of nuns,
including his own daughter, with a gift of poisoned porridge.
He will strangle a friar in his bed
and then gleefully sit up the corpse in the street as if it were alive.
That we bridle at such ugliness is the point.
We come to the theater expecting to be flattered,
expecting to be confirmed in the happiest, most hopeful account of who we are.
After all, we bought a ticket.
And, instead, we are betrayed and attacked.
And what of Shakespeare, what of his Jew, what of Shylock?
How does he follow up his eloquent plea for understanding,
for fellow feeling?
"If you prick us, do we not bleed?
If you tickle us, do we not laugh?
If you poison us, do we not die?
And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?
If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that.
If a Jew wrong a Christian, what is his humility?
Revenge.
If a Christian wrong a Jew,
what should his sufferance be by Christian example?
Why, revenge."
If Barabas opens his heart as a prelude to violence,
the same can be said of Shylock.
We may cite his stirring lines out of context
to teach lessons about the importance of empathy
and the value of art as a means of combating prejudice,
but that's not their function,
or at least not their entire function in Shakespeare's play.
In "The Merchant of Venice,"
Shylock delivers his moving speech and seems moved as he delivers it.
As he speaks,
he appears present in his words in a way that few of us ever are in real life.
And yet, what in the end does he speak up for?
Not empathy, not sympathy,
but revenge.
This is a surprising turn,
a disorienting turn,
perhaps a disappointing turn.
When it comes, we don't expect it,
just as we don't expect Barabas to voice his misery,
and then all of a sudden jeer at us.
And yet, the turn in Shylock speech is logical.
Empathy and revenge may, in a superficial sense,
seem opposites.
Empathy may even seem to preclude revenge,
but really, underneath it all,
they are two sides of the same coin,
two expressions of the same underlying pattern.
In empathizing, I make myself like you,
by feeling what you feel,
by knowing what you know,
by suffering what you suffer.
In revenge, I make you like me.
I force you to know what I know,
I force you to feel what I feel,
I force you to suffer what I suffer.
Shylock does not want empathy.
He wants revenge.
He wants the power to compel identification.
He wants the ability
to force another to see the world on his terms.
And, more than that,
he claims this desire of his to be the same as ours.
According to Shylock,
what links us as humans is not suffering
or the capacity to empathize with another's suffering,
but the common human compulsion to answer suffering with revenge.
He wants and we want the power to make others feel as we do.
And this is, I think, his point of contact with Shakespeare
and any other serious writer,
any artist who doesn't merely want to please his audience,
but to reach it, to move it,
whether that audience wants to be moved or not.
And by serious artists, let me be clear here,
I don't mean respectable high-culture artist.
If anything just the opposite.
The ambition I'm talking about
is the ambition to find some sharp or blunt instrument
that will allow you to compel an emotion in someone else,
to force an understanding,
by whatever means is available.
This is, I think, what Marlowe and Shakespeare's Jews are talking about,
the search for power that often masquerades as empathy.
This is, I believe, what Marlowe teaches Shakespeare.
Or at least it is the substance of this particular barroom lesson.
It is in this particular small room,
what they hear each other saying
about theater and about us.
Thanks.
(Applause)