Portia and Desdemona – Venetian cousins

This is a post from the weareoca.com archive. Information contained within it may now be out of date.
 
The writer John Toft is best known as a novelist. His depictions of his native Staffordshire, published in the 1970s and ‘80s, are cited in The Oxford Companion to English Literature as examples of the regional novel, which describe people and landscapes of an actual locality outside London.  With The Bitch of Belmont, published last year, he has turned his attention away from prose fiction to drama, taking characters and themes from Shakespeare’s Othello and The Merchant of Venice to create a play in eight scenes.  Here, the writer describes the genesis of the play and gives an insight into his motivation in writing it. Following his model of invention, which plays and characters might enjoy conflating in your own writing? What would your choices reveal about the origins of your own development as a reader and theatre-goer?

This play, linking Shakespeare’s two Venetian plays, resulted from a course I taught on Venice in literature. However, my interest in The Merchant of Venice goes much further back. It was the very first Shakespeare play I ever saw. I was nine and, though I did not understand it, I was hooked.  A few years later I acted the part of Portia in a schoolboy production and, though still intellectually uninformed, I saw the drama from the inside, so to speak. Then, as a student, I took on current academic notions of the play as a critique of early capitalism, and also as an exposition of Christian doctrines concerning the use of money and the transcendence of Old Testament Law by New Testament mercy and forgiveness.
Meanwhile in the theatre, growing anxiety about the racial issues raised by this play, and also by Othello, brought challenges to traditional assumptions concerning Shakespeare’s moral compass, and also to conventional presentations of Shylock and Othello.  The sources of both plays present the Europeans as moral norms, obnoxiously (to us) confident of their superiority. Shakespeare could, like Marlowe in The Jew of Malta, have shown the characters, Christians and Jews, as bad as one another. But it seems that, whilst he accepted the given moral structure of the stories, Shakespeare’s instincts as actor as well as dramatist compelled him to feel what it might be like to be Shylock or Othello.  This is what has kept these two plays still frequently performed on stage when, in the climate of informed opinion since World War II, they might have been discountenanced. However, modern productions are careful to confront the uncomfortable challenges and to stress Shakespeare’s disturbing ambivalences.
Ambivalence and discomfort were very evident in a famous Jonathan Miller production of The Merchant at the Old Vic, with Laurence Olivier as Shylock and Joan Plowright as Portia (who screamed when she met her black suitor!). With a mid-nineteenth century setting and the use of music from Verdi’s Rigoletto, Miller suggested a deeper relationship between Shylock and Jessica than is usually assumed, and also that her escape from his house is more of an abduction (à la Gilda, the heroine of Verdi’s opera) than an elopement. The production ended with Jessica alone on the stage, seeming almost abandoned by the triumphant cradle Christians, left to gaze wistfully into the wings as if in longing for her lost father. I was much affected by this and, in fact, my main motive in writing this play was to bring about their reunion.
The race issue made it irresistible to link these two troubling dramas set against the power and glory of Venice. The obvious device was to make Portia and Desdemona cousins. In the tight-knit social nexus of sixteenth century Venice and its hinterland such a conjunction was not unlikely. More to the point, both plays raise what we call ‘gender issues’ as well as racial ones, and these issues are bound up with religion and the creation of wealth and its distribution.
I believe I have remained largely faithful to Shakespeare’s characterisations, though, of course, I make them speak in the language of our time – the antithesis of modern productions where the characters speak Elizabethan English wearing funky twenty-first century gear! The excepted character is Bassanio who in The Merchant – dare I say? – is a vapid bore, not to be compared with Benedick or Orlando. All we know about him is that he has wasted a lot of money – mainly other people’s – on cutting a dash in high society. So I have re-conceived him in terms of his ‘contemporary’, Don Juan, later libertines such as Casanova and Byron, and some of my own contemporaries who must remain unidentified. I hope I have made him rather more interesting thereby.
I have also added a minor character, but not invented him since Chus is mentioned by Jessica as being, along with Tubal, her father’s friend and business associate, trusted with his closest confidences (Act III, sc.ii., line 284). Such passing and gratuitous references (to real people?), unnecessary to the drama, are among the most tantalising mysteries of the Shakespeare texts. Could it be that there was living illegally in London’s East End docklands at the time a certain Chuzas or perhaps a Josiah or Joshua known locally as Jos? And might he have been the original of Shylock himself?
The Bitch of Belmont is published by TCP (Books). John Toft has a small number of copies available to give to OCA students who would like to read the play.  To request a copy, email leeopenshaw@oca-uk.com with your name, student number and address.

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