The Merchant of Vengeance (29 page)

"Silence.!" Locke shouted, hammering upon the table again and again. "Silence I say.!"

"I call Portia Mayhew!" said Shakespeare.

Slowly, Portia stood. For a moment, she and Antonia simply stared at one another. The room became very still. Shakespeare turned his back upon Antonia and came over toward Portia.

"When did you learn that Thomas and Antonia were lovers?" he asked her gently.

She kept her gaze firmly fixed upon Antonia. 'The day he told me that she was pregnant with his child," she replied. She winced and brought her hand up to touch her ear.

"And what day was that?" asked Shakespeare.

"The day I killed him," she replied softly. She winced once more and shook her head several times.

There was a collective gasp in the room.

"Oh, my God," Elizabeth murmured.

Mayhew turned to face his daughter with astonished disbelief.

"Nay, it cannot be!" he said.

"Tell us what happened, Portia," Shakespeare said. "Please."

"He confessed to me that he and Antonia had been lovers," she replied in a flat tone. "He said that she had seduced him, and that he had not been able to resist. He begged for my forgiveness and said that he was weak."

Once more, she winced, as if with pain, and touched her ears. "He said that a man had needs… and then he told me that Antonia was pregnant with his child, and had threatened to tell my father unless he helped her to be rid of it. So he took her to see a cunning woman, and obtained for her a brew of pennyroyal and mugwort that would banish the child before it quickened…

She bit her lower lip and shook her head once more, wincing as if with pain.

"And then he told me that it was finished with Antonia and that it did not matter, but that all the trouble he had gone to would be in vain if I did not run away with him at once, because my father had discovered that his mother was a Jew and had forbidden us to marry."

There was not a sound within the room. No one spoke. Nobody moved.

"And what happened then?" asked Shakespeare softly.

"I felt as if my world had crumbled all around me," she said wearily. "I turned away from him… my head was spinning… and then I saw his dagger where he had laid it down upon the table… there was a roaring in my ears, a terrible roaring, like the wind… a sound so loud… so very, very loud… oh, I hear it still… I hear it still… It will not go away!" She brought her hands up to her ears to block out a sound that only she could hear.

"Make it go away! Please, make it go away!"

She sank to her knees upon the floor, rocking back and forth, her hands covering her ears.

"Make it go away!" she whimpered. "Please, make it go away!"

"Oh, Portia!" Mayhew cried, crouching at her side and putting his arms around her. "My poor Portia!"

Charles Locke rose to his feet, staring down at her, holding the hammer clutched tightly in his fist. Then he looked down at it, dropped it on the table, and walked out of the room without a word.

Antonia still stood there, as if rooted to the spot, staring at Portia with horror and dismay. Mayhew sobbed quietly as he held his daughter, who seemed no longer able to hear him. Or anything else.

Smythe came up to Shakespeare and took him by the arm.

"However did you guess that she had done it?" he asked.

Shakespeare shook his head. "I had no idea," he said.

"'Strewth, I thought Antonia had killed him."

Epilogue

"And so we were all blindfolded once again, and then taken back to where they found us," Shakespeare said. "Tuck and I were dropped off on London Bridge. Elizabeth and Winifred were taken to their homes, as were all the others, I would assume."

"And what became of Portia Mayhew and her father" asked John Hemings.

"Well, Portia will likely live out the remainder of her days in Bedlam," Shakespeare said. "And as for Mayhew… Shy Locke could not truly blame him for the death of his son. He knew that what happened to Henry Mayhew's daughter shall haunt him evermore. Rachel Locke had lost her son. And now, in a different way, Mayhew has lost his daughter. Mayhap Winifred shall be of some comfort to him."

"'Tis a tragedy worthy of the Greeks," Gus Phillips said, shaking his head.

"Indeed," said Shakespeare. "No one was truly blameless in this sad affair. 'Tis one of those tales where in the end, the stage is littered with victims."

"Truly, not even Marlowe could have penned a more dramatic tale," said Tom Pope.

"I am beginning to grow rather tired of hearing about Marlowe," Shakespeare replied testily.

"Indeed, he does seem to vex you. It does not seem as if the Rose Theatre is big enough for both of you," said Smythe with a smile.

"It does rather make one miss the good old days at our old theatre with the Burbages," said Shakespeare.

"Hark! Did I hear someone mention my name?" a ringing voice called out from behind them.

"Dick!" said Smythe.

They all turned as Richard Burbage came up to their table, grinning from ear to ear. "Well met, my friends! Well met!"

"Well met, Dick!" Hemings exclaimed, jumping up and clapping him upon the back. "'Tis good to see you once again, old friend! How goes it at the Theatre?"

"Well, 'tis funny you should ask," said Burbage. "I shall tell you how goes it at the Theatre. The Theatre goes, is how it goes!"

'The Theatre goes?" said Pope, raising his eyebrows. "What do you mean it goes?"

"It goes is precisely what I mean," said Burbage with a big grin.

He winked at them. "It goes straight across the river!"

"What goes across the river" Smythe asked with a frown.

"The Theatre does!" said Burbage, slapping him on the back with a laugh. "Listen well, my friends. Are you all up for a bit of mischief?"

"Always," Speed replied. "What did you have in mind?"

"Just this: You will recall, no doubt, our old adversary, our money-grubbing landlord? Well, after all of his repeated threats, the rascal has finally decided not to renew our lease. And so, since he owns the land upon which the Theatre sits, he thinks in this way to seize the Theatre for himself, the bounder! But whilst he may own the land, my father and lawn the building. And so, my friends… we are going to move it!"

"What?" said Shakespeare. "Move the entire theatre, do you mean?"

"Precisely!" Burbage said.

"But… how the devil do you plan on doing that?"

"We are going to tear it down completely, and then move the timbers by boat across the river to Southwark, where we shall use them to build a brand-new theatre, even better than the first!"

"You mean the one you told us you had planned?" asked Smythe.

"The very one," Burbage replied. "I had told you that the day would come when we would all play upon the same stage once again, did I not? Well, that day is here! And that very stage is now going to be built! We are going to construct the Globe, my friends!"

"When?" asked Shakespeare.

"It begins tonight!" said Burbage. "Tonight?" they all said at once.

"We must move swiftly, like the wind!" Burbage said. "We must have the building completely torn down by the morning, and the timbers loaded up on boats and floated 'cross the river afore our landlord can seize the property! The carpenters are standing by! What do you say, my friends? Are you with me?"

"We are with you!" Smythe replied at once, getting up from his seat.

"We are your very men!" said Shakespeare, rising to join him.

"Come then, my friends, and let us all away!" said Burbage.

"And together we shall confound the landlord come the break of day!"

Afterword

THE MERCHANT OF VENICE
, upon which this novel is rather loosely based, is without a doubt the most controversial of Shakespeare's plays. It is difficult, even for those who seem willing to excuse Shakespeare anything, to get around its anti-Semitic content. In the words of Harold Bloom, "One would have to be blind, deaf, and dumb not to recognize that Shakespeare's grand, equivocal comedy The Merchant of Venice is nevertheless a profoundly anti-Semitic work." Bloom does go on to say, however, that the question of whether or not Shakespeare was personally anti-Semitic is open to reasonable doubt. This sort of thing is not uncommon among Shakespearean scholars, actually. Most of them do it, this bet-hedging, talking out of both sides of their mouth. It's as if they want to have their cake and eat it, too.

They wouldn't be caught dead trying to assert that the portrayal of Shylock is not anti-Semitic (one can only imagine the academic tarring-and-feathering that would follow, the vituperation in the "little magazines," the howling and clothes-rending at teach-ers' conferences, the sudden denials of tenure, and so forth), but at the same time, they can't quite bring themselves to say that Shakespeare actually hated Jews, because then they would leave themselves open to the charge of having an anti-Semitic writer in their curriculum, and we certainly couldn't have that. (Look what happened to Mark Twain.) Of course, this leaves them in a rather awkward position—somewhere between a rock and a hard place, intellectually speaking. Even Jewish academics seem to suffer from this problem. They seem to want to say, "Well, all right, the play was anti-Semitic, or at least the character of Shylock was, but just because Shakespeare may have written an anti-Semitic play or character does not necessarily mean he was personally anti-Semitic." Well, in a word… bull.

Not being an academic type, I don't have any problem saying what I think. And what I think is that Shakespeare was probably no more and no less anti-Semitic than any other Englishman of his time. Which is to say, yes, he was. I think that could probably safely be said of most Elizabethans. And it could also safely be said that most Elizabethans wouldn't have known any more about a Jew than they would about a Martian. As Isaac Asimov has pointed out in his outstanding Asimov’s Guide to Shakespeare (which should really be a required text in any course on Shakespeare), neither Shakespeare nor his audience had any firsthand knowledge of Jews, because the Jews were kicked out of England by Edward I — well before Shakespeare's time—and they were not allowed to return until the time of Oliver Cromwell, which was well after Shakespeare's death. So in this case, at least, Shakespeare was not writing what he knew. He was writing what the people of his time thought and believed.

To a modern audience, the play certainly has unsettling aspects. The portrayal of Shylock is a classic example—perhaps the classic example—of cultUral stereotyping. To refer to Dc. Asimov once more: Shylock is not a Jewish name; there never was a Jew named Shylock that anyone has heard of; the name is an invention of Shakespeare's which has entered the common language (because of the power of the characterization of the man) to represent any grasping, greedy, hard-hearted creditor. I have heard Jews themselves use the word with exactly this meaning, referring back to Shakespeare's character.

Asimov goes on to speculate as to where Shakespeare actUally got the name. He mentions an old Hebrew word, shalach, which appears in the Bible and refers to a bird of prey. It is unclear exactly which bird this is a reference to, but it seems quite possible that Shakespeare used a form of the word as the name for his predatory moneylender, for while he probably knew next to nothing about Jews, Shakespeare would certainly have known his Bible.

So, what could Shakespeare's motive have been in creating title character of Shylock? Since he did not leave behind any diaries (or at least, none that anyone has ever found), we are reduced to guess-work. However, we can make what I dunk are some fairly logical and educated guesses. And my best guess is the one that I have portrayed here in this book, namely, that he ,vas trying to compete with Marlowe.

In an afterward to an earlier novel in this series, I said that I believed that if Shakespeare were alive today, he would probably be writing for television. I could easily see him sitting around over lattes at Starbucks with the likes of Steven J. Cannell and Harlan Ellison, talking shop. Or perhaps 'working with Lucas or Spielberg. And the responses to that comment were predictable. "Shakespeare? Writing for television?" (You have to say that with your upper lip curling in an aristocratic sneer.) Yes, Virginia, writing for television. Because, much as the literati might blanch at the idea, Shakespeare was a commercial writer.

He was not writing for the academic, literary writers of his day (in fact, most of them probably hated his guts because he was successful and was not a university man, as witness Robert Greene). He was writing for the groundlings, the average working stiffs who paid a penny apiece to stand in the yard and watch a play, which was their era's version of television. And in this regard, a rather hideous modern TV neologism comes to mind that could well be used to describe the work of Christopher Marlowe: "a motion picture event." Apparently, no one makes movies anymore, or even motion pictures. They make "motion picture events." (I always thought a motion picture "event" was what happened when the film broke in the projector at the movie theatre.) Well, in Marlowe's case, the silly term actually seems to fit. Marlowe did not simply write dramas. He wrote "drama events." His plays were something completely new to the Elizabethan audiences, spectacles full of lurid violence and bombastic speeches, every bit as over-the-top and overwhelming to the senses as the grisly bear-baiting at the Paris Gardens. And the people ate them up. Shakespeare had to compete with that. He was, of course, to surpass Marlowe and leave behind a far more lasting impact, but at the time he could not possibly have known that. If he was a cocky young Turk, he might easily have believed himself capable of it, but somehow that does not quite seem to fit his personality. Confident, perhaps. Cocky? I suppose it's possible, but I don't think so.

He had to measure himself against Marlowe. How could he not? They were close to the same age, but Marlowe's career was at its zenith when Shakespeare was just arriving on the scene. Marlowe was the big gun. And, while Shakespeare was probably not a cocky sort, Marlowe absolutely was. Marlowe was completely over-the-top in nearly every respect. And if Shakespeare might have been a television writer had he lived today, it would not be much of a stretch to imagine that Marlowe might have been a rock star. Marlowe does not stand up as well as Shakespeare, though.