Riassunto esame Cultura inglese, Prof. Squeo Alessandra, libro consigliato Shakespeare's textual traces. Patterns of «exchange» in «The merchant of Venice» , Alessandra Squeo

Chapter 1 – Textual exchanges – New critical approaches to Shakespeare

From intertextuality to interdiscursivity

During these last few years, the studies on the relationship between Shakespearian drama and Italian culture have broken away from an essentially philological approach (relationship between a text and its sources) and have taken into account subtler and more indirect forms of interaction and intertextual transactions, as well as a wider range of literary and cultural fields. This shows how Renaissance Italy tout court was a great cultural intertext for Shakespeare and his contemporaries: it was not only a meta or mega source for drama but also a generative machine that produced iconographic, behavioural, ideological, political, and cultural models which were taken up and transformed by the early modern English. This meant taking into account more inclusive and dynamic notions of text, intertextuality, and interdiscursivity which bear the influence of Foucault's concept of discourse.

Foucault’s concept of discourse

The process through which language constructs meaning is exemplified by what Foucault calls the “discourse” or “discursive practice”. A discursive practice is a process through which we provide things with specific meanings by using language. A discursive practice constructs, defines, and produces the objects of knowledge in an intelligible way (a way that can be understood and communicated between an addresser and an addressee) while excluding other forms of reasoning. When we use the word “orient” we regulate what can be said under determinate special and cultural conditions. It provides ways of talking about a specific topic, with clusters of ideas (stereotypical images), practices, and forms of knowledge. If I use the word “orient”, I refer to a specific area (China, India or countries that are geographically specific and their cultural background). No one would think of the USA if I use the word orient. All discursive practices are connected to power in Foucault’s investigation: By using the word orient to identify China, India, and so on, we implicitly assume that there is a reference point on the Earth (in this case, Europe and the USA). In this case I’m giving for granted the cultural processes through which it has been established that the main reference point is marked by those countries that are politically, socially, economically, and culturally most powerful. In language, words like “orient” spread ways of thinking that we give for granted and that are a clear result of political, economic, and international relationships developed through history. The example provided by Foucault was later explored by Edward Said in “Culture and Imperialism” and in “Orientalism” (1978). In Orientalism he says that the specific instance of the word “orient” is a meaningful example that shows that the language testifies to cultural processes that are deeply connected to political phenomena and to issues of power that contributed to establishing the dominating position of certain countries which have gradually become the implicitly assumed reference points of any geographical definition, even of position.

This innovative critical approach profited from a new view of the category of textual heritage, meant as a “dissemination of topoi, motifs, theatregrams, even when unconsciously encoded in the diachronic process of a long-established written tradition”.

Theatregrams → Clubb coined this notion with reference to the similarities between Italian and Shakespearian comedy but its meaning has widened over the years to identify repeated semiotic and functional units and recurrent dramatic structures which are useful in the investigation of the transnational exchanges of early modern literature.

Such interdiscursive critical approaches also imply a new model of socio-cultural and anthropological transmission which stems from the basic assumptions of British Cultural Materialism and American New Historicism.

Cultural materialism

Raymond Williams is the scholar that best embodies the idea of ordinary culture in the 20th century. He wrote “Culture and Society”, “The Long Revolution”, “Culture” (a study on the definition of culture), and then “Keywords”. “Keywords” introduced the idea of the connection of language and culture. Raymond Williams says that culture is one of the two or three most difficult words in the English language. Williams supported the thesis according to which culture is never the product of an isolated mind and always the product of a group of human beings (collectives) who communicate and share meanings, who share their attempt at making meaning and making a sense of their experience. His approach is defined “cultural materialism” and is produced by groups of people who live in specific material conditions. If you want to understand the kind of culture they produce, you must start by investigating and analysing the specific material conditions in which they live and in which their culture is produced. If we wanted to sum up Williams’ view, we could say that “culture is the production of groups of people who live in specific material conditions and the way in which they live (the specific conditions of their working day, their working hours, the conditions of their houses, streets, cars, what they ate, how they spent their leisure time…) and only by understanding these conditions we will be able to understand their culture”. Ex. A play by Shakespeare is related to the contexts of its production (to the economic and political system of Elizabethan and Jacobean England and to the institutions of cultural production - the court, patronage, education, the church).

Despite their differences, both theoretical approaches (Cultural Materialism and New Historicism) share an analogous interest in the parallel reading of literary and non-literary texts.

New historicism

As explained by Greenblatt, New Historicism reads all the “textual traces” of the past with an attention which is traditionally conferred only to literary texts, starting from the assumption that the text itself is not a container of all its meanings. The investigation of literary and non-literary texts focuses particularly on the dynamics through which they constantly enlighten and interrogate each other, starting from the assumption that works of art are the product of collective negotiations and exchange and that they are “plural, constructed by different social discourses, whose vocabularies intersect to constitute the text”. Greenblatt also coined the notion of “circulation of social energy” with reference to the multiple forms of interaction and resonance between discursive and aesthetic spheres, cultural field, and literary artefact.

NB. Another interesting notion is Elam’s notion of “interlexicality” (a form of micro-intertextuality), which refers to the dialogic relationship that exists within a single word, due to competing meanings or competing cultural connotations deriving from two languages and two texts that engage with each other within the space of a given lexical item.

Shakespeare’s textual traces

Shakespearian texts have been a privileged area of research for such critical approaches, for 2 reasons:

• They are examples of textual instability: the inevitable mistakes due to a still imperfect printing process make it impossible to establish an authoritative text (i.e., a record of Shakespeare’s original intentions).
• The collaborative nature of the theatrical enterprise in the Elizabethan Age: the crowd often interacted with the actors and the fact that the actors, the scribe, and the printer all had a hand in the text, make it impossible to establish authorship and artistic responsibility.

Greenblatt’s investigation of Shakespearian plays is in fact defined in terms of negotiations, exchanges, and trades. However, these observations raise the thorny issue of the actual legitimacy of such a totalising conception of textuality and textual exchange: Serpieri states that there has been a “shift” from a Ptolemaic conception of literature (with the author and the text at the centre) to a Copernican one (the text is decentralised) and while acknowledging that interdiscursive studies have shed light upon frequently undervalued networks of exchanges between culture and literature, he stresses that such results should always be functionalized to the text.

Linguistic negotiations and economic discourse

The play will be read against the background of a wider process of circulation of texts and discourses between Italy and England in the Mediterranean area dominated by Venice. In this perspective, The Merchant of Venice offers an insight into a great variety of socio-cultural conflicts of early modern Europe and calls attention to the sixteenth-century debate on moneylending and usury in the age of rising capitalism.

On the other hand, the investigation of interdiscursive practices will be functionalized to the study of the literary text, whose literariness lies in its levels of linguistic organization: this means applying a discourse-based approach to diachronic lexical semantics. Semantic changes are better understood by taking into account various kinds of external influences, and not simply language-internal factors. For instance, the causes of the semantic change of such keywords such as “venture”, “hazard”, “good” and “bond” are to be found in the Anglo-Italian circulation of the discursive practices of trade. This approach therefore sheds new light upon Shakespeare’s contribution to Early Modern English in the field of economics. The playwright’s engagement with financial issues and with the development of trade practices in early modern Europe has been the concern of many seminal studies.

The appearance of New Economic Criticism granted legitimacy to the aforementioned studies. The basic assumption is that the principles of economics may be incorporated into the analysis of the context of literary texts and that, likewise, the language of literature shapes economic thinking and practice. Many texts argue that Shakespeare’s plays testify to his thorough acquaintance with financial transactions and with the founding concepts of modern economic theory. They also highlight that Shakespeare not only knew a lot about economics but that he was also aware of the manifold dimensions and conflicting semantic values of economic words in a period in which they all still bore traces of multiple discourses: at the start of the seventeenth century, words, like the modern sense of “capital”, “debt” and “interest” were still under construction and terms like “reckoning” and “debt” still carried strong theological senses. Linda Woodbridge has likewise illustrated how Mathematics, trade, and Economics were essential in the language of Renaissance drama: commercial language permeates plays which are not money-oriented or even devoted to love or religion (ex., characters say “I am in your debt” when they simply mean “thank you”). Many are the references to accounts, inventories, bills of exchange, and Renaissance tragedy often dramatizes inappropriate attempts to quantify and measure (ex. King Lear → “Tell me, my daughters…/Which of you shall we say doth love me the most). This quality of early modern economic vocabulary offers Shakespeare the occasion to endow discourse with multiple strata and explore the poetic resonance of one single word bearing the traces of manifold meanings.

Ex., bond In Shakespeare’s corpus it refers to Cordelia’s filial duty and obligation in King Lear (I love your majesty/According to my bond), or to Macbeth’s bond with God, which he imagines as a written document to be cancelled and torn to pieces. In The Merchant of Venice it’s the terrifying contract that Antonio signs with moneylender Shylock, guaranteeing Shylock a pound of flesh if he does not pay up.

Chapter 2 – Performing exchanges – Frenzy of commodification in Shakespeare’s Venice

The Elizabethan myth of Venice

The city of Venice has a crucial role in Elizabethan drama. The myth of Venice in early modern England originated from a great variety of sources:

• Numerous Italian groups of ecclesiastics, humanists, bankers, and artists were living in England at the time, along with several Italian Protestants and other religious refugees who found in Tudor England a hospitable heaven. They brought with them an extremely rich cultural background and played an important role in the transmission of Italy’s cultural patrimony. Many Venetian Jewish merchants lived in England, despite the 1290 prohibition (the Jewish merchant Nuñez de Herrera might have been a model for Shakespeare’s Shylock).
• Travel books, ambassador’s and traveller’s reports spread information about Venice. Such accounts abounded in a context in which books were meant as a textual replacement for potentially dangerous travel experiences. Moryson’s account of his journey to Venice deserves particular attention: Moryson particularly emphasised the presence of water as the visual sign of the movement of life itself. He compares the circulation of blood in the human body (blood is a source of life) to the circulation of water and the idea of movement in the city of Venice. This idea is emphatically repeated by many different works by different English travellers. Another point that is clearly hinted at by Morrison is the association between religion and profit: the devotion of merchants is exemplified by Saint Mark’s church. The candles that illuminate the darkness of the church are put there by merchants as a sign of their devotion to the saint protecting them during shipwrecks. Also, a very common opening formula of book accounts (testi contabili) in Venice was “In the name of god and profit”. This formula is a testimony of the fact that profit, commerce was inseparable from the protection of god and of the saints.
• Translations of political and historical essays celebrating the city’s management of justice such as Gasparo Contarini’s De Magistratibus et Republica Venetorum or Lewkenor’s The Commonwealth and Government of Venice, which was not merely a translation but an intertextual weaving of multiple sources. Lewkenor has never visited Venice, so what we get from his work is the myth of Venice in its purest form. The judge’s natural sense of equity was the basis of Venetian justice: all matters were decided by the judges’ consciences and not by the civil nor by their own laws. This aspect provided a very influential model in England, in a period when profound jurisprudential problems were arising from the conflict between common law and equity. Shakespeare weaves the implications of this debate into The Merchant of Venice and particularly in the trial scene, which shows the divergence between two conflicting legal systems: Shylock’s appeal to his bond and to the letter of the law has been said to embody the strict legalism of the common law, whose judgements were based on statute or precedent, while Portia’s plea for mercy has been said to echo the supreme sense of “equity” embedded in the human conscience, which Elizabethans were very likely to see embodied in the righteousness of Venetian judges.
• Venice itself contributed to the circulation of its own myth: the city was becoming less and less competitive in an expanding world market, so Venetians started investing in symbolic capital and made of their own name a currency that circulated throughout Europe and beyond.
• What made Venice so fascinating to the Renaissance audience was its paradoxical quality. The myth of Venice was an ambivalent and contradictory one: on the one hand, the Republic was admired for its legal system and political sophistication, as well as for its achievements in the field of music, art, literature, economic, and political science. It was never subjected to foreign domination and was the image of an apparently tolerant and multicultural heaven where Jews were accepted, and Moors could reach the top of a military career. On the other hand, it was also perceived as an unsafe place, and as the cradle of political, religious, and sexual corruption.
• The parallels between sixteenth-century England and Venice, to the point where Venice became a geographically displaced representation of the complexity of Renaissance England: both were mercantile nations depending upon foreign trade, both were experiencing radical social and economic changes (the merchants in Venice acquired such power that they were seen as a threat to the aristocracy, much like what was happening in England). The spectacular ceremonies held in Venice resembled the ones of the English court and provided the Italian city with a “theatrical quality”. The direct influence of these reports on Shakespeare is hard to prove, however in the opening lines of The Merchant of Venice, the boats are described as “pageants at sea”.

Economic models in the “general market of the world”

Venice was known as the commercial core of the Mediterranean and would remain such until the eighteenth century. In the second half of the sixteenth century, after Vasco da Gama’s first voyage to India and Columbus arrival in the Americas, England found itself connected to a global economy system based on international trade, that brought about early forms of cultural globalization which affected the culture and literature of the time. In Elizabethan England, Venice therefore became an important archetype for its own increasingly international economic exchanges and provided very influential economic models:

• Public banking: The Venetian operations of deposit banking and credit became a reference point in the long process which would lead to the establishment of the Bank of England (1694). In 1581 Christopher Hagenbuch wrote a petition to Queen Elizabeth in which he proposed to institute an office to grant the Queen any needful sum of money without expense. He has become familiar with this idea during his stay in Venice, where de dangers of private banking were becoming evident.