The Merchant of Vengeance Read Free Page B

perhaps," said Shakespeare, "but then where is he?" Smythe frowned. "What do you mean, where is he?"
    "Surely, not upon the stage," said Shakespeare, with a shrug. "Aside from the fact that he is bent upon revenge, and that in this quest no evil seems to be beyond him, what else do we truly know of him?"
    "Why… that he is a Jew, I suppose."
    "But then how do we know that Barabas is a Jew?"
    Smythe frowned again. "Why, we know he is a Jew because we are told he is a Jew. I am not certain what you mean, Will."
    "Well, then, let us ask ourselves, what is a Jew?"
    "One who is not a Christian, I suppose," said Smythe. "One who has rejected Jesus." He shrugged. "I cannot say much more than that for certain, for methinks that I have never met a Jew."
    "And you are not alone, for neither have most Englishmen," said Shakespeare. "The Jews were expelled from England some three hundred years ago, in the time of King Edward I. What few Jews remained behind had all converted, though whether such conversion was a matter of faith or of expediency is another matter altogether. I, for one, know little more of Jews than you do. One hears the sorts of things that people say, but then in truth, these sorts of things are little different from the manner of speech they bruit about the Spaniard.. or the Flemish or the French, which is to say that most of it is likely arrant nonsense. We English seem to dislike foreigners, simply because they happen to be foreign. They mayor may not be dislikable in and of themselves, but that is quite beside the point. The fact that they are foreign is enough for us. Hence, we dislike them."
    "Whether we truly know anything of them or not, you mean."
    "Just so," said Shakespeare. "Marlowe wished to present the audience with something evil on the stage, a character whom they could loathe and despise and fear all at the same time. Thus,. he gave them a Jew, someone who was foreign, thus engaging the English predilection to despise the foreigner; someone who was not a Christian, thus invoking the one thing Catholic and Protestant alike could both agree to despise; someone who already has the reputation of being so undesirable and disagreeable that nearly all his kind have long since been driven out of England. Ergo, they must be evil. And, to add the crowning touch, he bestowed upon his Jew the name of Barabas, a name fraught with hatred of literally biblical proportions. And lo, there he stands before you now upon the stage," said Shakespeare, gesturing dramatically toward the street in front of them, as if he had just conjured Marlowe's character up out of his imagination. "All that is left for us to do is clothe him in a black robe and skullcap, add a nose like a promontory, and give him a wig of black tresses falling down about the ears in ringlets.
Hola
! Barabas, the dreaded, evil Jew of Malta! Boo! Hiss!"
    Smythe laughed.
    "But that is not a man, you see," said Shakespeare. "That is a masque, a Morris dancer, something all done up in bells and ribbons, nothing but a caricature. That is Marlowe's Tamburlaine, but merely in another costume. And yet, who is he? Who is this Jew?" he asked rhetorically, waving his anus in the air. "What does he think? What does he feel? Has he a wife at home, a child? Does he love them? Does he worry about them? Does he have fears of his own that keep him up at night? And if he is, indeed, as evil as Kit Marlowe paints him, then what has made him so?"
    "All very good questions," Smythe replied, nodding. "But 'twould be somewhat tiresome to answer all those questions for the audience in the prologue of a play, would it not?"
    "Not if they were
shown
the answers," Shakespeare replied. "
Shown
the answers? How?"
    "As a part of the unfolding of the action of the play," said
    Shakespeare. "'The more I think about it, Tuck, the more I become convinced that 'tis in this direction that my true path lies! Forget Marlowe's Jew. I will show you a Jew, by God! I will show you one who has a