Shakespeare's Merchant: St Antony and Sultan Suleiman

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PAX TIBI MARCE EVANGELISTA MEUS

(Peace be with you Mark my Evangelist)

Shakespeare’s Merchant:St Antony and Sultan Suleiman

I have just read the ‘Merchant of Venice’ with my local U3A Shakespeare group. As I had not done English Literature since I was 14, I was pleased the new group had chosen this as its first play. In the ‘Merchant’, Shakespeare had been able to choose all the characters’ names himself, which he couldn’t for a historical play. If I have any academic interests, they are in names, words and maps. There would be historical maps to show the extent of the Venetian Republic within the Europe of the time and the names in the ‘Merchant’ would give me somewhere to start.

However another trail opened up immediately. In the play, Shakespeare tells us that contact had been lost with four of Antonio’s argosies (Venice’s largest class of ship) and some others and they were feared lost. I could see that for many Venetians the ‘pound of flesh’ drama that Shakespeare had focussed on would have been a sideshow. They would want their husbands, sons, fathers and brothers on those ships safe home. There would have been prayers in homes, parish churches and in St Mark’s basilica. Catholics pray to patron saints and certainly would have done so in the Venice of the ‘Merchant’. I knew immediately who the prayers would have been addressed to. So the first thing I should do was read up on St Antony of Padua.

I found St Antony is also the patron saint of lost people as well as lost things. ‘Pray, St Antony, look around/Something is lost which should be found’. Shylock thanked God when he heard a ship had been lost. He did not want Antonio to be able to repay his debt. This puts Shylock in direct confrontation with the patron saint of lost things. It turns out that this is not the first time a Jewish merchant has challenged St Antony. In the end, the lost ships begin to turn up. This looks like the answer to a prayer to St Antony.

The play is about Antonio the Merchant’s debt to the Jewish moneylender, Shylock. St Antony was a Franciscan and knew St Francis. Like St Francis he was of a wealthy family. Though like St Francis he rejected personal wealth, he understood the role of capital and risk taking in an economy. St Antony initiated legislation in Padua (in Venezia and only 40 km west of Venice) to treat debtors fairly and to abolish the debtors’ prison. (Perhaps financial losses are lost things?) A copy of this 1231 law is in the museum in Padua. In the play Bellario (a fair wind?) sends legal force from Padua to the Doge’s court in Venice in the form of his cousin Portia (the name means an offering) which ensures fair play for Antonio the debtor. This looks like the answer to a prayer to St Antony.

With the ships apparently lost, Antonio could not repay Shylock. Those who cared for Antonio would have prayed for compassion from Shylock, whose contract gave him power of life and death over the Merchant. If only this man could acquire a Christian conscience. But he is a Jew. Who do you pray to if you want to see a Jew become a Christian? St Antony converted to Christianity the Jewish merchant who challenged him. In the play, Shylock converts to Christianity. This looks like the answer to a prayer. At the time of the pound of flesh contract, Antonio had said, ‘The Hebrew will turn Christian … ‘.

Given that there are answers to three unspoken prayers to him, it struck me that the story must have originated as a tribute to St Antony of Padua. In the Shakespeare play, the name of the Merchant of Venice can only be Antonio.

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St Antony may have made his presence felt in an original story in yet a fourth way. He had preached the Gospel to the Moors of North Africa. There is provenance for North Africa. At Belmont, Portia’s home 20 miles from Venice, there are servants, Nerissa and Balthazar. Nerissa means black, and the name Balthazar would be well known as the sometimes dark skinned one of the Three Kings of the Nativity. No-one would have been surprised to see these characters as black or brown Christian converts in a Mystery Play. Portia is fair haired, but the name she chooses when impersonating a male lawyer is also Balthazar. Shakespeare could therefore have presented her as black or brown in the courtroom scene. Balthazar also has a meaning – Baal (a god) protect the king. Portia as Balthazar certainly gets Venice’s head of state off the hook.

Shakespeare makes no reference to prayers to St Antony for the missing ships or to prayers generally. He could however have easily left non-verbal clues for the audience. Much of the action of the play takes place in streets and public places in Venice. Most of the rest of the action takes place in Portia’s home in Belmont. There is a scene in Shylock’s home, and one in the Venice Court of Justice. Stage props would have been minimalist, but there may have been some religious iconography. We don’t get to see Antonio’s home as a wealthy merchant but Portia was of a very wealthy family. The walls of her home would have been hung with portraits of Christ, the Madonna and various saints, the latter illustrating incidents from their lives as recorded in the Golden Legend. Because of the connection with Padua – her cousin Bellario a pre-eminent lawyer there – if there was anything at all, it would have been a portrait of St Antony of Padua. A sketch of a man standing erect and carrying a child

would have been recognisable from the furthest corner in the theatre and would probably still have been a well known icon. There might even have been a genuine article looted from a monastery or church in the recent past.

Shylock did not have from his own resources all of the 3,000 ducats Antonio wanted to borrow. So he borrowed the difference from another Jewish merchant, Tubal. As he lost at the hearing, he could not recover the money he had lent to Antonio. So he was in debt as he started his life as a Christian. I wonder if someone suggested to him that he say a prayer to St Antony.

Whilst writing this I have read that after a promising start to his career, Shakespeare’s father ran into troubling debts later in life. He did not go to prison. Maybe the Shakespeare household thought they had reason to be grateful to St Antony. In Shakespeare’s time, everybody’s grandparents had been Catholic and old practices would have lingered on.

There is another tribute to St Antony perhaps worth a mention. In 1607 King Philip III of Spain established an Irish Franciscan College in the already flourishing Catholic University of Leuven (Louvain), in what was then the Spanish Netherlands and is now Belgium. This was because monasteries and places of learning in Ireland were lost to them because of the rule and depredations of English Protestants. Philip’s brother in law and co-ruler of the Netherlands, the Archduke of Austria, laid the foundation stone. The King dedicated the College to St Antony of Padua. In 1607 Shakespeare was 43 years old.

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A tribute to St Antony need not require a Jewish heiress to marry a Christian and convert to Christianity. Shakespeare takes advantage of cosmopolitan Venice to have this happen with Shylock’s daughter Jessica. There is no mention of it, but inter-faith marriage is also in prospect for the Venetian heiress Portia. Her nine suitors include Catholics, Protestants and a Muslim. They are all aristocrats, but evidently their religion is not something that troubles Portia’s father. Before he died set up the lottery of the three caskets for the suitors, the prize being his daughter and his family fortune.

The nine suitors were: the Neapolitan prince, the Prince of Arragon, the Count Palatine, a nephew of the Duke of Saxony, the Prince of Morocco, a French lord, the English Baron Falconbridge, a Scottish lord and of course the lord Bassanio.

Why did not this band of suitors include a scholarly, wealthy Jewish merchant – there are many Jews in Venice; or a wealthy prince of the Greek Orthodox faith – Venice has only just lost Cyprus and still rules Crete, many Greek islands, and part of mainland Greece? There is no Jew and no Orthodox prince because Portia’s father had a hidden agenda. Neither a Jew nor an Orthodox could provide a diplomatic alliance for Venice: neither would be backed by an army or a navy. Venice needed both. The Ottoman Turks had closed the Black Sea to Venetian trade. Their conquests of Syria and Egypt early in the 16th century blocked ports there as well. They were pushing into North Africa as far as Morocco, where Moroccans were making common cause with Spain to resist them. Moroccan chiefs were finding refuge in Spain when things went wrong. Shakespeare’s audiences would have heard his Prince of Morocco say he had a scimitar ‘… That won three fields of Sultan Suleiman’. I am taking it that ‘fields’ means battlefields.

In Europe, the Ottomans reached Vienna in 1529, but not before the Protestant Count Palatine had arrived to reinforce the city so that it withstood the siege. The Emperor Charles V sent Spanish musketeers to the city’s defence as well. The Duke of Saxony was also a prominent leader against the Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent. He had Catholic and Protestant followers and was popular with both. This may be where Baron Falconbridge played a part in the common cause.

On holiday whilst writing this, I took a photograph of the Venetian walls of Famagusta, Cyprus, to show their thickness, designed to withstand Turkish cannon fire. The city was starved into submission in 1571. The brutal torture and murder of the Venetian commander after the surrender became one of the bitterest memories of Venetian history. The counter-punch from the Holy League fleet of most of the Catholic Mediterranean countries destroyed the galley-slave powered Turkish fleet at Lepanto, Greece, later in the same year.

A Venetian naval leader at Lepanto was later elected Doge (Duke). The Papacy and the Empire had ships at Lepanto, but Venice’s principal ally there was Spain. The Spaniards could also help protect Venice against pirates and privateers in the Caribbean. Venetian shores like all Christian shores as far afield as England, Ireland and Iceland were prey to slave raids by Barbary (=Berber) pirates from North Africa. Obviously, the establishment or reinforcement of an alliance with Spain would be in La Serenissima’s best interests. By his title alone, the Prince of Arragon could secure this. Spain also ruled southern Italy and other parts of Italy, making the Neapolitan prince just as much an important subject of the King of Spain.

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What little I know of Lepanto includes a comment that the Catholic fleet should have engaged the Ottomans sooner. I wonder if the galley slaves had a ‘human-shield effect’. Facing the Spanish Armada seventeen years later the English only had to feel remorse about the Spaniards’ horses. Would they have so cheerfully sailed their fire ships into the Spanish fleet if it had comprised galleys rowed by Protestant slaves? Famagusta motivated the Holy League fleet into action whatever happened to the galley slaves.

In Istanbul, on a plaque in the Galata Tower, I found that Christian captives were put to work ship-building in the dockyards of the Ottoman capital, Constantinople. Interestingly, these men were called ‘forsa’ by the Turks. In this context I would say this word means ‘workforce’ and I‘d guess it was from the international trading language in use over the eastern Mediterranean - the original Lingua Franca - which had a large Venetian Italian element in it. It suggests the origin of these unfortunates: Italian has ‘forza’, Catalan (Aragon) has ‘força’ and Castilian has ‘fuerza’. I suspect many of these slaves whether on land or at sea would have been seaman themselves and skilled at ship repair and maintenance.

So far five of the nine suitors can reinforce Venice against the Turks. I shall leave Bassanio till last. The English, French and Scottish lords know one another. Not forgetting that Shakespeare was an entertainer, the English Baron Falconbridge I think could be a contemporary Londoner, recognisable to Shakespeare’s players and audience. He stands to have his ears boxed by the Scottish lord to avenge a previous slight. The Frenchman will stand surety for the Scot. I think these three may get a mention because of some topical joke in London. The Falconbridge surname was local – appearing in records from the beginning of the 17th century at the church of St. Martin in the Fields - about four kilometres from Shakespeare’s Globe theatre.

If these three suitors are just mentioned for fun, it doesn’t matter if they don’t link to the front against the Turks. But they may do. The Templars were associated with emblems of the Rose and the Falcon. Their HQ in London had been the Temple – hardly more than over the bridge from the Globe. There is a Falcon Court there now. The falcon has featured in historical novels in our day and I assume Londoners of Shakespeare’s time would have associated the falcon and the Templars with front line activity against the Turks. It might have been a tease to contrast the strangely dressed Falconbridge with the crusader elegance of the Templar kit.

Also, the Englishman and the Frenchman might well make the shortlist in their own right. The Englishman wears clothes from anywhere except England, so he could be presented as someone who has been up to the front line against the Turks. France, uniquely, was allied with the Turks and captured Corsica from Genoa with Turkish help. The French lord may be the exception that proves the rule. A marriage alliance that would have brought France on side would have been a diplomatic coup.

Falconbridge would not have been the only suitor a London audience would recognise. The Count Palatine came to the court of King of England Henry VIII in 1539 as a suitor for the hand of Henry’s daughter Mary. Courtiers thought a Protestant prince would have been welcome to Henry, but the King did not encourage the initiative. Some in the audience might have had childhood memories of this visit.

So I come to the ninth man. The chief Spanish naval leader at Lepanto had a name that Sir Walter Raleigh spelt as ‘Bassan de Santa Cruse’. Raleigh would have spelt as he heard. Today we see Don Álvaro de Bazán, suggesting for those of us in the Old World the Castilian ‘z = th’ pronunciation

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which obscures the link. He was the Marqués de Santa Cruz. Shakespeare could have given Portia’s successful suitor any name he liked, but he chose Bassanio. I don't see where he got the name Bassanio from unless it was from Bassan.

Bassanio is the instigator of all the action in the play. He brings into the frame the suit for the heiress Portia, and he gets Antonio to borrow from Shylock. It does not follow that Bassanio himself was the hero of Lepanto, but being a son or close relative or godson of the Marqués de Santa Cruz would give him a rank one would expect of someone in competition with a Prince of Arragon and a Prince of Morocco for the hand of the wealthy Portia.

Bassanio is described as a Venetian scholar and a soldier of the company of the Marquis of Montferrat. Spain ruled Montferrat for a short while, after which the Hapsburg Emperor Charles V gave it to the Duke of Mantua. The Empire had had ships at Lepanto as well. Montferrat is west of Milan, which was itself under Spain at the time. I suspect Bassanio had a Spanish title.

Bassanio’s name recalls the fight against the Turks at sea and the company he keeps and his profession as a soldier make him likely to be called on to fight on land - in Hungary, or wherever the front line is. Bassanio is therefore has double heroic credentials and he is a scholar as well. No wonder Portia immediately falls for him. So the hero gets the girl – end of story? No.

Before linking on to the moneylender tale, I want to say something about the ‘terms and conditions’ that applied to Portia’s suitors. Those who chose the wrong casket and so did not win Portia, had to promise they would not marry anyone else. Six of the nine suitors found this unacceptable and so we were left with a short-list of three. It was an odd condition – why was it acceptable even to three? The Turkish wars and also a plague had caused a drastic drop in living standards. It is reckoned that between 1560 and 1600 Venetian registered shipping was down by half. Amongst the ways Venetians reacted to this was to conserve inheritances. Marriages were being limited to a few (and sometimes only one) of a number of sons. Shakespeare would have known all this. So it was not in the least abnormal that a Venetian such as Bassanio could contemplate a life without a wife. Aragon and Morocco being in the front line against the Turks and no less immune to disease than Venice must also have being feeling the pinch. This must be why Shakespeare has Bassanio’s two princely competitors also make this seemingly life-changing promise.

To resume the moneylender tale: Bassanio has to be a debtor. So he is in debt when the play starts, with, it has to be assumed, contracts already signed. Why does he need the huge sum of 3,000 ducats? A loan of this size cannot be just to make an appearance in Belmont to rival the two princes. A shipwright in Venice would make about 50 ducats per year. Is he consolidating his previous debts? Has he lost out as a military adventurer? Is it just that a lesser amount would not balance against a pound of flesh? Whatever the reason he is ‘maxed out’, so he has to go to his kinsman Antonio. Antonio doesn’t have the liquidity, but his credit is good. Bassanio finds Shylock. Shylock doesn’t have the liquidity for the whole loan either and borrows from another Jewish merchant, Tubal. Antonio then contracts with Shylock for the famous bond for the pound of flesh.

Antonio’s ships do not come in within the three months specified so he cannot repay and we have the hearing before the Doge. Why did the Doge send to Padua for a professional opinion on his difficult position in law? Padua was where Venetians went to university. So it was like London sending to Oxford or Cambridge. Portia arrives pretending to be Balthazar from Padua. She gets Antonio of the hook. She also puts Shylock on the hook. He cannot get his 3,000 ducats back from Antonio as he has lost the case. And the ‘costs’ have taken half his fortune.

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Shakespeare has shown us that in a chain of debt-credit links, only one link needs to break to ruin someone: first Antonio, then Shylock. This perhaps recalls Shakespeare’s father’s experience. At the end of the sequence, a Christian remains in debt to a Jew. This time Shylock is the Christian and Tubal is the Jewish merchant. I am left wondering what Tubal made of the outcome of the hearing before the Doge. Had Shylock told him that the loan he took of Tubal was secured only against a pound of human flesh, described by Shylock himself as worthless? Did Tubal connive in Shylock’s contract with Antonio, or was he unaware? Certainly, as far as we know from the play, Tubal’s conduct was perfectly proper.

The names ‘Shylock’ and ‘Tubal’ make an interesting comparison. ‘Shylock’ has no provenance. I think Shakespeare or any bard would have chosen/adapted or coined the name for precisely that quality. The audience has to be told Shylock is a Jew. They would not have known from this one-off name alone, as they would had he been called Abraham, Isaac or Benjamin. Shakespeare would never have given a well known Jewish name to a character of such un-Jewish conduct. The one-off name distances the character from Judaism. Shylock is going to be a better person for having to accept the values that go with his Christian conversion. His first prayer as a Christian looks like being to St Antony of Padua.

The name ‘Tubal’ on the other hand has excellent provenance. Tubal was a grandson of Noah and was the alleged ancestor of many peoples, including the Iberian and the Italic. (Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia, was named after him). Was Shakespeare’s choice of the name ‘Tubal’ to show that we are all one really?

As a final observation, not one of Shakespeare’s characters suggests there could be a backlash against the Jewish community if Shylock succeeds in killing Antonio. Whatever the outcome of the hearing before the Doge, neither anti-Semitism nor anything else is going to disturb the serenity of La Serenissima Reppublica.

I have followed two tracks in this piece: the prayers to St Antony and the provenance of the nine suitors of Portia. Shakespeare need not have left either of these tracks. St Antony would not have been apparent if the ships had not come home and if Shylock had not converted to Christianity. Neither event matters to the story and both could have been omitted. If Shakespeare had given Portia’s suitors any other names or titles, Venice’s need for defensive alliances against the Ottoman Turks would not have been evident.

Shakespeare was only 33 when he wrote this play. He is so well informed in an age when books were rare and expensive. He did have the advantage of being on the spot. He could have found out how many crewmen it took to man an argosy ship just by asking a seaman as he walked over the bridge to the theatre. If he had that information he chose not to use it.

The internet doesn’t solve all problems. I tried myself for this piece to find out on the web how many crewmen there would have been on an argosy, so that I could have said how many men were at risk on Antonio’s ships. The figure should be around somewhere, but it didn’t turn up for me. Perhaps I should have said a prayer to St Antony!

Edward Neafcy December 2013.

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Shakespeare's Merchant: St Antony and Sultan Suleiman

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