The wretched strangers

How easy it is to move chess pieces about a board.  Sacrificing your own pieces, killing off your opponents.  The trick is to remember that life is not a chessboard, that in real life both pawns and kings have human feelings.

In this week's New Yorker, Harvard professor Stephen Greenblatt discusses Shakespeare's play, The Merchant of Venice, looking at it -- and the play's treatment of Shylock -- from his own perspective as a secular Jew. 

Greenblatt's focus is neither a criticism of the treatment of Jews in Elizabethan society, nor a discussion of whether the teaching of the play is a "micro-aggression" in today's touchy academic world.  Instead, he marvels at Shakespeare's ability, almost against his better judgment as a playwright, to feel and express deep empathy for society's outcasts, indeed for the villains of his own plays. Greenblatt suggests, quietly, Shakespeare's relevance to events of our own time.

You'll recall that Shylock was a vindictive old man who wanted -- literally -- his pound of flesh.  In structure, the play is a comedy, with a happy ending, at least for the nominal heroes.  But Shakespeare portrays Shylock in such depth and with such understanding that the viewers feel sorry for him despite themselves, and despite the structure of the plot.  We all remember from high school the dramatic lines:

 I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that.

Shylock's eloquence wins him no sympathy from his adversaries within the play.  He is given a harsh choice -- convert to Christianity or suffer execution.  But his eloquence makes a significant impact on those of us who see or read the play -- those of us in both the sixteenth century and today.  Even while applauding Antonio's escape from Shylock's murderous conniving, we leave the theater feeling uneasy with the unfair societal burdens that have given Shylock his cruel bitterness.  As Greenblatt points out:

What Shakespeare bequeathed to us offers the possibility of an escape from the mental ghettos most of us inhabit.

In other words, he helps us to think outside the box of conventional thought.  Shakespeare does not offer solutions to our problems, but he reminds us that human beings are involved on all sides of every issue, that real life -- like Shakespearean plays -- is alive with "moral complexity."

Greenblatt quotes certain haunting lines from a play not included in the Shakespearean canon, but usually attributed to him.  A mob has demanded that Thomas More (Chancellor of England under Henry VIII) expel "foreigners"  from England.  The play has More reply:

Imagine that you see the wretched strangers,
Their babies at their backs and their poor luggage,
Plodding to the ports and coasts for transportation,
And that you sit as kings in your desires ...
What had you got?  I'll tell you: you had taught
How insolence and strong hand should prevail.

You would have set a precedent, More continues, and eventually you yourselves would fall victim to that same precedent. 

Shakespeare offers us no plan for a generous and wise immigration policy in today's world, Greenblatt agrees.  But Shakespeare reminds us of those considerations that we can never ignore.  When expelling the huddled but unwanted masses from our nation, we are not simply killing a few pawns in a chess game.  We must see the realities on the other side as well, the human results of our "desires": "the wretched strangers,/Their babies at their backs and their poor luggage,/Plodding to the ports and coasts for transportation."

Our leader may never have read Shakespeare.  But we, the people, have.