Dr. Eric Nicholson

What gave the unique city of Venice an almost irresistible allure for early modern English people, and made it a dynamic setting for outstanding plays by Shakespeare and his contemporaries? This is a key question of this special webinar, also a preview of my three-part seminar on “Venice, Superstar City of the Shakespearean Stage” to be offered in October.“Superstar” is an appropriate tile, as is “Diva,” since in its historical “theatre of the world” Venice played a leading role, with its complex blend of the real and the imaginary, of natural-artistic beauty and grace with potential moral and physical corruption. It was not only Europe’s most cosmopolitan city, but also its favorite playground, in every sense. Leading English playwrights like William Shakespeare and Ben Jonson could count on their audiences’ desire to glimpse versions of the Reality and Myth of Venice acted out on London stages.
In The Merchant of Venice, the play’s leading lady Portia, cross-dressed as the legal expert Balthazar, asks “Which is the merchant here, and which the Jew?”, soon after she/”he” arrives at the courtroom presided over by the Doge of Venice himself. Her question implies that the play’s title character Antonio and his opponent Shylock are as similar as they are different. ndeed, their similarities in many ways derive from the famously Venetian maschera, or character type, of the “commedia dell’arte” Pantalone. At the same time, Portia and her trusted accomplice Nerissa, along with the other cross-dressing and self-transforming female character Jessica, also have strong links to Italian role models, and in many ways represent Venice herself. In Shakespeare’s next Venetian play, The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice, the mask of Pantalone returns as the senator Brabantio, father of the bold and charismatic Desdemona. Unlike her Prima Donna counterpart Portia, this much-desired heiress does not disparage a suitor from North Africa but instead falls in love and elopes with him. Her fascination, identification, and love affair with an outsider resemble the thoughts and feelings that Londoners often had for Venice, as seen in Ben Jonson’s brilliantly funny comedy Volpone, or the Fox, set in a sumptuous Venetian palazzo. Here the title character, as much for fun as for profit, pretends to be dying and ready to choose his heir among a pack of gift-giving but self-interested, scavenging, and insatiably greedy Venetians. Several English characters, early practitioners of the Grand Tour of Italy, also enter the scene, which changes to an “obscure nook” of the Piazza San Marco. Intriguing encounters and complications ensue, as Jonson takes us on a rollicking imaginary trip through Venice’s houses, courts, streets, piazzas, and canals, filled with twists, turns, and an exciting climax that enables audiences to think deeply while also laughing heartily.
Thus the webinar will introduce you to how the superstar city of Venice, as portrayed on the Globe stage, could and still can be strangely familiar, a fantasy island filled with fun facts, and a complex dramatic mirror of modern personal identities and social relationships.