Black Shylock

Francis Dows did not go along with the generally accepted principle of our century that a teacher has a moral obligation to like his pupils. Affection was not necessary to the training of tigers, seals nor even of dogs, so why should it be to the instruction of such brutes as made up the eighth grade English class at St. Christopher's? Of course, he had to be careful to avoid being caught, by parents or even by the boys themselves, in any open display of animosity. It was a kind of parlor game and one that the latter, God bless them, thoroughly enjoyed. They were always doing their exuberant, whooping best to drive him into open country.

The boys of St. Christopher's exuded the peculiar confidence of Manhattan's upper middle class, rejoicing belligerently in being thoroughly abreast of all modern currents. They were up on everything, from the destruction of the ecology to the building of anti-ballistic-missile sites, and their ideas of integration, urban renewal and world disarmament were fashionably liberal. Sometimes Francis felt that he was being answered by 30 shrill voices from The New York Times editorial page. It was a world that he had known only too well through his ex-wife's family. Indeed, his own son was in the eighth grade, a situation that the boy, considering his abominable grades, owed more to his maternal grandsire's position as chairman of St. Christopher's trustees than to his father's being a poor pedagog.

Standing, on a November morning, by the door to his classroom in the five-minute break between classes, Francis assumed the pose of storklike immobility that he felt suited his tall, polelike, darkly tweeded figure and pretended to be oblivious of the din of the corridor. The eighth grade poured by him into the classroom, shouting, laughing, whistling. Francis ignored them, even when they greeted him loudly by name, as a long-incarcerated creature in a zoo might ignore the hustling crowd beyond its bars. His aloofness was not resented. He even enjoyed a certain bleak popularity with the older boys as a character, whose reputation for sardonic sarcasm gave a mild status to those whom he deigned to notice. It was a mark of sophistication to be singled out as a target by Mr. Dows.

As the second bell sounded, and as Francis turned to enter his classroom, he spotted, peering up over the landing of the stairway and apparently waiting for him to disappear, the pale, round countenance of Mr. Tomkins, the headmaster, and the redder one, under red-gray hair and over a blue collar, of his former wife's father, Leo Wright. The headmaster was taking his chairman on the monthly tour and obviously hoped to avoid a confrontation with the detested "ex." Chuckling, Francis strode over to them.

"Good morning, Headmaster. Good morning, Mr. Chairman. I trust you are well? I trust Mrs. Wright is well? I trust all your family are well?"

"Just fine, thank you, Dows," Leo Wright grumbled. "Just fine."

"Would you do me the honor of visiting my class? I think you might find a bit of amusement in it. We shall be discussing The Merchant of Venice, which the eighth grade is presenting for Christmas. I had so hoped that your grandson, Daniel, might play Old Gobbo, but Mr. Tomkins seems to feel that it would be difficult for him to be directed by his own father. Do you agree, sir?"

Mr. Wright gave a glance of appeal to the headmaster. Mr. Tomkins, normally a gentle, preoccupied man, could be surprisingly forceful under direct attack.

"It is hardly the time, Dows, to go into family matters," Mr. Tomkins reproved him. "Nor is Mr. Wright here this morning for his amusement. May I remind you that your class is waiting for you?"

"Thank you, Headmaster." It was another of Francis' little needling habits to address Mr. Tomkins in the English style. "I shall be with them anon. Good day, Mr. Wright. Please give my best wishes to Mrs. Wright. And to Mrs. Wright Dows."

And with a simpering smile as a final insult, he returned to his classroom, noting with satisfaction, as he closed the door, that the little encounter had been overheard and enjoyed by all.

"I was so hoping," he announced to the class, "that my former father-in-law, the august chairman of St. Christopher's board, would be able to visit us for a few minutes; but, alas, he is too busy. His time is precious. Your classmate's grandfather has a great name in the paper-book industry. He brings Shakespeare to the unwashed multitudes. To the poor and lowly. To the slums and ghettos." Here Francis paused, as if lost in admiration. "In due time, he will no doubt bring Shakespeare to the moon!"

He directed a smile at his son, Daniel, seated in the back row, but the boy did not return it. This did not have to mean any resentment on Daniel's part. He was very saving in his responses. He seemed to accept the situation, the reverse of his classmates', that he should see his father at school and not at home. He was a fat, moonfaced boy with small distrustful eyes. He did badly in his studies only because he was lazy. One could tell by the sharpness of the wisecracking with which he dominated his more successful contemporaries that he had a store of unused intelligence. He liked to loiter on corners, in playgrounds, in drugstores and impress other boys with his knowledge of sex. For adults, as for schoolwork, he had no use, barely even contempt. It was as if he were simply waiting for the inevitable enfranchisement of time.

Francis pulled out his pocket watch and held it down to his navel as he examined it. "I shall ask you to write a theme this morning. Do you consider that Jessica was morally justified in stealing her father's ducats when she eloped with Lorenzo? Ten minutes."

Ignoring the groan that always went up at the announcement of a theme, he took his seat as they turned to their pads. He needed a moment to savor the little scene in the corridor. For six years now, ever since Arabella had flown to Juárez for their divorce, his keenest satisfaction had been in not resigning from St. Christopher's faculty. Word had been privately conveyed to him that if he would give up the position, originally obtained only through the grace of his ex-father-in-law, the latter could be counted on to secure him a better one, at a larger salary, at Buckley or St. Bernard's. But Francis had retorted that St. Christopher's suited him down to the ground and that he liked being able to see his son Danny on weekdays as well as on the meager Saturday-afternoon visits stipulated in the separation agreement drawn up by Mr. Wright's expensive counsel. Oh, he had them! They could never remove poor Danny from a school where his bad record was covered by his grandfather's favor, and they could never remove him, the wretched father, without seeming to act for the most invidious of reasons.

"Hand in your papers," he told the class, precisely at the expiration of the given time, "and let us proceed to the day's topic. We will not discuss Jessica until I have read what you have to say. Personally, I think she was a bitch." He paused for a moment, as the room tittered. "I see that expression of 'Good, I guessed right!' on some of your faces. But most of you must surely know by now that your grades are not advanced by the coincidence--if it is a coincidence--of your happening to agree with me."

The tittering ceased and Francis turned to the subject of the morning.

"We do not know how Shylock was portrayed in Shakespeare's day, but it seems probable, by comparison with Marlowe's The Jew of Malta, that he was depicted as the blackest kind of villain. Certainly, this interpretation prevailed in the next two centuries. It was not until the 19th that great actors, particularly Sir Henry Irving, began to enjoy playing him as a sympathetic, even a noble character. Today, in some quarters, there has been a reaction against this so-called sentimentalization of Shylock. How about you, Burrows? How would you play him?"

"Well, I think; sir, you could do it both ways. Shylock is certainly a villain to plot against Antonio; but then, Antonio shouldn't have spat on his gabardine."

"I've always found it a bit difficult to picture Antonio doing that," Francis observed judiciously. "It doesn't seem quite like him."

"But Shylock says he does."

"Perhaps he was speaking metaphorically. Anyway, Antonio certainly sneers at him, which may be just as bad. How would you do Shylock, Gates?"

"I think I'd make him pathetic, sir. After all, he loved his daughter and she betrayed him."

"Did he love Jessica? In what line of the text does he reveal that to you?"

"Well, I can't point to the exact line, sir, but the general impression----"

"I'll have nothing to do with your general impressions, Gates. How about you, Pitney?"

"Well, sir, I think I agree with Burrows."

Francis was disappointed as he went through the class. After all, at least a fifth of them were Jewish, though none came of orthodox families. He found it difficult to believe that the question of persecution would not, sooner or later, find its way into the discussion. But after ten minutes of chatter, he had to give up indirection.

"What about playing Shylock as the hero and spokesman of a persecuted race?" he demanded. "What would you say to that, Levy?"

"He wasn't persecuted, sir. He was disliked. I asked my father about it. He said we Jews were all right as long as we were only disliked. We can rule the world as long as we're only disliked."

"But Jews were more than just disliked in Shakespeare's time," Francis protested. "They were actively persecuted in many places. I wonder if their plight is not comparable with that of the Negro in our own time. Mightn't that be the way to play The Merchant today? With Shylock a Negro?"

The class murmured in surprise.

"But the text doesn't justify that!" Levy pointed out, shocked. "Everyone would think you had mixed it up with Othello."

"Works of art are like constitutions," Francis retorted. "They need to be constantly reinterpreted. We don't have to be confined to what Shakespeare subjectively intended. Burrows, you're going to be Shylock. How about doing it in blackface?"

"Oh, Mr. Dows, you're kidding!"

"I'm not, truly. I suggest it's the only way to make him the hero."

"The hero! But, sir, he wants to kill Antonio. He wants to cut his heart out with a knife. He wants to do it himself, too!"

"Yes, but why does he want to do it?"

"Because Antonio has been snooty to him."

"Exactly. Because he has spat upon him! Metaphorically or not."

"But, sir, you don't cut a man's heart out for that."

"It's just what you do do!"

The last comment came from the back bench and was uttered in a kind of bark. To everyone's surprise, the utterer was Daniel Dows. Daniel had never before voluntarily contributed to a class discussion, which had been set down to his natural embarrassment at having his father in charge. Similarly, he had refused any part in the class plays and could be used only to paint scenery. But now he seemed involved. He glared about the room as if his own integrity had been called in question.

"Thank you, Daniel," Francis replied. "I'm glad that the Dows think alike. Nobody is going to spit on our gabardines, are they?"

Daniel, at this, immediately lost interest. He shrugged and drew a large circle on the pad before him.

"Seriously, boys," Francis continued, "I suggest that Daniel and I are the only ones here in tune with the times. The greatest crime in the world we live in--perhaps the only one that young people still take seriously--is to insult a man because of his race. Now, what does Antonio do but just that? He struts about the Rialto in his languid way, sneering at Jews and expectorating on their gabardines. For this, he has deserved the humiliating death from which he is spared only by the tricky casuistry of Portia, a typical establishment lawyer. But the fact that Shylock goes down to defeat before white power cannot lessen the splendor of his ideal!"

The room looked at him doubtfully. They never knew whether he was joking or not, but like good bourgeois, they also knew that it did not much matter.

"It would be an awfully funny Merchant," Burrows observed.

"It would be an awfully novel one," Francis returned, "and I can assure you that it would not be soon forgotten. What do you say we try it?"

This was followed by an outburst of questions.

"Would we change the text to make Shylock really black?"

"Would a Negro be apt to be a moneylender?"

"How about Jessica? What color would she be?"

"And Tubal?"

Francis held up his hands for silence as the questions proliferated. "We would not change a word of the text. The Jews in Venice would be black, that's all. Tubal would certainly be black. Jessica could be very light, for in the play, she abandons her Jewish faith. But the real change would be in the Venetians. In the trial scene, they would become a howling, lynching mob, out for Shylock's blood!"

The boys who were cast as Gratiano and Bassanio began to see possibilities in this and enthusiasm gradually permeated the class. As Francis had foreseen, it was the idea of secrecy that most appealed to them, the prospect of confounding the yuletime audience of their unwary parents with a shocking interpretation of the Bard. By the end of the hour, they were so excited that they were talking among themselves, threatening corporal chastisement on any member who leaked the plan.

Afterward, as he neatly erased from the blackboard the suggested chronology of Shakespeare's plays that he had as neatly chalked there for his own diversion, Francis considered with gratification the continuing frustration of Messrs. Tomkins and Wright. For how could they possibly object to his black Shylock? Was it not "relevant," as the young people said? Was it not just about as relevant as a production could be? Was it not precisely the kind of thing that his ex-father-in-law pretended to believe in?

He had met his wife while he had been working for this brisk, bustling, jovial, red-faced, red-tied, blue-shirted reissuer of classics and smut. Arabella and her brothers had been bigger, paler, milder reproductions of the busy sire whom they had wholly admired and almost invariably obeyed. Indeed, as far as Francis could make out, the only expression of filial independence in the life of his bland, blonde spouse had been her surprising and bitterly contested election of himself. For Leo Wright, however strong a partisan of the struggling writer, had no desire for one in his own family. A writer, to marry a Wright, had first to make his mark, had first to qualify with a signed photograph in the gallery of celebrities that constituted the great man's office. It had been Arabella's single error to have believed that she had out-guessed her progenitor in respect to Francis' capacity to join this gallery.

Oh, the Wrights had all tried, yes, but it had been worse than if they hadn't. Stuck with Francis Dows, they had attempted to make something of him and, in so doing, they had revealed the full horror of their Philistinism. They had got hold of his poor, pale manuscripts and had belabored him with suggestions: that he should put in more sex or more violence, that he should use more images or more literary conundrums, that he should be obscurer or simpler, more lucid or more problematical. The only short story that he had published after his marriage, a brief sylvan fantasy of childhood memories of the Adirondacks, had been greeted with snorts of derision.

"Writing for yourself in this way," his ex-father-in-law had reproached him, "is a form of masturbation." Francis had retorted that publishing as the Wrights did it was a form of rape. This crack had resulted in his transfer to St. Christopher's.

Standing up to the assembled Wrights would have been all very well, might, indeed, have provided the justification of a lifetime--or part of one, anyway--had Arabella only learned her proper role. She belonged with her family--what could have been more blatantly obvious? Yet she had had the poor taste to cling tenaciously to her conjugal duties, to try with a foolish pathos to reconcile her family and husband, to quench the scorn of one and to deflect the irritability of the other. It exasperated Francis that, even agreeing with the Wright estimate of his incapacity, as she could never quite help herself from doing, his wife should still want him. Arabella's husband might not be much, her blurry gaze seemed to concede to her impatient father, but might she not for that very reason be allowed to keep him for her own? There were moments when Francis, trying to prove to her what her mistake had been, was made to feel as if he were pounding with an oar on the desperate fingers that clutched the gunwale of a lifeboat. God, what a position to be in! There was no end to the male-factions of the Wrights. Even when he was most their victim, they went on as if he were the monster!

Arabella had given in at last. She had returned to her family with their son; she had gone to Mexico under the orders of her father's attorney. Back in the Wright camp, she had resumed her filial, pre-Dows submissiveness. Nothing now interfered with the bristling wall of Philistia by which Francis felt himself encircled. The war would be open and clean and without quarter. He could represent the soul of man against the spirit incarnate of vulgarity. He could fight the enemy from within its own citadel.

The rehearsals of The Merchant of Venice were almost as exciting as Francis had hoped. The boys developed an unprecedented enthusiasm. It exhilarated their director to observe with what high spirits and facility they converted themselves, under his interpretation, into a wolf pack. The boy who played Antonio, in his first scene with Shylock, was quite marvelously mocking. When he said, "The Hebrew will turn Christian; he grows kind," he did it in a pretended aside to Bassanio, but raised his voice as if to call after the departing Shylock. Then he and Bassanio burst into wild shrieks of insanely insulting laughter. Later, Salanio and Salarino continued the baiting in the same spirit, and Francis was almost ready to wager that by the time of the trial scene, the audience would be antagonized to the point of wanting a pound of Portia's flesh.

And then, only three days before the Christmas performance, Burrows, who played Shylock, came down with the mumps. For 48 hours, Francis worked desperately with one and then another substitute, but it was hopeless. They simply could not learn the part in the time left. Francis locked himself in his classroom for 15 minutes of contemplation. Was it, as his pounding heart told him, the chance of his lifetime? Then he walked down the corridor to the headmaster's office and announced that he would have to act Shylock himself or cancel the play.

"But can you?" Mr. Tomkins asked in astonishment. "Can you learn the part overnight?"

"I know it already," Francis replied with a touch of superiority. "I shall simply have to run over it by myself and rent my costume. But for that, I shall need all tomorrow morning off. Can you get someone to take my classes?"

"Certainly, my dear fellow. I'll take them myself!"

"Then I shall be here at two. The curtain's at two-thirty. Everything else is ready."

Francis made himself up the following afternoon in a closet off the stage. He allowed nobody to see him until the curtains had actually parted, and he could hear Antonio, in the opening line, wondering why he was so sad. Then he walked to the wings and awaited his cue.

There was a gasp from the dark void beyond the footlights as the tall black figure in flowing robes of sky blue strode out upon the stage, followed by a gesticulating Bassanio. Folding his arms, towering ominously and silently over Antonio's friend, the Shylock of Francis Dows gazed contemptuously about at a white man's Venice. He allowed the would-be borrower to saw the air for a minute before he responded, with a rich low gravity of tone: "Three thousand ducats--well." He maintained this air of aloofness right up to his first aside, and then, stepping to the footlights and removing himself abruptly from the world of Bassanio and Antonio, he shouted in a fit of fury, directly into that section of the audience where he knew Leo Wright was sitting: "I hate him for he is a Christian!"

In the negotiation of the contract, he never fawned hypocritically, never whined and bowed, as he had seen so many Shylocks do. He pointed out, in measured tones, with haughty demeanor, the wrongs that Jews habitually received of Venetians and contrasted these with the good that he ostensibly offered to Antonio, throwing off the implied question, with a magnificent shrug of his shoulders, of which, under the circumstances, was the superior race.

As the audience recovered from the first shock of his costume and black face, it became silent as a school audience hardly ever was. When Shylock went off stage, the applause was tumultuous.

Francis, exulting in the wings, thinking with feverish rapidity, decided on a new version of the scene with Tubal. This had posed the biggest problem for his heroic interpretation; for in it, Shylock seems irretrievably avaricious. But he would play it now as if the stolen ducats represented to Shylock the indispensable weapon of a persecuted race. When he came on stage, he was bent over, groaning, clasping his hand to his side, as if in despair at the thought of an empty scabbard. And his contempt for Jessica was total, monumental. She had written herself out of the tribe; she had ceased to exist for him. The money that he was spending in her pursuit was only to recover the ducats, ducats that would be vital to his war against the hated Christian.

The trial scene was the perfect climax to his interpretation. Never had he dreamed that the eighth grade could rise to such histrionics. As he stood in the center of the court, drawing himself up to his gauntest, his grimmest, running his finger gently over the bared blade of his knife, the boys who played the Venetian riffraff howled about him, screaming anti-Semitic insults, and were pushed back by supposed marshals of the court. Francis, aware of the tenseness of his audience, wondered if he had not become the incarnation of the spirit of old Africa, demanding the flesh of Simon Legree!

The boy who played Portia almost stole the scene from him. He was cute, giggling, tricky. It was as if all the principal characters were in on the plot, drawing it out only to intensify the ultimate humiliation of the Jew. But Francis had everyone's attention back at the end. When he broke, he broke rapidly, bending over as if stricken by a hideous (concluded on page 198)Black Shylock(continued from page 84) stomach-ache, and fairly screamed in his agony. Then, limping slowly, his hands on the shoulders of two tiny marshals, he hobbled off stage, as if to desired extinction, while the mob howled in victory.

When he appeared to take his curtain call, the entire audience rose. It was a day without precedent. His ex-father-in-law came backstage to shake his hand.

"It was a fantastic experience, Francis," he said in a tone that his ex-son-in-law remembered as the one that he reserved for his most important authors. "I take a personal pride in the whole thing, because I always maintained that you had a first-class talent. Only we didn't know exactly what it consisted of. Now, of course, it's clear. You're a great interpreter! You have the gift of putting Shakespeare across so that he's almost frighteningly alive. I don't say that you should necessarily go on the stage. But maybe we should arrange for a series of Shakespeare readings or recordings. I don't know. We'll have to see. We'll have to look into things. God bless you, my boy!"

When Leo Wright had left, Mr. Tomkins came in to add his felicitations.

"I've brought someone else to see you, Francis," he said, and Francis turned around to see his son.

"You were good, Dad."

Francis stared intently at that impassive face. Then, with only half an idea of embarrassing the hovering headmaster, he threw his arms around the boy's neck. Mr. Tomkins fled.

"Oh, Danny, do you really think so?"

Danny pulled away roughly from his father's embrace. "I said I did, didn't I? You don't have to make a production of it."

Francis stood up straight at this, again the teacher, a bit wilted, of the eighth grade. "I'm sorry. I must have been carried away. I guess that's what acting does to a man. And a very good reason why gentlemen should not become actors. But your approval means something to me, Daniel. I've had only its reverse. I've only been conscious of you sitting there, in the back of the classroom, sneering."

"I don't sneer at you."

"Oh, come off it. You know you do!"

"I don't. You're a good teacher. You're a good actor, too. Ma says you could have been a real actor."

"Does she? I didn't think she ever mentioned me."

"Oh, she talks about you all the time. She's always asking about you. You could have her back, you know. You wouldn't even have to whistle."

Was it possible? Was it conceivable that life could be that simple? That all he had to do was whistle and a loving, rich wife would be his? For a moment, Francis felt like one who has been awakened from a deep sleep by the sudden rattle of a shade snapped up. He turned away, writhing inwardly, burrowing his face into an imagined pillow to shut out the hard, garish light of a world that refused to let him be a rebel and martyr.

"No, Danny, I can't do that. I can't put the clock back. I never fitted into your grandfather's family; and even if divorce is wrong, remarriage doesn't make it right. And I'm not going to stay on at St. Christopher's, either. Because I've discovered something. I've discovered I'm a fraud and a phony. I've cultivated the art of protest without having anything to protest about. I've been playing parlor games in a world that's serious. But at least I know now what a man can do. A man with a cause."

Even as he talked, he felt his elation draining away. He was not going to be a man with a cause. Not at 40, anyway. The human mind was made up of habit, as the body was of water. And as the vision of his indefinite continuance as a self-dramatized rebel, a poser before boys, jumped back into his mind, like an old, hated slide stuck in a projecting machine, he felt nausea in his throat.

"Daniel, help me!" he appealed. "Help me! I can't stay here!"

The boy turned and walked deliberately to the lectern. It was the headmaster's, kept in that room while the stage was in use, and it supported the great school Bible from which the lesson was read at prayers. As Francis watched, paralyzed, his son opened the heavy volume, grasped a handful of pages and ripped them out. Tossing them to the floor at his father's feet, he stated in his flat tone: "You told the class that if a man spat on you, you should cut his heart out."

Francis, awed, knew that he was looking into the eggy eyes of a delinquent. He would have to find a cause, and a good one, to make up for the damage he had done.

he taught prep school english and his son was in his class, which complicated life. . . . . . but much graver problems loomed when he played shakespeare's jew as a negro