Schedule

LECTURE 1 – WEDNESDAY OCTOBER 11, 2023
“Venice, Supreme City of Wealth, Glamour, and Intrigue, with a Dynamic Diva and Two Pantaloni: The Merchant of Venice”

“Which is the merchant here, and which the Jew?”, asks Portia, cross-dressed as the legal expert Balthazar, 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: as we will study and discuss, their similarities can be instructively linked to the famously Venetian maschera, or character type, of the “commedia dell’arte” Pantalone. As is often the case with Pantalone, these two competitive, wealthy, and aging businessmen lose the person they most love to someone much younger.  In Antonio’s case, the younger rival is Portia herself, who strongly recalls the “Prima Donna” actress-divas of the Italian commedia with her exceptionally versatile qualities as rich young heiress, fairytale princess, Medea-like sorceress, trans-gendered trickster, and eloquently improvising public speaker. Focusing on Portia and her faithful friend and trusted accomplice Nerissa, along with the other cross-dressing and self-transforming female character Jessica, we will consider how these three women represent Venice and its world.  To assist and sharpen our ideas and interpretations, we will look at excerpts from recent cinematic and theatre adaptations, including the film, shot on location, with Al Pacino as Shylock and Lynn Collins as Portia, and the 2015-16 Shakespeare’s Globe live production.

LECTURE 2 – WEDNESDAY OCTOBER 18, 2023
“Venetian Acceptance and Love of Diversity vs. Hate and Racist Prejudice: The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice”

This play, based on an Italian short story, is so famous that it hardly needs any introduction, but what still can come as a surprise is its portrayal of a Venice that generally accepts and supports a North African of dark complexion and non-Christian background, with the one hideous exception of Iago. The mask of Pantalone returns as the Venetian senator Brabantio, father of the bold, charismatic, and much-courted Desdemona, who unlike her Prima Donna counterpart Portia does not disparage a suitor from Morocco but instead falls in love and elopes with him.  Desdemona is enchanted by the formerly enslaved Othello’s tales of travel, battles, and adventures, to the point where her “heart’s subdued even to the very quality of my lord,” having “wished that heaven had made her such a man.”  In other words, this native Venetian woman’s identification with the Moorish outsider is deep and all-encompassing, and together as a united couple they successfully rebuke the charges of witchcraft and immorality brought against them, making Act One of the play, entirely set in Venice, a comedy with a happy ending.  Unfortunately for their story, the play has four more acts, set in the Venetian garrison on the island of Cyprus, where Iago’s deceptive plotting and racist as well as misogynist poison do their destructive work. Again, we will focus on the specifically Venetian aspects of the play, assisted by watching and discussing clips from several recent stage and screen productions.

LECTURE 3 – WEDNESDAY OCTOBER 25, 2023
“In Renaissance Venice, Greed is Fun, Festive, and Energetic… but Is It Good?!: Ben Jonson, Volpone”

The Tragedy of Othello ends in a bed, and the comedy of Volpone, or The Fox begins in one, back in Venice.  We are invited to imagine ourselves inside a sumptuous palazzo, where an aging and fabulously wealthy “Magnifico,” 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, likened to a crow, raven, and vulture. 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. Here Volpone disguises himself as a mountebank, and like a quack Dottore of the “commedia dell’arte” hustles his “precious liquor” to an admiring crowd, until the insanely jealous merchant Corvino interrupts the proceedings, aptly calling himself a Pantalone and casting his innocent wife as a promiscuous “Franciscina”.  More intriguing encounters and complications ensue, as Jonson takes us on a rollicking imaginary trip through Venice’s houses, courts, streets, piazze, and canals, filled with twists, turns, and an exciting climax that enables audiences to think deeply while they also laugh heartily. As we will discuss, a major facet of Jonson’s theatrical portrait of Venice is the reflecting link between the opulent “floating” city of Palladio’s glittering façades of Palladio, Titian’s sensual paintings, the courtesan poet Veronica Franco’s love lyrics, the erotic madrigals of Monteverdi, the lavish banquets of Carnival, private parties in gleamingly gilt gondolas, etc. and the booming, ambitious, and ever more commercialized early 17^thcentury metropolis of London. Thus the superstar city of Venice, on the Globe stage not far from the Thames river, can be strangely familiar, a fantasy island filled with fun facts, and a still modern mirror of personal identities and social relationships lacerated by competitive, acquisitive, obsessive greed. And did I mention that this play is inventively smart as well as outrageously funny?!