Title: "This may appear unmanly Tenderness". Homosocial bonds and (un)ruly women in George Granville's The Jew of Venice (1701)
Source document: Theatralia. 2021, vol. 24, iss. 1, pp. 61-77
Extent
61-77
-
ISSN1803-845X (print)2336-4548 (online)
Persistent identifier (DOI): https://doi.org/10.5817/TY2021-1-5
Stable URL (handle): https://hdl.handle.net/11222.digilib/143814
Type: Article
Language
License: CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International
Notice: These citations are automatically created and might not follow citation rules properly.
Abstract(s)
In 1701 George Granville produced an adaptation of Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, which he renamed The Jew of Venice. In the preface, Granville declared he was operating in the wake of the "great men" who, before him, fitted Shakespeare's works for the Restoration stage and indeed the simplification of his plot and excision of a few characters seem to follow this lead. Although one may expect the new play to revolve mainly around Shylock, the Jew becomes little more than a (doubtfully) comic appendix, while Bassanio's role and his relationship with Antonio, now characterised by overt loving feelings, receive Granville's closest attention. This, however, seems to go against the play's Prologue in which Dryden's ghost laments the endorsement of open homosexuality on the contemporary stage, apparently cleansing both Granville's and Shakespeare's plays from this 'accusation'. Unexpectedly enough, though, the Jew of Venice is remarkably rich in allusions to the two friends' (homosexual) bonding which eventually leads to the exclusion of women and the silencing of their 'unruliness'. This raises a few questions: was Granville exploring the topic of male-male ties by camouflaging the operation under a misleading title? How does this operation fit into a dawning new mode of Shakespearian adaptations? And how did The Jew of Venice respond to contemporary social and cultural trends, also with regard to women's social role and position?
References
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[2] BURNABY, William. 1931. Love Betray'd or The Agreeable Disapointment. In Frederick E. Budd (ed.). The Dramatic Works of William Burnaby. London: The Scholartis Press, 1931, 343–403.
[3] CALVI, Lisanna. 2020. Of Flowers and Weeds. Veering Towards Comedy in Benjamin Victor's Adaptation of The Two Gentlemen of Verona (1762). Il castello di Elsinore (2020): 82: 9–20.
[4] CIBBER, Colley. 1965. The Tragical History of King Richard III. In Christopher Spencer (ed.). Five Restoration Adaptations of Shakespeare. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1965: 275–344.
[5] CRAFT, Catherine A. 1987. Granville's 'Jew of Venice' and the Eighteenth-Century Stage. Restoration and Eighteenth Century Theatre Research 2 (1987): 2: 38–54.
[6] DAVIDSON, Jenny. 2012. Shakespeare adaptation. In Fiona Ritchie and Peter Sabor (eds). Shakespeare in the Eighteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012: 185–203.
[7] DEFOE, Daniel. 1701. The Villainy of Stock-Jobbers Detected. London: n.p., 1701.
[8] DOBSON, Michael. 1992. The Making of the National Poet. Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Authorship, 1660–1769. Oxford: Clarendon, 1992.
[9] FRYE, Northrop. 1957. The Anatomy of Criticism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957.
[10] GRANVILLE, George. 1965. The Jew of Venice. In Christopher Spencer (ed.). Five Restoration Adaptations of Shakespeare. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1965: 345–402.
[11] HAGGERTY, George E. 1999. Men in Love. Masculinity and Sexuality in the Eighteenth Century. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999.
[12] HAGGERTY, George E. 2003. Male Love and Friendship in the Eighteenth Century. In Katherine O'Donnell and Michael O'Rourke (eds.). Love, Sex, Intimacy and Friendship between Men, 1550–1800. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003: 70–81.
[13] HALPERIN, David M. 2003. Introduction: Among Men – History, Sexuality, and the Return of Affect. In Katherine O'Donnell and Michael O'Rourke (eds.). Love, Sex, Intimacy and Friendship between Men, 1550–1800. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003: 1–11.
[14] JARDINE, Lisa. 1987. Cultural Confusion and Shakespeare's Learned Heroines: 'These are old paradoxes'. Shakespeare Quarterly 38 (1987) 1: 1–18. | DOI 10.2307/2870398
[15] INNOCENTI, Loretta. 2010. La scena trasformata. Adattamenti neoclassici di Shakespeare. Pisa: Pacini, 2010.
[16] LANIER, Douglas M. 2019. The Merchant of Venice. Language & Writing. London/New York: Bloomsbury, 2019.
[17] LÉVI-STRAUSS, Claude. 1969. The Elementary Structures of Kinship. Boston: Beacon Press, 1969.
[18] MARSDEN, Jean I. 1995. The Re-Imagined Text. Shakespeare, Adaptation, & Eighteenth-Century Literary Theory. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1995.
[19] MURRAY, Barbara. 2012. 'Strange Star': Same-Sex Love and William Burnaby's Love Betray'd or The Agreeable Disapointment (1703). English Studies 93 (2012): 2: 177–187. | DOI 10.1080/0013838X.2011.649064
[20] NEWMAN, Karen. 1987. Portia's Ring: Unruly Women and Structures of Exchange in The Merchant of Venice. Shakespeare Quarterly 38 (1987): 1: 19–33.
[21] PATTERSON, Steve. 1999. The Bankruptcy of Homoerotic Amity in Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice. Shakespeare Quarterly 50 (1999): 1: 9–32. | DOI 10.2307/2902109
[22] ROWE, Nicholas. 1709. The works of Mr. William Shakespear in Six Volumes. London: Printed for Jacob Tonson, 1709.
[23] SCHNEIDER, Ben Ross. 1993. Granville's Jew of Venice (1701): A Close Reading of Shakespeare's Merchant. Restoration: Studies in English Literary Culture, 1660–1700 17 (1993): 2: 111–134.
[24] SEDGWICK Kosofsky, Eve. 1985. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985.
[25] SHAKESPEARE, William. 2010. The Merchant of Venice. John Drakakis (ed.). London/New York: Bloomsbury, 2010.
[26] SINFIELD, Alan. 1996. How to read The Merchant of Venice without being heterosexist. In Terence Hawkes (ed.). Alternative Shakespeares 2. London/New York: Routledge, 1996: 123–139.
[27] STAVES, Susan. 1990. Married Women's Separate Property in England, 1660–1833. Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard University Press, 1990.
[28] WILSON, Harold J. 1943. Granville's 'Stock-Jobbing Jew'. Philological Quarterly 13 (1943): 1: 1–15.
[29] ZACCHI, Romana. 1994. The Jew of Venice di George Granville. In Mariangela Tempera (ed.). The Merchant of Venice dal testo alla scena. Bologna: Clueb, 1994, 197–211.
[30] ZEMON DAVIS, Natalie. 1975. Society and Culture in Early Modern France. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1975.