In the middle of The Merchant of Venice, right out of the blue, without warning, the audience is suddenly told that Launcelot the clown has gotten a "Negro" pregnant. Who is this 'Negro'? Why haven't we heard of her before? Why does Shakespeare introduce her into his play? And why, having invented her, does he precipitously drop her? A loose end, to be sure.
The pregnancy seems to be unplanned, both by the characters and the author. It occurs at the point in the play when Shylock's runaway daughter Jessica, newly married and newly converted to Christianity, engages her bridegroom Lorenzo and their clown/servant Launcelot in a bit of superficial banter. Launcelot puts forward the barren jest that Lorenzo is "no good member of the commonwealth," for "in converting Jews to Christianity, [he] raises the price of pork." Lorenzo veers from the context to reply sharply. "I shall answer that better to the commonwealth that you can the getting up of the Negro's belly. The Moor is with child by you, Launcelot." Up until this very moment, there had been no mention of a "Moor" or "Negro" (north Africans and sub-Saharan Africans were not always distinguished in the Elizabethan imagination). It's a sensational, unanticipated accusation and one that Launcelot does not deny. Instead, he attempts to deflect Lorenzo's indignation with clownish wordplay. The subject is abandoned as precipitously as it was raised and the pregnant Moor vanishes from the play. Neither Launcelot nor any other character has alluded to a "Negro" before, nor had there even been the slightest hint that Launcelot has been wooing a lady A perplexed editor simply shrugs his shoulders: "This passage has not been explained."
But where there is no explanation, there is room for conjecture.
The fleeting and mysterious black woman reminds us that The Merchant of Venice explores questions of exogamy. Jewish Jessica elopes with Christian Lorenzo, while the heiress Portia, a native Venetian, is pursued unsuccessfully by Morocco, a "tawny Moor." When Morocco fails the test that might have won him Portia for his bride, Portia expresses pleasure in words that were acceptable then but are unpleasant now: "Let all of his complexion (i.e. race) choose me so." So it would seem that one possible explanation for Launcelot's insemination of the Moor is that Shakespeare started a hare that he didn't bother to pursue; he was sufficiently intrigued by interracial sexual doings to provide Launcelot with a non-white lover, supplementing comedy with farce -- but he lacked either the inclination or the space to develop the relationship more fully. (The fertile subject of love between the races was one that Shakespeare had previously engaged in Titus Andronicus -- in which Aaron the Moor fathers a child upon Tamora, the queen of the Goths -- and would become the tragic motif of Othello.
There's a second possible explanation for the presence of the pregnant Moor. It's known that as originally perormed, the part of the clown Launcelot was played by the much celebrated comedian Will Kemp, whose part Shakespeare might have wanted to sweeten. Who now can imagine with what facial expressions or gestures Kemp, in 1596, responded to Lorenzo's charge. The visual comedy of the past is unrecoverable. Even though Launcelot's quibble on the homonym Moor/more ("It is much that the Moor should be more than reason...") lies absolutely limp on the modern page, we can guess that it would have been made much of (who knows how?) by the great comedian for whom it was composed.
So that while Launcelot's getting the Moor pregnant must remain ultimately mysterious, its odd and curious introduction at this juncture of the play very possibly offered its original audience a moment of humor which later readers and playgoers will never understand or appreciate.
Unsatisfying answers I know. But we must accept the fact that the past is not always explicable.
That Shakespeare wrote for the stage does not render the false starts and loose ends in his plays are any less fascinating. Beware of such knownothingist views, gentle blogreaders, especially when they come from self-promoting writers of vanity press books. The plays wouldn't have been published at all, especially in such elaborate formats as the 1623 Folio, if readership hadn't been cultivated (as recent scholarship has affirmed).
Posted by: Vivian de St. Vrain | March 24, 2009 at 11:47 PM
Shakespeare's plays are full of such side issues as Launcelot's Moor. To seek to explain them can be the work of an idle moment only. In many cases they are probably
topical references which have no meaning now. It is likely Shakespeare simply threw them in to lend the scene a feeling of life going on outside the play. Many of them only show up when the play is read. In the theatre they may pass without notice, and Shakespeare wrote for the theatre not for the book shelf, as I point out in my book, The Ignorance Of Shakespeare.
Posted by: John F.X. Doherty | March 24, 2009 at 11:18 PM