[In the following essay, Fleissner considers the influence of Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice on Death in Venice.]

To what extent was Thomas Mann inspired by no less than Shakespeare in writing his most famous novella, Der Tod in Venedig? That he was somewhat under such histrionic influence elsewhere can scarcely be questioned, but, to my knowledge, a serious case has not yet been made concerning such a debt here. Still, a position might be taken in favor of at least indirect influence of The Merchant of Venice (and not merely titularly with the Venetian ending, though that would also constitute a factor), owing to the relative proximity of his comments on the play and the composition of his own story.

The leading, or most provocative, piece of evidence is thematic: notably use of homosexuality (or, at any rate, homoeroticism) rampant in both works. Probably this Shakespeare comedy is the leading drama of his in which such allusion to sexual inversion has been prominently said to appear (with the possible exception of Othello, where it is more debatable), though strictly speaking only the reference to a “masculine whore” in Troilus and Cressida (5.1.16)¹ is ironclad proof thereof. The basic piece of evidence, some feel, seems to be intimated in the very first line, Antonio's “In sooth I know not why I am so sad”—the answer being in his unconscious predilections for Bassanio.

But the purpose of the present discussion is not to cover this psychoanalytic subject in full detail, only to mention that it has been taken seriously enough in this context. For example, a dramatic production with this emphasis appeared at the University of Michigan already in the '50s. Recently I happened to bring up the matter at the Shakespeare Institute at Wheaton College, the conference on Shakespearean comedy and Christianity (30 May - 1 June 1996), and the leading speaker (a noted editor of The Merchant of Venice, it so happened) acknowledged the point during the discussion period and immediately chose to connect this with modern speculation concerning the Elizabethan author's own overt sexual preferences in the Sonnets.² My own predilection then was not to go that far, as I subsequently pointed out, because the poet's crypto-Catholic upbringing most probably detracted from irregular sexuality, thought to be against Natural Law,³ though a certain homoeroticism might still be extant in some of the poems (e.g., no. 20). This qualified acceptance seemed to be allowed for by some others at this symposium.

The tie-in with Mann is in terms of the love of Gustav von Aschenbach for the youth Tadzio in Der Tod in Venedig—deviate sexuality which might, in turn, have a certain indirect biographical basis at least insofar as Mann's wife was Jewish and thereby very probably admired the writings of Freud, who posited, as is well known, that humans in general are naturally bisexual creatures. This rationale could then have influenced Mann himself along creative lines, though admittedly his Freudian interests could have arisen independently.

Yet how would the “Death” element in the novella relate back to the comedy, it might be asked? Again a Freudian response is applicable: in terms of Renaissance times, Shakespeare's age, the abstract concept of death sometimes could convey orgiastic connotations (most obviously in the poetry of John Donne); so some of these overtones could also have filtered into Mann's work by way of Shakespeare. For even though he deals mainly with a literal death by “suicide” in his most famous novella, the implications of sexual release as constituting a certain death effect, especially when not consummated properly (or conventionally), are also present. Presumably such a “death” would be compensated for properly if a child is born as a result thereof; thus it would lead to rebirth, early Freud's thanatos notwithstanding. Compare Mann's leading article “Freud's Position in the History of Modern Thought,” in the journal edited by T. S. Eliot, The Criterion,⁴ in which he announces that Freud “defines life as the play and interplay of Eros and the death urge” (568).

Now does the Christological religious factor in Shakespeare's play have any bearing then on the novella? On the surface, it may appear not to relate significantly at all, but Venice in both cases being recognized as a noted Roman Catholic city can hardly be completely dismissed. The matter of Shylock having to convert in the fourth act certainly becomes a dominant theatrical factor. Likewise Tadzio's being Polish, again from a country known for its stringent Catholicism, might enter the picture. Certainly Mann could be very sensitive to such religious issues. In Buddenbrooks, for example, consider Pastor Wunderlich and the Consul's remark “As a Christian, as a religious man, I can find no room in my heart …” (Chap. V, p. 19).⁵ The letters between Mann and Hermann Hesse reveal enough close interconnections between Christianity and Judaism too (e.g., Mann's letters of March and April 1934 regarding Wagner).⁶

As for Shakespearean indebtedness, Mann quoted from Hamlet, “The readiness is all” (5.2.211), in his correspondence with Hesse (8 April 1945). Elsewhere he could cite the Danish tragedy ad nauseam. Compare explicit reference to another comedy, Love's Labour's Lost as “pleasant well-conceited” in Doktor Faustus several times (pp. 215, 402).⁷ Other dramas he would randomly cite included King Lear, Macbeth, Othello, and again a major comedy, A Midsummer Night's Dream.

True, the Faustus novel bears much more on the German Faust tradition than it does on any overt Shakespearean connection; however, the latter should not be simply ruled out (even as, incidentally, the influence of a Faustus theme in, say, Hamlet, via Marlowe's version, cannot be either). So it is not so surprising to run into such a phrase as “like King Claudius' prayer, it can ‘never to heaven go’” in Doktor Faustus (173) (Hamlet, 3. 3. 98). And because this novel is often said to symbolize Nazi Germany's own pact with the devil, is it not germane to recall how the leader of the Third Reich happened to look so favorably upon Der Kaufmann von Venedig that he considered it even his favorite play? Probably what counted mainly for him was the downfall of Shylock. In any case, productions of the comedy then were known in Germany, as Meller for one, points out.⁸ Mann was aware of some of this, allowing him to be influenced in his own way.

Any relevance of the Merchant play to Der Tod in Venedig was still long before the Nazi threat became known, and the “tragic” circumstances of Aschenbach's demise, owing to his love for the Polish boy Tadzio, would appear to bear little relation to Naziism—except perhaps in that the dictatorial regime finally clamped down on the weakness of homosexuality, leading again to suicide often enough. No evidence of Shylock's relating to the condition of German Jewry seems apropos in this connection either. Although the initial syllable in his name may appear at first to link etymologically with the German scheu- (and Shylock cites Frankfurt in the play [3. 1.75]), a much stronger case can be made out for the name as reflecting that of an English recusant, Richard Shacklock, especially because other Catholics in Elizabethan England then compared their plight to that of forsaken Jews (e.g., Thomas Harding).

Moreover, nothing in the drama relates Shylock himself (whether actual Jew or, as has sometimes been claimed, more basically Puritan) to homosexual friendship. In fact, he is largely upset because the product of his heterosexual union, his daughter, has been converted, possibly forcibly, to Christianity. Still, the overall Hebrew connection cannot be simply ruled out as being another vague parallel insofar as Mann's Jewish wife, and his own concern for the plight of German Jews revealed indirectly in Doktor Faustus, represent important factors too. We might recall as well his interest in the Old Covenant as in his biggest book, Josef und seine Brüder.

It would hardly be surprising that at least two of the so-called leading four geniuses of western civilization—Homer, Dante, Goethe, and Shakespeare—helped inspire Mann in his novella sufficiently in order for scholarship to take at least cognizance thereof. If some influence of Goethe seems again probable, somehow, and Dante would at least nominally bring in the Italian factor, Shakespeare then could provide a climactic effect. And inasmuch as Mann's novella is regularly considered to be such a hallmark in the leading literature of our time involving sexual “perversion”—but in an aesthetically objective rather than merely negative sense—the plausible link with the Shakespearean forerunner likewise about culture in Venice should no longer go by the board. The Antonio-Bassanio “affair” provides at least a curious contrast to what happens to Shylock, whereby the Gustav-Tadzio association is even more curious.

One final demurrer. Although the incorporation of sexual inversion in The Merchant of Venice is fairly widely recognized by numerous scholars nowadays (hardly bypassing the likes of Jonathan Miller either),⁹ it appears doubtful whether Mann himself was conscious of this interpretation when he referred to the play in his early years, e.g. in “Bilse und ich” (1906), “Versuch über das Theater” (1908), or even “Gedenkrede auf Max Reinhart” (1943). Nonetheless it may still be thought to be intrinsically operative.¹⁰

Notes

1. Citations are to the Pelican ed., William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, rev. ed., gen. ed. Alfred Harbage (New York: Viking, 1977).

2. The speaker was David Bevington (U of Chicago), whom I should be able to cite here with impunity owing to the public forum. He has given his permission, though agreeably declines to acknowledge himself that these modern interpretations reflect his own beliefs.

3. See my “Virgin-to-Virgin: Did Shakespeare Really Shift from one Cult to Another?,” Marianum, no. 147 (1995): 369-73.

4. The Criterion 12 (1933): 549-70 (trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter).

5. Reference is to the Cardinal ed., trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter (New York: Pocket Books, 1952).

6. See The Hesse / Mann Letters: The Correspondence of Hermann Hesse and Thomas Mann 1910-1955, ed. Ann Carlsson and Voker Michels, trans. by Ralph Manheim (New York: Harper, 1975).

7. Reference is to Doctor Faustus: The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkühn as Told by a Friend, trans. by H. T. Lowe-Porter (New York: Knopf, 1948).

8. Horst Meller, “A Pound of Flesh and the Economics of Christian Grace: Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice,” in Essays on Shakespeare in Honour of A. A. Ansari, ed. T. R. Sharma (Aligarh, India: Shalabh Book House Meerut, 1986) 150-74 (especially 154-55).

9. Thus Keith Geary, in “The Nature of Portia's Victory Turning to Men in The Merchant of Venice,” Shakespeare Survey 37 (1984): 55-68, writes: “There has been a trend in recent productions to make the first scene and other moments in the play explicitly homosexual. Jonathan Miller emphasized this aspect in his National Theatre production (1970) with Laurence Olivier, and it is now common for Antonio and Bassanio to kiss in this scene and others” (59). Ann Thompson, in her “Shakespeare and Sexuality,” later in Shakespeare Survey 46 (1994): 1-8, tells of “the question of homoeroticism in The Merchant of Venice where the Antonio / Bassanio / Portia triangle has been read as a struggle between homosexual and heterosexual love” (5)

10. The title notwithstanding, this essay's main purpose has not been to focus on the love-death or Liebestod aspect of the analogy between play and novella. Yet, to some extent, that can be given at least a final notation. The point is that insofar as Shylock has to become a Christian in the middle of the comedy, he is obliged to face the spiritual reality of death, or death as relating to love, as exemplified in that of Christ, whose model Christians are expected to emulate. Thus, Aschenbach's love as relating to his death has a general thematic bearing, if no more. The noted homosexual critic W. H. Auden, in his “Two Sides to a Thorny Problem: Exploring below Surface [sic] of Shakespeare's ‘Merchant,’” The New York Times, 1 March 1953 (sec. 2, pp. 1, 3), contended that the drama was not anti-Semitic and put emphasis upon Antonio's melancholia, finding the Merchant's “hatred of Shylock … really a projection of his distaste for the whole society in which he lives, a distaste which makes him melancholic,” then notably finding the hint in “the first line of the play—so often in Shakespeare an important clue” (3), as I have indicated too. A neighbor of mine of Italian heritage, Louis Bianconi, has confided in me that the city of Venice has had a time-honored reputation for deviancy, and perhaps the queer watery environs have contributed to this.