Perhaps I shouldn’t admit this because I should already have known that I was a Frank O’Hara fan, but life takes sadistic joy in introducing ideas late that should have been known early.

Just the other day I was reading Stephen Greenblatt’s Will in the World and discovered that King Edward I in 1290 expelled all Jews from England, two hundred years before they were expelled from Spain (Greenblatt 258). I teach English. I teach Hamlet. So even though I don’t teach The Merchant of Venice, I should have known that when Marlowe wrote The Jew of Malta and Shakespeare wrote The Merchant of Venice that neither playwright knew Jews in the flesh, but only knew Jews as evil stereotypes in jokes and bedtime stories:

By the time of Marlowe and Shakespeare, three centuries later, the Jewish population of England was ancient history. London had a small population of Spanish and Portuguese converts from Judaism, and some of these may have been Marranos, secretly maintaining Jewish practices. But the Jewish community in England had long vanished, and there were no Jews who openly practiced their religion. Yet in fact the Jews left traces far more difficult to eradicate than people, and the English brooded on these traces — stories circulated, reiterated, and elaborated — continually and virtually obsessively. There were Jewish fables and Jewish jokes and Jewish nightmares: Jews lured little children into their clutches, murdered them, and took their blood to make bread for Passover. Jews were immensely wealthy — even when they looked like paupers — and covertly pulled the strings of an enormous international network of capital and goods. Jews poisoned wells and were responsible for spreading the bubonic plague. Jews secretly plotted an apocalyptic war against the Christians. Jews had a peculiar stink. Jewish men menstruated (Greenblatt 258-9).

To Marlowe and Shakespeare Jews must have seemed as distant and threatening as the people of sub-Saharan Africa are to many who only “know” the people of the Congo, Liberia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Nigeria through stories of Big Man atrocities and ethnic genocide.  So I shouldn’t be surprised that I feel uncomfortable with the comic elements in The Merchant of Venice that come at Shylock’s expense. But I should be surprised that even with this horrible depiction of a people that he didn’t understand, a people on whom ills could be blamed, Shakespeare was capable of seeing Jews with some humanity.

Solarino: Why, I am sure, if he forfeit [his debt], thou wilt not take [Antonio's] flesh: what’s that good for?

Shylock: To bait fish withal: if it will feed nothing else, it will feed my revenge. He hath disgraced me, and hindered me half a million; laughed at my losses, mocked at my gains, scorned my nation, thwarted my bargains, cooled my friends, heated mine enemies; and what’s his reason? I am a Jew. Hath not a jew eyes? hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? if you tickle us, do we not laugh? if you poison us, do we not die? and if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?

I should have known this about Shakespeare and Jews, but I didn’t.

And I should have known about Frank O’Hara before reading Zadie Smith’s “Speaking in Tongues,” but I didn’t.

Smith quotes the following passage from “In Memory of My Feelings,” which you can find in full at poetryhunter.com.

“I am a Hittite in love with a horse,” writes Frank O’Hara.

I don’t know what blood’s
in me I feel like an African prince I am a girl walking downstairs
in a red pleated dress with heels I am a champion taking a fall
I am a jockey with a sprained ass-hole I am the light mist
in which a face appears
and it is another face of blonde I am a baboon eating a banana
I am a dictator looking at his wife I am a doctor eating a child
and the child’s mother smiling I am a Chinaman climbing a mountain
I am a child smelling his father’s underwear I am an Indian
sleeping on a scalp
and my pony is stamping in
the birches,
and I’ve just caught sight of the
Niña, the Pinta and the Santa
Maria.
What land is this, so free?

This reminds us that we can only understand those whose skin we wear — an African prince, a girl walking downstairs in a red pleated dress, a jockey with a sprained ass-hole — whose lives we can imagine are like ours because they too bleed and laugh and die.

I should have known this, but sometimes I need reminding.