“[T]he Beauteous Scarf”: Shakespeare and the “Veil Question”

Abstract

Shakespeare's Twelfth Night and The Merchant of Venice both feature veils. While these are passing references, they throw valuable light on the plays’ engagement with the process by which Europe defined its relation to alterity, specifically to that form of racial and cultural difference represented by the Muslim world. In Twelfth Night the veil complicates the nature of female agency in the play, and the play's ambiguous location: the fact that it both evokes and erases the Islamic east is closely connected to the ambiguities in its depiction of this agency. The “beauteous scarf” in The Merchant of Venice is connected to the central themes of the play: duplicity, the disturbing gulf between appearance and reality, and moral questions surrounding the validity of a Christian society's engagement with the foreign and alien. The ambiguity of the veil (tantalizing in its beauty yet deceptive) may be compared to the status of the “tawnie Moor” of the play, Portia's suitor, the Prince of Morocco. The urbane Morocco's charm, grandeur, and chivalry might prove to be the deceptive “beauteous scarf” that Bassanio later condemns. The play reproduces the tension between an ideology that insisted on absolute difference between self and other and the persistent suspicion of any attempt to bridge or negotiate with such difference on the one hand, and an emerging international situation that demanded contact with the infidel on the other.