William Shakespeare : The Merchant of Venice 9781847600998

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Literature Insights

General Editor: Charles Moseley

William Shakespeare

The Merchant of Venice Boika Sokolova

“… How shalt thou hope for mercy, rendr’ing none?…” HEB  ☼  FOR ADVICE ON THE USE OF THIS EBOOK PLEASE SCROLL TO PAGE 2

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ISBN 978-1-84760-099-8

Literature Insights General Editor: Charles Moseley

William Shakespeare: The Merchant of Venice

Boika Sokolova

HEB ☼ Humanities-Ebooks, LLP

The Author

Boika Sokolova is a Visiting Research Fellow at Birkbeck College, London. She teaches Shakespeare on the London programmes of the University of Notre Dame, the University of California and the British American Drama Academy (BADA). Sokolova has published widely on Shakespeare, performance and Shakespeare’s reception in Europe. Her latest book (co-authored) is Painting Shakespeare Red. An East-European Appropriation (Newark: University of Delaware Press, London: Associated University Presses, 2001).

Contents

Preface 1. Shakespeare: his Life, his Schooling, his Theatre 1. 1. Life 1.2. Shakespeare’s Schooling 1. 3. Shakespeare and London’s Theatre Business 2. The Merchant of Venice in Context 2. 1. Genre 2. 2. Shakespeare’s Venice, Shakespeare’s London 2.3. Foreigners in Venice and London 3. Act 1: The Embarrassment of Riches 3. 1. Act 1, Scene 1: Venice, Venetians, Antonio, Bassanio 3. 2. Act 1, Scene 2: Portia’s Belmont 3. 3. Act 1, Scene 3: Shylock’s Venice 4. Act 2: Confusions and Exclusions 4.1. Morocco and Arragon 4.2. Jessica’s Elopement, Lorenzo, Venetians 4.3. Lancelot, the Subversive Fool 4.4. Expunging Otherness 5. Act 3: Loss and Gain 5. 1. Act 3, Scene 1: Xenophobia, Flesh, Blood and Rings 5. 2. Act 3, Scene 2: Caskets and Cultural Codes; Love and    Money 5.3. Jessica and Xenophobia

  Shakespeare: The Merchant of Venice 6. Act 4, Scene 1: Trial and Tribulations 6.1. Venetians at Court: Law and ‘Ancient Malice’, Shylock,    Antonio, Bassanio 6.2. Portia: ‘The quality of mercy’ Venetian style 6.3. Portia: Rearranging Emotional Hierarchies 7. Act 5, Scene 1: The Gardens of Belmont 7.1. Jessica and Lorenzo 7.2. Rings and ‘Parchment Bonds’ 8. A Very Brief Survey of Performance and Criticism 9. Suggestions for Further Reading, Filmography Recent Editions Performance Criticism Criticism Filmography

Preface The Merchant of Venice (1596) is one of Shakespeare’s most popular plays, with a continuous stage life of over four hundred years. It is also a controversial and complex text which, for the modern reader or playgoer, grapples with painful questions of anti-Semitism, xenophobia, identity, race and gender, woven around a story about love, marriage and friendship, mercy and justice. For a long time the play has created unease, even distaste. Especially after the mass extermination of Jews in the Second World War, history itself has added to that reaction and caused its banishment from schools and theatres in some parts of the world. So it is necessary, right from the start, to face up to a major problem—that of the play’s alleged anti-Semitism. To begin with, we should distinguish between the culture of the time when a text was written and the way it sits in a different, in this case, modern context. The term, anti-Semitism, as understood nowadays, dates back to the 19th century and conceptually ‘differs from the antiJewish ideas and theories which pre-dated the rise of racial theory in the 1850s in that it identifies Jewish characteristics as congenital, rather than as specifically religious or broadly cultural (and, therefore, capable of rejection by individual Jews)’. The Elizabethans would not have understood modern anti-Semitism (it would have made Shylock’s conversion devoid of meaning), nor does the play ever suggest that the hero is different from other characters, except in his religious and economic ideas. He is a ‘misbeliever’ (1.3.108), whose faith is ‘righted’ in the end, but he is also a character whose humanity is asserted in the strongest of terms as equal to that of the Christians. This does not mean that old religious anti-Semitism gave Jews advantages or relieved them of pressures and humiliation. In fact, religion was used as an argument for their banishment from England   http://www.answers.com/topic/anti-semitism

  Shakespeare: The Merchant of Venice in 1290. In the play, we find an intolerant society, but presented so that the audience is invited to question its verities, the limitations of its justice, the moral ambiguity involved in checking the powers of non-Venetians under the guise of objectivity; we are made to observe and think about the fundamental similarity of disaster incurred by blending extreme religious positions with everyday grudges by both Christians and Jews. While anti-Jewish sentiments had their provenance in Biblical texts and a long European history of intolerance during the Middle Ages, it is also of interest that after the Reformation, the period to which the play belongs, in the new historical reading of Scripture by Protestant theologians, Jews were considered redeemable and were viewed as a link in the divine plan of salvation. However, they had to be convinced to change their views by intellectual debate. Approached from this angle, the conversion imposed on Shylock could have been felt by some in the Elizabethan audience as questionable. Throughout the 15th and 16th centuries the forced change of religion was an accepted method of erasing difference and the awareness of its painful edge was alive in the culture. In the south-eastern parts of Europe, occupied by the Ottomans, Christians were forced into Islam; at the other end, in Spain, both Muslims and Jews had been pressed into a mass conversion to Christianity. The English themselves had lived through the religious cataclysm of the Reformation with the consequent trauma on those who had wished to preserve their Catholic faith. Though presented as an act of mercy, Shylock’s unwilling change of religion would not have been seen by all as a happy end, a reaction strengthened by the fact that the play compounds it with a punitive legal judgement. The 16th century saw the gradual emergence of a what we might recognise as a modern sense of English national identity, which played itself on the London stages in various ways, one being an interest in national history (Shakespeare’s History plays are a major contribution to the national debate). Another way of defining the ‘self’ is through the ‘other’. Elizabethan plays abound in foreigners: a few of them are Jews, covering the entire spectrum from the generous and upright man of Robert Wilson’s The Three Ladies of London (1584)

Shakespeare: The Merchant of Venice   to the grotesque villain of Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta (1589?), to Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice (1596) with its complex villain/victim living in a society whose principles and selfrepresentations often seem questionable. While it cannot be denied that the play carries the historical baggage of the time when it was composed, which can be abrasive to modern sensitivities, we should not forget that we also carry later historical baggage of anti-Semitism and racism. Sometimes, contemporary performances cut the text to remove what might be regarded as potentially offensive. This is not new in the play’s history. An example of the opposite, tweaking the play so as to give maximum offence, is how in the 1930s Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda tried to appropriate it for its own ideological ends. To obtain the desired effect however, Nazi propagandists had to slash the text, because in its wholeness The Merchant of Venice refuses to engage with extreme and simplistic agendas. We can continue by listing its resistance to generic descriptions, preconceived ideas of order, justice, etc. While it is the product of a culture which was religiously anti-Semitic, the great strength of Shakespeare’s play is that it inexorably undermines attempts to define unambiguously its position vis-à-vis its culture. It could have been written so as to take sides, produce a straightforward moral reading, capitalize on social prejudices, or refute them, but it does not. The play exhibits the same evasiveness in the hands of modern directors and, where it comes to literary criticism, the brief survey at the end of this book shows how radically different views have been upheld by different generations of scholars in the course of almost three hundred years. By the same token, the question, ‘How shalt thou hope for mercy, rend’ring none?’ (4.1.87), used as an epigraph to the present discussion of the play, though asked of Shylock, can be seen to apply to the moral positions of most characters. The purpose of this Insight is to open the play to its student as a multifaceted and challenging text. In The Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare transforms the genre of romantic comedy to enable it to talk about darker matters; its language takes us from the exalted idealisms of love to the lowest kind of racist abuse; powerful characters representing opposing value systems clash, revealing the limitations

10  Shakespeare: The Merchant of Venice of each point of view. Around the structure of the love story typical of comedy the play explores how societies work, how communities and individuals define and protect themselves, tests love against the realities of a materialistic society, shows the fundamental likeness of hard opposites, conjures up the irreducible complexity and ambiguity of human behaviour. The play raises a number of moral questions concerning the choice between ‘us’ and ‘others’, between the compromises involved in excluding or including them and the ethical and intellectual difficulties the process entails. The Merchant of Venice teases the audience through its strategies of evasion, through the denial of a firm vantage point for securely assessing the positions it takes. It asks more questions than it ever resolves, thus making us face the reality we live in, the beliefs we uphold, the hard uncomfortable truths of our own present, so disturbingly recognizable in this historically remote narrative. In what follows, Chapter 1 deals with Shakespeare’s life, in particular, with the nature of his schooling and the tradition of the Elizabethan theatre which formed and made possible his achievement. Chapter 2 discusses the genre of romantic comedy and how Shakespeare re-modelled it in this play; it also delves into the contexts of 16th century Venice and London. The following chapters, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7, closely analyse the text following the sequence of Acts and Scenes; the nature of the material in a particular section is suggested by sub-headings. Chapter 8 gives a bird’s-eye-view of major performance and critical trends. Chapter 9 contains an annotated list of suggestions for further reading and a filmography of the most easily available versions of the play on DVD. Negotiating between a text and its Elizabethan and modern contexts is at the best of times beset by problems. To clarify how interpretations alter, examples from performance have been included because the tradition of the stage best shows the dynamic of change within the context of a particular period. To reduce the number of references, I quote from only one source on performance history: Charles Edelman, ed., The Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare in Production (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); the list for further reading offers more sources of this kind.

Shakespeare: The Merchant of Venice   11 The Merchant of Venice has come down to us in five texts published before 1642, three ‘paperbacks’, known as Quartos (1600, 1619, 1637), and the luxurious First Folio (1623) and Second Folio (1637). There are no act and scene divisions in the Quartos; the Folios divide the play into Acts. Scene divisions were introduced in the 18th century by editors. There are slight variations among modern editions, so it is important to state, when quoting from the play, which one is being used. The one adopted here is Jay Halio, ed., The Merchant of Venice, Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). All other quotations from Shakespeare’s plays, unless stated otherwise, are from Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, eds., William Shakespeare, The Complete Works (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988).

1. Shakespeare: his Life, his Schooling, his Theatre 1. 1. Life Shakespeare was born in 1564 in the thriving town of Stratford-uponAvon, the third child of the glover John Shakespeare, who rose to become mayor, and his wife Mary who came from the affluent farming Arden family. Shakespeare married at 18, had three children by the time he was 21 and soon afterwards left Stratford, perhaps to join a travelling company of players, to start life as an actor in London, or, as yet another hypothesis suggests, to become a tutor in one of the noble households in the North. We know that in the early 1590s he was in London. Having already made a stir with his plays he soon joined the newly formed theatre company of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. Career wise, this proved to be an excellent piece of luck since the company had its own home; indeed, it possessed the first custom built open-air public playhouse in Europe, named The Theatre. He would spend the rest of his career with them, as a playwright, actor and shareholder. In 1599, the company dismantled The Theatre and built from its timbers a new open-air playhouse, called The Globe, on the South bank of the Thames. In 1609, they started performing also at their indoor space in Blackfriars. The Lord Chamberlain’s Men were the most successful company in London, the one most often performing at Elizabeth’s court and at the Inns of Court for the sophisticated audience of city lawyers; they attracted the largest popular audience. At the age of 34 their principal dramatist earned this accolade from a contemporary, Francis Meres: As Plautus and Seneca are accounted the best for Comedy   E. A. J. Honingmann, Shakespeare: the lost years (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985).   1, 2, 3 Henry VI, Richard III, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Titus Andronicus. (The dating of all these is uncertain).

Shakespeare: The Merchant of Venice   13 and Tragedy among the Latines: so Shakespeare among the English is the most excellent in both kinds for the stage; for Comedy, witness his Gentlemen of Verona, his Errors, his Love Labours Lost, his Love Labours Won, his Midsummer Night’s Dream, & his Merchant of Venice: for Tragedy his Richard II, Richard III, Henry IV, King John, Titus Andronicus and his Romeo and Juliet. Upon the accession of King James I in 1603, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men became The King’s Men and were directly engaged in court entertainment. In 1613 (after the Globe theatre was devastated by fire), Shakespeare sold his shares in the business and retired to Stratford, where he had acquired substantial properties. He died in 1616, a well-to-do 52 year-old burgher. Looking at this brief biography, there is little at its start to suggest that the glover’s son would end up a man who had written over 40 plays (alone and in collaboration) and would be regarded as the most acclaimed poet of his generation. He had excelled in the genres of comedy and tragedy, had been at the cutting edge in creating the history play, and then, following the wave of changing fashions, romantic tragicomedy. His achievement is extraordinary in its emotional and narrative scope, and for the brave experimentalism involved in reforming the traditional genres and creating a drama appealing to the broadest imaginable audience—from the refined courtier to the illiterate artisan. This inevitably raises the question, how did Shakespeare happen? What nourished and made possible the flourishing of his undoubted natural talent? The following pages consider the impact which his schooling and the needs of the theatre he worked for had on his making. 1.2. Shakespeare’s Schooling Though Shakespeare never went to university, his schooling at Stratford’s grammar school was solid. Latin, spoken and written, grammar and rhetoric, were at the core of his education. English was   Francis Meres, Palladis Tamia, 1598, http://ise.uvic.ca/Library/SLT/life/meres. html.

14  Shakespeare: The Merchant of Venice studied in parallel with the classical language. In later life, he seems to have picked up French (as passages in Henry V testify), and he probably at least read Italian too. One of the consequences of the Reformation (which had taken place during the life of Shakespeare’s parents’ generation), was the dissolution of the monasteries and the confiscation of the property of religious guilds. This had substantial effect on the schools which these bodies had provided for centuries. In the wake of the religious change, the old schools were first closed down, then re-founded around curricula which reflected the new spirit of Humanism. In 1553 Stratford’s old guild school became the King’s New School, funded from property once owned by the abolished guild. It was this new reformed institution, with its humanistic curriculum, which young Shakespeare attended for the eight or so years of schooling he seems to have had. First he would have gone to the neighbouring ‘petty school’. As the five year-old crept ‘like snail / Unwillingly to school’ (As You Like It, 2.7.146–7) at six o’clock in the morning, he might have had about him his horn book, a little oblong board with a handle, the size of a child’s palm. A sheet of paper, with the alphabet, phonetic combinations and the Lord’s Prayer—the first prerequisite for a good Protestant— was pasted on its face. To protect the paper, a transparent layer of horn was laid on top—hence ‘hornbook’. The first steps in English led the child through simple catechisms and the memorising of psalms. At seven, he—for only boys received higher levels of education—would pass on to grammar school where he would be introduced to William Lily’s (or Lyly’s) A Shorte Introduction of Grammar (1540), the only Latin grammar authorised for use in schools under Elizabeth I and James I. As the elision of ‘Latin’ in the title of the book suggests, at that time, ‘grammar’, i.e. ‘structure’, was considered property only of the classical languages. Latin was at the time the language of international diplomacy and trade, of philosophy and intellectual discourse. The generations of boys, future merchants, lawyers and play  Leonard Barkan, ‘What did Shakespeare read?’, in Margareta de Grazia and Stanley Wells, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 31-48.

Shakespeare: The Merchant of Venice   15 wrights, who were taught to read, write and think in Latin along with their native tongue, played a crucial role in bringing Latin ‘structure’ into the bloodstream of English. In the course of their studies, they also acquired an aesthetic sense based on classical literature. From Lily (whose own son, John Lyly, became a prominent dramatist who influenced Shakespeare), the boy would have learned figures of speech, prosody, poems and mnemonic verses, which trained children to learn by heart, all undoubted assets for a future poet and actor. Comic versions of school exercises in Latin appear in Shakespeare’s plays and add a frisson of recognition for those in the audience who had had similar schooling. In the following example from The Merry Wives of Windsor, young William Page is subjected to the traditional school drill of translating the same word from Latin into English and then back into Latin, a point which he misses to the despair of the Welshman Sir Hugh Evans: SIR HUGH EVANS: …What is ‘lapis’, William? WILLIAM PAGE: A stone. SIR HUGH EVANS: And what is ‘a stone’, William? WILLIAM PAGE: A pebble. SIR HUGH EVANS: No, it is ‘lapis’: I pray you, remember in your prain. [‘brain’] WILLIAM PAGE: Lapis. (The Merry Wives of Windsor, 4.1.28–33) Later, children studied Latin sententiae (aphorisms) with whose pointed moralistic neatness the language of many plays, including The Merchant of Venice, scintillates. The comedies of the Roman playwrights Terence, and Plautus, taught them good plot structure, symmetrical patterning, the function and use of stock characters of servants, fools, braggart soldiers and angry fathers. The sense of what makes a good speech, or play, Shakespeare must have acquired by writing imitations —a standard practice in grammar school. At twelve, boys were offered Ovid, Virgil, Horace, Cicero, Quintilian. They were also given Erasmus’s Colloquies, consisting of short speeches and dialogues, which helped beginners to learn to speak Latin, and his Copia [‘Foundations of the Abundant Style’]. This book offered

16  Shakespeare: The Merchant of Venice examples of and advice on how to write elegantly and how to vary the same idea by expressing it through different forms and figures (thus creating copia, ‘abundance’ of expression). This schooling in the Classics profoundly shaped Shakespeare’s sense of language and drama. The creation of ambivalence through rhetorical and linguistic strategies cultivated by Erasmian exercises in writing taught him how to balance an argument equally on both sides. He learned how ‘not to take sides’, while revealing the complex dynamic of human and social interactions. The changing perspectives on every character and situation in The Merchant of Venice, achieved by such strategies, are the source of its openness to interpretation and the slippery evasiveness of a stable reading. As for his personal favourite author, there is no doubt that Ovid became his life-long favourite, an influence palpable from Titus Andronicus (1592) to The Tempest (1611). Apart from being a shared source of stories and references with his school and university educated audience, Ovid’s narratives of metamorphic re-incarnations seem to have been fundamentally sympathetic with Shakespeare’s artistic taste. His drama is one of transformations where ‘imagination bodies forth / The forms of things unknown’ (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 5.1.14–15), turns evil into good in comedy, unleashes the horrors of tragedy, invents identities, reverses fortunes, gives vent to sexual desire, teases language into brilliant rhetorical figures and spins of ‘airy nothing’ (Dream, 5.1.16) characters with whom his audience could laugh and weep, could love and hate. In their shift from one reality to another, Ovid’s tales about the mutability of the forms and shapes of life offered an alternative mental world, a miraculous translation from the literal to the allegorical, a liberation from the social, physical, sexual, moral limitations of material reality. The bilingualism inherent in humanist education was also responsible for creating a variety of synonyms and heightened possibilities for richer linguistic nuance by encouraging negotiation between old and new linguistic forms and words. It is hardly surprising that this   Joel Altman, The Tudor Play of Mind (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1981).   Jonathan Bate, Shakespeare and Ovid (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993).

Shakespeare: The Merchant of Venice   17 was the hey-day of the pun which plays on homonymy (closeness of sound). An undercurrent of puns, e. g. ‘gentle’/’gentile’, runs through The Merchant of Venice sustaining a meaningful thematic sequence. Conceits, i.e., elaborate puns and extended metaphors, were the fashionable vehicles of elegant expression as in Portia’s speech in 4.1: The quality of mercy is not strained. It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven Upon the place beneath. It is twice blest: It blesseth him that gives and him that takes. (4.1.181–4) Latinisms were often used for the purposes of comic characterization to reveal a pedant or a fool. Lancelot’s ‘But I pray you ergo [i.e. ‘therefore’] old man, ergo I beseech you’ (2.2.53–4) is comic because it is completely at odds with the character that uses it. A favourite joke with Latin were the malapropisms, where foolish, or pretentious characters would mix up the meaning of similar-sounding words, in the style of Old Gobbo, who mistakes ‘infection’ for ‘affection’, ‘defect’ for ‘effect’ (2.2.120, 137). Shakespeare is credited with the introduction of nearly 1700 new words, about fifty per cent of them derived from Latin. Such a multi-layered lexicon enhanced the playwrights’ capacity to express complex subjectivity in drama and enlarged the linguistic scope of characterization. Thus Shylock is endowed with a personality through a professional dialect, which sets him off as a usurer: ‘ducats, usance, interest, bond/bound, forfeit/forfeiture’, are words which he consistently uses. On her part, Portia is in control of two quite different languages: the complex abstract conceits of romantic love, and legal terminology and literalism. The theatre actually helped disseminate this growing new lexicon, which might have been hard to understand for many in the audience, by linking it to physical stage action.   Named after Mrs Malaprop, a character in Sheridan’s The Rivals who always gets her words mixed up.   T. Nevalainen, ‘The Latinization of English Vocabulary in the 16th Century’, in Gunnar Sorelius and Michael Srigley, eds., Cultural Exchange between European Nations during the Renaissance (Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsalensis, 86, 1984), 143–152.

18  Shakespeare: The Merchant of Venice The picture of Shakespeare’s education would be incomplete without mentioning the importance of the translation of the Bible into English. Reading the Bible at home was at that time a rarity due to the high price of books, but regular participation in a church service in the native tongue as the new religion required was in itself an educational act. Even the illiterate knew the Psalms with their grand addresses to the Almighty, the sweeping narratives of the Biblical stories, and many listened to sermons arguing complex points of law, justice, morals, social and divine order. Shakespeare constantly avails himself of the knowledge he shared with his audience. Traces of different Biblical translations can be heard throughout his plays: mostly coming from the Geneva Bible, (1560, the most popular version till 1644), but also from the Bishops’ Bible (1568) and the Book of Common Prayer (1559). The Merchant of Venice is full of them. 1. 3. Shakespeare and London’s Theatre Business  For anyone envisaging a career in the theatre London was the place to be. London with its teeming cosmopolitan population, theatres dotted around its walls, book-shops clustered around St Paul’s Cathedral, its entertainment-hungry multitudes, its closeness to the Court which regularly required elegant pastime: this was where a budding playwright could create a stir and earn a living. London had what no other city at that time possessed—playhouses, where masses of people, up to 3000 for a single performance, could gather while, with its 200,000 inhabitants, it was large enough to sustain permanent demand. The rules and restrictions of the theatre business and the tastes of the audience were to be the next great influence in the making of Shakespeare the dramatist.   For an index to all Biblical allusions see Jay Halio, ed., The Merchant of Venice, Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), entry ‘Biblical expressions and allusions’, 232. Also M. M. Mahood, ed., The Merchant of Venice, The New Cambridge Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 184–8.   Two excellent books on the subject are: Andrew Gurr, The Shakespearean Stage, 1574–1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980); Peter Thomson, Shakespeare’s Professional Career (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).

Shakespeare: The Merchant of Venice   19 Elizabeth’s government, like her father’s before her, had been extremely sensitive to the powers of the theatre as a disseminator of ideas from the very start of her reign. Early measures were taken to suppress the old tradition of the medieval mystery plays, performed by the guilds, and the moralities, shown by travelling players, because of their Catholic theology. Though some were still being played in the late 1570s and later, they were on the wane. The theatrical tradition was moving in a new direction; plays were being encouraged, but only under government licensing control. The new touring companies which were created had leading courtiers as patrons; in 1574 the first royal patent for a company of adult players was given to the Earl of Leicester’s Men. In 1583, the Queen herself became patron of one: the Queen’s Men were set up by Elizabeth’s head of intelligence, Sir Francis Walsingham, to spread patriotic, anti-Catholic and anti-Spanish ideas among the population (it is possible they were the troupe Shakespeare joined early in his career). In 1594, several theatrical companies were merged into two newly reorganised troupes, the Admiral’s Men and the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, which toured and performed in London and at court and virtually had a monopoly of the London stages for adult players. That same year Shakespeare joined the Chamberlain’s Men for a partnership of a lifetime. However, soon other players who would intensify competition came onto the theatre market: the boy companies. The London theatres were under the scrutiny of the Master of the Revels, a government official with powers to censor, license, permit or ban plays for performance. The interest on the part of the political establishment means that to some degree plays were seen as politically sensitive, which inevitably affected the subject matter that could be tackled in them. Thus, the first three Quartos (paperback editions) of Richard II (1595) are without the scene where the king is deposed. The political repercussions of a theatrical deposing of an anointed monarch became obvious when, in 1601, the Earl of Essex planned to overthrow Queen Elizabeth. In way of preparation he commissioned Shakespeare’s company to perform a play called Richard II, which may have been Shakespeare’s, with the prohibited scene included.   Gurr, The Shakespearean Stage, 1574–1642, 31–2.

20  Shakespeare: The Merchant of Venice The Earl ended up at the block, and the company had to answer some very tough questions before the actors could be considered innocent. Areas like religion, or the person and position of the monarch, were seen as highly explosive and could only be treated with rapturous approval (which made for propagandist drama, of which there was a lot), or very obliquely (which was Shakespeare’s way). This is where the rhetorical and narrative strategies for creating ambiguity came in particularly useful, and why it is impossible, even after four hundred years of scholarship, to be certain about his political and religious allegiances. Another factor shaping the theatre was the City of London. Unlike the Court, it was strongly opposed to this new form of entertainment and tried to banish it from its territory. To avoid meddling into their affairs, theatres migrated to places beyond its jurisdiction —to the north of the City wall, in Shoreditch, or across the Thames, to Southwark. Some of the reasons for the tug of war between the City and the theatres were practical: theatres performed during the day and attracted people who should be at work; they were often sites of fights, brawls, crowd unrest. Southwark itself was a pretty disreputable place: it was where noisome trades like tanning and soapboiling were concentrated, as well as places of entertainment like bear and bull pits and brothels. Crowded places presented a public health hazard during the outbreaks of the plague, which in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries often visited London. The theatres were closed on many occasions, when the weekly toll of deaths rose to a certain level. The City’s dislike also had a strong ideological underpinning: Puritan groups were against entertainment which they considered a sinful distraction from the primary tasks of hard work, money-making and worship. One of Shakespeare’s creative responses to Puritan zeal was the character of the straight-laced killjoy Malvolio (Twelfth Night), who is duped into smiling, wearing preposterous yellow cross-gartered stockings and having sexual fantasies. Shylock, too, has something of the joyless Puritan practicality about him.   Stephen Orgel, Imagining Shakespeare (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 154.

Shakespeare: The Merchant of Venice   21 However obstructive the City authorities might have been, it was the City’s population that flocked into the theatres and provided their major income. Though licensed under an aristocratic patron, companies were economically independent, and they had to be able to balance their books, which depended on attracting greater audience numbers. In conditions of competition and glut for entertainment, new plays had to be offered frequently and written quickly. The massive need for new plots was met by rewriting old plays and by combining elements of old stories of various provenance. Shakespeare’s plots, including that of The Merchant of Venice, all came from a wide variety of sources. As in modern-day film scripting, speed was sustained through collaboration. Shakespeare wrote together with other playwrights at the beginning and the end of his career, thus honing his own talent to the needs of the tradition and, on his part, developing it and handing it down. The mixed nature of the audience he catered for explains the ‘layered’ nature of the plays —in them there was a bit for everyone. The unique long-term collaboration with one company also gave him perfect understanding of the expressive powers of the Elizabethan stage. We know that he made changes to his plays prompted by performance practice. To look at his achievement from this perspective is to recognise the influence of an already existing tradition of forms and theatre practices, which he adopted, adapted and developed. The Elizabethan stage was wide and bare, surrounded very closely by the audience. Actors appeared through doors in its back wall which had a higher balconied section, useful for representing city walls or upper stories of houses, etc. There were no sets, as we understand them nowadays; the sense of place was created with the help of a variety of smaller properties (tables, chairs, thrones, beds), sometimes, by painted hangings and larger properties, like rocks, tombs, arbours, but most importantly, by language. Since no major structures needed moving, change of location occurred quickly and seamlessly. The fluidity and speed of action required a quick realisation of the nature of the new place. Shakespeare learned how to do that expertly. In the opening scenes of The Merchant of Venice, he creates the atmosphere   Halio, ed., The Merchant of Venice, Introduction, 13-29.

22  Shakespeare: The Merchant of Venice of Venice without directly describing it, but by presenting three different groups of characters with their problems and concerns. Venice comes alive through the characters we see, that is, characters carry a sense of location. Location is also verbally indicated: Bassanio’s ‘In Belmont is a lady richly left’ (1.1.161) precedes Portia’s appearance and when she does appear, we already know where she is and what her position is. In 1.3, Shylock’s ‘place’ is indicated as ‘Venice’ (42), but more specifically, as the Rialto, the exchange (19, 34, 104), which is consistent with his character. The Elizabethan theatre used contemporary dress which, with a few added elements, could become a period costume, (e.g. Roman), if that was necessary. It could reveal a character’s ethnicity, as does Shylock’s ‘Jewish gabardine’ (1.3.111), or serve as an emblem of a character’s disposition, like Hamlet’s ‘inky cloak’ (Hamlet, 1.2.77) Sound effects and music were an important aspect of performance, fully and subtly utilised by Shakespeare. Tempests rage and armies march in his plays, accompanied by appropriate sound. Music is played for diversion, or for underlining the atmosphere and the heightened, emblematic nature of a particular moment. Portia’s speech to Bassanio before he chooses the leaden casket (in 3.2.43– 53) describes its multiple functions, while the song, at the turning point of the romantic plot, underlines the spiritual significance of the moment (3.2. 63–72). Strong facial expression and gesture, similar to that employed today in mime, were a vehicle for conveying emotion which could be read from a distance: a hand on the lips meant silence, covering the eyes, sorrow, outstretched clenched hands, supplication. Many of Shakespeare’s characters could and would have been performed in this way. Though we cannot be sure what performance was exactly like, Shylock can be imagined doing the exaggerated antics of a comic villain. As Shakespeare pushed his character further by endowing him with inner feelings and thoughts, the acting style would have had to be adjusted. Shylock’s questions concerning the common humanity of Jews and Christians, ‘Hath not a Jew eyes?’ (3.1.55), are unlikely to have been spoken by a cartoon character. All in all, the Elizabethan   Gurr, The Shakespearean Stage, 1574–1642, 99.

Shakespeare: The Merchant of Venice   23 acting tradition was presentational. Giving characters moments of psychological insight (though psychology is not consistently present) would have created the necessity to mix presentational acting with a different, representational, more psychologically viable kind, somewhat similar to what we recognise nowadays. Shakespeare revolutionised dramatic character as understood by the Elizabethans. Traditionally, characters were ‘types’—king, lover, soldier, fool, each presented through a set of characteristic gestures, costumes, behaviour. Shakespeare, to use Peter Thomson’s observation, ‘personated’ these, made them psychologically convincing, because he knew the artistic temperaments of the actors he wrote them for and their professional strengths. He, ‘invented character by building on role’ and ‘empowered’ his actors, by writing parts of extraordinarily wide linguistic and emotional register, which engaged and stretched their potential. His Shylock might have been written to tap (perhaps) Thomas Pope’s versatile talents, but the part required the actor to develop both his comic and tragic range to meet the demands of the character. Shakespeare’s art is a mixed art. It builds on a broad array of poetic and dramatic styles, firmly grounded in the tradition of the Elizabethan stage. It caters for a socially diverse audience, takes care of changing aesthetic tastes in a competitive entertainment market, and is aware of ideological restrictions. It denies settling around single or fixed meanings by involving the audience in a process of constant reexamination of its own reactions. Such need for active interpretation enables imagination, allows multiple, personalised versions of events to be read in the elusive interaction of the play’s structures. In The Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare is at a peak in mastering these techniques and the full power of his stage and actors. Shylock and Portia stand out as the most powerful characters he had created thus far in his career, outshining in their complexity even Juliet and Richard II.   Thomson, Shakespeare’s Professional Career, 103–4.   Thomas Baldwin, The Organization and Personnel of the Shakespearean Company (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1927), quoted by Warren Chernaik, The Merchant of Venice, Writers and Their Work (Northcote: British Council, 2005), 25. It is also possible that Shylock was played by Richard Burbage.

2. The Merchant of Venice in Context 2. 1. Genre Shakespeare wrote The Merchant of Venice in either 1596 or 1597, on the heels of the success of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1595). Yet, close as they are in time, and even in genre (both being technically romantic comedies), the two plays can hardly be more different. Though a powerful dark undercurrent runs through A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and to secure the happy end one of the lovers has to be left under the spell of a magic juice, the abrasive side of the quest of the young for their sweethearts is mediated through the comforting fiction of the dream which softens the edges of the betrayals and reversals lining the way to marriage. The emotional upsets inherent in the tragedy of Pyramus and Thisbe (the play-within-the play) are diffused by its actors’ inept exposing of theatre as fiction. Unhappiness is healed by the balm of fairy magic, tragedy turns comedy through the ‘rough magic’ of the Athenian workmen. The Merchant of Venice does not offer such comforts. In fact, it does not offer any comfort. The world it creates is realistic and full of dangers, its lovers are under constant external pressure. Though the First Folio (1623), published by Shakespeare’s colleagues after his death, classes the play among the Comedies, as did Frances Meres in 1598, there are indications that, from early on, critical opinion has been uneasy with this arrangement. Shakespeare’s first editor, Nicholas Rowe (1709), expressed his doubts by suggesting that the play was ‘design’d tragically’; two and a half centuries later, W. H. Auden (1962) thought it should be placed among the ‘Unpleasant Plays’.   Nicholas Rowe, ‘Some Account of the Life etc. of Mr. William Shakespeare’ in John Wilders, ed., The Merchant of Venice, A Casebook (London: Macmillan, 1969), 25; W. H. Auden, Brothers & Others , in Wilders, ed., The Merchant of

Shakespeare: The Merchant of Venice   25 It is very difficult to imagine what the Elizabethans felt or thought, but we can glean some clues from contemporary references. The play was entered for publication into the Stationers’ Register in 1598, where it features as ‘a book of the Merchant of Venice or Otherwise Called the Jew of Venice’. It was actually published a couple of years later, in 1600, with a descriptively extended title, in a cheap edition, known as the First Quarto: The most excellent History of the Merchant of Venice. With the extreme cruelty of Shylock the Jew towards the said Merchant, in cutting a just pound of his flesh: and the obtaining of Portia by choice of three chests. As it has been diverse times acted by the Lord Chamberlain his Servants. There is no sense of ‘unpleasantness’ here, but both titles underline the role of Shylock as opposed to a Merchant who remains unnamed. The Quarto also includes Portia and captures the contrasting nature of events later critics found troublesome—on the one hand a romantic story about ‘the obtaining of Portia’, on the other, one dealing with ‘extreme cruelty’. All seems to point to the play being accepted as a comedy, full of sensational contrasts. By the end of the 16th century, romantic comedy had evolved into a well-defined genre with certain conventions, which Shakespeare had used in a masterly way in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In his new play audiences were offered something defying their expectations, a new mixture of elements, which obviously was to their liking, since it made for a popular play, acted ‘diverse times’. What Shakespeare does is to take the romantic model, strip it of some of its conventions, modify them, and complicate their possibilities. For his comic characters, he grafts on the romantic comedy stock figures of the Italian commedia dell’arte, like Lancelot and Old Gobbo (‘gobbo’ is the Italian for hunchback). Romantic comedy is comedy of love presented as a quest for a soul Venice, 62.   The record book where printers entered the titles of manuscripts they wanted to publish, which secured their legal right to sell them.   Literary devices, forms and principles which are generally accepted at a certain time.

26  Shakespeare: The Merchant of Venice partner; the trajectory of the plot takes characters through a number of vicissitudes to a triumphant conclusion in marriage. In The Merchant of Venice, Bassanio is on such quest, but its outcome is partially predetermined by the structure of the casket lottery whose fairy-tale pattern traditionally delivers the prize to the third candidate. Portia’s ‘quest’ is realised through her performance in the Venetian court, and is not for Bassanio’s love, but for Antonio’s life, significantly shifting the romantic focus. Marriage occurs in the middle of the play and is given no time for celebration as husbands have to rush back to Venice. Couples are reunited only after all have lived through pain and danger. At the end, the typical multiple newly-weds of comedy are ready to go to bed, but as they embrace they also hold very unromantic deeds and legal documents as guarantees of protection. Love and marriage in romantic comedy are socially exclusive. Its central characters are aristocrats and classes never intermarry, though they cross paths. Sex is allowed only after wedlock, the ending often enjoining the lovers to go to bed. In most of these, The Merchant of Venice follows convention—the final pairing is socially and financially balanced, with Portia, the rich heiress of aristocratic Belmont, married to the penniless aristocrat Bassanio, whose wealth ‘[runs] in his veins’ (3.2.252–3). Nerissa, her waiting-woman, is united with Bassanio’s follower Gratiano in a marriage depending on the bounty of their superiors. Jessica’s ambiguous social status is precariously sustained by her stolen money, conversion and marriage to Lorenzo, a Venetian gentleman of limited means. Though class distinctions are preserved, a new and unusual element has entered the romantic world—money. While the consummation of the aristocratic marriages is to take place after the end of the play, as befits the genre, an antithesis to the sexual behaviour of the higher class couples is established by the behaviour of the comic fool Lancelot who has got ‘the Moor…with child’ (3.5.36). Such carnality is beyond the pale of romance, as are the money concerns of most characters. Romantic comedy is unapologetically young—the older generation, whether fathers or friends, like Shylock and Antonio, always remain single amid the final peal of wedding bells. Though Shakespeare sometimes allows older characters to marry (Twelfth Night, The Winter’s

Shakespeare: The Merchant of Venice   27 Tale), he never shows them courting, nor do they speak the exalted language of romantic love. In The Merchant of Venice he endows Bassanio and Portia with apposite heightened diction, as befits their position, but limits the scenes where they can indulge love’s idealisms by bracketing them with events tugging the action in a ‘tragic’ direction. Romantic love is always put to the test of social pressure, but its lovers are allowed to escape temporarily from society, typically to a ‘green world’, where they can act in freedom. In the case of The Merchant societal pressures are particularly violent—the lovers are confronted by the unusually powerful threat of Shylock. At the end cross-cultural and religious tensions are only partially resolved. Doubt remains hanging over Lorenzo’s and Jessica’s relationship. Belmont as a lovers’ refuge of peace, elegance and natural beauty is too often exposed to the turmoil in Venice, which renders its harmonies precarious. By remodelling the play’s ‘green world’ and allowing the lovers to be together only after a strenuous legal battle, love itself is transformed from an exalted passion to an experience marked by history and compromise. Even the fairy tale elements endemic in romance, such as the choice of the chests and the bond involving a pound of flesh, are turned into realistic fictions. The threat posed by the latter is resolved through a legal suit, while the casket test becomes an exercise in recognising cultural codes. The Merchant of Venice profoundly unsettles the delights of comedy through Shylock, a character of too much negative energy for a love play; the palpable atmosphere of religious hatred is also romantically counter-productive. Our exposure to characters occupying opposite positions in the action as characters with complex motivation, also renders the happy ending precarious. In the event, romance holds its territory, but the discordant elements that surround it make audiences ponder questions beyond its scope. Thus, the straightforward generic defining of The Merchant of Venice is beset by numerous dilemmas: ‘Is the play romantic?’, ‘Yes.’ ‘But what kind of comedy is it, if one at all?’ The answer to this question is controversial and must be surrounded with caveats.

28  Shakespeare: The Merchant of Venice 2. 2. Shakespeare’s Venice, Shakespeare’s London The Merchant of Venice is the first of Shakespeare’s Venetian plays (the other one is the tragedy Othello, written in 1603–4). Here Venetian atmosphere is created by references to boats and gondolas, ducats, the magnificoes (judges), the Duke. The Rialto district of the city, the largest stock-exchange in Europe, is mentioned a number of times. During the 15th and early in the 16th century Venice had become the cosmopolitan capital of a mighty maritime empire. Wealth pouring in from all over the world and its thriving markets made its citizens rich; its arts, architecture and prestige had reached an unprecedented peak. Though in the second half of the 16th century it entered upon a slow decline due to increasing Turkish dominance in the Mediterranean, the city continued to be the wonder of Shakespeare’s world. In A. D. Nuttall’s pithy summary, ‘Venice was the single, most spectacular example of the power of wealth to beget wealth, and its miraculous setting in the sea is emblematic of that power. Venice is the landless landlord over all’. Publications concerning its civic structure, legal system and multi-ethnic relations were numerous and the English avidly read translations of books about the city; or visited it and wrote about it themselves. 2.3. Foreigners in Venice and London Venice was renowned for its foreign merchants and the freedoms granted to them. So many were they that one of the 15th century French envoys to the State noted that ‘most of their people are foreigners’. This sizeable group of ‘others’ had their persons, religious and trading rights protected by the law. However, foreign merchants were also restricted in various ways. Protestants (doctrinally the most dangerous to a Catholic state) were not allowed to have churches and burial grounds, while Orthodox Greeks and Jews were given this   A. D. Nuttall, A New Mimesis, Shakespeare and the representation of reality (London and New York: Methuen, 1983), 121.   David Chambers and Brian Pullan with Jennifer Fletcher, eds., Venice, A Documentary History, 1450-1630 (Oxford UK & Cambridge USA: Blackwell, 1993), 325

Shakespeare: The Merchant of Venice   29 privilege. Citizens were discouraged from mixing with the foreigners who were consigned residences in specific parts of the city under strict regulation: the Germans were not allowed to lodge ‘outside the exchange house, upon a penalty of 50 ducats’, the Turks were segregated in the Fondaco exchange, a specially remodelled house on the Grand Canal, whose windows towards the street were walled up. The Jews, one of the oldest and most numerous of foreign groups, were, since 1516, allocated to the Ghetto (the site of a disused metal foundry; the modern word derives from the Italian for ‘foundry’). All foreigners had to pay the state rent for their lodgings, keep them in good repair and stay inside their building or district at night. In addition, Jews had to wear signs of distinction such as yellow badges or coloured hats and were subjected to a number of taxes. Segregation, which is so distasteful to us, was necessitated by the need to reconcile the religious fears connected with Protestants, Jews and Muslims with their usefulness to the prosperity of the city. Such measures did not encourage multiculturalism outside the market place, but enabled foreign communities to continue with their customs and have internal control over social relationships. The Merchant of Venice conveys a sense that Shylock and his fellow Jews have a life of their own, including a religious life, while the relationships with the Christians are tenuous, as testified by Shylock’s initial refusal do dine with Antonio and Bassanio. Christians were allowed inside the Ghetto during the day (which explains Jessica’s and Lorenzo’s falling in love and their clandestine correspondence through Lancelot), but had to leave the territory by a certain hour. Controlled separation, permitted to foreigners by government, was not unknown to Elizabethans. For centuries the German merchants of the Hanseatic League had had a licence to live in a part of the City of London, known as the Steelyard. This was a walled community, with wharves, warehouses, a strong tower, living quarters and a church, where the merchants lived, worshipped and obeyed strict rules of behaviour. Just as in Venice, visitors were allowed during the day, but   Chambers et al, eds., Venice, A Documentary History, 1450-1630, 328, 350, 338.   From the German stalhof, which means the court or warehouse where samples or patterns are stored.

30  Shakespeare: The Merchant of Venice the place was locked and guarded at night. No women were allowed in. Such enclaves of otherness were extremely important to trade and were protected by the authorities if attacked by hostile locals. The other side of the coin was that once a government decided they were no longer needed, or found them economically or otherwise threatening, it could withdraw their licence, as did Queen Elizabeth in 1597, when she expelled the German merchants from England. In Venice, as in London, others were tolerated within the limits of the marketplace, but cultural integration was not in the order of the day. By the end of the 16th century, Venetian power was in decline while London had grown to become an important business centre. Londoners had a first-hand experience of the various foreigners who appear in Shakespeare’s play—French, Germans, Spaniards, Africans—Moroccans and Negroes. Their knowledge of Jews was no less direct though diffused through historical reasons: Jews had been expelled from the country since the 13th century, but many had returned and were living in London as Marranos—officially they would attend church and take communion while at home many practiced their own religion, a fact which must have been known to Londoners, or, at least, they knew that some people were converts. Statistics about the number of foreigners are uncertain, but it seems that amongst London’s population of about 200,000, five to ten thousand could have been foreign. These ‘strangers’, as they were called then, were often a focus of economic complaint and retaliation. The myth of Venetian peace offered a model of multicultural existence with which the realities of London did not square. The city chronically suffered from xenophobic activity and the government, which was interested in the wealth foreigners brought in, had to be on the alert to discover plots against them. Such plots were neutralised in 1586 and 1593; a virulent outburst flared up in 1595 when a crowd of a thousand apprentices stoned foreigners and the officers of the law who came to their rescue. In the early 1590s, Elizabethan law relating to the economic rights of aliens was also unstable. There were   James Shapiro, Shakespeare and the Jews (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 68-72. In this section I also use material from Chapter VI, 167-94.   Shapiro, Shakespeare and the Jews, 75.

Shakespeare: The Merchant of Venice   31 secret attempts to deport foreigners in order to protect the economic interests of local artisans. In 1593, a bill was passed in the House of Commons, which prohibited merchant strangers from selling foreign goods in the city. However, the same bill was rejected by the House of Lords. ‘This Bill should be ill for London, for the riches and renown of the City cometh by entertaining strangers, and giving liberty to them’, wrote a Privy Counsellor. He went on to draw a comparison with other successful cities in Europe, unsurprisingly pointing to the success of Venice which ‘could never have been so rich and famous but by entertaining of strangers’. The position and the problems surrounding strangers were of great interest to playwrights and audiences and stories about how other places dealt with them would have resonated with local concerns. As a result, Shakespeare’s literary Venice displays an uneasy balance between the belief in the even-handedness of written statutes in real Venice and a very London-like pressure to accommodate local interest. One problem at the heart of the play—how to keep foreigners for their wealth and simultaneously neutralise their danger through the law—was both appealing to the imagination and difficult to resolve. In this sense, the play is an early document of the tensions created by market multiculturalism. Xenophobic attitudes had found their way onto the stages where a number of plays depicted foreigners as comic, stupid or predatory figures. The debate was complex and involved contrasting views. One of its strands can be illustrated by a play, Sir Thomas More, which involved a collaboration of four playwrights, one of them Shakespeare, around 1593. It uses real events dating back to 1517, when London artisans and apprentices rioted against foreign merchants and bankers. Sir Thomas More, then sheriff of the City of London, had to deal with the riot. Shakespeare’s contribution to the script is a scene where More reasons with the crowd over the implications of their drive to kill and banish the foreigners. It is an impressive piece of writing and   Shapiro, Shakespeare and the Jews, 183.   The other dramatists in question are Antony Munday, Henry Chettle and Thomas Dekker. The edition used for the quotation is: Anthony Munday and others, Sir Thomas More, The Revels Plays, edited by Vittorio Gabrieli and Georgio Melchiori, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990).

32  Shakespeare: The Merchant of Venice deserves to be quoted at some length. This is how the play argues, through More, a case in favour of the strangers: SIR THOMAS MORE: Grant them removed, and grant that this your noise Hath chid down all the majesty of England. Imagine that you see the wretched strangers, Their babies at their backs, with their poor luggage Plodding to th’ports and coasts for transportation, And that you sit as kings in your desires, Authority quite silenced by your brawl And you in ruff of your opinion clothed:.. …First,’tis is a sin Which oft th’apostle did forewarn us of, Urging obedience to authority; And ’twere no error if I told you all You were in arms ’gainst God… …For to the King God hath his office lent Of dread, of justice, power and command, Hath willed him rule, and willed you to obey; And to add ampler majesty to this, He hath not only lent the King His figure, His throne and sword, but given him His own name, Calls him a god on earth… …You’ll put down strangers, Kill them, cut their throats, possess their houses, And lead the majesty of law in lyam [on a leash] To slip him like a hound. Alas, alas! Say now the king, As he is clement if th’offender mourn, Should so much come too short of your great trespass As but to banish you, whither would you go? What country, by the nature of your error, Should give you harbour? Go you to France or Flanders, To any German province, Spain or Portugal, Nay, anywhere that not adheres to England, Why, you must needs be strangers. Would you be pleased

Shakespeare: The Merchant of Venice   33 To find a nation of such barbarous temper That breaking out in hideous violence Would not afford you an abode on earth, Whet their detested knives against your throats, Spurn you like dogs, and like as if that God Owed not nor made not you, nor that the elements Were not all appropriate to your comforts But chartered unto them? What would you think To be thus used? This is the strangers’ case, And this your mountanish inhumanity.   (Sir Thomas More, 2. 3. 81…–…155) The arguments for keeping the strangers are both political and moral. To banish them is to take ‘arms against God’, against the king, whom God ‘has given his own name’ and with whose permission the foreigners are in the country; it is to be involved in both sin and treason. The moral case is argued through a pitiful picture of the retreat of people burdened by meagre belongings and children and enhanced by an invocation to those who want to kill them to imagine what they themselves would feel like under similar circumstances; the closing lines resound with the grievances Shylock has against Antonio: You call me misbeliever, cut-throat dog, And spit upon my Jewish gabardine, […] […] You … did void your rheum upon my beard, And foot me as you spurn a stranger cur Over the threshold…   (The Merchant of Venice, 1.3. 108–9; 114–16) Fears of alien power, rendered through received antagonistic antiJewish sentiments, flared up in the 1594 revival of Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta (1589?), a play featuring a monstrous Jewish villain, Barabas, hell-bent on destroying the Christians. The revival of the play by the Admiral’s Men was aimed at capitalising on the stir caused by the case of the Jewish convert Roderigo Lopez, the Queen’s physician, who was sentenced to death on accusations of attempting to poison her. While his trial and execution provoked   Shapiro, Shakespeare and the Jews, 184.

34  Shakespeare: The Merchant of Venice a wave of popular anti-Semitic sentiment, the way the case was handled at court and later by the Queen, does not suggest that his former religion contributed to his sentencing. Just as there were different popular and official reactions to the Lopez case, on the stage, hanging in the balance against Barabas was Shylock, Shakespeare’s complex anti-hero and victim, the character of the new play of the Chamberlain’s Men. While Shylock’s otherness is understood as religious difference, (he is a Jewish ‘mis-believer’), Morocco’s racial difference, based on skin colour, was a relatively new experience on the Elizabethan stage and in real life. Shakespeare wrote his black character at a time when black people were becoming a visible minority, mostly as a result of the old trade in human flesh, which in the 15th century started to come from Africa. Since the 1560s, English profiteers were involved in buying and selling Africans. In the 1590s, Elizabeth’s government on several occasions legislated deportations of ‘blackamoors’, trying to ‘put into place a race-based cultural barrier of a sort England had not seen since the expulsion of the Jews at the end of the thirteenth century.’ By placing two ‘others’, a Jew and a black man, in prominent positions—one in the economic contest, the other, in the romantic one—the play addresses concerns about national identity and the social mechanisms available for its protection. The ‘other’ is necessary for articulating the ‘self’ and the play seems to define ‘Venetianness’ by rejecting ‘otherness’. The main aristocratic love story achieves it by marriage within the cultural community, while the ‘other’ is firmly kept out of Belmont: even his chance of children is curtailed, as contestants who fail have to promise never to marry. Conversely, in the economic sphere, though devoid of finan  A concise discussion of the Lopez case can be found in: Orgel, Imagining Shakespeare, 149–50.   His two other black characters are the charismatic villain Aaron (Titus Andronicus, 1592) and tragic Othello (Othello, 1603–4).   Emily C. Bartels, ‘Too Many Blackamoors: Deportation, Discrimination and Elizabeth I’, Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, Volume 46, Number 2, (Spring 2006), 305–22. This quotation is on 306. See also Ania Loomba, Outsiders in Shakespeare’s England , in Margareta de Grazia and Stanley Wells, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 147–66.

Shakespeare: The Merchant of Venice   35 cial strength, Shylock is left with enough to go on practicing his trade. Yet, if ‘Venetianness’ is a closed category, then what about Jessica and her attempt to become a Venetian? What about Shylock after his conversion? The play is evasive about her status and silent about his. If riots against trading foreigners offer a clear division into ‘us’ and ‘them’, ‘Londoner’ and ‘stranger’, a demarcation of the limits of the tribe, the invisible transformations of the resident foreigners into locals create a blurred picture, dogged by uncertainties. 2.3. Usury and Moneylending One of the pressure points of The Merchant of Venice is the question of Shylock’s alleged usury. A few words need to be said about this. To begin with, what is usury? Simply put, it is the medieval term for taking interest on a loan. To us this is a straightforward banking activity; to many Elizabethans, it was a sin. Taking of interest had been condemned since the Middle Ages, as ‘unnatural’ on a variety of doctrinal grounds, one of them being that money is a dead object and it is unnatural to make it ‘breed’, i.e., grow. As commercial loans became essential for the expanding European trade, theologians had to work hard to legitimize the taking of interest. Peter Spufford has illustrated how as early as the 13th century they began to attribute to capital the properties characteristic of other objects, say, a plough, for the borrowing of which rent needed to be paid. As banking structures grew in conjunction with the explosion of trade from the 15th century onward, interest rates fell and in 16th century Venice (Shylock’s Venice), they were under 10%, often as low as 5%, and under the constant scrutiny of the state. At this time, the meaning of ‘usury’ slightly changed as the word came to signify ‘excessive interest’ taken by loan-sharks functioning outside or on the fringes of the city as opposed to the interest taken by lawful Venetian bankers. Shylock is a mainstream Venetian moneylender, who is called a usurer by Antonio, an accusation which he energetically rebuts. He takes interest (which was legal both in Venice and London) but   Peter Spufford, Power and Profit, the Merchant in Medieval Europe (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2002), 44.   Spufford, Power and Profit, 45-6.

36  Shakespeare: The Merchant of Venice denies usury (extortionate interest); indeed, in the play he does not commit usury at all. Ironically, it is Bassanio’s ‘For your three thousand ducats here is six’ (4.1.84), an offer of 100% interest on a loan, that is more usurious in the monetary sense, but is also its opposite, as it is an act of giving, not taking. Shylock refuses to take the money. European Jews had been linked for centuries to moneylending, an occupation they acquired due to Biblical injunctions (e.g. Psalm 15 verse 6) warning Christians against it. In many places, like Venice, they were not permitted to own land, a major source of income in an agricultural society, or buy property, thus they went into money services and the handling of second-hand goods, among the few occupations open to them. In England, the huge amount of money Edward I owed the Jews was certainly a central factor in their banishment in 1290. Owing someone money does not make him popular with the borrower and the resentment and envy this caused fostered, across time, successive waves of European anti-Semitism. Hostility towards the Jews, which sprang from their economic success, was also nourished by suspicions caused by their living in close communities (which, as we saw, was imposed on them), and could easily be ideologically justified through the tropes of Christian culture—they had crucified Jesus Christ and held wrong religious beliefs. In the popular drama of the Middle Ages based on hard antinomies between Good and Evil, Jews were associated with the Devil, as Shylock often is in the play. Though there were hardly any ostensibly unconverted Jews in London in Shakespeare’s day, as Jay Halio points out, ‘stage-Jews were invariably associated with usury’. In the play, Antonio stands for the older view by scornfully referring to ‘the breed for barren metal’ (1.3.130) which Shylock expects and consistently calls him ‘devil’ (e.g. 1.3. 95). In England, Protestantism (which grew first and fastest among the urban trading classes) had cleared the air from medieval ideas about sin and interest and Henry VIII had legalised money lending in 1545, yet the practice was deeply unpopular and in the earlier days   John Lyon, The Merchant of Venice, Harvester New Critical Introductions to Shakespeare (New York, London, Toronto, Sydney, Tokyo: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1988), 26.   Halio, ed., The Merchant of Venice, note 3, 11.

Shakespeare: The Merchant of Venice   37 still punishable, if excessive charge was proved. Shakespeare’s own father, John Shakespeare, had been found guilty of overcharging on a loan and heavily fined. Shakespeare’s audience, too, would have held mixed views on the subject. London’s business-minded theatregoers would have accepted Shylock’s sound arguments as opposed to Antonio’s economics of generosity, while others would have seen eye-to-eye with the merchant. Such opposite attitudes would have mapped the ideological nexus between money, Jews and wrongdoing, while the religious anti-Semitism of the period would have pulled against compassion for the character. Shylock’s very name also offers ambiguously contradictory signals. While it has often been derived from various Hebraic names, and as a result of the play has come to be shorthand for a Jewish moneylender, Stephen Orgel has recently pointed out that it was, and still is, an English name, meaning white-haired, like Whitlock and Whitehead, more suggestive of an Englishman than of a Venetian Jew. 2.4. Women The complexity of the cultural interplay between Venice and London is further complicated by gender issues. Venetian law guaranteed aristocratic women financial security, clout and independence, even inside the limitations of a patriarchal society. While 16th century English law had given women the right to inherit substantial property, the predominant ideology demanded of them meekness, submission, silence and modesty. By showing a brilliant and socially articulate Portia, the play undoubtedly evokes cultural anxieties, some of them visible in the attempt to reconcile her image of an ‘unlessoned girl’ (3.2.159) with that of the formidable lawyer. Undeniably, it is   Charles Edelman, ‘Which is the Jew that Shakespeare Knew?’, Shakespeare Survey 52 (1999), 103.   Orgel, Imagining Shakespeare, 151–53. See also F. Hitchin-Kemp, ‘The name Shylock’. Notes and Queries 161, (1931) p. 467.   Lisa Jardine, ‘“O decus Italiae virgo”, or the Myth of the Learned Lady of the Renaissance ‘ Historical Journal, 28 (1985), 799-819; Carol Leventen, ‘Patrimony and Patriarchy in The Merchant of Venice’, in Valerie Wayne, ed., The Matter of Difference (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 59–79.

38  Shakespeare: The Merchant of Venice Portia’s agency which transforms relationships in Venice, around a core of recognizable patriarchal values. The world of The Merchant of Venice gyrates; its complex texture is spun out of varying artistic projections of the realities of Venice and London, of fantasies and fears about the way their societies operate. For some in the Elizabethan audience, Venice would have been a foreign place, the Jew, a fantasy, and the events in the play, an exotic tale. To others, it would have sounded a warning of what could happen, or was happening, to London. To us, who approach the play with the historical baggage of the 20th century, the play is also about xenophobia, anti-Semitism, race, gender and money. If there is a method for presenting and discussing these, it is best sought in the strategies of inconclusiveness and evasion.

  Peter Holland, Introduction, in W. M. Merchant, ed. The Merchant of Venice (Penguin Books, 2005), xxxii.

3. Act 1: The Embarrassment of Riches  Unlike A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Merchant of Venice does not begin with an outburst of romantic desire but with tensions which delay the development of the romantic narrative. The three opening scenes, which form part of the exposition (i.e., the part of a play introducing characters and conflicts), point to a love story, but consistently throw it in non-comic perspectives. Scene 1 begins with Antonio’s comic non-starter ‘In sooth I know not why I am so sad’ (1.1.1); Scene 2, introduces Portia who has an almost identical complaint, (1.2.1–2); Scene 3 shows Shylock mulling over sums of money ‘Three thousand ducats, well’ (1.3.1). The juxtaposition of the three scenes uncovers a pattern the play will follow in cutting from Venice to Belmont, thus keeping both places in view and providing the audience with glimpses for comparison. 3. 1. Act 1, Scene 1: Venice, Venetians, Antonio, Bassanio Venice is a world inhabited by men talking about money, merchandise and peril at sea. The play begins in mediis rebus (= the middle of a situation), in this case, a conversation. This is a favourite Shakespearean technique which demands the audience focus quickly and listen carefully in order to figure out what is going on. The first character to speak (identified later as Antonio) poses an enigma from the very start; he complains that he ‘know[s] not why [he] is so sad /…What stuff [his sadness] is made of, whereof it is born’ (1.1.1 and 4). Two other characters, Salarino and Solanio, seem to be trying to help him, by suggesting that his sadness is caused by an anxiety   The title has been hijacked from Simon Schama, The Embarrassment of Riches (London: Fontana Press, 1991).   The names of the young Venetians vary slightly from edition to edition. Actors refer to them as ‘the Salads’, which is an appropriate comment on their similarity.

40  Shakespeare: The Merchant of Venice about his ‘argosies’ (ships). At this point, we realise for the first time how the play can make its audience wonder about the exact meaning of what is happening. While the verse conjures up the exotic riches Venetian merchants trade in, it does so through distressing images of loss at sea, of ships ‘docked in sand’(1.1.27), rich merchandise of spices ‘scatter[ed]…on the stream’ of ‘roaring waters’ ‘enrobed’ in glistening silks (1.1.33–4). Salarino and Solanio compete in giving the same explanation, amplified by dramatic examples of all manner of disaster. This requires us to decide whether these are friends trying to lift up Antonio’s spirits, or two men who are perhaps a little envious of his wealth. Their conditional ‘would’s (23), ‘had I’s (15) and ‘should’s (29) suggest that they have no ships, though their imagination is ablaze with fears of loss. Are they typical Venetians, suffering from the neurosis of the instability of wealth, or overbearingly gossipy in their unstoppable prattle, or merely young, free and light-minded? To their florid propositions, Antonio responds with a rather reserved practical answer, ‘My ventures are not in one bottom trusted,’ / […] Therefore my merchandise makes me not sad’ (42 and 45). Solanio, though, will not let go and confronts him with another off-the-cuff explanation, rather more in the vein of comedy: ‘Why then, you are in love’ (46). Antonio’s monosyllabic ‘Fie, fie!’ (‘No, no’, 46) effectively scuppers the proposition, but on the stage a short answer can be more emotionally charged than a long speech. What does Antonio’s denial mean? Is it just a statement of fact (which it can be), or is it a nervous denial of an emotion, which he prefers to keep hidden? The Elizabethan context would have privileged the former meaning. In modern performance, the latter option is often explored with the implication that Antonio’s love for Bassanio goes beyond the limits of friendship and is in fact a suppressed sexual desire. Solanio continues to interpret Antonio’s emotions in another longwinded speech about the quirks of human nature which frames some   Similarly, we will have difficulty making up our mind about Tubal’s attitude to Shylock’s loss at the end of 3. 1.   There are numerous examples of performances showing Antonio in love with Bassanio. For some see Charles Edelman, ed., The Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare in Production (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 99 –101.

Shakespeare: The Merchant of Venice   41 people to laugh while others are ‘of such vinegar aspect / That they will not show their teeth in way of smile’ (54–5). The latter description turns Antonio into the traditional spoil-sport of comedy, or a comic Puritan. While all this might be construed, and performed, as friendly though somewhat shallow banter, the play projects tensions which shape the audience perception of Venice through a series of oppositions: old / young, opulent riches / fears of losing them, restraint / gossip, seriousness / laughter, friendliness / hypocrisy. These intensify as a second group of young characters comes in, and Salarino and Solanio hastily take their leave. Bassanio, Lorenzo and Graziano, who will all turn lovers, bring in a spirit of youthful mirth, signalled by Bassanio’s ‘when shall we laugh?’ (66), his first words in the play. Despite the change of characters, the audience experiences a sense of déjà vu as this time Graziano attempts to talk Antonio out of his sadness in the manner of Salarino and Solanio. His speech builds its argument around the opposition life / death: ‘Why should a man whose blood is warm within / Sit like his grandsire cut in alabaster?’ (83–4) For him, those who do not laugh have ‘visages’ that ‘Do cream and mantle like a standing pond’ (88–9), which reiterates Solanio’s earlier dig at Antonio. At this point, it seems that the play creates an opposition between age and sadness and youth and laughter, but the antinomy dissolves as Lorenzo and Bassanio show how embarrassed they are by their friend’s effusions. The first tactfully tries to lead away prattling Graziano, who leaves eventually, but not without a parting wisecrack in keeping with the Venetian obsession with money hidden under a façade of light-heartedness: ‘silence is only commendable / In a neat’s (ox’s) tongue dried, and a maid non-vendible’ (111–12). After Lorenzo and Graziano exit, Bassanio apologises for his friend’s speaking ‘an infinite deal of nothing’ (114). No doubt, there is a lot of empty chatter in this part of Venice where groups of young men are on the move, worrying about money, poking for soft personal underbellies, preaching hedonism, lavishly giving advice how to live happily. Antonio, the one character who actually makes money, does not seem to fit in the world of mirth, nor is it clear whether the young men are good friends, or just hangers-on

42  Shakespeare: The Merchant of Venice in times of affluence. Once Antonio and Bassanio are left alone, the play sets out on the track of the subject of love as Antonio invites his young friend to tell him ‘what lady is the same / […] That you today promised to tell me of’ (119, 121). However, instead of an answer, Bassanio delivers a disquisition of his financial troubles, his ‘disabled […] estate’ (123), his spending above his means (124–5), his being ‘something too prodigal’ (129), concluding with a recognition of his already existing debt to Antonio ‘in money and in love’ (131). In performance he has appeared in a torn hose, a visual reminder of penury, but he has also been well turned-out and affluent looking, which either way is a comment on his character. To Antonio’s generous offer again to avail himself of his ‘purse, […] person […] and extremest means’ (1.1.138), Bassanio does not respond with a clear expression of gratitude, but with a piece of self-justification. He remembers his school days when he would lose an arrow and would try to find it by shooting another in the same direction, implying that Antonio might do the same by again lending him money. This is certainly an elegantly put proposition, though there is some disagreement over the virtue of the proposed solution: some believe that this is a futile way of trying to reclaim a lost arrow, let alone a lost fortune, others—that it is viable, and as the play shows, the venture leads to re-gaining a fortune as well. Only after Antonio offers his love and means a second time, does the play proceed with the long-withheld story about the lady: BASSANIO: In Belmont is a lady richly left, And she is fair, and—fairer than that word— Of wondrous virtues. (1.1.161–3) We are, it seems, at the beginning of a romantic tale, though its priorities are oddly graded. Portia’s riches are mentioned first with her beauty and virtue following in descending order to the first attribute.   Edelman, ed., The Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare in Production, note to line 57, 97.   Holland, Introduction, in W. M. Merchant, ed., The Merchant of Venice, xlv.   Charles Moseley, my editor in this series, has proved experimentally that this is indeed possible.

Shakespeare: The Merchant of Venice   43 On the other hand, the comparative degree of ‘fair’, ‘fairer’, underlines her virtues as well. The language figures her through images of riches and power: […] her sunny locks Hang on her temples like a golden fleece, Which makes her seat of Belmont Colchis’ strand, [also Cholchos] And many Jasons come in quest of her. (1.1.169–72) Adjectives like ‘sunny’ and ‘golden’ paint the ideal blond lady of Renaissance poetry, while the references to ‘the golden fleece’ and ‘Colchis’ suggest mysterious power. Portia’s Belmont is metaphorically imagined as the mythical kingdom of Colchis, home of the sorceress Medea and the Golden Fleece, one of the most coveted magic objects in Greek mythology. The fleece was stolen by Jason, helped by Medea who had fallen in love with him, and brought to Greece. The Medea story will re-emerge in 5.1, in the conversation between Jessica and Lorenzo, thus turning into a thematic sequence underpinning relationships among lovers. To relate Portia to the Golden Fleece is to suggest a character of beauty and power. Considering the implications of the myth about the ‘Jasons’, they come across as seekers after power —and thieves. Which poses the question: is Bassanio a genuine lover, or is he just part of the race for the treasures of Belmont? At this stage it is difficult to say, because he is still new in the play. Performances have given him a whiff of the profiteer, but he can also be shown as a true lover because of his admiration for Portia’s person. There is no denying though that the situation falls somewhat short of idealistic, due to the mixing of love with profit and the need for money to achieve them: O my Antonio, had I but the means To hold a rival place with one of them, I have a mind presages me such thrift   Though there have been symbolic interpretations of the Golden Fleece’s mysterious powers, at the level of merchant venture, it suggests material success and good fortune.   Edelman, ed., The Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare in Production, note to lines 160-75, 100.

44  Shakespeare: The Merchant of Venice That I should questionless be fortunate. (1.1. 173–6) It seems money is the key to the gates of Belmont, if they are to open to a suitor. Bassanio will need to dress elegantly, take rich presents, hire a ship, and arrive in style, preceded by a messenger, as he is reported to do in 2.9. Display of wealth promises compensation, ‘thrift’ (which in the 16th century meant ‘success’ and ‘profit’, not ‘economy’) and the lady’s love. In the next scene Shylock will also talk about ‘thrift’ by alluding to the Biblical story of Laban, a justification which Antonio condemns. Little juxtapositions of this kind are used to question Bassanio’s ambitions. However, this is yet to come. What belongs to the moment is his passionately expressed wish to thrive, in riches and in love, two unusual bedfellows for romantic comedy, which traditionally presents love as selflessly idealistic. When Antonio realises the extent of the requested loan and that he does not have enough free capital, he makes another generous offer: ‘go forth, / Try what my credit can in Venice do, / That shall be racked even to the uttermost’ (1.1.179–81). The careful listener would notice the verb ‘rack’ (meaning the stretching of the extent of his credit), but also torture (by dislocating the limbs on a torture rack), which is an example of a prolepsis, or linguistic pre-figuration of events to come. By the end of 1.1, the play finally takes a romantic turn in a world beset with financial worries. Venetians make money, talk money, think money, figure their relationships by money; the economy of their human interactions is permeated by it. ‘Money’ is identical with ‘life’ in Venice, a connection which will be brought to the fore on several other occasions as the play progresses. How will love fare in these circumstances? Scene 2, develops and complicates many of these relationships. 3. 2. Act 1, Scene 2: Portia’s Belmont On the Elizabethan stage, the passage from Venice to Belmont would have been uninterrupted and signalled by a few properties which the actors would have brought along as they entered. In modern perform  Mahood, ed., The Merchant of Venice, note to line 174, 65.

Shakespeare: The Merchant of Venice   45 ance, Belmont has featured different period furniture and dress. In terms of structure, Scene 2 craftily replays elements of Scene 1 to weave a web of similarities between the ostensibly different Venice and Belmont. In opposition to Venice, Belmont is a female space, residence of the rich aristocratic heiress, Portia, and her waiting-gentlewoman, Nerissa. The mood of their opening exchanges though, recalls the concerns of Venice: Portia complains of weariness (1.2.1), while Nerissa cracks a joke on her mistress’s sadness suggesting that it would only be real ‘if your miseries were in the same abundance as your good fortunes are’ (3–4), thus ascertaining Portia’s wealth and setting the sententious tone of their dialogue. Portia has no financial worries, but has a problem with marriage. She is bound by her dead father’s will to marry the man who resolves a riddle involving three caskets. Nerissa tries to comfort her mistress that the lottery is to be trusted because it as a virtuous father’s attempt to secure the happiness of his daughter, for ‘who chooses his meaning chooses you, will no doubt never be chosen by any rightly but one you shall rightly love’ (30–2). Nerissa is suggesting that only the ‘right’ kind of man can make the ‘right’ choice and he will be such that Portia will ‘rightly’ fall in love with him. This optimistic version of the benign and protective meaning of the lottery is pitted against Portia’s complaint that her ‘will of a living daughter is curbed by the will of a dead father’ (23–4). While the young Venetian men have the freedom to mock the lifelessness of the ‘grandsire cut in alabaster’ (84), he is not a figure of fun in the female world of Scene 2 where he literally controls his daughter’s future from beyond the grave. In romantic comedy, women are given the freedom to run away from society and realise their desires before returning as wives to the men they have chosen. The heroine of The Merchant of Venice has nowhere to escape, nor can she choose for herself. She is literally besieged by undesirable suitors, whom she disparages in a series of comic sketches of national stereotypes: The Neapolitan ‘doth nothing but talk of his horse’ (39–40), the Count Palatine is ‘a weeping philosopher’ (47–8), the Frenchman is a faceless ‘every man in no man’ (58), the Englishman (tactfully and provocatively for the London   Edelman, ed., The Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare in Production, 102.

46  Shakespeare: The Merchant of Venice audience) is ‘a proper man’s picture’ (79), though somewhat lacking in foreign languages and not particularly elegant, the Scotsman is aggressive and prone to pick fights (76–7). The Prince of Morocco, whose arrival is announced at the end, draws from Portia an even stronger deprecation: ‘If he have the condition of a saint, and the complexion of a devil, I had rather he should shrive me than wive me’ (126–7). There is a cool, cutting wit and imagination in these comments and the audience is on Portia’s side, because irony seems the only way to challenge her constraints. These mocking descriptions would have been funny to the Elizabethans, because they relate to their contemporary images of otherness. The pugnacious Scotsman would have made a good joke in 1596, but in the 1623 Folio (published under King James VI of Scotland and I of England), he became ‘the other lord’, due to the political tactlessness of slighting the Scots. To modern audiences these references are rather tedious, because their meaning as contemporary comic digs is lost. To make up for that, modern performance employs a lot of explanatory stage business, like photographs and films of the suitors. Modern viewers, however, are very sensitive to Portia’s remarks concerning Morocco and the negative relationship between aristocratic femininity, otherness and race. To consider with hindsight the result of Portia’s father’s lottery is to realise that it provides exactly what Portia wants—a marriage to a Venetian. Thus, the play confronts the problem of the stranger in the sexual politics of Belmont by securing that daughters have internalised the anti-alien patriarchal code. There is no doubt that Portia ‘mislikes’ foreigners of any kind and that she would be only happy with a Venetian. Her sentiments are later to be matched by Shylock’s dislike of Christians and Antonio’s hatred for Jews. A sense of the groups inside Venice and the way they relate begins to emerge and it is definitely not one of multicultural harmony. What makes Venice tick is money exchanged among men as proof of friendship and love. Belmont offers a picture which is more diffuse—the patriarchal will operating behind its scenes proposes a seemingly open contest for the ‘exchange’ of an eligible heiress for a resolved riddle. However, on the emotional level, .

  Edelman, ed., The Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare in Production, 102–7.

Shakespeare: The Merchant of Venice   47 choice is limited by Portia’s preference for Venetians, and as we are to be prompted shortly, for one particular Venetian. If the father’s and daughter’s wills are to coincide, a Venetian gentleman named Bassanio is the only point where they can meet. The play signals that such possibility is in the offing by having alerted its audience to Bassanio’s intentions (in 1.1.) and shown that all odds in Belmont are in his favour–—he is ‘a Venetian, a scholar and a soldier’ with impeccable aristocratic credentials, having been ‘in the company of the Duke of Monferrat’ on a visit to Belmont ‘in Portia’s father’s time’ (1.2.109–10). He is one whom Portia ‘remembers well’ (117) and, unlike the hapless foreign suitors, finds ‘worthy of praise’ (118). In performance, the moment when Bassanio’s name is mentioned has ranged from a wary admission of interest on her part to barely suppressed excitement which would suggest that Portia is already in love with him. Shakespeare will use this technique in Much ado About Nothing (1598), where he will also slip in a piece of information suggesting that Beatrice and Benedic (like Portia and Bassanio) have known each other for some time, which helps deepen their relationship and set them apart from the lovers who fall in love on the spot, like Nerissa and Graziano, or who risk crossing tribal barriers, like Jessica and Lorenzo. So, what do we know about the heroine at the end of 1.2.? It is clear that she is beautiful, high born and rich, but also constrained and anxious. Carol Leventen has shrewdly observed that in spite of her complaints, Portia never voices anger against her father, nor opposes the absurdity of the lottery, that her compliance with patriarchal law is her personal choice. It is not clear how she is going to deal with the situation, but her intelligent character already transpires through her language. Portia converses in complex and sparkling prose in sentences juggling point and counter-point, suggesting intellectual alertness and a capacity to rationalise problems. Her speech consists of a series of aphorisms about the flimsy frontiers between intention and reality, self and other, reason and passion (12–20). The angst of indeterminacy is elegantly disguised under her sententiae (pithy, instruc  Leventen, ‘Patrimony and Patriarchy in The Merchant of Venice’, 67–8.

48  Shakespeare: The Merchant of Venice tive sayings, aphorisms): ‘It is a good divine that follows his own instructions’ (14–15), or, ‘The brain may devise laws / for the blood, but a hot temper leaps o’er a hot decree: such a hare is madness the youth, to skip o’er / the meshes of good counsel, the cripple’ (17–20). Beneath the linguistic gambols, the alliterative conjoining of oppositions, ‘brain’/’blood’ (reason / passion), ‘madness’ / ’meshes’ and phrases opposite in meaning ‘hot decree’ / cripple counsel’ (eager wish / constraining reason), gives each side of the argument similar weight and point to the relativity of human behaviour under the disguise of sententious absoluteness. The language of passages like these bristles with options, creates hurdles between word and action, projects a balanced and trained mind. All this will serve Portia in good stead later, when she will have to navigate the verbal straights between the absolute necessity to save Antonio’s life and the constrictions of the signed bond. By the end of 1.2 two slightly opposite pictures are in view: on the one hand, there seems to be as little peace of mind in romantic and wealthy Belmont as in the busy port of Venice; on the other, it is clear that the heroine, though constrained, is not helpless—linguistic muscle-flexing shows her alert and active. 3. 3. Act 1, Scene 3: Shylock’s Venice By now, it is hardly surprising that when the play returns to Venice, it does so by exposing the audience to a character (Shylock) who speaks of money: ‘Three thousand ducats, well’ (1.3.1). Antonio’s Venice is that of venture capital, Shylock’s of what we nowadays call banking. Then, as now, commerce was adventurous, money cautious. From the outset we encounter someone who hedges his bets and carefully considers options: ‘three thousand ducats’, ‘three months’, ‘Antonio bound’. Bassanio is kept waiting without an answer amid indeterminate, repetitive statements. ‘Antonio is a good man’ (12), mumbles Shylock, and as Bassanio enthusiastically confirms his friend’s credentials, his ignorance to the meaning of words in Shylock’s Venice   On the gap between language and action see D. J. Palmer, ‘The Merchant of Venice, or the Importance of Being Earnest’, in M. Bradbury and D. J. Palmer, eds., Shakespearean Comedy (London: Arnold, 1972), 97–120.

Shakespeare: The Merchant of Venice   49 becomes apparent. ‘My meaning in saying he is a good man’, explains Shylock, is ‘that he is sufficient’, i.e. solvent (15–17). Having taken stock of ‘the peril of waters, winds and rocks’ (24), Shylock concludes that Antonio is indeed ‘sufficient’, yet he must talk to him before making a decision. Eager for the loan, Bassanio with ingratiating naivety suggests that the three of them have dinner together, only to have Shylock fly in his face: ‘Yes, to smell pork!’ (31). A mere innocent on the Rialto, Bassanio understands neither its language nor its grudges. At this moment (line 31), Antonio himself appears and the audience is presented with an awkward social situation. Antonio is on stage for 20 lines, before Shylock acknowledges his presence, though Bassanio twice draws attention to him. A silent character is a powerful sign; his mute reactions can provide graphic comment on a situation. While Antonio waits, Shylock is given an aside (a speech, enabling a character to share thoughts and feelings with the audience, without being overheard by other characters). Asides signal alienation, distrust and scheming, but they also provide direct access to the audience who begin to recognise characters as individuals. Shylock’s aside, leaves no doubt about his reasons for hating Antonio and the complex nature of his grievances—religious, professional, personal: I hate him for he is a Christian, But more, for that in low simplicity He lends out money gratis, and brings down The rate of usance [interest] here with us in Venice […] He hates our sacred nation, and he rails, Even there where merchants even do most congregate, On me, my bargains, and my well-won thrift, Which he calls interest. (1.3.39–41; 45–8) Compounding economic issues with religion and nationality has proved to be an explosive mixture throughout history, as it is in   In Act 2 Shylock does go to dinner with the Christians, which enables Jessica to elope. This is an example of one of the inconsistencies in the play, which get lost in the flow of a performance. Or might it be that once he has made up his mind to trade with Antonio, Shylock places his business interest before religious objections?

50  Shakespeare: The Merchant of Venice the anti-Semitic argument that the Jews should be deprived of their wealth because they had killed Jesus, or in Antonio’s own hatred for the moneylender and Jew. Shylock’s aside is an excellent example of how these elements are inextricably and poisonously linked. His hatred is due to present infringement on his ‘usance’ and ‘thrift’ (‘profit’), but its root goes deeper. The order of the grievances (like Bassanio’s priorities as he sets off for Belmont) is indicative of the character’s value system: money considerations come first (the comparative and superlative degrees are used in statements related to it). Instead of love (which drives Bassanio), Shylock is motivated by religion cradling the memory of an ‘ancient grudge’ (44). The speech reveals Shylock’s strong sense of identity—he is a Jew living in an antagonistic world. Through him, the play opens in a direction uncharacteristic of comedy—to a past history of conflict between Jews and Christians and between Shylock and Antonio. So far, audiences have seen a noble, kind and generous Antonio, so it is important for them to see how he behaves during Shylock’s aside. If Shylock’s malice is expressed verbally, Antonio’s emotions will be revealed by facial expression and gesture. On the Elizabethan stage these were magnified; modern performance has had friendly, steely, detached, disgusted, or superior Antonios who have delivered their first words in a variety of emotions: Shylock, albeit I neither lend nor borrow By taking nor by giving of excess, Yet to supply the ripe wants of my friend I’ll break a custom. (1.3.58–61) Antonio’s claim is contradictory, if not slightly disingenuous. On the one hand, he has offered Bassanio support in excess of what he can actually afford, has himself suggested that they borrow the money; on the other, he asserts a moral high ground at the very moment when he is breaking his own rules. Shylock is alert to the inconsistency and does not miss the chance to rub it in: ‘Methoughts you said you neither lend nor borrow / Upon advantage’ (66–7). Antonio confirms that this is so, while Shylock launches into a Biblical disquisition which both the audience and

Shakespeare: The Merchant of Venice   51 Antonio are able to recognise. It is the story of Jacob, who, helped by a trick suggested by his ‘wise mother’ (70), obtained his father’s blessing instead of his elder brother, to whom it was due. Later, when employed by his uncle Laban to tend his sheep, he used another trick involving carved sticks which he placed before the ewes ‘when the work of generation was’ (79), thus making them bear ‘parti-coloured lambs’ (85). According to the agreement, these were to be given to him, while the white ones were to go to Laban. Shylock uses the Biblical story as a parable justifying his prosperity, concluding that ‘thrift is blessing, if men steal it not’ (87). Protestant divines were aware of the ambiguity surrounding Jacob’s ‘thrift’. However, the notion that his success was dishonest was too disturbing and the problem was circumvented by interpreting it as an example of God’s will. That much Antonio is ready to concede, but he refuses to recognise the implications of Shylock’s example for money-making, for ‘is your gold and silver ewes and rams?’ (92). Indeed, for a Venetian, for whom money is a life line, to deny the parallel between profit in money-lending and Jacob’s story signals either lack of interpretative skills, or sheer obstinacy. From Shylock’s point of view, Antonio completely misses the point. He concludes the conversation on a note, which in performance can be either fraught with irony, or sound as an extended gesture of peace: ‘I cannot tell, I make it breed as fast’ (93). At this point Antonio’s language degenerates into a stream of insults: ‘devil cit[ing] Scripture’, ‘evil soul’, ‘villain’, ‘apple rotten at the heart’ (95, 96, 97, 98). Then, without apology, he asks for a loan: ‘Well, Shylock, shall we be beholden to you?’ (102). Antonio’s abuse is sententious; it consists of set phrases which are ready at hand when needed and derive from a religious vocabulary. In the course of the play we shall become aware that this is typical of all Venetians, their world is linguistically split into Christians and others, as is Shylock’s. It would not have been surprising had the old enemy answered in kind, but instead, Shylock offers a tale of the abuses he has suffered from Antonio, delivered with stamina and biting sarcasm:   Halio, ed., The Merchant of Venice, note to lines 86–7, 122.   Frank Wigham, ‘Ideology and Class Conduct in The Merchant of Venice’, in Gary Waller, ed., Shakespeare’s Comedies (London and New York: Longman, 1991), 118.

52  Shakespeare: The Merchant of Venice Signor Antonio, many a time and oft In the Rialto you have rated me About my monies and my usances. Still have I borne it with a patient shrug, For suff’rance is the badge of all our tribe. You call me misbeliever, cut-throat dog, And spit upon my Jewish gabardine, […] […] You, that did void your rheum upon my beard, And foot me as you spurn a stranger cur Over the threshold, money’s is your suit. What should I say to you? Should I not say ‘Hath a dog money? Is it possible A cur can lend three thousand ducats?’   (1.3.103–9; 114–19) If we have had no reason to like Shylock, we also have no reason to mistrust what he says about his treatment, which is consistent with what we have heard moments before from Antonio. The verbal abuse he quotes resounds throughout the play. The audience knows that Shylock hates the Christians, but the reasons he gives make it understand why this is so. Shylock’s words take the play beyond religious antagonism and into the economic, ethnic and social problems at the heart of everyday life. The ‘dog’ Jew, created by the language, is also a social underdog and a metaphorical screen for projecting the behaviour of Christians. More than once will he speak unpalatable truths. At this moment, the audience has in view both Shylock’s meanness and the revelation that Antonio is not just the generous soul presented in Scene 1. He has a darker, aggressive, even violent side which is now played out as proof of Shylock’s words. Having come for a loan without excuse or apology, he behaves with the arrogance and selfassurance of those who are used to dominate others: ANTONIO: I am as like to call thee so again, To spit on thee again, to spurn thee, too. If thou wilt lend this money, lend it not As to thy friends; for when did friendship take

Shakespeare: The Merchant of Venice   53 A breed for barren metal of his friend? But lend it rather to thine enemy Who, if he break, thou mayst with better face Exact the penalty.   (1.3.126–33) Like Shylock’s, Antonio’s hatred is grounded in religious uprightness, and in this respect the two irreconcilable enemies are mirror-images of each other. In a world where religion disguises financial interest and financial gain is justified with religious arguments the market place becomes the arena of inherited tensions which disrupt its supposed rationalism. So far money has served as an expression of love (1.1); here, in an extraordinary gesture, Antonio proposes a bond of enmity, connecting money with hate. Both ideas will continue their interplay and produce some of the problematic resolutions of the action. Context is important to understand Shylock’s offer of a bond where the ‘forfeit (payment) be ‘an equal pound / Of your fair flesh’ (145–7), which Antonio accepts after a few feeble objections from Bassanio. Suddenly, the tension is released. It seems that both parties are satisfied; Shylock is off to the notary; Antonio is absolutely sure that he will in the interim get ‘thrice three times the value of this bond’ (156). The situation is rife with underlying contradictions: Shylock wants to do business, but also wants to catch Antonio ‘on the hip’ (43), Antonio hates the Jew, but has to avail himself of his services. In performance, it is interesting to consider whether Shylock shows signs of friendliness in the course of the conversation, to change after Jessica elopes, or whether he is devious throughout. There remains of course the question of the meaning of the bond and the related problem of whether it is a premeditated plan to destroy Antonio. By now the play has presented another strange bond exemplified by Portia’s father’s will. A comparison between Shylock’s and Portia’s father’s bond, can lead us some way into an answer. The staking of three thousand ducats for a pound of flesh resembles the marriage through a lottery of three caskets in that in both cases the connection between the items is not clear, nor is it reasonably explained. While Portia’s father’s ‘meaning’ is originally obscure, the play indicates (through Nerissa) that there is a hidden mean-

54  Shakespeare: The Merchant of Venice ing (1. 2. 27–32). Shylock’s bond is something of a mystery, too. Demanded by Antonio as a sign of enmity, it is eventually construed by him as a sign of kindness: ‘The Hebrew will turn Christian: he grows kind’ (175). Critics have explained it as Shylock’s power-fantasy of an imaginary triumph over an age-old enemy, dreamt up on the spur of the moment, or, as James Shapiro has argued, as a wish for a symbolic circumcision (through cutting out of some flesh) and conversion of the enemy. There is no doubt that it encapsulates the antagonism between the Christian and the Jew, though for all his gloating, Shylock cannot conceivably imagine that all factors needed for activating the bond can come together. In this instant, the play is emphatically silent about planning, though it pays attention to motive, while Portia’s father’s bond is fully premeditated, though its motive is hidden. Both bonds connect animate and inanimate, human and object (Portia / casket, human flesh / money). Portia’s father’s lottery wishes to limit ‘love’ and procreation, i.e. ‘life’, to a specific national and class defined group; the pound of flesh aims at limiting the connection between ‘money’ and ‘life’ through the continuation of Shylock’s economic and value system. In the long run, the action will reverse his fantasy of inversion into a reality applicable to himself: he will have to convert and lose his ‘life’ (4.1.370) by losing his wealth. The two fairytale stories thus acquire the status of metaphors for the workings of two recognizably real patriarchal systems, each attempting to overcome the other in the name of the control over wealth and continuity. At the end of Act 1, two antagonistic groups are visible: on one side are Antonio and the young men, who need his help and create   Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare, (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1960), Vol. 1, 93.   James Shapiro, Shakespeare and the Jews, 14–15.   Ruth Nevo, Comic Transformations in Shakespeare (London and New York: Methuen, 1980), 129.   H. B. Charlton, Shakespearean Comedy (London: Methuen, 1967), 147.   Alexander Leggatt, Shakespeare’s Comedy of Love (London and New York: Routledge, 1990), 123.   John Drakakis, ‘Historical Difference and Venetian Patriarchy’, in Martin Coyle, ed., The Merchant of Venice, New Casebooks (New York: St Martin s Press, 1998), 196–7.

Shakespeare: The Merchant of Venice   55 his social ambience. H. B. Charlton has summed the sociology of the group in the following way: The Venice of Bassanio, Lorenzo, Salanio, and the rest is an opulent world, inhabited by high-spirited men of affairs, who live richly, and with the reckless gaiety which is the privilege of those whom blood or experience has endowed with competent savoir–faire as with second nature. […] They are at liberty to enjoy the mirth and the large laughter of the world without concern for its seamier and more serious sides […]They are prodigal by habit and endeavour to come fairly off from their great debts […] they are, in sum, a society destined to make intolerable the life of an alien in their midst. What should be added to this comment is that the spirit of Venetian festivity enables love and that the Venetians need not be seen in totally dark colours; however permeated by money, there is friendship and love in their world. Yet, even if the comic spirit which involves generosity and prodigality is to be given sway, its nature will be tempered with the realisation that Christian Venice has a deeply ingrained unpalatable side. Opposed to the Christians is Shylock, the dogged Jewish moneylender who has experienced their intolerance and is protecting his livelihood with principles of ‘thrift’ derived from the hard-nosed practicality of the Old Testament. His Venice is constrained to the Rialto, with no room for prodigality, laughter and sport. He is unpleasant, but many in the Elizabethan playhouse would have recognised in his ways something of the economic rules operating in their own city. In the indeterminate near distance lies Belmont, alluring with its elegance, wealth and young mistress. Aristocratic remoteness and riddling language disguise its real desires, its power, its wariness of ‘others’. How will love overcome so many hurdles? How will the bonds be resolved? Act 2 answers some of these questions and creates further obstacles.

  Charlton, Shakespearean Comedy, 153–4.

4. Act 2: Confusions and Exclusions Act 2 consists of a sequence of relatively short scenes, shuttling between Venice and Belmont, ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ with a sense of enhanced urgency. This part of the play is crowded with newcomers, three of whom disappear at its end (Morocco, Old Gobbo, Arragon), while Jessica and Lancelot further complicate the web of relationships. The Act resolves the problem of Portia’s undesirable suitors and clears the stage for Bassanio; Shylock’s daughter, Jessica, elopes with Lorenzo; the romantic plot seems to move towards a climax. The spirit of comedy is enhanced by the appearance of the comic fool Lancelot. Strategically placed at the beginning and end of the Act are the three scenes of the casket plot, involving Morocco and Arragon; scattered in between are Lancelot’s comic pranks, his desertion of Shylock’s house and Jessica’s elopement. The urgency of events is underlined by arriving dispatches of letters, changes of travel plans, removal of money, an elopement, and an unsuccessful chase of fleeing lovers. The language bounces between formal verse (Morocco, Arragon) and woolly prose (Lancelot), to jingling rhymes (the derisory verses in the caskets of the failed suitors). 4.1. Morocco and Arragon ‘Mislike me not for my complexion’ (2.1.1), Morocco’s opening words addressed to Portia, remind the audience of her strongly expressed dislike of dark skin from 1.2. The Morocco scenes (2.1 and 2.7) return the play to the issue of the ‘other’ and what is appropriate for him to have. The question here is whether audience expectations modelled by Portia’s earlier comments (1.2.126–7), are confirmed by what they see. Many critics find Morocco foolish and unworthy of her, but, unlike the more shadowy Arragon, he has a character

Shakespeare: The Merchant of Venice   57 potential which performance rarely explores beyond broad comedy. Shakespeare, however, has given attention to this character through a considerable stage presence and impressive diction. Morocco appears twice, in 2.1 and 2.7; his speech in 2.7 is the longest in the play and his display of rhetorical skills is appropriate for a princely character. His opening lines in 2.1 directly address his race and insist that his humanity is identical to that of a white person: Bring me the fairest creature northward born, Where Phoebus’ fire scarce thaws the icicles, And let us make incision for your love To prove whose blood is reddest, his or mine. (2.1. 4–7) The idea of cutting the flesh to prove love carries resonances with Shylock’s bond and serves as a bridge towards the speech on the subject of race and religion in 3.1.50–69. Morocco’s words also open the question of appearance and reality, relevant to the immediate situation. His elegant verbal self-denial, ‘I would not change this hue / Except to steal your thoughts, my gentle queen’ (2.1.11–12), shows his taste for the hyperbole of romantic diction and reminds the audience of Portia’s racial preferences. Indeed, Morocco’s penchant for exalted metaphor is one of the reasons why he chooses the gold casket—he believes that Portia’s gem-like preciousness (2.7.54–5) can be set only in gold. One of the features which might make Morocco comic is his proneness to heroic bragging: ‘I would o’er-stare the sternest eyes […], / Outbrave the heart most daring on the earth, / Pluck the young suckling cubs from a she-bear, / Yea mock the lion […]’ (2.1.27– 30). However, he has soldierly credentials (25–6) and seems to have something of the scholar in him. Pulling in the opposite direction is the dubiousness of what he says. He seems to ascribe victory to battles which have been lost; his mythological references are impressive, but conflate elements of different stories. It is not clear how much of this fine detail would have been visible to the Elizabethans (though some would); to us, much of the context is lost.   Leggatt, Shakespeare’s Comedy of Love, 133.   See Halio, ed., The Merchant of Venice, notes to lines 25-6, 32-8, 128–9.

58  Shakespeare: The Merchant of Venice The overall impression the character gives is positive and subversive of Portia’s distaste. There would have been no need to give Morocco a sympathetic character, or any character at all, had he not been used to underline something important in the play. I believe this to be connected with the view the audience begins to form about the nature of the casket test. This idea will be developed at some length in 3.2, but for the time being let us remember that there is little which is wrong with Morocco; he is royal and well-mannered, his language is up to scratch with the requirements of romantic love, though he likes to extol his own virtues as well. He is in fact within reach of the right answer, having himself spoken of merit lying beyond appearance, though in choosing, he follows the assumption that the appearance of the caskets should correspond to the high value put on love. Morocco’s complex depiction, draws attention to Portia’s disingenuous pun that if he chooses correctly he would stand ‘as fair / As any comer I have looked on yet’ (20–1), which we know is false; (‘fair’ = ‘beautiful’, ‘white skinned’). Morocco, like Shylock, poses a problem of presentation in performance. Should he, as a long tradition goes, have an accent, wear strange clothes, or perform threatening actions with his scimitar? Such ploys alienate the character by making him comic and disqualify him in the audience’s eyes. Given the text, there is enough room to show an attractive ‘other’. Not many contemporary performances have grappled with the potential he offers and avoided racial stereotyping which is still prevalent in his treatment. The second suitor, Arragon (2.9), cuts a somewhat sketchier figure, though he, too, is a competent speaker. In the theatre, he is often played for laughs. Since his characterization is more negative, Arragon is usually caricatured in performance where he has been anything between young and arrogant, old and dithering, absurdly dressed, accompanied by outbursts of Spanish music, or followed by lugubrious-looking attendants.   A rare example of sympathetically comic treatment can be found in Trevor Nunn’s 2001 film (see Filmography). See also Edelman, ed., The Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare in Production, 157–61.   Nunn makes him funny, but uses the character to reveal some of Portia’s assumptions about foreigners; in Radford’s 2004 film, he is a caricature, as is

Shakespeare: The Merchant of Venice   59 The two unsuccessful suitors have something in common: they consider the riddling inscriptions on the caskets, choose appearances which gratify their high opinion of themselves and ‘deliberate’ (2.9.79). Obviously, logic invisible to foreigners is required by the test which by the end of Act 2 delivers Portia’s wish not wed a stranger. As the failed suitors get out of the way, having promised never to court another lady, the play announces the arrival of Bassanio’s messenger, unambiguously hailed as ‘Quick Cupid’s post’ (2.9.99). The gates of love are flung open. 4.2. Jessica’s Elopement, Lorenzo, Venetians Act 2 brings about Jessica’s elopement, which, in the course of events, will complicate the reasons behind Shylock’s revenge (in 3.1). In style, haste and secrecy, Jessica and Lorenzo’s relationship stands in contrast to the public ritual and verbal richness of Belmont’s lottery. Unlike Portia who, though grudgingly, accepts her father’s will, Jessica is ashamed of ‘being her father’s child’ and ‘daughter of his blood’ (2.3.17, 18). Portia and Bassanio share class and heritage, Jessica and Lorenzo come from two diametrically opposed worlds: he from the society of Venetian revelling, she from Shylock’s ‘sober house’ (2.5.36). In Shakespearean comedy, the world of revels always defeats sobriety and love triumphs over an individual patriarch’s obstruction, while remaining within the general limits of patriarchal order (compare A Midsummer Night’s Dream). However, the religious conflict in Venice gives an edge to Jessica’s choice, because her wish to marry Lorenzo pits her not just against her father (which is the typical transgression of comedy), but also against the order he represents and exposes her to the prejudice of the patriarchy she wishes to inhabit. Signals of precariousness and uncertainty are all around. Lorenzo’s planning is poor; even brash Graziano notes the lack of ‘good preparation’ (2.4.4) for the elopement, nor does his and Salarino’s presence as helpers raise the profile of the undertaking. Graziano’s repuMorocco.   Leggatt, Shakespeare’s Comedy of Love, 133.

60  Shakespeare: The Merchant of Venice tation for loud arrogance has been recalled in 2.2 when he asks to join the boat to Belmont, but Bassanio reminds him that this is risky because he is ‘too wild, too rude, and bold of voice’ (2.2.152) and might damage his own prospects. Only after Graziano promises to play the dignified man is he allowed to come along. The other friend, Salarino, is a non-entity, gossip-monger, hanger-on, obsessively interested in the lives of others. While they wait for Lorenzo, the two men callously jest about the ways of love in Venice: GRAZIANO: All things that are, Are with more spirit chasèd than enjoyed. How like a younker or a prodigal [young nobleman] The scarfèd bark puts from her native bay, Hugged and embracèd by the strumpet wind! How like the prodigal doth she return, With over-weathered ribs and raggèd sails, Lean, rent, and beggared by the strumpet wind!   (2.6.12–19) If this dramatic and rude metaphor is a forecast for Jessica’s future with Lorenzo, it is certainly a bleak one; the Venetian worries of loss at sea (compare 1.1), here become a metaphor for loss of youthful idealism. The bark that hopefully puts out to sea, bedecked in banners, returns battered by storms; the joyful anticipation of ad/venture is devastated by the ‘strumpet wind’. Is love in Venice, like ‘all things that are’, ‘with more spirit chasèd than enjoyed’? Such cynical banter provides the immediate context of Jessica’s elopement. Combined with Lorenzo’s belated appearance, it makes the audience wonder what kind of friends Graziano and Salarino are and how reliable he is. The brief exchange of loving words between Jessica and Lorenzo is followed by the throwing of a casket full of Shylock’s gold. In a gesture of dramatic irony Jessica ‘gilds’ (49) herself with more ducats as she apprehensively joins the masquers whose ‘varnished faces’ are, in her father’s words, nothing but ‘shallow foppery’(2.5.33, 35). Given the context, it is difficult not to find some truth in Shylock’s description however we want to be on the lovers’ side.

Shakespeare: The Merchant of Venice  61 While male disguise is a typical escape ploy for women in romantic comedy, Jessica’s nervousness about her boy’s attire (38–9), signals the unease of her transition into the new world she has chosen. Portia will wear her lawyer’s weeds with confidence (4.1) and will be empowered by them; Jessica is deeply anxious and ashamed by her change of clothes (2.6.41–2). Anxiety will remain part of her progress through the play as a mark of unsettled identity. On the Shakespearean stage, where girls’ parts were played by boys, Jessica’s worries over her boy’s costume is a comic touch, a gesture, underlining the nonnaturalistic nature of the stage and a reminder of what she stands for, rather than what she is. The sense of haste is intensified by the briefness of Lorenzo’s declaration of his love, which is squeezed for space and hangs on a couple of ‘ifs’: LORENZO: Beshrew me but I love her heartily. For she is wise, if I can judge of her; And fair she is, if that mine eyes be true; And true she is, as she hath proved herself; (2.6.52–5) Jessica had already expressed her hope for the future in similarly conditional language: ‘O Lorenzo, / If thou keep promise, I shall end this strife, / Become a Christian and thy loving wife’ (2.3.19–21). Critics have rightly asked how big an ‘if’ this is and how it affects our understanding of her behaviour. Is the money she showers on Lorenzo to be seen as an expression of love Venetian style, or is it a way of securing the uncertainties behind the ‘ifs’ in their relationship?  Will the bark of her hopes be ‘rent and beggared’? Will the casket she steals, contain the love the aristocratic couple find in theirs? As Acts 3 and 5 bring Jessica back on the stage, some answers will be suggested. 4.3. Lancelot, the Subversive Fool The comic fool, a character typical of comedy, makes his first appear  Lyon, The Merchant of Venice, 65.

62  Shakespeare: The Merchant of Venice ance also in Act 2. As usual, his function is to comment on the action by shadowing the movement and behaviour of other characters and creating the linguistic mayhem, relished by the audience. Lancelot is closely connected with Jessica’s trajectory in the play: he provides her with conversation in Shylock’s house (and Belmont), lightens the atmosphere, serves as a go-between for the lovers. Briefly, Lancelot is joined by his father, Old Gobbo. Their rambling logic and malapropisms— ‘infection’ for ‘affection’, ‘frutify’ for ‘certify’ (2.1.120, 128)—off-set the linguistic competence of the Venetians and insidiously undermine the perception of events. As an important part of the play’s structure Lancelot provides an additional vantage point for judging Jessica and other characters’ motives. Lancelot’s comic tricking of Old Gobbo into believing that his son is dead foreshadows Shylock’s loss; Old Gobbo’s reference to his son as his ‘flesh and blood’ (2.2.87) also resounds in Shylock’s words in 3.1. Lancelot’s dilemma whether to leave Shylock for Bassanio is presented as a quasi-moral debate in the style of the old-fashioned morality plays of the recent past, a conversation with two externalised forces, his Conscience and the Devil. In such a situation, the logic of the good Christian should be to follow his Conscience. However, in the inverted world of the fool, Lancelot chooses to follows the Devil. He does not like the advice of his ‘hard conscience’ (26–7) to stay with Shylock and resorts to the trick of equating ‘the Jew [with] the very devil’ (25), only to justify the decision to leave him on the advice of the ‘fiend’ who ‘is the devil himself’ (24). Lancelot’s bungled thinking demystifies religious issues, lays bare the moral ambiguity of his act, the necessity to demonize Shylock before leaving him, serves to question the morality of Jessica’s elopement. Like   In performance, the language of fools is most difficult to put across convincingly to modern audiences, not so much because of its bungled logic, but because fools tend to use everyday words and references, which sometimes do not make sense to us. Directors often resort to cuts of bits of the text, which are particularly inscrutable.   For a discussion of the role of Lancelot see also Walter Cohen, ‘The Merchant of Venice and the Possibilities of Historical Criticism’, in Marin Coyle, ed., The Merchant of Venice, New Casebooks (New York: St. Martin s Press, 1998), 59–61.

Shakespeare: The Merchant of Venice  63 Lancelot, she crosses into a new life, but she does not have the comforts of a clown’s woolly mind. Her clear-eyed realization that ‘To be ashamed to be [her] father’s child’ is a ‘heinous sin’ (2.3.17, 16) remains with her and colours her future. The comic fool’s defection from Shylock to Bassanio reminds of the motives of ‘thrift’ hidden under the romantic forays of the Venetians. Like them, he is attracted by the hope for profit—the ‘rare new liveries’ (2.2.104–5) bought for Bassanio’s servants, no doubt with Shylock’s money. His presence in the heartland of romance further subverts its politics of sexual exclusiveness. Lancelot’s illicit sex with a ‘Negro’ (3.5.36) brings miscegenation, the mixing of races, under the very roof of Belmont. By getting the ‘Moor […] with child’ (3.5.36) he transgresses into the territory of racial otherness, so distasteful to Portia and so dramatically (and it seems provisionally) fended off by the riddle of the caskets. The dangers latent in him are kept in check by removing him (along with Shylock) from the play’s ending. 4.4. Expunging Otherness As a device for multiplying points of view, Lancelot sustains a constant stream of reference to Jessica’s Jewishness, which follows her to Belmont by keeping alive in the playgoers’ mind the problems dogging her conversion. Her hope that her strife will end by becoming a Christian is put in doubt by the repetitive references to her origins. Eager as she is to convert, deny her father and run away, to the Venetians she continues to be the daughter of a Jew. Lancelot’s reminders (2.5.42, 3.5.1–23) are mirrored by various other slips of language. Lorenzo’s inadvertent, ‘Here dwells my father Jew’ (2.6.25), connects her (and him) with Shylock. Later, she is again linked with her   Kim Hall, ‘Guess Who’s Coming for Dinner? Colonization and Miscegenation in The Merchant of Venice’, in Marin Coyle, ed., The Merchant of Venice, New Casebooks (New York: St. Martin s Press, 1998), 92–116. Hall makes a much larger point than mine, but some of her ideas have been used in this presentation of Lancelot.   Indeed, there have been performances, where he has been an anti-Semite taunting her even in Belmont, as in Darko Tresnyak’s 2007 production for Theater for a New Audience, New York.

64  Shakespeare: The Merchant of Venice father through the cartoon image of ‘the villain Jew’ (2.8.4), crying ‘O my daughter! / Fled with a Christian’ (2.8.15–16). Even as she disappears in the direction of Belmont, a trail of Jewishness wafts after her across the water from Venice. Her denied past will continue to hover over her entry into the community of Christians as Act 3 will show. At the end of Act 2, Shylock, Morocco and Arragon are expelled from the world of comedy. Shylock’s strong relationship with the audience and his position as an underdog uncomfortably fits with his position as the laughable senex (the deceived old father or suitor) of comedy. His public suffering and humiliation dent the perception of the lovers’ joy. According to the restless gossips Solanio and Salarino ‘all the boys in Venice follow him, / Crying his stones, his daughter and his ducats’ (2.8.23–4) which rings more raw than funny. These two are of course a messenger device meant to provide information, but as the audience know the way they operate, they will notice how they mix the news of Shylock’s distress with that of the loss ‘of a vessel of our country richly fraught’ (30). With unfailing prurience they also describe the ‘affection wondrous sensible’ (48) of Antonio’s parting from Bassanio. Among so many forms of love, all alloyed with some other interest, one begins to wonder not only about the nature of Antonio’s love for Bassanio, but also whether Bassanio deliberately chooses to use it in his favour. Act 2 maps out the lines of dramatic developments in the second part of the play and the see-saw movement between comic resolution and incipient danger in Act 3.

5. Act 3: Loss and Gain Act 3 sharpens distinctions and teases out further similarities between Venice and Belmont. It begins with Shylock’s crucial decision to take a pound of Antonio’s flesh, then cuts to Belmont for the culmination of the romantic plot. Act 3 is the usual place of the climax, or turning point, but The Merchant of Venice, offers two turning points belonging to the two strands of the plot (Shylock’s decision concerning Antonio in 3.1 and Bassanio’s choice of the lead casket in 3.2); the intersection of their consequences will later produce the third climactic moment in the courtroom, in 4.1. The play moves from tension to tension with the golden world of romance subject to menacing external pressures. 5. 1. Act 3, Scene 1: Xenophobia, Flesh, Blood and Rings The better part of 3.1 takes place ‘outside’, where Venetians and strangers mix in the name of ‘the trade and profit of the city’ (3.3.30), gossip and play out their conflicts. In less than twenty lines the scene recaps and recreates Venetian xenophobia. Thus far, we have heard Shylock’s grievances, seen Antonio’s abuse (1.3), had comical reports of a father’s humiliation (2.8); now we see the smaller fry of Venice, Salarino and Solanio, bait Shylock. In the opening twenty lines they talk of disaster and loudly commiserate with Antonio. There is so much exalted verbiage that even Salarino feels the need for ‘a full stop’ (3.1.15). Shylock’s entry (line 20) brings him into an aggressively antagonistic situation. Performance has often underlined the unpleasantness of the young Venetians: they have been shown removing rings from their fingers and putting them in their pockets, suggesting that they were stolen from Shylock during the events reported in 2.8.   Edelman, ed., The Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare in Production, 173–4.

66  Shakespeare: The Merchant of Venice Shylock’s appearance, signalled by Solanio, is an insult, ‘the devil’ ‘comes in the likeness of a Jew’ (3.1.19–20). Here performance offers two options. One, a contrast to the ranting figure of Solanio’s earlier report, a hapless old man preoccupied with the loss of his daughter, the other—a rant. Current theatre practice tends to treat it as a poignantly personal moment. The language offers such a possibility as Shylock’s preoccupation with Jessica’s elopement is underlined by his missing Salarino’s question about ‘the news among the merchants’ (3.1.21– 2). Further, the convoluted, repetitive syntax of Shylock’s opening words, ‘You knew, none so well, none so well as you, of my daughter’s flight’ (23), can be taken to suggests disorientation. Salarino’s response (like Antonio’s in 1.3) is a taunt: ‘I knew the tailor that made the wings she flew withal’ (25–6), followed by the insult ‘devil’ (31). The men, whom we have heard inquisitively probe Antonio’s sadness in 1.1 and his attachment to Bassanio in 2.8, cling to Shylock’s every word and insultingly pervert his meanings. ‘My own flesh and blood to rebel!’ (32), is twisted into a crude sexual joke, suggesting that Shylock is talking about sexual ‘rebellion’, i.e. arousal: ‘Out upon it, old carrion! Rebels it at these / years?’ (33–4). Shylock has always been good at rising up to insult, but at this moment he is unresponsive to word games. ‘I say my daughter is my own flesh and my blood’ (35), he explains, the repetition revealing his preoccupation and pain. We are used to him defending his religion and trade defiantly, but the confusion of the slighted father might arouse genuine compassion. On the stage, there is too much of the human being and too little of the cartoon devil, which sharpens the deliberate crassness of the Venetians’ jibe as Salarino snatches Shylock’s ‘flesh and blood’ and reduces it to a list of goods for consumption: ‘There is more difference between thy flesh and / hers than between jet and ivory; more between your / bloods than there is between red wine and Rhenish’ (36–8). In a move similar to Antonio’s direct passage from abuse to a request for money in 1.3, Salarino’s rude effusion is followed by a question about Antonio’s loss at sea (39–40). If these are Antonio’s good friends, he is in no need of enemies. In the near proximity of verbal reminders of ‘flesh and blood’, the rumour about Antonio’s losses plays right into Shylock’s hands. Once on the familiar territory

Shakespeare: The Merchant of Venice  67 of economic conflict, he resorts to his well-trained aggression: ‘There I have another bad match: a bankrupt, a / prodigal […] a beggar that was used to come so smug upon the / mart. Let him look to his bond’ (41–7). Salarino and Solanio do not let go until their curiosity has pushed their quarry to an extreme. They make explicit what so far has been contextual by reminding Shylock (and the audience) that the bond is about a pound of flesh, ‘What’s that good for?’ (49), thus redirecting the conversation from Shylock’s paternal connection with Jessica to his bond with Antonio. As in 1.3, with a jolt, Shylock reverts to his old argument, only this time, it becomes a threat: ‘He hath disgraced me, and hindered me half a million, laughed at my losses, mocked at my gains, scorned my nation’ (51–3). This should be reason enough for revenge; however, the play lingers on its verge for a moment of puzzling emotional connection between Shylock and the audience. The Jew is given a long speech about the shared humanity of Jews and Christians and the consequence for Christians in applying their logic: 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? If we are like you in all the rest, we will resemble you in that. If a Jew wrong a Christian, what is his humility? Revenge. If a Christian wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be by Christian example? Why, revenge. The villainy you teach me I will execute, and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction. (3.1.55–69) The series of questions addressing the fundamental sameness of human beings develops the point made by Morocco in 2.1, but Shylock’s speech goes well beyond this. It insidiously interrogates the Christians’ self-image by evoking the suffering ‘of the crucified

68  Shakespeare: The Merchant of Venice Jew his enemies worship, ‘If you prick us do we not bleed?’’. Its tit for tat logic is also disturbing not only because he chooses to take his bond and ‘better the instruction’, but because it throws back a ‘mirrorimage of […their] concealed real nature’, ‘a bitter parody of [their] actual values’. Shylock is a hard and intolerant man, but precisely because of this his words so dangerously undermine the comforting fictions of Christian gentleness. The character is so disconcertingly subversive because he dares to make a successful bid for the moral ground in Venice while contemplating murder. The audience can see a dual picture uncovered by someone who is hateful and at the same time, somehow, right. Of course, common humanity presents more complex and varied options for human interaction. Some will be presented in 4.1, when, just as here, the idea of what is just will be shown as profoundly riven by contradictions. Though the play inexorably moves towards Shylock’s request for his bond, it shies away from demonizing him by providing a complex context for his revenge. In fact, the writing is so sensitive to the delicate balance of the moment that Shylock’s final decision is withheld until he has been given one more reason to exact his bond. As Tubal arrives and the Venetians bow out with the standard insult involving the devil, we are left to observe the character in a more private world. Tubal brings crucial news: that he could not find Jessica, that, by report, Antonio ‘hath an argosy cast away’ (95) and Jessica spent in ‘one night four score ducats’ (102). Shylock’s reaction, ‘I would my daughter were dead at my foot, and the jewels in her ear’ (83–4), is often strongly held against him. But in the patriarchal worlds of Shakespeare’s plays daughters disobeying paternal will are often threatened by death or treated as dead. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Hermia’s father requests, and is granted, the ‘ancient privilege of Athens’ (1.1.40) to dispose of his daughter’s life for disobeying him. Similar irate patriarchs appear in the tragedies Othello and King Lear. Shylock’s wish for his daughter to be pliable, though dead,   Park Honan, Shakespeare, A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 261.   Kiernan Ryan, Shakespeare, 2nd edition, (Hemel Hempstead: Prentice Hall, Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1995), 19.

Shakespeare: The Merchant of Venice  69 rings a very typical attitude which says more about the restraints put on women, rather than about Shylock as a villain. Indeed, his anger emphasises the failure of his patriarchal authority; unlike Portia’s father, he has been unable to bind his daughter to his will. Towards the end of the scene, the audience is acutely aware of the personal factors behind the decision: Shylock hates the Christians, has often complained of his treatment, yet he has ‘borne it with a patient shrug’ (1.3.106). The loss of Jessica to a Christian makes a historically ingrained hatred poignantly personal: ‘The curse never fell upon our nation till now; I never felt it till now’ (3.1. 80–2). Here, the play slips in yet another motive before finally pushing Shylock towards murder—the straw which breaks the camel’s back comes in the form of an object with a symbolic rather than monetary value. Tubal reports that Jessica has exchanged for a monkey a ring which he recognises as ‘my turquoise [,] I had it of Leah when I was a bachelor’ (114–15). In a single line, the character is given a personalised family history, a past enshrined in a dead wife’s ring. Wedding rings, just as the one soon to be given to Bassanio by Portia, were signs of ‘male possession, family fidelity and shared values’. Shylock’s lost ring, along with Jessica’s elopement with the enemy, signals the painful collapse of the order he represents. Only after he has lost absolutely all, does Shylock enter the synagogue, seeking vengeance as father and Jew. The conflict is thus formulated in personal and symbolic terms. If Christians believe that their goodness belongs in the heart (Christians are ‘kind-hearted’, Jews ‘hard-hearted’), then he ‘will have the heart’ of his enemy (120), enact a symbolic circumcision by cutting it out. The bond of enmity, proposed by Antonio, activated by Venetian xenophobia and the collapse of a value system, gives birth to the monster of religious extremism. From this moment on, Shylock will be impervi  Drakakis, ‘The Merchant of Venice: Historical Difference and Venetian Patriarchy‘, 197.   Karen Newman, ‘Portia’s Ring: Unruly Women and Structures of Exchange in The Merchant of Venice’, in Marin Coyle, ed., The Merchant of Venice, New Casebooks (New York: St. Martin s Press, 1998) 127; see also Frederick Turner, Shakespeare’s twenty-first century economics (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 60–1.

70  Shakespeare: The Merchant of Venice ous to human feeling and will act under the compulsion of a religious vow. To the Elizabethans this would have been a rather mixed scene, where Shylock’s withdrawal into the synagogue would have alienated the character in their eyes. Contemporary performance has consistently shown the end of the scene as a solemn transition into a world of ritual; Shylock has been acted as putting on his prayer shawl or laying his hand on an open prayer-book, vowing Antonio’s death as an act of defiance to an alien and cruel world. Tubal’s verbally minimal role in this episode can be that of a neutral messenger, or a compassionate friend. However, the slow-drip manner in which he delivers bad news always in conjunction with a refrain about Antonio’s losses, (shades of Salarino and Solanio), can also be interpreted as manipulative. In the long run, some of his information proves to be incorrect—Antonio’s ships do come back. Whether this applies to Leah’s ring is unclear and some performances have chosen to question this part of Tubal’s story as well by showing Jessica wearing the ring at the end of the play. If this is indeed the way Tubal operates, it would show a Shylock manipulated by his fellow Jews. Is this as an attempt on the part of the play to transfer prejudice? Or is this yet another of its quandaries? Whether the answer goes one way or the other, the Christian part in Shylock’s drama is hardly minimized. In circumstances like these, Shylock’s decision to challenge the Christians on their own ground through their own legal practice makes the process of his undoing as open to scrutiny as his arrival at the decision. At this point the play sharply shifts focus to the happy climax of the love plot. 5. 2. Act 3, Scene 2: Caskets and Cultural Codes; Love and Money This scene, set in Belmont, is antithetical in tone, style and atmosphere to Scene 1. By reverting to the patterned complexities of blank verse in conspicuous opposition to the almost naturalistic prose spoken in Venice, it creates an appropriate ambience for the climax   Edelman, ed., The Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare in Production, 183-4.   This happens at the end of Michael Radford’s 2004 film.

Shakespeare: The Merchant of Venice   71 of the love plot. Its emotional pitch is also in sharp contrast to the scenes with Morocco and Arragon. For the first time we see Portia torn between hope and fear. Her restlessness and anxiety are conveyed by the enjambements, caesurae and conceits of her opening speech (3.2.1–24). Portia wrestles with the impossibility of revealing her true emotions, or the truth about the caskets; she is prevaricating and impatient at the same time. Linguistically, the scene establishes a connection between her and Bassanio, as they are shown to be elegantly responding to each other’s words. Verbal and stylistic sophistication are at the heart of romantic love, they are a sign of shared sensibility and wit as the following passage illustrates: BASSANIO: Let me choose, For as I am, I live upon the rack. PORTIA: Upon the rack, Bassanio? Then confess What treason there is mingled with your love? BASSANIO: None but the ugly treason of mistrust Which makes me fear th’enjoying of my love […] PORTIA: Ay, but I fear you speak upon the rack Where men enforcèd do speak anything. BASSANIO: Promise me life and I’ll confess the truth. PORTIA: Well then, confess and live. BASSANIO: ‘Confess and love’ Had been the very sum of my confession.   (3.2.24–36) Patterned badinage is a touchstone for lovers, proof that they are in concert with each other. Linguistic chemistry is meaningfully absent from the scenes with the other candidates. Apart from the obvious interlacing of words in the above passage, ‘sum’ will be used by Portia again later when giving herself to Bassanio as ‘the full sum of me’ (3.2.157). Paying attention to such tiny gestures of continuity is important if we are to understand the larger cultural implications of   Enjambement (enjambment) occurs when the logical period of a phrase does not coincide with the end of the line, but runs on into the next, suggesting a hurried flow of thought or emotion; caesura is a break inside a line, at the end of a phrase. Stopping at different places in different lines can also suggest heightened emotion.

72  Shakespeare: The Merchant of Venice Bassanio’s success. The ritualism of the moment is enhanced by Portia’s speech about music, as Bassanio prepares for his choice: PORTIA: Let music sound while he doth make his choice; Then if he lose he makes a swan-like end, Fading in music […] […] my eye shall be the stream and watery deathbed for him. (3.2.43–6) Though Portia further speaks of the joys music can express, her opening words delicately broach the possibility of loss through the elegant metaphor linking ‘eyes’ and ‘death’. The song, which immediately follows, places the same two images in a context rejecting fancy’s obsession with appearance: ‘Tell me where is fancy bred, / Or in the heart, or in the head? [...] It is engend’red in the eyes, / With gazing fed, and fancy dies / In the cradle where it lies (3.2.63–69). A question which inevitably arises at this point is whether Portia tries to help Bassanio (after all, she already knows where her portrait is hidden). Critics and directors have answered it both in the positive and negative. Performances have often found ways of pointing Bassanio to the right casket. The rhymes of the song ‘bred’, ‘head’, ‘fed’ / ‘lead’ have also been considered a way of directing him. There might be some truth in this, though, in the light of the argument concerning the heightened linguistic sympathy between the characters, Bassanio might be said to choose the casket of ‘meagre lead / Which rather threaten’st than dost promise aught’ (3.2.104–5), in response to the anxieties in Portia’s preceding speech about loss and death and the similar vibes of the song. In other words, he responds to the essence, not the form of the message. This is not so much an act of prompting, but of the understanding of a mind, which, in Alexander Leggatt’s phrase, is ‘attuned to the workings of convention.’ What exactly comprises the convention though has been variously interpreted. One of the suggestions, which befits the aristocratic nature of the characters, is that Bassanio bases his choice on sententiae (maxims, prov  Leggatt, Shakespeare’s Comedy of Love, 133.

Shakespeare: The Merchant of Venice   73 erbs or aphorisms), which were an essential part of the upbringing of a gentleman. According to Frank Wigham, Bassanio chooses on the basis of maxims derived from Baldassare Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier (1528), the most popular manual for elegant conduct in Shakespeare’s day: The interlocutors of The Book of the Courtier repeatedly enjoin us to hide art with art, to underplay our attributes in order to generate greater impact when truth is revealed. When Bassanio decides to trust the least prepossessing casket, he assumes it promises reward by the principle of ars celare artem [‘It is art to conceal art’]. The ideals promulgated in Castiglione’s Courtier are those of aristocratic sophistication and refinement based on classical knowledge, chivalric virtue, imagination and intellect, cool mind and elegant manners. According to this polite code, accomplishments should be disguised, true merit artfully veiled. As one of the characters in The Courtier puts it, ‘It is an art which does not seem to be an art. One must avoid affectation and practice in all things a certain sprezzatura, disdain or carelessness, so as to conceal art, and make whatever is done or said appear to be without effort and almost without any thought about it […], obvious effort is the antithesis of grace’. Critics have noted that Bassanio, unlike the failed lovers, neglects the inscriptions on the caskets and effortlessly decodes the cultural riddle. It is worth noting that his 35-line long speech is a perfect example of a humanistic exercise in eloquence, in producing copia (an abundance of witty analogies and parallels), expounding on his opening thematic statement ‘So may the outward shows be least themselves’ (3.2.73), i.e. external appearances are deceptive, which goes straight to the heart of the puzzle. Abounding in religious and   Thomas Moisan, ‘“Which is the merchant here? and which the Jew?”’, in Jean Howard and Marion O’Connor, eds., Shakespeare Reproduced (New York: Methuen, 1987), 195.   Castiglione’s book was translated into English in 1561 and had several editions.   Wigham, ‘Ideology and Class Conduct in The Merchant of Venice’, 115.   Quoted after http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprezzatura   Leggatt, Shakespeare’s Comedy of Love, 133.

74  Shakespeare: The Merchant of Venice classical images and negotiating between different levels of experience, the speech is composed so as to create suspense, while taking course towards the correct answer from the very start. Thus, the fact that the key to the mystery has been found is artfully disguised by the numerous examples that ‘perform’ the thought process which comes to an end in a strong ‘but’ which clinches the argument: But thou, thou meagre lead, Which rather threaten’st than dost promise aught, Thy paleness moves me more than eloquence, And here choose I. Joy be the consequence! (3.2.104–7) And joy is the consequence. Bassanio’s eloquence, has proven him the worthy ‘scholar’ (1.2. 110), the refined aristocrat who truly understands the codes of Belmont, the only eligible man in the love contest. Through him, Portia’s father’s lottery plays out its social and protective function: its code is cracked by the ‘right’ man, someone coming from within Venetian aristocratic culture who can continue the line of this culture. What appears to be a bizarre game open to the world turns out to be an exercise requiring specifically Venetian class-honed skills. Portia’s distaste for foreigners, emblematically enshrined in her father’s lottery, finds a happy resolution in Bassanio whom they both wish to be the winner. The sexual politics of Belmont, based on a set of invisible norms, has successfully eliminated the alien from claiming its riches and its reproductive powers. As befits true aristocrats, Portia’s relief and explosive joy and Bassanio’s triumph are kept in firm linguistic control, which enables the elegant articulation of ideas. In an extended simile about giving and receiving, Bassanio asks Portia to ‘confirm […], sign […], ratify […]’ (148), i.e. willingly agree to accept what he has won. The extraordinary answer she gives is worth discussing at some length: PORTIA: You see me, Lord Bassanio, where I stand, Such as I am. Though for myself alone I would not be ambitious in my wish To wish myself much better, yet for you I would be trebled twenty times myself, A thousand times more fair, ten thousand times more rich,

Shakespeare: The Merchant of Venice   75 That only to stand high in your account I might in virtues, beauties, livings, friends, Exceed account. But the full sum of me Is sum of something which, to term in gross, Is an unlessoned girl, unschooled unpractisèd; Happy in this, she is not yet so old But she may learn; happier than this, She is not bred so dull but she can learn; Happiest of all, is that her gentle spirit Commits itself to you to be directed As from her lord, her governor, her king. Myself and what is mine, to you and yours Is now converted. But now I was the lord Of this fair mansion, master of my servants, Queen o’er myself; and even mow, but now, This house, these servants, and this same myself Are yours, my lord’s. I give them with this ring, Which when you part from, lose, or give away, Let it presage the ruin of our love, And be my vantage to exclaim on you. (3.2.149–74) Portia, the prize come out of the leaden casket, commits herself in marriage in perfect correspondence with the code that has informed Bassanio’s choice. She mannerly gives away herself, her love, property and allegiance as a wife is supposed to do to her husband. She presents him with a ring, symbolizing her wholeness, her marital loyalty and obligation in exchange for his. John Lyon comments that in the act she ‘has the security to describe herself—‘Such as I am’— openly, vulnerably, accommodatingly with neither loss of dignity nor manipulative intentions.’ But there is also another Portia hidden under this vulnerability—the aristocratic heiress, artfully disguised as in the test of the leaden casket. The woman who wishes to be ‘twenty times more fair’, ‘ten thousand times more rich’ to be worthy of her husband, standing before her in borrowed clothes, has in fact so much money as to make money irrelevant. Theoretically, Bassanio becomes   Lyon, The Merchant of Venice, 88.

76  Shakespeare: The Merchant of Venice the master of her wealth but the play never shows him disposing of the riches of Belmont. Instead, a hundred and fifty lines later Portia will be offering to pay ‘six thousand and deface the bond, / Double six thousand and then treble that’ (297–8), to buy off Antonio’s life. In compliance with the principles behind the lottery, Portia sums herself up as ‘an unlessoned girl’, happy ‘She is not bred so dull but she can learn’ (162) from Bassanio. Lisa Jardine notes that ‘the inventory of Portia’s womanly deficiencies contradicts everything that the rest of the play explicitly tells us about her’. The leaden casket ‘promises aught’, but infallibly delivers. Yet another Portia will materialise by the end—a woman of power over the system she has played along. ’Such as I am’, turns out to be a cryptic disguise of her merit, rather than a sign of vulnerability. At this point, though, as a true daughter of the patriarchal order, Portia gives to Bassanio her all—houses, servants, herself—requesting in return that he should never ‘part from, lose, or give away’ (172) her ring. This symbolic exchange (a wedding ring is both an object and a symbol) will in the long run prove yet another test for Bassanio: he will have to learn the true ‘virtue’ of the ring, which will only happen in 5.1. While Bassanio recognises conventions, Portia is aware of their higher, symbolic value. The only other character who shares this awareness is Shylock. Unsurprisingly, the courtroom battle in 4.1 will involve the two of them and oppose the symbolic systems they represent. The loss of Leah’s ring will have as consequence his ‘vow in heaven’ and his claiming of Antonio’s flesh; Portia’s ring will travel, but will return where it belongs. These material and symbolic losses and gains produce some of the problematic effects of Act 5. The language of Portia’s betrothal speech has often been noted for its monetary images (‘account’, ‘sum’, ‘gross’), for the moving scales between the comparative and superlative degree (‘more fair’, ‘more rich’, ‘happy’, ‘happier’, ‘happiest’). Its irregular syntax gives away her feelings: enjambement pushes the phrases forward into the   Lisa Jardine, Reading Shakespeare Historically (London: Routledge, 1996), 62.   Newman, ‘Portia’s Ring: Unruly Women and Structures of Exchange in The Merchant of Venice’, 117–38.

Shakespeare: The Merchant of Venice   77 following line; pauses appear inside lines, breaking the uniformity of verse rhythms; her language is marked by repetition, alliteration and assonance. Through her Belmont has spoken with the alluring language of opulence, generous love and happiness, but the exaltation of the aristocratic moment is brief and wobbles into hilarity as Graziano and Nerissa announce their sudden betrothal (a typical comic on-the-spot love), which deflects attention from the aristocratic couple. Crudely mercantilistic parlance overtakes elegance. Money descends from the heights of metaphor to its value on the Rialto. In perfect consistency with his character, Graziano proposes ‘a thousand ducats’ bet as to which couple will first produce a boy (213–14). Unlike Portia, who has spoken down her merits, Graziano brags of achieving his goals. ‘We are the Jasons, we have won the fleece’ (239), he exclaims, reviving the audience memory of Bassanio’s quest in the trail of the ‘many Jasons’ (1.1). Venetian manners make themselves even more apparent as a third couple of lovers arrives and Graziano points to them as ‘Lorenzo and his infidel’ (216). Soon, the festive mood of the celebration is marred by a piece of bad news from town—Antonio is bankrupt and Shylock wants his flesh. Portia is in for the first surprise of her married life. The golden boy of Venice who has so appropriately obtained her love turns out to have more of an appearance than substance, like the gold and silver caskets. Though Bassanio’s speech is all humbleness and self-erasure, he has to confess the uncomfortable truth that ‘When I told you / My state was nothing, I should then have told you / That I was worse than nothing’ (256–8). Portia’s earlier joke, about ‘confess[ing]’ the ‘treason […] mingled with [his] love’ (27), turns out to have been proleptic (anticipatory). If not treasonous, Bassanio has been certainly economical with the truth. He, too, has arrived ‘such as he is’—with strings attached—‘I have engaged myself to a dear friend / Engaged my friend to his mere enemy / To feed my means’ (259–60). Their marriage thus comes to depend on the fortunes of two other characters, Antonio and Shylock, who, as W. H. Auden perceptively commented, now have to face the hazard of the ambiguous inscription on the leaden casket: ‘Who chooseth me must give and hazard

78  Shakespeare: The Merchant of Venice all he hath’ (2.9.20) . In a quick descent from aristocratic exaltation the scene assumes the business-like style of the Rialto as Portia offers to pay sums beyond any merchant’s dream. We never hear what interest Shylock would have taken, but Portia’s fortune is capable of sustaining prodigious sums: ‘pay him six thousand’, ‘double six thousand, and then treble that’ (297–8), ‘pay the petty debt twenty times over’ (3.2.305). Poor, poor Shylock, with his moneys and usances, his Biblical sheep and thrift. Portia is speaking big money, money whose source is neither clear nor ever questioned. It is the money of hereditary privilege. Bassanio has been ‘dear bought’, and in keeping her part of their exchange of loyalties, she (in a double-edged pun), promises to ‘love [him] dear’ (311). In the brief calm after the shock of the news, the couples withdraw to the chapel to solemnise their marriages, whose consummation, appropriately, will occur after the end of the play. 5.3. Jessica and Xenophobia Jessica stands in interesting comparison with Portia in Act 3. Like her, she has ‘dear bought’ a husband; unlike her, she has done so against her father’s will. Portia has obeyed her father’s bond and received a huge dowry and a husband of her liking. Jessica has stolen from her father and has been disinherited. She wishes to be Christian, but the Christians greet her as an ‘infidel’ (3.2.216). Portia can define herself without ado as ’Such as I am’ (3.2.150), but Jessica’s self-definition is a more difficult matter. In her eagerness to be accepted in Belmont, Jessica reports that she has overheard Shylock swear before ‘his countrymen’ (283) that he will ruin ‘poor Antonio’ (288), thus publicly denying her Jewishness. Belmont, though, seems deaf to her words. When Portia speaks immediately after her, she addresses Bassanio, not Jessica who has given the information. Peter Holland reflects on the performative side of such a moment of social awkwardness in the else exquisitely mannered Belmont: The hiatus here between statements might be significant. There are many ways to play it. She may, for instance, be deliber  Auden, ‘Brothers & Others’, 76.

Shakespeare: The Merchant of Venice   79 ately ignoring the Jewish woman’s words, for the Portia who dislikes the Prince of Morocco’s complexion might also be anti-Semitic and nobody in the group has so much as mentioned Jessica, silent till this speech, since Graziano identified her at her entrance as Lorenzo’s ‘infidel’ (216). On stage and screen, Portias have been ‘icily polite, or pointedly forgetful of Jessica’s name’, or much more formal to her than to the other characters. Jessica, though, is mesmerised by the charms of the lady of Belmont, whom she finds admirable ‘past expressing’ (3.5.68). Like Portia and Bassanio, who share an aristocratic diction, Jessica and Lorenzo, also have a style of their own—they joke about themselves (65–85), their self-irony hinting at their own distance from perfection. Such distancing techniques and her continued connection with Lancelot, who is the only character (except Lorenzo) with whom she converses in Belmont, underline Jessica’s marginality. The clown’s jokes about the making of Christians and the price of hogs (3.5.21–2) and his teasing about her chances of salvation, keep in focus her inalienable otherness. She is in Belmont, but not of it. At the end of Act 3, except for Lorenzo and Jessica, the play takes the lovers to the Venetian courtroom for the battle between Shylock and Portia, where Belmont will play a crucial part in sustaining Venetian domination in matters of financial power and legal order.

  Holland, Introduction, in W. M. Merchant, ed., The Merchant of Venice, xxxix.   Edelman, ed., The Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare in Production, 204.   Leggatt, Shakespeare’s Comedy of Love, 143.

6. Act 4, Scene 1: Trial and Tribulations We have no knowledge how Act 4 was performed by Shakespeare’s company. Charles Edelman plausibly suggests that, this being the only public scene, it could have been used as an opportunity for some visual splendour. Whether clad in Renaissance costumes or modern dress, its ritualism recalls 3.2. In the court Shylock and Antonio are at the opposite poles of an ‘ancient malice’ as intense and powerful as love in Belmont. The casket scene marks the culmination of the romantic plot; the court room removes Shylock, the threat to the comic outcome. These two antithetically coloured climaxes relate to the sexual and economic politics of Venice / Belmont and account for the complex effect of The Merchant of Venice and the difficulties in classifying it as comedy. Act 4 Scene 1 directly addresses power relations in Venice, the limits between Christians and ‘others’ and puts under scrutiny the fairness of Venetian law. The courtroom scene is one of the most remarkable in English drama in its drive, its violent shifts of emotion, nail-biting anticipation and stunning resolution which, for all its legal conclusiveness, remains a moral crux of Shakespearean drama. Structurally, Portia’s arrival divides the scene into two parts which play out basically the same steps and arguments, once by the men, who fail, and once by Portia, to a brilliant victory.

  Edelman, ed., The Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare in Production, 211.   The actor Patrick Stewart, who acted Shylock in 1978, has noted that ‘no one is on trial and there is no formal court’, in Philip Brockbank, ed., Actors of Shakespeare (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 24. This remark is important in that it draws attention to the imperceptible way situations in the play change their meaning.

Shakespeare: The Merchant of Venice   81 6.1. Venetians at Court: Law and ‘Ancient Malice’, Shylock,    Antonio, Bassanio The opening of the scene sparingly reminds the audience of the divisions and rules of the city. In private, Venetians try to stand up for each other as much as they can, but their actions are confined by the law. Feeling in the company of insiders, the Duke describes Shylock as an ‘inhuman wretch’ (4.1.3). He has unsuccessfully tried to help Antonio, but now has to give Shylock his legal right (6–8), a fact fully accepted by Antonio. Next Shylock is called in. In the play, Shylock is rarely called by his name. What we hear over and over again is ‘Jew’, an appellation underlining his otherness. That the Duke addresses him by name having in his absence called him an ‘inhuman wretch’, alerts the audience to his attempt to broker a compromise. The slips of language in his conciliatory speech give away the difficulties dogging the image of Venetian inclusiveness. The Duke puts some gloss on Shylock’s claim by presenting it as a bit of brinkmanship, but goes on to say that he believes that ‘touched by human gentleness and love’ (24) Shylock will drop his claim, for such a plea would ‘pluck commiseration’ even ‘from stubborn Turks and Tartars’ (29, 31). These were infidels by Elizabethan standards. In Shakespeare’s fictional Venice religious otherness is presented as ‘hardness’: (e.g. ‘obdurate’, applied to Shylock in line 7); ‘brassy bosoms’, ‘rough hearts of flint’, ‘stubborn’ are references to Turks and Tartars (30–1), while Christian attitudes are spoken of as ‘gentle’. In his effort to persuade Shylock, the Duke tentatively reconciles alien harshness with Christian mildness: ‘We all expect a gentle answer, Jew’ (34). The pun gentle / gentile (i.e. non-Jew, Christian) next to ‘Jew’ is a somewhat contradictory plea for Christian-style forgiveness, of which the play so far has shown no example. Shylock’s answer, however, reminds of the Christian behaviour which we have seen and he has learned from experience: ‘If a Jew wrong a Christian, what is his humility? Revenge.’ (3.1.65) The word is not actually used here, but the decision to request his bond means exactly that. In a well-ordered series of examples constructed as a quasi-legal argument Shylock rebuffs reconciliation and disguises

82  Shakespeare: The Merchant of Venice his wish for revenge by presenting it as a whim (4.1. 34–61) within the limits of the law. He also rejects Bassanio’s attempts to debate the morality of his choice. Their short exchange (62–8) reveals Shylock’s intractability and through the image of a stinging snake who should not be allowed to bite twice (68) recalls his past, when he had been on the receiving end of Antonio’s insults. At this point, the courtroom offers its first surprise. When Antonio finally speaks, he does not ask Shylock for mercy, but delivers an invective on Jewish inhumanity (69–82) filled with images of raging elemental nature and predatory wolfishness: I pray you, think you question with the Jew. You may as well go stand upon the beach And bid the main flood bait his usual height; You may as well use question with the wolf Why he had made the ewe bleat for the lamb; […] […] You may as well do anything most hard As seek to soften that—than which what’s harder?— His Jewish heart. (4.1.70–74; 78–80)

Antonio’s

powerful verse creates a larger-than-life image of Shylock’s Jewishness as the hardest of alien identities (compare the Duke’s speech on p. 78). It also points to the fact that nothing has changed in his attitude since 1.3, but in the reversed situation of 4.1 his religious fervour helps him to articulate his situation and stand up to his coming ordeal at Shylock’s hands: ‘Let me have judgement and the Jew his will’ (82). In opposition to this loudly expressed death wish, Bassanio tries to press six thousand ducats on Shylock who refuses to take the money, just as he refused monetary interest in 1.3. Then as now, Bassanio’s attempts at appeasement are brushed aside by the two old men who are zealously locked in their conflict. Armed with their religious convictions they drive the situation to the verge. Antonio is ready to die ‘armed and well prepared’ (261) with his faith. (In performance he often holds a Bible or a cross). He speaks of himself as ‘the tainted wether of the flock’ (113)—‘castrated ram’, perhaps a sacrificial

Shakespeare: The Merchant of Venice   83 scapegoat, like the ram substituted for Isaac by the will of God—a marked, ‘tainted’, member of the Christian flock, to be slaughtered by the Jew. On his part, Shylock, too, is driven by religious conviction: he has sworn ‘by our holy Sabbath’ (35), and has ‘an oath in heaven’ (225). Some critics have seen in the conflict between Antonio and Shylock a clash between Old and New Law, Jewish and Christian ethic. However, the play never leaves the human reality of Venice for another, metaphorical reality; though it briefly projects visions of a larger moral order, it keeps its audience’s attention on the social one, exploring contrary moral positions with equal insidiousness. If the Christians are as ‘gentle’, as Shylock is asked to be, then why does the play allow him to puncture Christian ideas of right and wrong? His question why Venetians keep slaves and how they treat them sounds undeniably pertinent: You have among you many a purchased slave Which, like your asses and your dogs and mules, You use in abject and in slavish parts, Because you bought them. Shall I say to you, ‘Let them be free, marry them to your heirs […]’   (4.1.89–93) As the audience are beginning to experience compassion with the underdog Antonio, Shylock reminds them that society is full of underdogs; only, now, one of them has the law on his side. Under the grand gestures of martyrdom and savagery lies a huge historical and social divide and at its very bottom something very human—the pain and grief of a daughter’s elopement. Shylock’s passion for a pound of flesh is ‘dearly bought’ (99) (note the similarity with Portia’s phrase in 3.2.311) and its value is compounded by history and personal pain. By losing Jessica to a Christian world, Shylock loses footing in his own—his future (Jessica), his past (Leah’s ring). Stuck in a present filled with antagonism, his claiming of the heart   Halio, notes to line 113, 193.   Nevill Coghill, ‘The Basis of Shakespearean Comedy’, in Anne Ridler, ed., Shakespeare Criticism, 1935-1960 (London and Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1963), 201–27.

84  Shakespeare: The Merchant of Venice of his enemy is a gesture both concrete and symbolic—a revenge against Antonio and Christian Venice through the symbolic practices of his own religion—an attempt at a circumcision of the heart. As for the personal reasons behind Antonio’s readiness for sacrifice, the play remains ambiguous, though it allows a few glimpses at his relationship with Bassanio (113–17; 261–78), of which more will be said later. The first part of 4.1 is dominated by Shylock’s speeches and ends in a chaos of voices and threatening actions. Shylock begins to whet his knife ‘to cut the forfeiture from that bankrupt there’ (121), Graziano levels on him a violent verbal attack resounding with canine and wolfish images (127–37), Bassanio passionately protests that ‘The Jew shall have my flesh, blood, bones and all, / Ere thou [Antonio] shalt lose for me one drop of blood’ (111–12). These words say as much about the character as of the workings of the play. On the surface Bassanio’s words are a futile, though fervent expression of his love for Antonio; on a deeper, intimate level, they betray his promise to Portia. He has just accepted her ring and is now offering to lay down his life (though only in a manner of speaking) for Antonio. His reference to a ‘drop of blood’, though not overheard by Portia, will be used by her in Shylock’s defeat. Verbal flashes like these turn the situation in the Venetian court into a continuation of the relationships in Belmont. As the play takes a turn to catastrophe, in walks Portia in disguise. 6.2. Portia: ‘The quality of mercy’ Venetian style Portia’s appearance in male disguise as Balthasar, marks a turning point. On the Elizabethan stage she would have been a highly ambiguous figure: the young actor playing Portia would now be a boy/ young man playing a girl disguised as a boy, a series of role reversals curiously corresponding to the character’s shifting roles in the play. Her distanced and formal manner cools off the passions, while her even-handed address to both Antonio and Shylock, first by trade and then by name, gives her credibility as a trustworthy lawyer. Before   Shapiro, Shakespeare and the Jews, 130.

Shakespeare: The Merchant of Venice   85 moving forward, this part of the scene replays the steps we have seen so far, which enables the audience to reconsider all arguments before her magisterial showdown. Like the Duke, but more demandingly, Shylock is told that he ‘must be merciful’ (179) provoking a hardnosed refusal: ‘On what compulsion must I? Tell me that.’ (178) The response is Portia’s speech about the quality of mercy (181–202) which in its deep structure repeats the arguments laid down by the Duke, but composed of images and references which might strike a cord with Shylock not as an antagonistic ‘infidel’, but as a man belonging to the scheme of divine order. Differences are erased by the gentle power of mercy—to be merciful is to be godly. Portia’s speech is relevant in terms of both Christian and Jewish traditions as its allusions come from Ecclesiastes in the Old Testament, the Apocrypha, as well as from the New Testament. Fundamentally, it makes the same point as Shylock’s speech about the common humanity of Christians and Jews (in 3.1). However, it considers mercy— not revenge. Subverting the tenor of Portia’s words rumbles a veiled threat, more discernible to the Elizabethans than it is to us. A marginal note in The Geneva Bible (Matthew: 6:12) reads: ‘They that forgive wrongs, to them sins are forgiven, but revenge is prepared for them that revenge’. The logical consequence of this injunction is that the revenge that Shylock is set upon will be avenged and in the play, not God, but Portia is the instrument. In the long run, this will prove a problem, but at the moment audience concerns lie elsewhere. The moment is a challenge for actresses, since the speech has become a set piece, requiring a special effort to be made to sound fresh. It also decides what kind of Portia the production imagines: conciliatory, addressing Shylock as an individual, or superior, lecturing him on appropriate behaviour. Shylock’s dramatic, ‘My deeds upon my head! I crave the law, / The penalty and forfeit of my bond’ (203–4) exhausts the possibilities for compromise and warningly recalls the situation of the Crucifixion. From this moment on the   Mahood, ed., The Merchant of Venice, note 193–8, 143.   Merchant, ed., The Merchant of Venice, note to line 198, 141.   Edelman, ed., The Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare in Production, 222–25.   In the event, Pilate three times asked the Jews whether to release Jesus, instead of the murderer Barabas, and three times they cried Crucify him . See Matthew

86  Shakespeare: The Merchant of Venice endgame begins. So far, we have seen Portia as aphoristically brilliant, rational and detached (in 1.2), cool and ironical with the suitors (in 2.7 and 2.9), emotional, but still in full control (in 3.2). Her reactions and language have always been highly apposite to the nature of the situation; her protean linguistic capacity to adopt the idiom appropriate to a moment is now extended to the courtroom and Shylock. She begins by testing him, asking questions aiming at cracking the code of the way he thinks to discover that it can be summed up in two words: ‘law’ and ‘bond’. While accepting Shylock’s claim, Portia makes one final attempt at a compromise by suggesting that he might consider taking ‘thrice [his] money’ (224), only to learn that he has an unalterable ‘oath in heaven’ (225), which reveals the foundation of his position. As the play works, Portia does not cross this sacred line. While she legally defeats Shylock, it is left to Antonio to destroy him as a Jew. The ensuing 33 lines of the exchanges between Portia and Shylock feature the word ‘law / lawful’ three times and ‘bond’ / ‘tenour’ (wording) seven times. Even her suggestion that Shylock should call in a doctor to stop Antonio’s blood is countered by ‘’tis not in the bond’ (259). As a result, Shylock’s emotional case for revenge disappears from audience view and an obsessed man evoking fear rather than compassion emerges instead. Different degrees of callous murderousness have been shown in performing Shylock, but even if toned down, this is the moment of truth for him—there is no doubt that he is ready to kill. By allowing the action to move so far towards disaster, the play creates the tension necessary for Shylock’s spectacular demise. Shakespeare builds up the situation to a heart-stopping climax. Portia confirms the lawfulness of Shylock’s claim and waits for his definitive, ‘come, prepare’ (301–2), the instance when he is absolutely certain to stab Antonio. Some critics have seen this buildup as a ploy to disguise the fact that Portia has led him into a trap of confidence in the law, in order to secure the effectiveness of her pre27.25: His blood be upon us, and on our children . Cf. Mark (15. 6–19). This rejection of Jesus was given as a reason for the destruction of their kingdom and their dispersal around the world.   Leggatt, Shakespeare’s Comedy of Love, 138–9.

Shakespeare: The Merchant of Venice   87 pared solution. Others have imagined her solution as inspired on the spur of the moment. The fatal blow is suspended in mid air, ‘Tarry a little!’ (302); the dangerous power of the written word begins to unfold, ‘no jot of blood’ (303). Had Portia’s reversal of Shylock’s logic stopped here, she would have achieved a perfectly balanced victory. But she goes on: ‘if thou dost shed / One drop of Christian blood, thy lands and goods / Are by the laws of Venice confiscate’ (306–8). This is new! The ‘jot of blood’ has morphed into ‘a drop of Christian blood’, a subtle but portentous shift. Is ‘blood’ valued by religion? What if Shylock was claiming Turkish blood? Then comes the next caveat: size—a ‘just pound’ (322, notice the pun). The case could have stopped here, but it does not. There is more to come: ‘Tarry, Jew /… If it be proved against an alien / That by direct and indirect attempts / He seek the life of any citizen’ (345–7)—ah, so there is a difference between Venetians and ‘others’— and then the penalty: The party ‘gainst which he doth contrive Shall seize one half his goods; the other half Comes to the privy coffer of the state, And the offender’s life lies in the mercy Of the Duke only, ‘gainst all other voice —   (4.1.348–52) Amid the increasing turmoil of Graziano’s shouts, ‘Jew’ (310, 314, 319, 329, 337) ‘infidel’ (330), go ‘hang thyself’ (360), Portia delivers her lines in perfectly cold legalese. The emotion missing from the law is generously provided by the audience in the courtroom (and most probably in the Elizabethan theatre). The effect of the reversal is so stunning that we have no time to consider whether the case has been won on a quibble, or by turning a civil case into a criminal one, nor whether the law really exists, nor whether Portia could or could not have won on such grounds. What has happened though is that the even-handedness of the Venetian law has been laid down for scrutiny,   Wigham, ‘Ideology and Class Conduct in The Merchant of Venice’, 122.   This happens in Trevor Nunn’s 2001 TV production. The debate is similar to the one concerning Shylock’s premeditated, or, non-premeditated offer of a merry bond in 1.3.

88  Shakespeare: The Merchant of Venice just like Christian goodness, humanity and love. Its interpretative flexibility in the hands of Belmont’s lady stands in perfect symmetry to Bassanio’s skilful interpretation of the meaning of the caskets. Portia’s infinitely changing definitions (alien, citizen, Christian) and the pun that turns a ‘just’ pound into and act of justice perform an illusory inclusiveness while firmly placing the alien beyond the limits of the tribe at the mercy of the punitive side of the law. Comedy needs to avoid death, but the question how merciful Venetian mercy is and how just the law remains to disturb the play to the very end. The image of the law’s impartiality is quickly restored by the Duke’s readiness to show Shylock the mercy he had originally demanded of him (365) and give him back the money due to the state (as he had asked Shylock to do in favour of Antonio). While the Duke demonstrates mercy in applying the law, the case is not yet over. In another revealing symmetry, which swings the audience from one extreme to the other, Antonio is asked to show mercy to Shylock. While he accepts the ruling to have Shylock back on the Rialto (financially broken-backed), his willingness extends only that far. If Shylock’s pound of flesh was a power fantasy almost come true, Antonio’s wish that Shylock ‘presently become a Christian’ (383), becomes a reality adumbrated by the court. Shylock is further undermined as Antonio publicly humiliates him as a father by demanding that Jessica and Lorenzo are made his heirs, which contravenes his right to dispose of his property as he wishes. Nor is he himself averse to accepting half of Shylock’s money in keeping, with the promise to return it to the young couple after Shylock’s death. The language itself works against the grain of any thought of generosity that might arise. Lorenzo’s obtaining of Jessica is described as theft (381); the word chosen for Antonio’s dealing with Shylock’s money is ‘use’ (compare Shylock’s ‘usances’), underlining the contrast with his original principles. Shylock, too, has reversed expectations as he ‘ends up as the exact opposite of the stereotypical grasping Jew’ because ‘it is his final refusal […], to take financial advantage of the defaulted bond, that is his downfall.’   Wigham, ‘Ideology and Class Conduct in The Merchant of Venice’, 122.   Turner, Shakespeare’s twenty-first century economics, 69.

Shakespeare: The Merchant of Venice   89 In Act 2 Scene 8, Salarino and Solanio mock Shylock as a cartoon character who rushes about the streets followed by a mocking posse of children; at the end of 4.1, he is again bombarded by Graziano’s jibes: ‘In Christ’ning thou shouldst have two godfathers’ (4.1.394). Shylock is not killed, but is obliterated in economic and individual terms, erased as an ‘other’. He can set up shop again, as a non-rich non-Jew, non-citizen, non-father, a disempowered, unthreatening figure. What did Elizabethan audiences make of this scene? There is no doubt that the jibes of the Venetian would have had support in the audience. But it is unlikely that some in that same audience would not have noticed the profound ambiguity created in the courtroom around the limits of mercy and justice? Antonio and Shylock, who had vehemently asserted their differences, have also at times looked like the two faces of the same coin, and finally, changed sides. In performance the situation is additionally coloured by the tone of the actor playing Antonio, by Shylock’s distress, compliance, or defiance and by Portia’s reactions during her long, watchful silence. The quality of mercy Shylock receives is certainly not unstrained, as the necessity to save one’s own seasons justice. The courtroom battle sets the boundaries to alien presence in Venice by reducing the economic power of the stranger and by disabling the critical position his otherness had allowed him. In the event, Belmont crucially helps to preserve the integrity of Venice as a predominantly Christian economic space. Portia, though, has one more task to deal with. 6.3. Portia: Rearranging Emotional Hierarchies Now the play turns to emotional relationships which more directly affect Belmont. In parallel with the opposition between Shylock and the Venetians emerges an opposition of two gendered hierarchies: between husband and wife and between male friends. On three occasions, twice while Portia is in the courtroom and once before she arrives, Bassanio declares his relationship to Antonio as the most valuable in his life. He pledges the ‘forfeit of my hands, my head, my heart’ (209) on the promise for tenfold repayment of Antonio’s bond. This is Belmont-speak, but it is also a slip. His heart, after all, belongs

90  Shakespeare: The Merchant of Venice to Portia. Though not quite. Antonio seems to have no lesser claim to it. His, unexplained sadness, his sacrificial readiness to give his life in exchange for the telling of his tale to Bassanio’s ‘honourable wife’ (270) so that she can ‘be the judge / Whether Bassanio had not once a love’ (273–4) to modern audiences seem to imply much more than just friendship. It has been suggested that ‘Antonio’s desperate bond with Shylock is his way of holding Bassanio’, an attempt at possession which, like Portia’s father, he tries to extend beyond the grave. At this point, Bassanio openly disowns Portia for a third time: Antonio, I am married to a wife Which is as dear to me as life itself; But life itself, my wife, and all the world, Are not with me esteemed above thy life. (4.1.279–82) The play is too deliberate in its ways with words to pass this pledge without a comment. Portia’s response is pointed: ‘Your wife will give you little thanks for that’ (285) ‘These be the Christian husbands!’ (292), Shylock chips in, again puncturing Christian self-regard. Once she has dealt with him, Portia begins to recoup the loyalties due to her. In the same manner in which she tests Shylock, she pushes Bassanio to confirm his emotional allegiances. Under the cover of her disguise as a lawyer, she has seen the men’s mutual devotion, Bassanio’s penchant for bold statements of loyalty, his protestations placing friendship above any other commitment. Now she sounds his trustworthiness as a husband capable of keeping an oath by a strategy resembling her father’s lottery. She requests as her fee her own engagement ring, accepted with the pledge that ‘when this ring / Parts from this finger, then parts life from hence’ (3.2.183–4). First, Bassanio refuses to give Portia / Balthasar the ring, but pressed by Antonio who reminds him of his sacrifice and love, gives it away: My lord Bassanio, let him have the ring. Let his deservings and my love withal Be valued ‘gainst your wife’s commandment. (4.1.445–47)   Alan Sinfield, ‘How to Read The Merchant of Venice without being Heterosexist’ quoting Keith Geary, in Marin Coyle, ed., The Merchant of Venice, New Casebooks (New York: St Martin s Press, 1998), 164.

Shakespeare: The Merchant of Venice   91 In the context of recent events, this is a just request and a dramatically poignant moment. Can Bassanio really say ‘no’? Or should he stick to the letter of his promise to Portia? Perhaps, as in the casket test, he should respond to the spirit of the situation. But what is the ‘spirit’ then? Is it more appropriate to yield to the request of a friend who has sacrificed all for him or to keep the solemn oath given to his wife? In attempting to balance hierarchies, the play again toes a shadowy line. Karen Newman has aptly observed that in succumbing to his friend’s wish, Bassanio (and Graziano, who gives his ring to the disguised Nerissa) symbolically ‘lose the male privileges the exchange […] of the rings ensured’. When she returns her ring to Bassanio in 5.1, Portia will do so not as an act of submission to patriarchal imperative, but as an independent woman within the boundaries of a patriarchal order, whose desire to be a wife is her own and her control absolute.

  Newman, ‘Portia’s Ring: Unruly Women and Structures of Exchange in The Merchant of Venice’, 130.

7. Act 5, Scene 1: The Gardens of Belmont 7.1. Jessica and Lorenzo In the theatre, the impact of the trial scene is so powerful that it has made the fortunes of Act 5 problematic, so much so that in the 19th century it was sometimes cut or considerably shortened. In the later 20th century, the last scene has become a bone of critical contention and in the theatre, one of darkened mood and tone. Undeniably, there is a problem with the drastic change from the passions of the courtroom to the lovers’ antiphonal exchanges in the moon-lit gardens of Belmont. On the modern stage, with its tendency to realistic acting and atmosphere, audiences experience an even greater problem in leaping back to its rarefied idealism than the Elizabethan play-goer who was used to a variety of acting modes, speech styles and quick transitions in basically the same space. From the point of view of the Shakespearean stage, the intensely romantic exchange between Jessica and Lorenzo is absolutely necessary for establishing the locality and for creating a suitable atmosphere in which to resolve the love plots initiated in Acts 2 and 3. The popularity of the play would have depended on satisfying the expectations for romance. Nowadays, when the play is often seen as a text addressing issues of racism and exclusion, it is difficult to accommodate their seriousness with the harmonies of its closing scene. In tackling the problem, criticism and performance have explored the textual signals undermining the idealised picture of Belmont. Sometimes productions work against the text, suggesting discrepancies between spoken word and stage behaviour, and produce endings where characters are isolated and wary rather than happy and united. The last act revisits questions of moral value and projects an image of the lovers’ future. Antonio and Bassanio’s relationship, whether presented as idealised friendship or homosexual attraction, needs also to be resolved vis-à-vis the

Shakespeare: The Merchant of Venice   93 return of Portia’s ring. Act 5 opens in the gardens of Belmont with an elegantly patterned exchange between Lorenzo and Jessica, an artful exercise in copious variations on the theme of ‘night’ (repeated 10 times in 24 lines) through rich mythological reference. Badinage would have been for the Elizabethans the hallmark of romantic love. Added to it is the music playing as a continuation (68) to Lorenzo’s speech about the beauty of the natural world (54–68), which further amplifies the ‘night’ image. If the play ever manages linguistic harmonies close to those of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, it is in the slow movement and alliterative whisper of these verses, which connect the earthly and divine, material and spiritual. This musical moment is a necessary transition from the turmoil of the previous scene. From the perspective of structure, Jessica’s ‘I am never merry when I hear sweet music’ (5.1.69) invokes Portia’s speech about music as heightened expression of noble emotions (3.2.42–53). Lorenzo interprets Jessica’s reaction in the same vein, as emotional refinement (5.1.70). He further develops the idea by an example of its miraculous effect on young horses; the rages of these most noble of animals are ‘transformed’ by it. In the terms of the play’s romantic idealisms, all noble and sensitive souls respond to music, while The man that hath no music in himself, Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds, Is fit for treasons, strategems and spoils; (5.1.83–5) There is no mention of Shylock here, but as he is the character who does not end up in musical Belmont, this sounds like a veiled reminder of him and a past from which the play tries to move away. Sometimes, performance rides on the images of peace and beauty to block the memory of the past, producing a more ‘comic’ effect with happy lovers at the end; at other times, directors draw on the potential of the text to suggest the opposite. Both critics and theatre practitioners have paid attention to the tensions lurking under the surface of peace and harmony. The mythological allusions to Troilus and Cressida, Pyramus and Thisbe, Dido and Aeneas, Medea and Jason are all examples of doomed love.

94  Shakespeare: The Merchant of Venice Lorenzo’s religious rhetoric (54–65) aestheticises love in Christian terms, but glosses over the materialistic side of Jessica’s elopement. While the language writes peace, the ‘stratagems and spoils’ he refers to bring back the memory of Shylock and of Jessica’s way of getting to Belmont. Act 5 is inescapably beset by the history of Acts 1–4.  Only thirty or so lines earlier, Lorenzo stumbles into one of its shards by praising Jessica for stealing from ‘the wealthy Jew’ (15). How does she react to this? In performance Jessica’s sadness has been represented as the price she has to pay for her move to the world of the Christians through her remorse, her uncertain identity and isolation in Belmont. Lovers have spoken their lines as if quarrelling, have stood apart under a harsh light, Jessica has wept uncontrollably; Lorenzo’s speech about the beauty of nature has been subverted by a marionette show of Shylock’s baptism. As the play tries to withdraw from the realities of history, Portia’s and Nerissa’s return awakens memories of the near past. Portia’s quibbling leads the audience away from romance to an awareness of a harsher reality; her sententious language stresses the ‘gap between the ideal and the actual, between the absolute and the possible’. Here are a few characteristic lines: PORTIA: A substitute shines brightly as a king Until a king be by, […] Nothing is good, I see, without respect. […] The crow doth sing as sweetly as the lark When neither is attended, and I think The nightingale, if she should sing by day When every goose is cackling, would be thought No better a musician than the wren. (5.1.94–5; 99; 102–6) The language of relativity undermines the vision of the night’s transcendental moon-lit harmonies by bringing in a more pessimistic vision: ‘This night methinks is but the daylight sick. / It looks a little   Drakakis, ‘Historical Difference and Venetian Patriarchy’, 207.   Edelman, ed., The Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare in Production, 247, 251.   Lyon, The Merchant of Venice, 121.

Shakespeare: The Merchant of Venice   95 paler. ’Tis a day / Such as the day is when the sun is hid.’ (124–6) 7.2. Rings and ‘Parchment Bonds’ Indeterminacy marks the rest of the scene, too. As the men return from Venice, Portia’s first interaction with Bassanio is through a pun on ‘light’, ‘Let me give light, but let me not be light’ (129), which starts a conversation about husbands and wives. Next, she revives the memory of the events in the courtroom by an emphatic repetition of the verb ‘bound’ (36, 37), used by Bassanio in introducing Antonio as ‘the man […] / To whom I am so infinitely bound’ (134–5). Then, the scuffle between Graziano and Nerisssa raises the topic of the missing rings and their value. The circle quickly closes around Bassanio, courtesy of Graziano, who tries to justify giving away his ring with his master’s similar gesture (179). In what follows we recognise Portia of the courtroom, who circles around Antonio’s and Bassanio’s explanations, as she had done with Shylock before making her final effective move. On some level this is a teasing game: the women know that the rings have not gone to other women. ‘Where is my ring?’ is, of course, a joke. However, the question is not where the rings are, but what they stand for. Bassanio’s and Portia’s exchange (192–208) parallels in more serious terms the patterned dialogue between Jessica and Lorenzo. Positioning the word ‘ring’ at the end of successive lines and repeating it in the same position 10 times, gives the verse a pointed character which in performance can vary from admonition to humorous playfulness. For Bassanio, the ring has a material value worth paying for the rescue of his friend. For Portia, it is a symbol of her ‘virtue’ and ‘worthiness’ and Bassanio’s ‘own honour’ (199, 200, 201); a wedding ring is ‘A thing stuck on with oaths upon [the] finger / And so riveted with faith unto [the] flesh’ (168–9), a symbol of a commitment, higher than any other. Portia’s words underline the indivisible symbolic and physical nature of the marriage bond; to separate the ring from the hand is identical to cutting the flesh. (Shylock’s bond is similarly laden with symbolism and materiality and so is the loss of his ring.)

96  Shakespeare: The Merchant of Venice As the men beg pardon from their wives, Portia re-defines the grounds of her contract with her husband by raising the stakes. In a brilliant conceit she takes Bassanio’s pledge on her ‘fair eyes’, which she interrupts, to a higher power: In both my eyes he doubly sees himself: In each eye one. Swear by your double self, And there’s an oath of credit!   (5.1.243–6) Compared to the moment of pledging herself to him in Act 3, there is a subtle change of value and a reversal between giving and taking: Beshrew your eyes! They have o’erlooked me and divided me: One half of me is yours, the other half yours— And so all yours.   (3.2. 14–18) In her betrothal, Portia gives her whole self to her husband; at the end, she requires double guarantee, a pledge by his ‘double self’ (his double reflection in her eyes). Is this a statement of Bassanio’s lightened value? Or is Portia’s contract more valuable now? Or is she trying to teach her husband a lesson about the complex give and take relationships in marriage? The language of the market place, which in Act 3 Scene 2 is part of the fantasy of Belmont’s opulence, is here used to underpin the value of trust between partners. Bassanio will have ‘credit’, but Portia needs ‘surety’ (254), which conveniently comes in the person of Antonio, whose reply catches the need to answer the raised stakes: I once did I lend my body for his wealth, […] I dare be bound again, My soul upon the forfeit. (5.1.249, 251–2) Lest her point remain too abstract, Portia does not accept Bassanio’s new pledge before re-enacting the ritual of their betrothal under the new terms of the contract. In returning her ring by way of Antonio, she places the older man in the position of a putative father figure, thus

Shakespeare: The Merchant of Venice   97 putting him at a remove from the relationship between husband and wife on the highest possible pledge—his soul. As with Shylock, on whom she unleashes the devastating literalism of the law in response to his own adherence to its letter, she creates for Bassanio a fantasy of cuckoldry, illustrating the logical consequence of his broken promise: ‘pardon me, Bassanio, / For by this ring the doctor lay by me’ (5.1.258–9). In performance this is a crucial moment. What does Bassanio do with the ring? How does he react? Does he put it on his finger, in spite of Portia’s alleged infidelity? In the final stages of the play, Portia is in full control of Belmont, just as she is in the courtroom. Even more so, as she self-assertively interrupts Bassanio (243) and commands Graziano to mind his language (266). She is as far from an ‘unlessoned girl’ as is Bassanio from being ‘her governor, her king’; she can still call her house her own (81, 273) though it had been pledged to him (3.2. 159; 165; 168). Portia holds in her hands all characters’ livelihoods and confirms them in their new positions of dependence through an act of bounty commanding submission through gratitude. The letters and deeds she provides render Antonio ‘dumb’ (279) like Jessica, and elicit from Lorenzo the exclamation, ‘Fair ladies, you drop manna in the way / Of starvèd people’ (294–5). To the Elizabethan audience, the Biblical reference to the ‘manna’, the food sent form heaven with the morning dew in the form of white seeds to relieve the Hebrews starving in the desert, could not have been unambiguous. On the one hand, it establishes Portia’s God-like princely position as a life-giver and that of the others, as receivers of bounty; on the other—it connects through a reference from the Old Testament Jessica and Lorenzo to the source of their ‘manna’, Shylock’s wealth. According to Exodus 16: 21, the manna had to be collected every day before dawn because it melted in the sun, but those who collected too much had nothing to eat on the following day because it bred maggots, while those who collected regularly according to their needs, had plenty (Exodus: 16: 20). In an exquisite extension of the implications of the manna image   Coppélia Kahn, ‘The Cuckoo’s Note: Male Friendship and Cuckoldry in The Merchant of Venice’, in Gary Waller, ed., Shakespeare’s Comedies (London and New York: Longman, 1991), 135.   Newman, ‘Portia’s Ring: Unruly Women and Structures of Exchange’, 231.

98  Shakespeare: The Merchant of Venice to the larger action, the last view of the characters is in the greyness of morning (295), the time of manna collecting, but the question whether they have had enough, or too much, is left open. Graziano’s sexual pun brings to an end a play of reversals and unresolved tensions: Well, while I live I’ll fear no other thing So sore as keeping safe Nerissa’s ring. (5.1.306–7) If comedy concludes in male fears about female chastity (to the Elizabethans ‘ring’ meant ‘female sexual organ’), it certainly has lost much of its romantic idealism. It is still a play about love, but a love more mixed, more difficult, more realistic, set in a world where conflicts are not fully resolved or resolvable, where, partially veiled by the double-edged workings of language, they remain to alive under the surface of the proposed closure. How will Jessica fare with Lorenzo? Will their love survive the beams of the morning sun? Has Bassanio understood the parable of Portia’s ring? Though there is no doubt about his success in Venice, what will be Antonio’s position in Belmont? How will Christian Shylock fit in Venice? How good are all these gentle people? The play does not answer these questions. Instead of the all-inclusive celebration of comedy’s ending, the final act of The Merchant of Venice allows a view of a small group. There are no ‘others’, no threats, but Jessica’s presence and Antonio’s silence, the paper documents which the young lovers hold as defences, spell out uncertainty. Performance often underlines these tensions by leaving either Antonio or Jessica alone on the stage as the rest of the characters enter the house. In the liminal greyness of a burnt-out night the action draws to a close while the gardens of Belmont shiver with the morning chill.

8. A Very Brief Survey of Performance and Criticism Critical interpretations and performance traditions share a specific limitation—they view a text through the eyes, tastes and intellectual attitudes of a particular historical moment. Another boundary is set by the simple fact that no single reading, whether theatrical or critical, can do justice to the entirety of possible readings of a complex text. In this sense, performance and literary criticism reveal as much about ideas at the moment to which they belong as about the text they interpret. If The Merchant of Venice has something to teach us beyond the implications of its plot, it is an understanding of the relativity of interpretation and of its historically defined nature. Starting with this caveat, below I briefly sum up some of the meanderings of the play on stage and in criticism. In doing so, I am particularly indebted to three excellent collections, John Wilders’s The Merchant of Venice, A Casebook (1969), Thomas Wheeler’s The Merchant of Venice, Critical Essays (1991), Martin Coyle’s The Merchant of Venice, New Casebooks (1998) and to Charles Edelman’s The Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare in Production (2002) which are the best places to start getting acquainted with critical comments and performance histories. Performance and critical traditions of The Merchant of Venice are varied and often claiming diametrical opposites. There is a contest of opinion over every structural element of the play. Writing about just one—Shylock—Nicholas Rowe, Shakespeare’s earliest editor, noted in 1709 that ‘Though we have seen this play received and acted as a comedy, and the part of the Jew performed by an excellent comedian, yet I cannot but think that it was designed tragically by its author. There appears in it such a deadly spirit of revenge, such a savage fierceness and fellness, and such a bloody designation of cruelty

100  Shakespeare: The Merchant of Venice and mischief, as cannot agree either with the style and character of comedy’. Rowe’s remark draws attention to a very important aspect of any interpretation: the balance in the representation of Shylock. We have no knowledge what Shylock was like on the Elizabethan stage and what the audience reactions were (though we might safely assume some anti-Jewish gloating), but, as the preceding analysis hopes to have shown, no assumption of a unified reaction can be safely made, nor do the play’s elements unquestioningly produce such effect. Rowe was writing at a time when Shakespeare’s plays were mostly performed in adaptations, with their text massively rewritten or revised. However, theatrical traditions evolve. The middle of the 18th century brought about the first great change: Charles Macklin changed Shylock from a comic figure into a titanic and malevolent villain (1741) and such he remained for many decades. In 1814, Edmund Kean again transformed the part by turning the character into a deformed old man, malicious, yet psychologically convincing, a compassion arousing victim of Christian intolerance. In 1879, Henry Irving introduced Shylock the foreigner, arrived in Venice from another place, proud of his identity and desperate as the deceived father, which threw into sharp relief the cruelty of his conversion. The tradition of showing him as a foreigner (marked by dress or accent) continued during the 20th century and is visible until this day. His change from a local, living on the fringes of Venice (as he was in Macklin and Kean), to a resident foreigner, roughly shadows the waves of Jewish emigration to Britain, caused by 19th century pogroms and wars. Context matters in our perception of any piece of literature. In the case of The Merchant of Venice history has intervened in a particularly brutal way. The deep trauma incurred by the Jews during the Second World War again profoundly affected the play’s fortunes. Objections have been raised as to its acceptability; hence, cuts have been made, removing Shylock’s conversion and other offending parts of the text. Productions have rarely been unequivocally accepted by critics and audiences.   Nicholas Rowe, in Wilders, ed., ‘The Merchant of Venice’, A Casebook, 25.   Directed by Michael Langham, The Stratford Festival of Canada, 1989.

Shakespeare: The Merchant of Venice   101 The modern stage has focused on Christian anti-Semitism, the ambiguity of Venetian justice, the non-comic character of the play’s end, on Jessica’s fortunes in Belmont. Shylock has been almost indistinguishable from the Christians, until he is forced to see himself as an ‘other’. More recent approaches to the play have interpreted the play as dealing with marginalised communities: Shylock’s Jewishness has been lifted into a different framework by casting him as a black man. In a controversial Israeli production he was shown as a man who had embraced the logic and behaviour of terrorism. Indeed, it has been suggested that casting him as a Latino would make sense in an US context. All these are tendencies which re-position Shylock from the template of anti-Semitism to the more general one of xenophobia and racism. Of course, Shylock is not the only character whose fortunes have changed across time. Performance has asked and answered differently questions about all the rest of them: is Morocco stupid and funny, or noble and unlucky, an ‘other’ who has no chance because of his otherness, not his inadequacy? Are Salarino and Solanio vicious, or young and light-hearted? Is Portia admirable, or manipulative? How much of the lover and how much of the fortune-seeker is Bassanio? How happy are Jessica and Lorenzo? Critical interpretations have been no less varied. The rationalist 18th century could not reconcile its ideas of dramatic structure with the fairy-tale improbabilities of the plot. The 19th century drew attention to Shylock as a ‘realistic’ character—and there is more than a hint of him in Dickens’ Fagin in Oliver Twist—but he was still a nugget of ‘realism’ inside a fairy-tale. This argument was used to suggest that the play should not be read realistically, but as a fable, thus lifting it into the sphere of allegory. The opposition Shylock / Portia (Venice / Belmont), on whose centrality such interpretations rest, have been described in terms of various combinations of ‘themes’. Thematic   Jessica’s isolation is prominent in many productions, including Michael Radford’s 2004 film.   As in Jonathan Miller’s 1970 production with Laurence Olivier, VHS, 1974.   The first in Peter Sellars’s production at The Chicago Goodman Theatre, 1994; the second in Barry Kyle’s 1980 production in the Cameri Theatre, Tel Aviv.   As suggested by Stephen Orgel, Imagining Shakespeare, 160.

102  Shakespeare: The Merchant of Venice studies comprise one of the most popular traditions in 20th century criticism of the play. Here are just two such sets of opposites among many: ‘judgement’ and ‘mercy’, ‘usury and corrupt love’ and ‘harmony and perfect love’. The multiple Biblical allusions have produced interpretations of the contest between Judaic and Christian values, studies of the oppositions and harmonies existing between Old Law and New Law. A controversial element of the play’s structure is Act 5. Does it offer a proper happy comic ending? Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, who edited the play in 1926—a publication which ran into seven editions down to 1978—thought that the final act is a ‘gracious, most playful comedy’. Similarly, the musical language of this part has been interpreted as an expression of ‘personal love’ and ‘political concord’. The comic ending has been justified on the ground of the old idea of the fairy-tale. If The Merchant of Venice is a tale, like Jack and the Beanstalk, or a fantasy, then it can be safely claimed that it ends ‘pleasantly’. The integrity of the comedic pattern has also been defended by the thematic approaches through oppositions such as ‘wealth’s communion’ versus ‘lack of faith in community and grace’, or love’s wealth as opposed to material wealth. In recuperating the sense of comedy, the majority of these studies present Venice and Belmont as   Frank Kermode, ‘The Mature Comedies’, in John Russell Brown and B. Harris, eds., Early Shakespeare (London: Arnold, 1961), 224; Coghill, ‘The Basis of Shakespearean Comedy’.   Lawrence Danson, The Harmonies of The Merchant of Venice (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1978); Barbara Lewalski, ‘Biblical Allusion and Allegory in The Merchant of Venice’, Shakespeare Quarterly 13, 1962, 323-43;   Arthur Quiller-Couch, ed., 2nd edition, The Merchant of Venice, The New Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953, reprinted 1978), Introduction, xxxi.   G. Wilson Knight, ‘Tempest and Music’, in John Wilders, The Merchant of Venice, A Casebook (London: Macmillan, 1969). The essay was first published in 1932.   Harley Granville-Barker, Prefaces to Shakespeare, (London: Nick Hern Books, 1993). The essay first appeared in 1923; John Middleton Murray, ‘Shakespeare’s Method: The Merchant of Venice’, in Shakespeare (London: Cape, 1936), 153–73.   C. L. Barber, Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy, 2nd edition, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), 163-91.   J. R. Brown, ‘Love’s Wealth and the Judgement of The Merchant of Venice’, Shakespeare and his Comedies (London: Methuen, 1962), 61-75

Shakespeare: The Merchant of Venice   103 morally opposed, fundamentally different places. These efforts have uncovered many of the beauties and intricate patterns at work in the play, its rootedness in a rich literary and Christian tradition, the interconnectedness of its poetic images and constitute a major contribution to its critical legacy. What can be pointed out as a generalised single feature of these approaches is that they tend to bring to the fore a central unifying idea and in this way propose to resolve the inner conflict, to contain the pressures felt at the end of the play. Many critics have gone in the opposite direction—of exploring the tensions in Venice and Belmont, of breaking up straightforward oppositions and multiplying the facets of comparison, of underlining the similarities rather than the distinctions between the two places. Instead of unity and harmony, distance and irony have been in the focus of their attention. The all-pervasiveness of money in Venice and Belmont have been the object of a number of interesting studies, which has led to the re-examining of, among other things, Bassanio’s motives. Exploring the atmosphere of the locations of the play from such positions has brought about a serious re-consideration of the nature of the relationships among characters and the unease existing between its two settings. In the light of these, the unity of a comic ending has become more and more problematic. Norman Rabkin eloquently sums up the substance of such efforts as a recognition ‘of the deep polarities in the comedy’, as resistance to the temptation to see the ending ‘as conclusively resolved in favour of one character or a group of characters, or […] defined in terms of one issue’. Other trends in the critical examination of The Merchant have been   Sigurt Burckhardt, ‘The Merchant of Venice: The Gentle Bond’, Journal of English Literary History, 29 (September, 1962), 239–62.   A. D. Moody, Shakespeare: The Merchant of Venice (London: Arnold, 1964).   Auden, ‘Brothers & Others’; Nuttall, A New Mimesis, 120–42; Ralph Berry, Shakespeare and Social Class (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, INC., 1988), 43–50.   Ruth Nevo, Comic Transformations in Shakespeare (London and New York: Methuen, 1980), 115–41; Leggatt, Shakespeare’s Comedy of Love, 117–50.   Norman Rabkin, ‘Meaning in Shakespeare’, in Thomas Wheeler, The Merchant of Venice: Critical Essays (New York and London: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1991), 120.

104  Shakespeare: The Merchant of Venice discernible in the last couple of decades of the 20th century. In Martin Coyle’s succinct summary, these approaches are characterised by an interest in issues of politics, race, gender and by an awareness of the provisional nature of interpretation expressed in the self-conscious highlighting of their own theoretical positions. Perhaps the most distinctive feature of this type of criticism is the belief that ‘meaning’ is plural (which, however, does not mean that it is ‘utterly individualistic’); this renders impossible the settling of interpretation around one ‘correct’ reading and allows others to be made visible. Unsurprisingly, diverging views have emerged within similar theoretical frameworks. Marxist, New Historicist and Cultural Materialist critics have studied the play as a critique of Christian antiSemitism and gender politics, as a cultural document of the economic and political conditions in Renaissance England, shown through the lens of Venice. No less important have been studies trying to pin down the position of the play within the ideology of its time as radically playful and sceptical, or conservative.  Feminist critics of different theoretical persuasion have questioned its social and sexual hierarchies, interrogated the preservation or subversion, of the patriarchal status quo, the role of disguise in disrupting the sex / gender differences, the economies of exchange in marriage, the contradictions between Christian patriarchal ideas and the realities of economic practice. Is Portia empowered or not at the end? Does the play re-affirm or undermine the patriarchal status quo? How are financial and emotional economies related? The debates around Antonio’s sexuality have also bristled with questions. Is his sadness a sign of suppressed sexual desire for   Martin Coyle, ed., The Merchant of Venice, New Casebooks (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1998), Introduction, 5-6.   Ryan, Shakespeare, 17–24.   Cohen, ‘The Merchant of Venice and the Possibilities of Historical Criticism’.   Tomas Moisan, ‘“Which is the merchant here? and which the Jew?”’; see also Cohen, ‘The Merchant of Venice and the Possibilities of Historical Criticism’..   Newman, ‘Portia’s Ring: Unruly Women and Structures of Exchange in The Merchant of Venice’; Leventen, ‘Patrimony and Patriarchy in The Merchant of Venice’; Hall, ‘Guess Who’s Coming for Dinner? Colonization and Miscegenation in The Merchant of Venice’; Lars Engle, ‘“Thrift is Blessing”: Exchange and Explanation in The Merchant of Venice’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 37 (1986), 20–37.

Shakespeare: The Merchant of Venice   105 Bassanio? How does the play construe homoerotic and heterosexual relationships? How do modern ideas of sexuality affect our thinking about this character? How are modern and past ideas of homosexuality and otherness linked with those of power and order? An important contribution to understanding the historical contexts of the play is James Shapiro’s magisterial study of Jews in Early Modern England and the identification of Shakespeare’s text as an important site in the evolvement of English national identity, where Jewishness became a marker of otherness necessary in defining the self. In a stimulating recent essay, Stephen Orgel considers, along with stage representations, Shylock’s English lineage and connections with the image of the Elizabethan Puritan. Performance criticism has recorded and debated the responses provided by the stage. Its rise from stage history to cultural history coincides with the period of critical heteroglossia, where the discoveries of actors and directors have become as important in filling in the silences of the text and its projections of the modern world as that of literary critics. Editions of the play on the cusp of the 20th and 21st centuries bear testimony to the recognition of the problems presented by both text and performance. Perhaps, the best way to end this brief and by necessity, incomplete, overview is to quote from an editor, for no one is more aware than an editor of the historical conditions of the production of the play, the host of indeterminacies dogging Shakespeare’s texts, the slippery nature of language, the changing critical trends and the contradictions in its ever-contemporary re-examination by performance. As Jay Halio notes: Criticism cannot displace art, after all; the play’s the thing, as it always was and is. […T]he play lends itself to a wide   Auden, ‘Brothers & Others’; Kahn, ‘The Cuckoo’s Note: Male Friendship and Cuckoldry in The Merchant of Venice’..   Lawrence Hyman, ‘The Rival Loves in The Merchant of Venice’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 21 (1970); Sinfield, ‘How to read The Merchant of Venice without being Heterosexist’.   Shapiro, Shakespeare and the Jews.   Orgel, Imagining Shakespeare, 154–62.   On performance criticism see the list for Further Reading.

106  Shakespeare: The Merchant of Venice variety of interpretations—so various that no one staging can encompass the full range available. But, taken together, they may comprise a comprehensive criticism that makes us aware of the many currents and counter-currents that flow within The Merchant of Venice. And we might add, through the very flesh and blood of our culture.

  Halio, ed., The Merchant of Venice., 57-8.

9. Suggestions for Further Reading, and Filmography Recent Editions Mahood, M. M., ed., The Merchant of Venice, The New Cambridge Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). A sensitively written introduction with a wealth of information; very helpful footnotes. Cambridge UP has been updating the chapter on performance in recent re-prints. Halio, Jay, ed., The Merchant of Venice, Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). An essential introduction into the play; excellent on performance. Merchnat, W. Moelyn, ed., The Merchant of Venice, Introduced by Peter Holland (Penguin Books, 2005). Holland’s introduction offers a most comprehensive discussion of the role of money in the economy of the play; elegant little section on performance. Performance Criticism Bulman, James, Shakespeare in Performance: The Merchant of Venice (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991). An important source for performance. Edelman, Charles, ed., The Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare in Production (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). An edition of the play with a solid introduction and footnote comments on how respective moments have been acted; an essential source. Jones, Maria, ‘Defining the Alien in The Merchant of Venice’, Shakespeare’s Culture in Modern Performance (Houndmills, Basing-

108  Shakespeare: The Merchant of Venice stoke, Hampshire, New York: Palgrave, 2003), 57–99. An invigorating modern discussion of key productions with a particular interest in strategies for representing the foreigners in Venice; interesting on Portia, too. Criticism Auden, W. H., ‘Brothers & Others’, The Dyer’s Hand and Other Essays (New York: Random House, 1962), 218–37, and in John Wilders, ed., The Merchant of Venice, A Casebook (London: Macmillan, 1969), 224–40. Exciting and quirky. Touches on male relationships, homoeroticism, money and fairy-tale. Barber, C. L., Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy, 2nd edition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), 163–91. An influential thematic approach; important discussion of genre and the mechanisms of the play. Cohen, Walter, ‘The Merchant of Venice and the Possibilities of Historical Criticism’, ELH 49 (1982), 765–89, and in Marin Coyle, ed., The Merchant of Venice, New Casebooks (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998), 59–61. A Marxist study of the play in its 16th century contexts; Shylock as epitome of capitalism and the anxieties connected with it; broaches issues of genre and theory. Coyle, Marin, ed., The Merchant of Venice, New Casebooks (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998). A useful collection of contemporary criticism. Drakakis, John, ‘The Merchant of Venice: Historical Difference and Venetian Patriarchy’, in Marin Coyle, ed., The Merchant of Venice, New Casebooks (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998), 181–213. An excellent essay with a variety of takes on the play: Shylock as a device for projecting the most unpleasant qualities of Christian society; discusses issues of religion, ideology and modern critical practice. Hall, Kim ‘Guess Who’s Coming for Dinner? Colonization and Miscegenation in The Merchant of Venice’, Renaissance Drama, 23 (1992), 87–111, and in Marin Coyle, ed., The Merchant of Venice,

Shakespeare: The Merchant of Venice   109 New Casebooks (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998), 92–116. An important essay, using Marxist and New Historicist methodology connecting commerce and intercourse; discusses fears of miscegenation (Lancelot); Venice and Belmont exhibit similar anxieties. Kahn, Coppèlia, ‘The Cuckoo’s Note: Male Friendship and Cuckoldry in The Merchant of Venice’, in Peter Erickson and Coppèlia Kahn, eds., Shakespeare’s ‘Rough Magic’ (Newark, Del..: University of Delaware Press, 1985), 104–12, and in Gary Waller, ed., Shakespeare’s Comedies (London and New York: Longman, 1991), 128–37. A succinct and useful essay, taking Barber’s views as a starting point, but connecting them to the darker fears and sexual anxieties of the characters and the audience. Leggatt, Alexander, Shakespeare’s Comedy of Love (London and New York: Routledge, 1990). A complex and illuminating study of the changing patterns of comedy in the context of Shakespeare’s development. Newman, Karen, ‘Portia’s Ring: Unruly Women and Structures of Exchange in The Merchant of Venice’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 38 (1987), 19–33, and in Marin Coyle, ed., The Merchant of Venice. New Casebooks (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998), 117–38. Discusses Elizabethan marriage as an act of exchange; Portia is an ‘unruly woman’, whose role is both disruptive and positive; her ring as an emblem of the bond of marriage whose meaning changes and whose power increases as it changes hands. Nuttall, A. D., A New Mimesis, Shakespeare and the representation of reality (London and New York: Methuen, 1983), 120–43. An excellent chapter on the power of wealth, succinctly touching on various aspects of relationships in Venice and Belmont. Orgel, Stephen, Imagining Shakespeare (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 154–62. An exciting essay on Shylock in the Elizabethan context; explores the stages of Shylock’s evolution as a stranger in performance. Ryan, Kiernan, Shakespeare, 2nd edition (Hemel Hempstead: Prentice Hall, Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1995), 17–24. A Marxist approach to the play, stressing its subversive potential.

110  Shakespeare: The Merchant of Venice Shapiro, James, Shakespeare and the Jews (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996). Essential reading on questions concerning Jews in England. Includes the play in a complex cultural analysis. See particularly Chapter VI, 168–92. Wheeler, Thomas, The Merchant of Venice, Critical Essays (New York and London: Garland Publishin, Inc., 1991). A collection of seminal essays. Wilders, John, ed., Shakespeare. The Merchant of Venice, A Casebook (London: Macmillan, 1969). An excellent collection of older criticism. Wigham, Frank, ‘Ideology and Class Conduct in The Merchant of Venice’, Renaissance Drama (1979), 93-115, and in Gary Waller, ed., London and New York: Longman, 1991), 108–28. Discusses Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier as underpinning social conventions in Belmont; very good on sententious language; Shylock as means of demystifying the power of the Venetians. Filmography Apart from a visit to the theatre, an excellent way to start the study of the play in performance is to see one of the films currently available on DVD. Though it was extremely popular in the early stages of the development of the film industry, the play has been missing from the big English-speaking screen for many decades. Three of the four titles offered here are TV adaptations of theatrical performances: John Sichel, dir., (1974) with Laurence Olivier (Shylock), Joan Plowright (Portia) and Jeremy Brett (Bassanio), DVD. A TV version of Jonathan Miller’s 1970 National Theatre production. Sets the action in the 1880s; Shylock undergoes a tragic transformation; Jessica remains alone at the end. Jack Gold, dir., (BBC, 1980) with Warren Mitchell (Shylock), Gemma Jones (Portia), John Nettles (Bassanio) and John Franklyn-Robbins (Antonio), DVD. Uses costume and atmosphere based on 16th c master painters. Act 5 is romantic and the atmosphere is

Shakespeare: The Merchant of Venice   111 light and comical. Antonio remains outside while the lovers happily enter the house. Trevor Nunn, dir., (2001) with Henry Goodman (Shylock), Derbhle Crotty (Portia) and David Bamber (Antonio), DVD. A filmed version of Nunn’s 1999 National Theatre production. Transfers the action to the 1930s and the rise of Nazism; grapples with antiSemitism, race and homosexuality. Dark ending. Michael Radford, dir., (Britain, Luxembourg, Italy and USA, 2004), with Al Pacino (Shylock), Jeremy Irons (Antonio), Joseph Fiennes (Bassanio) and Lynn Collins (Portia), DVD. The first English-language feature film; uses naturalistic settings and places the events in 16th century Venice. Dark ending with Jessica wearing Leah’s ring.

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