In Act 2 of The Merchant of Venice, Launcelot Gobbo, Shylock’s servant, imagines himself as the hero of a medieval morality play. Standing alone on stage, Launcelot narrates an inner struggle between his conscience and ‘the fiend’ in which the two discuss Launcelot’s ongoing service to Shylock. According to Launcelot, his own conscience, like the Good Angel in medieval morality plays, urges him to stay with Shylock and to continue to serve his master faithfully. The fiend, on the other hand, like the earlier drama’s ‘Malus Angelus,’ encourages Launcelot to leave Shylock’s household, crying, ‘away! … for the heavens, rouse up a brave mind … and run’ (2.2.11–13). Presenting Launcelot’s inner conflict as an allegory in which good and evil argue with one another, Shakespeare, in The Merchant of Venice, follows medieval dramatic practice. Like Everyman and Mankind, the heroes of medieval moralities, Launcelot draws the play’s audience into his ethical struggle by analyzing his choice in front of the audience. Launcelot speaks directly to the audience, giving them a ‘blow by blow’ account of his struggle. In doing so, he involves the audience in his decision to run away from his master and offers them as well as himself an opportunity to move from allegorical abstraction to moral action.
Modern readers of Shakespeare are most familiar with medieval, ethical concerns as expressed in morality plays such as Everyman, Mankind, and the Castle of Perseverance; the plays were certainly important models for the playwright. But perhaps the most significant medieval literary work for the composition of the Merchant is a collection of stories called the Gesta Romanorum. In these well-known stories—which are believed to have been gathered together for use by medieval preachers—a seemingly unnatural, unreasonable, or inexplicable incident is the basis for an episode in which characters, who are psychologically ‘flat,’ respond to surprising circumstances. Although it is sometimes thought that Shakespeare was interested in medieval material like the Gesta for the didactic, spiritual allegories attached to the narratives, it seems to me more likely that late medieval as well as Renaissance readers and audiences were drawn to the narratives themselves. The stories from the Gesta, I argue, that are incorporated into Shakespeare’s plays, and in particular in the Merchant, served as moral experiments that audience members witnessed and experienced during performance. Shakespeare’s dramatic practice was influenced by this medieval, narrative / ethical tradition, and a consideration of the Merchant alongside the tales that it draws upon demonstrates how much Shakespeare’s sense of morality was shaped by medieval understandings.1
In this essay, I trace the way the Merchant takes up four moral tales drawn from or related to the Gesta Romanorum. I refer to them as follows: the Debate between the Daughters of God, the Bond Story, the Casket Story, and the Friendship of Barlaam and Josaphat. In working with these medieval sources, the Merchant, like medieval morality plays such as the one mimicked in the play itself by Launcelot Gobbo, insists that audience members consider their own ethical decision-making process as they view the drama. Shakespeare’s use of stories from the Gesta is, I argue, intentionally moral and concerned with social interaction. Moral narratives, rather than religious tenets or historical practices were, I maintain, what appealed to Shakespeare when he turned to medieval literature.2 At the end of the essay, I return to the nature of this ‘Renaissance’ treatment of medieval material.
Before moving explicitly into a discussion of the Merchant, it is useful to contextualize the Gesta and to identify the general tenor of arguments about Shakespeare’s use of medieval sources. The Gesta Romanorum is thought to have been compiled late in the thirteenth century. The collection of stories is presumed to have been made as a handbook for preachers. Critics have speculated about the compiler, and recently Brigitte Weiske suggested that the collection may have been the work of a Franciscan.3 There is, however, little hard evidence concerning the compilation’s origin. What is known is that multiple versions of the stories appeared and circulated widely among clerical and lay readers from the fourteenth century on. Medieval authors including Chaucer, Gower, and Hoccleve were familiar with stories from the Gesta, and the narratives were important sources for many anonymous writers as well.4
By the early sixteenth century, Wynkyn de Worde had printed an influential English version of the Gesta.5 Scholars generally assume that Shakespeare (as well as later writers including Bunyan and Defoe) read Richard Robinson’s 1577 revised and abbreviated version of de Worde’s edition.6 It is a likely guess. However, since the stories themselves appear in so many different collections and literary works, it is impossible to prove that any later retelling came directly out of the ‘official’ Gesta collections.7 There is a good deal of overlap between stories in various versions of the Gesta, for example, and saints’ lives such as those in the wildly popular Golden Legend. Rather than fixing originary sources precisely, the important point is that later writers including Shakespeare were familiar with many of these stories, in various versions, and that the narratives influenced later writers’ imaginative understanding of the Middle Ages and of medieval literature. Like classical stories and chronicle accounts, medieval stories such as those in the Gesta offered later writers narratives that could be reshaped, reinterpreted, or reinvented.
Although literary writers were drawn to the variety of narratives found in the Gesta, it has been the form of the stories in the Gesta (and in other collections like it) that has had the most profound influence on criticism about medieval literature. In particular, works such as the Gesta are largely responsible for critical methodologies that emphasize the allegorical nature of medieval literature. Due to the form of the stories in the Gesta and other story collections like it, in which a moral is attached to a free-standing narrative, such works seem to license a reading of medieval literature as predominantly idealistic, Christian allegory.8
Each story in the medieval and Renaissance English versions of the Gesta, includes an explicit moral following the narrative. Perhaps surprisingly, these morals are nearly the same regardless of the selection’s narrative content: in almost every case, these ‘stories of emperors’ are explained as spiritual allegories in which the relationship between God (the emperor) and the soul (a human character) is explicated. The fairly consistent nature of the moralizations in the Gesta has led critics to focus on this aspect of the stories. Indeed, this tendency in medieval writing generally has led critics such as D. W. Robertson to assert that all medieval literature must be read in relation to Christian ‘charity.’9
The fact that explicit morals are sometimes affixed to medieval narratives is often used to argue that direct allegorization of content forms the basis for the use of medieval material in Shakespeare’s plays. For example, in an important and still widely cited essay from 1962, Barbara Lewalski argued that in the Merchant ‘consistent and unmistakeable allegorical meanings’ can be traced in the play and that these patterns reveal ‘an important theological dimension.’10 In discussing the casket scene, Lewalski suggests that Shakespeare, like the medieval compiler of the tale that serves as its source, drew an explicit allegorical connection between the story and the ‘choice of the paths to spiritual life or death.’11 She suggests that narrative details are reducible to a theological structure in which the person making the choice represents the soul and its worthiness to wed the Son of God. In the Merchant, specifically, this analogy transforms Antonio into a Christ-figure who makes it possible for Bassanio, ‘the true Christian,’ to choose the spiritual life of loving God.12
If the value in the stories is seen as inhering in the morals, the Gesta Romanorum certainly seems to support this allegorical approach to medieval material in Shakespeare’s plays. This kind of allegorization was widespread in medieval writing, and to deny the importance of this tradition would be to miss an important aspect of medieval critical thinking. However, despite the importance of this allegorical tradition, especially for the medieval clerical establishment, it does not seem to be the motive behind literary writers’ adoption of the stories from the Gesta. In a discussion of medieval romance authors and the Gesta’s influence, Diane Speed, for instance, has observed that the moralizations from the tales rarely enter into romances: ‘Although the manner of moralisations may help to identify an exemplum as belonging to the Gesta, they have themselves been of little significance in relating the exempla to the romances—only the narrative is usually referred to.’13 This is suggestive when we think about the Merchant. If, as Speed concludes, transmission tended to favor narrative over moralization when the stories were used by later writers, it seems likely that sixteenth- and seventeenth-century audiences were drawn to the stories themselves and not to the relatively homogeneous moralizations.
As narratives, the stories from the Gesta follow a consistent pattern in which two seemingly disparate narrative components are brought together: the familiar, often in the form of familial dynamics and emotional conflicts, and the supernatural or inexplicable. The Gesta is filled with tales about events that feel recognizable as situations requiring human action but that also seem, from the perspective of realism, impossible or improbable: a shame-filled woman cannot wash blood from her hand; a lion slays an adulteress in a crowd and leaves all innocent bystanders standing; a woman’s suitors disappear in a magical garden. As part of the familiar component, the characters in the story never express surprise over events despite the strangeness of the circumstances: the inexplicable is naturalized in the stories, and the characters are required to respond as if the event were part of realistic, everyday life.
If, then, narrative rather than moral drew readers and writers to the Gesta, how do we understand the embeddedness of tales from the collection in later works such as the Merchant? Although the meanings are not, as I have suggested, ‘consistent’ and ‘unmistakeable,’ the stories are, nonetheless, involved in a relational dynamic that has similarities with the allegorized readings in the Gesta’s moralizations. Rather than pointing to relationships between God the Father, the soul, and sin, the Gesta’s stories, and Shakespeare’s adaptation of those stories, are insistently social and moral in orientation. For this reason, rather than seeing this medieval material as introducing idealized Christian allegory, we might, instead, see it as seeking to involve the audience in the process of moralization and interpretation. The stories demand further reflection on the characters’ actions. They are enigmatic, and that is why preaching collections offer Christianized ‘answers’ to the stories. Readers no doubt enjoyed comparing the ‘answers’ given in the moralized sections to the narratives. But another way to deal with this enigmatic quality, and one, I think, that accounts for the popularity of collections like the Gesta, is to think of it as the quality in itself for which readers looked. Because they valued and enjoyed the process of interpretation that pointed not just at the story’s characters but at themselves, readers were drawn to these tales and writers saw possibilities for story development in their sparse yet entertaining narrative outlines. I now turn to Shakespeare’s use of the Gesta in the Merchant in order to illustrate this idea.
The Merchant concerns itself with the relationship between mercy and justice: how, it asks, can these seemingly contradictory ideals operate simultaneously? Act 4 of the play, in which Portia disguises herself as the judge Balthasar, transforms this young woman looking for a husband following the dictates of her father’s will, into Mercy personified. Her well-known speech from the act’s first scene, in which ‘the quality of mercy is not strain’d’ (4.1.184), is clearly indebted to the medieval story of the Daughters of God. The story, in which the daughters Mercy, Truth, Justice, and Peace appeal to their Father for support in deciding the fate of a sinner, was a staple of didactic writing from the medieval period, especially drama: Mankind, the Castle of Perseverance, and the Court of Sapience include versions of the debate. The episode appears in a number of non-dramatic texts from the Middle Ages as well including the late thirteenth-century Cursor Mundi and Lydgate’s Praise of Peace.
Although varying in some details, the medieval stories, and especially the plays, usually show the debate as occurring before God the Father.14 Each sister appeals to her Father, directing her arguments for her own priority toward Him and appealing to His nature, and to his filial love. Truth’s rebuke, found in the Middle English Gesta, is typical: she tells her Father, the Emperor Agios in this version, ‘thow hast ever be trewe and sothefast, and it is truthe that he [the sinner] have peyne and dethe, therefor, fadir, pursue trewthe, as thow hast be holden her afore; for yf thow pursue not truth, thow shalt not have me thi dowter no more.’15 The four sisters turn to God the Father to resolve the case against the sinner. In the version of the story that appears in the morality play called the Castle of Perseverance, which the Merchant seems to echo, the Father agrees that humans should be judged ‘Not aftyr deservinge’ but, rather, according to mercy. Otherwise, He explains, no human could spend eternity in heaven.16
In the Merchant, Portia cautions Shylock in language that is reminiscent of the Castle of Perseverance: ‘Though justice be thy plea, consider this, | That in the course of justice, none of us | Should see salvation’ (4.1.198–200). She insists that mercy should ‘season[] justice,’ (4.1.197) and explains that there is a lesson in the story of Shylock: ‘We do pray for mercy, | And that same prayer doth teach us all to render |The deeds of mercy’ (4.1.200–202). The ‘we’ and the ‘us’ in this passage reach out to include everyone who hears Mercy / Portia’s words, including Shylock (who might appear to be outside this Christian-sounding idea) and the play’s audience. There is no doubt that this is represented as a religious idea—the language of salvation is explicitly invoked—but it is not a religious idea that simply reflects on the soul’s relationship to God, as is suggested in the allegory found in the Gesta. In describing Mercy’s role, the Gesta focuses on God’s attributes: ‘whenne mercy sawe this, that the sarvaunt was turnid ayene, she had no mater to playne … for hir fadir was founden true.’17
But in addition to her spiritual message, Mercy / Portia is also explicitly concerned with the importance of mercy in domestic and social life. Shylock’s failings are represented by the play as both familial (his problems with Jessica, his mistreatment of domestic help like Launcelot Gobbo) and social (his refusal, first, to eat with Christians and, more importantly, to follow business principles that are in his and society’s economic interest). Shylock, Mercy / Portia argues, must relinquish the letter of the law in favor of mercy that will make life in Venice, and Belmont, run more smoothly. Her intervention is explicitly aimed at making groups who are at odds, here Christians and Jews, work together in harmony.
Portia’s role in the play fluctuates between the human and the abstract, almost as if she encompassed both the story and the moral portions of the Gesta chapters. As Mercy in Act 4, she sheds what we might think of as her ‘romance clothing’—her appearance as a young, wealthy woman in need of a husband—when she puts on Balthasar’s robes and emerges as an allegorical figure. Although it might seem like a forced shift, her transition from heroine to allegorized virtue develops logically from her initial presentation in the play as a dutiful daughter and, more importantly, as a woman concerned explicitly with good deeds.
Shakespeare’s Portia is linked to the woman in the Gesta’s story of the bond through her position as a daughter with a lover (or, rather, suitor in Merchant) and through her assumption of the role of disguised, wise woman. It is possible that Shakespeare only knew the story of the bond through an Italian source, Giovanni Fiorentino’s Il Pecorone, but since the Italian version is drawn from the Gesta, it seems reasonable to look at Shakespeare’s treatment in relation to the original source.18
Like the Italian version, the Gesta’s treatment of the bond story is surprisingly racy. In particular, both Fiorentino’s and the Gesta’s plots concern sexual intrigue as the motive behind the financial risks that lead to the signing of the bond. The Italian version is about a beautiful widow who entraps potential lovers in order to take their ships and goods; the Gesta’s is about a knight who is unworthy of the emperor’s daughter yet convinces her to sleep with him for a large sum of money. In both versions, the women are as amoral as the men who want to sleep with them. The widow tricks Giannetto, drugging him so he cannot have sex with her and then taking his ship and goods while he sleeps; the emperor’s daughter inserts a magic, sleep-inducing letter between her sheets, preventing the knight from fulfilling his desires, and, because he keeps making the same bad bargain with her, bankrupting him.
Both texts show little interest in the woman’s lack of virtue. The Gesta feebly attempts to allegorize the immorality of the daughter by calling her ‘the sowle’ and describing the knight as ‘every worldly man’ who ‘stirithe’ the soul to sin, yet it brushes aside the woman’s complicity in the arrangement, never calling attention to the fact that she is taking money for sex or that she compounds her sin through deception and magic.19 Il Pecorone describes the widow as having ‘ruined’ many men, but aside from this, treats the incident without moral commentary and passes no judgment on the widow’s actions.
Shakespeare’s Portia, in contrast, worries about doing what is right. Not only is she neither a ruinous widow nor a mercenary deceiver, she is the daughter of a man who was ‘ever virtuous’ (1.2.27) and she herself is actively concerned with the application of ethical principles. When first introduced in Act 1, Portia comments explicitly on the difficulty of acting morally:
If to do were as easy as to know what were good to do, chapels had been churches, and poor men’s cottages princes’ palaces. It is a good divine that follows his own instructions; I can easier teach twenty what were good to be done, than be one of the twenty to follow mine own teaching. The brain may devise laws for the blood, but a hot temper leaps o’er a cold decree. (1.2.12–19)
She cuts her own reflections short at this point, ‘this reasoning is not in the fashion to choose me a husband’ (1.2.21–2), but the speech serves as a frame for thinking about her subsequent actions in terms of morality. The theme is carried through the rest of the play, including Portia’s comment in the fifth act in which she compares a candle in the window to good deeds: ‘That light we see is burning in my hall. | How far that little candle throws his beams! | So shines a good deed in a naughty world’ (5.1.89–91). In Shakespeare’s play, the woman from the earlier versions of the bond story is transformed into a thoughtful and concerned citizen.
This transformation is essential to our understanding of Shakespeare’s play because it changes the relationship between individual motivation and action established in the Gesta and Il Pecorone. In the earlier texts, the woman acts out of self-interest. First, she is wrapped up in monetary profiteering. Second, after she has embarked on a romantic relationship, she only acts to defend her lover. In contrast, in the Merchant, Portia never acts out of pure selfishness. She never strives to succeed financially. She does not entrap Bassanio for his money—he has none—and she freely gives of her own money when she hears about Antonio’s situation. Her actions may look self-interested, since she is in love with Bassanio, but the play emphasizes her desire to support a social system that is represented by Antonio: as Bassanio has told her, Antonio is ‘one in whom |The ancient Roman honour more appears |Than any that draws breath in Italy’ (3.2.294–6). The allusion to Roman honor, indicating Antonio’s civicmindedness, is as important in this description as his personal friendship. Portia says that ‘a friend of this description’ must not suffer on account of Bassanio’s debts. Although she does bring the situation back to her love for Bassanio, telling him ‘Since you are dear bought, I will love you dear,’ (3.2.313)—possibly an allusion to the original bond story and its financial / sexual arrangements—her own ethical concerns as illustrated by other scenes in the play mesh with this description of Antonio’s Roman honor.
In many ways, Antonio and Portia are interchangeable: both are elite figures who use their money for others, never for themselves, and who have teacherly relationships with the people around them (Antonio with Bassanio; Portia with Nerissa and, to a certain degree, with Bassanio). Portia’s positive role in the play is taken up from the other versions of the bond story: all of the women, even the treacherous widow in the Italian version, intervene in the trial with courage and wisdom. In contrast, merchants, like Shylock and also like Antonio and the lover’s foster-father in Il Pecorone, Ansaldo, are less clearly aligned with virtue on account of their involvement in trade.
In the Gesta version of the bond story, the association between mercantilism and evil is explicit and taken for granted. The unworthy knight and, to a much lesser extent, the emperor’s daughter, who takes the knight’s money for sex, are represented as sinful. But it is the merchant in particular—who is not Jewish in this version—that the moralization calls ‘the devil’ for his role in the bargain. In the Gesta, the unworthy knight needs cash in order to try to have sex with the emperor’s daughter. By the third try, he has exhausted his own resources and must go far away to ‘a grete citee, in the which wer many marchauntes, and many philesophers’ in order to find the money.20 Once he gets to the city, he finds a merchant who will lend it to him but not at the terms the knight suggests. The knight offers all of his lands if he fails to provide cash payment on the specified day; the merchant wants, instead, ‘a charter of’ the knight’s ‘owne blood’ and, if the knight cannot meet the monetary terms on time, ‘alle the flesh’ from the knight’s body ‘froo the bone.’21 The far away land, the contract in blood, and the ghoulish request for the knight’s flesh would have left the Gesta’s medieval readers with little doubt about the transaction: these were terms that only the devil himself would have offered. Only a very foolish person—or ‘lewde’ as the philosopher Virgil describes it after the fact to the knight—would have entered into such an arrangement.
In the Gesta, the merchant’s wickedness is almost an afterthought: it is the unworthy knight’s dilemma and subsequent rescue by the emperor’s daughter that carries the narrative and holds the reader’s interest. In Il Pecorone, two merchants are introduced, the foster-father Ansaldo and the Jewish moneylender. Like the Gesta, the evil of the moneylender, in this case Jewish, is important but unquestioned by the text: Ansaldo is to be killed, having taken the debt upon himself to help his foster-son Giannetto outfit a ship to woo the widow (unbeknownst to Ansaldo), because the moneylender wants to be known as he who ‘killed the greatest of the christian merchants.’22 Ansaldo, in contrast, is generous and seemingly without fault. Il Pecorone shows no concern with the widow’s behavior; it probably comes as no surprise, then, that the Italian story represents Ansaldo as entirely beneficent.
The ambiguity of the Merchant’s title, its ability to refer to either Shylock or Antonio, is a good indication of the vexed relationship between mercantilism and morality on which the narrative depends. In particular, it seems to look backward toward a ‘Roman’ (and medieval) ideal of generosity, fidelity, and self-sacrifice, but finds the economic and legal apparatus of the ‘new world’ in which its characters live and make decisions inescapable. Although traditional associations between mercantilism and corruption make their way into Shakespeare’s play, just as they do in other versions of the bond story, the Merchant finds its characters’ dependence on modern economic systems both troubling and inescapable. For all its celebration of Antonio’s generosity, the play understands that he is a merchant and as such concerned with profit; as it downplays Portia and Antonio’s concern for their own wealth, it reminds us that they are only able to intervene because they are wealthy. Unlike Jessica, who must steal from her father to be with the man she loves, Portia has the means to save her lover’s friend. Although Portia does not need to use her money to do this, ultimately, the play never lets its characters’ investments out of sight: we are told, for example, that some of Antonio’s ships have made it, that he is not, after all, ruined financially, even after Portia has saved his life by her wits.
The story of the bond might seem to be about hatred and revenge, but as much as that, it is about the performance of good deeds and the difficulty of separating such actions from economics. Allegory becomes a way of pushing that pressure aside, at least for a short time, and by the end of the court scene, Shylock has become as much an abstraction as Portia has. If she is a medieval virtue, he is the Gesta’s allegorized devil, taking his cues from the drama’s raging vice figures and demons. By using the story of the bond in this way, the play reminds its audience that the choices that all the participants in the ordeal have made are serious: Antonio’s decision to take on extreme risk; Bassanio’s decision, despite his reservations, to allow his friend to endanger his life; Shylock’s decision to forego monetary profit for revenge; Portia’s decision to try to ‘do good’ by offering mercy to the enemy. By removing the narrative, temporarily, from the realistic sphere, Mercy (Portia) and the Devil (Shylock) draw attention to the urgency of moral choice, adapting the Gesta’s story and highlighting the ethical impetus that motivates earlier, English drama.
Like the move toward allegory, incorporation of stylized scenes such as the choosing of the caskets acts as a check on dramatic imitation of real life, and its effect is to emphasize moral or philosophical principles. Although audiences can abstract those principles out of narrative, the morals appear in contexts, and it is the context, rather than the moral, that distinguishes Shakespeare’s use of the story of the caskets from the version in the Gesta. Despite the obvious principle elucidated by the test—do not choose according to external appearances—the principle as it appears in the Merchant requires application within parameters established by narrative.
In employing the story in the Merchant, Shakespeare takes the Gesta’s account about the vagaries of fortune and the importance of trust in God’s providence and turns it into a narrative about trusting one’s desires and acting wholeheartedly. In the Gesta, providing the right answer to the test is proof of virtue. In this account, the daughter of the King of Naples is examined by the Roman emperor after she is shipwrecked during a voyage to marry the emperor’s son, swallowed by a whale, and nearly killed by the knives of men butchering the whale. Although after hearing of her trials the Gesta’s emperor ‘hadde gret compassion for hir in his herte’ and acknowledges that she has ‘sufferid moche angre for the love of [his] soone,’ he nonetheless administers the test to see if she is ‘worthi.’23
In the Merchant, the test, although ostensibly aimed at fulfilling the terms of Portia’s father’s will, is used, in actuality, to demonstrate the identity of right choice and love. Destiny is not fickle fortune in the play but an intentional force, and, as Nerissa tells Portia, this assures that Portia will love the man who chooses properly. In response to Portia’s despair over the terms of the will, Nerissa assures her that, since Portia’s father was ‘virtuous,’ the lottery for her hand will give Portia what she wants: ‘who chooses [Portia’s father’s] meaning chooses you, [and you] will no doubt never be chosen by any rightly but one who shall rightly love’ (1.2.30–3). Virtue, then, is assumed and there is no need for the right choice and chooser, Bassanio, to prove his worth.
What is interesting about the scene is not the rightness of the right choice, but, rather, the logical nature of the thinking leading up to the wrong answers. In the Gesta, the wrongness of the mistaken choices would be apparent to any medieval reader. Medieval Christians were well aware that they were 1. undeserving (the first casket says the one who chooses it will find inside what she deserves) and 2. that human nature is corrupt and that choosing according to ‘kind’ (the second casket says it contains what nature and kind desire) means choosing false things of the world. Further, there is no mistaking the right choice in the Gesta: casket three states that the one who chooses it will find what ‘god hath disposid.’24 In contrast, in the Merchant the right answer, the casket made of lead on which is written ‘Who chooseth me, must give and hazard all he hath’ (2.7.9), is only an obvious choice if, like Bassanio, the woman you love has talked in similar terms to you, saying things like ‘One half of me is yours, the other half yours— | Mine own I would say, but if mine, then yours, | And so all yours’ (3.2.16–18). Critics squabble over the song sung just before the choice is made: does it tip Bassanio off by offering rhymes with lead (‘bred,’ ‘head,’ and ‘nourished’)? Is it fair of Portia to do so? But this is in some ways beside the point because Portia and Bassanio have already talked over things enough to have a common understanding of what love is. Even her parting comment before the ordeal, ‘Away then! I am lock’d in one of them; | If you do love me, you will find me out’ (3.2.40–1), is a reminder or clue: she is the casket and choosing her means making an active decision to accept this ‘all or nothing’ view of love and fortune.
Although it should have been obvious to Bassanio which casket to choose, the wrong choices in the Merchant are rationalized, indicating that the play distinguishes between what is logical and what is right. When Morocco selects the gold casket, the one which says it will give the chooser ‘what many men desire’ (2.7.37), he derives his answer from Portia’s excellence: she is of such worth that ‘all the world desires her. | From the four corners of the earth they come | To kiss this shrine, this mortal breathing saint’ (2.7.38–10). When Arragon picks the silver casket, his arguments for his choice are as convincing as Morocco’s had been for the gold casket. Arragon, in contrast with Morocco, devalues the importance of common opinion, the ‘many’ of the inscription, dismissing the gold chest because he does not wish to be ‘rank[ed] … with the barbarous multitude’; instead, he chooses the silver casket, the one that states that the chooser will ‘get as much as he deserves’ (2.9.36) because, he says, he believes in the importance of merit. Refusing to ‘cozen Fortune,’ he assumes that he is meritorious, that, on those grounds, the silver casket is the right answer, and that he will win Portia. His reasoning leads him to the wrong answer, as Portia observes, ‘O, these deliberate fools, when they do choose, | They have the wisdom by their wit to lose’ (2.9.80–1), but, like Morocco’s selection, Arragon’s might just as easily have been shown to be the proper one given other circumstances.
The choosing of the right casket in the Merchant is, like Portia / Mercy’s intervention in the court scene and Antonio’s boundless generosity towards Bassanio, an act that is motivated by love and not logic. For this reason, although part of the fun of the sequence lies in guessing how the wrong answers will be wrong, the audience is never troubled by the fact that the ostensible lesson of the caskets has little to do with the actual choices made in the play. This disparity is highlighted by the way that the Merchant modifies the moral in the Gesta by changing the caskets’ contents.
Although Bassanio, following the moral espoused by the Gesta, explains his choice by distinguishing between inner worth and outer show—‘So may the outward shows be least themselves— | The world is still deceiv’d with ornament’ (3.2.73-4)—consideration of the casket sequence as a whole points, instead, toward observations about the nature of love and community. In the Gesta, the casket contents are human bones (gold casket covered with jewels), precious jewels (silver casket), and precious jewels (lead casket), and the options are arranged to show a progression: from simple mortality, to earthly success that masquerades as genuine happiness, and on to spiritual joy that transcends externals and is given to those who, as Bassanio puts it ‘choose not by the view’ (3.2.131). In the Merchant, the moral sequence is re-articulated to emphasize varying degrees of self-love. The caskets contain a death’s head (the golden casket), a portrait of a ‘blinking idiot’ (the silver casket), and Portia’s picture (the lead casket). Here, the progression is from self-esteem based on acceptance of communal mores, to self-love predicated on a sense of superiority, to love for another that requires sacrifice of self.
Bassanio chooses properly, in the world of the play, not because his reasoning is better than that of the other suitors but because he is meant to be with Portia. The spectacle of the caskets is designed explicitly to showcase the ways that fortune and love conspire together for characters who, like Portia, try to act virtuously. This might seem to remove this episode from any aspect of moral decision-making to be found in the play, but it does not. Rather, it insists that to make a choice to ‘do good,’ in this case to act ethically in love, requires faith in one’s mission and understanding of the value of one’s desires. The scene, at least in part, supports a patriarchal system of authority over the individual—Portia’s father’s will must be respected—but it also offers the possibility of choosing and acting in accordance with one’s own wishes. This rule applies to other characters in the play as well: Launcelot and Jessica, for example, are granted the possibility of choosing, and finding, good fortune. Oddly enough, although it looks like the play is transcending ‘medieval’ ideas about fate, endorsing the rise of the independent individual, it is also espousing the Gesta’s idea, the one that the emperor’s daughter chooses, that insists that God does not dispose evil.
The casket story and its moral about selflessness, as described above, find expression in the Merchant in the romantic love between Portia and Bassanio. Yet, as is often the case in Shakespeare’s plays, the importance of wedded relationships coexists with an acute sensitivity to the significance of same-sex friendship. Antonio and Bassanio’s relationship, as well as Portia and Nerissa’s, illustrates the play’s commitment to and enjoyment of friendship. Antonio’s friendship for Bassanio has been described in a number of ways—as paternal, as potentially erotic, as Christian allegory in which Antonio is the Christ who must sacrifice for believers.25 In thinking about the nature of friendship in the play, another possible source from the Gesta Romanorum, the story of Barlaam and Josaphat, offers perspective on the importance of emotional, non-sexual relationships. Although relatively unfamiliar now, the story was enormously popular in the Middle Ages, appearing in the Latin Gesta and also in editions of the Golden Legend, including Caxton’s fifteenth-century English translation. The legend, which appears to be a Christianized account of the Buddha’s life, describes the prince Josaphat’s conversion by the monk Barlaam.26
The life begins with a history of Josaphat’s father’s antipathy toward Christianity. In the version from the Golden Legend, a friend of the Indian king Avennir converts to the Christian faith and enters a monastic order. This angers Avennir, and he begins to persecute Christians. Ironically, Avennir’s own son becomes a Christian, even though his father had tried to shield him from any contact with that faith. Because the court astrologers predicted that Josaphat would not reign in Avennir’s kingdom but would, instead rule ‘in an incomparably better one’ through his faith as ‘a believer in Christ’s religion,’ Avennir sends him to a faraway palace.27 Despite Avennir’s efforts to keep his son away from Christians, the monk Barlaam, in disguise as a merchant with a precious stone, goes to see the prince, and tells him a series of stories that lead to his conversion.
In Barlaam’s stories, the ascetic life, in which the inner world of the spirit is preferred over the outer world, is identified as the proper path for the young man to follow. The first encounter between Barlaam and Josaphat follows this model: Barlaam is disguised in rags but Josaphat welcomes him anyway. Barlaam commends him for this: ‘Prince, you did well when you paid no attention to my poor appearance.’28 Barlaam’s stories, like the Gesta’s story of the three caskets, draw attention to the importance of inner truth over outer appearances. One of his stories is, in fact, a variation on the story of the caskets. In the version told by Barlaam, there are four caskets, two covered in gold and filled with stinking, rotten bones; two covered with pitch, pleasant-smelling inside, and filled with treasure. The choice must be made by a group of nobles who have criticized a great king for having embraced poor, ill-clothed, and hungry men. The king calls the nobles before him and asks which caskets are the most valuable. The nobles, as expected, choose the gold ones, which the king tells them are ‘like the men who are clad in glorious garments but inwardly are full of the uncleanness of vice.’ The pitch-covered caskets, he explains, are like impoverished, badly-clothed people who, despite their outer appearance, ‘emanate the perfume of all virtues’ from within.29
Although Barlaam tells a number of other stories about the foolishness of judging by outer appearance, the legend, like the Merchant and its treatment of the caskets, seems to move away from the moral, with its dismissal of this world, toward an ideal of human community and shared life goals. Josaphat, after hearing a series of similar stories, decides to convert. Although the legend suggests that his decision is based on the exemplary stories he has heard, the text emphasizes the importance of companionship above all else. Josaphat wants to go to live with Barlaam in the desert. He is kept from this goal for many years, even serving as ruler of his father’s kingdom, but is, finally, reunited with Barlaam. He puts on rags, a disguise needed to escape from his kingdom, and wanders around the desert for two years before finding Barlaam living in a cave. These are, of course, ascetic trappings, but their importance is secondary to Josaphat’s relationship with Barlaam. Although ‘unable to find Barlaam’ for two years, Josaphat perseveres in his quest to find his teacher. Finally, ‘at last,’ he comes upon the cave in which Barlaam is living. Barlaam, having heard Josaphat’s voice, rushes out and they ‘embrace[] each other fervently.’30
Modern psychological theories might encourage us to read this story in a number of ways—probably the most obvious and pedestrian would argue for Barlaam as a paternal substitute for Avennir. But the story itself seems to emphasize the importance of both the affective and the moral in cementing the bond between the two: because Barlaam teaches Josaphat about a way of life, and not just an idea, Josaphat wants to live his life with Barlaam. Although the legend’s moral lesson might seem to concern the decision to convert or the decision to lead an austere, ascetic life, the hard decision for Josaphat is actually about his feelings for Barlaam. He cannot immediately follow his teacher because of his responsibilities in the world. He longs to live a life of ‘marvelous austerity and virtue’ in Barlaam’s company, but he is unable to do so for many years because when he tried to leave his kingdom ‘he was always caught by the people.’31 The choice, then, is about competing responsibilities and desires. In the Golden Legend version of the story, the desert sanctuary, in which companionship, ideals, and simple existence merge together, stands as an ideal.
In the Merchant, Belmont fulfils a similar function: it is a refuge for friends to talk about ideas of virtue and a place in which to live companionably. As Jessica tells Lorenzo during their stay with Portia, Bassanio, in marrying Portia, has found ‘the joys of heaven here on earth’ (3.5.76). The suggestion is that Portia shares with Bassanio the kind of friendship that Bassanio and Antonio, according to Portia, share: ‘in companions | That do converse and waste the time together, | Whose souls do bear an egall yoke of love, | There must be needs a like proportion | Of lineaments, of manners, and of spirit’ (3.4.11–15). This is the same friendship that Barlaam and Josaphat share, and, despite the asceticism they practice, it is another path to living life in this world to its fullest extent.
It is often assumed that moral writers in the Middle Ages devalued human relationships, especially friendship, because such relationships distracted believers. In Everyman, for example, it is Fellowship to whom Everyman first turns and Fellowship who, in turn, first deserts Everyman. Similarly, in the morality known as the Digby Play of Mary Magdalene, Lechery (obviously not a companion with whom one should spend time) acts as a comforter and friend when Mary’s father dies and then betrays her.32 The saint’s trials arise in part from her weakness for companionship. Negative representations like these coupled with the theme of life’s vanity are common in medieval literature, and it is perhaps not surprising that we might see the Middle Ages as an age that valued friendship to a lesser extent than Shakespeare and his contemporaries did. But if we conclude this, we do so at the risk of simplifying the idea of friendship and its moral importance in both periods. What matters, in the English moralities and in the Merchant, is the sense of ‘like proportion,’ as Portia calls it, between friends. If Fellowship and Lechery are dismissed it is because they are bad friends: good friends, like Antonio in the Merchant and Good Deeds in Everyman, share a common purpose and sense of morality with their friends. They come to their friends’ aid when they are needed.
Josaphat learns that there is a difference between bad and good friends just before his conversion. Barlaam tells him a story, which appears to be a source for Everyman, in which a man is deserted by two of his three friends when he is in great need. After the first friend, who the man loves most of all, abandons him completely and the second friend, for whom he has the second greatest affection—equal to his love of himself—also fails to help him, he turns to the third friend. This third friend, for whom he has felt little love, helps him. The man apologizes to the friend telling him, ‘I don’t know what to say to you. I have not loved you as I should have, but I’m surrounded by troubles and have lost my friends, and I beg of you to lend me your help and to grant me your pardon.’33 The third friend readily agrees to help, telling him he holds the man a dear friend who has treated him with kindness, and tells him he will intercede on the man’s behalf with the king. The Golden Legend allegorizes the story, but it does so within the narrative of friendship described above: good friends may represent ‘all the good works that can go in ahead of us … [and] can intercede with God for us’ but they are also companions whom Josaphat and people like him treat with kindness and seek out for companionship.
In this essay, I have shown how Shakespeare’s play differs from its sources in the Gesta. The Merchant, in its explicit concern with ties between human beings, pushes aside the allegorized morals that medieval preachers found so useful. The play takes medieval narratives about moral choices and uses them to insist on the importance of human relations in such decision-making. Each of the stories borrowed from the Gesta is, to varying degrees, about generosity toward other people; we might call this mercy, following the play’s theme, or refer to it more broadly as social responsibility. Shylock’s punishment in the play—the loss of his daughter, his money, and his religion—is important to the Merchant, if distasteful to modern audiences, because it is a reminder that he has not, as Portia has, worked to help others. When he claims not to dread judgment because he has done ‘no wrong’ (4.1.89) and compares his situation to slave-holders who defend ill-use of slaves because ‘“The slaves are ours”’ (4.1.98), Shylock demonstrates the problem with ideas of law and ownership that ignore the human dimension in society: without mercy, which entails recognition of value in excess of market value or justice, any kind of inequality is defensible. A comparison with the medieval sources shows just how much the play uses this idea to describe conditions in the world, that is, to present a medieval morality that is applicable to secular life. Shylock may be a ‘devil,’ since he is a merchant, in Shakespeare’s play, but then so, too, is Antonio: what the play does is take the medieval source’s transcendent morals and insist on finding ways to apply them to life in this world.
It may sound as if I am proposing that the divide between the medieval and early modern is almost insurmountable, but that is only true if we continue to assume that medieval readers looked at stories like those in the Gesta solely for their allegorical explanations of the sinner’s relationship to God. What the Merchant does for medieval literary traditions is remind critics that the stories can be read in other ways. It is just as likely that medieval readers, like Shakespeare’s audiences, were interested in the Gesta because it gave them ways to think about moral decision-making as it affected their lives in this world. Perhaps what Shakespeare saw in the material, an opportunity to think about moral choices and their importance in the secular world, was, in fact, what medieval audiences also appreciated about the stories. Perhaps it is our sense of the Middle Ages and its use of allegory for transcendent purposes that we need to reconsider in light of the lessons that Shakespeare’s play can teach us.