For The Merchant of Venice to be included in this book I had to overcome a feeling analogous to what psychoanalysis calls countertransference. Countertransference is defined as a situation in which the analyst's feelings and attitude towards a patient are derived from earlier situations in the analyst's life that have been displaced onto the patient. All the other plays I approached with inherent curiousity and a wish to understand them in psychoanalytic terms; this play's powerful anti-Semitism renders this more difficult. It threatens my idealisation of Shakespeare. I had to overcome a strong resistance expressed in the wish to skip this play. The feeling is not unconscious and strictly speaking not a countertransference, but it did require some extra energy not to be repelled by the play's blatant anti-Semitism. In psychoanalysis the countertransference has to be faced and, if possible, overcome if the analysis is to be successful; an analogous process will have to be undertaken not only by me but also by the readers of this chapter. Shylock is not just a Jewish moneylender; he is the Jew incarnate. We are in Act IV, scene one.
| GRATIANO: | O learned judge! Mark, Jew: a learned judge. |
| SHYLOCK: | I take this offer then: pay the bond thrice, And let the Christian go. |
| BASSANIO: | Here is the money. |
| PORTIA: | Soft. The Jew shall have all justice; soft, no haste; He shall have nothing but the penalty. |
| GRATIANO: | O Jew, an upright judge, a learned judge! |
| PORTIA: | Therefore prepare thee to cut off the flesh. Shed thou no blood; nor cut thou less nor more But just a pound of flesh. If thou tak'st more, Or less than a just pound, be it but so much As makes it light or heavy in the substance Or the division of the twentieth part Of one poor scruple—nay, if the scale do turn But in the estimation of a hair, Thou diest, and all thy goods are confiscate. |
| GRATIANO: | A second Daniel; a Daniel, Jew! Now, infidel, I have thee on the hip. |
| PORTIA: | Why doth the Jew pause? Take thy forfeiture. |
| SHYLOCK: | Give me my principal, and let me go. (The Merchant of Venice, IV.i.319–332) |
As if to add further insult, Gratiano is calling the judge Daniel, an Old Testament figure whom Shylock is expected to respect. Through the whole procedure, Shylock is never called by his name; he is always referred to as “Jew”, thus I infer he stands for all Jews.
It is difficult for us to accept that Shakespeare, who was so superior in insight and in understanding the unconscious, shared the popular prejudice against Jews and that we cannot place him among those who helped in the struggle to create a more tolerant world. Christopher Marlowe's Barnabus in The Jew of Malta is a mass murderer while Shylock is consumed by his wishes for revenge towards one person, Antonio.
It is a historical fact that the Nazis used this play to persuade the German public to exterminate the Jews, but if we are to succeed in arriving at a psychoanalytic interpretation we must put this knowledge on some psychological backburner. I had to force myself not to think about this aspect of the play to arrive at the psychoanalytic interpretation. It was the source of special gratification when I could formulate the analytic interpretation.
What is to be said about this play from a psychoanalytic point of view? The pound of flesh that Shylock demands makes him, at least in the unconscious of the audience, the castrator, so the play is about the reawakened castration anxiety. In Freud's thinking this castration anxiety brings about the end of the period of infantile sexuality and ushers in the latency period, which ordinarily lasts between the ages of six and thirteen years. The play re-arouses it. Portia, a woman dressed as a man, saves Antonio, who is in danger of the loss of a pound of flesh. She is therefore a masculine woman or, in psychoanalytic language, a phallic woman, saving Antonio from the castrating Shylock. Had The Merchant of Venice been a fairy tale, Antonio, freed from the castration anxiety, should have married Portia out of gratitude, but in the play she marries his friend Bassanio. All this goes on unconsciously, a man freed from his castration anxiety by a woman typically remains not only grateful but also submissive to her. It seems that in this play Shakespeare experimented with this idea but decided against it, leaving Antonio without a mate.
It is the relationship between the two men and Portia that differentiates the play from the clinically more common event of a woman helping a man overcome his castration anxiety.
We turn to the relationship between Antonio and Bassanio.
| ANTONIO: | In sooth I know not why I am so sad. It wearies me, you say it wearies you; But how I caught it, found it, or came by it, What stuff 'tis made of, whereof it is born, I am to learn. And such a want-wit sadness makes of me, That I have much ado to know myself. (I.i.1–7) |
A man who does not understand himself, who is depressed but does not know why and a man who has “much ado” to know himself is not a medieval sinner worried about punishment in hell but a modern man. We can go even further and say he is a man ready for psychoanalysis.
In these opening lines Shakespeare tells us that Antonio is depressed but also invites us to join him in the wish to know himself. When his friends try to guess what makes him sad, Antonio answers with one of Shakespeare's best-known metaphors, repeated in many plays, that life is nothing but a stage on which everyone plays their assigned role.
| ANTONIO: | I hold the world but as the world, Gratiano; A stage where every man must play a part, And mine a sad one. (I.i.77–79) |
Writing plays made Shakespeare feel that life itself was a stage and every individual was an actor in a play written by someone else.
In 1917 Freud published his important essay “Mourning and melancholia”, which explains Antonio's remark. In mourning, the mourner knows what he has lost and the work of mourning comes to an end. In melancholia the loss is unconscious and therefore the work of mourning cannot be done. Antonio has just helped Bassanio to reach the woman he loves at great cost to himself but Antonio does not know consciously that he is mourning the loss of Bassanio, for whom he has a repressed homosexual love.
The 3,000 ducats obtained from Shylock were to be spent by Bassanio to win Portia and it is for these ducats that Antonio offered a pound of his flesh as a surety. Once more, in psychoanalytic language Antonio exposed himself to castration anxiety so that Bassanio could marry Portia without anxiety. Antonio pays for Bassanio's heterosexuality.
The task of the creative playwright is not to shock us by revealing the hidden homosexuality outright and yet to make us aware of it. It is the veiled language that accomplishes this contradictory aim.
| ANTONIO: | I pray you, good Bassanio, let me know it, And if it stand as you yourself still do Within the eye of honour, be assured My purse, my person, my extremest means Lie all unlocked to your occasions. (I.i.134–138) |
Antonio is putting all he has at Bassanio's disposal so he can go and win the woman he loves. If we wish we can interpret the passage as friendship between Antonio and Bassanio but reading it carefully should make us suspect that more is involved. “My purse, my person, my extremest means, / Lie all unlock'd to your occasions” (I.i.137–138) sounds too passionate, too submissive, and too eager to be only words of friendship between two men, and then comes the offer to let Shylock have his pound of flesh if the loan cannot be repaid. We are dealing with submissive homosexuality. What sets the play in motion is the masochistic homosexual love of Antonio for Bassanio. The love is masochistic because Antonio is paying to make it possible for Bassanio to have a heterosexual relationship that will remove him further from a homosexual relationship with him. We cannot deny Antonio nobility. In spite of his love for Bassanio he is helping him reach the woman he loves. Shakespeare must have known what psychoanalytic work with homosexuals has demonstrated: that many homosexuals are particularly attracted to heterosexual men, or at least those who appear to be so. Antonio never asks why Bassanio needs so much money or whether he is pretending to Portia that he is rich when he is not. We gain the impression that Antonio is more eager to give the money than Bassanio is to receive it.
Psychoanalysis assumes that neither Shakespeare nor his audience are consciously aware of my interpretation but what remains so admirable in the work of great artists is that they know how to communicate unconscious knowledge in such a way that it becomes “almost” conscious, but without it becoming so conscious that it evokes anxiety in the author or audience. To push the material upward without crossing this line is what Freud called “ars poetica”.
With the main work of interpretation behind us I now draw attention to some other interesting aspects of this play.
As to the historical facts, Greenblatt's book reminds us that in 1290 the Jews were expelled from England. In Shakespeare's time there were no Jews practicing their religion in England, but stories about Jews were alive in English folklore. They were feared because of the blood libel and their supposed bisexuality. Jewish men were believed to menstruate. In 1589, when Shakespeare was near the beginning of his career, Christopher Marlowe had written a popular play, The Jew of Malta, in which the Jew Barnabas kills sick people with pleasure and poisons wells. We also learn from Greenblatt that Shakespeare lifted the whole plot of The Merchant of Venice from the Italian Ser Giovanni's Il Pecorone (Greenblatt, 2004: p. 290), published in Milan in 1558.
In this Italian version a merchant of Venice called Ansaldo adopts his orphaned grandson Giannetto. The grandson falls in love with a Belmont woman who tricks men into spending the night with her by giving them drugged wine and Giannetto loses his ship to the lady. Eventually Ansaldo has to borrow money from a Jew who demands a pound of flesh as assurance for the loan. In this version the woman playing Portia's role is as an openly castrating woman, while in Shakespeare's version Portia exhibits this quality only in relation to Shylock. What appears in Ser Giovanni's version as a family relationship between grandfather and grandson, it is transformed by Shakespeare into a thinly disguised homosexual love between Antonio and Bassanio. Greenblatt adds the important observation that Shakespeare's father, like Shylock, was a usurer.
The change that Shakespeare introduced was ambivalence toward the Jew. Ambivalence makes possible a more nuanced and interesting character than the portrayal of a hateful man. If we include the information that for Shakespeare the usurer unconsciously represented his father, the ambivalence is understandable.
| SHYLOCK: | Signior Antonio, many a time and oft In the Rialto you have rated me About my moneys 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 gaberdine, And all for use of that which is mine own. Well then, it now appears you need my help. Go to, then, you come to me, and you say, ‘Shylock, we would have moneys’—you say so, You that did void your rheum upon my beard, And foot me as you spurn a stranger cur Over your threshold: moneys 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?’ Or Shall I bend low, and in a bondman's key, With bated breath and whisp'ring humbleness, Say this: ‘Fair sir, you spit on me on Wednesday last, You spurned me such a day, another time You called me dog: and for these courtesies I'll lend you thus much moneys’. (The Merchant of Venice, I.iii.98–121) |
Shylock is willing to lend the money if he can legally murder Antonio and Antonio is so submissive to Bassanio that he accepts the deal.
| SHYLOCK: | This kindness will I show. Go with me to a notary, seal me there Your single bond, and, in a merry sport, If you repay me not on such a day, In such a place, such sum or sums as are Express'd in the condition, let the forfeit Be nominated for an equal pound Of your fair flesh, to be cut off and taken In what part of your body pleaseth me. |
| ANTONIO: | Content, in faith! I'll seal to such a bond, And say there is much kindness in the Jew. |
| BASSANIO: | You shall not seal to such a bond for me; I'll rather dwell in my necessity. (I.iii.135–148) |
In Act III, scene one, Shylock is speaking to Salarino and Solanio; his speech, one of the best-known passages from this play, has often been used to argue that Shakespeare was not anti-Semitic.
| SHYLOCK: | He hath disgraced me, and hindered me half a million, laughed at my losses, mocked at my gains, scorned my nation, thwarted my bargains, cooled my friends, heated mine enemies—and what's his reason? I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? if you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? (III.i.43–52) |
The theme of the three caskets
As early as 1910 Otto Rank, then one of Freud's most gifted disciples, noted that Portia makes what we call a Freudian slip. Portia is obliged by her father's will to take as a husband the man who chooses the right casket. In that portion of the play, the clever Portia manages to get the man she loves in spite of her father's restrictions.
Consciously, Portia meant to say, “half of me is yours” to convey to Bassanio that she was already half-conquered, but her unconscious prevailed and made her say that the other half was also his. Shakespeare deliberately wrote these lines. He may not have called it the intrusion of unconscious thinking into consciousness but in order to write these lines he must have known that a slip of the tongue expresses an unconscious wish.
The other psychoanalytic work commenting on The Merchant of Venice is Freud's 1913 essay “The theme of the three caskets”. In Freud's interpretation the choice of one of the caskets is a disguise for its opposite, namely lack of choice or necessity. He concludes that the three caskets stand for “the three inevitable relations that a man has with a woman—the woman who bears him, the woman who is his mate and the woman who destroys him” (Freud, 1913: p. 301). (Inevitable here means not by choice.) These women are mother herself, the beloved who is chosen after her pattern, and lastly mother earth. Freud concludes: “But it is in vain that an old man yearns for the love of the woman as he had it first from his mother; the third of the Fates alone, the silent Goddess of Death, will take him into her arms” (Freud, 1913: p. 301). Freud's essay cannot be called an interpretation of Shakespeare's play; rather, he uses Shakespeare's text to makes an observation of his own.
According to Freud, the second woman, the beloved, is never chosen just for her excellence, as lovers claim, but because “every finding is refinding” (Freud, 1905a: p. 202). Unconsciously, the loved woman represents the refound mother. Today we know that the problem is more complex. The refound beloved need not be only the mother; she could be a sister, a grandmother and at times even the father. With the third woman, Mother Earth, Freud does something strange. In Western culture death was typically a man, the “grim reaper”, but Freud feminised and libidinised death. Death is a goddess and she takes the dead man in her arms. Psychoanalytic clinical experience has shown that those who fear death do not experience it as a benevolent mother figure but rather, as Hamlet did, as a nightmare danger.
There is yet another scene that deserves our attention. Shylock is defending his request for the pound of flesh before the doge of Venice.
| SHYLOCK: | I have possessed your grace of what I purpose, And by our holy Sabaoth have I sworn To have the due and forfeit of my bond. If you deny it, let the danger light Upon your charter and your city's freedom! You'll ask me why I rather choose to have A weight of carrion flesh than to receive Three thousand ducats. I'll not answer that— But say it is my humour: is it answered? What if my house be troubled with a rat, And I be pleased to give ten thousand ducats To have it baned? What, are you answered yet? (The Merchant of Venice, IV.i.35–46) |
Shylock swears by Sabaoth, the Hebrew term for the god of hosts, and then speaks to the doge in a threatening way that one cannot imagine any Jew using: “If you deny it, let the danger light. / Upon your charter and your city's freedom”. It is unlikely that the future of the powerful state of Venice will be endangered if Shylock does not receive his bond. Shakespeare thus gives Shylock a boldness one cannot imagine the playwright could have ever displayed to his own queen. Despised as Shylock is, in this subtle way he also represents a republican ego ideal to Shakespeare.
Would any doge of the Serenissima let Shylock fulfill his bond? Would he not immediately condemn him for attempted murder? Would the Venetian population allow him to kill Antonio without Shylock being killed by a mob? Would the Jewish community of Venice allow Shylock to bring about a pogrom on the whole community? Dramatically the impotence of the doge is necessary because otherwise Portia could not have the opportunity to exhibit her sagacity.
What we hear, to our astonishment, is that Shakespeare gave Shylock an awareness not only that neuroses exist but also the conviction that they have a right to exist. Shylock's first example, the man who does not love a “gaping pig”, is, in our current language, a reference to pigs as phobic objects. This is a strange statement coming from such a self-conscious Jew. Another phobia mentioned concerns cats and the third example, a strange one, refers to men who lose urinary control when they hear bagpipe music. This is a bizarre reference and could refer to a better-known loss of urinary control at night, a common malady called enuresis. Logically the argument has no validity: the wish for a pound of flesh is in no way analogous to either of the two cited phobias or the loss of urinary control.
A further irony is that Jessica, raised by the Jew Shylock, turns out to be an expert on Greek mythology when she is with her lover.
All of Lorenzo's references are positive about the outcome of love, while all of Jessica's references are pessimistic. Were they play-acting, as lovers do, or do these lines indicate that Shakespeare did not have confidence that Lorenzo and Jessica's love would endure as it was based on an attack on the father?
From the analysis of a number of plays including King Lear and The Tempest, we have learned how the father-daughter relationship that excludes the mother was important to Shakespeare. The Shylock-Jessica relationship fits into this model, but there is a significant difference. Jessica is the only daughter to rob and betray her father. Desdemona and Cordelia make claims to be independent of their fathers in selecting their mates but they never repudiate their fathers as Jessica does.
| JESSICA: | Farewell, and if my fortune be not crossed, I have a father, you a daughter, lost. (II.v.54–55) |
Earlier she expressed some guilt about her decision to flee from her father's house.
Jessica is the only character in Shakespeare's works to be ashamed of her father and to betray him. In all other plays the daughter is portrayed as loving. Only here did Shakespeare permit the possibility of open hostility between daughter and father.
A psychoanalytic summary
Antonio is the masochistic homosexual, Bassanio the ambitious heterosexual and Shylock the castrator, but where shall we put the author of this play? I suggest midway between the three. Portia, the woman who solves the problem, is a masculine woman and finds ways to declare her love for Bassanio before he has made his choice of caskets. Then, disguised as a man, she is highly effective as the doctor of law and she saves Antonio from a symbolic castration. Such masculine women are often a compromise solution between homosexual and heterosexual strivings. If Shakespeare was close to Antonio the masculinity of Portia may make her acceptable as a bisexual individual. If Shakespeare, like Antonio, had an unconscious wish for self-castration as a way of gaining Bassanio's favour, this wish was projected onto Shylock, eliminating the danger of castration emanating from the woman; on the contrary, she protects Antonio from Shylock. We can look upon the play as Shakespeare moving from masochistic and self-castrating homosexuality to a measure of heterosexuality, even though it remains a qualified heterosexuality. This constitutes a psychoanalytic interpretation of this play.
There is yet another problem to consider. If I am right and Antonio, who is so dull, is the psychological centre of the play, why is Shylock the symbolic castrator endowed with so much life and energy, leading us to think that he is the centre of the play? In general we can say that Shakespeare's endowed his villains—including Richard III, Iago and Edmund as well as Shylock—with vitality. He knew how to harness aggression in the service of creativity. A castration wish is allowed to dominate the play. In the end, The Merchant of Venice represents an attempt to deal with the sadistic and masochistic part of Shakespeare's unconscious. In the play Portia triumphs over Antonio, Shakespeare's depression, as well as over homosexuality.