In The Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare represents the effects of global interconnectedness, mobility, and migration on the Venetian way of life. Portia’s suitors travel from the far corners of the world to vie for her hand; Antonio’s ships crisscross far-flung trade routes. Early modern writers do indeed acknowledge the role of Venice as a crossroads where routes and peoples intersected, and as Europe’s gateway to the rest of the world. Gasper Contarini refers to the city-state as a place where an immeasurable quantity of all sorts of merchandise is “brought out of all realms and countries”; a gathering place for “the wonderful concourse of strange and forraine people, yea of the farthest and the remotest nations”; and “a common and general market” for “the whole world” (1599: B1). Giovanni Botero notes that Venice not only sought trade in far-away places, but in fact established itself as a commodities distribution midpoint “throughout all Europe” (1635: E5). Sebastian Münster calls Venice the “Queen of the sea” and says that the city is “inhabited by people of sundry nations, and traffiqued to by marchants from out all partes of the world”; there, he adds, “a man may heare all languages, and see all diuersitie of garments” (qtd in Contarini: Z2v) The Venice of the play reflects not only networks of mobility and a sense of global interconnectedness but also attempts to safeguard itself from the forces associated with foreign influence and migration.
Lucy R. Lippard defines the “lure of the local” as “the pull of place,” “the need to belong somewhere” (1997: 7).1 She argues that the “lure of the local” pits a desire for “permanence and rootedness” against “restlessness” and “multicenteredness” (ibid.: 5). In this essay, I want to explore the extent to which the global meets the local in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, a “nexus” between the restlessness, mobility, and multicenteredness associated with the pursuit of global markets and the lure of the local, associated with a desire for permanence and rootedness. To that end, Harm de Blij deploys three useful terms—globals, mobals, and locals—to describe how the global and local evolve in a globalizing world and to reflect the mobility of people and patterns of migration (2009: 7).2 Globals move freely throughout the world and “build security and migration barriers” in an attempt to cordon off “core” from “periphery” (ibid.: 7). “Mobals” or “transnational migrants” leave their homes and “take a chance on new and different surroundings”: they may be skilled or unskilled migrants, legal or undocumented. They may be motivated by job opportunities, or they may be seeking asylum (ibid.: 7). The local, whether within the cultural and economic core or in the periphery, comes increasingly under threat; hence, we quickly come to see the push-back, the barriers—such as harsh anti-immigration laws, border fences, and resistance to foreign influence—erected to protect “core” from “periphery,” or in the case of Shakespeare’s play, Venetian from non-Venetian, native from alien. Some might argue that the terms I have adapted from de Blij’s study of contemporary globalization issues are, of course, anachronistic, but, as I argue, these concepts are also applicable to the early modern period. They help us understand how Shakespeare’s play represents—at least in part—responses to and perceptions of what Charles H. Parker identifies as “four central forms of interaction in the early modern period”: “new commercial exchange networks, large-scale migration streams, worldwide biological exchange, and transfers of knowledge across oceans and continents” (2010: 3). In so doing, they help us to understand Shakespeare, both text and context, anew.
In The Merchant of Venice, I submit, Shakespeare focuses on sites of cross-cultural and transnational encounters through which he localizes and explores a global/local nexus. Therefore, I am adapting de Blij’s key terms in an attempt to represent the early modern rather than present-day globalizing forces. Shakespeare’s play presents Antonio as a global merchant, whose mind scans the world and whose financial interests encompass the globe; Portia is truly a global bride, her international suitors constituting a veritable parade of nations, each with his own individual and stereotypical national traits. Shylock represents a group of migrants—the equivalent of de Blij’s “Mobals”—indeed temporary alien residents, who seek refuge and opportunities in Venice. Not unlike the forces of current globalism described by de Blij, Shakespeare foregrounds a sharp divide between Europe and a world elsewhere, core and periphery, whereby European globals forge an alliance with European locals against foreign mobals. In the play, alien worlds traverse domestic space and transform home into an unstable borderland: home abuts something dangerous and threatening. International commercial and cultural ties bring into contact the local and the global, home space and foreign markets, creating emotional distress and disrupting the sense of security and stability associated with home. I argue that the play dramatizes the nexus where the local meets, and clashes with, the global in three home spaces—Shylock’s, Antonio’s, and Portia’s—and explores the extent to which a global economy affects everyday life, as the characters struggle to establish and maintain the boundaries of the domestic.
The rise of what we recognize as a global core can no doubt be traced to the emerging forces of colonialism in the early modern period. Even as the European colonial powers tapped human, economic, and environmental resources on a global scale, they also began to erect barricades to separate core from periphery.3 Immanuel Wallerstein, in his seminal work on global systems theory, argues that “globalism” refers to a period of transition and of processes that initiated around 1450 and have continued to the present day (2000: 249–65).4 In her introduction to A Companion to the Global Renaissance, Jyostna Singh too writes of an age of transition and of paradigm shifts, and situates England’s “emerging role in the complex of travel and traffic in diverse regions and nations” in the early modern period (2009: 5). Like Daniel Vitkus, in his study of the Cave of Mammon episode in Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, I believe that a study of the emerging global dynamics of cross-cultural representation in Shakespeare’s play can “help us to see how early modern Europe was connected to other parts of the world”; but more to the point, we can situate early modern texts “within a much broader matrix of global flow and exchange—of goods, texts, people, and ideas” (2009: 33), and situate Venice at the center of transnational migration and networks of maritime commerce.
In Shakespeare’s time, Venice was de facto a global city with a thriving merchant community with worldwide travel and trade experience (Pearson 1991: 41–116)5 and a cosmopolitan magnet for adventurers, traders, immigrants, and visitors. As Frédéric Mauro argues, Venetian merchants were “agents” or “brokers” “engaged in furnishing commercial services” (1990: 259).6 As such, the Venetian merchant empire was engaged in intense competition with other maritime powers, especially Portugal and Spain (Bethancourt 2000: 17–34).7 In 1507, for example, the Portuguese enforced a blockade of the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf, but Venice continued to have access to spices through intermediaries in Alexandria (Lyber 1915: 577, 584, 588).8 The Venetian–Turkish Wars, culminating with the Battle of Lepanto in 1571 and the later Ottoman control over Cyprus, also posed a specific threat to Venice’s Mediterranean and global trade.
Venice, however, continued to thrive throughout the period as a commercial and cultural center for the whole world. Thomas Coryat notes in 1611, “Here you may see all manner of fashions of attire, and heare all the languages of Christendome, besides those spoken by the barbarous Ethnickes” (qtd in Gillies 1994: 124).9 Architectural historians remark on the resemblance between the Venetian palaces and the Arabic trading post, or funduk (Howard 1991: 59). Indeed, early modern representations of Venice show a place where East meets West, such as a Venetian manuscript illumination of Ptolemy, which offers “a delightful instance of the blurring of the boundaries between east and west” (ibid.: 59). In its role as a gateway, Venice “negotiate[d] the exchange and interchange of men, ideas, and especially goods between Europe and Asia” (Romano 2007: 9). Gasparo Contarini, in The Commonwealth and Government of Venice, translated by Lewes Lewknor (London, 1599), notes Venice’s “humanitie towards straungers” and the economic and social success that such foreigners have experienced in the city (1599: A2–A2v). John Gillies identifies “themes of ‘intrusion’ and ‘exorbitance’” in Shakespeare’s Venice, which capture a fundamental contradiction in the Elizabethan perception of the city: “Self-consciously imperial and a ‘market place of the world’, Shakespeare’s Venice invites barbarous intrusion through the sheer ‘exorbitance’ of its maritime trading empire” (1994: 125; Sousa 2002: 71). Gillies believes that Shakespeare’s Venice becomes “somewhat complicit” and intertwined with the “exotic” (1994: 123). Indeed, Shakespeare’s Venice “erects a protective barrier against dangerous contamination from its everyday interaction with alien worlds” (Sousa 2002: 71).
Writing of present-day global forces, de Blij observes that global societies find themselves in a bind between a desire to retreat to the “global core,” which “confers certainties and opportunities” that are “unattainable in the periphery” (2009: 16). This inherent inequality undermines and counters attempts to build walls and barriers between core and periphery. In the early modern period, the “global core” might be narrowly defined as areas of competition among the European merchant empires, including the Portuguese and the Venetian. In fact, Shakespeare seems to have been aware of similar forces in the early modern period, especially the extent to which Venice had established and defined boundaries between citizens and noncitizens, codified in the Serrata laws, which gave rise to the registry of noble births, known as Libro d’oro, and the registry of citizen families, known as Libri d’argento.10 Shakespeare’s Venetians reveal an intense preoccupation with the networks that connect them to the larger world, and, as Phyllis Rackin notes, “anxieties about the dangers and cultural dislocations produced by their involvement in an increasingly global marketplace” (2002: 88).
Bronwen Wilson argues that early modern maps portray Venice as a city “floating in the lagoon that protects its liberty and sustains its prestige as a trade emporium” (2006: 46). Shakespeare clearly counters this idealized view. The lagoon cannot protect the city from alien influence. The word “world” occurs 15 times in such contexts as “the wide world” (1.1.167), “the poor rude world” (3.5.75), “a naughty world” (5.1.91), and “the wealth / That the world masters” (5.1.173–4).11 The Venice of the play abuts the larger world, and seems intimately interconnected through trade and various forms of exchange with the rest of Europe and North Africa, as well as with such far-flung places as the Indies and Mexico. Transnational migrants such as Shylock and Tubal, who seek to participate in, integrate into, or be accepted by the citizenry of Venice, destabilize any sense of security. The transnationals encounter considerable resistance and become the centers of intense religious, ethnic, or racial conflict, exposing a fundamental contradiction in the Venetians’ pursuit of global trade and their geographical protection in the lagoon. If we see Venice as part of what de Blij calls “global core,” then The Merchant of Venice dramatizes not only the plight of “legal immigrants [who] have entered the global core” but also Venetian efforts to wall “off core from periphery” (2009: 16).
The Merchant of Venice abounds with globals. Antonio represents the interests of this group, and as an older-bachelor with financial interests all over the world, with neither wife nor children, he maintains an open house, a halfway house, for young Venetian bachelors—Bassanio, Gratiano, Lorenzo, and others—on the upwardly mobile ladder of the commercial empire. Shakespeare situates Antonio’s financial interests at the center of the drama. These financial interests preoccupy the opening lines of the play, propel the strife between Antonio and Shylock, and even help define happiness or the comedy’s happy ending in the closing lines of act 5. Salarino introduces Antonio’s global ventures colorfully through a metaphor of “argosies with portly sail” crisscrossing the world’s maritime trade routes; in the process, he summons images of “signors and rich burghers” who encounter “petty traffickers” in their travels (1.1.9–12). Indeed, Solanio believes that he himself would be sad or restless, like Antonio, if his “hopes” were “abroad” (1.1.17) (Leinwand 1999: 113–14).12 Salarino suggests that everything would serve as reminders of his risky business ventures: the “hourglass” would remind him of his ship (“Wealthy Andrew”) running aground, and a church building would bring to mind his ship hitting “dangerous rocks,” scattering “all her spices on the stream” (cf. 1.1.22–40).
Such global economic interests have a destabilizing effect on the very concept of home. Shakespeare makes clear that Antonio owns a house in Venice, whose doors he keeps open for his young Venetian friends. These bachelor friends all seem to live in lodging houses. Bassanio instructs a servant, “you may do so, but let it be so hasted that supper be ready at the farthest by five of the clock. See these letters delivered, put the liveries to making, and desire Gratiano to come anon to my lodging” (cf. 2.2.106–9). He also tells Lancelot Gobbo, “Take leave of thy old master and inquire / My lodging out” (2.2.143–4). Similarly, after dinner at Bassanio’s, Lorenzo reveals his plan to Gratiano, Salarino, and Solanio: “Nay, we will slink away in suppertime, / Disguise us at my lodging, and return / All in an hour” (2.4.1–3); yet a little later, he adds, “Meet me and Gratiano / At Gratiano’s lodging some hour hence” (2.4.25–6). Bassanio’s dinner feast and the gathering at Gratiano’s lodging connect to Bassanio’s imminent departure for Belmont and Lorenzo’s plan to run away with Jessica. The word lodged, in a metaphorical sense, occurs only once more, this time being used by Shylock: “Lodged hate and a certain loathing / I bear Antonio” (4.1.59–60). Quite interestingly, Shakespeare associates Bassanio, Gratiano, and Lorenzo with nonpermanent places of residence—that they lodge but do not dwell (Sousa 2010: 78)13—thereby, underscoring their fluid, unfixed status as Venetian locals and the promise of benefits and rewards from their dependence on their friend Antonio’s patronage.
Nowhere does the text associate a house with Lorenzo, Gratiano, and Bassanio. In contrast, the text makes it clear that Antonio owns a house. One of his household servants bears a message to Solanio and Salarino: “Gentlemen, my master Antonio is at his house and desires to speak with you both” (cf. 3.1.68–9). Bassanio also mentions Antonio’s house when he instructs Gratiano to give Portia-Balthasar the ring (4.1.451–2). The house serves to define Antonio’s relationship to his young Venetian male friends. In fact, he offers them his house, his possessions, and even his body. Antonio’s sadness, the depths of which he cannot, or more likely refuses to, fathom, demarcates a space that remains off limits:
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. (1.1.1–7)
Even Bassanio notices a change in Antonio’s appearance: “You grow exceeding strange” (1.1.67); as does Gratiano: “You look not well, Signor Antonio” (1.1.73). “Strange” implies cold or distant in demeanor, reserved, not affable; but it also implies that his mind belongs to some other place, some other country, foreign (OED 1989). Antonio refuses to speculate about his strange, melancholy mood: “I hold the world but as the world, Gratiano: / A stage where every man must play a part, / And mine a sad one” (1.1.77–9). When alone with Bassanio, however, Antonio reveals that his friend’s courtship of the Lady of Belmont is on his mind. Shakespeare either offers a character with no access to his innermost feelings, or, as I believe is the case, he wants us to focus on the demarcation between exterior and interior space by creating a character who keeps an open house and vouches to unlock his coffers and his body yet draws the limit, unable or unwilling to explore what makes him unhappy.
Scholars argue that Antonio’s reticence might be linked to homoerotic desire. As Bruce Smith aptly puts it, the scene “leaves no room for talk about feelings,” “verbal games of male camaraderie” being couched in the language of “money and commerce” (1991: 67). Commercial interests seem to trump the business of the heart. When Antonio inquires of Bassanio’s proposed expedition to and venture in Belmont—“Well, tell me now what lady is the same / To whom you swore a secret pilgrimage, / That you today promised to tell me of” (1.1.119–21)—Bassanio carefully recasts the “secret pilgrimage” as a business venture: “How to get clear of all the debts I owe” (1.1.133). To which, Antonio warmly responds and offers him all: “My purse, my person, my extremest means / Lie all unlocked to your occasions” (1.1.138–9).
Shakespeare changes the relationship between Gianneto and Gianneto’s rich but childless godfather Ansaldo, which he found in Giovanni Fiorentino’s Il Pecorone (1558), one of the principal sources for the play, into a relationship between an older man, who seems infatuated with and is courting the younger one (1961: 463–76). In the process, he invites a reevaluation of sexual morality, recontextualizing the Ansaldo-Gianneto relationship into a homoerotic one and showing “how ordinary amorous relations between males, intergenerational in their contexts,” derived from ancient formulations, could function in a contemporary setting (Borris 2004: 253).14 Antonio’s love for Bassanio and Bassanio’s discovery of his own “love” for Antonio in act 4 dramatize the extent to which Antonio is willing to put himself at risk by borrowing from Shylock and even surrendering his friend to the amorous clasps of the rich heiress from Belmont. We know from Michael Rocke’s study of same-sex circles in Renaissance Florence that male same-sex relationships, whether clandestine or long-term, did not constitute a separate “subculture” but merged “into other typical forms of male sociability, from the camaraderie of gangs of youths or the bonds of work and neighborhood to relations between patrons and clients or the sodalities of kin and friendship networks” (1996: 15). Same-sex desire can thus be recast in creative ways in terms of “established social bonds and patterns of collective life”; therefore, “homosexuality was deeply integrated into that cluster of social structures, gender values, and forms of aggregation that together helped constitute male culture in Florence” (Rocke 1996: 15). In The Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare recasts a godfather-godson relationship to suggest that same-sex bonds advance the interest of the merchant community; as Antonio puts it, “the trade and profit of the city / Consisteth of all nations” (3.3.30–31). This bond between Antonio as a merchant-patron and Bassanio as Venetian mobal-lover symbolizes the Venetian attempt to wall up core from periphery.15
I have argued that Antonio represents the interests of the globals, although his interests intertwine with those of Venetian locals; Portia, on the other hand, becomes the champion of locals. In Shakespeare’s source, the Lady of Belmont lives in a gulf of the sea on the mainland of Italy, a day’s ride to Venice (Sugden 1925: 56). In the play, this imaginary town is also on the coast of Italy. Bassanio goes there by sea (2.6.65), and Portia travels by coach from there to Venice (3.5.82) (ibid.: 56). However different—perhaps more romantic or exotic—Belmont may seem, it functions as an extension of Venice. When the disguised Portia appears in the courtroom to preside over Antonio’s trial, she easily passes for a Venetian lawyer. More significant, she uses her role as judge to underscore Antonio’s local roots as a Venetian, offer a spirited defense of Venetian values and traditions, and embrace Antonio’s global financial interests. Without doubt, she defines the boundaries between Venetian and alien.
In this and other respects, she differs considerably from her counterpart in Shakespeare’s source, Il Pecorone. In the source, the Widow of Belmonte does not become associated with the hustle and bustle of Venice. Rather, she dwells in a castle on a remote “sea-gulf with a fine port” (Bullough 1961: 465), which observes a strange custom, as Gianneto’s friend explains: “Sir, she is a beautiful and capricious woman, and makes this law, that anyone who arrives must sleep with her, and if he possesses her he can take her for his wife and become lord of the port and all of the country” (ibid.: 465). The Lady of Belmonte shows her cunning and delight in tricking would-be suitors into having a nightcap laced with a sleep-inducing drug. Gianneto fails on two separate voyages to stay awake and loses all the possessions he has brought with him; only on his third voyage, again financed by his godfather, who has to borrow money from a rich Jew, does he succeed, and only because this time a servant takes pity on him and gives him advice: “Pretend to drink, but do not drink tonight” (ibid.: 470). Consequently, he stays awake and gives her “the bliss of holy matrimony” (ibid.: 470). He marries her and takes possession of her house and wealth. Almost exclusively, the Lady of Belmonte becomes associated with local issues, namely the bed trick, although she too dresses as a lawyer and saves Gianneto’s godfather.
Shakespeare intertwines the local and the global in his appropriation of the story. Like Antonio, Portia seems “aweary” (1.2.1), lamenting her fate as a daughter of a father with a perverse imagination: “I may neither choose who I would nor refuse who I dislike, so is the will of a living daughter curbed by the will of a dead father” (1.2.22–4). Her father has thrust his daughter and his family into the midst of a global competition for her hand in the form of the lottery of the three caskets. An array of transnationals seek to win the prize that she represents.16 We learn that a horse-obsessed Neapolitan, and ill-humored County Palatine, a capering and fencing Frenchman, an uneducated shallow Englishman, a quarrelsome Scot, and a drunk German have come to try for her hand (cf. 1.2.37–94).17 Other risk-takers, including Morocco, Aragon, and Bassanio, also appear (cf. 1.2.106–28). In fact, hearing of the approach of Morocco, Portia summarizes her plight: “Whiles we shut the gate upon one wooer, another knocks at the door” (1.2.127–8). Her house has turned into a casino for foreigners, who come to risk their fortune. She must provide food, lodging, and entertainment for these fortune seekers and wife-hunters. Having obviously failed to make proper marriage arrangements for his daughter, Portia’s father has turned his daughter’s home into a boarding house for fortune seekers and wife-hunters. Yet, paradoxically, Portia’s father, beyond the grave, finds a way to retain his parental control and, in a strange way, make it possible for Portia to enter into consensual marriage and, therefore, avoid a clash between her father’s demand for obedience and her own free will (Hacke 2004: 89–118).18
Thus, at the beginning of the play, Portia’s situation juxtaposes the ambiguity of the space that her father’s will requires her to occupy. She must provide food, lodging, and entertainment to prospective husbands from “Hyrcanian deserts,” “the vasty wilds / Of wide Arabia,” and even “the watery kingdom” (2.7.41–4). It is difficult to determine whether these would-be migrants aspire to become cittadini, townspeople, as some foreigners in Venice did: “There is some evidence that older men of immigrant origin preferred to put their sons or nephews forward as cittadini in order to further their careers through the privileges which flowed from this” (Cowan 2007: 74). An aspiring merchant under the tutelage of Antonio, the Venetian Bassanio would stand to gain considerable status through marriage to the rich heiress of Belmont. As Alexander Cowan concludes, “Unlike other parts of Italy, participation in trade in Venice was far from a source of stigma”; it was, in fact, “a high-status activity,” and by itself would not prove an impediment in the prove di nobilità, a legal process to establish that a patrician “was entirely free from the state of ‘base’ blood,” in part because his family had not engaged in arte meccanica [physical labor] (ibid.: 78, 29, 92). Although the suitors in Shakespeare’s sources must sleep in the Widow of Belmonte’s bed, at least Portia’s counterpart can drug them so that they cannot make love to her. In Shakespeare’s play, only the caskets stand between Portia and a suitor. Compulsory hospitality takes the place of an arranged marriage. Of all the fathers in Shakespeare, Portia’s reveals a curiously perverse imagination. To her credit, Portia possesses extraordinary stability of character in confronting strangers and managing a constantly revolving door.
The will of Portia’s father creates a paradox: he wants his daughter to find a loving Venetian husband and have a secure home; yet the lottery of the caskets turns her house into a lodging house for adventurers and passersby. Ultimately, however, Portia’s house must transform from a lodging house to a stable home. Curiously, Aragon, who finds the blinking idiot’s head in the silver casket, criticizes those who “choose by show,” seeking to find what the “silver treasure house” (2.9.32) holds inside:
Not learning more than the fond eye doth teach,
Which pries not to th’interior, but like the martlet
Builds in the weather on the outward wall,
Even in the force and road of casualty. (2.9.26–9)
The martlet, or the swift, symbolizes the inept or ill-advised builder, who chooses an inauspicious or vulnerable location to build a house. In deciding to look inside himself, his deserts, Aragon chooses the wrong casket.
All who fail become like Aragon’s martlet, the inept house builder. Bassanio’s correct choice, however, allows the lodging place for transnationals and adventurers to become a home. From a place that welcomes transnational mobals, Portia’s house becomes a place that excludes them. Only then can Portia offer Bassanio possession of her house, wealth, and body:
Myself and what is mine to you and yours
Is now converted. But now I was the lord
Of this mansion, master of my servants,
Queen o’er myself; and even now, but now,
This house, these servants, and this same myself
Are yours, my lord’s. (3.2.166–71)
This is, in fact, the first explicit mention of her house, now that its previous function has been changed.
In the first three acts, as the caskets take center stage, Portia’s house recedes into the background; in the last two acts, however, the caskets, now a relic of a bygone custom, become obsolete and disappear. Before her departure for Venice, she entrusts Lorenzo “the husbandry and manage” of her house (3.4.25). Act 5, scene 1, establishes a contrast between inside and outside, as Lorenzo and Jessica tease each other in the moonlight and Lorenzo indicates that “the mistress of the house” approaches; he promptly sends a servant to inform the household: “My friend Stephano, signify, I pray you, / Within the house, your mistress is at hand” (5.1.51–2). Portia and Nerissa offer the most extensive comment on the experience of dwelling:
Portia |
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. |
Nerissa |
When the moon shone we did not see the candle. |
Portia |
So doth the greater glory dim the less. A substitute shines brightly as a king Until a king be by, and then his state Empties itself, as doth an inland brook Into the main of waters. Music, hark! |
Nerissa |
It is your music, madam, of the house. |
Portia |
Nothing is good, I see, without respect; Methinks it sounds much sweeter than by day. (5.1.89–100) |
This passage presents Portia’s house as an intimate, personal, homey place, over which she presides and to which she extends hospitality to Bassanio’s friends and others.
When Antonio is introduced to her, she states, “Sir, you are very welcome to our house” (5.1.139); however, later she reverts to the first person possessive pronoun when jokingly she warns Bassanio, “Let not that doctor e’er come near my house” (223).19 Portia’s house changes from a location where transnationals passed through, to a lodging house or casino, into a home, a place of security and dwelling. A radical dislocation of perception has occurred. The marriage of Portia and Bassanio transforms Portia’s house into an emblem of stability, continuity, and intimacy. From this position of security, Portia can go to Venice to rescue Antonio from the threat of the vengeful Shylock.
After their expulsion from Spain, which started in 1492, early modern Jews sought refuge in various European cities such as Amsterdam, Prague, Genoa, Rome, and Venice, which granted them “shelter from religious persecution in exchange for their contribution to what in 1598 Daniel Rodriga referred to as the ‘public good’ of well-ordered commerce” (Kitch 2008: 132–3). In these cities, they gained limited temporary residency status. As Kitch aptly puts it, Jews, deprived of a homeland and displaced throughout Europe, were believed to form “a nation based on trade” rather than geography, and many writers associated them with homelessness and failed assimilation because of a “tendency to remain aliens in Christian nations where they lived” (ibid.: 134).20 The Venetian authorities “allowed Jewish merchants to live in the city for up to two years, although some in the Senate periodically tried to exile Jewish Marranos” (ibid.: 136).21 In a situation reminiscent of present-day immigrants, the Jewish merchant Daniel Rodriga, for example, petitioned the Doge and the Senate in 1589 for permission for his “brother Jacob with his son-in-law and ten other families of our relatives and friends” to come live in Venice (Chambers, Pulle, and Fletcher 1992: 346).22 The Jewish residents of Venice had to renew their residency permits once every decade, “sometimes in the face of vocal objections from Venetian citizens and rival merchants” (Kitch 2008: 136). In contrast, England remained far more hostile to the Jews throughout this period; as James Shapiro points out, “Every Jew who stepped foot in England in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries—Joachim Gaunse of Prague, Roderigo Lopez of Portugal, Yehuda Menda of Barbary, Jacob Barnet of Italy—was an alien” (Shapiro 1996: 180). Carole Levin and John Watkins remind us that on the Elizabethan stage “the first Shylock probably wore a shaggy red wig and a hooked nose like the one sported by Judas in the mystery plays”; in Venice, the Jews not only lived in the Jewish ghetto but also had to wear “a yellow head covering to distinguish them from Christians” (Levin and Watkins 2009: 1). Levin and Watkins conclude that “it would be hard to find a place anywhere in sixteenth-century Christendom where a Jewish moneylender might be mistaken for a Christian merchant” (ibid.: 2).
Some resident foreign communities, such as the Jewish population of Venice, functioned “as cultural mediators between merchant groups that came from their native lands and the host community” and “position[ed] themselves at key geographical points to take advantage of the growing global networks” (Parker 2010: 82–3). Such migration phenomena did not, however, always occur without considerable tension and conflict, as The Merchant of Venice makes clear (ibid.: 142).23 It is in this larger historical context, therefore, that I suggest that Shylock epitomizes the transnational mobal, who has settled in Venice seeking to share in the economic prosperity of the Venetians. No wonder Shylock finds Venice to be an utterly unfriendly place for him. He sees his house as a veritable refuge from the harsh public sphere in a city divided between Christians and Jews, citizens and aliens.24 His home represents a sacred place, a place of refuge from the outside world, embodying perhaps D. Appleyard’s definition of the ideal home: “Home is a haven in the turbulent seas of urban life. It embodies the familiar, [and] it is the place we feel most comfortable in, where we know better than anywhere what will happen” (1979: 4–20).
Early on, Shylock distinguishes two mutually exclusive spaces: his house and the outside world. Just before he leaves for dinner at Bassanio’s, Shylock wonders why he has been invited in the first place:
There are my keys. But wherefore should I go?
I am not bid for love. They flatter me;
But yet I’ll go in haste to feed upon
The prodigal Christian. Jessica, my girl,
Look to my house. I am right loath to.
There is some ill a-brewing towards my rest,
For I did dream of money-bags tonight. (2.5.11–18)
At home, he can observe his dietary restrictions and follow his cultural and religious customs; outside of his own home, he finds himself with those who despise him and do not respect his traditions: “Yes, to smell pork, to eat of the habitation which your prophet the Nazarite conjured the devil into! I will buy with you, sell with you, talk with you, walk with you, and so following; but I will not eat with you, drink with you, nor pray with you” (1.3.31–5). At home, he could also perform an expected domestic ritual, as Roy Booth writes: “Shylock, with his sense of the sanctity of his threshold, ought on leaving his house to touch the mezuzah, a casket attached to the door post containing a piece of parchment on which is written Shaddai, the sacred name of God” (Booth 1999: 30).
In addition to different dietary customs, Shylock also points out that his and Antonio’s business interests work at cross purposes of each other, Antonio lending “money gratis” (1.3.40) and undermining Shylock’s banking.25 Further, Antonio insults and baits him in public places: “He hates our sacred nation, and he rails, / Even there where merchants most do congregate, / On me, my bargains, and my well-won-thrift” (1.3.44–6). Like many migrants who must live on the edge of mainstream society, Shylock considers his house a refuge from the outside world. He advises Jessica to keep her distance from Christians with “varnished faces” and remain within the protection of the house: “But stop my house’s ears—I mean my casements; / Let not the sound of shallow foppery enter / My sober house” (2.5.33–6). In this passage, Shylock personifies the house as an extension of his own body, endowed with ears that must be stopped. Even after his defeat in the courtroom, forced to surrender his fortune, and ordered to become a Christian, Shylock views his house as a refuge: “I pray you give me leave to go from hence; / I am not well. Send the deed after me, / And I will sign it” (4.1.393–5). This is the last time we see Shylock, as he disappears into the inner sanctum of his domestic space. To counter his unstable, provisional, temporary status as an alien, Shylock has attempted to create a stable environment in his house in order to provide a shelter for him and Jessica from the outside world, but the outside encroaches upon his private domain. Shakespeare delineates the plight of many transnational migrants and the ways in which the security of the house may contrast with a profound sense of cultural alienation.
In contrast to Shylock’s house, Barabas’ house in Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta plays an important, if not crucial role, in his interaction with both the Christians and the Turks. Ferneze, the governor of Malta, tries to confiscate the estates of the Jewish residents. He issues a decree ordering the confiscation of half of each Jew’s estate; if the Jewish property owner refuses, he must become a Christian; if he refuses to become a Christian, he “shall absolutely lose all he has” (1.2.79–80).26 Having resisted both the confiscation of half of his property and becoming a Christian, Barabas loses all he has; yet he indicates that he has made provisions for himself and Abigail by hiding “Ten thousand portagues, besides great pearls, / Rich costly jewels, and stone infinite / Fearing the worst of this before it fell” (1.2.249–51). The problem is that he has hidden this treasure inside his house, which the Christians have promptly converted into a nunnery (1.2.261–2). The conversion of the house requires the pretended conversion of Abigail as a nun, so that she can retrieve the hidden treasure. Here, as elsewhere, the house occupies a central place in Barabas’s life. With the hidden treasure, he buys a new house (2.3.13–14), to which he invites both Lodowick and Mathias, the two men interested in marrying Abigail, only to set the two rivals against each other. Likewise, in his house, Barabas cooks and poisons a pot of rice and asks Ithamar to deliver it to the nuns, whom he kills (3.4). He also invites both Friars Jacomo and Bernadine to his house, only to destroy them. He even entraps Calymath in his house, only to be outsmarted by Ferneze in his “homely citadel” (5.3.18). The house becomes an integral part of Barabas’s villainy, a place where he stages his assault upon his enemies. In contrast, Shylock escapes from his enemies into the inner recesses of his home.
In Il Pecorone, the Jew’s home serves a different purpose, as well. Once Ansaldo fails to pay the bond, “the Jew ha[s] Ansaldo arrested, and insist[s] on having his pound of flesh,” but agrees to wait for Giannetto to return from Belmonte before he exacts the penalty (Bullough 1961: 471). Ansaldo is held in the Jew’s house: “When he arrived, Giannetto went to the Jew’s house where he joyfully embraced Ansaldo, and told the Jew that he was willing to pay him his money and as much more in addition as he might demand” (ibid.: 472). In Shakespeare’s play, no Christian, except Lancelot Gobbo, who works as a servant for Shylock, sets foot in Shylock’s house, which Shylock seems to consider a sacred place, not to be contaminated by Christian presence.
Henry Irving’s 1879 production of The Merchant of Venice memorably presented the vast abyss that separates Shylock’s inner from outer world in act 2, scene 6, which the anonymous reviewer for the Saturday Review called “a singularly fine touch of invention”:
Lorenzo has fled with his stolen bride and her stolen money, and a crowd of masquers has crossed the stage and disappeared over the picturesque bridge with laughter and music. Then Shylock is seen, lantern in hand, advancing, bent in thought; and, as he comes close to his robbed and deserted house, the curtain falls (1879: 152–6).27
This captures well Shylock’s emotional isolation.
Shylock attempts to create a stable environment in his house in order to shelter himself and Jessica from the harsh outside world, but he senses that the outside encroaches upon his private space. In his first reference to the house, for example, Shylock reveals anxiety. He indicates that he will “see to my house, left in the fearful guard / Of an unthrifty knave” (2.1.173–4). In her conversation with Lancelot, Jessica makes a telling comment about her father’s house and her motivation for leaving it: “I am sorry thou wilt leave my father so; / Our house is hell, and thou, a merry devil, / Didst rob it of some taste of tediousness” (2.3.1–3). She never explains exactly what makes her house a hell, although one might infer that, like Hermia in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, she has concluded: “Oh hell to choose love by another’s eye,” fully aware that her father would never approve of her relationship to a Christian.28 Also, what Shylock considers “sober,” she views as “tediousness.”
Shylock’s house is also “sober” in another sense. As a point of reference for his emotional isolation and a refuge, the house does not call attention to itself. Two scenes in the play indicate that Shylock’s house seems to be inconspicuous. His house presumably blends in with the other houses in the Jewish Ghetto. In Shakespeare’s London, writes Roy Booth, the “only surviving Jew’s house,” an impressive stone structure, which stood “at the end of Bassinges hall street,” was well known (Booth 1999: 25, 27–8).29 Old Gobbo, not recognizing his son, asks for directions: “Master young man, you, I pray you, which is the way to master Jew’s” (2.2.30–31). At Lancelot’s confusing and humorous directions, the old man comments, “Be God’s sonties [saints], ‘twill be a hard way to hit! Can you tell me whether one Lancelot that dwells with him, dwell with him or no?” (2.2.41–3). Likewise, in act 4, scene 2, after the courtroom scene, Portia looks for Shylock’s house in order to have him sign the “deed of gift,” as part of the settlement that she extracted from him: “Inquire the Jew’s house out, give him this deed, / And let him sign it” (4.2.1–2). When Gratiano appears, she asks again for direction: “Furthermore, / I pray you show my youth old Shylock’s house” (4.2.10–11). The Christians in Shakespeare’s play, unlike those in The Jew of Malta, do not take the house away from Shylock, despite Shylock’s fears, as he indicates in the courtroom:
Nay, take my life and all! Pardon not that!
You take my house when you do take the prop
That doth sustain my house; you take my life
When you do take the means whereby I live. (4.1.372–5)
Despite these fears, the Christians respect Shylock’s house, even if they do not respect his person; this underscores Shylock’s humanity and profound sense of dignity.
In Susan Saegert’s words, a house “connotes a more active and mobile relationship of individuals to the physical, social, and psychological spaces around them”; it also emphasizes “the necessity for continuing active making of a place for ourselves in time and space,” and “[s]imultaneously, it points to the way in which our personal and social identities are shaped through the processes of dwelling” (1985: 287, 288). Saegert’s concepts encapsulate well the function of the house in The Merchant of Venice. The house becomes a point of reference for Antonio’s emotional isolation as well as for Shylock’s. Antonio tries to turn his house into a haven for ambitious young Venetian bachelors; Shylock tries to lock his house from such bachelors. Antonio hides his true feelings; Shylock hides his true intentions. The house becomes a dominant symbol for the dwellers’ sexual or ethnic difference. No one seems more preoccupied with protecting his house than Shylock. Portia succeeds where Antonio and Shylock fail. In the courtroom, she draws the boundary between Venetian and alien, core and periphery, when she uncovers an apparently forgotten law against “an alien” who seeks “the life of any citizen” (4.1.345–60). Likewise, she has also fixed the borders of her domestic space, shutting a door to the world while opening another for Venetian locals and mobals. Antonio ends up a guest in Portia and Bassanio’s home; Shylock, a refugee in his own house; Portia closes her house to undesirable guests and opens it to those persons who are important in her life. The moonlight bathes her garden, and the candle burns in her hall. Portia concludes, “Nothing is good, I see, without respect” (5.1.99), without a point of reference. To dwell is to set down roots, to intertwine ourselves with the physical world, to cast a light, as a candle does in a great hall.
In act 5 of The Merchant of Venice, Portia returns home to Belmont. Standing on the threshold of her domestic space, she comments on her surroundings and the significance of this homecoming, especially on such a romantic night, so brightly lit by the moonshine that it resembles a day “when the sun is hid” (5.1.126). Portia’s homecoming brings to mind, as Bassanio suggests, a connection between the safety of home and the uncertainty of alien spaces elsewhere: “We should hold day with the Antipodes / If you would walk in absence of the sun” (127–8). The Antipodes refer, of course, to those who live on the other side of the world, so that their feet are against our feet; the term also means a region of perpetual darkness, or a region where everything is upside down. In fact, the antipodal or sub-Antarctic regions become the emblem of what is entirely alien and topsy-turvy. The homecoming with which the play concludes serves to establish boundaries and to affirm the centrality of home life to the Venetian sense of security. Even Antonio’s argosies, given up for lost earlier in the place, “Are richly come to harbor suddenly” (5.1.277).
The houses of Antonio, Portia, and Shylock become a focal point of concern. Antonio’s domestic space underscores the uncertainties of global trade; yet, it also serves as a springboard, where young Venetians, under his tutelage, pursue profitable ventures and continue the sort of economic activity for which Venice was famous. Likewise, in her house, Portia must confront a local tradition, embodied in her father’s privilege to choose a husband for her, and the open door through which the world’s adventurers hope to establish a foothold in Belmont. Her marriage to the upwardly mobile Venetian Bassanio solidifies the links between Belmont and Venice, simultaneously excluding undesirable foreigners. In his rivalry with Antonio, his fight in the courtroom, and his search for refuge in his house, Shylock embodies the anxieties and discontinuities of the life of a transnational migrant. Here, the global and the local, geography and place intersect. In this larger context, the homecoming, dramatized in act 5, suggests that home can only serve as a temporary, provisional shelter in a world where roots clash with an intricate web of global routes, migrations, and strangers (Clifford 1997: 36).30
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1 Lippard focuses on her own experience with the “local”; she does not, however, discuss the “lure of the local” in Shakespeare or in the early modern period.
2 In his book, Theatre, Finance and Society in Early Modern England, Theodore B. Leinwand writes that “While my terminology throughout this volume—from credit crunch to nostalgia to venture capital—is often anachronistic, the economic categories and attendant affective responses that I describe are, I think, not” (1999: 3). See Parker, Global Interactions in the Early Modern Age, 1400–1800 (2010).
3 See de Blij’s map illustrating the current situation: global core, periphery, and barricades.
4 Daniel Vitkus argues that, though polemical and not at all homogeneous, global systems theories “offer a useful frame of reference for understanding the rise of capitalism, the beginnings of European colonialism in the New World, and the cultural changes that accompanied these developments” (2009: 33). In this essay, I am not particularly interested in applying such a theory to Shakespeare’s play, but rather in analyzing the dynamics of a point of contact between the local and the global. See also the discussion of early modern globalism in Alison Games, The Web of Empire: English Cosmopolitans in an Age of Expansion 1560–1660 (2008: esp. 83).
5 In Shakespeare and Venice, Graham Holderness thoroughly reviews the perception of Venice in the period. See especially ch. 1, “Renaissance Venice,” and ch. 2, “Jew and Moor” (2010).
6 As Thomas A. Brady, Jr., writes, “European trade expanded its scope through military enterprising on a global scale” (160). The European powers, he adds, “favor[ed] merchant property over other forms of property right”; as a consequence, “these two changes—expansion abroad, security of property at home—reveal the two faces of Europe’s empire-builders: plunderers, slavers, and extortioners abroad; prudent, law-abiding businessmen at home” (1991: 160).
7 In Trading Territories: Mapping the Early Modern World, Jerry Brotton writes about the dual function that maps, sea charts, and terrestrial globes performed in the period, “as confident imperial symbols of the power and authority of sovereigns like João III and Charles V when laying claim to territories, or even trading in those to which they claimed possession” (1998: 25); these “highly complex” cartographical objects also reflected “the more problematic and commercial exchanges between empires” (25). Brotton summarizes the problem as follows: “these were far-flung territories over which the empires had little ability to seriously establish anything like the regimes of colonial power and authority which were to characterize the developments of the proceeding European empires of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries” (25).
8 See also Kenneth R. Andrews, Trade, Plunder and Settlement: Maritime Enterprise and the Genesis of the British Empire (1984).
9 Duke Frederick of Wirtemberg, who visited London in 1592, noted the large number of foreign residents: “There are also many other churches here and there; in particular three, where they preach in the French, Italian, and Dutch tongues”; “A True and Faithful Narrative,” in England as Seen by Foreigners in the Days of Elizabeth and James the First, ed. William Brenchley Rye (1865: 8). Duke Frederick also remarked that Londoners “care little for foreigners, but scoff and laugh at them” (7). On the commercial connections between London and the Mediterranean, see Alison Games (2008: 47–79).
10 I offer an extensive analysis of Venice in the early modern period, especially in relation to Othello, in At Home in Shakespeare’s Tragedies (2010: 83–8).
11 All citations from the play are from William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, ed. A. R. Braunmuller (2000).
12 Leinwand speculates that Antonio is in fact “a privateering merchant” because “it is difficult to make sense of a late-sixteenth century Venetian merchant trading in Tripoli, the Indies, Mexico, and England (1.3.16–18), not to mention having ships in Lisbon and Barbary too (3.2.267–8)” (113–14).
13 A similar phenomenon appears in Othello (Sousa 2010: 78). Unlike Antonio’s friends, Othello is a transnational mobal.
14 As Borris notes, “Renaissance male bonding largely took its bearings from classical precedents, with, we assume, considerable oral diffusions into illiterate milieus” (254).
15 Paul Wagar’s 2003 film Shakespeare’s Merchant, an amusing and inept adaptation of the play, misses the point of this bond when at the end of the movie Bassanio, played by John D. Haggerty, has to choose between a dejected Antonio (Don Stewart) and an angry, demanding, and controlling Portia (Lorna MacNab), a choice rendered the more implausible after a torrid sex scene between the two male friends to celebrate Antonio’s victory over Shylock.
16 For a comparison of similar situations, see Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta and Robert Wilson’s The Three Ladies of London (1584).
17 Each of the suitors conforms to contemporary stereotypes. See Robert Stafforde, A Geographical and Anthological Descriptions of All the Empires and Kingdomes (London, 1607); and The Fyrst Boke of the Introduction to Knowledge, by Andrew Boorde (1490–1549).
18 In Women, Sex and Marriage in Early Modern Venice, Daniela Hacke explores the complexities of Venetian marriage arrangements. See especially ch. 5, “Children and Parents: Consensual Marriage and Parental Consent” (89–118).
19 Portia again reverts to the first person possessive in 5.1.273–4: “I have not yet / Entered my house.”
20 Kitch argues that “Shylock invokes his ‘sacred nation’ as a principle of economic rights on which citizenship might be founded, but Portia denies him such rights under the banner of Christian universalism” (155). See also Shapiro (1996: 168).
21 The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) defines denizen as “One who lives habitually in a country but is not a native-born citizen; a foreigner admitted to residence and certain rights in a country; in the law of Great Britain, an alien admitted to citizenship by royal letters patent, but incapable of inheriting, or holding any public office.”
22 See also Kitch (2008: 136).
23 Parker identifies in the early modern period the roots of modern migration patterns and the attendant “global interconnections”: “The ambitions that pulled world regions closer from 1400 to 1800 came not only from kings and merchants, for ordinary men and women—millions of them—resettled in new lands and created new societies” (142).
24 As Lloyd Edward Kermode writes in Aliens and Englishness in Elizabethan Drama (2009), “Elizabethan documents widely employed the term ‘alien’ and ‘stranger’ to refer to persons from a foreign country,” although aliens could also be used to refer to persons from Scotland and Ireland (2). A denizen referred to “a permanent resident with rights of residency and work in the adopted country”; this status was usually achieved through petitions to the Crown (3).
25 See Walter Cohen (1982: 769) and Amanda Bailey (2011: 1–24). Bailey aptly summarizes Cohen’s argument: “Cohen’s deft diacritical reading of Shakespeare’s play as a mediation of the anxieties and opportunities of nascent global capitalism sees Shylock as an ambivalent avatar of new economic formation” (1). Walter S. H. Lim argues that this play “dramatizes this emerging capital in its portrayal of the conflict and enmity transpiring between the usurer and the merchant” (2010: 355); he adds that the commercial ventures blurred the boundaries between Jewish usurer and Venetian merchant: “For in relation to an exfoliating trans-European commercial network, Venetian Jews had indeed played an important part in contributing to the development of capitalism as merchants” (355). For a discussion of the rivalry between Antonio and Shylock, see Henry S. Turner (2006: 413–42). Turner casts the rivalry in the context of a “friend-enemy relation” (441). Yet as merchant and banker, respectively, Antonio and Shylock remain connected. Alberto Tenenti demonstrates that the Renaissance merchants and the bankers, together, “brought a dynamic ferment and a conscious spirit of initiative that were widely recognized at the time” (1991: 179).
26 All quotations from this play are from Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta, in The Complete Plays, ed. J. B. Steane (1969). For an interesting comparison between Shylock and Marlowe’s Barabas, see Kitch (2009: 105–28).
27 C. L. Barber remembers the effect created by similar staging in a later production: “I remember a very moving scene, a stock feature of romantic productions, in which George Arliss came home after Bassanio’s party, lonely and tired and old, to knock in vain at the door of the house left empty by Jessica” (1970: 183). Barber, however, writes that “To insert a humanitarian scene about Shylock’s pathetic homecoming prevents the development of the scornful amusement with which Shakespeare’s text presents the miser’s reaction in Solanio’s narrative” (183–4).
28 See William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, ed. Russ McDonald (2000: 1.1.140). For a discussion of conflicts within the family, see Max H. James’s “Our House Is Hell”: Shakespeare’s Troubled Families (1989: esp. 43–5, 94–106).
29 Booth adds: “The most famous survivals [of such houses] to the present are in Lincoln and Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, in Lincoln, ‘Aaron the Jew’s House’ on Steep Hill, and on The Strait, ‘The Jew’s House itself, a two-storeyed stone house of the later twelfth century” (27). According to Booth, “Jews had built substantially in the early medieval town,” including eight stone houses in Ironmonger Lane (28).
30 I am echoing James Clifford’s discussion of the concepts of “roots” and “routes,” dwelling and traveling (1997: 36).