This chapter concentrates on The Merchant of Venice and, in particular, the famous trial scene and the forced conversion of Shylock to Christianity. As I turn to this most complicated of plays let me rehearse my larger thesis. The religion of Shakespearean drama, if not the playwright himself, is constituted primarily by a desire to give oneself absolutely to the “other” that cannot be known, a desire that may determine institutionalized monotheisms but is not equivalent to them, a desire that is inextricably intertwined with a secular or existential worldview. The inability of scholarship to locate Shakespearean drama precisely on the Christian spectrum stems, then, not from a secular tendency in the playwright, but from an almost hyperreligious one, one that pushes back to the ancient mystery of Genesis 22, a hyperreligious passion that, structurally speaking at least, presses very close to our own secular worldview and, in particular, our own (supposedly) secular ethics grounded in a respect or openness to the “other.”
I will test this hypothesis on the play that seems the most at odds with both any pre-Christian Abram/Abraham and our current secular ethics: The Merchant of Venice. In many ways, the play engages the most violent forms of Christian typology, rereading Judaism in general and certain figures, like Abraham, from the Hebrew Bible simply as prefiguring Christian salvation.1 Correspondingly, the play’s treatment of Shylock the Jew, and the forced conversion to Christianity he experiences, directly contradicts the prime directive of our ethics: you must respect the difference of the “other.” Derrida’s work allows us to see, however, that the play’s profound religious desire for the Abrahamic gift interrupts and interferes with its own violent and hypocritical early modern Christian allegorizing in a way that simultaneously turns an audience back to the ancient mystery of Abraham and Isaac, and points us forward—albeit briefly—to a post-modern desire for alterity, a post-modern respect for the individual subject that is not subsumed entirely by dominant political and cultural forces. The test of the hypothesis is especially rigorous because this rather Derridean hypothesis requires me to challenge Derrida himself. One implication of my reading is that in his reading of The Merchant of Venice in “What Is a ‘Relevant’ Tradition?” he seems to have missed his own Abrahamic point.2
In its juxtaposition of a calculating, economizing Jew, Shylock, who is seemingly obsessed with the law, and a notably giving Christian, Antonio, The Merchant of Venice clearly participates in Christian propagandistic discourse dating back to the post-Pauline politics of the first century. Juxtaposing the giving, aneconomic Christian to the exchangist, law-obsessed Jew was one way early Christianity created itself. The virulence of the play’s anti-Semitism can be understood as a Reformation reading of these ancient Christian origins, a dramatic effort to realize the perfect unconditional Christian love or capacity for giving love that the Book of John, in particular, often contrasts with the attitudes of the Pharisees.3 The play seemingly seeks to identify this notion of perfect love by contrasting true Christian gifts with Jewish exchange and economizing.
This strategy fails on close reading, of course, as all the Christian gifts in the play reveal themselves to have economic entanglements; they all turn out to be compromised versions of the gift, hopelessly entangled in economies, exchanges, and so on. Indeed, Shakespeare seems to highlight the limitations of these gifts. Antonio’s famous gift—giving his credit to Bassanio—which opens the play, for example, is tied to his complicated feelings for Bassanio. Antonio gives for something, and this hidden economizing compromises the nature of his generous gesture. He never offers to simply cancel Bassanio’s debt to him. This would not solve all of Bassanio’s problems, but it would certainly help and certainly would have illuminated even more strikingly his supposed generosity.
This is not to suggest that Shakespeare wants us to be overly suspicious and critical of Antonio’s generosity. Antonio is surely generous in offering his credit. Shakespeare does, however, seem to want to call into question the distinction between a generosity like Antonio’s and an absolute, almost impossible-to-think-of generosity. One can usefully compare this drawn contrast to the one I discussed in the context of Richard II, where Shakespeare’s distinguishes between Gaunt’s and Richard’s stated devotion to an absolute “Other” and their more realistic devotion.
In the context of the impossible gift, the gift without return, the gift that risks everything, even Antonio’s generosity is suspect. Antonio does not believe himself to be “hazarding” or giving anything, expressing confidence at least twice that his wealth is safely intact and growing (1.1.41–45; 1.3.155–58). We must continually remind ourselves that it is only his unexpected loss of ships that amplifies—indeed transforms—the nature of his generosity from a calculated, economical gesture of friendship to a total and complete gift of himself, a gift of death. I won’t argue the point, but one could say that Antonio fully realizes the nature of true or absolute giving only when his ships are so suddenly and unexpectedly lost. This relatively undiscussed and unanticipated act or event of “nature” potentially illuminates for us (and perhaps for Antonio) the distinction between everyday giving and absolute, perfect giving and, I will try to show, strikingly parallels a transformation in relation to divine economics that Shylock undergoes in Act 4. Before the loss of the ships, in other words, Antonio’s generosity toward Bassanio seems tinged with an all-too-human sense of calculated exchange.
The limitations, violence, and hypocrisy of Christian giving are realized most distinctly and most powerfully, of course, in Act 4 when the Christians try to extract from Shylock the true gift—in the form of a perfect and almost impossible-to-conceive act of mercy or forgiveness—which they, themselves, have failed to produce during the whole play.4 “Then must the Jew be merciful,” Portia insists (4.1.180). Shylock himself reveals the apparent contradictory nature of this Christian “mercy.” The gift they seek here is not a true gift, a free gift, but one that can only be realized in a violent economy: “On what compulsion must I” be merciful, Shylock asks (4.1.181). This violent hypocrisy is even more apparent in a subsequent moment, when Shylock is suddenly and surprisingly charged with the criminal offense of seeking the life of a citizen (4.1.350) and forced to convert to Christianity (4.1.389). Before this point he was involved only in a civil contract case, a hearing.
For many critics, if not most, the forced conversion of Shylock leaves the play horrifically situated in the post-Pauline Christian discourse mentioned above, beyond salvaging for a modern audience. Even if one argues, like René Girard, that the play self-consciously exposes rather than indulges a certain economizing hypocrisy at the heart of Christianity, one is left with a reading that condemns Christianity as being too Jewish, a reading that perversely condemns Judaism in an attempt to condemn Christianity.5 This early modern comedy, then, has become in some sense tragic. Honest critical appraisal generally admits that only some residual bardolatry, or some sense that something can be learned—in the negative—from this dramatic gesture, keeps the play circulating.
This is not to say that nuanced, intelligent, and productive arguments about the forced conversion are not possible. Most recently, Julia Reinhard Lupton has brilliantly shown how Shylock’s troubling “discontented contentment” and the loss of his Jewishness is actually a historical condition for modern citizenship writ large.6 In order to make this claim she reminds us of the historical trajectory of Jewish citizenship in Europe, the process wherein Jews were “emancipated” from distinctive, separate “corporate identities” in medieval and early modern Europe to “full citizenship” in the nineteenth century. In this context, then,
Shylock undergoes not so much a forced conversion as a nominal or procedural one; his reluctant consent is measured and limited, like the rule of law itself. . . . [H]owever ambivalent we may feel about Shylock’s conversion, there is nothing tragic in his destiny. We would prefer that Shylock had been offered citizenship without conversion, yet such a choice is only conceivable from across the historical divide of Jewish emancipation, whose success was predicated on the dissolution of the traditional corporate privileges of Europe’s Jewish communities. Before emancipation, naturalization was unthinkable without conversion, not only because Christianity was so hegemonic, but because being a Jew meant belonging to a separate political entity (a legacy from Roman law). While it is easy to deplore Shylock’s conversion as a forced one, that is because formal emancipation of the Jews into citizenship is so thoroughly entrenched in our contemporary modes of affiliation that we are no longer cognizant of the systematic transformations in the nature of Jewish collective life that emancipation itself entailed—namely the corporate self-rule (the many estates and bodies of Europe’s ancient regimes) by political representation in a larger entity (the modern state). When Portia strips Shylock of his corporate privileges and Antonio offers naturalization in its place, the play begins not only to imagine the foundations of Jewish emancipation, but also to calculate its costs. Emancipation, too, can be framed as a loss of sorts—another scene of death into citizenship—but, like Shylock’s life story, it, too, is not simply a tragedy. (Emphasis original.)7
What the play conjures, then, is not so much a hypocritical and tragic universalism, but a limited universalism, one disturbingly familiar to almost all citizens of modern nations who exist in a state of “discontented contentment,” aware at once of a sense of belonging and not belonging to a greater whole. Lupton’s reading eschews both bardolatry and a reliance on the play as a negative example. As a treatment of the forced or “procedural” conversion I find this reading remarkably persuasive, one that opens the play’s current “tragic” state to even more possibilities.
For example, in concentrating on this single moment of procedural conversion I am prompted to reflect on the simple fact that the notorious trial scene alone is made up of many moments, related but still distinctive moments that threaten to blur into one another and ultimately collapse into this single moment of procedural conversion. As just noted, for example, Shylock is pressed to be merciful in the civil contract case before he is charged with a criminal offense. As Lupton points outs, “the play moves quickly” as it shifts from the civil hearing on contracts that opens Act 4 to the criminal indictment that leads to Shylock’s conversion.8 It seems to me that in this rapidly moving scene an audience, too, might move too quickly. The character that commands the audience’s attention in this scene, Portia, is constantly telling everyone on stage to “tarry,” to slow down, and perhaps an audience should, too. I am particularly concerned about pacing because the instant of the Abrahamic gift, the impossible moment of the gift Shakespeare has been seeking throughout the whole play, if it appears, flashes quickly, interrupts, and breaks apart time itself, and would be easy to miss even for the most astute readers.9
I will slow down, then, and I will back up a bit, too. The scene opens, more or less, with the Duke pressing Shylock to be merciful and forgive the bond:
Shylock, the world thinks, and I think so too,
That thou but leadest this fashion of thy malice
To the last hour of the act, and then ’tis thought
Thou’lt show thy mercy and remorse more strange
Than is thy strange apparent cruelty;
And where thou now exacts a penalty,
Which is a pound of this poor merchant’s flesh,
Thou wilt not only loose the forfeiture,
But, touched with human gentleness and love,
Forgive a moiety of the principal.
(4.1.18–27)
The speech concludes with a violent pun: “We all expect a gentle answer, Jew” (4.1.34). We must acknowledge that this is a threat, a hint at the sovereign power yet to be fully demonstrated, especially in that what actually happens meets the Duke’s expectations perfectly. He ultimately demands the gentle/gentile answer he wants.
Intriguingly, however, we also must acknowledge that this threat takes the form of a prophecy, an expression of what is expected to come. That is, I want to take seriously and literally and even prophetically the Duke’s suggestion that Shylock will wait “To the last hour of the act” before showing a “strange” remorse and mercy, one so strange that scholarship—particularly a scholarship still invested in a certain Shakespearean secularism—has struggled to recognize it.
In brief, the dominant critical assumption has been that the so-called mercy the Christians look for in the play does not turn up, does not show itself, either in the Christians or in Shylock. Shylock refuses Christian demands, and only the forced or procedural conversion of the trial resolves the irresolvable tension between law and mercy on display. And this resolution, as suggested, is then judged disingenuous or inauthentic, and certainly violent. Mercy, the true gift, eludes the play. At best, as Lupton argues, we have procedural “discontented contentment.”
But, if we consider the context of Genesis 22, is this so?
To answer this we must move slowly through the trial scene. Portia first traps Shylock by pointing out that the bond provides for “no jot of blood.” “Tarry a little,” she says, calling attention to the crucial matter of pacing here:
There is something else
This bond doth give thee here no jot of blood;
The words expressly are “a pound of flesh.”
Take then thy bond, take thou thy pound of flesh,
But in the cutting it if thou dost shed
One drop of Christian blood, thy lands and goods
Are by the laws of Venice confiscate
Unto the State of Venice.
(4.1.303–10)
Shylock immediately recognizes his suddenly new situation in relation to the law and unhesitatingly seeks a way out at this point; he tries to take Bassanio up on his earlier offer to “pay the bond thrice” (4.1.315). But Portia reiterates and specifies the demand of the law here, ruling out Bassanio’s offer, which would have concluded the matter then and there: “The Jew shall have all justice. Soft, no haste / He shall have nothing but the penalty” (4.1.337). This remark follows her suggestion a few lines earlier that Shylock shall have “justice, more than thou desir’st” (4.1.314).
What happens next—and how this next moment differs from both the one we have just examined and the later moment of procedural conversion—is what fascinates me. Immediately after Portia tells Shylock that he shall have nothing but the penalty, she presses the demand of the law in a shocking and disturbing way—shocking and disturbing not just to Shylock, but to everyone on stage, and to a great many audiences prepared to enjoy a comedy:
Prepare thee to cut off the flesh.
Shed thou no blood, not 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
Or one poor scruple, nay, if the scale do turn
But in the estimation of a hair,
Thou diest, and all thy goods are confiscate.
(4.1.322–30)
Unlike the immediately prior demand of the law not to take any blood in the taking of a pound of flesh, this new demand, or call, of the law catches the usually fast-thinking and fast-talking Shylock offguard. We must, then, take this new formulation of the law seriously: Shylock is no longer prevented from killing Antonio because of consequences Shylock might suffer, but, instead, he is rather remarkably called by the law to kill Antonio whether he wants to or not. Unlike the earlier moment, when Shylock immediately recognizes his circumstances, he hesitates here, at this second moment. And it is Portia, who, again, has been asking everyone to slow down, who calls attention to the moment when Shylock finally does slow down: “Why doth the Jew pause?” She then, again, presses the new command of the law: “Take thy forfeiture” (4.3.333). Exactly how long Shylock pauses here, suspended by this new strange demand of the law to give death, is a matter of theatrical interpretation. But Shylock does, uncharacteristically, pause.
Despite Gratiano’s continued comic cheerleading (4.1.331–32), at this point, one must admit that there is a dramatic instant when Shylock might go ahead and follow the law and kill Antonio, even if this means enacting his own death sentence. This possibility, in fact, creates much of the dramatic energy of the scene. Indeed, Gratiano’s words can be read as breaking the dramatic tension, a realization on his part at least, that Shylock will resist the call of the law and not kill Antonio. Perhaps Shylock lowers his knife, and this cues Gratiano’s taunting about “A second Daniel” (4.1.331). Perhaps even Portia has been holding her breath, waiting to see what Shylock will actually do, before calling attention to Shylock’s “pause” (4.1.333). But we must acknowledge that it is at this instant that the comedic passes closest to the tragic, not later on when the Duke intervenes with his sovereign gesture and “pardons” Shylock (4.1.366). Of course, after a reasonable period of stage time Shylock must try to walk away, this time on substantially reduced terms: “Give me my principal, and let me go” (4.1.333). But we must attend to the instant when he pauses.
And, moreover, we must not move too quickly through this pause, this hesitation, especially in a scene that calls our attention constantly to “tarrying”; and and we must not say or think simply that Shylock “chooses” his own safety over the call of the law (and his own desire to kill Antonio). The simple fact of the matter is that we do not know what happens in this moment when Shylock hesitates. Shakespeare neither tells us nor shows us. On this crucial matter Shakespeare and Shylock, Shylock and Shakespeare, like Abraham on Mount Moriah, remain silent—to us.
Shakespeare does provide some context for approaching this pause. Immediately before this moment he reminds us that Shylock is sharp and fast enough to understand his legal situation; that is, Shylock knows that the force of law in this civil contract hearing is limited. There is no compulsion, no sovereign decision (yet), no real force of law pressing on him when Portia insists he is contractually entitled only to a pound of flesh and not a jot of blood. Shylock knows enough, thinks quickly enough, to simply try to negotiate the best deal he can under this new interpretation of the contract and renegotiate terms. So it seems likely that he would also know that he is really in no greater bind only a moment later. Nonetheless, Shylock hesitates, and he hesitates where he has not done so before, even though his legal circumstances have not changed a jot.
Portia, again, marks the change in pacing, the change in time. Instead of tarry, tarry, wait, wait, she suddenly says hurry up, why are you waiting. She will return to her more regular pacing shortly to indict Shylock on criminal charges—“Tarry, Jew, the law has yet another hold on you!”—but here there is a rupture in the dramatic time that Shakespeare, through Portia, has been counting for us.
I want to suggest that in this instant Shylock recognizes for the first time that his innermost desire to kill Antonio is not, strictly speaking, his own—that the law, the Law as a strangely religious Other—calls him and has a hold on him. In short, the moment reveals that Shylock’s “decision” to extract a pound of flesh from Antonio with his dagger is not, properly speaking, his own either or, at least, not solely his own—even though Shylock has been acting as if he exerts some control over the Law. That is, through much of the scene, Shylock, like the Christians, believes he is choosing to follow the Law. But at work in this play is a sense of Law other than law as human-made device to resolve; there is a sense of the Law beyond the law, there is religious Law, something altogether Other.10
In some sense, of course, Shylock has recognized or hinted at the religious demand of the Law in this sense before. “An oath, an oath! I have in heaven” (4.1.226), he cries a bit earlier when he presses for the contractual agreement to be enforced. But, again, that earlier moment in this fast-moving scene is different from this moment. Here, at line 330 or so, Shylock suddenly realizes that he does not have hold of the Law, but that the Law has hold of him. He realizes, this time without ironic distance, that he indeed does have an oath in heaven. And, I think, he begins to realize the Abrahamic fear and trembling such an oath engenders. One recalls the surprise of John of Gaunt when he realizes the actual force of the call to give everything over to the Law beyond the law.
The play has tried to suggest throughout that any demanding call of the Law is “Jewish,” but the play also reminds us in this intense moment, when Portia presses Shylock to plunge the knife into Antonio, that the Law is in some sense “Christian,” too, imposed by the Venetian court, necessary to sustain the legitimacy of the Venetian state. Neither specifically Christian nor Jewish, I would suggest that the play reveals a law—the Law—comes from someplace else. The Law is “Other.” Derrida’s “pre-definition” of religion is helpful here.
However little may be known of religion in the singular, we do know that it is always a response and responsibility that is prescribed, not chosen freely in an act of pure and abstractly autonomous will. There is no doubt that it implies freedom, will and responsibility, but let us try to think this: will and freedom without autonomy. Whether it is a question of sacredness, sacrificiality or of faith, the other makes the law, the law is other: to give ourselves back, and up, to the other. To every other and to the utterly other. (Emphasis added.)11
Let me put this another way, specifically the way of Genesis 22: in that earlier moment of the scene, when Portia limits the contract to flesh without blood, Shylock experienced no fear and trembling at the call of the Law, in part because he did not fully recognize it as such. At that point Shylock still experiences himself as in control of the law, even though Portia’s ruling has turned against him. He still believes he can negotiate a good deal and flee. In the (momentarily) later Abrahamic instance, however, Shylock suddenly and newly recognizes the utter strangeness and alterity of the call of the Law, the call of the Law to give death, a call that demands he act utterly and completely against his own self-interests.
In other words, Shylock suddenly and subtly finds himself in something more like the actual position of Abraham in Genesis 22—called to give death even though it will cost him everything—rather than in the position he believed himself to be in: someone with the Law on his side, an Abraham with a license to murder, not a son, but a hated enemy.
Like Kierkegaard’s Abraham, or, more precisely, the reader of Abraham trying to come to terms with Abraham’s actual position in Genesis 22, Shylock is momentarily paralyzed in Act 4 by the call of the Other, caught up short and unexpectedly by the Law which he thought he knew. To reiterate, the usually fast-talking, hard-driving Shylock hesitates at this Abrahamic instant, called to give death even though it means his utter ruin. Portia, who has been urging him to tarry, asks, “Why doth the Jew pause?” In this context, then, the question could be reread as an implicit taunt. Portia knows (as does Shakespeare) that the true Abraham does not hesitate, he does not calculate; he acts, like Shylock normally does, unhesitatingly. In Genesis 22, Abraham immediately responds, “Here I am” and destroys (or almost destroys) everything of value to him.
That is one interpretation, at least, of Genesis 22. Another interpretation that we must consider in light of Shylock’s unusual pause, however, emphasizes the fact that Abraham responds as quickly to the second call of God, the call that stays Abraham’s hand. As Levinas writes, challenging Kierkegaard directly, “Perhaps Abraham’s ear for hearing the voice that brought him back to the ethical order was the highest moment in the drama.”12 Shakespeare gives no indication that Shylock receives any comparable second call. But, again, one should refrain from make any hasty judgments. Shylock does walk away; for all his anger he does not respond to the call of the Law to kill. Consequently, we must keep open the possibility that mercy, grace, a gift appears in this instant, a mercy, grace, and gift that is not distinctly Christian, but tied to Abraham and Genesis 22, and the fear and trembling before the otherness of the Law.
Shylock doesn’t literally show or manifest any such mercy, any such gift. But, in this context, that might not tell us very much. Any manifestation of the gift would annul, render it economic, calculated, and so on—something like all the hypocritical Christian giving he (and the audience) has seen so far. As Kierkegaard puts it, “Abraham cannot speak, because he cannot say that which would explain everything (that is, so it is understandable).”13 To speak would be to explain God. This mercy, if it appears, must—as the Duke prophesized—be even “more strange” than Shylock’s “apparent cruelty.” That is, the mercy, if it appears, must be called for by the Law, the Other.
Let me be clear on this point. I am not suggesting Shylock undergoes a hidden Christian conversion or preconversion of some kind before his forced or procedural conversion and in some sense, then, “authentically” forgives Antonio without showing us. On the contrary, I am suggesting the possibility (of the impossible) that an Abrahamic moment of mercy, gift, or grace that is distinctly not Christian happens here, one that has little to do with Shylock’s volition. Indeed, the strong dramatic suggestion in this strange instant seems to be that it is no more Shylock’s choice to be merciful than it is Shylock’s choice to kill Antonio. The Law calls for the latter—that is certain—and because Shakespeare foregrounds this call to give death so strikingly, we must consider the possibility that the Law, strangely, calls for the former as well.
God talks to Abraham twice on Mount Moriah. That Shylock might in fact want to extend a certain form of mercy only to save himself is no more relevant to the otherness and the demand of the Law than the fact that his initial desire to kill Antonio coincides with the call of the Law to give death. In fact, Shylock argues with ferocious humor the utter irrelevance of his own desires at an earlier moment.
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 humor. 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?
Some men there are love not a gaping pig,
Some that are mad if they behold a cat,
And others, when the bagpipe sings I’ the nose,
Cannot contain their urine; for affection,
Mistress of passion, sways it to the mood
Of what it likes or loathes. Now, for your answer:
As there is no firm reason to be rendered
Why he cannot abide a gaping pig,
Why he a woolen bagpipe, but of force
Must yield to such inevitable shame
As to offend, himself being offended,
So can I give no reason, nor I will not,
More than a lodged hate and a certain loathing
I bear Antonio, that I follow thus
A losing suit against him? Are you answered?
(4.1.40–62)
Shylock tries to remind the court of what the law calls for; what he wants or desires he tries to keep more or less separate from the discussion: “I am not bound to please thee with my answers” (4.1.65). His own anger and hurt seeps out more poignantly because that pain actually mitigates the ironclad claim of the law. In this Christian court he knows his personal motivation would cloud, rather than reinforce, the basis for his claim, the absoluteness of the contract.
All this is to say, perhaps, that the Law and what the Law ultimately calls for in this play—including a very strange mercy—is God’s business, God’s quarrel as John of Gaunt framed it in Richard II, or, at least, that is how Shakespeare sees it. Portia hints as much in the first part of her remarkable speech on mercy:
The quality of mercy is not strained.
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath. It is twice blest:
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes.
’Tis mightiest in the mightiest; it becomes
The throned monarch better than his crown.
His scepter shows the force of temporal power,
The attribute to awe and majesty,
Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings.
But mercy is above this sceptered sway;
It is an attribute to God himself.
(4.1.182–93)
Now, of course, as Derrida points out with great elegance, what the Christians seemingly value in the play is less the utter strangeness of the divine and distant “attribute to God himself” and more “the resemblance, the analogy, the figuration, the maximal analogy, [the] sort of human translation of divinity” that takes place between an absolute, perfect, impossible gift of mercy (“an attribute to God himself”) and an ordinary human act of mercy.14 So, in the second part of this speech, when Portia and the court call on Shylock to “season” justice with mercy, we must be ever vigilant, as Derrida insists, because they are all calling for a specifically Christian translation or sublimation of this inaccessible mercy or gift: “earthly power doth show likest God’s / When mercy seasons justice” (4.1.195). Derrida argues it is the “likest God’s” that we need to suspect. The gift itself—if it exists—remains distant and distinct:
This analogical—and Christian—articulation between two powers (divine and royal, heavenly and earthly), insofar as it passes through the sovereignty of mercy and the right of grace, is also the sublime greatness that authorizes or enables the authorization of every ruse and vile action that permit the lawyer Portia, mouthpiece of all Shylock’s Christian adversaries from the merchant Antonio to the doge, to get the better of the Jew, to cause him to lose everything, his pound of flesh, his money, even his religion.15
Shylock, Derrida says correctly, resists “this transcription, this transaction which is a translation, this releve” and in so doing “delivers himself into the grasp of the Christian strategy, bound hand and foot.”16
With Derrida’s wariness of “Christian” Hegelian sublation, one should recall the first, and still among the powerful, philosophical challenges to the Hegelian gesture discussed in chapter 1. Kierkegaard’s reading of Genesis 22 and Abraham was specifically intended to unsettle the dominance of Hegelian thought in nineteenth-century Europe. For Hegel, of course, identity and difference, self and other, pass into one another, and thus, ultimately there is no difference, there is no “Other”—no “justified incommensurability”—in his dialectical logic. As Brad S. Gregory might put it, there is only a “univocal metaphysics” here. There is ultimately only a self/same and the other gets “translated” into that self/same. In Abraham, then, Kierkegaard specifically seeks to identify a figure who eludes this Hegelian universal “self-contained sphere”, suggesting a relation to the Absolutely Other.17 That is, to the extent Derrida reveals the pre-Hegelian strains in Shakespeare’s “Christianity” we must attend to the pre-Kierkegaardian strains in Shakespeare as well. In Act 4, when Shylock pauses, and perhaps encounters a mercy “more strange” than his strange apparent cruelty, Shakespeare already may have provided a “Kierkegaardian” Abrahamic counter to the “Hegelian” threat.
Derrida missed this impossible possibility, I think.
Remarkably enough, one does not need Kierkegaard’s exceptionalism to come to this conclusion about the play. Working the same logic, only through Talmudic sources, Aryeh Botwinick brilliantly comes to a comparable understanding of what I am calling an “Abrahamic counter.” For Botwinick, the binding of Antonio can only be called a “disenchantment of Christianity.” He argues,
The only visual symbol for the Judaization of Christianity in The Merchant of Venice is the binding of Antonio, which recapitulates both the binding of Isaac in the Hebrew scriptures and the crucifixion of Jesus in the Christian scriptures. Under Shakespeare’s auspices, this time around the Christians do it “right.” The life of the bound person is spared. He is not crucified. It is this Jewish revitalization of Christianity that makes modernity possible.18
For Botwinick, the trial scene becomes something of a suspended akedah, or an akedah reading that concentrates, again, as Levinas might, on God’s second call, the call Christianity might identify as “mercy” but—in this instance—a mercy most strange. It is in this sense, then, that we might begin considering Shylock a “knight of faith.”
Relating Abraham to Shylock in this fashion is not predicated simply on the call to give death that haunts Act 4. Earlier in the play Shylock had come fairly close to assuming for himself the authority or role of “holy Abram.” In Shylock’s initial (staged) encounter with the Christians, he articulates one possibility: to simultaneously live in and apart from the Christian world (1.3.70). This possibility derives from Abram and the story of Laban. Shylock offers, as Lupton suggests, a “midrash” that presents a Jewish economy every bit as legitimate as the Christian economy and resists the charge of usury.19 For Shylock here and, it would seem, for Shakespeare, Abram suggests a means to preserve a certain religious subject formation in a world that seeks to do it harm; Abram suggests a means to preserve the marginalized, particular “other” in the face of Christian (Hegelian?) universalizing impulses. Abram/Abraham here then also suggests the gift, the possibility of the impossible, a nonviolent, aneconomical relationship between self and other in which neither has an advantage.
Shakespeare recognizes the impossibility he must confront in attending to the Abrahamic as such. The offer of two distinct economies coexisting is immediately rejected by Antonio. And, almost immediately after raising the possibility of the impossible in the figure of Abraham, Shakespeare undermines Shylock’s (and his own) Abrahamic strategy entirely. When Bassanio and Antonio hesitate at Shylock’s offered bond, the pound of flesh, Shylock responds
O father Abram, what these Christians are,
Whose own hard dealings teaches them suspect
The thoughts of others!
To buy his favor I extend this friendship.
If he will take it, so; if not, adieu.
And for my love, I pray you, wrong me not.
(1.3.159–69)
Here Shylock again portrays Abram as the exclusively Jewish patriarch, but one whose lineage nevertheless bespeaks an openness to the non-Jewish world. This openness is, in fact, characterized by its appealing live-and-let-live attitude, neither seeking nor conceding an advantage in the economy of relationships. The bond, Shylock suggests, is “merry,” worthless. As described by Shylock, it contains a certain aneconomic purity, of no value, a gesture of pure friendship, or hospitality, an openness to the “other.” The obvious factor that complicates this openness of Shylock’s “father Abram” is that Shakespeare reveals Shylock’s true thoughts on the matter (1.3.38–49). He hates the Christian and is using this Abrahamic language as a Machiavellian mask of some kind, concealing his true intent, which is punishing Antonio in some way (1.3.38–49). Abram, in this instance, is merely something that Shylock can use as a weapon, a means of concealing his violent intent.
In his larger attempt to locate the gift—the impossible—Shakespeare has been contemplating Abram/Abraham from the play’s earliest moments. More specifically, he has been contemplating Abram/Abraham in relation to Shylock’s understanding of Abraham. In Act 4, then, Shakespeare puts Shylock in the very Abrahamic position Shylock had been exploring or examining earlier. Only this time Shakespeare puts Shylock in the position of Abraham to clarify the complexity, the difficulty, the impossibility of engaging the “other” aneconomically, without violence—a complexity that Shylock discovers, if he discovers it, alone and in isolation.
In this context, Portia’s subsequent insistence on the law protecting Venetian civilians is purely gratuitous. And the forced conversion, as Lupton suggests, is just a procedural gesture having little to do with either Shakespeare’s religion or religion writ large. The religious, as it were, is located elsewhere in the play, in the interrupted (non) time of Shylock’s pause.