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The Merchant of Venice (1596–8)
Since the Jewish Holocaust of the Second World War, The Merchant of Venice has provoked much debate about how it can be read or performed without causing unease. This is because it contains what some regard as overt anti-Semitism. The question many critics ask is whether in this play Shakespeare is confronting or pandering to the anti-Semitic prejudices of his audience or readers, both historical and contemporary.
While this complex play is often considered controversial because of its treatment of the Jew, Christians do not entirely escape without blame. The play has three interwoven themes, each of which depends on the structure for comedy that Shakespeare had developed.
Confronting or pandering to anti-Semitic prejudices?
Much has been written on the historical existence of Jews in Elizabethan London and reference is frequently made to the execution in 1594 of Dr Roderigo Lopez, Elizabeth I’s Portuguese physician, who was thought to have been a Jew, and who was accused of trying to murder her. Lopez’s trial and execution stoked a degree of anti-Semitism. Julia Briggs points to the fact that Jews in London, like Roman Catholics, could not profess their faith openly and notes that many of them were European ‘converts’, or converses, who had come from Spain.
‘There may have been as many as 200 Jewish converts in England, working as doctors and in other professional or advisory capacities. Socially and physically they were virtually invisible, and this, along with their (usually) Spanish origins further contributed to the anxiety their presence aroused.’
Briggs, J. (1977: 100), This Stage-play World: Texts and Contexts, 1580–1625. Oxford: Oxford University Press
To be a Jew from Catholic Spain, the bitter enemy of Protestant England, was probably not something many desired to publicize, but it raised the possibility of dramatic conflict that was ripe for theatre. The Jew in Shakespeare’s play, set in Catholic Venice rather than Spain, dislikes the Christians as much as the Christians demonstrate that they dislike the Jews. This is how Shylock refers to Antonio:
How like a fawning publican he looks!
I hate him for he is a Christian:
But more, for that in low simplicity
He lends out money gratis, and brings down
The rate of usance here with us in Venice.
(1.3.39–43)
He accuses Antonio of spitting on ‘my Jewish gaberdine’ and calling him ‘misbeliever, cut-throat dog’, to which the Christian churlishly replies:
I am as like to call thee so again,
To spit on thee again, to spurn thee too.
If thou wilt lend this money, lend it not
As to thy friends,…
But lend it rather to thine enemy.
(1.3.128f.)
And this is exactly what Shylock does, encouraging his ‘enemy’ Antonio into an agreement which, when taken seriously and enacted, will endanger the merchant’s life. The equity demanded is a pound of Antonio’s flesh, should he default on a loan he takes out to fund his friend Bassanio’s quest to gain ‘In Belmont’ Portia, ‘…a lady richly left,/…fair, and (fairer than that word),/ Of wondrous virtues’ (1.1.161–3). Antonio defaults on the loan and the matter goes to trial where, disguised as a lawyer, Portia – now won by Bassanio – pleads Antonio’s case. In the famous trial scene (Act 4, Scene 1), the Jew’s demand for justice is counterbalanced by Portia’s often-quoted Christian appeal for mercy, beginning:
The quality of mercy is not strain’d,
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath:
(4.1.182f.)
Shylock’s reply is one of cruel rejection, ‘My deeds upon my head! I crave the law,’ (4.1.204), a statement that is a faint echo of the curse that, according to St Matthew’s Gospel, the Jews called down upon themselves and their children in demanding Christ’s blood: ‘His blood be on us and on our children!’ (Matthew 27.25). Portia allows him his bond according to justice but warns that there is no mention of the spilling of blood in the deed. So Shylock may cut out exactly a pound of flesh, no more, no less, but in doing so he must not shed a drop of blood. The Jew is defeated but then finds himself frustrated by the law as the Christians taunt him, exposing the limits of their mercy. He is forced to bequeath part of his wealth to his daughter, who has rejected him and eloped with a Christian, and the remainder is confiscated by the State. Further, he is forced to convert to Christianity, just as historically some Spanish Jews in Elizabethan London may have been forced to do, although firm evidence of this is scarce. Shylock leaves the court a broken man.
But why, an actor of the part might ask, does Shylock behave as he does, bringing about his own downfall? In the concluding lines of Act 3, Scene 1, Shylock tells Tubal that, by exercising his revenge on Antonio, he will profit. ‘I will have the heart of him if he forfeit, for were he out of Venice I can make what merchandise I will:’ (3.1.118–20). He has a further motive than revenge: he can make money out of Antonio’s death because he will have eliminated someone who opposes him on the Rialto, frustrating his business dealings. He is shown to be premeditating a murder. Bassanio (1.3.178) suspected the bond, ‘I like not fair terms, and a villain’s mind’, a view dismissed by Antonio, ‘…there can be no dismay,/My ships come home a month before the day’ (179–80). For any seafarers in Shakespeare’s audience, such an assurance would have been seen as tenuous to say the least.
Shakespeare in that scene provides options for playing Antonio, which, of course, he might have discussed with the very first actor playing the role. Does Antonio really believe, after all that has reportedly passed between Shylock and himself, that Shylock is a ‘gentle Jew./…he grows kind’? (1.3.176–7). Is he really confident that this is ‘a merry sport’ (144), as Shylock depicts it? What an actor has to decide is Antonio’s motivation. Does it go back to the opening line of the play where he says ‘In sooth I know not why I am so sad’? Shakespeare makes none of this absolutely clear. His actors, through the ages, have to make their decisions on how to play the role, helped in modern productions by their directors.
Flesh and blood
So it is still for the modern actor playing Shylock to decide on the interpretation to be created in performance. Shakespeare shows Shylock to be a villain but also to be a father deeply hurt by his daughter Jessica’s elopement and her theft of some of his money and valued possessions, including a ring given to him by his wife Leah before they married: ‘I had it of Leah when I was a bachelor:’ (3.1.113–14). In Act 3, Scene 1, Shylock refers to his daughter in his description of what has happened as ‘My own flesh and blood to rebel!’ and is taunted by the Christian Salerio, to whom he insists, ‘I say my daughter is my flesh and blood’ (3.1.31,34). Here, Shakespeare is clearly providing the actor with the opportunity to characterize Shylock’s humanity as well as to expose the elements of ‘flesh’ and ‘blood’ which will be the Jew’s undoing.
Shylock continues with the great speech in which he defends his decision to take revenge, by making Antonio ‘look to his bond!’ (3.1.45). In some interpretations this can be delivered as an affirmation of his humanity. In others it can be expressed as his vicious determination to be revenged. The actor has to decide where and how on that spectrum he delivers this famous speech in the context of the overall interpretation of the play:
…I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions?…– if you prick us, do we not bleed? if you tickle us do we not laugh? if you poison us do we not die? and if you wrong us shall we not revenge?
(3.1.54f.)
Try speaking the whole passage yourself in different ways, to bring out various interpretations.
This passage, however, raises a number of other issues. The pricking of the thumb without bloodshed was an Elizabethan proof of witchcraft, so this Jew claims to be without that taint. The opening line of the extract might remind a Christian audience of the difference between the Old Testament ‘an eye for an eye’ mode of justice and the Christian teaching of love and mercy. But Shylock also plans to imitate the Christians in their demand for revenge. The very thought of ‘bleeding’ presages the eventual predicament of the Jew in that his bond will demand the bleeding of Antonio, who is thereby placed in a position similar to Christ before the Crucifixion. If you prick or pierce human flesh, then blood will flow. So what will happen when you cut a pound of flesh from near a man’s heart? Dr Lopez, of course, had been hung and then bled at his execution and those present would have seen that he was no different from any English Christian executed at Tyburn.
‘Blood is the bodily location of unrestrained carnal desire (the properties of youth but also the attributes of cultural otherness), and it also figures as the juridical absence that ultimately invalidates the Jew’s bond.’
Drakakis, J. (2010: 35), Introduction to the Arden 3 single edition of the play. London: Bloomsbury
Shylock’s ‘blood’ makes him a ‘stranger’ within the Venetian community; the carnal blood of youth is constrained by Portia’s dead father’s ‘will’, but it also prompts Shylock’s daughter’s elopement with the Christian Lorenzo, and is a betrayal of her Jewish blood. This in turn, as Drakakis argues, allows the word ‘flesh’ to open a series of conflicting meanings that reveal a struggle between a socially approved method of generation and a hellish aberration that biologically and fiscally perverts an accepted natural order. Salerio comments to Shylock:
There is more difference between thy flesh and hers, than between jet and ivory, more between your bloods, than there is between red wine and Rhenish:
(3.1.35–8)
Such flesh-and-blood images expose many of the preconceptions of the play and prefigure the trial scene in which Christian and Jew face each other as representatives of opposing cultures. Flesh-and-blood imagery and Christian tradition and argument coalesce as the Antonio/Shylock narrative develops through the play.
In Roman Catholic teaching, at the moment of consecration in the communion service, or Mass, the bread and wine are believed to be transformed into Christ’s body and blood through a mystical process termed ‘transubstantiation’. It was not necessary, however, for the congregation to receive both the bread (body) and the wine (blood) since it was argued that to receive the bread alone necessarily meant that the blood was also being received – since with flesh there would always be blood. The Protestant Reformation questioned the whole notion of transubstantiation but Shakespeare’s setting of the play is Catholic Venice. Shakespeare’s ‘Catholic’ Portia from Belmont may in her defence of Antonio be drawing on Catholic doctrine as well as medical fact to triumph over the Jew.
The Christian context
This Christian religious context, however, can be seen to go further in secularizing another theological point. In The Stripping of the Altars (2005: 94), Eamon Duffy reminds us that the sacrament of Holy Communion was ‘an image of forgiveness and grace, not of judgement’. He points out that the Catholic faithful took communion only at Easter, when it was called ‘taking one’s right’, a revealing phrase, indicating that to take communion was to claim one’s place in the adult community.
It can be argued that Shylock’s insistence on his taking his ‘bond’ or ‘taking his own right’ in law may have fed off past cultural/religious contexts in a negative way. In this instance it is not a communicant who is ‘taking his own right’, claiming his place through forgiveness and grace within the community. Rather a character is being drawn who is hostile to Christian Venice – and therefore Catholic society. He wishes to take the flesh and therefore the blood of a member of the community to ‘bait fish withal’, and ‘feed my revenge’ (3.1.49–50). The fish is one of the earliest symbols of Christianity and of Christ himself. Shylock is not only the outsider in a Christian/Catholic community, foregrounding ‘judgement’ over ‘forgiveness and grace’ by a crude parody of the Mass, but also a Jew deliberately trying to destroy the merchant Antonio because he is a Christian.
Antonio, as the play emphasizes from the opening scene (1.1.138f.) to the last scene (5.1.249–53), is prepared to sacrifice all he has, even his life, for the love of his friend. In Christianity, no man has greater love than he who lays down his life for his friend in imitation of Christ, who laid down his life in his love for all humanity. So Shylock is frustrated in his ‘baiting of fish’ by the courtroom’s secularized expression of Christian theology as well as the physical reality that, if you cut the flesh, the body will bleed.
Shakespeare’s conclusion of this critically controversial trial scene, however, goes further in not fully condoning the Christian triumph. Holy Communion is not an image of judgement but of forgiveness and grace. At the end of this scene the Christians are exposed in the cruelty of their judgement and triumph, since they demand of Shylock his very identity. He is forced to lose not only his possessions but also the creed by which he lives and his identity as a Jew.
Attending the 2015 production of the play at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, I was sitting close to some members of the Jewish community, who apparently did not know the play. At the point where the Christians demanded in their revenge that Shylock must become a Christian, one of the Jews near me indignantly commented, ‘That’s not fair.’ Nor, perhaps, did Shakespeare think so since in the final humiliation of Shylock he exposes the Venetians not only as bad Christians but bad Venetians, since Venice was known to consider itself to be a welcoming, hospitable place. Shakespeare’s Christians show, through the reports of their taunting and in the execution of their ‘justice’, that their hospitality, like the Christian virtues of grace, forgiveness and mercy, did not extend to Jews.
The mercantile currency
The story concerning Shylock demands attention in performance and criticism but the character appears only five times (1.3, 2.5, 3.1, 3.3, 4.1) in the whole play, and not at all in the final act. As with other comedies, the title of the play should not go unnoticed, since it foregrounds the ‘merchant’ Antonio. Consequently, a significant aspect of the play is to do with the mercantile currency of trade: commodities and money.
Bassanio’s description of Portia, as we have seen, points not only to her beauty and virtue but also first to her wealth. According to her father’s ‘will’, suitors have to choose one of three caskets: gold, silver and lead. On opening it, he will find whether he can claim Portia in marriage. The Prince of Morocco, another ‘outsider’ supposedly welcomed by an Italianate Christian society, soon learns that ‘All that glisters is not gold’ (2.7.65). Frustrated in choosing the wrong casket, the Moroccan prince departs, leaving Portia to remark, ‘Let all of his complexion choose me so’ (2.7.79). Similarly, another suitor, the Spanish Prince of Arragon, is ripe for dismissal for an Elizabethan society whose country had recently defeated the Spanish Armada, and whose Queen, the daughter of Anne Boleyn, not Catherine of Aragon, had rejected an earlier proposal of marriage from the Spanish King. He chooses silver. Bassanio has the good sense to choose dull lead, thereby winning Portia’s hand.
At the heart of the casket scene is the question of the appearance of wealth as opposed to the dignity of the human being. Portia has been placed at the centre of a dangerous wager that will determine her future. Those who take on the wager and fail will suffer, but what would have happened to Portia if they had triumphed? In the later play Othello, part of this question is answered in the elopement of Desdemona with the Moor Othello.
Money, money, money imbues the three plots of the play: the first relating to Antonio and Bassanio; the second to Portia; the third to Jessica. In each, love is set alongside currency. Antonio and Portia on their first appearances are portrayed as ‘weary’. We are uncertain about the initial cause of Antonio’s weariness, though some critics and some performances have suggested that it is because of his ‘love’ for Bassanio, which, converted into a monetary gift, will result in Bassanio leaving him for another. Portia has enough money to be able to help Bassanio’s friend but all the money in the world is not as important as the ring, the symbol of her intended marriage that she gives to her new husband as a sign of their faithful love for each other. Under her disguise as the lawyer she tricks him into parting with this ring.
Jessica steals her father’s wealth to secure her love Lorenzo, but does he love her? In the intensely poetic opening scene of Act 5, Jessica and Lorenzo recall a number of famous lovers. But they were all victims of tragedy: Troilus and Cressida, Thisbe and Pyramus, Dido and Aeneas, and finally Medea who, though she helped her lover Jason’s father Aeson, betrayed her own father in her elopement exactly as Jessica has done in betraying her father. There is an undercurrent of some poignancy, in that these are references to the fragility of love and relationships as a consequence of error or betrayal.
Deception and structure
Set alongside these three plots is a comic subplot involving the clown – variously named Launcelot Gobbo in the 1998–2011 Shakespeare Complete Works, Arden Edition, or Lancelet Giobbe in the latest single Arden Edition, Arden 3 (2010–13) – leaving his master Shylock’s service for that of Bassanio. In Act 2, Scene 2, the clown inadvertently deceives his blind father (Gobbo/Giobbe), leading him to believe his son ‘is indeed deceased, or as you would say in plain terms, gone to heaven’ (2.2.61–2).
Deception in other plays – from Romeo and Juliet and Much Ado About Nothing to The Winter’s Tale – is used by Shakespeare in a much more significant way but here is applied as a comic interlude, testing and commenting on the emotional aspect of relationships. The interlude gives an insight into what life is like in the Jew’s house and about the relationship of a father and son, as the father tries to help improve his son’s lot and, no doubt, thereby his own. It is a father–son relationship in a play that concerns a number of close relationships: Antonio and Bassanio; Portia and, through the will, her father; Bassanio and Portia; Shylock (as husband) and Leah; Shylock (as father) and Jessica; Jessica and Lorenzo; Nerissa and Gratiano.
The structure underpinning each of the three plots includes an initial problem, a journey, disguise, identity and self-knowledge, all interconnected and coming together in Act 4 with the exposure of Shylock and the Christian community. But this is not the end of the play, since not all of the issues have been resolved. Portia, having saved Antonio, has won back her ring from Bassanio. In Act 5 there is a further process of ‘learning’ about oneself, about society, about love and identity, which encompasses the recognition of Portia as the lawyer and Nerissa as the clerk. The ring is the symbol of that which shouldn’t be given away, the truth of a married relationship.
The Merchant of Venice uses the three interwoven plots and the comic episodes, thereby, to produce a drama that exposes issues of race and religion, of conduct and belief, of trust and oaths, mercy and justice, love, identity, lack of grace and faithfulness, of sacrifice, pain and compensation, of promise and fidelity. It is not a play to be reduced to stark judgements but it does expose the plight of the outsider. Maybe it is a play that tries to do too much, leaving certain issues to perplex the actor, audience or reader. But however complex and however controversial it proves to be, The Merchant of Venice is one of Shakespeare’s greatest plays, moving and manipulating his comic formula to great dramatic effect.
It is with The Merchant of Venice and its complex use of Shakespeare’s comic structure that, for the moment, we will leave our discussion of comedy and look at a parallel concern that from the 1590s Shakespeare developed in his dramatic writing: the English history plays, all of which raise a number of critical perspectives for a modern reader or audience.
