SOURCE: "'Thrift is Blessing': Exchange and Explanation in The Merchant of Venice," in Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 37, No. 1, Spring, 1986, pp. 20-37.

[In the following essay, Engle contends that the relationships in the play transcend emotional boundaries and are all to some degree economic or legal in nature. Engle goes on to argue that a discussion of the play's plot in financial terms suggests avenues of historical interpretation and criticism which focus on credit and marriage as the primary means by which Elizabethan gentry and aristocracy raised money.]

"Those critics who idealize the Venetians," René Girard comments of The Merchant of Venice, "write as if the many textual clues that contradict their view were not planted by the author himself, as if their presence in the play were a purely fortuitous matter, like the arrival of a bill in the morning mail when one really expects a love letter."¹ As I discuss balances and movements of cash, credit, and obligation in this essay, I shall suggest that in The Merchant of Venice bills and love letters are unusually difficult to distinguish.

The play offers an especially dense set of erotic, economic, and spiritual transactions. The erotic transactions, though unorthodox in ways I shall point out, link the play to Shakespearean comedy in general, and are thus perhaps more ordinary than the economic and spiritual transactions, as women leave the control of their fathers, and men loosen bonds to other men, in order to marry. The Merchant of Venice, however, is unusual in that hardly any relationship between two characters is left as solely emotional or erotic: all have some explicit economic or legal analogue. "[S]o is the will of a living daughter curb'd by the will of a dead father" (I.ii.24-25), complains Portia in Act I, punning on the emotional and legal senses of "will"; Bassanio has in the previous scene told Antonio "To you .. . I owe the most in money and in love" (I.i.130-31), declaring parallel, perhaps inseparable, financial and erotic debts.² Money, of course, has a logic of its own, and the play presents money relations in extraordinary and systematic detail. Discussing the play's plot as a financial one, moreover, suggests ways to criticize it historically. Since the credit market and the marriage market were, along with land sales, the main methods of raising money available to the Elizabethan gentry and aristocracy, a play about the recovery of an extravagant young aristocrat's decayed fortunes by marriage to an heiress, and the rescue of his bondsman from a usurer's grasp by an unexpected verdict in court, may be topical in a way that will reward historical investigation.³ The play's Venetian setting and numerous fantastic elements do not prevent it from fitting Elizabethan patterns of aristocratic indebtedness and cash-raising through marriage. These constituted the very different expectations of an Elizabethan audience about why and how young aristocrats married, and our reconstruction of these expectations marks the terms in which Shakespeare's characters—the openhanded merchant who despises interest and lends out of friendship; the beautiful, loving, able, and forthcoming bride; the lord whose nobility and grace protect him from his financial irresponsibility; the creditor whose alienness and vengefulness allow debts owed him to be miraculously dissolved—can be interpreted as intensely wishedfor or dreamed-about figures.⁴

One of my claims in this essay is that financial transactions in the play reward a more detailed analysis than they have to my knowledge received, and I shall survey the play with something of an accountant's eye for cash flows, unpaid balances, and the like. Since, as Bassanio and I have suggested, love and money reflect and express each other in the play, such a literal-minded inquiry will draw up perforce a second vaguer balance sheet of erotic obligation. As I chart these balances, I shall note points at which they suggest improvements in readings of the play as a meditation on marriage and credit in an emerging modern economy. I shall also contend that the theological terms in which many economic issues—especially usury—appear are also shown in the play to define a system of exchange or conversion which works to the advantage of the "blessed": those who, by religion and social situation, are placed to take advantage of exchange patterns.

My discussion of the play's plot divides into three sections, one centering on Antonio and Bassanio, which asks why Antonio is sad; one on Shylock's attempts to justify usury, which asks whether Shylock is more like Jacob, Laban, or Esau; and one on Portia's handling of money.

I

Above all, money contrives to insert itself into all economic and social relationships. This makes it an excellent indicator: by observing how fast it circulates or when it runs out, how complicated its channels are or how scarce the supply, a fairly accurate assessment can be made of all human activity, even the most humble.⁵

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. . . .

(I.i.1-5)

It is worthwhile to speculate on what Antonio, in the opening lines of the play, says he does not know: why he is sad.

Salerio and Solanio, the small fry of the Rialto with whom Antonio is glumly conversing, offer two explanations for his sadness: that Antonio is worried about his ships, which they rather inconsiderately imagine sunk in a variety of ways, and, barring that, that Antonio is in love. I shall argue that they are right on both counts. Antonio's reluctance to be sounded by them gives no more reliable clue to his state of mind than Hamlet's answers to the not-dissimilar queries of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. To their first speculation, "I know Antonio / Is sad to think upon his merchandise," the merchant replies:

Believe me no, I thank my fortune for it—
My ventures are not in one bottom trusted,
Nor to one place; nor is my whole estate
Upon the fortune of this present year:
Therefore my merchandise makes me not sad.

(I.i.41-45)

No merchant can admit to be at risk, of course: Chaucer writes of his Merchant that "Ther wiste no man that he was in debt," and limiting others' knowledge of one's finances is a professional necessity. But we know from what Antonio says later to Bassanio that he is misleading his less intimate friends here. To Bassanio he confesses:

Thou know'st that all my fortunes are at sea,
Neither have I money, nor commodity
To raise a present sum, therefore go forth
Try what my credit can in Venice do. . . .

(I.i.177-80)

In other words, all Antonio's disposable estate is "upon the fortune of this present year," despite what he has said to Salerio and Solanio about it. He later writes in desperation to Bassanio in Belmont, "my ships have all miscarried, my creditors grow cruel, my estate is very low, my bond to the Jew is forfeit" (III.ii.315-17). So Antonio's credit has already been heavily used, and the assets with which he secures loans do not cover his borrowings. His credit, which he draws on in the absence of liquid assets, is protected by the sort of dissimulation we see him engaged in at the play's start, while at the same time threatened by his inability to look happy when his livelihood is at risk. His demeanor has come under scrutiny: "Believe me you are marvellously chang'd" (I.i.76), as Gratiano notes. There are rumors on the Rialto that, as Shylock later puts it, "his means are in supposition" (I.iii.15), and the itemization Shylock gives—ships to Tripoli, the Indies, Mexico, and England, "with other ventures," as he says, "squandered abroad," not only confirms the impression given by the obsequiousness of Salerio and Solanio that Antonio is a big operator, but also suggests that he is overextending himself. When noted at all, this overextension is usually taken as a mere donnée of the plot, yet the play offers answers if we seek to know why Antonio should need or want to take risks.

There is manifold evidence, first of all, that Antonio is generous to the point of being unbusinesslike. "He lends out money gratis" (I.iii.39), Shylock says bitterly, later adding "He was wont to lend money for a Christian cur'sy" (III.i.43). Bassanio, probably with specific reference to the same habit from the viewpoint of a recipient rather than a competitor, calls him "the kindest man, / The best-condition'd and unwearied spirit / In doing courtesies" (III.ii.291). This echoes Salerio's earlier comment that "A kinder gentleman treads not the earth" (II.viii.35). Antonio himself says that formerly he has used his money to "oft deliver . . . from [Shylock's] forfeitures / Many that have at times made moan to me" (III.iii.22-23). Shylock obviously resents in part his personal losses from Antonio's generosity ("he hath . . . hind'red me half a million" [III.i.48]), but he also seems to resent Antonio's persistent personalization of business relations, his interference with the social Darwinism of the marketplace. Shylock at one point calls him a "prodigal" (III.i.39), ignoring the term's New Testament valency, and if Antonio is lending money without interest to defaulters in order to prevent their forfeitures, he is indeed putting himself at financial risk. Evidently, then, the liquid assets Antonio finds himself short of at the play's opening have ebbed away from him in this general direction. We know, however, a good deal more exactly where some of Antonio's money has gone. The Venetian scenes of the first act are, after all, devoted to progressively more revealing discussions of Antonio's financial situation, from the evasions of his talk with Salerio and Solanio through his revealing private conversation with Bassanio to his uncomfortable arrangement to borrow three thousand ducats from Shylock. We must now examine the second and third of these.

When told by Solanio "Why then you are in love," Antonio only replies, "Fie, fie."⁶ And when he is alone with Bassanio, Antonio is free to proceed to what is evidently uppermost in his mind:

Well, tell me now what lady is the same
To whom you swore a secret pilgrimage—
That you to-day promis'd to tell me of?

(I.i.119)

Antonio has known, then, for an unspecified time, that Bassanio intends to woo a lady, and awaits details; indeed, the line "you to-day promis'd to tell me of," indicates that Antonio seems to have been pressing Bassanio for details, and finally to be receiving them. Except that he must yet wait some time to hear the answer to his question. Bassanio begins with apparent irrelevance:

'Tis not unknown to you Antonio
How much I have disabled mine estate,
By something showing a more swelling port
Than my faint means would grant continuance:
Nor do I now make moan to be abridg'd
From such a noble rate, but my chief care
Is to come fairly off from the great debts
Wherein my time (something too prodigal)
Hath left me gag'd: to you Antonio
I owe the most in money and in love,
And from your love I have a warranty
To unburthen all my plots and purposes
How to get clear of all the debts I owe.

(I.i.122-34)

Bassanio, then, whom we have just seen cheerfully making dinner plans, is Antonio's debtor, evidently to a considerable extent; he will not apologize for this directly (he was living at "a noble rate," i.e., one consonant with his rank, and his admissions of extravagance are qualified), but the speech is heavy with an uncomfortable sense of obligation. There is a particular discomfort—beyond that of a debtor speaking to a creditor—in the clause "To you Antonio / I owe the most in money and in love." Taken to the letter, this means not only "you have given me money I have yet to return," but also "you have given me love I have yet to return"; it also, however, suggests that a return of love may partially compensate financial debt, or vice-versa. Certainly the debt to Antonio is not merely financial, but emotional as well; the bargains hitherto and following between Antonio and Bassanio show that very personalization of financial arrangements characteristic of Antonio which Shylock will parody with savage accuracy when he sets a pound of flesh as forfeit for a bargain later on.

If we, however, consider the local impact of this speech, it emerges as a request for permission for something: it admits debts (as things, apparently, which might inhibit the disclosure Antonio has requested), and makes Antonio's love a "warrant" for Bassanio to unburden himself, even in embarrassment. This at any rate seems to be how Antonio understands the speech—as a request for reaffirmation. He delivers in sweeping terms:

I pray you good Bassanio let me know it,
And if it stand as you yourself still do,
Within the eye of honour, be assur'd
My purse, my person, my extremest means
Lie all unlock'd to your occasions.

(I.i.135-39)

He offers, then, not only his money but himself, and seems to be imagining, even desiring, an "occasion" for self-sacrifice. The wistful homoerotic suggestion ("my person . . . / Lie[s] all unlock'd to your occasions"), since it is not taken up by Bassanio, perhaps explains the self-sacrificial impulse. He encourages Bassanio to ask him for money, but Bassanio apparently still cannot tell him what for:

In my school-days, when I had lost one shaft,
I shot his fellow of the self-same flight
The self-same way, with more advised watch
To find the other forth, and by adventuring both,
I oft found both: I urge this childhood proof
Because what follows is pure innocence.
I owe you much, and (like a wilful youth)
That which I owe is lost, but if you please
To shoot another arrow that self way
Which you did shoot the first, I do not doubt,
(As I will watch the aim) or to find both,
Or bring your latter hazard back again,
And thankfully rest debtor for the first.

(I.i. 140-52)

By infantilizing himself here, Bassanio metaphorically shifts responsibility for the previous money lost to Antonio: it was after all Antonio, in his image, who shot the first lost shaft, and who is being invited to shoot another whose flight this time Bassanio will watch. The relationship between Antonio and Bassanio, then, seems to resemble that between Citibank and Zaire, whereby the creditor, by the magnitude of the investment, becomes the thrall of the debtor, who can cause ruin by defaulting on or repudiating the debt. Bassanio's promise that he will at worst return the second loan in good time is, as we shall see in following the flight of Antonio's cash, a questionable one. And Antonio feels manipulated enough by Bassanio's evasive whimsy to object fairly strongly:

You know me well, and herein spend but time
To wind about my love with circumstance,
And out of doubt you do me now more wrong
In making question of my uttermost
Than if you had made waste of all I have:
Then do but say to me what I should do
That in your knowledge may by me be done,
And I am prest unto it: therefore speak.

(I.i.153-60)

This is a complex piece of reproach; at the end of it, we may well wonder who is winding about whose love with circumstance. "I can deny you nothing; at any rate acknowledge that you are making emotional use of me, and don't hide behind fictions of practicality which insult my intelligence and self-knowledge," might be a fair tendentious paraphrase in the Empsonian manner. We know that Shakespeare was interested in and had perhaps experienced such feelings from the sonnets: compare the opening of Sonnet 57:

Being your slave, what should I do but tend
Upon the hours and times of your desire?
I have no precious time at all to spend
Nor services to do, till you require. . . .

In any case, the financial upshot of Antonio's speech is clear. Everything he has is at Bassanio's disposal, and he is hurt that Bassanio hesitates to use it.

Bassanio at last, convinced no doubt that he hurts Antonio more by withholding details of his marriage plans than by revealing them, tells Antonio of Portia and, again without making a direct request, asks for money:

 her sunny locks
Hang on her temples like a golden fleece,
Which makes her seat of Belmont Colchos' strond,
And many Jasons come in quest of her.
O my Antonio, had I but the means
To hold a rival place with one of them.
I have a mind presages me such thrift
That I should questionless be fortunate.

(I.i. 169-76)

"Thrift," here, assimilates success in winning Portia to success in clearing his debt to Antonio; since "thrift" in its everyday dispositional sense is what Bassanio conspicuously lacks, he is imagining having his accounts redeemed in one great stroke, which will show him to have been "thrifty" in a grand way all along. Antonio immediately replies, in lines quoted above, that he has neither money nor goods to sell, which sounds like the beginning of a refusal. He continues, however:

 therefore go forth
Try what my credit can in Venice do,—
That shall be rack'd even to the uttermost
To furnish thee to Belmont to fair Portia.
Go presently inquire (and so will I)
Where money is, and I no question make
To have it of my trust, or for my sake.

(I.i.179-85)

Again, Antonio offers his "uttermost," and imagines his credit on the rack. It is interesting that they need to inquire "where money is," suggesting, as it does, that all Venice may, like Antonio and Bassanio, have problems with liquidity. And Antonio's final formulation—he will obtain cash "of [his] trust, or for [his] sake" (glossed by a series of editors as "on my credit, or for friendship's sake")—suggests that he hopes to find the sort of friendly creditor he himself is, but may have to borrow at interest, depending perhaps on "where money is."

At the end of the first scene, then, our balance sheet is already fairly detailed, though no precise sum has yet been mentioned. Bassanio is in debt to everyone, but especially to Antonio, and evidently can raise no money except from loving and forbearing friends; Antonio has ventured his clearly very considerable fortune at sea or has generously given it away; Bassanio offers him a chance to recoup an otherwise irrecoverable debt by sponsoring his marital venture to Portia; Antonio does so, but insists that his gesture be read in emotional rather than financial terms (he never mentions Bassanio's debts to him, and it is Bassanio rather than he who represents the voyage to Belmont as a financial "plot and purpose").⁷ Bassanio has been financially obliged, in effect, to ask Antonio's permission to woo—and this he does reluctantly.

Thus far, then, the wooing of Portia can be seen as an instance of what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has recently defined as "male homosocial desire": i.e., "the whole spectrum of bonds between men, including friendship, mentorship, rivalry, institutional subordination, homosexual genitality, and economic exchange—within which the various forms of traffic in women take place."⁸ Antonio, at least, has a stake in treating Bassanio's courtship of Portia as part of a complex economic and erotic transaction between two males. A comment of Sedgwick's suggests that she sees the difficulty of such subordinations as a Shakespearean theme: " . . . as Shakespeare's sonnets show, the male path through heterosexuality to homosocial satisfaction is a slippery and threatened one—although for most men, in at least most cultures, compulsory."⁹ I shall return to Sedgwick's very illuminating arguments when I have finished tracing the economic patterns of the play—patterns, interestingly, which no male seems to control thoroughly.

Bassanio, seeking "where money is," finds Shylock, and we seem to encounter a recognizable business transaction at last. The scene, which culminates in the acceptance of the "merry bond," as unbusinesslike a proposition as one could find, starts with a discussion of terms.

Shy. Three thousand ducats, well.
Bass. Ay sir, for three months.
Shy. For three months, well.
Bass. For the which as I told you, Antonio shall be bound.
Shy. Antonio shall become bound, well.

(I.iii.1-5)

The focus seems to be on the bargain and its precise terms, not the personal relations which lie behind it. It is worth noting that the loan will be to Bassanio, with Antonio "bound." This means, in our business language, that he is a guarantor, but in Elizabethan terms it would suggest something more precise yet. Bassanio is a Lord; Antonio is not. In England until the mid-seventeenth century a nobleman could not be arrested for debt. Lawrence Stone quotes a letter from Sir Robert Cecil to Alderman Rowe: "'it may be you will be loth to deal with a baron of the realm without some collateral securities of meaner quality.'" Stone continues:

It might indeed! Since the bodies of peers were immune and suits against them difficult, creditors often insisted that a nobleman's friends or his leading officers should join with him in a bond, recognizance, or statute. . . .

Owing, perhaps, to a natural reluctance of friends to get too deeply involved, the commonest sureties used by peers were their own servants Examples could be indefinitely extended, and there can be no doubt that this was normal practice. Satisfactory though this may have been to the creditors, the servants not infrequently found themselves less happily situated. In 1571 the servants of the Duke of Norfolk, in 1597, those of the Earl of Derby, in 1622 those of Bacon found themselves liable to arrest as sureties.¹⁰

There may, then, be a reminder in the initial terms of the arrangement, not merely that Antonio has credit and Bassanio has not, but that Bassanio is a noble and Antonio a merchant. This situates Antonio in class terms between Bassanio and Shylock, obviously, and it may help explain Antonio's extraordinary violence in repudiating Shylock's attempts to draw parallels between them later in the scene.

Shylock says, in an aside on Antonio's entry: "He hates our sacred nation, and he rails / (Even there where merchants most do congregate) / On me, my bargains, and my well-won thrift, / Which he calls interest" (I.iii.42-46). And he clearly sees Antonio's temporary dependence on him as an opportunity to make some point about thrift and interest—one that he is not prone to make to Bassanio (whom Shylock seems to regard as of small consequence), but insists on putting to Antonio. He begins his indirect argument with another detail about Venetian finance:

I am debating of my present store,
And by the near guess of my memory
I cannot instantly raise up the gross
Of full three thousand ducats: what of that?
Tubal (a wealthy Hebrew of my tribe)
Will furnish me. . . .

(I.iii.48-53)

Shylock here, it would seem, is making a point about circulation: Antonio, in tapping him for cash, has access not to an individual but to a system. Certainly Shakespeare, at any rate, is making such a point—already in two and a half scenes the search for venture capital has gone through two middlemen and has crossed boundaries of rank and religion, has brought friendship to the market to finance marriage (or marriage to repay friendship), and has offered a wide variety of definitions of "thrift." Shylock's complaint about Antonio, partly practical ("He lends out money gratis, and brings down / The rate of usance here with us in Venice" [I.iii.39-40]), is partly also a complaint about Antonio's categorization of his activities: "my wellwon thrift / Which he calls interest."

If a discussion of interest is what Shylock wants, Antonio could hardly be more cooperative.

Shylock, albeit I neither lend nor borrow
By taking nor by giving of excess,
Yet to supply the ripe wants of my friend,
I'll break a custom.

(I.iii.56-59)

Shylock reverts to this, with a key emendation: "but hear you, / Me thoughts you said, you neither lend nor borrow / Upon advantage" (I.iii.63-64). Antonio had used the word "excess"—and we must remember here that Antonio lends out money "gratis," so that he is treating any interest on a loan as "excess"; it is perhaps relevant to note that the officially permitted rate of return in England after 1571 was ten per cent, and moneylenders often got more.¹¹ Shylock turns Antonio's "excess" into the much more general "advantage," thus including the kinds of emotional return we have seen Antonio take from Bassanio earlier in the act.¹² Antonio, however, either does not notice the change, or will not split hairs: "I do never use it," he proudly replies.

II: Jacob, Esau, or Laban?

Antonio's sadness, I have suggested, is a market-linked phenomenon. So is Shylock's apparently irrelevant and patently incomplete retelling of the Jacob story, which is so evidently meant to justify usury.

Shy. When Jacob graz'd his uncle Laban's sheep,—
This Jacob from our holy Abram was
(As his wise mother wrought in his behalf)
The third possessor: ay, he was the third.
Ant. And what of him? did he take interest?
Shy. No, not take interest, not as you would say
Directly int'rest,—mark what Jacob
did —

(I.iii.66-71)

Shylock wishes to force Antonio to await his exegesis of the incident he has begun to tell; Antonio, impatient, wishes to force him to the point. The Jacob story itself, of course, is a powerfully multivalent subtext for Shylock to invoke here: Shylock claims to possess the patriarchs ("This Jacob from our holy Abram was"), and to interpret their example with authority. The lightly alluded-to story of Jacob's inheritance, however, is full of danger for him in an exegetical argument with a Christian in a Christian state. In general, as G. K. Hunter notes, Renaissance Christians held that "if Abraham and the other patriarchs of the Old Testament belong to the Christian tradition, they cannot belong to the Jewish one; and Jewish invocation of them is not simply alien but actually subversive."¹³ Specifically, the Lord's words to Rebekah, when Esau and Jacob struggled together in her womb, were taken by Christians as the prefiguration of their own inheritance of the blessings of the Jews:

And the Lord said to her, two nations are in thy wombe, and two maner of people shalbe deuided out of thy bowels, and the one people shalbe mightier then the other, and the elder shal serve y^e younger.¹⁴

Saint Paul, in Romans 9:12-13, comments, in "great heaviness and continual sorrow" for the Jews who have not accepted Christ:

It was said vnto her, The elder shal serue the yonger. As it is written, I haue loued Iacob, & haue hated Esau.

And Paul concludes:

What shal we say then? That the Gentiles which folowed not righteousnes, haue atteined vnto righteousnes, euen the righteousnes which is of faith. But Israel which folowed the Law of righteousnes, colde not atteine vnto the Law of righteousnes. Wherefore? Because they soght it not by faith, but as it were by the workes of the Law. . . . (9:30-32)

The Jacob story, then, is full of danger for Shylock. First, the story itself, as part of the Hebrew Bible, has been converted; and second, and more specifically, the story contains, from a Christian viewpoint, a prophecy of Christian inheritance of blessings, and a threat to those who trust in "the works of the law."¹⁵ Shylock seems unconcerned here with the story of how Jacob obtained his blessing: the deception of dim-eyed old Isaac, when Rebekah binds the kidskins on Jacob's hands and neck, is summed up neutrally by the phrase "as his wise mother wrought in his behalf; Shylock's concern is with what he did with the blessing. This is the story he tells Antonio, and it is crucial to note that he never completes or explains it. I quote at some length:

Ant. And what of him? did he take interest?
Shy. No, not take interest, not as you would say
Directly int'rest,—mark what Jacob did,—
When Laban and himself were compromis'd
That all the eanlings which were streak'd and pied
Should fall as Jacob's hire, the ewes being rank
In end of autumn turned to the rams,
And when the work of generation was
Between these woolly breeders in the act,
The skilful shepherd pill'd me certain wands,
And in the doing of the deed of kind
He stuck them up before the fulsome ewes,
Who then conceiving, did in eaning time
Fall parti-colour'd lambs, and those were Jacob's.
This was a way to thrive, and he was blest:
And thrift is blessing if men steal it not.
Ant. This was a venture sir that Jacob serv'd for,
A thing not in his power to bring to pass,
But sway'd and fashion'd by the hand of heaven.
Was this inserted to make interest good?
Or is your gold and silver ewes and rams?
Shy. I cannot tell, I make it breed as fast,—But note me signior.
Ant. Mark you this Bassanio,
The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose,—
An evil soul producing holy witness
Is like a villain with a smiling cheek,
A goodly apple rotten at the heart.
O what a goodly outside falsehood hath!
Shy. Three thousand ducats, 'tis a good round sum.

(I.iii.70-98)

What, we must ask, does Shylock want Antonio to "note," before he is thrown back on business by a series of insults in which his own behavior is taken as a text for moral commentary by Antonio to Bassanio? To learn, we must go back to the Jacob story, this time to that part of it Shylock is citing in detail. Jacob served Laban, his uncle, for twenty years, while avoiding the wrath of Esau for the theft of Isaac's blessing. Laban tricks Jacob by substituting Leah for Rachel in the dark (there's a kind of rough justice in this, given what Jacob and Rebekah did to Isaac), and he keeps Jacob as a servant even after Jacob has married Rachel. The wand trick which Shylock likens to his own interesttaking occurs after the following exchange between Jacob and Laban:

. . . Iaakób said to Labán, Sēd me away that I may go vnto my place and to my countrey. . . . for thous knowest what seruice I haue done thee. To whome Labán answered, .. . tarie: I haue perceiued that the Lord hathe blessed me for thy sake. . . . Appoint vnto me thy wages, and I wil giue it thee. But he said vnto hī, Thou knowest, what seruice I haue done thee. . . . For the litle, that thou haddest before I came, is increased into a multitude: and the Lorde hathe blessed thee by my comming. . . . (Genesis 30:25-30)

Jacob then proposes the grazing arrangement that Shylock describes, in which, from the increase of Laban's flocks, Jacob comes to have wealth of his own.

Shylock's never-interpreted biblical explanation, then, is an exceptionally rich one when applied to his situation as a Jewish moneylender in a cash-poor Christian state. He works for Antonio, supplying his needs and caring more providently for the money supply than the Christian merchants around him do; but because he is a Jew he is not allowed full participation in the economy, just as Jacob is prevented by Laban from having flocks of his own. Yet Jacob, blessed by God and his own ingenuity, breeds his own streaked flock from Laban's smooth one, and is hated for it, just as Shylock is hated for making money out of the money with which he supplies (or "blesses") the ventures of the Christians around him. Laban seeks to retain Jacob with him for the blessing Jacob brings—an economic one; yet he simultaneously denies Jacob rights to his gains, and indeed, as Jacob complains (Genesis 33:41), and as the Jews of Europe had notorious right to complain, "thou hast changed my wages ten times." It is this relation between Jacob and Laban, then, that Shylock is attempting to adduce as an explanation of his own place in the Venetian economy, and, more immediately, as a model for his relation to Antonio. Shylock's claim goes unheard because Antonio so violently rejects any claim of kinship, even as a fellow human being, from Shylock, who is driven to a much less sophisticated assertion of their relationship:

What should I say to you? Should I not say
'Hath a dog money? is it possible
A cur can lend three thousand ducats?'

(I.iii.115-17)

Shylock proposes the Jacob/Laban story as a model for the relationship between usury and venture capitalism with the former "blessing" the latter, but he cannot be heard except as a "devil," and must go on to defend his mere humanity. This entire incident offers rich territory for historically minded criticism to explore.¹⁶ There is no doubt that loans at interest were essential, available, perilous, and feared in the last two decades of Elizabeth's reign, during which Stone estimates that "about two-thirds of the peerage seem to have been in growing financial difficulties."¹⁷ R. H. Tawney calls usury "the mystery of iniquity in which a host of minor scandals were conveniently, if inaccurately, epitomized."¹⁸ Walter Cohen, in a recent essay on the play which seeks to read it historically in both English and Italian terms, argues that Shylock, in contrast to Antonio, is "a figure from the past: marginal, diabolical, irrational, archaic, medieval."¹⁹ But Shylock's abortive scriptural explanation of the usurer's relation to the capitalization needed by merchants is in fact an extraordinarily progressive one (rather like Bacon's in "Of Usury"); what the scene illustrates is the diabolism forced on Shylock by Antonio's near-hysterical resistance to any formal acceptance of the nature of the economic system he lives in. Cohen later comments that "if the play revealed that merchants were as exploitative as usurers, that they were in fact usurers [as was the case in England], then its entire thrust toward harmonious reconciliation could only be understood as a fiendishly oblique instance of ironic demystification."²⁰ Cohen represents this as an unacceptably complex intention, but economic patterns I wish to trace here support such an understanding; with respect to Shylock, they enlarge the significance of his exclusion to encompass the exclusion of the demystifying self-defense he tries to offer. A Christian merchant, preserving homosocial connection to a Lord, cannot afford to understand the parable of economic relations offered by the Jew.

Shylock, however, cannot control the interpretation of the text he cites. He does not remain Jacob for long, and the Jacob story has an independent life in the play outside his speech.

Launcelot Gobbo, Shylock's "unthrifty" servant, kneels backwards before his blind father, asks for a blessing, and gains it only after old Gobbo, feeling the back of his head, exclaims "what a beard hast thou got" (II.ii.89); the scene's parody of the deception of Isaac comes immediately prior to the entrance of Bassanio, who offers, as Christianity does to converts, "rare new liveries" (II.ii.105). Launcelot begs employment, commenting that "The old proverb is very well parted between my master Shylock and you sir, you have 'the grace of God' sir, and he hath 'enough'" (II.ii.140), suggesting that a blessing has passed to Bassanio. Jessica, fleeing Shylock's house to join Lorenzo, and taking with her a casket and bags of ducats, echoes Rachel, Laban's daughter, who steals his household gods when she flees in secret with Jacob. This last event, however, reinforces the argument that Shylock loses control of the Jacob story as soon as he introduces it: he becomes Laban, his daughter and idols stolen, or Esau, bereft of blessing and compelled to witness a younger people thrive, rather than the Jacob he had been. Shylock plans to catch Antonio "on the hip," echoing a detail from Jacob's wrestle with the angel, but in the trial scene it is Gratiano who exclaims "Now infidel I have you on the hip" (IV.i.330). And it is Portia who will not release Shylock until he has blessed her and hers.

III: Protecting the Endowment

Portia, "richly left" in Belmont and guarded by the casket test, is a source of all that is good in life for Bassanio if he can only find the proper intermediary. The caskets—gold, inscribed "who chooseth me shall gain what many men desire"; silver, inscribed "who chooseth me shall get as much as he deserves"; and lead, inscribed "who chooseth me must give and hazard all he hath,"—offer extraordinary opportunities for interpretation, which are complicated by Portia's telling Bassanio "I stand for sacrifice" and ordering a song about how fancy is bred by visual appearances. The scene, at least in part, tests his willingness to take subtle direction from Portia. In a play about economic, erotic, and religious venturing, circulation, and conversion, however, only the lead casket, with its injunction to give and hazard, stands for a dynamic of exchange, and touches the variety of kinds of exchange that the play presents. In doing so it creates, though rather vaguely, an approximation of an Elizabethan marriage settlement with some advantage to the bride. "The father of the bride had to provide a substantial cash sum, known as a portion," says Lawrence Stone. "In return .. . the father of the groom had to undertake a far wider set of obligations. The most important was the provision of an annual allowance for support of the bride if and when she became a widow, and the ratio between this jointure, as it was called, and the cash portion was the main issue around which negotiations turned."²¹ Portia's name, then, is suggestive of the means of relieving debts (of various sorts) which she provides for Bassanio; choosing the lead casket, which promises no profit and exacts gifts and risks, shows that he on his side offers a "jointure" of sorts to balance the huge "portion" he hopes to receive. It is worth nothing here that the lead casket in Shakespeare's presumed source for this part of the play bears the legend, "Who chooseth me shall finde that God hath disposed for him," so that Shakespeare has chosen an economic moral to replace a providential one.

Portia, then, in her speech ratifying Bassanio's successful casket choice, blesses him with herself and her wealth in familiar terms: "Myself, and what is mine, to you and yours / Is now converted" (III.ii.166-67). Her control, as Shylock's was the bond, is the ring:

This house, these servants, and this same myself
Are yours,—my lord's—I give them with this ring.
Which when you part from, lose, or give away,
Let it presage the ruin of your love,
And be my vantage to exclaim on you.

(III.ii.170-74)

Rings are signs of commitment and also tokens of wealth (Gratiano, who gets one from Nerissa, claims that his was of little cash value, as if that were relevant, when she condemns him for giving his away; Shylock lost two rings with Jessica, one a diamond that cost him two thousand ducats at Frankfurt, the other the turquoise Leah gave him when he was a bachelor, which Jessica, in an appalling parody of her mother's gesture, exchanges for a monkey: the error, then, involved in using something which has symbolic value for its exchange value is connected with rings in the play before the final scene). They are also, as circles, potential symbols of enclosure as well as of cycles of commitment and exchange.²²

The instant Portia's house becomes Bassanio's, it begins to fill with guests: Gratiano will marry Nerissa and stay, Lorenzo and Jessica arrive hungry, having thrown away the money Jessica stole from her father's house ("you drop manna in the way / Of starved people," he says to Portia at the play's end), and Salerio brings a letter from Antonio.

After welcoming them all in his new capacity as host, Bassanio is forced by the letter to explain in some embarrassment to Portia that, while he never pretended to be rich, "Rating myself at nothing, you shall see / How much I was a braggart" (III.ii.256); his debts and Antonio's danger are revealed—evidently tactfully unmentioned before—and we see Portia echoing his descriptions of Antonio as she learns the extent of this prior emotional and financial obligation.

Bass. I have engag'd myself to a dear friend,
Engag'd my friend to his mere enemy
To feed my means.
 . . . But is it true Salerio?
Jes. .. . If law, authority and power deny not,
It will go hard with poor Antonio.
Por. Is it your dear friend that is thus in trouble?
Bass. The dearest friend to me. . . .

(III.ii.260-91)

She then asks the sum of the debt, and delights all by saying "What no more?" "You shall have gold / To pay the petty debt twenty times over. / When it is paid, bring your true friend along" (III.ii.297, 305-7). Thus she reverses the current of cash that has flowed in her direction by sending Bassanio back to Venice with a tidal wave of ducats. Her speech, sometimes cited to show how far above financial concerns she is, concludes with a wonderful bow to the market—a line Pope thought unworthy of Shakespeare: "Since you are dear bought, I will love you dear" (III.ii.312). She can securely outbid Venice for Bassanio, and seems cheerful at the prospect of establishing credit in her own favor. Bassanio then reads out Antonio's letter:

Sweet Bassanio, my ships have all miscarried, my creditors grow cruel, my estate is very low, my bond to the Jew is forfeit, and (since in paying it, it is impossible I should live), all debts are clear'd between you and I, if I might but see you at my death: notwithstanding, use your pleasure,—if your love do not persuade you to come, let not my letter.

(III.ii.314-20)

"O love!" Portia echoes in an immediate counter to this claim; she then sends him off to the rescue: "Dispatch all business [their marriage!] and be gone!" And she wisely chooses to follow to protect her investment.

What Portia discovers here—to return to the terms suggested by Sedgwick—is the potentially homosocial aspect of her marriage to Bassanio. Describing the centrality of the homosocial relation of cuckoldry in Wycherley's The Country Wife, Sedgwick comments that in that play

the triangular transaction between men of the possession of a woman—a transaction whose structuring presence in other texts sometimes requires some inferential work to detect—is simply the most patent subject. The status of women in this transaction is determiningly a problem in the play: not their status in the general political sense but their ambiguous status of being at the same time objects of symbolic exchange and also, at least potentially, users of symbols and subjects in themselves.²³

Portia, discovering Bassanio's "engagement" to Antonio, turns immediately to money, to male disguise, and to the law to protect her status as a principal and to avoid becoming an object of homosocial exchange.

Seen in this light, the trial scene betrays an unexpected (and I believe hitherto unnoticed) but cogent financial logic. Bassanio, following Portia's initial suggestion, makes a series of offers to Shylock and to Antonio. We appear to be seeing the repayment of Venetian debts that Bassanio forecast when proposing his venture for the golden fleece of Belmont. And Bassanio's offers are by no means confined to money:

Antonio, I am married to a wife
Which is as dear to me as life itself,
But life itself, my wife, and all the world,
Are not with me esteem'd above thy life.
I would lose all, ay sacrifice them all
Here to this devil, to deliver you.

(IV.i.278-83)

All Belmont, love and money together, is offered for sacrifice.

What actually happens, however, is quite different. Portia leads Shylock to declare an intent to kill, by getting him to deny a surgeon's presence to staunch or cauterize the wound he will make in cutting the pound of flesh, and she then catches him in laws wider than those he has invoked.

Por. 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.

Shy. I take this offer then,—pay the bond thrice
And let the Christian go.
Bass. Here is the money.
Por. Soft!
The Jew shall have all justice,—soft no haste!
He shall have nothing but the penalty.

Shy. Give me my principal, and let me go.
Bass. I have it ready for thee, here it is.
Por. He hath refus'd it in the open court,
He shall have merely justice. . . .

(IV.i.305-35)

Up to this point, Portia has been protecting her own money, which Bassanio seeks to give away. Shylock then attempts to end the trial:

Shy. I'll stay no longer question.
Por. Tarry Jew,
The law hath yet another hold on you.
It is enacted in the laws of Venice,
If it be proved against an alien,
That by direct, or indirect attempts
He seek the life of any citizen,
The party 'gainst the which he doth contrive,
Shall seize one half his goods, the other half
Comes to the privy coffer of the state,
And the offender's life lies in the mercy
Of the Duke. . . .

Duke For half thy wealth, it is Antonio's,
The other half comes to the general state,
Which humbleness may drive into a fine.
Por. Ay for the state, not for Antonio.

(IV.i.342-69)

Each of these interventions protects Portia's endowment from threats; half Shylock's goods wipes out the debts Bassanio has to Antonio, and re-equips him as a merchant so that he will not turn into a dependent. He then, very neatly from this viewpoint, answers Portia's question, "What mercy can you render him Antonio?" by endowing Lorenzo and Jessica, so that they will not be dependents of Portia and Bassanio (whose house they are looking after, not very thriftily, in Portia's absence). The forced conversion of Shylock, moreover, completes the logic of his treatment in the play. His ducats, his servant, his daughter, his justifying biblical text, have all been converted to serve Christians; now he himself must convert, a final victim of the cruelty of typology.

Even though Portia's portion survives the trial untouched, Bassanio continues to attempt to give it away. He, with the freed Antonio beside him, says to the disguised Portia,

Bass. Most worthy gentleman, I and my friend
Have by your wisdom been this day acquitted
Of grievous penalties, in lieu whereof,
Three thousand ducats due unto the Jew
We freely cope your courteous pains withal.
Ant. And stand indebted over and above
In love and service to you evermore.
Por. He is well paid that is well satisfied.

(IV.i.404-11)

We may well believe Portia's comment here. She not only has the delicious opportunity to refuse her own money; she also has Antonio's precious testimony that the balance of erotic credit is now hers. She has, of course, ensured that the financial balance is on her side (in fact, any of the original three thousand ducats not spent by Bassanio before he first left Venice count as profit to Portia). She pauses only to request the ring, which Bassanio first denies, then gives at a request from Antonio that Balthazar's "deservings and my love withal / Be valued 'against your wife's commandement" (IV.i.446-47). And this is material for Portia's final educative gesture. She has put Antonio in her debt, though he doesn't yet know this, and with the ring she will teach Bassanio not to circulate her gifts, and turn Antonio from a rival into a surety for his love. She reproaches the ringless Bassanio on his return to Belmont, and he replies:

Bass. Pardon this fault, and by my soul I swear
I never more will break an oath with thee.
Ant. I once did lend my body for his wealth,
Which but for him that had your husband's ring
Had quite miscarried. I dare be bound again,
My soul upon the forfeit, that your lord
Will never more break faith advisedly.
Por. Then you shall be his surety: give him this,
And bid him keep it better than the other.
Ant. Here Lord Bassanio, swear to keep this ring.
Bass. By heaven it is the same I gave the doctor!

(V.i.247-57)

Antonio, claiming a right from his near-sacrifice—a right both to exculpate Bassanio and to establish the supreme obligation that all are under to the male "doctor"—becomes a guaranteeing middleman in the final transaction of the play, a transaction which binds both men in obligation to Portia.²⁴ Her triumphant manipulation of patterns of homosocial exchange is now complete. She remarks below: "I have not yet / Enter'd my house" (V.i.272-73, emphasis mine). She has, however, established her possession of it, and of Bassanio, and her absolute mastery of the systems of exchange in the play which have routed all blessings, economic, erotic, and theological, toward Belmont.

What then does this tell us?

I have tried to demonstrate that the pattern of credit and debit, payment and profit, is drawn in this play with nearly the precision of an auditor's report, and to suggest further that the character whose actions most shape and exploit this pattern is not Shylock or Antonio but Portia. She is both a better manipulator of exchange patterns, and a better idealizer of them, than her opponents Shylock and Antonio, who bless her with their thrift.

These claims, however, leave some vexing questions open: are the social values inscribed in The Merchant of Venice essentially conservative or progressive ones? Portia is, after all, a landed aristocrat, and the play shows, and apparently endorses, the fall of the goods of a progressive commercial exchange system into her lap. As in Shylock's story of Jacob and Laban, his "blessing" profits another—though in this case he must lose all that he values so that Portia may gain all she wants. From this viewpoint, the play offers reassurance that, while the world may change, inherited blessings will be preserved. On the other hand, more than any other Shakespearean play, The Merchant of Venice shows a woman triumphing over men and male systems of exchange: the "male homosocial desire" of Antonio is almost as thoroughly thwarted in the play as is Shylock's vengefulness. Thus the play is both conservative and radical, and is perhaps centrally concerned to show the availability of power to all through systems of exchange which yet favor the flexible, the intelligent, and the already strong.

Notes

¹ René Girard, "'To entrap the wisest': A Reading of The Merchant of Venice," in Literature and Society, ed. Edward Said (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1980), pp. 101-2.

² Arden edition, The Merchant of Venice, ed. John Russell Brown (London: Methuen, 1955). I incorporate line references from this edition parenthetically henceforth.

³ For persuasive arguments that the play invokes both English and Italian responses to the onset of credit economies, see Walter Cohen, "The Merchant of Venice and the Possibilities of Historical Criticism," ELH, 49 (1982), 765-85, incorporated into his Drama of a Nation: Public Theatre in Renaissance England and Spain (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1985), pp. 195-211. I will suggest that Cohen could find much more detailed support for his views in the plot of the play.

⁴ See Leonard Tennenhouse, "The Counterfeit Order in The Merchant of Venice" in Representing Shakespeare: New Psychoanalytic Essays, eds. Murray Schwartz and Coppélia Kahn (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1977), for persuasive argument on these lines.

⁵ Fernand Braudel, The Structures of Everyday Life (New York: Harper & Row, 1981), p. 436.

⁶ Lawrence Danson, rather nervously fending off a homoerotic interpretation of Antonio's melancholy, comments that "Two monosyllabic expletives might seem a slender basis on which to build a character's motivations, but it can be done," quotes reports from the stage, and concludes that "What is crucial to decide . . . is whether those otherwise innocuous "fies" in the first scene should actually lead to Antonio's exclusion and a final dying fall" for the play. But there is much more than a couple of "fies" to suggest erotic causes for Antonio's melancholy. See Danson's good book, The Harmonies of The Merchant of Venice (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1978), pp. 37-38.

⁷ See Marc Shell, "The Wether and the Ewe: Verbal Usury in The Merchant of Venice," The Kenyon Review, ns 1, 4 (Fall 1979), 66 for a summary of financial relations between Antonio and Bassanio which in some ways anticipates this one. Shell calls Antonio on p. 70 "a zealot [against interest-taking] who seems to condemn even marine insurance." See also Marianne Novy, Love's Argument (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1984), p. 69 for the interesting suggestion that Antonio "behaves like the altruists described by Anna Freud who have given up to another person, with whom they identify, the right to have their instincts gratified."

⁸ "Sexualism and the Citizen of the World: Wycherley, Sterne, and Male Homosocial Desire," Critical Inquiry, 11 (December 1984), 227. For a more extended account of homosocial desire, see the introduction to Sedgwick's Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1985).

⁹ Sedgwick, Between Men, p. 50.

¹⁰The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558-1641 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), pp. 520-21.

¹¹ See Stone, p. 530.

¹² Shylock's line on first seeing Antonio: "How like a fawning publican he looks!" (I.iii.36), which has always puzzled commentators because Antonio can hardly be said to be "fawning" in his relations with Shylock, may be explicable in these terms. If we assume that Shylock sees Antonio as fawning on Bassanio (certainly the only person we see Antonio prone to fawn on), then the notion that Antonio is like a Roman tax-gatherer who abuses those below him—especially Jews—in order to ingratiate himself to those above, shows Shylock's insight into the kind of emotional "interest" we have seen Antonio exacting from his own loans.

¹³ "The Theology of Marlowe's Jew of Malta," Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes (1964), p. 216.

¹⁴ Genesis 25:23, The Geneva Bible (1560). All subsequent biblical quotations are from The Geneva Bible.

¹⁵ See Arnold Williams, The Common Expositor (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1948), pp. 169-72, and Danson, pp. 72-76, where these contexts are drawn together to support a different argument.

¹⁶ For a different reading of it, turning on the distinction in Jewish law between "brothers" and "others," see Shell, pp. 68-70.

¹⁷ Stone, p. 542.

¹⁸Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1926), p. 151, quoted in Danson, p. 142.

¹⁹ Cohen, Merchant, p. 771.

²⁰ Cohen, p. 774.

²¹ Stone, p. 633.

²² Sigurd Burckhardt, in Shakespearean Meanings (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1968), p. 210, comments: "As the subsidiary metaphors of the bond and the ring indicate, The Merchant is a play about circularity and circulation; it asks how the vicious circle of the bond's law can be transformed into the ring of love." As will soon become clear, I do not feel that the "rings of love" at play's end offer a qualitative transformation of the earlier "bonds."

²³ Sedgwick, Between Men, p. 50.

²⁴ Compare Novy, pp. 76-80 for an account of how "the victory goes to Portia" at the end of the play which in several ways anticipates this one.