SOURCE: "The Ideology of The Merchant of Venice;' in English Literary Renaissance, Vol. 20, No. 3, Autumn, 1990, pp. 431-64.

[In the following essay, Ferber surveys the play from an ideological standpoint and examines how several varying ideological discourses inform the play's issues and themes. An early version of this essay was presented in 1979 to the Marxist Literary Group at Yale.]

Nearly all recent discussions of The Merchant of Venice have agreed with Auden that the play is a "problem play,"¹ filled with gaps, strains, seams, ironies, silences, subversions, and symptoms of discomfort. The last word on the play's unity and "harmonies" seems already to have been said,² and the reigning spirit of literary criticism today is skeptical, analytical, deconstructive, relentless in its search for ironies. The inconsistencies and paradoxes that have been turned up, however, often seem arbitrary, either because they are not folded back into a general assessment of the play or, more important, because they are not traced to the ideas and practices of Shakespeare's historical moment.

The exceptions, I think, are those discussions that invoke ideology as a concept mediating the work itself and its contemporary social ground, context, or totality. Although the concept is used in other theories, Marxists have recently made the most ambitious and most plausible use of the concept to comprehend The Merchant of Venice in its entirety. (The two most important Marxist critics of the play, so far as I am aware, are Walter Cohen and Michael Nerlich.)³ In what follows I will try to reconstruct the play along ideological lines, while also trying to give a more satisfactory sense of the whole than we have had.

Ideology

The play's general problem, the congruence of spiritual or moral values with the exigencies of the real world, may be adumbrated in its title. It is easy to imagine a play about the friendship of two men put to the test (perhaps over a woman, as in The Winter 's Tale), in a plot where practical, worldly concerns are not at issue, and it is easy to imagine a play that entangles the two friends in the unfriendly world of loan sharks. They might both be soldiers of fortune like Bassanio, devoted comrades-at-arms now on leave in the bewildering, sophisticated city. But Antonio, this Nisus to Bassanio's Euryalus, happens to be a merchant. As the traditional and probably universal story takes on the ballast of specific contemporary meanings it lists and threatens to capsize. Shakespeare makes Antonio a hero, but the strain is evident. In the tradition of great friendship he is ready to sacrifice everything for Bassanio, but he does not resist his fate in heroic soldierly fashion; if anything he seems to collaborate in it, and among the reasons he does so, it has been suggested, is his full complicity in the way things are done in Venice, even by his enemy Shylock. Shakespeare increases the complexity of Antonio by superimposing on him the theme of Christian self-sacrifice, assigning him aristocratic virtues, and attributing to him a mysterious sadness. But we can see that Shakespeare's audacity in elevating a merchant to heroic station works a change not only on the idea of the hero but equally on the idea of the merchant. One result is a distinctive version of an ideology emergent in Shakespeare's day, which Nerlich has named the "bourgeois ideology of adventure."

"Ideology," the crucial term of this essay, may seem well-enough defined if we are speaking only of "Elizabethan mercantile ideology" or "emergent bourgeois ideology," although to specify it in each case may not be easy. I want to use the term in some extended senses, however, and to apply various pressures to it. These extended senses are familiar to readers of Althusser, Jameson, Eagleton, and the "New Historicists," but their work has also set the term adrift upon a sea of varying definitions, some of them so general as to include its usual antonyms. It is worth a little time at the outset, then, to make my understanding of "ideology" explicit.

I think it makes sense to say that all literature has an ideology, although it may be preferable to say that it produces or induces an ideology in its audience. All literature has a design on us, whether palpable or not, and that design has social bearings, however remote. Perhaps certain highly self-conscious works make an exception to this rule, although it might be truer to say that such works project an anti-ideological viewpoint that is itself, in part, ideological. One might argue that while the many narrative stances and styles in Joyce's Ulysses seem to sweep away all privileged standpoints from which to comprehend the world, the careful continuity of its "realistic" level beneath all the devices, and the coming to the surface of that level in the seemingly artless soliloquy of Molly at the end, endorse the standpoint after all of "life," of empathy, of realism, of decency, which has ideological features of its own.

I use "ideology" in the singular advisedly, though it is sometimes argued that a work of any complexity is better described as a field across which several ideologies are at play, or at war. To leave it at that, however, is to abandon interpretation too soon. It may not be so simple an affair as, say, calculating the resultant vector of several component vectors—gaps and seams and silences will remain—but gaps and seams and silences belong almost by definition to a "single" ideology as well. I think we are obliged to try to state, with whatever provisos, the work's overall meaning and dominant ideological effect.

By the ideology of a work I do not mean the ideology of the author, about which in Shakespeare's case we know very little anyway. Nor do I mean the ideology of Shakespeare's social class, or of the social class of his audience or his patrons, though all of these, intersecting in complex ways, certainly entered into the production of the final text and its performance on stage. For one thing, these ideologies are mediated by what we can call an aesthetic ideology, or more specifically an ideology of form or genre. A major genre like comedy, for example, with its many conventions of plot, characterization, levels of style, stagecraft, and so on, will transform the ideologies of its content. This is a complex but in principle a specifiable process; it is nothing so vague as the elevation of a particular content by a universal form, or the purging of historical particulars in the fires of transcendent literary archetypes. The generic ideology of comedy, in its "scape-goat" subgenre, works now with and now athwart the Christian, aristocratic, and mercantile ideologies of The Merchant of Venice.

Even if we assume, moreover, that it makes sense to speak of an aesthetic and generic ideology, I do not want to suggest that this play or any work is "all ideology" or reducible to a conjuncture of ideologies. By various means virtually all works of art, and comedies not least, may be distanced from all values and beliefs. No matter how realistic, art is not reality, and in that difference or distance lies what Sartre calls its appeal to our freedom and Marcuse and Adorno call its negative and Utopian dimension.⁴ They may underestimate the extent to which art may seduce us and put to sleep our critical powers, but they are surely right that it does not overwhelm us and force us to emergency ideological defenses, as "reality" often does. Even a Marxist with so wide a definition of ideology as Althusser's may grant that art lets us see, by an "internal distance," the very ideology in which it is held.

Indeed Althusser and his followers expand the meaning of "ideology" until it embraces nearly every pattern of thought or experience including those once held to be its opposite. They subsume under ideology our "lived relationship" to our social and material conditions, an unconscious structure that determines how we perceive and conceive the world. There is no escaping it; it will persist even in a classless egalitarian society. Its opposite is not a truer or more inclusive set of beliefs and feelings but the "science of ideological formations" itself, an abstract science of abstract structures that has nothing to do with experience. Under such a global definition, we slide from the useful if controversial idea that everything in a literary work has an ideological bearing to the nearly useless (but no less controversial) idea that everything is in essence ideological.

My notion of ideology is akin to Marx and Engels', even though they are not always consistent. An ideology is a set of related ideas, images, and values more or less distorted by the social or material interests of those who believe and propagate it. It gives "the form of universality" to a particular bias, ignoring certain facts while privileging others, and defining certain unequal social relationships as natural or divinely ordained. It is a part that pretends to be a whole, a false totality.⁵ In determining the ideology of The Merchant of Venice, then, we must try to refer its plot-structure, main themes, "world," and meanings to several ideologies current in England and, to a lesser extent, the social and economic structure without pretending to exhaust their full significance or effect. That two men and a woman may increase their mutual love by risking their lives and their wealth for one another—we may not be able to assign this to an ideological formation. That one of the men is a merchant adventurer who despises usury, the other a soldier of fortune, and that the woman is an heiress "richly left" anchor what may be a universal human theme to a particular historical milieu. That something of the patina of universality remains makes the story all the more powerful in its ideological effect.

Aristocratic Virtues and Mercantile Interests

No theme in The Merchant of Venice is more prominent than friendship. Not only is the friendship of Antonio and Bassanio the premise of the main plot, but Venice seems full of friends. Salerio, Salanio, and Gratiano all try to cheer up Antonio; they and Lorenzo and Bassanio are always about to spend the evening together and whenever they meet they rail cheerfully at each other like schoolboys. Even Shylock has a friend or two.

The ideal of friendship, although it might seem in principle to pertain to all men and women, arose in an aristocratic warrior and clan culture, where oaths of blood-brotherhood, initiation rites, communal property, and homosexual bonds served as its institutional basis. In the ancient cities, where it received its classic expression in Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero, the ideal was nourished by a vigorous public life, while love for women was denigrated and confined to the private sphere. Aristotle would not have comprehended philia among the poor, slaves, or women; the only friendship worth mentioning is found among the good, the noble, the "free." To be generous and liberal with one another, as the etymologies of both adjectives suggest, friends must be noble in rank.⁶ During the Renaissance a more "liberal" version of friendship gained ground, according to which one might choose friends among lower ranks or even women—for "virtue is the true nobility"—but the association of friendship with high rank and wealth remained strong.

Friends must be secure enough materially to lend to one another without thought of return, to take risks as if they were not risks, to rise above the cares of the world and have an "unwearied spirit / In doing courtesies" (3.2.292-93). This nonchalance corresponds to the "graceful negligence" or sprezzatura recommended in books of etiquette for courtiers: beneath the display of one's skill at sonnets or fencing lies a gesture of conspicuous largesse. It is of course the opposite of the calculation and curiositas associated with the poor and especially with merchants. Antonio dismisses Bassanio's archery precedent as needless, even insulting, "In making question of my uttermost" (1.1.156). When Portia, who in the liberal atmosphere of this play acts the friend as well as beloved—for indeed the play scarcely distinguishes "love" from "friendship"—when she learns that Bassanio's friend is in trouble over the three thousand ducats, her response is prompt and bounteous:

 What no more?
Pay him six thousand, and deface the bond:
Double six thousand, and then treble that,
Before a friend of this description
Shall lose a hair through Bassanio's fault.

(3.2.297-301)

Bassanio also displays the instant generosity of a noble friend:

Gratiano: Signior Bassanio!
Bassanio: Gratiano!
Gratiano: I have a suit to you.
Bassanio: You have obtained it.

Nobility, however, demands generosity to social inferiors as well; Bassanio's granting of Launcelot's suit to join his household is an exemplary act of noblesse oblige.⁷

To these aristocratic virtues we may add another: the capacity to make promises and keep them. One must be autonomous and confident, as Nietzsche claimed, to make a promise;⁸ one's word as a gentleman is sufficient, and a symbolic act like exchanging rings will confirm an oath. Only base-born mistrusters of nobility demand a written contract. So Faust says to Mephistopheles: "So, you pedant, you demand something down in writing? / Have you never known a man, or a man's word?"⁹ The basis of the ring-plot in Acts Four and Five is the conflict between two "noble" deeds: Bassanio's extravagant promise to keep the ring—"when this ring / Parts from this finger, then parts life from hence"—and his fit of generosity (at Antonio's prompting) in giving it away.

In the midst of so much reckless magnanimity we almost forget that Antonio, and presumably all the other Venetians but Bassanio, are not landed aristocrats at all but merchants. Antonio may be "one in whom / The ancient Roman honour more appears / Than any that draws breath in Italy" (3.2.293-95), but he makes his living buying cheap and selling dear. Or so we must believe. In fact we never see Antonio do anything mercantile except negotiate a naive deal with Shylock, and we hear only that he never charges interest on his many loans. In the real Venice, it is true, "signiors and rich burghers" were the same people: the noble families in the closed Venetian oligarchy were nearly all "royal merchants." On the other hand, these same oligarchs, whether in their commercial, political, or military affairs (and there was often little difference among these) were renowned for their gravity, caution, and hard bargaining. They were not Antonios, and could not be.

Shakespeare, to summarize, has superimposed distinctions drawn within several incompatible ideological discourses: (1) between the landed aristocracy, who have the virtues we have been discussing and "Whose liberal board doth flow, / With all that hospitality doth know" (in Jonson's famous lines from "To Penshurst"), and the merchant class generally, who have the vice of greed; (2) between true merchants, who take risks to provide useful goods and may therefore claim profits, and the money-lenders, who risk nothing (because of bonds and collateral) and contribute nothing to the wellbeing of others; and (3) between the Christian doctrine of mercy or forgiveness and the "Jewish" doctrine of legality and vengeance. Not only the Venetians, of course, but real English noblemen invested money and time in merchant adventures; the second distinction, too, was not well founded, as most merchants in Venice as well as England also lent money at interest. But strong contrasts between these ideal types were a staple of the several conservative discourses prevalent in Shakespeare's day. Shakespeare wanted Antonio to have noble virtues, however improbable his calling makes them, and the resulting oddity is only partly concealed by making Antonio inexplicably "sad." One might take his sadness as a sign of his foundering under the burden of so much heterogeneous ideological cargo.¹⁰

Another class-biased discourse nascent in the sixteenth century has been described in Albert O. Hirschman's The Passions and the Interests?¹ It was a capitalist critique of such destructive "passions" as avarice, ambition, and pride, and it argued for their social control by pitting them against one another. Part of its strategy was to disparage the passions as violent and futile, and to reduce legitimate human motives to "interests," at first broadly conceived to include one's power and honor but inevitably narrowed to material wealth. One calculated one's interest and governed one's passions. We can see here, as Nietzsche might have said, the outlook of the ignoble little townsfolk scurrying to get rich in the spaces allowed them by the great lords of the earth, fearful of the lords' passionate and arrogant energy and wishing only to be left alone. "Interests" became nearly synonymous with "prudence," almost with "reason." If Shakespeare encountered this ideology among London burghers, his play seems almost a reply to it. For the great imprudent passions of Antonio, Bassanio, and Portia lead them not only to greater life and happiness but, thanks to comic providence, to greater wealth as well. Shylock, who always looks to his interests and his interest, is made the villain, and his downfall begins, ironically, when for once he waives interest and succumbs to his master passion, his inveterate hatred of Antonio.

Christianity

The third of the ideological discourses Shakespeare grafts together, Christianity, with its stress on charity, self-sacrifice, contempt of worldly things, and communal sharing (at least in some ideal communities), can absorb fairly well the ideals of friendship and generosity we began by discussing, but some theologians predictably saw worldly dangers, even the sin of idolatry, in the excesses of friendship. If Antonio only loves the world for Bassanio, so much the worse, for the world does not deserve love. The worldly wise, of course, also distrusted friendship, for the opposite reason. There appears to be a conflict between the exclusiveness of friendship and the universality of Christian love, between eros and agape. Perhaps the presence of Salerio, Solanio, and the others was meant to head off objections from a Christian quarter.

The crux of the conflict between friendship and some versions of Christianity lay precisely in Antonio's distinctive act, the extreme expression of classical friendship, standing surety for another. Medieval Christianity generally approved of it, encompassing it under the doctrine of imitatio Christi. So Antonio, the "tainted wether" or black sheep (or goat), becomes the Agnus Dei, submitting to sacrifice by the Jews so others may live. (This suggests an allegorical motive for Antonio's insistence that Bassanio witness his death.) But Luther condemned surety as presumptuous and unchristian,¹² a position derivable from his insistence on the unbridgeable gap between man and God, matter and spirit, this world and the next. In this as in so many other particulars, Shakespeare bridges that gap as he opts for the traditional view.

Not all noble virtues can be readily harmonized with Christianity, which arose, after all, as a plebeian religion in a remote colony of the aristocratic metropolis. Pride or love of honor presents difficulties, and that is no doubt one reason Shakespeare omits it; nor is it central to the idea of friendship. Magnanimity and condescension, on the other hand, can be "refunctioned," to use Brecht's term, for Christian purposes: they become "grace." As the rulers of this world are to be brought low, so all their lordly values must be transformed. Action, once the prerogative of aristocrats and free citizens, is now a universal right; only the form it must take in this world is its apparent opposite, patience. Christ's supreme act was to suffer on the cross and forgive his enemies. So, without rehearsing the literary transformations necessary to accommodate a Christian hero, we can see that Antonio's heroic act, after giving everything to Bassanio, is essentially to do nothing, to go to his slaughter like a lamb. A law of conservation of action seems to govern the three protagonists. Anton io's hazardous act frees Bassanio to act but leaves Antonio bound, Bassanio's hazardous act frees Portia to act while Bassanio stands helpless, and then Portia frees Antonio. And it has often been remarked that Portia's exemplary patience under her father's bond, a few complaints notwithstanding, has made her peculiarly competent to rescue Antonio from Shylock's bond.

It is the strong otherworldly thrust of Christianity, but also its compromise with this world, that we most need to bring out as an ideological horizon or framework essential to the play. Let one text on Christian dualism stand for many: "Lay not up treasures for your selves upon the earth, where the moth and canker corrupt, & where theeves dig through and steale. / But lay up treasure for your selves in heaven" (Matt. 6.19-20, Geneva Bible). Christian communities were to withdraw from the "world," although they tended to combine this withdrawal with the plebeian ressentiment that animates the lurid destruction of commercial Babylon in Revelation, the weeping of her merchants, the mark of the beast on those who buy and sell. No sooner, however, had Christian communities gathered to await the kingdom that is not of this world than they had to accommodate themselves to one that is. The indefinite postponement of Christ's appearance, the increasing numbers of Christians, the conversion of many of high social rank—these entailed compromise and doctrinal declension. By Shakespeare's day so many practices and exegeses had been established that the church could accommodate almost anything. Christianity was itself a kind of "supra-ideology" or universal culture or language in which subcultures or dialects could take up positions more properly termed ideological. But Christianity was not infinitely malleable. Tensions lay beneath many layers of hypocrisy. While Shakespeare's worldly audience might have felt little discomfort with the use of Christian values to justify worldly pursuits, there were those who did (members of the new sects, and "seekers" belonging to none); the texts could explode if not properly handled. Shakespeare risked blowing up his play by pressing the theme of spiritual wealth "even to the uttermost" amidst a cast of Venetian merchants and worldlings.

Jews, Puritans, and the Ideology of Risk

G. K. Hunter makes a strong case that in Elizabethan England the dominant orthodoxy held that Jewishness was a theological or moral condition, not a racial type.¹³ The Jew was "faithless" (see 2.4.37), a heretic, one who chose the wrong beliefs ("heretic" means "chooser" in Greek), but who could convert, as Jessica does, and be saved. When John of Gaunt speaks of "stubborn Jewry" (R2, 2.1.55), he implies that the Jews could decide not to remain Jewish. The Jews chose Barabbas—a thief, a type of avarice or worldly pursuit—over Christ. Hence worldliness is the "Jewish choice," and anyone who makes that choice is a Jew. Shylock reminds us of the original choice as he wishes "any of the stock of Barabbas" had married Jessica rather than a Christian (4.1.292). The "Jew," we might say, occupied an ideological space that might be taken by real Jews but not only by them; it could be taken by those who are Jews "inwardly," as St. Paul said (Romans 2.28-29).¹⁴ In England Jews were very few, and probably none could have served as a model for Shylock. It is true that the Lopez affair stirred up anti-Jewish feeling, but such feeling was ordinarily dormant, and was to a certain extent transferable to other targets. It is clear, in any case, what one of the main targets of The Merchant of Venice is, for Shylock is not only a miserly and avaricious worldling, and an inveterate hater of Christians, but a usurer.

There is now a vast literature on usury, and we need only glance at it here.¹⁵ The debate over usury epitomizes the tension between the worldly and otherworldly dimensions of Christianity. The Old Testament explicitly invokes a double standard: "Unto a stranger thou mayest lend upon usury; but unto thy brother thou shalt not lend upon usury" (Deut. 23.19-20). That seemed to mean that Jews might lend money on usury to Christians, whereas Christians, for whom all men are brothers, must forswear usury altogether. Christ said, "Mutuant date, " give loans without interest, "looking for nothing againe" (Luke 6.35). Most theologians agreed that usury was an act of hostility, the very opposite of charity and friendship. The official view of the Elizabethan government was that it was a "sin and detestable," forbidden by the Law of God (13 Eliz. c. 8, 1571), even though moderate interest (ten percent) was legal.¹⁶ When Antonio bids Shylock lend his money not as to a friend, "But lend it rather to thine enemy," he is invoking the Deuteronomic tradition as most Christians interpreted it.

The second source of teaching on usury is Aristotelian. In his Politics (1258b 1-9), Aristotle wrote that usury is contrary to nature (para physin) because its gain comes from money itself and not from exchange, for the sake of which money was invented. He notes that the very word for "interest" (tokos) originally meant "offspring": interest is money born of money, an unnatural thing. Thomas Aquinas agreed that it is contra naturam. Such is the basis of Antonio's argument against Shylock's exegesis of Genesis 30.31-43. As Shylock would have it, Jacob, the "skillful shepherd," intervenes in "the work of generation" and wins all the offspring as proper payment for his "thrift." To Antonio, Jacob's service was a "venture" in the hands of heaven. He scorns "A breed for barren metal," the gold and silver which Shylock boasts he makes breed as fast as ewes and rams (1.3.64ff, 129). Usurers are not only meddlers and panders, but false ones at that, for no new wealth is engendered; money is only transferred or stolen, as Laban learned.

We may note here an interesting instance of the layering of ideologies. The ideology of comedy celebrates marriage and fertility, and Aristotle denounces the unnatural fertility of usury. So there are two reasons that Shylock, who makes metal breed, loses his daughter and his wedding ring, not to mention "two sealed bags of ducats" and "two stones, two rich and precious stones" (2.8.18, 20), the family jewels; and that the contestants in the casket game must swear, if they choose wrong, "Never to speak to lady afterward / In way of marriage" (2.1.41-42): if they choose a breeding metal, they shall become sterile themselves.

With the Reformation, the prohibition of usury in Deuteronomy came in for revaluation and eventual rejection. Luther, always opposed in principle to usury, was even more opposed to efforts by radical reformers in 1524-1525 to abolish it. Faced with a peasantry in arms over usury, rents, and high prices, Luther unequivocally reopened the breach between this fallen world and the realm of the spirit. The Mosaic Code no longer bound Christians except in an inner, spiritual sense. A peasant is free to believe interest to be a sin, but if the law requires him to pay it, then pay it he must; a sin is not necessarily a crime. He must submit meekly, like Antonio, and leave to the discretion of the princes any action to abolish or limit usury.¹⁷

According to Benjamin Nelson, it was Calvin who most radically and influentially transformed opinion on usury. Calvin agreed with the tradition that held that the distinction between brother and stranger on which the Deuteronomic tenet rests is abolished, so there are now no strangers whom we may treat as enemies. Yet the Law of Moses was only political, and not binding on Christians, even in an inner sense. Moses, moreover, only forbade biting or excessive usury, not all interest. Interest is permitted as long as it does not contravene the practice of charity, and that must be determined in each case by our consciences. Calvin made a decisive move toward individualism as he dissolved the old "tribal" barrier. In Nelson's phrase, he brings us "from tribal brotherhood to universal otherhood."¹⁸

In England many clergymen (and playwrights) vehemently reacted in defense of the old prohibition and attacked those, mainly in the City, who practiced what they thought Calvin preached, and many of those were Puritans. The "elective affinity" of Swiss and Dutch Calvinists, Huguenots, German Pietists, and English Puritans for "rational" primitive-capitalist practice was noticed three centuries before Max Weber, generally with contempt. Much of the initiative for the new commercial expansion in the City of London came from Puritan bourgeois "new men," although it was by no means limited to them, as it was common for the landed aristocracy to invest in commercial ventures. As the traditional agricultural and craft-guild economy began to give way before the new forces, the conservative ideologies of all classes seem to have found a scapegoat in the worldly "cit," usually a usurer, and very often a Puritan. The ideological crosshairs trained on the Jew were now centering on the Puritan.

I agree with those who have argued that Shylock is a kind of surrogate Puritan.¹⁹ Walter Cohen disagrees, but he does not weigh the arguments for it; he is more interested in the situation in historical Venice, where there were Jews but no Puritans.²⁰ Contemporary literature about Puritanism, friendly and hostile, characterizes it, as Matthew Arnold did nearly three centuries later, as English Hebraism. Puritans were Judaizers, Christians of the Book, especially fond of the Old Testament, and they considered themselves, although with frequent anxiety, as the chosen people, or the elect. They gave their children Old Testament names either in Hebrew or in translation, such as Praisegod and Increase. They were people of contracts and compacts as the Jews were people of the Covenant. They banned images and kept the Sabbath holy. On the other hand, like the Pharisees, Puritans were seen as hypocrites who behind their "sad ostents" hid avarice or worse—lust, in the case of Shakespeare's "precise" Angelo. In 1572 Thomas Wilson denounced "the dissembling gospeller" with his counterpart the papist: "And touching thys sinne of usurie, none doe more openly offende in thys behalfe than do these counterfeite professours of thys pure religion" (p. 178).

Werner Sombart's revision of Weber's theory, in The Jews and Modern Capitalism (1911), whereby Jews were the carriers of capitalism into Europe, posits "an almost unique identity of view between Judaism and Puritanism"; indeed, "Puritanism is Judaism."²¹ Shakespeare makes the fit between the Jew and the Puritan tighter by adding characteristics probably untypical of the Renaissance Italian Jew, or his stereotype in English thought, but certainly part of the stereotype, and often the reality, of the Puritan. Shylock dislikes masques, merry-making, and music. (Marlowe's Barabbas, on the other hand, is a bon vivant with a full wine cellar.) Shylock's manner of speaking, his laconic "plain style," and his literalness ("ships are but boards, sailors but men") smack of the Puritan. Harold Fisch thinks he detects a hint of Ramist logic, popular with Puritans, in Shylock's talk.

It would be too simple, although not altogether wrong, to say that his substitution of a Jew for a Puritan is an Aesopian maneuver to protect Shakespeare from the City authorities, many of them of Puritan or Calvinist leanings, who already disliked the theater. (Two reasons it is too simple, of course, are that some Puritans liked the theater and that Shakespeare had protection enough at the Court.) Shakespeare never set his plays in contemporary England and there were no Puritans in Venice; the decorum he always observes puts the issues at sufficient distance here to let his audience turn them over without the distraction of immediate pertinence. He seems nonetheless to invite his audience to take the play's gravamen as directed at the new class of individualistic Puritan merchants in the City.

For merchants they were. Shakespeare is quite misleading in suggesting that merchant adventuring and usurious calculating were done by different sorts of people. Venetian Jews did both, and English merchants, Puritan and otherwise, did both.²² Puritans, in fact, were heavily engaged in the Society of Merchant Adventurers, as the history of New England will remind us. Marlowe's Barabbas, although a much more stylized caricature than Shylock, is an adventurer, and he dwells on his argosies still at sea as much as Salerio supposes Antonio does.

It is evident then that Shakespeare wanted Antonio and Shylock to represent contrasting kinds of economic enterprise and was perfectly willing to bend the facts to make them do so. In the general scheme of the play, Antonio, Bassanio, and Portia stand for generosity, self-sacrifice, risk, and love, while Shylock stands for miserliness, sacrifice of others, certainty (or surety), and hatred. To fit two economic practices, themselves ideal types, into so general and morally absolute a plan is perhaps Shakespeare's fundamental ideological maneuver.

I have not found recorded a claim by a Tudor merchant that he is entitled to large profits, or to the esteem of the community, because of the uncertainties and dangers of his work, but it is evident that a set of attitudes existed that we might call "the ideology of risk."²³ It shows up negatively in the argument that usury is reprehensible because it is certain. "The essence of usury was that it was certain, and that, whether the borrower gained or lost, the usurer took his pound of flesh."²⁴ Shylock is so filled with hatred that he passes up interest, but he insists on a contract, signed and sealed, according to his normal usage. Contemporary anti-usury tracts, too, distinguish clearly between merchant adventurers and money lenders (even if, as I have said, they were often the same people): "The usurer never adventureth or hazardeth the losse of his principali: for he will have all sufficient securitie for the repaiement and restoring of it backe againe to himselfe."²⁵ The lawyer in Wilson's Discourse, in phrases reminiscent of Shakespeare's "royal merchant," argues that "the merchaunt adventurer is . . . a lordes fellow in dignity, as well for his hardy adventuring upon the seas . . . as for his royall and noble whole sales" (p. 203). In the sixteenth century as in all eras, merchant adventuring was closely connected with voyages of exploration, plunder, colonization, and imperial conquest; the aura of heroism, great adventure, and patriotism was transferable to the more strictly commercial aspect. The voyage of Drake's Golden Hind caught the imagination of many in England not least because it returned 4,700 percent on the ventured principal when it came home in 1580. The Antonios and Bassanios of the time, if not quite interchangeable, shared many functions and worked for the same companies. Bassanio, a soldier of fortune, presumably once a mercenary in a French army (1.2.108-10), is a kind of merchant adventurer; Antonio, as we have argued earlier, is a kind of risk-taking hero. (We might recall here John Ruskin's attempt in Unto This Last to specify the conditions under which the merchant, like the soldier, must give his life.)

So a new ideology of mercantile activity was emerging in Shakespeare's day, and Shakespeare seems to have shared it. Under one traditional scheme, the merchant, being a middle-man, held a position of middle honor (ranging from grudging tolerance to real respect) between the primary producers (peasants and artisans) and the parasites (usurers).²⁶ Trade is dangerous to the soul and sometimes to the community, but it is necessary; the trader is entitled to fair profit for his labor, skill, and risk. When Calvin asks, "Whence do the merchant's profits come, except from his own diligence and industry," and omits Providence or luck, he transvalues the tradition, takes his stand on certainty, as if commercial prosperity is predestined as surely as our salvation or damnation, and gives Shylock an ideology opposite to that of risk, an "ideology of thrift," with its stock of proverbs such as "fast bind, fast find."²⁷

We may now see what may be Shakespeare's distinctive contribution to the history of capitalist ideology: he has invented an imaginary alternative to the Weber Thesis. Whereas Weber linked the habits of asceticism and rational self-scrutiny encouraged by Calvinism with the habits of saving and rational calculation essential to early capitalism, Shakespeare tied capitalism to a sort of anti-Calvinist Christianity that encouraged uncalculating acts of sacrifice and risk. Weber's and Shakespeare's spirits of capitalism, of course, differ as much as their Christian ethics. Shakespeare would separate mercantile capital from finance capital and attribute to the former not only the Christian virtues but the virtues of the aristocracy, as if to say that Antonio's way of doing business is the old true way, hallowed by tradition although it was in fact new), while Shylock's is an innovation dangerous to the community. It is thus fitting that the "old money" of Portia should, at least in intent, bail out Antonio from the clutches of the nouveau riche. The theses of Weber and Shakespeare, however, are similarly paradoxical, for both yoke an otherworldly ethic (Weber's "innerworldly asceticism") with worldly success. Weber tries to show how one transformed itself into the other; Shakespeare apparently sees no paradox at all, and employs each as the vehicle for the other's tenor.

Venice

Wherever they are set, all of Shakespeare's plays are "about" England. By this I mean more than the unexceptionable claim that all of English literature, no matter how exotic its subject, speaks to the condition of its English-speaking audience. For Shakespeare and his audience shared literary conventions, such as allegory and the exemplum, and notions about universal human nature that led them to translate easily from an alien locale to their own. "Venice," however, bore connotations richer than, say, "Verona," where Shakespeare twice set plays, or "Messina." As M. M. Mahood points out, there is more local color here than in the other Italian settings: there are gondolas and "trajects," the Rialto and synagogues, and so on.²⁸ On the other hand, Shakespeare's Venice is not so exotic that what goes on in it cannot easily strike home.

Venice, in fact, is a place with its own exotics; it is a part of Christendom, but as one of Christendom's frontiers it defines the alien. In nearby Belmont, Portia receives a stream of strangers, some of them quite exotic or outlandish in manner, but they are "inside outsiders" (assuming the Prince of Morocco is Christian), objects of mockery but not hostility, and familiar enough in this cosmopolitan locale. As a resident alien, the Jew can be tolerated as long as he maintains a pretense of civilized, "gentle" behavior, but he is always potentially the real enemy within, assimilable to the political enemy, the Turk, or the ultimate cosmic enemy, the Devil. Venice, then, can seem either generous and ecumenical, as befits a commercial capital, or strict and vigilant, as befits the defender of the frontiers. Translating, the London audience may think well of themselves as tolerant cosmopolites, but they are advised to consider their own undeniably English and Christian Shylocks as genuine aliens and threats to the polity.

A "myth of Venice" had gained currency in Elizabethan England and may have raised specific expectations among the better informed of Shakespeare's audience. Venice was a republic, indeed the "Most Serene Republic," whose longevity and stability were attributed by its admirers to a strict, intricate, and impersonal legal order. As Pocock summarizes it, "The mito di Venezia consists in the assertion that Venice possesses a set of regulations for decision-making which ensure the complete rationality of every decision and the complete virtue of every decision-maker."²⁹Othello illustrates the wisdom of Venetian decision-makers in the scene (1.3) where the Senate sees through the feint or "pageant" of the Turks and correctly concludes they are bound for Cyprus, and glances at Venetian serenity in the line of Brabantio to Roderigo, "What, tell'st thou me of robbing? this is Venice" (1.1.105). Lewes Lewkenor, who translated Contarini's book on Venice's constitution in 1599, praised "their penal laws, most unpardonably executed."³⁰ The Doge has strictly limited powers, and could not pardon criminals or deny the course of law. The helplessness of Shakespeare's Duke is perfectly well-motivated, of course, by the internal demands of the plot, but Zera Fink is probably right in claiming that

this play in which everyone (Shylock, Antonio, Portia) except the irresponsible Salarino [Solanio] assumes that the laws will be adhered to, in which the laws are adhered to, and in which Shylock reaches for his triumph and arrives at his doom at every step in accordance with the law, and in which his case breaks down, not because the Duke refuses to enforce the law against a patrician, but because the law is discovered to be against Shylock—it is impossible, I say, to believe that as Shakespeare portrayed these things he was unaware of the contemporary reputation of Venice for justice and that it did not color to some extent his handling of his materials.³¹

The material Shakespeare was handling had to be handled with care, for it had sharp edges, edges that grew visible a generation later as republicans, commonwealthmen, and more radical reformers pressed attacks first against the Stuart kings and then against the monarchy itself. Contarini wrote that "the Duke of Venice is deprived of all means, whereby he might abuse his authority, or become a tyrant," and many were to wish that Charles the First could be reduced to such a dukeship.³² A similar thought is found in print as early as the 1530s. Under Elizabeth the religious, political, and economic pressures were still far from the point where Members of Parliament could ask the Venetian ambassador for an account of his country's constitution, as they did in 1644 (others publicly called for its adoption), but that constitution was admired by the influential circle of Leicester, Sidney, and Ralegh, whose opinions Shakespeare and many in his audience would have known.³³ Yet if the "ideologeme" of Venice-as-republic was available, Shakespeare does not seem to have triggered it in The Merchant of Venice. Whatever expectations his audience might have brought, only the legalism, and not the constitution itself, is put into the foreground, and the legalism is of course morally ambiguous.

If the play entertains any thoughts about Venice's way of governing itself, they seem to be implicitly critical. A nation of laws, of equals under the law, however praiseworthy, may land its citizens in tangles from which they cannot extricate themselves unaided. Although it is finally by quintessentially Venetian means that the knot is untied, the solution is brought by one who is trebly an outsider: an unknown lawyer from Padua, a lady from Belmont, an emblem of mercy or grace from on high. If a gracious intervention is sometimes needed to keep citizens (or at least male citizens) from injuring themselves and their state, then ideologically this points not only to heaven but to a sovereign (and perhaps a female sovereign) who understands the mystery of statecraft. One can see in Portia, too, something of Machiavelli's Fortuna, to master which is the ever-exigent need of a republic (as well as a prince) and which in the long run is certain to cause the state's decline or corruption. This time Fortuna turns out to be a stroke of Lady Luck, but next time the wheel may take a turn for the worse.

Much more fully active in the play than the political meaning is the archetypal image of "Venice" as the wealthy mercantile city, but this too carried ambivalent connotations. There was of course the ambivalence of wealth itself, a worldly good but a spiritual danger, a means of generosity but also an object of greed. Othello's Venice is perilously worldly and sophisticated; the Venice of Jonson's Volpone (1606) is pervaded by rapacity and cunning (though also by strict laws). Many Englishmen praised Venice for "the beautye and ryches of thys world," as Andrew Borde did in 1542, but others denounced it for an immorality hidden behind its gorgeous facade.³⁴ The theme of the caskets, the hypocrisy of Shylock and his goodly outside, the general glitter and merriment and masking, are all appropriate to Venice's reputation.

Walter Cohen argues that Italian economic history would allay the fears of capitalism prompted by the dichotomies of the English situation, for in the more advanced economies of Venice and other Italian cities these dichotomies were resolved and incorporated: merchant princes were also moneylenders, Jewish moneylenders were also merchants, and aristocrats lived in the city. Jews even contributed (by law) to charitable banks that helped the Christian poor.³⁵ This may be so, although one may wonder how many Englishmen who knew about the Venetian economy were fearful of capitalism, since they would also have known that these dichotomies did not really exist in London either, except as abstractions. It is not "capitalism" that is frightening in the play, moreover, but moneylending; there was no name yet for capitalism in general. The "resolutions" of Venice, in any case, may not have been available as an "ideologeme" because few people knew about them, and Shakespeare seems not to have been one of the few.

This brighter side of Venice may have been eclipsed by a sense that England was in fact more advanced. The parallels between the two great island sea-powers of the modern world were hard to miss, and they were later elaborated in print (by James Howell, for example, in 1642).³⁶ But it is possible that Venice provided an example peculiarly pertinent to England because England seemed about to inherit its imperial and commercial glory. Cohen claims that to Londoners "Venice represented a more advanced stage of the commercial development they themselves were experiencing" (p. 769), but the opposite ought to have been obvious in 1595 or earlier. Venice was in decline. England, once almost its economic colony, was now its rival for the long-distance carrying trade even in the Mediterranean. "The Venetians, who once almost monopolized England's woollen exports, ceased regular visits to London after 1533; they were last seen at Southampton in 1587."³⁷ Indeed, this last visit ended in shipwreck off the Needles (Isle of Wight), a reminder of which may be found in the report that Antonio has lost a ship on the shoals of the Goodwins in the Channel, presumably on the return from London (3.1.1-7; cf. 2.8.27-32). The torch has been passed to London, and with it might come all the ills of worldly wealth. In Robert Wilson's The Three Ladies of London (c. 1581), the lady named Lucre, a granddaughter of "the old Lady Lucre of Venice," inherits the family servant Usury, who has followed her to this new and better version of his home town.³⁸

Antonio's Venice, to be sure, mutes the acquisitive spirit among the Christians, or rather transmutes it, as in Bassanio's quest, to a more spiritual one, while concentrating it on Shylock in order to get rid of it. But the sadness of Antonio may be premonitory of his, and his city's, sterility. Not the least of the ills of worldly wealth is its transience: there is no future in it. Sated at the opening ("sad" in its oldest sense) Antonio finds life and living at the end by leaving Venice behind for a better place. So the riches of this world will lend themselves for a time to Venice, as they did to Babylon, Tyre, and Carthage before her, and will to England after her. In his title of "royal merchant" we may hear an echo of the "princes who are merchants" of Tyre, the "merchant city" whose destruction Isaiah foretold (23.8, 11). In the great opening passage of Ruskin's The Stones of Venice we have the locus classicus of the historical parable the play lightly suggests: "Since first the dominion of men was asserted over the ocean, three thrones, of mark beyond all others, have been set upon its sands: the thrones of Tyre, Venice and England. Of the First of these great powers only the memory remains; of the Second, the ruin; the Third, which inherits their greatness, if it forget their example, may be led through prouder eminence to less pitied destruction."

Auden points out that Shakespeare's Venice produces nothing of its own. Wealth grows through trade (Antonio), usury (Shylock), and fortune-hunting (Bassanio).

"Richly left," Portia inherits her wealth from her father. The other classes and castes are the Duke, lawyers, servants (Launcelot Gobbo), and "many a purchas'd slave" (4.1.90). Primary production (in England, the woolen industry) survives only as exemplum and metaphor: Shylock's tale of Jacob the shepherd, Portia as the Golden Fleece, Antonio as the "tainted wether of the flock," Shylock as a wolf. In the play as in real city finances the stress falls on money, the representative of already existing real wealth or value (if it is not debased). In all of this an Elizabethan might find perils to the soul. However, as the universal medium of exchange and the means of the communication or circulation of wealth, money reduces the moral question to simple terms: hoarding or free circulating, too much or too little, greed or generosity. Money is isomorphic to a one-commodity economy and mates well with the single spiritual commodity of love or friendship.

That is perhaps why Shakespeare gives us two kinds of money, coins and rings. It is as if, having shown money to be barren, he felt uneasy with even the proper use of money—lending it freely to help a friend. Rings are Utopian money. As a symbol of the bond of love, each ring is unique, as each bond is unique. Rings cannot be exchanged, as coins can, but they can circulate; here they go round in small circles as befits their size and shape. They live a charmed life in the charmed circle of lovers and friends. You give them away and they return with interest. Shylock, who does not live according to the bonds of love and friendship, loses his ring when he loses his daughter. If you are a lover or a friend, however, the magic in each ring protects you from the consequences of your act: if you intend to break a bond, at least as long as you do so out of a generous spirit, out of another love-bond, the ring returns to the original finger, bringing with it a larger circle of love. So the ring that Portia gives to Bassanio, and Bassanio gives to "Balthazar," Portia finally gives to Antonio to give again to his friend. It is as if they are all married to each other, and all the richer for the exchange of the one ring.³⁹

Shakespeare was probably unaware of the doctrine of the "velocity of circulation," according to which a growth in the rate of circulation of money is a growth in the amount of money. This doctrine was circulating in his day (a Florentine named Davanzati invoked it in Lezione della Monete in 1588), but it was too good to be true.⁴⁰ Like Dante's mirrors, which illustrate how love, like light, is multiplied by giving it away, the rings add to the total quantity of love, and even to the amount each lover owns, by taking themselves rapidly away from each lover by turns.

Belmont

The scene shifts from Venice to Belmont seven times, the seventh bringing us to the entire final act, where all the unsolved problems of Venice are "answered faithfully." The story of the pound of flesh, set entirely in Venice, contrasts with the story of the caskets, set entirely in Belmont. As the situation darkens in Venice, it brightens in Belmont and resolves itself happily. Except for a sequence in Act II dealing with Jessica and Gobbo, the setting alternates continually between the tragic and comic locales, each getting about half the lines. From the first shift of scene we sense that Belmont is a realm of answered prayers, of compensation for the world's injuries: a moment after Antonio says that "all my fortunes are at sea" and he shall rack his credit for Bassanio "even to the uttermost" (1.1.177, 181), Nerissa speaks of the abundance of Portia's "good fortunes" (1.2.4). This sense grows as the tenors of the two main plots diverge, even before Portia plans her intercession in Venetian affairs. It is as if the credit that is racked in Venice is stored in the treasury of the saints in Belmont, or as if the ruins of time (in Blake's words) build mansions in eternity.

From the scenario alone we would expect the two main plots to be close in meaning or moral if not in structure. As many critics have noted, they are exempla of the same precepts, like the two plots of King Lear. The casket story, the simpler of the two, teaches two closely related lessons: that true wealth is spiritual and inward, and that to find it you must risk everything you have. Morocco and Aragon choose gold or silver over lead and find no prize but a death's head or fool's head and messages about deception. Bassanio, by contrast, chooses not "by the view" of the casket but by an inner eloquence in it and opens the leaden one to find Portia's portrait. The theme of inner versus outer, of being versus seeming, is common enough in Shakespeare and in all literature; here it takes on a Christian cast whereby the inner or true becomes the spiritual and the outer or false becomes the material or worldly. When the scroll in the gold casket tells Morocco that "Gilded tombs do worms infold" (2.7.69), it recalls for us the whited sepulchres or painted tombs of Matthew 23.27, beautiful outwardly, but "within full of dead mens bones and all filthines."⁴¹ The scroll in the silver casket echoes Psalm 12 in telling Aragon that "The fire seven times tried this" (2.9.63); so the words of the Lord are as pure as silver seven times purified, whereas all around us the children of men speak vain and flattering words with a double heart.

The connection with Shylock is obvious. Shylock is not only a vengeful usurer but a hypocrite, one of the Pharisees Christ likened to the painted tombs in his diatribe against them in Matthew 23. "O what a goodly outside falsehood hath!" (1.3.97).

More prominent in the choice of caskets is the requirement that he who chooses lead "must give and hazard all he hath" (2.7.9).⁴² Bassanio's choice of lead, which threatens more than it promises—a woman who announces she stands for sacrifice—reveals his willingness to risk all for love, to see the world well lost for the sake of the one thing needful. Here the link with the main plot is even more substantial. Antonio, whose livelihood depends on risk, is prepared to sacrifice all out of love for Bassanio. Bassanio, himself a soldier of fortune, offers his parable of the second arrow to convince Antonio: by "adventuring" both arrows he will either find both or bring at least the "latter hazard" back again (1.1.140-52). We might doubt the wisdom of throwing good money after bad, but such a doubt is worldly wisdom, and Antonio, more devoted to friendship than to money, needs no convincing.

Besides the two main plots there are three others: Jessica and Lorenzo, the ring business, and the defection of Gobbo. Each of the plots may serve as a gloss on the other four, and without much effort we can read the play much as we might read Scripture with the four levels of exegesis at hand. To give away money for the sake of friendship, for example, is to leave a house of bondage, or of hell (2.3.2), and win a heavenly bride or bridegroom. To steal from a miser, to put on a disguise to fool a hypocrite—both parodied perhaps in Launcelot's attempt to extract a blessing, like Isaac, from his blind father—these are to assert the inner realm of faith and love against the glittering outsides of this world. To face death in a lead casket in the name of love and to be obedient to the mysterious will of a wise father are both somehow like the choice that Launcelot makes of following a poor gentleman, and all three choices bring "rare new liveries" (2.2.105) of one kind or another.

These interinanimations of meaning give the play much of the unity and closure it has, but the question of the two settings threatens to prise the play apart. They are so different in mood and style as to occupy almost incommensurable metaphysical states. Portia's role in the Venetian court is almost that of a heavenly being incarnate (in disguise) as a mortal, the Virgin Mary interceding against the Devil. When with Act V we break with Venice for good, in a manner critics have found awkward, we have entered a heavenly mansion full of music, from which we seem almost to look down on "the floor of heaven / . . . thick inlaid with patens of bright gold" (5.1.58-59). Here the unaccomplishable reaches fulfillment, the indescribable incarnates as act, and the Eternal Feminine drops manna on us from above. Here the Jewess turns Christian under the gentle instruction of her bridegroom, the lost rings find their owners, and in a "beautiful example of Shakespeare's dramatic impudence," Portia by a "strange accident" (5.1.278) can tell Antonio that three of his argosies are richly come to harbor.⁴³

To put it another way, when we first hear of Belmont we guess it is a colony of Venice, a part of the Venetian empire, but by the end of the play the relationship seems reversed: Venice becomes a spiritually underdeveloped province of an empire of transcendent but benign power. At first we take Antonio's gift to Bassanio to be much like another commercial venture. He outfits Bassanio and sends him forth as he would a ship, borrowing against the prospects of success. As he would wait at home, perhaps in straitened circumstances, while his ship, unknown to him, founders on shoals or loads itself with riches, so he falls into ruin while Bassanio's expedition, unknown to him, grandly succeeds.⁴⁴ Belmont is likened to "Colchos' strond," where Jason found the golden fleece and a magical wife along with it (1.1.169-72); Venice did trade in the Black Sea, although Trebizond, near ancient Colchis, was a commercial colony of Genoa, Venice's rival. Venetian fleets being as much military as commercial, it is appropriate that the venturer be a soldier. Bassanio will be the new lord of the lady of Belmont, the conqueror and colonizer who "marries" the land as Aeneas married Lavinia, Miss Italy, and as the Doge of Venice marries the sea. This symbolism, however, gives way to our strong impressions of the supernal power of Belmont and the infernal paralysis of Venice, and to the increasingly frequent theological suggestions that gather around Portia and her mission. There are two worlds after all, and Belmont is the "other" world, the place that makes all of life's actions into a divine comedy and from which, like Chaucer's Troilus, we may look down upon them and laugh.

Ideological Distance or Openness

Is all this to say—and Shakespeare could hardly have pushed it further without writing a simple morality play—that Venice is hopeless, or at best a stage where we must play sad parts (1.1.77-79), a place only to be endured as we prepare for the Kingdom? In reducing Venice to "the world" in Christian terms Shakespeare does more than blunt the critical edge that the anti-usury polemic otherwise would give the play; he almost dismisses the sharp unbrotherly practices as of no importance to Christians, who will inherit their heavenly portions (or Portia, to repeat Ruskin's pun) when their worldly course is run. And yet by placing the otherworldliness of Belmont and its lady in the foreground, by giving so few "realistic" touches to it (mainly some charming complaints and teasings by Portia), Shakespeare also seems to be inviting us to take a closer look at this orthodox but unlikely resolution. He "estranges" it from us; it is all too wonderful, too pat, too flat. Behind the thin heavenly harmonies we still hear, and seem meant to hear, Shylock's harsh questions echoing unanswered.

I have been more or less skirting "the problem of Shylock," so troubling to modern audiences, and about which more has been written than any other feature of the play. Shylock can be gotten round if he is not presented as a tragic hero (as Heine interpreted him) or as one of a misunderstood and oppressed minority who sings kaddish over his daughter (as Laurence Olivier acted him). But he is there to be gotten round, and he must have been something of a "problem" in 1596, a character not fully digested and assimilated into the structure of themes.

Shylock has, notoriously, some good speeches which carry conviction and draw sympathy, although even his famous "Hath not a Jew eyes?" speech expresses his habit of reducing everything to physical or "worldly" terms. He has a prima facie case against the Christians—he has been spat upon—although the play would have us believe Shylock deserved it for his hateful financial practices. More troubling is Shylock's indispensability to the transactions that further the plot. He is thoroughly integrated into the Venetian economy. As Antonio well knows, "the commodity that strangers have / With us in Venice" is essential to its prosperity, "Since that the trade and profit of the city / Consisteth of all nations" (3.3.27-31). Although the mercy the Duke and Antonio render Shylock puts the lie to it, Shylock's plea that in seeking revenge he only follows Christian practice (3.1.61-66) rings uncomfortably true. (Marlowe's Barabbas says the same [JM 5.2.118]: "for Christians do the like.") He also reminds the court that Venetians hold many slaves, although we meet none of them. Shylock may be evil, but he is a necessary evil, and when the bienpensants of Venetian society mobilize to defeat him they can find nothing useful in their constitution. Even Portia's rescue, however satisfying dramatically, rests on the merest legal quibbles. That is of course part of the Christian theme: literally, "in the course of justice, none of us / Should see salvation" (4.1.195-96), for the law traps those who insist on it to the letter. Yet the feeling remains that not only Shylock but Venice too has gotten off more easily than it deserves: it was just good luck that Portia (or Bellario) came up with the answer. If the prosperity of the city rests on a system that allows hateful practices, its citizens should not be surprised if hatred also prospers to the point where it menaces the bonds of community. If the law permits any sort of contract, it can offer no reply to Shylock's "say it is my humour,—is it answer'd" (4.1.43). It must grant that it is answered, and preside over the dissolution of the traditional "organic" society into an aggregate of individuals who do as they like.

That seems to be what Shakespeare feared, but his honesty or empathy led him to give the Devil his due. The new and contemptible was hard to separate from the old and venerable, mercantile capital depended on financial capital, if not on old-fashioned usurious moneylending, and not all maritime ventures could be floated by partners in a joint-stock company. Up-to-date Shylocks of the London Exchange were a crucial part of the new capitalist expansion. The future lay with the banks. Shakespeare let such connections find expression in the play, with the result that the prevalent ideology of the play is at several points "subverted" or distanced.

This is not the only cause of the distancing effect. What I have just called the play's prevalent ideology is itself a product of at least three ideological discourses—agrarian-aristocratic, mercantile, and Christian (or one version of Christian)—that harmonize with each other only if certain features are kept subdued or vague. To these we should add an ambiguous theme on the power and place of women, a theme found in many other Shakespearian comedies but very prominent here. It is only Portia, brilliant, resourceful, and generous, who can extricate the male world of Venice from its stupid and self-destructive tangle—although she must do it through male means in male disguise, on a lark during a hiatus between her roles as dutiful daughter and dutiful wife.⁴⁵ Finally we should note the effect of the constant alternation between utterly different kinds of story, setting, and mood, the "realistic" concatenation of events in Venice as against the triple rhythm of fairy-tale deeds in Belmont. With so much to accommodate, in fact, it is quite wonderful that the play comes across as cogently and coherently as it does.

I would argue, however, that a fair and comprehensive reading of the whole play, or a viewing of a performance, informed about its historical and ideological horizon, cannot give much more weight to these moments than I have given them. Recent post-structuralist readings of The Merchant of Venice, with little reference to the actual ideologies mobilized in it, have thoroughly elaborated its ironies and conflicts and countercurrents and set them free, as it were, to swamp the whole. Rene Girard, for example, gives as subversive a reading as one can without resorting altogether to the arbitrary play of meanings post-structuralism often celebrates, and he enters a vigorous brief in Shylock's behalf.⁴⁶ Shylock is a Venetian among other Venetians, and only does what they do—especially when he confuses his personal and financial motives. He is the "grotesque double" of Antonio, and indeed "The generosity of Antonio may well be a corruption more extreme than the caricatural greed of Shylock" because it threatens the ordinary system of Venetian practices and seems to avert its gaze from them (p. 102). Venetians fail to face up to their own motive of revenge (the law itself being only formalized revenge) and cloak their doings in the language of charity. In the end Shylock is not so much punished for a crime—"he has done no actual harm to anyone" (p. 108)—as made into a scapegoat for Venice's otherwise insoluble contradictions. Shakespeare writes a play with two levels, addressed to the vulgar or to the sophisticated in his audience.

Terry Eagleton cleverly points out that "it is Shylock who has respect for the spirit of the law and Portia who does not" (pp. 36-37). That "blood" is entailed by "flesh" is a reasonable inference well within the spirit of the law, "as any real court would recognize," and the strict precisionism that defeats Shylock will also undo the law itself, the very concept of law, which cannot exhaustively enumerate every conceivable aspect of the cases it covers (p. 37). Shylock seems intent less on killing Antonio than on exposing Venetian law for a hollow sham behind which the Christian nobility gets what it wants. He succeeds, and the law deconstructs itself, for Shakespeare's audience if not for Shylock's.⁴⁷

In cutting against the grain of the play this way, Girard and Eagleton bring out the "subversive" features of the play, but in doing so they leave themselves open to several serious objections. Setting aside Girard's Nietzschean view of justice as mere revenge and his anthropological view of punishment as mere scapegoating, we may ask why the moments of sympathy for Shylock, his home thrusts at the Christians, and their moments of calculation even in love should turn the play into a constant simultaneous double track of meaning, more like a logical paradox or figure-ground illusion than a sequence of virtual actions unfolding in time before a real audience. We also wonder why, on the sophisticated track, the subversive elements should take precedence over the more or less consistent if "conventional" framework of the rest of the play. Girard's modern taste for irony is surely anachronistically attributed to Shakespeare's audience. The same may be said of Eagleton, whose deconstructive effects are momentary paradoxes that work only if we forget the rest of the play. Eagleton ignores the contradiction between the oral understanding concerning the pound of flesh and Shylock's insistence on what was written; Shylock's "merry sport" is a deliberate lie. Eagleton also ignores Portia's elaborate attempts to dissuade Shylock and pay him many times his due, it being a reasonable inference that the point of any commercial contract is to allocate money, not kill people. While "any real court would recognize" that flesh includes blood, any real court would also recognize that the clause ordaining the pound of flesh was illegal in the first place.⁴⁸ We may also ask Girard and Eagleton why they do not propose many more subversive ironies, for on their own principles there is an infinite number of them. To rule all but a few of them out, as they implicitly do, is to invoke standards of relevance—conventions of reading, historical probabilities, available ideologies, and even common sense—that will also, I believe, strictly limit the effects of the ones they discuss.

The harder if less exciting task is to weigh such subversive effects against the orthodox ones and give an account of what remains, after all, a single work that must be read or experienced in sequence through time, and a comedy at that. The larger problem with Girard and Eagleton, as with much post-structuralist criticism, is that their readings remain only two-term systems, despite the gestures toward infinite critical possibility. What one really needs for the interpretation I am presenting here is a system of five, six, or seven terms—terms that reflect the real cultural and ideological discourses accessible to Shakespeare and his audience. They were not infinite in number, they were not mere negations or subversions of one another (or any other), and they can (after all allowances for our ignorance) be specified in detail and discussed.

There may be another failure of historical imagination behind the attitude Girard and many earlier critics take toward the Venetians. They assume too easily that the Venetians, with the possible exception of Antonio, are shallow, superficial, hypocritical, and heartless, all tinsel and glitter, while against that suffocating background the harsh candor of Shylock is as welcome as a cooling breeze. They can point to a number of passages, but I think such critics are mainly giving vent to a mere distaste for the Venetians' friendly, gregarious banter: they forget the extent to which their own sensibility is colored by modern suspicions of courtesy and social warmth and by the shriveling of the public sphere. Shakespeare's audience would not have felt nearly so impatient with the Venetians, would have enjoyed them and readily lent them their sympathy. Venice may be unable to solve its problems by itself, but gay camaraderie is not one of its problems. It may be one of its saving graces.

Notes

I am grateful for criticism received [from the Marxist Literary Group], and to Margaret Ferguson, Robert Bell, Ilona Bell, Zachary Leader, Robert Hapgood, and Susan Arnold for comments on a later version. I quote throughout from the new Arden edition of the play, ed. John Russell Brown (London, 1955; rpt. New York, 1964).

¹ "Brothers and Others," in The Dyer 's Hand and Other Essays (New York, 1962).

² See, for example, Lawrence Danson, The Harmonies of The Merchant of Venice (New Haven, 1978).

³ Walter Cohen, "The Merchant of Venice and the Possibilities of Historical Criticism," ELH, 49 (1982), 765-89. Michael Nerlich, Ideology of Adventure: Studies in Modern Consciousness, 1100-1750, vol. I, trans. Ruth Crowley (Minneapolis, 1987).

⁴ An earlier version of this paper had a discussion of the Utopian dimension of the play, but it is omitted here for the sake of space.

⁵ The most thorough and careful discussion of Marx's use of "ideology," which defends it from several modern extensions and reductions, is Bhiku Parekh, Marx's Theory of Ideology (Baltimore, 1982).

⁶ "Free" and "friend" are also etymologically related.

⁷ A good discussion of the theme of gift-giving is Ronald A. Sharp, "Gift Exchange and the Economies of Spirit in The Merchant of Venice," Modern Philology, 83.3 (1986), 250-65. I am leaving aside the possibility raised by Auden and others that Antonio has a homosexual passion for Bassanio. The case for it rests on a few doubtful phrases such as "tainted wether," and it seems to create many more problems than it solves.

⁸Genealogy of Morals, Second Essay, Section 2.

⁹Faust I, 1716-1717, my translation.

¹⁰ Another of Antonio's departures from normal commercial practice: although he reports that "My ventures are not in one bottom trusted, / Nor to one place; nor is my whole estate / Upon the fortune of this present year" (1.1.42-44), it seems that the bottoms are entirely his own, so when they miscarry he must absorb the entire loss. "During the whole medieval period," however, "a ship almost never went out on the account of a single individual, because of the risk, but was always built for a number of share-holders." Various formal associations, societates maris, developed in early modern times to rationalize and distribute risk. See Max Weber, General Economic History (New York, 1961), pp. 157-59. Marc Shell points out that Antonio does not insure his ships, even though marine insurance was common in both Venice and England. See Money, Language, and Thought (Berkeley, 1982), p. 54 n. 19.

¹¹ Albert O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests (Princeton, 1977).

¹² Benjamin Nelson, The Idea of Usury: From Tribal Brotherhood to Universal Otherhood, 2nd ed. (Chicago, 1969), p. 152, quoting Luther, Von Kaufshandlung and Wucher (1524): "Standing surety is a work that is too lofty for a man; it is unseemly, for it is presumptuous and an invasion of God's rights. . . . Therefore the man who becomes surety acts unchristianlike, and deserves what he gets, because he pledges and promises what is not his and is not in his power, but in the hands of God alone." See also Barbara K. Lewalski, "Biblical Allusion and Allegory in The Merchant of Venice," Shakespeare Quarterly, 13 (1962), 327-43.

¹³ G. K. Hunter, "The Theology of Marlowe's The Jew of Malta," Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 27 (1964), 211-40.

¹⁴ I do not mean to suggest that there was no anti-Semitism of the racist sort we know in modern times, or that the play does not risk awakening it at a few points. But the idea of "the Jew" mobilized in the play does not rest on it, and indeed often opposes it. Terry Eagleton is simply wrong to call Antonio a "racist" and to compare his trial to that of "a later anti-semite, Adolf Eichmann." See his William Shakespeare (Oxford, 1986), p. 47.

¹⁵ See Benjamin Nelson; R. H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926; rpt. New York, 1954); Thomas Wilson, A Discourse Upon Usury (1572), ed. and intro. R. H. Tawney (London, 1925). See also L. C. Knights, Drama and Society in the Age of Jonson (London, 1937), pp. 164-68 and passim; and the notes to the Arden edition of the play.

¹⁶ Knights, p. 162.

¹⁷ Nelson, pp. 29-56. Luther "insisted upon the sharpest possible divorce between the Christian ethic and the character of political organization" (p. 67).

¹⁸ Nelson, pp. 73-82; Tawney, pp. 91-115.

¹⁹ Paul N. Siegel, "Shylock and the Puritan Usurers," Studies in Shakespeare, 129-38, and Shakespeare in His Time and Ours (Notre Dame, 1968), pp. 237-54; Peter Millward, Shakespeare's Religious Background (London, 1973), pp. 158-61; Patrick Crutwell, The Shakespearean Moment (New York, 1955), ch. 5; Harold Fisch, "Shakespeare and the Puritan Dynamic," Shakespeare Survey 27, ed. Kenneth Muir (Cambridge, Eng., 1974), pp. 81-92. I am aware that "Puritan" is difficult to define and is somewhat anachronistic for 1595, but there seems to be enough contemporary evidence that it meant something fairly coherent. See Christopher Hill, Society and Puritanism (New York, 1964), ch. 1.

²⁰ Cohen dismisses the identification of Shylock with the Puritan as unconvincing for two reasons: "it is just as easy to transform him into a Catholic and, more generally, because he is too complex and contradictory to fit neatly the stereotype of Puritan thrift." For the first point Cohen cites Danson, but Danson does not consider the usury question, sobriety, thrift, Old Testament names, and other salient features of Shylock and the Puritan stereotype; he stresses that Catholics were sometimes equated with Jews, largely because of their doctrine of justification by works. This is not sufficient. Cohen's second point is true but does not rule out the probability that Shylock evoked the Puritanas-usurer in the minds of his contemporary audience. It is not necessary to "fit neatly" a stereotype to bring it into play, nor is "thrift" the sum of the stereotype.

²¹ English version, trans. M. Epstein (New York, 1962), pp. 235, 236. Michael Nerlich has harsh criticisms of a different thesis of Sombart's, which we might call a variant of the Shakespeare Thesis, whereby capitalism is a hybrid of the heroic (entrepreneurial) spirit and the trading (bourgeois) spirit (pp. 79-82). But Nerlich does not consider the possibility that Shylock represents Puritanism.

²² Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (New York, 1958), p. 271 n. 58.

²³ Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno have a suggestive page on Odysseus and Robinson Crusoe as forerunners of the bourgeois rationale: "the possibility of failure becomes the postulate of a moral excuse for profit." Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York, 1972), pp. 61-62. Nerlich, in his very interesting survey of the decline of the knightly-courtly ideology of adventure and the rise of a bourgeois variant, does not find this argument explicit anywhere, but takes it as implicit in the ennobling of merchant "adventurers." Nerlich's main exhibit is The Merchant of Venice itself.

²⁴ Tawney, p. 44.

²⁵ Miles Mosse, Arraignment and Conviction of Usurie (1595), in R. H. Tawney and Eileen Power, Tudor Economic Documents, vol. 3 (London, 1924), p. 379.

²⁶ This was a scheme not very visible to the ideology that draws its main distinction between landed wealth and commercial getting, as in the opening of Jonson's imitation of Horace's Second Epode: "Happy is he, that from all business clear, / As the old race of mankind were, / With his own oxen tills his sire's left lands, / And is not in the usurer's bands."

²⁷ Calvin cited in Tawney, p. 36.

²⁸ "Introduction" to the New Cambridge Shakespeare (Cambridge, Eng., 1987), pp. 12-15.

²⁹ J. A. G. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment (Princeton, 1976), p. 324. The Florentines Guicciardini and Gianotti wrote a good deal in praise of the Venetian constitution; Machiavelli had reservations. Contarini's De Magistratibus et Republica Venetorum, an account by a notable Venetian, was published in Paris in 1543 and was soon available in Italian. Lewes Lewkenor's English translation, The Commonwealth and Government of Venice, was printed in London in 1599.

³⁰ Pocock, p. 325.

³¹ Zera S. Fink, The Classical Republicans: An Essay in the Recovery of a Pattern of Thought in Seventeenth-Century England (Evanston, 1945), p. 43. Fink also cites the two passages from Othello above.

³² Lewkenor's translation, in Fink, p. 38.

³³ By Thomas Starkey. See Christopher Hill, Intellectual Origins of the Puritan Revolution (London, 1972), p. 276; Fink, pp. 41-51.

³⁴ Fink, p. 44.

³⁵ Cohen, 769-72. Cohen's arguments about the actual English situation should now be canvassed in the light of Nerlich's discussion.

³⁶ Fink, p. 46.

³⁷ Christopher Hill, Reformation to Industrial Revolution (New York: Pantheon, 1967), p. 55; William H. McNeill, Venice: The Hinge of Europe 1081-1797 (Chicago, 1974), pp. 127, 142.

³⁸ See G. K. Hunter, "Elizabethans and Foreigners," in "Shakespeare in His Own Age" (Shakespeare Survey 17), ed. Allardyce Nicoli (Cambridge, Eng., 1964), pp. 37-52. Also following Lucre and usury to London, according to David Bady, was double-entry bookkeeping, known as "the forme of Venice," some terms from which may have entered the language of The Merchant of Venice. See David Bady, "The Sum of Something: Arithmetic in The Merchant of Venice" Shakespeare Quarterly, 36.1 (Spring 1985), 10-30. Zera Fink denies that Venice's decline was evident. The Venetians had recently won the Battle of Lepanto (although they lost Cyprus) and were thought to be capable of great expansion. But Fink does not consider the city's manifest loss of economic hegemony, which would have been well understood by City merchants.

³⁹ I realize that this theory of rings does not quite catch Jessica's seemingly heartless squandering of her parents' ring for a monkey. (She is denying her parentage? The ring is turquoise, i.e., Turkish, and therefore infidel?) In an annual ceremony the Doge of Venice married the sea by throwing a ring into it. (It always came back, too, in the form of worldly prosperity.)

⁴⁰ Joseph A. Schumpeter, History of Economic Analysis (New York: Oxford, 1954), pp. 316-17.

⁴¹ Geneva Bible. Shakespeare's source in the 1595 English translation of the Gesta Romanorum three times describes the golden vessel as "full of dead mens bones" (Arden edition, pp. 172-74).

⁴² This is mainly Shakespeare's idea; his source stresses a more passive trusting in the Lord.

⁴³ A comment on 5.1.278-79 in the New Cambridge edition, cited in the Arden, p. 138. Is it possible that the name Belmont is meant to echo the Venetian Monti di Pietà, Christian money-lending institutions intended to disrupt Jewish usurious practices? Monte meant "goods" or "assets," that is, a "mount" or "amount" of wealth; compare "he made his pile." See Stephen J. Greenblatt, "Marlowe, Marx, and Anti-Semitism," Critical Inquiry, 5.2 (1978), 294, and his source, Brian Pulían, Rich and Poor in Renaissance Venice (Oxford, 1971), as well as Cohen, 770. There were also Monti di Carità or Monti dell'Abbondanza that distributed grain and other supplies during famines.

⁴⁴ Nerlich elaborates this parallel very fully. Although he is often very illuminating in detail, he reduces the major characters to vehicles of a Marxist allegory. Antonio is a pale character with no personal life because he is nothing personally; he is bourgeois mercantile capital personified, sad because he has no function other than to provide the capital and stay home. Bassanio is the junior partner, or "apprentice," with no capital of his own, who carries out the actual business trip in return for a share of the profits. He defeats the feudal nobility (Morocco and Aragon) after the petty nobility withdraw (e.g., the Neapolitan prince, the County Palatine), just as bourgeois capitalism is defeating the remnants of feudalism. Portia is Fortuna, the goal of worldly pursuit. (Nerlich neglects that she is of the landed aristocracy herself.) Shylock is feudal usury, now archaic, about to be supplanted by venture capital.

⁴⁵ A fuller treatment of ideology than is possible here would take up "male ideology" from a feminist standpoint. I omit it here because I think the issue of the status or rights of women is not foregrounded in the play, and the peculiarly male character of the Venetian way of doing things is only passingly and obliquely indicated. It is an interesting question where an ideological analysis should cease. Recent theories have claimed that such things as the self, subjectivity, objectivity, experience, science, reason, heterosexuality, and a preference for the human over other species are all ideological. I try to hold to a historical standard of the availability of an ideology and whether it is signaled or triggered in the text.

This may be the place to comment on Marc Shell's brilliant and fascinating chapter on the play (see note 10 above). A fuller interpretation than mine would have to absorb his many insights, especially on the theme of generation (of the Jewish race, of money, and so on), but they have serious limitations. Shell claims that the idea of "verbal usury" (which mainly refers to puns, such as gild/geld/Geld) was an "important technical term" in Christian patristic writings, but he offers only one citation, and that is for "spiritual usury" (see his notes 6 and 50). For his key pun, ewes/use/Jews, he offers the slenderest of evidence, another pun, in LLL 5.2.620. He cites "the similarity between the sound ieu in adieu and Ju in Jude" (note 7). But why does he neglect the d in adieu or the word sweet before Jude? He concedes that Kökeritz gives the J the modern sound. With such faint historical controls, there is no end to punning and "supplementary" meanings.

⁴⁶ René Girard, "'To Entrap the Wisest': A Reading of The Merchant of Venice," in Literature and Society (Selected Papers from the English Institute, 1978), ed. Edward W. Said (Baltimore, 1980), pp. 100-19. Girard actually does claim that "an infinite number of readings is possible" of The Merchant of Venice, and "this infinity is determined by 'thy play of the signifier'" (p. 119). But as so often in post-structuralist essays, the infinite play of the signifier remains only a menacing possibility behind the actual work of interpreting a real text, and Girard is not really very playful. He even begins by claiming that "the symmetry between the explicit venality of Shylock and the implicit venality of the other Venetians cannot fail to be intended by the playwright" (p. 100). This old-fashioned appeal to authorial intention would surely fail to intimidate a signifier that was bent on infinite play.

⁴⁷ Eagleton, pp. 36-38. Besides Girard and Eagleton, one should note Frank Whigham's discussion of the importance of style in speech, dress, and demeanor: "Ideology and Class Conduct in The Merchant of Venice," in Renaissance Drama, NS 10 (1979), 93-115. While not post-structuralist, it leads to a plethora of ironies and subversions. "The intermixture of heroic and mercantile language emphasizes their relation to each other; the tonal disjunction suggests an ironic reading, since in romantic heroics financial foundations are usually suppressed as tawdry" (p. 96). Usually, perhaps, but it is precisely the ideological conjunction of heroic adventure and bourgeois merchant venturing, which Nerlich so thoroughly explores, that Shakespeare (and others) frankly celebrate. It may be ironic that Bassanio chooses lead even though it is gold that got him to Belmont, but the irony seems to be that of the worldhistorical mind, larger than Shakespeare's, and certainly larger than Bassanio's: to speculate on whether "Bassanio is so unreflective as to be unaware of the irony of his words" (p. 101) is to wander out of the play altogether.

⁴⁸ It is worth noting that according to the dietary laws of Leviticus flesh must not include blood. "No soul of you shall eat blood, neither shall any stranger that sojourneth among you eat blood" (Leviticus 17. 10-16). After Shylock twice exclaims about his "flesh and blood" (Jessica), and Salario elaborates on how different the two fleshes and the two bloods are, they then discuss the flesh (alone) of Antonio, which "will feed my revenge" (3.1.31-48). Shylock does not listen to himself or notice the implications of his metaphor of feeding for the prohibition in Leviticus (see also 1.3.161-63).