SOURCE: “Allegorical Commentary in The Merchant of Venice,” in Shakespeare Studies, Vol. XXIV, 1996, pp. 156-210.

[In the essay below, Rosenheim argues that the themes of power, fatherhood, and blindness are developed through allegory in The Merchant of Venice. These themes are principally presented through the parable of the Prodigal Son as it applies to Launcelot versus his father, Old Gobbo, and, by extension, to the “father” Shylock versus the “son” Antonio.]

In Asserting the prevalence of “symmetry” or moral equivalence between Shylock and Antonio, René Girard is adding his voice to an enduring current in the criticism of The Merchant of Venice. It is much the same opinion that Hazlitt advances in suggesting that Shylock's “Jewish revenge is at least as good as Christian injuries;” that A. D. Moody holds in finding that Merchant is “about the essential likeness of Shylock and his judges”; or Harold Goddard in remarking that Antonio “catches his own reflection in [Shylock's] face”; or Kiernan Ryan in defining Shylock's “bloodthirsty cruelty” as the “mirror-image of [the Christians'] concealed real nature.”¹ A factual basis for this parity can be identified in the observation of Walter Cohen and Michael Ferber that sixteenth century merchants like Antonio were themselves usurers like Shylock.² Yet those who draw these parallels are usually prompted by the consideration that Shylock's villainy should be weighed against his suffering. Indeed, Shylock has recently become the beneficiary of a critical tendency to censure the play's Christian society by showing him as its victim. Thus for Frank Whigham, Shylock is “a dehumanized tool and disposable slave of order,” who falls prey to the Christians' hegemonic use of law; for Ryan, he is the victim of a “money-centred world” “projecting upon him its displaced hatred of itself”; for Lars Engle, he is the provident custodian of the money-supply whose forced conversion makes him “a final victim of the cruelty of typology”; for Thomas Moisan he is the “scapegoat” absorbing “the blame for whatever is ‘wrong’ with the [economic] system.”³ Still, hostility toward Christian society would probably not generate sympathy for Shylock were it not for an accompanying perception of something attractive in his characterization, as Engle seems to suggest in representing him, a bit dubiously, as civic-minded. This perception may derive at least partly from the recognition that Shylock is drawn as a character of exceptional power. Thus John Russell Brown observes that

in performance Shylock is the dominating character of the play; none other has such emotional range, such continual development, such stature, force, subtlety, vitality; above all, none other has his intensity, isolation, and apparent depth of motivation.⁴

Brown's words attest the impact of what Moody and H. B. Charlton express as Shylock's humanity;⁵ but this term also seems to imply a positive element in his makeup, an element boldly asserted in Goddard's declaration that “what is deep down in Shylock is precisely his goodness.”⁶

I believe that, in their various ways, these perceptions of Shylock are valid. Yet the arguments supporting them are not entirely convincing. Those who would exculpate Shylock by likening him to the bad Christians encourage the skeptic to object that making the Christians bad cannot make Shylock good; as Girard admits in cautioning that “Shylock is rehabilitated only to the extent that the Christians are even worse than he is.”⁷ Even as he notes the power of Shylock's characterization, Brown fails to comprehend the function of that power in the drama, and thus is led to complain that Shylock's “dominance often does ill service to the play as a whole.”⁸ And while sensing a profound level of goodness in Shylock, Goddard identifies that goodness only as a yearning for acceptance,⁹ a yearning not likely to impress those who see Shylock as evil and thus as deserving the contempt he endures. Rather than a villain because a victim, Shylock becomes for such critics as C. L. Barber, Frank Kermode, and Sylvan Barnet a victim of his own villainy.¹⁰ And this view of Shylock, itself more or less explicitly informed by the negative attitude toward Jews prevailing in the sixteenth century, is reinforced by critics who emphasize the virulence of this attitude. To E. E. Stoll, Shylock's Jewishness is itself a “badge of opprobrium” associating him with Judas; add to this his identity as moneylender, and Shylock comes to embody “two of the deepest and most widely prevalent social antipathies of two thousand years.”¹¹ G. K. Hunter similarly insists that Jewishness be historically understood as a morally corrupt condition “which rejected Christ and chose Barabbas, rejected the Saviour and chose the robber, rejected the spirit and chose the flesh, rejected the treasure that is in heaven and chose the treasure that is on earth.”¹² And applying this view of Jewishness to Shylock, Alan Dessen sees him to exemplify the bad choice that Christians likewise make but should not.¹³

We cannot doubt that Stoll and Hunter accurately describe the accepted perception of Jews in Shakespeare's day. Nor can we doubt that this perception, including its darkest representation of Jews as deicides and cannibals, influences Shylock's characterization. What remains unclear is how this historically oriented perception can comport with the modern sense that, somehow, Shylock is good. To be sure, Girard would impugn the stereotypical aspects of Shylock's character by arguing that Shakespeare has put them into the play with the full intention of making them “an object of indignation and satire” comprehensible to “those who can be reached.”¹⁴ Girard thus sees Shakespeare as introducing an opposing current into his play, which he locates in the speeches of Shylock.¹⁵ Yet rather than accounting for Shylock's perceived power and goodness, this satire merely relieves the badness of his historical traits by once again applying them to everyone. The insufficiency of Girard's analysis thus prompts us to consider that we will not succeed in justifying the sympathy that Shylock so often inspires until we can stop opposing his historical meaning to his modern meaning. And we will be able to end this opposition only by endowing Shylock with an original meaning that is positive, a meaning that gives strong evidence of being authorially intended and that redefines the basis for his perceived likeness to the Christians. In sum, we need to recover from the originally intended conception of Shylock a value that resonates with—and even refines—our own perception of him, thus bringing coherence to what Robert Weimann would call his “past significance” and his “present meaning.”¹⁶

It is such a meaning, together with the meanings supporting it, that I will attempt to describe in the following pages. By complementing, adjusting, and extending the insights of previous interpreters, I propose to reveal the presence of a current in Merchant that contests Shylock's conventional badness in the very terms that have been seen to support it: the terms of Shakespeare's religious culture, which remains, if less authoritatively, our culture as well. From this religious culture Shakespeare will be shown to derive a positive meaning for Shylock's Jewishness and a similarly positive modification in the meaning of Antonio's Christianity. In deriving these meanings from the religious aspect of Shakespeare's culture, moreover, I depart from the recent critical tendency to define Shylock and Antonio with reference to their economic identities as usurer and merchant.¹⁷ Rather, it seems to me that the economic identities of these antagonists subserve their more important identities as Jew and Christian. And this view of their identities leads me to address their conflict through the teachings of St. Paul rather than those of Karl Marx. Yet, as I shall argue, the ancillary character of economics in this play will be grasped only in the recognition that Shakespeare's use of it is not literal but symbolic, a possibility overlooked by those who focus their historical investigations of this play on its economics. Cohen, for example, may admit that approaching the play as a critique of British capitalism “fails even to account for all of the purely economic issues in the work; his purpose in this admission is to justify an investigation of the play's Venetian setting as the venue more nearly reflecting its opposition of Jewish fiscal capitalism to native mercantile capitalism.¹⁸ Yet might we not alternatively refer to lack of precise realism in the play's economics to its function as the vehicle of a theological tenor? And would not such a function have the merit of integrating the play's economic and theological realms of meaning? My purpose in attempting this integration, however, is not to suggest that Merchant simply reflects received principles of religious orthodoxy; rather, it is to show how the distinctions that Shakespeare expresses through money present a formidable if highly constructive challenge to theological tenets engaged by the play.

The meanings I want to develop present Shylock not as a symbol of what Christianity negates, but rather as the symbolic source of its most treasured gift of salvation. But thus to redefine Shylock is by no means to regard him as free of defect or even as the play's main enunciator of this meaning. No doubt, he has morally compelling moments. Yet Shylock will be seen as contending with Antonio in a quarrel that is itself subject to censure, this censure tainting both antagonists. This censure has been partly discerned in the marginal dialogue between Launcelot and Old Gobbo in II.ii, which I shall further explore as an allegorical representation of the religious conflict represented in Antonio and Shylock. I suggest that this seemingly unimportant dialogue presents us with an instance of a literary device that André Gide in 1893 called mise en abyme, a term originally pertaining to heraldry, where it denotes a small figure placed at the heart of an escutcheon and replicating in miniature the escutcheon itself. Mise en abyme has been defined as “any enclave entertaining a relation of similarity with the work which contains it.”¹⁹ In Merchant, it appears as an encoded dialogue wherein two minor characters repeat on a smaller scale the play's major conflict, and in so doing, give new definition to this conflict. Not only repeating and redefining this conflict, however, they also exhibit a way of resolving it that seems to challenge the validity of its actual outcome. If the II.ii dialogue can be convincingly shown to perform these reflexive and critical functions in the play, it will emerge as a powerful key to its interpretation.

Yet assuming that the Launcelot/Old Gobbo dialogue harbors symbolic meaning, why should we assume that this meaning can be identified? Partly, perhaps, because it is expressed in terms that are arguably objective in comprising well-known elements of Shakespeare's religious culture. For, as we shall see, Launcelot and Old Gobbo are invested with two biblical allusions, and these allusions accord them typological identities that they then, as I think, transfer to Antonio and Shylock. These typological identities will be shown to have two functions. They refer the antagonism between these major characters to hegemonic impulses in both their traditions, Christianity attempting to dominate and assimilate Judaism, while Judaism would comparably dominate the gentile world by withholding its spiritual riches from that world. But these same allusions also identify a basis for the interaction of these characters that is not hegemonic but relational, and this relational basis turns out to be allegorically familial: Shylock and Antonio assume the relationship of father and son. It is this relationship that can support the pervasive but inadequately argued approbations of Shylock cited above. The biblical character of his paternity accounts for Shylock's power and goodness, and his fatherhood to Antonio places his perceived likeness to Antonio in a positive light that validates both these characters equally. For while the play certainly invests paternity with a connotation of authority, it also balances the father's authority over the son with the father's dependence on the son. This balance enables the relationship of father and son to imply not the “either/or” logic of domination but rather the “both/and” logic of mutual affirmation. And this “both/and” logic effectively destroys the legitimacy of a Christian or Jewish identity based on hegemony.

It is the evolution of power relations into family relations that the II.ii dialogue will be shown to achieve. And it is by contrast with this achieved evolution that the settlement between Antonio and Shylock in IV.i will be recognized as minimal and abortive. Thus the meanings generated by the II.ii dialogue tend to support the opinion of those who, in defiance of its historical justification, have found this settlement disturbing and unsatisfactory. Most importantly, these meanings shed light on the disputed significance of Shylock's forced conversion by suggesting that the play itself condemns it. The effect of the moral reference secreted in this dialogue is thus to endow Merchant with a refreshing, even startling, air of modernity. Yet what authenticates this modernity is its historic derivation. For since this dialogue can originate only in Shakespeare himself, its opposing voice will be regarded as his own allegorical commentary on the religious quarrel he depicts in Shylock and Antonio. Indeed, the force of this commentary emerges in the observation that Shakespeare compounds its new and relevant meanings out of wholly traditional components, and thus demonstrates how a poet of high and principled imagination validates his culture by causing it to transcend itself. In being grasped through its mimetic origin, the moral relevance of this dialogue reveals the play as both mirror and lamp: “a product of the past,” but also “a ‘producer’ of the future.”²⁰

I

Given what Mikhail Bakhtin has said about the carnivalesque in its various manifestations—the tendency of its crude and abusive laughter to annihilate the “epic image of the absolute past” by bringing it close for free and fearless investigation; its exploitation for this purpose of “an accidental and insignificant pretext”; its capacity to combine “an intense spirit of inquiry” with “a utopian fantasy”; and especially its use of the clown as the author's vehicle (though in this case not his own mask) for exposing “all that is vulgar and falsely stereotyped in human relationships”²¹—it is hardly surprising that Shakespeare locates his own critical and visionary engagement of ancient texts in the dialogue of Launcelot with Old Gobbo in II.ii. For here is a marginal dialogue that shows a young man, identified as clown, toying with his blind father in a manner both crude and cruel.²² Mistakenly supposing that this dialogue has an entertaining rather than a testing function, interpreters have often been baffled by its degraded humor. Accordingly, they have repeatedly dismissed Launcelot as, for example, “the slenderest and most pointlessly fatuous of Shakespeare's clowns.²³ Yet the mere gratuitousness of Launcelot's jesting has also prompted the suspicion that his antics somehow inform the action of the play. Leo Rockas and Jan Lawson Hinely have aptly noticed that Launcelot's conflicted decision to flee Shylock in II.ii, taken immediately before this dialogue, anticipates Jessica's similarly conflicted decision to flee Shylock in II.iii.²⁴ And with daring insight, René Fortin has found this dialogue to constitute an allegorical comment on the play's religious conflict, this comment providing a “counterstatement to the major allegorical statement of the play” that offers to correct “the one-sidedness and reductiveness of interpretation that the naive allegory invites.²⁵ In his view of this dialogue, Fortin uncovers important meanings; yet he only begins to mine them, his thesis thus begging the clarification and extension that this study will attempt to supply. To do this, however, requires that we first appreciate the importance of Fortin's thesis in light of the studies that inform it, particularly those of Dorothy Hockey and Barbara Lewalski.²⁶

Like Henley before her,²⁷ Hockey discerns a biblical persona lurking within this dialogue, a persona referring not to Launcelot but rather to Old Gobbo. This old father is seen to embody the Old Testament figure of Isaac: more precisely, the Isaac of Genesis xxvii, where the patriarch is similarly old and blind, and where his son Jacob, guided by the instructions of his mother, deceives his father into granting him his blessing.²⁸ Hockey's observation suggests that Old Gobbo is conceived as an allegorical representation, or type, of Isaac. And because this representation is presumably intended and therefore serious, Hockey attempts to interpret it by suggesting that it refers to the characterization of Shylock. For, as she notices, Shylock likewise invokes Genesis xxvii.²⁹

This Jacob from our holy Abram was
(As his wise mother wrought in his behalf)
The third possessor; ay, he was the third

—(I.iii.72-74)³⁰

Hockey's guess assigns a meaning to the otherwise vacuous character of Old Gobbo. But what gives that meaning dramatic significance is its ability to suggest that Old Gobbo typifies Isaac in order to project this biblical identity onto Shylock: that is, in order to make Shylock himself a type of Isaac. And a further parallel between Old Gobbo and Shylock emerges in the suffering of derisive cruelty by them both, this parallel suggesting that Old Gobbo's suffering may likewise be meant to inform the suffering of Shylock. If this is so, it means that the disturbing effect of this dialogue is entirely deliberate, its lucid cruelty ultimately referring to Shylock in his typological identity as Isaac and somehow linking that identity with his suffering.

Yet if Shakespeare is really using Old Gobbo to project the identity of Isaac onto Shylock, he is proceeding in a manner conspicuously oblique, especially when we observe that Isaac is named neither by Old Gobbo who represents him nor by Shylock who alludes to him. And why Shakespeare should find it desirable to mediate the connection between these characters through an allusion itself veiled will emerge in the tendency of Old Gobbo's Isaac to draw in a further typological identity anchored in Launcelot, an identity whose still more obscured lineaments may well answer to the subversive nature of the meanings it will be shown to suggest. Before addressing this identity, however, we ought first to consider what the presence of Isaac in Shylock can mean; and doing this entails acknowledging Lewalski's understanding of Shylock. In a view shared by a number of interpreters but best developed by herself, Lewalski regards Merchant as informed by the dichotomies of Pauline theology, in which Judaism affirms the works and justice of law in opposition to the unearned mercy or grace of Christian faith.³¹ This Pauline view of Judaism is what Lewalski finds Shylock to express, his individuality being subordinated to his symbolic representation of Judaism itself.³² Moreover, as Lewalski reposes the justice of Jewish law in Shylock, she likewise reposes the grace of Christian faith in Antonio, by allegorizing him as “the very embodiment of Christian love,” whose readiness to pay Bassanio's debt assigns him “the role of Christ satisfying the claim of Divine Justice by assuming the sins of mankind.”³³ And reinforcing the play's involvement of Pauline theology is Lewalski's observation that the dénouement of the conflict between Shylock and Antonio enacts Paul's critique of Jewish law. Paul insists that, like a schoolmaster whose lessons are designed to render him superfluous, law obviates itself by instructing its followers that it does not save, but rather condemns them. Shylock similarly finds that the law he has adduced for his vindication in fact confutes him, as his astonished “Is that the law?” (IV.i.314) suggests³⁴; and by identifying him as alien, law ends by condemning him. Thus Shylock's conflict with Antonio is found to dramatize “the confrontation of Judaism and Christianity as theological systems,” with Shylock's eventual subjection to Antonio and forced conversion to Christianity expressing the supersession of Judaism as the religion of law by Christianity as the religion of faith.³⁵

The pertinence of the biblical Isaac to this view of Shylock emerges in the ability of this figure to reflect Paul's explanation of why Judaism should of right be superseded. For the age and blindness that Isaac exhibits in Genesis xxvii are the very defects that Paul imputes to Judaism in presenting it as outworn. As “the ministration of death” which “is done away” (II Corinthian iii.7)³⁶ the dispensation of Moses is old, its law of works contrasting with the “Law of faith” (Romans iii.27), as “the oldenes of the letter” with the “newnes of Spirit” (Romans vii.6) and “newnes of life” (Romans vi.4). Paul also teaches that the old and outwardly literal meaning of Scripture is carnal, whereas its inwardly symbolic essence is spiritual; and that adherents to the Old Law of Judaism apprehend only the carnally literal meaning of Scripture and so are blind to its spiritual essence: God has given them “eyes that they shulde not se” (Romans xi.8); “The vaile is layed over their hearts” (II Corinthians iii.15). Thus Paul imputes a carnal unwisdom to Judaism, which he represents as blindness, this carnal unwisdom being what Isaac's blindness enables him to express. And the credibility of these Pauline meanings in Isaac is enhanced by their availability to Shakespeare in Calvin's Commentary on Genesis. Calvin here sees Isaac's physical blindness as a trope for the unwisdom or psychic blindness that causes him to prefer his elder son Esau above his younger and more deserving son Jacob: “With a blind, or, at least, a most inconsiderate love to his first-born, he [Isaac] undervalued the younger.³⁷ And further attesting his Pauline understanding of Isaac's blindness, Calvin notes its connection with his carnality: Isaac was “so enslaved to the indulgence of the palate” that he was “induced to give his preference to Esau, by the taste of his venison.”³⁸ But most significantly, Calvin makes Isaac symbolic of the Jews: “Let the Jews now go and glory in the flesh; since Isaac, preferring food to the inheritance destined for his son, would pervert … the gratuitous covenant of God!”³⁹ Possibly instructed by Calvin, Shakespeare seems to be giving Isaac the same meaning that Calvin gives him.

Thus a typological perception of Old Gobbo seems to ramify into further allegorical associations that intensify the theological suggestiveness of Shylock. Old Gobbo transfers his identity as Isaac to Shylock. But to the extent that Shylock himself can be viewed as symbolic of Judaism, the Isaac in Shylock allegorizes his Judaism as old, carnal, and blind. Yet the allegorical significance of Isaac becomes still more specific when we pause to observe that Genesis xxvii presents a father-son drama. If the Isaac in this text allegorizes Judaism, he also expresses fatherhood, a theme of Merchant that is primarily exhibited in both Old Gobbo and Shylock. And though the non-Jewish Old Gobbo cannot himself relate Isaac's paternity to his Jewishness, these qualities are subtly linked in Shylock, whom Lorenzo calls “father Jew” (II.vi.25),⁴⁰ thereby expressing Shylock's paternity as a function of his Jewishness. Thus in addition to being old, carnal, and blind, Judaism in Isaac emerges as paternal. And not adventitiously. For the carnal unwisdom of Isaac's blindness pertains to his paternity in preventing him from recognizing his son, Jacob. It is likewise a father-son drama that Old Gobbo and Launcelot present. And this same carnal unwisdom of father Isaac in failing to recognize his son Jacob is what blind Old Gobbo will be seen to exhibit in his own inability to recognize his son Launcelot. Yet if Old Gobbo's function is to apply the paternity of Isaac to Shylock, the carnal blindness of that paternity may plausibly pertain to him as well: Shylock too may have a son he cannot recognize; that is to say, a child other than Jessica, whom Shylock recognizes perfectly well. Carnal like Isaac, Shylock can be seen to recognize Jessica, because she is his carnal or biological daughter—Shylock calls her “My own flesh and blood” (III.i.34). But if Jessica's daughterhood is recognized because it is biological or carnal, this sonhood may well remain unrecognized because it is not carnal but rather spiritual: the same spiritual sonhood that Paul accords those whose faith in the redemption promised by God to Abraham makes them children of that promise and Abraham's true seed: “Nether are thei all children, because thei are the sede of Abraham: … That is, they which are the children of the flesh, are not the children of God: but the children of the promes are counted for the sede” (Romans ix.7-8). Paul thus identifies a spiritual as well as a carnal mode of sonhood; indeed, preferring the sonhood of the spiritual promise to the sonhood of the flesh. And since the play incorporates other cardinal tenets of Pauline theology, it is plausible to suspect that it incorporates this tenet as well, its involvement enabling Shakespeare to make Shylock father to an unrecognizably spiritual son. Yet not only hidden from Shylock, this son is also hidden from us, his hiddenness impelling us to ask if he really exists and thus obliging us to test for his existence. How might we do this? Perhaps by pursuing the suspicion that the identification of this son ought to parallel the recognition of Old Gobbo's association with Shylock. Just as Old Gobbo refers to Shylock, so Launcelot may be expected to refer to this son. And as Old Gobbo's reference to Shylock is veiled, emerging only through the mediating figure of Isaac that he typifies, so we can expect that the character to which Launcelot hypothetically refers will similarly resist identification until we discover a biblical figure that Launcelot likewise typifies. Does the play provide such a figure?

It would appear to in the biblical character of Jacob. For just as Launcelot is son to Old Gobbo, Jacob is son to Isaac. And Launcelot clearly invokes the Jacob of Genesis xxvii by twice asking Old Gobbo for his blessing: “Give me your blessing” (II.ii.78, 84). Moreover, by noting that Paul's Epistle to the Romans ix.6-13 represents Jacob's achievement of his elder brother Esau's blessing as symbolic of Christianity's supersession of Judaism, Fortin suggests that, even as an Old Testament figure, Jacob invokes sonhood as Christian;⁴¹ just as Isaac represents paternity as Jewish. Thus in causing Old Gobbo and Launcelot to typify Isaac and Jacob, Shakespeare is said by Fortin to be placing Judaism and Christianity in the relation of father and son, an idea that Lewalski likewise entertains in finding the converted Jessica's relation to her Jewish father to express the filial relation of Christianity to Judaism.⁴² It is, however, the failure of this father-son relationship that Fortin sees the II.ii dialogue to express, since he finds this relationship so represented as to require the paternal recognition that is lacking in Old Gobbo and the filial piety that is lacking in Launcelot.⁴³

I think that Fortin has discerned the broad meaning of this dialogue. Yet a problem remains. For while Launcelot's pursuit of his father's blessing can be seen to invoke Jacob, his Jacob seems, in the absence of a fraternal rival, to lack the specifically Pauline connotation that the carnal unwisdom of Old Gobbo, by contrast, imparts to his Isaac. Though the Isaac in Old Gobbo bears a suggestion of Judaism, the Jacob in Launcelot need not, in the absence of further evidence, bear a corresponding suggestion of Christianity. Thus, as it is, Fortin's thesis cannot be sustained. Still, the insufficiency of its defense need not suggest that Fortin's insight is invalid but only that it requires better substantiation. And this possibility prompts me to suspect that if Jacob does not sustain Fortin's thesis, it may be because the identity we are looking for is not primarily Jacob but rather some other figure that is likewise provided by the play. This hunch is reinforced, moreover, by the recognition that Launcelot's cruelty to his father is unaccounted for by the Isaac story, where Jacob deceives his father at his mother's command but certainly does not torment him. While imitating the behavior of Jacob, Launcelot also exhibits behavior unlike that of Jacob. And just as the figure of Jacob cannot account for all that Launcelot does, so Isaac cannot entirely account for the behaviors of Old Gobbo, especially his suffering and eventual recognition of his son. These unaccounted for details suggest that in addition to the Isaac story, which is certainly present, a second model may be involved in the Launcelot/Old Gobbo dialogue, a model that theologizes Launcelot in his cruelty just as the Genesis xxvii model theologizes Old Gobbo in his blindness. If an Old Testament model defines blindness as both paternal and Jewish, we may expect this second model to be likewise biblical but drawn from the New Testament and defining cruelty as both filial and Christian.

Suggestively, the play appears to contain a filial model of New Testament provenance in its allusions to prodigality. In I.i we hear Bassanio describe his habit of living past his “faint means” as making his time “something too prodigal” (I.i.125, 129); and Shylock likewise calls Bassanio “The prodigal Christian” (II.v.15). Not limited to Bassanio, however, this trait is also ascribed to Antonio: once obliquely in I.iii.21, where Shylock refers to his ventures as “squand’red abroad,” and again, more directly in III.i.45, where Shylock calls him “a prodigal” in the course of comparing him to the daughter who has fled with his wealth and squandered it. These allusions appear to invoke the story of the Prodigal Son in Luke xv. And these invocations are reinforced by the play's extended reference to this story in II.vi, a reference apparently directed at Jessica in immediately preceding the elopement that makes her a Christian. Might the Prodigal Son be the identity we are seeking? It seems probable. For, as we shall see, there is evidence to suggest that the sixteenth century understood this son to symbolize the Gentiles or Christians, it being this understanding that Shylock reflects in his reference to Bassanio as “The prodigal Christian.” And notwithstanding David N. Beauregard's view of prodigality as expressing extreme liberality,⁴⁴ much as Barnet earlier takes it to express Christian generosity,⁴⁵ we may recall that the original Prodigal's way with money has nothing to do with generosity, extreme or otherwise, and everything to do with the profligacy sequent to his rebellion against his father. Moisan, indeed, recognizes that the play invokes this term in its biblical sense of profligacy, while also considering that this meaning commands the recognition of Shakespeare's audience.⁴⁶ And supporting Moisan's opinion is Bassanio's characterization of his “something too prodigal” time as making him “a willful youth” who wastes and loses another's money; “and like a willful youth, / That which I owe is lost” (I.i.146-47). In this confession, Bassanio becomes one of those high-born prodigals that Moisan finds repeatedly censured in anti-usury tracts of the period such as The Death of Usury (1594): those idle borrowers who sought loans in order “to consume in prodigall maner, in bravery, banketting, voluptuous living, & such like.”⁴⁷ Yet in thus referring the censure of prodigality to the wasteful use of money not one's own, Moisan neglects other implications of this biblical term that the play may also be adducing: those nuances of rebellious flight and cruelty that are preeminent in Launcelot. For just as the Prodigal runs away from his father in an act of rebellion, so we meet Launcelot in the rebellious act of running away from Shylock. And just as the Prodigal's running away becomes an act of cruelty in making his father think him dead, so Launcelot exhibits cruelty in making his father think him dead. It thus becomes plausible to regard the rebellious flight and cruelty of Launcelot as enabling him to typify Luke's Prodigal Son,⁴⁸ just as Old Gobbo's blind nonrecognition of his son enables him to typify Isaac.

But if Old Gobbo projects his Isaac onto Shylock, who is the character upon whom Launcelot projects the identity of the Prodigal Son? As Launcelot is cruel, we can expect that the character he refers to will likewise be cruel. Suggestively, two of the characters verbally associated with prodigality demonstrate cruelty to Shylock in a manner evocative of Luke's Prodigal. The first is Jessica, who, like the Prodigal, takes her father's money, runs away from him, beggars herself, and causes her father, if not to think her dead, to wish her dead, in effect declaring her dead to him. Yet though fascinating and complex in her prodigality, and strongly associated with Launcelot, Jessica cannot be the character we are seeking, because she is both a biological and a recognized child. Besides Jessica, however, there is Antonio, who treats Shylock with contempt, this contempt resonating with the contempt that Launcelot likewise directs toward Shylock. And linked with Antonio's contempt is his demand to borrow Shylock's money, which enables him to invoke the Prodigal's demand for his father's money. Moreover, as the money demanded by the Prodigal facilitates the flight that repudiates and, in that sense, kills his own sonhood, so in the money he borrows from Shylock, Antonio actively abets Shylock's desire to kill him. These resemblances permit us to suspect that Antonio is the ultimate and hidden referent of Launcelot's prodigal sonhood. Just as the Gentiles are not the literal, biological children of the Jewish patriarch Abraham, and yet remain his symbolically spiritual children; so the gentile Antonio, while certainly not a literal, biological child of Shylock, may remain, in a realm of dramatic meaning restrictedly allegorical, the symbolically spiritual child of Shylock, the play's Jewish father, who invokes “holy Abram” and “father Abram” (I.iii.72, 160). And just as Shylock's psychic blindness comments on the Judaism he represents, so Antonio's prodigality can be seen to comment on the Christianity he represents. It may be the Christian cruelty of Antonio to Shylock in I.iii that Launcelot glosses as prodigal in II.ii, the prodigal representation of this cruelty turning its carnivalesque ridicule into an object of our ridicule. As exhibited in Launcelot, Antonio's contempt for Shylock can have no suggestion of revolutionary glamour; for, like Jack Cade of 2 Henry VI as well as Stephano and Trinculo of The Tempest, Launcelot rebels not against the system so much as against his place in it, his desire being to supplant his father's authority with his own,⁴⁹ as we shall see.

Against such a thesis one could, of course, object that, in being motivated by Shylock's usury, Antonio's cruelty should be able to resist the charge of prodigality. For as a monitory practice denounced by the Church, usury can be honorably detested by Antonio for transgressing his Christian ethic. Yet such an exoneration is complicated by the curious tendency of money to supplant religion itself as a motive for hatred between Shylock and Antonio. While hating Antonio as Christian, Shylock hates him even more for the losses he sustains in Antonio's refusal to practice usury:

I hate him for he is a Christian;
But more, for that in low simplicity
He lends out money gratis, and brings down
The rate of usance here with us in Venice.

(I.iii.41-45)

And with suggestive equivalence, Antonio “hates” Shylock's “sacred nation” but more vigorously “rails” against his usury:

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.48-51)

These emphases might well be taken to suggest that the religious conflict Shylock describes functions merely as the false consciousness of a conflict that is really economic.⁵⁰ Yet it also seems appropriate to observe that money can itself bear a spiritual meaning, as in Paul's references to divine grace as “the riches of [God's] bountifulnes” (Romans ii.4) and “the riches of his glorie” (Romans ix.23).⁵¹ Thus while money can express a negative worldliness, as it certainly does in Marlowe's Jew of Malta,⁵² Paul's words suggest that money can also be made to symbolize divine grace.⁵³ And the pertinence of this meaning to Merchant is suggested by the observation that Paul constitutes the riches of God's bountifulness in the blessing given by God to Abraham: the same blessing that Shylock in his I.iii defense of usury invokes as the possession lineally descending to Jacob from “our holy Abram” (I.iii.72). The association of money with blessing by both Paul and Shakespeare's character suggests to me that money in Merchant symbolizes this very blessing, the blessing of Abraham. Yet my intention in making this equivalence is hardly to ignore the play's negative portrayal of the money gained through usury, it is to explore the negative portrayal of usury for its own symbolic meaning. And this meaning will emerge in the interpretation of usury as symbolic of the Jews' claim to Abraham's blessing through a biological mode of inheritance that reserves that blessing exclusively to themselves. It is usury in its representation of this restrictedly Jewish blessing that can account for Antonio's detestation of it as well as his abuse of Shylock for practicing it, because the Christian Antonio claims this same blessing. Thus a theological competitiveness can be seen to inform the issue of money in this play. And by appreciating the theological resonance of this money, we can see that its Jewish grasping and Christian giving are not ultimate values but rather subserve the protagonists' differing needs. Shylock, the “rich Jew” (V.i.292), has the blessing and wants to keep it, so he favors grasping; the gentile Antonio needs this blessing and wants Shylock to give it to him, so he favors giving. Yet the one-sidedness of these values also distorts then, their distortion accounting for the representation of their exponents as blind and prodigal. Blind to the identity of Antonio as his spiritual son, Shylock, like father Isaac, would graspingly deny him the blessing of his wealth; while as Prodigal Son, Antonio demands the giving of Shylock's wealth in contemptuous repudiation of his carnal paternity.

To be sure, a still more problematical aspect of this thesis lies in its assertion of a relationship between Shylock and Antonio that lacks a literal basis in the text. Yet by invoking a theology that provides for a spiritual concept of sonhood, this thesis may mitigate if not solve the problem it raises. And further atoning for the allegorical character of this thesis is its usefulness in clarifying a number of critical perceptions about the play. By providing the play with typological identities that are relatively stable, it reinforces the conviction of Lewalski as well as Nevill Coghill, Kermode, John Cooper, Albert Wertheim, Norman Holland, Leslie Fiedler, Lawrence Danson, and to a lesser extent, Barber⁵⁴ that the conflict between Shylock and Antonio is religious. In postulating a symbolic view of money, this thesis dissolves the tension that Moody and Norman Rabkin see to trouble the play's ultimate enrichment of the Christians with the pelf that they have hated Shylock for possessing.⁵⁵ And in making money symbolic of Abraham's blessing, it reinforces John Coolidge's understanding of the conflict in Merchant as a struggle for possession of the Hebrew Scriptures that contain this blessing, a struggle that the Church conducted through the hermeneutics of its adversos Judaeos tradition.⁵⁶ This is the tradition that both Calvin and Shakespeare engage in their treatment of Isaac's blindness; and that Shakespeare appears, however surprisingly, to be adapting to his treatment of prodigality as well.

These typological references may also help to dispel some theoretical doubts regarding the play's interpretability by resolving discrepancies that Rabkin has observed between the meanings that the play tempts us to formulate and the nuanced responses that its experience demands. Identifying meaning as the product of intellection, Rabkin argues that an adequate definition of the play's meaning is not attainable because “all intellection is reductive”: “the closer an intellectual system comes to full internal consistency and universality of application … the more obvious become the exclusiveness of its value,” its “summary thematic statements” suppressing our “aesthetic experience.”⁵⁷ To support this view, Rabkin observes in part that critical formulations of the play's meaning are beset with disagreement.⁵⁸ Yet in extending to the question of whether Shylock or Antonio is the more deserving of blame, this disagreement may be obviated by the tendency of their typological identities to validate detractors of them both. Because their blindness and prodigality make them both wrong, the censure of them both can be right. Beyond showing us how both these characters are wrong, however, these biblical allusions also show how they are also both right, as Coghill perceives in finding that the Old Law and the New Law lodged in these antagonists are “both inherently right.”⁵⁹ For in also defining them as father and son, these typological identities refer the self-identity of each to the other, the father being father by virtue of the son and the son being son in having a father. Their relationship thus emerges as one of mutual dependency, which requires each to validate the other. And this shared validity can be seen to sustain the critical praise they have both received. The paternal and filial essences of these antagonists prevent their respective defenders from contradicting one another.

Moreover, by seeing that their defects of blindness and prodigality make them both wrong while their relationship as father and son makes them both right, we can see why the judgments they elicit from critics often exhibit the tentativeness, the backing and filling, the saying and unsaying that Rabkin has appropriately noticed.⁶⁰ Thus Barnet can declare Shylock to be “a hardhearted, self-regarding diabolical figure,” while also admitting that “we powerfully feel his claim.”⁶¹ Similarly attesting that Merchant is not an “easy” play by the apparent design of its author, Brown observes that he so presents Shylock's “devilish motivation” and “inhuman demands” as to encourage his audience to sympathize with them.⁶² And just as the play mitigates the evil of Shylock, so it impugns the goodness of Antonio, as Joan Ozark Holmer and Danson suggest in faulting his Christian failure to love his enemy Shylock.⁶³ Most importantly, however, the representation of these antagonists as both wrong and right prompts us to see what is wrong with them as vitiating what is right in them and thus as thwarting what should be a relationship of mutuality. As the source of their discord, then, the blindness and prodigality evinced by these characters become the objects of Shakespeare's censure and not the characters themselves. In Launcelot and Old Gobbo, moreover, these defects are largely surmounted, when Launcelot repents his cruelty to his father and Old Gobbo recognizes and blesses his son. Thus, as before suggested, Launcelot and Old Gobbo in II.ii seem to assume a paradigmatic function that renders their reconciliation prescriptive of a proper reconciliation between Antonio and Shylock. Yet while laying down this prescription, Shakespeare does not defy the realities of his world by having his antagonists fulfill it. Shylock's blindness is not lifted; rather, he is forced to bless Antonio with his symbolic money while remaining blind to his identity; and Antonio's prodigality seems to be reduced in one way, only to be maintained in another; specifically in his demand for Shylock's conversion, as we shall see.

Finally, recognizing the biblical character of Shylock's paternity can give us a surer sense of the play's tonality. For to the extent that this identity is derived from the Bible, it is not derived from New Comedy, and this means that Shylock is not a properly abandoned senex with whom we unaccountably sympathize, but rather a father whose dignity justly indicts the discontent and ensuing elopement of his daughter. Thus Shylock's biblical paternity lends support to those who deny that the tone of this play is romantic.⁶⁴ And since a romantic conception of the play is what impels critics to complain that Shylock's prominence impairs “the play as a whole” or raises “an interest beyond its resign,”⁶⁵ dispelling that conception also obviates the need for these complaints.

II

Yet before attempting to demonstrate how these meanings flow from the typological identities of Isaac and the Prodigal Son, I need to assure the reader by textual evidence that these identities exist in II.ii; and that they are there imposed on Launcelot and Old Gobbo in order to be transferred to Shylock and Antonio. Fortunately, a number of parallels suggesting the presence of blind Isaac in Old Gobbo have already been adduced by Hockey,⁶⁶ and need only to be restated and reinforced. Just as Genesis xxvii begins by telling us that Isaac “was olde,” so Shakespeare calls Launcelot's father Old Gobbo. In Isaac, blindness is a defect of age: Isaac “was olde, & his eies were dimme so that he colde not se” (Genesis xxvii.1); similarly, Old Gobbo is “more than sand-blind, high gravel-blind” (II.ii.36-37) which means that his eyes are not only dim but that he cannot see. Isaac's blindness makes him unable to recognize his son Jacob: “For he knewe him not” (Genesis xxvii.23). Correspondingly, Launcelot associates his father's blindness with nonrecognition of his filial self: “O heavens, this is my true-begotten father, who being more than sand-blind, high gravel-blind, knows me not” (II.ii.35-37). And just as Isaac's blindness is symbolic of his unwisdom, so Launcelot imputes unwisdom to Old Gobbo's blindness by saucily reversing the proverb regarding the wise child's ability to know his own father: “Nay, indeed if you had your eyes you might fail of the knowing me; it is a wise father that knows his own child” (II.ii.75-77).⁶⁷ Isaac's blind unwisdom is characterized as carnal in being focused on food, as he shows in telling his favored son, Esau, to “make me savourie meat, such as I love, and bring it to me that I maie eat, and … my soule maie blesse thee, before I dye” (Genesis xxvii.4); Launcelot ascribes a lecherous carnality to his father, which he describes in terms of cooking and eating: “For indeed my father did something smack, something grow to, he had a kind of taste” (II.ii.16-18). Genesis xxvii focuses on the blessing of Abraham, Jacob asking his father to “eat of my venison, that thy soule maie blesse me” (Genesis xxvii.19); Launcelot twice asks Old Gobbo, “Give me your blessing” (II.ii.78, 84). Even as it accounts for his unwillingness to bless Jacob, Isaac's carnal blindness enables Jacob's mother to coerce him into blessing Jacob by disguising him as the hairy Esau: “And she covered his hands and the smothe of his necke with the skinnes of the kyds of the goates” (Genesis xxvii.16). Thus deceived by his blindness, Isaac mistakenly but properly blesses Jacob: “For he knewe him not, because his handes were rough as his brother Esaus handes; wherefore he blessed him” (Genesis xxvii.23). Insolently presenting the back of his head to his father,⁶⁸ Launcelot causes the old man's blessing hands to mistake his head for his face and thus to think his face much hairier than it is: “Lord worshipp’d might he be, what a beard hast thou got! Thou hast got more hair on thy chin that Dobbin my fill-horse has on his tail” (II.ii.93-95). And if Jacob's “wise mother” plays a part in securing his blessing, Launcelot's identification of his mother helps induce Old Gobbo to bless him: “I am sure Margery your wife is my mother” (II.ii.89-90); to which the old father replies: “Her name is Margery indeed. I’ll be sworn, if thou be Launcelot, thou art mine own flesh and blood” (II.ii.91-93).

But while invoked by Old Gobbo who is not Jewish, Isaac seems to describe Shylock who is. By his own admission, Shylock too is “old” (II.v.2). In offering Antonio a bond of flesh, he shows his law to exhibit the carnality appropriate to its Jewishness. And to the extent that blindness symbolizes unwisdom Shylock's psychic blindness to Antonio as his spiritual son may be the unwisdom that Launcelot adduces, when he observes of his father, “Nay, indeed if you had your eyes you might fail of the knowing me; it is a wise father that knows his own child.” Just as Isaac's carnal blindness requires Jacob's “wise mother” to deceive Isaac into blessing him, so Shylock's blindness to his son Antonio requires another wise woman, Portia, to trick Shylock into endowing him with his blessing-symbolizing wealth.

Yet if Launcelot's pursuit of his father's blessing identifies him as Jacob, his running away from Shylock bears a different emphasis:

Certainly my conscience will serve me to run from this Jew my master. The fiend is at mine elbow and tempts me, saying to me, “[Gobbo], Launcelot [Gobbo], good Launcelot,” or “good [Gobbo], or “good Launcelot [Gobbo], use your legs, take the start, run away.” My conscience says, “No; take heed, honest Launcelot, take heed, honest [Gobbo],” or as aforesaid, “honest Launcelot [Gobbo], do not run, scorn running with thy heels.” Well, the most courageous fiend bids me pack. “Fia!” says the fiend; “away!” says the fiend; “for the heavens, rouse up a brave mind,” says the fiend, “and run.” Well, my conscience, hanging about the neck of my heart, says very wisely to me, “My honest friend Launcelot, … bouge not.” “Bouge,” says the fiend. “Bouge not,” says my conscience. … To be rul’d by my conscience, I should stay with the Jew my master, who (God bless the mark) is a kind of devil; and to run away from the Jew, I should be rul’d by the fiend, who, saving your reverence, is the devil himself. Certainly the Jew is the very devil incarnation. … The fiend gives the more friendly counsel: I will run, fiend; my heels are at your commandment, I will run.

(II.ii.1-32)

This speech depicts a psychic battle within Launcelot, a battle whose seriousness his flippant tone tries unsuccessfully to conceal. The fiend is prompting him to act on an impulse that his conscience is struggling to restrain. And the impulse that Launcelot's conscience would restrain is his desire to run away from Shylock, running away being variously alluded to seventeen times. Given the play's previous glances at prodigality, these insistent references to running away may well be inviting us to recall that Luke's Prodigal Son similarly “toke his journey into a farre countrey” where “he wasted his goods with riotous living” (Luke xv.13). So when Launcelot decides to run away from Shylock his master at the behest of the fiend, his action can plausibly acquire a prodigal connotation, especially in light of the association that II.ii will establish between master and father. But it also appears significant that, while decided, Launcelot's struggle is not resolved on the merits. By identifying his flight as prompted by the fiend, Launcelot recognizes that it is wrong. But Launcelot attempts to evade the wrongness of following the fiend's commandment by charging that Shylock too is “a kind of devil” and “the very devil incarnation.”⁶⁹ In the absence of a valid reason for his defection. Launcelot demonizes Shylock, this demonization spuriously licensing his running away.

Despite its light tone, Launcelot's demonizing of Shylock seems loaded with a serious meaning that emerges in its connotation of contempt. In demonizing Shylock, Launcelot is obviously expressing contempt for him. And once recognized to express contempt, Launcelot's demonizing can be linked to the flight it licenses. For flight and contempt both express alienation, albeit in significantly different ways. Flight is an action and thus can be said to express alienation psychically or spiritually. Thus if the alienation of flight expresses prodigality, so too the alienation of contempt may express prodigality, the one expression being carnal while the other is spiritual. In their carnality and spirituality, moreover, Launcelot's two expressions of prodigal expressions of prodigal alienation assume an obviously Pauline connotation, the connotation of Pauline spirituality in Launcelot's contempt being enhanced by its verbal character. For it is by defining the blessing as a verbal promise that Paul makes it spiritual; just as he declares “faith preached” to be the way of receiving the “Spirit”: “Received ye the Spirit by the workes of the Law, or by the hearing of faith preached?” (Galatians iii.2). But what makes these Pauline modes of prodigality significant is the observation that they are respectively displayed with great prominence by Jessica and Antonio. Like Launcelot, Jessica runs away from Shylock; and like Launcelot, Antonio treats him with contempt, in part, by calling him devil: “The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose” (I.iii.98). It thus becomes possible to suspect that the flight and contempt united in Launcelot associate him with both Jessica and Antonio in their respectively carnal and spiritual expressions of a common prodigality.

Further reinforcing Launcelot's association with Jessica and Antonio is his placement in the drama between these characters, Launcelot's prodigality in II.ii standing between Antonio's prodigality in I.iii and Jessica's prodigality in II.iii. This placement seems to enhance the ability of Launcelot to clarify the prodigality of Antonio. For it is by following and thus repeating the prodigality of Antonio that Launcelot can gloss that prodigality. But if Launcelot's prodigality follows that of Antonio, Jessica's prodigality follows that of Launcelot. And this suggests that just as Launcelot's situation enables him to comment on Antonio, Jessica's situation enables her to comment on Launcelot. Indeed, it would appear that if Launcelot's purpose is to comment on Antonio, it is Jessica that facilitates this purpose by clarifying prodigality in Launcelot. For Jessica expresses her prodigality in the physical action of flight, which is easily identified as prodigal, in contrast to contempt, which is relatively subtle. Thus an appreciation of how Launcelot's contempt identifies Antonio's contempt as prodigal should emerge from an appreciation of how Jessica's fight identifies Launcelot's flight as prodigal, it being Launcelot's flight that lends the connotation of prodigality to his contempt.

Jessica clarifies the prodigality of Launcelot's flight by repeating, and thus emphasizing, it in the next scene. But besides repeating Launcelot's flight, Jessica also repeats the thoughts and purposes attending it. In recognizing that shame for her lineage is a “heinous sin” (II.iii.16), Jessica exhibits the inner struggle that precedes Launcelot's flight. Like Launcelot, Jessica flees in order to “end [the] strife” (II.iii.20) that cannot be resolved. And albeit subtly, Jessica preserves Launcelot's association of flight with demonizing contempt by referring to her father's house as “hell” (II.iii.2). As Launcelot's demonizing of Shylock reflects badly on himself, so in locating the hellishness of Shylock's house in its “tediousness” (II.iii.3), Jessica has been seen to betray the frivolity of her own nature.⁷⁰ Launcelot and Jessica also flee for the same prodigal purpose. Launcelot anticipates and gets the license of a fool in being given “a livery / More guarded than his fellows” (II.ii.154-55), and he expresses that license in “getting up of the Negro's belly” (III.v.38-39); Jessica leads a life of riot with Lorenzo. And besides repeating Launcelot's flight in its various aspects, Jessica further clarifies the prodigality of that flight by recasting it as a child's flight from a father.

In II.vi, moreover, Shakespeare all but explicitly identifies Jessica's flight as prodigal through Gratiano's extended allusion to the Prodigal Son. For in being delivered just before Jessica executes her flight, this allusion seems to point toward her:

How like a younger or a prodigal
The scarfed bark puts from her native bay,
Hugg’d and embraced by the strumpet wind!
How like the prodigal doth she return,
With over-weather’d ribs and ragged sails,
Lean, rent, and beggar’d by the strumpet wind!

(II.vi.14-19)

Like Jessica, the “scarfed bark” is female. But this bark also seems to mediate between the behavior of the original Prodigal and Jessica. Like the Prodigal who takes his journey into a far country, the bark “puts from her native bay”; and like the bark, Jessica abandons her father's house, to journey abroad with Lorenzo. Like the lascivious Prodigal who “devoured [his father's] goods with harlots” (Luke xv.30), the bark is “Hugg’d and embraced by the strumpet wind”; and, like the embraced bark, Jessica is embraced by Lorenzo, who plays the harlot or “strumpet wind”; and like the bark, Jessica is beggared by her riot with Lorenzo.

Thus in II.vi, Shakespeare reinforces the prodigal character of the flight that Jessica clarifies in Launcelot, and Launcelot's flight, spiritualized into contempt, is what he clarifies in Antonio. Yet in mediating Jessica's prodigality to Antonio, Launcelot also orients these characters to each other; thus enabling us to regard them as the carnal and spiritual reflections of one another. As Jessica's flight acts out her contempt, Antonio's contempt emerges as a psychic flight from Shylock's strong claims against his conscience. As Jessica's flight becomes the recourse of an unresolved inner struggle, so the breakdown of Antonio's strained civility under the pressure of Shylock's arguments can likewise reflect an impasse in his own inner struggle.

Flight, however, is not the Prodigal's only behavior. For not only fleeing from his father, the Prodigal also demands his money: “And the yonger of them said to his father, Father, give me the portion of the goods that falleth to me. So he devided unto them his substance” (Luke xv.12). If the physicality of the Prodigal's flight suggests its carnality, the verbal character of his demand suggests its spirituality. And these distinctions become pertinent when we recall that both these prodigal behaviors are expressed in the play. If Jessica expresses the Prodigal carnally in her flight from Shylock, Antonio seems to express the Prodigal spiritually in his I.iii demand to borrow, or “have” (I.iii.116) Shylock's money. But one more complication obtains. For if, apart from the inherent spirituality of his demand, Antonio spiritualizes Jessica's flight into contempt, Jessica, apart from the carnality of her flight, may also be seen to carnalize Antonio's demand for Shylock's money by running away with Shylock's money. If Antonio spiritualizes what is carnal, Jessica carnalizes what is spiritual, these transformations enabling Jessica and Antonio to participate in both behaviors of the Prodigal, in both the taking of money and the flight that also appears as contempt. And this participation lends a moral significance to the observation that, even as he demands Shylock's money, Antonio treats him with contempt. His contemptuous demand for Shylock's money thus becomes a complex act of prodigality demonstrating his unworthiness to receive that money, as Shylock trenchantly observes:

Signior Antonio, many a time and oft
In the Rialto you have rated me
About my moneys and my usances.
Still have I borne it with a patient shrug
(For suff’rance is the badge of all our tribe).
You call me misbeliever, cut-throat dog,
And spet upon my Jewish gaberdine,
And all for use of that which is mine own.
Well then, it now appears you need my help.
Go to then, you come to me, and you say,
“Shylock, we would have moneys,” you say so—
You, that did void your rheum upon my beard,
And foot me as you spurn a stranger cur
Over your threshold; moneys is your suit.

(I.iii.106-19)

Once grasping a symbolic dimension in Shylock's “moneys,” we begin to recognize a meaning in his indignant words that transcends the realm of economics. Rather than the usually cited speeches of III.i and IV.i, these words of Shylock address the theological core of his claim against Antonio, a claim whose merit, while not perfect, is reinforced by Antonio's defiant retort:

I am as like to call thee so again,
To spet on thee again, to spurn thee too.
If thou wilt lend this money, lend it not
As to thy friends, for when did friendship take
A breed for barren metal of his friend?

(I.iii.130-34)

Not only churlish, however, Antonio's prodigal demand for Shylock's money assumes a further and darker implication emerging from its suggestive parallel with Jessica's absconding from Shylock. For in running away with her father's money, Jessica commits physical, literal theft. Thus to the extent that Jessica's flight expresses physically what Antonio's contempt expresses spiritually, it may effectively accuse Antonio of an alternatively spiritual form of theft. In short, Shakespeare may be ascribing theft to prodigality in both Jessica and Antonio, thus giving point to Shylock's monitory observation to Antonio that “thrift is blessing, if men steal it not” (I.iii.90). And Shakespeare seems to be establishing this guilty equality between Jessica and Antonio with the view to establishing a further equality in guilt between Antonio and Shylock. For in being understood as theft from Shylock, Antonio's contemptuous demand assumes a likeness to Shylock's usury, which was understood as a legal form of theft,⁷¹ a theft that Shylock at first intends to practice against Antonio. Further evidence for the view of Antonio's demand as theft will emerge in the discussion of how the text provides for a symbolic understanding of money as Abraham's blessing. What we need to notice now is that both the money stolen by Jessica and demanded by Antonio is lost, its loss in both cases invoking the Prodigal's loss of his father's money. If Jessica squanders Shylock's ducats in riot with Lorenzo, the ventures out of which Antonio is to repay Shylock's loan are analogously and therefore prodigally “squand’red abroad.” As with Bassanio's self-referred observation that “like a willful youth, / That which I owe is lost,” Antonio loses what he owes Shylock. But it is Shylock himself who most clearly and overtly identifies the bankrupt Antonio as prodigal by comparing him to his own profligate daughter: “There I have another bad match. A bankrout, a prodigal, who dare scarce show his head on the Rialto; a beggar, … ” (III.i.44-46). Just as Jessica's riot reduces her to beggary, so Antonio's losses reduce him in III.iii to begging Shylock for his life. And the lost gains of Jessica and Antonio are what Launcelot will likewise be seen to anticipate in II.ii by seeking the paternal blessing that money symbolizes in a manner conducting to its loss.

III

The obviously subversive implication of thus defining the play's representatively Christian character as prodigal may go far toward explaining why Shakespeare presents this definition in so veiled and oblique a manner. He could not prudently express such a meaning in any other way. Yet prudence may not be the only cause of its obscurity. Further impeding a recognition of Antonio's prodigality is the presence in Launcelot and Old Gobbo of more than one biblical persona. For the allusions to Isaac and the Prodigal Son draw in their own stories, both of which are told simultaneously. And each of these stories contains a father and a son. So by telling both of them at once, Shakespeare endows his dialogue with two fathers and two sons, Old Gobbo primarily representing the blind Isaac but also the suffering father of the Prodigal; while Launcelot primarily represents the Prodigal Son but also Jacob, the fusing of the Prodigal Son with Jacob supporting Fortin's sense of Jacob in this play as a Pauline expression of Christianity. The conflation can account for the puzzling linkage of Old Gobbo's Isaac with his suffering, that suffering pertaining to his identity as father of the Prodigal. It can also account for Launcelot's ability to associate his prodigal flight from Shylock with a request for his father's blessing that, besides resonating with the Prodigal's request, is Jacob-like in its deceitful withholding of his identity; just as Jacob hides his identity from his father. Yet while doubtlessly troublesome, this doubling is probably not capricious. For attention to the characteristics of the dialogue's two fathers can reveal them as supplying one another's deficiencies, just as the two sons seem similarly to supply one another's deficiencies. If Isaac is blind, the father of the Prodigal can see and recognize his son; if the Prodigal's father suffers under the impiety of his son, Isaac does not so suffer. If the Prodigal is rebellious, Jacob is pious; but Jacob is also devious in his piety, whereas the Prodigal is honest and forthright in his rebellion, just as Antonio is forthright in his hostility to Shylock. These mutually amending identities seem to anticipate a composite father who sees with joy and a composite son who candidly expresses piety, these composites being achieved by a purging away of the paternal defects of blindness and suffering and the filial defects of rebellion and deceit. But this is not all. For it is also important to notice that, in their rectification, these composites seem to coalesce into new typological identities, these identities being the father and son of the Prodigal's return. For that is the father who sees with joy: “And when he was yet a great way of, his father sawe him, and had compassion, and ran & fel on his necke, and kissed him” (Luke xv.20). And that is the son who candidly expresses repentant piety: “Father, I have sinned against heaven, and before thee, And am no more worthie to be called thy sone: make me as one of thy hired servants” (Luke xv.18-19). It is in these transformations that father and son express the redemptiveness of their mutual dependency, the father being blessed in the reclamation of his son and the son being blessed in his return to his father. And these typological transformations are what Launcelot and Old Gobbo achieve in their II.ii reconciliation.

It would thus appear that the powerfully moving scene of the Prodigal's return to his father is what Old Gobbo and Launcelot set forth as the, albeit unachieved, ideal of reconciliation between Shylock and Antonio as Jewish father and Christian son. Yet this scenario requires that the two fathers and two sons culminating in these redeemed identities pertain not only to Old Gobbo and Launcelot but also to Shylock and Antonio. In Shylock these fathers are relatively easy to spot. His blindness to his spiritual son and his suffering enable Shylock, like Old Gobbo, to represent both blind Isaac and the father of the Prodigal. Likewise, Antonio can be seen to reflect Launcelot's prodigal contempt, to which he adds a similarly prodigal demand to “have” Shylock's money. And as Launcelot is like Jacob in deceitfully hiding his filial identity from Old Gobbo, so Antonio refuses to acknowledge his filial relation to Shylock. But there is a deeper sense in which Antonio may express the deceit of Jacob. For Antonio demands Shylock's money not for himself but on behalf of his friend Bassanio. And by demanding this money in another's name, Antonio may subtly invoke Jacob as the son who asks for the blessing in the disguise of another's name. To be sure, this association may seem dubious in ignoring the sharp difference between Jacob's grasping and Antonio's generosity. Yet this difference seems curiously to fade in the observation that Antonio's generosity has in fact been challenged by a number of critics, who see it as his means of fast-binding Bassanio to himself.⁷² And in confessing his inability “to know myself” (i.i.7), which suggests an ignorance of his own motivation, Antonio may well prompt us to regard him as self-deceived. It is the self-deceivedly self-serving character of his demand that seems most profoundly to associate Antonio with the deceitful selfishness of Jacob; just as the contemptuous character of that demand can reflect the rebellion of the Prodigal. And these associations gain plausibility in the contrasting observation that, while not expunging rebellion and deceit from the terms of his IV.i settlement with Shylock, Antonio mitigates these defects by muting his contempt for Shylock and also, as I shall suggest, by demanding his wealth not for another but, more honestly and knowingly, for himself.

Yet Shakespeare's ability to meld the fathers and sons invoked by these two texts is also enhanced by similarities in the texts themselves. For in dealing alike with a father and son as well as with a father's gift to his son, these texts can almost be seen as Old and New Testament versions of the same story. And further suggesting their similarity is the observation that the original form of both these stories includes a third character in an elder brother who vies with the younger for paternal favor and loses out, or sees himself as losing out, to the younger. But what seems the most important similarity in these fraternal conflicts is their susceptibility to analogously allegorical interpretations that are pertinent to Shakespeare's play. As earlier observed in Romans ix.6-13, Paul takes the conflict of Jacob with Esau to symbolize the conflict between Christianity and Judaism, the elder Esau representing Judaism, while the younger Jacob who displaces him represents Christianity. In the Prodigal story, an elder brother interprets the father's celebration of the Prodigal's return as evidence that he loves this offending younger better than himself (Luke xv.29-30). Yet in this story the father assures the elder that his love for the returned Prodigal does not prejudice his love for him:

Sonne, thou art ever with me, and all that I have, is thine. It was mete that we shoulde make mery, & be glad: for this thy brother was dead, and is alive againe: and he was lost, but he is founde.

(Luke xv.31).

As with Paul's understanding of Esau and Jacob, the Geneva Bible glosses this verse in a manner that likewise makes the elder and younger brothers of Luke xv symbolic of the Jews and the Gentiles: “Thy parte, [who] art a Jewe, is nothing diminished by that ye Christ was also killed for the Gentiles.”⁷³ This gloss attests the sixteenth-century understanding of the Prodigal Son as symbolic of the Gentiles or Christians. But the further importance of this gloss emerges in its ability to suggest that, not only derogating the Jews, sixteenth-century Christianity could also recognize a mutuality between Jews and Christians, this mutuality being what Shakespeare affirms, even as he gives it an alternative definition. For in both these stories Shakespeare deletes the elder brother, the only trace of him in Merchant residing in Gratiano's reference to “a younger or a prodigal” in II.vi.14, which implies an elder as well. In effect, Shakespeare no longer needs the elder brother because he has transferred the Judaism he represents to the father. But in thus making these stories express a conflict between the father and a remaining younger, Shakespeare also puts moral pressure on this younger. For a younger brother may justly refuse submission to an elder brother inherently inferior to himself, as Paul finds a symbolically Christian Jacob to do regarding a symbolically Jewish Esau. But it is problematical for a son to rebel against a father, however old and infirm, because, unlike an elder brother, the father is author of the son; as Fortin likewise suggests in finding the II.ii dialogue to define Judaism as “the older tradition from which [Christianity] derives its richness.”⁷⁴ And beyond the father's authority, there is his dependence. While II.ii will show paternal infirmity as tempting the son to abrogate his loyalty to his father, it will also show this infirmity as making the son essential to the father, as Old Gobbo suggests in calling Launcelot “the very staff of my age, my very prop” (II.ii.66-67).

The description of filial defection as prodigal becomes still more suggestive, moreover, if we consider that this biblical term tends to resonate with doctrines central to the Christian theology of supersession. For the Prodigal's behavior toward his father seems to resemble the behavior of the Church toward its own parental source. We have observed that the Prodigal both demands his father's wealth and rebels against him. But as Rosemary Ruether observes in her influential book, Faith and Fratricide, this curious combination of demand and rejection is what Christianity has historically exhibited toward Judaism. Ruether explains that the Church needed “to legitimate its revelation in Jewish terms,” that is, to show that revelation as representing “the true meaning of the Jewish Scriptures and … the divinely intended fulfillment of Moses, the Psalms, and the Prophets.”⁷⁵ Thus the Church claimed the texts of Judaism for itself. But its need to legitimate its own interpretation of Jewish Scripture also prompted the Church to reject the Jews' reading of these texts. And the pertinence of this hostile appropriation of Jewish Scripture to Merchant is what Antonio appears to evince in his I.iii response to Genesis xxx, the text relating Jacob's breeding of Laban's sheep, which Shylock takes for his discourse on usury. For while accepting the authority of Shylock's text, Antonio rejects Shylock's interpretation of it. While Shylock takes this text to show the blessing as gained by “what Jacob did” as “skillful shepherd” (I.iii.77, 84), Antonio contradictingly refers to Jacob's blessing as “A thing not in his power to bring to pass / But sway’d and fashion’d by the hand of heaven” (I.iii.92-93). Yet what confirms the theological suggestiveness of this dispute is the recognition that Shylock's approbation of Jacob's skillful deeds adumbrates Paul's characterization of works as a method of active self-reliance by which the Jews are said to earn Abraham's blessing; while Antonio's reliance on “the hand of heaven” adumbrates Paul's identification of grace as the passively unearned way of Christianity, the way that supplants Jewish works. Thus Antonio's negation of Shylock's interpretation can be seen to epitomize the larger claim of the Church to a superior understanding of the Jewish Scriptures that validates its superseding appropriation of these Scriptures. And while it is certainly plausible to assume that Antonio's opposing interpretation should enjoy the presumption of approval, we should also note that this presumption is subtly undermined by the continuity of his argument with his contemptuous, which is to say prodigal, demand for Shylock's money.

But not only demanding his father's wealth and rebelling against him, the Prodigal also turns the wealth he takes from his father into the means of his rebellion, that wealth being what enables him to run away. And in this behavior, the Prodigal seems to reflect the tendency of the Church not only to claim Jewish texts and interpret them differently, but also to search these very texts for passages that might be seen to delegitimate the claim of the Jews to be their rightful inheritors, passages that formed the hermeneutical tradition known as adversos Judaeos.⁷⁶ In effect, this tradition adduced Scriptural texts purporting to show Judaism as delegitimating itself,⁷⁷ texts that Paul calls to witness in declaring Judaism abrogated by the coming of Christ: “Now is the righteousness of God made manifest without the Law, having witnes of the Law and of the Prophetes” (Romans iii.21). Ruether, moreover, explains that one of the ways in which the Church turned the Jews' texts against them was by distorting the dual character of Hebrew prophecy: its dialectic of judgments and promises, denunciations and consolations. Whereas the prophets directed both the judgments and the promises to the Jews, the Church claimed the promises for itself while relegating the judgments to the Jews. Thus Jewish texts were used to define the Jews as a rejected and reprobate people,⁷⁸ and this charge of reprobation attained its culmination in Christian writings demonizing the Jews and the law. In John viii.44, Jesus tells the Jews that “Ye are of your father the devil.” Associating law with the quasi-Gnostic realm of condemned nature, Paul defines it as “the traditions of men, according to the rudiments of the worlde” and as “ordinances of the worlde” (Colossians ii.8, 20); rudiments and ordinances, which in Galatians iv.3 and iv.8-10 assume the character of bondage: “Even so, we when we were children, were in bondage under the rudiments of the worlde.” And as the most notorious demonizer of Judaism and Jews, St. Chrysostom charges in one typical passage that “demons inhabit the very souls of the Jews, as well as the places where they gather.”⁷⁹

It is thus to the adversos Judaeos tactic of turning the Jews' prophecies against them that the Christians' demonizing of Shylock can be traced. And this tactic also seems to be symbolically acted out by Jessica and Antonio in their prodigal rejection of Shylock through his own wealth. For as her letter to Lorenzo suggests in crudely detailing the items of her stolen dowry, “What gold and jewels she is furnish’d with” (II.iv.31), Jessica uses her father's money to purchase the marriage that effects her escape from him. But is the behavior of Antonio any different? He demeans Shylock for lacking the “friendship” he would triumphantly display toward Bassanio by lending him money free of interest: “for when did friendship take / A breed for barren metal of his friend?”. Yet Antonio would express his superior generosity by means of money that belongs to Shylock. Just as Jessica uses her father's own wealth to flee from him, so Antonio uses Shylock's own wealth to insult him, the prodigality of their actions being reinforced by the financial ruin that overtakes them both. But the supersessionary implications of Antonio's prodigality also seem to invest the ruin it provokes with a specifically theological if unorthodox suggestion: which is that Christianity can void the validity of Judaism to Judaism only by voiding the validity of Judaism to itself as well, which is to say, by beggaring itself. We should note, moreover, that a comparably theological censure is applied to Shylock's Jewish blindness. As earlier observed, Shylock compares Antonio's financial losses to those of the prodigal Jessica in terms that finally include the overt identification of Antonio too as prodigal: “There I have another bad match. A bankrout, a prodigal, who dare scarce show his head on the Rialto; a beggar … ” Since prodigality implicitly includes the notion of son or child, a notion explicit in the case of Jessica, Shylock's comparison of Antonio to Jessica while calling him prodigal can be read as all but divulging to us that Antonio too is his child. Yet subtly invoking Paul's view of the Jews as blind to the meaning of their own texts, Shylock speaks words that he himself fails to understand.

It thus appears that Shakespeare's use of the adversos Judaeos tradition is most startling in the impartiality of its application. Not only using a Jewish text “against the Jews,” he also uses a Christian text “against the Christians,” thus turning the hermeneutic of self-invalidation against its own practitioners. Eschewing, moreover, the tendency of this tradition to distort Hebrew prophecy by disjoining its condemnations from its promises, Shakespeare's biblical texts exhibit a prophetic balance in their conjoined implications of censure and approbation. Yet here a problem arises. For the adversos Judaeos claim that Judaism confutes itself is precisely what Shylock's Jewish law appears to illustrate in IV.i. Shylock is defeated by his own bond or law in failing to fulfill its stipulation that he exact a just pound of Antonio's flesh while spilling no drop of his blood. How then can the play censure the use of Judaism to confute Judaism as prodigal without contradicting its own plot? Serious as this objection is, I think that we can answer it by observing that this plot evinces a suggestive parallel between the fates of Shylock and Antonio. If the play defeats Shylock's law in IV.i, it defeats Antonio's love in V.i by alienating him from Bassanio. If Shylock's own bond or law is implicated in his defeat, Antonio's love seems likewise involved in his defeat. And if law expresses Judaism, love assumes a comparably Christian connotation by invoking the concept of the promise. For Gratiano subtly bases love, like Abraham's blessing, on the word of promise: “I got a promise of this fair one here / To have her love” (III.ii.206-7). And by granting her love in a manner that evokes God's promise to Abraham, Nerissa makes it an expression of her generosity, or charity, thus endowing that love with a dominant spirituality that warrants Gratiano's theologically nuanced response to it with a pledge of “faith.” When Bassanio asks, “And do you, Gratiano, mean good faith?”, he responds, “Yes, faith, my lord” (III.ii.210-11). It is, moreover, the spiritual character of his love for Bassanio that Antonio attests in offering to immolate his flesh for him.

Yet, as earlier observed, a number of critics have recognized that Antonio's love is tainted by possessiveness, and this possessiveness introduces contradiction into Antonio's character by challenging the spirituality of his love. For if love expresses its spirituality in charity, which defines it as generous, its possessiveness bespeaks not spirituality but carnality. This observation tallies, moreover, with the widespread critical awareness of a carnal element, whether implicit or explicit, in Antonio's love for Bassanio.⁸⁰ I myself tend to view this carnality as latent and becoming overt when Portia thwarts Antonio's martyrdom for Bassanio in IV.i. For to the extent that Antonio's martyrdom expresses his love's spirituality, it does this by containing the possessiveness of that love within a dominant generosity. Though his martyrdom for Bassanio would give Antonio a powerful hold on him, yet that hold would be achieved through the greatest of all gifts: life itself. Thus when Portia thwarts Antonio's martyrdom by defeating Shylock's bond, she destroys the greater mechanism of generosity that had subsumed the carnal possessiveness of Antonio's love, which forthwith emerges in the interaction of Bassanio, Antonio, and Portia concerning Bassanio's ring. In her disguise as the young doctor Balthazar, Portia asks Bassanio to give her his ring in payment for saving Antonio's life. And since this is the ring that Portia has commanded him to keep and that he himself has promised to keep, Bassanio denies her the ring. But Antonio now intervenes to insist that he surrender the ring: “Let his deservings and my love withal / Be valued ’gainst your wive's commandement” (Iv.i.450-51), the term “commandement” bearing the obvious connotation of law. By dismissing Portia's prohibition as a “commandement,” Antonio seems to be urging Bassanio to disvalue his marriage with Portia as a merely legal arrangement. So when Bassanio reverses his refusal and sends the disguised Portia the ring, he can be seen to transgress the legal character of his marriage for the sake of Antonio. But this transgression also seems to convey a sense of sexual rejection. For with the carnality appropriate to the legality of the contract it betokens, Portia's ring has been seen to symbolize the sexual essence of the female body,⁸¹ as Portia herself suggests in her ensuing threat to entitle the possessor of the ring to the sexual possession of her body:

Since he hath got the jewel that I loved,
And that which you did swear to keep for me,
I will become as liberal as you,
I’ll not deny him any thing I have,
No, not my body nor my husband's bed”

(V.i.224-28)

It is important to notice, moreover, that Bassanio follows his surrender of the ring with a decision to accompany Antonio to his house, thus consenting to spend his wedding night not with his wife but with his friend. In a moment of special intimacy,⁸² Bassanio tells Antonio,

Come, you and I will thither presently,
And in the morning early will we both
Fly toward Belmont. Come, Antonio.

(IV.i.455-57)

This decision suggests that, rather than merely expressing his choice of a spiritual love for Antonio above his carnal love for Portia, Bassanio's surrender of the ring effectively transfers his erotic allegiance from his wife to his friend. And further negating a spiritual value in Bassanio's decision to surrender the ring and go home with Antonio is the recognition that in both these actions, Bassanio breaks promises. Bassanio had promised Portia to keep her ring and had likewise promised her that, while he was in Venice, “No bed shal e’er be guilty of my stay, / Nor rest be interposer ’twixt us twain” (III.ii. 326-27). As the object of Portia's faith in Bassanio's love, these promises constitute the spiritual basis of their marriage, the basis that Bassanio destroys in breaking them. In acceding to Antonio's demand and going home with him, Bassanio would appear to be violating both the carnal and the spiritual integrity of his marriage to Portia.

Yet the implications of Bassanio's moral failure extend beyond himself to Antonio as the instigator of that failure. For in prompting Bassanio to surrender Portia's ring, Antonio subtly demands, and I think, attains, a carnal payment from him not entirely different from that which Shylock had tried to achieve through his bond. In making this demand, Antonio degrades his love from charity to lust, thereby contradicting the spirituality of his love that is fundamental to his Christian faith. But what gives a further significance to the sense of degraded self-contradiction in Antonio's love is the ability of that love to assume a parallel with Shylock's law, which has similarly degraded itself to an unfulfillable and therefore self-contradicting warrant for murder. Just as the contradiction in his degraded law, together with its identification of him as alien, betrays Shylock into guilt; so the contradiction of his faith by his carnally degraded love betrays Antonio into guilt. And as Shylock is then forced to surrender the law that incriminates him, so Antonio is, albeit more subtly, forced to surrender the love that incriminates him by handing Bassanio over to Portia.⁸³ It is this parallel that Brown decries in observing that Antonio's eventual loss of his friend has “a potential dramatic interest comparable to Shylock's isolation at the end of the trial.”⁸⁴

Are we then to view the play as rejecting faith in love or the greater faith in God defined as Love? It does not seem likely. But if faith can be defeated and yet not rejected, are we compelled to view Shylock's defeated law as rejected? Instead, might we not surmise that what has been rejected in Shylock and Antonio are not the principles of law and faith but rather these principles in the blindness and prodigality that cause them to deny the mutual dependency of their relation as father and son?

I shall interpret the cold accommodation between Shylock and Antonio in IV.i as beginning and then aborting the restoration of their relation as father and son. Yet since the terms of this aborted reconciliation are partly monetary, they will attain the theological meanings I am trying to impart to them only if we perceive money as a symbolic representation of Abraham's blessing. This symbolic view of money is what the play supports in its subtle association of the physical “goods” that the Prodigal's father gives his son with the spiritual blessing that Isaac gives Jacob. And a comparably symbolic meaning in money is what Shylock suggests, with the tacit concurrence of Antonio, by representing Jacob's wealth as making him “blest” (I.iii.89). But more extensive evidence for such a view seems to emerge from the play's focus on Shylock's usury. For in defending this practice, Shylock articulates three pairs of terms, two of these pairs pertaining to the monetary practice of usury, while the third pair not only mediates between the realms of money and blessing but also discriminates two separate ways of having this blessing. While Shylock adduces the terms of this third pair to express his exclusively Jewish claim to Abraham's blessing, his effect, contrary to his intent, is to disclose a way in which Jew and Christian can both share in this blessing. What, then, are the terms that Shylock invokes, and how do they enable his usury to both symbolize Abraham's blessing and provide for its sharing?

IV

In I.iii, Shylock analyzes his usury into “moneys” and “usances” (I.iii.108), components which are analogously rendered as principal and interest. Shylock repeatedly makes mention of “interest” (I.iii.51) in I.iii, while twice referring to “principal” in IV.i: “Give me my principal, and let me go” (IV.i.336); “Shall I not have barely my principal?” (IV.i.342). But in addition to “moneys” and “usances” with their apparent equivalence to principal and interest, Shylock's I.iii defense of usury introduces a third pair of terms: possession and thrift, thrift meaning profit. In calling Jacob “the third possessor,” Shylock adverts obliquely to Abraham's blessing as the thing Jacob is possessor of; yet the possession he adduces also identifies a mode of having that blessing: the having of it as something owned, like Shylock's “moneys” or principal. Shylock also refers to Jacob as breeding thrift from his uncle's sheep. And Shylock likewise identifies thrift as blessing in observing that

This was a way to thrive, and he was blest;
And thrift is blessing, if men steal it not.

(I.iii.89-90)

Yet if thrift, like possession, is thus identified as blessing, thrift is also differentiated from possession. For whereas possession pertains to the blessing owned as principal, thrift pertains to the blessing derived as profit from a principal that is not owned. Jacob breeds this thrift out of sheep owned, rather, by his uncle Laban, as Shylock observes in beginning, “When Jacob graz’d his uncle Laban's sheep” (I.iii.71). Thus possession and thrift emerge as terms denoting distinct ways of having Abraham's blessing. And as possession corresponds to “moneys” held as principal, thrift corresponds to the “usances” or interest on that principal, interest being the concept that thrift is introduced to defend.

But while Shylock shows Jacob to breed the thrift that is blessing from a principal not his, he also shows Jacob, as “third possessor,” to possess the blessing as principal. Jacob is thus accorded a double having of Abraham's blessing. And it is Jacob's double having of Abraham's blessing that Shylock appears to adduce in justification of his own usury, since in usury Shylock similarly lays claim to both possession and thrift, as he emphasizes in referring to “my moneys and my usances.” This double having, however, is subtly reproved by Antonio's reference to the interest added to principalas “excess” (I.iii.62). For to the extent that Shylock's money and usances represent a double having of Abraham's blessing, they suggest an excess of having for Shylock that results in a defect of having for Antonio. In contrast to Shylock's usurious possessing with a thrift that is “assur’d” (I.iii.29), Antonio is a merchant, which means that his wealth is given out at hazard and, like the Prodigal's goods, may be “squand’red abroad” and lost, the profit with the principal.

Not only represented as something owned like principal, however, possession is also associated with paternity, and paternity as carnally defined. For in calling Jacob “the third possessor,” Shylock is obliquely referring possession to the three patriarchs of Israel, of whom Abraham and Isaac are first and second. And by referring to the first patriarchal possessor as “our holy Abram” and “father Abram,” Shylock is further defining the first of the great fathers biologically. For Abram is the name by which Genesis applies the patriarch's fatherhood to the Jews as his sole children through biological descent; as opposed to the name, Abraham, by which God makes him “a father of manie nacions,” a father defined by the Geneva Bible, citing Romans 4.17, “not only according to ye fleshe, but of a farre greater multitude by faith”:

Beholde, I make my covenant with thee, & thou shalt be a father of manie nacions, Nether shal thy name anie more be called Abram, but thy name shalbe Abraham: for a father of manie nacions have I made thee.

(Genesis xvii.4-5)

Since the children of a father are his heirs, it follows that Shylock's restriction of the patriarch's paternity to the Jews likewise makes them the sole inheritors of his blessing. And it is as one of these exclusively biological heirs that Shylock claims possession of Abraham's blessing. Moreover, to the extent that Shylock shows the blessing to comprise not only possession but also thrift, his restriction of its possession to himself can be seen as just. For even if Antonio's gentile identification as spiritual son makes him ineligible for possession of Abraham's blessing, he remains entitled to the thrift or profit of this blessing. Yet not only justly claiming possession, Shylock unjustly claims thrift as well, the injustice of this claim being what Antonio registers in railing against Shylock's “thrift, / Which he calls interest.”

It is Shylock's desire to claim thrift, moreover, that can explain his representation of its production as blatantly sexual: his conjuring up of “wooly breeders in the act” and “work of generation” (I.iii.83, 82). For these images establish the carnality and hence the Jewishness of Jacob's thrift that makes it rightfully his. And by comparing the thrift that Jacob breeds from sheep with the interest that he himself breeds from money, Shylock hopes to define his interest as likewise carnal, thereby rendering it Jewish and rightfully his.⁸⁵ It is thus appropriate that Antonio should challenge the legitimacy of Shylock's interest by challenging the carnality of its generation:

Was this inserted to make interest good?
Or is your gold and silver ewes and rams?

(I.iii.94-95)

Yet it is not Shylock's thrift only that Antonio challenges. For when Shylock refuses to concede the inorganic character of his “gold and silver”—“I cannot tell, I make it breed as fast” (I.iii.96)—Antonio turns to Bassanio with the insulting observation that “The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose” (I.iii.98). Antonio all but calls Shylock devil to his face. And just as the adversos Judaeos tradition called the Jews devils in order to define them as blessed in no manner whatever but rather as cursed, Antonio's demonizing of Shylock can be seen to alienate him from Abraham's blessing not only in its thrift but also in its possession, as he further attests in railing not only against Shylock's thrift but also against “me” and “my bargains.” Just as Shylock would deny the blessing to Antonio, Antonio would deny it to Shylock. Yet, it may be asked, how do we square such an argument with the eventual truth of Antonio's insult: the fact that Shylock indeed proves himself a “cruel devil” (IV.i.217) in Act IV. Perhaps by noting that, while showing Shylock to commit evil, the play also shows him to suffer evil, and may subtly be underlining that suffering through a positive meaning reposed in the name of Old Gobbo. In observing that “suff’rance is the badge of all our tribe,” Shylock emphasizes his habitual patience under contempt, thereby anticipating the similar patience of Old Gobbo. And heightening the suggestiveness of this anticipation is Brown's observation that Old Gobbo's name appears in the quarto as “Iobbe,” which is “the Italianized form of Job,”⁸⁶ the archetype of patience in suffering. Like Old Gobbo, Shylock is a kind of Job: a Job at the end of his patience.

If our sense of mutual wrong between Shylock and Antonio is clarified by the distinctions of possession and thrift, that sense is also informed by what has earlier been described as their common involvement in theft. Usury is, at first, to be Shylock's legal form of theft from Antonio. But Antonio too is associated with theft in being the object of Shylock's warning that “thrift is blessing, if men steal it not.” And supporting the reference of Shylock's words to Antonio is the tendency of Jessica, in exhibiting literal theft, to define Antonio's contemptuous demand for Shylock's money as a correspondingly psychic version of that theft. But likewise suggesting theft in both Jessica and Antonio is the recognition that the conditionality Shakespeare applies to Antonio's thrift is likewise applied to Jessica's possession. As Antonio is spiritual heir to Shylock's thrift, Jessica is carnal heir to his possession; what she takes is, after all, destined to be her own. But Jessica is heir to Shylock's possession only so long as she acknowledges her biological daughterhood to him, the very relationship she repudiates by fleeing from him: “Farewell, and if my fortune be not cross’d / I have a father, you a daughter, lost” (II.v.56-57). Jessica's repudiation of her biological daughterhood is what her absconding expresses and what defines the possession she absconds with as stolen. But if Jessica repudiates her biological daughterhood to Shylock, Antonio repudiates his spiritual sonhood to Shylock. Thus if Jessica's repudiation constitutes her possession as stolen, may not Antonio's repudiation constitute his thrift as stolen? Viewed in this way, Antonio's theft resides not in his demand for thrift, which is just, but rather in a spiritual contempt for Shylock that denies him possession as the prerogative of his carnal paternity. Just as Shylock's initial refusal of the thrift of profit of his symbolic money to Antonio bespeaks a blind refusal to acknowledge his spiritual sonhood, so Antonio's denial of Shylock's possession bespeaks a prodigal refusal to acknowledge the carnal character of his paternity, a refusal that Antonio attests in desiring to convert him.

Moreover, since “thrift is blessing” only “if men steal it not,” the loss of its efficacy as blessing would tend to suggest that it has indeed been stolen. And to the extent that the ability to bless is the ability to redeem or save, it is interesting to observe that thrift eventually proves unable to buy back or redeem Antonio from the condemnation of Shylock's law. Shylock eventually grants Antonio an interest-free loan, thus giving him the thrift of his money, but on the condition that he return its principal or possession within three months. And the terms Shylock establishes for his loan are such that no amount of interest or thrift will be allowed to compensate for the failure of Antonio to repay its possession by that time; rather, possession, inherently carnal to begin with because carnally claimed, will be claimed in the very flesh of Antonio. This is just what happens. Having failed to return the possession of Shylock's loan by the appointed time, Antonio finds that a ransom of thrift “ten times” (IV.i.211) the amount of that possession can be refused. Yet the spiritual meaning of this thrift is what reveals the true significance of its vitiation by suggesting that Christianity steals and thus vitiates its thrift or profit in Abraham's blessing by withholding its possession from the Jews. If this meaning is valid, it implies that the blessing of Abraham can be secured to neither Jew nor Christian unless secured to both together, by the allotment of possession to the Jews and thrift to the Christians. And that it may, despite its heterodoxy, be valid is supported by the observation that his dual allotment is what Antonio can be seen to propose in his IV.i disposition of Shylock's wealth.

Addressing the court, Antonio says,

To quit the fine for one half of his goods,
I am content; so he will let me have
The other half in use …

(IV.i.381-83)

Antonio divides Shylock's wealth between himself and Shylock, thus sharing that wealth with Shylock. But Antonio also stipulates that Shylock is to die “possess’d” (IV.i.389) of his half, whereas for the duration of Shylock's life, Antonio is to have the other half “in use,” which is to say, in a trust. The significance of Antonio's proposal of a trust emerges in the recognition that this legal instrument can enable its trustee to eschew possession of the principal while claiming its profit, or thrift, which is what I think Antonio intends to do. To be sure, a trust need not by definition grant the trustee its profit, and critics unable to cope with Antonio's eventual consent to get as well as give balk at the idea of his profiting from his trust. Yet when we consider that Antonio has at this point no other means of living and has just declared his preference for death over “An age of poverty” (IV.i.271); and when we further consider the symbolic meaning of the profit in question, it becomes highly unlikely that Antonio means to refuse it.⁸⁷ Not validated, moreover, as the result of Christian hazard, since it entails no hazard, Antonio's profit is rather validated in accruing to him without his possession of the principal, which he yields to Shylock's heirs. It thus appears that Antonio claims the thrift of Abraham's blessing for his Christian self while restoring its possession to the Jewish Shylock. In light of the meanings associated with possession, this restoration can suggest Antonio's attempt to recognize, however incipiently and obliquely, that the blessing he would have is Shylock's abiding possession, the prerogative of his carnal paternity. By claiming Shylock's thrift in a manner that restores his possession, Antonio claims his thrift but steals it not. Thus he begins to make it an authentic blessing, as he further suggests in claiming that thrift both without the conspicuous contempt that had marked his demand for Shylock's money in I.iii, and also more honestly, which is to say, for himself. Did Antonio do no more than this, he would have begun to purge away the defects of his identities as Prodigal Son and Jacob, thus initiating the process that redefines him as the returned Prodigal.

V

Yet Antonio appears to take this course only to abandon it and revert to the contempt and deceit of the unreconstructed Prodigal Son and Jacob. This abandonment suggests that Antonio ends his conflict with Shylock still mired in the internal struggle that Launcelot exhibits at the outset of II.ii but eventually overcomes. Yet if Launcelot's II.ii dialogue with his father shows how the conflict of Antonio with Shylock should end and does not, that dialogue also epitomizes major elements in the dynamics of this larger quarrel. For Launcelot's interaction with Old Gobbo shows how the defects of paternal blindness and filial prodigality exacerbate each other; how the mutual exacerbation of their defects would propel father and son, albeit figuratively, toward mutual murder but for the supervening realization that mutual murder is also mutually suicidal; and how this recognition prompts father and son to abate the blindness and prodigality that estrange them. Turning now to a close reading of this dialogue, I shall try to show how it conveys these meanings and invites their reference to Shylock and Antonio.

As Launcelot's flight from Shylock bespeaks his prodigality, his designation of Shylock as “this Jew my master” refers this prodigality to a resentment of authority. And appropriately leveling that resentment at the father he proceeds to meet, Launcelot determines to “try confusions” (II.ii.37) with him, just as Jacob tries confusions with old Isaac. By recalling, moreover, that Jacob's purpose in his confusions was to compass his father's blessing, we may surmise that Launcelot's purpose in these “confusions” is similarly to compass his father's blessing, presumably because he associates this blessing with authority. But if Jacob would seek this blessing by confusing himself with his brother Esau, Launcelot's reference to Old Gobbo as “my true-begotten father” (II.ii.35-36) suggests that he would seek this blessing by confusing the roles of father and son by making himself his father's father. And in forthwith demanding that his father address him as “Master Launcelot” (II.ii.48), Launcelot further suggests that his aim in this role reversal is to assume the mastery belonging to a father. Yet what enables Launcelot to act out his desire to dominate his father is his father's blindness. His blindness is what prevents Old Gobbo from recognizing that the stranger he stops to inquire the way to Shylock's house is his son. And this lack of recognition causes the old father to call him “Master young man” and “Master young gentleman” (II.ii.33, 39), as well as addressing him with the deferential “you” rather than the familiar “thou.” Not merely basking in the pleasure of his father's error, however, Launcelot is prompted to affect the persona of authority and erudition that will encourage its continuance. Launcelot would reinforce his father's belief that he is addressing his social better, so that the old man will continue according him the honorific titles of “sir,” “your worship,” “your mastership,” and “young gentleman” (II.ii.51, 56, 59, 70-71).

This deception becomes seriously mischievous, however, when Launcelot decides to tell his unrecognizing father that he is dead, much as Luke's Prodigal causes his father to think him dead: “For this my sonne was dead … ” (Luke xv.24). Addressing Old Gobbo as “father,” yet meaning him to perceive that address merely as a term appropriate to his age,⁸⁸ Launcelot says,

Talk not of Master Launcelot, father, for the young gentleman, according to Fates and Destinies, and such odd sayings, the Sisters Three, and such branches of learning, is indeed deceas’d, or as you would say in plain terms, gone to heaven.”

(II.ii.60-65)

This statement is deliberately cruel, as Launcelot himself acknowledges in telling the audience with Vice-like candor that it is intended to bring his father to tears: “Mark me now, now will I raise the waters” (II.ii.49). But not only cruel, this false news impairs still further his father's ability to recognize him. And to the extent that nonrecognition of a child is what constitutes paternal blindness, Launcelot's prodigality can be seen to deepen that blindness, just as that blindness incites his prodigality.

Yet the cruelty of Launcelot's communication is not without purpose. For in anticipating that it will reduce his father to tears, Launcelot invites us to regard his false report as intended to break his father's spirit, thus making him submissive to himself. Launcelot appears to be using the report of his own death as a way of achieving authority over his father, a way that, indeed, succeeds, as the old man attests in begging his unknown son to deny the death that his authority has already convinced him is true: “I know you not, young gentleman, but I pray you tell me, is my boy, God rest his soul, alive or dead?” (II.ii.70-72).

Not only subjugating his father, however, this news also threatens to kill him, as Old Gobbo's self-centered reaction demonstrates: “Marry, God forbid, the boy was the very staff of my age, my very prop” (II.ii.66-67). Trying to evade the force of his father's distress, Launcelot attempts to treat it as matter for mirth and, turning to the audience, asks, “Do I look like a cudgel or a hovel-post [that is, a little hovel or house⁸⁹], a staff, or a prop?” (II.ii.68-69). Yet the flatness of the joke seems to suggest that Launcelot's cruel heart is being disquieted by his conscience. And though, by contrast, there is no sense of deliberate cruetly in Old Gobbo's blindness, that blindness retains its own lethal potential. For Launcelot glancingly observes that “murder cannot be hid long; a man's son may” (II.ii.79-80), and the tendency of these words to associate murder with the hiddenness of “a man's son” enables them to suggest that a father's failure to recognize his son effectively, if subtly, murders him.

In the tendency of their blindness and prodigality to push them toward mutual murder, however, Old Gobbo and Launcelot seem to adumbrate a dangerously deepening bitterness in the settled antagonism between Shylock and Antonio. Because his habitual blindness makes him unable to see that Antonio is his spiritual son and, as such, entitled to the thrift of his possession, Shylock provokes him to the habitual insolence that parallels the Prodigal's flight from his father. But in I.iii, blindness and prodigality take a particularly nasty turn. Shylock's defense of his usury is dismissed by Antonio, and when Shylock in his turn scorns this dismissal, he incurs the ultimate contempt of demonization, which, confirmed and unrepented, prompts Shylock to propose the bond of flesh. It thus appears that Launcelot's reference to a son's murder by an unknowing father, which Old Gobbo displays only figuratively, really pertains to Shylock in his literal attempt to murder Antonio through the flesh bond. To be sure, it may be objected that the spectacle of Shylock similarly wishing his biological and acknowledged daughter Jessica “dead at my foot” (III.i.88) challenges this association of murder with nonrecognition or blindness. Yet Shylock's rejection of Jessica may have another point to make. It may be that just as Shakespeare shows antagonism between carnal law and spiritual faith to destroy both these principles, so he may also be working out that destruction in Jessica and Antonio as carnal and spiritual children of Shylock. In representing Shylock as a father who rejects the spiritual son he does not know only to eventually reject the carnal daughter he does know, Shakespeare may well be suggesting that Jewish paternity cannot choose between its children: that it will have both or neither. But setting aside Shylock's rejection of Jessica, what seems important to observe here is that, in his own way, Antonio shares the homicidal impulse of Shylock. For if the flesh bond serves Shylock's desire to murder Antonio physically, it also whets Antonio's desire to obliterate Shylock's Jewish identity through the spiritual means of conversion: “The Hebrew will turn Christian, he grows kind” (I.iii.178).

As Shakespeare cleverly demonstrates through Old Gobbo and Launcelot, however, these lethal impulses are self-defeating. For the true effect of Old Gobbo's paternal blindness toward his son is to enable that son to manipulate the father into denying his own authority. Seeking to assume his father's authority, Launcelot urges Old Gobbo to relinquish that authority by referring to his son as “Master Launcelot.” And recognizing the self-demeaning implication of this request, Old Gobbo refuses to comply. Thus when Launcelot twice asks his father, “Talk you of young Master Launcelot?” (II.ii.48, 50), the old man responds, “No master sir, but a poor man's son” (II.ii.51). Yet Old Gobbo's blindness has the ironic effect of turning his denials into affirmations. Failing to perceive that the Launcelot whose mastership he denies is the very person he is addressing as “sir” and “Master,” Old Gobbo in fact grants Launcelot the mastership he professes to refuse him, as Launcelot invites us to recognize. For when Launcelot proceeds to insist that “we talk of young Master Launcelot” (II.ii.54-55) and her father again objects, “Your worship's friend and Launcelot, sir” (II.ii.56), Launcelot rejoins with an emphatic and repeated “ergo,” signifying that the father has proved his son's point: “But I pray you, ergo, old man, ergo, I beseech you, talk you of young Master Launcelot” (II.ii.57-58). And to Old Gobbo's uncomprehendingly stubborn “Of Launcelot, an’t please your mastership” (II.ii.59), Launcelot triumphantly concludes, “Ergo, Master Launcelot” (II.ii.60). Just as Old Gobbo's blind inability to recognize his son effectively grants Launcelot the prodigal mastery so prejudicial to his paternal self, Shylock's carnal inability to call Antonio son may inform his own deferential address to him as “Signoir Antonio,” that address more broadly referring the historical domination of Judaism by Christianity to Judaism itself in its failure to recognize its paternal relation to Christianity.

Launcelot's prodigality can likewise be seen to recoil against him by thwarting the very aim it pursues. His aim in dominating an unrecognizing father is to secure that father's blessing. But having attained this dominance through the report of his own death, Launcelot now finds himself unable to induce his father to bless a son he thinks dead. To the contrary, the more credit his authority has with Old Gobbo, the more remote his blessing becomes.

Not only self-defeating, however, the homicidal impulses of blindness and prodigality are eventually revealed as suicidal. For Launcelot achieves authority over his father by verbally killing himself. Seeking to usurp his father's paternity, he kills his own sonhood. And Launcelot's self-killing quest for authority invokes a similarly self-destructive recoil in Antonio's desire to dominate Shylock. Antonio is prompted to accept Shylock's bond partly by his determination to interpret it as signaling Shylock's impending conversion from carnal Jew to spiritual Christian. And prompting Antonio to this interpretation is his wish to void the paternity constituted in Shylock's Jewish identity in order to claim the authority of that paternity for himself. Yet his eagerness to supplant Shylock's Jewish paternity makes Antonio, like Shylock, blind by preventing him from discerning the bond's ability to reduce him to the flesh claimable on terms of Shylock's carnality. In attempting to spiritualize Shylock out of existence, Antonio incurs the risk of carnalizing himself out of existence, this consequence of his bargain once again impugning the larger Christian theology of supersession. And just as the murder and suicide associated in Launcelot seem evinced in Antonio, so the same association of murder and suicide can be discerned in both Old Gobbo and Shylock. As he admits, Old Gobbo cannot survive without the support of the son his own nonrecognition murders. And his tendency to destroy the basis of his own existence may well inform the condemnation that Shylock incurs in attempting to murder Antonio. Just as Old Gobbo needs Launcelot to be the prop of his age, Shakespeare seems to be suggesting that Judaism in Shylock needs Christianity in Antonio to become the prop of its age.

It is thus appropriate that the suicidal implications of blindness and prodigality should force the surrender of these defects. Launcelot reveals himself submissively to his father, thus enabling Old Gobbo to recognize and bless him. But while imperative, this surrender and recognition also require a capacity for self-transcendence that is difficult to achieve. And this difficulty, the tough struggle it entails for both father and son, is what the II.ii dialogue is at pains to exhibit. Recognizing that the announcement of his death has alienated him from the blessing he wants, Launcelot finally decides to reveal himself to his father. Yet blind from the first and made more so by the authority of his son, Old Gobbo resists Launcelot's pleas for recognition. And just as Old Gobbo's blindness is so firmly planted as hardly to be uprooted, so Launcelot revokes his prodigal death by reluctant stages. Suing for recognition, Launcelot first asks, “Do you know me, father?” (II.ii.69). But plausibly mistaking his nomination as father merely for an address to his age (since Launcelot has so used it), Old Gobbo poignantly replies, “Alack the day, I know you not, young gentleman” (II.ii.70-71). Again Launcelot asks for recognition: “Do you not know me, father?” (II.ii.73.) But helplessly lamenting his blindness, Old Gobbo again replies, “Alack, sir, I am sand-blind, I know you not” (II.ii.74). Unyielding paternal blindness now prompts Launcelot to revive himself even to the prejudice of his authority, as he shows by kneeling down to ask his father's blessing: “Well, old man, I will tell you news of your son. Give me your blessing” (II.ii.77-78). Yet his own stubborn prodigality prevents Launcelot from identifying himself plainly and also causes him to kneel with his back to his father. And just as Launcelot's tergiversation comprises his filial submission, so Old Gobbo's inability to recognize him attests the old father's continuing blindness: “Pray you, sir, stand up. I am sure you are not Launcelot, my boy” (II.ii.81-82). The need to penetrate his father's blindness now drives Launcelot to concede that he can never be father to Old Gobbo. Dropping the title of master, he pleads, “I am Launcelot, your boy that was, your son that is, your child that shall be” (II.ii.84-86). But again, to no avail: “I cannot think you are my son” (II.ii.87). To overcome this blindness and secure his blessing, Launcelot must not only surrender his mastership; he must also, like the Prodigal asking to be as one of his father's hired servants, resume the rank of servant; which he does by styling himself “Launcelot, the Jew's man” (II.ii.89). This confession works. Now recognizing his son, Old Gobbo reclaims him with an exclamation of joy that drops the respectful “you” for the familiar “thou”: “I’ll be sworn, if thou be Launcelot, thou art mine own flesh and blood” (II.ii.91-93).⁹⁰ It is Antonio's similarly difficult—and unachieved—surrender of his Christian impulse to dominate the Jewish Shylock that seems prescribed as the condition of his filial recognition.

Yet we should also notice that Launcelot's confession not only vanquishes his own prodigality; it also accommodates the carnality of his father's blindness by adducing the identifiably carnal link between himself and his father, which is his mother: “I am Launcelot, the Jew's man, and I am sure Margery your wife is my mother” (II.ii.89-90). Significantly, Old Gobbo expresses his recognition of Launcelot in restrictedly carnal terms, terms that anticipate Shylock's later description of his biological daughter as “My own flesh and blood” (III.i.34). Yet while a maternal link allows Old Gobbo an at least carnal recognition of his son, no such carnal link can help Shylock recognize his wholly spiritual relationship to Antonio. He must either see spiritually or, as it proves, not at all. Thus if this dialogue posits the prodigality that Antonio does not vanquish as one condition of his recognition by Shylock, it also posits the carnality, which is to say, the blindness, that Shylock does not vanquish as another condition of that recognition.

By contrast, Old Gobbo so far sheds the psychic limitation of Isaac's blindness and the woe of the Prodigal's father as to liberate what is positive in these blessing fathers: their recognition and joy, which now coalesce to transform Old Gobbo into the father of the restored Prodigal, who blesses his son both knowingly and willingly. Old Gobbo places his hands on Launcelot's head in sign of blessing. And in the ability of his confession to purge away the rebellion of the Prodigal and the deceit of Jacob, Launcelot integrates the respective honesty and piety of these identities in evocation of the returned Prodigal. Validating these transformations, moreover, is their enabling of life to conquer death. By recognizing his son, Old Gobbo reclaims the staff and prop of his age; and in being restored to his father Launcelot evokes the Prodigal's return from death to life: “For this my sonne was dead, and is alive againe: and he was lost, but he is founde” (Luke xv.24).

Clearly, this satisfying reconciliation is not attained by Shylock and Antonio. Yet in supplying the pattern of a true reconciliation, Launcelot and old Gobbo enable us to recognize the movement, however tentative and aborted, that Antonio and Shylock make toward its achievement. As before observed, Antonio's request for Shylock's money in IV.i is devoid of the blatantly prodigal contempt he had exhibited in I.iii. Similarly, he drops his formerly Jacob-like pursuit of Shylock's blessing wealth in another's name. And in thus ameliorating his identities as the Prodigal and Jacob, Antonio offers to exchange them for the identity of the returned Prodigal. For just as Launcelot's self-revival as returned Prodigal also restores life to his father, Antonio restores life to himself and Shylock together by dividing between them both the wealth without which neither he nor Shylock could live, as Shylock, speaking for himself, attests:

Nay, take my life and all, pardon not that:
You take my house when you do take the prop
That doth sustain my house; you take my life
When you do take the means whereby I live.

(IV.i.374-77)

In returning the wealth that supports his house, Antonio becomes to Shylock what Launcelot becomes to Old Gobbo: the “staff” and “prop” of his age.

Yet this amelioration does not progress. For while Launcelot eventually vanquishes his Jacob-like reluctance to identify himself as Old Gobbo's son, Antonio remains like Jacob in asking Shylock for his money without confessing his filial identity. And not only failing to progress, this amelioration seems to collapse in a reversion to prodigality. For in an act that reassociates the transmission of Shylock's wealth with theft, Antonio forces Shylock to bequeath his possession to “the gentleman / That lately stole his daughter” (IV.i.384-85). And whereas Launcelot surrenders his Prodigal desire to be his father's master and father, Antonio fulfills that prodigal desire for filial dominance. As master to Shylock, Antonio demands that he “presently become a Christian” (IV.i.387). And as one of two “god-fathers” to bring Shylock “to the font” (IV.i.398, 400) of baptism, Antonio likewise becomes his father, albeit a father from whom Shylock now evinces a prodigal desire to flee: “I pray you give me leave to go from hence, / I am not well” (IV.i.395-96). This evidence suggests that the moral status of Shylock's forced conversion, long disputed,⁹¹ should be decided in the negative. Rather than prescriptive or remedial, this conversion can be seen as symptomatic of what remains wrong with both Antonio and Shylock. For not only attesting prodigality in Antonio, it also results from the self-defeating tendency of Shylock's blindness to incite that prodigality. Thus Shylock's conversion is congruent with his abidingly flawed identities as Isaac and father of the reprobate Prodigal. Like Isaac with Jacob, Shylock is made to bless Antonio in ignorance of his filial identity. And like the Prodigal's father, he endows Jessica in pained awareness of her unreformed prodigality. As a measure of what is wrong with both antagonists, moreover, this conversion appropriately informs the self-defeating events that Antonio's prodigality now prompts him to initiate. For the contempt of law that emboldens him to demand Shylock's conversion is what Antonio likewise exhibits in demanding that Bassanio break Portia's commandment, that demand culminating in the forfeiture of his friend. Had Antonio achieved a properly filial respect for Shylock's carnal law, and hence for his Jewishness, he would have observed Portia's analogously carnal law and kept his friend.

The play thus offers a sharp contrast between the failed reconciliation of Shylock with Antonio and the successful reconciliation of Old Gobbo with Launcelot. Yet even this paradigmatic reunion remains imperfect. For Old Gobbo remains blind. And in restricting his blessing hands to a carnally tactile knowing that mistakes his son's head for his beard, Old Gobbo's blindness suggests his enduring limitation. Comparably, Launcelot's atonement to his father does not expunge the appetitive aspect of his prodigality, which prompts him to continue hankering for a life of sexual license: “Here's a small trifle of wives! Alas, fifteen wives is nothing! Aleven widows and nine maids is a simple coming-in for one man” (II.ii.161-63). Yet while suggesting the partial persistence of paternal blindness and filial prodigality, the II.ii dialogue also tantalizes us with the fleeting vision of a time when these defects will be entirely dispelled. For to the request for his father's blessing, Launcelot appends a reflection of seemingly choric significance: “Give me your blessing; truth will come to light; murder cannot be hid long; a man's son may, but in the end truth will out” (II.ii.78-80). What can this truth be if it is not “a man's son” finally recognized by a father no longer blind? And if Shakespeare has designed this whole dialogue to point beyond itself to Shylock and Antonio, and especially to the religious traditions they embody, might not the truth here adduced refer to the eventually dispelled blindness of Shylock's paternal Judaism? But just as Launcelot's brief reference to the truth that must ultimately “come to light” may extend beyond Old Gobbo to Shylock's Jewishness, so Launcelot seems still more briefly and obliquely to reflect on Old Gobbo in a manner that likewise reflects on himself and, by extension, on the Christian Antonio. For in describing Old Gobbo as “this honest old man, and though I say it, though old man, yet poor man, my father” (II.ii.138-40), Launcelot is defining him as old, honest, and—poor man—father to a prodigal son! And if these words indeed imply a rueful self-awareness, might they not anticipate the remorse of the Prodigal that makes him no longer prodigal; just as Launcelot anticipates a time when the father will recognize his son? While such scent evidence cannot sustain so large an argument, its presence in this dialogue demands at least tentative recognition.

What seems more certain is that this dialogue is a highly articulated and profound allegory, which Shakespeare fashions out of received cultural elements that he molds into the vehicle of his own meaning. These elements are the two objectively biblical identities that he imposes on Launcelot and Old Gobbo, the resulting disproportion between the meaning of these characters and their marginal status prompting the justified suspicion that their function in this allegory is to mediate these typological meanings to the play's Venetian principals, Shylock and Antonio. These meanings allegorize their respectively Jewish and Christian identities as blind father Isaac and Prodigal Son. But it is in the II.ii dialogue that the complex interactions of these allegorized principals are epitomized. In their blindness and prodigality, Old Gobbo and Launcelot identify hegemonic impulses in the respective traditions of Shylock and Antonio that bring them into conflict; as father and son, Old Gobbo and Launcelot exhibit the properly familial relationship of these principal characters, with its reciprocal requirements of paternal duty and filial loyalty. In expressing an evolution of power relations into family relations, the II.ii dialogue shows how the quarrel between Shylock and Antonio should end, thus becoming an interpretive norm that Shakespeare inserts into his play. And by contrasting with the minimal and aborted settlement that Shylock and Antonio do in fact attain, this norm assumes an oppositional force censuring that settlement while also attesting Shakespeare's awareness of the difficulties involved in getting beyond it. Shakespeare thus makes old texts speak new meanings, meanings that show our religious culture as both flawed and instinct with the capacity for its own renewal; in their intellectual and moral refinement, these meanings secure the modern value of this play by making it a force for such renewal.

Notes

1. 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: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), 105. William Hazlitt, Characters of Shakespeare's Plays (New York: Wiley and Putnam, 1846), 174. A. D. Moody, Shakespeare: The Merchant of Venice (London: Edward Arnold, 1964), 10. Harold C. Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), 88. Kiernan Ryan, “The Merchant of Venice: Past Significance and Present Meaning,” Shakespeare Jahrbuch, 117 (1981): 51.

2. Walter Cohen, “The Merchant of Venice and the Possibilities of Historical Criticism,” ELH, 49 (1982): 768-69; and Michael Ferber, “The Ideology of The Merchant of Venice,” English Literary Renaissance, 20 (1990): 437-38.

3. Frank Whigham, “Ideology and Class Conduct in The Merchant of Venice,” Renaissance Drama, NS 10 (1979): 108, 107; Ryan, 51; Lars Engle, “‘Thrift is Blessing’: Exchange and Explanation in The Merchant of Venice,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 37 (1986): 31, 36; Thomas Moisan, “‘Which is the merchant here? and which the Jew?’: subversion and recuperation in The Merchant of Venice,” in Shakespeare Reproduced: The text in history and ideology, ed. Jean E. Howard and Marion F. O’Connor (New York: Methuen, 1987), 197.

4. John Russell Brown, “The Realization of Shylock,” in Early Shakespeare, ed. John Russell Brown and Bernard Harris (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1961), 205.

5. Moody, 14; H. B. Charlton, Shakespearean Comedy (New York: Macmillan, 1938), 133.

6. Goddard, 97.

7. Girard, 107.

8. Brown, 206.

9. Goddard, 97.

10. C. L. Barber, Shakespeare's Festive Comedy (1959; rpt. Cleveland: World Publishing Co., 1963), 169; Frank Kermode, Early Shakespeare, 223-24; Sylvan Barnet, Twentieth Century Interpretations of “The Merchant of Venice,” ed. Sylvan Barnet (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1970, 3-8).

11. Elmer Edgar Stoll, Shakespeare Studies: Historical and Comparative in Method (1917; rpt. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1960), 271, 294-95. For concurring views, see Hazelton Spencer, The Art and Life of William Shakespeare (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1940), 239-40; and Norman Holland, The Shakespearean Imagination (New York: Macmillan, 1964), 92.

12. G. K. Hunter, “The Theology of Marlowe's The Jew of Malta,” 1964, republished in his Dramatic Identities and Cultural Tradition (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1978), 64-65.

13. Alan C. Dessen, “The Elizabethan Stage Jew and Christian Example,” Modern Language Quarterly, 35 (1974): 232-33, 239-41.

14. Girard, 108-09.

15. Girard, 100.

16. Robert Weimann, Structure and Society in Literary History, expanded edition (1976; rpt. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), 1-56.

17. Cohen, 771; Ferber, 446.

18. Cohen, 767-71.

19. The quotation is from Lucien Dällenbach, La Récit spéculaire (Paris: Seuil, 1977), p. 17, as translated by Moshe Ron, “The Restricted Abyss: Nine Problems in the Theory of Mise en Abyme,” Poetics Today, 8 (1987), 421. Gide's diary entry appropriating this term is cited by Ron, p. 418, from pp. 30-31 of André Gide, Journals 1889-1949, trans. Justin O’Brien (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967). See also Lucien Dällenbach, “Reflexivity and Reading,” New Literary History, 11 (1980), 435-449; and Ann Jefferson, “Mise en abyme and the Prophetic in Narrative,” Style, 17 (1983), 196-208.

20. Weimann, 49.

21. M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 23-26, 161-63.

22. In “Bond Priorities in The Merchant of Venice,” Studies in English Literature, 20 (1980): 220, Jan Lawson Hinely finds Launcelot's antics instinct with an “undercurrent of real cruelty.”

23. Charlton, 128. See also Spenser, 244; Oscar Campbell, Shakespeare's Satire (London, Oxford University Press, 1943), 7; Leslie Fiedler, The Stranger in Shakespeare (New York: Stein and Day, 1972), 108; Bill Overton, The Merchant of Venice: Text and Performance (London: Macmillan, 1987), 39.

24. In “‘A Dish of Doves’: The Merchant of Venice,” ELH, 40 (1973): 347, Leo Rockas observes that Launcelot's moral dilemma in II.ii “is the same one that Jessica expresses in the following scene.” Hinely, 220, observes that “Launcelot's initial struggle between his conscience and the fiend … is a farcical version of Jessica's situation, presented in the scene immediately following.”

25. René Fortin, “Launcelot and the Uses of Allegory in The Merchant of Venice,” Studies in English Literature, 14 (1974): 259.

26. Dorothy C. Hockey, “The Patch is Kind Enough,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 10 (1959), 448-50; Barbara K. Lewalski, “Biblical Allusion and Allegory in The Merchant of Venice,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 13 (1962): 327-43.

27. John Russell Brown, ed. the new Arden Merchant of Venice (London: Methuen, 1959), 39, note to line 75, citing Henley as seeing “allusions to the deception practiced on the blindness of Isaac; cf. the recognition by feeling Launcelot's hair.”

28. Hockey, 448-49.

29. Hockey, 449.

30. All Shakespeare quotations are cited in The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans et al. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974).

31. Lewalski, 340-41. Barber, 185, had earlier identified St. Paul as providing the terms of law and grace in the trial sequence of IV.i. For subsequent arguments based on the operation of Pauline theology in the play, see John R. Cooper, “Shylock's Humanity,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 21 (1970): 121; and Sylvan Barnet, “Prodigality and Time in The Merchant of Venice,” Publications of the Modern Language Association, 87 (1972): 26.

32. Lewalski, 342.

33. Lewalski, 329, 334, 339. For other associations of Antonio with Christ, see Kermode, 224; and Joan Ozark Holmer, “The Education of the Merchant of Venice,” Studies in English Literature, 25 (1985): 310.

34. Lewalski, 341-42.

35. Lewalski, 331, 338.

36. All biblical citations are from The Geneva Bible: A facsimile of the 1560 edition, introd. Lloyd E. Berry (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969). Spelling has been minimally modernized.

37. John Calvin, A Commentary on Genesis (1554, Latin), (1578, English), Two Volumes in One, trans. and ed. John King (1847) (rpt. London: Calvin Translation Society, 1965) II, 50.

38. Calvin, 50.

39. Calvin, 50.

40. Fortin, 267.

41. Fortin, 266-67.

42. Lewalski, 334.

43. Fortin, 267-68.

44. David N. Beauregard, “Sidney, Aristotle, and The Merchant of Venice: Shakespeare's Triadic Images of Liberality and Justice,” Shakespeare Studies, 20 (1988): 33.

45. Barnet, “Prodigality and Time in The Merchant of Venice,” 26. Like Barnet, Brown in the Arden Merchant, lviii, uses prodigality to describe the giving that he sees as the play's most important value: “Giving is the most important part—giving prodigality, without thought for the taking.” And in “The Merchant of Venice and the Pattern of Romantic Comedy,” Shakespeare Survey, 28 (1975): 82, R. F. Hill similarly views Jessica's squandering as “a free outgoing of that which was not given us to hoard.”

46. Moisan, 198.

47. Moisan, 195.

48. At the 1985 meeting of the Shakespeare Association of America in Nashville, Tennessee, in seminar XIII entitled The Merchant of Venice Controversies: Past and Present, I presented the idea of Launcelot as a type of the Prodigal Son in a paper entitled “The Merchant of Venice and the Blessing of Abraham.” The same sense of Launcelot's meaning as well as its extension to Jessica appears in Beuregard's 1988 essay, 39-40.

49. Manfred Pfister, “Comic Subversion: A Bakhtinian View of the Comic in Shakespeare,” Deutsche Shakespeare-Gesellschaft West, 1987, 33-34, 35-36, 42.

50. For an example of this view, see Moisan, 191.

51. To appreciate Paul's insistent representation of grace as wealth, see Ephesians, where he calls God “riche in mercie” (ii.4) and refers to “his riche grace” (i.7), “the exceeding riches of his grace” (ii.7), and “the unsearcheable riches of Christ” (iii.8).

52. See Hunter, 64-65, for the conventionally negative representation of money in The Jew of Malta as worldly and anti-Christian.

53. For views of money in Merchant as symbolic, though not theological, see G. Wilson Knight, The Shakespearean Tempest (London: Oxford University Press, 1932), 129, 131; G. Wilson Knight, Principles of Shakespearean Production (London: Faber and Faber, 1936), 187; and John Russell Brown, “Love's Wealth and the Judgment of The Merchant of Venice,” in his Shakespeare and His Comedies (London: Methuen, 1957), 61.

54. Nevill Coghill, “The Basis of Shakespearean Comedy,” Essays and Studies, N.S. 1-3 (1948-1950), 21; Kermode, 224; Cooper, 121; Albert Wertheim, “The Treatment of Shylock and Thematic Integrity in The Merchant of Venice,” Shakespeare Studies, 6 (1970): 79, 86; Holland, 93; Fiedler, 86-87; Lawrence Danson, The Harmonies of “The Merchant of Venice” (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1978), 13; Barber, 185.

55. Moody, 50; Norman Rabkin, Shakespeare and the Problem of Meaning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 16.

56. John S. Coolidge, “Law and Love in The Merchant of Venice,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 27 (1976): 243 and note 15 on 249.

57. Rabkin, 20-21. For a full statement of Rabkin's argument, see 19-32.

58. Rabkin, 7.

59. Coghill, 21.

60. Rabkin, 10-12.

61. Barnet, Twentieth Century Interpretations, 6, 7.

62. Brown, Shakespeare and His Comedies, 71, 72-73.

63. Holmer, 309; Danson, 31-32.

64. Arthur Quiller-Couch, ed., The Merchant of Venice (1926; rpt. Cambridge: At the University Press, 1953), xxii; Charlton, 125; Moody, 17; Brown in the Arden Merchant, xxxiv, records the 1709 opinion of Nicholas Rowe that the play “was design’d Tragically by the Author.” In “Brothers and Others,” in The Dyer's Hand and other Essays (New York: Random House, 1948), 223, 221, W. H. Auden renders a common judgment in calling Merchant a “problem” play to be “classed among Shakespeare's ‘Unpleasant Plays.’” And Ryan, 49, likewise repudiates “the traditional romantic idealist reading of the play.”

65. Brown, “The Realization of Shylock,” 206; Barber, 190. See also Ferber, 459, for the description of Shylock as “character not fully digested and assimilated into the structure of themes.”

66. Hockey, 448-449.

67. Brown, the Arden Merchant, 39, note to 11. 73-74.

68. In the new Variorium edition of The Merchant of Venice, ed. Horace Howard Furness, 12fth ed. (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Co., 1888), 69, the note to line 89 records Staunton's opinion that “stage tradition, not improbably from the time of Shakespeare himself, makes Launcelot, at this point, kneel with his back to the sand-blind old Father, who, of course, mistakes his long back hair for a beard, of which his face is perfectly innocent.”

69. In Love and Society in Shakespearean Comedy (London: Univ. of Delaware Press, 1985), 33, Richard A. Levin these allegations as “Launcelot's rationalizations, offered … to ease his conscience … ”

70. Charlton, 156, observes that Jessica's phrase “says more of [her] frivolous nature than of the repulsiveness of her father's house.”

71. See Thomas Wilson, A Discourse upon Usury (1572), with an historical introduction by R. H. Tawney (New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1965), 219, 275-76, 285.

72. The possessive taint in Antonio's love for Bassanio has frequently been noted. In “Portia and The Merchant of Venice: the Gentle Bond,” Modern Language Quarterly, 28 (1967): 26, Robert Hapgood observes that “Antonio is at once too generous and too possessive.” In “The Rival Lovers in The Merchant of Venice,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 21 (1970): 110, Lawrence W. Hyman observes that “Antonio's wealth which he puts at his friend's disposal is a means of holding on to Bassanio's love.” Hinely, 234, likewise describes Antonio's love of Bassanio as “possessiveness expressed through generosity.”

73. This reading of the Prodigal story is accepted by modern interpreters, as exemplified by Rosemary Radford Ruether, Faith and Fratricide: The Theological Roots of Anti-Semitism (New York: Seabury Press, 1974), 254.

74. Fortin, 267.

75. Ruether, 94.

76. Ruether, 65, 139-40. On 117-21 Ruether lists the various expressions of this tradition, including Tertullian's Adversos Judaeos, Augustine's Tractatus adversus Judaeos, the eight sermons against the Jews preached by John Chrysostom, and Justin Martyr's Dialogue with Trypho.

77. Ruether, 137-40.

78. Ruether, 230. While observing Merchant to evoke the patristic negation of the Jews' claim to the prophetic promises, Coolidge does not recognize this negation as censured by the prodigal identities of Launcelot, Jessica, and Antonio.

79. Ruether, 101-2, 176-79.

80. For the sexual character of Antonio's love, whether conscious, or initially suppressed and only gradually emerging to consciousness, see Auden, 231; Graham Midgley, “The Merchant of Venice: A Reconsideration,” Essays in Criticism, 10 (1960): 125-26; John D. Hurrell, “Love and Friendship in The Merchant of Venice,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language,” 3 (1961): 340; Ralph Berry, Shakespeare's Comedies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), 125; Rockas, 346; Keith Geary, “The Nature of Portia's Victory: Turning to Men in The Merchant of Venice,” Shakespeare Survey 37 (1984): 58-59; and more tentatively, Levin, 31.

81. Fiedler, 136. See also Coppélia Kahn, “The Cuckoo's Note: Male Friendship and Cuckoldry in The Merchant of Venice,” in Shakespeare's Rough Magic, ed. Peter Erickson and Coppélia Kahn (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1985), 109.

82. Hinely, 235, observes that following the forfeiture of the ring, the friends are “closer than at any other time in the play.”

83. Fiedler, 135, observes that in returning her ring to Bassanio's finger, Antonio gives “the bridegroom away.” And Geary, 67, similarly perceives that Antonio's return of Portia's ring to Bassanio means that “Portia has defeated him and displaced him in Bassanio's heart.” See also Kahn, 107.

84. Brown, “The Realization of Shylock,” 206.

85. Engle, 28-31, finds the Jacob/Laban story to express Shylock's just complaint that, like Jacob working for Laban, he serves the economy without being allowed full participation in it. By contrast, Joan Ozark Holmer takes a negative and, I think, more accurate view of Shylock's biblical defense of his usury. By finding this story mentioned in an anti-usury tract that excoriates those who adduce Scripture in defense of usury, she aptly suggests that this tract provides both the text for Shylock's defense of usury and the opinion that censures it. See “Miles Mosse's The Arraignment and Conviction of Usurie (1595): A New Source for The Merchant of Venice,” Shakespeare Studies, 21 (1993): 15-17, 21, 34.

86. See Brown, the Arden Merchant, xxii: “The quarto's repeated ‘Iobbe’ (II.ii.3 ff.) suggests that Shakespeare intended to use the Italianized form of Job.”

87. The OED gives “Use 4” as “the act or fact of using, holding, or possessing land or other property so as to derive revenue, profit, or other benefit from such.” “Use 4” has an alternate meaning b that defines it as “a trust or confidence reposed in a person for the holding of property, etc., of which another receives or is entitled to the profits or benefits.” But it is meaning c that cites the phrase “in use,” not only showing that phrase to denote a trust but also referring the terms of that trust as readily to the primary definition that gives the profit to the trustee, as to the alternate meaning of b that gives the profit to another. It is the uncertainty thus introduced into “in use” that has prompted critics to disagree on the question of who gets the profit of Antonio's trust. Brown in the Arden Merchant, 119, note to line 379, suggests that it will go to Shylock. Holmer, “The Education of the Merchant of Venice,” 317, agrees. Danson, 125, thinks that both principal and profit will go to Jessica and Lorenzo at Shylock's death. Yet Brown also recognizes Antonio's poverty, which suggests that he himself keeps it, as Johnson, I think correctly, concludes: “Antonio declares that, as the Duke quits one-half of the forfeiture, he is likewise content to abate his claim, and desires not the property but the use or produce only of the half, and that only for the Jew's life … ” See Furness, the Variorum Merchant, 227, note to lines 398-402.

88. Furness, the Variorum Merchant, 68, note to line 65.

89. Furness, the Variorum Merchant, 68, note to line 64.

90. In the Variorum Merchant, 69, note to line 83, Furness asks us to “note Gobbo's respectful ‘you,’ until he recognizes Launcelot, and then his change to ‘thou.’”

91. Among those offended by Shylock's forced conversion are Quiller-Couch, xix-xx; Charlton, 128; Goddard, 89; and Sigurd Burckhardt, “The Merchant of Venice: The Gentle Bond,” ELH, 29 (1962): 253. Among those who defend it as saving Shylock's soul or bringing him social benefits are Coghill, 23; Lewalski, 341; Cooper, 121; Wertheim, 85; Barnet, Twentieth Century Interpretations, 7; and Holmer, “The Education of the Merchant of Venice,” 321.