SOURCE: “Prodigal Sons and Daughters: Transgression and Forgiveness in The Merchant of Venice,” in Papers on Language & Literature, Vol. 32, No. 1, 1996, pp. 45-62.

[In the essay below, McLean identifies allegorical elements in The Merchant of Venice, arguing that the parable of the rebellious but repentant Prodigal Son is reenacted numerous times between different character pairings. Consequently, by the end of the play the audience is left to contemplate the virtue of forgiveness.]

The word “prodigal” appears more often in The Merchant of Venice than in any other play of Shakespeare's, yet the relevance to the play of the parable of the Prodigal Son has excited little critical attention.¹ Not only is Bassanio called “prodigal” by himself and Shylock, but Shylock also calls Antonio “a prodigal,” and Gratiano alludes to the parable of the Prodigal Son just before Lorenzo elopes with Jessica. Bassanio and Antonio enact elements of the story of the Prodigal Son at a serious level, while Launcelot Gobbo and his father parody the same story. Jessica also rebels against paternal control, and Portia expresses her desire to do so, though she insists that she will never violate the conditions of her father's will.² Instead, she uses the ring plot to create a scenario of disobedience, sin, repentance, and forgiveness that exorcizes the threat of her previous independent behavior and embodies the New Testament ideal of love, in contrast to the unforgiving attitude of Shylock toward his daughter.

“Prodigal” has three key meanings in the context of The Merchant of Venice. It can refer to extravagant expenditure, lavish generosity, or the parable of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15:11-32), whose reckless defiance of paternal control led to sin, ruin, repentance, and ultimate forgiveness. In the parable, the younger of two sons asks his father for his inheritance, leaves home, spends all of his money on harlots and riotous living, and is reduced to becoming a famished swineherd. He then returns home in repentance to ask to become one of his father's servants, but is received gladly by his father, who gives him the best robe, a ring, and shoes, and feasts him on a fat calf. The elder brother begrudges his father's celebration, pointing out that he has never been similarly rewarded for being virtuous and obedient, but his father tells him that it is appropriate to rejoice, “for this thy brother was dead, and is alive againe: and he was lost, but he is found” (Luke 15: 32, Geneva Bible).

The paradox of the Prodigal Son—that the sin is a necessary prelude to the forgiveness—echoes the theme of the “fortunate fall.”³ The parable presents generosity and mercy as the central attributes of Christianity, and it rejects the elder brother's narrow focus on desert and obedience to his father's commandments. Allegorically, in the parable the elder brother is identified with the Jews and the laws of the Old Testament, the younger brother with the Christians, and the father with the merciful God of the New Testament. The parable thus brings together several themes that are important in The Merchant of Venice: the triumph of mercy over justice, as portrayed in the trial scene; the rewarding of humility over presumed desert, as exemplified in the casket scene; and the forgiveness of penitents, as seen in the ring plot and in the subplots concerning Launcelot and his father, and Lorenzo and Jessica.

The popularity of the Prodigal Son story in Renaissance literature has been attributed to several sources. Richard Helgerson suggests that stories of prodigals embodied the ongoing conflict between the two Renaissance traditions of “civic humanism and courtly romance,” in which “Humanism represented paternal expectation, and romance, rebellious desire” (41). Alan R. Young attributes the popularity of the theme in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century drama to its flexibility for exploring theological issues and “such special contemporary concerns as education, the proper use of wealth, and the responsibilities of a prince” (52-3). Young includes Shakespeare's Henry IV, parts 1 and 2 (which were written around the same time as The Merchant of Venice) among the plays that use the Prodigal Son motif.

Marilyn Williamson connects the popularity in the 1590's of romantic comedies about penniless young men who marry heiresses (such as Bassanio and Orlando) to the dearth of opportunities for social advancement among educated but impoverished young men, which encouraged fantasies of upward mobility through marriage to a wealthy woman (14). Williamson notes that in Shakespeare's romantic comedies the prodigal males often “put the powerful lady in the parent's place by asking her forgiveness” (33). This pattern also appears in Shakespeare's problem comedies, in which errant males, such as Bertram and Angelo, are redeemed by the forgiveness of virtuous women (58, 101).

Shakespeare's treatment of the Prodigal Son story is a radical departure from the didactic, admonitory treatment that the story usually received in early Tudor drama and fiction, in which “The prodigality of a son who defies his father's counsel is ruinous, not momentarily, in the third act of a play that will surely end happily, but forever” (Helgerson 35). Shakespeare restores the forgiveness that is central to the biblical parable and extends its scope to include romantic as well as filial relationships. The story of the Prodigal Son may have appealed to Shakespeare not only because forgiveness had a powerful claim on his imagination, but also because it is crucial to the contrast that he wished to show in The Merchant of Venice between the values of the Old and the New Testaments.⁴

For men, “prodigality” has overtones of sexual as well as financial impropriety, because the Prodigal Son of the parable wasted his patrimony on harlots. When Bassanio confesses to Antonio that he has lived beyond his means, he does not specify what he has spent his money on, but says

my chief care
Is to come fairly off from the great debts
Wherein my time something too prodigal
Hath left me gag’d.

(Merchant 1.1.127-30)⁵

In this context, the word “prodigal” could allude to sexual expenditures, but—if so—Bassanio's stated intention of seeking a wife suggests that he means to reform his behavior. When Shylock uses “prodigal” to describe Bassanio (“I’ll go in hate, to feed upon / The prodigal Christian” 2.5.15-16) or Antonio (“A bankrupt, a prodigal, who dare scarce show his head on the Rialto” 3.1.41-42) his meaning is primarily financial, but with suggestions of shameful behavior. However, the word tends to take on exclusively sexual connotations when applied to a woman, as is clear in Hamlet in Laertes's advice to Ophelia: “The chariest maid is prodigal enough / If she unmask her beauty to the moon” (1.3.36). Because sexual misbehavior was considered venial in a man, but unforgivable in a woman, the “prodigality” of Portia or Jessica has necessary limitations.

Bassanio is the most obvious parallel to the Prodigal Son. He wastes both his patrimony and the money that he had previously borrowed from Antonio, who then acts the part of the forgiving father and lends him more money. Later, Bassanio gives away Portia's ring and she accuses him of giving it to a woman, but once again he is forgiven.⁶ Bassanio's inherent generosity is visible when he hires the scapegrace Launcelot and tells a servant, “Give him a livery / More guarded [i.e., ornamented] than his fellows’“ (2.2.146-7). Marilyn Williamson argues that Bassanio's extravagance both clears him of suspicions of mercenary motives, and prepares the viewer for his ungreedy choice of the lead casket and his generosity in giving his wedding ring to the disguised Portia (33). Launcelot is more accurate than he knows when he tells Bassanio, “The old proverb is very well parted between my master Shylock and you, sir: you have the grace of God, sir, and he hath enough” (2.2.141-3). In the context of the play, Bassanio's open-handedness—like Antonio's and Portia's—is the human reflection of divine mercy.

Antonio resembles the Prodigal Son in the lavishness of his generosity, in its nearly disastrous consequences, and in his eventual redemption, but there is no hint of selfishness in his behavior, so there is nothing for him to repent in order to gain salvation. He is identified more closely with the father of the parable and with Jesus himself than with the repentant sinner. Not only does he forgive Bassanio for putting him into a life-threatening situation, but also he intercedes with the court to reduce Shylock's penalty and convert him to Christianity (thereby giving Shylock a chance at salvation as well).

The character of Launcelot Gobbo has often been considered irrelevant to the main action. Leo Rockas, however, argues that Launcelot participates in the theme of father-child relationships (347-48), and René E. Fortin draws a further connection to the incident in Genesis 27 in which the younger son Jacob tricks his blind father Isaac into giving him the blessing that should have gone to his elder brother Esau, an incident that Christians interpreted as prefiguring the transfer of divine favor from the Jews to the Christians (266-68). The Launcelot-Old Gobbo plot also functions as a comic parody of the Prodigal Son story. Like the Prodigal Son, Launcelot is famished in the service of a bad master, Shylock, and he turns to his father to get a better post as the servant of Bassanio, who rewards him with a fancy livery (just as the Prodigal Son is given the best robe on his return). Launcelot initially leads his blind father to believe that he is dead, which then increases the father's rejoicing upon learning that his son is actually alive. Old Gobbo does not kill a fat calf, but he does bring “a dish of doves” (2.2.127) as a present for Launcelot's master, and Launcelot persuades him to give them to Bassanio instead. As René E. Fortin has noted,

The doves also recall the doves or pigeons offered as sacrifice in the Presentation of Jesus (Luke 2:22-24); the passage lays stress upon this ritual as being according to the Law of Moses and highlights the fact that Jesus was himself observant of the Law.

(266n.)

The doves, which were prominently featured in pictorial representations of the Presentation in the Temple and were thus identified with paternal love, also recall the doves that Noah sent forth from the Ark (Genesis 8:8-12). They therefore are both a reminder of God's original covenant with the Jews and a symbol of the transfer of that covenant to the Christians, when the gift intended for Shylock is given to Bassanio instead.

The scene between the two Gobbos is funny because Launcelot's treatment of his father is distinctly unfilial, yet the father is no less happy to recover his son. Launcelot's behavior serves as a comic parallel to Jessica's treatment of Shylock (whose own attitude is so unfatherly that he wishes his daughter dead, if he could thus get his money back). Launcelot's effrontery also contrasts with the filial devotion of Portia to her father's will and of Bassanio to the fatherly Antonio. Launcelot's later concern that the conversion of Jews will raise the price of hogs (3.5.21-22) and his getting the Moor pregnant (3.5.37) may recall the Prodigal's working as a swineherd and consorting with harlots. Just as Launcelot's treatment of his father is the opposite of the Prodigal's humility, so his behavior after receiving his father's blessing is cheerfully unregenerate. Perhaps because his disrespect is neither malicious nor harmful, Launcelot participates in the general amnesty typical at the end of comedy, from which Shylock is excluded.

While waiting for Lorenzo to arrive and elope with Jessica, Gratiano alludes to the story of the Prodigal Son in a way that seems ominous for the eloping couple:

All things that are,
Are with more spirit chased than enjoy’d.
How like a younger(7) 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!

(2.6.13-20)

From the context, one might assume that Gratiano is identifying Lorenzo with the prodigal and Jessica with a strumpet who will ruin him. Lorenzo is certainly, like Bassanio, a penniless young man, but Jessica more nearly fits the pattern of the prodigal. She disobeys her father's orders; steals some of his money; runs off, disguised as a boy, with her lover Lorenzo, who is a Christian and therefore an inappropriate suitor in her father's eyes; and spends her father's money in an extravagant manner. Yet all of these “sins” have mitigating circumstances in the eyes of the audience. Because her father is wicked and a Jew, her disobeying and leaving him to become a Christian is presented as a change for the better. Because she is his only heir, she is seen as having some just claim to the money that she steals from him to be her dowry. Her running off with a lover would be sinful, except that she marries him. Her choice of Lorenzo, who has no money of his own, is a sign of the unselfishness of her love (Partee 18). Her subsequent wastefulness with money is both a suitable punishment on Shylock for his miserliness and, paradoxically, a sign of her own lack of mercenary attitudes.

Like the Prodigal Son, Jessica leaves her father's control and wastes part of her patrimony, but unlike him, she does not undergo ruin or repentance. Instead, Shylock himself undergoes ruin, (forced) repentance, and Christian forgiveness, at the cost of his own unwilling conversion to Christianity. Jessica reaps the Prodigal's reward of a generous welcome (though from Portia, not Shylock) and the rest of her patrimony upon Shylock's death (granted by Shylock at Antonio's insistence). This inversion of the parable, in which the child proves wiser than the father, depends on the fact that the child is Christian and the father Jewish. Shylock, indeed, resembles the narrow, rigid, calculating, and prohibitive Pharisees to whom the parable of the Prodigal Son was originally addressed. In rejecting her father, Jessica is rejecting Old Testament law for New Testament mercy, which is one reason that Shylock gets the full force of the law, while his daughter gets mercy.

Jessica leaves a patriarchal household, in which the man is a domineering autocrat, in favor of the loving mutuality of the Protestant ideal of companionate marriage.⁸ Lorenzo is, of course, still the head of the household, and it is into his hands that Portia commits the running of her house while she is away. Yet Jessica's teasing, bantering tone in her conversations with Lorenzo shows that she is neither a submissive nor a silent wife, and has led some critics to question the happiness of her marriage.⁹ When Jessica praises Portia, Lorenzo tries to turn her praise toward him:

Jessica:
Why, if two gods should play some heavenly match
And on the wager lay two earthly women,
And Portia one, there must be something else
Pawn’d with the other, for the poor rude world
Hath not her fellow.
Lorenzo:
Even such a husband
Hast thou of me as she is for a wife.
Jessica:
Nay, but ask my opinion too of that!
Lorenzo:
I will anon. First let us go to dinner.
Jessica:
Nay, let me praise you while I have a stomach.
Lorenzo:
No, pray thee, let it serve for table-talk;
Then, howsome’er thou speak'st, 'mong other things
I shall digest it.
Jessica:
Well, I’ll set you forth.

(3.5.76-87)

Her teasing refusal to endorse his playfully exalted opinion of himself both asserts the independence of her mind and reveals his willingness to allow her to say whatever she pleases. Similarly, when the two exchange stories of unhappy lovers at the beginning of Act 5, Jessica refuses to let Lorenzo have the last word:

Lorenzo:
In such a night
Did Jessica steal from the wealthy Jew,
And with an unthrift love did run from Venice
As far as Belmont.
Jessica:
In such a night
Did young Lorenzo swear he lov’d her well,
Stealing her soul with many vows of faith,
And ne’er a true one.
Lorenzo:
In such a night
Did pretty Jessica, like a little shrew,
Slander her love, and he forgave it her.
Jessica:
I would out-night you, did nobody come; …

(5.1.14-23)

Lorenzo refers to himself as being “unthrift”—a synonym for “prodigal,” but also a word that recalls Shylock's statement that “thrift is blessing, if men steal it not” (1.3.87). Lorenzo and Jessica accuse each other of stealing, yet in a play in which Shylock's “thrift” is exposed as damnable, Jessica's theft of herself and her father's money and Lorenzo's theft of her soul are paradoxically virtuous because the lovers obey the rules of “love's wealth,” stealing only in order to give (Brown 70-71).¹⁰ The underlying generosity of their love is visible in Lorenzo's instant forgiveness of Jessica's “slander.”

Lorenzo's jesting reference to Jessica as “a little shrew” does raise the issue of the threat to masculine authority that a wealthy wife traditionally represented to an impoverished husband. This threat is even more obvious in the case of Portia, who brings to Bassanio not only much greater wealth than Jessica's, but also extraordinary intelligence and even competence in the exclusively male field of law.¹¹ Because she has so much, it is essential that she give it all away if she is not to seem a threat to Bassanio's control. No sooner does he solve the riddle of the caskets than, in a speech that resembles Kate's speech of submission at the end of The Taming of the Shrew,¹² she compares herself to

an unlesson’d girl, unschool’d, unpracticed;
Happy in this, she is not yet so old
But she may learn; happier than this,
She is not bred so dull but she can learn;
Happiest of all is that her gentle spirit
Commits itself to yours to be directed,
As from her lord, her governor, her king.
Myself and what is mine to you and yours
Is now converted. But now I was the lord
Of this fair mansion, master of my servants,
Queen o’er myself; and even now, but now
This house, these servants, and this same myself
Are yours, my lord's. I give them with this ring,
Which when you part from, lose, or give away,
Let it presage the ruin of your love
And be my vantage to exclaim on you.

(3.2.159-174)

The exaggerated humility of this speech (which contrasts strikingly with her witty, condescending comments on her previous suitors) is all the more necessary because it is so patently false. Neither before nor after the speech does Portia act at all like an “unlesson’d girl,” yet it is essential that she acknowledge the legal reality that all of her possessions and her own independence now belong to her husband and that she accept the transfer of power ungrudgingly. She reserves to herself only woman's traditional weapon—speech—and promises to use it against Bassanio only if he breaks his marriage vow by relinquishing the ring.

Portia's subsequent behavior hardly seems consonant with her proclaimed submissiveness. She often thereafter refers to her house as “my house” or “my hall,” and to her servants as “my people” or “my servants.”¹³ Moreover, she continues to direct the action, both openly and covertly, urging her husband to pay off Antonio's debt, no matter what it costs, and to leave for Venice as soon as the wedding vows are made. She then delegates the care of her house to Lorenzo, and follows her husband to Venice in disguise and without his knowledge. In Venice, she tricks Bassanio into relinquishing the ring and then uses her possession of it to lord it over her husband and to threaten him with the ultimate indignity of cuckoldry.

Yet Portia's behavior is not as insubordinate as it appears. Her references to the house and servants as hers are made mainly when Bassanio is not present, and could be less a statement of ownership than a sign of her continuing residence and authority in her husband's absence (when he is present, she welcomes his friends to “our house,” 5.1.139, though she later reverts to saying “my house” twice, 5.1.223, 273). Bassanio seems bashful at first about assuming the authority that is his by marriage. When he chooses the correct casket, he says to Portia that he is “doubtful whether what I see be true / Until confirm’d, sign’d, ratified by you” (3.2.147-48). Later, in welcoming his friends to Belmont, he says,

Lorenzo and Salerio, welcome hither,
If that the youth of my new int’rest here
Have power to bid you welcome. By your leave,
I bid my very friends and countrymen,
Sweet Portia, welcome.

(3.2.220-24)

His hesitancy to assume command is something that Portia must help him to overcome. When she sees that he is moved by the contents of the letter he has received from Antonio, she urges him to share his trouble with her:

With leave, Bassanio; I am half yourself,
And I must freely have the half of anything
That this same paper brings you.

(3.2.248-50)

When she tells him to pay off Antonio's debt and to join his friend immediately, Portia knows that she is telling him to do what he really wants to do, but would hesitate to do for fear of seeming ungracious or spendthrift to her. Even her insistence on an immediate wedding is a generous action because it gives him the legal right to all of her property, but without any benefit to her, even of the physical satisfaction of the wedding night. Her statement to Bassanio—“Since you are dear bought, I will love you dear” (3.2.313)—is not a declaration of ownership, but, as John Russell Brown suggests, a sign of her “willingness to continue to give joyfully in love” (68). Lorenzo later commends Portia's “god-like amity, which appears most strongly / In bearing thus the absence of your lord” (3.4.3-4). It is Portia's own generosity that later makes her a suitable advocate for mercy.

Bassanio proves no match for Portia in generosity, so she is forced to give him a lesson in it. To do so, she turns herself into a “prodigal” to see whether he has the will to forgive her.¹⁴ The trouble starts at the trial, when he exclaims

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

(4.1.280-85)

Portia dryly responds, “Your wife would give you little thanks for that, / If she were by, to hear you make the offer” (4.1.286-7). She recognizes both that Bassanio would not say such a thing in front of his wife and that he does not have the right to make the offer. He would be justified in offering his own life, but not that of another. Her subsequent request of his ring is a test that he is predisposed to fail, because he has already established that he sets his obligations to his friend above those to his wife. His failure, however, is only partial. He demonstrates great reluctance to part with the ring; his sense of obligation to the friend who had risked his life for him is his sole reason for giving it up; and he is honest to Portia later about his reasons for losing it.

Because Bassanio defends his parting with the ring on grounds of honor, Portia tests him on those same grounds. He tells her,

I was enforc’d to send it after him.
I was beset with shame and courtesy.
My honor would not let ingratitude
So much besmear it.

(5.1.216-19)

In upholding his obligations to his friend and his reputation among men, Bassanio ignores the equally binding obligation to keep his word to his wife. She picks up the theme of honor:

Let not that doctor e’er come near my house.
Since he hath got the jewel that I lov’d,
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.
Know him I shall, I am well sure of it.
Lie not a night from home. Watch me like Argus;
If you do not, if I be left alone,
Now, by mine honor, which is yet mine own,
I’ll have that doctor for my bedfellow.

(5.1.223-33)

She threatens to be as “liberal” (i.e., “generous”) as Bassanio, and to give the doctor any thing she has—but, of course, the only thing that she still has any control over is her own body (even the bed is her husband's). A woman's honor is her chastity, and Portia can say that that still belongs to her because she has not yet given it to Bassanio. She reminds him that she has the power to ruin his honor—i.e., his reputation among men—by making him a cuckold. After he has begged her forgiveness for breaking his word and has sworn not to do so again, she asks his forgiveness and implies that she has already slept with the doctor.¹⁵

This is Bassanio's ultimate test—can he be as forgiving as she is?—and, interestingly, Portia does not wait for the answer because however he replied, he would look bad. The conscious cuckold was a figure of ridicule in the Renaissance, yet a refusal of forgiveness would be a failure of Christian charity. Portia saves Bassanio's face by revealing her imposture. Bassanio can then forgive her—not for adultery, but merely for playing a trick on him. Portia also gets one more chance to be generous, giving Antonio the news that his ships have come in safely and giving Lorenzo news of the bequest from Shylock. As a married woman, Portia can no longer give away money or property, but she can still use her energies and abilities to benefit others. Lorenzo's response—“Fair ladies, you drop manna in the way / Of starved people” (5.1.294-95)—again identifies Portia with divine generosity, and Antonio tells her, “Sweet lady, you have given me life and living” (5.1.286). As in the parable, he that was dead is alive, and that which was lost (the ships, the rings) is found.

The motif of the Prodigal Son not only links several plots and subplots of the play, but also should serve to moderate the current critical tendency to sympathize with Shylock and to judge the Christians harshly for not living up to the merciful ideals that they profess. The basic premise of Christianity—that the sinner who believes and begs forgiveness will find mercy, while the self-righteous and the nonbeliever will not—may seem unfair, as the parable of the Prodigal Son presumably did to the Pharisees to whom Jesus told it when they objected to his eating with sinners. Yet according to that premise, even such feckless or unfilial prodigals as Launcelot, Jessica, Gratiano,¹⁶ and Bassanio must be forgiven, along with the more virtuous Portia and Antonio, while Shylock the Jew, the arrogant pagan Prince of Morocco, and the self-regarding Prince of Arragon may not.

Portia says of mercy, “It blesseth him that gives and him that takes” (4.1.185). Those who give forgiveness (Portia, Antonio, Lorenzo, Old Gobbo) and those who receive it gratefully (Bassanio, Gratiano, Launcelot, and Jessica, through her conversion to Christianity) are granted both mercy and good fortune. Those who are convinced of their own desert (Morocco, Arragon) or righteousness (Shylock asks “What judgment shall I dread, doing no wrong?” 4.1.89, and exclaims “My deeds upon my head!” 4.1.204) are subjected to the full rigors of the law. Shylock does not beg for mercy when Portia urges him to do so, and he objects to the terms of mercy when he is offered his life, saying

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.

(4.1.372-75)

His inability to accept mercy gratefully when it is offered bodes ill for his future forced conversion.

To argue that Shakespeare uses the Prodigal Son motif to reinforce the sympathies of the audience with his Christian characters and to condemn the self-righteousness of Shylock does not minimize the ironies and moral ambiguities of the play. On the contrary, the variety of moral shadings in the different prodigals and self-righteous characters brings into sharp focus the paradoxes of salvation that are inherent in the parable itself. The combination in The Merchant of Venice of “optimistic faith in man's spiritual possibilities with an ironic sense of human fallibility” (Lucking 374) links it to Shakespeare's other “comedies of forgiveness.” As Robert Grams Hunter suggests, the success of a comedy of forgiveness depends on the audience's identification with the sinner:

Medieval men and their Elizabethan descendants were taught to be charitable out of a sense of common humanity, which meant a sense of common evil. … Modern charity … is more likely to be associated with making allowances, with pity and tolerance. We tend to forgive the man who does evil not because we recognize ourselves in him, but because we see him as a poor unfortunate, a victim of heredity and environment, the creature of an unhappy past—one who, through no fault of his own, is our inferior. We are likely, therefore, … to react rather as the pharisee reacted to the publican. This is not the reaction which the sinning mortals of Shakespeare's comedies … were intended to provoke. Such dramas invite us to forgive the sins of others not because we (unlike them) are good, but because we (like them) are not good.

(243-44)

This difference between Renaissance ideals of charity and modern ideals of tolerance interferes with our ability to see Shylock as Renaissance viewers probably would have seen him—not as a scapegoat, but as a man whose lack of charity sets off, by contrast, that virtue in others.

Notes

1. The parable is not mentioned, for instance, by Barbara Lewalski in “Biblical Allusion and Allegory in The Merchant of Venice.” René E. Fortin does note that Bassanio functions as a “prodigal” son to Antonio (263), but he does not elaborate. Sylvan Barnet points out that Bassanio, Antonio, and Portia are all “prodigal” in the sense of being generous (and that Shylock is their antithesis). He denies that the honorable Bassanio should be identified with “the wretch who appears in school dramas concerning the Prodigal Son” (26), yet he concludes that “Shakespeare's use of the motif is in accord with Christ's parable: the prodigal is ultimately acceptable, and the ‘virtue’ of the self-satisfied uncharitable elder brother—a figure who, like Shylock, holds to the law, fulfills the bond—is not enough” (26). John S. Coolidge says that the parable of the prodigal son “supplies a minor leitmotif to the play” (245), but he does not develop the idea except to say that the parable embodies “the New Testament idea of love” (246) and to point out the hint of hope that the parable lends to the otherwise ominous overtones of Gratiano's allusion to it just before Jessica's elopement (260).

2. Whether Portia hints at the correct answer to the casket riddle through the song or her line “I stand for sacrifice” (3.2.57) is impossible to determine, though I side with Harry Berger, Jr., in thinking that the cues are more likely unconscious than deliberate (160). One does not offer one riddle as the solution to another, and Portia tells Bassanio directly that she will never be forsworn by telling him the answer (3.2.10-12).

3. See Gary Grund, “The Fortunate Fall and Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice,” which discusses the motif of the Fortunate Fall, but does not connect it to the parable of the Prodigal Son.

4. Surprisingly, Robert Grams Hunter does not include The Merchant of Venice among Shakespeare's “comedies of forgiveness”—among which he includes Much Ado About Nothing, All's Well That Ends Well, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, Measure for Measure, and The Tempest—because, despite its denouement of forgiveness, “Shylock is the serio-comic scapegoat of the drama” (87). Yet to ignore the entire fifth act, in which forgiveness and reconciliation figure prominently, seriously misrepresents the play.

5. All quotations from Shakespeare's plays are taken from The Complete Works of Shakespeare, ed. David Bevington, 3rd. ed., New York: HarperCollins, 1980.

6. Because Bassanio swears “when this ring / Parts from this finger, then parts life from hence” (3.2.183-84), his loss of the ring parallels the Prodigal Son's presumed death. As Ronald A. Sharp has noted, Bassanio's gift of the ring is his opportunity to “hazard all for love” and thus prove himself worthy of both Antonio and Portia (256-57).

7. “Younger,” which appears in the Quarto and Folio texts of the play, is often emended to “younker,” meaning “a young nobleman or fashionable young man,” in order to remove a perceived redundancy in the allusion to the Prodigal Son. It is possible, however, that Shakespeare wished to evoke the situation of younger sons in general, as well as that of the biblical Prodigal, through his use of overlapping but not synonymous terms.

8. See Catherine Belsey (48-52) for a discussion of this new model of marriage in relation to Portia.

9. See Ralph Berry (59-61) and John Lyon (71) for a negative view of Jessica's relationship with Lorenzo.

10. For the opposite view, that Jessica's theft foreshadows an unhappy marriage, see Lynda E. Boose (336-37).

11. See Anne Parten (146-54) for a discussion of this threat in relation to Portia. She does not mention its relevance to Jessica.

12. The similarity of Portia's speech to Kate's has been noted by Lisa Jardine (60-61) and by Leonard Tennenhouse (55-56).

13. I am indebted for this observation to Joseph Wagner's paper, “From Obedience to Sovereignty in The Merchant of Venice,” which he delivered at the 1994 Midwest Modern Language Association conference in Chicago.

14. Shakespeare's later cross-dressed heroines, Rosalind and Viola, have the opportunity to educate their future husbands about the nature of love before they marry, but we do not see Bassanio and Portia together until the casket scene, so Portia is forced to be her husband's teacher after the wedding, a role that he may allude to when he tells her “Sweet doctor, you shall be my bedfellow” (5.1.284), “doctor” having its Latin meaning of “teacher.”

15. It is crucial that the audience knows all along that Portia has not been unfaithful to Bassanio. The audience can thus enjoy Portia's clever equivocations and Bassanio's discomfiture without thinking that Portia is a monster. According to the double standard in operation at the time, sexual prodigality in a woman was not forgivable.

16. Gratiano, whose name means “grace,” is a particularly ironic embodiment of the paradoxes of divine grace because he is vindictive toward Shylock and defensive rather than contrite to Nerissa about the loss of his ring. He tells Shylock

    Thou almost mak'st me waver in my faith
    To hold opinion with Pythagoras,
    That souls of animals infuse themselves
    Into the trunks of men.

    (4.1.130-3)

    He does not waver in his faith, however, and he does accept Nerissa's forgiveness with gratitude. Like Launcelot, another largely comic figure, Gratiano is allowed the latitude to misbehave without being condemned for it.

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