SOURCE: “‘Which is the merchant here? and which the Jew?’: Riddles of Identity,” in The Yoke of Love: Prophetic Riddles in The Merchant of Venice, University of Delaware Press, 1995, pp. 93-133.

[In the excerpt below, Oz remarks that the outsider status that Renaissance European cities imposed upon non-European inhabitants (and on Jews in particular) was an attempt to exert power over various members of society. Thus, in The Merchant of Venice,Shylock does his best to reverse this “master-slave” relationship through his pound of flesh arrangement with the European Antonio.]

The question whereby Portia, clad as a young male judge, launches the process of justice at the court of Venice has intrigued many readers of the play. “She can’t be serious,” we tend to ask, shifting our eyes from the figure of Venice's prince of merchants, who retains his posture of gloomy dignity even at court, to that of “old Shylock,” clad in his Jewish gaberdine. Thomas Moisan, who used the same question of Portia in the title of his illuminating discussion of The Merchant of Venice, concludes that seriousness is not at all what we must expect of this play; indeed it is the playfulness with which it treats the prevailing socioeconomic ideologies of the time, playfulness that produces something like Macherey's famous parodic distance toward them (Macherey 1978, esp. 61ff), which illuminates the dramatic tension in which the play holds “the competing impulses of recuperation and subversion” (Moisan 1987, 203). The idea that the play holds recuperation and subversion in dramatic tension seems, indeed, to be the only valid refutation of the age-old rivalry between the so-called “romantic” and “ironic,” or “apologetic,” interpretations of The Merchant of Venice. It is a way to recognize “the necessity that determines the work” without imposing a constraining “meaning” on the unresolved riddle of the play (Macherey 1978, 77-78). And yet Portia's question, raising one of the major issues of the play, the question of identity, should be taken more seriously into consideration. Coming from a character who but of late had openly yielded her identity to become the wife of he who won her in conforming his own identity to a heavily ideological construct, it is perhaps the very question that any judicious reading of the play must seriously attempt to leave open—not, however, without first scrutinizing its implications. It is, in other words, one of the most spontaneous and genuine expressions in The Merchant of Venice of that “process of riddle-work before its final completion,” a necessary stage in the “confrontation with otherness,” much upon which runs the wisdom of the play. Read against the background of the varied cluster of issues raised, addressed, suggested, and represented in the play by the plots of the merchant and the Jew, ranging from the politics of love and identity to the structure and meaning of cannibalism, slavery, private possession, money, and terrorism, Portia's “Which is the Merchant Here? and Which the Jew?” is not less crucial to The Merchant of Venice than Barnardo's no less riddilng “Who’s there” that sets the course for the probing into the mysteries of “the world” in Hamlet. Some facets of that “process of riddle-work” informing the play will be addressed in the present chapter.

It has already been argued in the introduction that the character of Shylock could be transformed from one minority affiliation, that of the Jew, to another, be it an alien in general, a moneylender, or an early modern version of the terrorist. My project here is to examine what makes Shylock's conspicuous ethno-religious identity lend itself to any transformation at all. A provocative artistic formulation of this project was offered, a few years ago, in an Israeli film, Rafi Bokai's Avanti Popolo (1986). The film depicts the escape of two Egyptian soldiers through the Israeli lines in Sinai in an attempt to reach the Egyptian border. When captured by a group of Israeli soldiers, one of the Egyptians starts to recite Shylock's “hath not a Jew eyes” speech. An Israeli soldier comments: “He has changed the parts!” Has he, indeed? It seems that Shylock is carefully provided in the play with more solid distinctions than any other character in terms of ethno-religious identity, class, family hierarchy, or even gender (which is more than can be said of Portia at the time she poses her question). Can we separate the validity of his Jewishness from all the rest and ask to what extent is it to be taken literally as a token of ethnic identity?

The question of identity looms constantly through the major tensions, conflicts, and crises informing The Merchant of Venice. On the surface level, the ancient narrative picked up by Shakespeare is populated by effective, well-defined dramatic subjects. Yet on a deeper level all the seemingly stable intersubject boundaries are deliberately effaced, all the safe codes of individuality transgressed by language devices and ceremonial acts, to finally transform what was initially conceived as a lifelike, well-defined character into a “crystallized monad” of entirely different order. The riddles propounded by the late Master of Belmont to the living suitors who have come to appropriate the identity of his daughter concern (and devour, like an ancient monster) their own identities. The moral riddle propounded by Shylock to Venice not only transforms Venice's prince of merchants to a helpless victim, but robs also Bassanio of his newly acquired identity as the new master of Belmont and causes Portia to adopt a male identity in order to secure her recent “yoke of love.” What we get here is a play about human subjects tampering with identities, attempting incessantly to contemplate, define, and fashion themselves and the others. This kind of mobility is barely surprising: “The Renaissance delighted in stories of the transformation of individuals out of all recognition—the king confused with the beggar, the great prince reduced to the condition of a wild man, the pauper changed into a rich lord” (Greenblatt 1988, 76). The interchangeability of characters as a major proclivity in Renaissance drama has been often marked by critics, but in many cases “recognition of change is resisted by the characters” (Loomba 1989, 100). Here, however, it is all premeditated and openly done. If Adam Smith is right to spot in human nature a basic “propensity to truck, barter and exchange one thing for another” (Smith 1950, 1:15), the characters of The Merchant of Venice constantly probe his point in dealing not only in merchandise, property and money, but also with their pliable identities. Subjects are yielding themselves to be restructured by socioeconomic circumstances; identities exchanged and bartered; and riddling formulations inscribed on caskets, informing bonds of credit, marriage and amity or consecrating rings disrupt any trace of the homogeneity of the subject. It is a play designed to dismay all essentialists: the moment we seem to have captured the properties qualifying a given dramatic subject, it leaps into another transformation, which explains the degree of personal offense taken by critics who painfully watch that slick prodigal, “self-loving parasite” (Eagleton 1986, 45), Bassanio, winning the top prize at the Belmont contest of wit.¹

In most cases, however, one feels the identities resulting of those transformations were hardly worth the effort. The Merchant of Venice has often been proclaimed a flawed vessel, unworthy of the serious themes it contains. Those who find fault with its dramatic merits, holding the plot incredible and the characters flat, tend to blame the deficient skills of an immature author. For those, as John Lyon puts it, “it seems appropriate to talk of the defects of Shakespeare's creative virtues” (Lyon 1988, 64). Indeed, judging The Merchant of Venice from the stance of Shakespeare's later psychological achievements, the world surrounding Shylock and Antonio seems shallow, its complexities mechanical, and the discourse out of which the characters stem hardly sufficient to pierce the code of even those shallow complexities. But this impression of a less substantial pageant is not exclusively produced by the shortcomings of a lesser authorial skill (in spite of many attempts to present it as such)² for in The Merchant of Venice most characters turn out to be imaginary constructs forged either by themselves or by others. Disguises, deceptions, mistaken identities, and other forms of transformation are common in Shakespeare, especially in the comedies; but nowhere do they seem more obsessively practiced than here. The play opens with Antonio, having much ado to know himself, presenting his perplexion in turns to the entire guild of Venetian merchants, each of whom volunteers to tell him who he really is, what are his concerns, and what role he should play on the world's stage. Having adopted the role assigned to him by Bassanio, devoting to him not only his purse but his person, Antonio proceeds to let Shylock have a claim on his body. In the meantime Portia is having fun constructing before Nerissa each of her present suitors. Since Nerissa must have seen them all, what we have here is yet another instance of the common practice by which the characters of our play seem to pass their time: the forging of identities. Launcelot Gobbo comes on stage to entertain us by multiplying himself, in the vein of medieval moralities, into the triad of Launcelot, conscience, and the Fiend. Then he dons a different identity to “try confusions” (2.2.35) with his blind father, just to go on adopting a new identity as Bassanio's servant, a transformation that involves the immediate provision of “a livery more guarded than his fellows” (147-48). And then follows Jessica, eloping with Lorenzo to receive her new identity as a Christian amidst the turmoil of the masque, in which everybody around adopts borrowed identities.

All these, however, are but an introduction to the feast of transformations and riddles of identity the play still has in store for us. Antonio may believe naïvely that there is “no masque to-night” (2.6.64), once his friends have taken off their masks to set sail for Belmont. But we know better. Not only Gratiano, who describes in great detail the sober habit and the observance of civility he vows to put on in Belmont, but Bassanio himself, who implored him to transform himself, prepares to do the same. The Master of Belmont, we learn, has devised a special quiz for his daughter's suitors, who are asked to define her by subscribing to a chosen model of moral identity. One of the offered models corresponds to the official ideology held by the Christian society of the play, and the penalty exerted on those who fail to find it or to comply by it is, not fortuitously, to remain forever solitary, namely to be devoid of marital affiliation, which in the world of romantic comedy is the basic form of solidarity. Whereas Bassanio wins sexual and economic gratification by endorsing a ready-made identity, his rivals, cut off from the fulfillment of love and procreation, are doomed to total insularity, which precludes identity, as the gloomy tokens of death and folly that will qualify them from now on will attest. Thus, Morocco and Arragon, those two potential alter-egos of Bassanio, are convicted to eternal otherness, a lot not incompatible with that awaiting both Shylock and Antonio by the end of the play even though Shylock, who lost his marital status by death and his patriarchal status by folly, will be graciously offered a refuge from his spiritual seclusion by drowning his otherness in the font of the official Christian ideology.

While all this is taking place, Shylock seems to be the only one to withstand the sea of transformations and, by opposing, remain himself. Stephen Greenblatt would even applaud him for accumulating identity in the course of the play (Greenblatt 1980, 208), namely, establishing it even further: accumulating is a crucial word to describe him who defends interest by using the fable of Jacob's hire (1.3.71-85). A closer look, however, will reveal the character of Shylock to be the most intricate construct among the play's dramatis personae. For whereas all the other characters are what we may call, for the sake of generality, regular dramatic constructs, the products of the dramatist's common skill of representing reality and his attentiveness to dramatic heritage, the representation of Shylock is doubly removed, namely a dramatic construct built on a cultural construct. It is a practice Shakespeare was scarcely to repeat in his work until the creation of Caliban in The Tempest, another dramatic construct built on the same principle (Aaron, Morocco, or Othello may not fall exactly into the same category, since their “alien” quality seems to immerse in their color symbolism rather than in a particular socioeconomic classification). For the sake of understanding the dramatic function of such a cultural construct in a play which otherwise seems to follow faithfully the narrative patterns of romantic comedy, we shall have to summarize some historical evidence. Thus we may learn, for instance, how Shylock's struggle to secure a complex identity by force of possession may be explained by its bearing on the history of Jewish economy in Renaissance Italy and Europe in general.

Since Jews were expelled from England by King Edward I in 1290, exactly three centuries before Shakespeare embarked on his playwriting career, he had no immediate model for Shylock. For whatever way we may read the play, we must acknowledge that Shylock baldly insists on his Jewish identity. Whether or not did the memory of self-confessed Jews remain sufficiently vivid to nourish Shakespeare's imagination three centuries after their expulsion (see, e.g., Poliakov 1966, 78), such a model was scarce in Elizabethan England. Indeed, both Shakespeare and Richard Burbage (who must have portrayed Shylock first) may have had an opportunity to meet in London the famous Doctor Roderigo Lopez, who, as Sidney Lee puts it, “shared with actors an intimacy with those noblemen who were the warmest patrons of the drama” (Lee 1880). Burbage could even have met him earlier, at Kenilworth, where his father's troupe was patronized by the Earl of Leicester, who then employed Lopez as his personal physician. And yet the small community of Marranos, to whom Lopez belonged, had officially to conceal their religious affiliation. Contemporary, London-born Amis, the possible relative of the Añes family (Lopez's in-laws), whom Thomas Coryat met in Constantinople, could hardly hope to observe the ceremony of circumcision as openly in England as in Turkey.³ Lopez's own Jewishness, emphasized in his trial by both his prosecutor (“worse than Judas himself”) and judge (“vile Jew”) (Sinsheimer 1964, 66), served but to underline the main charge brought against him of conspiring to poison the Queen in the service of Spain. “That he was a Jew,” says Lytton Strachey, not without justice, “was merely an incidental iniquity, making a shade darker the central abomination of Spanish intrigue.” Unlike Shylock, Strachey adds, “Dr Lopez was europeanized and christianized—a meagre, pathetic creature who came to his ruin by no means owing to his opposition to his gentile surroundings, but because he had allowed himself to be fatally entangled in them” (Strachey 1971, 61). When the rope was put on his neck, Bishop Goodman tells us sympathetically, Lopez cried out that his love for the Queen was greater than his love for Jesus Christ to which the crowd responded: “He is a Jew! He is a Jew!” (Goodman 1839, 155). Shylock paraphrases Antonio in citing that same phrase: “I am a Jew” (3.1.52) in a way that combines self-dignity with defiant complaint.

Jews were not allowed back officially into England before the successful negotiations between Menassheh Ben Israel, the leader of Amsterdam Jewish community, and Cromwell in December 1655 (see Katz 1982). We have already noted how in 1607, a decade after Shylock was created, Sir Thomas Sherley was still trying to intercede with King James on behalf of a group of Levantine Jews, who wished to settle in England, be granted freedom of religion and allowed to build synagogues (for the payment of a considerable annual tribute), but to no avail. King James declined granting them similar rights also in Ireland, for a tribute of two ducats per head (see Davies 1967, 181-82; and see introduction, n.18…). There were converts, such as Nathaniel Menda, brought into Christianity in 1577 by John Foxe (Foxe 1578). However, the one case we know of in contemporary England in which a Jew, arrested following a religious dispute, openly asserted his Jewishness in court, that of mining technician Joachim Gaunz (a native of Bohemia who found his way to England as a foreign laborer), was exceptional, local, and scarcely known.⁴ The Jewish gabardine was, at least in England, a visual metaphor; the antipathy between the population of London's Old Jewry and hogsflesh (as Jonson's Well-Bred testifies in Every Man in His Humour), was a thing of the past; and no usurer in usury-riddled London was a self-confessed Jew. To that extent was the reality of Jew hatred effaced from actual experience after three centuries of absence, that at the beginning of the seventeenth century, several Puritans dared convert themselves to Judaism, circumcision and all, while others demanded the recall of the Jews to England (Roth 1941, 149-54).

Even in contemporary Venice former Jewish moneylenders had to abandon their trade and revert to pawnbroking and the selling of second-hand merchandise (veteramentarii).⁵ The civil emancipation through money, which Greenblatt is borrowing from Marx's On the Jewish Question, in his essay on Marlowe,⁶ is but partly accurate: Marx's somewhat mystified figure of the “real Jew” is far from being methodologically scrupulous, drawing, as Julius Carlebach is showing, on descriptions of his intellectual predecessors from Kant and Hegel to Feuerbach and Bauer rather than on empirical experience.⁷ In any case any such concept belongs to a later age: only from the later part of the seventeenth century onward do we find among Jews the common practice of monetary investments in industry, agriculture, and commerce on a large scale (see Katz 1961, 44). There is only scant historical evidence in the early modern period of Jews actually initiating the monetary process rather than joining it at less advantageous, hence less competitive, junctures. The exclusivity of the institutional framework made it difficult, if not impossible, for the Jews to launch any mainstream enterprise.⁸ Credit is far from being a Jewish invention, but a basic element of capitalist economy, for which Jews, whose money was not often invested in immovable property (a point to the consequence of which I shall come back later) had normally more available assets (see Katz 1961, 47-48). Most European countries utilized Jewish material and human resources to enrich economic processes that were developing within the frameworks of their own established institutions, which were as a rule impenetrable by the Jews and thus uninfluenced by any allegedly emancipated Jewish economy. England, which has vigorously embarked on its capitalist era especially under the Tudors without a single Jewish catalyst of significance, is obviously a case in point.

The dramatic construct called Shylock (unlike the historical “Barabas,” a name of obscure origin and without analogues)⁹ had no representational bearing on contemporary reality in the sense that other characters did. Thus what distinguishes Shylock from the other characters of the play is a representational void, or an absence. It is, of course, a roaring absence, full of stage presence. We do not know whence, if at all, he came from, or how he came by his present occupation or wealth. The play does not tell us much about past events in the lives of its characters¹⁰ and yet we know a good deal about Bassanio's prodigal career; about his former association with the Marquis of Montferrat, which has brought him to meet Portia before; we know about Portia's life as a rich heiress desired by suitors from all over the place; about Antonio's mercantile enterprises; and we even get a feeling of Launcelot Gobbo's childhood. The case of Shylock is entirely different. The only biographical detail we know about him is one which is revealed in a functional context: his having had a wife (or that, at least, is whom we assume she was) named Leah, who gave him a turquoise ring when he was a bachelor (3.1.111). But the absence of a personal biography suggests that Shylock partakes in the general, fairy-tale biography offered by the popular imagination for the cultural construct of the Jew. Such an exemplary biography is provided by Marlowe for his Barabas, involving all the clichéd activities and occupations traditionally attributed to, or associated with the Jew, from well poisoning and killing sick Christians, through practicing “physic” to the detriment of his Christian patients, to usury (The Jew of Malta 2.3.176-202). In terms of that nonbiography, the Jew is indeed very close to Marx's definition, cited by Greenblatt: “a universal antisocial element of the present time” (Greenblatt 1980, 204). Shylock's wish to see his daughter “dead at [his] foot, and the jewels in her ear … and the ducats in her coffin” (3.1.80-82) belongs to the same order of transgressive acts as Barabas's murdering Abigail: both are simultaneously deeds and non-deeds, devoid of the necessity of representation. For in the case of that cultural construct turned dramatic character, we cannot easily separate the positive limits, the finitude of the subject, which in Foucault's hostile description “is marked by the spatiality of the body, the yawning of desire, and the time of language” (Foucault 1970, 315), from the transgression of the subject, which suggests an absence of knowledge, or a knowledge of absence. Barabas has done a lot of mischief, as he himself admits and as we get a chance to see for ourselves; and yet, regardless of what he has actually done, there is a permanent stock of evil, inherent in the cultural construct of the Jew and ever ready to be assigned to him in people's minds with no need for factual evidence:

Barnardine.
… go with me
And help me to exclaim against the Jew.
Jacomo.
Why, what has he done?
Barnardine.
A thing that makes me tremble to unfold.
Jacomo.
What, has he crucified a child?

(The Jew of Malta, 3.6.45-49)

Marlowe even provides us with a lively illustration of the common process in which such a fictional identity, or “biography,” is forged, when drunken Ithamore is gratuitously constructing the clichéd image of the mean Jew before the courtesan and her bully, with Barabas in disguise providing the truth for us, as he always does in his asides:

Ithamore.
’Tis a strange thing of that Jew: he lives upon pickled grasshoppers
and sauc’d mushrumps.
Barabas [aside].
What a slave's this! The governor feeds not as I do.
Ithamore.
He never put on a clean shirt since he was circumcis’d.
Barabas [aside].
O rascal! I change myself twice a day.
Ithamore.
The hat he wears, Judas left under the elder when he hang’d himself.
Barabas [aside].
’Twas sent me for a present from the Great Cham.

(4.4.65-74)

Such an imaginary biography awaits, potentially, Shylock as well; but since, unlike in the case of Barabas, which Marlowe took the pains to draw carefully to the last detail, it is not complemented in Shakespeare's play with actual, reliable details, Shylock lives in the public domain of common fictionality. Technically, of course, Shylock is a dramatic subject as any other character in the play. But even in his asides, even when citing his dreams, he seems to be nothing more than an abstract measure, qualifying and defining the immanent constitution of the others. Shylock is the zero point of all the other identities in the play: signifying all, representing none. Unlike an individual case of transgression, such as an evil eye cast by a local witch, the Jew is not counted as a particlar threat on a personal level. His effect is of a different, universal order.¹¹ He is the archetypal Other whose desire structures the subject. For on the one hand he is the great menace, penetrating the dream of love and humanity offered by the play with his blunt discourse of vulgar rationality, his seemingly soluble riddles, to reduce a mystery of enchanting volume into an impoverished pageant of disenchantment; but paradoxically he also represents at the same time the secret, unconscious desire of all the rest for a momentary (or maybe eternal?) liberation from the fetters of “legitimate” discourse and official ideology. Shylock may not be the only one in Venice who dreams of money-bags (2.5.18), but he is certainly the only one to admit it freely in public. Money-bags investing a dream, Jacob's staff informing a fable or a swear (2.5.36), and even a vision of jewels in one's dead daughter's ear (3.1.81) acquire a different symbolic meaning than “some more ducats” (2.6.50) gilding a romantic elopement in plain reality. The plain monetary transaction that threatens to reduce the narrative of the play to the level of a fortuitous, if curious, court proceeding suddenly acquires an aura of poetic acuteness and necessity.

The use of a cultural construct of great popular currency as a model for a dramatic character makes both for greater freedom and constraint: while immuned to factual refutation, it may prove qualified by the more unified image planted in the popular imagination than the variety of human subjects evoked by the other characters. The strategy adopted to avoid such a constraint was deliberate eclecticism. Shylock is a composite construct: the raw foundation of his character involves typically Jewish constituents such as Herod in the Nativity plays (especially in his wrathful appearances in 3.1 and 3.3), the vice in the moralities (be it Avaritia in Catholic Respublica or Infidelitio in Wager's Protestant Maria Magdalena), Judas, Gernutus, the Jews who burst in a grotesque, ecstatic dance round the foot of the cross at the moment of the crucifixion in the Coventry Cycle,¹² Sir Jonathas and his fellow Jews in the Sacrament Play of Croxton,¹³ and the ritual killers of the boy Hugh of Lincoln. It also involves metaphorically Jewish constituents such as the usurer and non-Jewish constituents such as the pantaloon, the puritan, or the devil as the prosecutor in the medieval Processus Belial (see Rea 1929). Some of those constituents were interchangeable already on the level of ground material: Avaritia in Respublica, for instance, was often dressed as a Jew, but since the play was Catholic in its ideology this may have been intended as an insult to the Protestants rather than a direct representation of an ethnic or religious identity. And the tenets of “Moysaical Justice” as stereotypically represented in the popular imagination are expressed in The Merchant of Venice, as we shall see, in the argumentation of the Prince of Arragon no less than by Shylock himself. Shylock, however, evoked something larger and more complex than the common image of the Jew. As Stephen Greenblatt rightly notes, “the figure of the Jew is useful as a powerful rhetorical device, an embodiment for a Christian audience of all they loath and fear” but also “a true representative of his society,” a qualification Greenblatt reserves for Barabas, but one that could equally be applied to Shylock, though in a different manner. Lacking an accurately corresponding identity, that bigger-than-life stereotype may represent at once no one and everyone, a threat and a form of desire, a mirror of fantasy, and the black hole of the play. There is no possible reconciliation which contains Shylock, yet no reconciliation is possible outside the discourse initiated by Shylock.

Thus The Merchant of Venice, a play whose poetry is curbed by a constant look to the rise and fall of shares in the Rialto, needs Shylock's fairy-tale cruelty to redeem its hidden depths of love and harmony. The dry words of Shylock's bond provide for Bassanio's encounter with the prophetic words which the Lord of Belmont had inscribed on the caskets, elicit Portia's poetic lecture on the quality of mercy, and make Lorenzo praise the harmony of the spheres. The legitimate discourse of Venice and Belmont, which has fallen prey to Antonio's sadness, Bassanio's prodigality, and Portia's weariness can only be recovered when Shylock's subversive discourse intervenes. But Shylock exacts his price. By the end of the trial scene both Venice and Belmont are buying their freedom from Shylock's constraint by the sole device of subscribing to his own discourse.

For Shylock is planted in a discourse within which human desire and happiness are almost totally subordinated to economic needs and gratification; where human sympathy and solidarity, redefined in a newly formed cosmoplitan world, is divorced from the all-embracing image of Christ (a divorce for which the obvious cases of Shylock or Morocco serve but radical symbolic signifiers) and becomes a function of a fragile, compromising alliance between interdependent classes, genders and races; where the notion of “good men” equals financially “sufficient” ones. In such a world of growing individualism any representation of harmony is but a token of coming to terms with the ever-multiplying, necessarily heterogeneous modes of one's own identity. In a world in which credit has become a precondition of commerce (see Cohen 1985, 199); where risk and hazard inform the very core of survival; where personal identities, so much dependent on power structures generated by economic status, are constantly prone to get diffused or totally lost in the procedures of mercantile ventures containing the calculated, though barely insured, risks of storms and pirates, one gets obsessed with fashioning and redefining one's identity by means of symbolic language games with ideological backing. The word, it seems, will hold even when everything else, including one's own identity, will fail, that is, of course, if you are at the right end of the political vocabulary, as Shylock is painfully to learn. Which is why Antonio, who at the outset is sufficiently provided with material wealth, craves for having his sadness and identity put in appropriate words; and why Portia's suitors have to know their way with words rather than with bed-pillows, as is the case with the earlier, medieval versions of the story, in the Dolopathos or the Gesta Romanorum.¹⁴ A world reduced to moral riddles and legal phrasings will not be recuperated by psychological subtleties or accented realism but by symbolic acts, involving the breaking of a code of mystery, which at the same time negotiate their validity with the imaginary patterns of unconscious jouissance. And indeed, as Granville Barker rightly diagnosed, “There is no more reality in Shylock's bond and the Lord of Belmont's will than in Jack and the Beanstalk” (Barker 1963, 99). It is a telling phrase, since, whether or not we agree with its other implications, we cannot escape the notion that The Merchant of Venice is indeed a play governed by symbolic signifiers, by words and phrasings qualified by unconscious semiotic patterns, rather than by lifelike characters representing full-fledged human subjects motivated by rational considerations.

Without taking too seriously the extent of “reality” Granville-Barker's implied reader is supposed to expect, it is obvious that the provocative assertion with which he opens his discussion of The Merchant of Venice implicates the host of critics who for ages had attempted to endow the play with solid aura of reality, presenting the religious conflict as contributing to a “problem play” such as Measure for Measure is reputed to be, “pièce à thèse” attacking a topical political or moral problem in terms of a didactic theatrical event. As such, Granville-Barker's assertion is not entirely out of place: the prominent symbols investing the narrative of the play—the bond, the caskets, the pound of flesh, and the ring—are all assembled here from the popular repository of folklore and mythology, the powerhouse of human fantasy, the vocabulary of the imaginary order and the immediate constituents of the collective unconsciousness. As many nineteenth-century source hunters have assiduously shown, one may trace all the moral and ideological issues and narrative-units of The Merchant of Venice back to the realm of folktales and parables, exemplum and fairy tales.¹⁵ A major property of the fairy tale, before it has been loaded by modern authors (especially from the eighteenth century onward) with heavy ideological burden (Zipes 1988, 3), is its potential indifference to moral criteria and psychological responses. The function of those, to the extent they exist at all in the world of fairy tales, is hardly more than to serve or decorate the narrative. Human subjects (and their interrelationships) are to be grasped more in terms of textual strategies, such as hermeneutical analysis (see, e.g., Ricoeur 1973), rather than conceived of as fully rounded, holistic human beings equipped with a distinct and definite psychological apparatus. If Shakespeare's fairy-tale characters haunt our deepest feelings long after the play has ended, it is because Shakespeare “could not help giving life to a character … no more … than the sun can help shining” (Barker 1963, 99); and the major function of those fairy-tale symbols in the world of the play may not be incompatible with providing for “the Utopian vocation of the newly reified sense, the mission … to restore at least a symbolic experience of libidinal gratification to a world drained of it, a world of extension, gray and merely quantifiable” (Jameson 1981, 63). For without that symbolic level, negotiating and appropriating imaginary patterns of uncounscious jouissance, both the language investing Shylock's bond and Portia's caskets, and the experience of love and harmony investing the play, cannot be reconciled with the world of the Real (or the Rialto, for that matter) but in terms of measure and calculation. And these are better expressed by signs and ratios rather than by full-fledged dramatic representations of human subjects.

A surprising feature (for some) of the early folk versions of the Pound of Flesh narrative is the absence of the Jew from the story.¹⁶ But this should come as no surprise for anyone who will note that The Merchant of Venice has nothing to do with a narrow concept of Jewishness but rather with the general theme of power relations and their critical exposure and demystification. It is not just the power the Venetian state exerts on its citizens (among them Shylock), but also the power that the latters exert on the world and their fellow citizens. For power, which (as Foucault tells us) is always inseparably entangled with knowledge, has no constant, definite source but is revealed in an open, dialectical “cluster of relations” between the political and social factors (Foucault 1980, 199). Therefore, power is not solely the property of the political establishment, but is circulated by chain reaction from society to the individual. The very effect of power constitutes the individual, which is parallelly transformed into becoming a vehicle of power.¹⁷ The same political establishment that gave privilege to the worldview (hence, to the system of knowledge or ideology) of the society of Christian merchants surrounding Antonio has simultaneously generated Shylock's power to exert moral and physical terror on that society by his knowledge of its constitution. Shylock is far from owning an essential dramatic identity: a function of the others' fears and desires, he is rather a dramatic process or a “flow,” which can be construed either in terms of the signifying flow, whose discovery is assigned by Lacan to Freud and “the mystery of which lies in the fact that the subject does not even know where to pretend to be its organizer” (Lacan 1977, 259), or, alternatively, in Deleuze and Guattari's antioedipal terminology (Deleuze and Guattari 1977). Rather than becoming a unified subject, endowed with particular psychological or ethnic properties, Shylock embodies the nonsubjective, anarchic power contained in the subversive exploitation of judicial rationality by the other or the alien, and he is thus empowered by the very liberal-humanist discourse held by the society he turns against. The dramatic situation emanating from this cluster of relations is ambiguous and dialectical: on the one hand, Venetian society allows Shylock a seemingly protected legal standing, yet on the other hand this legal protection is precarious, owing to Shylock's alienation from that liberal-humanistic discourse, founded in the play on the magic unity of gentle and gentile, which is to The Merchant of Venice what kin and kind is to Hamlet.

Yet the signifying pattern gentle-gentile does not necessarily depend, as it would appear, solely on Shylock's ethno-religious identity. Rather, it may allude to every aspect of the Christian discourse of the play, which embraces such diverse themes as commerce, usury, music, love and amity, in all of which Shylock's otherness plays a crucial role. Instances of all these fields of dramatic tension will be touched upon in our reading of the play in chapter 3 of this book. It will suffice for our purpose in the present chapter to demonstrate how the “cluster” of power relations is activated in a socioeconomic context in which Shylock's Jewishness plays an important, yet not indispensable, part.

“’TIS MINE, AND I WILL HAVE IT”: POSSESSION IN THE MERCHANT OF VENICE

An experienced merchant and capital owner, Antonio somewhat condescendingly rejects the suggestion, made by Salerio and Solanio, that his melancholy, which drives him to “have much ado to know [him]self” (The Merchant of Venice, 1.1.7), is caused by a worry for his scattered property. In business, as in mental economy, there are obvious advantages for diversification:

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

(41-44)

There is, however, a point in their suggestion (if that is what they imply) that parts of his identity are imprinted in his material possessions. The latter, which range from his merchandise to his very body, are the symbolic battleground upon which much of the dramatic conflict of The Merchant of Venice is acted out.

Rising capitalism, which dominated English socioeconomic discourse in the early modern period, had a slower impact on legitimate ideology than on daily practice. This resulted in ideological controversies on the intellectual scene between conservatives and conformists, both lagging behind, and attempting to come to terms with social and economic realities. Under the influence of the Reformation, new theories of property were preached and advanced throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In 1549, Sir John Cheke “warns the poor that an equal distribution of wealth would not be in their interest, as it would take from them the opportunity of becoming rich” (Schlatter 1951, 105). The changing perspectives on economy distinguish the obsolete attitude of fifteenth-century moralities toward material wealth from that of a sixteenth-century morality such as Skelton's Magnyfycence, in which material prosperity is not any more solely a function of faith and good deeds but of economic discretion and husbandry, and where Prince Magnyfycence (an updated Everyman, significantly endowed with an absolute hegemonic power, rather than a representation of the communal average like his fifteenth-century prototype) is not expected to renounce wealth altogether but use it conscientiously. Antonio, the prince of Venice's merchants, rehabilitates the contemptuous view of the merchant by the early authorities, for whom “A merchant shall hardly keep himself from doing wrong, and a huckster shall not be freed from sin.”¹⁸ The moral ambiguity regarding commerce investing the economic discourse since the revival of mercantile enterprise around the eleventh century still moderately haunts the conscience of Venice's Christian merchants in Shakespeare's play, and the economic aspects of the “good inspirations” informing the will of Portia's dead father curbing “the will of [his] living daughter” (1.2.24-25, 28) reflect, at least in theory, the sentiment informing the wills of many bankers and merchants in the late Middle Ages, who left a good deal of their worldly goods to the poor or the clergy as a token of repentance (see Pirenne 1969, 17ff). This ambiguity may account for the fact that Antonio will never be caught throughout the play in the actual process of dealing with any of his commercial enterprises (as opposed to Shylock, who considers Bassanio's offer, initially at least, as a regular, daily transaction and partakes with Salerio and Solanio in being constantly attentive to news from the Rialto).

A similar change of attitude affects the contemporary controversy over usury. As against the more orthodox views of ecclesiastical conservatives, reiterating Scriptural and patristic prohibitions, one may find contemporary voices defending the lending at interset as an act of Christian charity.¹⁹ In his exegesis of the Deuteronomic passage concerning usury, Benjamin Nelson argues, Calvin himself “charted the path to the world of universal Otherhood, where all become ‘brothers’ in being equally ‘others’. … prov[ing] that it was permissible to take usury from one's brother” (Nelson 1969, 73). Calvin's argumentation was adopted by many exponents of usury in Tudor and Stuart England, “a society of small property owners … borrowing and lending were common” (R.H. Tawney in Wilson 1925, 19). When a major seventeenth-century figure like Sir Robert Filmer enters that ideological battle, he supports a similar position, namely denying a godly warrant for the denouncement of usury and reducing it to a matter of personal conscience.²⁰ Nelson believes that Shakespeare may have joined the debate in The Merchant of Venice, in the special connotation given in this context to “Christians' and ‘Jews’, ‘friends’ and ‘enemies’” (Nelson 1969, 86-87). In spite of Antonio's harsh words against Shylock's practice of usury, which seem to reflect the ideological position of the church's orthodoxy, the play follows the more pragmatic position in presenting many of its characters with the task of taking decisions on material wealth by using personal conscience: such is the case of Portia's suitors, Antonio and his Venetian merchant-companions, or the party concerned in deciding the fine on Shylock at the end of the trial.

Another field of ideological controversy was the realm of private possession. With the rise of capitalism, we are told, “property is equated with private property—the right of a natural or artificial person to exclude others from some use or benefit of something” (Macpherson 1975, 105). But though on the whole English society in the Renaissance was organized accordingly as a private property system,²¹ the official ideology of the age was still committed to the orthodox idea that original communism was a state of purity from which the present system has diverted. Whether that diversion was sinful, tolerable, or justified under the circumstances was a matter of opinion. The world was promised to Adam to dominate, but was it allocated to any private individual? And how exactly was that domination qualified or compared to the domination of God? The orthodox monastic ideal, derived from the monks' traditional reading of the Bible and Patristic authorities, regarded private property as a major impediment to salvation, and thus considered its abolition part of the desirable return to the primary condition (see Reeve 1986, 53-55). More's Utopia could be taken to express implicitly a similar sentiment. Filmer, however, taking part in this controversy as well, defended private property in denying that there had ever been a stage in which it was absent.

Those two conflicting conceptions of private property are lying at the core of The Merchant of Venice. It is, in more than one way, a play about ownership. Antonio, the merchant of Venice, is faced in the play with at least three challenges to his identity as a possessor. In the first outer circle of ownership, he is challenged by natural and human powers as an owner of material possessions. In this struggle he is prone to lose his goods, ships, and money—all of which serve him as tokens or carriers of some other, imagined, yet undefined wealth. In the second circle of ownership he is challenged by human powers as an “owner” of a friend who is first to proclaim himself contracted to Antonio, owing him “the most in money and in love” (1.1.131). On the third, more personal level of ownership, Antonio is challenged by individual and corporate human powers as the owner of his own body. On all three levels his position of ownership is temporarily shaken, to be only partially recuperated. His material goods are partly returned to him at the very end, but the fact that he will never “know by what strange incident” three out of his five argosies have fortuitously “come to harbour” (5.1.277, 78) will forever undermine his sense of absolute domination of his property. His “ownership” of Bassanio as a friend is both reasserted and qualified at the end by the latter's marriage bond. And, finally, Antonio's domination of his body is returned to him, but its partial recuperation does not signify an absolute reassertion of Antonio's ownership rights as it does the fallibility of human reason in securing possession through language. In spite of Shylock's defeat in court, his terms, indicating the limits of Antonio's possession of his own body, are ultimately reasserted rather than challenged in principle. A similar crisis of ownership affects other characters in the play, from Portia, through Bassanio and Shylock down to Portia's bunch of suitors.

The solution of the Master of Belmont's ideological riddle contest, behind which the subject of possession is constantly and notably lurking, suggests (at least in theory) a restrained approach to private possession: one is rewarded for not aspiring (let alone proclaiming an aspiration) for lucrative wealth. This is the common compromise of the official Christian ideology in early capitalist Europe between orthodox humility before a guiding providence and pragmatic recognition of the power of wealth. The binary opposition to that dogmatic prescription is provided by Shylock, who would identify himself with Jacob in his capacity as “third possessor” and insist on his deserts. Confident in his autonomous ability to assess and formulate the latters, he phrases them eloquently in what seems at the time to be a carefully drawn bond. On the surface level, according to which the narrative appears to follow the pattern of romantic comedy, Shylock's project is doomed to failure. This position corresponds to the message of the silver casket, echoing Antonio's reproaching Shylock for making no distinction between his gold and silver and Jacob's ewes and rams. It is Antonio, who but now sought a judicious definition of his own identity, who introduces to the play Shylock's identification with the devil. On the face of it, there is no leap of imagination here, since the association of the Jew with the devil is a commonplace on the plane of symbolic order. Barabas, for instance, is described by Ithamore as the devil's instrument to perform sheer evil:

the devil invented a challenge, my master writ it,
and I carried it.

(The Jew of Malta, 3.3.20-21)

But whereas Barabas serves the devil because he is “set upon extreme revenge” (3.3.47) on the Christians he hates, the association of Shylock with the devil is made in different terms. Though Shylock is presented by Antonio as “the devil [who] can cite Scripture for his purpose” (1.3.93), his identification with the devil is made in an economic, rather than religious, context. Like the devil who should be denied any right of possession in the human world, Shylock should be denied any such right for living of the breeding of a barren metal. Whereas the metaphor of procreation may be applied to substantial possessions of representational value, such as Portia's lands or Antonio's goods, Shylock's money is denied the right of breeding. In his delegitimation of Shylock as possessor, Antonio is joined by a surprising ally. It is Jessica who reiterates his identification of her father with the devil in describing her father's house as “hell,” a clear indication of an illegitimate property. In fourteenth-century Venice, Jews were not allowed to possess even houses or land which were given them as a gift. They were only allowed to live temporarily in rented appartments (Shipper 1935, 425). The move of Launcelot Gobbo from the household of the Jew to that of the Christian, accompanied by the same identification of the Jew with the devil, belongs to the same pattern.

More complex in this context, however, are the implications of Jessica's obscure reference to Tubal and Chus as Shylock's “countrymen” (3.2.284). As opposed to Marx's aforementioned reference to the “chimerical nationality” of judaism as “the nationality of the merchant, of man of money in general,” which may be read as a sociological or theological one (Marx 1975, 239), the reference to a Jew as a “countryman” is purely symbolic, implying absence rather than identity. Since Jews reached Europe through expulsion and a process of gradual dispersion rather than conquest, colonization, or mass migration, they could possess no economic positions which depended on hegemonic power or expropriation of lands:

I must confess we come not to be kings:
That’s not our fault: alas, our number's few,
And crowns come either by succession,
Or urg’d by force.

(The Jew of Malta, 1.1.127-30)

Even where the Jews could be in possession of lands, such as in Barabas's island, whose circumstances Marlowe appears to have studied carefully:

Barabas.
and I have bought a house
As great and fair as is the Governor's;
And there in spite of Malta will I dwell,
Having Ferneze's hand.

(2.3.13-16)

—they often preferred to deal in landed property not so much as “a form of family investment, as it was for the Christians in Malta as elsewhere, so much as a method of making money,” since that tricky “mortgage” system served “to avoid the odium which the taint of usury brought with it” (Wettinger 1985, 40). With the continuing practice of expulsion of Jews, which became widespread especially in Western Europe throughout the fifteenth century, such a prospect becomes a considerable factor in the Jewish own investment policy (see Katz 1961, 47). The lack of lasting property, in Feudal and early modern Europe, meant a temporary status of citizenship and a perpetual state of alienation. Othello the Moor, another alien in Venice, is theoretically free to join his fellow countrymen in the realm of the Prince of Morocco. In The Merchant of Venice, all the characters are identified by local habitation: Portia's suitors are identified by their countries; there is a clear division, at the outset, between the Venetians and the residents of Belmont; Launcelot Gobbo defines himself as an Italian (2.2.150), and his father, who owns a horse and brings a dish of doves as a present, must own a plot of land in the country. Even “a poor Turk of tenpence” such as Ithamore would season his fantasy of marrying the courtesan with the vision of settling in “a country:”

Content: but we will leave this paltry land,
And sail from hence to Greece, to lovely Greece.
I’ll be thy Jason, thou my golden fleece.

(The Jew of Malta, 4.2.92-94)

Whereas all the others may be referred to by their local habitation or country of origin, the Jew may cite a list of places where he visited for a purpose (Shylock's Frankfort, Barabas's Italy, France, etc.) or at best be related to his latest country of temporary residence, where, like here, he was residing in “hell.” Not even the ancient, spiritual locus of Jewish desire will do: “creep[ing] to Jerusalem” (The Jew of Malta, 4.1.62) is brought up by Barabas as a mode of penance only when he shams a wish to become a Christian. Calling their fellow Jews “countrymen,” as do Jessica (who, whether she reports faithfully or lies about Shylock's particular talk with Tubal or Chus, probably quotes her father's regular terminology) and Barabas, betrays aliens' conspiracy rather than citizens' local pride or patriotism:

Barabas.
… let ’em combat, conquer, and kill all,
So they spare me, my daughter, and my wealth.

(150-51)

The identification of Shylock with the devil is associated, both in principle and in the play's praxis, with the latter's unlawful possession of human souls and bodies. Again, it appertains to a breach of a socioeconomic restriction no less than to religion. The exchange of identities, as we have seen, is a common practice among the characters of the play. Portia, for instance, whose identity is first defined in the play as “a lady richly left” (1.1.161), yields herself to Bassanio in terms of identity and possession simultaneously:

Myself, and what is mine, to you and yours
Is now converted.

(The Merchant of Venice, 3.2.166-67)

By way of a specially designed system of restrictions, which proved to have defined the ethno-religious identity of Shylock and his “fellow countrymen” in terms of a separate socioeconomic class, Shylock is barred from possessing anything but faceless, “barren metal,” which, on the one hand, is devoid of any representationable identity but for the “breeding use” of which, on the other hand, he is sharply reproached. Denied his rights to substantial possession, Shylock's subversion of power in striving for autonomous identity is diverted against the body of Antonio. The exertion of bodily punishment is one of the age-old emblems of absolute power: the right to dismember, fracture, or confine the human body to a forced asylum, as Essex, for instance, took the liberty to do to Doctor Lopez (a liberty that significantly will be qualified by a law of “habeas corpus”) is a prerogative of kings and masters. Here it is appropriated for the private use of an individual who is himself coerced by the official system: the physical expropriation of Antonio's body will defeat the rival “legitimate discourse,” which threatens Shylock's autonomy of otherness. The body, that “most quotidian part of our landscape and the most potent signifier known to us” (Gent & Llewellyn 1990, 9), is hardly confined in the context of the play to its physiological ontology. It indicates the boundaries of individual identity as recognized by the world (which Antonio emphatically interrogates at the opening scene of the play): “The subject originally locates and recognises desire through the intermediary, not only of his own image, but of the body of his fellow being” (Lacan 1988a, 147). Shylock, for whom a body is a rich metaphorical “habitation” (The Merchant of Venice 1.3.29), will regard his habitation as a body, with casements for ears (2.5.34). He would catch his rival “upon the hip” (1.3.41), feed upon him (2.5.14-15) and bait fish with his flesh (3.1.47). James Shapiro's suggestion that Shylock's design against Antonio's body has to do with castration places Shylock's otherness within a specific context through its implication of circumcision (Shapiro 1992). It would seem, however, that Shylock aspires to a more ambitious and universal project. By mutilating Antonio, Shylock will inscribe his own otherness on the body that stands nearest the heart of Venice's wholesome, dominant discourse. The wholeness of the human body is a vital condition for man's position in the world:

Man is all symmetrie,
Full of proportions, one limbe to another,
And all to all ther world besides.

(George Herbert, “Man,” 13-15)

The complexity of human body is revealed in its symmetry and proportions, and “the first step in unraveling this complexity is to postulate that the system of man's body is both exhaustive and all-inclusive, that it has everything it needs and nothing superfluous.” This complexity of the body serves also “as a figure for the world's complexity whether cosmic, political, or architectural” (Barkan 1975, 3-4, 6). By inscribing his will on Antonio's body in threatening to strike off a material pound of flesh and proclaiming his right to redesign its natural shape, not only does Shylock disrupt the inherent symmetry of Antonio's body, but he also offends the ideological values that symmetry stand for within the official Christian discourse (of which the harmony of the spheres, eulogized by Lorenzo in act 5 is a typical macrocosmic metaphor). For if Shylock's scheme prevails, it may subversively subordinate “objective” history to his own, rival discourse of divisiveness, quantifiable individuality, and reified personal deserts. Shylock's project of dismembering Antonio is thus one of self-assertion, an act of self-recognition on his own part:

The body as fragmented desire seeking itself out, and the body as ideal self, are projected on the side of the subject as fragmented body, while it sees the other as perfect body. For the subject, a fragmented body is an image essentially dismemberably from its body.

(Lacan 1988a, 148)

Shylock's design to cut off Antonio's body constitutes the peak of his imagery of feeding and devouring throughout the play, to serve as the diametrical opposition of the “barren metal” and the utmost stage of acquiring a substantial identity. The myth of eating a rival's body is widespread and influential in folk literature, and Shakespeare himself did not shy from using it literally in Titus Andronicus. Speculations regarding its relevance for The Merchant of Venice have ranged from ritual killing to therapeutic drinking of the heart's blood. In Declamation 95 of The Orator (1596), which has been suggested as a possible source for Shakespeare's play, the Jew says: “I might also say that I haue need of this flesh to cure a friend of mine of a certaine maladie, which is otherwise incurable.”²² The image of Shylock standing over Antonio with his pointed knife could also bring to mind Abraham, prevented at the last moment by the Angel of mercy from sacrificing Isaac. And yet the essential meaning of Shylock's act of transgression is verbal rather than physical. As he himself initially suggests (whether genuinely or cunningly one does not know), there is no material gain for him in exacting the forfeiture:

A pound of man's flesh taken from a man,
Is not so estimable, profitable neither
As flesh of muttons, beefs, or goats.

(1.3.161-63)

Hence the execution of Shylock's threat must be public and ceremonial, since it is not necessarily the actual pound of flesh he is after, but what it stands for, through the ritual proclamation of his possessing it. Cutting a person's body can be conceived as a statement, a speech act, as the case of the biblical Levite and his raped and murdered “concubine” tells us:

And when he was come into his house, he took a knife, and laid hold on his concubine, and divided her, together with her bones, into twelve pieces, and sent her into all the coasts of Israel. And it was so, that all that saw it said, There was no such deed done nor seen from the day that the children of Israel came up out of the land of Egypt unto this day: consider of it, take advice, and speak your minds.

(Judges 19:29-30)

Just as the severed body of the biblical girl speaks,²³ so is Shylock's bodily threat not surprisingly secured by language: its meaning is discursive rather than physical. Shylock's project, in other words, is not bodily punishing the Antonio who spat on him on Wednsday last (1.3.121) but to transform his identity into a human quantity, subject to possession by others. Nor is it surprising that only within the discourse generated by Shylock's phrasing of his bond, offered in “merry sport” (1.3.141), will Portia be able to defeat him at court, in adopting similar terms of jouissance. It is a battle of words that uncovers the two rival concepts of possession which, as we have seen, lie at the core of the play's ideological clash. On the one hand there is Shylock, who attempts to appropriate the constituted validity assigned to feudal property into the realm of mobile property where he reigns, and then in turn tries to convert his money, which in the domain of property is basically a signifier, into substantial property in the shape of human flesh (materializing the image of the body as “habitation”). Using the two signifying modes at his disposal, the money in his coffers and the language of his bond, Shylock would inscribe his power on Antonio's body, playing creator and destroyer in dominating the course of his victim's life and death. Shylock considers his proclaimed act of ceremonial mutilation as serving him to enact his symbolic richness in terms of the material world. Unlike Portia who claims the rights for her possessions by birth, Shylock uses his economic power and knowledge of Venetian law to carve for himself (literally) the identity of one “richly left” whose claim on material property is clearly evident. He is bound to find out, however, that it is much easier to handle an abstract quantitative possession such as money than any kind of substantial possession, let alone human flesh.

The standing of human body within the realm of property theory is far from decisive. Some would regard the body as a substance sui generis among the world's entities, and therefore deny any subordination of it to property laws. “What?” says St. Paul, “know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost which is in you, which ye have of God, and ye are not your own? For ye are bought with a price: therefore glorify God in your body, and in your spirit, which are God's” (I Cor. 6:19-20). Hobbes, who “reduces the human essence to freedom from others' wills and proprietorship of one's own capacities” (Macpherson 1962, 264), observes accordingly that it is the law of nature (lex naturalis) that implies that “every man has a right to every thing, even to another's body,” a liberty that endangers the security of everyone, and therefore it is a general rule of reason to seek peace (Hobbes 1929, 99). According to Common Law (which for Shakespeare's audience may be the normative representation of the law), the human body is “incapable in law of being [subject] of property” (Pollock and Wright 1888, 232). Others, however, “hold that the body should be thought of as property, and emphasize that each person owns or has title to himself or herself” (Munzer 1990, 37). For the Levellers, and especially Richard Overtone, the fundemental postulate of natural property right “was that every man is naturally the proprietor of his own person” (Macpherson 1962, 139-42), a position which will be readily endorsed by modern liberal theory (see, e.g., Nozick 1974). Shylock, no doubt, claims Antonio's pound of flesh by strength of property law:

The pound of flesh which I demand of him
Is dearly bought, ’tis mine and I will have it:
If you deny me, fie upon your law!

(4.1.99-101)

How would the original audience of the play conceive of the moral basis of Shylock's claim? The legal analogy Shylock uses in that same speech to support his claim is that of slavery: a more familiar demand which, he might hope, not improbably may help to render his original claim less striking. In this he follows a long conceptual tradition, which can be traced back to Aristotle's contention that “the slave is not only the slave of his master but wholly belongs to him” (Politics 1254a 12; Aristotle 1905). Christianity amplifies this, and St. Thomas Aquinas reminds one that for maiming one's servant “the penalty was forfeiture of the servant, who was ordered to be given his liberty” (Summa Theologica, 21, q. 105 art. 4). Rejecting James's claim on the English throne, Robert Parsons, in 1594, would appeal to property owners in reminding them that “the upholders of divine right … also maintain that the king reduces all subjects to slaves, for as Aristotle defined him, a slave is a man whose property belongs to his master” (Schlatter 1951, 113). Parsons does not address the issue of the body as property, but the persistence of the phenomenon of mutilating slaves (see, e.g., Patterson 1982, 59) betrays such a notion. For Shakespeare's audience, the slave is a less abstract cultural construct than is the Jew. Both the presence and impact of slavery, consisting in the radical legal claim of master on slave in terms of property, persisted uninterruptedly within the ideological framework of the Middle Ages, side by side with its common substitution in feudalism by the less radical relation of serfdom.²⁴ “As a commodity, the slave is property” (Finley 1983, 73), and for some writers his/her powerlessness is comparable with death, since “it always originated (or was conceived of as having originated) as a substitute for death” (Patterson 1982, 5; see also Phillips 1985, 5-6). Shylock's tricky formulation of his claim over Antonio's pound of flesh never mentions death explicitly, even though everyone knows with Portia that following the implementation of Shylock's bond Antonio is in danger to “bleed to death” (4.1.254). Shylock's reified conception of his “owned” part in Antonio's body precludes any notion of death, for there is no life in quantifiable property. In an ironic Foucauldian overturn of power relations, he who is not allowed to make “a barren metal” breed turns a living body into a lifeless property.

But not only the actual presence of slavery has affected medieval Europe and contributed to the cultural construct of the slave:

The persistent and growing influence of Roman law, which contained a sophisticated set of regulations for slavery, helped shape the legal systems of the European West and provided a ready-made set of rules that could be put into force easily when slavery again became economically significant.

(Phillips 1985, 3-4)

English law, we are told, “has never furnished a case in which a person claimed a pound of flesh as penalty, but it has been called upon to consider the case of a usurer who reduced his debtor by contract to virtual slavery, and has refused to enforce it” (Keeton 1967, 132-33). However, some earlier investigators of the legal implications of Shylock's claim did attempt to relate the latter to the persistent influence of the Roman law on contemporary legal practice. In the profused nineteenth-century practice of source hunting for the Pound of Flesh motif, no clear connection has ever been established between the early oriental, religious versions of the story and its medieval Western, secular ones. In the former versions, such as the one in the Indian Mahabharata, the human hero is tested by the gods in making him shelter a dove (Agni in disguise) from a pursuing Indra, disguised as a hawk: when the latter claims his right of feeding according to the law of nature, the hero finally yields to him a piece of his own flesh which equals the weight of the dove.²⁵ In the Western medieval versions, the secular bond substitutes the religious vow, the creditor or usurer substitutes the bird of prey (which may explain why the farfetched etymological association of the name Shylock and Shallach, the archaic Hebrew for cormorant, has fascinated some scholars), the legal penalty substitutes the religious sacrifice, and the secular law replaces moral tenets. As a consequence, several attempts have been made to trace the origins of the Pound of Flesh story back to the Roman laws of the Twelve Tables. The third Table accords the creditor with almost unrestricted rights over the debtor's freedom and body: after three days in which the debtor was exposed in the marketplace and the debt was still due, the several creditors were allowed by the law to divide his/her body between them, “and he who takes more or less than he legally deserves will not be held guilty.”²⁶ Scholars who believed that the last clause is a direct reference to the Pound of Flesh story conjectured that the story itself preceded the Law of the Twelve Tables, or that the clause is a later interpolation (the fact that we do not have the original Table gives ground to such speculations).²⁷ Jacob Grimm (the elder of the two famous brothers) associated the story with the fifth-century Sallic Wergild law, which he argues is a relic of an ancient Teutonic law that decreed the death or mutilation penalty against a debtor failing to pay his debt (see Grimm 1828, 611-21). Grimm compares this law with a Norwegian law allowing the creditor of a debtor who would not be baled by his friends “to cut from the debtor's body as he pleases, from above or below.”²⁸ English law followed the German in allowing the mutilation of the debtor's or offender's body.²⁹ Under the influence of the ancient slavery law, the amputation of a hand or a leg became a fashion during the rule of Henry II (Pollock and Maitland 1898, 461); and in Shakespeare's time (3 November 1579), John Stubbs and William Page, the author and distributor, respectively, of The Discovery of the Gaping Gulf, a “lewd and seditious” pamphlet against the queen, were punished by striking off their right hands with three blows.³⁰ But there was another, more direct yet unnoticed bearing of the Pound of Flesh narrative on the master-slave property relation. There is no evidence that Shakespeare might have read the earliest European version of the folk motif, the Creditor of the Dolopathos; but it is interesting to note that in it, the vengeful creditor is a former slave of the young hero, who bears a grude toward his former master who, at a burst of choler, once struck off his leg. The Creditor of the Dolopathos is not a Jew. If there is any connection in the common imagination between the Jew and slavery, it has to do with the major involvement of Jews in the slave trade since the early Middle Ages (see, e.g., Bloch 1975, 3). With the decline of feudalism and the rise of colonialism as an outcome of mercantile and early industrial capitalism, the master-slave relation was vigorously revived as a socioeconomic paradigm, especially in regard to Christians—non-Christian, European—non-European binary relations. We have Hakluyt's description of the first English slaving voyage under Hawkins's command, which left the coast of England in October 1562, and after having received “friendly intertainment” at Teneriffe,

passed to Sierra Leona … where he stayed some good time, and got into his possession, partly by the sworde, and partly by other meanes, to the number of 300 Negros at the least, besides other merchandises which that countrey yeeldeth.

(Craton, Walvin, and Wright 1976, 12)

The ethno-religious otherness of the enslaved party from the point of view of the official ideology helped suppress the moral problem potentially involved in the revived practice, establishing it as a legitimate institution rather than a moral category (See Finley 1983, 126). We may only speculate about the exact reaction of the original audience of Marlowe's play to Barabas's malicious hope “to see the Governor a slave, / And, rowing in a galley, whipp’d to death” (5.1.66-67), a wish granted him in the following scene, but if he wanted to let his illustrious heroic villain retain his dramatic stature and command of the audience's subversive sympathies until the very moment of his overthrow, Marlowe had to make Barabas relinquish white, Catholic Ferneze's slavery for strategic reasons. Similarly, Shylock would not bring up the issue of slavery in relation to Antonio but as an analogical case in terms of property relations. It is this property relation that is represented in Prospero's reference to Caliban: “this thing of darkness I / Acknowledge mine” (The Tempest 5.1.275-76) in which “mine” represents an identical claim to Shylock's reference to Antonio's pound of flesh, or Catholic Vice-Admiral del Bosco's account of his

fraught [of] Grecians, Turks, and Afric Moors;
… our slaves,
Of whom we would make sale.

(The Jew of Malta, 2.2.9, 17-18)

While Launcelot Gobbo is hired by Shylock for a wage, and by agreement may change his master at his own request, Barabas purchases Ithamore (“a poor Turk of tenpence … born in Thrace; brought up in Arabia” [4.2.42, 2.3.129-30]), at the marketplace and promptly marks him, as he would do with any piece of property. Such precedents enable Shylock to regard his bodily claim on Antonio in terms of a legitimate legal relation. The analogy between body rights and property rights is not contested by the Venetian court. In fact, Keeton argues,

Portia was adopting precisely the attitude of the Court of Chancery of the period. Substitute “estate” for “pound of flesh,” and you have a typical Elizabethan suit in Chancery. The creditor is about to take possession of the debtor's estate. Very well, says the Court, you may take possession, but you must use the profits you acquire by taking possession in satisfaction of the debt, and you must account strictly for everything you receive. … The estate must not suffer in the slightest degree from the entry into possession of the creditor. In both cases the creditor prefers the safer course, and refrains from entering into possession.

(Keeton 1967, 145)

By introducing the second defense against the implementation of Shylock's bond (as she did earlier in “The quality of mercy” speech), Portia does contest, indeed, the total reification of Antonio's body implied by Shylock's argument. But this is but an added victory (which is therefore absent from the narrative, more basic, sources of the Pound of Flesh story). For all practical reasons, she won her legal battle in the first round, and that she did on Shylock's terms. Even her potentially spiritual arguments are subject to the logic of property law: the human body is not that well dissociated from spirit; and thus had even Shylock remembered to specify blood in his bond, Portia could get him on account of Antonio's spirit which is not to be separated by him from Antonio's body, whether by way of death or dementia. Like the devil's, Shylock's claim on anybody's soul (which lies beyond the controversial domain in which the body may be reified and conceived as subject to property law) is a priori unfounded, which is why Shylock himself would never have brought it up. Even here, however, the victory of the official Christian ideology over Shylock's transgression would have been granted on Shylock's terms.

Against Shylock's reifying argument the play had posited the public quiz proclaimed by the Master of Belmont for a lucrative prize: the contesters are required to fashion their own identity, assisted by the guidelines inscribed on the caskets, in order to gain possession of the late master's daughter, the Belmont heir. The ideological position represented by the clever charade devised by the Master of Belmont, as we have seen, is designed to reassert the ideological patterns shaping the official discourse of Christian Europe in the Renaissance. Those patterns consists in two basic tenets: one is to adopt a meek and humble position, relinquishing all claim to material possession, in order to gain such fortune as an answer to this obedient gesture. It is a typical post-medieval, early capitalist translation of the Christian-feudal idea of humbleness into the realm of mercantile venture. Antonio's conception of his commercial ventures is founded on the same ideological grounds. So do all the merchants of Venice accept some providential authority when they venture and hazard with their transitory “fortunes,” that mobile property which can change hands in no time in the same way the goddess Fortune is tampering with human lots. It is the official knowledge, immersed in the “conscientious” solution of the identity riddles inscribed on Portia's caskets; conscientious, since it stands the test of the official, legitimate ideology: one is expected to yield one's material possessions in order to regain “conscientious” property.

The other basic tenet of early capitalist Christianity suggests a similar move regarding one's identity. It is clearly symbolized by the “egall yoke of love” (3.4.13), shared by those carrying that legitimate discourse in the play: Bassanio, Portia, and Antonio. Only they are capable of generating the word which, by countering Shylock's claim over Antonio's body, will physically bar Shylock from any threatening power position. Paradoxically, they will do so by coercing Shylock to baptize, namely accept the yoke of the legitimate discourse in an act in which love is enforced rather than willingly subscribed to. Thus this spiritual union, as indeed the play will later remind us, contains dialectically bodily and spiritual bondage that also counters the illusion of freedom and autonomy:

Ant.
I once did lend my body for his wealth,
Which but for him that had your husband's ring
Had quite miscarried. I dare be bound again,
My soul upon the forfeit, that your lord
Will never more break faith advisedly.
Por.
Then you shall be his surety.

(The Merchant of Venice, 5.1.249-54)

The illusory autonomy of the legitimate discourse contains the submission of its major proponents in the play to the restrictive formations of that very discourse. Thus it is accustomed to blame Shylock for overobserving the written word rather than the spirit of the law. But Terry Eagleton, not less convincingly, argues that

it is Shylock who has respect for the spirit of the law and Portia who does not. Shylock's bond does not actually state in writing that he is allowed to take some of Antonio's blood along with a pound of flesh, but this is a reasonable inference from the text, as any real court would recognize. … Portia's reading of the bond, by contrast, is “true to the text” but therefore lamentably false to its meaning.

(Eagleton 1986, 36-37)

This is certainly true; as it may be true that “what is at stake in the courtroom … is less Shylock's personal desire to carve up Antonio than the law of Venice itself” (Eagleton 1986, 38). Yet Eagleton's excited defense of Shylock and just account of his dramatic position as some Brechtian alienating character does not make Shylock an Azdakian alienated (if biased) umpire. Although he is, as I have argued above, a function of the others' fears and desires, a dramatic process or a “flow,” still he functions as a party in a dialectical move. As such he is not just a victim (as Eagleton would have him) but also a terrorist. What we have here, then (at least on one significant level), is a Foucauldian process of power, in which rivaling speech-acts are clashing rather than psychological human beings. Shylock's very knowledge of the official “truth” serves him as a subversive instrument for gaining power and control which contradict his otherness, which is why the legitimacy of his economic activity is rejected by the official society. When Shylock, armed with his knowledge of the Venetian legal and political discourse, exploits the power granted him by the Venetian book of laws to materialize his barbaric fantasies to the point of cannibalistic fit, he simultaneously asserts and challenges the power of the political system. In that mimetic procedure whereby power and knowledge combine to subvert hegemonic power, rather than in a subjective alignment of individual properties, lies the dramatic effectiveness of Shylock in the play.

Notes

1. See, e.g., Lloyd 1875, 100; Moody 1964, 23-24; Nuttall 1983, 122.

2. Of which Shakespeare was accused, ranging from alleged inability to master properly characters and situations (see Fergusson 1971, Goddard 1951, among others), to occasional slips such as the discrepancy, marked by Dr. Johnson, between the terms of the caskets ordeal (never to “woo a maid”) and the schedule's addressing Arragon: “Take what wife you will to bed” (2.9.70), or the incredible testimony (timewise) by Jessica concerning her overhearing her father's talk with Tubal and Chus (see, however, Bradshaw 1986, who considers the latter slip as enriching the argument of the play).

3. See Coryat 1625, 1823-25. For an extensive analysis of the evidence concerning the absence of Jews from England between 1290 and their return in 1655, see Cardozo 1925, 85-140.

4. Gaunz was arrested in Bristol in 1598, about two years after the writing of The Merchant of Venice. See Roth 1941, 142.

5. See Shipper 1935, 420.

6. Greenblatt 1980, 204. And see Marx 1975, 239.

7. See Carlebach 1978, 152-53. For Kant's conjectures see chapter 1, n. 13.

8. “Each outsider, including the Jews as individuals, had to fit into the pre-existing economic structure and social fabric, upon neither of which he could expect to make any significant impact” (Arcadius Kahan, “The Early Modern Period,” in Gross 1975, 58). See also Grebanier 1962, 82-83.

9. None of the the suggested etymologies and analogues is convincing. Biblical Shèlah or Shiloh, awkwardly glossed as “dissolving … mocked or deceiving” by a contemporary source, sound farfetched, whereas Shallach, an archaic Hebrew word for cormorant, was hardly used at all, let alone as a personal name.

10. See, however, the discussion about the relation between past and present in the play in Lyon 1988, “Beginning in the Middle,” 29-52.

11. For this distinction, see Thomas 1973, 668.

12. See “The Crucifixion of Christ,” in Ludus Coventriae 1841, 319.

13. See Manly 1897, 1:239-76.

14. See Johannis de Alta Silva 1913; Gesta Romanorum 1879.

15. These are discussed at large in the third chapter of Oz 1990. For the Pound of Flesh motif in folk literature, see also, e.g., Toulmin-Smith 1875-76; Conway 1880 and 1881; Manzi 1896; Vámbéri 1901; Friedlander 1921; Wenger 1929; Landa 1942; Sinsheimer 1964.

16. Such a later insertion of the Jew is not an uncommon practice. See, e.g., the discussion of pseudo-Jewish characters in folk literature in Bin-Gurion 1950, 205-12. In addition to the Pound of Flesh motif, Bin-Gurion counts among the legends in which the figure of the Jew was a later interpolation also “The Jew among the Thorns” (Grimm K-HM no. 110, type 592 in Aarne-Thompson [FFC 184]), where in the original version a Christian priest appears instead of the Jew; “The Revenge for a Murdered Jew” in its various versions (Grimm no. 115, Bechstein, DM 1845, 60, “Das Rebhuhn”; Aarne-Thompson 960), which reminds the Classical story of “The Murdered Ibicus”; Judas Iscariot; “The Wandering Jew”; and the story of the three rings, which Bocaccio borrowed from the “Novelino” and Lessing used in his Nathan the Wise.

17. Ibid., 98. And see chapter 1,n.54; Foucault 1979, 92-97; Foucault 1977, 213.

18. Ecclesiasticus 26, 29; and cf. also 27, 2: “As a nail sticketh fast between the joinings of the stones, so doth sin stick close between buying and selling.” Demosthenes says it is a marvel to see a man practicing commerce remaining honest.

19. For an extensive summary of that controversy, see Jones 1989. See also Nelson 1969, 82ff.

20. See Filmer 1653, where in the preface Filmer summarizes his entire argument. And see Jones 1989, 158ff, and the whole chapter titled “The Evolution of the Concept of Usury.”

21. Namely, in which “in principle, each resource belongs to some individual” (Waldron 1988, 38).

22. Silvayn 1596, 402 and see J. R. Brown's “New Arden” edition, Brown 1959, 169. For an extensive discussion of the use of the heart's blood for therapeutic needs, see Cassel 1882; see also Pouchelle 1990, 74-75. The Grimm Brothers speculated about some analogies between the Pound of Flesh theme and the German epic poem Poor Heinrich, where the doctor “whets his knife” like Gernutus or Shylock (94.1.121). A similar scene is found also in the Bluebeard story, which, the Grimm brothers argue, is also related to the therapeutic theme: Bluebeard is trying to cure himself from the rare disease that turns his beard blue by drinking his wives' blood. They relate theme to medieval allegations of Jews as seeking the blood of Christian children, possibly for therapeutic needs. This connection is unconvincing, and it should be remembered that in the first Western versions of the Pound of Flesh story the creditor is not a Jew.

23. The speech act implications of the Judges incident is illuminatingly discussed by Mieke Bal; see Bal 1988, 129-68. And cf. Felman 1980, who makes a similar case for Molière's Don Juan, reading it in the light of the speech act theories of Austin, Searle, etc.

24. Bloch's once neglected theory (Bloch 1975) is now borne out by new historical writing, dating the decline of slavery as a major socioeconomic system in Europe much later than was accepted before. See, e.g., Phillips 1985, especially part II; Bonnassie 1991.

25. For a detailed discussion of the oriental versions, see Oz 1990, 36-44; Wenger 1929; and see also, e.g., Foucaux 1862, 241-50; Benfey 1859, 1, 388-407; Conway 1880, 830-31.

26. “Si pluribus addictus sit, partes secanto, si plus minusve secuerint se [= sine fraude esto.” The law is cited in Aulus Gellius, Noctes Atticae, 20, 1. See also Kohler 1919. Cardozo eagerly supports the theory connecting the Pound of Flesh story with the Roman law, as well as similar Germanic and Nordic laws; see Cardozo 1932. Radin, however, stresses the fact that Gellius himself comments that the very severity of the law manifests that it was not designed to be actually executed, and that he, Gellius, himself did not know of any case in which the radical clause of the law was implemented. See Gellius, loc. cit.; Radin 1922. Radin denies the alleged connection between The Merchant of Venice and the “third Table,” arguing that the whole motif is based on a private contract agreed upon by the parties concerned and not dependent on state law.

27. See Cardozo 1925, 242. Griston 1924 places the action of The Merchant of Venice in the second decade of the fourth century A.D., under the Law of the Twelve Tables.

28. See Kohler 1919, 91, where the Norwegian law is cited in the original.

29. See, e.g., Pollock and Maitland 1898, 453; Friedlander 1921, 27; Niemeyer 1912, 22.

30. See Stubbs 1968, introduction, xxxv-xvi; Landa 1942, 25. Mutilation was used, though rarely, as accompanying punishment on the pillory: “a Kent laborour convicted in 1599 for declaring that ‘the Queen's Majestie was Antichrist and therefore she is throwne down into hell’ was sentenced to be pilloried and to have his ears cut off, while a Colchester yeoman convicted in 1579 for calling the Earls of warwick and leicester traitors was sentenced to stand on the pillory in the town's market place and have his ear nailed to the pillory” (Sharpe 1990, 21).

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