SOURCE: “Prejudice and Law in The Merchant of Venice,” in Shakespeare Survey: An Annual Survey of Shakespeare Studies and Production, Vol. 51, 1998, pp. 159-73.

[In the essay below, Sokol discusses the legally sanctioned forms of racial prejudice in Elizabethan England—against Jews and people of color, for example—but argues that through characterization, language, and imagery in The Merchant of Venice,Shakespeare intimates that Renaissance public opinion condemned these prejudicial laws.]

I

The legally institutionalized prejudice seen in The Merchant of Venice is repulsive from a modern perspective. I will argue that this play portrays deeply ironic images of social prejudice that offended Elizabethan standards of decency and fairness as well as ours. Paradoxically, these contemporary Elizabethan standards come into focus when the play is viewed from a perspective involving legal history, for they in fact trumped the prejudicial laws of Shakespeare's time.

In the updated approach to Shakespeare of his provocative book Kill All the Lawyers?, a practising American lawyer Daniel J. Kornstein advises Shylock to appeal against Portia's judgement.¹ And he makes frequent reference to modern legal doctrines, often specifically American, to show how these have evolved or advanced since Shakespeare's time. Yet Kornstein sometimes discusses issues and principles which have persisted in the Anglo-American legal tradition since Shakespeare's time, which may guide us to the shared social and moral vocabulary of Shakespeare and his age.

I share Kornstein's view that Shylock is presented by Shakespeare as distinctly ill-intentioned, yet still a man wronged and unjustly treated. I also agree that this ‘minority view’ in literary criticism negates certain prima facie appearances of the play, but it is a valid and necessary one because in the play's fictionally constructed world, as in the real world, ‘appearances deceive’.² But I will base my position more historically than Kornstein's; to launch my own discussion I will note what is illuminating in his advice to Shylock, and how inaccuracies and anachronisms detract from it.

A first error is that this advice ignores Elizabethan jurisdictional and legal peculiarities relevant to The Merchant of Venice. The question of what jurisdiction, if any, Shakespeare had in mind for the play's fictional lawcase has been much debated. I have argued for the special appropriateness of a jurisdiction which was originally derived from Italy, but well known to Elizabethans. This was the jurisdiction of the pan-European traditional International Law Merchant. Uniquely in England, some Law Merchant tribunals allowed a combination of summary civil and criminal judgement (as is seen in the ‘pie-Powders’ court of Ben Jonson's Bartholomew Fair).³ This very combination of judgements in the trial scene of the Merchant of Venice therefore need not have provided, pace Kornstein,⁴ any grounds for an appeal.

Others of Kornstein's law points are less ahistorical. He discusses at length a social need for appropriate limitations on the freedom to make contracts,⁵ and there were parallel (if subtly different) sixteenth-century discussions of enforcement or relief from the provisions of ‘sealed bonds’ like Shylock's.⁶

Even more interesting, in spite of partial anachronism, is Kornstein's citation of a modern principle of ‘equal protection of the laws’, under which he condemns the ‘vile Alien Statute’ invoked by Portia against Shylock.⁷ Despite his revulsion at the unequally protective ‘Alien Statute’ of Venice cited by Portia, at first glance such a statute would seem hardly remarkable from an Elizabethan perspective. In 1601 Elizabeth arranged to expel from England all ‘Negars and blackamoors’.⁸ In 1594 she seemed hesitant to punish the unfortunate Doctor Lopez,⁹ but Jews were so unequally protected in her realm as to be officially outlawed.¹⁰ Although they were not enacted, other Elizabethan anti-Alien laws were repeatedly proposed, and economic surveys were undertaken to investigate their applicability. Roman Catholics also suffered legal disabilities in Shakespeare's time, and possibly Shakespeare's family suffered under these.¹¹ Yet, despite these circumstances, I will argue that legal and social inequality based on prejudice is intended to be seen as unjust within the context of The Merchant of Venice.

II

To bring this into focus, I will first trace allusions in the play to legalistic biblical materials. In the course of his dramatic handling of a litigious and mercantile Jew, Shakespeare drew so heavily upon biblical stories concerning especially property relations and legal vindication that The Merchant of Venice contains the most extensive biblical references in all his work. Current legal topics were also apparently meditated upon by Shakespeare for The Merchant of Venice. I believe that the play reflects a contemporary crisis about justice. Historically, this resulted from no simple matter of ‘law before equity’ or any converse formula, but rather from the philosophic casualties of a battleground between conflicting and combative jurisdictions.¹²

Certainly the riddle of where true justice lies was made more complex both in The Merchant of Venice and in Shakespeare's London by the presence of economically important alien subcommunities. Those were generally tolerated, although their rights, for instance to trade and to employ English men and women, suffered periodic verbal attack and occasional outbursts of unofficial anti-foreigner rioting. So Shakespeare's allusions to social and ethical questions concerning aliens, as in Gobbo's ruminations on employment by Shylock, touched live issues. Yet not entirely live, for it is most likely that Elizabethan London did not provide Shakespeare or his audience with visible prototypes for the legal treatment and actual behaviour of Jews.¹³ There were, however, many refugee households, and foreign merchants or visitors whom Shakespeare could have asked about continental Jews; with certainty, by early Jacobean times, Shakespeare had contacts with artisans who numbered among London's alien communities.¹⁴

The balance of evidence indicates that Shakespeare's personal associations were unlikely to have produced close observation of any Jews.¹⁵ One of the surprises of The Merchant of Venice, therefore, is that he imagined a Shylock exhibiting a propensity often seen in tolerated Jewish minorities, which is his enthusiastic voluntary turning to Christian courts and lawyers.¹⁶ Shylock's doomed pursuit of a Venetian legal underpinning for his revenge against Venice embodies some of the most complex human motives portrayed in the play.

III

In his pursuit of revenge Shylock repeatedly makes references to Old Testament stories of the legal vindication of the oppressed and of the restoration of their denied freedom or rights. One such reference is made in a moment of anticipated triumph, when all seems to be going Shylock's way in his lawcase against the Christian merchant Antonio. Highly gratified by the apparent progress of the case, Shylock exclaims of the seemingly unbiased Christian justicer Portia/Balthazar: ‘A Daniel come to judgment: yea, a Daniel!’ (4.1.219). Significantly, the name ‘Daniel’ means in Hebrew ‘God has judged’.

Shylock does not refer directly to the biblical book of Daniel in which the exiled Jewish hero is first valued for skill in interpreting dreams and visions, but then, for his piety, is thrown into a lions' den. Yet there is a parallel between various demands for the rigid application of Venetian laws in Shakespeare's play and the legalistic basis for Daniel's ordeal; Daniel is punished through the application of an inflexible law of the Medes and Persians obtained by his enemies solely in order to catch Daniel out.¹⁷

Let us delay discussion of such stories of jurisprudential chicanery to note first that Shylock explicitly refers to Daniel as a shrewd lawyer, rather than as an unfairly treated Jewish alien. Shylock's reference must then be to the story in the book of Susanna in which Daniel appears as a resourceful detective/advocate. In this apocryphal book of Shakespeare's frequently employed Geneva Bible, Daniel wins a court case for the innocent but vulnerable Susanna, and thereby defends justice itself. He astutely represents her, saving her person and her reputation despite the apparent hopelessness of confronting the perjured testimony of two salacious Elders. These lying old men are not only establishment figures, but also possess the crushing moral authority of actually being judges. What is crucial in Shylock's allusion is that Daniel's advocacy for Susanna before the court of the people defends the friendless weak against the socially powerful. It is also important that Daniel's defence of Susanna relies on a cunning legal stratagem; he separates the two false witnesses and traps them into contradictory statements. The risky legal adventures of Susanna lead to a biblical conclusion that God ‘saves those who hope in him’, even if they are in desperate straits.

As his own hopes rise, Shylock begins to identify himself with a socially weaker party avenged and vindicated by law, and so remembers Susanna's legal rescue by Daniel. His joy in seeming to win his law case with Portia's aid shows Shylock's complex motives, which include not only revenge against powerful Antonio, but also a desire for public acknowledgement of his rights, and thus for social recognition.

Shylock's intended foul revenge is only ambiguously legal, and is necessarily incapable of rendering the good he desires. Nevertheless, in the complexity of his motivation Shylock is unique among fictional Jews of the age. These were typically stereotyped as monsters of furtive, gloating, mass-murdering perfidy. Correspondingly, Shylock's broken-hearted ending is unlike the merely physical dismemberment through torture that demolishes other Elizabethan literary Jew-monsters.

IV

Shylock's excitement when he lauds Portia's Daniel-like astuteness is not only villainous gloating. The peculiarly urgent significance he attaches to his anticipated legal victory is clarified by a consideration of Shylock's lengthier allusions early in the play to the legal manoeuvres recorded in the Book of Genesis of the patriarch Jacob. These are manoeuvres that Shylock finds wholly good. Shylock first mentions Jacob's wrested inheritance, ‘wrought’ by his ‘wise mother’ (1.3.68), thus making the only approving comment on mothers in The Merchant of Venice (all others are bawdy, cynical or both).¹⁸ This allusion introduces an explicitly approving account by Shylock of the trickery Jacob used to gain an advantage over the revenge upon Laban. Both biblical stories, purportedly told to justify lending money for interest, are oblique to this purpose, but both have other compelling resonances in The Merchant of Venice.

An important factor common to both of these stories is that they involve peculiar dealings with animals. This fact, if not its significance, is obvious in Shylock's account from Genesis 30-1 of how ‘Jacob graz’d his uncle Laban's sheep’ (1.3.66), but it arises also in connection with his allusion to how Jacob became holy Abraham's ‘third possessor’ (1.3.68-9), that is, the third Hebrew patriarch. Genesis 27 tells how Jacob's ‘wise mother’ Rebekah helped him to trick the second patriarch, Isaac, into giving to him a deathbed blessing intended for the first-born son Esau. To this end Rebekah covered Jacob with the ‘skins of the kids’ so that he appeared to blind Isaac's touch to be a ‘hairy man’ like Esau, and she dressed him in animal skins smelling of the hunter Esau. This looks like a direct application of a technique of benevolent deception still practised by shepherds today; to save an orphaned lamb they place the skin of a stillborn lamb over it to trick the stillborn's mother into accepting it as her own. Shakespeare, raised near the Cotswolds, knew of such techniques of husbandry, as many in his audiences may have done. For them Shylock's allusion to the biblical pastoralist's ruse was a first hint in The Merchant of Venice of an inspired use of trickery.

The story of Jacob and blind Isaac re-echoes in the play in the ludicrous episode of the ‘confusions’, or practical jokes, perpetrated by Launcelot Gobbo on his ‘more than sand-blind’ father, who refuses him blessings, finding him too hairy (2.2.30-95). This burlesque emphasizes how in the Bible divinely controlled fate, acting through means that may even seem unjust, selects a destined heir through deception.

After alluding to Jacob's inheritance, Shylock gives Antonio a rendition of the story of Jacob's revenge on Laban which, in the context of their ongoing financial negotiations, has sinister implications.¹⁹ Involving a crafty contract, in effect a ‘merry bond’, which yields redress for a legitimate grievance, this story again describes Jacob's trickery. After Laban has repeatedly cheated Jacob of the rewards due for decades of labour, Jacob negotiates for a final wage all the (normally rare) black or parti-coloured offspring of his flocks. Jacob then employs specialized animal breeding techniques, to his great advantage.²⁰ By inducing all the best animals of Laban's flocks to conceive ‘streak’d and pied’ offspring, he gains all the profits of the herds.²¹

This biblical story, like the tale of Jacob acquiring Esau's blessing and birthright, might seem to us only an account of crafty cheating. But the Renaissance responded differently to Jacob's tactics.²² The episode of the coloured sheep is followed in Genesis by Jacob's explanation to his two wives (Laban's daughters) that God Himself ordained his success (31:4-10). In the Geneva or ‘Breeches’ translation of the Bible often used by Shakespeare the passage is glossed marginally: ‘This declareth that the thing which Iacob did before, was by Gods commandement, and not through deceite.’²³ Next Jacob tells his wives that in a dream God's angel showed him the way to his safe vindication, and the Geneva Bible glosses: ‘This Angell was Christ.’ Thus Shakespeare's audience may well have held Jacob's cunning legal moves to be an unorthodox but no less justified means of attaining an outcome ordained divinely, an outcome vindicating the oppressed.

Just like Jacob, whom he describes making a seemingly foolish but wily contract with oppressive Laban, Shylock obtains a silly-seeming ‘merry bond’ from Antonio. His aim is also to obtain compensation. Analogously with Jacob wearing animal skins, Shylock later mimics animality in his insistence on taking Antonio's flesh (justifying accusations he is a ‘cut-throat dog’ or ‘wolf’). Antonio, for his part, notices merely that Shylock's story of Jacob's practice against Laban does not excuse the taking of monetary interest (nor does Shylock take any from Antonio on this occasion). There is deep irony in how the Christian merchant impatiently understands Shylock's stories in a mercantile light only, and cannot hear how much the Jew admires the third biblical patriarch's skill in obtaining a ‘merry’ legal redress for injustices.²⁴

The picture unseen by Antonio in Shylock's story, of the powerless foreigner Jacob besting the established local patriarch Laban, explains why Shylock does not retire in defeat after the egregious theft of his wealth and his daughter. He seeks rather for vindication on the terms of Venetian justice, and yearns to present such an excellent legal case against Antonio that it is sure to succeed.²⁵ Just as Othello must show himself the most superb of Venetian soldiers to overcome the racial prejudices that he has internalized, so Shylock must show himself to be the most adroit Venetian litigant and businessman.

There are things in Shakespeare that cannot be appreciated without imagining that some of his characters have mental interiors. Why did Antonio fail to comprehend the point of Shylock's story about Jacob's divinely inspired revenge, and also why isn’t he made suspicious by Shylock's willingness to lend him money without taking interest? Is he distracted even more than his unworldly ‘want-wit’ sadness described at the play's start might account for, or deaf to the ominous drift of Shylock's question: ‘Hath a dog money? Is it possible / A cur can lend thee three thousand ducats?’ (1.3.116-17)? In twenty lines Shylock five times repeats that Antonio has abused him as a ‘dog’ or ‘cur’. Antonio's response is, ‘I am as like to call thee so again, / To spet on thee again’ (1.3.126). Thus Antonio flaunts his hatred of the Jew while he puts his life in hands that must be clenched at hearing his hate.

This may seem suicidal. Indeed by the time of his law trial Antonio's melancholy has deepened to the point where he craves only death. Using animal imagery in ways new to the play, he speaks of himself as a sacrificial lamb. Correspondingly, he and Gratiano relabel the former ‘dog’ Shylock as a ‘wolf’, perhaps recalling the name of the infamous Doctor Lopez. But unlike the historical Lopez,²⁶ Shylock makes an excellent legal case for himself, which despite prejudice seems to give him ascendancy.

At this point Shylock gleefully seizes the dramatic and linguistic initiative, transforming the Christians' animal images by saying that he intends to use Antonio in no other way than they use ‘many a purchas'd slave, / Which (like your asses, and your dogs and mules) / You use in abject and in slavish parts, / Because you bought them’ (4.1.90-3). In other words, Shylock spitefully reviles the Christians by claiming to imitate their low moral stature. Despite sentimentalists' readings, Shylock similarly concludes the famous ‘Hath not a Jew eyes?’ speech not with a noble plea for equality, but by spitefully justifying a Jew's desire for Bacon's ‘wild justice’ of illegal revenge on the basis of ferocious ‘Christian example’ (3.1.60-6). However, in his argument about asses and slaves Shylock may extend his sarcasm into an even more bitter and unexpected area than such levelling ethical nihilism. In the First Folio punctuation (more clearly than in the Arden), his ambiguous retort may even propose that the Christians might support bestiality:

You haue among you many a purchast slaue,
Which like your Asses, and your Dogs and Mules,
You vse in abiect and in slauish parts,
Because you bought them. Shall I say to you,
Let them be free, marrie them to your heires?

(TLN 1996-2000)

We will find the legal and ideological aspects of such a suggestion crucial. Before addressing them, we may note that Shylock, in taxing the Christians on keeping slaves, may recall with bitterness the Scholastic doctrine that ‘all Jews collectively inherited servile status to Christians'.²⁷ It may also reflect the legal status of Jews as the king's property in England between the Conquest and their expulsion.²⁸

But usually (or in practice) such semi-feudal ownership was more constrained by decency than Shylock's mercantile ‘asses/slaves' equation,²⁹ which obliterates distinctions of human life, animal life and material goods. Indeed the very making of such an equation might seem to condemn Shylock's morality, compared with the Christians'. But the play quite promptly upsets this distinction, by showing two Venetian men blithely regarding their wives as their absolute property, as disposable as so much livestock:

bassanio
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.
[…]
gratiano
I have a wife who I protest I love,—
I would she were in heaven, so she could
Entreat some power to change this currish Jew.

(4.1.278-88)

On hearing these edifying offers, Shylock remarks with wholly justified sarcasm, and also in dismay for his apostate daughter, ‘These be the Christian husbands!’

V

Often without explicit censure, The Merchant of Venice repeatedly presents characters confusing human with animal life, thereby suggesting ethical equations of life with property. Thus Shylock dismisses his lazy servant Gobbo with comparisons to unprofitable livestock (2.5.45-50).

Later Shylock seems to equate his paternal relationship with cash when he polishes Marlowe's Barabas's ‘O girl! O gold! O beauty! O my bliss!’ to: ‘My daughter, O my ducats! O my daughter!’ (2.8.15). But Shakespeare, as opposed to Marlowe, tempers his Jew's mercenariness in relation to his daughter when the human/animal distinction becomes crucial in Shylock's shocked response to learning of Jessica's bartering of Leah's love-token turquoise ring for a monkey.

Shylock's hatred of Antonio is also not limited by a cash nexus; no amount of ‘moneys' can buy off his revenge on his reviler and tormentor. Yet he explains this with bitter animal/human sarcasm, pretending that his hatred is as inexplicable as an animal phobia: ‘men there are love not a gaping pig! / Some that are mad if they behold a cat!’

There are many other strange concatenations of hatred with animal imagery in the play, as when Shylock sarcastically mocks his own supposed mercenariness by asserting that a financial option on Antonio's human flesh is ‘not so estimable, profitable neither / As flesh of muttons, beefs, or goats' (1.3.162-3). These concatenations are focused and elucidated by an oddity of legal history. To find the appropriate connection we must take a close look into some little regarded elements of the play.

VI

Seemingly minor excrescences of Shakespearian texts may hold clues to deep themes and meanings. One such excrescence produces a conundrum and tonal crux of The Merchant of Venice when, in supposedly idyllic Belmont, the newly married Lorenzo accuses Launcelot Gobbo of the ‘getting up of the negro's belly’ (3.5.35). This accusation is framed in a scene containing much quibbling, and might seem to disclose no more than the insignificant tastelessness of a bawdy mini-subplot. But the complex wording of Gobbo's reply to Lorenzo's accusation serves rather as a key, or the second half of a key, to unlock the cupboard of prevalent social attitudes as portrayed in Belmont. Evaluation of these attitudes is crucial for a proper understanding of the play.

The first half of the key provided by Gobbo's overtly crude excuse for his fornication is found in the concept behind a repulsive legality noted by Sir Edward Coke. Coke discusses a law symptomatic of fear and hatred which made a marriage between a Christian and Jew equivalent to the clamantia peccata of sodomy and bestiality. According to his Institutes, ‘the party so offending should be burnt alive’.³⁰ Indeed an unusual case of such a burning in 1222 is discussed in Pollock and Maitland's monumental History of English Law,³¹ which also ponders an alternative view that burial alive was more appropriate than burning for Christians married to Jews.³²

However, for our discussion, not rare punishments but the legal equivalencing of Jewish miscegenation with bestiality is most significant. For, even beyond biblical injunctions, Shakespeare's age viewed the damantia peccata of bestiality with an anxiety fuelled by ideological terror.³³ Although actual indictments in Elizabethan England for bestiality were rare, and convictions still rarer,³⁴ the offence was violently condemned. According to the analysis of Keith Thomas, this was because it violated an insecure yet crucial division of humans from animals.³⁵ So nudity, long hair, night work, nocturnal burglary (for, said Coke's Institutes, night was ‘the time […] wherein beasts run about seeking their prey’), the play-acting of animal roles and even swimming caused great anxiety.³⁶ No wonder then, wrote Thomas:

Bestiality, accordingly, was the worst of sexual crimes because, as one Stuart moralist put it, ‘it turns man into a very beast, makes a man a member of a brute creature.’ The sin was the sin of confusion; it was immoral to mix the categories. Injunctions against ‘buggery with beasts' were standard in seventeenth-century moral literature, though occasionally the topic was passed over, ‘the fact being more filthy than to be spoken of.’ Bestiality became a capital offence in 1543 and, with one brief interval [1553-62], remained so until 1861. Incest, by contrast, was not a secular crime at all until the twentieth century.

In accord with what Keith Thomas identifies as persistent early-modern ‘discourses on the animal nature of negroes',³⁷ the doctrine equating Jewish-Christian miscegenation with bestiality is extended to Moorish-European miscegenation also when envious Iago repeatedly describes newly married Othello and Desdemona as beasts coupling.³⁸ In the light of such equivalencing, suggesting ideological damnation beyond any aesthetic repugnance, we may understand why Portia so strongly abhors the prospect of marriage with a Prince having ‘the complexion of a devil’, even if ‘he have the condition of a saint’ (1.2.123-4).

The legal equivalencing of miscegenated human marriages with the terrible clamantia peccata of bestiality may also help explain why The Merchant of Venice contains nearly eighty references to animals, and why the most striking of these are to animals breeding.³⁹ In fact, Jewish Law prescribes a more humane standard of care for animals than Christian interpreters of Shakespeare's time recognized when they overlooked or anthropocentrically allegorized Old Testament demands for kind treatment.⁴⁰ Nonetheless, of all the characters in the play Shylock uses negative animal imagery most often (thirty-three times), and most vehemently. In Shakespeare's creation of Shylock it seems Jewish dietary restrictions were taken as characteristic of revulsion for all beasts, despite the many Old Testament laws protecting them.⁴¹

So, as mentioned earlier, Shylock describes an irrational detestation of animals or of certain music when asked to explain his hatred of Antonio:

What if my house be troubled with a rat […]
Some men there are love not a gaping pig!
Some that are mad if they behold a cat!
And others when the bagpipe sings i’ th’ nose
Cannot contain their urine.

(4.1.44-50)

But Shylock's allusions to animal or music-phobia are a disingenuous opposite of what they claim to be: rather than describing an unfounded aversion, they recall how Antonio persistently called him a dog, and how the music of a Venetian festival covered the theft of his wealth and daughter.⁴² Again, he images unpleasant animal/human interactions to represent more ugly human/human ill-will.

A mock denial of ill motives where these are crucial, a sly or spiteful self-denigration, and deliberate confusion of the animal with the human, characterize also the covert message of Lancelot Gobbo's dismissal of responsibility for his fornication. Like Shylock's jest about hating Antonio for ‘no reason’, Gobbo's self-exoneration for having illicitly impregnated an unseen and nameless female ‘negro’ or ‘Moor’ is ostensibly humorous. It caps a scene of quibbling, perhaps not really merry, in Belmont. This begins with Jessica cornered by her erstwhile servant/ally Gobbo, now elevated in rank, who over-familiarly, uncomfortably and blasphemously (by denying grace) wrangles that she must be ‘damn’d’ either with Jewish ancestry or else (if she is not Jewish) with bastardy. Next, in a parody recalling Shylock's commercial grievance against Antonio's interest-free lending which ‘brings down / The rate of usance here with us in Venice’ (1.3.39-40), Gobbo laments Jessica's religious conversion because:

this making of Christians will raise the price of hogs,—if we grow all to be pork-eaters, we shall not shortly have a rasher on the coals for money.

(3.5.21-3)

Although he is now a licensed clown, Gobbo's use of commercial/animal imagery in connection with Christian conversion may make the auditor begin to wonder if there is something untoward in his raillery.

At this moment Jessica's new husband Lorenzo enters, and she reports to him how Launcelot:

tells me flatly there’s no mercy for me in heaven because I am a Jew's daughter: and he says you are no good member of the commonwealth, for in converting Jews to Christians, you raise the price of pork.

(3.5.29-33)

To this gibe against his wife and his marriage, Lorenzo retorts with a counter-accusation of miscegenation against Gobbo: ‘I shall answer better to the commonwealth than you can the getting up of the negro's belly: the Moor is with child by you Launcelot!’ To this Gobbo makes his riddling reply:

It is much that the Moor should be more than reason: but if she be less than an honest woman, she is indeed more than I took her for.

(3.5.37-9)

Lorenzo comments on this, ‘How every fool can play upon the world!’, presumably pointing towards quibbles including the multiple puns: ‘more’/‘Moor’; ‘more’ = greater vs. more = pregnant; and take = understand vs. take = sexually use.

Yet there is more going on in Gobbo's complexly phrased rationalization than simply his skill with what Lorenzo later calls the ‘tricksy word’. Gobbo says that if the pregnant Moor is ‘less than an honest woman’ (and therefore is a woman) she is ‘indeed more’ than he took her for. This amounts to a confession or boast that Launcelot took her for less than a woman of any kind, for he ‘took’ her as an animal. With the greatest effrontery he frankly admits that racial miscegenation was, for him, just bestiality.

VII

Gobbo's ‘humorous’ crudeness about the pregnant Moor creates a unique and valuable episode of the play, yielding a context in which racial prejudice is stripped of its more usual disguise of politeness and social grace. The Clown's indecent racialism is not wholly different from the casual bigotry of the higher-born Belmontese visitors and natives, and it serves to point up what may tend to be confused or overridden by their charm.

Due appreciation of our distance from Shakespeare's age does not obscure his depiction of the ‘better’ classes of Belmont as comfortable and indeed satisfied with their offhanded disdain for aliens and minorities. Possibly the reason that their collective attitudes of scorn and unthinking bias have rarely been explicitly commented upon is that the racialist attitudes of the socially ‘superior’ characters of The Merchant of Venice need not affront us unless we choose to be painfully responsive to them. If we choose to enjoy a comedy with clear winners and losers, or to identify with a ‘winning side’, we may easily accept the self-estimation of the play's blithely overweening characters and evade whatever may taint their charismatic gloss, fashionable charm and eventual triumph.

Moreover Shakespeare makes the taking of an ethical stance which can question the dominant group's position very difficult for both Elizabethan and modern audiences. The Merchant of Venice is deliberately designed to evoke a specific anxiety inhibiting any disapproval of its luxury-loving Belmontese. Those who attack their leisured ‘good life’ may appear boorishly Malvolio-like or untutored in pleasure. Some of the finest poetry of the play specifically warns off resistance to Belmont's softer charms, disparaging that dangerous curmudgeon ‘The man that hath no music in himself’ (5.1.83). Many critics even go farther, identifying in wealthy Belmont a kind of utopia, a place of giving without stint and a community of unlimited selfless love. I would argue, rather, that a lesson is dearly bought in the play's last Act: that adult love distinctly requires both a clear sense of the self and an understanding of the need for limitations in giving.⁴³

Despite the warnings and temptations of Belmont's elite, I believe that their mixture of bigotry and cruelty with social privilege and charm is a product of Shakespeare's deeply intentional irony. Such irony adds a clanging impact to the unruffled expression, at a moment of joy, of a racialist metaphor for mistaken or misled perception:

Thus ornament is but the guiled shore
To a most dangerous sea: the beauteous scarf
Veiling an Indian beauty; in a word,
The seeming truth which times put on
To entrap the wisest.

(3.2.97-101)

Bassanio's aberrant association of an in-reality ugly ‘Indian beauty’ with a trap and a sea of danger passes without any comment in the scene, as it does in most explicit criticism.⁴⁴ Yet corresponding unnoted particulars problematizing value are unquestionably manifest elsewhere in the play.

For example, the word ‘good’ is used in a particularly cynical way by Shylock when he carefully explains that by calling Antonio a ‘good man’ he means merely good for the ducats owed (1.3.11-15). The same word appears sixty-three times in the play, mainly used by the Venetian men to mean profitably effective or in conventional epithets (as in ‘good signors’ or ‘good Leonardo’). But ethical ‘good’ is also discussed by Nerissa and Portia (1.2.10-28, 3.4.10, 4.1.257, 5.1.91); on varied uses of a single word hinge differences between material concerns, empty social conventions, and moral concerns.

If varied uses of a single word in The Merchant of Venice require irony-detecting discrimination, harder problems of interpretation arise in regard to the chauvinism of its Belmont. Veiled distinctions must be sifted without the aid of Shylock's very helpful key to his own comment on Antonio being only financially ‘good’:

Ho, no, no, no, no: my meaning in saying he is a good man, is to have you understand me that he is sufficient.

(1.3.13-15)

The only sure external test for literary irony requires a certainty about assumed values unavailable in The Merchant of Venice, where virtually all values presented are problematized. There may be clues, however, to an intended literary irony in the stylistic or structural quirks of over-emphatic expression or repetition (as there are in the hyper-altruistic zeal of the cannibalistic letter-writer of Swift's A Modest Proposal). Accordingly, in basically monocultural Belmont one hears excessively many casual slurs against foreigners, some like Bassanio's aspersion quite violent, which may imply an habitual trend of prejudice there.

Discrimination on this point is perplexing. Are we being tested when we are invited to join the clear lead of Nerissa in approving Portia's repetitively jeering characterizations of her foreign suitors? Are Portia's remarks really witty, or are they desperate antidotes to her initially depressed weariness with ‘this great world’ (1.2.1-9)? Arguably, Portia's anti-foreigner invective may be an extra-dramatic ‘stand-up comic’ bid for the pit's vulgar laughter.⁴⁵ But in most instances her comments are not mere banter, for they purport to represent her offstage experiences of the Neapolitan, Palatine, French, English, Scottish, and German suitors' odd behaviours. Yet the culminating instance of Portia's anti-suitor gibes cannot be excused as wry reportage. In this she gratuitously dismisses the courtship of the Prince of Morocco before she has seen or met him; she denigrates his ‘complexion of a devil’ after seeing only his (presumably black) ‘forerunner […] who brings word the prince his master will be here to-night’ (1.2.118-25). So Shakespeare presents us with the image of absolute racial prejudice.

We are placed at risk of being seduced by elements in the play asking for our tacit allowance of Portia's stark prejudice against Morocco. For one thing, the Belmontese world of genteel privilege, luxury and wit discourages all punctilious distinctions or unsuave scruples. In such a world, the harshness of racial discrimination may seem attenuated, as are the later cruelties of the sexual ring tricks, by being attuned to near-musical conventions of teasing and charm. A great majority of modern critics greatly favour what they hear as the social harmonies of Belmont,⁴⁶ which drown out for them Portia's prejudgement of the not-yet-seen, soon stunningly seen, ‘tawnie Moore all in white’ (Folio stage direction, TLN 514).

But by making this one clear instance of Portia's wholly unsupported prejudice resemble her former wryly ‘observant’ nationality quips, the play tempts us to lose our own ethical bearings. Here, as often, The Merchant of Venice seems deliberately to make difficult its demands on audiences; here these are demands of the sort Peter Davison believes implicitly made with regard to racism: ‘often in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, and especially in [Othello] the audience is called upon to exercise judgement, to distinguish facts from its prejudices’.⁴⁷ But the misleading parallel of Portia's remarks on Morocco with her earlier ones on other suitors, rather than confusing us, may challenge us to identify a tonal difference. Such a difference does arise, because Portia cannot describe Morocco or his behaviour. Her barb must therefore be purely verbal. Although in Shakespeare's age punning could present true wit or even profundity, it could also portray moral shallowness.⁴⁸ Portia's equivocation between Morocco's ‘complexion’ meaning skin colour and his ‘complexion’ in the sense of humoural make-up or character does mark an unamiable decline in the quality of her repartee. It displays none of the fashionable skill in Theophrastian character sketching she has shown before—we may even feel vicarious embarrassment on account of her descent from high-spirited wryness into desperately brittle hilarity.⁴⁹

But Shakespeare makes it impossible for audiences to dwell long on Portia's racial prejudice, although for some its acrid taste may linger. For when the Prince of Morocco arrives he indeed at first displays an unbalanced personality, or unfortunate ‘complexion’. In a seeming anticipation of racial prejudice he shows himself vainglorious and magniloquent, over-vaunting his heroic valour and sexual ‘blood’. So he begins, ‘Mislike me not for my complexion’, boasts of virility, and claims that he can ‘Pluck the young suckling cubs from the she-bear / Yea mock the lion when a roars for prey’ (2.1.1-38). Again, as with Shylock, animality is actually asserted by an individual who is subject to social prejudice. This is of course in accord with the prejudicial English marriage law.

Morocco's embattled vanity leads him to mis-choose the golden casket, which occasions Portia's gruesomely dismissive couplet:

A gentle riddance,—draw the curtains, go,—
Let all of his complexion choose me so.

(2.7.78-9)

Her racialist relief is expressed with perhaps a telling displacement of idiom, wherein ‘gentle riddance’ substitutes for a more usual locution such as ‘fair’ or ‘good riddance’ (OED, ‘riddance’, 4). This may suggest that for Portia ‘gentle’ behaviour, good breeding, prevails over any other good.

On another plane, Portia's elation with being safe from marriage with Morocco may imply more than racial aversion. The defeat of any unwanted suitor may give her some relief from the feelings of oppression and powerlessness under the mortmain of her father's will: ‘I may neither choose who I would, nor refuse who I dislike, so is the will of a living daughter curb’d by the will of a dead father’ (1.2.23-5). Antipatriarchal motives may well inspire Portia's anti-foreigner gibes, all of which are made against sexually acquisitive men.⁵⁰ Yet, if Portia's sense of oppression is lightened by Morocco's defeat, she lacks compassion for a fellow-sufferer under the will that oppresses her. Shakespeare pointedly shows Portia administering to Morocco (and only to him) the oath required under the will, ‘if you choose wrong / Never to speak to lady afterward / In way of marriage’ (2.1.40-2). In accepting this stipulation, hazarding his sexual and dynastic future, Morocco is fully as brave as he claims to be. Because he risks a heavy loss for her, it is difficult to hear the pat, sententious couplet above, in which Portia welcomes his destruction.

Characteristically, the play complicates the issue. The Prince of Arragon soon after finds a mocking fool's head in his chosen silver casket, which seemingly releases him from his vow of permanent celibacy: ‘take what wife you will to bed, / I will always be your head: / So be gone, you are sped’ (2.9.70-2). Arragon's only punishment for his mistaken choice is humiliation. His choice of silver, although showing insincerity, may also reflect that he is white, not ‘tawnie’ or golden like Morocco. I would not insist on this contrast of Arragon's and Morocco's fate, but will note that it aligns with the variation in Portia's remarks about these suitors. Her sneers about Morocco's ‘complexion of a devil’ far exceed her brief gibe on Arragon's folly, suggesting that racial prejudice in Belmont is so virulent as to make miscegenation with bold Morocco more unacceptable than marriage with vain and foolish Arragon.

VIII

If all laws are enacted only to support the interests of powerful élites, or if law typically only strait-jackets human desires (these are the alternatives often proposed by recent commentaries on Literature and Law), then law can have little to do with literature's longstanding fascination with justice. But, conversely, part of the strong theatrical appeal of The Merchant of Venice may derive from what it shares with many other literary and folkloric portrayals of justice enacted. This is the satisfaction of a desire that may even be a human instinct, the desire to see redress of grievances and the orderly advancement of social good. Even a troubling critique of society, exposing the deficiencies of law, may hinge on a hope for such ‘good’.

To carry a bit farther our prior discussion of the varied uses of the epithet ‘good’ in The Merchant of Venice, let us note that its application in an often-repeated and insincerely conventional form of address is once applied even to ‘good Shylock’ (3.3.3). This is Antonio's phrase when he is about to be arrested for debt, when his vital interests are at stake. The hollowness of this form of address could not be more poignantly indicated than by its use in imploring a reviled enemy.⁵¹ But its typical hollowness in use is once made even more explicit, by means of an inversion. This occurs in another highly charged context, when Solanio, regretting his former cynical banter about Antonio's depression (1.1.47-56), brings the news of Antonio's merchant losses. Solanio here eschews what he calls his former ‘slips of prolixity’, and consciously if brokenly tries to rehabilitate the worn-out phrase ‘good Antonio’, and recover its meaning:

it is true […] that the good Antonio, the honest Antonio;—O that I had a title good enough to keep his name company!—

(3.1.10-14)

That the very word ‘good’ can be used so feelingly in The Merchant of Venice, as well as in self-interested, sarcastic, and unthinkingly conventional ways, surely indicates that we must confront this play with very alert attention.

With such attention we have noted that the play's pervasive animal imagery, bearing both legal and ideological ramifications, rears up in a ‘witty’ exchange between a Clown and a newly married Jew and Christian to disgrace its often critically vaunted world of Belmont. Although Jessica identifies Portia as a near-goddess in the same short scene, Launcelot's guilt-dismissing ‘confession’ still exposes the submerged racialist values of Portia's realm. Well in advance of Gratiano's frighteningly obscene (not bawdy, nor erotic) castration jests, which cap Belmont's gender struggles while ending the play, Gobbo's ugly sexual gloating demonstrates how all the resolving finalities of the comedy are undercut by chronic confusions. These are confusions between seeking wealth or pleasure, fitting societal moulds, and possessing full humanity.

Notes

1. Daniel J. Kornstein, Kill All the Lawyers?: Shakespeare's Legal Appeal (Princeton University Press, 1994), ‘Fie upon Your Law: The Merchant of Venice’, pp. 63-89; the ‘imaginary appeal’ is outlined pp. 83-5.

2. Kornstein, Kill All the Lawyers, pp. 77-9. A similar theme is given a very sophisticated basis in René Girard, ‘ “To Entrap the Wisest” ’, in Shylock, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1991), pp. 291-304, esp. pp. 297-300.

3. My ‘The Merchant of Venice and the Law Merchant’, Renaissance Studies, 6 (1992), 60-7, hereafter referred to as ‘Law Merchant’, argues that English pie poudre courts of the Law Merchant provided a model uniquely appropriate to the play, partly because they were able to combine civil and criminal judgements. Fascinatingly, Jewish Law tribunals in pre-expulsion England also attended to both criminal and civil matters—see Sir Frederick Pollock and F. W. Maitland, The History of English Law Before the Reign of Edward I, 2 vols. (Cambridge University Press, 1898, 2nd edn repr. 1968), vol. 1, p. 474.

4. Kornstein, Kill All the Lawyers, p. 84.

5. Ibid., pp. 68-79.

6. See ‘Law Merchant’, pp. 64-5.

7. Kornstein, Kill All the Lawyers, pp. 79-81.

8. Eldred Jones, Othello's Countrymen: the African in English Renaissance Drama (London: Oxford University Press, 1965), pp. 12-13.

9. See David S. Katz, The Jews in the History of England 1485-1850 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), pp. 49-101. The execution for treason of Lopez in 1594 occasioned a wave of Elizabethan anti-Semitism which was engineered ‘in Essex's interest’ according to J. R. Brown, ed. the Arden Edition The Merchant of Venice (1955; London: Methuen, 1977), p. xxiii. (Except where otherwise noted, all references to the play will be from this edition.) But Merchant was unlikely to have been occasioned or influenced by the Earl of Essex's manipulation of the Lopez affair, since Shakespeare was allied with an anti-Essex faction; see my ‘Holofernes in Rabelais and Shakespeare and some manuscript verses of Thomas Harriot’, Etudes Rabelaisiennes 25 (1992), pp. 131-5.

10. In 1148 an English court upheld the first prosecution based on the infamous Jewish ‘blood libel’ (the case of William of Norwich)—see R. Po-chia Hsia, The Myth of Ritual Murder (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), p. 2, and Frank Felsenstein, ‘Jews and Devils: Semitic Stereotypes of Late Medieval and Renaissance England’, Journal of Literature and Theology, 4 (1990), p. 17. Following this, increasing restrictions and agitation led to the first European expulsion of Jews, from England in 1290.

11. E. A. J. Honigmann, Shakespeare: the ‘Lost Years’, (Manchester University Press, 1985), pp. 115-25.

12. I argue in ‘Law Merchant’ that The Merchant of Venice is set in the context of profound jurisprudential problems arising from the competition for profitable business of King's Bench with Common Pleas, the intellectual jostling of common law with equity, and the common lawyers' attack on the powers of the special jurisdictions of Borough Courts, Merchant Law, Admiralty, Staple Courts, etc. (not officially over until 1977!).

13. A community of Sephardi Jews was present in Shakespeare's London: see Lucien Wolf, ‘Jews in Elizabethan England’, Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society, 11 (1928), 1-91, which states, pp. 21-2, that the Marranos were tolerated ‘so long as they did not break the law or outrage public sentiment’, although once, in 1592, they departed from secrecy to ‘assemble for Divine worship in London’ under diplomatic protection. According to Katz, The Jews, p. 108, these Marranos were generally so secretive that ‘The only Jews of most people's acquaintance were biblical figures, literary characters, and entirely imaginary.’ On contrary speculations see below.

14. As seen from the 1612 lawsuit Bellot vs. Mountjoy, discussed in S. Schoenbaum, William Shakespeare: A Compact Documentary Life (New York: New American Library, 1986), pp. 260-4 and E. K. Chambers, William Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and Problems, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1930), vol. 2, pp. 90-5. On Shakespeare and the mainly foreign Southwark sculptors see my ‘Painted Statues, Ben Jonson and Shakespeare’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 52 (1989), 250-3.

15. On whether Shakespeare knew any of the ‘hundred or more’ Jews in his London see James Shapiro, Shakespeare and the Jews (The Parkes Lecture: University of Southampton, 1992), pp. 1-7. This is generally sceptical, but notes, p. 17, that Thomas Coryate ‘expresses no surprise […] that Amis [a Jew Coryate met in Constantinople] had spent thirty years in a London that many scholars assume was free of Jews’.

    Shakespeare's acquaintance with converted Italian Jews could be argued if he knew of John Florio's partial Jewishness, or else through the highly unlikely actuality that: (1) Emilia Bassano Lanier was intimate with Shakespeare, as alleged by A. L. Rowse, ed., Emilia Lanier, The Poems of Shakespeare's Dark Lady (London, 1978), pp. 6-37; (2) all of the musical Bassano family in England were Jews, as is well argued by Roger Prior, ‘Jewish Musicians in the Tudor Court’, Musical Quarterly, 49 (1983), 253-95, p. 253; (3) the staunchly Christian Emilia Bassano even knew of her ancestral faith; (5) she confided about this to Shakespeare. Only if these concur is it possible that Emilia's Jewishness might have influenced The Merchant of Venice, as alleged in A. L. Rowse, What Shakespeare Read—and Thought (New York: Coward, McCann and Geoghegan, 1981), p. 172.

16. As detailed by Robert Kirsner in ‘Rabbi Sem Tob the Poetic “Melamed” of Fourteenth Century Spain’, the Sepharad 1492-1992 conference (7-10 May 1992) at San Francisco State University. To illustrate typicality Professor Kirsner told me a parallel anecdote from his own life: the congregation of the Feinberg synagogue of Cincinnati Ohio, divided in the 1950s over whether to seat women with men during religious services or to preserve traditional segregation, asked an eminent Christian judge to decide the issue (he chose integration).

17. Daniel 6:4. The conspiratorial legal moves of the envious rivals against Daniel are emphasized in the twelfth-century text of The Play of Daniel (Egerton Ms. 2615) and in W. H. Auden's poem ‘Daniel […] a sermon’ written to accompany the play's 1958 performance: these texts are printed in the album booklet of the performance, Decca DL 9402.

18. Aside from Shylock's perceptions of Rebekah and Leah, the play excludes images of powerful women and of women valued as other than possessions. So, all of Portia's shrewd actions require denial of gender while her rival Antonio loses all his vigour when offering a breast in false-feminine nurturance. My ‘Constitutive Signifiers or Fetishes in The Merchant of Venice?’, The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 76 (1995), 373-87, finds these issues central.

19. These implications are not analysed in John Scott Colley, ‘Launcelot, Jacob, and Esau: Old and New Law in The Merchant of Venice’, Yearbook of English Studies, 10 (1980), 181-9, which sees Shylock's reference to the biblical story of Jacob and Laban only in relation to the story of Jacob and Esau. Colley references only the Bishops' Bible.

20. Vexed questions of just what Jacob's special methods of cattle breeding were, and particularly whether they were natural or miraculous in operation, are discussed in an essay on the tradition that maternal imagination may affect embryos: M. D. Reeve, ‘Conceptions’, Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society, 215 (1989), 81-112. Reeve's discussion of exegetical and textual problems relevant to Jacob and Laban, pp. 85-92, does not consider Shakespeare or the Bible translations that he used.

21. That Laban's coloured animals have especially high value is richly ironic in the racial contexts of The Merchant of Venice, as we shall see.

22. On divine validation of the trickery of Esau see Colley, ‘Launcelot, Jacob and Esau’, p. 186. Condoned trickery constitutes a huge theme reflected in Solomonic justice, Jesuit teachings on equivocation, the trick statue in Tirso de Molina's Don Juan, Duke Vincentio's ‘craft’ in Measure for Measure, etc.

23. The Bible, trans. L. Tomson (London: Christopher Barker, 1597).

24. Barbara K. Lewalski, ‘Biblical Allusion and Allegory in The Merchant of Venice’, in Shylock, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1991), pp. 236-51, suggests in a note, p. 250, that Antonio may allude to the biblical justification of Jacob's action. But Antonio's impatient remark that Jacob's ‘venture […] sway’d and fashion’d by the hand of heaven’ cannot ‘make interest good? / Or is our gold and silver ewes and rams?’ (1.3.86-90) shows that he has not understood how, for Shylock, trickery of the unjust may provide a divinely ordained recompense.

25. See ‘Law Merchant’, pp. 64-5.

26. See Katz, The Jews, pp. 49-101.

27. Hsia, The Myth of Ritual Murder, p. 114, discusses Aquinas' and Duns Scotus' views.

28. See Pollock and Maitland, The History of English Law, vol. 1, 468-75, and William Holdsworth, A History of English Law, 16 vols. (London: Methuen, 1903-), vol. 1, pp. 45-6.

29. Pollock and Maitland, The History of English Law, vol. 1, 471, explains: ‘the Jew, though he is the king's serf, is a freeman in relation to all other persons'. See R. A. Routledge, ‘The Legal Status of the Jews in England, 1190-1790’, The Journal of Legal History, 3 (1982), 91-124.

30. Sir Edward Coke, Third Part of the Institutes of the Laws of England (London, 1644), p. 89. A note in a contemporary hand in the British Library copy 508.g.5(2.) adds, ‘But if converted he shall not be burnt’.

31. Pollock and Maitland, The History of English Law, vol. 2, p. 584: ‘Stephen Langton […] degraded and handed over to lay power a deacon who had turned Jew for the love of a Jewess. The apostate was delivered to the sheriff of Oxfordshire, who forthwith burnt him [… This] prompt action seems to have surprised his contemporaries, but was approved by Bracton’. Archbishop Langton's proceedings became quite famous for legal and political reasons discussed in F. W. Maitland, ‘The Deacon and the Jewess; or, Apostacy at Common Law’, Collected Papers, ed. H. A. L. Fisher, 3 vols. (Cambridge University Press, 1911), vol. 1, pp. 385-406. Pollock and Maitland, vol. 2, p. 394 cites a converse case where one partner in a Jewish marriage converts to Christianity, a rare instance where a full divorce allowing remarriage was allowed, and another case in which ‘a Jewish widow was refused her dower on the ground that her husband had been converted’.

32. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 549.

33. For a lawyer's view of this clamantia peccata see Coke, Institutes of the Laws of England, pp. 58-9.

34. See statistics in ‘Bestiality and Law in Renaissance England’ pp. 147-50, an appendix to Bruce Thomas Boehrer, ‘Bestial Buggery in A Midsummer Night's Dream’, The Production of English Renaissance Culture, ed. David Lee Miller, Sharon O’Dair, and Harold Weber (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 123-50.

35. Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England 1500-1800 (Allen Lane: London, 1983), pp. 38-9, 94-117, 118-19, 134-5.

36. Ibid., pp. 38-9. Slightly later human transfusion of animal blood, and still later vaccination, were opposed on the same basis.

37. Ibid., p. 42; on later-emerging racialist theories of human polygenism see ibid., p. 136.

38. Caroline Spurgeon, Shakespeare's Imagery and What It Tells Us (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1935), p. 335, reveals that ‘contemptuous or repellent’ animal images dominate Othello. Othello at last compares himself to a ‘base Indian’ or in the Folio text a ‘base Judean’ (TLN 3658), and then stabs himself imaged as a ‘circumcised dog’.

39. This search was done using the University of Toronto's TACT text analysis program applied to William Shakespeare, The Complete Works, ed. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, Electronic Ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989).

40. Thomas, Man and the Natural World, pp. 22-4 and 151; but p. 137 claims that some common people ignored this and regarded animals ‘in the way that Jews had before them, as essentially within the covenant’.

41. Exodus 23:5 and 12; Deuteronomy 22:4; Proverbs 12:10; Hosea 2:18 even speaks of a holy covenant with beasts.

42. Jessica says at 3.2.6 that Shylock's murderous intention predated her elopement, but Ruth Nevo, Comic Transformation in Shakespeare (London: Methuen, 1980), argues persuasively, pp. 130-1, that by emotional logic it must develop afterwards.

43. I argue in ‘Constitutive Signifiers’ that Antonio's selfless code is necessarily defeated by Portia and the marriage contract.

44. What Bassanio has in mind is made explicit in Montaigne's sceptical ‘An Apology’, Essays (New York: Modern Library, 1933), p. 429: ‘The Indians describe [beauty as] blacke and swarthy, with blabbered-thick lips, with a broad and flat nose, the inward gristle whereof they loade with great gold-rings, hanging downe to their mouth’. The Oxford text places Bassanio's lines in an aside, exonerating the others present from sharing his vision. Other editors emend, not seeing the implied contrast of Indian with the beauteous. Yet, as the Arden editor tersely notes, p. 82, ‘the Elizabethan aversion to dark skins gives sufficient meaning to the passage’.

45. René Girard, A Theatre of Envy (Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 249 suggests The Merchant of Venice speaks to two simultaneous audiences, a ‘refined’ one on an ironic plane and a ‘vulgar’ one in accord with their bigotry. I propose that Shakespeare had a more complexly constituted audience in mind in my Art and Illusion in ‘The Winter's Tale’ (Manchester University Press, 1994), pp. 65-6.

46. Many seem influenced by the lauding of idyllic Belmont in C. L. Barber, Shakespeare's Festive Comedy (1959; rpt. Cleveland, OH: Meridian, 1963), pp. 163-91. Barber's chapter title, ‘The Merchants and the Jew of Venice: Love's Communion and an Intruder’, epitomizes a view that ‘Shylock and the accounting mechanism which he embodies are crudely baffled in Venice and rhapsodically transcended in Belmont’ (p. 173). This classic pro-Belmont argument is more temperate than many of its descendants: for instance, Colley, ‘Launcelot, Jacob and Esau’; J. S. Coolidge, ‘Law and Love in The Merchant of Venice’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 27 (1976), 243-63; M. J. Hamill, ‘Poetry, Law and the Pursuit of Perfection: Portia's role in The Merchant of Venice’, SEL, 18 (1978), 229-43. Stephen J. Greenblatt, ‘Marlowe, Marx, and Anti-Semitism’, Critical Inquiry, 5 (1978), 291-307 (rpt. in Greenblatt, Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture, NY: Routledge, 1990, pp. 40-58), contrasts Shylock's Venetian ‘economic nexus’ with Portia's world, ‘not a field in which she operates for profit but a living web of noble values and moral orderliness’ (p. 295), and seemingly excuses Marx's notion of the loathsome ‘Jewishness’ of capitalism.

47. Peter Davison, Othello (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988), p. 65.

48. On wordplay central to a Shakespeare play see my ‘A Spenserian Idea in The Taming of the Shrew’, English Studies, 66 (1985), 310-16; for an ignoble pun see King Lear, 1.1.11-12.

49. Production may highlight Portia's decline from witty discernment, may elide this, or may make it ambiguous and confusing. The last may be best, as it leaves uneasy responses unguided.

50. Lynda E. Boose, ‘The Comic Contract and Portia's Golden Ring’, Shakespeare Studies, 20 (1988), 241-54, p. 247, finds Portia's ‘covertly manipulative subversions of passive aggression’ used against ‘the male system of female suppression’.

51. The locution ‘good sir[s]’, listed only four times by Bartlett, is actually very commonly used in Shakespeare's plays (62 times). In Hamlet, 2.1.47, Polonius explains its insincerity to his spy Reynoldo.