SOURCE: “Shylock and the Struggle for Closure,” in Judaism: A Quarterly Journal, Vol. 43, No. 2, 1994, pp. 173-89.

[In the essay below, Picker describes Elizabethan England's creation of and discrimination against the “other,” or outsider, in order to preserve its own sense of a closed society. Picker observes that this “ghettoizing” is reflected in The Merchant of Venice, where Shylock is consistently excluded from communal life simply because he is a Jew.]

1. “GO PRESENTLY INQUIRE, AND SO WILL I / WHERE MONEY IS”: THEORETICAL AND HISTORICAL CONSIDERATIONS

In his seminal work on Shakespearean festive comedy, C. L. Barber introduces a theory of comic form which attempts to account for the role of figures such as Shylock in the early plays. Emphasizing the connection between theatrical practices and social customs such as May Day and the Winter Revels, Barber argues that the early comedies celebrate natural vitality and social identity. He considers the underlying movement of Shakespearean comedy to be the passage “through release to clarification,” that is, from revel and celebration to the formation of a durable communal bond. According to Barber, Shakespearean comedy requires integration and closure such that any marginal figures, or “butts,” as Barber refers to them, must be restrained and expelled by society. By defeating such challenges, the society gains strength and, finally, reestablishes itself.¹ The presence of a threatening figure thus enables disparate groups to come together as a community, and overpower a common scapegoat. Yet, as Barber writes, “behind the laughter at the butts, there is always a sense of solidarity about pleasure, a communion embracing the merrymakers to the play and the audience.”² Barber's theory of festive comedy, then, contains the underlying paradox that a welcoming community can be established only through ridicule and ostracism.

This essay examines how characters in The Merchant of Venice attempt to silence, ignore, interrupt, and otherwise stifle Shylock; at the same time, it demonstrates how Shylock's voice and personality undercut their attempts, to the extent that his presence informs a reading of the play. In what follows, I will argue that Shylock thwarts society's attempts to contain him. I would like to suggest that in Merchant, Shakespeare poses two similar questions, one focusing on historical circumstances, and the other dealing with issues of genre: just how can Venice's and Belmont's citizens reconcile the need for Shylock's money with the fact that they shun him socially? And secondly, how can the play reconcile its need for Shylock's threatening presence with the fact that it ultimately expels him from comic closure? By allowing Shylock to undermine closure, Shakespeare unites these historical and generic concerns, and exposes the paradoxical principle upon which his comedy and his society operate: the formation of communal identity through exclusionary practices.

Although Edward I expelled the majority of Jews from his kingdom in 1290, Jewish stereotypes continued to flourish in England throughout the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Elizabethans encountered few Jews in the city and countryside, yet Church sermons nevertheless proclaimed Jews to be “hard-hearted blasphemers who were also vain, ostentatious, and deceitful,” and encouraged the association of the “devil Jew” with avarice.³ The tradition of connecting Jews with cupidity had originated virtually as they arrived on European soil, and with good reason: moneylending was one of the few professions that European Jews were permitted to practice. As Cecil Roth writes, the “practice of usury was considered to be a sin for any man, but seemed in Gentile eyes to be less so for Jews, who had so many [sins] on their infidel consciences that one more or less hardly mattered.”⁴ While Christians considered usury sacrilegious, they did not hesitate to request extensive loans from Jews in order to conduct trading ventures and appease belligerent enemies. And, lacking the relatively modern invention of state-sponsored welfare programs, many Italian city governments depended upon Jewish usurers to support the poor by opening “loan banks.” Jewish money thus represented a powerful force governing the sustenance, expansion, and protection of Christian societies.⁵

Yet, Renaissance Europe denied Jews the freedom to inhabit the same communities as Christians. In the words of Bernard Glassman, “there was the need for the Jew's services on the one hand, and the contempt for his person, on the other.”⁶ Christians welcomed Jewish money, and often required it, so long as accepting it did not necessitate welcoming the Jewish moneylender. Venice, the most important trading city in Italy, established the first ghetto in Western history for its substantial Jewish population. Because Venetian merchants relied heavily on usurers to finance business ventures, Jews who sought business flocked to the city. In 1516, however, the threat of a burgeoning Jewish population drove the Venetian government to legislate the confinement of Jews to a specified district. This was the New Foundry, or geto nuovo, from which the word “ghetto” originated.⁷ Within the geto nuovo, Jewish heterodoxy was kept safely away from Christian homes, while, in the marketplace or piazza, those same Christians coveted loans from Jewish usurers. Hence, the very layout of Venice reproduced the Christians' paradoxical desire to embrace desperately needed Jewish money and simultaneously shun the Jews who possessed it.

There is a striking parallel between the bind in which Jewish usurers were placed by their Christian debtors, and the place of marginal figures in the model of Shakespearean comedy as expressed by C. L. Barber. As Jewish usurers were required to finance the growth of Renaissance European communities, so threatening figures must be present for communal growth to occur in Shakespeare's comedies. And, paradoxically, just as those Jews were socially ostracized by the societies that they financed, so the community that the outsider helped to construct had to expel him or her in order to reach closure. Throughout Merchant, Shakespeare dramatizes this paradox by allowing Shylock consistently to challenge the restraints of the Venetian community and, finally, by permitting him to undermine comic closure.

2. “I AM NOT BOUND TO PLEASE THEE WITH MY ANSWERS”: SHYLOCK'S CONTAINMENT CHALLENGED

We are introduced to Shylock through a series of abrupt, grating conversations which feature his refusal to be manipulated and ostracized. In his first scene, Bassanio makes him acutely aware of his marginal status by approaching him solely to take out a loan of three thousand ducats. Shylock shows his resentment toward this treatment by manipulating their dialogue in fascinating ways:

shylock:
Three thousand ducats—well.
bassanio:
Ay, sir, for three months.
shylock:
For three months—well.
bassanio:
For the which, as I told you, Antonio shall be bound.
shylock:
Antonio shall become bound—well.
bassanio:
May you stead me? Will you pleasure me? Shall I know your answer?
shylock:
Three thousand ducats for three months, and Antonio bound.
bassanio:
Your answer to that.
shylock:
Antonio is a good man.

(I.iii. 1-11)⁸

Here, Shylock uses repetition and carefully-placed interjections to masterful effect. He entices Bassanio by echoing “for three months” and “Antonio shall become bound,” but forces anxious pauses upon the dialogue with each irritating “well.” His refusal to answer Bassanio with a simple yes or no is not simply a sign of verbal teasing or “dangling,” as Lawrence Danson has suggested.⁹ Rather, by withholding an answer, Shylock subtly resists conducting economic as well as linguistic transactions with Bassanio. In this way, Shylock establishes a connection between conversational and monetary exchange. Through pauses, repetition, and a final pun on the moral and economic connotations of “good,” Shylock defies Bassanio's repeated attempts to impose limits on his response to the bond. Rather than reply in terms that readily satisfy Bassanio, Shylock disturbs and challenges him by remaining linguistically and economically unengageable.

If Shylock is subtly obdurate with Bassanio, he is ardently defiant toward Antonio's wishes. When Antonio enters the scene, he has little desire to speak directly to Shylock, from whom he only wants money; Antonio asks Bassanio, “Is he yet possessed / How much ye would?” (I.iii. 61-2). The odd wording of this question reveals contempt for Shylock in two ways. First, it suggests a low pun on the Jew's supposed “possession” by the devil. This gibe is consistent with Antonio's caustic remark about Shylock later in the scene, that the “devil can cite Scripture for his purpose” (95). Second, in his question, Antonio marginalizes Shylock by speaking about him in the third person despite his presence onstage. Shylock, however, refuses to be slighted or ignored, and he interrupts with, “Ay, ay, three thousand ducats” (62). This interjection enables him to disrupt Antonio's conversation with Bassanio and protest his relegation to a third-person presence.

In the Jacob and Laban story which follows this exchange, Shylock further challenges both his relegation to marginal status and the evil connotation implied in Antonio's use of “possession.” Lars Engle, one of the few critics to grapple with the exegesis, provides an insightful analysis based on the premise that “the Jacob story … is full of danger for Shylock.”¹⁰ Indeed, notions of threat and discontinuity pervade Shylock's speech from the moment he starts to deliver it:

shylock:
When Jacob grazed his uncle Laban's sheep—
This Jacob from our holy Abram was,
As his wise mother wrought in his behalf,
The third possessor; ay, he was the third—
antonio:
And what of him? Did he take interest?

(68-72)

The reference to the patriarchs is a calculated non sequitur, and to make its impact even more disturbing to Antonio, Shylock breaks off his narrative to supply apparently irrelevant background information. Thus, his words here seem carefully crafted to serve a double purpose: to defend the practice of usury while offending Antonio. The significance of Shylock's digression is revealed through his skillful mockery of Antonio's initial pun on possession. While the merchant had implied only ten lines earlier that the Jew was “possessed” with deviant spirits, Shylock subtly twists this double meaning to remove the negative connotation from “possession” and align himself with the patriarchs. Thus he ingeniously suggests that each patriarch was not “possessed” by evil because of his Judaism, but, quite the opposite, a “possessor” of God's promise.¹¹

Such wordplay and digression annoy Antonio and prompt the merchant to ask impatiently, “And what of him? Did he take interest?” Shylock responds with a detailed description of Jacob's cunning actions, a speech which taunts both Antonio's argument for the abnormality of usury as well as the merchant's lack of children:

shylock:
… the ewes being rank,
In the end of autumn turned to the rams;
And when the work of generation was
Between these woolly breeders in the act,
The skillful shepherd pilled me certain wands,
And in the doing of the deed of kind
He stuck them up before the fulsome ewes,
Who then conceiving, did in eaning time
Fall parti-colored lambs, and those were Jacob's.

(77-85)

This speech is part of Shylock's attempt to draw a parallel between Jacob's manipulative tactic and his own usury in order to suggest that usury is as natural as sexual propagation. Using alternatingly rolling and terse alliteration, Shylock makes the sheep's sexual activities uncomfortably visual: “rank” ewes “turned to the rams” “in the end of autumn” for “the work of generation” and “the doing of the deed of kind.” He supplements this with the bizarre image of “woolly breeders,” a coarse description of mating sheep. According to Shylock, Jacob himself takes an active role as the one who “stuck [“certain wands”] up before the fulsome ewes” in order to carry out his plan. Thus, through the use of a phallic object, Jacob makes the ewes conceive a specific type of lamb.

Shylock uses this tale of overt sexuality to disturb Antonio's containing presence. With references to the reproductive behavior of sheep, Shylock's exegesis of the Jacob story seems “full of danger,” not so much for the Jew, as Lars Engle suggests, as for Antonio, who is confronted in this speech with a subtle criticism of both his opinion of usury and his own lack of offspring. Shylock, by craftily arguing that usury gives him the power to control acts of reproduction, directly challenges Antonio's belief that usury involves the use of “barren metal” (131). When Antonio expresses impatience once more with “Was this inserted to make interest good? / Or is your gold and silver ewes and rams?,” Shylock retorts with a pun which aligns usury and reproduction: “I cannot tell; I make it breed a fast” (91-3). Shylock defends usury as natural and regenerative rather than abnormal and impotent. Furthermore, Shylock argues that interest, like sexual reproduction, is a creative, productive catalyst; he suggests that interest is necessary to produce new wealth, just as sex is essential to create new people. In this way, his words belie the definition of usury to which Antonio subscribes.

By emphasizing sexual regeneration in the Jacob story, Shylock further discomforts Antonio, the play's only bachelor and childless adult.¹² Although E. Pearlman considers Shylock “hungry for money but basically unsexual or anti-sexual,” it seems that Shylock equates sexual regeneration with the interest he gains through usury.¹³ In fact, Shylock blurs distinctions between the two, so that he would have his “gold and silver” “breed as fast” as “ewes and rams.” Using this analogy to argue that usury is as natural as sexual reproduction, Shylock can only further disturb Antonio, who lacks offspring as well as the hope of marrying and producing them. Hence, Shylock's exegesis, as an argument for the legitimacy of usury and a statement of sexual fecundity, challenges and discomforts the very man who most detests him.

Antonio and Bassanio are not alone in failing to contain Shylock's presence. In the second act, after Jessica has absconded with a portion of her father's savings, Solanio presents a narrative of Shylock's reaction to Jessica's flight which attempts to satirize the Jew:

solanio:
I never heard a passion so confused,
So strange, outrageous, and so variable,
As the dog Jew did utter in the streets:
“My daughter! O my ducats! O my daughter!
Fled with a Christian! O my Christian ducats!
Justice! The law! My ducats and my daughter!
A sealed bag, two sealed bags of ducats,
Of double ducats, stol’n from me by my daughter!
And jewels—two stones, two rich and precious stones,
Stol’n by my daughter! Justice! Find the girl!
She hath the stones upon her, and the ducats!”

(II.viii.12-22)

We should be wary to take this passage at face value, for, as Paul Cantor correctly observes, Solanio's paraphrase of Shylock is not simply a quotation of Shylock's words verbatim, but a caricature.¹⁴ As a caricature in the guise of a paraphrase, the speech becomes a complex form of containment. Solanio purports to repeat Shylock's words, but he actually exaggerates and manipulates them to construct a warped picture of how, as we later discover, Shylock reacted.¹⁵ Although he delivers this report in order to make Shylock's personality seem, like a “dog Jew,” inhuman and obsessive, Solanio ironically implicates not so much Shylock here as his own bad judgment. We might find it difficult to discover what in the speech seems “so strange … and so variable,” for Solanio's rendition is nothing if not predictable in its reliance on the Jewish stereotype and in its redundant use of “daughter,” “ducats,” “justice,” “stol’n,” and so forth.

As we later see firsthand, Shylock's response to Jessica's departure uses much of the same language as Solanio's paraphrase, but exhibits anger and pain that the crude parody simply does not convey. When Tubal tells Shylock of Jessica's whereabouts, there is an almost chilling bitterness in the abandoned father's words: “I would my daughter were dead at my feet, and the jewels in her ear! Would she were hearsed at my foot, and the ducats in her coffin!” (III.i.83-5). With its funerary pall, this passage is anything but comic. Furthermore, there is mournful remorse in Shylock's tone as he realizes he will have “no satisfaction, no revenge, nor no ill luck stirring but what lights o’ my shoulders, no sighs but o’ my breathing, no tears but o’ my shedding” (III.i.89-91). These lines convey a genuine sense of loss and tragedy, not the humorous obsessiveness of Solanio's shallow parody, which deprived Shylock's reaction of its emotional core and left only the empty shell of similar words (“daughter,” “ducats,” and “jewels”). It seems that Shakespeare allows Solanio to deliver his satiric paraphrase first, so that when Shylock finally speaks, his own deeper feelings undermine the limited portrayal that Solanio had previously constructed for him.

As we have seen thus far in Merchant, Shylock's physical presence is at once required by the Venetians—enabling Bassanio to finance travel to Belmont—and despised by them, as revealed by Solanio's demeaning paraphrase. However, rather than placidly acquiesce to the paradoxical constraints set on his shoulders, Shylock adamantly defies them. The play's famous “I am a Jew” speech represents the culmination of Shylock's rebellious attitude:

shylock: Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions?—fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that. If a Jew wrong a Christian, what is his humility? Revenge! If a Christian wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be by Christian example? Why revenge! The villainy you teach me I will execute, and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction.

(II.i 55-69)

The cohesiveness of this speech pivots upon a series of intricate counterbalances. Nourishing feeding is juxtaposed against poisoning, the latter of which, with the wounds, the diseases, and pricking, is counteracted by healing. In the middle of the passage, warming and cooling conveniently neutralize each other. Shylock neatly places his tickling question next to his pricking one, thereby suggesting a metaphorical relationship between creeping fingers' and a puncturing point's contact with skin (in addition to the rhyming of the two verbs). This complex series of counterbalances gives the speech a symmetry which allows it to stand on its own, similar to a soliloquy.¹⁶ Ironically, Shylock chooses an unpredictable moment—when he is in the company of two of the play's least significant characters—to deliver one of the play's most extraordinary pieces of rhetoric.

Embracing a plethora of corporal perceptions, from an animated tickle to cold-blooded murder, Shylock's lines emphasize a sensuality which transcends the social hierarchy imposed by the Christian community. While Shylock's previous earthiness relied on brash statements of sexual activity in order to rile Antonio, now the focus is on basic mortal characteristics and sensations: at first, eyes, hands, and organs; then, illness and health, life and death, and laughter. His images work to challenge and eradicate notions of difference which the Christians want desperately to maintain. For, Shylock speaks not only of Jewish experience, but of human experience. In doing so, he confronts Salerio and Solanio with what, for them, must seem a frightening prospect: that, despite his religious and cultural identity, he shares with them a fundamental humanity.

With his final query—“if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?”—Shylock consciously vocalizes his challenge to containment for the first time. No longer will he taunt and be taunted. His vow for vengeance is as eloquent a statement of defiance as it is a call for Antonio's pound of flesh. Kiernan Ryan artfully writes that this speech introduces “the full, protesting force of an irresistible egalitarian vision, whose basis in the shared faculties and needs of our common physical nature implicitly indicts all forms of inhuman discrimination.”¹⁷ Shylock's forcefulness leaves Salerio and Solanio stunned and speechless; the climactic affirmation of vengeance is only disturbed by the entrance of “a Man from Antonio” (s.d.). In the moment right before this, Solanio, Salerio, and perhaps the audience realize the shocking implications of Shylock's words. However irrational his response seems, it nevertheless represents a combative stance against the restraining power of the Christian community, particularly the stifling voice of Antonio and the deceptive actions of Lorenzo.

Following this decisive argument for equality, Shylock's more intimate conversation with Tubal aids in further humanizing him by providing details of his present condition as a forsaken father and of his previous role as a husband. We watch Shylock reveal anger and despair, with his emotional state at the mercy of Tubal's words.¹⁸ In just forty lines, Shylock confesses his anguish over Jessica, his hatred towards Antonio, his attachment to his savings, and, perhaps most interestingly, his devotion to Leah, his wife:

tubal:
One of them showed me a ring that he had of your daughter for a monkey.
shylock:
Out upon her! Thou torturest me, Tubal. It was my turquoise; I had it
of Leah when I was a bachelor. I would not have given it for a wilderness
of monkeys.

(III.i.111-16)

While this exchange contains an element of absurdity by juxtaposing a cherished ring against “a wilderness of monkeys,” within the trade-off there is also, undeniably, a sense of poignancy. Clearly, Shylock values the “turquoise” that Leah gave him before their marriage, for the loss of the ring represents Jessica's paramount crime, the news of which actually goes so far as to “torture” him. Judging by the worth that Shylock places upon the ring, it quite possibly represents the only memento of Leah left to him. This passage, then, takes Shylock's “Hath not a Jew eyes?” argument one step further by establishing his humanity on an emotional level. He perceives his possessions as much more than simply a means to acquire more money and ensure prosperity in days to come. The turquoise ring represents for him not a method to build for his economic future, but a connection to his emotional past.

In the talk with Tubal, Shylock's character undergoes myriad developments which convey a multifaceted portrait. His urgent concerns of the present bring to the surface memorable past experiences. These, in turn, enable Shylock to appear as more of an individual human being and less a stereotypical menacing villain to us. As Norman Rabkin rightly argues, during this scene, we “respond to signals of Shylock's injured fatherhood, of his role as heavy father, of his light hearted mistreatment at the hands of the negligible Salerio and Solanio, of his motiveless malignity, and we try hopelessly to reduce to a single attitude our response.¹⁹ At once, then, Shylock strikes us as more fully humanized than his oppressors, and his characterization seems more complex than theirs. Shylock thus maintains a significant humanity which succesfully undermines the other figures' attempts to belittle him.

In Shylock's first scene with Bassanio and Antonio, his resentment seems somewhat restrained and playful. But with Antonio behind bars, his tone suddenly shifts to an intractable extreme, beyond reason, humaneness, and even the ability to listen:

antonio:
I pray thee hear me speak.
shylock:
I’ll have my bond. I will not hear thee speak.
I’ll have my bond, and therefore speak no more.
I’ll not be made a soft and dull-eyed fool,
To shake the head, relent, and sigh, and yield
To Christian intercessors. Follow not.
I’ll have no speaking; I will have my bond.

(III.iii.11-17)

Earlier, Antonio attempted to silence Shylock while attaining a monetary bond. Here, though, the power dynamics have been reversed, so that Shylock now plays the role of stifler and bond seeker to the imprisoned merchant. Furthermore, Shylock reverses the roles with a diabolical twist; while Antonio's original desire for a loan of money was innocuous, Shylock's bond is deadly.

With “I will not hear thee speak,” Shylock openly admits to what he had only hinted at with his repetitive “well” to Bassanio in their first scene together. That is, he now refuses outright to participate in conversational exchange, nor will he listen to Antonio. Shylock's “I’ll have my bond, and therefore speak no more” expresses precisely Antonio and Bassanio's original demand upon him: a binding economic agreement but not a conversation, the latter of which implies a linguistic communion formed between speakers and listeners. Shylock seems to hint at the paradox of his own position as a member of an economic but not a social community in Venice. Through demands for both silence and fulfillment of a bond, Shylock forces Antonio into the very position in which the merchant had previously placed him.

Thus, the play constructs Shylock as a man acutely aware of his subservient role in Venice and preoccupied with how to thwart those who have relegated him to that position. As we have seen, he accomplishes this through coarse references to the corporeal, through stylish rhetoric, or by bluntly refusing to listen. Uniting all of these responses, the climactic trial scene sets Shylock against Merchant's community as it frantically tries to impose closure upon him by swaying him from his violent plan. Conflict in the scene does not occur solely between Christian mercy and Jewish hardheartedness, as has often been argued.²⁰ Rather, what gets played out during the trial is, in part, the battle between expectation, in the guise of comic closure, and defiance of what is expected, as represented by Shylock's determination to perform the directive of his bond.

Early on, the scene establishes the expectation that the Christian community will triumph over the outsider. The Duke hints at this when he tells Shylock, “We all expect a gentle answer, Jew” (IV.i.34). Indeed, the Duke does not simply want “a gentle answer,” he expects it, as if he knows he is a player in a comedy, and that comedy requires overcoming obstacles to secure comic integration and closure. And if the title character succumbs to Shylock's knife, hope for such closure is, of course, doomed. The court scene, then, captures characters in Merchant as they struggle to save their own comedy from imminent collapse.

Portia, dressed as the judge Balthazar, functions both to interpret the law and to ensure that the comedy achieves closure. After Antonio confesses to Shylock's bond, Portia commands: “Then must the Jew be merciful” (181). Disguised as a representative of the law, Portia gains the authority to make such absolute decrees in Venice. Yet, her command serves a structural purpose as well. Portia does not say solely that Shylock should show mercy, but that he must. As with the Duke's desire for a “gentle answer,” Portia's words suggest an underlying expectation for behavior which will guarantee proper comic closure. Indeed, by saving Antonio's life while defeating Shylock, Portia effectively removes the obstacle to the comic denouement. Shakespeare accomplishes a fascinating unity of plot and structure through her, since she serves a dual purpose as both judge within the intrigue of Merchant, decreeing what is correct behavior in Venice, and judge without, determining how best to overcome the obstacle to community and close the comic framework of the play.

Like Portia, the Duke attempts to overpower and ultimately expel Shylock. Rather than put Shylock to death, however, he forces the Jew to give up all of his savings:

duke:
Thou shalt see the difference of our spirit,
I pardon thee thy life before thy ask it.
For half thy wealth, it is Antonio's;
The other half comes to the general state,
Which humbleness may drive into a fine.

(367-71)

Jean Howard has written that a “pardon so self-righteously granted seems more a gesture of pride than of spontaneous mercy,” and she is right to see in the Duke's pronouncement a thinly veiled ego trip.²¹ Also present, however, is the urge to deprive Shylock of his only source of power—his money. But, as Shylock says, such an action would do more than simply bankrupt him:

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

(373-6)

Shylock makes a valid point here, since usury, as we have seen, was one of the only means by which Jews could earn a living.²² In these lines, Shylock continues to drive home his paradoxical relationship with Venice's Christians, by imploring them to understand that their “pardon” promises not forgiveness but annihilation. Ironically, the Duke spares Shylock's life by “tak[ing]” the very things which enable Shylock to live. Thus, the “pardon” which seemed motivated by mercy reveals itself to be mercilessly sadistic. Had the Duke ordered Shylock's death, at least this would have been a terminal punishment, but the Duke's so-called pardon instead promises to be interminably torturous and humiliating. Stripped of his possessions—the very things which define his identity in Venetian society—Shylock retains his life, but no possible way to live it.

Together with the Duke's pardon, Antonio's final demand for Shylock's conversion constitutes a self-defeating and excessive punishment. Rather than let Shylock remain a Jew, albeit a poor one, Antonio suggests a different penalty:

antonio:
So please the Duke and all the court
To quit the fine for half his goods,
I am content; so he will let me have
The other half in use, to render it
Upon his death to the gentleman
That lately stole his daughter.
Two things provided more: that for this favor
He presently become a Christian;
The other, that he do record a gift
Here in the court of all he dies possessed
Unto his son Lorenzo and his daughter.

(379-89)

Not only does Antonio's supposed “favor” maintain, in the long run, total control over Shylock's possessions, but it further stipulates that Shylock “become a Christian.” Hence, Antonio's punishment does not fully restore Shylock's independent economic status, and it completely obliterates Shylock's cultural and religious connections. The punishment comes to represent not so much a response to a misdeed as it does a personal attack on an outsider. By maintaining economic and religious control over Shylock, Antonio attempts to eradicate the Jew's identity on every level. Paul Cantor notes that, as we watch Antonio pronounce his punishment, we “sense that Venice is forcibly imposing conformity, responding to a challenge to its beliefs by simply trying to eliminate that challenge.”²³ Ironically, rather than teach Shylock a lesson in compassion and display evidence of the mercy which just moments ago Portia had urged Shylock to use, Antonio goes too far.

The conversion's harshness reveals a fundamental anxiety among the Christians to reach closure. The conversion is so excessive that it does not elevate Shylock to the level of a gratified, merciful Christian, but reduces him to a broken, weary man. When Portia asks him, “art thou contented, Jew?,” he merely echoes her resignedly with, “I am content” (392-3). There is no evidence of the conversion bringing Shylock any solace, newfound understanding, or acceptance into the Christian community. Rather, it humiliates him, and he exits anticlimactically:

shylock:
I pray you, give me leave to go from hence.
I am not well. Send the deed after me,
And I will sign it.

(394-6)

The incomplete act of signing the deed seems to symbolize Shylock's relationship with the Christian community as he leaves the stage. The conversion, far from enlightening Shylock in the glories of Christianity, sickens him into silence. In their anxious rush to reach closure, the Venetians and Belmontians have attempted to overcome an obstacle to community at a terrible price. Denying Shylock his dignity, the Christians have mercilessly victimized him.

3. “AND YET I AM SURE YOU ARE NOT SATISFIED / OF THESE EVENTS AT FULL”: SHYLOCK'S CONTAINMENT DEFIED AND CLOSURE DENIED

The cruel punishment of Shylock casts an ominous cloud over the final act's attempts at blissful closure. When E. C. Pettet writes that “the play dissolves, appropriately, in the exquisite love scene under the moon in Belmont,” he disregards the very inappropriateness of the Christians' behavior toward Shylock and the way in which this flaws the play's comic ending.²⁴ As the Christians celebrate their own marriages and good tidings, their joy is undercut by an audience's acute awareness of Shylock's absence. The words of Portia and Jessica reveal that the Christians' improper treatment of Shylock overpowers the festive attempts of the final act.

Rather than revel in the triumph of community, the characters in Belmont struggle gloomily to honor their newly-formed bonds. Their conversations are overshadowed, literally and figuratively, by Shylock's mistreatment. Portia makes this clear when she compares Belmont's nighttime to a day plagued by dark clouds:

portia:
This night methinks is but the daylight sick;
It looks a little paler. ’Tis a day
Such as the day when the sun is hid.

(V.i. 124-6)

Portia's image of a sick, paling night undermines the attempts to create a lively scene in Belmont. While glorious sunshine would have portrayed the confident couples in brilliant light, the inclement weather seems to reflect discomfort below the play's surface. According to Portia, the clouds hide the sun from view, and this has the effect of infecting the day with disease. But Portia's metaphor also seems to give voice to a deeper message within the play. Just as the clouds cover the sun, the characters of Merchant have hidden Shylock away by refusing to acknowledge his cruel punishment and by attempting to forget him. As the sickness which Portia refers to darkens an otherwise sunny day, Merchant's Christians have inflicted their comedy with an illness, the inability to deal satisfyingly with Shylock, which darkens what should be a radiant closure to the play.

Throughout the final act, pessimism, discomfort, and doubt emanate from Jessica. Her few lines and mysterious silences reveal a subtle alignment with her father's personality. During the act's opening exchange between herself and Lorenzo, she puts a damper on the romantic mood with a suggestion of dishonest love:

jessica:
In such a night
Did young Lorenzo swear he loved her well,
Stealing her soul with many vows of faith,
And ne’er a true one.

(V.i. 17-20)

Just as her father mocked Antonio's sexuality earlier, so Jessica now mocks Lorenzo's status as a faithful husband.²⁵ However, while Shylock disturbed the single Antonio by discussing the natural reproductive activity of “woolly breeders,” Jessica teases the married Lorenzo with the dour insinuation that his “vows of faith” to her are suspect and that he is a liar, perhaps even an adulterer. Jessica, then, ridicules the sexual attitudes of the Christian community as her father had before her, and, by doing so, her personality is partially aligned with Shylock's. Thus, the Jew's presence, although banished, resurfaces through his daughter's attitudes and effectively challenges the supposed fidelity of the very thing which enables communal continuity—marriage—in the final act.

Furthermore, like Shylock, Jessica stubbornly refuses to conform to the wishes of the Christian community. As Lorenzo tries in vain to entertain her by speaking of celestial music as the “harmony … in immortal souls” and finally ordering music to be played, Jessica's discomfort becomes most acute:

lorenzo:
Come ho, and wake Diana with a hymn!
With sweetest touches pierce your mistress' ear
And draw her home with music.
                    Play music
jessica:
I am never merry when I hear sweet music.
lorenzo:
The reason is, your spirits are attentive.

(V.i. 70)

By calling for music, Lorenzo desires to envelop himself and Jessica in an illusion of blissful harmony, where only his notion of celestial notes played by “young-eyed cherubins” can be heard (62). Yet, with her remark, Jessica refuses to participate in this illusion. Her words betray deep feelings of anxiety and detract from the joyous atmosphere that Lorenzo struggles to attain. Jessica cannot easily make her “spirits” less “attentive” and simply disregard her sadness for the sake of a comic resolution. Rather than pretend, as Lorenzo does, that music has the power to resolve problematic situations, she acknowledges her discomfort and draws an audience's attention to the artificial nature of Lorenzo's request in light of what has happened to Shylock.

Both Jessica and Shylock represent what Ralph Berry describes as “the unmentionable” in the play, that is, threatening forces which the central community tries vainly to sweep aside and cover up.²⁶ In court, the Duke told Shylock that he “expect[ed] a gentle answer,” and Portia announced that Shylock “must … be merciful,” as if they knew that obstacles to comedy have to be defeated if comic closure is to be attained. Lorenzo seems to share this attitude when he elaborates on the beneficial effects of harmonious sounds and then concludes with an imperative for Jessica to “mark the music” (88). In effect, Lorenzo forces Jessica to endure the music, despite the fact that she seems unwilling to partake in his musical illusion of happiness.

Jessica's pessimistic remark about “sweet music” is also her last speaking moment in the play. Rather than permit the existence of challenges to comic progression, Lorenzo stifles Jessica's voice, just as Portia and the Duke do to Shylock's in the courtroom. Thus, the Christian community effectively marginalizes both the Jewish father and his converted daughter. Whereas Shylock leaves the stage, however, Jessica remains onstage in spite of her silent misgivings, watching but not conversing with the other characters. The audience never hears her respond to Lorenzo's silencing mechanism, and the text does not indicate how she reacts. This leads an audience to wonder whether or not Jessica remains internally torn between Jewish and Christian worlds and between her father's and her husband's households.²⁷ By stifling Jessica's voice, the Christians fail to resolve, and prevent Jessica from resolving, her religious, cultural, and social allegiances. Anxiously attempting to reach closure, the characters of Merchant have only compounded their difficulties by failing to deal satisfactorily not just with Shylock, but with Jessica as well.

Many of Shakespeare's festive comedies, including Love's Labors Lost, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and Much Ado About Nothing, end with song and dance celebrating the integration of community. But The Merchant of Venice ends quietly and anticlimactically, with Gratiano's crass quibble on “Nerissa's ring” and the Christians' hasty exit. In marked contrast to endings of other Shakespearean comedies, I envision a performance in which the stage remains absolutely silent and still, similar to Jack Gold's 1980 BBC production. Jessica has been left alone on the set; her solitude expresses her own hesitancy to participate in the revelry, just as it also parallels Shylock's own solitude offstage. She reads his “special deed of gift,” the document that Nerissa has given to her and to Lorenzo, which states that they will inherit Shylock's property upon his death (291-2). This deed represents the only connection remaining between the Jewish father and his converted daughter, and I believe that it jars Jessica's memory to recall stealing Shylock's jewels and learning of his subsequent punishment. In this sudden moment of realization for her as well as for the audience, her expression slowly shifts from happy anticipation of married life as a Christian, to guilty regret for what she has tacitly allowed to be done to her father. Jessica's performance thus involves the skillful act of opening the play up to the audience and encouraging us along with her, to feel sorrow for Shylock's treatment.

4. CONCLUSION

In The Merchant of Venice, Shylock fulfills a necessary role in the Christians' economic community as a usurer, but he is simultaneously shunned because of his Judaism, while, within the play, he represents a threatening presence which a welcoming community must paradoxically ostracize in order to reach comic closure. Similarly, Jessica, as a wife with a large dowry, is required for the Christians' economic community, but, like her father, she, too, is alienated for voicing a challenge to closure. Hence, both Shylock and Jessica are necessary to the play's central community for their economic importance and their role as obstacles which must be overcome. Yet, in the community's efforts to reach closure, it fails to deal appropriately with these opposing voices. Rather than negotiate with its outsiders, the Christian community silences them, but with so much force that its attempts are undermined. In the process of restraining Shylock, the society ironically draws attention to the unrestrained cruelty that it uses in its own punishment of difference.

By allowing Shylock and Jessica to undermine closure, Shakespeare unites the historical and literary concerns outlined above. He seems to recognize the inherent similarity between Renaissance Venice's need for the Jew in order to define itself economically, and the need of his play's Venetians to ostracize Shylock in order to define themselves as a community. Indeed, Shakespeare creates a fascinating tension between the exclusionary practices of Venetian Christians and the demands of the comic genre.

Leaving this tension unresolved, Shakespeare makes a statement about the tendency of both comic form and historical circumstance to require an “other” for self-definition. He problematizes the fact that comic characters, like sixteenth-century Venetians, manipulate and finally ostracize those outside of their central community. By allowing Shylock to upset the play's closure, then, Shakespeare places in the foreground the position of the “other.”²⁸ He suggests that, rather than operating under principles of egalitarianism and mercy, the Christians of the comedy and of Venice take what they want from Jews, only to hide them away in an attempt to silence their frustrated voices. Defying containment and overshadowing The Merchant of Venice's closure, Shylock protests the fact that the comedy has established community at the paradoxical price of ghettoizing its outsider.

Notes

1. C. L. Barber, Shakespeare's Festive Comedy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959), pp. 4, 6-8. Barber defines the “butts” as scapegoats who obstruct the actions of the play's central community in Shakespeare's comedies. Thus, characters such as Falstaff are not “butt” figures, according to Barber's use of the term.

2. Ibid., pp. 8-9.

3. Bernard Glassman, “The New Jewish Villain,” Anti-Semitic Stereotypes without Jews (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1975), p. 62. This chapter provides background information on the development of Jewish stereotypes during the Renaissance.

4. Cecil Roth, The Jews in the Renaissance (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1959), p. 6.

5. For a dramatic treatment of the ways in which city governments required and extracted Jewish funds for self-protection, see Christopher Marlowe's The Jew of Malta, one of Shakespeare's most important sources for The Merchant. For more on English Christian perceptions of, and relations with, Jews, see the introduction in James Bulman, The Merchant of Venice [Shakespeare in Performance Series] (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991).

6. Glassman, p. 68.

7. Roth, p. 13. John Gross's recent book Shylock: A Legend and Its Legacy (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993), contains information and insights on the ghetto of Venice, pp. 23-28, as well as a marvelously detailed summary of the play's sources, Shylock's performance history, and critical and popular responses to him.

8. All references to The Merchant of Venice are taken from The Merchant of Venice, edited by Kenneth Myrick (New York: Signet Classic, 1987).

9. Lawrence Danson, The Harmonies of The Merchant of Venice (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), p. 139.

10. Lars Engle, “‘Thrift is Blessing’: Exchange and Explanation in The Merchant of Venice,” Shakespeare Studies 37 (1986), p. 29. See also, Gross, pp. 30-33.

11. I find Engle's word choice particularly suggestive when he writes that “Shylock claims to possess the, patriarchs … and to interpret their example with authority” (p. 29). Here, Engle uses a meaning of “possess” which, knowingly or unknowingly, plays on Antonio's possession pun by twisting it just as Shylock does. Instead of the Devil possessing Shylock, we now have Shylock possessing Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

12. Coppelia Kahn has argued convincingly for Antonio's homosexuality in “The Cuckoo's Note: Male Friendship and Cuckoldry in The Merchant of Venice,” Shakespeare's “Rough Magic”: Renaissance Essays in Honor of C. L. Barber, ed. by Peter Erikson and Coppelia Kahn (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1985), pp. 104-110.

13. E. Pearlman, “Shakespeare, Freud, and the Two Usuries, or, Money's a Meddlar,” English Literary Renaissance 2 (1972): 222.

14. Paul A. Cantor, “Religion and the Limits of Community in The Merchant of Venice,” Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal 70 (1987): 249.

15. Shakespeare uses these notions of caricature and paraphrase similarly in Othello, when Iago relays what seem to be Cassio's sleepy outbursts to Othello:

    iago: In sleep I heard him
    say, “Sweet Desdemona,
    Let us be wary, let us hide our loves!”
    And then, sir, he would gripe and wring my hand,
    Cry “O sweet creature!” Then kiss me hard,
    As if he plucked up kisses by the roots
    That grew upon my lips; laid his leg o’er my thigh,
    And sigh, and kiss, and then cry, “Cursed fate
    That gave thee to the Moor!”

    (III.iii.416-23)

    Just as Solanio slandered Shylock with the message equating daughters and ducats, so Iago condemns, and, even more extremely than Solanio, nearly dooms, Cassio by portraying him as a lusty, jealous suitor. Paraphrasing, then, represents for both Solanio and Iago a means to ridicule and manipulate their enemies.

16. This point gains even more credence if we accept James Bulman's suggestion that Shylock's speech may have originally been delivered directly to the audience as a soliloquy; see Bulman, p. 8.

17. Kieman Ryan, Harvester New Readings: Shakespeare (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1989), p. 17.

18. Ralph Berry, “Discomfort in The Merchant of Venice,” Shakespeare and the Awareness of the Audience (London: Macmillan Press, 1985), p. 57.

19. Norman Rabkin, “Meaning and The Merchant of Venice,” Shakespeare and the Problem of Meaning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 6.

20. See, for example, Barber, p. 185; Danson, p. 164; E. C. Pettet, “The Merchant of Venice and the Problem of Usury,” English Association Essays and Studies 31 (1945), p. 29.

21. Jean Howard, “The Difficulties of Closure: An Approach to The Problematic in Shakespearean Comedy,” in Comedy from Shakespeare to Sheridan, ed. by A. R. Braunmiuller and J. C. Bulman (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1986), p. 124.

22. Bulman, p. 21.

23. Cantor, p. 253.

24. Pettet, p. 29.

25. Importantly, the act begins with Jessica and Lorenzo exchanging a series of remarks about various tragically doomed couples (Ryan, p. 22). The tragic subjects of the opening conversation ironically undermine the comic harmony that Lorenzo hopes to foster.

26. Berry, p. 57.

27. Lawrence Danson claims with hesitation that, in “I am never merry when I hear sweet music,” Jessica expresses herself “with (I take it) a newcomer's insecurity” (Danson, p. 187). Rather than insecurity, it seems that Jessica reveals the reluctance that she, as well as the audience, feel toward rejoicing in comic closure so soon after her father has been humiliatingly banished. I do not agree with John Gross's opinion that Jessica's “emotional bond with [Shylock] is broken” in this act, and that her silence suggests her acquiescence to the others (Gross, p. 62). Ralph Berry is perhaps correct when he writes that “Jessica becomes a focus of stillness and darkness” in the final act and that she “has a long way to go in Christian society” (Berry, pp. 61, 59).

28. I would not go so far as to claim that the ambiguous ending does enough to balance the oppression of Shylock. Rather, it avoids providing a simplistic comic resolution and thus calls into question the appropriateness of his treatment.