SOURCE: “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? Colonization and Miscegenation in The Merchant of Venice,” in Renaissance Drama, Vol. XXIII, n.s., 1992, pp. 87-111.

[In the essay below, Hall focuses on lines in Act Three of The Merchant of Venice which describe Launcelot's impregnation of a black woman. Hall argues that this brief passage underscores a major theme of the play: the fear of racial intermingling that occurs when a country such as Elizabethan England makes imperialistic inroads into other countries.]

Samuel Purchas introduces his popular collection of travel narratives, Purchas His Pilgrimes (the 1625 sequel to Richard Hakluyt's Principal Voyages), by recounting the virtues of trade. He equates the benefits of navigation with Christian charity and leads his reader into the collection proper by envisioning a world converted to Protestantism:

… and the chiefest charitie is that which is most common; nor is there any more common then this of Navigation, where one man is not good to another man, but so many Nations as so many persons hold commerce and intercourse of amity withall; … the West with the East, and the remotest parts of the world are joyned in one band of humanitie; and why not also of Christianitie? Sidon and Sion, Jew and Gentile, Christian and Ethnike, as in this typicall storie? that as there is one Lord, one Faith, one Baptisme, one Body, one Spirit, one Inheritance, one God and Father, so there may be thus one Church truly Catholike, One Pastor and one Sheepfold?

(1: 56)

Charity may not begin at home, but it certainly ends up there, as the charitable cause of conversion redounds to the economic benefit of the English world. The initial ideal of “commerce and intercourse of amity” among many types of men is replaced by a vision of global unity that denies difference just as Purchas's own language does. (The singular construction [“one Lord, one Faith”] subsumes difference when it replaces the “and” that allows differences to exist simultaneously [“Jew and Gentile”].) English trade, rather than fostering a mixing of cultures, will eradicate religious differences, as well as cultural and gender differences, under one patriarchal God.

Purchas's glorified version of the end of English colonization similarly serves to efface the multivalent anxieties over cross-cultural interaction that permeate English fictions of international trade. In uniting economics and Christian values, Purchas highlights the fact that colonial trade involves not only economic transactions, but cultural and political exchange as well. The anthropologist Gayle Rubin notes in her influential feminist critique of Lévi-Strauss, “Kinship and marriage are always parts of total social systems, and are always tied into economic and political arrangements” (207). Likewise, the exchange of goods (or even the circulation of money) across cultural borders always contains the possibility of other forms of exchange between different cultures. Associations between marriage, kinship, property, and economics become increasingly anxiety-ridden as traditional social structures (such as marriage) are extended when England develops commercial ties across the globe. Extolling the homogenizing influence of trade suggests that English trade will turn a world of difference into a world of Protestant similitude. However, it leaves unspoken the more threatening possibility—that English identity will be subsumed under foreign difference.

It is this problem of “commerce and intercourse,” of commercial interaction inevitably fostering social and sexual contact, that underlies representations of miscegenation in the early modern period.¹ In addition to addressing domestic anxieties about the proper organization of male and female (particularly about the uncontrolled desires of women), the appearance of miscegenation in plays responds to growing concerns over English national identity and culture as England develops political and economic ties with foreign (and “racially” different) nations. This essay will draw on Purchas's dual sense of the all-encompassing nature of trade encounters and colonialism's alleged homogenizing power to suggest the significance of a brief instance of miscegenation in Shakespeare that has been insistently ignored by critics.

Although the most central—and most commented on—problem of difference and trade in The Merchant of Venice is between Jew and Christian, more general anxieties about the problem of difference within economic exchange are encapsulated in an instance of miscegenation never staged. In act 3, the audience witnesses a joking interchange between Shylock's servant, Launcelot, and Lorenzo and Jessica about their mixed marriage:

jes.
Nay, you need not fear us Lorenzo, Launcelot and I are out,—he
tells me flatly that there’s no mercy for me in heaven, because I am
a Jew's daughter: and he says that you are no good member of the commonwealth,
for in converting Jews to Christians, you raise the price of pork.
lor.
I shall answer that better to the commonwealth than you can the getting
up of the negro's belly: the Moor is with child by you Launcelot!
laun.
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.

(3.5.28-39)

The Arden edition of Merchant helpfully notes that “this passage has not been explained” and suggests, “Perhaps it was introduced simply for the sake of the elaborate pun on Moor/more” (99n35). Their joking conversation no doubt parodically reflects the investment of the commonwealth in sexual practices. Nonetheless, it also begs the question of the difference between Lorenzo's liaison with a Jew and Launcelot's with a Moor. The Renaissance stage abounds with jokes about bastards: if Launcelot's fault was merely the getting of another, there would be no reason to emphasize that this invisible woman is a Moor. In his Black Face, Maligned Race, Anthony Barthelemy notes that this exchange reflects ideas of the licentiousness of the black woman typical of the time (124).² However, it may be that this pregnant, unheard, unnamed, and unseen (at least by critics) black woman is a silent symbol for the economic and racial politics of The Merchant of Venice. She exposes an intricately wrought nexus of anxieties over gender, race, religion, and economics (fueled by the push of imperial/mercantile expansion) which surrounds the various possibilities of miscegenation raised in the play.

II

Before moving into the play itself, I would like to sketch out some of these anxieties over miscegenation by examining one of the play's possible “sub-texts” (Jameson 81). In 1596, despite her earlier support of English piracy in the slave trade, Queen Elizabeth expressed concern over the presence of blacks in the realm. She issued a proclamation to the Lord Mayor of London which states her “understanding that there are of late divers blackmoores brought into this realme, of which kinde of people there are allready here to manie” (qtd. in Fryer 10) and demands that blacks recently brought to the realm be rounded up and returned. This effort was evidently not very successful, as she followed up that proclamation with another order of expulsion:

… whereas the Queen's Majesty, tendering the good and welfare of her own natural subjects greatly distressed in these hard times of dearth, is highly discontented to understand the great numbers of Negars and Blackamoors which (as she is informed) are crept into this realm since the troubles between Her Highness and the King of Spain, who are fostered and relieved here to the great annoyance of her own liege people that want the relief which those people consume; as also for that the most of them are infidels, having no understanding of Christ or his Gospel, hath given especial commandment that the said kind of people should be with all speed avoided and discharged out of this Her Majesty's dominions. … And if there shall be any person or persons which are possessed of any such Blackamoors that refuse to deliver them in sort as aforesaid, then we require you to call them before you and to advise and persuade them by all good means to satisfy Her Majesty's pleasure therein; which if they shall eftsoons willfully and obstinately refuse, we pray you then to certify their names unto us, to the end Her Majesty may take such further course therein as it shall seem best in her princely wisdom.

(Qtd. in Jones, Elizabethan Image 20-21)³

While such critical attention as has been paid to this document concentrates on the attempt to discharge Moors from the realm and uses the attempt itself to prove the existence of a viable black presence in England (Newman, “And wash the Ethiop white” 148), the terms of the proclamation demand special attention. The image of large numbers of Moors having “crept into this realm” suggests that they suddenly appeared of their own volition (despite having been “fostered and relieved” here by unnamed residents).⁴ The proclamation then lays the fault of this invasion at the foot of Spain, a country already suspect for its past history of interracial alliance.⁵ The rest of the document is concerned to prevent contact between these “creeping” invaders and “her own liege” people despite its contradictory contention that Elizabeth's own subjects are the ones “possessed” of blackamoors to the detriment of the state.

Although chronic food shortages occurred throughout Elizabeth's reign and certainly seemed to be a goad to plantation and exploration, her naming of “these hard times of dearth” suggests that both of the expulsions occurred in the context of very immediate state concerns. England from 1594 to 1597 saw dramatic declines in grain harvests (the staple of the lower-class diet), culminating in the famine of 1597. Indeed, much of northern Europe (although, interestingly, not Italy) suffered from famine and starvation from 1595 to 1597. Although the famine in England hit hardest in the northwestern parishes, its effects were felt throughout the realm, as Andrew Appleby notes, “It is abundantly clear, however, that the grain harvest was the heart of the English economy … and that its malfunctions were felt, with disastrous results, throughout the kingdom” (137). Private citizens, the Privy Council, and the general public showed concern over the unavailability of bread even in the earliest of those years. These “dear years” carried with them a range of other social dislocations: a reduction in baptismal and marriage rates, a rise in mortality and civil unrest, and, significantly, the unemployment of servant classes. Key government measures were issued in proximity to both expulsions and indicate that the famine generated a degree of class conflict. Elizabeth's order to make starch from bran rather than grain needed for food was issued in the same month as the first order of expulsion. Another proclamation, ending price-fixing and compelling the landed classes to remain in the counties because “her majesty had thus determined for relief of her people to stay all good householders in their countries, there in charitable sort to keep hospitality” (Hughes and Larkin 172), was issued a few months later.

Equally important in the expulsion order is the reference to the religion (or lack of religion) of the Moors, which is based on the supposition that they are a logical group to cut off from state resources because they have “no understanding of Christ or his Gospel.” In this time of crisis Christianity becomes the prerequisite for access to limited resources. Certainly, Elizabeth's evocation of the religious difference of the Moor would seem to support the common view that religion, not race, is the defining mark of difference in early modern England.⁶ I would argue, however, that even though religion is given as a compelling reason for excluding Moors, emphasizing religious difference only clouds the political reality that the Moors' visibility in the culture made them a viable target for exclusion. In other words, it is their physical difference in association with cultural differences (a combination that is the primary basis for the category “race”) that provokes their exclusion—not just their religion.

In Elizabeth's proclamation we see what may be a source of the threat posed by Launcelot's Moor. In times of economic stress, visible minorities very often become the scapegoat for national problems. The proclamation shares with Merchant an alarm over unregulated consumption. Launcelot's evocation of the scarcity of food through his jesting over the rising price of pork reveals a similar unease over limited resources. Thus, famine, one of the more specific rationales for English colonial plantation and expansion, becomes here associated with the black woman. Ultimately both texts draw on and reproduce the same racial stereotype. Just as the image of the black female as consumer of state resources in the twentieth-century United States is statistically inaccurate but politically powerful, so may the black presence have been a threat (albeit small) to white European labor, which is magnified by its very visibility.⁷ This sense of privation produces an economic imperative in the play, which insists on the exclusion of racial, religious, and cultural difference. With the finite resources of a Venetian (or Elizabethan) society reserved for the wealthy elite, the offspring of Launcelot and the Moor presents a triple threat that in this world is perceived as a crime against the state. Their alliance is perhaps even more suspect than the ominous possibility of a marriage between Portia and the prince of Morocco, since it would produce a half-black, half-Christian child from the already starving lower classes who threatens to upset the desired balance of consumption. The pun on “Moor/more” further supports this image of the black woman as both consuming and expanding and is particularly striking in a play where the central image is the literal taking of flesh and where Christian males worry throughout about having “less.”

The acute sense of privation amid plenty is signaled through Merchant's ubiquitous images of starvation that are interwoven with the incessant eating in the play. Walter Cohen sees Launcelot as integral to the play and notes in particular the way he “systematically and wittily misconstrues Lorenzo's apparently straightforward order that the kitchen staff ‘prepare for dinner!’” (210). Launcelot's first move is to remind Lorenzo of the servants' hunger: “they all have stomachs” (3.5.44). Earlier, he claims that he is starving in Shylock's employ: “I am famish’d in his service. You may tell every finger I have with my ribs” (2.2.101-03). Shylock's version, “The patch is kind enough, but a huge feeder” (2.5.45), may reinforce the idea that these outsiders literally starve rightful citizens, yet it also suggests a Christian appetite out of control. Bassanio, describing his poor finances, suggests bulk without sustenance in saying that he lost wealth, “By something showing a more swelling port / Than my faint means would grant continuance” (1.1.124-25). Finally, Antonio, in reminding Solanio of Venice's strict commercial laws, laments, “These griefs and losses have so bated me / That I shall hardly spare a pound of flesh / Tomorrow, to my bloody creditor” (3.3.32-34).

The associations with eating and starvation link outsiders, particularly Shylock, with one of the most compelling tropes of colonialist discourse: the cannibal.⁸ Cannibalism was a source of as much anxiety as fascination for the traveler; it seemed to be one of the final lines drawn between the savage Other and the civilized self (Cheyfitz 42; Hulme 81-83; Kilgour 5-7). The reasons given for imperial plunder by Bertoldo in Philip Massinger's The Maid of Honour suggest that much of this obsession springs from a sense that the dividing line is not as clear as one might like:

Nature did
Designe us to be warriours, and to breake through
Our ring the sea, by which we are inviron’d;
And we by force must fetch in what is wanting,
Or precious to us. Adde to this, wee are
A populous nation, and increase so fast,
That if we by our providence, are not sent
Abroad in colonies, or fall by the sword,
Not Sicilie (though now, it were
more fruitfull,
Then when ’twas stil’d the granary of great Rome)
Can yeeld our numerous frie bread, we must starve,
Or eat up one another.

(1.1.202-13)

In specifically ascribing to the English an aggression and ferocity that are the essence of European definitions of the cannibal (Hulme 83), Bertoldo hints at the tentativeness of that division. The movement of the passage also suggests a blurring of boundaries: the opening image of the breach of England's geographic insularity which releases the energies of a warlike nation rapidly moves into an evocation of violent, desperate want which could easily turn in upon itself. Massinger skates a fine line between identity and difference in allowing his character to suggest that imperial expansion is the only thing separating the civilized Englishman from the cannibal and that the dangers of cannibalism lie on either side of England's borders. His metaphor is similar to an earlier and more specific reference to English want in Richard Hakluyt's Discourse of Western Planting. In this attempt to persuade Elizabeth to adopt a plantation policy, Hakluyt associates cannibalism with another marginalized group—the unemployed. He warns Elizabeth:

But wee for all the Statutes that hitherto can be devised, and the sharpe execution of the same in poonishinge idle and lazye persons for wante of sufficient occasion of honest employmente cannot deliver our common wealthe from multitudes of loyterers and idle vagabondes. … [W]e are growen more populous than ever heretofore: So that nowe there are of every arte and science so many, that they can hardly lyve one by another, nay rather they are readie to eate upp one another.

(234)

The troping of cannibalism links actual shortages of food with the need to promote colonial trade in a way that also provides a compelling metaphor for the loss of communal identity in such trade. The desire to make contact with and to exploit Others always carries with it the possibility of engulfment. Such fears of erasure are embedded in metaphors of eating, but the figure of the cannibal specifically locates such fears within a framework of colonial trade and religious difference.

The language of eating in The Merchant of Venice situates Shylock within this framework by merging images of cannibalism with older accusations of blood libel. He claims, “But yet I’ll go in hate, to feed upon / The prodigal Christian,” and Gratiano describes him, “thy currish spirit / Govern’d a wolf, who hang’d for human slaughter—” (4.1.133-35).⁹ According to Maggie Kilgour, feeding from (or eating with) the Other is a perilous involvement which carries the risk of being eaten by the Other:¹⁰

To eat in a country is potentially to be eaten by it, to enter into a false identification by being absorbed by a foreign culture—what we call “going native”—and so be prevented from returning to a place of origin in which one is truly at home. The opposite of returning to one's own hearth is ultimately to be subsumed totally by a hostile host.

(23)

Shylock's reluctance to eat with the Christians displays the fear of “be[ing] subsumed … by a hostile host,” but in terms that ratify the reciprocal Christian fear of being consumed by a guest/alien who has been allowed into the home/country. Economic exchanges with an outsider like Shylock open up Venice to sexual and commercial intercourse with strangers; this breach brings with it the threat of economic upheaval and foreign invasion. Social activities such as eating and marriage resonate because of the already permeable borders of the Venetian economy. In defending his insistence on the completion of a legal bond, Shylock comments on the assumed rights of the Venetians to “bond” and to preserve their racial purity in a speech laden with references to problematic communal activities:

You have among you 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,—shall I say to you,
Let them be free, marry them to your heirs?
Why sweat they under burthens? let their beds
Be made as soft as yours, and let their palates
Be season’d with such viands?

(4.1.90-97; emphasis added)

Rhetorically, Shylock exposes the fears of a chauvinist culture by revealing the Venetians' problematic economic position, suggesting that, in such an open system, the slaves among them may just as well become sons-in-law.¹¹ The passage may also tie the problem of eating with colonial trade in the reminder (“let their palates / Be season’d with such viands”) that the search for spices for aristocratic palates provided much of the momentum for foreign trade. His questions allow for a provocative glance at Queen Elizabeth's dilemma. Producers of labor are also consumers, and the blacks that she wants to exile are a presence precisely because of the increased economic expansion she supported.

As critics have often noted, the language of commerce and trade permeates the Venetian world. This mercantile vocabulary is tied to an erotic vocabulary in much the same way as Titania's description of her Indian votress in A Midsummer Night's Dream links the pregnant maid and Indian trade. Like his companion, Bassanio, Antonio begins the play in a melancholy mood; Solanio attributes his sadness not to love, but to the possibility of economic disaster: “Believe me sir, had I such a venture forth, / The better part of my affections would / Be with my hopes abroad” (1.1.15-17). Echoing the eroticized discourse of actual merchant adventure, Solanio's discussion of Antonio's afflictions as “affections” locates the erotic in the economic, particularly as he makes Antonio's fear of losing his ships sound much like the fear of losing a lover:¹²

should I go to church
And see the holy edifice of stone
And not bethink me straight of dangerous rocks,
Which touching my gentle vessel's side
Would scatter all her spices on the stream,
Enrobe the roaring waters with my silks. …

(1.1.29-34)

Solanio's displacement is all the more resonant in its religious overtones and its hints at a loss of Christian belief. Foreign adventure proves a dangerous distraction as the stones of the Christian church provoke reminders of the beguiling hazards of trade.

The potential dangers of Antonio's mercantile involvement with foreign Others, read as seductive sexual union, are offset by the rejection of difference in the golden world of Belmont. Bassanio's discussion of his intent to woo Portia suggests an interesting inversion of Antonio's economic adventures. The narrative of his romantic quest is filled with economic metaphors, and his description of Portia makes it obvious that there is an unfavorable balance of trade on the marriage market. Rather than bringing wealth into the country, suitors are coming to Belmont to win away Portia's wealth, as Bassanio notes:

Nor is the wide world ignorant of her worth,
For the four winds blow in from every coast
Renowned suitors, and her sunny locks
Hang on her temples like a golden fleece,
Which makes her seat of Belmont Colchos' strond,
And many Jasons come in quest of her.

(1.1.167-72)

While Antonio participates in the expansion of Venice's economic influence, Bassanio insulates the sexual economy of Venice from foreign “invasion.” In language closely approximating Bassanio's, his competitor, the prince of Morocco, “a tawny moor” (and, we presume, a Muslim), frames his own courtship as colonial enterprise and religious pilgrimage when he chooses caskets:

Why that’s the lady, all the world desires her.
From the four corners of the earth they come
To kiss this shrine, this mortal breathing saint.
The Hyrcanian deserts, and the vasty wilds
Of wide Arabia are as throughfares now
For princes to come view fair Portia.
The watery kingdom, whose ambitious head
Spets in the face of heaven, is no bar
To stop the foreign spirits, but they come
As o’er a brook to see fair Portia.

(2.7.38-47)

Morocco reveals the peril of such international competition for wealth (and beauty). The test demanded by Portia's father expands the sex/gender system by opening up the romantic quest to foreign competition, as it were, inviting both the possibility of miscegenation and of another race absconding with the country's money and its native beauty. Morocco explicitly raises this idea and associates it with England:

They have in England
A coin that bears the figure of an angel
Stamp’d in gold, but that’s insculp’d upon:
But here an angel in a golden bed
Lies all within.

(2.7.55-59)

At the very moment in which he loses the game by making the wrong choice, Morocco raises the specter of a monetary and sexual exchange in England with the image of Portia as an angel in a golden bed. Although the metaphor would seem to deny the comparison (“but that’s insculp’d upon: / But here … ”), Portia is imaged here as the literalized coin of the realm. She, as object of an expanded sex/gender system, can like a coin be circulated among strangers.

The boundaries of Portia's island are hardly impregnable: the surrounding water “is no bar” and no more than a “brook” to outsiders; Portia herself is the open “portal” to Venetian wealth. The sexual and the monetary anxieties of a Venetian state that is open to alien trade are displayed and dispelled in the casket plot, which allows Portia to avoid the threat of contact with others. The prince of Morocco is thus able to attempt to woo but ultimately to lose her. He also loses his right to reproduce his own bloodline, a right not explicitly denied the other suitors (Shell 72). The momentary threat posed by the prince's wooing is dispelled, as is the larger cultural threat posed by the sexuality of the black male. The denial of his fertility should perhaps be looked at in juxtaposition with the fertility of Launcelot's Moor: the prince's sexuality denied, Launcelot then has license to replace him as the Moor's “cultural partner” and to appropriate her body.

The Morocco scene is only the most obvious example of the exclusionary values of Belmont. Portia derides all other suitors for their national shortcomings, reserving her praise for her countryman, Bassanio (a man who at first glance seems to have little to recommend him). Interestingly, the joking about the effects of intermarriage is preceded by the prince of Morocco's attempt to win Portia and Portia's deliverance as he chooses the wrong casket. Portia's response to her narrow escape, “A gentle riddance,—draw the curtains, go,—/ Let all of his complexion choose me so” (2.7.78-79), is typical of the generally negative attitudes toward blacks prevalent at the time, but, in true Belmont fashion, in no way reveals the political and economic implications of her aversion.¹³

The economic issues which underlie the romantic world of Belmont rise to the surface in Venice, where there appears to be a real cash-flow problem. Most of the Christian men, it seems, are on the verge of bankruptcy. Bassanio reveals his monetary woes in the opening of the play, “’Tis not unknown to you Antonio / How much I have disabled mine estate” (1.1.122-23). Despite Antonio's denial, his funds are stretched and the possibility of his financial ruin is evoked from the very beginning. Tellingly, Antonio has no hope for a legal remedy from his bargain because strangers in Venice have certain economic privileges:

The duke cannot deny the course of law:
For the commodity that strangers have
With us in Venice, if it be denied,
Will much impeach the justice of the state,
Since that the trade and profit of the city
Consisteth of all nations.

(3.3.26-31)

In Antonio's case, the very openness of Venetian trade has negative effects for the city's males. The protection Venetian law should afford its “own natural subjects” is weakened by the economic imperatives of mercantile trade.

In contrast to the males, the women are associated with an abundance of wealth. As we have seen, Portia comes with a large fortune and Lorenzo “steals” two thousand ducats along with a jewel-laden Jessica. The comic resolution of the play is not merely the proper pairing of male and female, but the redistribution of wealth from women and other strangers to Venice's Christian males. Portia's wealth goes to Bassanio, Antonio's is magically restored through her agency, and, most importantly, Shylock's is given over to the state through a law unearthed by Portia/Balthazar:

It is enacted in the laws of Venice,
If it be proved against an alien,
That by direct, or indirect attempts
He seek the life of any citizen,
The party ’gainst the which he doth contrive,
Shall seize one half his goods, the other half
Comes to the privy coffer of the state.

(4.1.344-50)

The law that allegedly gave advantage to aliens is counteracted by a law that repeals that advantage. More than providing an object lesson for Shylock, “hitting him where it hurts,” as it were, the punishment makes sure that the uneven balance of wealth in the economy is righted along racial and gender lines. Antonio's modification of the sentence only highlights this impulse, as he insists that his portion of Shylock's money be passed down “unto the gentleman / That lately stole his daughter” (4.1.380-81). Lorenzo's final expression of gratitude to Portia, “Fair ladies, you drop manna in the way / Of starved people” (5.1.294-95), typifies the tonality of the play. Portia does indeed drop manna (which she redistributes from the city's aliens) upon the males of Venice: she is the bearer of fortunes for Bassanio, Antonio, and Lorenzo.

Economic alliances in the play are made with expectations of one-way exchange, which is often troped through conversion. Thus Bassanio and Antonio stress Shylock's “kindness” when making the deal in order to give Shylock the illusion of a communal interest and identity rooted in Christian values. Antonio takes his leave, claiming, “The Hebrew will turn Christian, he grows kind” (1.3.174), a phrase which only serves to remind Shylock and the audience that his “kindness” is still contingent. The pun on “kind” used throughout this scene reminds us that the courtesy and “kindness” shown in the play's world is only extended to those who are alike and judged of human “kin” by Christians. Shakespeare also demonstrates how selective such inclusion can be when the duke, in an attempt to make Shylock forgo his bond, invites him into the community, not by imagining a shared humanity, but by creating a cultural hierarchy which stresses Shylock's difference: “From stubborn Turks, and Tartars never train’d / To offices of tender courtesy” (4.1.32-33). Such rhetorical moves only emphasize that the power of exclusion and inclusion rests with what Frank Whigham calls the “elite circle of community strength” and that the outsider is powerless to determine his status within that group (106-07).

The imagery associated with Shylock in the play reveals an ongoing link between perceptions of the racial difference of the black, the religious difference of the Jew, and the possible ramifications of sexual and economic contact with both. We can see clearly how the discourses of Otherness coalesce in the language of the play.¹⁴ In claiming that Chus is one of his countrymen, Shylock gives himself a dual genealogy that associates him with blackness, forbidden sexuality, and the unlawful appropriation of property.¹⁵ Obviously, Shylock's recounting of the Jacob parable has its own cultural overtones and serves to highlight his religious difference.¹⁶ However, his incomplete genealogy is further complicated by the fact that Jacob, the progenitor of the Jews, robbed his brother, Esau, of his birthright as eldest brother.¹⁷ Both Jews and blacks become signs for filial disobedience and disinheritance in Renaissance culture. In the two biblical accounts of blackness, Chus (or Cush), the son of Ham, is born black as a sign of the father's sin. A popular explanation of blackness recounted by George Best in his description of the Frobisher voyages shows the problem of disinheritance:

and [Ham] being persuaded that the first childe borne after the flood (by right and Lawe of nature) should inherite and possesse all the dominions of the earth, hee contrary to his fathers commandement [to abstain from sex] while they were yet in the Arke, used company with his wife, and craftily went about thereby to dis-inherite the off-spring of his other two brethren: for the which wicked and detestable fact as an example for contempt of Almightie God, and disobedience of parents, God would a sonne should be borne whose name was Chus, who not onely it selfe, but all his posteritie after him should bee so blacke and lothsome, that it might remaine a spectacle of disobedience to all the worlde.

(Hakluyt, Principal Navigations 3: 52)¹⁸

Like Shylock's genealogy, Best's narrative gives disobedience and disinheritance a crucial role in the formation of difference. In reading Jews and blacks as signs for theft from rightful heirs, such genealogies may have supported the notion for the English reader that these “aliens” usurp the rightful prerogatives of innocent (pre-Christian) victims. (In other words, forcible seizure of their property is excusable because their ownership is suspect.) The Ham story is a bit more problematic because Ham, the originator of the sin, was himself white. Only his offspring, Chus, bears the burden of the original sin, and the blackness thus becomes a reflection of the nether side of a white self. These biblical “sub-texts” help support the play's central action: a circulation of wealth to an aristocratic, male elite that is predicated on the control of difference. Aliens must be either assimilated into the dominant culture (Shylock's and Jessica's conversions) and/or completely disempowered (Shylock's sentence). Their use as explanations for racial difference allows for the organization of property, kinship, and religion within an emerging national—and imperial—identity.

III

Since the Venetian sex/gender system is constructed along the axis of foreign trade, it is not surprising that female characters play key (if little noted) roles in the circulation of wealth. The successful end of courtship (endogamous marriage) is achieved through the balancing of the problems of conversion, inheritance, and difference. The proper pairing of male and female thus comes to represent the realignment of wealth and the reassertion of control over difference. In their active desire, these outspoken women are often the more conservative agents of the play. Associated with conversion, they assure that wealth is redistributed into the hands of the male elite.

Merchant offers the Jessica-Lorenzo courtship as a successful type of cross-cultural interaction: one like our original model in Purchas, where cultural difference—and property—are controlled under the aegis of a Christian God. Unlike another disobedient daughter, Othello's Desdemona, Jessica's filial disloyalty is lauded by the community largely because her actions constitute submission to the larger, racially motivated values of Belmont and Venice. Ironically, her very disobedience proves her “faith” to her husband just as it shows her “fairness.” Lorenzo declares, “And fair she is, if that mine eyes be true, / And true she is, as she hath prov’d herself” (2.6.54-55). In cutting herself off from her father, Jessica also divorces herself from her Jewish ancestry. When she leaves her father's house, Gratiano declaims, “Now (by my hood) a gentle, and no Jew” (2.6.51), punningly connecting her conversion with the race and the class privileges of Belmont.

In fact, the very desire to marry a Christian separates Jessica from her father's alienness. Shylock's claim of consanguinity is resolutely denied throughout the play. Salerio declares, “There is more difference between thy flesh and hers, than between jet and ivory, more between your bloods, than there is between red wine and Rhenish” (3.1.34-36). The terms of Salerio's insistence on absolute difference go as far to exclude Shylock from the realm of humanity (so defined by Christian Venetians) as they do to include Jessica. Jessica herself, in a rehearsal of her own conversion, parodically stages herself as the bride of the Song of Songs, saying, “I am glad ’tis night—you do not look on me” (2.6.34), and covering herself with gold, “I will make fast the doors and gild myself / With some moe ducats” (2.6.49-50), as she begins the “conversion” of money from Shylock to Lorenzo. Jessica's disobedience is acted out as a gender transgression: she escapes from her father's house dressed as a page and is playfully aware of her transgressive behavior, “For I am much asham’d of my exchange” (2.6.35). Of the “exchanges” Jessica makes (husband for father, male dress for female, Christian identity for Jewish), the change in dress is the one she marks as potentially subversive. However, Jessica's cross-dressing is seemingly less complicated than Portia's, since her transgression, taking place as it does during a carnival and facilitating her assimilation into the community of Belmont, is validated by the rest of the play.

Like Jessica's cross-dressing, which is not only excused but lauded in the play, Portia's actions work mainly to fulfill the larger economic needs of the commonwealth. Portia is the focal point of the Venetian economy and its marriage practices: it is through her that money is recirculated to the Christian males and difference is excluded or disempowered. She describes her betrothal as a conversion, “Myself, and what is mine, to you and yours / Is now converted” (3.2.166-67). Bassanio's “pilgrimage” results in the “conversion” of Portia and her possessions as she too fills the coffers of the male Christians. As Balthazar and as Portia she performs a valuable service to the state. Her disguise allows her to become the agent of conversion and, as Frank Whigham notes, compulsory conversion is associated historically with confiscation of goods by the state. It is she (as Balthazar) who silences the alien. She is the enabling factor that “converts” cash to its “rightful owners,” not only hers to Bassanio, but Shylock's to the state and to his Christian heirs.

With their cross-dressing and their active pursuit of female desire, both Portia and Jessica break the constraints of gender; nevertheless, in a text dense with cultural, economic, and gender conflict, glorifying these women as the transgressive disrupters of social order may serve only to obscure the very complex nature of difference for a changing society in which racial categories developed along with changing organizations of gender.¹⁹ To look solely at hierarchies of gender defines the issue too narrowly and valorizes gender as the primary category of difference. Reading Portia as the heroic, subversive female proves particularly problematic when we place her actions in relation to other categories of difference. While her “witty” remarks about her suitors display a verbal acumen and forwardness typical of the unruly woman, her subversiveness is severely limited, for her strongest verbal abilities are only bent toward supporting a status quo which mandates the repulsion of aliens and outsiders. To valorize such cross-dressed figures as liberating Others is to ignore the way their freedom functions to oppress the racial/cultural Others in the play. Portia's originally transgressive act is disarmed and validated by the play's resolution when these “disorderly” women become pliable wives.

Although I have argued that these women serve in some ways as successful comic and economic agents, the play itself does not allow for the same neat elimination of difference offered by Purchas in the opening of this essay. Unlike other Shakespearean comedies, The Merchant of Venice ends not with a wedding or the blessing of the bridal bed, but with the exchange of rings and the evocation of adultery. The only immediately fertile couple presented in the play, Launcelot and the Moor, are excluded from the final scene. Her fecundity exists in threatening contrast to the other Venetians' seeming sterility, particularly as it is created with Launcelot Gobbo, the “gobbling,” prodigal servant whose appetites cannot be controlled. Like Shylock's absence, their exclusion qualifies the expected resolution of the text and reminds us of the ultimate failure to contain difference completely even as the play's aliens are silenced. The Moor, whose presence may be a visible sign for the conflation of economic and erotic union with the Other in the rhetoric of travel, provides a pregnant reminder of the problematic underpinnings of the Venetian economy.

In her Literary Fat Ladies, Patricia Parker charts the appearance of dilated female bodies in Renaissance texts. While they are specifically located within the rhetorical technique of dilation, these “fat ladies” are figures for the delay and deferral that is a central topos of many important Renaissance subtexts such as the Odyssey, the Aeneid, and the Bible (texts that are also key in the troping of imperial desires). The chief purpose of dilation (amplification or the production of copia) is mired in an anxiety over uncontrolled excess; hence the texts become as preoccupied with mastery and control over expansion as with the expansion itself. Parker argues, “Dilation, then, is always something to be kept within the horizon of ending, mastery, and control” (14). Certainly the problem of controlled expansion reverberates within colonial discourses of the Renaissance as travel writers and editors struggle to produce texts which allow expansion but always within the confines of conversion and colonial mastery. In some ways, the figure of the fat lady serves the same purpose as Purchas's introduction: the promise of profitable conversion within the space allowed by deferral of the judgment of the Second Coming.

These fat ladies resonate within a varied field of meanings associated with the judicial, the temporal, the genealogical, and the erotic. Although Parker does not specifically name Launcelot's Moor in her catalogue of fat ladies, she too operates within a similar web of meaning. She appears in the dilated space of the play that postpones both the resolution of Antonio's dilemma and the consummation of Bassanio's and Portia's betrothal. Like Parker's first example (Nell from The Comedy of Errors), she is a large presence that is only described. Not permitted to speak, the Moor still encapsulates ideas of copious fertility and threatening female sexuality.²⁰ However, unlike the other Shakespearean fat ladies, Launcelot's Moor cannot be regarded as “a dilative means to a patriarchal end” (19), that is, as a momentary disruption of the text or a deferral that contains the promise of an ordered conclusion. Her pregnancy is a reminder of the dangerous result of uncontrolled crossing of borders, of trade that holds the dual (and irreconcilable) promises of the production of new wealth and of an insupportable excess. The end she promises is a mixed child, whose blackness may not be “converted” or absorbed within the endogamous, exclusionary values of Belmont.²¹ This dusky dark lady is perhaps more like the women of the Aeneid, perpetrators “of delay and even of obstructionism in relation to the master or imperial project of the completion of the text” (Parker 13). She interferes with the “master/imperial” project of The Merchant of Venice—the eradication or assimilation of difference. Unlike other fat ladies, her “promised end” signals not resolution, but the potential disruption of Europe's imperial text, because in Merchant's Venice—and Elizabeth's England—the possibility of wealth only exists within the dangers of cultural exchange.

Notes

1. Even though the word intercourse did not come to have its current sexual connotation until the eighteenth century, Purchas's use of “commerce and intercourse of amity” resonates powerfully in this way for a modern reader, and I would like to retain this anachronistic sense for the purposes of this paper. Indeed, this paper will read anachronistically throughout. Miscegenation, too, is an eighteenth-century term which has particular resonances for the modern American reader. Like “race,” the word miscegenation is particularly enabled by later scientific discourses; however, the concepts certainly predated the scientific sense. Although there certainly were Renaissance words, such as mulatto, for the offspring of certain interracial couples, I prefer to use the term miscegenation, just as I play on intercourse, to locate an emerging modern dynamic for which there was no adequate language.

2. Eldred Jones sees this moment as the first glimmer of an emerging stereotype of black women (Othello's Countrymen 119). He also seems to agree with the Arden editor. He argues that the Launcelot/Moor liaison is an “earthy basic relationship” which completes a structural pattern of romantic relationships in Merchant, yet he downplays the relationship's significance: “This cold douche of earthy realism is not unlike the Jacques/Audrey contrast to the Orlando/Rosalind, Silvius/Phebe love types in As You Like It. The fact that Launcelot's partner is a Moor only lends emphasis to the contrast” (Othello's Countrymen 71).

3. For a more complete discussion, see Peter Fryer's Staying Power (10-12). Fryer provocatively contends that the second order of expulsion was to make up the payment for the return of eighty-nine English prisoners from Spain and Portugal.

4. The reprintings of this document indicate some confusion. I have used Eldred Jones's transcription of the 1601 draft proclamation in the Cecil papers, which reads “are crept.” In contrast, James Walvin's version of this same proclamation (65) reads “are carried,” as does the version in Hughes and Larkin (220-21). The facsimile included in Jones (plate 5) appears to me to read “are crept” and I have thus accepted his transcription.

5. English travel writers, not surprisingly, frequently compared their visions of colonial rule with the Spanish model. England saw itself as in part “correcting” the vexed model of colonial rule in Spain. In his View of the Present State of Ireland, Spenser outlines one of the sources of this sense of Spain's mixed heritage, as he suggests that Spain's current riches are the inheritance of a long history of invasion, particularly by Africans: “ffor the Spaniarde that now is, is come from as rude and salvage nacions, as theare beinge As it maye be gathered by Course of ages and view of theire owne historye (thoughe they thearein labour muche to ennoble themselues) scarse anye dropp of the oulde Spannishe blodd lefte in them: … And yeat after all these the mores and Barbarians breakings over out of Africa did finallye possesse all spaine or the moste parte thereof And treade downe vnder theire foule heathenishe fete what euer litle they founde theare yeat standinge the which thoughe afterwardes they weare beaten out by fferdinando of Arraggon and Elizabeth his wiffe yeat they weare not so clensed but that thorogh the mariages which they had made and mixture with the people of the lande duringe theire longe Continvance theare they had lefte no pure dropp of Spanishe blodd no nor of Romayne nor Scithian So that of all nacions vnder heaven I suppose the Spaniarde is the most mingled moste vncertaine and most bastardlie … ” (90-91).

6. Kwame Anthony Appiah is the most recent purveyor of this view. In the entry “Race,” in Critical Terms for Literary Study, he argues, “… in Shakespearean England both Jews and Moors were barely an empirical reality. And even though there were small numbers of Jews and black people in England in Shakespeare's day, attitudes to ‘the Moor’ and ‘the Jew’ do not seem to have been based on experience of these people. Furthermore, despite the fact that there was an increasing amount of information available about dark-skinned foreigners in this, the first great period of modern Western exploration, actual reports of black or Jewish foreigners did not play an important part in forming these images. Rather, it seems that the stereotypes were based on an essentially theological conception of the status of both Moors and Jews as non-Christians; the former distinguished by their black skin, whose color was associated in Christian iconography with sin and the devil … ” (277-78). It seems apparent in Elizabeth's document that there was a black presence that had its own reality for Elizabeth and that religion appears as rationale after the fact.

7. Patricia Hill Collins lucidly outlines the connections between the welfare mother and mammy stereotypes, arguing, “Each image transmits clear messages about the proper limits among female sexuality, fertility and Black women's roles in the political economy” (78). See also Angela Davis's description of specific political manipulations of the welfare mother image (23-27).

8. My brief discussion of cannibalism owes a great deal to Peter Hulme's materialist critique of the term “cannibal” (78-87) as well as to Maggie Kilgour's exploration of metaphors of incorporation. For an anthropologist's critique of the charge of cannibalism, see Arens.

9. On blood libel, see Poliakov 58 and Kilgour 5. Hulme also suggests a connection in his sense that the rise in accusations of anthropophagy involved the “ritual purging of the body of European Christendom just prior to, and in the first steps of, the domination of the rest of the world: the forging of a European identity” (85-86). Ben Jonson's Every Man out of His Humour contains similar links between economics, cannibalism, and anti-Semitism when Carlo Buffone exclaims, “Marry, I say, nothing resembling man more than a swine, it follows nothing can be more nourishing: for indeed, but that it abhors from our nice nature, if we fed upon one another, we should shoot up a great deal faster, and thrive much better: I refer me to your usurous cannibals, or such like: but since it is so contrary, pork, pork is your only feed” (5.5.61-66).

10. Eric Cheyfitz briefly outlines the relationship of cannibalism to kinship structures in his discussion of Montaigne's “Of Cannibals”: “Cannibalism expresses, or figures forth, a radical idea of kinship that cuts across the frontiers of hostile groups. To eat the other is to eat the self, for the other is quite literally composed of the selves of one's kin, who compose oneself, just as the self, it follows, is composed of the others one has eaten. Cannibalism, like kinship, expresses forthrightly the essentially equivocal relationship that obtains between self and other” (149). As I have suggested, it is precisely this aspect of cannibalism that appears so upsetting to European notions of social order and control. In A Report of the Kingdome of Congo (1597), Abraham Hartwell expresses horror at the idea of cannibals who eat their own kin: “True it is that many nations there are, that feede upon mans flesh as in the east Indies, and in Bresill, and in other places: but that is only the flesh of their adversaries and enemies, but to eat the flesh of their own friends and subjects and kinefolkes, it is without all example in any place of the worlde, saving onely in this nation of the Anzichi” (36).

11. I borrow this multivalent use of “chauvinist” from Susan Griffin (298-305).

12. For more on the gendering of the discourses of travel and trade, see Parker 142.

13. In his liberally sympathetic discussion of Morocco's rejection, Frank Whigham acknowledges the racism of courtly ideology by nothing that “[t]hroughout the scenes with Morocco the element of complexion provides a measure of the exclusive implications of courtesy in Portia's society” (98). However, Whigham then blames the Moroccan prince for his own loss because of “his statement of defiant insecurity regarding his skin color” (98), which is rhetorically out of sync with courtesy theory. His reading remystifies the color problem by blaming it on the prince. Portia never mentions his “imagery of martial exploit and confrontation” (98), only his complexion; so too the tradition of failed suitors indicates to the audience that his unsuitability is not so much a question of rhetorical decorum as racial “propriety.” In Morocco's case, “defiant insecurity” may simply be a sensible response to the racism implicit in Portia's courtly ethic.

14. Shakespeare draws upon a system of associations between the Jew and the black which is as old as Christianity itself. For a brief outline of the association of blackness with the Jew, see Gilman 30-35.

15. For an excellent discussion of the racial and economic ramifications of the Jacob and Esau parable, see Shell.

16. In his Pseudodoxia Epidemica, Sir Thomas Browne uses this same parable to explain one theory of the causes of blackness, replacing the biblical injunctions against disobedience with a lesson about the powers of the imagination: “[I]t may be perpended whether it might not fall out the same way that Jacobs cattell became speckled, spotted and ring-straked, that is, by the power and efficacy of Imagination; which produceth effects in the conception correspondent unto the phancy of the Agents in generation” (513).

17. Lars Engle argues that this story is purposely incomplete: “It is this relation between Jacob and Laban, then, that Shylock is attempting to adduce as an explanation of his own place in the Venetian economy, and, more immediately, as a model for his relation to Antonio” (31).

18. It is in this same narrative that Best includes one of the earliest recorded instances of miscegenation in early modern England, which he uses to refute the climatic theory of the cause of blackness: “I my selfe have seene an Ethiopian as blacke as a cole brought into England, who taking a faire Englishwoman to wife, begat a sonne in all respects as blacke as the father was, although England was his native countrey, and an English woman his mother: whereby it seemeth this blacknes proceedeth rather of some natural infection of that man, which was so strong, that neither the nature of the Clime, neither the good complexion of the mother concurring, could any thing alter, and therefore wee cannot impute it to the nature of the Clime” (Hakluyt, Principal Navigations 3: 50-51).

19. Among critics of The Merchant of Venice, particularly feminists, there is a great deal of debate over the possible feminist implications of Portia's transvestite disguise. Is Portia truly the disorderly, unruly female preached against in tracts against cross-dressing or are such disguises diversions which ultimately serve to restore patriarchal order? Catherine Belsey finds the play less radical than its earlier counterparts: “The Merchant of Venice is none the less rather less radical in its treatment of women as subjects. … [The play] … reproduces some of the theoretical hesitation within which it is situated” (195-96). Lisa Jardine locates Portia within a tradition of “confused cultural response[s] to the learned woman” (“Cultural Confusion” 17) and notes that although Portia possesses many threatening advantages over the males in the play, the play still ends with the sexual subordination of women (17). In contrast, Karen Newman finds in Portia a necessary threat to social order: “Portia evokes the ideal of a proper Renaissance lady and then transgresses it; she becomes an unruly woman” (“Portia's Ring” 29). Lars Engle also notes a split between conservative and radical elements in the play; however, he sees Portia as part of the latter precisely because she is the agent of exchange: “On the other hand, more than any other Shakespearean play, The Merchant of Venice shows a woman triumphing over men and male systems of exchange: the ‘male homosocial desire’ of Antonio is almost as thoroughly thwarted in the play as is Shylock's vengefulness” (37). Nonetheless, male homosocial desire (which can be a conservative force) is also a force which threatens the sex/gender system.

20. Parker draws on Jardine's connection of the figure of the pregnant woman and her “grossesse” with fertility and threatening sexuality (Jardine, Still Harping 131; Parker 18).

21. Black Africans become in the Renaissance signs for the impossible, which often comes to include the impossibility of their being subdued to European order. The emblem for the impossible, “washing the Ethiop white,” suggests a sense of submission to a European order. Richard Crashaw's poem “On the Baptized Ethiopian” specifically adapts this as a figure for conversion and the Second Coming. For more see Newman, “And wash the Ethiop white,” and ch. 2 of my dissertation, “Acknowledging Things of Darkness: Race, Gender and Power in Early Modern England.”

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