SOURCE: “Responses, Sources, Contexts,” in Harvester New Critical Introductions to Shakespeare: ‘The Merchant of Venice,’ Harvester/Wheatsheaf, 1988, pp. 9-28.

[In the essay below, Lyon describes The Merchant of Venice as a “controversial play.” He demonstrates that literary critics have been widely divided concerning Shakespeare's views on anti-Semitism, and concludes that the play needs to be examined not only from the point of view of Shakespeare's era, but also within the context of his other plays.]

The safest place to begin with so controversial a play as The Merchant of Venice is with effects rather than causes. In a brilliantly economical survey of the play's criticism, Norman Rabkin recently identified the essential quality of The Merchant of Venice to be its capacity to provoke a welter of diverging and opposing responses. Consequently Rabkin lamented the play's critical history as a series of strategies of evasion, determined either to dismiss the play, or through partiality and evasion, to coerce it into a thematic and tonal unity. Rabkin's crisp diagnosis of this critical tradition merits quotation at length:

Such radical disagreements between obviously simplistic critics testify to a fact about their subject that ought to be the point of departure for criticism. Instead, critics both bad and good have constructed strategies to evade the problem posed by divergent responses. Some blame Shakespeare, suggesting that his confusion accounts for tension in the work and its audience. Others appeal to a narrow concept of cultural history which writes off our responses as anachronistic, unavailable to Shakespeare's contemporaries because of their attitudes towards usury or Jews or comedy. Still others suggest that, since the plays are fragile confections designed to display engaging if implausible characters, exegetical criticism is misplaced. Though all of these strategies attract modern practitioners, they have lost ground before the dominant evasion, the reduction of the play to a theme which, when we understand it, tells us which of our responses we must suppress. The ingenious thematic critic … is licensed to stipulate that ‘in terms of the structure of the play Shylock is a minor character’ and can be ignored, or that the action is only metaphorical and does not need to be examined as if its events literally happened, or that Shylock is only a Jew, or a banker, or a usurer, or a man spiritually dead, or a commentary on London life, never a combination of these; or that The Merchant of Venice is built on ‘four levels of existence’ corresponding to Dante's divisions—‘Hell (Shylock), Purgatory proper (Antonio) and the Garden of Eden (Portia-Bassanio), and Paradise’; or that the play is exclusively about love, or whatever, and, insofar as it doesn’t fit the critic's formulation, it is flawed.

(Rabkin 1981, pp. 7-8)

Only very recently have critics (Leggatt 1974; Rabkin himself; Nuttall 1983; Berry 1985) been prepared to display at length a perplexity which may perhaps account for the reticence of so many of our great Shakespearean critics on the subject of The Merchant of Venice. The critical response to the play proves less than directly rewarding. This can be ascribed in part, as Rabkin implies, to critics' obtuseness and interpretative aggression. But it also says something more interesting about the tenacity of the play's hold on the minds of its audiences and readers. The Merchant of Venice proves an extraordinarily difficult play from which to free oneself into an adequate degree of objectivity, and criticism tends to be symptomatic of the play rather than illuminating of it. Indeed, such criticism can often seem a reactive prolongation of that unfolding of postures, positions and habits of mind which both characters and audience assume, reject and reassume in the course of the play's performance. The oddities and embarrassments which surface in the course of these critical arguments are co-extensive with those occurring in the play and amount, in themselves, to something of a comedy.

There are two predominating and opposed ways of reading The Merchant of Venice. The basic division of opinion manifests itself in a variety of ways. Thus critics divide over Shylock. Some see in him the consistent villain of the piece, and consequently celebrate the Christian lovers' triumph over him. Against this, some see in Shylock victimised humanity and, accordingly, view the play's lovers with varying degrees of scepticism which, in extreme cases, can amount to hostility. More particularly, there are two focal points in such disagreements, two rich and complex scenes where, in Act 1 Scene 3, Shylock and Antonio first agree the terms of the bond, and, in Act 3 Scene 1, Shylock declares his intention to claim his rights in respect of it. Critical debate, though lively, is circumscribed, limited to discussion of character, and Shylock's character in particular. Prior to this century, the body of criticism of The Merchant of Venice has shown this emphasis on Shylock, but has proved less rich or rewarding than that which has accrued to many of Shakespeare's other plays; it has often been occasional, prompted by particular productions of the play and reveals, as the stage history does, the predictable shift, as we move from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century, in the characterisation of Shylock—from clown and villain to the figure of wronged humanity who merits our compassion. (See John Russell Brown, ‘The Realization of Shylock’, in Brown and Harris 1961, pp. 187-210.)

When we turn from critics who discuss character to those who discuss theme, we find the critical accounts broader, accommodating more of the play, but the critics remain similarly divided in their opinions and attitudes. Thus, for some critics the play secures and celebrates valued distinctions—between material and spiritual wealth; between venturing and usury; between generosity and possessiveness; between love and the law; between mercy and justice. For others the play works to quite the opposite effect, undermining such distinctions through dark and troubling ironies. And some such critics pursue what they see as the play's ironic mode to discover covert correspondences underlying the play's ostensible oppositions; hence, for example, the play's principal antagonists, Shylock and Antonio, are revealed to share the painful kinship of isolation and exclusion. These are larger discussions, not limited to a few of the play's great scenes, and exercised by questions of the relationship between the worlds of Belmont and Venice, and between the casket plot and the bond plot. As with considerations of character, however, the fundamental disagreement remains whether to regard the The Merchant of Venice as characterised by celebration or irony.

Frank Kermode is representative of those who emphasise celebration, and reveals incidentally the kind of oddity which typically accompanies the expression of such views:

The Merchant of Venice, then, is ‘about’ judgment, redemption and mercy; the supersession in human history of the grim four thousand years of unalleviated justice by the era of love and mercy. It begins with usury and corrupt love; it ends with harmony and perfect love. And all the time it tells its audience that this is its subject; only by a determined effort to avoid the obvious can one mistake the theme of The Merchant of Venice.

(Kermode, in Brown and Harris 1961, p.224)

The tone of this is reminiscent of that adopted by the overly brusque Antonio in his dealings with Shylock early in the play. With Kermode's earlier insistence on ‘the correct interpretation’ (ibid., p. 222), it is all the more surprising from a critic who is later to emerge as a champion of critical pluralism, and who has always emphasised the patience of Shakespeare before his interpreters. The tension between the claimed themes of harmony and love, and the impatience and intolerance with which they are urged is odd indeed. Kermode's method of argument is also interestingly representative in the way he appeals to analogies from nondramatic literary modes to ‘resolve’ the play's difficulties and thus stabilise, and perhaps falsify, the drama; in his case the appeals are to Spenser, Milton and the Bible. Barbara K. Lewalski pursues a similar interpretation of the play, with similar no-nonsense tone and similar appeals to nondramatic modes, here biblical allusion and allegory:

comprehension of the play's allegorical meanings leads to a recognition of its fundamental unity, discrediting the common critical view that is a hotch-potch which developed contrary to Shakespeare's conscious intention.

(Lewalski 1962, p.328)

But when the importing of an allegorical framework threatens to displace rather than illuminate the particularities of incident and character, might we not wonder whether drama should be subordinated to allegory in this way? We are getting remote from the experience of The Merchant of Venice.

Harley Granville-Barker has proved even more brusquely untroubled by the play in his insistence that the casket plot and the bond plot have all the unreality of fairy tales, unaware in that appeal that fairy tales and folklore rarely enjoy the psychological and sociological innocence he imputes to them (Granville-Barker 1958, Vol. 1, p.335). Concerned to assimilate The Merchant of Venice to the pattern of festivity and merriment which he discerns in Shakespearean comedy generally, C. L. Barber finds various embarrassments in pursuing this line of interpretation; Barber openly confesses his unease, but finds himself drawn into weak argument nevertheless:

The whole play dramatizes the conflict between the mechanisms of wealth and the masterful, social use of it. The happy ending, which abstractly considered as an event is hard to credit, and the treatment of Shylock, which abstractly considered as justice is hard to justify, work as we actually watch or read the play because these events express relief and triumph in the achievement of a distinction.

(Barber 1972, p. 170)

But a distinction which works only if we don’t think about it, is more likely to be a distinction undermined than a distinction made.

John Russell Brown also sees The Merchant of Venice as a play which secures distinctions—between material wealth and love's wealth. He finds the play's own sententiousness catching, but proves less than fully responsive to the drama's dynamic testing of such static aphorisms and can be led into such contortedly protective logic as the suggestion that ‘it is Shylock's fate to bring out the worst in those he tries to harm’ (Brown 1962, p. 74).

Of course, all of these critics, and many others who share the same interpretative emphasis on celebration, have valuable and substantial things to say about the play, but the oddities here suggest that their readings bear a tangential relation to The Merchant of Venice's essential nature.

Those critics who see The Merchant of Venice as an ironic play are also useful. Moreover, perhaps because they don’t pursue extraneous authorities to verify their interpretations, their readings often have the advantage that they focus more attentively and sustainedly on the drama before us. Even when overingenious or wrong-headed, the particularity of their arguments seems closer to the particularities of the play itself. But is also true that these critics are often no less biased nor odd than their opponents. Both A. D. Moody and Harold C. Goddard are aware that they are not offering interpretations from first principles, as it were, but their corrective readings often prove less surefooted than these critics might intend. Moody sees The Merchant of Venice as a play which ‘does not celebrate the Christian virtues so much as expose their absence’ (Moody 1964, p. 10), but comes repeatedly close, in his emphasising of the covert above the overt, to seeing the transparent evil of Shylock as no evil at all; Shylock's ‘villainy is almost naïve and innocent’ by comparison with the Christians' (ibid., p.29). At times Goddard loses his footing entirely and sinks into rhetoric and implausible metaphor:

Even Shylock, as we have seen, had in him at least a grain of spiritual gold, of genuine Christian spirit. Only a bit of it perhaps. Seeds do not need to be big. Suppose that Portia and Antonio, following the lead of the seemingly willing Duke, had watered this tiny seed with that quality that blesses him who gives as well as him who takes, had overwhelmed Shylock with the grace of forgiveness! What then? The miracle, it is true, might not have taken place. Yet it might have.

(Goddard 1960, p. 111)

If Professor Kermode sounded uncomfortably like Antonio, then Professor Goddard's pleading out-Shylocks Shylock, but without the villain's vengeance.

The Merchant of Venice's capacity to prompt these contradictory reactions has led critics to speculate about the circumstances of the play's composition and its creator's intentions. Initially, the focus of attention is the portrayal of Shylock. In H. B. Charlton's influential view, the anti-Semitic Shakespeare sets out to pander to prejudices common to himself and his audience but finds, in spite of himself, that his characteristic powers and intuitions lead to a humanised Shylock; ‘His Shylock is a composite production of Shakespeare the Jew-hater, and of Shakespeare the dramatist’ (Charlton 1949, p. 132). It is a powerful thesis, reiterated as recently as 1980 by D. M. Cohen, with but one alteration in its argument:

It is as though The Merchant Venice is an anti-Semitic play written by an author who is not an anti-Semite—but an author who has been willing to use the cruel stereotypes of that ideology for mercenary and artistic purposes.

(Cohen 1980, p. 63)

The limitation in such arguments lies in their often unintentionally diminishing image of Shakespeare as naïve and inspirational, a great artist almost in spite of himself. Shakespeare does not stumble on the fact of Shylock's humanity; a writer who habitually confers inner life on the characters he finds in his sources and who, as we shall see, characteristically compounds the complexities of these sources, is cultivating difficulty in a spirit of exploration. The openness which allows him to make such discoveries is matched by a resourcefulness in subduing the arising discrepancies into some degree and some appearance, at least, of artistic coherence.

Most recently some critics have emphasised, in The Merchant of Venice, not a failure of artistic unity but the dynamism of drama, and have therefore shown themselves more thoroughly admiring of the play. Ralph Berry finds it to have ‘the self-adjusting elasticity of the great play’ (Berry 1985, p. 46), and finds design in the play in its temporal shaping of the sequence of its audience's diverse responses: the play is so organised as to provoke the audience's discomfort. The boldest and most ambitious of recent critics writing on the play locate discrepancy and incoherence, not in Shakespeare's play, but in his, and our, world beyond the drama, and they thus transform talk of incoherence into praise of the play's inclusiveness. A. D. Nuttall finds The Merchant of Venice characteristic of Shakespeare's tendency ‘to take an archetype or a stereotype and then work, so to speak, against it, without ever overthrowing it’ (Nuttall 1983, p.124). But ‘Shakespeare will not let us rest even here. The subversive counter-thesis is itself too easy. We may now begin to see that he is perhaps the least sentimental dramatist who ever lived. We begin to understand what is meant by holding the mirror up to nature’ (ibid., p. 131). For Norman Rabkin, too, The Merchant of Venice in its inclusiveness, contradictions and complications, reflects the larger reality of a world itself unyielding of simple and single meanings. The ‘artistic multivalence … is the mirror of an unfathomable reality which is the source of the trouble … a reality that cannot be cut down to a single understanding’ (Rabkin 1981, p. 139-40). It misrepresents both Nuttall and Rabkin, each engaged in large considerations of Shakespeare and the nature of creativity and criticism, to adumbrate their arguments in this way and to narrow their speculations to apply only to The Merchant of Venice. Nevertheless, tout comprendre c’est tout pardonner, and we might worry that their emphasis on Shakespeare's reality and nature is at the cost of criticism and appreciation of his art, and that the play continues to trouble despite the grandeur of such exonerations: The Merchant of Venice perhaps represents a moment of integrity too questioning and insufficiently artful to contain multifarious truths within the coherence and consolation of art. Some, at least, of the irreconcilable elements in The Merchant of Venice are not shaped into telling insight, but remain unrewarding flaws, symptomatic of lines of thought discarded in the course of the exploratory process. Indeed, Nuttall's and Rabkin's arguments are not too far removed from the greater stringency of Dr Johnson who celebrates Shakespeare as the poet of nature whose incoherences and discrepancies, though natural, are incoherences and discrepancies none the less.

Like King Lear, The Merchant of Venice's provocativeness goes beyond critical response to creative redaction. Famously, King Lear spawned Nahum Tate's corrective Restoration work, The History of King Lear, and more recently, Edward Bond's Lear. The Merchant of Venice follows a very similar pattern, giving rise to George Granville's The Jew of Venice, first performed in 1701 and dominating the stage until Macklin's return to the Shakespearean text in 1741; and, more recently, to The Merchant, by Arnold Wesker, himself Jewish. What is interesting in the case of both works, given my argument for the inherently problematic and dramatic nature of Shakespeare's play, is how both redactions, though in opposing ways, simplify and clarify the issues of the original by means which also substantially reduce the dramatic power of the results. Granville's play secures Shylock as comic villain and celebrates love and friendship in the figures of Antonio, Bassanio and Portia. The most relevant omission is that of the critically contentious Act 3 Scene 1 of Shakespeare's play, where we had seen Shylock's reaction both to the loss of his daughter and to Antonio's losses; Shylock's villainy becomes much less ambiguous as a result of that omission. The now clear contrast between Shylock and the Christians is repeatedly and crudely pointed up in such moments as Shylock's aside in the scene, merely reported in Shakespeare but now dramatised by Granville, of Bassanio's and Antonio's pained parting:

Bassanio
… Oh my Antonio! ’tis hard, tho’ for a Moment,
To lose the Sight of what we Love.
Shylock (aside)
These two Christian Fools put me in mind
Of my Money: just so loath am I to part with that.

(Spencer edn, 1965, p.372)

In Granville's version, the original play's sententiousness is heavily augmented, playing, as it does, into the Restoration's shrivelled sense of dramatic action as merely subservient to, and illustrative of moral statement. Granville reverses the characteristic Shakespearean process of creation to the extent that the drama is now contained by its moral sententiae, its ‘good Morals and just Thought’ as the play's Epilogue puts it (ibid., p. 401). Action once exploratory is now ornamental, and the resulting play is both stable and static. The dramatic urgency of the early scenes in Shakespeare's play is supplanted by an interpolated scene of stylised moralising in which Antonio, Bassanio and Shylock drink to Friendship, Love and Money, respectively, and this moralised tableau-like quality is further enhanced by the addition of a masque reiterating the values of Love and Friendship.

As a creative response to what he sees as Shakespeare's anti-Semitic play, Arnold Wesker's The Merchant, first performed in Stockholm in 1976, is altogether more extreme—and understandably so, given the racial identity of the playwright and the holocaust after which he writes. But the integrity of his intention is destructive of the dramatic qualities of his play, and it is unsurprising that The Merchant failed in New York and has never been performed in London.

In Wesker's version, the casket plot is but the foolish philosophical whim of Portia's father, and the love of Portia and Bassanio is marked, not by any romantic idealism, but by pragmatism and realism. Jessica runs off with the ‘sort of’ poet, Lorenzo, in similarly mundane fashion, although she later proves stouter and more articulate in Shylock's defence than Shakespeare's Jessica did. The shallowness of the young Venetians is much emphasised. Wesker's Shylock and Antonio are old friends in their mid-sixties. This Shylock dominates his play: he is tyrannically hospitable; he is a miser only in so far as he hides Hebrew books to prevent the Christians burning them, and only his daughter is treasured above these books; a committed feminist, Shylock is out to demonstrate in the education of Jessica that daughters can be the intellectual rivals of sons. Money-lending is never Shylock's full-time occupation, and he uses his wealth to function as a one-man Arts Council in the Venetian ghetto, financing art, music, literature, philosophy and architecture. His wealth is further used in helping the poor and the Jewish refugees fleeing the Inquisition. Moreover, the Jews, through taxes and forced ‘loans’, are shown to be one of Venice's principal sources of finance.

Wesker's Shylock and Antonio agree their bond reluctantly, only because the law demands it. And it is a merry nonsensical bond indeed, in mockery of the law and agreed over much mutual tickling. Later Shylock's sole reason for not abandoning the legal claims he has in respect of the lapsed bond is that others in the Jewish ghetto fear—and have cause to fear—that the Christians will use such a precedent against them in future dealings. Shylock must stick to the law to ensure the law's future protection of his people, and his reaction when Portia deploys her legal tricks is thus a relieved ‘Thank God’. Shylock pays the price of seeming to threaten the life of a Christian, and now contemplates a departure for the Holy Land.

But Wesker's corrective urge is repeatedly of a vehemence and urgency in excess of what the immediate dramatic contexts he creates will sustain, and the emphatic extremity of his message is thus intelligibile only if we look beyond the particular moments in which it is delivered to the Shakespearean play against which it is a reaction. Wesker's The Merchant has a problematic status as a work of art and is not the autonomous drama it ostensibly appears but is parasitic on the play it reviles. The characters' voices are subordinated to the single, wilful voice of the playwright pursuing his argument with Shakespeare.

For us here, Wesker's redaction illuminates the Shakespearean original in two ways. In transforming his sources, Shakespeare had rendered Shylock a more complex and sympathetic character than the villain in the various tales he used, and clearly Wesker is moving very much further in the same direction. But in one important way Wesker is reversing the effect which Shakespeare had on his source materials. Wesker returns the story to its earlier simplicity, and unravels the teasings and testings which Shakespeare's creative amalgamation of a variety of sources had produced. The result is stridently univocal and undramatic. The three centres of narrative interest—Shylock and Antonio, Portia and Bassanio, Lorenzo and Jessica—are now securely and hierarchically ordered with the Shylockian tale almost eclipsing the other two. And the questions and challenges arising from the Shakespearean interplay of narratives are thus suppressed. Wesker renders the casket test cynical so that the Portia we see there is no longer at odds with the quick-witted character we see in the trial scene. Bassanio becomes once again the godson of the Antonio figure of Shakespeare's primary source, Ser Giovanni's Il Pecorone, and Antonio ages accordingly; the further amatory tension which the love of Antonio for Bassanio had introduced into Shakespeare's play is again excised in Wesker's version. The story, now so favourable to the Venetian Jews, has in other respects come full circle and Wesker is at odds with Shakespeare not merely in attitude but in method and art. While more obviously liberal, Wesker is also less exploratory.

Wesker's play vindicates his Jew. But it is a neat irony that Wesker's play is more akin to the flatter simplicities of Shakespeare's sources than to The Merchant of Venice itself; the story can become comforting for the prejudiced and the enlightened alike only if its Shakespearean truths are simplified.

The possible sources of The Merchant of Venice are multiple and various, admit of varying degrees of probability and influence, and extend both very far back to longstanding traditions of folklore, and to near-contemporary plays, some of which are now lost. (The full facts are discussed by Geoffrey Bullough [1957], Kenneth Muir [1977], and John Russell Brown in the Arden edition of the play [1961].) What is salient is the audacity implicit in Shakespeare's combining of such diverse material, his cultivation of the problematic and the probing. Shakespeare is going out of his way to make things difficult for himself and his audiences. In Ser Giovanni's Il Pecorone, the impecunious Giannetto is dependent on his Venetian godfather, Ansaldo, to finance the amatory pursuit of a widowed lady of Belmonte, whose devised test is altogether more basically sexual and mercenary. To win her, the suitor must bed her—not an easy task, since she habitually knocks him out, prior to bedtime, with some doped wine. If the suitor fails, he forfeits all his wealth. Effectively, the lady of Belmonte is running an enterprising business. Giannetto's third attempt on the lady is again financed by Ansaldo, despite the godfather's having been bankrupted by Giannetto's two previous ventures. Ansaldo now borrows from a Jew and is dependent on a bond which, if he fails to keep it, demands the payment of a pound of his flesh. The lady's maid warns Giannetto off the wine, Giannetto successfully performs the required test—the narrative spares us any details of the lady's initial surprise but reassures us that finally she is highly delighted by his performance—and Giannetto takes charge of Belmonte. Eventually, he recalls Ansaldo's bond and realises that his godfather's life must be in danger. Giannetto returns to Venice to be followed there by his lady in disguise, and she successfully performs her tricks in the Venetian courtroom. The ring intrigue follows but is quickly cleared up in Belmonte, where godfather Ansaldo is cheerfully married off to the lady's maid.

Borrowing from other sources, Shakespeare multiplies both his cast-list and the story’s complications. Thus the Jessica story is the synthesis of elements and hints from a wide range of narratives: she owes something to Abigail, the daughter of Barabas, Marlowe's Jew of Malta; she echoes the daughter of the usurer in Munday's Zelauto, a story which, with its financial borrowings and cruel bonds, influences The Merchant of Venice in multiple ways; and Jessica derives, too, from Il Novellino of Masuccio, where a young girl plunders her miser father to run off with the youth who is his debtor. The important point here is that in The Merchant of Venice Shakespeare seems to be multiplying his young couples and to be producing a number of triangular relationships which mingle obligations and loyalties of love and money (father—daughter—lover, friend—suitor—lady). By such means he sets up testing analogies among the various centres of dramatic interest. In what ways are the relationships between, first, Jessica and Shylock and, second, Portia and her father, similar? How does Bassanio differ from Lorenzo? Do Portia's and Bassanio's attitudes to money differ substantially from those of Lorenzo and Jessica? To this end, too, Shakespeare alters the relationship in Il Pecorone between Ansaldo the godfather and Giannetto the godson, to the loving friendship of Bassanio and Antonio. And Shakespeare rejuvenates the Ansaldo figure to further that emphasis. The neatness of Ser Giovanni's original is intentionally disrupted as Gratiano now marries the lady's maid, Nerissa, and in Shakespeare's asymmetrical ending, Antonio is left in disquieting isolation. A new complicating relationship comes into play in Shakespeare's drama. In contrast, Wesker, as we have seen, firmly subordinates the various love stories to the story of Shylock, and restores Antonio to his former dignified and disinterested age.

The Jew and/or usurer who is to become Shylock in The Merchant of Venice is frustrated in courtrooms as diverse as those of Il Pecorone, The Ballad of Gernutus and Munday's Zelauto, but Shylock's antecedents are not further punished. The new emphasis on the trial of Shylock and its painful consequences for him is Shakespearean; it deepens the seriousness of the threatening villain and invites speculation about the inner condition of Shylock's future life and about the society that preserves itself by such harsh means. Characteristically, Wesker again mitigates the isolated silence of Shylock's exit from the Shakespearean play in the new image of his projected pilgrimage to Jerusalem.

But perhaps the largest change which Shakespeare makes is in the borrowing of material from the Christian allegory of Gesta Romanorum, which allows Ser Giovanni's test of virility and seduction to be displaced by the decorous formality of the casket test. The trickery of the trial scene and the sexual trickery in Belmonte in Il Pecorone are all of a piece. They belong to a coarser and simpler comic world, fabliau-like in its ribaldry. When Shakespeare imports the casket plot into his play, this bawdry gets pushed to the side of the drama and is expressed through the figures of Gratiano and Nerissa. Bassanio's wooing of Portia is conducted by way of the caskets and involves the elevated and stylised presentation of rich depths of human feeling. Fabliau-like tales concentrate on the entertaining intrigues of action, while what we might describe as the romantic elements in the narrative of The Merchant of Venice invite its audiences and readers to look beyond events to matters of morality, feeling and human worth. It is this curious mixture of kinds of story which produces the greatest interpretative puzzles of The Merchant of Venice and may afford some explanation of the play's capacity to prompt opposing responses.

Shakespeare's fusion of this variety of sources is not without flaw; Bassanio, for example, is introduced as Antonio's ‘most noble kinsman’, a residual detail left over from Il Pecorone, but this relationship is never again mentioned in the play. But Shakespeare's bringing together of the realism of Il Pecorone and the romantic qualities from Gesta Romanorum produces the distinctive challenge of The Merchant of Venice: the shifting nature of the literary worlds in which the various stories are played out; the uncertainties over the kinds of response appropriate to the play's various characters; and the typical tensions between the play's characters and the situations in which they find themselves. Is Bassanio out of place in the elevated world of Belmont's moral testings? Is Portia more suited to being the dignified lady of Belmont or the quick-thinking manoeuvrer in Venice? In which scene and in which world are Portia and Bassanio most truly themselves?

Again in contrast, Wesker in his version refuses to enter imaginatively into the expressive life of the casket plot convention and views it externally, as it were, as merely the mad whim of a foolish philosopher, a whim to be circumvented by some devious thought in order that a shallower and more tawdry love between Wesker's Portia and Bassanio can come to fruition.

Wesker's The Merchant illuminates the controversies which surround The Merchant of Venice in a second way. Throughout his play, Wesker is much exercised by the problem of interpretation and repeatedly off-loads undigested and undramatic lectures on Jewish history on the slender and insufficient pretext that Shylock, who gives voice to them, is a garrulous hoarder of books, much interested in his racial past. In attempting to locate some stability of attitude among the ambiguities of The Merchant of Venice, and to constrain the play's troublesome meanings, literary critics often appeal beyond literature to history and historical contexts. Although few literary historians would defend the assumption in the abstract, they often argue, in their considerations of The Merchant of Venice, as if, unlike literature, history were straightforwardly factual, unambiguous and not itself in need of interpretation. But within Wesker's play, historical information is extensively used as an honourable, if dramatically clogging, means to further Wesker's polemical argument and vindicate the Venetian Jews. Wesker's example usefully reminds us that historical argument, like art, is never merely factual and is rarely disinterested.

Arguing that Shylock is a villain, that Shakespeare and his audiences were, to a man, prejudiced against Jews, and that the practice of usury was universally reviled, though practised none the less, E. E. Stoll is representative in his naïve confidence in Shakespeare's ‘thoroughly Elizabethan taste’, ‘the popular imagination’, ‘the established traditions’ and so on. Stoll exhibits, too, a tendency to argue from origins, and in doing so, to argue The Merchant of Venice back to the cruder simplicities of its antecedents. Thus Shylock is dragged back to the Jews of medieval iconography and the Mystery plays, and to the Barabas of Marlowe's cruder, more farcical Jew of Malta—though, as Stoll doesn’t note, the Christians in that play are not shown much more favourably than Barabas himself. But, even allowing that Stoll's characterisation of the times is predominantly accurate, The Merchant of Venice may be a response to, as well as a reflection of, popular beliefs and prejudices (Stoll 1927, pp. 255-336).

One particularly neat example of history's untidiness, its tendency to complicate rather than clarify, lies in Renaissance England's attitudes to usury, an issue central to our play. But even that is not strictly true. Rather oddly, critical interpretation of The Merchant of Venice so often circles around the issue of usury when, in fact, no transaction involving usury occurs in the dramatic action of the play. (See, for example, E. C. Pettet, ‘The Merchant of Venice and the Problem of Usury’, in Wilders 1969, pp. 100-13.) Shylock is by profession an usurer, although we never see him behaving as one on stage, and none of the numerous financial dealings and misdealings in the play involve usury. Yet characters within the play judge, or prejudge, Shylock by his profession rather than by his immediate actions, and critics beyond the play—especially those who see Shylock as the villain of the piece but wish to defend the play from accusations of anti-Semitism—maintain that emphasis. This phenomenon is but one of the play's examples of the workings of prejudice and its infectiousness: judgements are formed on the evidence of, or hearsay about, the past, and such judgemental habits preclude the possibility of innocence in the present and particular. Yet it remains true that Shylock is an usurer and that usury is important to the play, even if that importance has been exaggerated. History proves less helpful than it might, and, like the play, displays an ambiguous and equivocal attitude to usury.

In 1571 English law legalised usury, despite the evidence that it was ruining the more profligate among the landed gentry caught out by the inflation attendant on the rise of commerce. In 1572 Thomas Wilson published his Discourse Upon Usury which reiterates, energetically and at length, medieval and religious hostility to the practice of usury. And this is a text much favoured by purveyors of Elizabethan World Pictures, despite, it seems, Elizabethan practice. But in the third edition of his Essays, published in 1625, Francis Bacon, writing ‘Of Usury’, takes a more sanguine and balanced view. He argues that, given human frailty, usury is a necessity and discovers not merely the disadvantages but the benefits of the practice. Between Wilson and Bacon comes The Merchant of Venice, written at some time between 1596 and 1598. It would seem that in their actions, in their discursive writings, and, indeed, in their plays, these Elizabethans do not take an unequivocally black view of usury.

In this example I am gesturing briefly at the intellectual and social history of Renaissance England. But which history are we to appeal to? If we are seeking the security of a context for The Merchant of Venice then geography conspires with history to augment our difficulties. Do we look to Shakespeare's England? Or to the history of Venice? Or, more problematically still, to the history of Belmont? Are we not rather dealing with a coalescing of various kinds of history and fiction which occurs within the dramatist's mind and which we are more likely to recover from an examination of the play, than from history books? And if we look beyond Shakespeare to the history of his audience, we might wonder whether Shakespeare plays to his audience's assumptions, or plays against them or, most likely, does both in his usual complex way.

Nevertheless, The Merchant of Venice is not ahistorical. Indeed, it is itself an historical document which contains history's complexities and ambiguities—although the play is not merely that. But The Merchant of Venice isn’t autonomous either, and if we need a context for the play, then what follows here suggests that Shakespeare's larger oeuvre answers most fully to that need. Of the same historical period, created by the same mind, and in the same literary mode, Shakespeare's other plays illuminate The Merchant of Venice but do violence neither to its individuality nor its complexity.