SOURCE: “‘Which is the merchant here? and which the Jew?’: Subversion and Recuperation in The Merchant of Venice,” in Shakespeare Reproduced: The Text in History and Ideology, edited by Jean E. Howard and Marion F. O’Connor, Methuen, Inc., 1987, pp. 188-206.

[In the essay below, Moisan argues that while The Merchant of Venice appears to celebrate the Elizabethan values of Christian ethics and good business, the play instead subtly exposes a contradiction between the apparent belief in these values and whether or not they are actually practiced.]

As a locus in which to ponder the ideological function of the Shakespearean text, The Merchant of Venice is an obvious, and obviously problematic, choice. At a glance, the Merchant seems to inscribe and affirm an ideological calculus that fused the interests of the state and the assertions of a providentialist Christianity with the prerogatives of an increasingly capitalist marketplace. We can perceive this calculus allegorized in the central action of the play and ratified in the ultimate thwarting of the Jewish usurer Shylock, the redemption of the Christian merchant Antonio, and the triumphs—forensic and domestic—of the bountiful aristocrat Portia, and we can see it reflected and legitimated in the sundry polarities the play has often been said to be—to use Frank Kermode's rather equivocal quotation marks—“‘about’”: the Old Law versus the New Law, Justice versus Mercy, Vengeance versus Love (1961, 224).¹ At the same time, however, the considerable residue of qualification that attends even the most compelling efforts to schematize the play in this way has made it no easy matter to say what the Merchant is “about;”² and in the degree to which the play leaves us, for example, feeling troubled over the treatment of Shylock, or appears to blur the distinctions on which the polarities above depend, leading us, in effect, to ask with Portia, “Which is the merchant here? and which the Jew?” (IV. i. 170), we may wonder whether the Merchant invokes the ideologically sanctioned mythologies of the time only to question and subvert them.

In part, of course, it can be argued that the contradictions we experience in the Merchant are evidence, not of its subversive design, but of its mimetic fidelity, and that the dissonances we detect in it are but echoes of the tensions and stresses of the society it reflects, a society in transition, confronting—or being confronted by—what Louis Adrian Montrose calls “the ideologically anomalous realities of change” (1980, 64). “Taken on its own terms,” Jonathan Dollimore reminds us, “an ideology may appear internally coherent. When, however, its deep structure is examined it is often discovered to be a synthesis of contradictory elements” (1984, 20). Thus, in the inclination we feel to ask “Which is the merchant here? and which the Jew?” we may merely be responding to the traces in the play of a debate within the times over whether Old Religion and New Business were fully compatible, and whether the “thrifty” pursuit of trade and the “prodigal” indulgence of greed were fully distinct. On the other hand, to the extent to which we see in the Merchant a movement toward reconciliation and harmony—a thesis argued most fully by Lawrence Danson some years ago (1978, esp. 1-21, 170-95)—the play can be said to ritualize the ideological synthesis being wrought from the contrarieties of its society.

We find the Merchant scanned in these terms quite cogently in an essay published several years ago by Walter Cohen (1982). For Cohen the Merchant enacts a largely successful, and deeply comic, mediation between two differing conceptions of socioeconomic relations: the one rooted in English history and reflective of contemporary anxiety over the emerging economic order, the other derived from Shakespeare's Italian sources and reflecting both a less troubled view of the capitalist system and a more confident differentiation between the figure of the usurer, who incarnates, Cohen would suggest, “a quasi-feudal fiscalism” in decline, and that of the merchant, who embodies, in Cohen's words, “an indigenous bourgeois mercantilism” on the ascent (1982, 771). In Cohen's reading the workings of dramatic form and ideological synthesis are persuasively integrated. Even as the central action of the play, Cohen argues, upholds a “formally dominant Christian, artistocratic ideology,” we see in “the subversive side of the play” evidence of “an internal distancing,” a distancing, however, which may complicate but does not annul that harmonic “movement” Cohen sees in the play “towards resolution and reconciliation” (pp. 779-81). In this way The Merchant of Venice can be seen to negotiate among the heterogeneous impulses and interests that characterized the “public” of the public theater. At the same time, the Merchant can also be taken to exemplify what might be called the emerging “containment” theory of Renaissance drama, to wit, that the Shakespearean stage offered a platform on which cultural heterodoxy could be at once expressed, engaged, and contained, a forum, Cohen observes, for “communal affirmation and social ratification, [and] a means of confronting fear and anger in a manner that promoted reassurance about the existence and legitimacy of a new order” (p. 783; see also Montrose, 1980, 62-4; Greenblatt, 1981, 40-61).

Still, that there is a “movement” in The Merchant of Venice “towards resolution and reconciliation” has not been, the annals of criticism would show, a truth universally acknowledged. To be sure, a play which has as much conflict in it and yet ends as happily as the Merchant does would seem to have something to do with resolution and reconciliation, and, certainly, the subject of harmony is much in the night air of Belmont in act V. Yet whether the play actually produces a harmonious resolution and reconciliation or merely invokes harmony by the power of dramatic fiat and in the interest of ideological conformity or capitulation is not an easy matter to settle, though it is an important one to consider if we are to assess the nature of the accommodation the Merchant reaches with its society.

At this point it might be useful to think of what it is we experience in, to use Cohen's words, that “internal distancing” at work in the play. For Cohen this distancing is evident in the articulation the Merchant accords sentiments that would qualify or subvert the ideological prescriptions the action, or fable, of the play would appear to embrace. Ultimately, though, I would suggest that in the “internal distancing” we perceive in it, the Merchant asserts its “play-ful” alterity, distancing itself simultaneously, on the one hand, from the ideological implications of its fable, and on the other, from the very questionings and subversive sentiments to which it gives notice. We get a hint of this distancing in the tendency of the play to leave unresolved dialogic exchanges in which it permits the mythologies it inscribes to be interrogated. We sense it more pointedly, though, in the, literally, “anti-literal” skepticism we hear displayed in it toward “words” and “texts,” a skepticism through which the play pretends to dissociate itself from the very textuality that nourishes and complicates it. In this way the play implicitly underscores its theatricality and resolves, and “recuperates,” the “confusions” in its text by posing—or imposing—a comic, a comically dramatic, solution.

What follows, then, is an attempt to read The Merchant of Venice in and, in a sense, out of the discourse of its times. First, and at the risk of viewing the play from the kind of distortingly narrow, overly economic, overly Anglicized, perspective that Cohen warns against—and avoids (pp. 768-70)—I will look at some of the ways in which the play participates in and interrogates the economic mythologies of its times by affiliating itself with the texts in which these mythologies are shaped, rehearsed, and questioned. From there, however, I would like to speculate on how the play strives to extricate itself from the complexities and contradictions of the times which its text, and textuality, have “uncovered.”

1

In what sense, though, would The Merchant of Venice, with its eponymous setting and Italian literary pedigree, have held up a mirror to its English audience? Quite apart from the topicality commentators have detected in it,³ of interest to us here is our awareness that the Merchant evokes the growing “trafficking” of the English nation in trade, or, rather, the growing identification of England and its institutions with trade and capitalist enterprise. We hear this prominence of trade and investment recorded not a little sardonically in the impecunious Thomas Dekker's observation in “The Guls Horn-Booke” (1609) that the theater “is your Poets Royal Exchange,” and that the poets' muses “are now turned to Merchants” (pp. 246-7). We find it noted more positively in contemporary sententiae fusing the pursuit of trade and the interests of the state. Thus, for Bacon (“Of Vsurie,” 1625 [1966]) the “Customs of Kings or States … Ebbe or flow with Merchandizing” (p. 170), an opinion seconded and elaborated upon by John Stow in The Survey of London (1603 [1912]), when he pauses in his account of London's past to recount the benisons produced by London's mercantile present, remarking that

truly merchants and retailers do not altogether intus canere, and profit themselves only, for the prince and realm both are enriched by their riches: the realm winneth treasure, if their trade be so moderated by authority that it break not proportion, and they besides bear a good fleece, which the prince may shear when he seeth good.

(p. 495)

In sum, the business of Britain is business, and what’s good for business is good for Britain.

At the same time, as we know, such assertions do not infrequently bear the refrain that what is good for business and Britain is probably not displeasing to God either. It is in God's name that profit often gets pursued, and it is as a providential sign of God's favor that the attainment of profit often gets justified. Certainly we find this providentialist and Calvinist-based mucilage spread quite profusely and adhesively in contemporary accounts of exploration of the New World, in which the propagation of God's word and the true faith is invoked both as a necessary and sufficient condition for the successful pursuit of commercial gain and national enhancement, and, at times, as a happy consequence of that pursuit. “Godlinesse is great riches,” Hakluyt declares at the outset of his Divers Voyages (1582 [1850, 8]), his implicit confusion of riches spiritual and material a characteristic illustration of the idiom in which the desire for gain and a concern for salvation could without the slightest betrayal of cynicism be reconciled as part of the same ideological “project.”

Nor is this coupling of the propagation of faith and trade any less pronounced—though it sounds less ingenuous—in the accounts of the English Merchant Adventurers' dealings with the Old World, a recurrent theme of which, understandably, is the abundance of blessings that will accrue to all parties concerned through an expansion of English trading rights on the continent. Hence, in a letter from one such Adventurer (c. 1565) we find the Earls of East Friesland being advised that with a strong English trading presence in their realm, “God shall be known, praised and feared, and his whole Gospel and commandments taught and preached, to the comfort of all Christian nations” (Ramsay, 1979, 113), and, it should be added, to the intended discomfort of the Pope, the Turks, and any other infidels who might have political or religious, or, of course, commercial, designs on that part of Europe.

To an audience inured to such texts, The Merchant of Venice might well have seemed a transparent allegory of its times. It establishes the merchant in the figure of Antonio as a friend of the state (IV. i. 1-34), it trots out a biblical precedent for the association of profit by “venture” with the blessings of divine providence (I. iii. 86-8), and, in the rather “providential” restoration of Antonio's fortunes after his deliverance from the merciless Jew (V. i. 273-9), it might well appear to subscribe to the notion that “Godlinesse is great riches.” Indeed, Cohen has alluded to act V in particular as an “aristocratic fantasy” in which the “concluding tripartite unity of Antonio, Bassanio, and Portia enacts precisely [an] interclass harmony between landed wealth and mercantile capital, with the former dominant” (1982, 772, 777). If, for the moment, we accept Sidney's contention in his Defence of Poesie (1595 [1968]) that the mimetic role of poetry is to show not “what is, or is not, but what should, or should not be” (p. 29), then we might say that the Merchant realizes its mimetic function by dramatizing a vision of how the established social order and religious values could be reconciled with the new economics.

Central to this vision, however, and deepening the involvement of the Merchant in the economic discourse of its time is the triumph the play enacts over usury in the figure of the usurer Shylock. That usury was at once a widespread practice and significant concern in Shakespeare's society, and that the resources of usurers were sought, not only by profligate young gentlemen and capital-hungry merchants, but by Parliament and the Queen herself, are facts well-established and oft remarked.⁴ The purpose of underscoring them here is to recall the degree to which a work like the Merchant, “indebted” as it is to its Italian sources, could still integrate these sources with more localized and contemporary materials both to create a fulcrum for the expression of communal concerns and frustrations, and also, and more interestingly, to create the illusion that whatever the socially and economically diverse elements of Shakespeare's audience did not have in common, they at least shared a common enemy in the form of usury and its personification.

In no small part, of course, the domestic appeal of the Merchant would have lain in the domestication of its villain, Shylock, who—whatever kinship he may share with his thinly drawn counterpart in the putative source story, Il Pecorone, or with Marlowe's exotically evil and extravagant Machiavel, Barabas—should have been quite recognizable to any in Shakespeare's audience who had read or heard their share of the myriad of anti-usury harangues in circulation at the time. To those so fortunate the penalty ultimately imposed upon Shylock—harsher than that suffered by Fiorentino's usurer in Il Pecorone, and harsh enough to have occasioned a good deal of critical rationalization⁵—may well have seemed just what they had come to believe a usurer conventionally deserved, including the obligation to be converted and saved in spite of himself.⁶ Certainly those in the audience who were versed in the anti-usury tracts of the times, and had heard interest taking excoriated by Henry Smith in The Examination of Usury (1591) as “biting usury” (p. 8), or had read in Thomas Lodge's Alarum Against Usurers (1584) that usurers possessed “the voracitie of wolves” with which to devour men's bodies and souls (p. 77), should have read the string of daimonic and “currish,” wolverine epithets liberally bestowed upon Shylock in the play (I. iii. 106; II. ii. 22-6; II. viii. 14; III. i. 19-20; III. iii. 7; IV. i. 128; IV. i. 283) as merely a standard part of his job description.⁷ Those, meanwhile, familiar with the tract wishfully entitled The Death of Usury, or, The Disgrace of Usurers (1594) would have read that when in days of yore “an usurer came to be knowne, his houses were called the devils houses, his fields the devils croppe” (p. 34), and may well have heard a familiar resonance in Jessica's preelopement complaint that “Our house is hell” (II. iii. 2).

Stephen Greenblatt has suggested that Jessica's description of her father's house as hell is an apt metonym for the peculiar social isolation of the Jew in the modern European society from which, and for which, he earned capital (1978, 295). We find this conception of the usurer's social alienation no less evident in the diatribes against the Jewish moneylender's Christian counterpart in Shakespeare's England. Cut off from the society his profession would undermine, the usurer—Henry Smith maintains (1591, 35)—will be cut off from posterity as well, a fate, we will recall, Shylock is spared only when, in the spirit of Christian forgiveness, Antonio compels Shylock to “re-inherit” his daughter and make her and her Christian husband his heirs (IV. i. 384-6). In his moral isolation the usurer is prone, Smith contends, to vices such as revenge, vices which may eventually work against the usurer's economic self-interest (pp. 6-7).⁸ We are reminded of this especial, and ultimately self-destructive, perversity, of course, in Shylock's unwillingness to accept any compensation for the forfeiture of Antonio's bond except the penalty of flesh stipulated in the contract. “You’ll ask me why I rather choose to have / A weight of carrion flesh, than to receive / Three thousand ducats,” Shylock tauntingly declares. “I’ll not answer that! / But say it is my humour,—is it answer’d?” (IV. i. 40-3).⁹

Nor, we might surmise, would Shakespeare's audience have had Shylock answer in any other way. For there must have been a certain rhetorical convenience and moral self-assurance in being able to cast the argument against usury in the terms of polar oppositions of good and evil that transcend purely economic considerations. Indeed, the pressure of ideology may manifest itself most strongly in the attempt evident in the rhetorical structure of the play to universalize its central conflict and suppress its more parochial economic antecedents. In the exchange with which the play opens, after all, Antonio is permitted to reject the insinuations of Salerio/Solanio that he is the total homo economicus, whose mind is “tossing on the ocean” with his investments (I. i. 8-45), and he implies both by his words here and by his actions shortly hereafter that, for him at least, it is not money that makes the world go round. For his part, Shylock may be sincere in attributing at least a part of his hatred of Antonio to the abuse he has suffered from Antonio on the Rialto (I. iii. 101-24), to the resentment he justifiably feels on behalf of his race (I. iii. 43-7), and to his perception of the hand Antonio's friends may have had in the elopement of Jessica and Lorenzo (III. i. 22-3), and we may well see in his enmity the traces of the economic rivalry in Venice between the Jewish moneylender and the up-and-coming Christian entrepreneur and banker (Cohen, 1982, 770-1). Yet as he proceeds in his bloodlust, Shylock acts in a way that would have confirmed the anti-usury polemicists of Shakespeare's audience in their darkest beliefs about usurers: he becomes that most reassuring of villains, the villain who pursues his villainy because “it is my humour,” because he would “choose” it over, not only a more virtuous, but even a more lucrative alternative.

That Shylock should “choose” to do wrong reminds us, though, of the simultaneously most damning and yet socially and ideologically most reassuring charge to be leveled at usurers in Shakespeare's time, namely that usurers are heretics, willful choosers of the wrong course and, therefore, most deserving of unqualified reproach. “[O]ne saith well,” Henry Smith observes, “that our Vsurers are Hereticks, because after manie admonitions yet they maintaine their errours, & persist in it obstinately as Papists do in Poperie” (1591, 2). In fact, we find this association of usury and heresy made quasi-official by that great collector of commonplaces and regurgitator of Elizabethan orthodoxy, Francis Meres, whose entries for “Vsurie” in his Palladis Tamia (1598) are followed immediately by those for “Heresie, Heretickes,” which, doubtless by no accidental coincidence, are immediately followed by “Death” (pp. 322-7).

This association of usury with heresy and with choosing the wrong course is of “interest” on several counts. On the one hand, the connection between usury and heresy might suggest that the rhetoric was in place by which the usurer could be singled out, not simply as an economic scoundrel and renegade, but as an enemy of God and, therefore, a threat to the state, and our recognition of this possibility deepens our perception of the audience's perception of Shylock. On the other hand, the connection of usury with choosing enables us to see a link between Shylock and the unhappy “choosers” of the casket scenes, and suggests a sense in which both elements of the rather exotic source tradition behind the Merchant, both the flesh-bond and the caskets stories, could be said to respond to the domestic experience and economic concerns of Shakespeare's audience.

Here we might recall that oft cited passage from The Schoole of Abuse (1579) in which Stephen Gosson pauses in his drama-bashing long enough to bestow unwonted praise upon a play called The Jew, which Gosson describes as “representing the greedinesse of worldly chusers, and bloody mindes of usurers” (p. 30). Now, how indebted Shakespeare is to this play, if he is indebted at all, and whether Gosson's “worldly chusers” and “bloody minded usurers” refer to different characters or are merely different tags for the same character, are matters quite unsettled (Brown, 1955, xxix-xxxi; Bullough, 1964, 445-6). Still, we might observe that in the anti-usury parables to which Shakespeare's audience was likely to have been exposed two character types recur, the “bloody minded usurer” and the “wordly chuser,” the figure, that is, whose craving for the riches and vain delights of the world creates the conditions in which the usurer thrives. We find evocations and validations of this antimaterialist sentiment in the unlucky choices of Morocco, who assays his choice of caskets by reckoning the things of this world he desires, and Aragon, who chooses by considering the things of this world he deserves. “All that glisters is not gold,” reads the not very consoling scroll Morocco finds in the death's head “awarded” him for choosing the golden casket (II. vii. 65), a truism Thomas Lodge invokes in his Alarum Against Usurers when he recounts how “a young Gentleman,” smitten with promises of easy credit and easier living, listens to the blandishments of a wicked usurer, a “subtill underminer,” and, “counting all golde that glysters,” succumbs (p. 45).

Indeed, the wisdom of such antimaterialist apothegms is most volubly articulated, and heeded, by the one happy casket chooser, Bassanio, whose casket-selection musings resonate with the kind of sententiae one finds in Lodge or other anti-usury writers. Not for Bassanio is it to assume “all golde that glysters.” Rather, “The world is still deceiv’d with ornament” (III. ii. 73). Obviously knowing something that eluded Morocco, Bassanio immediately rejects the allure of riches and beauty metonymized in the “crisped snaky golden locks” beneath which lurks “[t]he skull that bred them in the sepulchre” (92-6). Ornament “is but the guiled shore / To a most dangerous sea” (97-8), with “gaudy gold, / Hard food for Midas” (101-2), and silver but a “pale and common drudge / ’Tween man and man” (103-4).

Surely, though, there is at least a hint of incongruity in hearing this vein of rhetoric from Bassanio, whose tendency toward materialism and consumption has been deemed conspicuous enough to trouble a number of critics,¹⁰ and whose reasons for seeking funds might well have reminded Shakespeare's audience of the idle borrowers condemned by the anti-usury authors, who seek loans, not to survive, but, as the author of The Death of Usury insists, “to consume in prodigall maner, in bravery, banketting, voluptuous living, & such like” (1594, 32). Bassanio may well love Portia for her “wondrous virtues,” but, as we know, in limning her praises to Antonio, he notes first that she is “a lady richly left, / And she is fair” (I. i. 161-2). And, skeptical as Bassanio may later show himself to be toward “damned show,” we recall that, by his own admission, it was precisely for the sake of “showing a more swelling port / Than my faint means” would permit that Bassanio “disabled mine estate” (I. i. 123-5)—even as his continued pursuit of financing will come close to disabling Antonio's estate and Antonio himself!

Surely there is an incongruity here, and it is an incongruity which reflects, not simply the hybrid traces of Shakespeare's sources,¹¹ but an ambivalence we find in Shakespeare's culture toward wealth and the “venturing” for it in trade. As we noted before, to those engaged in exploration for profit, there may have been something at once instructive and reassuring in Hakluyt's dictum that “Godlinesse is great riches.” Yet for every suggestion that God and Plutus may not be incompatible, we hear the dissonant reminder that they are not identical either. “[S]hall we conclude,” Lodge asks, not unrhetorically, “because the usurer is rich, he is righteous? because wealthie, wise? because full of gold, therefore godly?” (1584, 71). Indeed, we overlook the full rhetorical agenda of texts celebrating the benefits of trade if we fail to hear in them an attempt to calm the fears and quiet the antimaterialist objections the “prodigal” pursuit of profit had engendered. Thus, Stow (1603), we will recall, trumpets the blessings trade has brought to the many, even as he acknowledges the great riches that have accrued through trade to the few, and even as he adds the rather anti-laissez-faire proviso that merchants' business “be so moderated by authority that it break not proportion” (p. 495).

In a sense, contemporary attacks upon usurers are a reflection of the success of such utilitarian rationalizations as Stow's. For if it is granted that the fruits of trade enhance the “commonweal,” then it only follows that the ills attendant upon the increases in trade and venture capitalism should be treated, not as inherent in the system, but as excesses or abuses, or even subversions of the system. Thus, it is quite consistent with the times that Bassanio, who so incarnates the entrepreneurial spirit of the age,¹² and whose very choice of the lead casket is encoded as an act of “hazard,” should dissociate himself from the ornamental riches with which “the world is still deceiv’d,” and the obsession which usurers and other breakers of economic proportion exploit.

As we know, however, usury and trade existed in a relationship that was far more ambiguous than anti-usury tracts might imply, indeed, a relationship that might be said to have been more symbiotic than inimical. Bacon puts the complexity of the relationship squarely when he observes (in “Of Vsurie,” 1625) that, while the first “Discommoditie” of usury is that “it makes fewer Merchants” since, obviously, it diverts money from trading to trading in money, the first “Commoditie” of usury is, paradoxically, that it makes more merchants and “aduanceth” trade, since “it is certain, that the Greatest Part of Trade is driuen by Young Merchants, upon Borrowing at Interest” (pp. 170-1).

This embarrassing interrelationship is a fact that not even avowedly anti-usury discourses can fully suppress. So it is that we hear the author of The Death of Usury labor to give the most moral, anti-usury, reading to the law enacted by Elizabeth which voided the ban imposed by Edward VI upon the practice of usury, and which formally reinstated 10 per cent as the maximum interest rate.¹³ The law, the author maintains, could not be construed as condoning usury, but, instead, “leaves it after a sort to the curtesie and conscience of the borrower”—rather as if interest payments were to be regarded as something no more coercive than tipping! Why did Elizabeth enact this statute if it was not the intent of her government to encourage the practice of usury? Our author notes that when, under Edward VI, usury was prohibited “this inconvenience came, fewe or none would lend because they might have no allowance, whereupon her Maiestie to avoyde this euill, made this remissiue clause” (1594; see also Smith, 1591, 30). Having rationalized the government's unapprovingly permissive policy on usury, the same author wonders why the usurer does not simply follow the example of a number of merchants and invest his money in trade where, with the likelihood of fewer risks and greater profits, “it will be lesse noted, and himself better esteemed” (p. 27). Which is the merchant here, and which the usurer?

Indeed, to keep the distinction straight, and to cope with the disquieting realities of the economic system, we find polemicists engaging in the sorts of polarization evident in the surface of the Merchant. Merchants follow a career, Lodge hastens to affirm, “both auncient and lawdable, the professors honest and vertuous, their actions full of daunger, and therefore worthy gaine; and so necessary this sorte of men be, as no well governed state may be without them” (1584, 43). The blame for whatever is “wrong” with the system, then, is left for the usurer to absorb, whose function is rather that of the scapegoat: he embodies the enemy within that must be exorcised by being externalized and, literally, alienated.¹⁴ What better figure to fill this role than, of course, the Jew, whose vices can be, as we suggested before, familiarized, but whose identity by type is comfortably different and distanced. Shakespeare's Shylock, rooted as he is in older and foreign literary and dramatic forms, is an appropriate focus for the domestic anxieties of Shakespeare's audience, not in spite of his difference, but, rather as Stephen Greenblatt has argued, because of it (1978, 295-6).

2

To enumerate ways in which a play “reflects” the discourse of its times is not the same, unfortunately, as saying how the play responds to that discourse, a truth one feels embarrassingly keenly in the case of The Merchant of Venice. It may be fair to suggest that what we encounter in the play is “merely” a mirroring both of the myths by which the age read itself and of the anxieties those myths could not entirely dispel. Yet in holding up the mirror to its age so faithfully, does the play affirm the myths it enacts, or does it subvert them by mirroring their qualifications as well? Or, rather, does it affirm the myths it dramatizes by mirroring their qualifications, by admitting them as qualifications which ultimately can be contained and “lived with”?

Recently, Greenblatt has explored this tertium quid in texts where the play of ideology much more clearly assumes the form of a conflict between authority and forces threatening to undermine that authority (1981, 40-2). In the Merchant what is questioned is not authority as such, but whether the accommodation of Christian orthodoxy and economic reality the play inscribes is entitled to the moral authority to which it appears to lay claim. The play allows this questioning to be voiced, and voiced forcibly, only to contextualize it in such a way that its implications are deflected or muted, or, as Cohen has observed, repressed.

Certainly, for example, we feel the justice of Shylock's enraged defense of his humanity (III. i. 47-66), and we recognize as valid both in that speech and in others by Shylock the doubt being cast upon the Venetian Christian' presumptions of moral superiority. Yet, as Cohen remarks, though Christians may well be abusive slaveholders, we encounter no Christian slaveholders within the fiction of the play (1982, 774), and, a point so often noted, when push comes to shove, we know who cannot be dissuaded from killing whom, and who is capable of mercy—at least on some terms. And even though, as could be rightly objected, Gratiano shows himself (IV. i. 360-3, 375, 394-6) to be one Christian in whom the quality of mercy appears quite strained—perhaps, even, drained—still, it could also be urged that Gratiano is interestingly differentiated from his fellow Christians, who, it would seem, find him not worth listening to (I. i. 114-18).

Again, what is worth noticing is not that the Merchant should mute or repress contradictions and qualifications, but that it should call them into play at all only to repress them, illuminating them only to cover them, or, perhaps, “re-cover” them. For an example we might consider the curious resonances in the play of the idea of “prodigality.” The word “prodigal” occurs several times, twice on the tongue of Shylock (II. v. 15; III. i. 39-40), who employs it as a term of derision for Christians whose “prodigality” clearly differentiates them from the “thrift” Shylock tends to associate with his own endeavors (I. iii. 45, 85, 172; II. v. 54). Like “thrift,” “prodigal” is a word prodigally used in anti-usury tracts, and is employed to castigate, or warn, those “worldly choosers” whose wasteful ways and love of material things make them the prey of the likes of Shylock (The Death of Usury, 1594, 32; Lodge, 1584, 50, 51, 53, 56, 62, 75). On the one hand, there is, doubtless, a purposeful irony in having Shylock condemn the Christians for the sort of fiscal irresponsibility off which he “thrives;” to paraphrase Antonio, not only can the devil cite Scripture, but he seems to have done his share of reading in anti-usury tracts as well. Moreover, that Shylock should find prodigality contemptible obviously gives prodigality something to commend it, and we feel invited to associate the word with those antipenurious, anti-Shylockean virtues that schematic interpretations of the play generally place on the Christian side of the ledger: love, mercy, liberality. On the other hand, however, in the degree to which Shylock's words recall the antimaterialist rhetoric of the age, they remind us that in some sense Shylock's charges against the Christians are true, that Bassanio in particular is conspicuously, perhaps, culpably, “consumptive,” and we may hear in his words an evocation, rather muffled, of that anxiety over wealth which is a part of the cultural context of the play.

At the same time, it is difficlt for us, and was likely to have been even more difficult for Shakespeare's audience, to hear the recurrent references to “prodigal” without thinking of the parable from Luke 15 with which “prodigal” has become synonymous. An allusion to the parable occurs in the chattering Gratiano's description of the once finely fretted merchant ship returning from its voyage “like the prodigal … / With over-weather’d ribs and ragged sails—/ Lean, rent, and beggar’d by the strumpet wind!” (II. vi. 17-19). Dangling here in the idle Grantiano's idle simile, the parable of the prodigal son looms over much of the play, though it is a reference Shakespeare seems quite pointedly to have kept in the background. It informs the story in Il Pecorone, in which the surrogate Antonio is the adoptive father of the Bassanio figure and plays the part of the all-forgiving, self-sacrificing father when the son twice “hazards”—and loses—all he has (Bullough, 1964, 466-7, 469). It informs the Alarum Against Usurers, in which Lodge offers a variation on the parable, having the father at first forgive the son, only to disown him later when the prodigal proves unregenerate (1584, 56-7). In the Merchant, traces of the parable suggest themselves in the opening exchange between Antonio and Bassanio, only to remain submerged within the notoriously elliptical and elusive relationship between these characters. For Shakespeare to have made those traces more distinct would have strengthened the connection between Bassanio and the wastrel youths pilloried in the anti-usury tracts of the day, and, implicitly, would have given a sharper resonance to the antimaterialist evocations in Shylock's invective.¹⁵ As it is, however, the parable of the prodigal son presents itself in the play as an analogy left teasingly inchoate, with our sense of its nonpresence keen enough for us to notice its suppression.

Still, is such suppression evidence that the Merchant participates in the religioeconomic mythology of its times, or that it parodies it? In reifying in its own text the rationalizations and contradictions we encountered in other texts of the times, is the Merchant exorcising these qualifications, or, rather, is it underscoring their persistence? As Norman Rabkin demonstrated several years ago, critical commentary on the Merchant documents nothing more clearly than the resistance we encounter if we seek answers to these questions in the text of the play (1981, 28-9). In fact, what the text of the play may lead us to infer is that “texts” themselves are not to be trusted. “Texts,” the play insists, can mislead and can be misread. Scripture we may think is authoritative, but, as Antonio warns Bassanio, it can be cited by the devil “for his purpose” (I. iii. 93); sententiae, “Good sentences,” no matter how “well pronunc’d,” Portia reminds Nerissa, are far easier to pronounce than to follow (I. ii. 10-20); words are “tricksy,” Lorenzo declares, and can be summoned to “Defy the matter” by any number of fools like Launcelot Gobbo, “who hath planted in his memory / An army of good words” for the purpose (III. v. 59-64); while “deliberate fools” can, like Morocco and Aragon, display their foolishness in the very deliberateness with which they puzzle over texts, showing that they “have the wisdom by their wit to lose” (II. ix. 81). Indeed, if we read E.F.J. Tucker's reading of the play aright, what Portia's climactic judgement against Shylock enshrines most of all is the principle that for the law to be properly applied it must be understood in its spirit or intent, rather than read for the “letter” of its text (1976, 100-1).

How do these expressions within the play of skepticism toward texts affect our reading of The Merchant of Venice? Collectively, they would appear to support the argument that the play allegorizes the triumph of love, mercy, divine justice, and other desiderata over the various mean-spirited and short-sighted impulses emblematized in a narrow, close-reading legalism. Bassanio, for example, does not have to ponder closely the wordings on caskets, since he has higher, intuitive impulses to guide him—not to mention, of course, the subliminally helpful hints and “mood music” provided by Portia! On the other hand, the antiliteralism we come upon in the play at times serves the ideologically salutary purpose of upholding orthodoxy against the subversive, and subversively unanswerable, “misuse” of the texts and authorities by which orthodoxy is normally enforced: Scripture, the law, formulations of the “best interests” of the “commonweal.” Antonio issues his admonition about Scripture, after all, when Shylock proves uncomfortably adept at biblical exegesis, with Antonio's words, as A. D. Nuttall has put it, suggestive of “a man who is holding fast to a conviction that his opponent must be wrong but cannot quite see how” (1983, 128). Analogously, Lorenzo lodges his complaint against “tricksy” words and fools just after Launcelot has appealed to the laws of supply and demand to argue that Jessica's conversion to Christianity will raise the price of pork (III. v. 19-23). The “word” must be suspect if it allows a Jew to use Scripture to justify usury and a fool to use the economic calculus of the times to suggest that, at least in one respect, the interests of Christianity and the economic interests of the commonwealth are not identical!

Yet in underscoring the equivocality and ambiguity of texts and “the word,” The Merchant of Venice distances itself from the very textuality which nourishes it and the texts which it evokes and by which its discourse is enriched and complicated: the Italian novelle that are the immediate source of its fable, anti-usury diatribes, accounts of commercial exploration and exploitation, parliamentary decrees and edicts of law, and, the most authoritative and yet misreadable text of all, Scripture. In calling attention to the ways in which texts can be misused to yield subversive generalizations, the Merchant would have its audience believe that it is something other than, more than, another text, and would persuade us that the way to true harmony and resolution lies in the playful particularity of its dramatic action. In this way the Merchant as a piece of theater distances itself from the subversive resonances it yields as a text. At the same time, however, by its very ludic nature the Merchant can pretend merely to “play” with the religioeconomic mythology its fable inscribes. In the degree to which the Merchant asserts its independence of the very textuality it evokes, its playwright can invoke the indemnity of Sidney's poet, who, Sidney glibly reminds us, cannot ever be said to lie, because he “nothing affirmeth” (1595, 29).

We find this curious negotiation between text and play epitomized at the outset of act V, in the exchange in which Jessica and Lorenzo lyrically recount some of the assorted amorous misadventures that occurred on just “such a night” as the moonlit one they are enjoying at Belmont (V. i. 1-24). It is a passage which can be cited to confirm the darkest misgivings that can be, and have been, entertained about the “prodigal” and “unthrift” manner in which Lorenzo and Jessica contrived to “steal from the wealthy Jew” (Moody, 1964, 46-7; Burckhardt, 1968, 224). It is a passage which, if read darkly, provides an ironic prelude to that “aristocratic fantasy” played out in the rest of this the concluding scene of the play. How we interpret this exchange depends very much on the degree of proximity we posit between Jessica and Lorenzo and the roster of literary amatory “unthrifts” whom they invoke and with whom they “playfully” associate themselves, or, rather, each other: Troilus and Cressida, Thisbe and Pyramus, Dido and Aeneas, Jason and Medea. To measure Jessica and Lorenzo by the texts in which they would inscribe themselves is not only to deepen our suspicion that Jessica and Lorenzo themselves either are not or will not be or do not deserve to continue to be happy, but also to bring the world of the play closer to the ambiguous light shed upon its proceedings by literary allusion and analogy. In the immediate context the intrusion of the dramatic action, in the person of Stephano arriving to announce the imminent return of Portia (V. i. 25), prevents Lorenzo and Jessica from fully shaping their own history to the specifications of the doleful texts they have been reciting. In this way they are permitted to maintain their theatrical “otherness” from the textual patterning by which they make it very tempting to read them. Hence, with no little tension, the world of texts is kept playfully separate from the world of the theatrical fiction.

Here, to be sure, it could be argued that the playfulness we have been claiming for the Merchant is but the rhetorical signature of its own textuality, with the distancing effect this playfulness produces nothing other than that parodic distance which Pierre Macherey contends must ever mark the relationship of “literary language” to the ideological discourses it evokes, that inherent distantiation through which “literary discourse merely mimics theoretical discourse, rehearsing but never actually performing its script” (1978, 59). At the same time, though—even as we must question whether “literary language” can in fact be so essentially distinguishable from other discourses as Macherey would maintain¹⁶—we are no less likely to recognize in the Merchant the symptoms of the curious dualism with which the public stage of Shakespeare's day “represented” the world of, and to, its public, and with which it negotiated—and accommodated—the ideological currents and cross-currents of the time. As Louis Montrose has demonstrated, Shakespearean drama in particular calls upon the affiliative power inherent in theater to “re-present” to the audience a “paradigm” of its culture even while calling attention, self-reflexively, to the devices, conventions, and forms that inscribe the experience of theater as but illusion, and its business but “play” (1980, 66; also 1981, 33). This dualism entails, of course, a certain artistic—and political—convenience, for even as it proclaims the mimetic power of drama to suggest and portray resemblances to “real life,” it insists upon the figurative character of those resemblances and, thus, enables the playwright to claim limitations upon his responsibility, his accountability, for literal truth. “What childe is there,” asks Sidney in his response to Gosson's attack, “that coming to a play, and seeing Thebes written in great letters upon an old doore, doth beleeve that it is Thebes?” (p. 29). Sidney's “question” is, in fact, an assertion of an artistic license which the more wary upholders of orthodoxy should have found disquieting: the license to be taken seriously but not literally, and, therefore, not too seriously!

In no form are this reflexivity and playing at representation so overt as in comedy, and in no Shakespearean comedy is the tension that this playing embodies—and the convenience it affords—more evident than in the Merchant, where, I have tried to suggest, we are treated to an exposition and interrogation of the prevailing religioeconomic mythologies of the day, even as we feel a pull toward the reassuring particularity only a dramatic solution and resolution can provide. Indeed, nothing better attests to the will and power of dramatic art to divert attention from the ideological contradictions it reflects to its own playful alterity than the sense that has permeated a good deal of criticism on the Merchant that “somehow,” through some combination of conventions comic, festive, and carnivalesque, the play manages to transcend the issues its text problematizes to render a dramatically, theatrically, satisfying experience. “The happy ending,” C. L. Barber observes, with a keen and generous appreciation for this festive difference, “which abstractly considered as an event is hard to credit, and 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” (1959, 170). The Merchant “works”—and worked—and achieves its “triumph,” of course, precisely in the degree to which it works upon its audience, and critics, to relax their discriminations and equate the illusion of a “distinction” with its “achievement.”

Now, as Robert Weimann has shown, no figure in Shakespearean drama so well incarnates in action and speech the playfully representative force of Shakespearean drama as does the fool (1978, 30-48, 133-51), and so, to italicize the peculiarly playful relationship of the Merchant to the religioeconomic vision its fable enacts, we might conclude by looking once again at that exchange in act III (v. 19 ff.) in which the fool, Launcelot Gobbo, opines on the economic ramifications of Jessica's conversion. Cohen has observed how in general Launcelot's penchant for the verbal malapropos gives voice to “an alternative perspective on the related matters of Christian orthodoxy and social hierarchy” (1982, 780), and the truth of that observation is in no way belied by Launcelot's performance here. Yet what is most exemplary in what Lawrence Danson calls Launcelot's “wonderful confusion of carnal matters and spiritual” (1978, 97) is the complexity of response it elicits from us. Practiced as we have become in making sense of what we take to be the ostensible non-sense and inversions of sense that dot Launcelot's “normal” discourse, we have no difficulty in grasping an ulterior pertinence in the apparent im-pertinence of Launcelot's juxtaposition of things spiritual and porcine. After all, Launcelot is not the first character in the play, we are likely to recall, who has shown himself to be a homo economicus in matters related to Jessica; and whatever incongruity we may feel in hearing Jessica's conversion turn Launcelot's thoughts to pork is only a comic reprise of the incongruity we may have felt in hearing from Solanio that Jessica's elopement turned her father's thoughts to ducats (II. viii. 12-22). Still, even as Launcelot's reasoning reassuringly parodies the materialism we associate with and hear burlesqued in Solanio's burlesque of Shylock, it reminds us that it is not only the Jew and usurer who brings an economic algorithm to his reading of experience, and that the line in the play distinguishing the “thrift” of the usurer from the values of the Christian community is not so very reassuringly or consistently sharp.

At the same time, however, the associations called into play by Launcelot's words are kept at a playful distance by the comic theatricality of his character. Yet this distancing is double-edged. On the one hand, Launcelot's generic “foolishness” permits the play to articulate elements of social criticism without appearing to engage or take them seriously. Indeed, Launcelot's comicality enables the Merchant to glance yet glance but teasingly at assumptions left unquestioned by its fable: that godliness and riches are linked, that Christianity and the economic interests of the commonwealth are in harmony. On the other hand, though it may distance itself from the kinds of question and questioning Launcelot's words may suggest, the Merchant leaves these same assumptions ultimately unaffirmed. Lorenzo deals with Launcelot's provocative—and provoking—thesis, we will recall, not by refuting it, but by changing the subject and grumbling about “tricksy words” in the mouths of fools. Like the exchange between Jessica and Lorenzo, the dialogue here is significantly disengaged. Above all, in having economic theory uttered from the mouth of a fool, the Merchant glances reflexively and parodically at the very sort of discourse in which it has involved itself and immersed us. In the playfulness of Launcelot the Merchant asserts its own playfulness and illuminates the dramatic tension in which it holds the competing impulses of recuperation and subversion.

Notes

1. For another synopsis of the polarities through which the play is often schematized, see Greenblatt (1978), 293-4. All references to the Merchant are to the Arden edition, edited by Brown (1955).

2. Consider the note of qualification obtruding in Barbara Lewalski's contention that the conversion imposed upon Shylock at the end of the play is a prefigurement of the final conversion of the Jews: “because Antonio is able to rise at last to the demands of Christian love, Shylock is not destroyed, but, albeit rather harshly, converted” (Lewalski, 1962, 334).

3. For a summary and discussion of a number of the topical possibilities, see Brown (1955), xxi-xxvii.

4. See Draper (1935), 39-45; Brown (1955), xliii; also, Acts of the Privy Council, December 5 and 24, 1598, cited in Harrison (1931), 324-6.

5. In the source story from Il Pecorone, “[t]he Jew, seeing that he could not do what he had wished, took his bond and tore it in pieces in a rage.” See Bullough (1964), 474.

6. Thus, in the concluding remarks in Thomas Lodge's Alarum Against Usurers (1584), the moneylenders are exhorted to “harden not your hearts, but be you converted … and turne, turne, turne unto the Lord, (I beseech you) least you perish in your own abhominations” (1584 [1853] 79). See also the penitence of the usurer at the conclusion of Lodge's A Looking Glasse, for London and England (1598 [1963, 69]).

7. See Lodge (1584 [1853], 77; Smith (1591), 8; also Brown (1955), xxiv.

8. Smith goes so far as to maintain that were there no usury, there would be no “revenging,” and that “they which brought in Vsurie, brought in a law against themselves” (pp. 6-7).

9. In his insistence upon the letter of the bond, Shylock follows the example of the usurer in Il Pecorone (Bullough, 1964, 471), but in the defiance with which he teasingly defends his right to the pound of flesh, he seems akin to the moneylender in Alexander Silvayn's The Orator (trans. L.P., 1596), who, having speculated on various reasons why “I would not rather take silver of this man, then his flesh,” shrugs them off, and “will onelie say, that by his obligation he oweth it me” (Bullough, 1964, 484).

10. In, perhaps, the most virulent expression of anti-Bassanian sentiment among critics, A. D. Moody observes of Bassanio that “[i]t would not be inappropriate if his name came to be suggestive of baseness, in the sense of ‘opposed to high-minded’; and perhaps also to suggest the bass, ‘the common perch’, which catches the shallow and callow aspect, and also ‘a voracious European marine fish’, which catches the more serious underside” (1964, 23-4). A. D. Nuttall puts the case of Bassanio's apparent materialism in more silken accents when he notes, “There is a certain repellent ingenuousness about Bassanio. He can trust his own well-constituted nature. It would never allow him to fall in love with a poor woman; for, after all, poor women are not attractive” (1983, 122).

11. In Il Pecorone, after all, we also find an interesting admixture of Eros and commerce, though it could be argued that the Merchant is an inversion of the fable of its source. For in Il Pecorone what begins as a commercial venture turns into an erotic adventure; in the Merchant what we would presume to be an amatory quest seems persistently mixed with material considerations.

12. To take but one example, Bassanio's very appeal to Antonio for a renewal of his loan appropriates the vocabulary of investment. Were Antonio to give Bassanio the funds with which to replace the money Bassanio has already wasted, Bassanio promises either “to find both, / Or bring your latter hazard back again,” while the thought of his courtship of Portia “presages me such thrift / That I should questionless be fortunate” (I. i. 150-1, 175-6).

13. For a brief discussion of this statute, see Draper (1935), 41.

14. For two quite complementary discussions of Shylock as the figure of the scapegoat, see Girard (1978), 108-14; and Barber (1959), 177-84.

15. Indeed, has Shakespeare given greater definition to the analogy between Bassanio and the prodigal son, he might have affiliated the fable of the play with a concern evident in the anti-usury complaints of the day, namely, that the profits of usurers were a threat to familial legacies and, thus, to nothing less than social continuity. Lodge, who may have been especially sensitive to the overthrows familial fortunes could suffer, exclaims that “Purchased arms now possess the place of ancient progenitors, and men made rich by young youth's misspendings doe feast in the halls of our riotous young spend thrifts” (1584, 48).

16. At the heart of Macherey's position on the nonideological nature of “literary language” is the assumption that “literary language” is essentially nonrepresentational. Indeed, to Sidney's self-exculpatory claim that the poet never lies because he “nothing affirmeth,” Macherey might well add that the poet—or playwright—can only lie whenever he seems to affirm. “Literature is deceptive,” Macherey argues, “in so far as it is evocative and apparently expressive. … Making us take the word for the thing, or vice-versa, it would be a fabric of lies, all the more radical for being unconscious” (1978, 61).

Works Cited

Bacon, Francis (1625) “Of Vsurie,” in Bacon, Francis, Essays, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1966.

Barber, C. L. (1959) Shakespeare's Festive Comedy, Princeton, Princeton University Press.

Brown, John Russell (ed.) (1955) The Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare, Arden edn, London, Methuen.

Bullough, Geoffrey (1964) Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Burckhardt, Sigurd (1968) Shakespearean Meanings, Princeton, Princeton University Press.

Cohen, Walter (1982) “The Merchant of Venice and the Possibilities of Historical Criticism,” English Literary History, 49, 765-89.

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

The Death of Usury, or, The Disgrace of Usurers, London, 1594, STC 6443.

Dollimore, Jonathan (1984) Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries, Chicago, University of Chicago Press; Brighton, Harvester.

Draper, John W. (1935) “Usury in The Merchant of Venice,” Modern Philology, 33, 37-47.

Girard, René (1978) “‘To Entrap the Wisest’: A Reading of The Merchant of Venice,” in Said, Edward W. (ed.) (1980) Literature and Society: Selected Papers from the English Institute, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 100-19.

Gosson, Stephen (1579) The Schoole of Abuse, Containing a Pleasant invective against Poets, Pipers, Players, Jesters, and such like Caterpillers of a Commonwealth, repr. 1841, London, The Shakespeare Society.

Greenblatt, Stephen (1978) “Marlowe, Marx, and Anti-Semitism,” Critical Inquiry, 5, 291-307.

——— (1981) “Invisible Bullets: Renaissance Authority and its Subversion,” Glyph 8: Johns Hopkins Textual Studies, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 40-61.

Hakluyt, John (1582) Divers voyages touching the Discouerie of America and the Ilands Adiacent, ed. Jones, John Winter (1850), London, Hakluyt Society.

Harrison, G. B. (ed.) (1931) A Second Elizabethan Journal: Being a Record of Those Things Most Talked of During the Years 1595-8, London, Constable.

Kermode, Frank (1961) “The Mature Comedies,” in Brown, John Russell and Harris, Bernard (eds), Early Shakespeare, Stratford-upon-Avon Studies, 3, London, Edward Arnold, 211-17.

Lewalski, Barbara (1962) “Biblical Allusion and Allegory in The Merchant of Venice,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 13, 327-43.

Lodge, Thomas, (1584) An Alarum Against Usurers, repr. 1853, London, The Shakespeare Society.

——— (1598) A Looking Glasse, for London and England, vol. IV of The Complete Works of Thomas Lodge, 1883; repr. 1963, New York, Russell & Russell.

Macherey, Pierre (1978) A Theory of Literary Production, trans. Geoffrey Wall, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Meres, Francis (1598) Palladis Tamia, London, facsimile repr. 1938, New York, Scholars' Facsimiles & Reprints.

Montrose, Louis Adrian (1980) “The Purpose of Playing: Reflections on a Shakespearean Anthropology,” Helios, n.s. 7, 51-74.

——— (1981) “‘The Place of a Brother’ in As You Like It: Social Process and Comic Form,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 32, 28-54.

Moody, A. D. (1964) Shakespeare: The Merchant of Venice, Woodbury, New York, Barron's Educational Series.

Nuttall, A. D. (1983) A New Mimesis: Shakespeare and the Representation of Reality, London, Methuen.

Rabkin, Norman (1981) Shakespeare and the Problem of Meaning, Chicago, University of Chicago Press.

Ramsay, G. D. (ed.) (1979) The Politics of a Tudor Merchant Adventurer: A Letter to the Earls of East Friesland, Manchester, Manchester University Press.

Sidney, Sir Philip (1595) The Defence of Poesie, London, vol. III of The Prose Works of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. Albert Feuillerat, 4 vols, 1912, repr. 1968, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

Smith, Henry (1591) The Examination of Usury, London, STC 22660.

Stow, John (1603) The Survey of London, introd. H.B. Wheatley (1912), London, J.M. Dent.

Tucker, E. F. J. (1976) “The Letter of the Law in The Merchant of Venice,” Shakespeare Survey, 29, 93-101.

Weimann, Robert (1978) Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theater: Studies in the Social Dimension of Dramatic Form and Function, ed. Robert Schwartz, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press.

Stephen A. Cohen (1994)

SOURCE: “‘The Quality of Mercy’: Law, Equity and Ideology in The Merchant of Venice,” in Mosaic, Vol. 27, No. 4, 1994, pp. 35-54.

[In the essay below, Cohen argues that The Merchant of Venice should be examined from a legal point of view in order to better understand the cultural changes that began to occur in Elizabethan England—specifically, the increasing use of common law by the “rising classes” to thwart the “ruling classes.”]

The interdisciplinary study of literature has received considerable impetus over the last two decades from the rise of New Historicism. Particularly in Renaissance studies, the work of Stephen Greenblatt, Louis Adrian Montrose and others has illuminated the relation of such diverse matters as exorcism, colonialism, architectural design and primogeniture to the cultural work performed by literary texts. One subject largely neglected by the New Historicists, however, is the law. This neglect may in part be attributable to the prominence of the law in older, positivist historical readings of Renaissance literature, and in turn to the New Historicists' desire both to distance themselves from this reflectionist model and to investigate unexplored areas of Renaissance culture. In any case, by conjoining the considerable work done by Renaissance legal scholars with New Historicism's characteristic questions—what are the sociopolitical functions of the cultural phenomenon in question, and how are those functions employed or adapted through the literary text—we may shed considerable light on both the law and the literature of the Renaissance.

Not surprisingly, given its explicitly economic central conflict and its intricately detailed legal climax, The Merchant of Venice has had considerable appeal for interdisciplinary critics. As O. Hood Phillips's investigations have shown, for over a century legal scholars and historians have studied the trial scene's relation to contemporary jurisprudence, debating its verisimilitude and its position in the period's jurisdictional and philosophical disputes, especially the conflict between the common law and equity (91-118). More recently, historical critics like Walter Cohen, Leonard Tennenhouse and Thomas Moisan have explored the play's relation to Renaissance social and economic history and ideology, and particularly its role in the period's transition from the cultural and financial structures of late feudalism to those of early capitalism. These two lines of inquiry have, however, remained almost entirely separate: legal readings of the trial scene tend to treat its legal significance in both cultural and textual isolation, failing to link it to the social and economic issues prominent in both text and cultural context; and socioeconomic readings of the play as a whole give little or no attention to the role of the trial's legal background in that framework.

A contemporary audience, however, would have made no such separation. The late 16th and early 17th centuries in England were notable both for unprecedented economic and social change and for a marked increase in legal activity; the connection between the two developments was sufficiently clear at the time that Francis Bacon could note almost as a commonplace that “times of peace, for the most part drawing with them abundance of wealth, and finenesse of cunning, doe draw also in further consequence multitudes of suits, and controversies … [which] do more instantly sollicite for the amendment of lawes, to restraine and represse them” (“Epistle Dedicatorie,” n.p.).

Nor were such associations beyond the bounds of the theater. In the case of The Merchant of Venice, the susceptibility of the play's legal content to sociopolitical interpretation is attested to by no less a legal and political authority than Lord Chancellor Ellesmere, who in a 1615 judicial dispute over the power of King James to legislate economic policy without the concurrence of Parliament advised his fellow judges “to maintain the power and prerogative of the King; and in cases in which there is no authority and precedent, to leave it to the King to order it according to his wisdom and the good of his subjects, for otherwise the King would be no more than the Duke of Venice” (qtd. in Andrews 41). The significance of the reference—to the Duke's legal inability to act on his sympathy for Antonio—would not have been lost on James and his court, for whom The Merchant of Venice was performed twice in 1605 (Knight 108n8).

For its contemporary audience, then, the trial scene's legal conflict was firmly connected to the economic and political issues in which the period was increasingly embroiled. By bringing together the historical particularity of the play's legal critics and the ideological sensitivity of its newer historical readers, I hope to recapture the significance of this connection; and in shedding new light on the meaning of the trial scene's common law-versus-equity debate I will attempt to illuminate the role that The Merchant of Venice played in the culture of which it was a part.

The case that Shylock makes for the enforcement of his bond rests on three claims: 1) the self-evidence of the law's application to the case at hand; 2) the supremacy of that law over any other power, personal or governmental; and 3) the importance of that supremacy to the foundations of the state itself. “I [have] sworn / To have the due and forfeit of my bond,” he tells the Duke as the trial opens; “If you deny it, let the danger light / Upon your charter and your city's freedom!” (4.1.36-39).¹ These three claims were the foundation of the case presented by the champions of the common law in their jurisdictional and philosophical conflict with the courts of equity. In supporting the inviolability of the common law's authority they argued that the order and security of the nation rested upon the adjudication of its increasingly complex web of rights and obligations by—as Sir Edward Coke phrased it—“the golden and straight mete-wand of the law, and not the incertain and crooked cord of discretion” (qtd. in Ives 125).

While acknowledging the technical legality of Shylock's suit—“Of a strange nature is the suit you follow, / Yet in such rule that the Venetian law / Cannot impugn you as you do proceed” (177-79)—Portia counters his claims by decrying the cruelty of the bond and the severity of the law that enforces it and insisting on the need for mercy “to mitigate the justice of thy plea” (203). The necessity of such mitigation was the basis of the argument presented by the advocates of equity's appellate superiority to the common law, in order, in the words of Lord Keeper John Williams, “to mix & temper mercie and equitie with the black and rigorous L[ette]re of the Law” (qtd. in Thomas 526). Consequently, Portia's victory has been read by legal critics like Mark Edwin Andrews, Maxine McKay and W. Nicholas Knight as Shakespeare's endorsement of the ethical importance of equity to mitigate the impartial but at times overly-strict justice of the common law.

As Lord Chancellor Ellesmere recognized, however, behind the ideological trappings of blind-but-strict law and corrective equity, the issue at stake in the trial plot is political power—specifically, the power of the Crown to further its social and economic agenda in the face of the legal challenge presented by the common law. As the complex, large-scale financial operations of early capitalism began to emerge in the middle years of the 16th century, its practitioners became acutely aware of the value of a comprehensive and predictable legal system that offered protection from arbitrary interference. As Max Weber notes:

The modern capitalist concern … requires for its survival a system of justice and an administration whose workings can be rationally calculated, at least in principle, according to fixed general laws. … It is as little able to tolerate the dispensing of justice according to the judge's sense of fair play in individual cases or any other irrational means of principles of administering the law … as it is able to endure a patriarchal administration that obeys the dictates of its own caprice, or sense of mercy. …

(qtd. in Whigham 107-08n14)

The common law, particularly after it began to recognize and incorporate the jurisprudence of the increasingly important international mercantile legal system (Hill 238), was clearly the law that best offered this protection, given its fundamental concern with meum et tuum property rights: “The person, goods and possessions of a man (as yow know) are the things which the Common lawes of England doe protect,” wrote Edward Hake in the late years of Elizabeth's reign (69).

The Crown's difficulty with this conception of the common law was that the very same principles which facilitated the new economic activity could also be—and increasingly were—employed to protect the profits of that activity from royal exploitation. The value to the nation of this new commerce and industry provided the Crown with a strong disincentive to violate or abrogate the common law; yet with the steadily growing financial pressure on the royal treasury in the late 16th century, the maintenance of state power came increasingly to require the diversion of the profits of English capitalism into the government's coffers. The means by which the Elizabethan state attempted this diversion—ad hoc financial and commercial regulation, extra-parliamentary taxation and forced loans that were never repaid—brought it into direct conflict with the necessary predictability and inviolability of the common law, and those profiting from the new economy were quick to invoke those principles in their own interest. Even Hake, who was by no means a wholehearted ally of the new capitalists (his revised Epieikeia was presented to King James), held that “concerning the subiect's goods, neither subsidyes, taxes, contributions nor loans are by the lawe to take hold thereof or to be imposed upon any Englishe subiect without his free consent”; thus “any seisures to be made of an Englishe subiect's goods to the King's use withowt iust and lawfull tytle” were not to be considered (83-84).

Coupled with the ideological prestige of the common law's status as England's unique and indigenous legal heritage (insightfully described by J. G. A. Pocock), the Crown's reliance on the new economy made a royal attack on the common law in general both undesirable and impracticable. Instead, the Crown for the most part restricted its response to the particular instances in which the common law was used to oppose the Crown's will: thus while common-law tacticians cast their legal resistance to the state's unpopular financial devices as the defense of property rights against royal tyranny, the Crown countered by depicting that resistance as the economically self-interested misuse of the law contrary to the unity, order and security of the state. Equity, as the theoretical remedy for injustice produced by the misuse of the law, was consequently an essential component of the Crown's legal arsenal. While other legal weapons like the royally-dominated ecclesiastical courts, Star Chamber and the considerable direct prerogative power of the ruler himself would provide the Crown with greater practical power in the increasingly contentious years leading up to the Civil War, equity's established jurisprudential credentials allowed it to become one of the Crown's earliest and most powerful ideological tools in its efforts to stave off the political implications of capitalism's use of the common law.

Seen in this light, the broader social conflict behind the common-law/equity dispute is not the primarily economic battle between capitalism and feudalism, but the primarily political battle between two socioeconomic factions for the spoils of the nascent capitalist economy. These two factions were defined less by social status (aristocracy versus gentry or nascent bourgeoisie) than by a combination of economic interest and ideological affiliation. On one side were the merchants, financiers, landed gentry and even aristocrats who profited directly from the new economy and who perceived their interests—financial and otherwise—to be at least on occasion different from the Crown's (Stone, Causes 114-15). This group may be designated the “rising class,” provided that we understand “rising” primarily in the economic rather than social sense and “class” as a taxonomy based on neither birth nor wealth but on economic activity.

Their opponents were the large landowners—Crown and older aristocracy—that for reasons both economic and social had been unable to adapt their financial practice to the new economy and who were consequently forced into an increasingly parasitical relationship to that economy—the Crown in the ways discussed above and the aristocracy as royal clients competing for monopolies and state offices (Tawney 9-13; Stone, Crisis 199-207). Despite the growing challenge posed by the rising class, this second group may still be referred to as the period's ruling class, for since Henry VII and Henry VIII subjugated the great noble families to the Crown, this royal-aristocratic bloc had wielded a nigh-hegemonic political and social power which in the late 16th century continued to hold most of the nation under its official or ideological sway.

Thus, while the immediate stakes in the conflict between the two groups were financial, the ultimate prize was much greater: the ability of the independent rising class to use the common law to thwart the sociopolitical will of the ruling class. Not simply a clash of legal principles or jurisdictions, the contest between common law and equity was one of the first and most important sites of the conflict between the rising and ruling classes that would climax (but not conclude) with the Civil War. As one of the earliest articulations—literary or otherwise—of this ideological struggle, the victory of Portia in the trial scene of The Merchant of Venice is not a simple reflection of a jurisprudential dispute or an all-but-complete economic shift but rather a highly partisan intervention in a growing cultural crisis.

As in the contemporary legal dispute, the trial's battle lines are drawn not between capitalism (Venice) and feudalism (Belmont), but between the socially and politically independent rising class (Shylock the Jew) and the ruling class and its ideological allies (the Christian aristocrats and Antonio). Even before the trial scene itself, the play makes clear that its target is neither capitalism nor common law per se. In response to Solanio's certainty that the Duke will void Shylock's bond, Antonio pointedly establishes not only the close connection between common law and nascent capitalism but also the importance of both to the economic survival of the state:

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)

During the trial, the legality of the contract itself, exemplar of both capitalist economics and common law, is never challenged: Antonio “confesses” the bond (181-82) and Portia declares, “Why, this bond is forfeit” (230)—that is, forfeited by Antonio upon his nonpayment. Instead, Shylock is vilified for the particular use to which he puts the law of contract: the enforcement of the bond's horrific stipulations at the expense of the Christian “royal merchant” Antonio.

The trial scene opens with a reassertion of its central sociopolitical division. Referring to Antonio by name, the Duke says: “I am sorry for thee” (3); the merchant responds by acknowledging the pains the Duke and the other “magnificoes” have already taken on his behalf (7-9; see also 3.2.279-83). Shylock, in contrast, is first referred to simply as “the Jew” (14), an epithet used throughout the trial to underline his social alienation. Despite (or more precisely because of) its prominence in the play's definition of his character, Shylock's religion is not to be taken at face value, but rather as an exemplary illustration of the play's mediation of Elizabethan sociopolitical reality for presentation on the stage. Without dismissing the importance of the considerable literature debating The Merchant of Venice's anti-Semitism, I would argue that it is difficult to see Shylock primarily as a representative of Judaism. Shylock's Jewishness throughout the play is less theological than cultural: he is not identified by (and reviled for) his failure to accept Christ or the New Testament, but by his “Jewish gaberdine,” his unwillingness to dine with his Christian business associates and especially his usury—in short, his social, economic and ideological alienation from Venice's dominant sociopolitical group.

Rather than a transparent religious designation, Judaism (certainly a flexible signifier in an England virtually devoid of professed Jews) functions in the play as a derogatory marker for a group extant but not fully delineated in the cultural consciousness of the late 16th century, a group characterized by its economic self-interest and its willingness to further that interest by opposing itself to the dominant social ideology: the rising class. If the play partakes in contemporary anti-Semitic stereotypes (greed, social separatism), it does so not in the service of their own furtherance, but in order to transfer those negative associations from the religious to the socio-economic sphere.

The Duke's first speech to Shylock (17-34) employs this transference in linking the trial's economic foundations to its larger social significance. Lacking the prerogative power to pardon Antonio—a power that belonged to the ruler only in criminal cases—the Duke resorts to the considerable extra-legal social power wielded by the ruling class. Antonio's financial straits, he says, should elicit pity and mercy not only from Christian hearts, but “from stubborn Turks, and Tartars never train’d / To offices of tender courtesy” (32-33). The Duke offers Shylock the following choice: either to remain more alien than even the Turks and Tartars in pursuing his suit, or to enter—as has Antonio—the hegemonic penumbra of the aristocracy by changing his pagan “malice” for Christian “courtesy” and economic cooperation. The full weight of the social pressure that the ruling class could bring to bear upon a recalcitrant individual is focused in the speech's final line (particularly in light of the recurring pun on gentle/gentile): “We all expect a gentle answer, Jew!”

In the not-too-distant Tudor past such a threat might well have proven the trump card that the Duke intends it to be. By the 1590s, however, the inviolability of the common law was providing the rising class with an increasingly effective shield with which to resist the Crown's efforts to assert its will over the law. Shylock's response to the Duke links the common law's economic domain, its class affiliation and its ideological status as foundation of the state:

                              by our holy Sabaoth have I sworn
To have the due and forfeit of my bond.
If you deny it, let the danger light
Upon your charter and your city's freedom!

(36-39)

Throughout the trial scene, Shylock invokes the shield of the common law in the face of Christian attempts to coerce or cajole him by emphasizing his social exclusion or offering him inclusion at the price of his bond. “Till thou canst rail the seal from off my bond,” he admonishes Gratiano, “Thou but offend'st thy lungs to speak so loud. / … I stand here for law” (139-42).

The lack of formal social submissiveness and regard for hierarchical distinctions implicit in both the substance and the tone of Shylock's response to his aristocratic opponents suggests the ultimate consequence of his common-law defense: the weakening of the sociopolitical hegemony that preserved royalist-aristocratic privilege. In keeping with the play's ideological agenda, this use of the law is presented as a threat to the safety and stability of a Venetian society whose social and juridical similarities to late 16th-century England would not be overlooked by a contemporary audience. This threat is clearest in Shylock's famous “Hath not a Jew eyes” speech (3.1.53-73).

Read in context—as a response to Salerio's suggestion that Shylock has nothing to gain by enforcing the bond—the speech is not the appeal to universal brotherhood it is often taken to be. Antonio's hostility towards Shylock is rooted in the latter's social alterity—“You call me misbeliever, cut-throat dog, / And spet upon my Jewish gaberdine” (1.3.111-12)—and it is this distinction between Jew and Christian that the speech rhetorically effaces. The result of this effacement, however, is not a pledge of mutual forbearance but a promise of retaliatory violence: “And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that” (3.1.66-68). For Shylock, the bond's utility is not economic—“A pound of man's flesh,” he tells Antonio and Bassanio, “Is not so estimable, profitable neither, / As flesh of muttons, beefs, or goats” (1.3.165-67)—but sociopolitical, through its power as an instrument of the common law to nullify the class privilege that protects Antonio from Shylock's vengeance. This association between the common law and violent social disruption is a crucial element of the play's ideological work.

The ruling class's response to Shylock's threat is presented by Portia. She begins by acknowledging both the validity of the bond (177-79) and the ideological power of the common law's promised consistency that underpins Shylock's confident intransigence. In reply to Bassanio's appeal to the Duke to “Wrest once the law to your authority” (215) she insists:

It must not be, there is no power in Venice
Can alter a decree established.
’Twill be recorded for a precedent,
And many an error by the same example
Will rush into the state. It cannot be.

(218-22)

Consequently, her solution to Shylock's legal challenge—“Then must the Jew be merciful” (182)—at first seems identical to the Duke's. The mercy Portia seeks, however, is not the Duke's unconditional Christian mercy. While the Duke demands that Shylock forgive Antonio not only the interest owed but “a moi’ty of the principal” as well (26), Portia seeks not the abandonment of the bond but its payment, with justifiable interest, in place of the legal but abhorrent penalty Shylock demands. “Be merciful,” she tells Shylock, “Take thrice thy money, bid me tear the bond” (233-34). It was precisely this type of mercy—that which does not mitigate justice for the sake of pity but mitigates (common) law for the sake of true justice—that the courts of equity claimed to dispense. Knight notes the distinction: “The ‘mercy’ of the High Court of Chancery's equitable decisions by the Lord Chancellor is not to be confused with … simple clemency or empathetic pity … for William West says: ‘there is a difference between Equitie and Clemency: for Equitie is alwaies most firmly knit to the evil of the Law which way soever it bends, whether to clemency, or to severity’” (“Equity” 95-96). Many in the play's contemporary audience would have recognized Portia's suggested compromise—the payment of appropriate interest rather than the contractually stipulated forfeiture—as a solution typical of the equity courts of the day (Keeton 137).

Like Shylock's use of common law, Portia's invocation of equity has social as well as legal significance. According to the theory of equity which emerged during Elizabeth's reign, while equitable mercy assured the justness of the law, equity's own justness was in turn guaranteed by its origin in the royal conscience (Thorne viii). The monarch's conscience itself was validated by his role as the earthly conduit for divine justice, which by virtue of its source was necessarily superior to, and thus the ultimate venue of appeal from, the merely human common law. William Lambarde, in his Archeion, writes:

And considering that the Prince of this Realme is the immediate minister of Iustice under God, and is sworn at his Coronation, to deliver to his subjects aequam & rectam Iustitiam; I cannot see how it may otherwise be, but that besides his Court of meere Law, he must either reserve to himselfe, or referre to others a certaine soveraigne and preheminent Power, by which he may both supply the want, and correct the rigour of that Positive or written Law. … if onely streight Law should bee administred, the helpe of GOD which speaketh in that Oracle of Equitie, should be denyed unto men that neede it.

(42-44)

Accordingly, the court of Chancery was considered the “court of the King's conscience,” its Chancellor deputized by the monarch to implement the justice of the royal will, correcting when necessary the injustices perpetrated by the common law by overruling the decisions of its courts. Contrary to the levelling effect of the common law that placed even the sovereign under the law, this construction of legal authority offered a hierarchical ideology which situated the monarch at the terrestrial pinnacle of the legal system.

Portia's response to Shylock's use of the common law is thus the jurisprudential reassertion of the fundamental value and necessity of social hierarchy, replacing his vision of inter-class violence with one of royally-regulated harmony. It is in this light that we must understand Portia's famous “quality of mercy” speech:

The quality of mercy is not strain’d,
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath. It is twice blest:
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes.
’Tis mightiest in the mightiest, it becomes
The throned monarch better than his crown.
His sceptre shows the force of temporal power,
The attribute to awe and majesty,
Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings;
But mercy is above this sceptred way,
It is enthroned in the hearts of kings,
It is an attribute to God himself;
And earthly power doth then show likest God's
When mercy seasons justice.

(184-97)

Mercy, in short, descends from heaven into the heart of the monarch, allowing him to fulfill his role as the terrestrial conduit of God's justice, with which he “seasons” flawed human justice. In addition to justifying ideologically the supremacy of royal equity, however, Portia's speech also makes clear its practical implications. Her juxtaposition of the monarch's divine equitable authority with his “temporal power” sets up the speech's concluding union of Christian piety and realpolitik intimidation: “We do pray for mercy, / And that same prayer doth teach us all to render / The deeds of mercy” (200-02). The power that equity gives to the Crown by reinstating royal will as the ultimate legal authority assures that one can no more hope to prosper without the king's mercy than without God's, and that one who hopes for such mercy should be prepared to make concessions of his own. Some seven years after the play's composition, King James would make this same point less subtly in his July 1604 rebuke to a recalcitrant Parliament: “Justice I will give to all, and favour to such as deserve it … in cases of equity, if I should show favour, except there be obedience, I were no wise man” (qtd. in Kenyon 60).

While Portia replaces the social coercion of the Duke's Christian mercy with an equitable mercy which responds to Shylock's legal defense in kind, the ramifications of both threats are the same for him. To accept Portia's equitable resolution is to surrender his equal legal standing and accede to the existence of a higher legal and social authority. Not surprisingly, then, Shylock spurns Portia's veiled threat, preferring to rely on the power of his position under the common law to indemnify him from the need for royal mercy: “By my soul I swear / There is no power in the tongue of man / To alter me: I stay here on my bond” (240-42). What follows is one of the most dramatic—and ideologically potent—scenes in Shakespearean comedy, in which judgment is pronounced not once but twice, juxtaposing for the audience the results of the competing legal philosophies presented in the first half of the scene.

Portia's deliberations proceed first in accordance with the common law. When she declares the bond forfeit, Shylock esteems her for her knowledge of the law, suggesting the common law's justification of its judges' authority not by their own discretion but by their preeminent ability to administer consistently a time-tested body of law: “It doth appear you are a worthy judge; / You know the law, your exposition / Hath been most sound” (236-38). As the impartiality of the common law requires, Portia's ruling is pointedly faithful to the law of contract, despite her personal desire to offer mercy:

Por:
… lay bare your bosom.
Shy:
Ay, his breast,
So says the bond, doth it not, noble judge?
“Nearest his heart,” those are the very words.
Por:
It is so. Are there balance here to weigh
The flesh?
Shy:
I have them ready.
Por:
Have by some surgeon, Shylock, on your charge,
To stop his wounds, lest he do bleed to death.
Shy:
Is it so nominated in the bond?
Por:
It is not so express’d, but what of that?
’Twere good you do so much for charity.
Shy:
I cannot find it, ’tis not in the bond.

(252-62)

Alongside this emphasis on the strict legality of the procedure, however, is the no less insistent emphasis on the materiality of its outcome: the mutilation and almost certain death of Antonio. Present throughout the trial scene, this linking of common-law principle to its horrific results is unmistakable as the scene reaches its climax. As Shylock approaches Antonio with whetted knife, Portia again reminds us that what we see is the result of the court's obligation to proceed according to the law: “The law allows it, and the court awards it” (303). The result is a vivid and ideologically charged illustration of the irrelevance of the common law's human consequences to its inflexible requirements.

The clear injustice of this strictly legal proceeding is, of course, precisely what the flexible, case-specific judgments of the courts of equity claimed to remedy. Before Shylock can strike, Portia halts him—“Tarry a little, there is something else” (305)—and the trial shifts from the procedures of a common-law court to those of equity. Portia's famous “quibble”—Shylock may have his pound of flesh according to the bond, but on the condition that “if thou dost shed / One drop of Christian blood, thy lands and goods / Are by the laws of Venice confiscate / Unto the state of Venice” (309-12)—is a stratagem typical of the equity courts. While the common law traditionally held that if the law granted an individual a right (including the right to take possession of property) it also granted him the means to exercise that right (Andrews 77nA), the courts of equity would often thwart a common-law award by placing such stringent restrictions and protections on the property to be seized as frequently to make the path of least resistance that taken by Shylock, the “voluntary” non-collection of the award (Andrews 66; Keeton 145). The relief and amazement, both on stage and off, at Portia's dramatic aversion of the travesty of justice almost perpetrated by the common law underscores the contrasting results of the two legal systems.

The audience's pleasure in Portia's victory is heightened by the irony of her use of Shylock's insistence on strict interpretation against him: “For as thou urgest justice, be assur’d / Thou shalt have justice more than thou desir'st” (315-16). In doing so, however, Portia has vexed legal scholars by belying the equitable principle most often associated with the trial scene, the mitigation of the strict letter of the law through recourse to its gentler spirit. The reason for this seeming contradiction lies in the political significance of Portia's legal device. While the mitigation of the letter of the law by its spirit or intent was indeed a central tenet of traditional equitable jurisprudence, in Shakespeare's time it was chiefly associated not with royally-controlled equity but with the judges of the common-law courts. Throughout the 16th century, as the limitations placed upon the common law by its codification into written rules became apparent, its judges began to revivify a procedure utilized by their predecessors in the 13th and 14th centuries: the interpretation of a law based on its intent rather than its precise wording (Thomas 515-16). Such an approach was entirely congruent with common-law ideology, basing the authority of the common-law judges to interpret rather than simply apply the law on their unmatched knowledge of its history and principles.

The practice of common-law equity was, of course, opposed by the equity courts, whose authority was based on the inadequacy of the common law to the requirements of justice and the necessity of an alternate source of justice—royal conscience—to remedy that inadequacy. To correct the letter of the law with its spirit was merely to affirm the ultimate wisdom of the common law. For this reason the principle of intent is emphatically not the basis of Portia's equitable decision. Portia herself discounts intent as a means of correcting the defects of the letter of the law when she pointedly acknowledges that the spirit as well as the letter of the law supports Shylock's claim: “the intent and purpose of the law / Hath full relation to the penalty, / Which here appeareth due upon the bond” (247-49). As the play takes pains to indicate, the intent of the law of contract is to protect the sanctity of contracts from external interference in order to ensure the rights of those who do business in Venice, regardless of the specific contents of those contracts.

The principle that Portia applies in reaching her verdict is not the mitigation of the letter of the law by its spirit, but the equally venerable equitable doctrine which holds that equity may mitigate the unjust results of the law's necessary generality by taking into account the aspects of a specific case of which the law takes no notice. This conception of equity is traceable to Aristotle's Ethics, in which he argues that “all law is universal but about some things it is not possible to make a universal statement which shall be correct. … this is the nature of the equitable, a correction of law where it is defective owing to its universality” (133; bk. 5, ch. 10). Elizabethan advocates of the courts of equity argued that the common law, in its quest for comprehensiveness and consistency, must operate on a general level and thus could never be made to take account of the “collaterall circumstances” of individual cases (Hake 123). As a result, equity was both necessary and necessarily superior to the common law, overruling the latter when the application of its general rules to a specific case produced evident injustice.

It was this theory of equity that was at the heart of the Crown's claims to legal authority: for even if superior knowledge of both the letter and the spirit of the common law must be conceded to the common-law judges, the individualized requirements of justice were the province of conscience: “the examination of the case by circumstances … doth necessarily appertayne to the high courte of Chauncery … by an Equity that is drawne from the only conscience of the Lord Chauncellor” (Hake 123). The stipulations in Portia's ruling concerning the spilling of blood and the removal of an exact weight of flesh underline the gruesome specifics excluded from the common law's generality even as they correct the injustice produced by that exclusion. Neither the letter nor the spirit of the law make allowances for contracts like Shylock's; it is left to Portia and equity to mitigate the effects of the law's generality by considering the circumstances of the case at hand, overruling the requirements of the law in order to satisfy those of justice.

The sociopolitical consequences of equity's victory over the common law are immediately and decisively registered in the treatment of Shylock by a legal system once again under the control of the ruling class. During the first half of the interpretational contest, Portia in her role as common-law judge sets aside the scene's emphasis on Shylock's cultural difference, addressing him not as “Jew” but by name. The shift to equity, however, returns social difference and discrimination to the law, indicated by Portia's invocation of the statute specifically criminalizing the shedding of “Christian blood.” For the remainder of the trial Shylock goes unnamed, referred to only as “Jew” not merely by his avowed Christian enemies but also by Portia, the representative of justice. This connection between equity and social differentiation casts the freeing of Antonio as a reassertion of the distinctions between classes that Shylock's use of the law attempted to erase.

As Shylock tries to leave the court—“Why then the devil give him good of it! / I’ll stay no longer question”—he learns that “The law hath yet another hold on [him]” (345-47). Because Portia's equitable reading of the bond has disallowed the shedding of Christian blood as a contractually protected act, Shylock is guilty of attempted murder and thus subject under the criminal law to the forfeiture of life and property. The social basis of Shylock's predicament is suggested by the statute to which he falls prey, the law “against an alien, / That by direct or indirect attempts / [Seeks] the life of any citizen” (349-51).

Such a law is present in none of the sources of the pound-of-flesh plot; moreover, in the 16th-century England all felonies, including attempted murder, were punishable by death and loss of property no matter who the perpetrator (Auden 228; Keeton 146). There is thus no dramatic or historical justification for a law specifically targeting aliens except to emphasize the link between Shylock's social status and his fate forged by the power of the law to discriminate between—and against—social groups or classes: having resolutely maintained his status as cultural outsider, he now finds himself trapped by it. The pleasure we take in Shylock's resultant comeuppance reinforces the play's implicit rebuttal to the common law's central justification, the economic necessity of a law predictable and impartial even to the “strangers” whose “commodity” is so important to the nation. Punishing Shylock's abuse of the common law with a statute that explicitly discriminates against such “strangers” answers the economic arguments of the rising class by implying that despite its potentially deleterious effect on commerce a certain amount of regulation is necessary for the security and moral order of the state.

The reestablishment of the legal authority of the ruling class is complete when the statute places discretionary judicial power directly in the hands of the monarch: “the offender's life lies in the mercy / Of the Duke only” (355-56). Stripped of the common law's protection, Shylock is subject to Portia's earlier threat: his failure to grant mercy to Antonio puts him at the mercy of the Duke. That this mercy is not Portia's equitable mercy but instead the clemency which was the Crown's prerogative in criminal cases (as indicated by the Duke's use of the word “pardon” [369]) merely confirms the sociopolitical complicity of the two juristic principles.

Their legal power over him established, Shylock's antagonists immediately use it to nullify his socioeconomic threat: the loss of half of his wealth now to Antonio and the other half upon his death to Lorenzo places his economic power in the hands of the aristocracy and its allies, and his forced conversion symbolically completes his absorption by the dominant Christian-aristocratic culture. Notably, despite his earlier denunciation of Shylock's usury, Antonio makes no provision at this point to prevent its continuance; it would seem that the eventual appropriation of any profit made therein by the ruling class does much to mitigate usury's sinfulness. The Christians' true target is not Shylock's economic practice but the social and political ends to which it is employed.

Finally, the trial concludes with a further demonstration of the coercive power granted the Crown by the supremacy of equity that Portia intimates in the “quality of mercy” speech, as the Duke requires Shylock's acquiescence to Antonio's terms, “or else I do recent / The pardon that I late pronounced here” (391-92). Legally at the mercy of his enemies, Shylock can only accede to Portia's ironic query, “Art thou contented, Jew?” (393). Thoroughly humbled, he leaves the court not with the unregenerate curse of his attempted exit prior to the invocation of the law against aliens but with the entreaties of a broken man: “I pray you give me leave to go from hence, / I am not well” (395-96). The trial's last word, however, is given to Gratiano: “In christ’ning shalt thou have two godfathers: / Had I been judge, thou shouldst have had ten more, / To bring thee to the gallows, not to the font” (398-400). This taunting valediction, while reemphasizing the “mercy” granted Shylock in sparing his life, at the same time underlines the contingency of that mercy, suggesting how easily his fate could have been that which Gratiano prefers. That it was not is due less to the principles of equity than to the dramatic and ideological appropriateness of a punishment befitting Shylock's social and economic crime.

Seen from the dual perspective of legal and political history, the threat posed by Shylock to the Venetian social order is fundamentally the same threat that Lord Chancellor Ellesmere recognized nearly twenty years later in what was by then one in a growing number of legal challenges to the Crown's sociopolitical hegemony. Shylock's use of the common law represented to a contemporary audience a question not simply of jurisprudential principle, nor even of economic practice, but ultimately of “the power and prerogative of the King.” And despite the efficacy of his defeat at Portia's hands in defining and resolving the conflict for the theater-going public in the interests of royal authority, the ideological battle fought in Shylock v. Antonio would prove to be but an early skirmish in the war between the rising and the ruling classes that was to dominate the next century of English politics.

Notes

1. All quotations from The Merchant of Venice are from The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans. References to the trial scene (Act 4, scene 1) will be cited by line number only.

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