[In the following excerpt, Yaffe argues against the conventional view that the depiction of Shylock in The Merchant of Venice is anti-Jewish.]

The figure of Shylock is like some secondary figure in a Rembrandt painting. To look sometimes with absorption at the suffering, aging Jew alone is irresistible. But the more one is aware of what the play's whole design is expressing through Shylock, of the comedy's high seriousness in its concern for the grace of the community, the less one wants to lose the play Shakespeare wrote for one he merely suggested.

—C. L. Barber, Shakespeare's Festive Comedy

In this book I analyze the figure of Shylock, the unfortunate Jewish villain in Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice. My immediate aim is to challenge the widespread presumption that Shakespeare is, in the last analysis, unfriendly to Jews. In so doing, my larger hope is to rescue Shakespeare's play as a helpful guide for the self-understanding of the modern Jew.

What modern Jewish readers find most unpalatable and upsetting about the dramatic fate of Shylock is his forced conversion to Christianity. Shylock, a wealthy moneylender, is made to convert to Christianity as part of the surprising outcome of his personal lawsuit in retaliation against a Christian merchant, the play's title character. The merchant has been waging a vehement one-man crusade on the Rialto against him for his putatively un-Christian business practices. Shylock's harsh and humiliating punishment might be more merited, one suspects, if the moral and legal circumstances surrounding it were more clearcut. But they do not seem to be. Despite its otherwise happy ending or perhaps because of it, Shakespeare's Venetian comedy leaves us unsettled and perplexed over the place of the Jew in the modern city.

Shylock's offense in the eyes of the city is in the end not just civil or even religious. It is criminal. He has granted the merchant an emergency loan of three thousand ducats, interest free but with a sinister, life-threatening penalty clause for late payment. The penalty, for which Shylock eagerly sues, is a pound of the merchant's flesh. Yet his suit proves in court to be treasonous. It is tantamount to the seeking of a Venetian citizen's life by a resident alien—and is therefore punishable by death and by forfeiture of the offender's estate, half to his intended victim and half to the city. Nor is this all. Although the court mercifully waives the death penalty and offers to reduce the claim on its half of Shylock's estate, it soon withholds the waiver pending Shylock's agreement to a counterproposal by the merchant. The latter recommends extending the court's mercy even further. But he adds three constraints. In return for the city's forgiving all penalties, Shylock must now allow the merchant trusteeship over half his estate so long as Shylock lives, must immediately convert, and must designate the Christian bridegroom of his recently converted and eloped daughter as his sole heir. Even so, questions here arise.

To begin with, why does the court ignore Shylock's repeated subjection to publicly tolerated harassment concerning both his religion and his means of livelihood (personal lending, we might call it; loansharking, as Shakespeare's Venetians seem to regard it)? During the trial, moreover, why do spontaneous Jew-baiting outbursts from one of the merchant's friends go uncensured? And why does the court fail to forewarn Shylock about the imminent likelihood of self-incrimination, into which it eventually entraps him? Finally, why has the merchant, admittedly prominent and well liked in Venice, been allowed the final say to determine Shylock's punishment in accord with his own biblically inspired anti-usuriousness? In short, is not Christian Venice itself party to the abusive conduct of its citizens toward Shylock? Shakespeare's play makes us wonder: why can't the city just let Shylock be?

In order to know from the foregoing circumstances whether Shakespeare's play deserves its anti-Jewish reputation, we must face such questions and try to answer them squarely. Our task first and foremost is therefore to look in a scholarly way at the answers, if any, the play itself provides. In my view, the play's own remarkable answers have not been well understood or appreciated by modern scholars. Although it is reasonable to expect some help from the accumulated scholarly literature about the play, when we turn to it with our questions, we find that it has not succeeded very well in answering or even in facing them. A few recent examples will serve to illustrate.

Harold Bloom, in his introduction to an anthology of critical essays on Shakespeare's Shylock, castigates the playwright severely.¹ He calls the play “both a superb romantic comedy, and a marvelously adequate version of a perfectly Christian, altogether murderous anti-Semitism” (1). He is particularly incensed by Shakespeare's having inflicted on his antagonist a “false conversion,” an imposed acceptance of Christianity without any word of defiance or complaint (1f.). He finds Shylock's quiet acquiescence here dramatically implausible, on the grounds that Shylock is a “proud and fierce Jew” for whom conversion is entirely out of character. “We sooner could see Falstaff as a monk, than we can contemplate Shylock as a Christian” (2). Where Shylock's character lacks consistency, Shakespeare's art fails. Bloom the critic therefore turns to ad hominem speculation about the playwright's “agonistic context” and infers a “need to compete with and overgo Marlowe's superb villain, Barabas, the Jew of Malta” (5). Shakespeare, we are told, chiefly meant to outdo his literary rival in fashioning a vivid and memorable portrait of (what he took to be) a Jew. Yet in so doing, and especially in succeeding as well as he did, he could not help appealing to the ruling anti-Jewish prejudices of his Christian contemporaries. “In this one play alone,” Bloom concludes, “Shakespeare was very much of his age, and not for all time” (6).

Leaving aside the suggestive comparison with Christopher Marlowe's Jew of Malta …, I limit myself here to noting a significant omission in Bloom's summary description of Shylock as a “proud and fierce Jew.” How, we must ask, are we meant to understand Shylock's Jewishness? Neither Bloom in his introduction nor anyone he selects for his anthology has pursued this question very far—though it is central to Shakespeare's play.

Shylock's Jewishness first comes up in act I, scene iii, during his preliminary encounter on the Rialto with Bassanio, the young man for whose sake the merchant, Antonio, needs the emergency loan. When Shylock asks whether he might speak with Antonio directly, Bassanio at once invites him to dinner for that purpose. Evidently the young man does not expect what Bloom would undoubtedly characterize as Shylock's “proud and fierce” reply:

BASSANIO:
If it please you to dine with us.
SHYLOCK:
Yes, to smell pork, to eat of the habitation which your prophet the Nazarite conjured the devil into! I will buy with you, sell with you talk with you, walk with you, and so following; but I will not eat with you, drink with you, nor pray with you.

(I.iii.29-34)²

Yet from Shylock's point of view, his insistence that he will do business and otherwise associate with Venice's Christians but will not eat or drink or pray with them implies, in the first instance, not pride and ferocity so much as a strict loyalty to Jewish law, which among other things forbids eating pork (evidently a staple in Shakespeare's Venice)³ and prescribes the prayers that Jews in particular must recite before eating and drinking. Shakespeare identifies Shylock's Jewishness here with his law-abidingness, that is, with his pious deference to the legal demands of Jewish orthodoxy.⁴ Even so, in act II, scene v, when Shylock next appears, we are given occasion to question the steadfastness of Shylock's piety.

Once the terms of the loan have been agreed on and sealed, Shylock returns home to tell his daughter that he has decided to accept an invitation to eat at Bassanio's after all, albeit “in hate” and for an ulterior motive:

I am bid forth to supper, Jessica.
These are my keys. But wherefore should I go?
I am not bid for love; they flatter me.
But yet I'll go in hate, to feed upon
The prodigal Christian.

(II.v.11-15)

Shylock's ulterior motive, “to feed upon / The prodigal Christian,” is connected as well with a second reason for having returned home, namely, to announce to his household servant that he will gladly let him switch to the “prodigal” Bassanio's employment:

The patch is kind enough, but a huge feeder,
Snail-slow in profit, and he sleeps by day
More than the wildcat. Drones hive not with me;
Therefore I part with him, and part with him
To one that I would have him help to waste
His borrowed purse.

(II.v.44-49)

Shockingly enough, the motive for which Shylock is prepared to give over his household servant and which is, at least in part, a further extension of that for which he is prepared to suspend his observance of the dietary laws is that of “help[ing] to waste / [Bassanio's] borrowed purse.” Shylock's intent to add to Bassanio's overhead in these ways would have the net effect of increasing the likelihood, however slim, of Shylock's extending yet another loan for Bassanio, this time interest bearing, or even under certain conditions (which almost do transpire) of his collecting on his sinister penalty clause with Bassanio's benefactor. At this point, Bloom might well wish to raise the larger question of whether Shakespeare means to imply that Jewish orthodoxy sanctions hatred or revenge against non-Jews; yet as we shall soon see, it is a question the play answers sufficiently clearly in the negative. Meanwhile, contrary to Bloom, we must say that far from simply succumbing to putative Elizabethan stereotypes concerning Jews, Shakespeare evidently understands both Shylock's piety and his departure from it (which appears to begin well before the forced conversion) by the standards of Jewish orthodoxy itself.

But Bloom notwithstanding, whether or not Shakespeare's play is anti-Jewish cannot be decided by a single argument. Controversy over the treatment of Shylock is not confined to questions of character but permeates the entire fabric of the play. With an eye to the considerable range of disagreement about the play among scholarly critics, John Lyon, in his monograph on The Merchant of Venice in Twayne's New Critical Introductions to Shakespeare, sounds a timely warning against one-sided readings.⁵

The play has suffered from the aggressive justifications of its champions no less than the dismissals of its detractors. It seems a rich play where the potential multiplicity of meanings is in excess of any full realization. And to actualize any single interpretation of the play is to stress, and perhaps overstress, one of its parts at the cost of ignoring or doing violence to parts of the play developing in other, equally interesting ways.

(5)

Lyon's book calls attention, in general, to the rich mix of particulars as the playwright meant us to savor them. He is properly averse to scholarly arguments that would, in effect, dissolve those particulars into thick generalities for the sake of some bland unifying gloss that looks good from a distance. At the same time, we are admonished that the particulars of the play themselves solicit our subsequent wonderment and inference: “The Merchant of Venice is no piece of theatrical ephemera: the play is of a substance to merit and require the kinds of sustained recollection and speculation which occur subsequent to our enjoyment of the play in the theatre” (105). Lyon therefore proposes to “characterize, rather than resolve, the play's puzzles” and to “raise questions about the limits of plausible interpretation” (5). Proceeding somewhat idiosyncratically, the central chapters of his book may be described as a freewheeling tour of Shakespeare's plot, which sometimes fends off, sometimes embraces the views of scholarly critics, depending on whether they block or widen a scenic path through the play's main contours. Lyon justifies his procedure by the assertion that the play is “not finished” (8). He finds its dramatic action unpolished and its philosophical perplexities left unresolved. Hence, he infers, it is best approached tentatively, as a play-in-progress, whose chief merit is to testify to the creative and provocative genius of its author.

The practical result of Lyon's argument, however, would seem to be the opposite of the full openness to the dramatic and philosophical richness of the play which he has intended. Instead of encouraging us to venture wide eyed and alert into the play's “puzzles,” guided above all by Shakespeare's many-layered text, Lyon effectively discourages us from making the necessary effort to explore whether any one speculation is better than another so far as an understanding of the play as a whole (at least as we have it) is concerned. By simply denying that the play is a finished whole, he denies to us from the outset any standard for judging which interpretations are good or better or best beyond our private fancies. And yet that same denial scarcely prevents him (or anyone else) from interposing judgments that may well block our view of the richness of what Shakespeare has left us.

A single example must suffice. Lyon rightly disputes the answer offered by Harold C. Goddard to one of the questions I began by raising, about the propriety of the Venetian court's legal entrapment of Shylock—at the hands, moreover, of a surprise amicus curiae (secretly Bassanio's newly wedded wife, Portia, in disguise): why “didn't she invoke immediately the law prescribing a penalty for any alien plotting against the life of any citizen of Venice instead of waiting until she had put those she supposedly loved [namely, Bassanio and, by extension, his benefactor] on the rack?”⁶ To Goddard's hastily advanced claim that “the only possible answer is that she wanted a spectacle, a dramatic triumph with herself at the center,” Lyon fittingly adds that there may be forensic reasons as well: “With an opponent as legalistically precise as Shylock, Portia needs as much evidence of the reality of Shylock's malevolent intent as he can be brought to give, and it is perhaps only at the last moment that the last-moment solution can be safely and effectively revealed” (105).

Nevertheless, faithful to his general caveat that any solution to a given “puzzle” in the play can be only tentative, Lyon immediately expresses his misgivings about what he has just said and meanwhile drops the issue—except to salvage what he takes to be one incontrovertible point. “Certainly,” he assures us, “Portia suffers when considered with hindsight” (ibid.). Yet the assurance Lyon offers follows not from the particulars of Portia's actions during the trial but rather from the doubtful premise that he accepts without argument from Goddard, that Portia's actions are largely self-centered. In her admonitory speech to Shylock about the “quality of mercy” (IV.i.182-203), however, Portia emphasizes that her actions are guided not only by the legalities of the case, of which she is evidently the master, but also by justice seasoned with mercy (cf. IV.i.200f.). Contra Goddard, the prospect therefore opens up that Portia's cross-examination of Shylock, while fulfilling the obvious requirements of justice, is at the same time a high-minded act of mercy on the part of someone, indeed the only one in the courtroom, who knows the law. As I argue later, Portia's words give Shylock himself every opportunity to render a spectacular act of mercy so as to render nugatory the law under which she alone knows he stands guilty. Recalling Lyon's previous words (105), we cannot help wondering whether his offhand suppression of this possibility is a consequence of his unsupported insistence that our receptiveness to the play's details and our thinking about them are two separate things—an assumption belied by anyone whose attention is drawn to the thoughtful details of Portia's speech to begin with.

Lyon does not mention the only other full-fledged monograph on the play, Lawrence Danson's, which might have provided him with a direct challenge to the view that The Merchant of Venice lacks a dramatic unity.⁷ Danson argues for its unity on the basis of “the fact that the play was written by a Christian for a Christian audience, and that it is about Christian issues” (13). According to Danson, Shakespeare's Christianity does not narrow but broadens his understanding of things; it is “an amplifier, not a deadener of conceivable meanings” (15). Nor need we then presume that Shakespeare's thought is a prisoner of (the Christianity of) his time, for as in those plays that consider issues of kingship, “he is drawing upon ideas common to his time. But that is very different from saying that Shakespeare's ideas are common” (16). Against critics who would impute to Shakespeare a Christian teaching that sets itself in opposition to Judaism and seeks to triumph over it, as mercy over justice or the New Law over the Old, he looks instead to the teaching of “completion or fulfillment” (17f.), that is, of the reconciliation or harmony of souls among themselves and with the divinely ordered cosmos. The main evidence, so far as Portia's aforementioned “quality of mercy” speech is concerned, is that the warrant for her appeal to the need for mercy to temper justice is the Lord's Prayer (66f.), whose theme as she understands it is common to both Jewish and Christian worship, as her words imply:

That, in the course of justice, none of us
Should see salvation. We do pray for mercy,
And that same prayer doth teach us all [sic] to render
The deeds of mercy.

(IV.i.197-200)

Danson's argument has the further merit of indicating why the play cannot end with Shylock's defeat in the trial scene of act IV but must conclude in the pastoral setting of act V, at the wealthy Portia's estate in Belmont. There the three newlywed couples—Portia and Bassanio, Portia's maid, Nerissa, and Bassanio's companion Gratiano, and Shylock's eloped daughter, Jessica, and her poet husband, Lorenzo—each for the moment at odds, soon become reconciled. In a moonlit setting under the stars, Lorenzo woos Jessica with a speech about cosmic harmony that prepares us for that reconciliation:

                                                            Look how the floor of heaven
Is thick inlaid with patens of bright gold.
There's not the smallest orb which thou behold'st
But in his motion like an angel sings,
Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubins;
Such harmony is in immortal souls;
But whilst this muddy vesture of decay
Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it.

(V.i.58-65)

The Christian overtones of Lorenzo's words are undeniable, as Danson points out (186f.): the stars are “patens” (or communion dishes); the harmonics of their geometrically ordered motions are angels' songs; and the reason we hear only intimations of those sounds is our “fallen” earthly condition.⁸

Nevertheless Danson does not take into account the chief evidence against his view, namely, that the play contains at least as many allusions to classical mythology and philosophy as to Christian doctrine. Lorenzo's speech about the harmony of the stars is a case in point, for the notion in terms of which that speech becomes intelligible—that the stars are embedded in invisible concentric spheres surrounding the earth—is ultimately of pre-Christian, Pythagorean origin. To be sure, Danson might easily reply that those same Pythagorean allusions are also found in certain Christian authors who have appropriated them, such as Boethius, to whom he refers briefly (187f.). Still, to the claim that Shakespeare's Christianity is the play's final word there is a further objection from the play itself.

During the tense moments of the trial, when Shylock's insistence on the letter of the law seems to be holding sway, an outraged and frustrated Gratiano exclaims against what he takes to be Shylock's inhuman inflexibility:

O, be thou damn'd, inexecrable dog,
And for thy life let justice be accus'd!
Thou almost mak'st me waver in my faith,
To hold opinion with Pythagoras,
That souls of animals infuse themselves
Into the trunks of men. Thy currish spirit
Govern'd a wolf, who, hang'd for human slaughter,
Even from the gallows did his fell soul fleet,
And, whilst thou layest in thy unhallowed dam,
Infus'd itself in thee; for thy desires
Are wolvish, bloody, starv'd, and ravenous.

(IV.i.128-38)

It strikes Gratiano that Shylock's “currish spirit” is evidence for the pagan Pythagoras's view of the transmigration of souls between animals (in this case wolves) and humans. Exasperated, he is on the point of “waver[ing] in [his] faith” to accommodate that view. To Gratiano, at least, Christianity and Pythagoreanism are not simply compatible. Indeed, if Lorenzo is Gratiano's erstwhile teacher in these matters, as the play's description of their close companionship suggests (see I.i.69-71, 106ff.), the same may need to be said of Lorenzo's moonlit speech about harmony and perhaps other Christian-sounding speeches as well. Pace Danson, we shall have to explore how Shakespeare faces and seeks to resolve the evident tension between Christianity and philosophy in the play before we can determine to what extent or in what way its teaching may be said to be Christian.

This last would seem in part to be the aim of Edward Andrew, a political scientist, who also reads the play in the light of what he takes to be its implicit Christian teaching, though unlike Danson he finds that teaching one-sided and faulty.⁹ It is the teaching of Christian charity, which Andrew understands to mean the doing of acts of kindness or mercy to others with or without their consent. He follows the literary critic Harry Berger Jr., who adduces the term mercifixion to describe Shylock's forced conversion insofar as it is meant for his own good.¹⁰ Shakespeare's scriptural precedent here is said to be Luke 14:23: “Go out into the highways and hedges, and compel them to come in, that my house may be filled.” Andrew's interpretation is guided by an appeal to the authority of St. Thomas Aquinas, who appears to him to cite this verse in support of the church's position that it is just to compel unbelievers into the Christian communion. Meanwhile, Andrew also notices an opposing view in the play, which he finds spelled out only incompletely. It is the “possessive individualism” personified by Shylock.¹¹ As usurer, Shylock embodies the “heartless greed” and “limitless acquisitiveness” at the root of modern entrepreneurial capitalism (4). At the same time, in Shylock's attempts to justify his retaliation against his Christian tormentor, he anticipates the philosophical arguments for religious toleration later articulated in Benedict Spinoza's Theologico-Political Treatise (1670) and John Locke's Letter on Toleration (1689). Throughout, however, Shylock also shares in his own way the old-fashioned charitableness of his Christian persecutors. According to Andrew's admittedly unconventional analysis of the play, Shylock would like nothing better than to marry his daughter Jessica to a nice Jewish husband. Andrew's Shylock is therefore driven at bottom by a charitable wish to befriend the merchant in order to convert him to Judaism for that purpose.

But Andrew's attributing the merchant's own conversion-seeking zeal to traditional Christian teaching is overly hasty and seriously misleading. In the very passage that Andrew cites in support of his contention that Christianity authorizes the compulsory conversion of Jews, Thomas Aquinas emphasizes exactly the opposite. Here are Thomas's words in response to the question, “Whether the faithless are to be compelled to the faith?”

I respond that it should be said that certain of the faithless are those who have never taken up the faith, such as gentiles [i.e., pagans] and Jews. And such people are in no way to be compelled to the faith, in order that they might believe for themselves—since believing is a matter of the will. Nevertheless they are to be compelled by the faithful, if the means are there, in order that they not impede the faith, whether by blasphemies or by bad arguments or even by open persecutions. And on this account faithful Christians frequently make war against the faithless, not in order to compel them to believe (since even if they were to conquer them and hold them captive, they would leave them at their liberty concerning whether they wished to believe) but in order to compel them not to impede the Christian faith.¹²

According to Thomas, Jews and pagans alike are exempt from forcible conversion at the hands of Christians, though not from acts of force if they impede the Christian faith by means of slanders, dubious propaganda, or overt harassments. Even so, they are to be left “at their liberty” so far as matters of belief are concerned, if only that they might eventually come to Christian belief on their own. Because belief as such is voluntary, Thomas insists, neither Jews nor pagans can be forced into it.

True, immediately following the passage just quoted, Thomas goes on to justify the punishment of heretics and apostates. But these differ from non-Christians by being deviant and lapsed Christians, who have already put themselves under the authority of the church. In any case, Andrew overlooks Thomas's indication that “liberty” or tolerance is in some sense part of traditional Christian teaching. Despite what Andrew suggests, then, tolerance of Jews can hardly be said to receive its first, to say nothing of its best, philosophical treatment in the theologico-political arguments of Spinoza and Locke. Indeed, in looking later on at the speeches of Shylock to which he calls our attention, we shall have occasion to wonder how well such intimations of the case for religious toleration as Andrew rightly discerns in The Merchant of Venice can be understood in terms of the political and religious liberalism of those modern thinkers (as instructive as their arguments might otherwise prove to be). As the example of Pythagoras has already indicated, we shall have to weigh in addition the considerable merits of certain premodern philosophical and theological views that Shakespeare has evidently inherited from thinkers such as Thomas.

It is admittedly possible to read The Merchant of Venice as a Christian or quasi-Christian play and yet to defend Shakespeare's presentation of Shylock as being not quite so derogatory toward Jews as it might have been in the hands of another at that time—Marlowe, for example. Such is the approach of the literary journalist John Gross.¹³ Shakespeare, he writes, “simply tried to imagine, within the confines of his plot, and within the limits that his culture set him, what it would be like to be a Jew” (349). What is chiefly missing from Shakespeare's Shylock is any “hint … of an inner faith, or of religion as a way of life, as opposed to a set of rules” (45). In contrast, the Christian characters in the play are said to “have admirable ideals, and on the whole—in their dealings among themselves, as opposed to their dealings with Shylock—they live up to them” (350). However that may be, the result, to Gross at least, is “tragic,” inasmuch as the “anti-Semitism” shown by the other characters “coexists with so many admirable or attractive qualities” (351).

Thankfully, Shakespeare's Shylock is cut somewhat larger than his stereotype. Gross makes much of the playwright's investing his Jewish character with unforgettable habits of speech, including the staccato repetitions and symmetrical constructions of the money-lender's angry outburst promising revenge against the merchant:

—and what's his reason? I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that.

(III.i.50-59)

Gross comments: “Where else, in Shakespeare's time, can you find such sentiments?” (66). True, they are uttered in the service of an “inhuman purpose” (67). And they are followed by an ugly conversation with Shylock's own banker and fellow Jew, Tubal, who presses Shylock mercilessly with reports of looming financial disasters stemming from his eloped daughter's free spending and from the merchant's losses at sea. “Yet,” Gross insists, “nothing that happens in the rest of the play cancels out ‘Hath not a Jew?’ The words have been spoken; the stereotype will never be the same again” (ibid).

Unfortunately, the conclusion Gross would have us reach—that Shakespeare perhaps couldn't help being just a bit anti-Jewish—becomes plausible only if we overlook much of the detailed content of the play. Among Gross's dubious factual claims are that Shylock lacks any “inner faith” (here Harold Bloom seems on stronger ground) and that the Christian characters are by comparison meant to be admirable. (I shall have much to say on the latter point about Gratiano in particular, as well as about the merchant himself, later on.)

Most egregious, because most decisive for his argument, appears to be Gross's erroneous assertion that “at no point [in the play] does anyone suggest that there might be a distinction to be drawn between [Shylock's] being a Jew and his being an obnoxious individual” (351). Portia aside, to whom I have already referred, it is enough for the moment to quote the highest ranking authority of the court, the Duke himself, in his introductory plea for Shylock to show mercy to the merchant:

Shylock, the world thinks, and I think so too,
That thou but leadest this fashion of thy malice
To the last hour of act; and then 'tis thought
Thou'lt show thy mercy and remorse more strange
Than is thy strange apparent cruelty;
And where thou now exacts the penalty,
Which is a pound of this poor merchant's flesh,
Thou wilt not only loose the forfeiture,
But, touch'd with humane gentleness and love,
Forgive a moiety of the principal,
Glancing an eye of pity on his losses,
That have of late so huddled on his back—
Enow to press a royal merchant down
And pluck commiseration of his state
From brassy bosoms and rough hearts of flint,
From stubborn Turks and Tartars never train'd
To offices of tender courtesy.
We all expect a gentle answer, Jew.

(IV.i.17-34)

Here Antonio is said to deserve Shylock's “pity” in light of his overwhelming shipping losses, the putative cause of his failure to repay on time. In the circumstances, the Duke adds, Shylock ought to forgive not only Antonio's penalty but some of his principal too.

What are important here are the Duke's announced reasons for expecting some last-minute, out-of-court refinancing from Shylock. First, he says, everyone including himself believes that Shylock is merely stalling so as to make his eventual show of compassion more spectacular. That is, the Duke attributes to Shylock a sense of theatrics. Second, there is also the depressing magnitude of Antonio's reported losses—enough, as he says, to make even hardboiled, crudely raised observers act compassionately (Turks and Tartars come to the Duke's mind). Hence, he concludes, “We all expect a gentle answer, Jew.” The pertinent question is whether the Duke's concluding reminder that Shylock is a Jew means that he manifestly includes Jews among those who are by nature or upbringing ungentle. Two reasons suggest he does, but then again a third seems to override these. First, a pun on “gentle” yields “gentile,” implying that the Duke is seeking a gentile or un-Jewish answer from Shylock.¹⁴ Second, the Duke has already confided to Antonio privately that he considers Shylock incorrigible (IV.i.3-6). Still, third, the Duke, whatever his private opinion, cannot admit publicly that Shylock as Jew was “never trained” to be gentle that is, by Jewish law, without weakening his earlier argument that Shylock's apparent lack of compassion was a deliberate theatrical delay. The inescapable conclusion, then, is that the Duke is forced to give the public impression to Shylock and everyone else that Jewish law does after all teach moral decency, including compassion, and that Shylock, being uncompassionate, is simply being a bad Jew. Evidently Gross's approach, which (in contrast to, say, Danson's) looks not much further than the putative stereotypes Shakespeare is said to share with his contemporaries, blurs just that point in the Duke's speech which goes contrary to stereotype.

In other words, the Duke makes a public effort to compliment Shylock's Jewishness and pleads with him simply to live up to it. As with Portia's subsequent speeches in court, a possibility here emerges that is entirely different from any that Gross seems willing or able to acknowledge. Perhaps the possibility is best put by way of our denial of a remark made in passing by an articulate but overly sympathetic reviewer of Gross's book: “It was clearly not part of Shakespeare's conscious design,” writes Robert Alter, “to question the received wisdom of Christian hostility toward the Jews.”¹⁵ But the facts we adduce, and which Gross and others ignore, suggest just the opposite.

Even so, the question remains today to Shakespeare's apparent moral obtuseness, his lack of sensitivity (as we say) about Jews and Judaism, whether we ultimately ascribe to him a reformer's intention or not. Once the most obvious incidents of the play, such as we first take note of them, are seen for what they are morally, it is hard to resist interpreting The Merchant of Venice as a whole simply in their terms—that is, moralistically. How could anyone who writes such stuff, we tend to ask, have been very nice to Jews? The play undeniably draws from an appalling legacy of Jew-hatred in England from, say, 1290, when Jews were officially expelled, till at least 1753, when the ill-fated Jew Bill, as it was called, momentarily dropped professing the sacraments as a naturalization requirement and so opened citizenship to Jews, who had begun to be formally readmitted under Cromwell a century earlier. Perhaps the most convenient place to begin to acknowledge the bearing of that legacy here is James Shapiro's recent Shakespeare and the Jews.¹⁶ Shapiro draws from abundant references to Jews in chronicles, sermons, stories, plays, legal opinions, political tracts, and the like surrounding what he calls the “cultural moment” of the play's first staging (10). He disclaims any overall interpretation of the play, or of Shakespeare's private intentions, for that matter. Still, his comments on passages seen to dovetail with the historical evidence he adduces suggest much by way of innuendo which is morally damaging. Although the passages he cites are few and far between, they are worth listing, so that one can see both the force of the argument to which he contributes and its limitations.

That Jews sometimes suffered brutal reprisals for alleged ritual murders of Christians around Easter time, for example, serves to explain a report in the play of an ominous predawn nosebleed on “Black Monday,” or Easter Monday, by Shylock's clownish ex-servant, Launcelot, in his chatterbox cover-up of an impending elopement of Shylock's daughter, Jessica, and her Christian lover, Lorenzo (II.v.22-26) (258 n. 71). Launcelot's report resonates a few lines later during his coded message to Jessica, “There will come a Christian by / Will be worth a Jewess' eye” (II.v.40-41)—the “worth” here alluding less, Shapiro argues, to “the value of a lover than the revenge exacted upon the Jewish community for its crimes” (109). That Shakespeare's contemporaries were generally aware that there was no strictly female counterpart to male circumcision as the sign of Jews' covenant with God, moreover, explains the relative ease with which Jessica could break that covenant in marrying Lorenzo (120). And yet the short-lived contemporary belief that women's earrings could somehow substitute for ritual circumcision, Shapiro thinks, might explain Jessica's absconding with Shylock's jewels and Shylock's afterward lamenting that he would rather see her dead at his feet with the jewels in her ear (III.i.77-79) (ibid.). In any case, the further suspicion that a Jewess who could easily convert might just as easily revert to the old covenant seems to Shapiro to underlie the disturbing exchange between Jessica and Lorenzo comparing their hasty marriage to several thwarted love affairs of classical antiquity (V.i.1-24) (58f.). Finally, contemporary theological discussion over the meaning of “circumcision of the heart” in Paul's Letter to the Romans leads Shapiro to speculate that Shylock's insistence on a pound of Antonio's flesh might be a metonym for genital circumcision or even castration (114-21).

The historical import of these and other derogatory images of Jews, according to Shapiro, was to cast doubt over whether Jews could ever be trusted as fellow denizens, much less citizens, alongside Englishmen. To the extent that Shakespeare may be said to have given further currency to such images, he also seems to have lent them further credibility as his national stature rose. Or so Shapiro finds when looking at the public debate over the Jew Bill more than a century and a half later (195-224). The same images continued to be invoked by opponents of the bill, Shapiro notes, and led to its repeal barely two years after its passage, despite arguments in its favor drawn from more enlightened thinkers such as John Toland, Daniel Defoe, and John Locke. Shapiro leads us to infer, though he does not put it in so many words, that the bill might have had an easier time of it had Shakespeare thought better than to write The Merchant of Venice in the first place. For these and other moral reasons, he has no hesitation about calling the play “anti-Jewish” (216).

Here is where the limitations of Shapiro's argument become apparent. Assuming that the popular images as Shapiro describes them were as decisive politically as he suggests, there seems a further need to explain why Parliament itself was not altogether dazzled by them, at least for a time. Why, in short, did public life become as receptive as it was to the position in favor of tolerance of Jews as articulated by Toland, Defoe, Locke, and others? Here Shapiro is comparatively silent. It is testimony to the difficulty of this question that it would require him to widen the scope of the inquiry, to move from the narrower question of the popular prejudices latent and prevailing at a given hour (what Shapiro calls “cultural history”)¹⁷ to the broader question of how responsible statesmanship would have to discern and guide such prejudices on important public issues such as the Jew Bill.

Let us come closer to the point at hand. Given at least the modest success of enlightened statesmanship in 1753 in overcoming the derogatory images of Jews admittedly found in Shakespeare's then popular play, wouldn't we have to ask—as Shapiro does not—whether Shakespeare himself might have had enough statesmanlike insight to be able to anticipate and even encourage these same possibilities, however modestly, in his dramatic presentation of Shylock? The moment this question occurs to us, unless we simply decide to rule out certain answers beforehand, we are forced to look again at the manifestly derogatory things said of and by Jews in Shakespeare's play, to see whether they are indeed the play's last word or whether instead they might also call to mind other, more salutary images of the behavior of Jews—and of Christians—embedded as well in the psyches of his viewing and reading audience. But this last question can be answered one way or the other not by insinuation from evidence outside Shakespeare's play, but only by firsthand examination of the play itself. …

Notes

1. Harold Bloom, ed., Shylock, Major Literary Characters Series (New York: Chelsea House, 1991). Citations to this work and to those of other critics are given in the text.

2. I follow the text of the play as found in William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, 2d ed., ed. George Lyman Kittredge, rev. Irving Ribner, Kittredge Shakespeares (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1966). All citations are to that edition unless otherwise noted.

3. Cf. III.v.21-23, 30-33; IV.i.47, 54.

4. Cf. also IV.i.204, 221f., 226f., 233ff., 312.

5. John Lyon, The Merchant of Venice, Twayne's New Critical Introductions to Shakespeare (Boston: Twayne, 1988).

6. Harold C. Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare, 2 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), 1:109, as quoted in Lyon, Merchant of Venice, 105. Goddard's chapter is reproduced in H. Bloom, Shylock, 137-70; the sentence quoted is on 163; Goddard alludes in passing to III.i.32. Similarly, M. J. Landa, The Jew in Drama (reprint; Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat, 1968), 76f. On the other hand, Bernard Grebanier, The Truth about Shylock (New York: Random House, 1962), 282ff., correctly sees that Portia shows mercy to Shylock when exhorting him in effect to exculpate himself legally by showing mercy in turn to Antonio; but Grebanier misses the larger theological and political implications. Cf. chap. 3, sec. 5, and chap. 5, sec. 2, below.

7. Lawrence Danson, The Harmonies of The Merchant of Venice (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978). I omit from fuller consideration Grebanier, who defends the play on the too narrow grounds that Shakespeare understands his Shylock as a banker in conflict with a merchant prince rather than as a Jew in conflict with a Christian: “No one expects compassion from a bank” (Truth about Shylock, 213; cf. 95). See, however, I.iii.37, 41-43, with IV.i.17-34 and my remarks on Gross, below.

8. Danson here quotes S. K. Henninger, Touches of Sweet Harmony: Pythagorean Cosmology and Renaissance Poetics (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1974), 5.

9. Edward Andrew, Shylock's Rights: A Grammar of Lockean Claims (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988).

10. Harry Berger Jr., “Marriage and Mercifixion in The Merchant of Venice: The Casket Scene Revisited,” Shakespeare Quarterly 32 (1981): 155-62.

11. Andrew acknowledges his debt for the term to C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964).

12. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae II-II.10.8 (my trans.; my italics).

13. John Gross, Shylock: A Legend and Its Legacy (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992).

14. For a useful discussion of Shakespeare's “verbal usury” in the play, that is, his habit of generating added meaning from given words, see Marc Shell, Money, Language, and Thought: Literary and Philosophical Economics from the Medieval to the Modern Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 47-83.

15. Robert Alter, “Who Is Shylock?” Commentary 96, no. 1 (1993): 33.

16. James Shapiro, Shakespeare and the Jews (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996). Shapiro's larger argument disputes the suddenness and thoroughness of the expulsion of Jews under Edward II in 1290 and their readmission under Cromwell in 1656, partly because of the absence of hard documentary evidence in either case and partly because of Englishmen's ongoing fascination with, and abuse of, opinions about Jews in the meantime, as a foil for understanding what being English might mean for themselves.

17. Cf. ibid., 43, with 83, 110, 189 (“the play as a cultural safety-valve”), 228 (“The Merchant's capacity to illuminate a culture”).