SOURCE: Tanner, Tony. “Which Is the Merchant Here? And Which the Jew?: The Venice of Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice.” In Venetian Views, Venetian Blinds: English Fantasies of Venice, edited by Manfred Pfister and Barbara Schaff, pp. 45-62. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999.

[In the following essay, Tanner analyzes the three crucial locations in The Merchant of Venice—Antonio's Rialto Venice, Shylock's Venetian ghetto, and harmonious Belmont—and discusses the troubling elements of this romantic comedy that arise through the juxtaposition of these settings.]

see how yond justice rails upon yond simple thief. Hark in thine ear: change places, and handy-dandy, which is the justice, which is the thief?

(King Lear IV.vi.151-4)

When Portia, disguised as Balthasar, “a young and learned doctor”, enters the Court of Justice in The Merchant of Venice, her first, business-like, question is “Which is the merchant here? And which the Jew?” (IV.i.173) It is an astonishing question. We know that Shylock would have been dressed in a “gaberdine”, because, we are told, Antonio habitually spits on it. This was a long garment of hard cloth habitually worn by Jews who, since 1412, had been obliged to wear a distinctive robe extending down to the feet. Shylock would have been, literally, a ‘marked’ man (in a previous century he would have had to wear a yellow hat). Antonio, a rich merchant who, we are again told, habitually comes “so smug upon the mart” (where ‘smug’ means sleek and well-groomed, as well as our sense of complacently self-satisifed), is more likely to have been dressed in some of the ‘silk’ in which he trades (look at the sumptuously dressed Venetian merchants in Carpaccio's paintings to get some idea). It would have been unmissably obvious which was the merchant and which was the Jew. So, is that opening question just disingenuousness on Portia/Balthasar's part—or what?

The first act is composed of three scenes set in the three (relatively) discrete places, or areas, each of which has its distinct voices, values, and concerns. Together, they make up the world of the play. I will call these—Rialto Venice; Belmont (Portia's house, some indeterminate distance from Venice; probably best thought of as being like one of those lovely Renaissance palaces still to be seen in the Veneto); and Ghetto Venice (Shylock's realm: the word ‘ghetto’ never appears in the play, and, as John Gross has pointed out, Shakespeare makes no mention of it. But the name Ghetto Nuovo (meaning New Foundry) was the name of the island in Venice on which the Jews were, effectively, sequestered (and from which the generic use of ‘ghetto’ derives); and, clearly, Shylock lives in a very different Venice from the Venice enjoyed by the confident Christian merchants. Hence my metaphoric use of the name for what, in Shakespeare, is simply designated as ‘a public place’). The opening lines of the three scenes are, in sequence:

In sooth I know not why I am so sad.
It wearies me, you say it wearies you …
By my troth, Nerissa, my little body is aweary of this great world.
Three thousand ducats—well.

Sadness and weariness on the Rialto and in Belmont; money matters in the Ghetto. Is there any inter-connection? Can anything be done?

Antonio speaks first, which is quite appropriate since he is the ‘Merchant’ of the title—not, as some think, Shylock. Had Shakespeare wanted Shylock signalled in his title, he could well have called his play The Jew of Venice, in appropriate emulation of Marlowe's The Jew of Malta (1589), which was playing in London in 1596 when Shakespeare (almost certainly) started his own play, and which he (most certainly) knew and, indeed, deliberately echoed at certain key points (of which, more by and by). But Shylock is a very different figure from Barabas, who degenerates into a grotesque Machiavellian monster. In fact, Shylock only appears in five of the twenty scenes of the play; though he is, overwhelmingly, the figure who leaves the deepest mark—‘incision’ perhaps (see later)—on the memory. He shuffles off, broken, beaten, and ill—sadder and wearier than anyone else in Venice or Belmont—at the end of Act Four, never to return. But, while the triumph and victory belong unequivocally to Portia, it is the Jew's play.

However, Antonio is our merchant, and very Hamlet-ish he is, too. He sounds an opening note of inexplicable melancholy:

But how I caught it, found it, or came by it,
What stuff 'tis made of, whereof it is born, I am to learn …

(I,i,3-5)

We might later have a guess at at least some of the ‘stuff’ it is made of, but for now Salerio and Solanio (another of those effectively indistinguishable Rosencrantz-and-Guildenstern couples Shakespeare delights in—it offers another ‘which-is-which?’ puzzle in a lighter key), try to commiserate with him and cheer him up. And in their two speeches, Shakespeare—breathtakingly—manages to convey a whole sense of mercantile Renaissance Venice. Of course, they say, you are understandably worried—“your mind is tossing on the ocean”—about your “argosies” (a very recent English word for large merchant ships, coming from the Venetian Adriatic port of Ragusa—and also used in Marlowe's play). Salerio, packing all the pride and confident arrogance of imperial, incomparable Venice into his lines, imagines those ships as “rich burghers on the flood”, or “pageants [magnificent floats in festival and carnival parades] of the sea”, which

Do overpeer the petty traffickers
That cursy [curtsy] to them, do them reverence,
As they fly by them with their woven wings.

(I,i,12-14)

Other sea-faring traders are “petty traffickers”: Venetian merchants, attracting and exacting world-wide admiration and deference, are something quite superbly else. Solanio chimes in, evoking a merchant's necessary anxieties about winds, maps, ports, piers, and everything that, he says, “might make me fear / Misfortune to my ventures”—‘ventures’ is a word to watch. Salerio develops the theme, imagining how everything he saw on land would somehow remind him of shipwrecks:

Should I go to church
And see the holy edifice of stone
And not bethink me straight of dangerous rocks,
Which touching but my gentle vessel's side
Would scatter all her spices on the stream,
Enrobe the roaring waters with my silks—
And in a word, but even now worth this,
And now worth nothing?

(I,i,29-36)

“But now a king, now thus”, says Salisbury when he watches King John die, pondering the awesome mortality of kings (King John V,vii,60). In this Venice, there is much the same feeling about the loss of one of their argosies, monarchs (or burghers—it was a republic) of the sea as they were. And what a sense of riches is compacted into the lines imagining spices scattered on the stream, and waves robed in silk—an image of spilt magnificence if ever there was one.

It is important to note Salerio's reference to “church … the holy edifice of stone”. In one of those contrasts dear to artists, the stillness and fixity of the holy edifice of stone is to be seen behind the flying ships on the tossing oceans and flowing streams—the eternal values of the church conjoined with, and in some way legitimating, the worldly wealth-gathering of the sea-venturing, transient merchants; the spiritual ideals sustaining the material practices. For Venice was a holy city (the Crusades left from there), as well as the centre of a glorious worldly empire. It was an object of awe and fascination to the Elizabethans. Indeed, as Philip Brockbank suggested, Venice was for Renaissance writers what Tyre was for the prophet Isaiah—“the crowning city, whose merchants are princes, whose traffickers are the honourable of the earth” (Isaiah 23:8). But Tyre was also a “harlot” who made “sweet music”, and Isaiah prophesies that it “shall commit fornication with all the kingdoms of the world” (Venice was also famed, or notorious, for its alleged sensualities—in Elizabethan London there was a brothel simply named ‘Venice’). But, also this about Tyre:

And her merchandise and her hire shall be holiness to the Lord: for it shall not be treasured nor laid up; for her merchandise shall be for them that dwell before the Lord, to eat sufficiently, and for durable clothing.

(23:18)

Traditionally, religion is ascetic and preaches a rejection of worldly goods. But here we see religion and the ‘use of riches’ creatively reconciled—and by spending, not hoarding. As Tyre, so Venice. But there is, in Isaiah, an apocalyptic warning—that God will turn the whole city “upside down” and “scatter” the inhabitants—

And it shall be, as with the people, so with the priest … as with the buyer, so with the seller; as with the lender, so with the borrower; as with the taker of usury, so with the giver of usury to him. The land shall be utterly emptied, and utterly spoiled: for the Lord hath spoken this word.

(24:2,3)

Ruskin would say that that was effectively what did happen to Venice. But that is another story. The point for us here is that the Venetian setting of his play allowed Shakespeare to pursue his exploratory interest in (I quote Brockbank)

the relationship between the values of empire and those of the aspiring affections, human and divine; those of the City of Man and those of the City of God … between the values we are encouraged to cultivate in a mercantile, moneyed and martial society, and those which are looked for in Christian community and fellowship; between those who believe in the gospel teachings of poverty, humility and passivity, and those who (as the creative hypocrisy requires) pretend to.

Returning to the play, Solanio says that if Antontio is not sad on account of his “merchandise”, then he must be in love. Antonio turns away the suggestion with a “Fie, fie!”. As it happens, I think this is close to the mark, but we will come to that. Here Solanio gives up on trying to find a reason for Antonio's gloom—

Then let us say you are sad
Because you are not merry; and 'twere as easy
For you to laugh and leap, and say you are merry.

(I,i,47-9)

And he leaves with Salerio, who says to Antonio—“I would have stayed till I had made you merry”. ‘Merry’ is a lovely word from old English, suggesting pleasing, amusing, agreeable, full of lively enjoyment. “To be merry best becomes you,” says Don Pedro to the vivacious Beatrice “for out o' question, you were born in a merry hour” (Much Ado II,i,313-4)—and we feel he has chosen just the right word. The princely merchants of Venice favour the word, for, in their aristocratic way, they believe in ‘merriment’. It is an unequivocally positive word; it has no dark side, and carries no shadow. Yet in this play, Shakespeare makes it become ominous. When Shylock suggests to Antonio that he pledges a pound of his flesh as surety for the three thousand ducat loan, he refers to it as a “merry bond”, signed in a spirit of “merry sport” (I,iii,170,142). The word has lost its innocence and is becoming sinister. The last time we hear it is from Shylock's daughter, Jessica in Belmont—“I am never merry when I hear sweet music” (V,i,69). After her private duet with Lorenzo, nobody speaks to Jessica in Belmont and these are, indeed, her last words in the play. It is hard to feel that she will be happily assimilated into the Belmont world. Something has happened to ‘merry-ness’, and although Belmont is, distinctly, an abode of “sweet music”, a note of un-merry sadness lingers in the air.

When Bassanio enters with Gratiano, he says to the departing Salerio and Solanio, as if reproachfully, “You grow exceeding strange; must it be so?” (I,i,67) It is a word which recurs in a variety of contexts, and it reminds us that there is ‘strangeness’ in Venice, centring on Shylock, whose “strange apparent cruelty” (IV,i,21) is some sort of reflection of, response to, the fact that he is treated like “a stranger cur” (I,iii,115) in Venice. And he is, by law, an alien in the city—the stranger within. Gratiano then has a go at Antonio—“You look not well, Signior Antonio” (“I am not well”, says Shylock, as he leaves the play—IV,i,395: now the merchant, now the Jew. Sickness circulates in Venice, along with all the other ‘trafficking’).

You have too much respect upon the world;
They lose it that do buy it with much care.
Believe me, you are marvelously changed.

(I,i,74-6)

His scripture is a little awry here: what people lose who gain the whole world is the soul, not the world. A mondain Venetian's slip, perhaps. But we are more likely to be alerted by the phrase ‘marvelously changed’. Shakespearian comedy is full of marvellous changes, and we may be considering what transformations, marvellous or otherwise, occur in this play. In the event, the ‘changes’ turn out to be far from unambiguous ‘conversions’. Somewhere behind all these conversions is the absolutely basic phenomenon whereby material is converted into ‘merchandise’ which is then converted into money—which, as Marx said, can then convert, or ‘transform’ just about anything into just about anything else. It is perhaps worth remembering that Marx praised Shakespeare, in particular, for showing that money had the power of a god, while it behaved like a whore.

Jessica willingly converts to Christianity, hoping for salvation, at least from her father's house, but it hardly seems to bring, or promise, any notable felicity or grace. Shylock is forced to convert to Christianity—which, however construed by the Christians (he would thereby be ‘saved’), is registered as a final humiliation and the stripping away of the last shred of his identity. When Portia gives herself to Bassanio, she says:

Myself, and what is mine, to you and yours
Is now converted.

(III,ii,166-7)

and this is to be felt as a willing conversion, a positive transformation—just as she will, like a number of other heroines, ‘change’ herself into a man to effect some genuine salvation. Sad Antonio, it has to be said, is not much changed at all at the end—though his life has been saved, and his ships have come sailing in. Venice itself, as represented, is hardly changed; not, that is, renewed or redeemed—though it is a good deal more at ease with itself for having got rid of Shylock. If that is what it has done. One hardly feels that, as it were, the realm has been purged, and that the malcontent threatening the joy of the festive conclusion has been happily exorcised. The play does not really end quite so ‘well’ as that. It is not a ‘metamorphic’ celebration.

It is Bassanio's plea for financial help from Antonio that concludes the first scene, and the way in which he does so is crucial to an appreciation of what follows. He admits that he has “disabled mine estate” by showing “a more swelling port” than he could afford. ‘Swelling port’ is ‘impressively lavish life-style’, but I think we will remember the ‘portly sail’ of the Venetian argosies just referred to, also, no doubt, ‘swollen’ by the winds (cf the ‘big-bellied sails’ in A Midsummer Night's Dream). The Venetian princely way of life is both pregnant and distended—fecund and excessive. As Bassanio is, however inadvertently, recognising by using a key word: he is worried about his ‘great debts’

Wherein my time, something too prodigal,
Hath left me gaged.

(I,ii,1490-50)

Shylock calls Antonio a “prodigal Christian”, and it was always a fine point to decide to what extent ‘prodigality’ was compatible with Christianity (think of the parables of the Prodigal Son, and the Unjust Steward), and to what extent it contravened it. It is one of those words which look two ways, pointing in one direction to the magnanimous bounty of an Antony, and in the other to the ruinous squandering of a Timon. Clearly, the munificent prodigality of Antonio is in every way preferable to the obsessive meanness and parsimony of Shylock. But there is a crucial speech on this subject, tucked away, as was sometimes Shakespeare's wont, where you might least expect it. Salerio and Gratiano are whiling away the time in front of Shylock's house, waiting to help Lorenzo in the abduction of Jessica. Salerio is saying that lovers are much more eager to consummate the marriage than they are to remain faithful (‘keep obliged faith’) subsequently. “That ever holds” says Gratiano:

All things that are
Are with more spirit chased than enjoyed.
How like a younger or a prodigal
The scarfed bark puts from her native bay,
Hugged and embraced by the strumpet wind!
How like the prodigal doth she return,
With over-weathered ribs and ragged sails,
Lean, rent, and beggared by the strumpet wind.

(II,vi,12-19)

An apt enough extended metaphor in a mercantile society, and the Venetians must have seen many ship sail out ‘scarfed’ (decorated with flags and streamers) and limp back ‘rent’. It may be added that Gratiano is something of a cynical young blade. But the speech stands as a vivid reminder of one possible fate of ‘prodigality’, and of marriage. Ultimately of Venice too, perhaps.

Bassanio, whatever else he is (scholar, courtier) is a ‘prodigal’, and he wants to clear his ‘debts’. Antonio immediately says that “my purse, my person” (a nice near pun, given the close inter-involvement of money and body in this play) “lie all unlocked to your occasions” (I,i,139). This open liberality might be remembered when we later hear the frantically retentive and self-protective Shylock (a name not found outside this play) repeatedly warning Jessica to “look to my house … lock up my doors … shut doors after you” (II,v,16,29,52). The difference is clear enough, and need not be laboured. Antonio also positively invites Bassanio to “make waste of all I have” (I,i,157)—insouciantly negligent aristocrats like to practise what Yeats called ‘the wasteful virtues’. The contrast with ‘thrifty’ Shylock, again, does not need underlining.

But Bassanio has another possible solution to his money problems; one which depends on ‘adventuring’ and ‘hazard’.

In Belmont is a lady richly left;
And she is fair and, fairer than that word,
Of wondrous virtues …
Nor is the wide world ignorant of her worth,
For the four winds blow in from every coast
Renowned suitors, and her sunny locks
Hang on her temples like a golden fleece,
Which makes her seat of Belmont Colchos' strand,
And many Jasons come in quest of her.
O my Antonio, had I but the means
To hold a rival place with one of them,
I have a mind presages me such thrift
That I should questionless be fortunate!

(I,i,161-176)

Antonio, all his wealth at sea, at the moment has neither “money, nor commodity”; but he will use his “credit” to get “the means”. He will borrow the money from Shylock to finance Bassanio's quest of a second golden fleece. So it is that the seemingly discrete worlds of the Ghetto, the Rialto, and Belmont are, from the beginning, indeed, interinvolved.

Venice, as we have seen it and will see it, is overwhelmingly a man's world of public life; it is conservative, dominated by law, bound together by contracts, underpinned by money—and closed. Belmont is run by women living the private life; it is liberal, animated by love, harmonised by music and poetry (‘fancy’), sustained by gold—and open. However cynical one wants to be, it will not do to see Belmont as “only Venice come into a windfall” (Ruth Nevo). It is better to see it as in a line of civilised, gracious retreats, stretching from Horace's Sabine farm, through Sidney's Penshurst, Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, up to Yeats's Coole Park. As Brockbank said, such places ideally offered “the prospect of a protected life reconciling plenitude, exuberance, simplicity and order.” It was Sidney who said that “our world is brazen, the poets only deliver a golden”, and you might see Belmont as a kind of ‘golden’ world which has been ‘delivered’ from the ‘brazen’ world of trade and money. Yes, somewhere back along the line, it is all grounded in ducats; but you must think of the churches, palaces, art works and monuments of the Renaissance, made possible by varying forms of patronage, and appreciate that the “courtiers, merchants and bankers of the Renaissance found ways of transmuting worldly goods into spiritual treasure” (Brockbank). Belmont is a privileged retreat from Venice; but, as Portia will show, it can also fruitfully engage with it.

In scene two, we are in Belmont, and Portia is weary. Partly surely, because she must be bored stiff with the suitors who have come hopefully buzzing round the honey-pot—the silent Englishman, the mean Scotsman, the vain Frenchman, the drunken German, and so on, as she and Nerissa amuse themselves discussing their different intolerabilities. But, more importantly, because she is under the heavy restraint of a paternal interdiction (familiar enough in comedy, though this one comes from beyond the grave). She has been deprived of choice—and she wants a mate. Then we learn from Nerissa about the lottery of the casquets, which she thinks was the “good inspiration” of a “virtuous” and “holy” man. We shall see. But we note that, in this, Belmont (in the form of Portia) is as much under the rule of (male) law as Venice. There are “laws for the blood” in both places, and they may by no means be “leaped” or “skipped” over (I,ii,17ff.). In other comedies, we see inflexible, intractable, unmitigatable law magically, mysteriously melt away or be annulled. Not in this play. Here, the law is followed, or pushed, to the limit—and beyond. Indeed, you might say that Belmont has to come to Venice to help discover this ‘beyond’ of the law.

And now, in scene three, we are in Shylock's Venice; and we hear, for the first time, what will become an unmistakable voice—addressing, as it were, the bottom line in Venice: “three thousand ducats—well”. Shylock speaks in—unforgettable—prose, and this marks something of a crucial departure for Shakespeare. Hitherto, he had reserved prose for, effectively, exclusively comic (usually ‘low’) characters. With Shylock, this all changes. For Shylock is not a comic character. He has a power, a pain, a passion, a dignity—and, yes, a savagery, and a suffering—which, whatever they are, are not comic.

On his first appearance, Shylock establishes his ‘Jewishness’ by, among other things, revealing his adherence to Jewish dietary rules—“I will not eat with you, drink with you, nor pray with you” (I,iii,34-5). But when Antonio appears, Shylock reveals a darker side of his nature in an ‘aside’:

I hate him for he is a Christian;
But more, for that in low simplicity
He lends out money gratis, and brings down
The rate of usance here with us in Venice.
.....He hates our sacred nation, and he rails,
Even there where merchants most do congregate,
On me, my bargains, and my well-won thrift,
Which he calls interest. Cursed be my tribe
If I forgive him.

(I,iii,39-49)

Shylock gives three good reasons for his hating of Antonio—insofar as one can have good reasons for hatred: personal, professional, tribal. This is interesting in view of his response during the trial scene, when he is asked why he would not prefer to have ducats rather than Antonio's flesh:

So can I give no reason, nor I will not,
More than a lodged hate and a certain loathing
I bear Antonio …

(IV,i,59-61)

His opening exchange with Antonio really defines the central concern of the play, and is crucial. He has already mentioned ‘usance’ (‘a more cleanly name for usury’), ‘thrift’ (which means both prosperity and frugality—‘thrift, Horatio, thrift’), and ‘interest’. And ‘usury’, of course, is the heart of the matter. Any edition of the play will tell you that the law against lending money at interest was lifted in 1571, and a rate of 10٪ was made legal. Queen Elizabeth depended on money borrowed at interest, so did most agriculture, industry, and foreign trade by the end of the sixteenth century (according to R H Tawney). So, indeed, did Shakespeare's own Globe Theatre. Plenty of Christians lent money at interest (including Shakespeare's own father); and Bacon, writing “Of Usury” in 1625, said “to speak of the abolishing of usury is idle”. Antonio, scattering his interest-free loans around Venice, is certainly an ‘idealised’ picture of the merchant, just as Shylock sharpening his knife to claim his debt, is a ‘demonised’ one. But Aristotle and Christianity had spoken against usury, and there was undoubtedly a good deal of residual unease and ambivalence about it. Ruthless usurers were thus especially hated and abused, and since Jews were identified as quintessential usurious money-lenders, (and, of course, had killed Christ), they were available for instant and constant execration. This must certainly be viewed as a collective hypocrisy—one of those ‘projections’ by which society tries to deal with a bad conscience (not that Shakespeare would have seen many Jews in London; it is estimated that there were less than two hundred at the time). Shakespeare was not addressing a contemporary problem; rather, he was exploring some of the ambivalences and hypocrises, the value clashes and requisite doublenesses, which inhere in, and attend upon, all commerce.

The play is full of commercial and financial terms: ‘moneys’, ‘usances’, ‘bargains’, ‘credit’, ‘excess’ and ‘advantage’ (both used of usury and profit), ‘trust’, ‘bond’ (which occurs vastly more often than in any other play: curiously ‘contract’ is not used—Shakespeare wants us to focus on ‘bond’), ‘commodity’ and ‘thrift’. Launcelot Gobbo is “an unthrifty knave”, while Jessica flees from her father's house with “an unthrift love”. This last serves as a reminder that both here and elsewhere in Shakespeare the language of finance and usury could be used as a paradoxical image of love (happiness accrues and passion grows by a form of natural interest). You will hear it in Belmont as well as on the Rialto. When Portia gives herself to Bassanio, she, as it were, breaks the bank:

I would he trebled twenty times myself,
A thousand times more fair, ten thousand times more rich,
That only to stand high in your account,
I might in virtues, beauties, livings, friends,
Exceed account.

(III,ii, 153-7)

Rich place, Belmont; generous lover, Portia!

The absolutely central exchange occurs when Antonio and Shylock discuss ‘interest’, or ‘borrowing upon advantage’. “I do never use it” declares Antonio (what is the relationship between ‘use’ and ‘usury’? Another consideration.) Shylock replies, seemingly rather inconsequentially: “When Jacob grazed his uncle Laban's sheep. …” Antonio brings him to the point. “And what of him? Did he take interest?” Shylock seems to prevaricate: “No, not take interest—not as you would say / Directly int'rest” and then recounts the story from Genesis. This tells how Jacob tricked—but is that the right word?—his exploitative uncle, Laban: they agreed that, for his hire, Jacob should be entitled to any lambs, in the flocks he was tending, that were born “streaked and pied”. Following the primitive belief that what a mother sees during conception has an effect on the offspring, Jacob stripped some “wands” (twigs or branches), so that some were light while others were dark, and “stuck them up before the fulsome ewes” as the rams were impregnating them. In the subsequent event, a large number of “parti-coloured lambs” were born, which of course went to Jacob. Nice work; but was it also sharp practice? Or was it both, and so much the better? Or, does it matter? Not as far as Shylock is concerned:

This was a way to thrive, and he was blest;
And thrift is blessing if men steal it not.

(I,iii,86f.)

‘Ewes’ may be a pun on ‘use’; and for Shylock, it is as legitimate to use ewes in the field as it is to use usury on the ‘mart’. Not so for Antonio:

This was a venture, sir, that Jacob served for,
A thing not in his power to bring to pass,
But swayed and fashioned by the hand of heaven.
Was this inserted to make interest good?
Or is your gold and silver ewes and lambs?

(88-92)

And Shylock:

I cannot tell; I make it breed as fast.

(88-93)

Antonio's last line effectively poses the question of the play. It was a line often quoted, (or more often, slightly misquoted), by Ezra Pound in his increasingly unbalanced vituperations against usury and Jews. The root feeling behind it is that it is somehow unnatural for inorganic matter (gold, silver, money) to reproduce itself in a way at least analogous to the natural reproductions in the organic realm (“they say it is against nature for Money to beget Money”, says Bacon, quoting Aristotle). This enables Antonio to reject Shylock's self-justifying analogy: Jacob's story does not “make interest good”, because he was having, or making, a “venture”, and the result was, inevitably, “swayed and fashioned” by—heaven? nature? some power not his own. This, revealingly, was how Christian commentators of the time justified Jacob's slightly devious behaviour (as Frank Kermode pointed out)—he was making a venture. Antonio's ships are ‘ventures’, and Bassanio is on a venture when he ‘adventures forth’ to Belmont. It seems that the element of ‘risk’ (= to run into danger) and ‘hazard’ purifies or justifies the act. As ‘hazard’ was originally an Arabian word for a gaming die, this would seem to enable gambling to pass moral muster as well. Perhaps it does. Whatever, there is seemingly no risk, as well as no nature, in usury. Shylock's answer, that he makes his money “breed as fast”, is thought to tell totally against him; and Bassanio's subsequent remark, “for when did friendship take / A breed for barren metal of his friend?” (I,iii,130-1), is taken to orient our sympathies, and values, correctly. But this won't quite do.

Because, like it or not, money most certainly does ‘breed’. It may not literally copulate, but there is no way round the metaphor. Sigurd Burckhardt is the only commentator I have read who has seen this clearly, and he wrote: “metal [‘converted’ into money] is not barren, it does breed, is pregnant with consequences, and capable of transformation into life and art”. For a start, it gets Bassanio to Belmont, and the obtaining of Portia and the Golden Fleece (or Portia as a golden fleece). And, as if to signal his awareness of the proximity, even similitude, of the two types of ‘breeding’, with the lightest of touches: when Gratiano announces he is to marry Nerissa at the same time as Bassanio marries Portia, Shakespeare has him add—“We'll play with them the first boy for a thousand ducats” (III,ii,214). You ‘play’ for babies, and you ‘play’ for ducats. Which also means that when Shylock runs through the streets crying “O my ducats! O my daughter!”, (echoing Marlowe's Barabas who cries out “oh, my girl, my gold”, but when his daughter restores his wealth to him), we should not be quite so quick to mock him as the little Venetian urchins. He may not use his money to such life-enhancing and generous ends as some of the more princely Venetians; but he has been doubly bereaved (which literally means—robbed, reaved, on all sides, be-).

Having mentioned that robbery, I will just make one point about the Jessica and Lorenzo sub-plot. However sorry we may feel for Jessica, living in a ‘hell’ of a house with her father; the behaviour of the two lovers is only to be deprecated. Burckhardt is absolutely right again: “their love is lawless, financed by theft and engineered by a gross breach of trust”. Jessica “gilds” herself with ducats, and throws a casket of her father's wealth down to Lorenzo (“Here, catch this casket; it is worth the pains” II,vi,33—another echo-with-a-difference of Marlowe's play, in which Abigail throws down her father's wealth from a window, to her father). This is an anticipatory parody, travesty rather, of Portia, the Golden (not ‘gilded’) Fleece, waiting to see if Bassanio will pass the test of her father's caskets (containing wisdom, rather than simple ducats). He ‘hazards’ all; this couple risk nothing. They squander eighty ducats in a night—folly, not bounty. Jessica exchanges the ring her mother gave her father as a love-pledge, for—a monkey! They really do make a monkey out of marriage—I will come to their famous love duet in due course. Their's is the reverse, or inverse, of a true love match. It must be intended to contrast with the marriage made by Bassanio and Portia. This marriage also, admittedly, involves wealth—as it does paternal caskets; but, and the difference is vital, wealth not gained or used in the same way.

Those caskets! Shakespeare took nearly everything that he wanted for his plot (including settings, characters, even the ring business in Act V) from a tale in Il Pecorone (The Dunce), a collection of stories assembled by Giovanni Fiorentino, published in Italy in 1558—everything except the trial of the caskets. In the Italian story, to win the lady, the hero has to demonstrate to her certain powers of sexual performance and endurance. Clearly, this was not quite the thing for a Shakespearean heroine. So Shakespeare took the trial-by-caskets from a tale in the thirteenth-century Gesta Romanorum, which had been translated into English. Here, a young woman has to choose between three vessels—gold, silver, lead—to discover whether she is worthy to be the wife of the Emperor's son. All we need note about it is one significant change that Shakespeare made in the inscriptions on the vessels/caskets. Those on the gold and silver ones are effectively the same in each case—roughly, “Who chooseth me shall gain/get what he desires/deserves”. But in the mediaeval tale, the lead casket bears the inscription “Thei that chese me, shulle fynde [in] me that God hath disposid”. Now, since the young woman is a good Christian, she could hardly have been told more clearly that this was the one to go for. It is, we may say, no test at all. Shakespeare changes the inscription to “Who chooseth me must give and hazard all he hath” (II,vii,9). This is a very different matter. Instead of being promised a placid and predictable demonstration of piety rewarded, we are in that dangerous world of risk and hazard which, at various levels, constitutes the mercantile world of the play. And to the prevailing lexicon of ‘get’ and ‘gain’ has been added the even more important word—‘give’. One of the concerns of the play is the conjoining of giving and gaining in the most appropriate way, so that they may ‘frutify’ together (if I may borrow Launcelot Gobbo's inspired malapropism). “I come by note, to give and to receive”, Bassanio announces to Portia (III,ii,140—my italics). Which is no less than honesty.

While she is anxiously waiting as Bassanio inspects the caskets, Portia says:

Now he goes,
With no less presence, but with much more love,
Than young Alcides [Hercules], when he did redeem
The virgin tribute paid by howling Troy
To the sea monster. I stand for sacrifice;
The rest aloof are the Dardanian wives,
With bleared visages come forth to view
The issue of th' exploit. Go, Hercules!

(llI,ii,53-60)

The “virgin tribute” was Hesione, and her rescue by Hercules is described in Book XI of Ovid's Metamorphoses (where it is preceded by stories concerning Orpheus, who turned everything to music, and Midas, who turned everything to gold—they are both referred to in the play, and are hovering mythic presences behind it). Portia's arresting claim—“I stand for sacrifice”—resonates through the play; to be darkly echoed by Shylock in court—“I stand for judgment … I stand here for law” (IV,i,103,142). When she says “stand for”, does she mean ‘represent’, or ‘embody’; or does she imply that she is in danger of being ‘sacrificed’ to the law of her father, unless rescued by right-choosing Hercules-Bassanio? Or is it just that women are always, in effect, ‘sacrificed’ to men in marriage, hence the “bleared visages” of those “Dardanian wives”? Something of all of these, perhaps. In the event, it is Portia herself who, effectively rescues, or—her word—‘redeems’, not Troy, but Venice. Bassanio (courtier, scholar, and fortune-seeker) is, as we have seen, if not more, then as much Jason as Hercules. The point is, I think, that he has to be both as cunning as the one and as bold as the other. The ‘both-ness’ is important.

This is how Bassanio thinks his way to the choice of the correct casket:

So may the outward shows be least themselves;
The world is still deceived with ornament.
In law, what pleas so tainted and corrupt,
But being seasoned with a gracious voice,
Obscures the show of evil?

(III,ii,73-7)

This, mutatis mutandis, is a theme in Shakespeare from first to last—“all that glitters is not gold”, and so on (II,vii,65). Bassanio is on very sure grounds in rejecting the gold and silver and opting for lead, in the context of the test. But—‘ornament’: from ornare—to equip, to adorn. Now, if ever there was an equipped and adorned city, it was Venice. It is aware of dangerous seas and treacherous shores, of course; but it is also a city of beauteous scarves, and silks and species—and what are they but ‘ornaments’ for the body and for food? Bassanio is an inhabitant and creation of an ornamented world, and is himself, as we say, an ‘ornament’ to it. So why does he win by going through a show of rejecting it? He wins, because he realises that he has to subscribe to the unadorned modesty of lead, even while going for the ravishing glory of gold. That was the sort of complex intelligence Portia's father had in mind for his daughter. Is it hypocrisy? Then we must follow Brockbank and call it “creative hypocrisy”. It recognises the compromising, and willing-to-compromise, doubleness of values on which a worldly society (a society in the world) necessarily rests, and by which it is sustained. The leaden virtues, and the golden pleasures. Bothness.

Such is the reconciling potency of Belmont; and Portia seals the happy marriage with a ring. But, meanwhile, Shylock is waiting back in Venice for his pound of flesh, and he must be satisfied. Must—because he has the law on his side, and Venice lives by law; its wealth and reputation depend on honouring contracts and bonds—as Shylock is the first to point out: “If you deny [my bond], let danger light / Upon your charter and your city's freedom”. Portia, as lawyer Balthasar, agrees: “There is no power in Venice / Can alter a decree established” (IV,i,38-9,220-1). “I stay here on my bond” (IV,i,241)—if he says the word ‘bond’ once, he says it a dozen times (it occurs over thirty times in this play—never more than six times in other plays). We are in a world of law where ‘bonds’ are absolutely binding. Portia's beautiful speech exhorting to ‘mercy’ is justly famous; but, as Burckhardt remarked, it is impotent and useless in this ‘court of justice’, a realm which is under the rule of the unalterable letter of the law. Her sweet and humane lyricism founders against harsh legal literalism. The tedious, tolling reiteration of the word ‘bond’ has an effect which musicians know as ‘devaluation through repetition’. The word becomes emptier and emptier of meaning, though still having its deadening effect. It is as if they are all in the grip of a mindless mechanism, which brings them to a helpless, dumb, impasse; with Shylock's dagger quite legally poised to strike. Shylock, it is said, is adhering to the old Hebraic notion of the law—an eye for an eye. He has not been influenced by the Christian saying of St Paul: “The letter killeth but the spirit giveth life.” For Shylock, the spirit is the letter; and Antonio can only be saved by the letter. It is as though Portia will have to find resources in literalism which the law didn't know it had.

Tarry a little; there is something else.
The bond doth give thee here no jot of blood;
The words expressly are “a pound of flesh.”
Take then thy bond …
Shed thou no blood, nor cut thou less nor more
But just a pound of flesh.

(IV,i,304-7, 324-5; my italics)

Ex-press: to press out. Portia squeezes new life and salvation out of the dead and deadly law—and not by extenuation or circumvention or equivocation. “How every fool can play upon the word!”, says Lorenzo, in response to Launcelot's quibbles. But you can't ‘play’ your way out of the Venetian law courts. Any solution must be found within the precincts of stern, rigorous law. “The Jew shall have all justice … He shall have merely justice and his bond”. (IV,i,320,338) And, to Shylock: “Thou shalt have justice more than thou desir'st”. (315) Portia makes literalism yield a life-saving further reach. Truly, the beyond of law.

Life-saving for Antonio—and for Venice itself, we may say. But not, of course, for Shylock. He simply crumples; broken by his own bond, destroyed by the law he “craved”. But prior to this, his speeches have an undeniable power, and a strangely compelling sincerity. Necessarily un-aristocratic, and closer to the streets (and the ghetto life back there somewhere), his speech in general has a force, and at times a passionate directness, which makes the more ‘ornamented’ speech of some of the more genteel Christians sound positively effete. Though his defeat is both necessary and gratifying—the cruel hunter caught with his own device—there is something terrible in the spectacle of his breaking. “I pray you give me leave to go from hence. I am not well.” (IV,i,394-5) And Gratiano's cruel, jeering ridicule, with which he taunts and lacerates Shylock through the successive blows of his defeat, does Christianity, does humanity, no credit. Like the malcontent or kill-joy in any comedy, Shylock has to be extruded by the regrouping, revitalised community, and he is duly chastised, humiliated, stripped, and despatched—presumably back to the Ghetto. He is never seen again; but it is possible to feel him as a dark, suffering absence throughout the final Act in Belmont. And in fact, he does make one last, indirect ‘appearance’. When Portia brings the news that Shylock has been forced to leave all his wealth to Jessica and Lorenzo, the response is—“Fair ladies, you drop manna in the way / Of starved people.” (V,i,293-4) ‘Manna’ was, of course, what fell from heaven and fed the children of Israel in the wilderness. This is the only time Shakespeare uses the word; and, just for a second, its deployment here—at the height of the joy in Christian Belmont—reminds us of the long archaic biblical past stretching back behind Shylock—who also, just for a second, briefly figures, no matter how unwillingly, as a version of the Old Testament God, providing miraculous sustenance for his ‘children’ (a point made by John Gross).

But why did not Shakespeare end his play with the climactic defeat of Shylock—why a whole extra Act with that ring business? Had he done so, it would have left Venice unequivocally triumphant, which perhaps he didn't quite want. This is the last aspect of the play I wish to address, and I must do so somewhat circuitously. Perhaps Shylock's most memorable claim is:

I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passion?—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?

(III,i,55-61)

That last question, seemingly rhetorical (of course you do), but eventually crucial (Shylock seems to have overlooked the fact that if he pricks Antonio, he will bleed too), is prepared for, in an admittedly small way, by the first suitor to attempt the challenge of the caskets. The Prince of Morocco starts by defending the “shadowed livery” of his “complexion”, as against “the fairest creature northward born”:

And let us make incision for your love
To prove whose blood is reddest, his or mine.

(II,i,6-7)

So, a black and a Jew claiming an equality with white Venetian gentle/gentiles (another word exposed to examination in the course of the play), which I have not the slightest doubt Shakespeare fully accorded them (the princely Morocco, in fact, comes off rather better than the silvery French aristocrat who follows him). And Morocco's hypothetical ‘incision’ anticipates the literal incision which Shylock seeks to make in Antonio. When Bassanio realises that Portia is going to ask to see her ring, which he has given away, he says in an aside:

Why, I were best cut my left hand off
And swear I lost the ring defending it.

(V,i,177-8)

So, there may be ‘incisions’ made ‘for love’, from hate, and out of guilt. Portia describes the wedding ring as

A thing stuck on with oaths upon your finger,
And so riveted with faith unto your flesh.

(V,i,168-9)

‘Rivetting on’ is, I suppose, the opposite of Shylock's intended cutting out; but, taken together, there is a recurrent linking of law (oaths, bonds, rings)—and flesh. The play could be said to hinge on two contracts or bonds, in which, or by which, the law envisions, permits, requires, ordains, the exposing of a part of the body of one party to the legitimate penetration (incision) by the other party to the bond. If that party is Shylock, the penetration/incision would be done out of hate—and would prove fatal; if that other party is Bassanio it should be done out of love—and give new life. Shylock swears by his ‘bond’; Portia works through her ‘ring’.

It should be noted that, in the last Act, when Bassanio is caught out with having given Portia's ring away to Balthasar, he stands before Portia as guilty and helpless as Antonio stood before Shylock. And, like Shylock, she insists on the letter of the pledge, and will hear no excuses and is not interested in mercy. Like Shylock too, she promises her own form of ‘fleshly’ punishment (absence from Bassanio's bed, and promiscuous infidelity with others). As with the word ‘bond’ in the court scene, so with the word ‘ring’ in this last scene. It occurs twenty-one times, and at times is repeated so often that it risks suffering the semantic depletion which seemed to numb ‘bond’ into emptiness. Both the word ‘bond’ and the word ‘ring’—and all they represent in terms of binding/bonding—are endangered in this play. But the law stands—and continues to stand; bonds must be honoured or society collapses: there is nothing Bassanio can do. Then, just as Portia-as-Balthasar found a way through the Venetian impasse, so Portia-as-Portia has the life-giving power to enable Bassanio to renew his bond—she gives him, mysteriously and to him inexplicably, the same ring, for a second time. (She has mysterious, inexplicable good news for Antonio, too, about the sudden safe arrival of his ships.) A touch of woman's magic. For Portia is one of what Brockbank called Shakespeare's “creative manipulators” (of whom Prospero is the last). Like Vincentio (in Measure for Measure), she uses “craft against vice”. She can be a skilful man in Venice (a veritable Jacob), and a tricky, resourceful, ultimately loving and healing woman in Belmont (a good Medea with something of the art of Orpheus—both figures invoked in the scene). She can gracefully operate in, and move between, both worlds. Because she is, as it were, a man-woman, as good a lawyer as she is a wife—more ‘both-ness’; she figures a way in which law and love, law and blood, need not be mutually exclusive and opposed forces. She shows how they, too, can ‘frutify’ together.

The person who both persuades Bassanio to give away his ring, and intercedes for him with Portia (“I dare be bound again”) is Antonio. He is solitary and sad at the beginning, and is left alone at the end. He expresses his love for Bassanio in an extravagant, at times tearful way. It is a love which seems to be reciprocated. In the court scene, Bassanio protests to Antonio that

life itself, my wife, and all the world
Are not with me esteemed above thy life.
I would lose all, ay sacrifice them all
Here to this devil to deliver you.

Portia, (she certainly does “stand for sacrifice”!), permits herself an understandably dry comment:

Your wife would give you little thanks for that
If she were by to hear you make the offer.

(IV,i,283-8)

Perhaps this is why she decides to put Bassanio to the test with the ring. I do, of course, recognise the honourable tradition of strong male friendship, operative at the time. I also know that ‘homosexuality’, as such, was not invented until the late nineteenth century. I am also totally disinclined to seek out imagined sexualities which are nothing to the point. But Antonio is so moistly, mooningly in love with Bassanio (and so conspicuously uninvolved with, and unattracted to, any woman), that I think that his nameless sadness, and seemingly foredoomed solitariness, may fairly be attributed to a homosexual passion, which must now be frustrated since Bassanio is set on marriage. (Antonio's message to Bassanio's wife is: “bid her be judge / Whether Bassanio had not once a love”, which implies ‘lover’ as much as ‘friend’; revealingly, Antonio's one remaining desire is that Bassanio should witness the fatal sacrifice he is to make for him.) Even then, we might say that that is neither here nor there. Except for one fact. Buggery and usury were very closely associated or connected in the contemporary mind as unnatural acts. Shylock is undoubtedly a usurer, who becomes unwell; but if Antonio is, not to put too fine a point on it, a buggerer, who is also unwell, well. …

Perhaps some will find the suggestion offensively irrelevant; and perhaps it is. But the atmosphere in Venice-Belmont, is not unalloyedly pure. The famous love duet between Lorenzo and Jessica which starts Act Five, inaugurating the happy post-Shylock era—“In such a night …”—is hardly an auspicious one, invoking as it does a faithless woman (Cressid), one who committed suicide (Thisbe), an abandoned woman (Dido), and a sorceress (Medea whose spells involved physical mutilation), before moving on to a contemporary female thief—Jessica herself. I hardly think that she and Lorenzo will bear any mythological ‘ornamenting’. And that theft has become part of the texture of the Belmont world. It is a place of beautiful music and poetry—and love; but with perhaps just a residual something-not-quite-right lingering from the transactions and ‘usages’ of Ghetto-Rialto Venice. (The very last word of the play is a punningly obscene use of ‘ring’ by Gratiano, the most scarbous and cynical voice in Venice—again, a slightly off-key note.) There is moonlight and candle-light for the nocturnal conclusion of the play, but it doesn't ‘glimmer’ as beautifully as it did at the end of A Midsummer Night's Dream. Portia says:

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

(V,i,124-6)

A little of the circulating sickness has reached Belmont. The play is a comedy; but Shakespeare has here touched on deeper and more potentially complex and troubling matters than he had hitherto explored, and the result is a comedy with a difference. And, of course, it is primarily Shylock who makes that difference.

Now, let's go back to the beginning. “Which is the merchant here? And which the Jew?” It turns out to be a good question.

Bibliography

Brockbank, Philip: “Shakespeare and the Fashion of These Times”. Shakespeare Survey 16 (1963).

Burckhardt, Sigurd: “The Merchant of Venice: The Gentle Bond”. Journal of English Literary History 29 (1962).

Gross, John: Shylock. Four Hundred Years in the Life of a Legend. London 1992.

Kermode, Frank: “The Mature Comedies”. In: Brown, J. R. / B. Harris (eds.): Early Shakespeare. Stratford-upon-Avons Studies, 3. London 1961.

Nevo, Ruth: Comic Transformations in Shakespeare. London 1980.

Tawney, R. H.: Religion and the Rise of Capitalism. London 1926.