[In the following essay, Rosen remarks on the rhetorical strategies of The Merchant of Venice's racial outsiders, emphasizing Shylock's recursive and literal mode of speaking and the Prince of Morocco's eloquence as beyond “the borders of legitimate discourse” in the play.]

In the 1590s, both Jew and Moor remained for English Christians exotic infidels, whose obstinate unbelief and cultural difference continued to challenge, boldly or surreptitiously, Christian hegemony in Europe.¹ In Shylock the Jew and the Prince of Morocco the Moor, The Merchant of Venice presents these two kinds of infidels and thus brings together within this problem comedy two groups for whom Renaissance England felt a special fascination and repulsion. That the play forges and exploits a link between the two groups is not self-evident, for Shakespeare assigns Shylock and Morocco to separate realms—Venice and Belmont respectively—and thereby seems to place in the background any meaningful association between Jew and Moor. I wish, however, to foreground this association and argue that the distinctive rhetoric of each character—for Shylock, plainness; for Morocco, eloquence—threatens in its own way to undermine the linguistic foundations of the play. Although this threat is contained, dramatic juxtaposition works to connect the two characters, blurring the boundaries between them. Once linked, shared aspects of their language challenge the play's discourse of insider/outsider while simultaneously reinforcing the threat that the infidels pose.

1

Despite varying assessments of Shylock's language, critics share two assumptions: first, Shylock is made by Shakespeare to speak differently from other characters in the play; second, he speaks more plainly than other characters.² This plain speaking is evidenced particularly in Shylock's propensity to repetition.

The play foregrounds Shylock's repetitions from his first appearance on stage in 1.3. For the scene quickly establishes a pattern in which Bassanio initiates and Shylock repeats the financial terms of the proposed agreement. Moreover, the constant pattern of Shylock's repetition makes the audience retroactively aware that, although Shylock speaks the first words of the scene—“Three thousand ducats”—even these words echo an implied off stage proposal by Bassanio.³ In the first eight lines of the scene, then, Shylock speaks words that are not his own.

This appropriation of another character's words at the moment of dramatic introduction blurs the distinctions that one expects to obtain between Bassanio and Shylock, noble Christian and miserly Jew,⁴ frustrating at least for a time the expectation that Jews speak differently, that they have in Sander Gilman's phrase “a hidden language” uniquely their own.⁵ By repeating Bassanio's words, Shylock also makes use of them. It is this aspect of use which, as Burckhardt and Shell have argued, is a defining characteristic of Shylock's approach to language as well as to money.⁶ From the very first utterance, then, Shylock's role is to keep things (and words) in circulation.

Shylock continues to echo Bassanio, yet he also introduces a note of self-repetition, a mode of iteration that becomes conspicuous in Shylock's next scene, in which he calls for Jessica several times. Although the repeated call serves at first as an anxious summons for his daughter, it is soon taken up by Lancelot, parodying Shylock's earnestness.⁷ In the next scenes, as Jessica flees, this pattern of repetition and parody intensifies.⁸ Solanio quotes Shylock repeating the features of his losses and Salerio notes that boys echo Shylock's repetitions (2.8.12-24). As Shylock repeats himself with increasing frequency, seemingly in search of a language to express his loss, other characters parody his iterations, resulting in what one critic refers to as the denial of “the right to coherent speech.”⁹ Even as Shakespeare ritualizes Shylock's language, the choric procession of children simultaneously establishes a parody of that ritualization.

In act 3, the climax of Shylock's self-repetition, Shakespeare complicates the variations on this technique. To the Christians, Shylock responds to taunts with the “Hath not a Jew” speech, in which the repetitions are arranged in a complex rhetorical schema: “Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands? …” (3.1.46-47). To Tubal the Jew, by contrast, Shylock merely repeats words, bereft of this larger rhetorical framework:

TUBAL.
Yes, other men have ill luck too. Antonio, as I heard in Genoa—
SHY.
What, what, what? ill luck, ill luck?
TUBAL.
—hath an argosy cast away coming from Tripolis.
SHY.
I thank God, I thank God! Is it true, is it true?

(3.1.77-81)

Shylock's repetitions embody language at a reduced and primitive level: “An even more primitive way than punning,” suggests Sigurd Burckhardt, “to strip words of their meanings is repetition. Say ‘a rose is a rose is a rose’ a few more times, and what you have is a meaningless sound, because you have torn the word out of its living linguistic matrix and so are left with nothing but a vile phonetic jelly.”¹⁰ Repetition emphasizes material corporeality, “mak[ing] the word malleable, ready to take the imprint the poet wants to give it.”¹¹

Burckhardt's emphasis on the corporeality of language enforces Shylock's association with the corporeal; a Jew, in other words, whose materiality symbolizes for Christians an unredeemed carnality, would fittingly speak a language itself carnal. Appropriately, Shylock reaches the climax of such “primitive” speech in the only scene in which he speaks at length with another Jew.

According to A. R. Braunmuller, however, the rhetorical strategies of Renaissance drama point in a different direction, not enforcing but subverting the conventional system of meaning.¹² Dramatists carried out this subversion by emphasizing “alliteration, repetition, echo, reversal,”—language that privileged sound over sense. “This similarity of sound,” writes Braunmuller, “among words and phrases overrides the semantic, conventional, unthinkingly assumed difference between them.”¹³ While these rhetorical strategies informed other modes of public discourse in Renaissance England, the plotted nature of drama exploited “patterned speech” in ways that significantly undermined conventional systems of linguistic meaning, keeping audiences in “a continuous rhetorical anxiety,” a linguistic limbo “puzzling and possibly terrifying.”¹⁴

Braunmuller's comments suggest that Shylock's discourse is not only to be viewed as signifying a perverse materiality but also as concretizing the vertiginous aspects of Renaissance dramatic rhetoric. Made to speak an ever more heavily patterned speech, Shylock embodies the unfamiliar system of meaning, the “continuous rhetorical anxiety,” produced by this rhetoric. As he repeats more frequently, his idiom threatens to subsume the system of semantic difference which continues to inhere in the language of other characters. The repetitions of his repetitions—Solanio's account and the boys' cries—acknowledged the threat of Shylock's idiom but also keep it in check through parody. Seen in this light, the force of Shylock's meeting with Tubal is that here, as Shylock comes to repeat almost every line, there is no parody, no repetition of his repetition, no policing of his alternative system of meaning. At this point, not only does Shylock's passion for revenge endanger Antonio, but his iterative language, multiplying without check, threatens to overwhelm all other language.

But Shakespeare himself polices Shylock's phonic language. Just as the court scene defuses the danger that Shylock poses to Antonio's well-being, so it also constrains Shylock's language, compelling him to speak in proper rhetorical formulas.¹⁵ Even if Burckhardt and other ironic readers are correct in claiming that Shylock's courtroom rhetoric outshines that of Antonio and Portia, it is also the case that Shakespeare eliminates the subversive repetitions. Indeed, the elimination of what had become an increasingly frequent sign of Shylock's distinctiveness is startling and perplexing. The answer may lie in the way the institution of the courtroom shapes the language spoken.¹⁶ For, as the play implies, the courtroom represents the Venetian law which allegedly applies equally to all. As the law applies to all equally, so, one may speculate, do all participants in the court proceedings share the same discourse. Hence, this legal discourse preempts Shylock's repetitions before they are set in motion.

If the courtroom eliminates the repetitions, there nevertheless remains an imagistic trace of the threat they posed. Telling the Duke why he cannot explain his passion for revenge, Shylock suggests that “Some men there are that love not a gaping pig; / Some that are mad if they behold a cat; / And others when the bagpipe sings in i'the nose / Cannot contain their urine: for affection / Masters oft passion, sways it to the mood / Of what it likes or loathes” (4.1.48-52). Shylock's list—pig, cat, and bagpipe—enumerates what are generally benign aspects of culinary, domestic, or musical culture. But what is benign to most makes dysfunctional an idiosyncratic few. In the case of the bagpipe, the special sound causes the victim to lose control of natural functions. This association of unnerving sound and a threat to control recalls the “rhetorical anxieties” which confronted the audience faced with “patterned speech,” that is, repetition. Braunmuller indicated that, by replacing semantic difference with phonetic identity, repetition subverted the conventional system of linguistic meaning, a subversion which occasioned a “possibly terrifying” feeling in the audience. Similarly, the bagpipe foregrounds an unusual type of sound which assaults the listener, causing a breakdown of normal functioning. Both bagpipe and repetition figure in the play as sources of phonic subversion. Even though Shylock himself is no longer given to repetition, then, the analogy he chooses to represent his motivation continues to intimate the threat embodied by it. It is suggestive, furthermore, that the only other reference in the play to bagpipes comes in association with the creature most emblematic of repetition: “Now by two-headed Janus,” says Solario, also trying to account for abnormal behavior, “Nature hath framed strange fellows in her time: / Some that will evermore peep through their eyes, / And laugh like parrots at a bagpiper” (1.1.50-53; emphasis added).¹⁷

2

The difference between Shylock's recursive speech and that of other characters has frequently been described in terms of plainness versus eloquence: where Shylock the Jew speaks unpoetically, realistically, plainly, the Christians in the play speak lyrically, beautifully, eloquently.¹⁸ Most critics valorize eloquence, understanding Shylock's deviant plain-speaking as reinforcing his villainy. But the dichotomy drawn between plainness and eloquence has its proponents as well among those who see Shylock as the play's victim, a view culminating in Burckhardt's extended contrast between Antonio and Shylock. Suspicious of Antonio's flaccid grandiloquence, Burckhardt favors Shylock's plainness, supporting his reading by indicating that the play itself puts forth a hermeneutics of suspicion regarding eloquence. Additionally, Burckhardt argues that the plainness with which Shylock speaks registers Shakespeare's achievement as a dramatist: “But the qualities which make us rank Shylock's lines over Antonio's have long been accepted among the criteria by which we seek to establish the sequence of Shakespeare's plays, on the assumption that where we find them we have evidence of greater maturity and mastery.”¹⁹

Though most critics have not shared Burckhardt's radical suspicion of eloquence in the play in general, they have shown a marked suspicion of the eloquence of one specific character: the Prince of Morocco. According to this view, Morocco's eloquence indicates his concern with appearances; just as his language is full of ornate rhetorical flourish, valuing surface over substance, so he chooses the gold casket, again valuing surface over substance.²⁰ Language reflects action, and vice versa. Besides testifying to Shakespeare's multilevel control of plot, this reading of Morocco's language often attempts to assign it a psychological or moral significance, confirming his unworthiness to win Portia.²¹

Initially, Shylock and Morocco seem as much separated by style as by setting, the rhetoric of the former shaped by the absence of ornament, that of the latter formed by the excess of it. But by associating Shylock with plainness and Morocco with eloquence, Shakespeare positions both outsiders at the opposite extremes of the rhetorical continuum, equally, if contrarily, pressing against the borders of legitimate discourse. On the one hand, this positioning allows the other characters in the play to speak comfortably within the limits that the Jew and Moor articulate. On the other hand, Shylock and Morocco are compelled linguistically as well as culturally to inhabit a place on the margins of discourse.

Having established this linguistic extravagance, glosses on Morocco amplify this suspicion of eloquence by indicating that his language recalls Marlowe's Tamburlaine, an intertextual resonance initially noted by M. C. Bradbrook and subsequently applied by numbers of readers.²² Frank Whigham, for instance, sees Morocco

handicapped by his race, his lack of sophistication and his outmoded style. The attribute of his style most relevant here is his lavish claims made for his own desert. In the early days of Elizabethan drama the non-European setting and character, presented with extensive rhetorical ornament, gave the exotic an incantatory power over Elizabethan audiences. In the courtly context, however, the imperialistic titanism of Tamburlaine is ill-adapted to purposes of wooing.²³

This judgment implies that Shakespeare chose to outfit his suitor with a clumsy language, one more appropriate to conquest than romance. But the association with Marlowe also suggests that for Morocco's lines Shakespeare turned to an earlier, more primitive dramatic language. Morocco's eloquence, then, not only represents a psychological or moral flaw but also Shakespeare's parody of the bombastic vocabulary that Tamburlaine spoke and Marlowe wrote. Just as Bassanio displays his romantic merit by choosing the right casket, so does Shakespeare display his dramatic merit by surpassing his predecessors in the fit choice of language, not gaining the fortune of Belmont but rather containing the influence of his greatest competitor and asserting his authorial mastery.²⁴

In his reading of the play, Freud also connects the casket scene with mastery, arguing that the choice of the caskets is actually the choice of a beautiful woman and that the scene dramatizes the attempt to master death—which here masquerades as its opposite, beauty.²⁵ The emphasis for Freud is on choice: “Choice stands in the place of necessity, of destiny. In this way man overcomes death, which he has recognized intellectually.”²⁶ The casket scene registers the move from non-choice to choice, from a passive relation to what is determined to an active mastery over it. The scene becomes the site where psychological overcoming works in conjunction with stylistic mastery. In both instances, mastery is achieved by containing what is other: on the one hand, death represents the metaphysical other; on the other hand, Morocco (and Tamburlaine and Marlowe) represents the cultural other. Even these realms converge, however, in Morocco's second appearance, in which, after a speech replete with images of burial and death, Morocco chooses the casket containing “A carrion Death” (2.7.63). By having Morocco choose a death's head, Shakespeare links what is culturally other to what is metaphysically other, doubly enforcing repulsion while simultaneously mastering it.

While the play admittedly encourages the association of Morocco and Tamburlaine, it also questions the aptness of the parallel and consequently provokes doubt in Morocco's position as an absolute other. Significantly, Morocco styles himself as a kind of Hercules, the Renaissance ideal of a warrior (and a prototype of Tamburlaine as well),²⁷ a self-identification that would seem to reinforce his “titanic” status. But the association does not promote his warrior status but rather undermines it, for the Hercules that Morocco invokes renounces acting as a warrior, consenting instead to “play at dice” and be led by “blind Fortune” (2.1.36). Bassanio, moreover, is also identified with Hercules (3.2.53-62), and in this identification Shakespeare emphasizes the more familiar, martial side of the Greek hero. Tellingly, where Morocco's link to Hercules highlights an uncharacteristic submission, Bassanio's dramatizes a stereotypical aggression, provoking the audience to see not Morocco but Bassanio as the emblem of heroism, as the one who brings into the “courtly context … imperialistic titanism.” This link to Bassanio via Hercules further destabilizes Morocco's status as Other, for it makes it difficult to clearly distinguish one suitor from another, effacing to a degree the difference between winner and loser and between familiar Venetian and exotic Moroccan.²⁸

In the Prince of Morocco, Shakespeare represents a Moor who is liminal and transitional, coming between the demonization of Aaron in Titus Andronicus and the heroic, if problematic, characterization of Othello.²⁹ The critical dispute concerning two pivotal traits, color and religion, attests to this liminal status. Morocco is described as “tawny,” a term which some critics argue indicates “light-skinned, as distinct from a ‘blackamoor’”;³⁰ others believe the linguistic and even dramatic evidence demonstrates that Morocco is black.³¹ Morocco's religion is less subject to dispute; but the lack of an explicit religious designation has led at least one recent critic to assume that Morocco is Christian, a judgment which in essence nullifies his outsider status.³² Morocco's position vis-à-vis stage and social history reinforces this transitional status. Significantly, Morocco is one of the first “non-villainous” Moors to appear on the English stage³³ a stage which had previously dramatized Moors as villains and in which blackness served as an emblem of evil. Morocco as a noble suitor contravenes this stereotype. Nevertheless, the representation of Morocco as an exotic “tawny” Moor continues to reinscribe the alien traits of previous stage Moors (including Shakespeare's own Aaron in Titus Andronicus) and thereby to provoke suspicion, particularly suspicion concerning sexual propriety that would be aroused in watching a black alien attempt to marry a white heroine.³⁴

Although the play eschews the direct representation of the Moor as villain, it enforces suspicion of Morocco by linking him dramatically with Shylock the Jew, a strategy which blurs the boundaries between one outsider and the other. At the beginning of 1.3 Shylock enters the play, a Jew in a Christian world; at the beginning of act 2, Morocco enters, a black in a white world. As Shylock intrudes upon the homogeneity of Christian Venice, so Morocco intrudes upon the homogeneity of white Belmont. The discomfort caused by the intrusion of one enforces the discomfort caused by the intrusion of the other. In addition, reference to Morocco's “complexion” frames Shylock's first appearance. In 1.2, Portia shows her repulsion of Morocco by quipping, “If he have the condition of a saint, and the complexion of a devil, I had rather he should shrive me than wive me” (1.2.123); next Shylock has his scene (1.3); then act 2 begins by Morocco in effect answering Portia's quip: “Mislike me not for my complexion” (2.1.1).

Shylock's scene both postpones and substitutes for Morocco's. If we recall that prior to MV black men on the English stage were conventionally villains, the postponement of Morocco's arrival intensifies anxiety over what kind of black man will appear on stage. Where Portia's racial strictures initially seem to apply only to marriage in contrast to religion (“rather he should shrive me than wive me”), the substitution of Shylock for Morocco problematizes this formula, exposing the way the discourse of exclusion governs religion as well as matrimony. The substitution of one intruder for the other also means that Shylock arrives in a drama whose discourse is already in place to distinguish insider from outsider. Consequently, Shylock enters the play caught not only in the stage conventions associated with Jews but also in those associated with Moors.

The play further promotes this association of Jew and Moor by linking the way they themselves manipulate the discourse of insider/outsider. Morocco claims his right as a suitor by questioning the criterion chosen by Portia—“complexion of a devil”—and offering his own: “Let us make incision for your love / To prove whose blood is reddest” (2.1.6-7). As with the caskets, Morocco's new criterion also takes the form of a contest, a contest in which Portia would be compelled to distinguish one thing from another. The shift from “complexion” to “blood,” from outer surface to inner substance, links Morocco's claim with the other gestures in the play (caskets, bonds, rings) which require one to go beneath a deceptive surface. More specifically, however, Morocco's contest prepares for Shylock's challenge to Salerio: “If you prick us, do we not bleed?” (3.1.58). Significantly, both Moor and Jew claim that what seems different on the surface can be better judged by what is beneath it; that the less favorable exterior which they present can be neutralized by reference to an interior dimension: the blood which flows in all people's veins.

By rejecting surface and privileging depth, Moor and Jew attempt to use the operative discourse of the play—outside/inside—to redefine their relation to other characters. This discourse works generally to make clear who is the resident and who the intruder. In the case of Morocco, his skin color excludes him from Portia's (and the Elizabethan audience's) favor. His ornamental language and choice of the golden casket allegedly betray a concern with surfaces that reinforces his rightful exclusion. In the case of Shylock, his literalism highlights concern with the letter rather than the spirit, with the outer form rather than the inner meaning. In this attempt to challenge their marginalization, then, Morocco and Shylock mobilize the very discourse that enforces the distinction between insider and outsider and which confers on them, Moor and Jew, the status of Other.

But this attempt to turn the discourse of exclusion back on itself fails, as both Morocco and Shylock use images of violence—“incision” and “pricking,” acts committed with a sharp, invasive instrument—to exhibit their solidarity with the rest of human kind. The two intruders, moreover, are the ones who brandish weapons in the play, a detail which enforces the association of alien and violence. Even as Moor and Jew try to undermine and overcome the terms that set them apart from the Christian characters, these images of violence continue to dramatize the danger they pose, justifying their exclusion. The images of violence also enforce the fantasies of the audience, for the wounds which Morocco and Shylock envision are rhetorically inflicted upon themselves (Morocco will make an “incision” on himself; Shylock will be “pricked”), thereby substantiating the belief in an alien threat while simultaneously having the danger recoil upon those who are believed to threaten. Taken to its furthest point—as some critics have done—the recoil of the violence causes both Morocco and Shylock to undergo a symbolic castration (again scenically juxtaposed): the Moor, who has pledged not to marry, leaves Belmont uttering “farewell heat and welcome frost” (2.7.75); the Jew, whose fortune has been stolen, is reported to focus his grief on the loss of his “two stones, two rich and precious stones” (2.8.20).³⁵ The punishment, then, links the two intruders even as it renders them impotent.

This impotence no doubt underscores failure. Yet, through the eccentric discourse of its intruders, MV sets forth alternative systems of meaning that challenge more conventional ones: Shylock's repetitions begin to erode the order articulated by semantic difference,³⁶ while the juxtaposition of Moor and Jew indicates the attempt to rewrite the categories of exclusion. Neither challenge meets with success. But the play must work hard to neutralize the threat posed by these outsiders. Indeed, one may speculate that the threat to conventional meaning tested here in MV becomes more fully realized in the later tragedies, in which Shylock's repetitions modulate into Lear's maddened iterations and Morocco's eloquence informs Othello's captivating tales.

Notes

1. For a recent consideration of England and the Jews in the context of The Merchant of Venice, see James Shapiro, “Shakespeare and the Jews,” The Parkes Lecture, University of Southhampton, 1992; and more generally, including the arrest and trial of Lopez, Cecil Roth, History of the Jews in England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1941). On England's relation to the Moors in the 1590s, see Jack D'Amico, The Moor in English Renaissance Drama (Tampa: University of South Florida Press, 1991).

2. See particularly B. I. Evans, The Language of Shakespeare's Plays (London: Chatto & Windus, 1964). Cf. C. L. Barber, Shakespeare's Festive Comedy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959), 163-91; Thomas Fujimura, “Mode and Structure in The Merchant of Venice,” PMLA [Publications of the Modern Language Association of America] 81 (1966): 499-511; and Jane Donawerth, Shakespeare and the Sixteenth-Century Study of Language (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984), 189-218. On the equivocal claims of “plainness” and “plain speaking,” see Kenneth J. E. Graham, “‘Without the form of justice’: Plainness and the Performance of Love in King Lear,” Shakespeare Quarterly 42 (1991): 438-61.

3. This and all subsequent citations are from M. M. Mahood, ed., The Merchant of Venice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).

4. “Well, thou shalt see, thy eyes shall be thy judge, / The difference of old Shylock and Bassanio—” (2.5.1-2). The elaborate form of Shylock's salutation to Lancelot reinforces the fact that the difference between Shylock and Bassanio, while discernible, is not to be taken for granted.

5. Sander Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred: Anti-Semitism and the Hidden Language of the Jews (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986).

6. Sigurd Burckhardt, Shakespearean Meanings (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968). Marc Shell, “The Wether and the Ewe: Verbal Usury in The Merchant of Venice,” Kenyon Review, n.s. 1 (1979): 65-92.

7. James Bulman notes in his volume on The Merchant of Venice in the Shakespeare in Performance series (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991), that in Komisarjevsky's iconoclastic production of Merchant, not only Lancelot but old Gobbo echoes Shylock here, creating a “double echo” (60).

8. For a discussion of parody as repetition, see Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms (New York: Methuen, 1985).

9. Lawrence Normand, “Reading the Body in The Merchant of Venice,” Textual Practice 5, no. 1 (1991): 57.

10. Burckhardt, Shakespearean Meaning, 29; Shell's attempt in “The Wether and the Ewe” to analyze Shylock's “verbal usury” sees puns (rather than repetition) as his emblematic verbal gesture, 66-67.

11. Burckhardt, Shakespearean Meanings, 30.

12. A. R. Braunmuller, “The Arts of the Dramatist,” in The Cambridge Companion to English Renaissance Drama, ed. A. R. Braunmuller and Michael Hattaway (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 63-67.

13. Ibid., 63.

14. Ibid., 67.

15. Normand, “Reading the Body,” 66.

16. From a different perspective than the one I am pursuing here, Lawrence Danson emphasizes the relation between courtroom and language in The Harmonies of ‘The Merchant of Venice’ (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978).

17. Interestingly, the two-faced Janus also hints at repetition. Sarah Kofman has recently examined the Janus figure in relation to The Merchant of Venice; her analysis, however, does not consider repetition as such but emphasizes instead how doubleness is the real theme of the play. See “Conversions: The Merchant of Venice Under the Sign of Saturn,” tran. Shaun Whiteside, in Literary Theory Today, ed. Peter Collier and Helga Geyer-Ryan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990): 142-66.

18. See my remarks, note 4 above. On the issue of eloquence, see Renaissance Eloquence: Studies in the Theory and Practice of Renaissance Rhetoric, ed. James J. Murphy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983).

19. Burckhardt, Shakespearean Meanings, 209.

20. While critics generally say little about Morocco, the little they do say tends to comment on his eloquence. See, for example, Donawerth, Shakespeare and the Sixteenth-Century Study of Language, and Frank Whigham, “Ideology and Class Conduct in The Merchant of Venice,” Renaissance Drama, n.s. 10 (1979): 93-115; also James Shapiro, “‘Which the Merchant Here, and Which the Jew?’: Shakespeare and the Economics of Influence,” Shakespeare Studies 20 (1987): 269-79. While Emily Bartels, in “Making More of the Moor: Aaron, Othello, and Renaissance Refashionings of Race,” Shakespeare Quarterly 41 (1990) does not discuss Morocco, she does note the role of eloquence in relation to Aaron of Titus Andronicus: “What threatens to undermine Aaron's function as an absolute sign of the Other is his cultural literacy and … his eloquence. … [But] Aaron's speech simultaneously declares his malign differentness.” Aaron's “malign differentness,” however, is betrayed not by exaggerated eloquence but by a “purposelesness that makes his villainy all the more insidious” (445). In contrast, such commentators as Donawerth or Shapiro suggest that Morocco's otherness is represented not by motivation (or its lack), but by style (or its excess).

21. A. D. Moody's small casebook on The Merchant of Venice (Woodbury, N.Y.: Barron's Educational Series, 1964) is the only commentary I have encountered which does not psychologically or morally justify Morocco's failure to choose the winning casket; on the contrary, Moody argues that Morocco deserves to win Portia.

22. See two discussions by M. C. Bradbrook, Shakespeare and Elizabethan Poetry (London: Chatto & Windus, 1951), 175-76; and “Shakespeare's Recollections of Marlowe,” in Shakespeare's Styles, ed. Philip Edwards, Inga-Stina Ewbank, and G. K. Hunter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 191.

23. Whigham, “Ideology and Class Conduct,” 98-99.

24. James Shapiro focuses on the contention between Marlowe and Shakespeare in “‘Which the Merchant Here, and Which the Jew’?”

25. Sigmund Freud, “The Theme of the Three Caskets,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press, 1955), 12:289-301.

26. Ibid., 299.

27. Renaissance views of Hercules, including the association with Tamburlaine, are documented in Eugene M. Waith, The Herculean Hero in Marlowe, Chapman, Shakespeare and Dryden (London: Chatto & Windus, 1962).

28. Raymond Waddington draws attention to the association of Hercules with Morocco and Bassanio, only to argue ingeniously that the shared attribution is meant not to link but to distinguish the two suitors and their contrasting views of fortune, in “Blind Gods: Fortune, Justice and Cupid in The Merchant of Venice,” ELH 44 (1977): 458-77.

29. In her study of Shakespeare's Moors, Bartels argues that, in Titus Andronicus, the early Shakespeare unironically demonizes Aaron but, in Othello, the late Shakespeare exposes the process of demonization. Bartels notes, 435n, that she does not consider Morocco because he is a minor character.

30. Eldred Jones, Othello's Countrymen: The African in English Renaissance Drama (London: Oxford University Press, 1965); Mahood, The Merchant of Venice, 79.

31. G. K. Hunter, “Elizabethans and Foreigners,” Shakespeare Survey 17 (1964): 37-52; Anthony Barthelemy, Black Face, Maligned Race: The Representation of Blacks in English Drama from Shakespeare to Southerne (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987).

32. Michael Ferber, “The Ideology of The Merchant of Venice,” ELR 20 (1990): 448.

33. Barthelemy, Black Face, 147.

34. Barthelemy emphasizes that even though Morocco is not a villain, he continues to present “an obvious and unwelcome sexual threat to Portia,” a threat directly associated with his Moorishness (149-50).

35. Zvi Jagendorf links Morocco's departing words to castration in “Innocent Arrows and Sexy Sticks: The Rival Economies of Male Friendship and Sexual Love in The Merchant of Venice, Hebrew University Studies in Literature and the Arts 19, no. 2 (1991): 37. More graphically, Shell, “Wether and the Ewe,” writes of Shylock's castration: “the two sealed bags and stones … are confused with his two testicles. … Shylock lost his Geld when Jessica ‘gilded herself with ducats’ (2.6.59-50) and has also been ‘gelded’” (77).

36. I am currently at work on an article which will consider the application of other theories of repetition (e.g., Derrida, Freud, Deleuze, Miller) to Shylock's language. Additionally, James Shapiro argues that catastration plays a central role in the play and, more generally, in the image of the Jew in early modern England. See “Shakespeare and the Jews.”