SOURCE: Berley, Marc. “Jessica's Belmont Blues: Music and Merriment in The Merchant of Venice.” In Opening the Borders: Inclusivity in Early Modern Studies, edited by Peter C. Herman, pp. 185-205. Cranbury, N.J.: Associated University Presses, 1999.

[In the following essay, Berley examines Lorenzo's statements concerning music and harmony alongside Jessica's dark response to “sweet music,” finding in this contradiction a thematic dissonance in The Merchant of Venice.]

With Lorenzo's famous lines about harmony in The Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare offers, as he often does, his uncommon treatment of a Renaissance commonplace. Nevertheless, scholars have long agreed that Lorenzo's speech about harmony in the last scene of Merchant is a traditional praise of music that enacts dramatically the play's fully harmonious resolution. Long ago, C. L. Barber asserted that “No other comedy, until the late romances, ends with so full an expression of harmony as that which we get in the opening of the final scene of Merchant. And no other final scene is so completely without irony about the joys it celebrates.”¹ This remains a standard reading of Lorenzo's speech and the final scene. In this essay, I mean to show that the play does not support such readings. A harmonious resolution “completely without irony” requires the harmonious assimilation of Jessica in Belmont; and Jessica is excluded from the celebration. What is most important, she excludes herself, with her response to Lorenzo's speech: “I am never merry when I hear sweet music” (5.1.69).² Critics have been hesitant to see the dark aspects of Jessica's last line. Shakespeare, however, builds a pattern of responses to music that culminates in Jessica's important response. Jessica is excluded from the musical celebration at Belmont, and the final scene makes Merchant an early comedy by Shakespeare that questions with ironic dissonance the joys some of its characters too forcibly celebrate.

James Hutton first identified Lorenzo's speech as merely a conventional mixture of speculative (chiefly Neoplatonic) musical theories in praise of music.³ “Much has been written … about Lorenzo's almost too familiar lines,” Hutton writes. “Everyone recognizes that the topics are traditional, but, if I am not mistaken, it is always assumed that Shakespeare himself has brought them together. … [I]t has not … been made clear that this speech not only contains traditional topics, but that the arrangement is traditional. … [I]n short,” Hutton concludes, “we have here to do with a coherent literary theme that Shakespeare has taken bodily into his play … [s]o familiar a theme, indeed, that Shakespeare permits himself to treat it in a kind of shorthand.” After quoting Ronsard on the subject of the “unmusical man,” Hutton concludes that “It is as one more of these laudes musicae that an Elizabethan audience would hear Lorenzo's familiar words.”⁴

Hutton's valuable study influenced the criticism of Lorenzo's speech and Shakespeare's allusions to speculative music in particular, as well as Renaissance discussions of music in general, in two important ways. First, scholars such as John Hollander, S. K. Heninger, and Lawrence Danson furthered Hutton's reductions: of Lorenzo's speech to Neoplatonic “shorthand”; of Lorenzo to Shakespeare; and of Shakespeare's view to Lorenzo's speech.⁵ Second, they followed Hutton's assumption that Shakespeare's “shorthand treatment” is a version that typifies the thought of an age that extends from Ronsard to Milton.⁶ Such readings of Lorenzo's speech fail to account for the considerable innovations, not only of Merchant but, more generally, of Shakespeare and Milton.⁷

Lorenzo's speech is filled with Neoplatonic elements, but it is not a disembodied summary of Neoplatonic treatises that “Shakespeare has taken bodily into his play.” Lorenzo speaks for neither Shakespeare nor the play. Lorenzo speaks for himself, and the dramatic context of his speech is complex. The relationship between Jessica and Lorenzo and the pattern of allusions to music and merriment throughout the play provide the larger context in which not only Lorenzo's speech but also the general harmony of Belmont must be considered.

Jessica's response to both Lorenzo's speech and the music of Portia's musicians addresses crucial questions raised by what is anything but an unambiguous play that celebrates joys without irony. What precisely does Jessica mean when she says, “I am never merry when I hear sweet music” (5.1.69)? And what does her reply mean within the play? What, furthermore, is the relationship between music and merriment within the play? On this important question, Jessica, as much as Lorenzo, speaks for the play.

During the last forty years, various critics and diverse schools of criticism have either ignored Jessica or fit her into their readings. Even recent feminist studies do not give Jessica the attention she demands.⁸ Some critics have suggested that the harmony of Belmont is suspect, but the matter—like Jessica—still has not been considered adequately. Jessica's last response, one of many reactions to music and talk about music within the play, is the most inharmonious, and important; for too long it has been attuned by scholars to the dazzling speech that surrounds it.

Shakespeare was, among other things, a brilliant and subtle orchestrator of dramatic form—and by the time of Merchant, he was getting mighty good. Indeed, he was beginning to write comedies in which problems—rendered with precise innovations of dramatic form—resist the dramatic resolution of the play. Shakespeare used this tension to involve his audience in its own moral and cultural dilemmas. Throughout Merchant, reactions to music form a coherent pattern, building tensions that climax in Lorenzo's speech and Jessica's reaction to it. Reactions to music—and talk about music—reveal the quality of merriment achieved by its characters. Finally, an audience's reaction to Lorenzo's speech reveals much about the quality of merriment an audience may achieve for itself.

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We must begin any consideration of Lorenzo's speech by placing it within its immediate dramatic context, the echoic exchange of “In such a night …” that precedes it. The exchange centers on classical stories of love-turned-bitter; the subject speaks against the harmony of the echoic form. Lorenzo speaks of Troilus and Cressid, which turns Jessica to Thisbe. Lorenzo mentions Dido, which turns Jessica to Medea, and Jessica's insinuation that she has risked everything for him leads Lorenzo to their case:

                                                                      In Such a night
Did Jessica steal from the wealthy jew,
And with an unthrift love did run from Venice
As far as Belmont.

Jessica speaks directly to the core of what seem to be real troubles:

                                                            In such a night
Did young Lorenzo swear he loved her well,
Stealing her soul with many vows of faith,
And ne'er a true one.

(5.1.15-22)

If the others can be explained away as playful literary allusions, Jessica's last, direct charge cannot. Lorenzo responds with similar direction: “In such a night / Did pretty Jessica, like a little shrow / Slander her love, and he forgave it her.” But Jessica appears unforgiving, concluding the exchange by remarking her unwillingness to conclude it: “I would out-night you, did nobody come: / But hark, I hear the footing of a man” (5.1.23-24). By 5.1, real trouble is afoot; playful banter has turned dark. Moreover, given the thematic analogies to the plot of Portia and Bassanio, this exchange between Jessica and Lorenzo has its further dark resonance.

The serious subject of the exchange pushes the limits of its playful banter, signaling a conflict between beautiful form and ugly content, between the charm of sound and the trouble of its meaning. The exchange ends with Jessica promising to “out-night” Lorenzo, interrupted by Portia's servant Stephano. Before Stephano is gone, Lorenzo begins a speculative speech about musical harmony. Rather than a disembodied piece of Neoplatonism, Lorenzo's speech is part of Shakespeare's intricately woven dramatic context. An attempt to make Jessica merry once again, the speech is spoken by the play's hottest lover at a time when his lady appears, with reason, to be getting cold. Lorenzo tries to effect a transition to a better, more harmonious aspect of “such a night.” Using speech and music, Lorenzo tries to get Jessica to see that “such a night” becomes “the touches of sweet harmony” rather than the will to “out-night.”

The “sweet power” of speech and music were deeply linked in Shakespeare's day. Both were considered modes of seduction, and Lorenzo now has need for grander, sweeter promises, bigger vows that might make Jessica forget about broken ones:

Sweet soul, let's in, and there expect their coming.
And yet no matter; why should we go in?
My friend Stephano, signify, I pray you,
Within this house, your mistress is at hand,
And bring your music forth into the air.
                                                                                                    [Exit Stephano.]
Here will we sit and let the sounds of music
Creep in our ears; soft stillness and the night
Become the touches of sweet harmony.
Sit, Jessica. 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.
                                                                                                    [Enter musicians.]
Come ho, and wake Diana with a hymn!
With sweetest touches pierce your mistress' ear
And draw her home with music.
                                                                                                    Play music.

(5.1.49-68)

Rather than mere Neoplatonic shorthand, the speech is dramatic recapitulation. Lorenzo first promises the “the touches of sweet harmony.” The phrase seems at first to refer to actual music to be played by the musicians, but Lorenzo eventually links it to the heavenly harmony they cannot hear: “Such harmony” (which “is in immortal souls”) refers back to the “sweet harmony” that (“whilst this muddy vesture of decay / Doth grossly close it in”) they cannot hear. Six lines after offering Jessica heavenly harmony, Lorenzo begins to explain why he may offer only earthly discord. Lorenzo, in short, offers Jessica something he cannot provide, and the exchange of “In such a night …” suggests he has done this before. The speech is dazzling, but it confirms a pattern of promising more than he will deliver.

Lorenzo continues to elicit harmony where there appears to be discord, moving from musical speech to the power of music itself. After he tells Jessica that we cannot hear the music of the spheres, the musicians enter, and Lorenzo gives them specific directions. Speaking to Portia's musicians at Portia's house, Lorenzo is telling them to draw her home. But he is also speaking, in Neoplatonic terms, about the theory according to which the actual “sounds of music” can pierce the ear, touch the soul, and re-attune it, thereby drawing it home to the heavenly harmony. The Neoplatonic theory of the “sweet power of music”—namely, that music can penetrate one's soul and draw it to heaven—merely complicates the matter of wooing with false vows, for it is deeply related to seduction by false music, as well as, more generally, penetration of Jessica's body.

Lorenzo attempts to placate Jessica not by winning an old argument but by dazzling her with beautiful new promises and lascivious music—both of which had worked well before. As Robin Headlam Wells observes, “a man of eloquence is capable of persuading people to do whatever he wishes. However, the real mark of his power is not his ability to force people ‘to yeeld in that which most standth against their will’, but rather,” as Thomas Wilson asserts in his influential Arte of Rhetorique, “his skill in inducing them ‘to will that which he did.’”⁹ Jessica, however, continues the tone she establishes during the echoic exchange by asserting that music does not make her merry. Given the common association of music and rhetoric, Shakespeare is juxtaposing—indeed, likening—the forced conversion of Shylock with Lorenzo's attempt to re-seduce Jessica in the final scene. Shylock never wills what Portia does, but Jessica early on appears to will what Lorenzo does. By the last scene, though, she has reasons not to, and Lorenzo has a need to steal her soul again. Stealing one's “soul with vows of faith” is akin to wooing one with music and musical language. Neoplatonic theory promises momentary ecstasy by penetration. But Jessica, as she says, won't be merry.

Lorenzo's speech has long been seen as traditional (Neoplatonic) praise of music, but it is only within this dramatic context that we can appreciate its significance. It cannot be seen as “the most purely religious utterance in the play.”¹⁰ Lorenzo offers a seductive speech. He knows to seize every opportunity to throw in the adjective sweet. But in Shakespeare's plays, such excess serves to mock precisely the subjects most relevant here. To be excessively sweet is not to be sweet at all; music becomes an illusion, and any love it induces becomes a foible. A good example is Troilus and Cressida 3.1. Similarly, in Cymbeline, Shakespeare has Cloten mock the hyperbole of both the Neoplatonic idea of penetration and the literary conventions derived from it. Cloten—like Lorenzo, but in direct, ribald, language—alludes to the musicians as surrogate seducers: “Come on, tune. If you can penetrate her with your fingering, so; we'll try with tongue too.” Once they play, Cloten hedges: “So, get you gone. If this penetrate, I will consider your music the better; if it do not, it is a vice in her ears which horsehairs and calves' guts, nor the voice of unpaved eunuch to boot, can never amend” (2.3.11-31). Comically rendering the conflict between deceptively false and beautifully true music, Cloten razes the system of musical powers established by Neoplatonists such as Ronsard. The music shall prove itself good and powerful, says Cloten, only when it shall have penetrated his lady.

Shakespeare's interest in the prurient mocking of Neoplatonic theory is evident as early as Love's Labor's Lost. The King decrees that he and his lords will be “brave conquerors … / That war against your own affections,” devoted to a contemplative life: “Our court shall be a little academe, / Still and contemplative in living art.” Berowne, however, troubled by the prospect of there being no ladies, voices his doubt about the austerity: “But is there no quick recreation granted?” Offering a substitute, the King answers that in lieu of ladies the men shall recreate themselves by means of musical language:

          Our court you know is haunted
With a refinèd traveller of Spain,
A man in all the world's new fashion planted,
That hath a mint of phrases in his brain;
One who the music of his own vain tongue
Doth ravish like enchanting harmony;
A man of complements, whom right and wrong
Have chose as umpire of their mutiny.

(1.1.159-66)

A man who “hath a mint of phrases in his brain” and a “vain tongue,” a man who “ravish[es] like enchanting harmony” is a rhetorician. He may be an umpire of mutiny, but his skill points to another mutiny: between “quick recreation” (wine, women, and song) and slow moral “contemplation in living art” (recreation), between “purposing merriment” and enduring the much ado it takes to attain self-knowledge. This conflict is one of Shakespeare's major themes throughout his plays—another way of speaking about the mediation of appetite and reason, frenzy and self-rule, evasion of shame and painful self-reflection.

The music plays in Belmont, and Jessica responds, both to Lorenzo and to the music for which he has made his great Neoplatonic claims. Jessica tells Lorenzo—in language more subtle than the language of her father, but less than subtly—that all is not “sweet” for her in Belmont. Whereas Shylock sticks to his rough idiom, Jessica can adopt the harmonious utterance of the Italians; she can speak poetry, echo Lorenzo. But, finally, she answers in blunt prose to Lorenzo's dazzling blank verse; her response is poignantly unmusical in both its meaning and its form: “I am never merry when I hear sweet music.” Jessica offers, in the manner of her father, rough idiom to Lorenzo's mellifluous “vows of faith.”

Jessica's response puts Lorenzo in a predicament. Lorenzo resumes his speech, turning his focus to the Neoplatonic theory of the “unmusical man”:

The reason is, your spirits are attentive.
For do but note a wild and wanton herd
Or race of youthful and unhandled colts
Fetching mad bounds, bellowing and neighing loud,
Which is the hot condition of their blood:
If they but hear perchance a trumpet sound,
Or any air of music touch their ears,
You shall perceive them make a mutual stand,
Their savage eyes turned to a modest gaze
By the sweet power of music. Therefore the poet
Did feign that Orpheus drew trees, stones, and floods;
Since naught so stockish, hard, and full of rage
But music for the time doth change his nature.
The man that hath no music in himself,
Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds,
Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils;
The motions of his spirit are dull as night,
And his affections dark as Erebus.
Let no such man be trusted. Mark the music.

(5.1.55-88)

With her last line, Jessica leaves Lorenzo to deliver a stock Neoplatonic answer that, rather than resolve the matter, shows that he is in deeper trouble than commonplace sweet-talk can get him out of.

In the two parts of his speech, Lorenzo speaks for himself, not for the play. Here we can begin to see Shakespeare's original, dramatic use of the commonplace praise of music. In the first part of his speech (while he is trying to charm Jessica), Lorenzo blames a universal human nature, the “muddy vesture of decay.” After Jessica says she is not merry, in contrast, Lorenzo blames Jessica specifically, making the dark (Neoplatonic) suggestion that she has no music in herself—whether due to momentary attentiveness or the essential unmusicality of her Jewish soul. The two parts of Lorenzo's speech speak to an important question: is there something irreparably wrong with Jessica? Shakespeare never directly gives us an answer, but he has Lorenzo insinuate one early. Lorenzo alludes to the problem of Jessica's Jewish soul in 2.4; and by 5.1, Jessica has shown herself fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils. According to Ronsard, the “unmusical man” is “not delighted and is not … sweetly ravished and transported,” giving “proof thereby that he has a … depraved soul, and is to be guarded against as one not happily born.”¹¹Merchant raises important questions: is Jessica “unhappily born”? Can she be merry?

That Shylock cannot be happy is a basic fact required by the plot of the play. Jessica's happiness is a different matter—it is in no way certain, and its uncertainty is a central part of the play. One reason “Shylock's enforced baptism is disconcerting,” as John Gross observes, “is that it is contrary to predominant Christian tradition. … The treatment meted out to Shylock belongs at the harsh end of the spectrum.”¹² Jessica's failure to be merry, if the result of treatment that belongs to the kinder end of the spectrum, stands as a significant, ironic counterpoint to Shylock's defeat. And none of the darkness comes as a surprise by 5.1. The likely failure of Jessica's assimilation is, as we will see, registered with irony in every scene in which she appears before 5.1.

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One can say with good reason, as has Frank Kermode, that Merchant is a play about justice, but Merchant is also chiefly a play about characters who seek, in their various ways, merriment. The theme befits a comedy, especially a play Kermode rightly links with A Midsummer Night's Dream and Twelfth Night.¹³ Antonio begins the play by saying, “I know not why I am so sad,” confessing that he has “much ado to know myself.” His friend Solanio offers tautology as counsel, “Then let us say you are sad / Because you are not merry …” (1.1.47-48). In the second scene, Nerissa has to tell Portia, who has long been seeking merriment, to be careful not to let hastiness keep her from striking an Aristotelian “mean.” It is in this context that one must see the attempts of all the characters to be merry—especially Jessica's.

The question whether “sweet music” should make Jessica “merry” contains within it the larger question on which the play is centered: what does it mean to be “merry”? Merchant, after all, is a play about conflicting attempts to be “merry”—and the antipodal world-views on which these attempts are based. The crux of the play, of course, is that Antonio and Shylock cannot both end the play “merry.” The Christians are, as Bassanio himself exclaims to Gratiano, “friends / That purpose merriment” (2.2.189-90). For Shylock, who rejects such purposing, the possibility for merriment exists only in the “merry sport” of his “bond” (1.3.139-47). It is clear that the “merry sport” of the bond is not “merry.” It is less clear, though clearly as true, that forcible conversion of a Jew is another form of “merry sport” that is not truly “merry” or “gentle”—and that such a lack of gentleness is as possible for gentiles as for Shylock “the Jew.”

Merchant is a play about polarizing views that would make one the true and the other the false pursuit of merriment. But, as Maynard Mack observes in his essay, “Engagement and Detachment in Shakespeare's Plays,” “the usual lesson of comedy [is] that overengagement to any obsessive single view of oneself or the world is to be avoided.”¹⁴ Shakespeare has written, I am arguing, a play that is neither a simple attack on Jews nor a subtle defense of them. Merchant depicts merciless Christians seeking merriment as well as a merciless Jew. The play considers not why one of the two pursuits is true, but why both potentially are destructive. And it is Jessica, I suggest, who most comes to feel, if not understand, the reasons why.

The pun on gentle and gentile made consistently in the play suggests that Shylock could improve his fortune by assimilating, by being gentle. The plot requires that we accept not only Shylock's forced conversion as a comic resolution, but also his forced response to Portia's question: “Art thou contented, Jew? What dost thou say?” Shylock says, “I am content” (4.1.391-92), and we all know he is not. Jessica, in stark contrast to her father, not only converts willingly but twice accepts this promise that a change of religion will bring a change of fortune: “O Lorenzo, / If thou keep promise, I shall end this strife, / Become a Christian and thy loving wife”; “I shall be saved by my husband. He hath made me a Christian” (2.3.20-22; 3.5.17-18). Jessica looks to conversion as an answer to her troubles, which appear to her to be rooted in her life with her repressive Jewish father. The first time we hear her, Jessica says, “Our house is hell” (2.3.1). Whereas Shylock's conversion is forced, Jessica's is willing—but her willingness is rooted in a flight from tedium. She gives away her father's turquoise ring, voiding with this gesture the union that made her a Jew, trading, symbolically, a world of rigidity for a world of lascivious joys. But when we see her in 5.1, the final scene of the play, sweet music—precisely the same music that first caused her to “thrust [her] head into the public street”—no longer makes Jessica merry. Forced to convert, and forced to speak, Shylock's penultimate utterance in the play—“I am content”—is clearly ironic. Jessica's last line—“I am never merry when I hear sweet music”—is also ironic. She cannot say never.

The dramatic counterpoint created by the last utterances of father and daughter is significant. Much depends on whether Jessica is truly unmerry at the end of the play—and whether her failure to be merry is a result of a failure in her (a natural failure of her impenetrable Jewish soul?) or a failure in Lorenzo. Shakespeare, moreover, provides us with a clear pattern that suggests that blame is to be placed on both Jessica and Lorenzo. On Jessica, not because her soul is Jewish, but because she avoids the truth that it is; on Lorenzo, because he seduces Jessica with promises he does not keep. Jessica's response to Lorenzo and his music suggests, moreover, the deeper falsehood of the promise of Christian harmony announced by Lorenzo in his speech. We must arbitrate these matters, and we do well to base any conclusions on careful consideration of larger patterns built within the play.

With Jessica, Shakespeare presents us with another Jew, one who willingly converts; yet, still, Lorenzo sees the need to account early for the possibility of her future misfortune:

If e'er the Jew her father come to heaven,
It will be for his gentle daughter's sake;
And never dare misfortune cross her foot,
Unless she do it under this excuse,
That she is issue to a faithless Jew.

(2.4.33-37)

Even before the two appear together in the play, Lorenzo warns that Jessica might not be “merry” even as his bride. The “excuse” will be Jessica's Jewish nature, which, despite her hope that marriage and conversion will change it, Lorenzo says plainly cannot be changed. Similarly, Launcelot helps Jessica leave her father, but not without telling her that “the sins of the father are to be laid upon the children” and “truly I think you are damned” (3.5.1-6).

Not only does it appear that something has changed for the worse between Jessica and Lorenzo in 5.1; to this point, the play has hinted consistently at the likelihood of such trouble. In the elopement scene, for example, the first scene in which Jessica and Lorenzo appear together, Gratiano and Salerio preface the elopement with foreboding truisms about love. As Salerio says, “O ten times faster Venus' pigeons fly / To seal love's bonds new-made than they are wont / To keep obligèd faith unforfeited” (2.6.5-7). Gratiano replies with his speech on the effects of “the strumpet wind,” including his maxim “All things that are / Are with more spirit chasèd than enjoyed” (2.6.12-13). Indeed, as soon as Jessica reenters, Lorenzo quickly confirms what Gratiano had said, that “lovers ever run before the clock” (2.6.4): “What, art thou come? On, gentlemen, away! / Our masquing mates by this time for us stay” (2.6.58-59). It is time, says Lorenzo, to be in time for merriment, for merriment is fleeting.

The elopement scene shows a Jessica eager for merriment, but it also imparts misgivings about Jessica's self-knowledge, as well as deeper matters of shame and conscience that might come to her when she knows herself better. Jessica naively expects Lorenzo to change her Jewish identity and thus her fortune, as she says to Launcelot before leaving Shylock's house:

Alack, what heinous sin is it in me
To be ashamed to be my father's child
But though I am a daughter to his blood,
I am not to his manners. O Lorenzo,
If thou keep promise, I shall end this strife,
Become a Christian and thy loving wife!

(2.3.16-21)

Jessica puts all her hope for future merriment in Lorenzo's vow and her associated conversion. In short, a new life hangs on the promise of a man. But Jessica confuses strife, which can end, with facts about her life that cannot be erased—facts which, if she refuses to acknowledge them, promise, rather, to increase her strife.

In saying farewell to her father, Jessica tries to change her identity, and hence her fortune: “Farewell; and if my fortune be not crost, / I have a father, you a daughter lost” (2.5.54-55). But in the elopement scene, ironically, Jessica shows herself to be very much “to his manners”: while trying to rid herself of the shame of being her father's child, Jessica “gilds” herself with her father's ducats.

Whether a Jew can exchange her fortune by assimilating, by changing her manners, is a question central to the play. Jessica's “Here, catch this casket” (2.6.33) suggests her possession of an unburdened, merry spirit. She is rejecting a penurious, fruitless pursuit of merriment for a fruitful one. But the rest of what Jessica says in the elopement scene is laden with dark hints of repression: “I am glad 'tis night—you do not look on me—/ For I am much ashamed of my exchange” (2.6.34-35). Jessica then offers a truism that hints at the future troubles the blindness of love can bring: “But love is blind, and lovers cannot see / The pretty follies that themselves commit …” (2.6.36-37). Because Jessica sees the shame of cross-dressing (“my exchange”), the lines register a latent concern that what she does not see might in the future be of greater consequence. Jessica uses the word shame twice in this scene, and both times it resonates with her earlier mention of the “heinous sin. … To be ashamed to be my father's child”:

What, must I hold a candle to my shames?
They in themselves, good sooth, are too too light.
Why, 'tis an office of discovery, love—
And I should be obscured.”

(2.6.43-44)

The lines have their obvious, as well as deeper, meaning. Clearly, Jessica wishes to hide her cross-dressing from her lover, and this seems natural. Jessica, however, appears overly concerned with her “shames,” rather than naturally concerned with the single shame of cross-dressing. There is disparity, moreover, between Jessica's worry “I should be obscured” and Lorenzo's assurance, “So are you, sweet, / Even in the lovely garnish of a boy.” Jessica, as Lorenzo says, is already obscured. Further, Lorenzo knows what he is getting—a pretty Jewish girl who is wearing pants and sporting the ducats of her “father Jew” (2.6.22). What Jessica seems anxious to obscure, rather, is a more general need to obscure herself. Lorenzo tells Jessica to “come at once,” but Jessica—thinking her shames “too too light”—delays, risking, in effect, a greater light, the sun: “I will make fast the doores, and gild myself / With some moe ducats, and be with you straight” (2.6.49-50). Shakespeare highlights Jessica's worries about the exchange she makes with Lorenzo; the stakes are so high already that to gild herself with more ducats is worth the risk.

Gilded in her father's ducats, Jessica endeavors to close forever behind her the doors of her father's house. But the scene suggests that Jessica may not get away from her father's house with the mere consequence of the shame of cross-dressing. Like Launcelot, Jessica leaves her old master, Shylock, for a new one, Lorenzo. Indeed, Shakespeare has Launcelot offer his clownish wisdom on two subjects very important to Jessica: leaving one's Jewish master and the conscience that attends any attempted flight from one's identity. “Certainly my conscience will serve me to run from this Jew my master” (2.2.1), says Launcelot in his first line. He then encounters his father, Old Gobbo, and proceeds to ask him, “Do you know me, father?” The Launcelot-Gobbo subplot suggests, however glibly, that where identity, conscience, and shameful fathers are concerned, “Truth will come to light … in the end truth will out” (2.2.74).

Jessica seems, in short, to lack an understanding of the exchange she is making.¹⁵ (Exchange, of course, is her father's hated skill.) Jessica seems, in fine, to cloak the “heinous sin” of being ashamed to be who she is under the shame of her cross-dressing. This becomes a common proto-Freudian theme in Shakespeare: to be ashamed to be ashamed of shame.

Jessica's identity—as a woman, as a lover, as a convert—appears to be in flux in 2.6. Jessica, like Lorenzo, knows only that she is her father's child. The central problem seems to be that Jessica does not know the true value of what she is giving Lorenzo in “exchange.” Another problem is that she worries too little about what she is getting in Lorenzo.

The notion that love is an office of discovery suggests that, in time, through the foibles of blind love, there is truth to be known by Jessica—about Lorenzo and about herself. Just as there is irony in Jessica's last response to Lorenzo, so is irony in Jessica's first response to Lorenzo in the play, in the balcony scene: “Who are you? Tell me for more certainly, / Albeit I'll swear that I do know your tongue” (2.6.26-27). As the play goes on, it becomes clearer that Jessica knows the tongue, the dazzling vows, but not the man. By 5.1, there is the strong suggestion that something has happened since 3.5, that Lorenzo is the main reason Jessica is not merry when she hears sweet music. Self-knowledge and conscience appear to be other reasons.

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Throughout Merchant, reactions to music are linked to one's merriment, for they display one's knowledge of oneself and the world. And, just as Shylock and Lorenzo offer competing theories about what will keep Jessica from being merry, they also offer competing views of music. Sensing “some ill a-brewing towards my rest,” Shylock warns: “Jessica my girl, Look to my house” (2.5.15-17). Informed by Launcelot about “a masque,” Shylock warns, more specifically, about the danger of music:

What, are there masques? Hear you me, Jessica:
Lock up my doors; and when you hear the drum
And the vile squealing of the wry-necked fife,
Clamber not you up to the casements then,
Nor thrust your head into the public street
To gaze on Christian fools with varnished faces;
But stop my house's ears—I mean my casements;
Let not the sound of shallow fopp'ry enter
My sober house. By Jacob's staff I swear
I have no mind of feasting forth to-night;
But I will go. Go you before me, sirrah.
Say I will come.

(2.5.27-38)

Jessica is part of Shylock's house; her maidenhead is one of his doors. With words that anticipate, in both form and matter, Lorenzo's speech in 5.1, Shylock gives his daughter his last command: “Let not the sound of shallow fopp'ry enter / My sober house.”

Jessica, we see, is called on to choose between these antithetical views. What is more important, Jessica is twice called upon to see through the discrepancy between form and content apparent in the articulation of each view. In the first instance, Jessica shuns her father's disharmonious “manners” and is led to a kind of merriment by the “vile squealing.” Finally, however, at Belmont, music and musical speech lose their formerly seductive power: sweet music—and sweet vows—do not make Jessica merry. An untrue lover cannot speak persuasively about harmony, having already taught a harsh lesson about discord.

Shakespeare uses Lorenzo's speech to build dramatic tension; the end of the play puts Jessica back where she began. Just as Lorenzo's vows turn to lies, his seductive exhortations turn to commands. Lorenzo's commands replace Shylock's. They are more subtle, and tempered by the music of his speech, but they are commands: “Sit, Jessica. … Mark the music.” Jessica's reaction to music is again her form of resisting the man who commands her, her rejection of a particular world-view that would govern her reaction to music, and thereby her reactions to all things. Moreover, Jessica's claim that she is never merry when she hears sweet music reveals that Shylock's view of music turns out to be more nearly true for her than Lorenzo's view.

Writing about Jessica and Lorenzo in 5.1. in his study The Harmonies of The Merchant of Venice, Lawrence Danson, following John Hollander in assuming that Lorenzo speaks for Jessica, writes that “[it is] this pair of lovers who speak about that music of the spheres which the play's other harmonies imitate.”¹⁶ Such a conclusion is based on the assumption that the talk about false vows is merely playful banter (Danson calls it “easy banter and serious intimacy”). The critical consensus represented by Barber and Danson is expressed by Kermode. Merchant, he writes, “begins with usury and corrupt love” and “ends with harmony and perfect love.”¹⁷

As Danson knows, the question of Lorenzo's “moral fitness” is crucial to “our response to teasing banter at the opening of the fifth act.” Danson sees that his fitness has “been established,” but the only proof he can adduce is the encomium of a hot lover, Lorenzo's praise of Jessica in 2.6.52-57. Danson bases his assessment of Lorenzo's “moral fitness” on an assumption that his famous speech is an enactment of religious harmony: the “union of the Gentile husband and the daughter of the Jew suggests the penultimate stage of salvation history described by St. Paul.”¹⁸ But a Christian's theft of a soul “with many vows of faith / And ne'er a true one” speaks, ultimately, not for the “harmony in his immortal soul” but for the impenetrable grossness of his “muddy vesture of decay.” Jessica's response that she is not merry is not a confirmation of her salvation—not even a playful one. We are reminded, after all, of the County Palatine, who “hears merry tales and smiles not” (1.2.44-45), whom Portia therefore deems unfit to marry.

.....

An unambiguous resolution of the play requires harmony between Jessica and Lorenzo. And it is for this reason—a circular one—that scholars have for so long thrown Jessica over to the side of the Christians, despite what she says.¹⁹ Gross is one critic who sees the darker aspects of Jessica's marriage to Lorenzo, and of the troubling edges in their dialogues; but even he suggests “[o]ne should not make too much of” it.²⁰ One should be reminded of Leo Spitzer's warning in Classical and Christian Ideas of World Harmony about the “harmonizing tendency” that frequently attends the study of ideas of Christian harmony.²¹ Even if one persists in playing down Jessica's dissent, there is no justification for saying that Jessica speaks with Lorenzo—or that Lorenzo speaks for Jessica. Jessica says she is not merry; thereafter, she does not speak at all. She is present at the final celebration at Belmont, but she is not part of it.

As Norman Rabkin writes, “As the entire critical history of the play has made equally apparent, the play's ultimate resolution of [its] conflicts is anything but clear or simple.” Even Rabkin, however, sees the critical challenge as a demand for allegiance on one of two sides; and he, too, reads Lorenzo's speech as the signal of harmonious resolution of Lorenzo's side: “On the one side, as we have seen, we find Shylock, trickery, anality, precise definition, possessiveness, contempt for prodigality” as well as “distrust of emotion and hatred of music, bad luck, and failure.” “On the other,” writes Rabkin, “we find Portia, but also Antonio, Bassanio, Lorenzo, Jessica, and Gratiano; freedom, metaphorical richness of language, prodigality” as well as “love of emotion and music, supreme trickery, a fondness for bonds, good luck, success.”²² In this common reading, Jessica is thrown in—here, just before Gratiano—as Lorenzo's happily instructed wife.

Catherine Belsey, in “Love in Venice,” appears ready to reverse the sway of this “harmonizing habit.” But while she questions the assumptions of Barber and Danson, Belsey offers a sweeping description of love in Venice that leads her to reduce Lorenzo's talk about the “muddy vesture of decay” to putatively historical truths about the body and desire. Belsey writes that “the older understanding of love leaves traces in the text, with the effect that desire is only imperfectly domesticated” and the “consequence” that “Venice is super-imposed on Belmont.” Belsey astutely identifies the consequence, but she ignores the particular exclusion of Jessica. She suggests that all the characters in the play look “back to a world, fast disappearing in the late sixteenth century, where love was seen as anarchic, destructive, dangerous.”²³ Apparently, Belsey does not uphold Jessica's distinction between false and true vows. Belsey argues instead that the play speaks nostalgically (historically) about a desire that, in accordance with historical indicia, can no longer be fulfilled. According to Belsey, Jessica and Lorenzo, an otherwise harmonious couple, are deprived of an allegorical harmony, or granted only a trace of it—for, in the late sixteenth century, just as now, one may get no more than a trace of anything. Merchant, however, does not treat an essential crisis in the history of desire; it depicts the particular, contextualized problems the women in the play have with particular men.

There is something peculiarly wrong with all the male characters in Merchant. Portia shows herself to be superior to all the men in the play, and Jessica seems to be. Each, however, is hampered by her father's rules for choosing men, opposing sets of rules that specify different reactions to music, reactions that are central to the resolution of the play. Moreover, both Portia and Jessica are also morally flawed.

As we have seen, Jessica's response to Lorenzo's speech and the music of Portia's musicians raises questions that are crucial to any thorough reading of the play. Does Jessica's response to the music at the end of the beginning of act 5 confirm that a Jewish soul is “not happily born,” unmusical? Or is Jessica's failure to be merry a good thing? Does she exhibit a noble melancholia that distinguishes her from those flighty wenches who, when they hear the strains of a lascivious lute, giggle, roll their eyes, and fall wholly for the man who brings the strains about—as Jessica once did? Do we listen now to a young woman whom love has discovered to herself, a woman made wiser by brief experience, a woman who is ready to register her dissenting view? And might she somehow speak for the play? These questions are necessary to any study of Merchant.

As Keith Geary writes, building on the insight of Rabkin, “We must, critics tell us, take sides either with Shylock or with Portia and the Christians, and stand by our choice.” But such “black-and-white judgement seems peculiarly inappropriate to a play that argues the falsity of such neat and absolute distinctions,” for Merchant, as Geary writes, “deals in shades of grey and continually raises the problem of appropriate response and judgement, most acutely, of course, in relation to Shylock.”²⁴ Jessica, I am suggesting, is the character who most feels and portrays what becomes the obvious falsity of neat distinctions.

Merchant contrasts the Christians' gift for musical speech with the rough idiom of Shylock. Lorenzo is dazzling; Shylock is blunt. Merchant, however, demands that we distinguish the harmony of form (“In such a night …”) from the force of real discord. At the same time, the play reveals to us our inability to distinguish them. Shylock's nasty “contempt for prodigality” and “hatred of music” is an extreme antithesis to the dangerous trust in music shown by the Christians. They demonstrate a Neoplatonic trust in music and musical language that becomes suspect. With Jessica's final rejection of Lorenzo's claims, the play suggests that the “sweet power” of “sweet music” is a potentially destructive illusion for Christians as well as Jews. The case of Portia is apposite.

Merchant is neither spoken for nor resolved by the seductive harmony Lorenzo so dazzlingly proclaims. As he does in other plays, Shakespeare involves the audience in the moral dilemma of the play. He compels us to take sides even as he warns of the dangers of doing so. In Merchant he gives us a character whose middle position is, even more dangerously, easy to ignore. By living between “Antipodes,” by reacting nakedly to music, Jessica learns the most in the play, and yet she is the least pedantic character in the play. She is, moreover, the least likely to seduce us: as a Jew Jessica is eclipsed by her father; as a woman by Portia; as someone who might tell us something about being merry, she is eclipsed by Antonio; as someone who might tell us something about the “power of music,” by Lorenzo. By the end of the play, Jessica can neither be disassociated from nor identified with her father—or Lorenzo.²⁵ Jessica's is the strange suffering of one who dares to live between the “Antipodes.” A tug on the audience from two sides can make for great drama, but Shakespeare does even better in Merchant. If all the other characters demand our taking one side or another, Jessica does not, for she herself is tugged by both. As Launcelot says, her mother and father are Scylla and Charybdis: “Well, you are gone both ways” (3.5.15-16).

The wonder of the play, I am suggesting, is its ability to bring the audience around to Jessica's experience in the middle of undesirable extremes. In many ways, Merchant is a precursor of Measure for Measure—a comedy with a troubling comedic resolution; a comedy with a trenchant focus on the virtue of moving from Hebrew justice to Christian mercy; a comedy about the trouble Christians can have being merciful as they seek merriment. It would only be a few years, we must remember, before Shakespeare would write his “problem plays.”

In Merchant, one character, a minor character, Jessica, tries unsuccessfully to arbitrate the merciless extremes of Jewish rigidity and Christian frivolity. Act 5 begins (and the play ends) by developing the problems the play presents, not by fully resolving them in a traditional praise of musical harmony. Lorenzo offers a dazzling speech by which we, like Jessica, are liable to be seduced. But Shakespeare allows us to see through Lorenzo, and forces us to consider large and important questions raised both by Jessica and the dramatic themes and tensions within the play. In the end, Lorenzo delivers a speech about heavenly harmony that succumbs to the earthly conflict it tries to resolve.

Merchant is a difficult play, and has long been a divisive one. Many critics have, along with Lorenzo, praised a pristine harmony; some critics have grudgingly acknowledged it; and a few critics have briefly remarked hints of discord.²⁶ But these various readings have persisted in seeing (or not seeing) Jessica in much the same way. When we examine Jessica and her role, moreover, we see that Merchant is a play about undesirable extremes over which even competing schools of criticism might come to some consensus.

We must remember, in the end, that Jessica's last line—like the second part of Lorenzo's speech—competes for our attention with the seductive sounds of the musicians. At the conclusion of a play that pushes its dramatic content to the limits of comic form, a play that juxtaposes the harmony of form with the reality of discord and coerced harmonies, we must listen with an ear to the seductive music of both Lorenzo's speech and Portia's musicians, and with our soul bent toward deeper, more speculative matters—in short, like Jessica, with attentive spirits.

Notes

1. Barber, Shakespeare's Festive Comedy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959), 187.

2. I quote throughout from William Shakespeare, The Complete Plays, ed. Alfred Harbage (New York: Viking, 1969).

3. Hutton, “Some English Poems in Praise of Music,” English Miscellany 2 (1950): 1-63.

4. Ibid., 1-5.

5. See Hollander, The Untuning of the Sky (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961); Heninger, Touches of Sweet Harmony (San Marino, California: The Huntington Library, 1974); Danson, The Harmonies of The Merchant of Venice (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978).

6. See, for example, Nan Cooke Carpenter, Music in the Medieval and Renaissance Universities (New York: Da Capo Press, 1972) 147.

7. See Marc Berley, “Milton's Earthy Grossness: Music and the Condition of the Poet in ‘L'Allegro’ and ‘Il Penseroso,’ Milton Studies, ed. Albert C. Labriola, Vol. 30 (Pittsburgh: University Pittsburgh Press, 1993): 149-61.

8. Irene Dash, Wooing, Wedding and Power (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), mentions neither Jessica nor Merchant; in The Woman's Part: Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare, ed. Carolyn Ruth Swift Lenz, Gayle Greene, and Carol Thomas Neely (Urbana: University Illinois Press, 1983), Jessica is mentioned in only one essay, and only once, in a typical sentence linking her choice of Lorenzo to her father's misfortune; Lisa Jardine, Still Harping on Daughters (1983; New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), mentions Jessica only once, to remark only the matter of her cross-dressing; Women's Re-Visions of Shakespeare, ed. Marianne Novy (Urbana: University Illinois Press, 1990) is a collection in which Jessica is not mentioned at all; in the few allusions to Merchant throughout the volume, it is Portia who is the subject.

9. Wells, Elizabethan Mythologies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 5.

10. John Gross, Shylock: A Legacy and Its Legend (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), 99.

11. Hutton, “English Poems,” 4.

12. Gross, Shylock, 91.

13. Kermode, Shakespeare, Spenser, Donne (London: Routledge, 1971), 210-15.

14. Mack, “Engagement and Detachment in Shakespeare's Plays,” reprinted in Everybody's Shakespeare (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993), 25.

15. Some criticism written from Marxist and cultural materialist perspectives sheds further light on Jessica's “exchange.” Even these studies, however, do not give Jessica the attention she requires. See, for example, Karen Newman, “Portia's Ring: Unruly Women and Structure of Exchange in The Merchant of Venice,” Shakespeare Quarterly #38 (1987): 19-33. Newman offers intelligent analysis of the role of Portia's ring, as well as of “exchange” more generally. But Newman does not even mention Jessica's “exchange” as a point of comparison or contrast.

16. Hollander, Untuning the Sky, 151-52; Danson, Harmonies, 177.

17. Kermode, Shakespeare, Spenser, Donne, 215.

18. Danson, Harmonies, 178-84.

19. James Shapiro, Shakespeare and the Jews (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 158-59, remarks only briefly the possibility that Jessica “might revert to her Jewish nature.” The possibility, of course, is only hinted at; and it is part of Shakespeare's skill here to resist closure. To consider the matter fully, one has to pay more attention to the dramatic structure of the play than Shapiro does.

20. Gross, Shylock, 72.

21. Spitzer, Classical and Christian Ideas of World Harmony, ed. Anna Granville Hatcher (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1963), 4.

22. Rabkin, Shakespeare and the Problem of Meaning (Chicago: University Chicago Press, 1981), 28-29.

23. Belsey, “Love in Venice,” Shakespeare Survey 44 (1991): 43.

24. Geary, “The Nature of Portia's Victory: Turning to Men in The Merchant of Venice,” Shakespeare Survey 37 (1984): 55.

25. One exception to the “harmonizing habit” is offered by John Picker, “Shylock and the Struggle for Closure,” Judaism 43:2 (1994): 174-89, who considers with insight Jessica's response to Lorenzo's “musical illusion of happiness.” Picker's consideration of music, however, is general and brief, for his subject is the more general one of closure. He concludes, moreover, by bringing Jessica too close to Shylock's world-view.

26. See, for example, Newman, “Portia's Ring,” 32.