SOURCE: Ajzenstat, Samuel. “Contract in The Merchant of Venice.” Philosophy and Literature 21, no. 2 (October 1997): 262-78.

[In the following essay, Ajzenstat evaluates The Merchant of Venice as a romantic comedy featuring a number of significant oppositions, the most fundamental being that between “the conditional and the unconditional.”]

The Merchant of Venice is widely interpreted as a Christian parable about the power of selfless love to raise us above the loveless inflexibilities of the legal and commercial orders.¹ The account I shall offer is the precise opposite of this interpretation: The Merchant makes more sense as a play about love's inability to allow us to dispense with a loveless realm of hard necessity and, even more, about love's dependence on a loveless realm for its own survival. But the rejection of the idealistic account does not make The Merchant a cynical play. It remains a romantic comedy because it shows that love does not require the myth of its invulnerability and all-conquering power to remain meaningful both in the here-and-now and as a pointer to something beyond it.

The Merchant intertwines two distinct stories, a very pleasant and a very unpleasant one. The pleasant story takes place in the beautiful estate of Belmont where the young Venetian nobleman Bassanio wins Portia's hand by passing the test specified in her father's will, picking from among a golden, a silver and a lead casket the one which contains her picture. The unpleasant story takes place in a dark, ugly Venice where the merchant Antonio, in order to finance his beloved friend Bassanio's trip to Belmont, puts himself under the power of Shylock, the Jewish moneylender whose hatred he has earned by reviling him as a Jew and a usurer. Antonio risks his life, pledging a pound of his flesh if the debt is unpaid. Shakespeare brings the two stories together by having Portia, disguised as a man, go to Venice to defend Antonio in the law courts. Shylock is defeated and forced to convert to Christianity and the victors return to Belmont. Shylock's daughter Jessica, having run away to marry the Christian, Lorenzo, is also allowed to make the passage from Venice to Belmont.

To idealistic critics, the two stories work against each other. However compassionate the Christians may think they are being by making Shylock convert, it is clear enough to us in the modern audience that they are destroying him. It takes something away from the beautiful triumph of pure love—which such critics think must be the point of the play—to see it purchased at the price of the destruction of someone for whom we have come to have considerable sympathy. Consequently, the play seems either to fall apart dramatically or to be a unity only if anti-semitic. Such critics adopt a number of expedients, trying to get us to see Shylock as a simple, generalized villain, or viewing the play as anti-semitic but falling back on the historicist, Shakespeare-couldn't-have-known-any-better line, or else arguing that the play's incoherence is praiseworthy because Shakespeare's human sympathy overcame his skill as a playwright. But once we recognize, as I shall argue, that the ubiquity of something less than love is as present in the love story taken by itself as it is in the Shylock story, the sense of incoherence disappears. As for anti-semitism, it is surely an element in the play. But when we see it as a consequence of the Christian characters' attempt to separate themselves from what the play shows us to be an inseparable aspect of human life, we can understand that the play not only opposes anti-semitism but offers an astute philosophical analysis of it.

The play's fundamental opposition, often characterized as between love and commerce, is more revealingly seen as an opposition between a need for unconditional commitments and the equally pressing need to fence our commitments with conditions. The conditional is rooted in that aspect of ourselves—part of what we call justice—that tells us it is only fair for us to be self-interested enough to expect a return for what we give, reward for good, punishment for bad, measure for measure. Its basic metaphor is the contract. The unconditional is rooted in our sense of the grandeur of being able both to give and to get without demand of a return on either side, each entirely transcending need for the sake of the other. The Christian characters are not necessarily wrong to see the unconditional as spiritual perfection and the conditional as a taint on spiritual perfection. Their mistake—which the idealistic critics share—is to think that spiritual perfection is open to them. The mistake has two sides: the belief that they can distance themselves from what they find most dubious in commerce by identifying it with the Jew Shylock, and the belief that human love is sustainable without a conditional, tit-for-tat component. The play destroys both beliefs, the first in its way of telling the Shylock-Antonio story, the second in the Portia-Bassanio story. In both, we see the Christian characters being eased in the direction of a more rueful, less utopian conception of the spiritual possibilities open to them than they were reaching for at the beginning. At the same time our recognition that this reaching resulted in the casual and hypocritical demonization of others need not rob the Christian characters of our sympathy once we see that the harm they do comes from no worse a motive than the desire to be able to think well of themselves. The play shows us that the life of purely unconditional relationships, however exalted it may be, is unreachable and the attempt to reach it corrupting, but it resists a complacent reaction to the realization that this is how things must be. In a grand tradition, perhaps now on the wane, it is profoundly anti-utopian without quite letting us give up longing for a purer world. And though it is the Christian Portia who in many ways most fully represents the divided soul, Shakespeare will find a way of hinting that the spirit that blows through the play is an Old Testament spirit.

I

In The Merchant, as often in Shakespeare, issues emerge most clearly and subtly in incidental set pieces easily overlooked and sometimes cut in performance. Such episodes do not so much add to the plot as permit Shakespeare to comment unobtrusively on the main action. My account of the play hangs on four such episodes. The first of these, I wish to suggest, can best be seen as a “comment” on the demand in the trial scene that Shylock convert to Christianity. It occurs at the beginning of Act III, Scene v, when Shylock's daughter Jessica tells Launcelot Gobbo, the clown and ex-servant of Shylock, of her conversion to Christianity.

Audiences find Shylock's forced conversion extremely distressing. Yet this occurrence gives the true measure of Shakespearean irony—an irony more often saving than cynical. The saving irony here is that what is literally the cruelest persecution Shylock undergoes marks symbolically the collapse of the system which finds it useful to cast him as an object of persecution in the first place. Portia, we shall see, undergoes a similar turnabout. Both reversals reveal the instability of the Belmont-Venice dichotomy. This implication emerges not in the trial scene itself but in Launcelot's reaction to Jessica's talk of conversion. When she tells him that her husband, Lorenzo, “hath made me a Christian,” the clown responds:

Truly the more to blame he; we were Christians enow before, e'en as many as could well live one by another; this making of Christians will raise the price of hogs,—if we grow all to be pork eaters, we shall not shortly have a rasher on the coals for money.

(III.v.19-23)

A bad joke, maybe. But a revealing one. Antonio may well think of Shylock's conversion in spiritual terms. Launcelot helps us see that it also has an economic consequence—a much more interesting one than the price of bacon.

What would be the economic consequence of a conversion of all Venetians to Christianity? Clearly, either that all money lending would cease, with the consequent collapse of the Venetian commercial empire—something that Antonio has already told us he is willing to give his life to avoid (III.iii.26-36)—or else that Christians would become moneylenders. Launcelot's joke points to the increasingly explicit entry of Christians into usury, henceforth to be dignified with the name of banking. Of course, for this to happen there is no literal need for the conversion of all or any Jews. What Shylock's conversion points to symbolically is not a spiritual change in Jews but a spiritual change in Christians.

It is not that Christians become moneylenders for the first time. In the twelfth century, St. Bernard had written: “We are pained to observe that where there are no Jews, Christian moneylenders ‘Jew’ worse than the Jews, if indeed these men may be called Christians and not rather baptized Jews.” The historian who reports this statement comments that though “the Jews always formed a tiny minority of the people so engaged,” squeamish Christians could console themselves with the fiction that Christian moneylenders must really be Jews.² The spiritual change that is taking place is that they will soon no longer need the fiction.

Some may wish to explain this ironically as nothing more than the replacement of traditional squeamishness with a modern complacency that does not worry itself over spiritual ambiguities. We cannot be sure that this is not the direction in which Shakespeare sees his characters heading; many of them have a strong streak of complacency. But we have yet to point to some hints in the play to suggest a different explanation of what is happening.

The explanation I wish to explore is well suggested in a remark of the American Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr about St. Augustine's The City of God. Augustine speaks of two cities or ways of life, the city of God and the city of man, and has seemed to many of his readers to believe—just as the separation between the two “cities” of Belmont and Venice helps the Christian characters and idealistic critics of The Merchant to believe—that the human race can be fairly neatly divided into two categories: those who live in the community of unconditional love and those who live in the community of self-love and who, among other things, do the dirty work of law and order by which the ungodly control each other so that the godly can live in peace. Niebuhr offers a criticism which, whether or not fair to Augustine, seems to me to crystallize the movement of our play precisely:

When Augustine distinguished between the “two loves” which characterize the “two cities,” the love of God and the love of self, and when he pictured the world as a commingling of the two cities, he did not recognize that the commingling is due not to the fact that two types of people dwell together, but because the conflict between love and self-love is in every soul.³

For all that Belmont is a poor counterfeit of the city of God, Niebuhr's remark helps us see The Merchant of Venice as a parable in which the idea that pure Virtue and pure Vice are exemplified in “two types of people,” Shylock and Portia, is replaced by the realization that vice and virtue are in conflict within each soul. This realization allows for a more concrete account of all human beings as unpurifiable mixtures of good and ill who, instead of pretending to banish contradiction from their hearts, will have to embark on the project of learning how to live torn by the struggle between the unconditional and the conditional.

To be able to see the play in these terms we must be able to keep alive our sense that there is something despicable about the conditional, contractual life. There must be something capable of moving us in Antonio's essential criticism of lending at interest:

If thou wilt lend this money lend it not
As to thy friends—for when did friendship take
A breed for barren metal of his friend?

(I.iii.127-129)

To say of the Renaissance Venetians that they wish to live golden spiritual lives full of beauty and mutual regard far above the life of crass, competitive money-grubbing but that they can see no way of doing so except through the proceeds of those crass activities is not to situate them historically or geographically but to understand them as exemplars of a more generally familiar dilemma. What hangs over Antonio's head surely is the injunction to “sell all you have and give to the poor.” It makes him a better man and a worse one. He cannot live with it and he cannot live without it.

We may miss the advantages of the Belmont-Venice system, which are mainly two: first, that it keeps up the morale of at least some members of the society, by allowing them, however artificially, to think well of themselves without asking them to forgo the benefits of wealth. And secondly, along with this, that it is able to keep alive, even if only by lip-service and only among an elite, an exalted conception of human relationships. If they had been more honest with themselves both of these things might have been more difficult for them.

But Shakespeare does not endorse this self-deception. So, though he allows us to see, in spite of everything, the graces of Belmont, he also shows us the unworkability of the separation of Belmont from Venice. We have yet to see the fatal flaw that will bring the system crashing down. Before we can do so, we need a further understanding of how the basic principle at issue is brought into the play and an examination of Portia's role in bringing out the collapse of the social structure she is trying to save.

II

A second “incidental” episode points us towards a deeper view of what is at issue in The Merchant. Once more it involves Launcelot Gobbo, the play's wry philosopher-clown, and should also be read as a comic commentary on a serious scene, the only one in which Antonio and Shylock debate the issue of usury. In the comic episode, Launcelot meets his father coming to visit him (II.ii.31-94). The high-spirited son cannot resist confusing the blind old man. He first pretends not to be Launcelot, then, acknowledging that he is, kneels down and asks his blessing. The father, feeling the top of Launcelot's head expresses surprise that his son has grown such a long beard. Truly, as Launcelot remarks, “It is a wise father that knows his own child.”

This episode is a comic acting out of the biblical scene (Genesis 27) in which Jacob wears goatskins so that his blind father Isaac will feel him, think he is his elder son, the hairy Esau, and be deceived into giving him Esau's blessing. The point of this scene begins to emerge when we recall the serious scene in which Shylock tells Antonio that by usury he is following Jacob's example and Antonio's reply that Jacob, unlike Shylock, did nothing unjust and was in any case guided by God (I.iii.66-90). The scene between Launcelot and his father functions as Shakespeare's invitation to us to consider Antonio's rosy, idealizing picture of Jacob as not quite what Scripture intended, indeed as a deep misunderstanding of the religious tradition.

It is not possible here to give a full account of the story of Jacob. Of all the Biblical patriarchs he most conspicuously lives out a double bind. In order to fulfill his spiritual calling of being one of the founders of a holy nation he must lie and cheat. At the same time, the God he serves with his lie is a god who demands truth so Jacob and his mother must be punished.

The biblical text lays out the structure of the punishment with wonderful clarity. In the story of Jacob's marriage, the same kind of trick he had used to supplant his elder brother (Genesis 29: 16-27) is used against him to supplant a younger of two sisters.

Reading Jacob's marriage to Leah as punishment suggests that his original act of lying was evil. But the story also suggests that the lie was necessary. This seems to be the reading that emerges from Launcelot's scene with his father, for just before their meeting Launcelot has been debating with himself whether he should obey his conscience and remain Shylock's servant or obey the devil and run off and enter Bassanio's service (II.ii.1-24). He decides that the devil's advice is altogether better just as his father enters. This suggests in a comic way that it may be necessary to disobey one's conscience.

This account can be usefully juxtaposed with the Shylock-Antonio debate.⁴ Antonio thinks that Jacob did not cheat but could and did leave everything in God's hands, hence he cannot be used to justify usury. Shylock thinks that Jacob's practices were justified by their results. Neither of them seems to think of Jacob as morally ambiguous, doing what was both wrong and unavoidable. The idea of moral ambiguity is what Launcelot points towards. The scene between the Gobbos offers Shakespeare's account of Jacob in opposition to both Shylock's and Antonio's. The Jacob of this interpretation is, as it were, a combination of Shylock and Antonio within one person, practicing out of necessity what must also be seen as a falling away from perfection. That we are meant to take Jacob as a person who must suffer the consequences of a divided heart is suggested by his dream (Genesis 28: 11-15) of a ladder connecting a high place with a low place with beings moving up and down on it continually but never simply in an upward direction and never reaching God, who is not at the top of the ladder but above it.

The question, then, that the Shylock-Antonio part of the story poses for us is whether a full ethical life can be unified and consistent or must of necessity exhibit a tense and never quite consistent duality. Turning now from the Shylock story to the story of Portia's wedding, we shall see further reasons for reading The Merchant as a demonstration of inescapable human duality and the less than perfect but nevertheless genuine good available to us by living in terms of it.

III

The third of our set pieces is the ring episode at the very end of the play. The crisis past, the main characters (except, as often noted, Shylock) gather in Belmont. The atmosphere of relief is briefly disturbed when Portia and her maid Nerissa ask for the rings they had given their husbands and made them promise never to part with. Bassanio and Gratiano have reluctantly given the rings to the lawyer and his clerk who had saved Antonio. The women who, of course, were the lawyer and “his” clerk, and had demanded the rings to test their husbands, put the poor men through hell for a few moments. They can say truthfully that since the lawyer and his clerk now have the rings they will sleep only with them. But they soon take pity on Bassanio and Gratiano and tell all. The men promise, once more, never to part with the rings. As Nerissa and Gratiano run off to consummate their marriage, Gratiano ends the play with an obscene remark in which a ring on a finger represents the joining of sexual organs:

Well, while I live I'll fear no other thing
So sore, as keeping safe Nerissa's ring.

These jokey threats of tit-for-tat infidelity hold an important clue to the rest of the play. I do not doubt that Portia's marriage is a love match. But what does that imply in a play that is supposed to be pitting tit-for-tat contractualism against unconditional love? The inscription on the leaden casket, the one containing Portia's picture, makes reference to unconditional love by demanding of the chooser that he “give and hazard all he hath” (II.vii.16). Is Portia required to “give and hazard all [she] hath” or ought she to try, if possible, to state her conditions? Is a mating of souls spoiled if an element of tit-for-tat enters it? To think so would be remarkably similar to the idealistic attitude we have seen Antonio take towards money-lending (I.iii.128-129). But this is not Portia's answer. Among the different interpretations of her action, depending on whether we like or dislike her, it is open to us to believe that she states her conditions in the faith that she is not thereby relinquishing the unconditionality of her relationship with Bassanio. For all her bantering tone she delivers a deadly serious and, in the context of the rosy glow of dawn at Belmont, a very poignant threat: my sexual fidelity is conditional on yours. We need not think that she actually would retaliate in this way if the issue arose. She may well be incapable of it. All the more reason, we might say, to threaten.

It may be helpful to think about Bassanio and Portia in the light of some of our own recent confusions about marriage. The idealistic insistence that marriage should not state conditions on either side was one of the more permanent legacies of the counter-cultural revolution of the 1960s. A certain measure-for-measure backlash redeemed the legalities of marriage when many women found themselves facing such realities as the need for child support payments. In our times—and not only in ours—both unconditional love (as long as it lasts) and liberal contractualism have been applied to marriage with a vengeance and often with an uneasy sense that they were not quite compatible.

Realism about the need for guaranteed security would have been entirely unproblematic if the idealistic or utopian view were simply wrong. Unfortunately for any simple account, it seems to be as important for human beings to give and get unconditional love as it is for them to be able to hedge it around with conditions for the sake of security. Is it possible to satisfy both requirements?

The Merchant's last episode answers with a qualified yes. The yes is that the combination of self-surrender and self-preservation is a human necessity that we are able to cobble together. The qualification is that it is after all a kind of makeshift, an ambiguous joining of two very different spiritual attitudes, requiring considerable moral equilibrium—something Portia luckily possesses to a fault—so as not to be overwhelmed when utopian temptations make ordinary marriage seem like mere hypocrisy.

Right at the end, then, the play brings us gently back to the ubiquity of contract. The ring episode invites us to consider that pure unconditional love by itself cannot and never could provide the cement for normal, human relationships and yet can draw aid and support from the lower, or less idealistic, conditional part of ourselves. It suggests that even in our most personal and intimate relations we have to make room in our hearts for the external constraints of the contractual, even when it seems to us a less beautiful and more grasping way of life than the pure refusal to enforce conditions. But that the low can help the high to survive is part of what makes The Merchant a comedy—even if a bittersweet one.

In her marriage Portia gently calls a threat of retaliation to the aid of a love which an idealist or a romantic might think was incompatible with such threats. In retrospect she seems from the very beginning of the play to have been the sort of person who would be able to temper the demand for the unconditional with contractual realism. As such, rather than as a presumed agent of Christian mercy, she is an appropriate person to offer Shylock an acceptably contractual compromise when they confront each other in the courtroom. But the hostility of others has turned Shylock from a person who lives by conditionality into an agent of unconditional hatred in the service of which he has twisted the very idea of contract. After he refuses to accept twice his money back (IV.i.84-87), he is beyond the pale of the contractual and will have to be destroyed. The trial is a prefiguring of the collapse of the system under which Shylock was made a pariah. But that collapse will come too late to help him.

IV

The fatal flaw that will bring down the Belmont-Venice system is that it depends vitally on the participation of two people, Shylock and Portia, who can hardly be expected to be very pious towards it. They are both in a position to see through the roles they are expected to play as quite a bit less than God-given. Portia's golden existence in Belmont requires, at least as her father sees it, that she and her wealth be handed over to a man (or manager) whose main qualification is to be wised-up enough to the hypocrisies of others so that he can survive his forays into Venice. Bassanio reflects in front of the caskets (III.ii.73-105) not on how good externally plain things may be inwardly but on how corrupt beautiful-looking things often are within, an odd reflection with which to win a woman he thinks both “fair, and (fairer than that word) / Of wondrous virtues” (I.i.162-163). The choice of the caskets is cunningly arranged to appear to reflect the values of Belmont—which are supposed to be Portia's—while actually attracting someone who not only has a fair amount of Venice in his soul but also knows how to hide it. For the protection of Belmont, Portia cannot be allowed to marry according to her own will. And Shylock is allowed to make a living in Venice only at the cost of ostracism and humiliation. Both have good cause to see the price they are paying in order to represent what the Christian males need them to represent, an allegory of pure Virtue versus “pure” Vice.

Because this allegory makes Shylock an outsider, it takes the chance that he may want to pull it down and will find the opportunity to do so in its own weakness, the inflexible legalism that underlies the commercial contract. But Shakespeare adds a twist. As it turns out, the system can be saved only by someone who is as much an outsider as Shylock, someone as willing as he is, and as Antonio is not, to find a loophole in the letter of the law. That other outsider is, of course, Portia. What makes it impossible to see the confrontation between Shylock and Portia as a clash between law and mercy is simply that both of them use the law shamelessly for their own purposes. In a further irony it is Antonio, though a Christian, who is the play's committed legalist; he considers the commercial law of Venice untouchable:

The duke cannot deny the course of law:
For the commodity that strangers have
With us in Venice, if it be denied,
Will much impeach the justice of the state,
Since that the trade and profit of the city
Consisteth of all nations.

(III.iii.26-31)

If Portia had had that much respect for the law she would have been unable to play with it enough to save it from the consequences of its own mechanical rigidity.⁵ This suggestion seems outrageous to those critics who believe the Belmont-Venice allegory and therefore believe that Portia can only act on the highest standards of purity. These are the same critics—a surprisingly large number—who think it merely cynical to suggest that Portia gives Bassanio a hint as to which casket to choose by having a song containing rhymes for “lead” sung to him.⁶ But once we are ready to take the play as teaching that we live in a world where we must be willing to marshal the impure on behalf of the pure if anything pure is to survive, it becomes extremely plausible to see the trial of the caskets as Portia's dry run for the trial of Antonio, a dry run in which she displays an understandable unscrupulousness, cheating her father as surely as Jacob cheated his—in her case in the interest of a true love.

Very gently Shakespeare here touches the theme of unscrupulousness in defense of a world where scruples are to have a chance to survive, a theme which becomes crucial in his histories. What is in question is Machiavelli's teaching that a legal order can be created and defended only by someone who does not feel bound by it, the unscrupulous founder who stands outside the law. The point is put delicately by King Henry V (a student of Falstaff in seeing through the law) to Katherine of France: “you and I cannot be confin'd within the weak list of a country's fashion; we are the makers of manners” (Henry V, V.ii.266).

Anyone who gets to know Portia must feel that she too, in her heart “cannot be confined within the weak list of a country's fashion.” But in her dealings with Venice she thinks of herself as acting to save her country's fashion. It seems that though she has seen through the conventions of Venice she knows that the self-esteem of the man she loves depends on the maintenance of the world in which he has his noble status. The mixture of conditional and unconditional she is able to admit into her marriage—if indeed she knows she is doing it—she does not here force on the Christian males. It is against her will that she sows the seeds of destruction in the Belmont-Venice system's way of dealing with commerce.

The trial scene has an almost epic quality. Two great antagonists, Shylock and Portia clash, both empowered because they have seen through the laws of their community, he to pull down at least one of its pillars, she to save it. Victory is Portia's. But Shakespeare has one more saving twist of irony. Portia's victory like Shylock's conversion has a double meaning.

Portia the woman takes on in pretense the figure of a man just as Shylock the Jew takes on in pretense the figure of a Christian. She symbolically unfits herself to play the role mapped out for her in the society she is supposedly saving—even though she largely returns to playing it. Just as Shylock's conversion tells us that in the future Jews will not be able to be placed at the low end of the Belmont-Venice system, Portia's appearance in Venice in male dress tells us that she or her descendants will not willingly stay put on the pedestal in Belmont. Shakespeare is tangibly predicting the demise of the Belmont-Venice dichotomy.

But even if the dichotomy does die, we are not meant to think that love and contract simply join hands and become mutually supporting. It may be that to be able to love at all one must be able to state one's conditions. But it is not the case that in order to state one conditions one must be able to love. So, even when the conditional and the unconditional come to reside in the same heart, the conditional, especially in the form of commercial life, will retain an independence that the unconditional does not have. Love will need contract more than contract needs love. The melding of Venice and Belmont cannot eradicate the division between those we love and those we do not love. But it can stop us—sometimes—from believing that only those we do not love have contractualism in their souls. In this world at least, the conditional is a more inescapable power than the unconditional. The ubiquity of commerce may now open the way for Shylock to become a respectable businessman. The exclusiveness of love makes it extremely unlikely that he will ever be invited to even the new, more ambiguous Belmont.

V

Some hint of what Shakespeare may think of the social order whose death he anticipates lies in the references to Christian hypocrisy which the more cynical critics have noted in almost every scene of The Merchant.⁷ To these critics they suggest simple condemnation of the Christians. More likely, I think, they are there to shore up the message that we live out our lives in a not quite harmonious double-mindedness.

But for many, double-mindedness is just a euphemism for hypocrisy and may well come to seem morally intolerable. Is there anything that can ease the tension of living with the necessity of duplicity? Is dividedness the last word about us?

At one point Shakespeare suggests otherwise. This is the last of the episodes I shall consider. At the beginning of Act V, the scene that ends with the rings, Lorenzo, lying out under the stars at Belmont, speaks to Jessica of the music of the spheres:

There's not the smallest orb which thou behold'st
But in his motion like an angel sings,
Still quiring to the young-ey'd cherubins;
Such harmony is in immortal souls,
But whilst this muddy vesture of decay
Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it.

(V.i.60-65)

Lorenzo elegantly calls up a world that transcends the double bind, that is harmonious rather than conflictual, but is unavailable to us while we wear “this muddy vesture of decay.” For the idealists these words will be discredited by being spoken by a frivolous playboy consoling himself complacently for his own grossness with the drug of religion. But if the play is about double-mindedness it is appropriate that Lorenzo should speak these lines. When Lorenzo continues:

The man that hath no music in himself,
Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds,
Is fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils …
Let no such man be trusted

(V.i.83-88)

he may think he is talking about someone like Shylock, who speaks of the “vile squealing of the wry-neck'd fife” (II.v.30) and the dire effect of the bagpipes (IV.i.49-50). But since he has just said that none of us can hear the real music, we are apparently all “fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils.”

Here Lorenzo sums up the double-mindedness of the play and moves it for a moment to a cosmic plane. Lorenzo's dream is not unlike Jacob's. We only know what is low in our world because we have glimpsed something high. Our ability to see ourselves from above is an element of our worth even when what we see from that perspective is our worthlessness. Even if Lorenzo is not fit to speak these words or doesn't believe them in any but the most superficial sense, one would have to be an intensely serious deconstructionist not to be glad he says them or not to like him a little better for saying them.

VI

I have argued that The Merchant of Venice is best understood in the context of a tension between the conditional and the unconditional. A tension of this kind continues to reverberate through our philosophies and theodicies. We vacillate between thinking that goodness is rewarded and thinking that reward would demean it; of love we think both that it endures all but that we may demand good behavior from those who say they love us; in commerce, the profit motive can seem both reasonable and crass. One need not be a Christian to feel the tug of living like the lilies of the field. But one will also feel the tug of having a retirement savings plan at a respectable interest rate. Controlling the future, which requires laying down conditions, and letting the future look after itself, which is what makes unconditional commitment possible—both of them answer to something powerful in our natures that helps to define our self-understanding. Our hearts are torn by the tension between them.

The utopian cure for the torn human heart can hardly be better put than in Hamlet's “throw away the worser part of it / And live the purer with the other half” (Hamlet, III.iv.159-160), and many would identify that as The Merchant's teaching. This is certainly how the Christian characters in the play see themselves. But much of Shakespeare's work can be seen as showing that we cannot “throw away the worser part” and that trying to do so is disastrous. But to let “the worser part” in the form of our less generous, more self-centered, more unscrupulous impulses run rampant would also be disastrous in the world of Shakespeare, who does not seem as optimistic as later thinkers that such impulses will act on each other as checks and balances. Instead, at least in The Merchant, a different sort of impulse—one of unconditioned love—is what offers a counterweight to the ungenerous, conditional impulses, though it also loses something by existing in tension with them. In The Merchant this counterweight operates, reasonably enough, only in what we would call the private world of marriage and personal friendship. The fate of the more public world of relations between strangers remains uncertain as it is seen moving in the direction of a more openly acknowledged contractualism. But the utopian cure is unambiguously set aside. If “the worser part” is the contractual life, then neither Portia nor Antonio can throw it away. Antonio projects it onto Shylock and in the process creates an implacable enemy who might well have destroyed him. And though the surface symbolism of Belmont suggests that the man who would win Portia must be a devotee of unconditional love who will “give and hazard all he hath.” Portia has learned by the last scene that for her to give and hazard all she has would be hazardous indeed.

The world into which we are introduced at the beginning of The Merchant is both in Venice and in Belmont a make-believe world that depends on clear-cut social distinctions between Jews and Christians and between men and women based on clear-cut social roles. It is Shakespeare's anti-utopianism to show us that this world is a fool's paradise. But his anti-utopian attitude is not one of moralistic indignation. Post-Holocaust critics, anxious to acquit Shakespeare of the charge of anti-semitism, have tried to show him “taking sides” against the Christian characters. In fact, he does something more useful. Without moralizing, he offers an analysis, a brilliant piece of social science, identifying an important spiritual function that intolerance tries to serve and also showing—from our vantage point one might say predicting—exactly how the Venice-Belmont system comes to collapse. Nor does he flatten out the dilemma. Tit-for-tat contractualism is not seen as untainted. Nor does Shakespeare suggest, as some critics do, that money-lending itself is unambiguously moral as long as the rate of interest is not exorbitant and pounds of flesh are not brought into the bargain. Antonio despises Shylock long before there is any pound-of-flesh contract. Nor are the Christians condemned for wishing to think of themselves—however unrealistically—as untainted either by the profit motive or by a measure-for-measure conception of love relations. The project is simply shown collapsing under its own weight.

For some commentators the political teaching of The Merchant of Venice is that the society in which we live has been bought at the price of the driving out of love and friendship. But Lorenzo's and Jessica's rueful reflection in the final scene (V.i.1-22) on legendary lovers who came to a bad end—Troilus, Thisbe, Dido, Medea—is perhaps meant to remind us that there was never a time when love and friendship did not have a hard time maintaining themselves against the necessities of nature and commerce even while depending on those necessities for support. They do not list these lovers to give themselves an excuse for infidelity. Rather, having caught a hint of perfection in the night and the stars, they are pledging themselves not to betray the only life they can know just because it is mixed and imperfect. A few minutes later Portia, in the ring episode, will also pledge her loyalty to a life that is something less than the music of the spheres. That they can settle for less without forgetting the more is one of the things that after all makes The Merchant of Venice a comedy and not a tragedy.

Notes

1. Citations are to the Arden edition, The Merchant of Venice, edited by John Russell Brown (London: Methuen, 1971).

2. Lester K. Little, Religious Poverty and the Profit Economy in Medieval Europe (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978), pp. 52, 56.

3. Robert McAfee Brown, ed., The Essential Reinhold Niebuhr (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), p. 135.

4. See Barbara K. Lewalski, “Biblical Allusion and Allegory in The Merchant of Venice” Shakespeare Quarterly 13 (1962): 327-43. Lewalski does not include Launcelot Gobbo's gloss on the Jacob story.

5. I adopt the general view that Portia uses a legal trick in her defense of Antonio since a contract that granted a pound of flesh would also grant the right to shed blood in taking the pound.

6. John Russell Brown, for example (note on III.ii.63, p. 80) says that such a hint “would belittle Bassanio and Portia and cheapen the theme of the play.”

7. For a detailed, classic account of the “ironic” interpretation, see A. D. Moody, Shakespeare: The Merchant of Venice (London: Edward Arnold, 1964).