SOURCE: Oldrieve, Susan. “Marginalized Voices in The Merchant of Venice.” Cardozo Studies in Law and Literature 5, no. 1 (spring 1993): 87-105.

[In the following essay, Oldrieve reads both Shylock and Portia as social outcasts alienated from the Christian and patriarchal world of Venice/Belmont in The Merchant of Venice.]

I. INTRODUCTION

In The Merchant of Venice, Shylock and Portia both represent marginalized groups, the one an ethnic and religious minority, and the other women. As Marianne Novy points out,

Women and Jews could be seen as symbolic of absolute otherness—alien, mysterious, uncivilized, unredeemed. Although women could be praised for being as virtuous or intelligent as men, or Jews for converting to Christianity or behaving as Christians ought, nevertheless femaleness and Jewishness as qualities in themselves had negative meanings in this tradition—both were associated with the flesh, not the spirit, and therefore with impulses toward sexuality, aggression, and acquisitiveness. …¹

Novy argues that these were “all qualities becoming more evident in Renaissance society” and that in rejecting the Jew and finally repressing the power of women, the play reflects a desire to contain its own movement toward individualism.²

While I do not entirely agree with Novy's reading of Act V, her association of Jews and women as outsiders is significant. Their legal and economic conditions, as well as their emblematic connotations, support the analogy. Women were the property of their fathers, and Jews the property of their rulers. The mid-12th century “Laws of Edward the Confessor” (assuming that Shakespeare was adhering to English law, and placed his story in Venice as part of his poetic license) describe clearly the legal position of the Jew in England:

All Jews, wherever in the realm they are, must be under the King's liege protection and guardianship, nor can any of them put himself under the protection of any powerful person without the King's licence, because the Jews themselves and all their chattels are the King's. If therefore anyone detain them or their money, the King may claim them, if he so desire and if he is able, as his own.³

Similarly, in The Merchant of Venice, Portia is her father's property: even from the grave he has the legal and moral right to decide the most intimate concerns of her life. Furthermore, when married, she is expected to transfer control of her life and living from her father's hands to the hands of a man who might well be completely unknown to her.

Portia's first appearance onstage shows her struggling to balance her needs as an individual against the demands of the patriarchal society in which she lives. She knows she should conform to her father's will, but she desperately wants to control her choice of a husband. Harry Berger's excellent explication of the casket scene in Act III sensitively reveals Portia's conflict between independence and submission. He suggests that Portia is caught between her desire to give Bassanio clues about how to choose and her reluctance to betray her father's will. She is also torn between her desire for Bassanio and her anxiety about submitting herself to him. As Berger explains, “Portia plays the inquisitor, but this is a role which, if she were more crass, she could conceivably induce upon Bassanio, assigning him the function of torturing out of her the answers for deliverance (for her deliverance as well as his) which she would have too many scruples to offer voluntarily, not only the scruple about being forsworn but also the scruple about crowning Bassanio over her as her monarch.”⁴

In spite of Portia's scruples and her determination to live by the rules, her discussion with Nerissa in Act I admits the possibility of rebellion against her father's authority. Whether the director chooses to emphasize the clues in the song or not, this scene and her tense conversation with Bassanio make us aware that Portia could choose to ignore her father's will and dispose of herself according to her own wishes. Shylock's situation seems much less flexible. He must convert or die.

While Novy believes that the play rejects the Jew,⁵ it seems that in juxtaposing Shylock's dilemma with Portia's, Shakespeare suggests that it is possible for all “Others” to conform in public but at the same time to establish a private realm in which they can successfully satisfy their emotional needs. Berger concludes that Portia finally asserts her individuality and power by “mercifying” Antonio in the last scenes. She simply outgives both him and Bassanio, and in so doing puts them under her power.⁶ My reading differs from Berger's in that I believe she exhibits this power not just for her own sake but also for Shylock's.

II. SHYLOCK AND THE CHRISTIAN PATRIARCHY

Shylock's counterpart in the Christian business world is Antonio, who represents the dominant élite. He is the successful businessman of Venice, totally immersed in the city's financial and social life. Antonio first appears surrounded by friends who are deeply concerned about his melancholia. In Act I, Bassanio's entrance with Lorenzo widens Antonio's socio-commercial circle. The men on stage are obviously part of a well-knit and familiar group who both do business and socialize with each other. Antonio is the most successful of them, and the most respected. A true “Old Boy Network” is portrayed during the friendly exchanges of I,i,57-73.⁷ The stage is full of men of various ages who share common interests, values, and daily pursuits, and who give each other both the emotional and the financial support that enable them to retain their social and commercial security. Antonio is the center of their concern in every scene in which he or they appear, until Act V. Bassanio is the newest member of the group, favored by Antonio and encouraged by all the men to succeed in their world of commerce. When he says, “To you, Antonio, / I owe the most in money and in love” (emphasis added), his words imply that he has received help from others as well, but that Antonio is his primary mentor. Their conversation extends the tone of mutual bonding established at the rise of the curtain, culminating in Antonio's slightly reproachful, “You know me well … do but say to me what I should do / That in your knowledge may by me be done, / And I am prest unto it.” (I,i,153-160) Antonio is willing to devote both his material and emotional resources to ensure Bassanio's success.

Whether Antonio is motivated by more than his mentorship and his enthusiasm for business cannot be told from the text alone.⁸ However, the mentor-protegé relationship does not necessarily need overtones of homosexuality to radiate strong emotion. In such a relationship, the protegé's success is a reflection of the mentor's, and it can be difficult for the mentor to dissociate his professional self-image from the success or failure of the protegé. When Antonio is engulfed in his losses, he wishes to see Bassanio, because in so doing he can assure himself that he has not completely failed in his economic ventures: he can affirm that his loans to Bassanio have secured the young man's social and financial position. He rejects Bassanio's offers of sacrifice, telling him, “You cannot be better employed, Bassanio, / Than to live still and write mine epitaph.” (IV,i,117-18) In writing Antonio's epitaph, Bassanio would preserve his friend's reputation, and through his success, carry on Antonio's role in the world.

In this sense, Bassanio is more Antonio's son, continuing the family name and tradition, than his lover.⁹ Such a relation is borne out by one of Shakespeare's sources, Il Pecorone, where the relationship between the mentor and protegé is one in which a rejected younger son finds a surrogate father.¹⁰ Bassanio and Antonio thus stand in comparison not to Portia and Bassanio, but to Portia and her father, and to Shylock and Jessica. The need to perpetuate one's estate—to control it after one's death by handing it on to an obedient child—is a motif that runs throughout the play. The will of Portia's father and Shylock's grief over the loss of both his daughter and, through her, his ducats, clearly reflect the play's concern with perpetuation. Antonio, too, can reflect this concern, particularly if a director follows Shakespeare's source and portrays him as an older man. Beneath Antonio's intense interest in Bassanio may be a homosexual attraction or a doting friendship, but he also may be motivated by a bachelor's desire for a surrogate child who will ensure his immortality.

III. PORTIA AND BELMONT'S PATRIARCHY

Perpetuation is also an issue for Portia, as we move from a predominantly male world to a predominantly female world. Portia's father has tried to ensure that his daughter and his rich estate will continue to prosper after his death. While Antonio trusts Bassanio's judgment in spite of indications that his “son” wastes more money than he preserves, Portia's father takes the care of his estate totally out of his daughter's hands, completely disregarding her intelligence and common sense. Portia cannot even veto her father's choice of a husband, a right increasingly accepted in Elizabethan times.¹¹ Certainly with both her parents dead, and apparently competent of age and capable of managing the estate well, Portia could expect to have some influence over her marriage.

Portia chafes against this patriarchal control but eventually accepts it, partly out of trust and duty, and partly because she finds that it ultimately works to her advantage. When she discovers that her father's will has chased most of her distasteful suitors away, she resolves, “If I live to be as old as Sibylla, I will die as chaste as Diana, unless I be obtained by the manner of my father's will.” (I,ii,104-6) David Sundelson argues that her submission to her father is a form of identification that enables her to cope with his death. She recreates him within herself by taking upon herself his characteristics and values.¹² Carol Leventen also argues that Portia internalizes her father's will, but attributes her motivation to cultural imperatives:

Quite literally, Portia makes a virtue out of what once was perceived as necessity. In Freudian terms, Portia's words to Nerissa in I,ii and to Bassanio in III,ii, demonstrate the power of the superego: the internalisation of cultural imperatives. Guilt is so internalised that one can never “get away with it” because one punishes one's self; the sanctions are no longer “out there.”¹³

With or without the influence of guilt, when Nerissa announces that at least some undesirable suitors have been driven away by Portia's father's demands, the will and the patriarchal and economic system it reflects seem to have worked for her. It is this success that makes her more willing to accept the demands of the patriarchal authority and to submit both her possessions and her person to her husband. The ring that she gives Bassanio is a symbol of her trust in him and in the institution of marriage in her patriarchal world. It is also, as Newman points out, “a representation of Portia's acceptance of Elizabethan marriage which was characterized by women's subjection, their loss of legal rights, and their status as goods or chattel.”¹⁴ A potential rebel at first, Portia conforms to the demands of her society and places her entire life and living into her husband's hands.

Her faith in the patriarchal view of marriage extends to Antonio and to the exclusively male socio-commercial relationships with which the play begins. She tells Lorenzo,

                                                                      … this Antonio,
Being the bosom lover of my lord,
Must needs be like my lord. If it be so,
How little is the cost I have bestowed
In purchasing the semblance of my soul
From out the state of hellish cruelty!

(III,iv,16-21)

Her trust in Bassanio makes her willing to trust Antonio, and her generous financial offers mimic the financial and emotional support the play's Christian merchants give each other. Portia becomes “one of the boys” even before she takes on her disguise as a male to defend her new group of friends from an outside threat.

What Portia does not realize at first is that Antonio is not exactly like her lord—or like what she has seen of Bassanio so far. Nor does she understand that the man who is threatening Bassanio's friend has been victimized by the Christian merchants just as she could have been victimized by her father's patriarchal control. Shylock is a businessman in Venice, too, but conducts his business very differently than do his Christian colleagues. Not only does he charge interest while Antonio does not, but he also for the most part works alone, without the social, financial, and emotional support of mainstream Venetians. Antonio is threatened by Shylock's business practices; he resorts first to vehement anti-semitism and then to the legal opportunities Portia affords him to eliminate that threat.

IV. THE CONTRACT AND ITS ENFORCEMENT

Both Shylock and Antonio are highly successful, and the fact that Antonio sends Bassanio to Shylock shows that even in Antonio's mind, Shylock is an important business force on the Rialto. Shylock says he hates Antonio because he “brings down the rate of usance,” (I,iii,42) but also because he berates Shylock in public, “even there where merchants most do congregate.” (I,iii,46) One result of Antonio's behavior would be to drive customers away from Shylock and into his own fold; therefore, his berating Shylock in public would reflect not just anti-semitism, but an anti-semitism used to give the Christian an economic advantage. If Antonio were not threatened professionally by Shylock's business abilities, he would have less motivation to denigrate him in front of customers.

Their rivalry emerges directly as they briefly vie for Bassanio early in scene three. Shylock has just told the Laban and Jacob story, parrying Antonio's pointed questions with a good joke underscoring his financial success. That Bassanio responds by laughing, as he does in the 1981 BBC television production of the play, is signaled by Shylock's line “But note me, signor.”¹⁵ Shylock has gotten Bassanio's attention and wishes to extend their moment of comraderie. Antonio immediately interrupts him with “Mark you this, Bassanio,” drawing the young man's attention back to himself and reminding him to which camp he belongs.

For a short moment, then, Bassanio is caught between two potential mentors, and the rivalry between Shylock and Antonio becomes not just a matter of business practice and success, but of the gathering and losing of friendship and prestige. Shylock is not really interested in stealing Antonio's protegé from him; he seeks only professional respect for his way of doing business. His rival needs a loan and is willing to adhere to conditions he has vehemently denounced in public. Antonio, faced with his economic vulnerability and perhaps smarting from Shylock's ability to attract Bassanio's attention, berates Shylock's methods even as he is asking for help.

Shylock's bond proposal comes out of his emotional reaction to this insult. He has said that he wants to “catch him once upon the hip” (I,iii,43) for the way in which Antonio has damaged his business reputation; and here he finds himself subjected to worse scorn. He is justifiably angry, and he wants to find a way to stop Antonio's behavior once and for all. The unusual bond that he offers both satisfies his anger and will prevent future public outcry. He begins by accepting Antonio's way of doing things. The implication is that if he can compromise, Antonio should also, especially since he wishes to profit by Shylock's practice:

To buy his favor I extend this friendship.
If he will take it, so; if not, adieu.
And for my love, I pray you, wrong me not.

(I,iii,167-9)

If Antonio does not accept the loan without monetary interest, then he can no longer berate Shylock for demanding interest, for Shylock can counter Antonio's public criticism by claiming that he offered him a no-interest loan and was refused. And if Antonio is willing to “play” with Shylock by accepting the bond and the “merry sport” that it represents, then perhaps he will voluntarily come to treat Shylock with more respect. In either case, Shylock will get what he most desires: the silencing of Antonio's public criticism of his business practices.

On the other hand, Shylock is deeply and justifiably angered by Antonio's insults and some part of him would probably enjoy cutting into Antonio's “fair flesh.” Because Shylock's social and legal position prevents him from taking a more direct action for revenge, his anger expresses itself in a dare that also allows Shylock the opportunity subtly to insult Antonio by stating that his “fair flesh” is worth less than an animal's.

Antonio accepts the dare, sure that he cannot lose and pleased that he may have pressured Shylock into conforming to the “proper” way of doing mercantile business. As long as Shylock operates according to his own rules, he threatens Antonio's business supremacy. When Antonio thinks Shylock may be persuaded to change his business practices, he no longer feels threatened; perhaps he believes that he can then compete with Shylock on his own terms and win.

In the trial scene, the Duke, speaking for “the world,” (IV,i,17) also expects Shylock to play by Antonio's rules. Not only does he tell Shylock that everyone expects him to change his mind about exacting the forfeiture, but also to

Forgive a moiety of the principal,
Glancing an eye of pity on his losses
That have of late so huddled on his back …

(IV,i,26-28).

The Duke seems to have forgotten that Shylock is motivated by his own great losses. Not only has he lost ducats and jewels, but in losing Jessica, he has lost both a daughter and the means by which to control his estate after his death. Antonio can still hope to perpetuate his image in Bassanio, and Portia has behaved as an admirable image of her father and of Bellario her mentor, but Shylock has had all hope of the future torn from him. The Duke ignores Shylock's grief and tells him that loyalty to business associates—even if they have betrayed him—should come before personal concerns. Shylock refuses this argument, and in a forceful speech argues that his feelings are all that matter in this case. His private and personal emotions are going to take precedence over social and political amenities, and he is there to see that the system that allowed him to be humiliated is forced to recognize his personal experience.

Portia enters the scene in the service of that system, intent upon saving her husband's friend and punishing his enemy, upon showing that the feelings of the individual must give way to the larger cause of social harmony. Portia has her plan clearly worked out before she enters the courtroom. She hopes, like the Duke, that she can talk Shylock into relenting and conforming to the expectations of the establishment, but she is prepared to “throw the book at him” if he should not.

However, by defeating Shylock, Portia learns that the very system she upholds would make a victim of her as a woman and a mockery of the marriage to which she has trusted her life and living. The warnings begin with Bassanio's offer to sacrifice her for Antonio. Her aside, even if jocular in tone, expresses some concern over this offer, a concern echoed by Nerissa and by Shylock's comment about Christian husbands. Pausing only momentarily, Portia returns to her primary task and offers the Duke a chance to render the mercy he previously asked of Shylock. The Duke meets her expectations, but she does not allow him to speak for Antonio. “Ay for the state, not for Antonio” (IV,i,371) she says of the Duke's reducing Shylock's punishment to a fine. Antonio is to have his own opportunity to demonstrate the charity which he has so vehemently argued Shylock should show.

When Portia turns to Antonio, she asks for his demonstration of mercy, expecting it to exceed the Duke's. Instead, Antonio not only appropriates half Shylock's wealth, but proposes to settle it on his protegé Lorenzo, thus making Jessica, in effect, his rather than Shylock's daughter, and completely divesting Shylock of the right to control his estate. Portia, who has so painfully accepted the patriarchal right to dispose of a daughter, suddenly sees that when it suits them, powerful men care little about that right when it belongs to a member of a marginalized group. The father-daughter relationship for which she risked great unhappiness disappears in the game of power. This moment reminds Portia that she is the property of the dominant male. From the grave or in the courtroom, he has the legal right to pick her up or lay her down; she is completely subject to his whim. When Antonio demands Shylock's conversion, Portia suddenly recognizes the similarity between the Jew's plight and her own. That recognition gives her reason both to devise and to resolve the dilemma of the rings with which the play ends.

V. FORCING A CONVERSION

Shylock's conversion must be accounted for in any comprehensive reading of The Merchant of Venice. In the trial scene, when Antonio stipulates “… that for this favor / He presently become a Christian,” (IV,i,384-5) the audience inevitably feels tremendous tension. From that point on, the dynamics of the scene depend heavily upon the characters' non-verbal reactions to Antonio's words. Interpretation of the subtext depends upon one's feelings about conversion in general and upon the relationship one sees between Shylock's forced conversion and the play's themes.

The Merchant of Venice reflects an era in which conversion resonated differently than it does today, and it is therefore useful to understand what a religious conversion might have meant to the Elizabethan audience of Shakespeare's play. Barbara Lewalski, Lawrence Danson, and others (including myself) have argued that Shylock's conversion reflects an allegorical representation of harmony; that because Shakespeare knew no Jewish people, he thought of the conversion of a Jew primarily in theological and abstract terms; and therefore, that Shylock's conversion was not meant to generate the degree of emotion it often elicits from the modern reader.¹⁶ However, the issue of religious conversion in Elizabethan England was not merely a theological concern in which the Jew represented the Old Law and the Christian the New Law. It was a life experience for many in Shakespeare's own audience, and a political and social issue that affected their daily lives.

Henry VIII had required that his subjects repudiate the Pope, opening the door for the influence of zealous Continental Protestantism upon the English Church. The short reign of Edward VI continued the conversion from Catholicism to Protestantism, but Mary radically reversed that process. Under the influence of Mary and her Spanish husband, English men and women again found themselves worshipping as Catholics, or risking accusations of treason. When Elizabeth came to the throne, she came as a strong Protestant leader, soon to be excommunicated and marked for death by the Pope who encouraged all English Catholics to reject her as their sovereign. Nevertheless, most English people donned their Protestant cloaks in compliance with the orders of the state. Some Catholics retained their faith as secret recusants, caught between theological belief and national loyalty. Shakespeare's own father is believed to have been among these recusants,¹⁷ indicating that the issues of religious conversion for political and social reasons may have been more experiential than theoretical for our playwright. If William Shakespeare were raised in a Catholic household that secretly held onto its faith in spite of Elizabeth's ascension to the throne, the playwright himself would have experienced having to disguise or change his faith, his heritage, and his manner of worship in order to comply with the law of the land or risk losing both his living and his life.

Religious conversion in Renaissance Europe was inextricable from political and social conformity and practical daily living, both for Christians and for Jews. If a person wanted to be socially accepted, politically safe, and economically stable, conformity to the politically correct religion of the day was imperative. Consequently, it is not surprising to find that Elizabethan anti-semitism, like that of its European cousins and medieval predecessors, was grounded upon the Jewish refusal to convert, that is, their refusal to conform to the political and religious unity of the state.¹⁸

However, just as there were English recusant Catholics who outwardly conformed to Protestantism, or earlier, Protestants accepting Catholic trimmings to please their monarch, so too, some Jews compromised by converting outwardly while practicing their preferred religion in secret. Such “converted” Jews were known as conversos, ostensible Christians whom everybody knew as Jews.

It is impossible to estimate how many such conversos were present in London while Shakespeare was there. One who was well-known was Dr. Roderigo Lopez, physician to the Queen, translator, and spy, best known for his grisly death as a (probably wrongfully) accused traitor in 1594. Richard Popkin argues that Shakespeare may have known of the Jewish hostage, Alonso Nuñez de Herrera (Abraham Cohen de Herrera) whose situation and learning were much discussed in certain Elizabethan court circles.¹⁹ Also, both Cecil Roth and Maurice Freedman tell of small groups of Jews from Antwerp who settled in London and Bristol as conversos, officially either “Portuguese” or “Protestant” although even the authorities knew them to be Jewish. Evidently, these groups lived comfortably enough in England until 1609 when an internecine quarrel led one faction to report to the authorities that the other faction was practicing Judaism. The whole community was then expelled from England.²⁰ Once these groups were exposed, they became a threat to the political and social unity of the state and were expunged.

So to say that Shakespeare knew only of the theological treatment of Jews and their conversion is probably not entirely accurate. He may have known more than one Jewish converso. Certainly he knew conversion as a way to achieve political and social unity through at least an outward conformity. Thought of in this way, religious conversion becomes part of the larger theme of how individuals might cope with authoritarian political, social, and economic pressure. Shylock's dilemma is therefore not entirely different from Portia's. He struggles under the political and economic sanctions of Christian authority; she copes with a patriarchal system that similarly exerts economic and social control over individuals.

Christian mercy has been traditionally given as Antonio's motivation in his demand for Shylock's conversion. However, in the bond scene, Antonio was more concerned with Shylock's business practices—and weakening them—than with his religion, and there is no reason for him to have changed his motivation here. In forcing Shylock to become a Christian, he thinks he is demanding that Shylock give up his practice of charging interest. Since the court has already diminished Shylock's capital by as much as half, Antonio's demand for conversion would ideally force Shylock to stop charging interest. This would destroy Shylock's means of increasing that capital quickly, effectively eliminating Antonio's most threatening business rival. Rather than respond to Portia and the trial scene by rendering mercy, Antonio continues his business competition with the man and uses his rival's vulnerability to assert further dominance.

VI. PORTIA AND SHYLOCK LINKED

I fully appreciated the reaction of Joanne Comerford, as Portia, during the trial scene of Peter Royston's staged reading of Bonds—Made and Broken.²¹ She was shocked at both the Duke's and Antonio's offers of “mercy,” and pained by the effect of her judgment upon Shylock. Portia suddenly sees how the law “being seasoned with a gracious voice, / Obscures the show of evil,” (III,ii,76-77) and is horrified to have been a part of it. When she asks Shylock, “Art thou contented Jew? What dost thou say?” (IV,i,391) she is making a hopeless plea for a way out. Shylock, of course, cannot offer her one, but his concerned look draws attention to their common understanding of oppression. Shylock's “I am content” then becomes a fatherly response meant to indicate that sometimes conformity is the only choice that can be made. For a brief moment, Shylock regains a child—one who understands and will listen to him—and Portia a father.

After a moment of silence, the emotional connection between Portia and Shylock dissipates with Portia's somber “Clerk, draw up a deed of gift.” (IV,i,392) Shylock, shaken by the swiftness of his defeat, asks leave to go and resignedly departs amid Gratiano's heartless taunts, a picture of personal emotion crushed beneath public displays of power. Portia's eyes follow him out the door as she realizes that her feelings as a woman have been just as easily dismissed by the dominant patriarchal system she has worked to support, and could as easily again be disregarded.

At this point, the winning party approaches to ask her to dinner. Impressed with this young “man,” they want to make him part of their social and business circle. Suddenly aware of her femininity and of her distaste for the cliquishness of these men, Portia begs off, only to be accosted by Antonio and Bassiano, who try to pay her off for the work she has suddenly found so distasteful. She asks only that Bassanio recognize her when they meet again, a line that can be taken to express the hope that he will look past her feminine exterior to the personhood beneath, rather than to forget the humanity masked by her otherness as his friends forgot Shylock's. Novy argues that the pun on “know me,”

which relates sexuality to recognition, anticipates her emphasis on sexual identity in the return to Belmont and her implicit victory over Antonio. In the trial, the threat of aggression has been removed by projection onto a scapegoat; at Belmont, it can be dissolved in play—mock hostility which unites the married couples more closely.²²

The pun instead underscores the intimacy Portia requires and links to it the ability to see behind appearances to people's real feelings. Unless Bassanio can recognize her, he will never develop true intimacy with his wife. In Act V, Portia literalizes her point by making the sexual knowing contingent upon Bassanio's acceptance of her emotions, her intelligence, and her financial power.

Immediately after the trial scene, though, she only fears that Bassanio cannot be trusted to see beyond the materialistic comraderie of the business world. She therefore tests him by asking for his ring. Will he sacrifice his wife's trust to the demands of the “Old Boy Network?” He seems to pass the test at first, but immediately Antonio insists that their friendship take precedence over Bassanio's vows to his wife. When Gratiano brings her the ring, Portia finds that her fears were justified—business and power, coated with friendship, are more important to her husband than emotional, domestic bonds. Men count more than women. Berger points out that Bassanio's giving Antonio Portia's ring indicates “man's assumption that men are superior to women, that it is men who save each other and the world and who perform great deeds and sacrifices; the pledge to a woman can be superseded by the debt of gratitude owed a man.”²³ When that exchange occurs in Act IV, Berger explains, “Once again we see how a culture dominated by the masculine imagination devalues women and asserts male solidarity against feminine efforts to breach the barrier. In her own way, Portia is no less an outsider than Shylock and her “I stand for sacrifice” is finally not much different from Shylock's “I stand for judgment.”²⁴ Too feisty and too angered by her experience in the courtroom to accept this subjugation, she resolves with Nerissa that “we'll outface them and outswear them too.” (IV,i,17)

The ring plot thus becomes Portia's version of what Shylock wanted to accomplish in the trial scene, but, as Novy suggests, with the violence removed.²⁵ In the privacy of Belmont, Portia again takes control of her estate and her life, and ensures that her marriage to Bassanio will be conducted upon hers and not Antonio's terms or the terms of the patriarchal system under which she was wed. As Richard Weisberg explains, Portia is fed up with the mediation of others:

The legal relationship adopted as a commercial matter by Antonio as the play began now threatens to mediate the most personal of human relationships. Portia, exhausted by her own courtroom tactics on behalf of the mediators, will have none of it. It is time for Bassanio to stand for himself; it is time for the couple, unhindered by third-person intervention, to consummate their marriage.²⁶

Weisberg argues that Portia's annoyance comes from her disillusionment with social and legal mediation, and from her growing impatience with the way in which it has delayed the fulfillment (represented as sexual consummation) of Bassanio's commitment to her.²⁷

I would argue, however, that her impatience arises from the way in which Antonio's world, including its legal system, ignores the humanity and emotional concerns of the outsider. Her husband was willing to sacrifice her for a business associate. Business competition easily displaced the father's right to dispose of his property—for which she had been willing to risk her life's happiness. Disguised as a man, she was accepted and admired for her perceptive logic and presence of mind; but she knows that as a woman she could never have exercised her intellectual gifts in the Venetian court any more than she had been permitted to exercise them in choosing a husband. The public world has denied her feelings, her intelligence, her right to life (Bassanio wishes she were dead for Antonio's sake). (IV,i,281-6) These experiences send her back to the privacy of Belmont determined to make her husband and his friends acknowledge—in both word and deed—the interests of those whom their public world has marginalized.

She does not again submit herself and her estate to male governance. Portia takes advantage of her private power over Bassanio's economic and patrilineal success to gain and maintain control over her life. Her husband must depend upon her chastity to maintain his reputation, his line of descent, and his control over his estate after his death. Only as long as her children are his children will Bassanio's public influence endure. Portia returns to Belmont as its mistress and retains her power as a woman and a wife to the close of the play. She also refuses to promise sexual fidelity until Antonio commits more to Bassanio's private and emotional well-being than he did to his public business ventures. She rebels not so much against her husband as against the Venetian values which Antonio has taught him. In order to purge those values from Belmont, she must ensure that Antonio as well as Bassanio is made to recognize the importance of people outside his commercial coterie. When Antonio offers his soul as surety for Bassanio's vows, Portia has won. The world of men has been forced to acknowledge the importance and power of woman.

VII. THE MOVE TO THE MARGINS

In Act V, Portia also sees to it that Antonio finds himself obliged to her for his life and living. Ronald Sharp suggests that the “return” of Antonio's ships is in fact a gift from Portia, one that she disguises as “good fortune.”²⁸ It is difficult to imagine how Antonio's ships could have returned, since everyone on the Rialto—Solanio, Solario, and Tubal—seem certain that they have all sunk. However, even if the ships have survived, Portia's revelation that she was Balthasar and her control over the news about Antonio's good fortune force him to recognize that he is no longer center stage. There is more to the world than the Rialto, and his life depends upon the hidden power in the margins. He is duly humbled and perhaps even humiliated by the realization that the brilliant young clerk who saved his life was no more than a woman, and that this same woman wields more control over the life of his friend and over his business transactions than he can.

On another level, Newman explains that “Portia's unruliness of language and behavior exposes the male homosocial bond the exchange of women insures, but it also multiplies the terms of sexual trafficking so as to disrupt those structures of exchange that insure hierarchical gender relations and the figural hegemony of the microcosm/macrocosm analogy in Elizabethan marriage.”²⁹ Portia's demand that her feelings and power be recognized disrupts not just Antonio's view of the world, but also that of patriarchy and authority in general. Her triumph in Act V is thus in some ways a recap of Shylock's powerful “gaping pig” speech of Act IV.

Ann Parten argues that the resolution of the ring plot and Gratiano's concluding pun on “Nerissa's ring” dissolve the fear that Portia will remain dominant.³⁰ Her point is convincingly stated, but for me that joke always falls flat, even amidst the most comic of performances. In contrast to the serious sexual and financial concerns that Portia's authority and dignified language have just laid to rest, it is simply too lewd to be funny. The time for such masculine flippancy is long past, left behind in Venice at the conclusion of the trial scene. Gratiano's tone seems uncomfortably out of place, as if an important point has just gone over his head. The joke's consequent failure seems to reinforce the powerlessness of the men in the face of Portia's strength. They may try to laugh off her threat to their exclusively male world, but their effort does not succeed. Sundelson's view of the joke as an uneasy effort to resist being engulfed by the feminine reflects more clearly my experience of the play.³¹ Antonio doesn't lose Bassanio or his power to Shylock in public, but in private, he loses both to Portia.

Shylock's accepting his conversion stresses the necessity of submitting to authority, but the play's comic conclusion is comic because it holds out the hope that in spite of this necessity, ways can be found to retain control over personal and private concerns. It is for this that we all—male or female—enjoy Portia and Nerissa's putting down of Bassanio, Gratiano, and Antonio. The play would end upon a celebratory note except for the lingering regret over Shylock's fate. The public pain we have felt for him in Act IV still overshadows the private resolution in Act V too darkly for the play to feel wholly comic. Thinking of Shakespeare's own father, I am not sure that that pain should be resolved, but if a director wishes to convey a more fully comic closure, the text provides a way to make it possible.

When Lorenzo hears of Portia's return to Belmont, he asks who comes with her. Stephano replies, “None but a holy hermit and her maid.” (V,i,33) Who is this holy hermit? Few productions bother with him at all, so why does Shakespeare mention him? Portia and Nerissa did say they were going to a convent during their husbands' absence, but in fact they went to visit Bellario, and then on to Venice. Where did they pick up a holy hermit?

The last person Portia and Nerissa saw before returning to Belmont was Shylock. Could Shylock be the holy hermit, disguised in a friar's robe like the “fantastical Duke of dark corners” in Measure for Measure? The idea is far-fetched if one conceives of the play as it has traditionally been staged, but given the Elizabethan experience of religious conversion, it is possible. In this context, Shylock, disguised in a way that identifies him as a converso, observes Portia exert in private the personal autonomy that he was forced to give up in public. She conveys his deed of gift to his daughter Jessica, humbles his enemy, and shows that conforming to authority need not entail total abdication of individual power. Although bound publicly to the role of wife, Portia maintains individual power in her home.

Disguised as a hermit, Shylock would also represent an outward conformity that does not necessitate abandonment of personal autonomy, either religious or economic. As long as Shylock maintains his Christian disguise, he will be free to go on believing and even practicing religion as he wishes. Roth reports that “During a lawsuit brought in 1596 against one of the Marrano merchants who had been trading with the Peninsula in partnership with an Englishman, the Jewish ceremonies observed at his home in Duke's Place, London, were alluded to in Court without any sense of incongruity and (what was more remarkable) without any untoward results.”³² Apparently, in some cases at least, the practice of Judaism was allowed in the private sphere, even when the authorities were aware that it was occurring.

Furthermore, in spite of the Christian injunctions against usury and Antonio's insistence that loans should be made freely and business conducted without the contamination of interest charges, it is likely that an Elizabethan Shylock could have continued to charge interest on his loans. In his chapter, “Property and the Grasp of Greed,” Max James discusses 16th and 17th century treatises against usury. He explains that “even though both Stubs and Smith declare that the government placed a cap on interest rates at ten percent maximum to restrain greed, in actual fact, ten percent was usually the minimum, and many devices were used to circumvent the law and to charge a much higher percentage. …” He also points out that not all usurers were Jews: “… most usurers were merchants, and … merchants were often criticized and excoriated as severely as usurers.”³³ According to Elizabethan legal practice, then, Shylock as a Christian merchant could have continued to charge at least ten percent interest. So, Antonio has not gained his presumed victory when he forced Shylock to convert. In Elizabethan society, even a judgment such as that rendered in the play would not have necessitated a change in Shylock's methods. Instead, Antonio's desire to live according to his period's economic ideals might have been seen by many in the Elizabethan audience as nice, but impractical. If so, then The Merchant of Venice, like Richard II, pits ideology against practicality. However one reads Richard II, the ideals that Antonio preaches in The Merchant of Venice are undercut by his satisfaction in victimizing Shylock. Seeing a disguised Shylock achieve his revenge both non-violently and practically might help to relieve an audience of any discomfort with which the last act might otherwise leave them.

As the lovers enter the house with Antonio trailing awkwardly behind, the hermit throws back his cowl. He walks slowly off stage, alone, isolated, and still in pain, but satisfied with the revenge he has observed, and resigned to his fate as actor of conformity, as converso, in an authoritarian world. Portia's private victory thus becomes Shylock's, and not just Shylock's, but also the victory of the public playwright/London actor torn between acknowledging the necessity for political and religious conformity and his personal drive to recognize and celebrate individual human experience.

Notes

1. Marianne L. Novy, “Giving, Taking, and the Role of Portia in The Merchant of Venice,” 58 Philological Quarterly 137, 139 (1979).

2. Id.

3. Cecil Roth, History of the Jews in England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964; reprinted 1978), p. 96. For Elizabethan women as their fathers' property, see Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500-1800 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1977), pp. 180-191.

4. Harry Berger, “Marriage and Mercifixion in The Merchant of Venice,” 32 Shakespeare Quarterly 155, 160 (1981).

5. Novy, supra note 1 at 151. Novy concludes her essay by stating that “Like the threat of Shylock, whose trial postpones the consummation of marriages, otherness may seem an obstacle to love and indeed Shylock's exorcism may be intended to remove it as an obstacle. But the acceptance of Portia's self-assertion that we find at the end of The Merchant of Venice is also a celebration of otherness and of the means it depends on—financial, sexual, verbal—to give and to receive.”

6. See Berger, supra note 4 at 161-162.

7. William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, David Bevington, ed. (New York: Bantam Books, 1988). Hereinafter, parenthetical line references will be in the text.

8. Karen Newman, “Portia's Ring: Unruly Women and Structures of Exchange in The Merchant of Venice,” 38 Shakespeare Quarterly 19, 22 (1987). Karen Newman looks at The Merchant of Venice in the light of Lévi-Strauss' anthropological theory of cultural exchange (in which he defines the origin and sustenance of society to be the authorized exchange of women to ensure male bonding) and of Luce Irigaray's feminist critique of his theory. From this perspective, Newman concludes that “Instead of choosing one interpretation over the another, idealized male friendship or homosexuality, Irigaray's reading of Lévi-Strauss allows us to recognize in Antonio's relationship with Bassanio a homosocial bond, a continuum of male relations which the exchange of women entails.”

9. See Stone, supra note 3 at p. 118. In concluding his chapter on “Family Characteristics,” Stone explains that children were often sent out of the home to be raised by other families. As a result, nuclear family bonds were weakened so bonds based upon mutual political or economic interests could be strengthened. He writes that “This was a family group [which] was held together by shared economic status and political interests, and by the norms and values of authority and deference. This was a family type which was entirely appropriate to the social and economic world of the 16th century, in which property was the only security against total destitution, in which connections and patronage were the keys to success, in which power flowed to the oldest males under the system of primogeniture, and in which the only career opening for women was in marriage. In these circumstances the family structure was characterized by its hierarchical distribution of power, held together not by affective bonds but by mutual economic interests.” To an Elizabethan audience, therefore, Antonio's paternal bond to Bassanio would seem much more logical and familiar than it does to us today.

10. See Bevington, ed., supra note 7 at 104 for a translation of this story.

11. See Max James, “Our House is Hell”: Shakespeare's Troubled Families (New York: Greenwood Press, 1989), pp. 12-16. See also Stone, supra note 3 at p. 190.

12. David Sundelson, “The Dynamics of Marriage in The Merchant of Venice,” 4 Humanities in Society 245-262 (1981).

13. Carol Leventen, “Patrimony and Patriarchy in The Merchant of Venice,” A Matter of Difference: Materialist Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare, Valerie Wayne, ed., afterword by Catherine Belsey (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), p. 70.

14. Newman, supra note 8 at 25.

15. The Merchant of Venice (BBC television broadcast, 1981).

16. See Lawrence Danson, The Harmonies of The Merchant of Venice (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), pp. 165-169; Barbara K. Lewalski, “Biblical Allusion and Allegory in The Merchant of Venice,” 13 Shakespeare Quarterly 327, 334 (1962); reprinted in Twentieth Century Interpretations of The Merchant of Venice, Sylvan Barnet, ed. (New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1970), pp. 33-80. My reading exists in an unpublished essay, “Reconciliation and Closure in The Merchant of Venice.”

17. See F. W. Brownlow, “John Shakespeare's Recusancy: New Light on an Old Document,” 40 Shakespeare Quarterly 186 (1989). The document naming John Shakespeare as a recusant is dated 1592, a date close to the earliest date of 1594 given for the composition of The Merchant of Venice. Brownlow also points out that the authorities tended to deal gently with most recusants, and that a common explanation for their absence from church was debt. In the law and social culture of Elizabethan England, there was evidently a connection between debt and religious nonconformity that may have laid the groundwork for Shakespeare's development of a similar connection in Merchant.

18. See further Daniel Lasker, Jewish Philosophical Polemics Against Christianity in the Middle Ages (New York: Ktav Publishing House, 1977); David Berger, The Jewish-Christian Debate in the High Middle Ages: A Critical Edition of the Nizzabon Vetus (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 5739-1979), pp. 30-32; Egal Feldman, Dual Destinies: The Jewish Encounter with Protestant America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990); and Rosemary Ruether, Faith and Fratricide (New York: The Seabury Press, Inc., 1974). Cecil Roth also traces the origin of anti-semitism to the Jews' refusal to convert, but shows that under John's reign, political and economic concerns also became powerful motivators. See Roth, supra note 3 at 32.

19. Richard Popkin, “A Jewish Merchant of Venice,” 40 Shakespeare Quarterly 329, 329-331 (1989).

20. See Roth, supra note 3 at 139-144 and Maurice Freedman, A Minority in Britain: Social Studies of the Anglo-Jewish Community (London: Mitchell Valentine, 1955), p. 9. Roth's chapter “The Middle Period” recounts the history of other Jewish groups in England, suggesting that they were not completely absent from England during Elizabeth's reign.

21. Bonds—Made and Broken (New York Bar Association reading, December 11, 1992). The reading was part of a symposium on “Legal Aspects of The Merchant of Venice.” See “Editor's Preface” to this number.

22. Novy, supra note 1 at 147.

23. Berger, supra note 4 at 161.

24. Id.

25. See Novy, supra note 1 at 148-149.

26. Richard Weisberg, Poethics, And Other Strategies of Law and Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), p. 102.

27. Id. at 101.

28. Ronald A. Sharp, “Gift Exchange and the Economies of Spirit in The Merchant of Venice,” 83 Modern Philology 250, 263 (1986).

29. Newman, supra note 8 at 32.

30. Anne Parten, “Re-establishing Sexual Order: The Ring Episode in The Merchant of Venice,” 9 Women's Studies 145, 145-155 (1982).

31. See Sundelson, supra note 12 at 252-257.

32. Roth, supra note 3 at 141-142.

33. James, supra note 11 at 97-98.