[In the following essay, the critics argue that The Merchant of Venice demonstrates that “racism was already fully operational” in the late Elizabethan era, despite the fact that “race” as a concept had not been fully developed.]

Can a cultural historian of Shakespeare's period speak about genetics and eugenics in relation to Jews and Moors? Not only did words like Jews, Moors, and race mean something different then from what they have meant since the nineteenth century, but a glance at a historical dictionary will tell us that the term genetics did not yet exist.¹ Therefore it might be the better part of valor for us as cultural historians to avoid such terms and, someone might suggest, even such topics altogether. The alternative is to sin boldly, i.e., to do what “really” shouldn't be done, but not naively, rather with the consciousness of stretching what is permissible. Some fears are productive, and taking some comfort from Claude J. Summers's essay on the early modern scholar's anxieties of anachronism, we hope to negotiate the narrow path between the Scylla of anachronism and the Charybdis of pedantry.² Can we talk about notions of genetics in Shakespeare or about notions of Jews and Africans? We suggest that if we historicize properly, a process in which, for instance, “genetics” will become something quite different from what it is at present, we can. When we examine genetics in Shakespeare, however, we find not just one idea of genetics but several. Also, when we let the terms Jew and Moor drift a little from their modern racial and religious moorings, in Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice they move surprisingly close together as versions of the alien or Other. While the play, in its very obsession with otherness, demonstrates that racism was already fully operational, ironically, it also illustrates the extent to which the concept of “race” was still under negotiation, hovering between the spheres of religion and genetics.

With all the critical attention (in relationship to Shakespeare's play) given to what Jews could or could not do in Elizabethan England and Renaissance Venice, the depth of the underlying scientific and pseudo-scientific notions about inheritance has not yet been sounded.³ Some of those notions are recondite and so complicated that even the most careful modern editors cannot hope to do them justice; others are so unpleasant (because they use human beings as a mere means to an end) that they seem to have been surrounded by taboos even in Shakespeare's time. Any attempt to elucidate them on today's stage would seem not only futile but strangely out of place. But students of Shakespeare will not be content to leave taboos unexplained, particularly if some passages then remain inexplicable, because “cruxes” are intellectually bothersome. We will examine two passages in Merchant of Venice that point to larger themes: the first is Shylock's use of the biblical passage about breeding of ewes (I.iii.66-69 and 71-85), which introduces the “natural” boundaries of genetics; the second is Lorenzo's charge that Launcelot has impregnated a black woman (III.v.35), which invokes notions of “race.” In the former case, this discussion adds an undercurrent that has not been seen in this play; in the latter, we offer an explanation of what is truly a crux, for John Russell Brown says that “[t]his passage has not been explained; it might be an outcrop of a lost source, or a topical allusion.”⁴ More than literary puzzles, however, these passages invoke some understanding of genetics and of “race,” and of the instability of both terms in Merchant of Venice.

In Merchant of Venice, Shylock, a Jewish money lender, is approached by Antonio, a prominent Venetian merchant in need of a loan. Shylock is willing to supply the money but puts into the contract that the borrower will forfeit a pound of his flesh upon non-payment. When (because of some unforeseen reversals of business fortune) the merchant is unable to repay the debt, the money lender, seizing upon the opportunity to get even for past abuses, demands that the contract be fulfilled literally. By the ingenuity of a young woman cross-dressed as a lawyer, who out-literalizes Shylock with her request that he cut off exactly a pound of flesh or be indicted for murder, the merchant is acquitted and Shylock condemned for endangering the life of a Venetian. Important subplots concern the marriage of Shylock's daughter, Jessica, to a gentile, and the wooing of Portia, a noblewoman, by a number of suitors.

In Act I Shylock tells the story of Genesis 30:33-43 to Antonio and Bassanio, two Venetian noblemen, beginning “when Jacob graz'd his uncle Laban's sheep,” in what seems to Antonio and Bassanio a long-winded way. When Shylock points out that Jacob was only the third generation after Abraham (apparently genetic closeness to Abraham heightens Jacob's status in Shylock's eyes), Antonio interrupts impatiently asking, “And what of him? Did he take interest?” (I.iii.70). Shylock denies that he did “directly,” but tells the rest of the story, possibly to remind himself and also Antonio that craft or ruses are legitimate:

No, not take interest, not as you would say
Directly int'rest,—mark what Jacob did,—
When Laban and himself were compromis'd
That all the eanlings which were streak'd and pied
Should fall as Jacob's hire, the ewes being rank
In end of autumn turned to the rams,
And when the work of generation was
Between these woolly breeders in the act,
The skilful shepherd pill'd me certain wands,
And in the doing of the deeds of kind
He stuck them up before the fulsome ewes,
Who then conceiving, did in eaning time
Fall parti-colour'd lambs, and those were Jacob's.
This was a way to thrive, and he was blest:
And thrift is blessing if men steal it not.

(I.iii.71-85)

Jacob's stratagem, if it is not evident, would have been explained by any biblical commentary in the Renaissance: Jacob's white pilings, erected close to the water, were reflected as streaks on the dark surface of the water (the biblical passage mentions watering troughs). At the moment of generation, the moment when the conceived fetus would have been eminently impressionable by what the mother saw or imagined, these streaks were seen by the ewes, who in time bore lambs that were streaked.

Antonio knows the story, but he understands it differently, for he replies somewhat perplexedly,

This was a venture sir that Jacob serv'd for,
A thing not in his power to bring to pass,
But sway'd and fashion'd by the hand of heaven.
Was this inserted to make interest good?
Or is your gold and silver ewes and rams?

(I.iii.86-90)

For Antonio, Jacob's acquisition of wealth is as miraculous as a cane turning into a snake or a well bubbling out of the spot that has been struck. Shylock, however, is intrigued by Jacob's ingenuity, which seems to him to be at least two-fold: Jacob accepts a bond and eventually holds Laban to its terms; and he is a successful husbandman. Shylock's gloating over the enforcement of potential bonds is anticipatory and private—Antonio cannot possibly understand him and is not supposed to do so. He may, and possibly does, understand Shylock's sense of the heads of the herd as capital (in the etymological sense of caput—head). He does not, however, read Jacob's feat as of a piece with the specific notions of the human medicine of his time, a correspondence between human medicine and what we now call animal science. It is Shylock who will constantly bring together ewes and humans. He is not the only character in this play to engage in such reduction, though, because some Christian low-lifers (i.e., Launcelot) will reduce the problematics of conversion to the economics of pork, its relative plentifulness or scarcity. Before Antonio signs Shylock's bond for a pound of flesh, Shylock denies the equivalence of human flesh with mutton, but he is only pretending, and the spectators (in contrast to Antonio) are supposed to see through this pretense:

A pound of man's flesh taken from a man,
Is not so estimable, profitable neither
As flesh of muttons, beefs, or goats.

(I.iii.161-63)

How “good” are we to think Shylock's science? What kind of “genetics” does he advance here?

The strength of the medical and psychological commonplaces invoked by the Laban story cannot be overestimated. For convenience, we use for demonstration the Dutch physician Levinius Lemnius (1505-1568)—most of his works were translated from Latin into French and English—but we could also use Campanella, who in his utopian City of the Sun recommends in the interest of a certain eugenics that one control what wives see in their bedrooms at conception.⁵ However, although Lemnius partakes of a broad tradition, he is perhaps more outspoken than most Renaissance physicians on the principle at issue. Speaking of the power of imaginations, Lemnius says in The Touchstone of Complexions (1576).

which ymaginations are of so great force and efficacie, that the things by her in mynd earnestly ymagined in and at the very instant time of her conception, is derived into the infant and child then begotten. For this Sexe being wanton, toying, and stedfastly eying every thing that is offered to sight, it happeneth that the naturally facultie being then in workinge and forming of the child, directeth her cogitations and inward conceiptes that way, and bringeth unto the Infant, an other forein shape and forme, in nature and condition altogether unlike the right parents.⁶

Lemnius then adds as an example from his own experience in Holland that women, after looking at the gallant soldiers of the army of Charles V, bore infants with eyebrows and hairs black and curled, and he insists that this happened “among right honest and tryed Matrones.”⁷ The force and effect of the mother's vision and imagination are here seen as opposed to and stronger than the force of inheritance. They overcome features including those we may today (and some people possibly did then) consider “racial.” In fact there is a poem of the first half of the seventeenth century on this very subject (titled Callipaedia) in which the African parents, an “Aethiopian” mother and her “sooty Sire,” are shaken when they have a “Babe deform'd,” namely a white child, because the mother has been looking on the picture of a white woman.⁸

In his book De miraculis occultis naturae libri quatuor (1564), which Shakespeare might have seen in the French translation of 1567 (the English translation, The Secret Miracles of Nature, is of 1658), Lemnius goes over similar material, but in greater detail. This time it is primarily the woman's “secret” or “tacite” imaginations “whilst the man embrace” that influence the child:

For such is the power of the Imagination, that when the woman does intentively behold any thing, she will produce some thing like that she beheld, so it falls out, that children have the forms of divers things upon them, as Warts, Spots, Moles, Dashes, which cannot easily be wiped off, or taken away. So some of our women seeing a Hare, bring forth a child with a Harelip; so some children are born with flat Noses, wry mouths, great blubber lips, and ill shaped of all the body, because the woman when she conceived the child, and in the time she was big of it, had her eyes and mind busied upon some monstrous creature.⁹

In a different context, it would be worth pointing out what to today's reader is obvious, namely that responsibility for birth marks and particularly birth defects is here shifted to women alone; however, our interest at present is in the archaeology of the notion of genetic manipulation. Lemnius goes on to point out that the principle invoked can be ingeniously used: “Men use to effect the like by art in other creatures, setting before them when they are to conceive the colours of divers things.” “Art” has here the meaning of “artifice” or rather, in the modern sense, science or genetic manipulation. In fact, all his examples are from animal husbandry: “Jacob used that stratagem, who was afterwards called Israel, laying rods he had pilled off the rinds from, before them every where, and so he made the greatest part of the flock spotted and party-coloured. So we make painted birds, dogs and horses dappled, with divers spots.”¹⁰ The biblical story of Jacob's stratagem appears here integrated into “scientific” discourse. It is not a miracle; in other words, it appears as Shylock's version, not Antonio's.

If any proof is needed that the notion of imagination over inheritance (as encapsulated in the idea of the malleability of the young fetus) was strong even before Lemnius wrote, we may point to a Latin poem by Thomas More that wittily plays on it and with it. In this we follow Lemnius, who quoted it in its entirety, undoubtedly because he realized that More was refuting the common argument (which Shakespeare's Paulina was still to use effectively in A Winter's Tale) that similarity proves progeny. Here is what Lemnius calls More's “witty epigram” in the English verse translation of the English Lemnius edition of 1658:

TO SABINUS

Those four boys, Sabine,
Which thy Wife brought forth
Thou think'st are not thine,
Unlike thee, nought-worth.
But that Boy alone
That she lately bore,
Like thee, for thine own
Thou tak'st, and no more.
Four as bastards born
Rejected are in scorn,
Yet wise men suppose
That the Mothers mind
Doth the Child dispose
For likeness in's kind.
Four were begot
When that many miles
From home, thou wert not
Feared, nor thy wiles.
This last like to thee,
Was begot in fear,
Thy Wife was not free
Thou wert then too near.
This I think was it,
That thy likenesse hit.(11)

All of his wife's children were begotten by other men; her fifth child only looked like him because his presence in town made a detection of her adulterous act more likely. She thought of him and thus her child looked like him. The Dutch physician drew the conclusion from the medical notions he recorded and from More's poem that it would be vain to assign fatherhood from the likeness of the child: “For neither the Law of Nature, nor the publick consent of Mankind will suffer a child to be laid to any man because it is like him.”¹²

In Christian exegetical tradition, for which we let the medieval Nicholas de Lira stand as representative, there are both camps: those who believe that Jacob was taught by an angel, and those who consider him knowledgeable in natural science (in cognitione virtutum naturalium). In explaining Jacob's knowledge of science, Nicholas de Lira points to Jerome's reference to a Spanish horse-breeding practice of putting beautiful horses within sight of those being covered. He also tells the case of a matrona accused of adultery because she had borne a black child (peperisset Aethiopem) but found innocent after the picture of a black person was found in her bedroom.¹³

For Shylock the immediate relevance of the story of Jacob breeding ewes is that it points to his thriving by ingenuity while sticking to a bond or contract, but the biblical passage—highlighted by Antonio's lack of comprehension—also introduces the theme of passing on traits, of inheritance from parent to child. This is the primary use to which the story has been put in western civilization, and whatever extra “spin” Shakespeare could give it through the character Shylock, its center of gravity would have been exactly there.

Swearing “by the Jacob's staff” (II.v.36) and with a wife about whom we know little else than that she was also called Leah, Shylock is conceived to recapitulate in some sense the ingenious Jacob/Israel, who, more than for his sheep breeding is famous for the ruse through which he obtained the blessing from his father, who mistakes him for his first-born brother Esau. In a related scene loosely parodying the biblical episode or at least playing on it, the “sand-blind” Gobbo meets his son Launcelot and fails to recognize him.¹⁴ Launcelot kneels and asks for the blessing of his father, who will feel his son's skin and comment on his excess of (facial) hair. Their meeting includes this exchange:

LAUN.
Do you not know me father?
GOB.
Alack sir I am sand-blind, I know you not.
LAUN.
Nay, indeed if you had your eyes you might fail of the knowing me: it is a wise father that knows his own child.

(II.ii.70-74)

Dismissing his father's excuse, Launcelot here generalizes in the manner of the Shakespearean wise fool: the father's eyesight would not guarantee recognition of his son. Thomas More and the physician Levinius Lemnius would have agreed. In an ironic reversal, then, sight cannot guarantee recognition of genetic descent, but it may cause transmission of genetic traits.

The transmission of such traits is thus configured as an area of radical insecurity that allows “race” to be manipulated by the various characters in the play. The poles of this manipulation are established early in the play by Shylock, who insists twice that Jessica is his flesh and blood (“my daughter is my flesh and my blood” [III.i.33]), and by Salerio, who responds, “There is more difference between thy flesh and hers, / than between jet and ivory, more between your / bloods, than there is between red wine and Rhenish” (III.i.34-36). While on the surface Salerio can be understood to deny modern notions of “race,” his denial may presuppose exactly such a notion in that it relies in part on “racial” imagery to make its point. Even more crudely, Launcelot the clown tries to demean Jessica with some such understanding, holding out to Jessica what he succinctly calls “a kind of bastard hope”: “Marry, you may partly hope that your father got / you not, that you are not the Jew's daughter” (III.v.9-10). Realizing fully how demeaning this “way out” is, Jessica confirms the fittingness of the phrase “bastard hope”: “That were a kind of bastard hope indeed,—so the / sins of my mother should be visited upon me” (III.v.11-12). The general opprobrium that the period associated with illegitimate birth was anchored in canon and civil law, which excluded the illegitimate from certain honorable professions. We cannot tell whether another irony is unintentional, namely that in Jewish understanding the proof of Jewish descent is through the mother rather than the father. The very crudeness of these jokes underlines the insecurity surrounding the question of transmission of traits, an insecurity reflected, as we shall see, in the construction of “race.”

Shylock's story of Laban's sheep and the genetic paradigms into which it was integrated in Renaissance medicine relates also to a somewhat complicated and often discussed passage in Act IV: Gratiano's slur berating Shylock when the latter keeps insisting on the pound of flesh as his due:

GRA.
                    thy currish spirit
Govern'd a wolf, who hang'd for human slaughter—
Even from the gallows did his fell soul fleet,
And whilst thou layest in thy unhallowed dam,
Infus'd itself in thee.

(IV.i.133-37)

In the interest of dating the composition of the play, scholars have—correctly, it would seem—seen a reference in the “wolf … hanged” to the execution on 7 June 1594, of the Portuguese Jewish physician Lopez (with an etymological play on lupus “wolf”), sentenced as a traitor for allegedly trying to poison Queen Elizabeth.¹⁵ Our interest is not to date the play, but to note that the berating slur again questions fatherhood on the principle explained earlier, namely the impressionability of the young fetus in the womb. Rather than a eugenic argument, this is demeaning cacogenics (nonsensical genetics) intended to be witty. On the surface, the slur questions Shylock's humanity by inserting a ravenous (slaughtering) beast as father. For those spectators at the Globe, however, who understood the reference to the executed Jewish physician, it allied Shylock with Lopez and possibly all Jews, questioning the humanity of the religious other.

Religious otherness indeed preceded “racial” otherness as main category of difference in Renaissance Europe. Muslims and Jews were usually seen in terms of religion and culture (though the use of those terms often verged on what could be termed “racial” difference). But the Renaissance witnessed large scale encounters of Europeans with peoples of colors and cultures different from those of Europe. Shylock alludes to these encounters in his speech on Antonio's business interests, when he lists Antonio's ships en route to Tripoli, the Indies, and Mexico. One result of these large-scale encounters was a gradual shift from religion as the main marker of otherness. David Brion Davis's comment concerning European terminology for sub-Saharan Africans indicates such a shift: “It was only in the fifteenth century that Europeans, possibly following Arabic precedents, began to identify sub-Saharan Africans not simply as ‘black Saracens’ but as ‘blacks.’”¹⁶ The events of 1492 in Spain, the reconquista against the Moors and the expulsion of the Spanish Jews—Spain ridding itself of the African and Jewish “other” at the same time—point to a historical conflation of the two categories as well. Fifty years later, however, Cabeza de Vaca, in his Relation of Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca, sees religion as the main differentiating factor between Europeans and Native Americans, referring to Spaniards as “Christians,” not as Spaniards or as people differing in color, suggesting that both terminology and related attitudes were still under construction.¹⁷ Shakespeare's play, as we shall see, might be said to bear witness to the shift from religious to racial otherness. Though Daryl W. Palmer reminds us that “early modern notions of ‘race’ must never be reduced to color,” we may also conclude with him that “this injunction must not stop us from appreciating the ways in which a supremely influential dramatist like Shakespeare has contributed to the obsession with color.”¹⁸

In this play, Shylock is primarily the cultural and religious other, though the boundaries between “race” and religion are indeed porous, as Mary Janell Metzger notes when pointing out that Jessica gives as her father's ancestors—or as his genetic descent—two individuals: Tubal and Chus (III.ii.285); “the first is a Jew and the second the mythical originary black African.”¹⁹ That religious and “racial” otherness are differentiated in the play is exemplified most clearly by Jessica's marriage. Although her otherness may be removed by conversion, thus facilitating her marriage with a Gentile, Morocco's otherness appears to be an insurmountable obstacle and is expressed in terms of “racial” difference. Although for the modern spectator some of the innuendo used by the Christians (for instance, the “bastard hope” held out to Jessica) as well as some of the language used by Shylock (his wish that someone “of the stock of Barrabas” [IV.i.292] might have been Jessica's husband) will have racial overtones, religion is primary. Shylock is forced to convert at the end of the play, in the process losing most of his money (in his account of the Jews of Venice, Coryat regretted that the costliness of conversions acted as a deterrent to becoming a Christian).

When we study how Africans are presented in this play, however, we see again the play's challenge to some of the most basic and seemingly commonsensical genetic assumptions, for instance the one that child is like father. When the Prince of Morocco first appears as one of the three suitors to Portia's hand, he is described as “a tawny Moor” (II.i, stage direction). The meaning of tawny is a bit of a puzzle: it could mean “dark,” but possibly a shade of skin color contrasting with a “black” Moor.²⁰ Be that as it may, Morocco is very much conscious that his skin color is different from Portia's and from that of her European suitors, for his first words are:

Mislike me not for my complexion,
The shadowed livery of the burnish'd sun,
To whom I am a neighbour, and near bred.

(II.i.1-3)

Of course, complexion, as a term in humoral physiology, had a fuller meaning than it has now: it meant not only skin color, but the entire principle imagined to effect it. Morocco fears that his looks might cause dislike. Fear of rejection because of his different looks makes him say that “this aspect” of his “hath fear'd the valiant” and attracted the most prized young women of his clime: “I would not change this hue, / Except to steal your thoughts my gentle queen” (II.i.11-12). Again we may disagree about what shade of skin is intended, but it seems to be clear that complexion, aspect, and hue in some way refer to the otherness of the African and that otherness is conceptualized in terms of “race.” Indeed, “racial” otherness comes across as a liability in this passage.

Portia denies that she is “solely led / By nice direction of a maiden's eyes” (II.i.13), where nice might indicate an over-fastidious attention to mere looks. All her remarks are potentially reversible, however, for even the denial just mentioned may imply that Morocco lacks conventional good looks. Portia on the whole remains courteous and polite, even when punning on the two meanings of fair: under certain conditions Morocco might have “stood as fair / As any comer I have look'd on yet / For my affection” (II.i.20-23). However, ideas of beauty and “whiteness” are firmly linked elsewhere in this play, as in Lorenzo's exclamation, upon seeing Jessica's letter, “I know the hand, in faith, 'tis a fair hand, / And whiter than the paper it writ on / Is the fair hand that writ” (II.iv.12-14). Portia's courtesy and politeness during both this scene and the casket scene (II.vii) contrast with the unambiguous rejection of him and “all of his complexion” the moment he has left at the end of that scene, after choosing the wrong casket: “A gentle riddance—draw the curtains, go,—/ Let all of his complexion choose me so” (II.vii.78-79). In the context of this play, “all of his complexion” means “all Africans.” This dismissal, then, appears to be based to a high degree on Morocco's otherness. Not only is he unacceptable as an individual suitor, but so is his whole “race.” It seems that that “race” is understood to be reason enough for his rejection so that no further explanations are needed—an implicit commentary on what one may assume to be Globe audience's attitudes. Indeed, the social meaning of this otherness is highlighted by the fact that Morocco is the suitor of the highest societal standing, so that matters of “race” appear to overrule all other considerations here.

Not surprisingly, Portia is not the only one with narrow and parochial standards of beauty. As Bassanio mulls over the virtues of gold, silver, and lead in his casket scene and particularly over the deceit of appearance, he says, “Thus ornament is but the guiled shore / To a most dangerous sea: the beauteous scarf / Veiling an Indian beauty” (III.ii.97-99). Although (as John Russell Brown reports) some editors have tried to emend Indian beauty because of the jingle and fuzzy contrast, the meaning—with an emphasis on Indian, whether East Indian or American—is consistent with the Elizabethan aversion to dark skins that speaks through this play.²¹ The long cultural and religious roots of this aversion need not be argued here, except to point out that in addition to such elements as the hostile “Saracen” of medieval romance, there is also a societal tradition of valuing white skin, shaded from the sun, as aristocratic, while tanned skin marked shepherds, farmers, and artisans as members of the lower classes. The latter were, to use a modern Americanism with similar associations, “rednecks.” Even in Prince Morocco's understanding of his dark skin, its color was the effect of the sun, for in a passage already cited he called his “complexion” the “shadowed livery of the burnish'd sun” (II.i.2).

The play's insecurity as to the exact meaning of “race” is not only reflected in the implicit controversy over whether it is a matter of nature or nurture but also in its implicit equation of Jewishness and Blackness in terms of presumed religious values. We might point to three passages in this respect: one concerns Portia's anticipation of rejecting Morocco as a suitor because “if he have the condition of a saint and the complexion of a devil, I had rather he should / shrive me than / wive me” (I.ii.123-25). The second passage deals with Launcelot's assessment of Shylock as a “kind of devil” (II.ii.23). The third passage illustrates Solanio's view of Shylock and, by extension, all Jews, when Shylock is approaching him: “Let me say ‘amen’ betimes, lest the devil cross my / prayer, for here he comes in the likeness of a Jew” (III.i.19-20). Jewishness as religion and Blackness as a marker of “race” function equivalently here. Not only are they signs of otherness, but this otherness also has a moral value: it is regarded as evil. Though we have seen that Jewishness may change into Christianness, thus making “evil” appear to be a matter of “nurture,” Blackness cannot be erased in the same manner. Here the transitional stage of the concept of “race” exposes itself. While “race” and “religion” may operate as functional equivalents, both translating into generic otherness associated with evil, they are also parting ways, one assigned to nurture, the other to nature.

One passage that has befuddled the editors becomes intelligible when read through the lens of “race” and genetics. It is the passage following Launcelot's ridiculing and belittling of Jessica, in which he holds out to her a “bastard hope,” namely that she might not be Shylock's daughter. As the exchange continues, Jessica puts her hopes on her husband, Lorenzo, who, she says, has made her a Christian. Launcelot the Clown, in a kind of Brechtian reduction to the most materialist aspect of the situation, responds to this that her husband is the more to blame, for “this making of Christians will raise the price of hogs” (III.v.21-22). At this point, the new husband enters and is told by Jessica, apparently in full earnest, Launcelot's allegations. Lorenzo responds in a way that is not immediately understandable:

LOR.
I shall answer that better to the commonwealth than you can the getting up of the negro's belly: the Moor is with child by you Launcelot!
LAUN.
It is much that the Moor should be more than reason: but if she be less than an honest woman, she is indeed more than I took her for.

(III.v.34-39)

John Russell Brown says that Lorenzo's remark has not been explained, and he surmises, “It might be an outcrop of a lost source, or a topical allusion. Perhaps it was introduced simply for the sake of the elaborate pun on Moor/more.”²²

The notion that the entire passage is motivated by punning recalls Samuel Johnson's low view of word-play in the period but too easily dismisses Launcelot's words. Clearly Lorenzo's reply, that Launcelot has impregnated a black woman, is meant to repay Launcelot's unpleasantness. Popular belief at that time held that a syphilitic could cure himself of his disease if he slept with a black woman.²³ In his Luis venereae perfectissimus tractatus (1597), the well regarded Italian physician Hercole Sassonia (or Saxonia) writes,

But one needs to inquire into what I have heard was experienced by some people in Venice: they claim [dicunt] to have been cured instantly of gonorrhea by having intercourse with a black woman [mulier Aethiopis]. The experimentum [experience; experiment; demonstration or proof] is true and it seems can be confirmed by [Julius Caesar] Scaliger's exercitatio 180, c. 18, according to whom Africans are cured from lues venerea by sleeping with a Numidian or Ethiopian woman. That I know, too, even though I would consider as invented the reports that indeed more men were freed from gonorrhaea antiqua by sleeping with a virgin spouse; but then the woman gets infected.²⁴

At least three matters are important here: that in the 1590s such a view is thus documented of all places in Venice; that not only some experiential but also some literary evidence for what we may call a canard is given; and, although not evident from this passage, that the remedy was surrounded by strong taboos.

If we recognize the importance of taboo in this matter, namely that Sassonia was severely criticized for even recording this belief without assenting to it (since this kind of knowledge might induce the diseased to a desperate and unethical act), we will not be surprised that the view is not more often documented in medical texts.²⁵ For literary documentation, however, Sassonia refers to Julius Caesar Scaliger (1484-1553), who in his Exoticarum exercitationum liber reports that in Africa the disease was first imported from Spain and that “those suffering from it recover when they go to Numidia or Black Ethiopia by a gift of the Heavens without any other medications.”²⁶ Scaliger says nothing about intercourse, nor does Leo Africanus, who in turn seems to have been Scaliger's source, for Leo reports that if anyone in Lybia, where the disease is yet rare, gets infected, he (Leo uses the masculine form) travels to Numidia or the region of the Black Ethiopians (in Numidiam aut Nigritarum regionem), where he is healed by the temperateness of the air.²⁷ Leo, who as an African was the period's main informant on that continent, claims that he saw such cures, effected without drug or physician, many times with his own eyes.

However, the notion reported by Sassonia to be current in Venice, that intercourse with a black virgin would cure the syphilitic, might supply the logic or deep structure to Lorenzo's counter-charge, after he learns that Launcelot has insulted Jessica and him: “The Moor is with child by you Launcelot!” Launcelot's response, “It is much that the Moor should be more than reason,” would not be a mere and empty play on the words much, moor, and more, but an acknowledgement of the charge with explanation or excuse, for “more than reason” would refer to the special powers attributed to the mulier Aithiops. Even Launcelot's next statement, “but if she be less than an honest woman, she is indeed more than I took her for,” which continues the play on moor and more, makes considerable sense in the context of the beliefs reported by Sassonia, for Launcelot's surface sense may be that, rather than womanizing, he was only interested in having intercourse with a virgin, as Sassonia puts it, cum uxore Virgine. The sense hovers precariously between two possibilities. One possibility is that Launcelot wanted an “honest” woman for medical reasons—this would be some sort of an acceptance of the charge and an excuse. The other possibility is that more in the sentence quoted last is read as Moor and than as that: “But if she be less than an honest woman, she is indeed more / Moor than / that I took her for.” The latter would acknowledge his attempt at womanizing, his awareness of her being “less than an honest woman,” and his intent to have sex with an African woman, but as a response to Lorenzo's charge such an acknowledgment would make little sense. However, the view Sassonia reports from Venice supplies a continuous sense to the passage. That it is not widely reported (although documented in Theodor Zwinger's voluminous commonplace book) need not be surprising or bothersome considering that the subject matter is highly tabooed and Sassonia was taken to task for only mentioning it.

At the beginning of this essay, we acknowledged our uneasiness in projecting modern meanings of words like eugenics, Jew, and race into the past. Ultimately, though, this seemingly linguistic problem is a version of the hesitancy that Emily C. Bartels has well noted in a recent book on Marlowe: “Critics have been hesitant to ascribe racism and homophobia to early modern culture, in large part because the idea of race and homosexuality seemed poorly formed at best.”²⁸ After acknowledging these anxieties, the scholar overcomes them: “Racism, homophobia, xenophobia, and the like, though they did not have a local habitation or name, had their beginnings here, with cross-cultural and domestic discourses whose uncertainties amplified difference, allowing the self to impose its terms of supremacy on the world, over the alien abroad and the alien at home.”

In The Merchant of Venice some of the most time-honored and accepted Elizabethan commonplaces about inheritance of traits and about non-European skin color are held up to inspection: the likeness of child to parent and a quasi-instinctive negative reaction to the otherness of dark skin. The expectation that the child should be like the father is rehearsed several times and set against the view that Jessica is very different from Shylock and the view that Launcelot is not recognizable to Gobbo, his father. Shylock, most likely unaware of the implications, cites in detail one of the proof-texts of contemporary scientific discourse, namely the view, by Thomas More attributed to the graves Sophi or wisemen, that the fetus is influenced by the imaginations of the mother. In terms of attitudes about race, Portia's negative reaction to Morocco and to “all of his complexion” would find its counterpoint in Launcelot's veiled defense when he was charged with impregnating a black woman or “Moor.”

More significant than any claim to have solved a “crux” is the realization that the play sexualizes Otherness—this holds for the female “Moor” as well as for Morocco as potential sexual partner for Portia. We also recall that some of the most striking examples illustrating concepts of Renaissance “genetics” are those in which the Other is so powerful that merely looking at or imagining the Other will turn one's offspring into it. The synchronic presence of religious and racial otherness in this play, and the significantly different modes of plot intrigue for dealing with them, may mark a point on the diachronic scale (or history of European consciousness) at which religious otherness is shifting to the predominance of “racial” otherness. The “tanning” theory professed by Morocco as cause of his blackness, as well as Shylock's ewegenics and similar notions about acquiring traits at conception (notions that go deep into the fabric of this play), warn us to place race in quotation marks. The difference from later notions of race, for instance nineteenth-century ones, is salient.

Our explications call into question readings of the play that favor insurmountable dividing lines among people, like those James Shapiro recently demonstrated from Shakespeare's contemporary Andrew Willet, who believed that if an Englishman settled in Spain, his heirs would be Spaniards, but that “‘Jews have never been grafted unto the stock of other people.’”²⁹ Our attempt has been not to replace such readings with modern cultural constructions with which we feel more comfortable, but to demonstrate that certain medical commonplaces underlying various passages, some of them obscure, put imagination over inheritance, and question fatherhood and the transmission of traits from father to son. These passages reveal a medical pseudo-science that was much stronger than Shakespeare scholars generally acknowledge. Of course such commonplaces did not die with the early modern period, but they gradually sank from the works of recognized physicians and serious literary authors to the realms of popular belief, whence they have occasionally reared their arcane heads among impostors and charlatans. Thus in the eighteenth century, as Dennis Todd has recently shown, one Mary Toft held England in suspense in 1726 with her claim of rabbit births (she said that, just a couple of weeks pregnant, she had been startled by a rabbit in her garden). She was initially believed by some medical practitioners because this claim, as Todd puts it, “was more or less in accordance with respectable medical opinion about the power of prenatal influence.”³⁰The Merchant of Venice may be seen as recording a moment when notions of otherness, while they had apparently not hardened yet into the concept of “race” as later times would know it, were in the process of formation. However, the play also illustrates that, while the concept of “race” was not yet fully formed, racism surely was.

Notes

1. See Winfried Schleiner, “‘That Matter Which Ought Not To Be Heard Of’: Homophobic Slurs in Renaissance Cultural Politics,” Journal of Homosexuality 26 (1994): 41-75; and “Renaissance Exempla of Schizophrenia: The Cure by Charity in Luther and Cervantes,” Renaissance and Reformation 9, no. 3 (1985): 157-76.

2. Claude J. Summers, “Homosexuality and Renaissance Literature: Or, The Anxieties of Anachronism,” South Central Review 9 (1992): 2-23.

3. See, for instance, Benjamin Arbel, Trading Nations: Jews and Venetians in the Early Modern Eastern Mediterranean (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1995).

4. William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, ed. John Russell Brown (London: Methuen [Arden Edition], 1977), 25, n. Subsequent quotations are from this edition and will be cited parenthetically in the text.

5. Tommaso Campanella, La Citta del Sole (1623): The City of the Sun, ed. and trans. Daniel J. Donno (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1981), 106-7: “Restano pitture solo o statue di grand' huomini, e quelle mirano le donne formose, che s'applicano all'uso della razza.” (Only the pictures and statues of great men survive, and these the shapely women devoted to the perpetuation of the race gaze upon to improve their offspring.) There is a similar passage about the women's preparation for coition by looking at statues (pp. 54-55).

6. Levinus Lemnius, The Touchstone of Complexions (London, 1576), 40.

7. Ibid., 40v.

8. Claude Quillet, Callipaedia, or, An Art How to Have Handsome Children … Written by Monsieur St. Marthe, Physician to Henri III, trans. N. Rowe (London: 1710), 3:21-22.

9. Lemnius, The Secret Miracles of Nature (London, 1658), 1:11.

10. Ibid.

11. The modern More edition prints the Latin poem “Ad Sabinum” and a modern prose translation of it (Thomas More, Complete Works, vol. 3, pt. 2, ed. Clarence H. Miller et al. [New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 1984], 234-37).

12. Lemnius, Secret Miracles, 1:12.

13. Nicholas de Lira, Biblia Sacra cum Glossa ordinaria, 6 vols. (Antverp, 1634).

14. We owe this suggestion to Louise Schleiner.

15. See John Russell Brown, introduction to The Merchant of Venice, xxiii.

16. David Brion Davis, Slavery and Human Progress (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, (1986), 331 n. 86.

17. Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca, Relation of Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca, in The Heath Anthology of American Literature, 2d ed., ed. Paul Lauter et al. (Lexington, Mass.: Heath, 1994), 1:130-40.

18. Daryl W. Palmer, “Merchants and Miscegenation: The Three Ladies of London, The Jew of Malta, and The Merchant of Venice,” in Race, Ethnicity, and Power in the Renaissance, ed. Joyce Green MacDonald (Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ. Press, 1997), 36-66, quotation p. 57.

19. Mary Janell Metzger, “‘Now by My Hood, a Gentle and No Jew’: Jessica, The Merchant of Venice, and the Discourse of Early Modern English Identity,” PMLA 113, no. 1 (1998): 52-63, quotation p. 55. Metzger's excellent essay explores through Jessica “how Shakespeare may have struggled with competing notions of Jewishness circulating in early modern England” (p. 53). These competing notions were whether Jewishness was a matter of religion or “race,” indicating the same gradual shift we argue can be detected in the juxtaposition of the depictions of Jewishness and Africanness in the play.

20. See Brown's note to that stage direction.

21. Brown's note to “Indian beauty,” 82.

22. Brown's note to III.v.35-36.

23. See the chapter “Syphilis and the Power of Virgins,” in Winfried Schleiner, Medical Ethics in the Renaissance (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown Univ. Press: 1995), 186-202.

24. Ercole Sassonia, Luis venereae perfectissimus tractatus, c. 37, fol. 40 (Patavii, 1597), quoted in Schleiner, 201 n. 58: “Sciendum autem est, quod habui a quibusdam expertis Venetis; Dicunt se a Gonorrhaea statim curatos usu Veneris cum muliere Aethiope. Experimentum est verum, et videtur posse confirmari ex Scaligero exercitatione 180. cap. 18. qui scribit Affros a Lue Venerea curari, dum in Numidiam, et Aethiopiam sucedunt. Haec quoque scio, si tamen literis consignam licet antiqua gonorrhaea plures fuisse liberatos, qui cum uxore Virgine rem habuerunt, sed mulier inficitur.”

25. See the discussion of Giovanni Battista Sitoni and Paolo Zacchia in Schleiner, 190-93.

26. Julius Caesar Scaliger, Exoticarum exercitationum liber XV de subtilitate, exercitatio 181, c. 19 (Hannover, 1620), quoted in Schleiner, 201 n. 59: “Qui eo laborant, si in Numidiam aut Nigriticam sese conferant Aethiopiam, solius Caeli beneficia, sine ullis medicamentis convalescere” (p. 563).

27. Ioannes Leo Africanus, De totius Africae desciptione libri IX (Antverp, 1556), 33, chapter titled “Morborum, quibus afficiuntur Africani, genera.” For an English translation, see Leo Africanus, A Geographical Historie of Africa, trans. John Pory (London, 1601); see also Oumelbanine Zhiri, L'Afrique au miroir de l'Europe: Les fortunes de Jean Léon Africain à la Renaissance (Geneva: Droz, 1991); and Kim F. Hall, Things of Darkness: Economics of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1995).

28. Emily C. Bartels, Spectacles of Strangeness: Imperialism, Alienation and Marlowe (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania Univ. Press, 1993), 9.

29. Andrew Willet, Judaeorum Vocatione (Cambridge: 1590), quoted in James Shapiro's excellent chapter “Race, Nation, or Alien?” in Shakespeare and the Jews (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1996), 168.

30. Dennis Todd, Imagining Monsters: Miscreations of the Self in Eighteenth-Century England (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1995), 8.