SOURCE: Cohen, Walter. “The Merchant of Venice and the Possibilities of Historical Criticism.” ELH 49, no. 4 (winter 1982): 765-89.

[In the following essay, Cohen views The Merchant of Venice as a flawed romantic comedy and suggests that the play may be viewed as a reflection of the socio-economic problems in late Elizabethan English society.]

Traditional historical scholarship has not fared well with many contemporary literary theorists. Jonathan Culler concludes: “The identification of historical sequences, while an inevitable and indispensable aspect of literary study, is not just open to oversimplification; it is itself an act of oversimplification.”¹ What is rhetorically striking in this passage is the comfortable coexistence of the author's characteristic moderation with the extremity of the position. Under the influence of the work of Louis Althusser in particular and of structuralism and post-structuralism in general, similar doubts have penetrated Marxism, long a bastion of historical interpretation. Terry Eagleton argues that “Marx initiates a ‘genealogical’ break with any genetic-evolutionist conception of the historical materialist method, and, indeed, of its object—‘history’ itself.” For Eagleton, “history is not a classical narrative: for what kind of narrative is it that has always already begun, that has an infinitely deferred end, and, consequently, can hardly be spoken of as having a middle?”² Fredric Jameson (although he begins with the injunction “Always historicize!”) is at pains to demonstrate that Marxism “is not a historical narrative.” And his own “historicizing operation” presupposes a fundamental bifurcation:

we are thus confronted with a choice between study of the nature of the “objective” structures of a given cultural text (the historicity of its forms and of its content, the historical moment of emergence of its linguistic possibilities, the situation-specific function of its aesthetic) and something rather different which would instead foreground the interpretive categories or codes through which we read and receive the text in question.³

In partial opposition to these claims, I hope to show that it is possible to have it both ways, to combine history with structure and to connect “the historical moment” with “the interpretive categories” through which that moment has been understood. Such innovative critical strategies as symptomatic reading, metacommentary, and the elucidation of the ideology of form acquire their full force only when explicitly located within the larger framework provided by the Marxist notion of the mode of production. Jameson, in fact, comes close to this position in asserting that “Marxism, … in the form of the dialectic, affirms a primacy of theory which is at one and the same time a recognition of the primacy of History itself.”⁴ The resulting procedure may also be viewed as a modified version of the approach recently proposed by Robert Weimann.⁵ More particularly, the present discussion proceeds from a detailed account of The Merchant of Venice to a brief look at broader issues. It concludes by reversing gears and summarily considering not the utility of contemporary theory for the study of Renaissance literature, but the implications of Renaissance literature for the development of theory.

I

The Merchant of Venice (1596) offers an embarrassment of socio-economic riches. It treats merchants and usurers, the nature of the law, and the interaction between country and city. But since it is also about the relationship between love and friendship, the meaning of Christianity, and a good deal more, a thematically minded critic, regardless of his or her persuasion, may be in for a bit of difficulty. In the most comprehensive and compelling study of the play yet produced, Lawrence Danson attempts to solve this problem by arguing that The Merchant of Venice dramatizes not the triumph of one set of values over another, but the transformation of conflicts into harmonies that incorporate what at the same time they transcend.⁶ Shakespeare's procedure thus resembles both medieval figural and Hegelian dialectics.⁷ Because the intellectual and structural design posited by Danson elegantly accommodates not only thematic diversity but also our ambivalent responses to both Shylock and the Christian characters, it is the appropriate object of a skeptical scrutiny of interpretation in The Merchant of Venice.

Shakespeare needs to be interpreted, it may be claimed, simply because of the antiquity and complexity of his art. Yet far from being ideologically neutral, such an enterprise, by juxtaposing an alternative and richer reality with our own, involves an implicit critique of the present. Even more, we may recall that Shakespeare's plays, despite their elaborateness, appealed to a broadly heterogeneous primary audience: an achievement that depended on a comparative social and cultural unity, long since lost, in the nation as well as the theater. This underlying coherence emerges in the logical and, it would seem, inherently meaningful unfolding of the dramatic plot,⁸ a strong example of which is provided by the rigorously interlocking, causal development of The Merchant of Venice. Presumably, then, the best criticism would deepen, rather than overturn, a sense of the play's meaning widely shared in space and in time.⁹

This is, however, precisely what we do not find in discussions of The Merchant of Venice. The play has been seen as the unambiguous triumph of good Christians over a bad Jew;¹⁰ as the deliberately ambiguous triumph of the Christians;¹¹ as the unintentionally ambiguous, and hence artistically flawed, triumph of the Christians;¹² as the tragedy of Shylock, the bourgeois hero;¹³ and as a sweeping attack on Christians and Jews alike.¹⁴ No other Shakespearean comedy before All's Well That Ends Well (1602) and Measure for Measure (1604), perhaps no other Shakespearean comedy at all, has excited comparable controversy. Probably the most promising way out of this dilemma is to see the play as a new departure for Shakespeare; as his earliest comedy drawn from the Italian novelle; as the first of several not quite successful attempts to introduce more powerful characters, more complex problems of conduct, more realistic representation, and a more serious vision of life into a traditionally light genre.¹⁵ Such a perspective is not without its drawbacks. Nonetheless, it has the virtue of suggesting that the play is by and large a romantic comedy; that it is partially flawed; that it calls for an unusual set of critical questions;¹⁶ and, most important, that it requires us not so much to interpret as to discover the sources of our difficulty in interpreting, to view the play as a symptom of a problem in the life of late sixteenth-century England.

Critics who have studied The Merchant of Venice against the background of English history have justifiably seen Shylock, and especially his lending habits, as the embodiment of capitalism.¹⁷ The last third of the sixteenth century witnessed a sequence of denunciations of the spread of usury. In The Specvlation of Vsurie, published during the year Shakespeare's play may first have been performed, Thomas Bell expresses a typical sense of outrage. “Now, now is nothing more frequent with the rich men of this world, than to writhe about the neckes of their poore neighbours, and to impouerish them with the filthie lucre of Usurie.”¹⁸ Behind this fear lay the transition to capitalism: the rise of banking; the increasing need for credit in industrial enterprises; and the growing threat of indebtedness facing both aristocratic landlords and, above all, small, independent producers, who could easily decline to working-class status.¹⁹ Although the lower classes were the main victims, it may be as inadequate to describe opposition to usury in Shakespeare or elsewhere as popular in character, as it is misleading to argue that “Elizabethan drama, even in its higher ranges, was not the expression of a ‘class’ culture at all.”²⁰ Rather, we are confronted with the hegemonic position of the nobility, whose interests the ideology ultimately served. Artisans and peasant smallholders might fall into the proletariat, but once the majority of the traditional ruling class had adapted to capitalism, the issue of usury faded away.

This had not occurred by 1600, however, and The Merchant of Venice offers a number of specific parallels to the antiusury campaign,²¹ most notably in its contrasts between usury and assistance to the poor, and between usurers and merchants. Miles Mosse, for example, laments that “lending upon vsurie is growne so common and usuall among men, as that free lending to the needie is utterly overthrowne.”²² The distinction between merchants and usurers, also of medieval origin, could be drawn on the grounds that only the former operated for mutual benefit, as opposed to self-interest. Or it might be argued, in language recalling Shakespeare's high valuation of “venturing,” that the usurer does not, like “the merchant that crosse the seas, adventure,” receiving instead a guaranteed return on his money.²³

A number of dubious consequences follow from concentrating too narrowly on the English background of The Merchant of Venice, however. From such a perspective, the play as a whole seems unproblematic, noneconomic issues unimportant, and related matters like Shylock's religion or the Italian setting irrelevant.²⁴ Even explicitly economic concerns do not make adequate sense. An emphasis on the difference between trade and usury might imply that Antonio and his creator are resolutely medieval anticapitalists.²⁵ But not only do Shakespeare's other plays of the 1590's show few signs of hostility to capitalism, The Merchant of Venice itself is quite obviously procapitalist, at least as far as commerce is concerned. It would be more accurate to say that Shakespeare is criticizing merely the worst aspects of an emerging economic system, rather than the system itself. In this respect, moreover, he deviates from the antiusury tracts and from English reality alike. Writers of the period register both the medieval ambivalence about merchants and the indisputable contemporary fact that merchants were the leading usurers: suspicion of Italian traders ran particularly high.²⁶ It may be that Shakespeare intends a covert parallel between Shylock and Antonio. Yet no manipulation will convert a comedy in which there are no merchant-usurers and in which the only usurer is a Jew into a faithful representation of British economic life.

Similar trouble arises with Shylock, whom critics have at times allegorically Anglicized as a grasping Puritan.²⁷ The identification is unconvincing, however, partly because it is just as easy to transform him into a Catholic²⁸ and, more generally, because he is too complex and contradictory to fit neatly the stereotype of Puritan thrift. It is also unclear what kind of capitalist Shylock is. The crisis of the play arises not from his insistence on usury, but from his refusal of it. The contrast is between usury, which is immoral because it computes a charge above the principal from the moment of the loan, and interest, which is perfectly acceptable because it “is never due but from the appointed day of payment forward.”²⁹ Antonio immediately recognizes that Shylock's proposal falls primarily into the latter category, and he responds appropriately, if naively: “Content in faith, I'll seal to such a bond, / And say there is much kindness in the Jew.”³⁰

In addition, the penalty for default on the bond is closer to folklore than to capitalism: stipulation for a pound of flesh, after all, is hardly what one would expect from homo economicus. To be sure, Shakespeare is literalizing the traditional metaphorical view of usurers.³¹ Moreover, Shylock's desire for revenge is both motivated by economics and possessed of a large degree of economic logic (e.g., I.iii.39-40; and III.i.49, and 117-18). But when the grasping moneylender refuses to relent in return for any repayment—“No not for Venice”—he goes beyond the bounds of rationality and against the practices of a ruthless modern businessman (IV.i.226).³² In short, although it is proper to view The Merchant of Venice as a critique of early British capitalism, that approach fails even to account for all of the purely economic issues in the work. Can tolerable sense be made of the play's economics, or was Shakespeare merely being fanciful? To answer these questions, we need to take seriously the Venetian setting of the action.

To the English, and particularly to Londoners, Venice represented a more advanced stage of the commercial development they themselves were experiencing. G. K. Hunter's telling remark about the predilections of the Jacobean theater—“Italy became important to the English dramatists only when ‘Italy’ was revealed as an aspect of England”—already applies in part to The Merchant of Venice.³³ Yet Venetian reality during Shakespeare's lifetime contradicted almost point for point its portrayal in the play. Not only did the government bar Jewish usurers from the city, it also forced the Jewish community to staff and finance low-interest, nonprofit lending institutions that served the Christian poor. Funding was primarily derived from the involuntary donations of Jewish merchants active in the Levantine trade. The Jews of Venice thus contributed to the early development of capitalism not as usurers but as merchants involved in an international, trans-European economic network. Ironically, elsewhere in the Veneto, the public Christian banks on which the Jewish loan-houses of Venice were modeled drew most of their assets from interest-bearing deposits by the late sixteenth century.³⁴

From a longer historical view of Italy and Venice, however, The Merchant of Venice assumes a recognizable relationship to reality. Between the twelfth and the early fourteenth centuries in Italy, international merchant-usurers were often required by the church to make testamentary restitution of their profits from moneylending. Thereafter, this occupation decomposed into its constituent parts. Without changing their financial transactions, the merchants experienced a sharp rise in status, eventually evolving into the great philanthropical merchant princes of the Renaissance. The other descendants of the earlier merchant-usurers, the small, local usurer-pawnbrokers, suffered a corresponding decline in social position. This latter group, the main victim of ecclesiastical action against usury in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, increasingly consisted of immigrant Jews.³⁵

Jewish moneylenders benefited the Venetian Republic in two principal ways. They provided a reliable, lucrative source of tax revenues and forced loans to finance the state's military preparations; and they also drove down interest rates for private citizens, rich and poor, underselling the Christian usurers, whom, consequently, they gradually replaced. The Christian banks referred to above, founded beginning in the late fifteenth century, were designed not only to assist the poor but also to eliminate Jewish moneylenders by providing cheaper credit. Although never established in Venice itself, the Monti di Pietà, as they were called, were soon widespread in the cities and towns of the Republican mainland. They rarely succeeded in completely replacing Jewish pawnbrokers, however.³⁶

This, then, is the other, Italian historical background to The Merchant of Venice. None of Shakespeare's probable sources refers to any prior enmity between merchant and usurer, much less to a comparable motive for the antagonism. English discussions of Italy, on the other hand, regularly mention both Jewish usury and Venetian charity,³⁷ while Bell, among others, speaks of the mons pietatis, a bank where the poor can “borrow money in their neede, and not bee oppressed with usury.”³⁸ From this point of view, the hostility between Antonio, the open-handed Christian merchant, and Shylock, the tight-fisted Jewish usurer, represents not the conflict between declining feudalism and rising capitalism, but its opposite. It may be seen as a special instance of the struggle, widespread in Europe, between Jewish quasifeudal fiscalism and native bourgeois mercantilism, in which the indigenous forces usually prevailed.³⁹ Both the characterization and the outcome of The Merchant of Venice mark Antonio as the harbinger of modern capitalism. By guaranteeing an honorable reputation as well as a secure and absolute title to private property, the exemption of the Italian merchant-financier from the stigma of usury provided a necessary spur to the expansion of the new system.⁴⁰ Shylock, by contrast, is a figure from the past: marginal, diabolical, irrational, archaic, medieval. Shakespeare's Jacobean tragic villains—Iago, Edmund, Macbeth, and Augustus—are all younger men bent on destroying their elders. Shylock is almost the reverse, an old man with obsolete values trying to arrest the course of history.⁴¹

Obviously, however, the use of Italian materials in The Merchant of Venice, for all its historicity, remains deeply ideological in the bad sense, primarily because of the anti-Semitic distinction between vindictive Jewish usurer and charitable Christian merchant.⁴² Shylock's defense of usury is not so strong as it could have been,⁴³ nor was Shakespeare's preference for an Italian merchant over a Jewish usurer universally shared at the time.⁴⁴ Indeed, the very contrast between the two occupations may be seen as a false dichotomy, faithful to the Renaissance Italian merchant's understanding of himself but not to the reality that self-conception was designed to justify.

We can understand the apparently contradictory implications of British and Italian economic history for The Merchant of Venice as a response to the intractability of contemporary life. The form of the play results from an ideological reworking of reality designed to produce precisely the intellectual and structural pattern described at the beginning of this discussion. The duality we have observed, especially in Shylock, is absolutely necessary to this end. Briefly stated, in The Merchant of Venice English history evokes fears of capitalism, and Italian history allays those fears. One is the problem, the other the solution, the act of incorporation, of transcendence, toward which the play strives.

A similar, if less striking, process of reconciliation is at work with Antonio, whose social significance varies inversely to Shylock's. As a traditional and conservative figure, he nearly becomes a tragic victim of economic change; as the embodiment of progressive forces, he points toward the comic resolution. But Antonio cannot be too progressive, cannot represent a fundamental rupture with the past. Giovanni Botero attributed his country's urban preeminence partly to the fact that “the gentleman in Italy does dwell in Cities,”⁴⁵ and indeed the fusion in the towns of nobility and bourgeoisie helped generate the Renaissance in Italy and, much later, in England as well. The concluding tripartite unity of Antonio, Bassanio, and Portia⁴⁶ enacts precisely this interclass harmony between aristocratic landed wealth and mercantile capital, with the former dominant. A belief that some such relationship provided much of the social foundation of the English monarchy accounts for Shakespeare's essentially corporatist defense of absolutism in the 1590's.

A brief consideration of Marx's views on Jews, on usurers, on merchants, and on The Merchant of Venice will enable us to restate these conclusions with greater theoretical rigor and to point toward additional, related issues. In the “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right: Introduction,” Shylock is an exploiter of the lower classes. Characterizing the German historical school of law, Marx comments: “A Shylock, but a servile Shylock, it swears upon its bond, its historical, Christian-Germanic bond, for every pound of flesh cut from the heart of the people.” The Second part of “On the Jewish Question” basically equates Judaism with capitalism, a position that Volume One of Capital reasserts in a discussion of the efforts of nineteenth-century British manufacturers to force children to work long hours. “Workmen and factory inspectors protested on hygienic and moral grounds, but Capital answered: ‘My deeds upon my head! I crave the law, / The penalty and forfeit of my bond.’ This Shylock-clinging to the letter of the law …,” Marx adds, “was but to lead up to an open revolt against the same law.” But the extended discussion of usury in Volume Three of Capital implicitly reaches a very different conclusion. Usurer's capital, Marx claims, arises long before the capitalist system itself, its parasitic action weakening the precapitalist mode of production off which it lives. But unassisted it cannot generate a transition to capitalism. When that transition does occur, however, usury inevitably declines, partly as a result of the determined opposition of mercantile capital. Finally, commercial capital itself is, like usury, an early and primitive form of capital and, as such, ultimately compatible with precapitalist modes of production. Thus, Marx's comments in effect recapitulate our entire argument on the economics of The Merchant of Venice.⁴⁷

In one instance, however, they lead beyond that argument. Up to now, we have been primarily concerned to show how dramatic form, as the product of an ideological reworking of history, functions to resolve those contradictions that prove irreconcilable in life. But, of course, many critics have been unable to feel a final coherence to The Merchant of Venice. In Volume One of Capital, after showing how industrial capital endangers the worker, “how it constantly threatens, by taking away the instruments of labour, to snatch from his hands his means of subsistence,” Marx quotes Shylock's reply to the Duke's pardon: “You take my life / When you do take the means whereby I live.”⁴⁸ The passage implies exactly the opposite of what is suggested by the lines previously cited from the same volume. There, Shylock was identified with capital, the Christians with labor; here, the Christians represent capital, Shylock labor. Such a reversal cannot be assimilated to the dualisms we have already discussed: instead, Marx's use of selective quotation succeeds in capturing Shylock as both victimizer and victim.

As many critics have observed, the fact that Shylock is grand as well as pitiable does not in itself imply any structural flaw in The Merchant of Venice. Shakespeare needed an antagonist possessed of sufficient, though perhaps not “mythical,” stature to pose a credible threat.⁴⁹ The sympathy elicited by the Jewish usurer, often a consequence of his mistreatment by Christian characters who resemble him more than they would admit, also serves a plausible formal purpose in the overall movement toward mercy and harmony. In fact, by the end of the trial scene most of the Christian characters have fairly settled accounts with Shylock.⁵⁰ The trouble is that Christianity has not. Although the Christian characters in the play are better than Shylock, the Christian characters not in the play are not. In his famous “Jew” speech and in his declamation on slavery to the court, Shylock adopts the strategy of equating Christian with Jew to justify his own murderous intentions (III.ii.47-66, and IV.i.89-103). But by the end of Act IV, his analogies are strictly irrelevant to most of the Christian characters in the play. They have either given up the practices that Shylock attributes to them, or they have never been guilty of them at all: certainly, we meet no Christian slaveholders in The Merchant of Venice. Yet Shylock's universalizing accusations are never challenged in word by his Christian auditors, nor can they be sufficiently answered in deed by the individual charitable acts with which the trial concludes. The devastating judgments, particularly of the second speech, are allowed to stand; and they tell us that although Shylock is defeated and then incorporated in the world of the play, in the world beyond the play his values are pervasive.

This bifurcation is a consequence of the fundamental contradiction in Shakespeare's social material. English history requires that the threat embodied in Shylock be generalized; Italian history, that it remain localized. Yet if Shakespeare had fully responded to both imperatives, The Merchant of Venice would have lapsed into incoherence. If the play revealed that merchants were as exploitative as usurers, that they were in fact usurers, then its entire thrust toward harmonious reconciliation could only be understood as a fiendishly oblique instance of ironic demystification. But if instead Shakespeare intended the movement toward transcendent unity to be taken at least as seriously as the dangers of nascent capitalism, he needed to present the latter in a way that would not undermine the former. He needed to transform materialist problems into idealist ones (Antonio cannot very well give up commerce, but he can learn to be more merciful) or to project them harmlessly away from the Christian characters in the play (some Christians whom we do not meet own and mistreat slaves). To achieve a convincing resolution, Shakespeare had to begin with a partly imaginary dilemma. But only partly. For had his premise been wholly imaginary, his treatment could easily have been relatively free of contradiction. That it is not is a testimony to both his strengths and his limitations.

Such a perspective enables us to understand and in a sense to justify the opposed responses to The Merchant of Venice, to see in its flaws not signs of artistic incompetence but manifestations of preformal problems. It also suggests answers to the questions with which we began. We need to interpret this play particularly because its formal movement—dialectical transcendence—is not adequate to the social conflict that is its main source of inspiration and one of its principal subjects. Some of the merit of The Merchant of Venice ironically lies in the failure of its central design to provide a completely satisfying resolution to the dilemmas raised in the course of the action. We have seen that one purpose of the form is to reconcile the irreconcilable. Similarly, one effect of interpretive methods that view explication as their primary end is a complicity of silence with the play, in which the ideology of the form is uncritically reproduced and the whole, The Merchant of Venice as we have it, is replaced by the part, Shakespeare's possible intention.

These inferences may be related to the debate on organic form and artistic totality that has troubled Marxist criticism since the 1930s. It would seem that the above argument aligns itself with those theories that see in the sense of closure or wholeness sometimes produced by a work of art an analogue to reactionary corporatist ideologies designed to suppress awareness of class conflict. An antiorganicist orientation, however, must deny in principle the possibility that the realm of aesthetics can deliver an experience of a contradictory totality or, for that matter, of demystification followed by retotalization.⁵¹ Few plays if any completely accomplish so much: the achievement of The Merchant of Venice is oblique and partial. But it would be a mistake to overgeneralize from a single example: some of the greatest works of the early seventeenth-century theater, most notably King Lear, do in fact approach this elusive ideal.

Nonetheless, our consideration of the ideology of form in The Merchant of Venice from the vantage point of economic history has primarily constituted an act of demystification. An exclusive preoccupation of this sort fails to do justice to the play, however. To locate the merit of the work in Shakespeare's inability to accomplish precisely what he intended hardly corrects the deficiency; it merely betrays the critic's wish that The Merchant of Venice were The Jew of Malta. The positive value of Shakespeare's comedy naturally includes the significant concerns that it voices, a prominent example of which is the problem of usury. But at least as important is the utopian dimension of the play: what may seem escapist from one perspective, from another becomes liberating. Although the effort of art to transcend the constraints of its time is not necessarily apparent, in The Merchant of Venice much of this tendency is right on the surface. For instance, the play persistently attempts to establish a congruence between economic and moral conduct, between outer and inner wealth; to depict a society in which human relationships are not exploitative. Such a vision, quite literally a fantasy, simultaneously distracts us from the deficiencies of our lives and reveals to us the possibility of something better. Utopian mystification and liberation are always inseparable and often, as here, strictly identical.

Similar lines of analysis could be extended to the other major issues in the play. Here, however, we need only suggest the outlines of such an inquiry. The supersession of justice by mercy, of the letter by the spirit, and of the Old Law by the New in the trial that occupies Act IV at once reveals the fairness of the legal system and the ethical premises of the entire plot.⁵² Shakespeare's demonstration that the principle of equity is inherent in the rigor of the law is rooted “in the adjustment of the common law to the practice of Equity in the Court of Chancery” during the sixteenth century.⁵³ Beginning in the 1590's, however, the officials of the old, comparatively popular common law courts and their counterparts on the newer, royally dominated courts like Chancery entered into a struggle that ultimately resulted in the common lawyers joining the militant opposition to the crown.⁵⁴ In this respect Shakespeare's ideological project represents an anticipatory and, in the event, futile attempt to reconcile absolutist values with popular, traditional, but ironically revolutionary institutions, so as to prevent civil war.⁵⁵ Another version of this compromise is implicit in Shylock's demand of his bond from the Duke: “If you deny it, let the danger light / Upon your charter and your city's freedom!” (IV.i.38-39). On the one hand, the case acquires such political reverberations because Shakespeare assumes a feudal conception of law, in which justice is the central peacetime conduit of aristocratic power. On the other, Shylock's threat becomes so grave because the trial is based on a bourgeois commitment to binding contracts. Portia's integrative solution reveals the compatibility of rigor and freedom, of bourgeois self-interest and aristocratic social responsibility. But the profound allegiance to contractual law can make this ideological yoking seem either unjust or precarious, responses that indicate the tension between the limits of reality and the promises of utopia in The Merchant of Venice.

The relationship between country and city, perhaps the other major, overtly social issue raised by the action, situates the play in the tradition of Renaissance pastoral, a literary and theatrical reaction by the nobility to the two dominant trends of the age—the rise of capitalism and the partly complementary growth of absolutism. The construction of the pastoral world resolves the intractable dilemmas of aristocratic life in the city or at court: the form ideologically reconciles the socially irreconcilable.⁵⁶ Rather than representing a species of escapism, however, this enterprise is transformed into a fully conscious process in The Merchant of Venice. The strictly causal logic of the action, noted earlier, is identical to the interplay between Belmont and Venice. Because the multiple plot extends the social range of representation, the traditional ruling class, ensconced in the second or “green” world, is tested and validated by its ability to master the deepest conflicts of the first world. Shakespeare's goal is thus, once again, to rebind what had been torn asunder into a new unity, under aristocratic leadership. The symbolic repository of value is the great country house, home not of reactionary seigneurial barons but, especially in England, of a rising class increasingly dependent for its revenues on capitalist agriculture and soon to align itself against the monarchy. The play, of course, remains oblivious of these developments: no one does any work at Belmont; there is no source of Portia's apparently endless wealth; and all comers are welcome to a communism of consumption, though not of production.⁵⁷ The aristocratic fantasy of Act V, unusually sustained and unironic even for Shakespearean romantic comedy, may accordingly be seen as a formal effort to obliterate the memory of what has preceded.

The treatment of love is also socially hybrid. The fairy-tale-like affair between Bassanio and Portia is constrained by the harsh will of a dead father, is motivated by a concern for property, and is premised upon the traditional sexual hierarchy. But largely for these very reasons, it produces a love match in which virtue counts for more than wealth or beauty, and the wife is, in practice at least, the equal of her husband. Shakespeare's typical synthesis here represents a response to the unsettled position of the late sixteenth-century aristocracy, whose practices and ideology were in the process of transition from a feudal to a bourgeois conception of marriage.⁵⁸ The striking characteristic of love in The Merchant of Venice, however, is that it is not unambiguously primary. For Leo Salingar, Shakespeare's comedies regularly enact an unresolved conflict in their author's mind “over the claims of love and the claims of law in Elizabethan society.”⁵⁹ But in this play the controlling intellectual pattern requires what is partly a romantic and personal solution to a social problem. From this perspective, however, Act V may also be viewed as a playful and graceful effort by the aristocratic heroine to carry out the serious business of reestablishing the bourgeois assumptions of her marriage, assumptions endangered by the very romantic solution to a social problem that she has just provided.⁶⁰

Since our discussion has been designed to complicate and at times to challenge a Christian interpretation, it is appropriate to conclude by examining directly the religious dimension of the action. The problem is not particularly the tendency of some critics to overemphasize the allegorical meaning of the plot's unfolding,⁶¹ although attempts to incorporate such moments as Shylock's anguished response to Jessica's sale of his ring or his forced, as opposed to his daughter's voluntary, conversion may seem a bit strained.⁶² It is rather the difficulty of transforming the play into a paraphrasable meaning of any kind. Founding his argument upon the critical controversy over The Merchant of Venice, Norman Rabkin has questioned “the study of meaning” and the “bias towards rationality” in general, pronouncing “all intellection … reductive” because of “its consistent suppression of the nature of aesthetic experience.”⁶³ Although Rabkin's position is obviously opportunistic in its reliance on a notoriously hard case, it is quite true that “aesthetic experience,” especially when induced by more than words alone, cannot be adequately converted into argumentative meaning. At any rate, religious interpretation has proven symptomatically incapable of understanding the play as a comedy, except to the limited extent, suggested above, that romantic comedy and Christian myth share a common ritual movement. On the other hand, as part of an effort to elucidate the overall significance of the work,⁶⁴ including its aesthetic value, a demystification of allegorical reading can specify the comic side of The Merchant of Venice, in its integral relationship to the popular tradition in the theater.

Allegory may be viewed as a utopian drive to assimilate alien experience, to create or restore unity where only incoherence and fragmentation are felt, to confer meaning upon a secular existence that seems intrinsically meaningless.⁶⁵ Shakespeare's intermittently quasi-allegorical mode in The Merchant of Venice, in its moving revelation of the correspondence between human agency and divine plan, represents the most profound version of the Christian Neoplatonism that flourished especially in the pastoral tragicomedy of the Counter Reformation court.⁶⁶ The providential pattern of Neoplatonism in turn moralizes the intrigue, a dramatic genre that at times confirms the Russian Formalist insistence on the primacy of form. When the intrigue serves as an end in itself, rather than merely as a means, issues are raised and then dropped not for their cognitive importance, but for their contribution to the plot, whose elegance is meant to point only to the playwright's ingenuity.⁶⁷ Ideologically, the intrigue, unlike Shakespearean comedy, proclaims that people are not responsible for their conduct, that social rules have no consequences, that things will work out, that the status quo is secure. But the intrigue itself actually domesticates a still more anarchic impulse toward misrule and liberation that returns us to the root of comedy. Today, literature often censors some fantasy about work;⁶⁸ in the Renaissance, however, when hierarchy was more open and alienated labor not yet the norm, dramatic form often submerged an aspiration toward freedom from social convention and constraint. Shakespeare's own religious interpretive strategy in The Merchant of Venice thus simultaneously constitutes an act of humane sophistication and a process of repressive concealment.

But the repression is incomplete, and the internal distancing produced by the subversive side of the play justifies our transformation of the learned surface, a comedy mainly in the Dantean sense, into a deep comic structure with affinities to popular festivity, folklore, and ritual. In general, Shakespeare's synthetic enterprise in an age of transition ran a considerable risk: the ultimately antiabsolutist implication, invisible to the playwright, of even a qualified allegiance to the country or to the common law is an obvious example. But these conflicts mainly concern the upper classes, and much of the material that we have considered and still more that could be cited place the work within the neoclassical literary and dramatic tradition. To understand the tensions generated within the synthesis by the popular heritage, to explore the consequences of what we will later identify as the inherent contradiction between artisanal base and absolutist superstructure in the public theater for which Shakespeare wrote, we must attend to matters of stage position and of dramatic speech, to deviations from the norms of blank verse and Ciceronian prose.⁶⁹

It is easy to demonstrate that the clown, Launcelot Gobbo, has an integral role in The Merchant of Venice, that, for example, his abandonment of Shylock for Bassanio foreshadows and legitimates Jessica's similar flight from Jew to Christian.⁷⁰ Nonetheless, his physical, social, ideological, and linguistic proximity to the audience comically challenges the primary mimetic action and intellectual design. Launcelot's function may first be illustrated by his penchant for malapropism. In seeking service with the understandably bewildered Bassanio, the socially mobile clown explains that “the suit is impertinent to myself” (II.ii.130). Having somehow obtained the job, he revisits his old employer to invite him to dinner with his new one: “I beseech you sir go, my young master doth expect your reproach”; to which Shylock replies, “So do I his” (II.v.19-21). Shylock's recognition that the apparent misuse of “reproach” for “approach” is at some level intentional points to the linguistically and socially subversive connotations of young Gobbo's double meanings, to the “impertinent” quality, again in two senses, of his speech and conduct.

In his final major appearance, Launcelot begins by expressing his theological concern for Jessica: “I speak my agitation of the matter: therefore be o' good cheer, for truly I think you are damn'd,—there is but one hope in it that can do you any good, and that is but a kind of bastard hope neither” (III.v.4-7). The confusion of “agitation” and “cogitation,” the proposed response of “good cheer” to the prospect of damnation, the ironic play on bastardy—all hopelessly jumble and thus demystify the serious religious issues of the plot. Later in the same scene the clown systematically and wittily misconstrues Lorenzo's apparently straightforward order that the kitchen staff “prepare for dinner” (III.v.43). His quibbling replies range from an aggressive assertion that the servants, too, are hungry (“they have all stomachs!”) to a pretended retreat into deferential humility (“I know my duty” [III.v.44 and 49]). In general, then, from his very first appearance, significantly in soliloquy, when “the devil himself” prompts him to run from his master “the Jew … the very devil incarnation” (II.ii.25-26), Launcelot provides an alternative perspective on the related matters of Christian orthodoxy and social hierarchy. On the one hand, his nonsense parodically demystifies; on the other, it uniquely combines archaic memories and utopian vistas.

This complex vision is compatible with the disturbingly ambiguous implications of Shylock, himself a figure with important ancestors in the popular tradition.⁷¹ Like the vice, he is associated with the devil; is the leading manipulator of the action; elicits from the audience fascination as well as revulsion, laughter as well as terror; functions as both homiletic foe of Christianity and incisive critic of Christian society; and, accordingly, ranges linguistically from rhetorically polished, mimetic dialogue to popular, self-expressive monologue. Thus, insofar as The Merchant of Venice combines a formally dominant, Christian, aristocratic ideology with that ideology's qualification by the alternative and partly oppositional conduct and values of other social classes, the play escapes standard categories of interpretation while strikingly embodying the central creative tension of Shakespearean drama.

II

The preceding comments rest on a number of assumptions that have not been explicitly stated. It may be useful, then, to sketch in some of the mediations between drama and society that make it plausible to think of The Merchant of Venice as a response to a conflict between two modes of production. I propose to move from the play to the form of romantic comedy; from there to the theater as an institution; and from there, finally, to the larger contours of late Tudor England and of Renaissance Europe in general.

Any attempt to assimilate The Merchant of Venice to a conventional generic category like romantic comedy is bound to be problematic, however. The work stands apart from Shakespeare's other comedies of the 1590's, romantic or not, and, in addition, from most other comedies of the period, both in the gravity of its subject and in its socio-economic emphasis. Yet the play is entirely typical of comedy in its movement toward resolution and reconciliation, and typical of specifically romantic comedy in its reliance on married love as a means to those ends. Indeed, it is on the embattled terrain of the love-marriage that the ideological significance of the form of romantic comedy is to be located. On the one hand, married love represented a progressive step for women and men alike, consequent upon the relative liberation of women—at least in the realm of ideas—during the age of the Renaissance. On the other, the concluding matrimony of many a comedy may be viewed as a transference, defusing, or suppression of conflict. Romantic comedy, firmly founded on marital love, its climactic weddings presided over by great lords, dramatizes the adaptation of the nobility to a new social configuration, an acceptance of change inextricable from a reassertion of dominance.

The form carries out this function in self-consciously theatrical fashion. First, the characters' frequent recourse to disguise or acting is in part a response to the simultaneous instability and rigidity of the aristocracy's position. The improbable situations confronted by the protagonists are at once signs of uncertainty and insecurity, and preferred alternatives to the imposed constraints of daily life. Pastoral, intrigue, lower-class disguise, acting, the atmosphere of holiday or of release—all testify to a utopian impulse toward freedom and an extended range of self-expression. In the end, playing and pretense often help resolve the problems of the action: the main characters forego masquerade and return to the common conduct of a class whose collective sense of purpose has been renewed and reformed by their experience. Yet the conventional resolutions do not entirely negate the liberating moments that have preceded. From this perspective, it is possible to understand a distinctive feature of the form: that its power primarily resides not in social mimesis but in the representation of comic, anarchic freedom issuing in an ideal solution. It is from here, moreover, that its most enduring social criticism usually derives. As a rule, the festive side of a play is inversely proportional to both the social seriousness of the subject and the prominence of other, potentially antagonistic classes. Hence, The Merchant of Venice, by its very atypicality, reveals the formal and ideological limits of Renaissance romantic comedy.

At least in England, most such plays were performed in the permanent, public, commercial theaters that emerged in the last quarter of the sixteenth century. What was the character of this new institution? The monarchy, the nobility, the clergy, and the bourgeoisie all crucially shaped the cultural, political, social, and economic functioning of the theater industry. Yet on matters of immediate production and consumption—actors and companies, stages and playhouses, playwrights and audiences—popular influences were paramount.⁷² More precisely, the theater combined widespread commercialization, relative absence of a proletariat, and extensive regulation of the conditions of production. It most closely approximated, in other words, the postfeudal, precapitalist, fundamentally artisanal mode of economic organization known to some historians as petty commodity production.

As such, the public theater constituted part of both the base and the superstructure, and its function in one conflicted with its role in the other. However aristocratic the explicit message of a play might be, the conditions of its production introduced alternative, lower-class effects. For members of the audience, a trip to the theater was a festive occasion, a species of escape, a form of aspiration, an embodiment of an ideal. Romantic comedy in particular could evoke recollections of popular pagan ritual and thus inspire often legitimate upper-class fears of religious heterodoxy. The same interaction of dramatic form and theatrical mode of production generated socially subversive effects from the recurrent use of lower-class disguise as a means of aristocratic validation; yet stage performance also rationalized and contained such implications, not only by the specific resolution of the plot, but also by the channeling of anarchic instincts that is an inherent part of attendance at a play. The public theater in this respect offered communal affirmation and social ratification, a means of confronting fear and anger in a manner that promoted reassurance about the existence and legitimacy of a new order. The theater within the nation, like theatricality within the play, at least in part served to restore a stratified social unity.

That unity was ultimately guaranteed by an incomplete but stable absolutist state that had temporarily abandoned centralizing efforts after the unrest of the middle of the century and the still earlier era of initial national consolidation. Like the public theater, though on a far grander scale, the monarchy both reinforced and depended on the relative cultural homogeneity of town and country, of upper class and lower. Its social basis was thus at least as complex as the stage's. We might note in particular the presence of an increasingly powerful ensemble of capitalist classes, whose crucial influence is unmistakable everywhere from the broadest issues of national policy to the narrowest details of a play such as The Merchant of Venice. But in the end, emphasis on the bourgeoisie or analogies between the state and the theater are profoundly misleading. In England as elsewhere in Europe, absolutism served the interests of the neofeudal aristocracy against those of all other classes, in the epoch of western Europe's transition from feudalism to capitalism.⁷³The Merchant of Venice is of a piece with this international pattern of development. An English play with an Italian setting, it attempts to come to terms with a stage in the process by which western Europe was undergoing an internal transformation that was soon to make it the dominant power on earth.

III

At this point, it may reasonably be asked what guarantees of validity are possessed by the interpretive categories and procedures that govern the present discussion. Metacommentary, for example, can obviously be turned against itself, opening up a process of infinite regress. The primacy claimed for modes of production would seem to be vulnerable to a similar, if not quite identical, challenge. The reply to these objections, such as it is, is the traditional one: the validity of the overall argument offered above depends on that argument's explanatory power. Put another way, the organizing hypotheses are designed to provide a paradigm for, and thus to risk falsification across, the range of European drama of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, from Ariosto to Racine. Yet explanatory power is hardly a neutral or independent concept, inextricably bound as it is to such questions as what sort of knowledge is being sought and why. And the answers to these questions will ultimately be determined by the critic's sense of what matters most. The founding premise of this essay is—to quote Fredric Jameson once again, this time apparently contradicting his opposition between Marxism and historical narrative—that “the human adventure is one; … a single great collective story; … for Marxism, the collective struggle to wrest a realm of Freedom from a realm of Necessity.”⁷⁴

Finally, if we attempt to use The Merchant of Venice to interrogate literary theory, rather than the other way around, it will be evident from what already has been said that the play imposes upon us, in a particularly forceful fashion, the need to account for both its familiarity and its otherness. But it seems more profitable to ask instead what problems the work raises for the specific perspective adopted here. We may approach this matter by noting that Renaissance dramatic theory was fundamentally incapable of grasping the nature or significance of Renaissance dramatic practice, at least in England. This failure was largely a consequence of an inability to theorize the social heterogeneity, and especially the popular elements, that gave the drama its distinctive quality and that have always made it an attractive subject for a radical, activist-oriented criticism. Yet the distance between Renaissance and Marxist theory may not be as great as this formulation suggests. In both instances, the problem is the gap between theory and practice. Marxist theory, whatever its intentions, will tend to reproduce the defects of Renaissance theory whenever it remains isolated, as it currently does, from a now scarcely existent, larger, contemporary movement for social and political transformation capable of once again uniting learned and popular culture, and thereby both justifying a theoretical project like the present one and providing Shakespearean drama with its most resonant context at least since the early seventeenth century.

Notes

1. Jonathan Culler, The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1981), p. 65.

2. Terry Eagleton, Walter Benjamin: Or, Towards a Revolutionary Criticism (London: NLB, 1981), pp. 64 and 70.

3. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1981), pp. 9, 139, and 9, respectively.

4. Jameson, The Political Unconscious, p. 14.

5. Robert Weimann, Structure and Society in Literary History: Studies in the History and Theory of Historical Criticism (Charlottesville: Univ. Press of Virginia, 1976).

6. Lawrence Danson, The Harmonies of The Merchant of Venice (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1978).

7. For figural interpretation, see Erich Auerbach, “Figura,” in Scenes from the Drama of European Literature, trans. Ralph Manheim (New York: Meridian Books, 1959), pp. 11-76. The dialectics of the trial scene are stressed by Danson, p. 70; the more general “dialectical element in Shakespeare's comic structure” is noted by Northrop Frye, A Natural Perspective: The Development of Shakespearean Comedy and Romance (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1956), p. 133.

8. For the social and ideological implications of the well-made plot in the novel, see Jameson, “Metacommentary,” PMLA, 86 (1971), 12-13. Sigurd Burckhardt, Shakespearean Meanings (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1968), pp. 206-36, offers a symbolic, modernist, self-referential analysis of the rigors of the plot in The Merchant of Venice.

9. For this argument, see Richard Levin, “Refuting Shakespeare's Endings—Part II,” Modern Philology, 75 (1977), 132-58.

10. See C. L. Barber, Shakespeare's Festive Comedy: A Study of Dramatic Form and Its Relation to Social Custom (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1959), pp. 163-91; Frank Kermode, “The Mature Comedies,” in Early Shakespeare, ed. John Russell Brown and Bernard Harris, Stratford-upon-Avon Studies, no. 3 (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1961), pp. 220-24; and Paul N. Siegel, “Shylock, the Elizabethan Puritan, and Our Own World,” in Shakespeare in His Time and Ours (Notre Dame: Univ. of Nortre Dame Press, 1968), pp. 337-38.

11. Danson's argument is a sophisticated version of this approach.

12. See Madeleine Doran, Endeavors of Art: A Study of Form in Elizabethan Drama (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1954), pp. 318-19, 347, and 362-64.

13. Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard S. Trask (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1953), pp. 314-15, 316, 320, 325, and 328, offers elements of this reading, though also acknowledging that the resolution of the play precludes a tragic interpretation. The stage tradition described by Brown, “The Realization of Shylock: A Theatrical Criticism,” in Early Shakespeare, ed. Brown and Harris, pp. 187-209, seems to fall primarily into this category.

14. Anselm Schlösser, “Dialectic in The Merchant of Venice,” Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, 23 (1975), 5-11; Marc Shell, “The Wether and the Ewe: Verbal Usury in The Merchant of Venice,” Kenyon Review, NS 1 (1979), 65-92; Burton Hatlen, “Feudal and Bourgeois Concepts of Value in The Merchant of Venice,” in Shakespeare: Contemporary Critical Approaches, ed. Harry R. Garvin (Lewisburg: Bucknell Univ. Press, 1980), pp. 91-105; and René Girard, “‘To Entrap the Wisest’: A Reading of The Merchant of Venice,” in Literature and Society, ed. Edward W. Said, Selected Papers from the English Institute, 1978, NS 3 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1980), pp. 100-19. For a more detailed discussion of this debate over the play, see Danson, pp. 1-18.

15. Leo Salingar, Shakespeare and the Traditions of Comedy (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1974), pp. 298-325.

16. For a theoretical statement and practical application of this argument, see Ralph W. Rader, “Fact, Theory, and Literary Explanation,” Critical Inquiry, 1 (1974), 249-50 and 258-61.

17. John W. Draper, “Usury in The Merchant of Venice,” Modern Philology, 33 (1935), 37-47; E. C. Pettet, “The Merchant of Venice and the Problem of Usury,” Essays and Studies, 31 (1945), 19-33; and Siegel, “Shylock.”

18. Thomas Bell, The Specvlation of Vsurie (London, 1596), A2r. For similar statements, see Thomas Lodge, An Alarum Against Vsurers (London, 1584), E1r, and Roger Fenton, A Treatise of Vsurie (London, 1611), B1r.

19. R. H. Tawney, Introd. to A Discourse upon Usury by Way of Dialogue and Orations, for the Better Variety and More Delight of All Those That Shall Read this Treatise (1572), by Thomas Wilson (New York: Harcourt Brace, [1925]), pp. 1-172. See also Lawrence Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558-1641 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), pp. 158, 183, and 541-43.

20. L. C. Knights, Drama and Society in the Age of Jonson (London: Chatto and Windus, 1937), p. 11. The same assumption governs Knights's comments on usury, pp. 127-30, 164-68, and passim.

21. Some of these are pointed out by Draper, pp. 45-46, and Pettet, pp. 26-27.

22. Miles Mosse, The Arraignment and Conviction of Vsurie (London, 1595), C3v. See also H. A. [Henry Arthington?], Provision for the Poore, Now in Penurie (London, 1597), C2v, and Philip Caesar, A General Discovrse Against the Damnable Sect of Vsurers (London, 1578), the title page of which refers to “these / later daies, in which, Charitie being ba- / nished, Couetousnes hath got- / ten the vpper hande.”

23. The Death of Vsvry, or the Disgrace of Vsvrers (London, 1594), E1r. The contrary valuation of merchant and usurer may also be found in Nicolas Sanders, A Briefe Treatise of Vsvrie (Lovanii, 1568), D1r, and in Lodge and Thomas Greene's A Looking Glasse for London and England (1590), ed. Tetsumaro Hayashi (Metuchen, NJ: The Scarecrow Press, 1970), I.iii. and III.i. A sympathetic view of merchants is taken for granted—a position impossible at the time with regard to usurers—in John Browne, The Marchants Avizo (London, 1591), and in A True Report of Sir Anthony Shierlies Iourney (London, 1600).

24. Draper, pp. 46-47; Pettet, pp. 19, 29, and 32; and Siegel, “Shylock,” pp. 249 and 252.

25. Draper, p. 39, and Pettet, pp. 19, 22, 23, 27, and 29.

26. Bell, B4v and C3v, is again representative. Medieval attitudes toward merchants are surveyed by Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism: A Historical Study, Holland Memorial Lectures, 1922 (New York: New American Library, 1954), pp. 20-39. A Discovery of the Great Svbtiltie and Wonderful Wisedom of the Italians (London, 1591), B1r, partly attributes Italy's success in economically exploiting other nations to the country's vigorous trade.

27. Siegel, “Shylock,” and A. A. Smirnov, Shakespeare: A Marxist Interpretation (New York: Critics Group, 1936), p. 35.

28. Danson, pp. 78-80, and T.A., The Massacre of Money (London, 1602), C2v.

29. Mosse, F2r. Tawney, Religion, pp. 43-44, elaborates on this point, and W. H. Auden, The Dyer's Hand and Other Essays (New York: Vintage, 1968), pp. 227-28, notes that Shylock does not demand usury.

30. The Arden edition of The Merchant of Venice, ed. Brown (London: Methuen, 1955), I.iii.148-49. Subsequent references are noted in the text.

31. Barber, p. 169; Whartons Dreame (London, 1578), A3r; and for a striking theatrical anticipation, Robert Wilson, The Three Ladies of London (1581), ed. John S. Farmer (The Tudor Facsimile Texts, 1911), D4v.

32. Stephen J. Greenblatt, “Marlowe, Marx, and Anti-Semitism,” Critical Inquiry, 5 (1978), 291-307, emphasizes Shylock's irrationality, even madness. My discussion of The Merchant of Venice is generally indebted to this essay.

33. “English Folly and Italian Vice: The Moral Landscape of John Marston,” in Jacobean Theatre, ed. John Russell Brown and Bernard Harris, Stratford-upon-Avon Studies, No. 1 (London: Edward Arnold, 1960), p. 95. For reservations about conflating late Elizabethan and Jacobean Italianism, see pp. 91-94. For comments on Venetian trade, see Robert Johnson's translation of Giovanni Botero, Relations of the Most Famovs Kingdoms and Common—weales thorovgh the World (London, 1611), Gg2v-Gg3v, and George Sandys, A Relation of a Iourney (London, 1615), B1r.

34. Brian Pullan, Rich and Poor in Renaissance Venice: The Social Institutions of a Catholic State, to 1620 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1971), pp. 538-621, and Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, trans. Siân Reynolds (London: Collins, 1973), II, 817 and 823. Fynes Moryson, Shakespeare's Europe: A Survey of the Conditions of Europe at the End of the Sixteenth Century; Being Unpublished Chapters of Fynes Moryson's “Itinerary” (1617), ed. Charles Hughes, 2nd ed. (1903; rpt. New York: Benjamin Blom, 1967), p. 488, gives a reasonably accurate picture of the position of Italian Jews.

35. Benjamin N. Nelson, “The Usurer and the Merchant Prince: Italian Businessmen and the Ecclesiastical Law of Restitution, 1100-1550,” Journal of Economic History, Supp. 7 (1947), 104-22, an essay deeply aware of the parallels to The Merchant of Venice.

36. Pullan, pp. 431-537.

37. Wylliam Thomas, The Historye of Italye (London, 1549), U4v-X1r, Y2v, and Y3v; Lewes Lewkenor's translation of Gasparo Contarini, The Commonwealth and Gouernment of Venice (London, 1599), T2r; and Moryson, An Itinerary (London, 1617), H1v-H2r.

38. D4v. See also Fenton, P4v, and, for background, Tawney, Introd., pp. 125-27, and Religion, p. 53; Draper, pp. 45-46; and Nelson, The Idea of Usury: From Tribal Brotherhood to Universal Otherhood, 2nd ed. (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1969), p. 73 n. 2. Greenblatt seems to be the only critic to suggest a parallel between Antonio and the Monti di Pietà.

39. For fiscalism versus mercantilism, see Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century (New York: Academic Press, 1974), pp. 137-38 and 149. For possible problems with this hypothesis, as applied to Italy, see Pullan, p. 451. Greenblatt employs Wallerstein's paradigm to help explain The Merchant of Venice, but he does not seem aware that his argument consequently contradicts the position of those scholars, whom he also cites, who rely on the antiusury tracts. See his n. 5.

40. Nelson, “The Usurer and the Merchant Prince,” 120-22.

41. For similar perceptions, see Barber, p. 191, and Frye, p. 98.

42. Curiously, Brown, Introd. to his edition of The Merchant of Venice, p. xxxix, denies that the play is anti-Semitic.

43. Danson, pp. 148-50, argues that Shakespeare allows Shylock a fairly strong case, but Draper, pp. 43-44, seems more persuasive in taking the opposite position.

44. See, for example, Three Ladies, D3v.

45. Robert Peterson's translation of Botero, A Treatise, Concerning the Causes of the Magnificencie and Greatnes of Cities (London, 1606), I3v.

46. Danson, p. 55.

47. Marx's remarks may be found in “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right: Introduction,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker, 2nd ed. (New York: Norton, 1978), p. 55; “On the Jewish Question,” in the Marx-Engels Reader, pp. 47-52; The Process of Capitalist Production, trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, vol. I of Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, ed. Frederick Engels (New York: International Publishers, 1967), pp. 287-88; and The Process of Capitalist Production As a Whole, vol. III of Capital, ed. Engels (New York: International Publishers, 1967), pp. 593-610 and 323-38.

48. Capital, I, 487.

49. The term is from Brents Stirling, Introd. to his edition of The Merchant of Venice, in William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, gen. ed. Alfred Harbage (Baltimore: Penguin, 1969), p. 213.

50. This position is most fully developed by Danson. See especially pp. 123-25.

51. For an early and crucial stage of this debate, see Ernst Bloch, Georg Lukács, Bertolt Brecht, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor Adorno, Aesthetics and Politics, trans. and ed. Ronald Taylor, Afterword by Jameson (London: NLB, 1977). Contemporary positions appear in Louis Althusser, “The ‘Piccolo Teatro’: Bertolazzi and Brecht,” in For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster (London: NLB, 1977), pp. 129-51; Terry Eagleton, Criticism and Ideology: A Study in Marxist Literary Theory (London: NLB, 1976), pp. 102-61; and Pamela McCallum, “Ideology and Cultural Theory,” Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory, 3 (1979), 131-43.

52. A recent attempt to define the meaning of the plot in terms of Act IV is Alice N. Benston's “Portia, the Law, and the Tripartite Structure of The Merchant of Venice,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 30 (1979), 367-85. See also Brown, Introd., p. li, and Danson, pp. 82-96 and 118-25. On the relationship between trial and drama, see Herbert Lindenberger, Historical Drama: The Relation of Literature to Reality (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1975), pp. 21-23.

53. W. Gordon Zeeveld, The Temper of Shakespeare's Thought (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1974), pp. 141-42. Other discussions of the play against the background of common law and Chancery include Maxine MacKay, “The Merchant of Venice: A Reflection of the Early Conflict between Courts of Law and Courts of Equity,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 15 (1964), 371-75; George Williams Keeton, Shakespeare's Legal and Political Background (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1967), pp. 132-52; and E. F. J. Tucker, “The Letter of the Law in The Merchant of Venice,” Shakespeare Survey, 29 (1976), 93-101. For a general review of commentaries on the legal situation in the play, see O. Hood Phillips, Shakespeare and the Lawyers (London: Methuen, 1972), pp. 91-118.

54. Stone, The Causes of the English Revolution (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972), pp. 62, 75, 97-98, 103-05, and 114.

55. Zeeveld, p. 154 n. 20, and Tucker, pp. 98-101, both emphasize that Portia's argument and solution occur wholly within the canons of common law. But this particular integration of letter and spirit would have been impossible without Chancery's influence. For the popular prefeudal bases of English law, see Perry Anderson, Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism (London: NLB, 1974), p. 160, and Lineages of the Absolutist State (London: NLB, 1974), pp. 115-16.

56. Noël Salomon, Recherches sur le thème paysan dans la “comedia” au temps de Lope de Vega (Bordeaux: Féret et Fils, 1965), passim, esp. pp. 167-96, 222-23, and 451-73; Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1973), pp. 18-21; and Elliot Krieger, “The Dialectics of Shakespeare's Comedies,” Minnesota Review, 7 (1976), 85-88.

57. Stone, Causes, pp. 105-08, and Williams, pp. 22-34.

58. Stone, Crisis, pp. 589-671.

59. Salingar, p. 312.

60. On the special role of love in this play, see R. F. Hill, “The Merchant of Venice and the Pattern of Romantic Comedy,” Shakespeare Survey, 28 (1975), 75-87. For the problem of marriage in Act V, see Shell, pp. 86-87.

61. This is the case in Barbara K. Lewalski's distinguished essay, “Biblical Allusion and Allegory in The Merchant of Venice,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 13 (1962), 327-43.

62. See Danson's efforts, pp. 136-39 and 164-69.

63. “Meaning and Shakespeare,” in Shakespeare 1971: Proceedings of the World Shakespeare Congress Vancouver, August 1971, ed. Clifford Leech and J. M. R. Margeson (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1971), pp. 89-106. The quoted passages appear on p. 100.

64. This distinction is pursued, for different purposes, by E. D. Hirsch, Jr., “Introduction: Meaning and Significance,” in The Aims of Interpretation (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1976), pp. 1-13.

65. Jameson, “Metacommentary,” p. 10, and “Criticism in History,” in Weapons of Criticism: Marxism in America and the Literary Tradition, ed. Norman Rudich (Palo Alto, CA: Ramparts Press, 1976), pp. 41-42.

66. Louise George Clubb, “La mimesi della realtà invisibile nel dramma pastorale italiano e inglese del tardo rinascimento,” Misure Critiche, 4 (1974), 65-92.

67. On the intrigue, see Laura Brown, “The Divided Plot: Tragicomic Form in the Restoration,” ELH, 47 (1980), 67-79.

68. Jameson, “Metacommentary,” p. 17.

69. For Shakespeare and Ciceronian prose, see Jonas A. Barish, Ben Jonson and the Language of Prose Comedy (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1960), pp. 1-40. Brian Vickers, “Shakespeare's Use of Rhetoric,” in A New Companion to Shakespeare Studies, ed. Kenneth Muir and S. Schoenbaum (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1971), pp. 83-98, demonstrates that classical rhetoric informs the language of high and low characters alike. The remainder of the present discussion is primarily indebted to Robert Weimann's Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theater: Studies in the Social Dimension of Dramatic Form and Function, ed. Robert Schwartz (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1978).

70. Geoffrey Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, I (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957), 457, and Frye, p. 97.

71. Frye, p. 93, sees the affinity between the two characters, though in somewhat different terms. Bernard Spivack, Shakespeare and the Allegory of Evil: The History of a Metaphor in Relation to His Major Villains (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1958), generally tends to exclude Shylock from the vice tradition, but he neglects most of the relevant evidence.

72. Although this conclusion rests on the work of a number of contemporary scholars, most of the relevant data may still be found in E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, 4 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1923).

73. Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State.

74. Jameson, The Political Unconscious, p. 19.