[In the following essay, Hatlen offers a Marxist reading of The Merchant of Venice, maintaining that the playwright questioned both feudal and bourgeois concepts of value.]

Twentieth-century historians such as R. H. Tawney and Christopher Hill have demonstrated that a profound economic, social, and cultural revolution was taking place in England during Shakespeare's lifetime.¹ How did this revolution affect Shakespeare's art? Was he a “conservative” defender of the dying feudal order? Or was he perhaps a “progressive” spokesman of an emerging bourgeois civilization?

In the 1930s and 1940s scholars devoted a good deal of energy to debating such questions as these, and by the early 1950s a consensus on this matter had apparently emerged: Shakespeare was, such critics as Theodore Spencer and E. M. W. Tillyard persuasively argued, a “Christian humanist,” a defender of a traditional, hierarchical world view.² This Conception of Shakespeare has been, in the last two decades, subjected to attack from many quarters; most contemporary Shakespeareans would, I suspect, agree that the Spencer-Tillyard description of Shakespeare's world view is at the very least simplistic.³ Yet rather that seek a more accurate view of Shakespearean scholarship has in the last two decades largely busied itself with smaller, more easily resolvable questions of language, form, and theme. The one significant exception to this general tendency is Marxist literary scholarship, and the insistence of such critics as Robert Weimann, Paul N. Siegel, and Arnol Kettle that we must see Shakespeare within the context of his moment in history has made Marxist criticism, in my judgment, the most vigorous and fruitful of the various current tendencies in Shakespearean studies.⁴ However, it must also be recognized that Marxist scholarship has not yet achieved a consensus of its own on the question of Shakespeare's relationship to his epoch. Some Marxists, including Siegel, have continued to accept the Spencer-Tillyard conception of Shakespere as a “Christian humanist”⁵; others, such as Annette Rubenstein, have seen him rather as a “progressive” spokesman for all the bourgeoisie;⁶ and still others have regarded him as a representative of (in some phrases of Zdanek Anikst quoted by Siegel) “a cross-section of the nation's progressive elements,” and have argued that he does not “express the interests of any one particular Estate over and above any other.”⁷ My own (equally Marxist, I believe) approach to Shakespeare differs from all of these, for I see Shakespeare not as a spokesman for any one ideology but rather as an acute critic of all the ideologies current in his time. In this essay I shall seek to develop this conception of Shakespeare by focusing on his treatment of one central question, the nature of value, in one particular play, The Merchant of Venice in the attempt to show that the play, rather than inviting us to accept one or another of these ideas of value as “true,” dramatizes the consequences of the two modes of thought here at issue—and thus, by implication at least, brings into focus both the virtues and the limitations of the feudal and the bourgeois ways of life themselves.

In Shakespeare's time the official agents of church and state diligently promulgated the idea that value is a quality that is intrinsic in certain objects, acts, or persons. The legitimacy of both the aristocracy and the monarchy rested primarily upon the willingness of Englishmen in general to believe that some human beings are, by virture of their birth into certain families, inherently “better” than others. Indeed, some members of the English aristocracy continue even today to believe that their blood contains certain attributes absent from the blood of ordinary human beings, and until recently most working-class English children were trained in childhood to show respect for their “betters.” Exactly what makes aristocrats different from ordinary human beings was always unclear, but the feudal system confidently assumed that aristocrats possessed from birth a quality variously denoted as “honor,” “grace” (significantly, both these words were traditionally employed as terms of address toward certain members of the aristocracy) or “courtesy.” No less than the medieval feudal system, the medieval church was also committed to the principle that value is an objective phenomenon. As Frederick Copleston notes, God is, for Thomas Aquinas, “the supreme value and the source and measure of all value: values depend on Him … in the sense that they are participations or finite reflections of God.”⁸ Thus, to Thomas, and to medieval Catholicism in general, value is an objective phenomenon and our duty as humans is to discover the relative degree of value inherent in an object, act, or person. From this mode of thinking issued medieval moral theology, with its conception of sin as “inordinate love”—i.e., love that ascribes either too much or too little value to some object of desire. From this absolutist habit of thought there also issued medieval economic theory, with its concept of the just price (which assumes that the market price of a commodity should be determined by its presumed intrinsic value, a value established by God himself) and with its blanket condemnaton of usury (on the grounds that usury permits money to function, not merely as the medium of exchange, but as a creator of wealth and so of value—at which point money threatens to usurp God's role as the fons et origo of value). Such an economic theory, I might add, is both natural to and reasonably adequate to the needs of an agrarian society. For in such a society use-value (both the obvious physical usefulness of the foods and fibers that sustain life, and the supposed usefulness of those spiritual “goods” that claim to offer a means of access to supernatural powers) is an immediate and obvious phenomenon, whereas exchange-value seems to be an “unnatural” form of value superimposed upon the use-values “naturally” inherent in things. A conception of value as an objective phenomenon is thus the characteristic ideology of an agrarian society. Such a concept of value embodied itself in the hierarchical structure of European society during the Middle Ages and percolated through all areas of medieval thought, and both this hierarchically structured society and this absolutist habit of thought survived, although not without some modifications, into Shakespeare's time.

Beginning in the sixteenth century, however, the traditional conception of value as an objective quality was challenged by a new mode of thought, which tended to see value as an ascribed rather than inherent quality. The challenge took many forms. In politics, the authority of the feudal aristocracy was disputed by wave after wave of new aspirants to power (the new aristocrats created by Henry VII, the country gentry, the urban merchants), all of whom were impatient with the old aristocracy's claim to be intrinsically “better” than ordinary (“common”) human beings. (Ironically, however, these new claimants to power generally soon decided that their own blood was superior to ordinary blood, so the challenge to aristocratic pretensions was, perforce, repeated over and over.) At the same time, Protestant thinkers, as Tawney has shown, generally either ignored or even explicitly repudiated both the doctrine of the just price and the traditional ban on usury. In this way, Protestantism (followed shortly by post-Tridentine Catholicism) began to chart out an area of human conduct—specifically, those activities that we now call “business”—in which value was to be determined less by the will of God than by the operations of the market. Concurrently, philosophers such as Hobbes began to argue that the source of value lies not in the object itself but in the mind of the beholder:

But whatsoever is the object of any man's appetite or desire, that is it which he for his part calleth good: and the object of his hate or aversion, evil: and of his contempt, vile and inconsiderable. For these words of good, evil, and contemptible are ever used with relation to the person that useth them: there being nothing simply or absolutely so; nor any common rule of good and evil, to be taken from the nature of the objects themselves. …⁹

Hobbes applied this mode of thinking not only to objects but to persons as well:

The value or WORTH of a man, is as of all other things, his price; that is to say, so much as would be given for the use of his power: and therefore is not absolute; but a thing dependent on the need and judgement of another.

(Leviathan, p. 57)

Hobbes's political absolutism is, passages such as these make clear, in no sense “conservative.” Rather he is an absolutist because, having rejected all claims to authority grounded upon a supposed intrinsic merit, he can imagine no form of political order except one created by force. These passages from Hobbes also suggest the ways in which the new, subjectivist concept of value was appropriate to a capitalist society. For capitalism, as Marx argued, seeks to reduce all things to commodities, and all modes of value to exchange-value. Under capitalism, the value of anything—even, as Hobbes suggests, of a human being—is the price that people will pay. To reduce all value to exchange-value, capitalism must first destroy any lingering notions that the value of a thing might be determined either by its relative usefulness or by the amount of labor required to produce it. The reduction of all value to exchange-value is the “impossible dream” of capitalism. (This dream is “impossible” simply because even under capitalism people have real needs, which can be satisfied only by use-values.) But before capitalism could set off in pursuit of its impossible dream, it was first necessary to persuade people that value is determined not by the relative usefulness of things but by the relative intensity of people's desire for things, and in this respect the shift from objective to subjective conceptions of value that occurred in the seventeenth century is of major historical significance.¹⁰

In The Merchant of Venice the concept of value as an objective quality is associated primarily with the world of Belmont. This association is appropriate enough, since Belmont represents a feudal way of life which, within the dialectical structure of the play, stands in sharp contrast to the bourgeois ethos of Venice. That Belmont represents the feudal way of life has, however, been recognized by relatively few commentators on the play, perhaps because Portia, who presides over Belmont, is never addressed by any of the honorific titles traditionally applied to members of the aristocracy. Nevertheless, Portia is regularly referred to as a “lady,” a term applied to women of a wide range of social ranks, from the gentry through the upper aristocracy, and she herself has at least one lady-in-waiting. More important, all of her suitors are members of the aristocracy. These suitors include a Prince of Naples (the King of Naples was a powerful monarch in the early seventeenth century); the County Palatine (in this period, the County Palatine ruled a large area of Germany); lords of Scotland, France, and England; the nephew of the Duke of Saxony (another powerful German ruler); and the Princes of Morocco and of Aragon. Belmont is, furthermore, clearly a “great house,” a country estate surrounded by pastoral gardens, and in this respect Belmont represents the agrarian mode of life of the landed aristocracy, which stands in contrast to the urban milieu of the Venetian bourgeoisie.¹¹ Belmont is also a thoroughly absolutist society. Portia's father has decreed that only the man who chooses the right casket can marry her. Portia's father is dead and she thinks that the rule he has establishesd is absurd. Nevertheless, she feels she must abide by his wishes: in Belmont, the dead hand of the past determines the behavior of the living. Of course, the three caskets story, as many critics have noted, seems to derive from a fairy tale¹² and therefore my socioeconomic interpretation of Belmont may seem, at best, a little humorless. However, the fairy-tale aura that surrounds Belmont actually offers additional evidence in support of my argument. For if we read the caskets story as a fairy tale, then the requirement that the successful suitor must choose the right casket becomes analogous to those various trials (for example, killing the dragon, or climbing the glass mountain) that fairy-tale kings are wont to impose upon the suitors of their daughters. Thus Portia's dead father assumes, when we interpret the play in this way, the attributes of a king, and Portia herself becomes not merely a lady but a royal princess—a fit wife for a Neapolitan prince, or for a County Palatine, or for an impoverished but charming aristocrat like Bassanio.

The concept that value is an intrinsic quality is introduced into the Belmont plot primarily through the symbolism of the three caskets themselves. Portia's portrait, as we all learned in high school, is in the lead casket. The suitors who choose the apparently more valuable caskets, the gold or silver, are rewarded with, respectively, a death's head and a fool's cap. What is the point of this elaborate iconography? On this matter Harold C. Goddard sums up what seems to be the consensus view of Shakespearean critics: “The casket story obviously stresses the contrast between what is within and what is without.”¹³ While I would not quarrel with this interpretation of the casket story, it seems to me important that the realm of “appearance” here is also the realm of money. The two “deceiving” metals, gold and silver, were commonly employed in the Renaissance in the making of coins, whereas the idea of lead money seems grotesque.¹⁴ Thus the casket story appears to suggest that we must reject external monetary values if we are to perceive “true” value. And what represents, in the terms of the play, “true” value? Nothing less than the infinite treasure of Portia herself. She is, Bassanio has told us earlier, the “golden fleece,” the object of all quests: and the sign on the lead casket demands that the suitor must “give and hazard all he hath”—with the implied promise that he will receive in return the summum bonum. As John Russell Brown has argued, Portia is the supreme embodiment of “love's wealth”—an unquantifiable, spiritual mode of value that stands in contrast to the quantifiable modes of value represented by Shylock.¹⁵ The casket symbolism suggests that this mode of value should be defined in Christian terms. The lowly lead casket proves more valuabale than the outwardly precious gold and silver caskets, thus exemplifying a basic Christian principle: “Blessed are the humble, for they shall inherit the earth.” Yet the “inner” values emphasized by Christianity are no less “intrinsic” than the more “worldly” forms of value embodied in feudal society. Furthermore, the Belmont plot implies that the “spiritual” values that Christianity affirms and the hierarchical structure of the feudal state are not incompatible but mutually complementary. Why, we may ask, is Portia (rather than the lady-in-waiting Nerissa, or the Jewess Jessica) the supreme incarnation of “love's wealth”? Is it not because her social rank is “higher” than Nerissa's or Jessica's? This play (unlike, for example, All's Well That Ends Well, which clearly seeks to dissociate intrinsic worth from social position) offers us no specific evidence for ascribing Portia's value to qualities of character or conduct that are independent of her social position. We must therefore conclude that her intrinsic merit, although not to be confused with her external appearance or her wealth, is a “natural” manifestation of her aristocratic birth, and when Bassanio “sees through” ignoble appearances, he merely displays his ability to perceive what might be called the “princess within.” We have a comparable state of affairs in A Winter's Tale, when Prince Florizel falls in love with a humble shepherdess, only to learn that she is in fact a princess. The implication seems clear: Florizel's noble heart intuitively detected the princess hidden within the shepherdess Perdita. As shepherdess, Perdita embodies the “natural” values of simplicity and innocence that pastoral celebrates; as princess, she embodies the aristocratic values associated with the court. She is thus “precious” in two ways—both outwardly (as shepherdess) and inwardly (as princess). Portia, too, is “precious” in both ways, even though her external circumstances are quite different from Perdita's. The casket symbolism suggests her “inner,” “spiritual” value; her lavish estate suggests her “external,” social value. But I would reiterate that both modes of value here at issue are intrinsic. Portia's value is inherent in Portia herself; it is not created by Bassanio's (or Morocco's, or the County Palatine's) desire for her.

But if Belmont exemplifies the qualities of an aristocratic way of life, Venice is no less clearly a quintessentially capitalist society.¹⁶ In its detailed portrait of a society given over chiefly to getting and spending, The Merchant of Venice differs markedly from most of Shakespeare's other comedies, and the very title underscores this difference for us. First, the title reminds us that one of the major characters in this play is, not an aristocrat, but a merchant—a businessman. (In such plays as Love's Labor's Lost, Twelfth Night, As You Like It, and Much Ado About Nothing, all the principal characters except the farce characters or clowns are aristocrats.) Second, much of the play is set, neither in the idyllic world of the “great house” (compare the king's palace in Love's Labor's Lost, or Leonato's palace in Much Ado About Nothing, or Countess Olivia's palace in Twelfth Night) nor in the overtly pastoral world of Arden Forest (As You Like It) or of the woods outside Athens (A Midsummer Night's Dream), but rather in the streets of a busy city. In its use of an urban setting, The Merchant of Venice looks back to The Comedy of Errors and The Taming of the Shrew, and it looks forward to Measure for Measure. But unlike these other urban comedies, The Merchant of Venice sets up a deliberate contrast between the city and an alternative world: Belmont, a setting which, as we have already seen, has both “great house” and pastoral overtones. Just as A Midsummer Night's Dream and As You Like It turn upon a court/country opposition, so The Merchant of Venice turns upon a city/great house opposition, and much of the unique flavor of this play results from this pattern of contrast. Moreover, if, as I have here argued, the great house represents the feudal way of life and the feudal concept of value, so the city represents the bourgeois way of life and the bourgeois concept of value. The specific city Shakespeare chose as his setting—Venice—represented what may well have been the highest development of mercantile capitalism, just as today the United States represents the highest development of monopoly capitalism. By Shakespeare's time, however, the mercantile capitalism of Venice was already being challenged by new forms of capitalism (primarily Spanish and English) that integrated production and distribution systems more effectively than sea-girt Venice was able to do. Thus Venice represented a social form that had, by the end of the sixteenth century, completed its historic function, and was lapsing into decadence.¹⁷ But in his treatment of Venice, Shakespeare displays an acute understanding of the city's historical significance. The first scene of the play sets the tone: here we learn that the primary concern of all Venetians is the making and the spending of money, that the most respected citizens of Venice are those individuals who (like Antonio) have become wealthy through trade, and that in the fiercely competitive economic atmosphere of Venice even a glamorous young aristocrat like Bassanio can find himself deeply in debt. In this scene, too, we also sense, in the languid melancholy of Antonio, the incipient decadence of Venice. Two scenes later we meet the eminence grise of this capitalist society and the concrete embodiment of its decadence: the banker, Shylock. All the gentile Venetians we meet share an intense dislike of Shylock. But the primary reason they dislike him so much is that they need him so much: merchant and banker, gentile and Jew are bound together in a symbiotic relationship. The lending of money at interest was, in the sixteenth century, still regarded as a morally dubious enterprise, yet the rapid development of capitalism had, by Shakespeare's time, made the moneylender an essential figure within society.¹⁸ Few entrepreneurs of the period could finance their ventures out of their own pockets and so even Bassanio must turn to the moneylender for the capital to finance his quest for the golden fleece. As we read or watch the play, we are likely to forget that without Shylock's money Bassanio could not have wooed and won Portia. Yet if we forget this fact, we will miss one of the essential points made by the play: in a capitalist society, as Shakespeare has acutely observed, the man who controls the flow of capital holds the reins of power. In this play, the merchants and the aristocrats finally unite to defeat the banker, but not before the latter has revealed his enormous potential power, and not before we have perceived how dependent both merchant and aristocrat have become upon the banker. In Belmont “Lord Love” may, as Nerissa suggests, rule over human affairs.¹⁹ But in Venice capital is the absolute lord, and Shylock is its priest.

Since Shylock is the kingpin of Venice's capitalist economy, it is fitting that he should be the primary—though by no means is he the only—spokesman for what I have described as the bourgeois concept of value. Shylock has difficulty conceiving of any form of value except monetary value. This point is graphically underlined for us by Solanio's description of Shylock staggering about the street shouting, “My daughter! O my ducats! O my daughter / … my ducats, and my daughter!” (2.8.15-16). In Shylock's mind, money and human life are interchangeable. Jessica, who should be priceless to her father, is stamped with a price: to Shylock, she is “worth” no more (but no less) than the ducats she has taken. Shakespeare's portrait of Shylock also suggests that once we begin to define human relations in monetary terms, we end by reducing all that exists merely to so much dead, meaningless matter, devoid of any form of value except the monetary value momentarily ascribed to it by the market. The symbolism of the “pound of flesh” makes this point memorably and concisely. The bond between Antonio and Shylock is purely monetary. They hate each other, but they are united by a financial “deal”: a purer example of the “cash nexus” would be hard to imagine. The cash nexus reduces the worker to the status of a “hand,” and it reduces human beings in general to mere “meat on the hoof”—commodities to be bought and sold. Thus Antonio, who had heretofore thought of himself as a free and responsible creature, possessed of dignity and delicate feelings, finds himself suddenly become merely so many pounds of meat; he also discovers that another human being has a legally valid claim to one pound of this meat. To add insult to injury, Shylock even suggests at one point that this particular piece of meat is significantly overpriced: “A pound of man's flesh taken from a man / Is not so estimable, profitable neither / As flesh of muttons, beefs, or goats” (1.3.161-63). Shylock's determination to see Antonio as nothing more than “meat on the hoof” also lends a disturbing implication to the references to dogs scattered through the play. “If you will call me a dog,” Shylock seems to say, “then I will act like a dog—but remember that the dog is a carnivorous animal.” But the dog references also remind us that the inhumanity of Shylock finds its mirror image in the inhumanity that the gentile Venetians display toward Shylock himself. Here again Shylock and the men whose flesh he would devour (and who in the end devour his wealth) are united in a symbiotic relationship. Shylock does not choose to be a dog, but having been labeled a “Jewish dog” by his society, he accepts this identity. The crimes of Shylock are monstrous, but Shakespeare seems to imply that the society that transformed him into a “dog” must share in the guilt for those crimes. Furthermore, the cruelty of the gentile Venetians, no less than Shylock's cruelty, seems to result from a tendency to confuse monetary values with human values, for everyone in the city is obsessed with money. Even the aristocratic Bassanio sounds, while in Venice, like a mercenary adventurer, as he proposes to wed Portia for her money. Jessica too seems to have difficulty distinguishing monetary values from human values: “I will … gild myself / with some more ducats.” (2.7.49-50) she says as she prepares to offer herself to her lover. The accents in which Bassanio and Jessica speak change markedly once they arrive in Belmont, and we are mistaken if we see their mercenary statements as signs of character defects. Rather they speak, while in Venice, as Venetians, and the ethos of Venice is the ethos of capitalism, which rejects all modes of value except monetary value. Within the play Shylock is the supreme exemplar of the capitalist mode of thought, but all the Venetians display, in lesser degree, an inclination to see all human life in monetary terms.

Can we, on the basis of the evidence provided by The Merchant of Venice, draw any conclusions about Shakespeare's attitudes toward the feudal and the bourgeois concepts of value, and toward the feudal and the bourgeois ways of life? At first glance, the line between “good guys” and “bad guys” would seem to be sharp: Shylock, the supreme exemplar of the capitalist mentality, is the villain, while the aristocratic Portia not only embodies the summum bonum but also devises a clever legal maneuver that permits good to triumph over evil. Yet the more we reflect on the play, the less adequate this neat, good-guys-versus-bad-guys interpretation seems to be. On the one hand, the villain of this piece seems at several moments a man more sinned against than sinning. The notion that Shylock is a partly sympathetic character is not simply an invention of liberal sentimentalists: the “Hath not a Jew eyes” speech was (so far as we can tell) written by Shakespeare himself, and its defiant assertion of Shylock's humanity brings sharply into focus the inhumanity of Solario and of the other Venetians. On the other hand, many of the aristocratic “good guys” in the play show, as I have already argued, some traces of that obsession with money which, when we see it in Shylock, we are asked to condemn as the quintessence of evil. But even if we cannot neatly categorize the characters in the play as wholly good or wholly evil, can we not at least conclude that Shakespeare here indicates a marked preference for the traditional feudal conception of value over the new bourgeois conception of value? Here the evidence seems a little more conclusive, for undoubtedly the play does assume a strongly negative stance toward Shylock's inclination to reduce all forms of value to monetary value. Yet I would argue that there is something to be said of Shylock's view of the world. Shylock's repeated appeals to the protection of the law, together with the Duke of Venice's insistence that the law must not be abrogated in any way, should remind us that in one respect at least the bourgeois state represented a major advance over the feudal state: for hereditary privilege and rule by fiat, the bourgeois state early sought to establish the principle of equality before the law. It is worth remembering that Jews could live in bourgeois Venice and could claim the protection of Venetian law, whereas in the sixteenth century Jews were still forbidden to live in such nations as England and Spain, which still paid at least lip service to the aristocratic ideal. In practice, I suspect that most of us would prefer life in bourgeois Venice to life in feudal Belmont, for life in the “great house” was an idyll only for the privileged few. I also suspect that Shakespeare wants us to recognize the ways in which rule by law is preferable to aristocratic privilege, for the fairy-tale atmosphere that he creates around Belmont undercuts any inclination we may have to see the “great house” way of life as a practicable alternative to the bourgeois way of life.²⁰ For these reasons, I must reject the notion that Shakespeare's critique of the bourgeois concept of value necessarily implies that he believes in and wants us to adopt the feudal concept of value. My unwillingness to see Shakespeare as a spokesman for the feudal concept of value is reinforced by the fact that in other plays, notably All's Well That Ends Well, he seems strongly skeptical of the notion that some people are intrinsically better than others, and in at least one play, Troilus and Cressida, Shakespeare assumes a distinctly critical viewpoint toward the concept of intrinsic value itself. Any assertion that Shakespeare “believed in” the intrinsic concept of value must thus be made in the teeth of considerable evidence to the contrary.

Rather than seeing The Merchant of Venice as an attempt to persuade us to reject the bourgeois concept of value and to accept the feudal concept of value, I would suggest that we see the play as a dialectical exploration of the relationship between these two modes of thought. I believe that Shakespeare invokes the concept of value as an intrinsic phenomenon less to offer it to us as an object of credence than to establish for himself a point d'appui from which he can subject the bourgeois concept of value to a critique. This conception of the role ideas play in The Merchant of Venice owes a good deal to Norman Rabkin, who has suggested that generally Shakespeare is less concerned with advocating one set of ideas than with dramatizing the interplay between various ways of explaining human existence.²¹ For Rabkin, the distinctive quality of Shakespeare's art is “complementarity,” the capacity to hold simultaneously in mind two contrasting sets of ideas about the world. Following Rabkin on this point, I would contend that The Merchant of Venice holds in solution (without any “irritable straining after fact or reason”) two “complementary” ways of thinking about the nature of value. Rabkin is, however, essentially a formalist: he sees Shakespeare's dialectical dance as occurring in a vacuum. In contrast, I believe (and I have here sought to show) that Shakespeare was deeply engaged with the great historical issues of his time. In this respect my approach to The Merchant of Venice is Marxist rather than formalist, even though I depart from most other Marxist critics in my belief that Shakespeare here engages these issues, not dogmatically, but rather critically. Shakespeare is not, I would suggest, much interested in telling us what we should think about the world. Rather than regarding The Merchant of Venice as a piece of propaganda for the virtues of feudalism, therefore, I think we should see it as primarily a critique of capitalism; the play's appeal to feudal ideals seems to me more a dialectical ploy than a serious statement of ideological commitment, whereas the play's critical examination of capitalism seems both profound and seriously intended.

Such a conception of the play seems to me both intellectually and aesthetically satisfying. It has another virtue as well: when the play is so viewed, its message is as cogent today as it was in the sixteenth century. If Shakespeare lived in the dawn of capitalism, we live in its twilight, and we see all around us the destructive effects of the capitalist mentality. For us, an emergent socialism offers an alternative to capitalism, and an awareness of this alternative permits us to understand the limits of capitalism. Shakespeare, of course, knew nothing of socialism, but a dying feudalism offered him the model of an “organic” society that contrasted sharply with the “mechanical” society of capitalism, and a comparison of these two societies enabled him to perceive and to dramatize for us the ways in which capitalism distorts our humanity. Shakespeare's critique of capitalism seems to me at least as cogent as the critiques of capitalism developed by modern socialists—although, of course, Shakespeare's critique of capitalism is less “scientific” than Marx's. If Shakespeare is not, as Jan Kott proposed, “our contemporary,” he is at least our comrade in our struggle to discover our humanity. Humanists working in the Marxist tradition should welcome him as such.

Notes

1. See especially R. H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (New York: New American Library, 1947), and Christopher Hill, The Century of Revolution: 1603-1714 (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1966).

2. See especially Theodore Spencer, Shakespeare and the Nature of Man (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1949), and E. M. W. Tillyard, Shakespeare's History Plays (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1944).

3. See, for example, Herbert Howarth, “Put Away the World-Picture,” in The Tiger's Heart (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), pp. 165-91.

4. See, for example, Robert Weimann, “The Soul of the Age: Towards a Historical Approach to Shakespeare,” in Shakespeare in a Changing World, ed. Arnold Kettle (1964; reprint ed., Norwood, Pa.: Norwood Editions, 1974), pp. 17-42; Robert Weimann, Structure and Society in Literary History: Studies in the History and Theory of Historical Criticism (Charlottesville, Va.: University Press of Virginia, 1976), esp. pp. 18-56 and 188-233; Paul N. Siegel, Shakespearean Tragedy and the Elizabethan Compromise (New York: New York University Press, 1957); Paul N. Siegel, Shakespeare in His Time and Ours (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1968); and Arnold Kettle, “From Hamlet to Lear,” in Shakespeare in a Changing World, pp. 146-71.

5. See, for example, Siegel, Shakespeare in His Time and Ours, p. 23.

6. Annette Rubinstein, “Bourgeois Equality in Shakespeare,” Science and Society 41 (1977): 25-35.

7. Paul N. Siegel, “Marxism and Shakespearean Criticism,” The Shakespeare Newsletter 24 (1974): 37.

8. Frederick Copleston, A History of Philosophy, vol. 2, pt. 2 (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1963), p. 130.

9. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Michael Oakeshott (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, n.d.), p. 32.

10. The shift from feudal to bourgeois concepts of value is a complex phenomenon that historians of economics, philosophy, and literature have only begun to explore. On Hobbes, specifically, I have found useful two important works by C. B. Macpherson: The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962) and “Hobbes's Bourgeois Man,” in Hobbes Studies, ed. K. C. Brown (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1965), pp. 169-83. Of broad relevance to this subject is J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1975). On the role of value theory in Shakespeare's works, I have found useful John F. Danby, Shakespeare's Doctrine of Nature (London: Faber & Faber, 1948). I am also indebted to W. R. Elton, “Shakespeare's Ulysses and the Problem of Value,” Shakespeare Studies 2 (1967): 95-111. Elton's essay first suggested to me the importance of the two passages from Hobbes that I here discuss.

11. On the significance of the “great house” in Elizabethan literature, see John F. Danby, Elizabethan and Jacobean Poets (London: Faber & Faber, 1952). That The Merchant of Venice revolves around the contrast between Venice and Belmont has been recognized by a good many critics. Sigurd Burckhardt, for example, sees the “world of The Merchant” as consisting of “two separate and mostly discontiguous realms: Venice and Belmont, the realm of law and the realm of love, the public sphere and the private.” See “The Gentle Bond,” in Shakespearean Meanings (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1968), p. 211. Other interpretations of the Venice/Belmont polarity are summarized in John Russell Brown's introduction to the Arden edition of the play (London: Methuen, 1955), p. liii. However, I know of only one critic who has described this opposition in the same terms I have used, that is, as an opposition between a bourgeois and a feudal way of life. The critic is Paul N. Siegel, who has outlined such a view of the play in a recent essay, “Marx, Engels, and the Historical Criticism of Shakespeare,” Shakespeare-Jahrbuch (Weimar) 113 (1977): 130.

12. See, for example, C. L. Barber, Shakespeare's Festive Comedy (1959; reprint ed., Cleveland, Ohio: Meridian Books, 1963), p. 169; W. H. Auden, “Brothers and Others,” in The Dyer's Hand (New York: Random House, 1962) p. 221; and Harold C. Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare (1951; reprint ed., Chicago: Phoenix Books, 1960), 1:86.

13. Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare, 1:82.

14. On the role of money in The Merchant of Venice, see Max Plowman, “Money and the Merchant,” Adelphi 2 (1931): 508-13, reprinted in The Merchant of Venice: A Casebook, ed. John Wilders (London: Macmillan, 1969), pp. 77-80.

15. John Russell Brown, Shakespeare and His Comedies, 2d ed. (London: Methuen, 1962), pp. 45-81.

16. On Venice as a capitalist society, see Brown, Shakespeare and His Comedies; Marvin Felheim, “The Merchant of Venice,” Shakespeare Studies 4 (1968): 94-108; Ralph Berry, Shakespeare's Comedies: Explorations in Form (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1972), pp. 111-45; Sidney Finkelstein, Who Needs Shakespeare? (New York: International Publishers, 1973), pp. 57-73; and (most useful of all, in my judgment) Auden, “Brothers and Others.”

17. On the historical significance of Venice, I have found useful Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment; William H. MacNeill, Venice: The Hinge of Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974); Frederic C. Lane, Venice: A Maritime Republic (Baltimore, Md.: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973); and Richard Tilden Rapp, Industry and Economic Decline in Seventeenth-Century Venice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976).

18. Obviously, I find Shylock's economic role as banker more significant than his religious role as Jew. For a similar judgment see Siegel, Shakespeare in His Time and Ours, p. 249. For some useful information on changing attitudes toward usury in Shakespeare's time, see John W. Draper, “Usury in The Merchant of Venice,” Modern Philology 33 (August 1935): 37-47; and E. C. Pettet, “The Merchant of Venice and the Problem of Usury,” Essays and Studies by Members of the English Association 31 (1945): 19-33 (reprinted with revisions in The Merchant of Venice: A Casebook, ed. Wilders, pp. 100-113).

19. The Merchant of Venice 2.9.101. All subsequent references to the play will be from the Arden edition and will be cited in the text.

20. A good many recent critics have offered judgments on this point that are similar to mine. See, for example, Berry, Shakespeare's Comedies, pp. 111-48; Auden, “Brothers and Others,” esp. pp. 221 and 234; and R. Chris Hassel, Jr., “Antonio and the Ironic Festivity of The Merchant of Venice,” Shakespeare Studies 6 (1970): 67-74. One recent critic has even suggested that the commentators on this play “split into warring camps” on this issue, with one group of critics seeing the Christian characters of the play in largely “positive and approving terms,” while another group, “noticing that commerce, wealth, and financial speculation as thoroughly preoccupy the Venetians as they do Shylock, see the play ironically exposing the failure of the Christians to practice the beliefs which they profess.” See Raymond B. Waddington, “Blind Gods: Fortune, Justice, and Cupid in The Merchant of Venice,” Journal of English Literary History 44 (1977): 458. On this point I am obviously in essential agreement with the spokesmen for the second of these two positions.

21. Norman Rabkin, Shakespeare and the Common Understanding (New York: The Free Press, 1967), esp. pp. 1-29. Rabkin has commented at length on The Merchant of Venice in an important (and too little heeded) essay on the limits of interpretive criticism: “Meaning and Shakespeare,” in Shakespeare 1971: Proceedings of the World Shakespeare Congress, ed. Clifford Leech and J. M. R. Margeson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1972), pp. 89-106. This essay makes clear both Rabkin's sensitivity to the “multivalent” quality of Shakespearean drama and his formalist inclination to “de-historicize” these plays.