[In the following essay, Anderson references Shakespeare's religious sensibility to explain the “sordid conflict between religions” in The Merchant of Venice.]

                    every something blent together
Turns to a wild of nothing, save of joy
Expressed and not expressed.

—3.2.181-83¹

Norman Rabkin argues in the first chapter of his recent book, Shakespeare and the Problem of Meaning, for a critical vision which embraces the whole of a play's “aesthetic experience.” Even the most fruitful interpretive scholarship runs the risk of being reductive so long as it neglects the “total and complex involvement” of all of an audience's considerable powers of appreciation, which the best literary art invariably calls into play. Meaning in literature, Rabkin suggests, is almost never simple, almost never internally consistent, almost always richer than any single line of argument can convey.²The Merchant of Venice provides him with an especially apt text for these observations in view of the diversity of response which the figure of Shylock has elicited over the play's history and which that character continues to elicit at different moments in any given performance and in the experience of any given reader. That diversity has ranged from the broadly humanitarian view of the play espoused by John R. Cooper to the more recent, and more emphatic, judgments of D. M. Cohen. Cooper has argued that the “fundamental opposition” in the play is not between religions but between sets of value: an “uncalculating generosity and forgiveness” on the one hand and a remorseless assertion of self on the other. Ethics, and not racism, is the dramatic issue. Cohen's assessment could not be more different; The Merchant of Venice, in his view, is “crudely anti-Semitic.”³ My intention here is to show that neither of these opposed views fully appreciates the extent to which Shakespeare brought a deeply religious perception to bear upon the sordid conflict between religions. Uncalculating forgiveness is certainly the indispensable human capacity upon which that perception rests. But Shakespeare's understanding of forgiveness is, in key ways, rooted in Shylock's faith.

I

Of course, playwrights make plays; they do not construct academic arguments. The indebtedness of The Merchant of Venice to the Old Testament is not simply a matter of textual allusion and verbal echo. But allusion and echo do play a part in summoning up a sense of the play's religious background at two crucial points in the action, as well as at other, more frivolous moments. I am not thinking primarily of direct biblical references—Shylock's consideration of Jacob, Laban, and the eanling lambs, for example—though those too are important. More interesting for my purposes here are those moments when Shakespeare works the biblical source directly into his dramatic fabric. A comic instance of this treatment occurs in the curiously layered scene where Launcelot Gobbo tries “confusions” with his old, “high-gravel blind” father. Launcelot makes his first appearance in the play deeply engaged in a debate between his conscience and the “fiend” over the question of whether or not he should abandon Shylock's service. Conscience appeals to his honesty and advises him to stay; the fiend, of course, is enthusiastically in favor of flight. Reasoning at last that though the fiend is evil, “the Jew is the very devil incarnation,” Launcelot decides to run. Just as the long controversy ends on this wonderfully resonant malaproprism—the idea of “incarnation,” after all, is bound to remind us of a very different Jew from Shylock, and of a vastly different vision of Jewishness from the one Launcelot entertains—Old Gobbo enters and Launcelot proceeds to tease the blind old man. In the course of this teasing, Shakespeare makes it clear to any member of his audience who is even casually acquainted with Genesis that Launcelot is unwittingly reenacting two popular stories from Jewish legend: Jacob's deception of his own blind father, Isaac, when he steals a blessing meant for Esau, and the deception carried out by Joseph's brothers when they, in turn, tell Jacob that Joseph is dead. It is difficult to make this pattern of allusion clear without quoting prohibitively large portions of text, but even the brief comic exchange on Launcelot's beard has its biblical analogue in the fleece that Jacob uses to simulate his proverbially hairy brother:

GOBBO:
Pray you, sir, stand up. I am sure you are not Launcelot my boy.
LAUNCELOT:
Pray you let's have no more fooling about it, but give me your blessing. I am Launcelot—your boy that was, your son that is, your child that shall be.
GOBBO:
I cannot think you are my son.
LAUNCELOT:
I know not what I shall think of that; but I am Launcelot, the Jew's man, and I am sure Margery your wife is my mother.
GOBBO:
Her name is Margery indeed! I'll be sworn, if thou be Launcelot thou art mine own flesh and blood. Lord worshipped might he be, what a beard hast thou got! Thou hast got more hair on thy chin than Dobbin my fill-horse has on his tail.

(2.2.72-88)

Part of the charm in this scene derives from Old Gobbo's delighted rediscovery of his wife's name, but part surely stems from more complex sources. Launcelot's simple-minded “confusions” lead immediately to the sort of innocent burlesque of scripture characteristic of the Second Shepherd's Play, in which sheep-stealing and rough-housing blend harmoniously and beautifully with the birth of Jesus. That harmony between humble and exalted subjects works its magic in this short exchange too. Launcelot and Old Gobbo, like the Towneley shepherds, give human simplicity and warmth to the remote and momentous biblical record. The subject of celebration here, however, is Genesis and not Matthew, Mark, and Luke.

An instance of far more potent dramatic allusiveness involves the casket scenes, particularly Bassanio's moment of choice, for by then the audience has already learned which casket is the right one and what the wrong caskets contain. Morocco chose gold and received a skull, with a scroll pronouncing his dismissal stuck in its empty eye. Aragon chose silver and earned “the portrait of a blinking idiot” and a dismissal similar to Morocco's. The unprepossessing leaden casket, as we all learn when Bassanio astutely chooses it, contains a portrait of Portia so lifelike that, to the enraptured Bassanio, the eyes seem to move and the lips seem “parted with sugar breath.” Barbara Lewalski noted some years ago that Shakespeare's source for the caskets, the Gesta Romanorum, leads directly to Deuteronomy 30, in which Moses offers his people a choice between life and death, between obedience and disobedience to God's commandments.⁴ The death's head and the portrait of Portia are Shakespeare's dramatic reminders of the Mosaic choice. But what Lewalski does not notice, or neglects sufficiently to emphasize, is precisely that this is a Mosaic choice, from a critical text in the Old Testament, the beauty and pertinence of which assert themselves not only here but again and again in Shakespeare's work where the choice between life and death, good and evil, becomes a central feature of his imagination.

Indeed, Shakespeare's interest in this portion of Deuteronomy is even more dramatically evident in The Merchant of Venice as Portia makes her appeal for mercy in act 4. The speech is justly famous and it is no exaggeration to observe that it is a crucial moment in the play for those readers who see Shylock and Portia as emissaries of the Old Law and the New, of covenant and grace respectively:

The quality of mercy is not strained;
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath. It is twice blest;
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes.
'Tis mightiest in the mightiest; it becomes
The thronèd monarch better than his crown.
His sceptre shows the force of temporal power,
The attribute to awe and majesty,
Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings;
But mercy is above this scept'red sway;
It is enthronèd in the hearts of kings;
It is an attribute to God himself,
And earthly power doth then show likest God's
When mercy seasons justice.

(4.1.182-95)

The scene as it develops after this appeal does, in fact, sustain the view that Portia's New Testament morality supersedes Shylock's Old Testament legalism. Antonio himself suggests a parallel with Christ's sacrifice when he describes the contentment with which he will pay Bassanio's “debt” with his life (4.1.277). Shylock appears to underline these sacrificial associations by alluding to Barabbas (4.1.294). Gratiano even adds a gruesome reminder of Judas' suicide as he exults over Shylock's discomfiture: “Beg that thou mayst have leave to hang thyself!” (4.1.362). The language clearly asserts New Testament themes, but once again the imaginative core of the scene is deeply indebted to the very religion which its Christian participants appear to scorn. Not only does Portia repeatedly offer Shylock the same choice between life and death which we noted above in the casket scenes, but she offers that choice very nearly in Moses' own words, taken from the song Moses sings at the close of Deuteronomy in which he summarizes the themes of virtually the entire Pentateuch and foretells the repeated patterns of anger and forgiveness which will characterize God's relations with Israel. The entire song takes up forty-three verses, but it is the opening passages which are most interesting here:

Hearken, ye heavens, and I will speak, and let the earth heare the wordes of my mouth.

My doctrine shall drop as the raine, and my speech shal stil as doeth the dewe, as the showre upon the herbes, and as the great raine upon the grasse.

For I will publish the Name of the Lord: give ye glorie unto our God.

(Deut. 32:1-4)⁵

The image of falling rain does not play an extended role in the rest of Moses' song, anymore than it does in the remainder of Portia's speech. In both cases, the metaphor is a lyric precursor to more complex, detailed discourse. Indeed, this structural parallel between the two passages underscores the similarity in language. Moses' reference to the rain and dew is calculated to remind his recalcitrant followers both of the Lord's capacity to punish and of his capacity to nourish. The floods of Genesis (“great raine”) and the manna that fell with the dew in Exodus are equally present in this balanced peroration and in the song that follows. Portia's speech develops the elements of mercy and nourishment more exclusively than Moses does, but the same linkage of mercy with power so startling in the biblical passage continues to make itself felt in Shakespeare. Surely all careful readers of the play have observed that Portia's advice is pointed every bit as sharply at the Duke and his Venetian “magnificoes” as it is at Shylock. The Christians represent “earthly power” and “scept'red sway” in Shakespeare's scene. The moral vision brought into play as a check on that power is Jewish.

Students of theology and history will immediately reply that Elizabethans had long been accustomed to reading the Bible typologically, interpreting Old Testament events and figures as metaphorical anticipations of events and figures in the New Testament. Moses, in such a context, becomes a “type” of Christ and not a distinctly Judaic hero and prophet; his words become, in effect, hints of the forthcoming “new” law of grace. More than one collection of English mystery plays, for example, has exploited this typological connection by staging the Israelite escape from Egypt and then moving immediately to the first of the New Testament themes, the Annunciation. Indeed, in the Towneley plays, Moses himself not only draws on the same passage from Deuteronomy that gives rise to Portia's speech, but in the process of doing so he further confuses the distinction between Judaism and Christianity by acknowledging himself to be a good trinitarian:

MOYSES:
Heven, thou attend, I say in syght,
And erthe my wordys; here what I telle,
As rayn or dew on erthe doys lyght
And waters herbys and trees full well,
Gyf lovying to Goddes mageste.
Hys dedes ar done, hys ways ar trew,
Honowred be he in trynyte,
To hym be honowre and vertu. Amen.(6)

It is probably impossible to know how familiar Shakespeare was with a typological understanding of the Bible. One of the tremendous advantages students of Shakespeare enjoy over those who study nearly any other major English or American poet is that our nearly complete ignorance in matters of biography constantly sends us back to the plays themselves as works of art rather than as objects of clinical speculation or as footnotes to late-sixteenth-century culture. Even the three short passages we have examined so far make it clear that Judaism exercises a dramatically rich and wide-ranging influence in The Merchant of Venice that is by no means wholly, or even significantly, confined to the presence of Shylock.

Shylock himself, of course, is less than exemplary as a man of faith, even if we discount the ferocity of his resentment against Antonio. He appears to honor dietary laws, but he has at the same time an odd predilection (which he shares with Marlowe's unsavory Barabas) for using the pre-covenant name for Abraham—Abram—in his conversations with Bassanio and Antonio. The difference between the two names is easily audible and an actor might well make an issue of the name with his audience by exaggerating the pronunciation. Perhaps more significantly, Shylock is clumsy in his use of scripture to defend the practice of usury. Antonio's knowing caution to Bassanio that the devil can quote the Bible in a bad cause is off the mark. Shylock's malice is not so clearly evident at this early stage in the play as is his prolixity:

SHYLOCK:
I had forgot—three months, you told me so.
Well then, your bond. And let me see—but hear you,
Methoughts you said you neither lend nor borrow
Upon advantage.
ANTONIO:
I do never use it.
SHYLOCK:
When Jacob grazed his uncle Laban's sheep—
This Jacob from our holy Abram was,
As his wise mother wrought in his behalf,
The third possessor; ay, he was the third—
ANTONIO:
And what of him? Did he take interest?
SHYLOCK:
No, not take interest—not as you would say
Directly int'rest. Mark what Jacob did:
When Laban and himself were compromised
That all the eanlings which were streaked and pied
Should fall as Jacob's hire, the ewes being rank
In end of autumn turnèd to the rams;
And when the work of generation was
Between these woolly breeders in the act,
The skillful shepherd peeled me certain wands,
And in the doing of the deed of kind
He stuck them up before the fulsome ewes,
Who then conceiving, did in eaning time
Fall parti-colored lambs, and those were Jacob's.
This was a way to thrive, and he was blest;
And thrift is blessing if men steal it not.

(1.3.63-86)

This speech is devious and garrulous at the same time. Shylock is coyly warning an oblivious Antonio to be wary of the bargains he makes; “the doing of the deed of kind” can refer not only to the procreation of sheep but to an act that reciprocates “in kind” the public scorn which Antonio has heaped upon Jews. At the same time, Shylock has rather politicly strayed from the subject at hand. Antonio quickly and quite rightly challenges the application of the story of Jacob and Laban to usury. Indeed, if Shylock had wanted only a biblical justification for his lending practices, he might have quoted two brief verses in Deuteronomy which countenance the lending of money at interest to strangers, though not to one's “brothers” in Israel. That Shylock does not avail himself of this direct and easy defense against at least one Christian accusation may well reflect Shakespeare's awareness of the level of biblical sophistication in his audience. The verse in Deuteronomy which permits the charging of interest is a notable exception in Old Testament commentary on the subject. Both Exodus and Leviticus explicitly prohibit all usury, without exception. And Proverbs provides a simple, beautiful verse which could well have served as an epigraph to the fourth act in Shakespeare's play: “He that increaseth his riches by usurie and interest, gathereth them for him that will be merciful unto the poore” (Prov. 28:8). Shylock's riches do indeed become the means of a mercy that is practiced by third parties. So close is the application of the verse in Proverbs to the action of the play that it is difficult to believe that Shakespeare did not consciously invite the comparison.

In any event, it is clear that Shylock himself is something less than a pattern for his people. In this much, he is a perfect complement to Antonio, whose brand of Christianity is every bit as repellent as Shylock's blood lust. Shylock far exceeds his Christian counterpart, however, in dramatic grandeur. Antonio's passionate outbursts against Jews in general and against Shylock in particular make only a second-hand appearance in the play itself. Shylock reports them to us. Shakespeare chooses to give full and direct expression exclusively to Shylock's memorable counterattacks against Venetian racism. The only Christian character who in any sense “answers” Shylock is Gratiano, whose name is a grotesque commentary on his jackal-like gloating in act 4. Antonio himself half acknowledges this supreme dignity in his enemy, even as he gives frightening expression to the depths of his own bigotry. In the trial scene, after Bassanio and the Duke have exhausted themselves trying to shake Shylock's resolve, Antonio himself resignedly urges the court to proceed:

I pray you think you question with the Jew.
You may as well go stand upon the beach
And bid the main flood bate his usual height;
You may as well use question with the wolf,
Why he hath made the ewe bleat for the lamb;
You may as well forbid the mountain pines
To wag their high tops and to make no noise
When they are fretten with the gusts of heaven;
You may as well do any thing most hard
As seek to soften that—than which what's harder?—
His Jewish heart.

(4.1.70-80)

Here we are quite beyond matters of a more or less scholarly sort—biblical references, typology, mystery plays and so forth. In this speech Shakespeare succeeds in an act of dramatic concentration that requires, I think, some critical description to make its power fully apparent. Elements of Antonio's speech are clearly invidious: the implied comparison of his antagonist to a wolf, the embittered racism behind his reference to the “Jewish heart.” But these elements clash with others which are substantial and striking: the comparison of Shylock's force of character with the force of the tides, the suggestion that his passion has some of the grandeur and beauty of mountain pines tossed by the wind. Half of this passage, if you will, chooses life and half chooses death. Half of Antonio's intelligence is locked in bigotry and half is illuminated by a sympathy richer and more compelling, perhaps, than any other human sympathy in the play. In his joy at discovering Portia's portrait in the leaden casket—and filled with a sense of “confusion in my powers”—Bassanio burst forth with the lines which I quoted at the beginning of this piece: “every something blent together / Turns to a wild of nothing, save of joy / Expressed and not expressed.” A confusing blend of “powers” is indeed the signature of this play, but its distinctive quality is not necessarily the ecstatic joy of a successful suitor. Equally potent is this frightening (and saddening) blend of powers, for hatred and for sympathy, in Antonio and in the entire action of the play's fifth act. I hope it is clear that we have not at all abandoned the question of Shakespeare's indebtedness to the Old Testament. The choice between life and death, as Moses offers it, is simple. Despite the casket business, Bassanio's choice is comparatively easy too (even without Portia's clever musical hints) when we once consider that gold and silver are the true base metals where something as unworldly as love is in question. But life and death are not so readily separable when we encounter them painfully intermingled in the heart and mind, as Antonio's speech suggests they are in his. The Merchant of Venice is in many ways a lesson in the profound difficulty of Moses' choice.

II

The closing moments of The Merchant of Venice seem calculated to bring together both the narrowest and the broadest aspects of Shakespeare's biblical indebtedness. His imagination clings to the simplest details and at the same time explores the most far-reaching implications of those final chapters of Deuteronomy which I hope to add to Il Pecorone and the Gesta Romanorum in the list of the play's primary sources. In the area of simple details, the word “deuteronomy” itself signifies “second law,” according to the indefatigable Geneva editors. Moses restores, in this last book of the Pentateuch, the binding covenant between God and Israel, which the idolatrous Israelites had previously forfeited. He gives the commandments a second time. One of the functions of Portia's tricksiness with the rings is that it gives Shakespeare a chance to include his own second “covenant” of sorts:

BASSANIO:
                                                                                                    Nay, but hear me.
Pardon this fault, and by my soul I swear
I never more will break an oath with thee.
ANTONIO:
I once did lend my body for his wealth,
Which but for him that had your husband's ring
Had quite miscarried. I dare be bound again,
My soul upon the forfeit, that your lord
Will never more break faith advisedly.
PORTIA:
Then you shall be his surety. Give him this,
And bid him keep it better than the other.

(5.1.247-55)

A broader, and more suggestive, biblical influence involves the treatment of human generations in the play—“the work of generation,” Shylock might call it. Many readers have noted in one connection or another the number of variations upon the father-child relationship which The Merchant of Venice explores: Jessica and Shylock, Portia and her father's will, Launcelot and Old Gobbo. Antonio and Bassanio are, for all dramatic purposes, father and son. The prototypes for these two characters in Il Pecorone are godfather and godson. Moreover, the cast as a whole appears to divide rather neatly into an older and a younger generation. Antonio, Shylock, Morocco, Aragon, the Duke, Old Gobbo, and Tubal all fit into the generation of the fathers; Portia, Bassanio, Gratiano, Lorenzo, Jessica, Nerissa, Salerio, Solanio, Launcelot, the generation of children.

The very first scene in the play gracefully and enjoyably insists on this division. Salerio and Solanio make an animated and, I think, affectionate attempt to lift Antonio's spirits. In the process, to be sure, they reveal themselves as ingenuous. All the worries in the world to them must certainly be attributable to merchandise. A man like Antonio, they fancy, can't even eat his soup without worrying about storms at sea, profit and loss. Or if not merchandise, then the crux of life must certainly be love. “Fie, fie!” Antonio swiftly replies to their nonsense, and the audience would no doubt see immediately from this man's gravity of manner how silly their suggestions are. After Solario and Solanio depart, Gratiano elaborates upon the theme by continuing to tease Antonio:

                              Let me play the fool!
With mirth and laughter let old wrinkles come,
And let my liver rather heat with wine
Than my heart cool with mortifying groans.
Why should a man whose blood is warm within
Sit like his grandsire cut in alabaster?
Sleep when he wakes? and creep into the jaundice
By being peevish?

(1.1.79-86)

The scene immediately establishes a lasting contrast between the exuberance of youth—a kind of verbal prodigality in Gratiano's case—and the quietly mournful demeanor of age and experience.

The contrast between generations is equally critical to Numbers and Deuteronomy. The “numberings” that give Numbers its name involve a complete census of Israel in order to be certain that none of the tainted, older generation who had known slavery (and Egyptian religious abominations) would enter the Promised Land. Moses himself is excluded. Very nearly this same sharp division in age and geography marks The Merchant of Venice. For all practical purposes only the generation of the children will reside in Belmont. Antonio may even invite the biblical parallel in his bleak self-assessment as the trial scene opens: “I am a tainted wether of the flock, / Meetest for death. The weakest kind of fruit / Drops earliest to the ground, and so let me” (4.1.114-17). His presence in Belmont in the final act is surely temporary, for his newly-arrived ships must soon draw him back to Venice. Already he is absorbed in the letter which brings word of his unexpected good fortune. In light of this division of fathers and children, it is important, too, that Antonio is chiefly responsible for imposing the sentence of religious conversion upon Shylock. In the audience's mind these are the two characters most thoroughly saturated with the history of racial hatred between Christian and Jew. The forced conversion is only a final and quintessentially offensive expression of that historical antagonism. All the exchanges between Antonio and Shylock are marked by the sense of a long and bitter past. Together they fittingly constitute the Venetian abominations that must not be permitted to corrupt Paradise.

Belmont, however, is not Paradise—at least, it is not an untroubled Paradise—nor are its residents free from the kind of spiritual limitations that cripple Antonio and Shylock. The wonderfully simple contrast between gold and leaden caskets, between death and life, loses all its simplicity in act 5. Shakespeare reaches far beyond his biblical analogues to attain the psychological and dramatic poignancy we associate with great art. In the opening lines of the final scene, as Jessica and Lorenzo idly make love in the moonlight, they announce this greater reach by recalling instances of tragically (or notoriously) thwarted love. These two are, presumably, on a blissful honeymoon, but their talk is of Troilus and Cressida, Pyramus and Thisbe, Dido and Aeneas. Lorenzo teasingly reminds Jessica that their marriage began in theft. Jessica teasingly replies that all Lorenzo's vows of love are faithless. Their fondness for one another is unmistakable, but Shakespeare has found a way to blend that fondness with equally unmistakable reminders of the tenuousness of its foundations and of its sheer human vulnerability. Death and life are tangled in their speech, as they are a bit later when Lorenzo's admiration for the stars reminds him of “this muddy vesture of decay,” the flesh, that prevents him from hearing their celestial music, or when praise for the soothing power of music reminds him that much in the human spirit is savage, full of rage, “dark as Erebus” (5.1.51-87). “I am never merry when I hear sweet music,” Jessica wistfully observes. Sweetness and sadness season one another here, as mercy and justice do in Portia's courtroom plea. Indeed, the vision of this play insists that all of human life is a seasoning, a mingling. So Portia would suggest as she and Nerissa wend their way home to Belmont:

PORTIA:
That light we see is burning in my hall;
How far that little candle throws his beams!
So shines a good deed in a naughty world.
NERISSA:
When the moon shone we did not see the candle.
PORTIA:
So doth the greater glory dim the less.
A substitute shines brightly as a king
Until a king be by, and then his state
Empties itself, as doth an inland brook
Into the main of waters. Music! hark!
NERISSA:
It is your music, madam, of the house.
PORTIA:
Nothing is good, I see, without respect;
Methinks it sounds much sweeter than by day.
NERISSA:
Silence bestows that virtue on it, madam.
PORTIA:
The crow doth sing as sweetly as the lark
When neither is attended; and I think
The nightingale, if she should sing by day
When every goose is cackling, would be thought
No better a musician than the wren.
How many things by season seasoned are
To their right praise and true perfection!

(5.1.89-108)

This last speech is delivered to the sound of the music which Lorenzo has just called for from Belmont's musicians. As Portia and Nerissa draw near the sleeping couple, Portia gazes down at Lorenzo and Jessica and breaks off her reflections on the relativity of all beauty with an observation which makes the preceding lines seem idle: “How the Moon sleeps with Endymion, / And would not be awaked” (5.1.109). To some degree these words are no less than “right praise” for a true, romantic perfection. That Portia delivers the line with considerable affection is evident in the light-heartedness with which she immediately greets the awakening Lorenzo a moment or two later: “He knows me as the blind man knows the cuckoo—/ By the bad voice.” But the mythological lovers to whom Portia has briefly alluded represent a mixture of romantic promise with hopeless limitation. They are close kin to the equivocal partners that Jessica and Lorenzo mentioned earlier, for the Moon could only visit the shepherd Endymion in his sleep. Their passion has all the perfection and all the insubstantiality of dreams.⁷ Life and death—the choice facing us in so much of this play—face us once again in the guise of love and sleep, and here too the antagonistic forces are hopelessly interfused. No human possibility, and no character, in The Merchant of Venice is free from the kind of entanglement with death that Portia's words so beautifully express. “Fair ladies,” Lorenzo exclaims to Portia and Nerissa in one final Old Testament allusion, “you drop manna in the way / Of starvèd people” (5.1.294). But there are no true saviors here; that fact roots the play firmly in drama and not in scripture or fable. Portia herself is tainted with the very bigotry she so memorably restrains. Human beings are blessed with the power to see the choice between life and death, to feel its urgency, and now and then to choose wisely, but not with the power wholly to embody life. Clarity of vision and incapacity of spirit are the constituent elements of Shakespeare's art in The Merchant of Venice, as they must be in a play that spends so much of its time on the borders of tragedy.

Notes

1. All citations to the play by act, scene, and line refer to the Pelican text of The Merchant of Venice in William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, ed. Alfred Harbage (rpt. New York: Viking Press, 1977), 211-42.

2. Norman Rabkin, Shakespeare and the Problem of Meaning (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1981), 1-32.

3. Cooper's article, “Shylock's Humanity,” may be found in Shakespeare Quarterly 21 (1970): 117-24, but Rabkin provides an able summary both of Cooper's work and that of others who share Cooper's general view. D. M. Cohen's article, “The Jew and Shylock,” is also in Shakespeare Quarterly 31 (Spring, 1980): 53-63.

4. See Barbara Lewalski, “Biblical Allusion and Allegory in The Merchant of Venice,” Shakespeare Quarterly 13 (1962): 327-43.

5. All biblical citations are to The Geneva Bible: A Facsimile of the First Edition, ed. Lloyd E. Berry (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1969). I have supplied consonants in place of diacritical marks and printed “and” in place of the ampersand.

6. The Towneley Mysteries, vol. 3 in The Publications of the Surtees Society (London: Nichols and Son, 1836), 65. S. Schoenbaum speculates that Shakespeare may have been acquainted with the tradition of mystery plays. He had an opportunity to witness one of the last performances of the Coventry cycle when he was fifteen. See S. Schoenbaum, William Shakespeare: A Compact Documentary Life (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1977), 111.

7. E. S. LeComte traces the Endymion myth through all its classical sources in Endymion in England: The Literary History of a Greek Myth (New York: King's Crown Press, 1944). It is an extremely complicated piece of detective work, and the myth itself is hospitable to a wide variety of interpretations which poets and compilers in succeeding centuries have not hesitated to provide. It seems likely that the predominant version of the myth available to Shakespeare carried connotations of unfulfillment. LeComte quotes Montaigne's punning reference: “Seemes it not to be a lunatique humor in the Moone, being otherwise unable to enjoy Endimion hir favorite darling, to lull him in a sweete slumber for many moneths together; and feed herself with the jovissance of a boye that stirred not but in a dreame?” (LeComte, quoting Florio's translation, 9).