SOURCE: Berley, Marc. “Shakespeare and the ‘Sweet Power of Music.’” In After the Heavenly Tune: English Poetry and the Aspiration to Song, pp. 83-140. Pittsburgh, Pa.: Duquesne University Press, 2000.

[In the following excerpt, Berley focuses on the dramatic context of Lorenzo's speech about music and harmony in Act V, scene i of The Merchant of Venice.]

Shakespeare put into dramatic conflict all of the competing theories considered in the previous chapter. Platonic speculation, Aristotelian ars, and Neoplatonic magic all have a place not only in dramatic and lyric poetry, Shakespeare knew, but in the contemplation and enjoyment of life itself. Living in a nation hungry for musical language, he dramatized not only individual poetic aspiration to a heavenly tune but also the complex aspiration of an entire nation at once to enjoy the music he could give them and examine their proper enjoyment of it. The importance of music—both practical and speculative—in Shakespeare's plays is rooted in an intense need both to engage people in their aspirations toward musical merriment and show them how pursuits of merriment might come to either harmonious or clashing ends. Shakespeare made it possible, indeed necessary, at once to enjoy the inscrutable magic of poetic music and contemplate its potential dangers. Enjoyment of the wrong kind of earthly music, many in Shakespeare's England knew, could lead one away from the heavenly tune. But dissonance, Shakespeare consistently shows us, is part of the rich harmony we may know on earth.

The conflict between speculation and practice is related to the grandest themes in Shakespeare's plays—a way of speaking about the mediation of appetite and reason, frenzy and self-rule, evasion of shame and painful self-reflection. An insuperable champion of “the sweet power of music” and musical language, Shakespeare was also critical of naive (Neoplatonic) assertions of that power. He was unique in using the charms of music and musical language subtly to involve audiences in complex speculative debates about their power and value. With an abiding interest in the conflict between speculative and practical music and his ability to complicate or resolve it with his honeyed tongue, Shakespeare fashioned the condition of music to which future poets could aspire.

Shakespeare's interest in speculative music is most famously represented by Lorenzo's dazzling speech about heavenly harmony in the last scene of The Merchant of Venice. With Lorenzo's speech, Shakespeare offers, as he often does, his uncommon treatment of a Renaissance commonplace.

James Hutton first identified Lorenzo's speech as merely a conventional mixture of speculative (chiefly Neoplatonic) musical theories in praise of music.¹ “Much has been written … about Lorenzo's almost too familiar lines,” Hutton writes. “Everyone recognizes that the topics are traditional, but, if I am not mistaken, it is always assumed that Shakespeare himself has brought them together. … [I]t has not … been made clear that this speech not only contains traditional topics, but that the arrangement is traditional. … [I]n short,” Hutton concludes, “we have here to do with a coherent literary theme that Shakespeare has taken bodily into his play … [s]o familiar a theme, indeed, that Shakespeare permits himself to treat it in a kind of shorthand.” As Hutton writes:

The following topics appear in this order, though much expanded, in Gioseffo Zarlino's Institutioni harmoniche 1.2-4 (1558): The Pythagoreans said that the world is musically composed, the heavens produce harmony, and that the human soul, formed on the same principle, is moved and vivifies its virtue by music; music is an important ingredient in the other arts and disciplines … and is the only art practiced in Paradise; the earth is full of natural music; man the microcosm should respond to music, since even insensible things do so, and Linus and Orpheus tamed beasts and birds, moved rocks, and checked streams; the Pythagoreans and others cured ills of mind and body with music; one who does not delight in it must be of base character, and nature has failed to provide him with the organ that judges of harmony.

Quoting Ronsard on the subject of the “unmusical man,” Hutton concludes that “It is as one more of these laudes musicae that an Elizabethan audience would hear Lorenzo's familiar words.”²

Lorenzo's speech is rightly the locus classicus for discussions of speculative music in the Renaissance, but it is so for a number of wrong reasons. Scholars have long agreed that Lorenzo's speech is merely a traditional (Neoplatonic) praise of music that enacts dramatically the play's fully harmonious resolution. But the musical and dramatic meanings of his speech are more complicated than scholars have suggested. Lorenzo's speech is doubtless filled with Neoplatonic elements, but it is not a disembodied summary of Neoplatonic treatises that “Shakespeare has taken bodily into his play.”

Hutton's valuable study influenced the criticism of Lorenzo's speech, and Shakespeare's allusions to speculative music in general, in two important ways. First, scholars—John Hollander, S. K. Heninger, and Lawrence Danson, among others—furthered Hutton's reductions: of Lorenzo's speech to Neoplatonic “shorthand”; of Lorenzo to Shakespeare; and of Shakespeare's view to Lorenzo's speech.³ Second, they followed Hutton's assumption that Shakespeare's “shorthand treatment” typifies the thought of an age that extends from Ronsard to Milton.⁴ Such readings of Lorenzo's speech fail to account for the considerable innovations not only of Merchant, but, more generally, of Shakespeare and Milton.⁵

Shakespeare's interests and “views” go far beyond what Lorenzo says, or what has been said about Lorenzo's speech. Lorenzo speaks for neither Shakespeare nor the play. Lorenzo, we will see, speaks for himself, not for Shakespeare. For too long, many fine critics have based their interpretations of Merchant on a fixed Neoplatonic reading of Lorenzo's speech. C. L. Barber asserted long ago that “No other comedy, until the late romances, ends with so full an expression of harmony as that which we get in the opening of the final scene of Merchant. And no other final scene is so completely without irony about the joys it celebrates.”⁶ This is still a standard reading of Lorenzo's speech and the final scene. The play, however, does not fully support it, for a number of reasons this chapter will examine. A harmonious resolution “completely without irony” requires the harmonious assimilation of Jessica in Belmont, but Jessica perhaps excludes herself from the celebration with her response to Lorenzo's speech: “I am never merry when I hear sweet music” (5.1.69).⁷ The meaning of this line rests, ultimately, upon the context of discussions about music and merriment that take up much of Merchant to this point. Either Jessica is hinting, darkly, that she is never “pleased,” or “joyous,” when she hears music that should make her so, or she is asserting with ironic humor that she is never “facetious,” or merely “amused,” when she hears music that should make her contemplative. Either way, we will see, Jessica's last line presents us with an engaging problem that centers on the conflict between practical and speculative approaches to music.

Critics have been hesitant to see the darker aspects of Jessica's last line, hearing it as mere prattle in a playful relationship. But there is much more to Jessica and her response. Shakespeare built into Merchant a pattern of responses to music that culminates in Jessica's response to Lorenzo and the celebratory music. In a number of ways, the play is a less-than-merry, troubling comedy that questions with ironic dissonance the joys most of its characters celebrate too forcibly.

The relationship between Jessica and Lorenzo and the pattern of allusions to music and merriment throughout Merchant provide, we will see, the larger context in which not only Lorenzo's speech but also the general harmony of Belmont and resolution of Merchant must be considered. The harmony of Belmont must be examined, moreover, within a theoretical musical context: the conflict between speculative and practical music on which Shakespeare bases a number of the play's dramatic tensions.

What exactly does Jessica mean when she says, “I am never merry when I hear sweet music”? What, generally, is the relationship between music and merriment—and between speculation and practice—within the play? And what is the relationship between these questions and the central issues of the play? On these important matters, Jessica, as much as Lorenzo, speaks for the play. In Merchant, men attempt to control women by controlling their reactions to music. Shylock and Lorenzo live according to competing theories not only of religion and life but also music. By living with both, Jessica learns more about their competing truths than anyone else in the play.

One of many reactions to music and talk about music within Merchant, Jessica's last line is the most important; for too long it has been attuned by scholars to the dazzling speech that surrounds it. During the last 40 years, various critics and diverse schools of criticism, paying little attention to Shakespeare's interest in the conflict between speculative and practical music, have either ignored Jessica or fit her into their readings. Even recent feminist studies do not give Jessica the attention she demands.⁸ Some critics have suggested that the harmony of Belmont is suspect, but the matter—like Jessica—has still not been adequately considered, in large part because the speculative context has not been fully examined. The aspiration to a condition of song brought Shakespeare to remarkable insights for which commonplaces would not do.

Shakespeare was, among other things, a brilliant and subtle orchestrator of dramatic form, and by the time of Merchant he was already getting very good. He was beginning to write comedies in which problems resist the dramatic resolution of the play, using not only dramatic but also thematic tensions to involve his audience in its own moral and cultural dilemmas. Throughout Merchant, reactions to music form a coherent pattern, building tensions that climax in Lorenzo's speech and Jessica's reaction to it. Shakespeare, we will see, not only develops and complicates the idea of harmony within the history of ideas; he does so with complex theoretical and dramatic contextualizations.

As Cynthia Lewis points out, taking further the observations of Norman Rabkin, “a sensible reading of [Merchant] begins not with formulating quick judgements that reduce its meaning, but with observing ‘patterns,’ like those in a ‘dance,’ which recur throughout the work.”⁹ Reactions to music in Merchant reveal a large, coherent pattern that helps us to understand the play. Reactions to music—and talk about music—reveal the quality of merriment achieved by its characters. Finally, the reaction of an audience to Lorenzo's speech reveals a good deal about the quality of merriment that audience may achieve for itself.

Although Shakespeare never reveals directly his desire to sing with the angels, even in his sonnets, he everywhere exhibits it. What is perhaps most important, he often plays with our aspiration, sometimes delighting us with the heights of his music just after he has warned us of the power of false music to delude and corrupt. So, too, he often tells us about the power of music to heal by bringing us to truth. A study of Merchant, … will help us better to appreciate Shakespeare's innovative articulations of the “sweet power” of music and poetry, as well as the ways they shaped profoundly both the opportunities and limits of future poets who would aspire to turn poetry into song.

MUSIC AND MERRIMENT IN THE MERCHANT OF VENICE

One can say with good reason, along with Frank Kermode, that Merchant is a play about justice, but it is also chiefly a play about characters who seek, in their various ways, merriment.¹⁰ The pursuit of merriment—and its relation to a Platonic sense of justice, or temperance—is the subject of the first three scenes. Antonio begins the play by saying, “I know not why I am so sad,” confessing wisely that he has “much ado to know myself.” His friend Solanio offers tautology as counsel, “Then let us say you are sad / Because you are not merry …” (1.1.47-8). In the second scene, Nerissa has to tell Portia, who has long been seeking merriment, to be careful not to let eagerness to achieve it keep her from striking a happy mean: “It is no mean happiness … to be seated in the mean; superfluity comes sooner by white hairs, but competency lives longer” (1.2.6-8). With her choice “curbed by the will of a dead father,” which requires certain reactions to music, Portia reveals that such pressure can further thwart one's judgement. Musing upon two bad choices and rejecting “mean happiness,” Portia proposes an intemperate choice, “I had rather be married to a death's-head with a bone in his mouth than to either of these. God defend me from these two” (1.2.47-49). In the third scene, Shylock sets up the extreme requirements of his “merry sport.”

In the first three scenes, Shakespeare quickly establishes the context in which we must see the choices characters make in their attempts to be merry. Whether merriment is to come from within or without is a central question, and it is related to the difference between Platonic and Neoplatonic approaches to the power of music.

The question whether “sweet music” should make Jessica “merry” contains within it the larger question on which the play is centered: what does it mean to be “merry”? Merchant is a play about conflicting attempts to be “merry”—and the antipodal worldviews on which these attempts are based. The crux of the play is that Antonio and Shylock cannot both end the play “merry.” There is the further suggestion that Christians and Jews cannot simultaneously be merry, and this is why Jessica's last utterance carries so much weight.

The Christians are, as Bassanio himself exclaims to Gratiano, “friends / That purpose merriment” (2.2.189-90). For Shylock, who rejects such purposing, the possibility for merriment exists only in the “merry sport” of his “bond” (1.3.139-47). It is clear that the “sport” of Shylock's bond is not “merry.” It is less clear, although clearly as true, that forcible conversion of “the Jew” is another form of “merry sport” that is not truly “merry” or “gentle.”

Merchant is a play about polarizing worldviews causing people to assert one as true and the other as the false pursuit of merriment. No character, moreover, is willing to be content with “mean happiness.” But, as Maynard Mack observes in his essay “Engagement and Detachment in Shakespeare's Plays,” the “usual lesson of comedy” is that “overengagement to any obsessive single view of oneself or the world is to be avoided.”¹¹Merchant depicts merciless Christians purposing merriment as well as a merciless Jew. The play considers not why one of the two pursuits is true, but why both are potentially destructive. And it is Jessica, a willing convert, I am suggesting, who most comes to understand the reasons why.

The pun on gentle and gentile made consistently in the play suggests that Shylock could improve his fortune by assimilating: by being gentle (by becoming a Christian). The plot requires that we accept not only Shylock's forced conversion as a comic resolution, but also his forced response to Portia's question: “Art thou contented, Jew? What dost thou say?” Shylock says, “I am content” (4.1.391-92), but we know he is not. Jessica, in stark contrast, not only converts willingly but twice accepts the promise that a change of religion will bring a change of fortune: “O Lorenzo, / If thou keep promise, I shall end this strife, / Become a Christian and thy loving wife”; and “I shall be saved by my husband. He hath made me a Christian” (2.3.20-22; 3.5.17-18). The first time we see her, Jessica says: “Our house is hell” (2.3.1). Jessica looks to conversion for salvation and merriment, for an alternative to her life “of tediousness” (2.3.3) with her repressive Jewish father. Whereas Shylock is forced to convert, Jessica is willing—but her willingness is a repressive flight from curbed choices more than it is a faithful leap to a good life. She gives away her father's turquoise ring, voiding with this gesture the union that made her a Jew, trading, symbolically, a rigid world of law for a lascivious world of choice. But the question of self-knowledge complicates her embrace of choice.

Whereas Shylock is forced to convert, Jessica is seduced by the offer of a merry life. Shylock's penultimate utterance in the play—“I am content”—is ironic. Jessica's last line—“I am never merry when I hear sweet music”—is also ironic. She cannot say never. Or can she? Is she saying she was not merry the first time she heard Lorenzo's sweet music? Or is she saying she will follow Lorenzo's speculative lesson with requisite seriousness? We know what Portia demands of Shylock when she asks, “Are you content, Jew?” But do we know exactly what Lorenzo demands of Jessica when he says, “Mark the music”?

The dramatic counterpoint created by the last utterances of father and daughter is significant. Lorenzo's “resolution” in Belmont hinges on whether or not Jessica is “merry” at the end of the play—and whether any failure to be merry is a result of a failure in her (a natural failure of her impenetrable Jewish soul?) or a failure in Lorenzo. Anyone interested in Merchant must arbitrate these matters, and this means taking a fresh view of the play, and of the dramatic and thematic contexts of Lorenzo's speech.

The immediate context of Lorenzo's famous speech is the echoic exchange of “In such a night …” that precedes it. The exchange centers on classical stories of love-turned-bitter; the subject speaks against the harmony of the echoic form. Lorenzo speaks of Troilus and Cressida, which turns Jessica to Thisbe. Lorenzo mentions Dido, which turns Jessica to Medea, and Jessica's insinuation that she has risked everything for him leads Lorenzo to their case:

                                                                                In such a night
Did Jessica steal from the wealthy Jew,
And with an unthrift love did run from Venice
As far as Belmont.

Jessica speaks directly to the core of what seem to be real troubles:

                                                                                In such a night
Did young Lorenzo swear he loved her well,
Stealing her soul with many vows of faith,
And ne'er a true one.

(5.1.14-22)

If the other exchanges can be excused as playful literary allusions, Jessica's last charge—a direct one—cannot. Lorenzo responds: “In such a night / Did pretty Jessica, like a little shrow / Slander her love, and he forgave it her.” But Jessica appears unforgiving, concluding the exchange by remarking her unwillingness to conclude it: “I would out-night you, did nobody come: / But hark, I hear the footing of a man” (5.1.23-24). By 5.1, real trouble appears to be afoot.

The exchange ends with Jessica promising to “out-night” Lorenzo, interrupted by Portia's servant Stephano. Before Stephano is gone, Lorenzo begins his speculative speech about musical harmony. Rather than an isolated piece of Neoplatonism, Lorenzo's speech is part of Shakespeare's intricate dramatic context. It appears to be an attempt to make Jessica merry once again. Lorenzo's speech is a seductive praise of the power of music, spoken by the play's hottest lover at a time when Jessica appears, with reason, to be getting cold.

The serious subject of the exchange pushes the limits of playful banter, signaling a conflict between beautiful form and ugly content, between the charm of sound and the trouble of its meaning. Lorenzo attempts to effect a transition to a better, more harmonious aspect of “such a night.” He tries to get Jessica to see that “such a night” becomes “soft stillness” and “the touches of sweet harmony” rather than the will to “out-night.” Any movement from embittered discussion to “sweet touches” would be good, and Lorenzo, an astute rhetorician, uses what he knows of musical theory to refashion the night.

Rather than mere Neoplatonic shorthand, Lorenzo's speech is a conspicuous translation of a lover's lofty new promises into exalted musical terms:

Sweet soul, let's in, and there expect their coming.
And yet no matter; why should we go in?
My friend Stephano, signify, I pray you,
Within this house, your mistress is at hand,
And bring your music forth into the air. [Exit Stephano.]
How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank!
Here will we sit and let the sounds of music
Creep in our ears; soft stillness and the night
Become the touches of sweet harmony.
Sit, Jessica. Look how the floor of heaven
Is thick inlaid with patens of bright gold.
There's not the smallest orb which thou behold'st
But in his motion like an angel sings,
Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubins;
Such harmony is in immortal souls,
But whilst this muddy vesture of decay
Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it.
                                                                                          [Enter musicians.]
Come ho, and wake Diana with a hymn!
With sweetest touches pierce your mistress' ear
And draw her home with music.
                                                                      Play music.

(5.1.49-68)

Lorenzo first promises “the touches of sweet harmony,” which appears, at first, to refer to actual music to be played (off stage) by the musicians—seductive sounds that might make Jessica happy to become soft and still, and receptive to Lorenzo's “sweet touches.” But six lines later Lorenzo links “the touches of sweet harmony” to the heavenly harmony they cannot hear: “Such harmony” refers back to the “sweet harmony,” but “whilst this muddy vesture of decay / Doth grossly close it in,” Lorenzo says, they cannot hear.

Six lines after offering Jessica some tangible music, he redefines it as heavenly harmony, only to explain one line later that they cannot hear it. In short, Lorenzo promises Jessica something he cannot provide, and the exchange of “In such a night …” suggests he has done this before. The speech is dazzling, but it reveals what appears to be a habit of breaking vows.

The “sweet power” of speech and music were deeply linked in Shakespeare's day. Both were considered modes of seduction, and in 5.1, Lorenzo has a need for grander, “sweeter” promises, bigger vows that might make Jessica forget about broken ones. Lorenzo, it appears, must elicit harmony from discord. After he tells Jessica that we cannot hear the music of the spheres, the musicians enter, and Lorenzo gives them specific directions. Speaking to Portia's musicians at Portia's house, Lorenzo tells them, literally, to draw her home. But he is also speaking, in Neoplatonic terms, about the theory according to which the actual “sounds of music” can pierce the ear, touch the soul, and reattune it, thereby drawing it home to the heavenly harmony. The Neoplatonic theory of the “sweet power of music,” namely that music can penetrate one's soul and draw it to heaven, merely complicates the matter of wooing with false vows, for it is deeply related to seduction by false music, as well as, more generally, to penetration of Jessica's body.

Lorenzo attempts to placate Jessica not by winning an old argument, as in the exchange of “In such a night,” but by dazzling her with beautiful new promises and lascivious music—both of which had worked well before. As Robin Headlam Wells observes, “a man of eloquence is capable of persuading people to do whatever he wishes. However, the real mark of his power is not his ability to force people ‘to yeeld in that which most standth against their will,’ but rather,” as Thomas Wilson asserts in his influential Arte of Rhetorique, “his skill in inducing them ‘to will that which he did.’”¹² Using the common association of music and rhetoric, Shakespeare juxtaposes the forced conversion of Shylock with Lorenzo's attempt to re-seduce Jessica in the final scene.

It is only within this dramatic context that we can appreciate the significance of Lorenzo's speech. It is not merely a traditional (Neoplatonic) praise of music. And it is surely not “the most purely religious utterance in the play,” as John Gross suggests.¹³ Shakespeare gives Lorenzo a seductive speech, but he also subtly reveals Lorenzo's purpose. Lorenzo not only applies the “sweet power” of speech; he exposes his motives by seizing every opportunity to throw in the adjective sweet. In Shakespeare's plays, such excess serves to mock precisely the subjects most relevant here. To be excessively “sweet” is to be not “sweet” at all. Music, like rhetorical seduction, can be an illusion, and the love it induces becomes a foible. The best example of such acrid sweetness is Troilus and Cressida 3.1, where Shakespeare links the hyperbolic use of the word sweet with excessive appetites that lead to “broken music.” As Ulysses says, “Take but degree away, untune that string, / And hark what discord follows” (1.3.109-10).

In Cymbeline, Shakespeare has Cloten mock the hyperbole of both the Neoplatonic idea of penetration and the literary conventions derived from it. Cloten—like Lorenzo, but in direct language—alludes to the musicians as surrogate seducers: “Come on, tune. If you can penetrate her with your fingering, so; we'll try with tongue too.” After the musicians play, Cloten hedges: “So, get you gone. If this penetrate, I will consider your music the better; if it do not, it is a vice in her ears which horsehairs and calves' guts, nor the voice of unpaved eunuch to boot, can never amend.”¹⁴ Comically rendering the difference between deceptively false and beautifully true music, Cloten razes the system of musical powers affirmed by Neoplatonists such as Ronsard. Music shall prove good and powerful, says Cloten, only when it shall have enabled him to penetrate his lady.

Shakespeare's interest in mocking Neoplatonic theory is part of his larger interest in the pursuit of merriment and its relationship to the conflict between speculative and practical aspirations to music. It is evident as early as Love's Labor's Lost, which exalts an austere course of speculative musical study in the Platonic tradition only then to undercut it with Neoplatonic sublimations of rampant appetite. The King decrees that he and his lords will be “brave conquerors … / That war against your own affections,” devoted to a contemplative life: “Our court shall be a little academe, / Still and contemplative in living art.” Berowne, however, troubled by the prospect of there being no ladies, voices his doubt about the austerity: “But is there no quick recreation granted?” Offering a substitute, the King answers that in lieu of ladies the men shall recreate themselves by means of musical language:

                    Our court you know is haunted
With a refinèd traveller of Spain,
A man in all the world's new fashion planted,
That hath a mint of phrases in his brain;
One who the music of his own vain tongue
Doth ravish like enchanting harmony;
A man of complements, whom right and wrong
Have chose as umpire of their mutiny.

(1.1.159-66)

Such a man is a rhetorician. He may be an umpire of mutiny, but his skill points to another mutiny: between “quick recreation” (wine, women, and song) and slow moral re-creation (“contemplation in living art”), between “purposing merriment” and enduring the “much ado” it takes to achieve the happiness of self-knowledge.

Merchant is a play that centers on this conflict. Neoplatonic theory promises momentary ecstasy, but, in the end, Jessica offers, in the manner of her father, rough idiom to Lorenzo's mellifluous “vows of faith.” At first, Jessica engages in the echoic exchange of “In such a night,” showing that it cannot contain and beautify ugly truths. But, finally, she returns blunt prose to Lorenzo's dazzling blank verse: “I am never merry when I hear sweet music.”

Jessica's unmusical last line induces Lorenzo to deliver a stock Neoplatonic answer that, rather than resolve the matter, shows that he is in deeper trouble than commonplace (Neoplatonic) sweet-talk can get him out of:

The reason is, your spirits are attentive.
For do but note a wild and wanton herd
Or race of youthful and unhandled colts
Fetching mad bounds, bellowing and neighing loud,
Which is the hot condition of their blood:
If they but hear perchance a trumpet sound,
Or any air of music touch their ears,
You shall perceive them make a mutual stand,
Their savage eyes turned to a modest gaze
By the sweet power of music. Therefore the poet
Did feign that Orpheus drew trees, stones, and floods;
Since naught so stockish, hard, and full of rage
But music for the time doth change his nature.
The man that hath no music in himself,
Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds,
Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils;
The motions of his spirit are dull as night,
And his affections dark as Erebus.
Let no such man be trusted. Mark the music.

(5.1.70-88)

Lorenzo's reply, his Neoplatonic theory of the “unmusical man,” suggests the seriousness of Jessica's reply. He glosses Ronsard: “The man who, on hearing a sweet accord of instruments or the sweetness of the natural voice, is not delighted and is not moved and does not tremble from head to foot, sweetly ravished and transported, gives proof thereby that he has a crooked, vicious, and depraved soul, and is to be guarded against as one not happily born.”¹⁵ Lorenzo darkly suggests that Jessica has no music in herself, for the reason that she is “not happily born.”

In both parts of his speech, Lorenzo speaks not for Renaissance humanism, not for Shakespeare, but for himself. At first, trying to make a smooth romantic transition where none seems possible, Lorenzo applies the grandeur of Platonic talk. Pressed by Jessica's response that what he offers her does not make her merry, however, Lorenzo shows the meaner side of the man who stole “her soul with many vows of faith.” In the first part of his speech, Lorenzo tells Jessica that heavenly harmony—much like true love?—is impossible to experience in this life. But after Jessica speaks, Lorenzo demands, with the hyperbole and illogic common to Shakespeare's hot lovers, that she—hence they—experience it. In the first part, while he is trying to charm Jessica, Lorenzo blames a universal human nature, the “muddy vesture of decay.” What they have, he appears to be saying, is as good as can be had, given the “gross” nature of the world. But after Jessica says she is not merry, Lorenzo, shifting to a Neoplatonic argument, blames Jessica specifically.

Shakespeare has Lorenzo allude to two traditions (or conflicting aspects of a larger one). Whereas Plato maintains the unmusicality of all human souls (even Socrates'), Neoplatonists maintain that only unmusical souls are incapable of being pierced.¹⁶ According to the strict speculative tradition developed by Plato, the soul must reattune itself.¹⁷ According to Zarlino and other Neoplatonists, in contrast, instrumental music possesses the “sweet power” to refresh or “recreate” the human soul, to induce ecstasy, to lift the soul temporarily out of the body—to “draw it home.”¹⁸ Revealing the limits of Neoplatonic powers—especially the “sweet power” of “sweet music”—is part of the drama of the last scene.

Merchant is a play about contrary systems of values, and competing theories of music—like competing religions—are central to its dramatic structure. Lorenzo and Shylock offer competing theories of music, as well as competing beliefs about what will make Jessica merry. Lorenzo speaks the grandest, most eloquent speech about music in Merchant, but Shakespeare places it among plainer voices, voices he arranges to achieve the grand counterpoint of his dramatic logic. Despite his contempt for Christians and misplaced passion for his daughter, and despite the vile language in which he issues it, Shylock early offers Jessica what turns out to be a useful warning about music.

Sensing “some ill a-brewing towards my rest,” Shylock warns, “Jessica my girl, / Look to my house” (2.5.15-17). Informed by Launcelot about “a masque,” Shylock warns, more specifically, about the danger of music:

What, are there masques? Hear you me, Jessica:
Lock up my doors; and when you hear the drum
And the vile squealing of the wry-necked fife,
Clamber not you up to the casements then,
Nor thrust your head into the public street
To gaze on Christian fools with varnished faces;
But stop my house's ears—I mean my casements;
Let not the sound of shallow fopp'ry enter
My sober house. By Jacob's staff I swear
I have no mind of feasting forth to-night;
But I will go. Go you before me, sirrah.
Say I will come.

(2.5.27-38)

Fearful of the sexual allure of a Christian fool, Shylock commands Jessica not to “thrust” her “[maiden]head” into “the public street.” The music played by Christians, warns Shylock, is like the “vile squealing” of pigs. Shylock commands Jessica to “stop [his] house's ears.” Jessica's ears are the doors to her maidenhead, and such doors are his, for “Jessica [his] girl” is part of his house. With words that anticipate, in both form and matter, the first words of Lorenzo's speech in act 5, Shylock gives his daughter his last command: “Let not the sound of shallow fopp'ry enter / My sober house.”

Music has power, according to Shylock—not the deep, true power claimed by Neoplatonists, but the shallow power to corrupt decried by Puritans. That Shylock the Jew with his emotive Jewish music should make this charge only shows how complex the musical discussion in Merchant is. Shakespeare leaves us much to mark. Shylock has no “mind of feasting” on the “vile squealing” of “sweet music.” Jessica does. But after feasting, she says, in her last line, that she “is never merry” when she hears “sweet music.”

“MARK THE MUSIC”

Unlike Lorenzo, Shakespeare is not one to tell us simply to “mark the music.” Shakespeare urges us to examine ourselves—to know what music we mark and how we mark it. We should not be surprised that Merchant, a comedy that plays on an audience's willingness to side emotionally with one tradition against another, concludes not with a traditional praise of harmony (laudes musicae) but rather with an ambiguous speech that borrows antithetical views from opposing traditions. Much like Measure for Measure, a play with which it has much in common, Merchant juxtaposes not only Judaism and Christianity but also Platonism and Neoplatonism. Both Merchant and Measure depict the opposition of merciless appetites for merriment and law, and both depict mediation by a Duke whose power it is either to be too merciful or too severe. Just as justice depends on temperance, as Measure shows, so does merriment. The way one listens—the expectations one has—determines how one will hear the music, and what kind of power it will have to make one happy.

That Shylock cannot be happy is a basic fact required by the plot of Merchant. But Jessica's happiness is a different matter: its uncertainty is a central part of the play. One reason “Shylock's enforced baptism is disconcerting,” as Gross observes, “is that it is contrary to predominant Christian tradition. … The treatment meted out to Shylock belongs at the harsh end of the spectrum.”¹⁹ Jessica's unhappiness, if the result of a seduction that belongs at the kinder end of the spectrum, stands as a significant, ironic counterpoint to Shylock's defeat. Jessica converts willingly, yet still Lorenzo accounts early for the possibility of her eventual misfortune. Indeed, the likely failure of Jessica's assimilation is registered with irony in every scene in which she appears before 5.1.

In 2.4, even before the two appear together in the play, Lorenzo warns that Jessica might come to misfortune even as his bride:

If e'er the Jew her father come to heaven,
It will be for his gentle daughter's sake;
And never dare misfortune cross her foot,
Unless she do it under this excuse,
That she is issue to a faithless Jew.

(2.4.33-37)

The “excuse” will be Jessica's Jewish nature, which, despite Jessica's hope that marriage and conversion will change it, Lorenzo says plainly cannot be changed. Similarly, Launcelot helps Jessica to leave her father, but not without telling her that “the sins of the father are to be laid upon the children” and “truly I think you are damned” (3.5.1-6).

Long before it seems that something has changed for the worse between Jessica and Lorenzo in 5.1, the play hints consistently at the likelihood of such trouble. As early as the elopement scene, the first scene in which Jessica and Lorenzo appear together, Gratiano and Salerio preface the elopement with foreboding truisms about love. As Salerio says, “O ten times faster Venus' pigeons fly / To seal love's bonds newmade than they are wont / To keep obligèd faith unforfeited” (2.6.5-7). Gratiano replies with his speech on the effects of “the strumpet wind,” including his maxim “All things that are / Are with more spirit chasèd than enjoyed” (2.6.12-13). And as soon as Jessica reenters, Lorenzo confirms that, as Gratiano had said, “lovers ever run before the clock” (2.6.4): “What, art thou come? On, gentlemen, away! / Our masquing mates by this time for us stay” (2.6.58-59). It is time, says Lorenzo, to be in time for music and merriment.

The elopement scene shows Jessica too eager for merriment. It imparts misgivings about Jessica's self-knowledge, as well as deeper matters of shame and conscience that might come to her one day when she knows herself better. Jessica has expected Lorenzo to change her Jewish identity and thus her fortune, as she says to Launcelot before leaving Shylock's house:

Alack, what heinous sin is it in me
To be ashamed to be my father's child.
But though I am a daughter to his blood,
I am not to his manners. O Lorenzo,
If thou keep promise, I shall end this strife,
Become a Christian and thy loving wife!

(2.3.16-21)

Jessica puts all her hope for future merriment in Lorenzo's “promise” and the associated promise of her conversion. Jessica confuses strife, which can end, with facts about her nature that cannot be erased—facts which, if she refuses to acknowledge them, would seem to promise to increase her strife.

In saying farewell to her father, Jessica tries to change her identity, and hence her fortune: “Farewell; and if my fortune be not crost, / I have a father, you a daughter lost” (2.5.54-55). But in the elopement scene, Jessica shows herself to be very much “to his manners”: while trying to rid herself of the shame of being her father's child, Jessica “gilds” herself with her father's ducats.

Whether a Jew can change her fortune by assimilating, by changing her manners, is a question central to the play. Jessica's “Here, catch this casket” (2.3.33) suggests her possession of an unburdened, merry spirit. She thinks she is trading tedium for merriment. The rest of what Jessica says in the elopement scene, however, is laden with dark meanings: “I am glad 'tis night—you do not look on me—/ For I am much ashamed of my exchange” (2.6.34-35). She then offers a truism that hints at future troubles: “But love is blind, and lovers cannot see / The pretty follies that themselves commit” (2.6.36-37). Since Jessica sees the shame of cross-dressing (“my exchange”), the lines register a latent concern that what she does not see might in the future be of greater consequence.

Jessica uses the word shame twice in this scene, and both times it resonates with her earlier mention of the “heinous sin … To be ashamed to be my father's child”:

What, must I hold a candle to my shames?
They in themselves, good sooth, are too too light.
Why, 'tis an office of discovery, love—
And I should be obscured.

(2.6.43-44)

The lines have their obvious as well as a deeper meaning. Clearly, Jessica wishes to hide her cross-dressing from her lover—and this seems natural. But Jessica appears more generally concerned with her “shames.” There is disparity between Jessica's worry “I should be obscured” and Lorenzo's playful assurance, “So are you, sweet, / Even in the lovely garnish of a boy.” Lorenzo knows what he is getting—a pretty Jewish girl who is wearing pants and sporting the ducats of her “father Jew” (2.6.22). What Jessica seems anxious to obscure, rather, is a general need to obscure herself. Lorenzo tells Jessica to “come at once,” but Jessica—thinking her shames “too too light”—delays, risking, in effect, a greater light, the sun: “I will make fast the doores, and gild myself / With some moe ducats, and be with you straight” (2.6.49-50). Jessica appears worried about the exchange she makes with Lorenzo; to gild herself further with ducats is worth the risk. Jessica's identity—as a woman, as a lover, as a convert—appears to be in flux in 2.6. One problem is that she knows too little about the nature of “exchange” (her father's hated skill).²⁰ She does not know the true value of what she is giving in “exchange,” and worries too little about what she is getting in Lorenzo.

Gilded in her father's ducats, Jessica endeavors to close forever behind her the doors of her father's house. But the scene suggests that Jessica may not quit her father's house with the mere consequence of the shame that comes from one episode of cross-dressing. On a deeper level, Jessica is ashamed to be ashamed of shame. This is a common proto-Freudian theme in Shakespeare, and it usually means trouble.

The notion that love is an “office of discovery” suggests that in time, through the foibles of blind love, there is truth to be known by Jessica—both about Lorenzo and about herself. Jessica also stands to learn about two very important subjects about which Launcelot proffers his clownish wisdom: the practical concerns of leaving one's Jewish master and the conscience that attends an attempted flight from one's identity as one's father's child. Launcelot has an easier time than Jessica, for the two concerns are not one for him. “Certainly my conscience will serve me to run from this Jew my master” (2.1.1), he says in his first line. He then encounters his father, Old Gobbo, and proceeds to ask him “Do you know me, father?” The Launcelot-Gobbo subplot suggests, however glibly, that where identity, conscience, shame, and fathers are concerned, “Truth will come to light … in the end truth will out” (2.2.74). Not only is love an “office of discovery”; music is a means toward revelation.

The relationship between Jessica and Lorenzo develops off-stage. Shakespeare tells us little about them, but he composes what he does tell us with his consummate ability to use themes to build dramatic conflict. Jessica and Lorenzo appear together in only three scenes: 2.6, 3.5, and 5.1. The first two establish a pattern of hinting at trouble that is sure to come, at truth that is sure to come out. In 2.6, Salerio ends his discussion with Gratiano about the fickleness of lovers. In 3.5. Lorenzo appears ready to defend Jessica from the charge he himself makes in 2.4, namely “that there's no mercy for [Jessica] in heaven because [she is] a Jew's daughter,” as Launcelot says. Evading the serious charge against his wife, Lorenzo chooses instead to defend the comic assault on his own reputation, namely that he is “no good member of the commonwealth” (3.5.29-33) because by converting Jews he raises the price of pork. Lorenzo's tone with the clown is appropriately playful, but Lorenzo's focus on himself is suspect. He spends very little time talking with Jessica. Finished with Launcelot, Lorenzo asks, “How cheer'st thou, Jessica?” The question is central to our understanding of the banter in act 5. Lorenzo does not, however, wait for an answer. Instead, he elicits her opinion of Portia. When Jessica replies that “the poor rude world / Hath not her fellow” (3.5.75-76), Lorenzo takes her answer as an opportunity to assert his opinion of himself: “Even such a husband / Hast thou of me as she is for a wife” (3.5.77-78). The ensuing dialogue is the only conversation between the couple since 2.6, and it is the last we hear from them until 5.1:

JESSICA:
Nay, but ask my opinion too of that!
LORENZO:
I will anon. First let us go to dinner.
JESSICA:
Nay, let me praise you while I have a stomach.
LORENZO:
No, pray there, let it serve for table-talk; Then howsome'er thou speak'st, ‘mong other things I shall digest it.
JESSICA:
Well, I'll set you forth.

(3.5.78-83)

The banter is playful, but the talk about appetite broaches darker matters. The transformation of appetite to dyspepsia is a common theme throughout Shakespeare, most notably in Troilus and Cressida, the play in which, not coincidentally, Shakespeare shows with the greatest detail the way excessively “sweet” music and speech become sour. In Merchant the theme is initiated by Nerissa—“they are as sick that surfeit with too much” (1.2.5)—and continued, as we have seen, by Gratiano and Salerio in 2.6. The short dialogue between Jessica and Lorenzo in 3.5 alludes to the correlation between moving from appetite to digestion and from opinion to knowledge. It registers hints of difference between the lovers that begin to seem serious in 5.1.

And there are significant differences: Lorenzo would eat first; Jessica would praise him while she has a stomach. Jessica appears set on giving her opinions; Lorenzo appears ready to digest them, “among other things.” Digestion, like the calculated rendering and shifting of opinions, is the stuff of lovers after they have ceased to “run before the clock,” after they have “feasted,” as the excessive urge to taste gives way to disgust. Music sounds different when the stomach is full of food and the ear full of compliments. As Shakespeare's Cleopatra knows, the ear is lusty. But it also gets full.

The two brief discussions between Jessica and Lorenzo in 2.6 and 3.5, along with the exchange of “In such a night …” at the beginning of 5.1, compose the context of Lorenzo's famous speech about harmony. The pattern is vital. Just as there is irony in Jessica's last response to Lorenzo, so is there irony in Jessica's first response to Lorenzo in the play, in the balcony scene: “Who are you? Tell me for more certainty, / Albeit I'll swear that I do know your tongue” (2.6.26-27). As the play goes on, it appears that Jessica knew the tongue, the dazzling vows, but not the man. By 5.1, there is the strong suggestion that something has happened since 2.6, that a shrewd woman (shrewd like her father) confronts a sweet-talking man who appears to have failed to keep his vows, that Lorenzo is the main reason Jessica is not merry when she hears “sweet music.” Self-knowledge and conscience appear to be other reasons.

Shakespeare develops a pattern showing that blame is to be placed on both Jessica and Lorenzo. On Jessica, not because her soul is Jewish, but because she intemperately avoids the truth that it is. Jessica is an inversion of Antonio. Antonio considers self-knowledge a precondition for merriment and merriment a necessary precondition for love. Jessica, in contrast, has less need to hide her shames from the public street than from herself. Antonio knows enough to reject Solanio's suggestion that repression leads to happiness: “Then let us say you are sad / Because you are not merry; and 'twere as easy / For you to laugh and leap, and say you are merry / Because you are not sad” (1.1.47-50). Jessica thinks that because she is unhappy in her father's house she will be happy if she leaves it—with Lorenzo. With an “unthrift love,” she goes as far as she thinks she has to (“As far as Belmont,” as Lorenzo says), which turns out, it seems, to be at once not far enough and too far from home.

Following the description of the serious consequences of failing to be made merry by music, Lorenzo speaks his last words to Jessica: “Mark the music.” These last words, in the form of a command, do not suggest mere playful banter. Recalling Shylock's commands when he senses trouble with his daughter, Lorenzo's last words to Jessica suggest that there is, and is going to be, trouble between him and his wife. By the last scene of the play, Jessica appears to know that merriment is not determined according to religious dogma or musical theories but according to the faith of one's lover.

Just when Lorenzo's vows may turn to lies, his seductive exhortations turn to commands. Lorenzo's commands replace Shylock's. They are more subtle, made mellifluous by the music of his speech, but they are commands: “Sit, Jessica. … Mark the music.” Jessica's reaction to Lorenzo's speech and the music of Portia's musicians is her form of resisting once again the man who commands her, her rejection of a worldview that would govern her reaction to music, and thereby her reactions to all things. Jessica's answer that she is “never merry” when she hears “sweet music” reveals, moreover, that Shylock's view of music turns out to be more nearly true for her than Lorenzo's view.

Jessica must not only choose between the antithetical views put forth by her father and her lover; twice she is called upon to see through the discrepancy between form and content apparent in the articulation of each view. In the first instance Jessica shuns her father's disharmonious “manners” and is led to a kind of merriment by the “vile squealing” of Lorenzo's music. Finally, however, at Belmont, music—and musical speech—lose their formerly seductive power. Lorenzo's speech about “the sweet power of music” becomes a useless lesson about harmony, for an untrue lover cannot teach it, having already taught a lesson about discord.

Whether or not Merchant expresses a cogent theory in which Shakespeare himself believed may not be determined from Lorenzo's speech alone. What is clear from Lorenzo's speech is that Shakespeare was learned enough to make Lorenzo speak in a way that fit his clear dramatic design.²¹

The question whether “sweet music” should make Jessica “merry” contains within it the larger question on which the play is centered: what does it mean to be “merry?” Jessica may perhaps seem too “attentive” to discord, but contemplation, as Antonio declares at the beginning of the play, is the only means of achieving true and lasting merriment. This antithesis—between Platonic speculation and Neoplatonic magic—is a central theme of the play. Whatever the mystery of Antonio's sadness, Antonio's conception of merriment is Socratic in its basic terms: one needs to reattune (re-create) one's soul morally before one can achieve merriment (recreation). Jessica, in contrast, had thought that merriment might come as freely as the music of a tabor—as a result of the easy conversion from Judaism to Christianity. At first Lorenzo provides her with recreation; but eventually, it is clear that neither conversion nor marriage will re-create Jessica. She must do that herself. One has to mark not only the seductive music of another but the speculative music of one's life.

HARMONY IN BELMONT

Jessica's response to Lorenzo's speech and the music of Portia's musicians in act 5 raises questions crucial to the resolution of the drama. Does Jessica's response confirm that a Jewish soul is “not unhappily born?” Or is Jessica's failure to be merry a good thing? Does she exhibit a noble melancholia that distinguishes her from those flighty wenches who, when they hear the strains of a lascivious lute, giggle, roll their eyes, and fall wholly for the man who brings the strains about—as Jessica once did? Do we listen to a woman who promises, after merely playful banter, that she will not be facetious in response to her husband's philosophical speech? Or do we listen now to a young woman who has by now “discovered” herself through “love,” a woman who is ready to register a view about music and theories about music that dissents from her husband's? And, if so, might we be listening to a woman who speaks loudly within the play? Or is Jessica's view marginal, as dismissible as her father's?

Jessica's response to Lorenzo's speech confronts, in musical terms, the complex systems of values—Jewish versus Christian, Platonic versus Neoplatonic—in which the play more generally involves its audience. Lorenzo's two-part speech and Jessica's response raise questions that further, rather than resolve, these dramatic tensions. How, precisely, does Lorenzo conceive the problem of hearing the heavenly tune (musica mundana), the nature of the human soul (musica humana), and the ability of instrumental music (musica instrumentalis) to tune the soul? Does Lorenzo think the relationship is different for him than for Jessica?

The musical accompaniment to Lorenzo's speech—from 5.1.65 to 5.1.88, throughout Jessica's reply and the second part of Lorenzo's speech—raises other vital questions: How is the effect of the music on Jessica related to the effect the music may have on Shakespeare's audience? Are we merry as we hear the music playing in Belmont? If so, what kind of merriment is it? Do we have cause to be truly merry? Or do we “purpose merriment” too much? Are we being too facetious? too serious?

Most of the critics who pay close attention to the music of Merchant ignore most of the questions that Jessica's experience raises. Writing about Jessica and Lorenzo in The Harmonies of The Merchant of Venice, Lawrence Danson—following Hollander in assuming that Lorenzo speaks for Jessica—concludes that “[it is] this pair of lovers who speak about that music of the spheres which the play's other harmonies imitate.”²² Danson's conclusion is based on his assumption that the talk about false vows is merely “easy banter and serious intimacy.” Danson sees Lorenzo's speech and Jessica's reply as plainly celebratory, a clear instance of dramatic “fulfillment and reconciliation”:

Now, in act 5, a sweeter sort of unheard melody is invoked by Lorenzo for the benefit of the attentive Jessica: the heard music that sounds throughout much of the last part of the play is a sensory approximation of that heavenly music which (as Lorenzo explains) sounds just beyond the threshold of our gross mortal perceptions.

Danson dismisses Jessica's reaction to Lorenzo's speech as that of a “gentle newcomer”: “because Jessica is a newcomer, and because he loves her, Lorenzo tells Jessica about the musical wonders of this peaceful night.”²³

Danson concludes that “the intellectual history of the ideas out of which Lorenzo's speech on celestial music is made” is “embarrassingly rich. … But it is not necessary to dwell on it in order to appreciate the speech, so tactful is Lorenzo's pedagogy.” According to Danson, “Lorenzo's treatment of music's role in human and in cosmic nature is at once description and demonstration: it enacts its meanings. It leaves us, as audience, as it does Jessica, prepared to mark the music.”²⁴ Concluding that Lorenzo speaks for the play and for Shakespeare, Danson, it appears, is not prepared to mark what Jessica says. Nor does he allow an audience to feel ambivalence in its experience of the play. According to Danson, we, like Jessica, remain naive to our genuine feelings because Lorenzo is so “tactful” a pedant.²⁵ Charles Mosely offers a similar reading: “Lorenzo gives Jessica some elementary instruction in what her father, who was deaf to music and blind to Christian Grace, never told her.”²⁶

As we have seen, however, Lorenzo's Neoplatonic musical theory itself offers the darkest hints about Jessica's nature. Jessica's response that she is not merry is not a confirmation of her salvation—not even a playful one. We are reminded, rather, of the County Palatine, who “hears merry tales and smiles not” (1.2.44-45), whom Portia therefore deems unfit to marry. By the time Lorenzo speaks the second part of his speech, Jessica has already proven herself “fit for … stratagems,” and there is the deep suggestion that she is unmusical, “not happily born.” As Launcelot says about Jessica, she is “damned both by father and mother” (3.5.13-14).

In addition to these serious questions about Jessica's nature, there is also the question of Lorenzo's “moral fitness,” which is, as Danson knows, crucial to “our response to teasing banter at the opening of the fifth act.” Danson concludes that Lorenzo's fitness has “been established,” but the only proof he adduces is the encomium of a hot lover, Lorenzo's praise of Jessica in 2.6.52-57. In Danson's view, Lorenzo “enacts” his moral fitness with harmonious words. This ignores the running conflict between speculation and practice, as well as the irony that the words of a vow-breaker make a mockery of those who believe in verbal enactment. It is for precisely this reason that Cordelia makes a dramatic point of acting before she speaks in King Lear. Too many people, she knows too well, manipulate the human desire to mistake mere words for the accomplishment of deeds.

Danson bases Lorenzo's moral fitness on an assumption that his famous speech in act 5 is itself an enactment of religious harmony: the “union of the Gentile husband and the daughter of the Jew suggests the penultimate stage of salvation history described by St. Paul.”²⁷ But a Christian's theft of a soul “with many vows of faith / And ne'er a true one” speaks, ultimately, not for the “harmony in his immortal soul” but for the impenetrable “grossness” of his “muddy vesture of decay.”

Many critics have provided intelligent arguments for the dominant reading represented by Barber and Danson. Merchant, writes Kermode, “begins with usury and corrupt love” and “ends with harmony and perfect love.”²⁸ And although Gross sees the darker aspects of Jessica's marriage to Lorenzo, and of the troubles broached in the dialogues preceding Lorenzo's speech, even he suggests “[o]ne should not make too much of” them.²⁹ But if troubles exist, I am suggesting, they must be accounted for, and examined more deeply than scholars intent on seeing harmony have been willing to go. Any harmony in Belmont must, if not resolve, at least include these discordant elements.

In “Love in Venice,” Catherine Belsey appears ready to reverse the sway of the “harmonizing habit” that critics have brought to the play.³⁰ But while she questions the assumptions of Barber and Danson, Belsey offers a sweeping description of love in Venice that leads her to reduce Lorenzo's talk about the “muddy vesture of decay” to putatively historical truths about the body and desire. Belsey writes that “the older understanding of love leaves traces in the text, with the effect that desire is only imperfectly domesticated” and the “consequence” that “Venice is superimposed on Belmont.” Belsey identifies the consequence accurately, but she ignores Jessica's important reactions to music and love in Belmont—as well as the exclusion of Jessica from the harmonies described by Lorenzo and effected by Portia.³¹

Scholars have for so long thrown Jessica over to the side of the Christians, despite what she says—and does not say.³² Jessica's answer to Lorenzo's speech is central to the theme of merry resolution at Portia's house in Belmont, but Jessica's voice, like her father's, is curiously absent from the final celebration. Shakespeare subtly highlights the problem posed to the harmony at Belmont by Jessica's silence. Jessica is addressed by Portia, but Jessica never speaks again. Portia addresses Jessica precisely on the subject of exclusion, of “being absent”:

                                                                                Go in, Nerissa.
Give order to my servants that they take
No note at all of our being absent hence—
Nor you, Lorenzo—Jessica, nor you.

(5.1.118-21)

Jessica does not say a word. Shakespeare taunts us with the disparity between harmonious form and real discord. The chiastic word order addresses a couple; but the repetition and reversal of word order (“Jessica, nor you”) suggests, with incongruous neatness, the afterthought one gives to what remains.

Silence indicates trouble here, as does an unwillingness or inability to confront the roots of discord head on. Shakespeare clearly understands the implications, and value, of allowing unresolved tensions to threaten the larger dramatic resolution. Scholars such as Hutton, Hollander, and Danson see Lorenzo as a Neoplatonic philosopher. But although Lorenzo's speech raises many serious philosophical questions, Shakespeare clearly does not make Lorenzo a speculative musician capable of resolving the troubles he brings.³³

As Rabkin has written, “As the entire critical history of the play has made equally apparent, the play's ultimate resolution of [its] conflicts is anything but clear or simple.” But even Rabkin sees the critical challenge as a demand for allegiance on one of two sides. He, too, reads Lorenzo's speech as the signal of harmonious resolution of Lorenzo's side: “On the one side, as we have seen, we find Shylock, trickery, anality, precise definition, possessiveness, contempt for prodigality” as well as “distrust of emotion and hatred of music, bad luck, and failure.” “On the other,” writes Rabkin, “we find Portia, but also Antonio, Bassanio, Lorenzo, Jessica, and Gratiano; freedom, metaphorical richness of language, prodigality” as well as “love of emotion and music, supreme trickery, a fondness for bonds, good luck, success.”³⁴ In this common reading, Jessica is thrown in—here just before Gratiano—as Lorenzo's happily instructed wife.

Building on the insight of Rabkin, Keith Geary articulates the burden we confront in seeing or reading Merchant: “We must, critics tell us, take sides either with Shylock or with Portia and the Christians, and stand by our choice.” But such “black-and-white judgement seems peculiarly inappropriate to a play that argues the falsity of such neat and absolute distinctions.” Merchant, as Geary writes, “deals in shades of grey and continually raises the problem of appropriate response and judgement, most acutely, of course, in relation to Shylock.”³⁵

Jessica, I am suggesting, is the character who most feels and portrays what becomes the obvious falsity of neat distinctions. For Jessica, the differences between “sweet music” and “vile squealing” appear to resolve, finally, to the differences between true and false vows. Music is “sweet” only if degree holds.

Merchant forces its audience to focus on the human tendency—regardless of sex or religion—to “purpose merriment.” The play centers on a conflict between people who “purpose merriment” without mercy (Shylock and the Christians alike) and people with “attentive spirits.” Jessica begins the play by purposing merriment and ends it with “attentive spirits.” Whereas Shylock is compelled to say he is content, Jessica feels free enough—finally—to speak her truth. And we must not dismiss her dissenting opinion. It is a woman's merry sport with language, one Christian's ability to out-interpret a Jew, that brings about the comic resolution that keeps Shylock from the “merry sport” of his bond. Against Portia's ability must be seen Jessica's confidence at the end of the play that she can “out-night” Lorenzo.

For every question in Merchant, Shakespeare poses a counterquestion that is even more important and more difficult to answer. He also makes it easy for us to fail to see the latter. This problem, our problem, is in large part what Merchant is about.

Merchant considers the burden of choosing “a love song, or a song of good life” (2.3.32), as Feste puts it to Sir Toby Belch in Twelfth Night. In Romeo and Juliet, both are possible at once, but parents do the choosing when the lovers should. In Twelfth Night, the parents are out of the way; but the lovers at first have trouble with the burden of choosing. In Merchant, Shakespeare considers the ways in which two fathers attempt to control their daughters by controlling their reactions to music. Both daughters are hampered by their father's rules for choosing men, opposing sets of rules that specify different reactions to music, reactions that are central to the resolution of the play. Children prevailing against parental error is one aspect of comedy. Merchant, however, concerns the extent to which parents may be right, as well as wrong, in trying to check urges to be merry their children do not yet fully understand. Launcelot's theft of the doves from old Gobbo shows the importance of this theme within the play.³⁶

Portia's father has seen to it that his daughter's suitors are unable to seduce her with sweet-talk; rather, they must show their good nature in their reaction to music. It is a Neoplatonic test: it determines if one is “happily born.” The case of Portia is a precise inversion of Jessica's: Portia secures her man with the help of music. But these facts alone do not assure her future merriment. Bassanio appears to be a good match for Portia, for he chooses the right casket, but the words to Portia's song provide him with hints. It is possible her father's trust in music could fail to prove true. But if Portia cheats with her hints, her father's wisdom—like Shylock's—might prevail, and therefore not her love.

Portia's success must be examined alongside Jessica's failure. Showing a knowledge of the need to temper Neoplatonism with Platonism when Bassanio chooses the right casket, Portia knows she will be merry only if her love may “be moderate” and “allay thy ecstasy, / In measure rain thy joy, scant this excess! / I feel too much thy blessing. Make it less / For I fear I surfeit” (3.2.111-14). Seen against Shylock's fear of music, Portia's fear of “surfeit” is perhaps the most healthy feeling in the play. It is precisely what Jessica lacks. Here the play points to Portia's success, which we are to weigh against Jessica's failure—not because Portia is Christian, but because she, unlike Jessica, early understands the danger of music. Nevertheless, even Portia is susceptible to its corruptive powers. And knowledge of Jessica's experience could help her.

Jessica early speaks against the character of Bassanio, and in the beginning of act 5 speaks generally, and from experience, against trusting the “sweet power of music.” But Bassanio's speech about a world “still deceived with ornament” does show his value. He could perhaps turn out to be Portia's fellow, just as Lorenzo, if he would “keep promise,” could turn out to be Jessica's fellow. During the celebration at Belmont, however, there is the suggestion that Jessica might be right in her early appraisal of Bassanio, correct that the poor rude world hath not Portia's fellow. The final scene broaches the possibility that “the sweet power of music” has helped to bring together another pair of lovers who do not know each other well enough; and one—or both—may purpose merriment too much. Portia, like Viola in Twelfth Night, remembers her lover from long ago. But whereas Orsino “unclasped” to Viola “the book even of my secret soul” (1.4.12-13), Portia has no access to Basanio's secret soul. It is clear Portia loves Bassanio, but it is not clear what he offers her. To this point, he has offered only deceit.

Portia, like Jessica, must deal with a man's inconstancy, and however well she fares, the lesson is that “the pledge to a woman,” as Harry Berger, Jr. observes, “can be superseded by the debt of gratitude owed a man.” Whereas “Shylock practices usury, Portia is the master mistress of negative usury,” which Berger defines as “giving more than you get.” I do not agree that “in her own way, Portia is no less an outsider than Shylock” because “her ‘I stand for sacrifice’ is finally not much different from Shylock's ‘I stand for judgement.’”³⁷ But Berger's point about Portia's troubles is just—made larger when we consider the plight of Portia and Jessica as women, whether in Venice or Belmont. Portia is the character in the play who appears most capable of controlling her fortune. But Portia's superiority deflects attention away from her vulnerability.

More generally, the conflict between Christians and Jews deflects attention away from the problem between men and women that arises when one or both have insufficient knowledge of themselves. This problem is a large part of the intricate relationship between music and merriment the play addresses. As Portia returns home in the final scene, she hears the music of her own house without recognizing it. The music, Nerissa has to tell her, “is your music, madam, of the house.” The error is comic, but also serious. Portia responds, “Nothing is good, I see, without respect” (5.1.99).

As Antonio says at the beginning of the play, there will be no merriment without “respect.” It takes Jessica some time to learn what Antonio announces in the first lines of the play. Portia knows enough to handle Shylock and Bassanio, but it is not a good sign if Portia needs Nerissa to identify the music of her house. Likely there remains “much ado to know [her]self.”

Self-knowledge and reactions to music are linked, moreover, to the crucial subject of Merchant: mercy. In Measure for Measure, a play with a trenchant message about the virtue of moving from Hebrew justice to Christian mercy, Shakespeare links concisely, in speculative terms, the Christian capacity for mercy and the subjects of self-knowledge, merriment, and temperance. Asked to describe the “disposition” of the Duke, Escalus says that he is “One that, above all other strifes, contended especially to know himself. … Rather rejoicing to see another merry, than merry at anything which professed to make him rejoice: a gentleman of all temperance” (3.2.217-23). Such temperance constitutes being “contemplative in living art”—not being prone to “quick recreation” by wine, women, and lascivious song. But so, too, such temperance necessitates not being too rigid, whether in the manner of Angelo or Shylock. Vincentio, the Duke, is reputed, if only by Lucio, to have “some feeling” of the merry “sport” of getting bastards. The Duke's temperance supports Lucio's claim, if not its truth. Angelo, in contrast, is a Christian version of Shylock. Exhibiting trickery, anality, precise definition, contempt for prodigality, distrust of emotion and hunger for justice, his sin is not so much the corruptibility of the Christian soul as his merciless ability to cover up his sin by imputing it to others. If Portia can force Shylock to purpose merriment falsely (“I am content”) and derive from such force her own “merry sport,” does not her lack of mercy speak not only generally against a lasting Christian merriment but also specifically against her understanding of what makes one truly merry? Hatred of “the Jew” can help, in this respect, to make the harmony of Belmont seem real, durable—indeed, blessed.³⁸ But there is the hint that Portia is susceptible to dangerous forms of displacement.

In many ways, Merchant is a precursor of Measure for Measure—a comedy with a troubling comedic resolution; a comedy about the virtue of moving from Hebrew justice to Christian mercy; a comedy about the difficulty Christians can have in being merciful as they seek merriment; a comedy about the difficulty an audience will have when a merciful Duke pardons a Christian scoundrel. Only a few years after Merchant Shakespeare would begin to write what we call his “problem plays.”³⁹

Merchant not only examines large speculative musical debates, but also their practical value in life. The play demands that we distinguish musical sweet-talkers who “purpose” but displace merriment from plain-talkers who are attentive to the preconditions of true merriment. Merchant contrasts the Christians' gift for musical speech with the rough idiom of Shylock. Lorenzo is dazzling. Shylock is blunt. Shylock's nasty “contempt for prodigality” and “hatred of music” is merely an extreme antithesis to the dangerous trust in music shown by the Christians. The Italians are puffed with rhetoric; they are prodigal with words because they can use them so well, and they demonstrate a Neoplatonic trust in music and musical language that becomes suspect. And so is their conception of merriment suspect. With Jessica's final words to Lorenzo, Merchant suggests that the “sweet power” of “sweet music” is a potentially destructive illusion for Christians as well as Jews.

In Merchant, as in other plays, Shakespeare induces us to distinguish between eloquence and truth, between form and content, between words and deeds. Merchant, in this respect, is complex, for it offers no explicit speeches on the subject; rather, it subtly pits the harmony of form (“In such a night …”) against the force of real discord. At the same time, however, the play reveals—and involves—our inability to distinguish them. Similarly, the play also involves our ability—or inability—to discern true merriment.

When Lorenzo asks her opinion of “Lord Bassanio's wife” Jessica focuses on the two ways of defining and achieving merriment that are at odds in the play:

Past all expressing. It is very meet
The Lord Bassanio live an upright life
For having such a blessing in his lady;
He finds the joys of heaven here on earth,
And if on earth he do not merit it,
In reason he should never come to heaven.

(3.5.63-68)

Jessica suggests that Bassanio achieves a merriment he may not merit. He “finds the joys of heaven here on earth,” but “the poor rude world / Hath not [Portia's] fellow.” Portia, that is, may be settling for an illusive merriment that will not last. The Christians manifest, as Bassanio reveals (2.2.188-91), the human tendency to “purpose” a kind of merriment, aided by music and musical speech, that turns out—in its stubborn clinging to earthly judgements of divine things and pseudodivine judgements of earthly things—to be false.

Given her high view of Portia, it cannot be that Jessica flatly rejects the merriment of the Christian world as her father tried to teach her to do. In her last line, Jessica seems to remark not her unmusical Jewish soul but the unmusicality of a “poor rude world.” This theme is common in Shakespeare. In this respect, Jessica speaks for Shakespeare as much as, if not more than, Lorenzo.

It is Shakespeare's genius to center the closure of Merchant in his audience's opinion of the power of “sweet music”—and to center our opinion of the power of “sweet music” in the speculative connections between music and merriment. It takes an openness to the possibility of drama to see that “ambivalent signals” are “built into the play,” as Rabkin has observed: “one element or another in the play can come to seem like the center of the play's values and the focus of its allegiances is paradoxically the source of both its inexhaustible complexity and its vulnerability to powerful productions in which the play seems to belong completely to Shylock or to Belmont.”⁴⁰ Lorenzo's speech is the last starkly “inexhaustible complexity” before the festivities at Portia's house. By failing to attend to the character of Jessica, to her important responses to music in the play, and to her significant exclusion and silence, one may dismiss the way in which Lorenzo's speech reproduces many of the “ambivalent signals” of the play, not in a traditional way, but with Shakespeare's ability to use a commonplace subject to effect uncommon and decided dramatic meanings.

In Merchant, Shakespeare involves the audience in the moral dilemma of the play. He compels us to take sides even as he warns of the dangers of doing so. He gives us a character whose middle position is, even more dangerously, easy to ignore. By living between “Antipodes,” by reacting nakedly to music, Jessica learns the most in the play, and yet she is the least pedantic character in the play. She is, moreover, the least likely to seduce us: as a Jew, Jessica is eclipsed by her father; as a woman by Portia; as someone who might tell us something about being merry, she is eclipsed by Antonio; as someone who might tell us something about the “power of music,” by Lorenzo. By the end of the play, Jessica can neither be dissociated from nor identified with her father—or Lorenzo.⁴¹ Jessica's is the strange suffering of one who dares to live between the “Antipodes.” A tug on the audience from two sides can make for great drama, but Shakespeare does even better in Merchant. If all the other characters demand our taking one side or another, Jessica does not, for she herself is tugged by both. Launcelot says her mother and father are Scylla and Charybdis: “Well, you are gone both ways” (3.5.15-16).

The wonder of the play, I am suggesting, is its ability to bring the audience around to Jessica's experience as it keeps Jessica's view in the middle of what are depicted as undesirable extremes. In Merchant, one character, a minor character, Jessica, tries unsuccessfully to arbitrate the merciless extremes of Jewish rigidity and Christian frivolity, as well as Jewish frivolity and Christian rigidity. Shakespeare gives Shylock, not Jessica, the moving argument for the humanity of the Jew, for the essential identity of the Jewish and Christian soul (3.1.46-64). But if Shakespeare does not inspire much sympathy for Shylock because he so ably depicts his thirst for Christian blood, he does inspire sympathy for Jessica; and he gives her final view of music a competing authority.

The sympathy one has for Antonio precludes the sympathy one might have for Shylock; but one is likely to have similar sympathy for Antonio and Jessica. Shakespeare sets up the glaring antipodes of Antonio and Shylock, but he suggests the deeper similarities and differences between Antonio and Jessica.

Whereas Shylock and Antonio are the blatant “Antipodes” of the play, Jessica converts willingly, moving from one pole to another in an attempt to make herself “merry.” This willingness makes Jessica a compelling case. Whatever the viciousness of the victory, the defeat of Shylock's “merry sport” is comic resolution. But it is not comic when Jessica, who willingly converts, must say “I am never merry when I hear sweet music.” Shakespeare centers the great mystery of Merchant—what makes one “merry?”—in the minor character of Jessica.

Putting her stock in the salvation offered by a Christian husband, Jessica is a character whose attempt to be merry becomes a touchstone. Shakespeare gives us a neutral character to offset any sympathy we might feel either with Shylock or with the purposed and vengeful merriment of the Christians.

It is difficult not to side with Jessica in this play. Siding with Jessica, however, one does not know where one stands, for one may feel a particular sympathy for everyone. One may see that every individual may have a desire to let music creep in her ear, may put her trust in a seductive if, may depend upon a vow—may have a misfounded scheme to “purpose merriment” that is sure to go awry.

Act 5 begins (and Merchant ends) by developing the problems the play presents, not by fully resolving them in a traditional praise of musical harmony. Shakespeare offers the forced resolution of the conversion of Shylock, but not without subtly implying, in the case of Jessica, questions that the conversion of Shylock too-forcibly resolves. Lorenzo offers a dazzling speech by which we, like Jessica, are liable to be seduced. Thinking themselves to be seduced by Shakespeare himself, scholars have for a long time been seduced instead by Lorenzo, hearing his speech as an enactment of the univocal resolution of the play. But Shakespeare allows us to see through Lorenzo, and forces us to consider large and important questions raised both by Jessica and the dramatic themes and tensions within the play.

Merchant is a difficult play, and has long been a divisive one. Most critics, siding with Lorenzo, have praised a pristine harmony; only a few have remarked hints of discord.⁴² A number of critics have argued intelligently for a complete celebration of joys without irony, but that requires an explicit and fully resolved harmony between Jessica and Lorenzo. And that is not what we get. Shakespeare appears to leave the matter of harmonizing to us, and we will each, he seems to suggest, do it in our own ways. Some of us will not hear Jessica fully. Merchant is a much deeper play, less purely enjoyable, but more ripe for ongoing contemplation, with Jessica as its dissonant center. It is not that Shakespeare is pessimistic here, but rather that he appears to be telling us that the achievement of harmony on earth is a process, not the celebration it will be one day in heaven.

Merchant demands that its audience mark both the music to which we aspire and the means we employ to mark it. To that end, Jessica's last line—like the second part of Lorenzo's speech—competes for our attention with the seductive sounds of Portia's musicians. Merchant is a play that pushes its dramatic content to the limits of comic form, a play that juxtaposes the harmony of form with the reality of discord and coerced harmonies. At its conclusion, we must enjoy with a hungry ear the seductive music of both Lorenzo's speech and Portia's musicians, with our soul bent all the while toward deeper, more speculative matters. Such temperance is, after all, the universal condition of aspiring toward the heavenly tune. …

Notes

1. James Hutton, “Some English Poems in Praise of Music,” English Miscellany 2 (1950): 1-63.

2. Hutton 1-5.

3. See John Hollander, The Untuning of the Sky (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1961); S. K. Heninger, Touches of Sweet Harmony (San Marino, California: The Huntington Library, 1974); Lawrence Danson, The Harmonies of the Merchant of Venice (New Haven: Yale UP, 1978).

4. See, for example, Nan Cooke Carpenter, Music in the Medieval and Renaissance Universities (New York: Da Capo Press, 1972) 147.

5. See Marc Berley, “Milton's Earthy Grossness: Music and the Condition of the Poet in ‘L'Allegro’ and ‘Il Penseroso,’” Milton Studies, ed. Albert C. Labriola, Vol. 30 (Pittsburgh: U Pittsburgh P, 1993): 149-61.

6. C. L. Barber, Shakespeare's Festive Comedy (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1959) 187.

7. I quote throughout from William Shakespeare, The Complete Plays, ed. Alfred Harbage (New York: Viking, 1969).

8. Irene Dash, Wooing, Wedding and Power (New York: Columbia UP, 1981), mentions neither Jessica nor Merchant; in The Woman's Part: Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare, eds. Carolyn Ruth Swift Lenz, Gayle Greene, and Carol Thomas Neely (Urbana: U Illinois P, 1983), Jessica is mentioned in only one essay, and only once, in a typical sentence linking her choice of Lorenzo to her father's misfortune; Lisa Jardine, Still Harping on Daughters (1983; New York: Columbia UP, 1989), mentions Jessica only once, to remark only the matter of her cross-dressing; Women's Re-Visions of Shakespeare, ed. Marianne Novy (Urbana: U Illinois P, 1990) is a collection in which Jessica is not mentioned at all; in the few allusions to Merchant throughout the volume, it is Portia who is the subject.

9. Cynthia Lewis, “Antonio and Alienation in The Merchant of Venice,” South Atlantic Review 48 (1983) 20.

10. Frank Kermode, Shakespeare, Spenser, Donne (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971) 210-15.

11. Maynard Mack, “Engagement and Detachment in Shakespeare's Plays,” reprinted in Everybody's Shakespeare (Lincoln: U Nebraska P, 1993) 25.

12. Robin Headlam Wells, Elizabethan Mythologies (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994) 5.

13. John Gross, Shylock: A Legacy and Its Legend (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992) 99.

14. Shakespeare, Cymbeline 2.3.11-31.

15. Hutton 4.

16. Hutton and Hollander do not not consider how Capella and Zarlino differ from Pythagoras and Plato on the subject of music. See Hutton (36-37), where he observes an abruptness but fails to remark its significance; also (6-7), where he does not distinguish the writings of Plato from the work of later writers such as Aristotle, Quintilian, “Heraclides Ponticus, Theophrastus, and others [who] had further extended the subject,” for according to Hutton, “the whole was reduced by the Hellenistic schoolmen to simple statements illuminated by suitable exempla.” A weakness of Hutton's “sketch” is the irrelevance of many of the exempla he adduces to a meaningful dramatic analysis of Lorenzo's speech. Hutton considers neither Jessica nor the important questions raised by the dramatic context.

    Similarly, the conclusion of Hollander's analysis of Lorenzo's “troping of the doctrine” (151-52), fails to take Jessica into account: “This is the vision of Plato's Er and Cicero's Scipio. It is significant that the one instance of Shakespeare's troping of the doctrine is Lorenzo's explanation of the inaudible character of the heavenly music. Neither of the traditional reasons (acclimatization, or the physical thresholds of perception) is given. Instead, the unheard music is related to immortality, and by extension to a prelapsarian condition, a world which, like heaven, need not conceal its ultimate gold, which even Belmont must do. This approaches Milton's treatment of the subject in At a Solemn Music.” Hollander points to Ronsard and then, remarking no difficulties in Lorenzo's exchange with Jessica, writes that “Lorenzo retorts with a traditional disquisition on music and the affections, ending on a note of musica humana with all of its ethical and political connotations.” Hollander concludes his analysis without stating what the connotations are: “Innuendoes of musica mundana, golden, silent, and inaccessible, are intimated at Belmont, where actual music is heard, and where the Venetian incompatibilities of gold and love are finally reconciled, almost as much in the golden music as in the golden ring.”

17. See Plato's Phaedrus, especially 247c-d.

18. See Marsilio Ficino, The Book of Life; also Gary Tomlinson's study of Ficino in Music in Renaissance Magic.

19. Gross 91.

20. The subject is too large for the length of this chapter, but I would turn the reader to the recent articles and books written from Marxist, Cultural Materialist, and New Historicist perspectives that might shed further light on Jessica's “exchange.” I would point out, however, that even these studies do not give Jessica the attention she commands. See, for example, Karen Newman, “Portia's Ring: Unruly Women and Structures of Exchange in The Merchant of Venice,” Shakespeare Quarterly 1987 (38) 19-33. Newman offers intelligent analysis of the role of Portia's ring, as well as of “exchange” more generally. But Newman does not even mention Jessica's “exchange” as a point of comparison or contrast.

21. Shakespeare's learning has always been in question. But his ability to take commonplaces from various traditions and make them both his own and dramatically relevant suggests not only more learning than we can account for but also a kind of learning it is impossible to quantify. Cf. E. M. W. Tillyard, “The Cosmic Background,” Shakespeare's History Plays (London: Chatto & Windus, 1944). Tillyard argues that Shakespeare was “learned,” but he qualifies what is meant by “learned.” “For proofs,” Tillyard writes (3) “take for example Lorenzo on music. …” Tillyard quotes lines four to eleven and makes the following argument: “This has been called ‘an unlearned man's impression of Plato's sublime dream’. … Shakespeare, it is alleged, gets Plato wrong. … It is true that he garbled the above passage from the Republic by substituting cherubim for sirens and vastly enlarging the revenge of the heavenly music, but Lorenzo's general doctrine shows an accurate knowledge of a part of Plato's Timaeus. … Shakespeare reproduces the gist of this doctrine.”

22. Hollander 151-52; Danson 177.

23. Danson 170, 175, 186.

24. Danson 188-89.

25. See Danson 186.

26. Charles Mosely, “Portia's Music and the Naughty World,” The Merchant of Venice, Eds. Linda Cookson and Bryan Loughrey (Essex: Longman, 1992) 22.

27. Danson 178-84.

28. Kermode, Shakespeare, Spenser, Donne 215.

29. Gross 72.

30. Catherine Belsey, “Love in Venice,” Shakespeare Survey 44 (1991): 41-53.

31. Belsey 43. Belsey writes that all of the characters in the play look “back to a world, fast disappearing in the late sixteenth century, where love was seen as anarchic, destructive, dangerous.” Belsey does not uphold, apparently, Jessica's distinction between false and true vows, between destructive and true love. She argues instead that the play—hence Shakespeare, hence Lorenzo—speaks nostalgically (historically) about a desire that, in accordance with historical indicia, can no longer be fulfilled. In Belsey's view, Jessica and Lorenzo, an otherwise harmonious couple, are deprived of an allegorical harmony, or granted only a trace of it—for in the late sixteenth century, just as now, one may get no more than a trace of anything. It is certainly true that Merchant reveals a dark side of love in Venice, as Belsey writes—true, too, that Shakespeare is an expert on the subject of desire. But Merchant does not concern a general crisis in the history of desire as much as it treats the particular problems that the women in the play have with particular men.

32. James Shapiro, Shakespeare and the Jews (New York: Columbia UP, 1996) 158-59, remarks briefly the possibility that Jessica “might revert to her Jewish nature.” The possibility, of course, is only hinted at, and it is part of Shakespeare's skill here to resist closure. To consider the matter fully, one has to pay more attention to the dramatic structure of the play than Shapiro does.

33. He has Lorenzo himself mock his claim to such a title: “I must be one of these same dumb wise men, / For Gratiano never lets me speak” (1.1.105-06).

34. Norman Rabkin, Shakespeare and the Problem of Meaning (Chicago: U Chicago P, 1981) 28-29.

35. Keith Geary, “The Nature of Portia's Victory: Turning to Men in The Merchant of Venice,” Shakespeare Survey 37 (1984): 55.

36. See Michael W. Shurgot, “Gobbo's Gift and the ‘Muddy Vesture of Decay’ in The Merchant of Venice,” Essays in Literature 10:2 (1983): 139-148.

37. Harry Berger, Jr., “Marriage in The Merchant of Venice,” Shakespeare Quarterly 32:2 (1981): 161.

38. On this general subject, see James Shapiro, Shakespeare and the Jews.

39. Even before his “problem plays,” Shakespeare likes to set up patterns that suggest the closure the play refuses to provide. A. P. Rossiter, Angel with Horns (London: Longmans, 1961), offers a general discussion of the reasons “problematical” plays might be given the title “Problem Plays” and suggests that perhaps we ought “no longer be content with an eternal triangle of three “Problem Plays.” The matter is beyond the scope of this chapter, but I am suggesting a number of problems, as well as a central one large enough to include Merchant in the general discussion.

40. Rabkin 28.

41. One exception to the “harmonizing habit” is offered by John Picker, “Shylock and the Struggle for Closure,” Judaism 43:2 (1994): 174-89, who considers with insight the dramatic context that forces us to consider Jessica's response to Lorenzo's “musical illusion of happiness.” Picker's consideration of music, however, is general and brief, for his subject is the more general one of closure. He concludes, moreover, by bringing Jessica too close to Shylock's worldview.

42. Cf. Newman 32.