SOURCE: Cantor, Paul A. “Religion and the Limits of Community in The Merchant of Venice.” Soundings 70, nos. 1-2 (spring-summer 1987): 239-58.

[In the following essay, Cantor identifies devotion to religious principles as the quality that links Shylock and Antonio in The Merchant of Venice, asserting harmony is only achieved by the defeat of both the Jew and the merchant, whose commitment to the values of their respective religions threatens the traditional values of comedy.]

I

The Merchant of Venice continues to be a controversial play, the most controversial of all Shakespeare's romantic comedies. Indeed for a comedy, the play deals with unusually weighty subject matter, raising fundamental issues about religion one would not expect to see brought up in a humorous context. Critics have come to view the play as portraying the conflict between Christianity and Judaism, but they disagree as to Shakespeare's evaluation of the conflict. Some see Shakespeare as siding exclusively with the Christians and treat Shylock as the pure villain of the piece. Others argue that Shakespeare is in fact sympathetic to Shylock and making a plea for religious toleration. The critics who take a purely negative view of Shylock tend to be the ones who discuss The Merchant of Venice as a comedy, viewing Shylock in the context of the tradition of comic villains. By contrast, critics who are sympathetic to Shylock often discuss the play as if it were a tragedy, concentrating on Shylock's role and dealing only with the serious themes. I want to argue that there are ways of treating The Merchant of Venice as a comedy and still viewing Shakespeare as sympathetic to Shylock. Indeed it is only by looking at Shylock in the context of the whole play—and that means in relation to the other characters and to its comic structure—that one can appreciate the complexity of Shakespeare's portrayal.

But The Merchant of Venice is not an ordinary comedy, and the tendency to discuss it as if it were a tragedy does have some basis in its peculiar nature. If Portia did not intervene in the Antonio-Shylock conflict, it would have some kind of tragic outcome. More than most comedies, The Merchant of Venice flirts with tragedy. Shakespeare appears to be trying a dramatic experiment: to see how far he can push a play toward tragedy and still bring about a comic ending. Many critics would say that he let the experiment go too far, allowing the character of Shylock to take over the play to the point where the comic ending becomes unsatisfactory. For the play to be a comedy, Shylock has to be the villain, in comic terms the blocking agent. In the conventional comic pattern, he is the old man who stands in the way of the young lovers and threatens to prevent their happiness. Because he interferes with the potential harmony of the community, he has to be eliminated by the end of the play. But if we come to sympathize with Shylock, it will interfere with our feeling of comic resolution. Above all, if we feel that Shylock stands for a genuine principle, we will have at least something of a tragic impression at the end of the play. We will sense that the community has re-established itself only at the cost of excluding a legitimate point of view and thus narrowing its horizons.

Shylock is not the only potentially tragic figure in the play. He is after all not even the title character. Shylock is the Jew of Venice; Antonio is the merchant of Venice. The popular confusion as to who the title character is reveals how over the years Shylock has come to steal the show, leaving Antonio in his shadow, neglected by audiences and critics alike. But only by taking into account Antonio's role can one fully understand Shylock's; for despite the surface conflict between the two characters, they have a hidden affinity. Antonio also does not fit comfortably into the comic world of the play. In the grip of his melancholy and world-weariness, Antonio, like Shylock, is basically a killjoy. In particular, he refuses to participate in the comedy of romance, and represents in his own way almost as much of a threat to the happiness of the young lovers as does Shylock. Antonio stands up for the value of male friendship, for the idea that friendship is a higher form of concord than romantic love. Thus for the comic ending to be possible and the lovers to be happily married, Antonio has to be defeated just as Shylock is. Act IV is devoted to the defeat of Shylock, Act V to the defeat of Antonio. Indeed, if Shylock were the only opposition to the comic resolution, the structure of The Merchant of Venice would be defective, since the main character would drop out with a whole act to go. Only if one sees the importance of Antonio in the play does the structure of The Merchant of Venice make sense. Before Portia can be happy in her marriage, she has to prove that Bassanio loves her more than he does Antonio. Thus Antonio ends up being excluded from the happy ending almost as much as Shylock is. But if that is the case, then the comic resolution of The Merchant of Venice cannot simply reflect, as many critics have claimed, the triumph of Christianity over Judaism, for Antonio is as much the representative Christian in the play as Shylock is the representative Jew.

Investigation of The Merchant of Venice ought to begin from this observation: the comic resolution is possible only at the expense of both Shylock and Antonio, the two characters who take life seriously in the play, which above all means the two characters who take religion seriously. It may at first seem odd to claim that Antonio is the representative Christian in the play. There are of course many characters in the play who espouse Christianity, but, as I will show, they act like pagans, concerned primarily with the gratification of their senses and using their Christian principles to attain that end. What makes Antonio and Shylock similar is that they are both men of religious principles, but that of course is also what causes them to come into conflict, since their principles differ. For the conflict to be resolved, characters like Portia must intervene, characters who are more flexible about their principles and are in fact willing to bend whatever principles they have for the sake of happiness. Hence, as important as the opposition between Antonio and Shylock may be, in some ways it is less basic to The Merchant of Venice than the opposition between both Antonio and Shylock, who get involved in a potentially tragic conflict, and characters like Portia and Bassanio, who find a way of resolving it comically. By analyzing both the differences and the similarities between Shylock and Antonio, I hope to shed new light on The Merchant of Venice. The best way of understanding the play may not be to seek to resolve the ambiguities which seem to pervade Shakespeare's characterization of Shylock, but rather to uncover the ambiguities which surround his portrayal of Antonio and indeed of all Venice. The complexity of Shakespeare's portrayal of Shylock is rooted in a deeper complexity in The Merchant of Venice, what one might call its ambiguity of genre, the way the play oscillates between tragedy and comedy.

II

The most thoroughgoing attempt I have seen to characterize Shylock and Antonio as products of their religious principles is Allan Bloom's essay, “Christian and Jew: The Merchant of Venice.” Bloom describes Shylock this way:

Shylock holds that respect for obedience to the law is the condition for leading a decent life. … Righteousness is hence the criterion for goodness; if a man obeys the law to its letter throughout his life, he will prosper. … Justice is lawfulness; Shylock is a son of Moses. Along with this goes a certain positive temper; Shylock lives very much in this world. Money is a solid bastion of comfortable existence, not for the sake of pleasure or refinement, but for that of family and home. … Decent sobriety is the rule of life.

Bloom contrasts Antonio in these terms:

Antonio … bases his whole life on generosity and love for his fellow man. For him, the law, in its intransigence and its indifference to persons, is an inadequate guide for life. … Equity and charity are more important than righteousness. … Calm calculation is beyond him. He makes promises he cannot keep, and his hopes are based on ships that are yet to come in. The restraint and coldness of the Jew are not his; his sympathies go out to all men, and he cares much for their affection.¹

Bloom thus shows how Shakespeare's portrayal of Shylock and Antonio reflects the traditional opposition of Judaism and Christianity in terms of justice vs. mercy or obedience to the letter of the law vs. charity.

Out of these contrasting religious attitudes, the conflict between Shylock and Antonio over the issue of usury grows. Antonio's Christianity gives him an otherworldly perspective on life. For him material things have no real value; the only true value is spiritual. For Antonio a man's wealth is ultimately worthless to him. The only purpose it can serve is to allow him to do good deeds by lending a helping hand to his friends. For Antonio, charging interest on loans serves no purpose. By contrast, as Shakespeare characterizes Shylock's Judaism, it gives him a thisworldly orientation, in which whatever a man achieves, he must achieve on earth. Wealth becomes for Shylock one of life's few solid values, and amassing it becomes his way of demonstrating his virtue and talent. He finds a biblical precedent for his way of life in the Old Testament figure of Jacob and thus views his business as having a religious sanction: “thrift is blessing, if men steal it not” (I.iii.9).² Shylock sees no reason to part with his money, unless he receives some consideration in return, namely an interest payment. Antonio and Shylock are never going to agree on the issue of usury, because it has become bound up with the fundamental differences in their ways of life. We are inclined to say that usury is a narrowly economic issue which should be left to economists to decide. What we find surprising and alien is that Antonio and Shylock regard usury as a religious issue. But for them religion is a comprehensive force, governing how they behave in all aspects of life. For them there are no narrowly economic issues: ultimately every issue is religious. In particular, the Bible has something to say about every ethical issue, and as strange as it seems to us today, their dispute over usury quickly turns into a dispute over how to read the Bible (I.iii.71-101).³

The clearest way of seeing the problem Antonio and Shylock face in living together in the same city is to realize that in effect they do not speak the same language. Shylock says of Antonio:

He hates our sacred nation, and he rails
Even there where merchants most do congregate
On me, my bargains, and my well-won thrift,
Which he calls interest.

(I.iii.48-51)

What Shylock calls sound business practice, Antonio calls usury. Similarly, what Antonio calls generosity, Shylock calls wastefulness.

How then does Venice succeed in making men live together in peace within the city? Shakespeare presents Venice as a remarkable community: a great commercial republic, which brings together men from all over the world for the purposes of trade. The commercial interests of Venice dictate a cosmopolitan nature for the city, but that creates a problem. Men with different beliefs and values can easily come into conflict, as we have seen in the case of Antonio and Shylock. Venice brings men together for the sake of commerce and attempts to maintain the peace between them on the basis of commerce.⁴ The city tries to get men to reduce their spiritual concerns, which are potentially divisive. Men differ—often bitterly and violently—as to what the Bible says. But they can agree as to what an account book says: the figures are there, totalled up in black and white for all to see. Thus Venice tries to get men more interested in their material concerns, because it is easier for them to agree as to what is to their mutual economic benefit. The harmony of Venice rests on what is today called the cash nexus.

In the traditional view, the harmony of a community rests on its members having a common nature. They have to share certain common concerns. Above all, they have to share the same beliefs about the fundamental things in life. The community is originally a community of believers, and hence community is based on friendship. Portia's comments in passing on the nature of friendship have interesting implications for our view of Venice:

                                                                                in companions
That do converse and waste the time together,
Whose souls do bear an egall yoke of love,
There must be needs a like proportion
Of lineaments, of manners, and of spirit.

(III.iv.11-15)

Antonio and Shylock do not have “a like proportion / Of lineaments, of manners, and of spirit” and hence their community cannot be based on friendship. Rather Venice uses economic ties to bind together its citizens. The key principle is this: you do not have to like a man in order to lend money to him; in fact when it comes to securing repayment, it may help if you do not like him. Antonio understands what it means to enter into a purely business relationship with Shylock:

If thou wilt lend this money, lend it not
As to thy friends, for when did friendship take
A breed for barren metal of his friend?
But lend it rather to thine enemy,
Who if he break, thou mayest with better face
Exact the penalty.

(I.iii.132-137)

As bitter as this passage may be, it reveals what is attractive about economic ties to a city like Venice: they offer a way of binding together enemies as well as friends. As opposed to traditional communal ties, the cash nexus promises to be more stable and secure, and also to embrace a wider range of humanity.

Shylock gives the clearest statement of the principle of the Venetian community:

I will buy with you, sell with you, talk with you, walk with you, and so following; but I will not eat with you, drink with you, nor pray with you.

(I.iii.35-38)

Shylock reveals that there is no true communion in Venice: men may do business with each other, but they do not necessarily share the deepest side of their souls. That is why the law becomes so important in Venice. With no inner spiritual principle of allegiance, men in Venice have to be united by the external, objective principle of the law. Antonio understands the connection between the cosmopolitanism of Venice and its need for a strict rule of law:

The Duke cannot deny the course of law;
For the commodity that strangers have
With us in Venice, if it be denied,
Will much impeach the justice of the state,
Since that the trade and profit of the city
Consisteth of all nations.

(III.iii.26-31)

The Venetians are not united in their beliefs about the highest things. Rather they are united on the lowest principle, the principle of the body, what all men share as human beings. Men disagree as to what conduces to their spiritual welfare, but it seems more likely that they will agree as to what conduces to their bodily welfare.⁵ One can point to the body; one cannot point to the soul.

The result is that the tendency of Venice is to redirect its citizens from spiritual to material concerns in order to bring about social harmony. That is why most of the Christians in the play do not appear to take their Christianity very seriously. The typical Venetians we see, men like Bassanio or Gratiano, are chiefly concerned with marrying well. Since the Venetians are wrapped up in securing a good place in society, religion becomes a social amenity in their eyes. A well-bred man has to put on a religious front, but that is all. When Bassanio warns his companion to be on his best behavior, Gratiano reveals his attitude toward religion:

If I do not put on a sober habit,
Talk with respect, and swear but now and then,
Wear prayer-books in my pocket, look demurely,
Nay more, while grace is saying hood mine eyes
Thus with my hat, and sigh and say amen,
Use all the observance of civility,
Like one well studied in a sad ostent
To please his grandam, never trust me more.

(II.ii.190-197)

This is a telling passage: for Gratiano, religion has become reduced to a matter of civility, something one pays lip service to in order to placate one's grandmother.

One must in fact look very carefully at the Venetians in The Merchant of Venice to see how deep their religious impulses run. To read many of the critics, one would think that Shylock is confronted with a community composed of Church Fathers, representing the Christian faith at its purest and most exalted level. But beneath the surface pieties commerce has taken over the lives of Shakespeare's Venetians. This is evident in their language: they constantly speak of things in commercial terms. Consider Bassanio's declaration of friendship:

                                                                      To you, Antonio,
I owe the most in money and in love,
And from your love I have a warranty
To unburthen all my plots and purposes
How to get clear of all the debts I owe.

(I.i.130-134)

For Bassanio, money characteristically comes before love, and he mixes indiscriminately terms of business and terms of friendship. In the opening scene, when the various Venetian merchants see Antonio unhappy, they automatically assume that only business worries could upset a man this much. Salerio makes the most revealing comment about Antonio's distress:

                                                            Should I go to church
And see the holy edifice of stone,
And not bethink me straight of dangerous rocks,
Which touching but my gentle vessel's side
Would scatter all her spices on the stream,
Enrobe the roaring waters with my silks.

(I.i.29-34)

Even when he is in church, this Christian merchant is thinking about his merchandise, concerned more about the fate of his goods than the fate of his soul. One could not choose a better emblem for the mentality of Shakespeare's Venice.

This tendency of Venice is parodied in the behavior of the clown, Launcelot Gobbo. He finds himself torn between his interest as a Christian in having Jessica convert to the true faith and his interest as a consumer:

We were Christians enow before, e'en as many as could well live one by another. This making of Christians will raise the price of hogs. If we grow all to be pork-eaters, we shall not shortly have a rasher on the coals for money.

(III.v.21-26)

In worrying that “in converting Jews to Christians, you raise the price of pork” (III.v.35-36), Launcelot provides a comic equivalent of Venice's tendency to let economic considerations override the religious.

III

The typical Venetians may seem superficial by comparison with Antonio and Shylock. But the fact that they are concerned with material pleasures does not mean that they are to be condemned. The typical values of Venice are in fact the typical values of comedy. As critics such as Northrop Frye and C. L. Barber have shown, Shakespearean comedy celebrates vitality and natural energy.⁶ The festive spirit and carnival atmosphere in the comedies reflect this fact. The comedies tend to dwell on the most natural and universal of human concerns: getting married, establishing a family, and living well. There is something life-enhancing about the prevailing spirit in Venice. One can see it in Bassanio's opening line: “Good signiors both, when shall we laugh?” (I.i.66). Both Shylock and Antonio stand in the way of Venice's enjoyment.⁷ As shown by his opening lines, Antonio is just too somber:

In sooth, I know not why I am so sad;
It wearies me, you say it wearies you.

(I.i.1-2)

As the letter Antonio sends to Bassanio shows (III.ii), he has a way of interrupting other people's moments of happiness and ruining their enjoyment.

With his otherworldly temperament, Antonio is not himself interested in the pleasures of this world:

I hold the world but as the world, Gratiano,
A stage, where every man must play a part,
And mine a sad one.

(I.i.77-79)

Gratiano answers Antonio very much in the spirit of comedy—“Let me play the fool” (I.i.79)—giving an eloquent defense of the goal of enjoying life and dismissing Antonio's melancholy as mere posing. But Antonio's melancholy is not a mere pose. Claiming to be weary of the world, Antonio is willing to prove it by sacrificing himself for his friend Bassanio. He has in fact a kind of martyr complex:

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.
You cannot better be employ'd, Bassanio,
Than to live still and write mine epitaph.

(IV.i.114-118)

Here Antonio is most clearly modelling himself on Christ. His sentiments may be admirable in themselves, but they still threaten to disrupt the comic world. Portia knows that she has to save Antonio: if he were to die as a martyr to his friendship for Bassanio, it would poison her marriage forever.

Shylock equally contradicts the comic spirit of the play. At first sight he paradoxically seems to resemble the other Venetians more closely than Antonio does: like them he is concerned with obtaining wealth, not giving it away. But Shylock differs from the other Venetians in not wanting to use his wealth for the sake of pleasure. Making money has become part of Shylock's sober way of life. When he is threatened with the loss of his wealth, he refers to it as “the prop / That doth sustain my house” (IV.i.375-376). Wealth is what gives security and stability to Shylock's life: he sees it as the foundation of his family line. Hence Shylock is unwilling to squander his money on frivolous pursuits and is actively hostile to any form of merriment:

What, are there masques? Hear you me, Jessica:
Lock up my doors; and when you hear the drum
And the vile squeaking of the wry-neck'd fife,
Clamber not you up to the casements then,
Nor thrust your head into the public street
To gaze on Christian fools with varnish'd faces;
But stop my house's ears, I mean my casements;
Let not the sound of shallow fopp'ry enter
My sober house.

(II.v.28-36)

In short, Shylock rejects the whole world of music, dancing, and comic festivity. Both Shylock and Antonio understand dimensions of life that elude the average Venetian. But at the same time, they are both missing an integral element of life: the ability to enjoy it.

Indeed Shylock's concern with money threatens to turn into an obsession, as he tends to forget that money has only instrumental value. One can see this danger in what appears to be his most ridiculous moment: when he equates the loss of his daughter with the loss of his money:

“My daughter! O my ducats! O my daughter!
Fled with a Christian! O my Christian ducats!”

(II.viii.15-16)

This is the most satiric moment in the portrayal of Shylock, but critics often forget that we never actually see Shylock speak these words. This is in fact Solanio's report of what Shylock says and as such it is a caricature. For Shylock's own words on this theme, we must look later in the play:

A diamond gone, cost me two thousand ducats in Frankford! The curse never fell upon our nation till now, I never felt it till now. Two thousand ducats in that, and other precious, precious jewels. I would my daughter were dead at my feet and the jewels in her ear! Would she were hears'd at my foot, and the ducats in her coffin! No news of them? Why, so—and I know not what's spent in the search.

(III.i.83-92)

There is still something laughable in Shylock's miserly concern with the cost of the search, but the way he himself links his daughter with his ducats has a bitterness about it that silences laughter. We can see here how closely Shylock associates his financial fortunes with the fortunes of his family. His dream is to be able to continue his line by passing his wealth on to his Jewish daughter and hence his nightmare is to see her throw it away as a Christian. By the end of the scene, Shylock rises to a note of genuine pathos:

Out upon her! Thou torturest me, Tubal. It was my turkis. I had it of Leah when I was a bachelor. I would not have given it for a wilderness of monkeys.

(III.i.120-123)

Once we see that wealth has a deeper value for Shylock, he no longer appears as ridiculous as he did in Solanio's portrait.⁸ In Solanio's version, Shylock seemed to reduce Jessica to the level of his ducats; in Shylock's own words we see that in fact the reason why his money is so important to him is that it is bound up with his feelings about his family.

This is a good example of the complexity of Shakespeare's portrait of Shylock. In the words of Solanio, Shakespeare first gives us a purely external, unsympathetic view of Shylock, in which he appears merely grotesque and ridiculous. But then Shakespeare in effect repeats the scene, allowing us to hear Shylock's own words and to see inside his soul. Once we get a feel for the intensity of Shylock's emotions, it is difficult to treat him as merely laughable. There is something warped and one-sided about Shylock. But he has managed to make a virtue of his limitations. He has in fact taken a limited form of virtue—thrift and industry—and pushed it to an extreme, pushed it to the point where it becomes problematic and brings him into conflict with society. Antonio displays a similar one-sidedness. He tries to make friendship into the whole of life, and his martyr's mentality prevents him from participating in the joys of Venetian society. Ultimately what makes Antonio and Shylock similar is their inability to take pleasure in the moment. They are both masters of what is today called delayed gratification. Both are always laying up treasure, Antonio in heaven, Shylock in his counting house. They thus both contradict the holiday spirit of Venice, perfectly expressed by Jessica when she describes Bassanio:

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!

(III.v.76-78)

In their desire to have their heaven here on earth, the Venetians speak for the world of comedy, precisely the world which both Antonio and Shylock reject.

IV

Left to themselves, Antonio and Shylock could only destroy each other. Though they appear to have agreed to deal with each other for business purposes, their economic bond is only an illusion. In the end, neither allows his behavior to be governed by strictly economic motives. Shylock wants to use his economic relationship with Antonio to gain revenge, while Antonio uses the bond to express his love for Bassanio. If Shylock and Antonio behaved like pure economic men, they would be able to resolve their differences peacefully, especially once Shylock is offered his money back. But Shylock and Antonio turn out to be too much caught up in their principles to accept any monetary solution to their conflict. Hence the intervention of Portia becomes necessary to save the day. She does not feel bound by rules, as shown by the way she outwits her dead father's will, giving hints to Bassanio so that the one suitor she herself desires will win her hand.⁹ In general, fathers do not fare well in the world of The Merchant of Venice.¹⁰ Jessica flees her father, rejects his religion, and even robs him. Launcelot Gobbo makes fun of his father, leading him around by the nose. This is all part of the comic pattern of the play. Fathers represent the power of convention and have to be defeated for the spirit of comedy to prevail. Having outwitted her own father, Portia has to go on to defeat the main father in the play: Shylock.

In the powerful courtroom scene, Portia begins by appealing to Shylock's mercy. She gives a beautiful speech, and the sentiments she expresses are no doubt admirable. But in taking this speech at face value, critics have made far too much of it. Portia knows that the appeal to mercy is not going to affect Shylock. This speech is only her opening gambit, and as such it is a very rhetorical performance. It is precisely what it sounds like—a set speech. Indeed we have to check carefully to see how closely Portia abides by these sentiments later in the scene.¹¹ Earlier in the play she herself warned us to check her speeches against her deeds:

If to do were as easy as to know what were good to do, chapels had been churches, and poor men's cottages princes' palaces. It is a good divine that follows his own instructions; I can easier teach twenty what were good to be done than to be one of the twenty to follow mine own teaching.

(I.ii.12-17)

Here as elsewhere in the play, Shakespeare alerts us to the possibility that Portia may not always live up to the pieties she espouses. The fact is that Portia has a purpose to accomplish in the courtroom scene and she will do anything to bring about the result she desires. But she knows that she must not reveal her partiality. That is the lesson she learned from the test of the three caskets: she had to give the appearance of impartiality even while manipulating events to the outcome she wanted.¹²

In the courtroom scene, Bassanio wants to be open about the manipulation:

Wrest once the law to your authority:
To do a great right, do a little wrong,
And curb the cruel devil of his will.

(IV.i.215-217)

But Portia vehemently rejects this approach on legal grounds:

It must not be, there is no power in Venice
Can alter a decree established.
'Twill be recorded for a precedent,
And many an error by the same example
Will rush into the state. It cannot be.

(IV.i.218-222)

But this appearance of impartiality is all part of Portia's strategy for getting Shylock on her side. Since she seems to be defending his cause, he begins to trust her. Portia thus lulls Shylock into a false sense of security. Only then does she spring her trap on him: he can take Antonio's flesh but not his blood. Portia has gotten Shylock to insist that whatever is not explicitly stated in the bond is not legally valid (IV.i.257-262) and hence his failure to include title to Antonio's blood in the agreement now bars him from spilling even one drop of it (IV.i.306-312). Portia traps Shylock in his own legalism: he is reduced to asking weakly: “Is that the law?” (IV.i.314).

Thus Portia is able to defeat Shylock by exploiting what was regarded in the Renaissance as the Jewish tendency to read the law literally, rather than figuratively as Christians were supposed to do. Having checked his attack on Antonio, Portia now moves swiftly against Shylock. Suddenly he is the one on trial, charged under a law prohibiting an alien from practicing against the life of a Venetian citizen. The court is prepared to sentence him to death and take away all his wealth. The Duke and Antonio combine to show Shylock mercy, sparing his life and not confiscating all his wealth. But Antonio takes it upon himself to determine who shall inherit Shylock's wealth and moreover he insists that Shylock convert to Christianity. Several critics have argued that in Elizabethan eyes forcing Shylock to convert would have been viewed as a true act of mercy, since it shows concern for the salvation of his soul. But Shakespeare does not have Antonio say a single word about the salvation of Shylock's soul, and certainly Shylock does not overflow with gratitude in recognition of the Christians' concern for his spiritual welfare.

Indeed Shakespeare is unusually restrained in showing Shylock's reaction to the way he has been treated. Shakespeare seems to have gone out of his way to leave it open how to interpret the outcome of this scene. Shylock's laconic response—“I am content” (IV.i.394)—is profoundly ambiguous. An actor or a director can interpret this line in a variety of ways, as anyone who has seen a number of productions of The Merchant of Venice can confirm. Said with resignation, the line can suggest that Shylock is genuinely capitulating to the Christians. But said with defiance—with clenched teeth as it were—the line can suggest that Shylock is unrepentant and unbowed. The fact is that Shakespeare never shows a converted Shylock at the end of The Merchant of Venice. It would have been possible for Shakespeare to stage such a conversion, or at least to have it reported as he does with Duke Frederick at the end of As You Like It. The notion of conversion or change of heart is basic to the movement of comedy and adds greatly to the feeling of comic resolution. But Shakespeare evidently drew the line at showing a converted Shylock. He presents Shylock as a principled man, and to renounce his Judaism would be to betray whatever integrity he has. In A Midsummer Night's Dream, Demetrius can give up Hermia and still be Demetrius. But Shylock cannot give up Judaism and still be Shylock. All along, the dispute between Shylock and Antonio has had greater depth than the romantic squabbles typical of Shakespearean comedy. They have been arguing not over who is the prettiest girl in Venice but over what are the fundamental values in life.

That is why Shylock makes a tragic impression in his final scene. We sense that Venice is forcibly imposing conformity, responding to a challenge to its beliefs by simply trying to eliminate the challenger. Venice ultimately finds it cannot include Shylock as Shylock in the community. The courtroom scene is powerfully dramatic precisely because Shakespeare's sympathies are evenly divided. The first half of the scene is weighted against Shylock; as long as he appears to be the cruel one, threatening Antonio's life, we want to see Shylock defeated. But once Portia turns the tables on Shylock, our sympathies are reversed. We feel that Shylock has been caught by a legal trick and now the supposedly merciful Christians can hardly wait to break his spirit. It is easy to imagine how Shakespeare could have written the scene to slant it completely against Shylock. The Christians could have been presented as more genuinely merciful to him and less eager to see him crushed.¹³ But Shakespeare did not want a one-sided view of Shylock. As we have seen throughout the play, just when Shylock is beginning to look inhuman or ridiculous to us, Shakespeare throws in a touch to humanize or dignify him in our eyes. By the same token, just when we are warming up to Shylock, Shakespeare has him do or say something that chills our sympathy for him. Shylock's final moment in the play arouses mixed feelings in us no matter how we choose to interpret his last words. If he is really giving in, then he is doing so only as a broken man, as is suggested by his claim: “I am not well” (IV.i.396). If this is the case, then we have watched a once proud and forceful man humbled and crushed. If the actor playing Shylock manages to convey defiance with his final words, then we have to admire Shylock's integrity, the fact that he does not crack under pressure from Venice.

When all is said and done, Shylock is at his most impressive in his final scene, and it is impossible to dismiss him as the mere butt of a joke. Though he is obviously no King Lear, he has many elements of a tragic figure. Above all, he is ultimately destroyed by his own virtues. His highest claim on our admiration is his devotion to the law. More than any other character in the play, he takes justice seriously and it is important to bear in mind that in pursuing Antonio he genuinely believes that the law is on his side. Shylock is willing to stand or fall with the law.¹⁴ Thus it is his law-abidingness which brings about the reversal in his fortunes. He accepts Portia as his judge, and hence accepts her judgment in the case. When the law appears to turn against him, he does not try to evade the consequences with oversubtle interpretations of the statutes. He tries to maintain his dignity in the scene. In particular we never see Shylock begging for mercy or grovelling before the court.

Moreover, the Venetians cannot claim to have clean hands in the scene. Shylock is able to turn most of their arguments against them. For all their talk of mercy, they are, as Shylock points out, slaveholders (IV.i.90-93). And whatever Shylock is, they have made him that way. If he acts inhumanely, the reason is that the Venetians have not treated him as a human being, or as Shylock succinctly puts it: “since I am a dog, beware my fangs.” (III.iii.7.). Though it would be going too far to call Shylock a tragic hero, our response to him involves the kind of complexity we feel in responding to the great tragic figures in Shakespeare (which explains why he has provoked almost as much critical debate as they have). We can admire certain qualities in Shylock without thinking that he would be a particularly pleasant person to have around. Shylock does not fit into the Venetian community, but perhaps that shows that something is lacking in Venice. As always, Shakespeare's viewpoint cannot simply be identified with that of any of his characters. Too often critics have been concerned with the question of whether Shakespeare was for or against Shylock. That is not the point: a dramatist does not have to give a verdict the way a judge does. The Merchant of Venice is a great drama, and not a cheap melodrama, precisely because Shakespeare can see what is good and bad in both Shylock and his antagonists.

V

By the same token, to defend Shylock does not require us to attack Portia. Because Shakespeare is a good dramatist, we can appreciate why they both act the way they do. Portia does what she has to do in the courtroom scene to save the situation. But we should recognize that she goes about her task very cleverly, indeed shrewdly. There is no use getting sentimental about her as so many critics have done. Throughout the play we see that she is not averse to manipulating people to get what she wants. In Act V, Portia completes her triumph by defeating Antonio, who in light of his relationship with Bassanio may be regarded as the final father-figure in the play. The comedy of the rings shows Antonio that he has gotten everyone in trouble by insisting that a man should be more loyal to his best friend than to his wife. In effect, Antonio has to remarry Bassanio and Portia, giving his consent to a union that will take his friend away from him.¹⁵ Hence Antonio ends up almost as isolated as Shylock, literally the odd man out in the final scene. As the three couples march off, presumably to bed, Antonio is left standing on stage alone.¹⁶

It is possible to assimilate The Merchant of Venice to the standard pattern of comedy. The play deals with the elimination of whatever stands in the way of the satisfaction of the desires of the young lovers. By the end of the play, the characters are free to love and procreate. This was not so at the beginning, when Venetian society seemed threatened with sterility. As we have seen, there are two blocking agents in the play: Antonio and Shylock. Antonio's melancholy threatens to spoil the festive spirit of comedy. Moreover, he represents an extreme ideal of male friendship, which would keep the society of men together in necessarily sterile relationships. Shylock is equally opposed to the festive spirit, repelled by the thought of anybody enjoying himself. And he wants to breed money, not human beings. The chilling and killing hand of the law is perhaps best represented by the will of Portia's dead father. At the beginning of the play, it seems as if she will never get married. All the various forms of law and custom which inhibit the lovers have to be thrust aside in the course of the play in order to liberate the natural energies of the community.

But The Merchant of Venice does not make the same impression as most straightforward comedies. The reason is that in Shylock and Antonio Shakespeare experimented with using characters who have more depth than we normally expect in a comedy. Usually the blocking agents in a comedy are made to look purely ridiculous. They have no real principle to champion against the young lovers, but seem to oppose them merely for the sake of opposition. Moreover, the blocking agents are usually allowed to participate in the fun at the end of the play. Frequently they are brought to repent and reform in order to join the crowd. The conversion of Scrooge at the end of Dickens' A Christmas Carol is typical of this sort of movement. The stony old man suddenly turns out to have a melting heart. But this is not what happens with Antonio and Shylock. They give in but never clearly admit that they were wrong. Neither has a moment of recognition and neither, in Northrop Frye's terms, discovers a new social identity for himself.¹⁷ In particular, Antonio remains a bachelor. Above all, neither Shylock nor Antonio undergoes a change of heart at the end of the play. Hence they do not fit into the happy ending, Shylock not at all and Antonio only barely. They both remain isolated from the final harmony, thereby indicating that it is somehow limited. Their opposition to the youthful passionate characters is not simply based in crotchetiness or cantankerousness. They are not just mean-spirited old men who do not want anyone else to have fun. Their opposition to the comic world is a principled opposition, rooted as we have seen in religious principles, and that makes us take them seriously.

In the tragic world to which they seem at first confined, Antonio and Shylock are bitterly opposed to each other. But from a higher perspective they are united against the whole comic world of the play. Antonio and Shylock have different principles, but at least they are both principled men. Only in the context of a comedy does their integrity look like inflexibility or stubbornness. They are opposed by characters like Portia, Bassanio, and Gratiano, who are not obsessed with principles, and will in fact adapt their principles whenever they stand in the way of success in life. What would come across as pliancy and lack of integrity in a tragedy appears as healthy flexibility and adaptability in a comedy.

Critics have understandably been concerned with the opposition between Christianity and Judaism in The Merchant of Venice and hence with the conflict between Antonio and Shylock. But as we have seen, a more fundamental opposition is at work in the play, which can be formulated in a variety of ways: Antonio and Shylock vs. the rest of the characters, the spirit of tragedy vs. the spirit of comedy, the world of religious principles vs. the world of nature and vitality. The attempt to read The Merchant of Venice as if it were some kind of sectarian debate, pitting one religion against another, has led to seemingly endless controversy. As I have tried to show, a more fruitful approach may be to raise the discussion to a higher level and view the play as a more comprehensive reflection on the problematic place of religion in general in social life, an enquiry in which aspects of both Christianity and Judaism are called into question.

Notes

1. Allan Bloom, Shakespeare's Politics (New York: Basic Books, 1964) 18-19. Throughout this essay, I am heavily indebted to Bloom's discussion of The Merchant of Venice.

2. The edition of Shakespeare I have used is G. Blakemore Evans, ed., The Riverside Shakespeare (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974).

3. For a discussion of theological views on the subject of usury in relation to The Merchant of Venice, see W. H. Auden, “Brothers & Others,” The Dyer's Hand and Other Essays (New York: Vintage Books, 1968) 233-237.

4. See Bloom 15-16.

5. Bloom (23) demonstrates the focus on the body in Venice by analyzing Shylock's “Hath not a Jew eyes?” speech (III.i.59-71): “if one looks at the list of similar characteristics on which Shylock bases his claim to equality with his Christian tormentors, one sees that it includes only things which belong to the body.” See also 33, note 17: “Shylock characteristically mentions laughter as a result of tickling. He and Antonio would not laugh at the same jokes.”

6. See Northrop Frye, A Natural Perspective (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965) and C. L. Barber, Shakespeare's Festive Comedy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959).

7. See Auden 233.

8. See Bloom 22.

9. See Bloom 26: Portia “lets Bassanio know how to choose by the song. … It depreciates the senses, and its meaning is clear. Moreover, the first rhyme is ‘bred’ with ‘head,’ which also rhyme with ‘lead.’” For confirmation of this point, see Leslie A. Fiedler, The Stranger in Shakespeare (New York: Stein and Day, 1972) 113-115, and Barbara Tovey, “The Golden Casket: An Interpretation of The Merchant of Venice,” in John Alvis and Thomas G. West, eds., Shakespeare as Political Thinker (Durham, North Carolina: Carolina Academic Press, 1981) 215-216.

10. See Fiedler 86.

11. See Fiedler 131.

12. See Bloom 26-27.

13. See René Girard, “‘To Entrap the Wisest’: A Reading of The Merchant of Venice,” in Edward Said, ed., Literature and Society (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979) 107-108, 111-112. Approaching The Merchant of Venice from a very different perspective from mine, namely his theory of mimetic desire and the monstrous double, Girard arrives at similar conclusions about the apparent differences and hidden similarities between Shylock and the other Venetians.

14. See Bloom 13, 24, and Girard 112.

15. See Bloom 29, Fiedler 135, and Tovey 230.

16. See Fiedler 87-88 and Auden 233-234.

17. See Frye 78.