SOURCE: Roth, Marty. “The Blood that Fury Breathed: The Shape of Justice in Aeschylus and Shakespeare.” Comparative Literature Studies 29, no. 2 (1992): 141-56.

[In the following essay, Roth remarks on the parallels between Aeschylus's Eumenides and Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, with special reference to their depictions of the conflict between old and new orders of revenge and justice.]

Two thousand years before Portia appealed to the “Jew” for mercy and then defeated him, the maiden Athena convened the world's first court of justice. She stood between Orestes and the Erinyes, who were, like Shylock, doggedly bent on revenge. She too made an appeal to sweet “Persuasion.” Aeschylus' Eumenides (458 B.C.) is a play about justice, but instead of the static dimension of rights and wrongs it is worked out in dark and vivid shapes: heavy breathing, tension in the jaw and fingers, an aching to bite and tear.

The Eumenides dramatizes certain truths about revenge and justice that are also present in the Merchant of Venice (1597) in a less obvious form. These are, first, that revenge is no less a legitimate form of justice for being hideous; and second, that justice is a creation of value that has little to do with the tangled arithmetic of legal systems. Aeschylus and Shakespeare dramatize that mystery of justice that we still live with under the pale and secular name of rehabilitation. The true function of the courts is reclothing and renaming—the transformation of social hatred into social health. Two golden maidens, “the golden daughter of Zeus” and Portia, have magical roles to enact within their respective courts.

The Eumenides begins with a slow and measured account by the priestess of Apollo of the successive deities who have presided over her sanctuary at Delphi. She enters the temple and is convulsed by what she sees; she crawls out, dragging herself by her hands. Within are things as terrible to tell about as they are for eyes to see:

… they are black and utterly repulsive, and they snore with breath that drives one back. From their eyes drips the foul ooze, and their dress is such as is not right to wear in the presence of the gods' statues.¹

They are the Erinyes, the Furies, encircling an exhausted Orestes. They are the material (and maternal) embodiment of revenge, called by the shade of Clytemnestra to punish her murderer. The Erinyes are revenge; they have been the image and instrument of justice from the beginning of time, and their ancient authority is indisputible—

… my place has been ordained, granted and given by destiny and god, absolute. Privilege primeval yet is mine.

(148)

The Eumenides dramatizes the conflict between this authority and that of a new rule, the dispensation of the Olympians whose clean sweep of heaven had been praised by Hesiod as the final ordering of the universe.²

The authority of the Erinyes is absolute also because it is “natural.” Among other things, they represent the sudden onrush of hatred that is unleashed by the sight of a person who has done us injury. Their role cannot be a matter of argument in the play, to be overcome rhetorically and then relegated to the dustbin of obsolete ideas. That second miracle of order, the city-state, may demand a gentler creature for its survival, but impulses cannot be repressed by civilization any more easily for Aeschylus than for Freud.

Vengeance is not an idea in the Eumenides. It is not even retributive justice which depends upon some notion of measure. In this text vengeance is primal and, in the most absolute sense, concrete. It is unfair to submit such beings as the Erinyes to a process conducted in language. They know a language of cries, moans, and curses; and they repeat these furiously when they are baffled by a language intended to be understood. They cannot explain themselves—“we have our duty. It was to do what we have done” (142). But when the spoken word does reach them, it registers itself with tremendous force. Here is the impact of the words of Clytemnestra that roused them from their sleep:

The accusation came upon me from my dreams, and hit me, as with a goad in the mid-grip of his fist the charioteer strikes, but deep, beneath lobe and heart. The executioner's cutting whip is mine to feel and the weight of pain is big, heavy to bear.

(140)

Blood is the controlling symbol in the Eumenides; the conception of revenge that is brought into the light of definition by Zeus is implicit for the Erinyes in the drama of blood. Crime is the shedding of kindred blood. The criminal is one who is stained with, still smells of, blood:³

Our man has gone to cover somewhere in this place.
The welcome smell of human blood has told me so.

(144)

Blood calls up revenge as simply as in Genesis “the voice of thy brother's blood crieth unto me from the ground.” The man with “stained hidden hands” shall find the Erinyes behind him. And justice is just as simply the sucking dry of blood until not a trace remains to infuriate eye or nose:

… His mother's blood spilled on the ground can not come back again.
It is all soaked and drained into the ground and gone.
You must give back for her blood from the living man red blood of your body to suck. …

(144)

… your heart, blood drained, chewed dry by the powers of death, a wraith, a shell.

(145)

Filled with civilized disgust, Apollo vows to make them “spew out the black and foaming / blood of man, vomit the clots sucked from their veins” (141).

In the Eumenides, the new dispensation of Zeus has recently triumphed but has not yet been completely tested. Aeschylus gives the universe a tentative and transitional quality. The universe still contains elements of aboriginal power with which the Olympians must negotiate. On the other hand, while the Erinyes still possess their former power, they have been alienated from their place in the world—“they with whom no mortal man, / no god, nor even any beast, will have to do”; “Zeus has ruled our dripping company outcast, nor will deal with us” (137, 147).

The Erinyes are given a chant of self-description in the play, which could have been spoken by Shylock:

… we are strong and skilled; we have authority; we hold memory of evil; we are stern nor can men's pleadings bend us. We drive through our duties, spurned, outcast from gods, driven apart to stand in light not of the sun.

(148)

Because the Erinyes are controlled by the fact of blood, they cannot even understand the differences (much less the legitimacy) of the Olympian order. They only see “the younger gods” holding “by unconditional force, beyond all right, a throne / that runs reeking blood, / blood at the feet, blood at the head” (140). They are unable to see the difference between the deposition of Uranus and that of Cronos, why one is claimed to be a despotic act and the other an act of justice.

Shylock is similarly convinced of the hypocrisy of Christians: whatever he has done, he has had their frequent example, and yet they babble to him of mercy. Unfortunately, when Shylock expresses this conviction, the appeal of his presumptive arguments—that all men are human; that men should not own other men, etc.—may cause us to overlook the brute premises upon which Shakespeare has hinged his logic. Shylock tells Salarino that Christian and Jew alike bleed, laugh, die, and seek revenge, but every one of his examples, except the last, his conclusion, is taken from the realm of involuntary effects.⁴ Shylock is made to believe that revenge follows a wrong as inevitably as the other three effects follow their causes. And in the following exchange with Bassanio, he treats the whole range of offense, insult, and injury as if it were comparable to the poisonous sting of a serpent:

BASS.
Do all men kill the things they do not love?
SHY.
Hates any man the thing he would not kill?
BASS.
Every offense is not a hate at first!
SHY.
What! wouldst thou have a serpent sting thee twice?

(4.1.66-69).⁵

The same sense of the world lies behind Shylock's argument on Christian slavery. He tells the Duke that his own claim to his “purchased” slaves is no different than Shylock's claim to his pound of flesh. A satirist might deliberately reduce human beings to their physical weight to force us to feel afresh the dehumanizing effects of slavery, but Shylock has no such intention.

Shakespeare has given tremendous force and definition to Shylock's character, but what is being characterized is not a man but a radical impulse. And this impulse is absolute; it proceeds from no set of causes or circumstances that can be located in the temporal fiction or reconstructed past of the play. Of course Shylock is literally embedded in a texture of circumstances that fixes him in relationships. Within this system, he distinguishes among his several motives or values: his money, his people, his daughter, and the sanctity of his home. The frustration of any of these forms of gratification by Antonio could possibly provoke his hatred and his desire for revenge. And Antonio, as we are often told, “lends out money gratis, and brings down / The rate of usance here with us in Venice” (1.3.36-37). Shylock also says that he holds Antonio responsible for Jessica's desertion, apostasy, and affective death.⁶ Jessica, however, while she still lived with him, overheard him telling Tubal and Chus, “That he would rather have Antonio's flesh / Than twenty times the value of the sum” (3.2.285-86). The tangle of possible motives can be probed and balanced against one another, but the forfeit that Shylock claims, the energy with which he pursues it, and his intractibility cannot be related to or qualified by circumstances, no more than Iago's hatred can be emotionally equated with a suspicion that Othello slept with his wife.

The sheer energy of Shylock's hatred is only one of the liberating devices used to characterize him in terms of his desire. The animosity between Jew and Christian, for example, is never attached to its testamentary context, although the practice of usury is. It has been so internalized that it exists only as an “ancient grudge,” a “lodged hate, and a certain loathing” (4.1.60).

The only defining characteristic given to Shylock's desire for revenge is that it is tribal, that it belongs to him as a Jew. He reminds us three times that he has reinforced his fury by an oath upon his Sabbath, and he lays a curse upon his tribe to further bind him to revenge. To say that Shylock's revenge is tribal, however, is to say that it is also defined by blood.

In the Eumenides, revenge operates along tribal lines, and, when a frustrated Apollo declares that Clytemnestra was herself a murderess, guilty of shedding Agamemnon's blood, the Erinyes insist that “such murder would not be the shedding of kindred blood. … The man she killed was not of blood congenital” (156).

One of the images that Aeschylus gives to pure revenge is that of hounds pursuing a fawn:

So. Here the man has left a clear trail behind; keep on, keep on, as the unspeaking accuser tells us, by whose sense, like hounds after a bleeding fawn, we trail our quarry by the splash and drip of blood.

(144)

Shylock is, as a matter of common abuse, “the dog Jew,” “inexorable dog,” “stranger cur,” and “cut-throat dog.” Shylock reminds Antonio that the abuse so casually uttered may well inform their relationship: “Thou call'dst me dog before thou hadst a cause, / But since I am a dog, beware my fangs” (3.3.6-7). Antonio accepts this threat, substituting an even stronger image: “You may as well use question with the wolf / Why he hath made the ewe bleat for the lamb” (4.1.73-74). And Gratiano extends this to a vision of primordial fury:

Thy currish spirit
Governed a wolf, who—hanged for human slaughter—
Even from the gallows did his fell soul fleet,
… for thy desires
Are wolfish, bloody, starved and ravenous.

(4.1.133-35, 137-38)

A number of Shakespearean studies have emphasized the archetypal quality of the plays, particularly the comedies. Adapting a current story, Shakespeare was able to articulate its deep form, and, through a series of inevitable structures and images, create meanings that have a ritual authority. If Shylock wants revenge, then his object in the play is not the flesh of Antonio, but his blood.

The structure of the Merchant of Venice offers some support for this possibility. The turning point of the play, the first of Shylock's three defeats at Portia's hands, occurs when she tells him that he may not have “one drop of Christian blood.” Such an interpretation would also give this scene the dramatic support that is often lacking in performance: Portia drains Shylock of his energy by naming his crime, the implicit object of the contract.

The end of revenge in the Eumenides is contained in images that associate the Erinyes and their victims through the medium of a sacred feast: “You are consecrate to me and fattened for my feast” (145), they promise Orestes. Shylock was not literally intending to eat Antonio or drink his blood. The most cursory reading of the Old Testament impresses upon us (despite a history of rumors to the contrary) the repudiation by the Jews of blood sacrifice, much more cannibalism: the story of Abraham and Isaac, the exclusion of the Benjamites in Judges, the punishment of the sons of Eli. But metaphors have a literal authority of their own, and Portia is a second Daniel: she first defeats Shylock by reminding him that his own tribal law stipulates that he may not eat bloody meat.

Shylock's Jewishness is a formal characteristic. As the more primitive of the dispensations, it takes to itself absolutely primitive attributes. Shylock certainly considers the cannibalistic feast to be an appropriate metaphor for his revenge. He persuades Bassanio that his bond is purely gratuitous by pointing out that the only thing he could do with a pound of flesh is eat it: “A pound of man's flesh, taken from a man, / Is not so estimable, profitable neither, / As flesh of muttons, beefs, or goats” (1.3.158-160). But this is an echo of those savage and quite serious lines with which the scene opened: “If I can catch him once upon the hip, / I will feed fat the ancient grudge I bear him” (1.3.38-39). Salarino raises the question of what human flesh is good for yet again, and Shylock expands upon his earlier remark in quite another mode—“if it will feed nothing else” [I told the truth when I said that it was neither estimable nor profitable] “it will feed my revenge” (3.1.42-43). In support of this suggestion, Shakespeare provides us with an actual feast given by the bankrupt Bassanio—a feast which has little function in the play. Shylock had at first refused to attend and then, for some unknown reason, changed his mind. There is ambiguity in his announcement of what is to be eaten there:

I am not bid for love, they flatter me;
But yet I'll go in hate, to feed upon
The prodigal Christian.

(2.5.13-15)⁷

Shakespeare knew that mythic Jews pursued mythic Christians for tribal reasons; he knew when and why they did it. And if he was not willing to dramatize this explicitly on the level of plot and motive, he nonetheless allowed it an adequate range of suggestive meaning. Many commentators on this play have mentioned the “superstition” that Jews ate Christian flesh. Unlike many ancient relics, however, this was a belief of singular strength and persistence. In his notes to the ballad “Sir Hugh and the Jew's Daughter” Child collected a great many records of Jews accused of ritual murder:

Murders like that of Hugh of Lincoln have been imputed to the Jews for at least seven hundred and fifty years. … The process of these murders has often been described as a parody of the crucifixion of Jesus. The motive most commonly alleged, in addition to the expression of contempt for Christianity, has been the obtaining of blood for use in the Paschal rites,—a most unhappily devised slander, in stark contradiction with Jewish precept and practice.⁸

In contradiction perhaps, but Child cites instances from the literature of every European nation from the early Middle Ages to the nineteenth century: “It would be tedious and useless to attempt to make a collection of the great number of similar instances which have been mentioned by chroniclers and ecclesiastical writers; enough come readily to hand without much research.”

The persistence of these legends is understandable once we recognize their paradigmatic relationship to the crucifixion of Christ. Paschal Day is Good Friday, and as Jesus suffered on the cross, “one of the soldiers with a spear pierced his side and forthwith came there out blood and water.” Joseph of Arimathaea bore the body away, and this Joseph is intimately connected with the talismanic grail of Arthurian romance, which miraculously preserves the blood that flowed from the wound of the dying savior. The plot of Easter is a story of Christian salvation or of Jewish hatred and revenge, depending on whether it is set on Sunday or Friday. Saturday is Shylock's day. The black passion is repeated in history because it is present in the shape of the Christian year.⁹

Of all the Christians in the Merchant of Venice, Antonio is certainly the prime candidate for the annual Christ. Kindly, passive, melancholy, he acts only once in the play—he contracts with the Jew to give all he has to Bassanio; the money stands for his love, his friendship, and his life—and for the rest he suffers. After the contract scene, he is unbelievably passive and remains so even after his release. Christ was sacrificed as man and as animal; Antonio is also the Paschal lamb. He sees Shylock as one who pursues revenge as inexplicably as the wolf the lamb; and he offers himself to the knife as the “tainted wether of the flock, / Meetest for death” (4.1.114-15).

The Eumenides dramatizes the institution of a new justice in Athens. Apollo predicts the nature of this moment when he advises Orestes to

… Never fail until you come at last to Pallas' citadel. Kneel there, and clasp the ancient idol in your arms, and there we shall find those who will judge this case, and words to say that will have magic in their figures. Thus you will be rid of your afflictions, once for all.

(137)

The Atridae are, after all, kings, as well as the bloodiest family in Greek legend. The determination of guilt is a relatively simple matter; it is its termination that radically concerns the state. What is needed is magic, a magic that will make guilt less enduring than blood, and thus allow individuals to put their blood into the city but not the taint of their individual fragility. The magic needed is similar to that of so many of Shakespeare's comedies, magic which transforms a state of fragmented and disintegrative energy into a new social harmony. But the means of cleansing blood cannot be worked out of the images that define the older justice; the physical logic there is irrefutable.

The words which have magic in their figures are, very simply, affective language. Aeschylus and Shakespeare have identified justice with language itself, which is capable of separating object and sign; and the blood that cannot be washed away, the insult that cannot be borne in fact, can be transformed through the affective power of art. This is the mythic gift of Greece to mankind—of Orpheus who gentled the brutish natures of beasts and trees, and of Amphion who fashioned a city by charming the rocks into place through the power of his music.

Aeschylus has done something in his play which might appear to undermine its dramatic power and make it the melodrama on justice that the Merchant of Venice is so often felt to be. For he has made it clear that Orestes is already innocent when the trial takes place; he has absolved his guilt through expiation and sacrifice. By eliminating all question of guilt, he forces us to see that the object of justice is not the accuser or the accused but the health of the state. Justice is intimately connected with the angry desires of the Erinyes and Shylock, not with the crimes of Orestes and Antonio.

The words with magic in their figures are certainly not the words of Apollo who defends Orestes and gains him an acquittal by invoking the power of the father. He avoids the issue; he quibbles just as Portia does in her first two arguments against Shylock's claim.¹⁰ He argues that the true parent is he who mounts; the mother is a stranger who preserves the parent's seed. In proof of this he points to Athena herself—an offspring of the father alone.

Zeus has given the Athenians the Aereopagus; henceforth men and women will argue about crime and decide guilt and innocence by ballot. But this process of judgment is an expedient. Things must be done this way if the state is to survive. After the decision has been reached, however, the operation of justice begins: the accused will plead for mercy and it will be granted, the accuser will plead for satisfaction and it also will be granted.

Apollo outwits the Erinyes and gains a victory, but their outraged cry of retaliation against the state and its natural roots suggests how barren such a victory is:

Gods of the younger generation, you have ridden down the laws of the elder time, torn them out of my hands. I, disinherited, suffering, heavy with anger shall let loose on the land the vindictive poison dripping deadly out of my heart upon the ground; this from itself shall breed cancer, the leafless, the barren to strike, for the right, their low lands and drag its smear of mortal infection on the ground.

(163)

The Erinyes have threatened to curse Athens. For justice to be done their curse must be turned into a blessing, otherwise nothing but sterility and death has been effected by the mechanism of the law.¹¹ Justice will have nothing less as its object than the sanctification of crime itself. If Shylock is defeated by two quibbles (one of which names his act and defeats him as a Jew who is defined through dietary laws; the other of which defeats him as a capitalist, to whom the principle of weights and measures must be held sacred), justice must clear the very air of guilt by the magical act of renaming it.

The words with magic in their figures are spoken by Athena after Orestes is acquitted. She pleads with them—“But if you hold Persuasion has her sacred place / of worship, in the sweet beguilement of my voice, / then you might stay with us” (166). The Erinyes ultimately are renamed: they will no longer be the Furies, but the Eumenides, the Friendly Ones.

But the Erinyes are proof against persuasion. To Athena's plea they merely repeat their threat to Athens.¹² And then magic does occur in the play: the Erinyes are moved by words they have been hitherto unable to feel—they relent. Aeschylus offers no explanation of this conversion; it remains, as promised, a mystery.¹³ As “friendly ones,” they will occupy a place deep under the city, honored by the citizens as presiding deities, and the effect of their presence will be the opposite of that threatened by them:

Let there blow no wind that wrecks the trees.
I pronounce words of grace
Nor blaze of heat blind the blossoms of grown plants, nor
cross the circle of its right
place. Let no barren deadly sickness creep and kill.
Flocks fatten. Earth be kind
to them, with double fold of fruit
in time appointed for its yielding. Secret child
of earth, her hidden wealth, bestow
blessing and surprise of gods.

(168)

The Erinyes have not changed their natures; they have changed their names because they have changed their relationship to the state. Where once they were alien and excluded they are now integral, incorporated into the social life: “I establish in power / spirits who are large, difficult to soften. / To them is given the handling entire / of men's lives. That man / who has not felt the weight of their hands takes the strokes of life” (168). The social form of fury is that sense of fear which prevents the knife from falling too easily into its victim's heart.

The conversion of Shylock, so hastily dealt with in the fourth act as if the playwright were ashamed of such an easy solution, is usually understood as either a stock device for getting Shylock out of the play or as a mirror for the theme of Christian hypocrisy. I would insist that it is the center of the play, and a direct response to Portia's plea for mercy. How else can we understand the rapid and apparently incoherent sequence that includes Portia's plea, a triple defeat (when any one would have been adequate), and the destruction of the Jew? The “key question,” C. L. Barber writes, is “whether the baffling of Shylock is meaningful or simply melodramatic” (208).¹⁴

In the Merchant of Venice, Christ as mercy and grace has long sat beside the throne in heaven, and the mitigating principle of persuasion in human affairs has long been accepted. Yet Shylock, as one of the unconverted, stands outside this dispensation, testifying to its incompleteness. The justice of Christianity is in effect being defined for the first time—art, after all, is a recurrently definitive gesture, a perpetually renewed “in the beginning.”

We will not be convinced of one of the most important meanings of this play until it is articulated in production, and that is that Shylock possesses in the form of hatred an abundance of the emotional energy that an atrophied Venice desperately needs. Venice's relationship to the Jew, however, has been one of continual exclusion, and this is mirrored in the rejection of the energies of Morocco and Aragon at Belmont.

These considerations have the virtue of at least suggesting answers to two persistent problems in the trial scene. Portia did not invoke the law against aliens who seek to take the life of citizens until after Shylock was defeated. On the face of it this is absurd; without this law there can be no society, and yet Portia either deliberately withheld using it or was somehow unable to find it on the books. She could not use it until after Shylock's defeat, however, because it did not effectively exist in Venice until that society's will to live again began to assert itself—until the energy for it was available. Portia also plays a grotesque part toward Antonio and Bassanio, assuring them that there can be no death, and trifling with Bassanio's honest pledge to “lose all, ay sacrifice … all.” But this is the nether point of death and dying in the play. Portia does not plead so eloquently with the Jew for a particular act of kindness; she is pleading on behalf of her world for a vitality that it must have to survive. Mercy, in her famous speech, is not a spiritual force that touches the hearts of individuals; it is a rain that regenerates the earth itself.

Shylock, like the Erinyes, is beyond the power of persuasion. When he says, “There is no power in the tongue of man / To alter me” (4.1.237-38), he means quite literally what he says. That language is meaningful which has the power to hurt or physically alter. Gratiano abuses Shylock with the most angry comparisons he can find, and Shylock literally replies: “Till thou canst rail the seal from off my bond, / Thou but offend'st thy lungs to speak so loud” (4.1.139-40). Shylock never denies the existence of mercy; he is aware that it belongs to Christians, and he is, I believe, afraid of its potential strength. Portia says that the Jew must be merciful, and Shylock's reply—“on what compulsion must I? tell me that” (4.1.179)—is nervous and wary.

At the opening of act three, scene three, before the jailor has a chance to speak, Shylock barks at him, “tell me not of mercy.” He has apparently run the gamut of too many who have talked to him of this singular quantity. Antonio tries to speak to him twice, but Shylock cuts him off. Then Shylock tell us what mercy is, but he defines it in terms of the physical signs that mark one who has been “altered” by it: “I'll not be made a soft and dull-eyed fool, / To shake the head, relent, and sigh, and yield / To Christian intercessors” (3.3.14-16).

When Shylock is defeated, the Duke announces that he will now see the difference between the spirit of Christian and Jew, and Venice proceeds to dismember him financially. Antonio insists that the Jew convert, and Shylock murmurs that he is content to do so. The resolution is hasty, and yet we can imagine that Shylock has suddenly become a pale shadow of himself, the words “I am content” breathed so listlessly that they can hardly be heard. That Shylock who burst with the energy of rage and savage delight has been drained in his defeat. He himself identifies the forfeits taken with his life.

The conversion scene is hasty, a vanishing, because the real conversion in the play has already taken place. Jessica is the friendly one to Shylock's fury, and the conversion scene is also that point in the play where Jessica receives her inheritance.

We need not believe with Lorenzo that Jessica is wise, fair, and true, but may we not accept the opinion of almost every Christian that she is gentile? “Gentle” is the Christian word in the play, and it stands possessed of all the rich ambiguity the word contains.¹⁵ It is continually applied to Jessica, and it is announced by Antonio to be the special quality of conversion: “Hie thee, gentle Jew. / The Hebrew will turn Christian, he grows kind” (1.3.170-71). And the Duke, like Portia, pleads for Venice when he concludes his appeal by saying, “We all expect a gentle answer, Jew” (4.1.34).

Jessica's action in the play is to bring to Christian society all the treasures of the Jew. If that is merely wealth and jewels, that is because those are the only forms a blessing can take at that time. But, like all the other properties and qualities in the play, they will soon be converted into something far more rich and fair.

Shylock vanishes from the play after his defeat, and he is replaced by Jessica, who is now installed at Belmont in Portia's place. The entire universe is singing, calling for human music as the only fit response. Lorenzo speaks of the intimate relationship between music and conversion, a truth which poets understand:

… 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 not music in himself,
Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds,
Is fit for treason, strategems, and spoils;
The motions of his spirit are dull as night,
And his affections are as dark as Erebus.

(5.1.78-87)

Earlier in the play, Shylock had shut his ears and those of his house against the power of music. But now, the universe itself is renewed by his conversion.

The similarity between these two fictions—one from an early moment in the great age of Greek tragedy, the other from the high Christian Renaissance—need testify to nothing more specific in culture than a constant pressure to exclude the fearsome other—and then express the price of that exclusion in painful or celebratory ways. What is excluded in Athens is the female, in London the racial other, the Jew: this has too often been the face of patriarchal justice in history. C. L. Barber's “key question,” “whether the baffling of Shylock is meaningful or simply melodramatic,” may not really express an opposition, for melodrama is simply meaningful when it sets up the other as a compendium of ugly qualities and repulsive desires, makes an unbreakable case for the justice of their/his case, and then slowly (and sweetly) reverses the power balance crushing the opponent in the grip, if not of social justice, then at least in the grip of that other justice, poetic justice, that mediates more intimately to our imaginary fears and desires.

Justice and the law is one pertinent fiction, marriage is another, and the shape of marriage in Shakespeare testifies in a cunning way to the centrality of this paradigm. That outsider who shows up one day to claim the daughter in marriage grows more intolerably other throughout his career: in A Midsummer Night's Dream, he is simply an ordinary young Athenian but one whom the father, for no given reason, has forbidden. In The Merchant of Venice, he is a gentile, in Othello, he is a black African, and in the Tempest he is a depraved monster. Against his will, Prospero does what he must and puts an ordinary young Neapolitan in the place of that depraved monster, sets him to doing the monster's tasks, and slowly comes to accept the fact that the intruding other that stands between him and his sense of the fitness of things is at least a human being.

Notes

1. Aeschylus, “The Eumenides,” in The Complete Greek Tragedies, ed. David Grene and Richmond Lattimore (The U of Chicago P, 1969) 136. Further page number citations will be made following each quotation.

2. John Herington, Aeschylus (New Haven: Yale UP, 1986) 136-37; and Hesiod, Theogony, ed. Apostolos N. Athanassakis (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1983) 54.

3. James C. Hogan, A Commentary on The Complete Greek Tragedies (U of Chicago P, 1984) 147.

4. See C. L. Barber, “The Merchants and the Jew of Venice: Wealth's Communion and an Intruder,” in Modern Shakespearean Criticism, ed. Alvin B. Kernan (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1970) 219-20; and Ludwig Kahn, “The Changing Image of the Jew,” in Identity and Ethos, ed. Mark H. Gelber (New York: Peter Lang, 1986) 246.

5. William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, ed. M. M. Mahood (Cambridge U, 1987).

6. Marc Shell, “The Wether and the Ewe: Verbal Usury in The Merchant of Venice,” The Kenyon Review, N.S. 1 (1979): 76.

7. David Lucking adds one more such reference: “to the merchant himself, who appears on the scene while the Jew is discussing him with Bassanio, he remarks with a certain sly humor that ‘your worship was the last man in our mouths’ (I.iii.55)”; “The Merchant of Venice,” The University of Toronto Quarterly 58 (1989): 357. See also Dennis R. Klinck, “Shylock and ‘Neschech,’” ELN 17 (1979); and Leslie Fiedler, “‘These Be the Christian Husbands,’” in The Merchant of Venice, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1986) 73.

   For Theodor Reik, it is precisely the Jews' traditional excessive fear of blood that leads to the allegations of cannibalism; The Unknown Murderer (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1945) 212-13.

8. The English And Scottish Popular Ballads, ed. Francis James Child (New York: Dover Publications, 1965) 3: 240.

9. David Bevington, “Introduction,” The Merchant of Venice (New York, Bantam Books, 1980) xxv.

10. “Portia resorts to a legalism more literal-minded than Shylock's”; Harry Levin, “A Garden in Belmont,” in Shakespeare and Dramatic Tradition, ed. W. R. Elton and William B. Long (Newark, U of Delaware P, 1989) 16.

11. Hogan 172.

12. Walter Otto, The Homeric Gods (Boston: Beacon P, 1954) 20: the Erinyes “know only deeds, and if the fact of commission is established, words are useless”; “according to the law of blood the answer can only be No, and the Erinyes must maintain the law.”

13. Herington 141 and 152.

14. The two quibbles can also to be found in Shakespeare's source, Ser Giovanni's Il Pecorone; see Mahood 3 and Shell.

15. Levin 20.