The English Renaissance in Context: The Merchant of Venice

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The Merchant of Venice

This introduction to the play will attempt to outline some of the anti-Semitic sources and contexts for Shakespeare's play, describe the play's understanding of the distinction between Christian merchant and Jewish usurer, and finally turn to the Venetian setting of the play to think through how Shakespeare might be defining both Englishness and Jewishness in a Venetian context.

Introduction

In one of the most memorable moments in Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice, Shylock, the Jewish villain of the play, wanders the streets of Venice crying "My daughter! O my ducats! O my daughter/...my ducats, and my daughter!" (2.3.15-17). Shylock's legendary greed takes center stage in this infamous scene as "all the boys of Venice follow him,/ Crying his stones, his daughter, and his ducats" (2.3.23-24). The funny thing about this moment, however, is that it never actually happens onstage. Like most anti-Semitic stories, this is a tale told second-hand. We hear the voice of Shylock ventriloquized by Salerio and Solanio as they wander the streets of Venice, mocking the man they label the "dog Jew."

This second-hand story is indicative of the problems a reader faces when attempting to decide how to read Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice. Does

Shakespeare share in the blatant anti-Semitism of Christian characters like Salerio and Solanio, or is he dramatizing that anti-Semitism in order to hold it up to ironic scrutiny? Is it possible that he does both? How do we account for the fact that Shylock, perhaps the most fully realized character in the play, is both the villain of the drama and, at times, its most sympathetic character?

Shakespeare's England was an intensely anti-Semitic society which prided itself on having exiled the Jews in 1290. Although scholars now believe that a few Jewish communities persevered in the face of ethnic hatred and religious bigotry, the members of such communities would have had to profess the state religion and conceal any attempt to preserve their heritage. Needless to say, there was not a strong Jewish presence in Elizabethan England. Nevertheless, as James Shapiro notes, early modern

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England was "a society surprisingly preoccupied with Jewish questions." Shapiro notes that “[s]ome of the more frequently addressed questions include: In what ways were Jews racially and physically different? Did those who converted lose all trace of their Jewishness? Was it true that Jews habitually took the knife to Christians, circumcising and murdering their victims? Should Jews be formally readmitted into an England that had long ago banished them?, or were Englishness and Jewishness mutually exclusive identities”?

Scholars have argued that this preoccupation with "Jewishness" demonstrates a concern with defining "Englishness." In other words, English Christians used Jews as a foil against which they defined themselves. Despite its Venetian setting, Shakespeare's play attempts to work out notions of Englishness by defining the Christian, and in particular the Christian merchant, over and against his Jewish counterpart. At the same time, Shakespeare does not shy away from depicting the hypocritical and unchristian nature of Christian anti-Semitism.

Anti-Semitism in Shakespeare's World

Anti-Semitism has a long and horrific history. Traditionally, Christians blamed Jews for the crime of murdering Christ despite the fact that it was a provincial magistrate of the Roman Empire who ordered the crucifixion of the historical Jesus. In Shakespeare's day, the poet John Donne voices this accusation in one of his "Holy Sonnets":

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Spit in my face you Jews, and pierce my side, Buffet, and scoff, scourge, and crucify me, For I have sinned, and sinned, and only he, Who could do no iniquity, hath died: But by my death cannot be satisfied My sins, which pass the Jews' impiety: They killed once an inglorious man, but I Crucify him daily, being now glorified. Oh let me then, his strange love still admire: Kings pardon, but he bore our punishment. And Jacob came clothed in vile harsh attire But to supplant, and with gainful intent: God clothed himself in vile man's flesh, that so He might be weak enough to suffer woe.

Here, Donne aligns himself with the crucified Jesus in order to express his desire for punishment and redemption, but also aligns himself with Christ's killers in his depiction of himself as a sinner. Donne defines Jewish people as the murderers of Christ, and, therefore, as the personification of sin. Interestingly, in Shakespeare's play it is the supposedly villainous Jew who is spit upon by the ostensible hero of the play, Antonio. As Shylock reports,

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Signior Antonio, many a time and oft In the Rialto you have rated me About my moneys and my usances: ........................... You call me misbeliever, cut-throat dog, And spit upon my Jewish gaberdine, .................................. Well then, it now appears you need my help: Go to, then; you come to me, and you say 'Shylock, we would have moneys:' you say so; You, that did void your rheum upon my beard And foot me as you spurn a stranger cur Over your threshold: moneys is your suit What should I say to you? Should I not say 'Hath a dog money? is it possible A cur can lend three thousand ducats?' Or Shall I bend low and in a bondman's key, With bated breath and whispering humbleness, Say this; 'Fair sir, you spit on me on Wednesday last; You spurn'd me such a day; another time You call'd me dog; and for these courtesies I'll lend you thus much moneys'?

To which Antonio responds I am as like to call thee so again, To spit on thee again, to spurn thee too. (1.3.106-131)

In The Merchant of Venice Shakespeare uses the traditional caricature of the bloodthirsty Jew in his depiction of the villain Shylock, but also gives that villain a sympathetically human voice and depicts him suffering at the hands of so-called Christians.

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Is Shakespeare's depiction of Shylock anti-Semitic or is it a critique of his society's anti-Semitism? Consider Shylock's speech that begins "Hath not a Jew eyes?". Consider Portia's "The quality of mercy is not strain'd" speech .

? What is Shylock's ultimate fate in the play?

? How does the play end and what part does Shylock play in this ending?

? Why do you think Shakespeare does not bring Shylock on stage in Act V?

? What role does Shylock's daughter Jessica play in the "happy" ending of The Merchant of Venice?

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Some of the sources of the anti-Semitism of Shakespeare's society can be found in a series of grotesque and unfounded stories that had been circulating throughout Europe since at least the twelfth century. The most popular and influential of these tales alleged falsely that Jewish communities had engaged in the ritual killing of Christian children. In England, for instance, the story that Jews had tortured and murdered nine-year-old Hugh of Lincoln spread like wildfire. One of Chaucer's enormously popular and influential Canterbury Tales, "The Prioress' Tale," is a variation on the Hugh of Lincoln story, depicting the ritual murder of "a litel clergeoun," or schoolboy, by a Jewish community. The circulation of such false stories led to the very real persecution and murder of Jewish people by Christians.

Shakespeare uses one of these grotesque anti-Semitic tales in the main plot of The Merchant of Venice. As Geoffrey Bullough notes, “[t]he tale of a wicked merchant who made a bond with a trusting debtor by which the latter must lose part of his body if he could not repay on the proper day has many variations in the later Middle Ages”. (447)

Critics have cited a number of possible antecedents to Shakespeare's plot. The Furness Collection holds one of these possible sources for Shakespeare's play: the 1596 English translation of Alexandre Le Sylvain's The Orator, a collection of rhetorical and oratorical set pieces designed to teach the reader "Rhetoricke to inforce a good cause, and art to impugn an ill." Sylvain's collection contains a certain oration "Of a Jew, who would for his debt have a pound of the flesh of a Christian" which may have served as the model for the legal arguments made in Shakespeare's courtroom scene.

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Read through the rhetorical exercise from The Orator in conjunction with the courtroom scene in The Merchant of Venice.

? What does The Orator tell you about the way Christians viewed Jewish people?

? How does Shakespeare's scene relate to The Orator?

? What does he take from it? What does he change?

? Why might he have borrowed certain elements from Sylvain's exercise and not others?

In addition to drawing on a long history of anti-Semitic tales, Shakespeare may have been motivated to write The Merchant of Venice both by a recent event and by a hugely popular play by a rival English playwright. In 1594 Roderigo Lopez, a Portugese Jew who converted to Christianity, was executed for high treason. Lopez had been the physician both to the Earl of Leicester and to Queen Elizabeth herself. For some reason that remains obscure to historians, Lopez ran afoul of the Earl of Essex, who claimed that the doctor was a traitor who had attempted to poison Elizabeth. Christopher Marlowe's The Jew of Malta, first performed around 1589, was resurrected in the wake of the Lopez trial and was performed fifteen times in 1594. Marlowe's depiction of the Jewish villain Barabas almost certainly influenced Shakespeare's portrayal of Shylock.

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Read the following speech from The Jew of Malta and compare and contrast Marlowe's depiction of Barabas with Shakespeare's depiction of Shylock:

BARABAS As for my selfe, I walke abroad a nights And kill sicke people groaning under walls: Sometimes I goe about and poyson wells; And now and then, to cherish Christian theeves, I am content to lose some of my Crownes; That I may, walking in my Gallery, See 'em goe pinion'd along by my dove. Being young I studied Physicke, and began To practice first upon the Italian; There I enrich'd the Priests with burials, And alwayes kept the Sexton's armes in ure With digging graves and ringing dead mens keels: And after that I was an Engineere, And in the warres 'twixt France and Germanie, Under presence of helping Charles the fifth, Slew friend and enemy with my stratagems. Then after that was I an Usurer, And with extorting, cozening, forfeiting, And tricks belonging unto Brokery, I fill'd the Jailes with Bankrouts in a yeare, And with young Orphans planted Hospitals, And every Moone made some or other mad, And now and then one hang himselfe for griefe, Pinning upon his breast a long great Scrowle How I with interest tormented him. But marke how I am blest for plaguing them, I have as much coyne as will buy the Towne. (2.3.179-206)

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Of Usurers and Merchants

In the climactic trial scene of The Merchant of Venice, Portia, disguised as the lawyer Balthazar, enters the courtroom and asks "Which is the merchant here and which the Jew?" (4.1.170). Looked at in a certain light, the entire play can be read as an attempt to answer this question, can be read as an attempt to work through the ways in which a Christian merchant can differentiate himself from his Jewish counterpart.

Of course, in the courtroom scene, the emphasis is placed on the opposition between the New Testament (and therefore Christian) virtue of mercy and the Old Testament (and therefore Jewish) virtue of justice. Christians traditionally defined themselves against Jews by suggesting that they were merciful and read the law according to its spirit whereas Jews were cruelly and merely just, following the dead letter of the law.

Read through Portia's "The quality of mercy is not strain'd" speech, and think about Shylock's punishment in relation to notions of justice and mercy.

? Is the quality of mercy strained in Venice? Why or why not?

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Read through Shylock's "Hath not a Jew eyes?" speech.

? Does Shylock have reason to want justice, to want vengeance?

? From whom does he learn about justice and vengeance?

Only at the end of the play does the opposition between Christian and Jew become primarily an opposition between mercy and justice. Earlier in the play, Antonio is at great pains to distinguish himself from Shylock and he does so by insisting on a distinction in their business practices. Looking at a curious bit of banter between Antonio and Shylock about the proper way to interpret a particular Biblical passage may help us understand the nature of the distinction Antonio wants to make:

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

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ANTONIO: This was a venture, sir, that Jacob served for; A thing not in his power to bring to pass, But sway'd and fashion'd by the hand of heaven. Was this inserted to make interest good? Or is your gold and silver ewes and rams? SHYLOCK: I cannot tell; I make it breed as fast. (1.2.68-96)

In this perplexing exchange Shylock recounts the Jacob and Laban story from Genesis as the tale of a man profiting through his thrift and ingenuity. The story, in which Jacob literally breeds his capital in such a way that he gains at the expense of Laban, works to justify the practice of usury through scriptural precedent. Both Jacob and Shylock profit by making their capital breed--Jacob literally, Shylock metaphorically. The notion that usury, or the practice of lending money with an interest charged for its use, involved the breeding of money was a commonplace in the period. Indeed, this was one of the main arguments against usury at the time. Following Aristotle, many Renaissance thinkers argued against lending money at interest by suggesting that the breeding of moneys was unnatural. Shylock's assertion that he makes his gold and silver "breed as fast" as Jacob's ewes and rams would have fallen on unsympathetic ears since, as Bacon says in his essay "Of Usury," "it is against Nature, for money to beget money."

Antonio immediately rejects Shylock's reading of the Biblical passage by suggesting that Laban's activity is not an example of human ingenuity but "a venture.../ A thing not in his power to bring to pass/ But sway'd and fashion'd by the hand of heaven." For Antonio, the essential difference between the Christian merchant and the Jewish usurer is that the merchant risks his capital, and therefore puts his faith in heaven, while the usurer takes no risk and is assured that he will profit from the debtor. Here, Antonio is rehearsing another of the standard anti-usury arguments found in numerous pamphlets and treatises in sixteenth-century England.

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Henry Smith's The Examination of Usury. Miles Mosse's Arraignment and Conviction of Usury

In Shakespeare's time usury was almost universally denounced as an anti-Christian and rapacious activity. These denunciations became more frequent and vehement in the latter half of the sixteenth century as England moved from an agrarian to a market economy. As Walter Cohen argues,

behind the fear and loathing of usury in Shakespeare's England lay the transition to capitalism: the rise of banking; the increasing need for credit in industrial enterprises; and the growing threat of indebtedness facing both aristocratic landlords and small independent producers. (73)

One of the most prevalent arguments against usury insisted that Christian charity presupposed that one would give freely of oneself without expecting any payment in return. As Henry Smith suggests in his treatise The Examination of Usury (1591),

[usury] is against the Law of Charity, because Charity biddeth us to give every Man his own, and to require no more then our own : but Usury requireth more then our own, and gives not to other their own. Charity rejoyceth to communicate her Goods to other, and Usury rejoyceth to gather other Mens Goods to her self. (6-7)

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Another common argument against usury is the argument implicitly made by Antonio: the Christian merchant will risk all in a venture while the usurer is guaranteed an illicit gain. In his Arraignment and Conviction of Usury, Miles Mosse incorporates this argument into his definition of the usurer; according to Mosse,

the usurer is he "that so lendeth any thing...and dooth couenant...to receiue more then his owne againe...and dooth not aduenture the estate and returne of that which hee lendeth (57).

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Venice Englished

Why is The Merchant of Venice set in Venice? What did "Venice" mean to an English audience in Shakespeare's day? David McPherson has argued that

"in the time of Shakespeare...if one used only one adjective to describe Venice, it was almost always 'the Rich'" (28).

And if Venice was defined by its wealth, Venetian wealth, as Shakespeare's play makes clear, is wealth of a particular sort. In the opening lines of the play, Salerio, diagnosing Antonio's melancholy, suggests that

Your mind is tossing on the ocean, There where your argosies with portly sail Like signiors and rich burghers on the flood, Or as it were the pageants of the sea. Do overpeer the petty traffickers That cur'sy to them, do them reverence, As they fly by them with their woven wings

Solanio adds ...had I such venture forth, The better part of my affections would Be with my hopes abroad. I should be still Plucking the grass to know where sits the wind. Piring in maps for ports and piers and roads; And every object that might make me fear Misfortune to my ventures, out of doubt Would make me sad. (1.1.8-22)

From the beginning of the play then, the merchant venture takes center stage of Shakespeare's Venetian play as both a source

of incredible riches and a source of uncertainty and anxiety. Peter Parolin has argued that

[i]n these early lines, The Merchant of Venice sets up two major components of the English understanding of Venice: that it was a vastly wealthy city; and that its wealth was connected with a capitalist rather than a land-based economy. (91)

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Walter Cohen adds that

"to the English, and particularly to Londoners, Venice represented a more advanced stage of the commercial development they themselves were experiencing" (75).

One could argue that the anxiety surrounding merchant ventures expressed in the opening lines of The Merchant of Venice and tied to the changing fates of Antonio's ships throughout the play expresses an English anxiety about the commercial development of their own country.

Of course, Venice is not the only setting of Shakespeare's play; the other is Belmont. A utopian space of aristocratic wealth and virtue, Belmont is everything that Venice is not. If urban and commercial Venice is a version of late sixteenth-century London, pastoral and genteel Belmont is a version of the English country estate. If capitalist Venice points to an anxious future for England, feudal Belmont points to an idyllic past.

Reread the opening lines of Act 1 Scene 1 and Act 1 Scene 2.

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? Why is Antonio melancholy?

? Why is Portia "a-weary of this great world"?

? What do their emotional states have to do with the respective economic systems of Venice and Belmont?

? Why do you think that Shakespeare divides his play between Venice and Belmont?

? If these places are possible versions of England, which do you suppose Shakepeare would prefer for his country?

? Is all well in Belmont at the end of the play?

? Do Jessica and Antonio seem to fit in the harmonious setting? Why or why not?

Like The Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare's Othello, the Moor of Venice presents Venice in juxtaposition with another setting. The play begins in Venice, but the majority of the action takes place on Cyprus, a "warlike isle" (2.3.57). Unlike The Merchant of Venice, in Othello Venice is presented as the civilized antithesis of all that is unruly and barbaric. When Brabantio is jolted awake by Roderigo and Iago, he exclaims:

"What tell'st thou me of robbing? This is Venice; My house is not a grange" (1.1.104-6).

Incredulous, Brabantio suggests that Venice is a place where such events simply do not happen.

If Venice was known for its wealth, it was also known for its effective government. The most successful and long-standing of the republics of the time, Venice was, despite its infamous liberality, a model of efficient and orderly rule; its judicial system in particular was renowned throughout Europe. In his preface to Commonwealth and Government of Venice (1559), Lewis Lewkenor claims that in Venice "justice is pure and uncorrupted” (A2v). Indeed, he asserts that Venetian justice was so respected around Europe that the Senate became a sort of international tribunal.

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And as The Merchant of Venice makes clear, the renowned justice system of Venice was the backbone of the economic life of the city. Indeed, the importance of Venetian justice to the Venetian economics lies at the heart of the "pound of flesh" plot. As Antonio says, his case seems hopeless since

For his part, Shylock suggests that there will be dire consequences for Venice if his legal claim to Antonio's flesh is denied:

Read the first act of Shakespeare's Othello and think about the depiction of Venice in both plays.

? Why do you think that Shakespeare chose to set both The Merchant of Venice and Othello in Venice?

? What is the relationship of the city to the plays' two "outsiders": Shylock and Othello?

In both Merchant and Othello Venice seems to be contrasted with other locations for specific reasons.

? What sort of picture of Venice emerges if one triangulates from hyper-civilized Belmont and barbaric Cyprus?

Read the preface to Lewis Lewkenor's Commonwealth and Government of Venice (1559) and think about the relationship between Venetian justice and Venetian economics in The Merchant of Venice.

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List of Works Cited

Bullough, Geoffrey. Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare. New York: Columbia University Press, 1957.

Cohen, Walter. "The Merchant of Venice and the Possibilities of Historical Criticism." Materialist Shakespeare: A History. Ed. Ivo Kamps. New York: Verso, 1995.

Parolin, Peter. "Not So Fitte a Place": English Identity and Italian Difference in Early Modern England. Dissertation: University of Pennsylvania, 1997.

Shapiro, James. Shakespeare and the Jews. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996.