Shylock,Bassanio,and the Jacob Narrative

Abstract

Shakespeare’s structural allusions to the Jacob narrative in The Merchant of Venice subvert traditional readings of the play, which posit Jew against Christian, law against charity, or wealth against love, problematizing these dichotomies until they ultimately collapse. Distinctions between Jew and Christian become ideologically irrelevant; instead, the willingness to negotiate, barter, and settle for imperfect love holds tragedy at bay. In conflating religious identity, and reversing the conventions that posit religious identity as central to state politics, the play suggests that political accommodation rooted in pragmatism offers an uneasy peace as an alternative to a violent and tragic end.

Keywords

The Merchant of Venice Old Testament Puritan Jew Shylock Jacob

The Merchant of Venice has long-troubled modern critics. The role of money, in particular, is often assumed to act in opposition to romantic love or other positive attributes, emphasizing a distinction between the material and spiritual world. In some cases, critics have assumed a Jewish worldview to be inherently more material, against a Christian, and thus inherently spiritual, posture. David Bevington, for instance, argues that “a Christian ethic of generosity, love, and risk-taking friendship is set in pointed contrast with a non-Christian point of view, as grudging, resentful, and self-calculating.”¹ According to Jane Blanchard, “Shylock, as Shakespeare’s Jew, is uncomfortable with a court or a culture that prefers love to law, mercy to method, and effort to effect.”² Ruth Levitsky sees a similar dichotomy, in which Shylock’s use of the Jacob-Laban story indicates his “failure to comprehend the spirit of Christianity.”³ And Ross G. Arthur has suggested that when Bassanio gives away Portia’s ring to Antonio, the scene functions as “an indication from the author to the audience that love and gratitude, as concerns of the spirit, are more important than the adherence to the letter of any contract.”⁴

The presumed opposition of wealth and romance in particular has merited attention by several critics. Robin Russin finds that the play examines the values of romantic love against wealth, arguing that the play “is less about the pursuit of love than about the pursuit, possession, and power of money.”⁵ Anthony Julius has critiqued the play’s apparent position that the love of family cannot be reconciled to the love of money, for “[t]o the extent that Shylock is capable of love, it is only the love of things, that most degraded of attachments; … The love for his daughter is jumbled in his mind with this love of money; the love for his wife is made deliberately ridiculous by its material comparator, a ‘wilderness of monkeys.’”⁶ And Valerie Schutte focuses specifically on the dichotomy between Portia’s inherited wealth and her person, arguing that in the casket scene, Portia “reminds him that according to the logic of common practice in English inheritance laws, Bassanio had no right to her silver and gold but only to her lead, her physical body, and her love.”⁷

Critical attention to the Jacob-Laban story recounted by Shylock has often led to an increased interest in usury, usually presumed to be morally suspect. Lars Engle⁸ argues that the episode functions as a deliberately “incomplete retelling” intended to “justify usury”.⁸ Valerie Forman examines usury in light of late sixteenth-century economic theories of loss and profit.⁹ Natasha Korda looks at female moneylenders and the gendered nature of debates about moneylending relating to Portia.¹⁰ Joan Ozark Holmer has noted the influence of Miles Mosse and Christian scholars’ debates for or against usury.¹¹ And Marc Shell expands the notion of usury to include “verbal usury,” “the generation of an illegal—the church fathers would say unnatural—supplement of verbal meaning by use of methods such as punning and flattery.”¹²

Interest in money and wealth has also led critics to examine the financial realities in the play related to emerging mercantile economies. Mark Netzloff focuses on Gobbo as an important economic indicator who becomes a locus for transactional exchanges.¹³ Ian MacInnes argues that the play explores the changes in financial risk created by the new maritime insurance industry, which engaged in “the buying and selling of risk itself.”¹⁴ And Jill Philips Ingram examines the relationship between self-interest and depictions of credit relationships, arguing that the play is concerned with “the individual’s place in the larger market economy.”¹⁵

Unhae Langis, on the other hand, argues that since usury was legal and there was no interest charged to Antonio for his loan, usury as a concept is “the red herring” in the play. The play, she writes, rescues the concepts of use and usury “from a false dichotomy that ignores, for instance, the biblical tradition of the Word turned flesh.” Langis claims that Shakespeare’s play conflates “moral and mercantile values,” “[a]gainst the traditional dichotomy of spirit and matter, morality and money, communion and commodification.”¹⁶ Huey-Ling Lee likewise finds a conflation of commerce and comradeship, arguing that money works “in tandem with its use as a commercial currency to deal with the changing dynamics of both inter-group as well as intra-group relations.”¹⁷ Langis’s and Lee’s analyses reflect the critical moves made of late to challenge the dichotomies of money and love, arguing for a symbiotic relationship between the two. Stephanie Chamberlain, for instance, finds a direct and complementary relationship between the risks of early modern capital investment and attendant emotional connections, such as romantic love.¹⁸ Likewise, William O. Scott has noted metaphorical and literal conflation of financial contracts and marriages during the period, which we find reflected in the play.¹⁹

This article will argue that the play’s structural, linguistic, and symbolic reliance upon the larger Jacob narrative disrupts traditional formulas of the period, insisted upon in public discourse, that presumed comedic contrasts between true and false friendship, mercy and justice, body and spirit, or gifts and loans. First, the Genesis story of Jacob embedded throughout the play challenges the conventional separations between spiritual and material riches, deflating sixteenth-century Christian doctrine’s insistence upon the superior value of the first and empty vanity of the second. Instead, both spiritual and material treasures become identical signifiers of divine and human love. Thus the play’s affirmative association of love with wealth, and material inheritance with spiritual blessings, redirects our attention away from Shylock’s wealth and business interests to the larger dynamics of possession and dispossession.

Second, the play focuses our attention on the Jacob narrative to reveal important cultural intersections. As a Jew, Shylock’s religious and cultural identity is rooted in a metaphysical order that foregrounds the lineage of Jacob as central evidence of God’s favor and divine plan. As Genesis makes clear, the twin sons Jacob and Esau represent two nations, and their destinies are ordained even within the womb: “And the Lorde sayd to her, Two nations are in thy wombe, and two maner of people shalbe diuided out of thy bowels, and the one people shall be mightier then the other, and the elder shall serue the yonger.”²⁰ Jacob’s name, which means “he supplants” or “he takes by the heel,” confirms his status as the divinely favored son who will rule over his slightly older brother. And God’s favor is extended to him before he is born—before, that is, he can earn God’s favor through any specific deeds or accomplishments. English religious and political identity likewise foregrounds the Christian, rather than Jewish, inheritance of God’s favor as central points of tension during periods of cultural instability, a supposition which the play carefully subverts.

Finally, John Klause has argued that Shakespeare “made a special effort to include doctrinal passion (distinct from but not unrelated to racial prejudice) as a significant part of the energy that gave his characters life.”²¹ Furthermore, “the enmity between Christian and Jew can serve as a figure for the conflicted state of a divided Christendom—a problem more broadly and immediately critical to Elizabethans than was their ‘Jewish Question.’”²² Nicole Coonradt agrees, arguing that the play is not “so much about the Jewish Question, but the Christian one as found in the Catholic–Protestant crisis, as crisis it undoubtedly was.”²³ I will argue, however, that the most divisive religious passions we find in the play foreground the tensions between conformist and non-conformist Christians in early modern England. The play suggests that the cultural anxieties of living in such a precarious, fickle, and mercurial world can best be met, not with principled dogma, but with qualified renegotiation and comedic acceptance. Two nations create two potential futures, and the play leads us through a negotiation between the two.

Early in the play, Shylock reminds Antonio of the methods by which the patriarch Jacob, the most notable trickster-hero of Genesis, obtained flocks of sheep and goats from his uncle Laban’s herds. The Jacob narrative focuses primarily on Jacob’s acquisition of first his father’s and then his mother’s family inheritances, not through conventional means, but by virtue of his calculated craftiness. The presence of such a recognizable inheritance motif throughout the play calls our attention to the processes through which Jacob accomplishes his destiny, which we find repeated in Bassanio.

John Scott Colley has noted that the play “is replete with references to the Jacob and Esau story” as the “symbolic fraternal struggle between Jacob and Esau, the younger and elder, the new and the old, is sustained through The Merchant of Venice.”²⁴ Colley argues, therefore, that “Shakespeare has his clown act out a foolish and inverted pattern of the more serious and central tensions of the play,” which Jessica duplicates.²⁵ Alternatively, Michael Bristol and Sara Coodin argue that it is Shylock who mirrors the Jacob narrative, viewing himself as the true heir to his forefather’s fortunes and destiny: “If Shylock sees himself as Jacob’s descendent, then the wealth he possesses is generational, dynastic wealth—wealth that signals his place within that succession and his membership in the nation established by his forebears.” Moreover, “[b]y citing biblical precedent in the way that he does and casting himself as a character in a pre-Christian biblical narrative, Shylock suggests that, for him, the loan constitutes a re-enactment of an ancient biblical story.”²⁶ Certainly, Shylock views himself in these terms, and the play is indeed engaging ideas of generational, dynastic wealth made possible by divine favor. However, the tragic reality for Shylock is that, within the context of the play, he is proven to more closely resemble Esau than Jacob—the elder dispossessed by the younger.

Somewhat surprisingly however, despite the title of the play, it is actually Bassanio whose actions precipitate the plot and the complications which ensue. Specifically, Bassanio re-enacts the Jacob narrative by acquiring the love and wealth of those closest to him, first in the male-centered world of Antonio and then in the female-centered world of Portia, with that wealth explicitly linked to family lineage and inheritance. In the biblical story, Jacob consistently repeats a pattern of acquiring the dual inheritances of others: the official patriarchal blessing and the material wealth that signifies and literalizes it. The Merchant of Venice repeats and reconstructs the complementary relationship between love (blessing) and money (inherited wealth or property) in the Jacob cycle.

The Jacob Narrative as Biblical Intertext

In Genesis, it is not enough for Jacob to usurp the inheritance rights of his brother Esau, the firstborn of the twin brothers. Through first manipulation and then overt deception, Jacob craftily procures the wealth of men and then proceeds to similarly acquire the wealth, through inheritance, of his wives—as Bassanio will later do. Jacob establishes himself as the inheritor of his father’s wealth by first persuading his brother Esau to trade his birthright for a bowl of pottage in a moment of hunger. But as the narrative pattern of Genesis repeatedly confirms, prosperity can only be truly secured if one is properly blessed, that is, marked out as chosen by God (or the father) to receive his special care and attention. The blessing that confers the mark of love is first conferred on Abraham and passed along to Isaac, and is intended by Isaac for the eldest son Esau.²⁷ So Jacob, following his mother’s advice, disguises himself as his brother in order to secure his father’s formal blessing which cannot be rescinded. The blind Isaac, eager to consume the meat provided (as he believes) by his firstborn son, inadvertently bestows the blessing upon his second son, thereby disinheriting Esau for the second time.

Fearing Esau’s wrath, Jacob flees to his mother’s family and her brother Laban in the east. Once established in Laban’s household, Jacob begins the business of acquiring the love and wealth of his maternal family. The blessing, the mark of love, appears in the form of Rachel, whom Jacob loves and who will later give birth to Joseph and Benjamin. Joseph the elder brother will become the savior of Egypt and his family as well as a wealthy government official; Benjamin the younger brother will receive his father’s special love as the (supposed) only remaining child of his beloved Rachel. Benjamin will consequently become the spiritual recipient of the family blessing as the tribe from which the first king of Israel eventually emerges. Unlike Jacob’s earlier experiences with his father and brother, here in his mother’s homeland he must labor for his acquisitions; however, manipulation and deception again play important roles. Jacob labors seven years for Rachel, but at the wedding feast is served his own turn, for in the darkness Laban gives him Leah instead of Rachel.²⁸ The deceit costs Jacob another seven years of labor. While he labors for his wives, however, Jacob simultaneously builds his own wealth from the accrued interest of his uncle’s herds. Here, he uses a trick to manipulate the gestation of his uncle’s flocks, and thus usurps the inheritance rights of his brothers-in-law. He tells Laban he will separate all the sheep and goats with spots and keep them as his wages,²⁹ thus relying upon Laban’s capital to build his personal wealth.

Shakespeare has taken careful note of Jacob’s shrewdness. Shylock explains, in his conversation with Antonio, how Jacob wisely bred his animals to increase their strength and numbers, manipulating their sight during conception which caused the offspring to have multicolored fleece. He finishes approvingly with “This was a way to thrive; and he was blest; And thrift is a blessing, if men steal it not.”³⁰ But Antonio dismisses the agency of Jacob: “This was a venture, sir, that Jacob served for—A thing not in his power to bring to pass, But swayed and fashioned by the hand of heaven.”³¹ Shylock and Antonio are both correct, of course. Jacob possesses an advantage in that God has chosen him for special favor and obviously works on his behalf. For instance, Laban admits “I haue perceiued that the Lord hathe blessed me for thy sake.”³² But at the same time, Jacob’s own resources, and his personal shrewdness, contribute significantly to his prosperity both at home and in Laban’s household. Human wit and ingenuity working in tandem with divine favor produce a remarkable story. Here, and in Bassanio’s story as well, the hero’s success requires an element of divine favor mixed with individual shrewdness and resourcefulness. Like Jacob, Bassanio is also a trickster and a deceiver. He steals men’s and women’s hearts just as routinely as he acquires their inheritances. Bassanio’s resemblance to Jacob becomes even more marked when we consider his relationships with Antonio and Portia, his reliance upon Portia’s wisdom in Act IV, and the care with which his pseudo-doubles, Lorenzo and Lancelot, are crafted.

In the play, as in the Jacob cycle, love acts as a marker that anticipates the direction in which wealth will travel. Antonio obviously loves Bassanio, and treats him with the loyalty befitting a favored brother.³³ Bassanio just as clearly understands this, acknowledging what Antonio has already given him: “To you, Antonio / I owe the most in money and in love.”³⁴ And Antonio offers more in return: “My purse, my person, my extremest means / Lie all unlocked to your occasions.”³⁵ Likewise, the blessing of Jacob appears to equate love, particularly divine love, with herds, wealth, and power—material prosperity as the embodiment of divine love.³⁶ But Antonio has given Bassanio not simply what he owns; he has given his future earnings, the inheritance of his business ventures, by borrowing on Bassanio’s behalf. Antonio offers him his heart, his body as bond, and his money, as though they are interchangeable, making no distinction between the carnal and soulful.

Once Antonio’s heart, body, and wealth are secure, Bassanio is free to travel to Belmont and pursue Portia—and her portion, as Jacob had traveled to his mother’s homeland. Here we discover that Portia’s heart, body, and wealth appear similarly intertwined. And just as Jacob labored and plotted for his wives and their inheritance, Bassanio must use his wits to win Portia and her inheritance. Again like Jacob, Bassanio possesses an advantage in that, since Portia already favors him, he seems destined to win her, as we naturally expect when Nerissa exclaims upon his arrival: “Bassanio, Lord Love, if thy will it be!”³⁷ But Bassanio cannot rely solely upon love—he must use his wits (and Portia’s hints) to acquire her wealth as well.

Like Jacob, whom Shylock calls the “third possessor,”³⁸ Bassanio is the third suitor to choose one of the three caskets. When he chooses the lead casket, he possesses at last Portia’s heart, body, and wealth, which she confirms: “Myself and what is mine to you and yours / Is now converted.”³⁹ Portia disinherits herself, as Antonio has, in exchange for Bassanio’s love. Antonio has given Bassanio a flesh-bond, and Portia gives him a ring, the symbol of the primal flesh-bond of marriage. Both Antonio and Portia give Bassanio artifacts that, when lost, either literally or metaphorically will cost them their lives. The pound of flesh taken “closest to the heart” as the bond stipulates, will obviously kill Antonio. And Bassanio makes the same claim for Portia’s ring, for “when this ring Parts from this finger, then parts life from hence. O, then be bold to say Bassanio’s dead.”⁴⁰ Material tokens of love thus become indistinguishable from life itself.

Having secured both the love and wealth of Antonio and Portia, Bassanio’s second important resemblance to Jacob appears during Portia’s legal intervention in the Duke’s court. For Portia understands and manipulates the law similarly to the ways Rebekah and Rachel understand and manipulate inheritance law in Genesis. When Rebekah overhears Isaac giving instructions to Esau, she understands the significance of the occasion and hurries Jacob into place as his brother’s substitute; through her assistance Jacob can take advantage of the situation. The blessing appears to be a gift, freely conferred, yet Jacob tricks his father into offering it, blurring the distinctions between what one gives and another takes; the process of transferal alters the nature of giving and taking. And despite Jacob’s deception, Rebekah fully understands that the letter of the law governs Isaac’s blessing and it cannot be reversed, to Esau’s great sorrow.

The pattern repeats itself when Jacob and his wives flee from Laban; though Jacob leaves with great wealth built from what Laban has “given” him, Rachel secures the claim to Laban’s property without Laban’s approval. Jacob has already, according to Laban’s sons, “taken away all that was our fathers.”⁴¹ But the household gods represent the legal claim to Laban’s remaining household.⁴² When an angry Laban wishes to search their belongings, Jacob replies that Laban is free to search the caravan and kill anyone found with them.⁴³ Once again, the symbol of Laban’s wealth, and his love, appears most vividly in the tense moments when a character hovers tenuously between life and death.⁴⁴ But it is Rachel who conceals the gods and deceives her father. She and Leah had already told Jacob, “Haue we anie more porcion and enheritance in our fathers house? Doeth not he count vs as strangers? for he hathe solde vs, and hathe eaten vp & consumed our monie.”⁴⁵ The daughters’ inheritance would not be given freely.⁴⁶ While Shakespeare and his contemporaries may or may not have been explicitly familiar with the legal traditions of ancient Canaan, the episode clearly indicates that Rachel’s decision to act without the knowledge or approval of her husband has assisted Jacob in securing the wealth of his wives and escaping the wrath of his now-disinherited brothers-in-law.

Portia reminds us of Rachel’s partnership with Jacob in stealing her father’s inheritance when she gives him hints concerning the three caskets. But she also mirrors Rachel in her dealings at the Duke’s court, where she uses the law to disinherit Shylock. In her insistence that Shylock not spill any blood in his extraction of Antonio’s flesh, and her requirement that the flesh weigh no more nor less than exactly one pound, Portia relies upon the letter of the law that she faults Shylock for insisting upon. Furthermore, she refuses to allow Shylock to abandon his suit with or without the money owed him and forces him into a life-endangering position. Though she has asked Shylock to offer money to Antonio as a gift, Portia offers no gift herself. Instead, she alters the methods of the transaction from giving to taking, against the will of the dispossessed Shylock. Jessica’s inheritance, coerced from Shylock by Portia, once more reverses the expectations of giving and taking. Like Rachel, Portia takes full advantage of the law to strip Shylock of his remaining wealth.

As noted, Bassanio is the third suitor and Jacob is the third possessor. In addition, Shakespeare has created a plot centered on three caskets and three couples. Moreover, he has created three versions of the Jacob narrative, reinforcing the importance of the story to the play’s primary concerns. The most obvious doubling of the pattern occurs, of course, when Bobbo and his son Lancelot the clown re-enact the scene of the old, blind Isaac not recognizing his son Jacob. Lancelot recognizes his father when he asks directions, but Bobbo does not know his son:

O heavens, this is my true-begotten father

Who, being more than sand-blind—high-gravel-blind—knows

Me not. I will try my confusions with him.⁴⁷

Taking advantage of his father’s blindness, Lancelot first pretends to be someone else, and then, when his father believes him dead, claims to be himself. Bobbo’s confusion leads him to inadvertently repeat the blessing scene of Isaac and Jacob:

Lancelot: Do you not know me father? Bobbo:Alack, sir, I am sand-blind. I know you not.

Lancelot: Nay, indeed, if you had your eyes you might not fail of the knowing me. It is a wise father that knows his own child. Well, old man, I will tell you news of your son. [Kneeling] Give me your blessing.⁴⁸

Once Bobbo believes that Lancelot is his son, he repeats the words that Isaac uses to Jacob, “thou art mine own flesh and blood,”⁴⁹ and feels his face, identifying him as Isaac had identified Jacob.⁵⁰

The third Jacob-Bassanio story appears in the Lorenzo-Jessica plot. Instead of emphasizing the disrupted father–son relationship in the Jacob cycle, this plot emphasizes the disrupted father–daughter relationship. Reversing the motif of an inheritance voluntarily bestowed upon the beloved, she happily assists Lorenzo in stealing her father’s heart, his flesh and blood, and his wealth. The casket she carries away, filled with ducats and jewels, recalls not only the theft of Shylock’s wealth (and her inheritance) but also the symmetry between her own situation and Portia’s.

There are enough similarities between the two couples to make it clear that they are duplicating a similar plot. Both Lorenzo and Bassanio acquire their wives through their wits, simultaneously acquiring their fathers-in-law’s fortunes. Both of the women find their desires in conflict with their fathers’ will, and aid their would-be husbands in evading it. In the final act of acquiring their fathers’ estates both send a secret letter through a servant and disguise themselves as young men. On stage, the curtains used to hide the caskets from Bassanio would likely be the same curtains from which Jessica looks down on Lorenzo as she prepares to leave with her father’s casket.

(Dis)inheritance

But while Shakespeare has constructed a triplicate version of the Jacob narrative in his play, he has also subverted and rearranged that plot. To begin with, his focus on Shylock and Antonio draws our attention to the disinherited. Even the importance of Portia in resolving Shylock’s dispute with Antonio reminds us that her money is also at stake, for she has already disinherited herself to Bassanio while she simultaneously disinherits Shylock from his own wealth.

Although the Jacob narrative permeates the play, one of the central figures on the stage is Shylock, the disinherited Jew. Shylock first appears as a prosperous Jew, and ends up betrayed by his servants, his neighbors, and his own flesh and blood. He begins the play giving to others, and ends the play losing everything to the same people. He initially demonstrates generosity (at least, more than the audience would expect from a Jew) toward Bassanio by lending Antonio 3000 ducats without interest and releasing his servant Lancelot to Antonio’s service. Shylock even agrees to dine with Bassanio, though the laws of Venice had long prohibited Jews and Christians from eating together.⁵¹ But while at dinner with his new friends, fellow guest Lorenzo steals his daughter, jewels, and money. These losses are more than material to Shylock, for they are the signs of all he values. In losing the turquoise ring of his wife, he has lost the symbol of their love. He laments “It was my / turquoise. I had it of Leah when I was a bachelor. I would not / have given it for a wilderness of monkeys.”⁵² In losing his daughter, he has lost his “flesh and blood,”⁵³ and in losing his money he has lost his daughter’s inheritance. Like Antonio and Portia, he has lost his heart, body, and future wealth, and from this moment he transforms from a man who hates Christians as a general rule but is willing to work with them into a man whose personal vendetta takes a shockingly heartless turn. Even his own daughter appears to merit no compassion: “I would my daughter were dead at my foot and the jewels in her ear! Would she were hearsed at my foot and the ducats in her coffin!”⁵⁴ Shylock becomes dead to positive human emotion and his earlier pragmatism dissipates, replaced by a rage for revenge.

If Shylock suffers these dehumanizing effects after losing his heart, we must recognize ominous implications indeed for any others who would put their hearts, flesh, or wealth at Bassanio’s disposal. Indeed, we know from Bassanio himself that he is a poor steward who has wasted his own estate:

‘Tis not unknown to you, Antonio,

How much I have disabled mine own estate

By something showing a more swelling port

Than my faint means would grant continuance,

Nor do I now make moan to be abridged

From such a noble rate; but my chief care

Is to come fairly off from the great debts

Wherein my time, something too prodigal,

Hath left me gaged.⁵⁵

After squandering his own inheritance, he has begun to squander Antonio’s as well:

To you, Antonio,

I owe the most in money and in love,

And from your love I have a warranty

To unburden all my plots and purposes

How to get clear of all the debts I owe.⁵⁶

Unlike Jacob, who seems to accrue and multiply inheritances at every turn, and whose prosperity spills over into the lives of those associated with him, Bassanio cannot keep up with his debts. And he relies upon the love, first of Antonio, and then of Portia, to clear him of his losses. In a play where love and money appear so intricately dependent upon each other, we must wonder how carefully Bassanio will guard the hearts of Antonio and Portia. Jessica supplies us with a clue, as she and Lorenzo thematically double Bassanio and Portia. To Shylock’s horror, his daughter places no value on the treasure she has stolen from her father, and squanders it in the most flagrant manner. According to Tubal, “Your daughter spent in Genoa, as I hear, one night fourscore ducats.”⁵⁷ The structural parallelism in the play thus informs our expectations of Bassanio as we witness Jessica’s wastefulness.

Not surprisingly, Bassanio seems as willing to squander the hearts of his friends as he is willing to squander their money, displaying a startling casualness as he trades off relationships with Antonio and Portia. While he leads each of them to believe he loves them best, Bassanio never hesitates to vow something quite different when out of their hearing, for he is a spendthrift with both money and love. For instance, he leads Antonio to believe that he is interested in Portia solely for the purpose of acquiring the money he needs to repay Antonio. So he persuades Antonio to invest yet more money:

but if you please

To shoot another arrow that self way

Which you did shoot the first, I do not doubt,

As I will watch the aim, or to find both

Or to bring your latter hazard back again,

And thankfully rest debtor for the first.⁵⁸

Bassanio’s description of Portia emphasizes the riches she brings to a marriage, and the predilection she apparently has for him. But Bassanio downplays his own feelings of love for Portia. Instead he presents her as a treasure, a wealthy beauty whose “sunny locks / Hang on her temples like a golden fleece … / And many Jasons come in quest of her.”⁵⁹ Later in the fourth act, Bassanio once again implies that his love for Portia cannot compare to his love for Antonio. He declares his willingness to sacrifice not just his wife’s money, but even his wife, to free Antonio from Shylock:

Antonio, I am married to a wife

Which is as dear to me as life itself.

But life itself, my wife, and all the world

Are not with me esteemed above thy life.

I would lose all, ay, sacrifice them all

Here to this devil, to deliver you.⁶⁰

To emphasize the point, Graziano echoes the sentiment. Not surprisingly, Portia, Nerissa, and Shylock are all startled to hear these declarations, though Shylock seems to take them more seriously than the women, muttering, “These be the Christian husbands. I have a daughter. Would any of the stock of Barabbas Had been her husband rather than a Christian.”⁶¹ Though Bassanio speaks these words at a tense moment in which his relationship with Antonio seems paramount, we cannot dismiss his claim merely as an acknowledgment of male bonding. For the same dynamic of temporary love appears almost simultaneously in the scene between Jessica and Lorenzo in Portia’s garden.

While Bassanio is making his vows to Antonio in Venice, Lorenzo and Jessica are literally taking Bassanio and Portia’s places as they house-sit in Belmont. Honeymooning in the garden’s moonlight, they compare the evening to other evenings shared by ancient lovers such as Troilus and Cressid, Thisbe and Pyramus, Dido and Aeneas, Medea and Jason, all lovers whose relationships end in heartbreak, severed by infidelity, ignorance, or death. Lorenzo and Jessica immediately follow this list of lovers by a description of themselves as thieves:

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

Jessica: In such a nightDid young Lorenzo swear he loved her well,Stealing her soul with many vows of faith,And ne’er a true one.⁶²

Jessica as both thief and spendthrift contrasts starkly with Shylock’s earlier admiration of Jacob, as her “unthrift love” reminds us that Jacob’s thrift was the sign of his divine blessedness. Shylock’s daughter, in duplicating and even intensifying Bassanio’s plot, exposes the discrepancies between Shylock’s ancient Jacob and our modern Bassanio, who only appears to be Jacob-like. As a deeply flawed, even anti-Jacob figure, Bassanio’s character challenges many of our perceptions. Jacob creates wealth out of wealth; Bassanio creates debt out of wealth, particularly for those who are closest to him. And the differences between Bassanio and Jacob appear central to the strange tension between Acts IV and V.

Contesting Claims of Love and Heritance

The Jacob narrative and the two nations who arise from it—the favored Israelites and their cousins the Edomites—presents both love and wealth as divine markers, the undisputed foundation of an inexorable religious and political lineage that leads straight through the Old Testament into the New. Traditionally, the Jacob narrative had been marshalled by European Christians to justify political hegemony and the marginalization, if not outright persecution, of Jews, as the younger religion displaced the older. Protestants used the narrative to argue for religious and political ascendency over the Roman church. And reformist Protestants within older establishments likewise turned to the Jacob narrative for theological and political authority. Yet the Bassanio plot disrupts the epistemological structure of favored and unfavored, loved and unloved, by illuminating the dangers of absolute principle in a world where betrayal, deceit, and falseness are not political or personal exceptions, but the normative framework of English life. Bassanio’s profligacy with money, therefore, cannot be disentangled from the ephemeral, disruptive, and uncertain nature of love itself in the play, which remains rooted in a sensual experience.

The love that Bassanio shares with Portia, and the love between Lorenzo and Jessica, depends upon physical vision to create and sustain it. The Jacob narrative begins with Isaac’s faulty vision, which allows Jacob’s usurpation of his brother’s blessing. Yet The Merchant of Venice persists in presenting us with lovers who rely upon vision to cultivate and justify love, a scheme that appears most prominently in the song that Portia’s servant sings to Bassanio as he considers which casket to choose:

Tell me where is fancy bred,

Or in the heart, or in the head?

How begot, how nourished?

Reply, reply.

It is engendered in the eyes,

With gazing fed; and fancy dies

In the cradle where it lies.⁶³

Love depends upon perception and eyes are limited to outside appearances. Old and blind, Isaac’s love for one son can be manipulated and deceived into love for another. The outward trappings of his son trap him into “seeing” what he wishes to see. Vision and perception are notoriously unstable, as the disguises of Portia and Nerissa attest, so the love that depends upon such props must be equally unstable. Lorenzo alludes to this dilemma while he waits for Jessica to disguise herself, for in his praise of Jessica, Lorenzo raises the possibility that he might be seeing what someone (even himself) wants him to see:

Beshrew me but I love her heartily,

For she is wise, if I can judge of her;

And fair she is, if that mine eyes be true;

And true she is, as she hath proved herself;

And therefore like herself, wise, fair, and true,

Shall she be placed in my constant soul.⁶⁴

Of course, we are perfectly aware that Lorenzo’s eyes might not be true at all, for Jessica does not appear wise, fair, or true to the audience. In fact, Jessica’s own words to the waiting Lorenzo reveal a correlation between his love and her manipulation of his perception: “I will make fast the doors, and gild myself / With some more ducats, and be with you straight.”⁶⁵ The gilding makes her “wise, fair, and true” for Lorenzo, as Portia’s wealth gilds her for Bassanio. But Bassanio must also be gilded before he can become an attractive suitor for Portia.

Bassanio readily admits that he must be gilded with Antonio’s riches in order to secure Portia. The entire plot, indeed, stems from his need for capital to present a wealthy appearance. To win her affections, he creates a false image that she can fall in love with. The first two suitors had assumed that the outward appearance of the casket would reflect the inward worth of Portia or themselves, as they reflected their true wealth through their own appearances. But Bassanio in his borrowed riches understands that appearance does not mirror reality, reflecting that “The world is still deceived with ornament.”⁶⁶ So Bassanio chooses the lead casket, which appears to suggest that Portia’s wealth cannot be judged by appearances. But Bassanio’s reflection and choice are ironic, in a sense. His earlier description of Portia with hair like “golden fleece” reminds us of the fleece used by Jacob to deceive his father and the manipulation of the fleece in his uncle Laban’s herds to increase his wealth. Stripped of her golden fleece, is Portia nothing more than a figure of lead? Stripped of his borrowed gilding, is Bassanio the same? If we cannot trust what we see because it is gilded, if love relies solely upon visual perception and that perception is constantly at risk of being blinded by gold, we must reconsider the permanence or reliability of love. Shylock focuses our attention on the essentially limited scope of love. Like Antonio and Portia, he offers his heart and his wealth to Bassanio, through Antonio. Shylock believes his eyes, which see the appearance of a new and slightly less hostile (and thus more lucrative) relationship between himself, Bassanio, and his friends.⁶⁷ What he discovers is that, despite appearances, Bassanio and his friends will happily disinherit him, stealing all that he has.

Critics have struggled to reconcile Act IV with the expectations of comedy, for Shylock’s disinheritance and forced conversion appear too cruel for laughter, at least for modern audiences. The court scene veers disturbingly close, in fact, to tragedy, as Shylock’s absolute insistence upon the principle of contractual law nearly destroys him. By contrast, Act V whisks us away from Venice to the pastoral setting of Belmont, where Portia re-enacts the dilemma of Shylock, now as romance. She has heard Bassanio’s speech to Antonio in which he claims he would give her up to save his friend, violating their own marriage contract. She also knows that he has, in fact, given up the ring that symbolizes her love as payment to “Balthasar” for saving Antonio. And her chastisement to Graziano sounds remarkably similar to Shylock’s lament over his daughter’s betrayal:

You were to blame, I must be plain with you,

To part so lightly with your wife’s first gift,

A thing stuck on with oaths upon your finger,

And so riveted with faith upon your flesh.

I gave my love a ring, and made him swear

Never to part with it; and here he stands.

I dare be sworn for him he would not leave it,

Nor pluck it from his finger for the wealth

That the world masters.⁶⁸

Both Portia and Shylock have participated in a flesh-bond in which their faith has been treated more casually than they expected. Portia’s faith in Bassanio has been strained, and Shylock’s faith—both his faith in people such as Bassanio and Jessica and his ability to practice his religious faith as a Jew—has been destroyed. Both have been disinherited, Portia quite willingly to Bassanio and Shylock quite unwillingly to Lorenzo, Bassanio’s thematic and structural double. As Portia and all that she owns is converted to Bassanio, Shylock and all that he owns is converted to his enemies. Shylock and Portia pull the play in different directions, Shylock propelling it toward darkness and tragedy while Portia wrests it back toward comedy and romance. Act V reasserts romance over revenge, humor over hatred.

When Portia realizes how readily Bassanio would betray her love to save Antonio, she diffuses the potential for tragedy by making a joke of infidelity, accusing Bassanio of loving another woman, and claiming to have been unfaithful herself with the Doctor. Though she forgives him for giving up the ring, the audience cannot believe that Bassanio has altogether changed his nature, or that his second oath will prove stronger than his first. The difference between Shylock and Portia, of course, is that Portia’s world does not require absolute fidelity or integrity. Jessica and Lorenzo recognize their resemblance to lovers who did not live happily ever after and Portia must confront a similar prospect. She has already heard Bassanio devalue his supposed love for her. Bassanio is not what he seems, but only gilded. Yet, it is enough. Just as Portia accepts Bassanio’s poverty earlier in the play, she accepts the limitations of his love at the end of the play. Her forgiveness and acceptance of Bassanio is not Christian charity so much as an acknowledgment that love, “engender’d in the eyes,” is unstable at best. In Act V love is joyful, witty, good-humored, and bawdy, but not sacred, eternal, or divine. Like the music of the spheres, such love exists beyond the realm of everyday human experience. Portia the pragmatist triumphs at the end of the play because she does not expect transparency or sincerity, because she does not insist upon principled absolutes. Shylock is defeated because he does.

Shylock as Jew and Puritan

The play, of course, encompasses two locations, in effect two potential futures for the contemporary audience, as we would expect in a play with so many elements of the Jacob narrative foregrounded. The world of Belmont, in which love is a negotiation, rather than a divine principle, is a world in which betrayal becomes a moment to remediate, rather than abandon, relationships. Venice, however, and Shylock in particular, offers an alternative vision, in which principles take precedence. Julia Reinhold Lupton has argued that Venice represents a new and unsettling kind of world entirely, “a Christian mercantile modernity clearly marked off from both ancient and medieval world-views.”⁶⁹ Most significantly for issues of English political and religious identity, Shakespeare’s audience may have recognized in Shylock not only the Jew of Venice but also the Puritan businessman of the City, a resemblance noted by several critics. Although Harold Bloom refers to Shylock as “Shakespeare’s grim Puritan,”⁷⁰ specific references in the play itself suggest that the audience would have made this connection less metaphorically.

For instance, Robin Headlam Wells argues that Shylock’s “values seem almost indistinguishable from those of a puritan: he is thrifty and self-righteous (‘What judgement shall I dread, doing no wrong?’—iv.i.88); he hates music, masquing and revelry; his house is ‘sober’ (II.v.36); he places great importance on his family (unlike his wifeless ‘prodigal’ adversary); and his idea of justice in based on the old lex talionis.”⁷¹ Given the political dangers posed by Puritans, Wells argues, Shakespeare “used a politically uncontroversial hate figure to stand for the puritan sensibility.”⁷² Paul Yachnin has noticed that Puritans on stage in Renaissance drama tend to share several characteristics, as Puritans are often “excitable, voluble, hypocritical, self-important, and obsessed with food and drink.”⁷³ Shylock’s Puritan-like tendencies also extend to his use of language, in which he obliquely resembles Puritan preachers. Kristen Poole has argued that parodies of sixteenth-century Puritans include a rhetorical style, “employed extensively by early modern puritan preachers” that is “repetitive, pedagogic, and laced with abundant biblical exegesis,” including “a question and answer format.”⁷⁴ Shylock, likewise, appears to echo Puritan mannerisms in his early speeches to Antonio and Bassanio. In his first exchange with Antonio, he explicates the Jacob narrative despite Antonio’s interruptions, including the exegesis of Jacob as the third possessor. When Antonio then seeks to conclude the agreement, Shylock’s response begins to incorporate rhetorical questions and answers:

What should I say to you? Should I not say,“Hath a dog money? Is it possibleA cur can lend three thousand ducats?” Or“Shall I bend low and in a bondsman’s key,With bated breath and whisp’ring humbleness,”Say this:“Fair sir, you spet on me on Wednesday last,You spurn’d me such a day, another timeYou call’d me dog; and for these courtesiesI’ll lend you thus much moneys”?⁷⁵

An audience as aurally attuned as Shakespeare’s would note the linguistic allusion to Puritan sermons.

In addition to Shylock’s language and mannerisms, The Merchant of Venice imitates plot devices in contemporary plays that feature Puritans, for not only are they subjected to elaborate deceptions and tricks, but the loss of symbolic jewelry figures prominently in their humiliations. For instance, in The Puritan Widow, Sir Godfrey’s servant steals his gold chain, commonly associated among Puritans as a symbol of the path to redemption. Paul Yachnin has noted that lost jewelry often evokes “the power of the theater to enchant and punish the opponents of the drama”:

From Adriana’s chain in The Comedy of Errors, to the chain of pearl in You Five Gallants, to Gunwater’s lost chain in A Mad World My Masters (“My chain, my chain, my chain, my one and only chain!”), this property binds together complex plots and can also represent the vanity of office or the dread that fixes on fetishized objects. Here the chain stands for both pride and anxiety. Sir Godfrey expands on Gunwater: “O my chain, my chain, I have lost my chain … ’twas my father’s, my father’s father’s, my grandfather’s huge grandfather’s. I had as life ha’ lost my neck as the chain that hung around it” (PW, 3.2.20, 29–31).⁷⁶

Certainly, the revenge motif noted above figures prominently in the play. But more specifically, Sir Godfrey’s lost chain elicits cries that closely resemble Shylock’s, as recounted by Solanio:

I never heard a passion so confus’d,

So strange, outrageous, and so variable

As the dog Jew did utter in the streets.

“My Daughter! O my ducats! O my daughter!

Fled with a Christian! O my Christian ducats!

Justice! the law! my ducats and my daughter!”⁷⁷

Shylock’s own reflections upon the ring echo the motif: “It was my / turquoise. I had it of Leah when I was a bachelor. I would not / have given it for a wilderness of monkeys.”⁷⁸ The ring’s meaning is both personal—it was a love token during courtship—and generational, as the allusion to Leah necessarily reminds us of the long lineage Shylock claims to the patriarch Jacob and his first wife Leah. The traditional chain associated with Puritans has been transformed into a ring, to suit the play’s structural integrity, but the sentiments expressed, and the methods used to express them, clearly appeal to Puritan stereotypes on the stage.

With these dramatic antecedents in place, Shylock’s introduction as a moneylender becomes more ambiguous, for legal usury was practiced in London by Puritan businessmen. Shylock’s very name invites us to make this cultural connection. Stephen Orgel argues for a direct connection between Shylock’s name and Puritanism, suggesting that he could be played as a Puritan moneylender familiar to Shakespeare’s London audience.⁷⁹ Shylock’s resemblance to a Puritan also appears in his very Jewishness, for he is a character who views himself as the heir to Abraham’s covenant, one of the chosen people, and the member of a community that has not assimilated into the “shallow fopp’ry” of Venice.⁸⁰

The Puritan claim to be the new Israelites often invited pejorative comparisons even in the seventeenth century. The severe literalism of Puritans, only slightly exaggerated by Shylock, was frequently the primary source of friction between Puritans and mainstream Anglicans. As Bloom remarks, “Shylock is massively, frighteningly sincere and singleminded.”⁸¹ Moreover, despite widespread English awareness of Venetian laws, Shylock appears to live not in the Jewish ghetto but in the City, in the midst of his Christian neighbors. He warns his daughter to ignore the masquers outside the house in “the public street” where “Christian fools” cavort; he likewise expresses his impatience with the noise they make. Once Gratiano, Salerio, and Lorenzo rendezvous with Jessica, Antonio immediately tells us that “’Tis nine a’clock.”⁸² Yet Venetian Jews would have been double-locked behind the ghetto’s gates after nightfall—from the outside by the Venetian authorities and from within by the Jewish inhabitants.

John Klause has pointed out that the religious tensions of the play are not to be found in Shakespeare’s sources, and that the play “both reveals and invites deep satisfaction with current political solutions to doctrinal strife.”⁸³ Klause attributes the tension to Shylock’s Puritanism and Antonio’s Roman Catholicism, the divided Christendom of the play. Certainly Shylock’s Puritan-like character is most striking in his deep-seated antipathy toward Antonio, which he voices in the first act.

How like a fawning publican he looks!

I hate him for he is a Christian;

But more, for that in low simplicity

He lends out money gratis, and brings down

The rate of usance here with us in Venice.

If I can catch him once upon the hip,

I will feed fat the ancient grudge I bear him.

He hates our sacred nation, …⁸⁴

Shylock’s hatred for Antonio resembles, at its core, the hatred of Puritans for Roman Catholics—primarily for what they are, and then for what they do. The “low simplicity” and “gratis” of Antonio recall the asceticism of his character, his melancholy, his aloofness from women, and his close male friendship with Bassanio. Shylock’s reaction to him echoes the nearly visceral reaction of Puritans to Roman Catholic priests. However, Antonio remains aloof from the play’s resolution in Act V. As Bloom points out, “though he is there in Belmont, [Antonio] will go to bed alone” in the midst of the married couples.⁸⁵ Ultimately, as Portia seems to understand, Antonio’s extreme asceticism must be diffused, his martyrdom averted, and a more balanced (and less dangerously sacred) relationship between Portia, Bassanio, and Antonio reasserted. It is therefore not the Protestant–Catholic schism that threatens Venetian society, but the principled intensity of a Puritan faction in their midst.⁸⁶

As previously noted, the love between Bassanio and Portia, Lorenzo and Jessica, depends upon physical vision to create and sustain it. Likewise, Shylock’s understanding of the world depends upon his ability to see clearly and objectively, and react accordingly. The failure of his vision—his failure to see Jessica’s contempt for him, to see through Portia’s disguise in the Duke’s court, to see the trap being laid for him—leads to his destruction. Just as Isaac’s blindness allows him to be manipulated into giving up his property to the supposedly wrong son, so Shylock’s blindness allows him to be trapped into giving up his property first for Antonio’s use, and then to Lorenzo via Jessica’s coerced inheritance. And just as Esau’s appetite, like his father’s, allows him to be manipulated into signing away his inheritance to Jacob, so Shylock’s appetite for Antonio’s flesh allows him to be gulled by Portia. Shylock discovers that he is not the heir of Jacob, but the disinherited fool Esau, whose appetites have led him astray.

The cultural and political response to Puritanism (with its adherence to principle over negotiation), through a surrogate and scapegoated Jew appears most directly at the end of Act IV, when Shylock’s reliance upon a strict interpretation of the law is used to assimilate and silence him. The authorities, of course, went to great lengths to silence Puritans, as evidenced by the Marprelate pamphlet wars of 1588–89. The volubility of Marprelate was particularly irksome to the authorities, as Shylock’s volubility early in the play irks Antonio and his friends. The government marshaled its resources to silence the pamphlets, eventually shutting them down in mid-October 1589. But silencing Puritans was but a half measure—total assimilation and religious unity under the queen and church were the ultimate goals. Shylock’s forced assimilation, therefore, re-enacts the desire of the authorities to absorb and thereby silence Puritan critics as well as Jews.

Yet the vengeful destruction of Shylock, in particular his forced acceptance of the fact that he is no longer one of God’s “chosen” after all, is mitigated by the recognition that the Christians in the play also fail to earn their title as Jacob’s heirs. Instead, Jew and Christian in the play reflect two responses to cultural anxiety that Gordan Tesky has termed metaphysical and genealogical order, discourses we see intersecting in Hesiod’s myths. As Tesky and other critics have pointed out, such myths serve not only to remember, but to forget—to erase from the cultural memory the pain and violence that established the Olympian order. Metaphysical order uses its existence to justify and repress the memory of its origins, as Tudor claims to authority—both religious and political—required the repression of uncomfortable theological and historical facts. Genealogical order, on the other hand, is the memory that reasserts itself, the prior claim that puts all metaphysical order at risk. As Tesky writes, “Authority can be defined as the power to compel the public forgetting of what is privately remembered; it is hegemonic amnesia.”⁸⁷ Shylock, as both Jew and Puritan-like figure, asserts his prior claims—legal, religious, and political. Portia and the Duke’s court assert their authority over Shylock by erasing his lineage, his memory of his own identity, and his future ability to reassert that heritage.

By contrast, Bassanio, Jessica, and Launcelot, despite their Jacob-like plots, hardly inspire confidence in their steadiness or spiritual reliability as an alternative to Shylock. What they offer instead is a pragmatic, agile, clear-eyed understanding of legal, political, and personal possibilities among self-interested but potentially cooperative citizens, merchants, and gentry who accept the world order simply as it exists, not as it should be. Shylock’s role as Puritan-like Jew, with a literal and absolute view of the world, ultimately represents a clear political and personal threat to an imperfect but relatively (for the time being) balanced political system. The play offers us a “gilded” and easily identified conflict between Jew and Christian, Old Testament Law and New Testament Charity. But beneath the apparent ideological conflict lies a more profound reflection on the nature of ideological conflict itself—the absolute sincerity of conviction represented by Shylock that leads inexorably toward vengeance and tragedy, or the pragmatic adjustments, both political and religious, represented by Portia that can defuse iconoclastic violence, civil war, or regicide by accepting something less than divine perfection in a human world. Shylock’s literalism in seeking his pound of flesh leads directly to his own destruction, despite the unyielding “justice” of his cause. Portia’s ability to wrest comedy from potential tragedy presents us with a profound commentary on the religious, social, and political tensions of Shakespeare’s world—a world seeking to establish its own identity, its myths of origin and purpose, and its future place in the divine order. In the midst of internal tension and division, Shakespeare offers his audience in The Merchant of Venice a path out of an ideological dead end and political conflict toward a notion of accommodation to reality that offers a hopeful, if imperfect and tenuous, future peace.

Footnotes

Notes

Author biography

Lori A. Davis Perry is an Associate Professor of English in the Department of English and Fine Arts at the United States Air Force Academy. Her research focuses on intersections between religion, race, violence, and science through the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Her current research spans Edmund Spenser through Alexander Pope, though she has published primarily on Elizabeth Rowe and Jonathan Swift.

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