The Merchant of Venice

The Merchant of Venice is one of William Shakespeare's best-known plays, written at an uncertain date between 1594 and 1597. It is a comedy ("comedy" had a very different meaning at the time; see Shakespearean comedies) and is best known for its portrayal of the Jew Shylock, which has raised questions of anti-semitism. Shylock is a tormented character but is also a tormenter, so whether he is to be viewed with disdain or sympathy is up to the reader.

Shakespeare puts one of his most eloquent speeches into the mouth of this "villain":

Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs
dimensions, senses, affections, passions; fed with
the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject
to the same diseases, heal'd by the same means,
warm'd and cool'd by the same winter and summer
as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed?
If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us,
do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?

Act III, scene I

Date

The play's date of composition is believed to be between 1594 and 1597. The play was entered in the Stationers' Register, the method at that time of obtaining copyright for a new play, by James Roberts on July 22, 1598. It was first printed in 1600, and again in a pirated edition in 1619. The play was mentioned by Francis Meres in 1598, so it must have been familiar on the stage by that date.

The play seems to be influenced by (and perhaps reacting against) Christopher Marlowe's immensely popular tragedy The Jew of Malta.

Summary

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

The title character is the merchant Antonio, not the more famous villain, the Jewish moneylender Shylock.

Bassanio, a young Venetian, wants to travel to Belmont to woo the beautiful and wealthy heiress Portia. He approaches his friend Antonio, a merchant, for 3000 ducats needed to subsidize his travelling expenditures for three months. As all of Antonio's ships and merchandise are tied at sea, Antonio approaches the Jewish moneylender Shylock for a loan. Shylock, spiteful of Antonio because he had spat on him the previous Wednesday, proposes a malicious condition. If Antonio is unable to repay the loan at the specified date, Shylock will be free to take a pound of Antonio's flesh from where ever he pleases. Although Bassanio does not want Antonio to accept such a condition for his sake, Antonio, surprised by what he sees as the moneylender's generosity, signs the agreement. With money at hand, Bassanio leaves for Belmont with another friend Gratiano.

At Belmont, Portia has no lack of suitors. Portia's father, however, has left a will stipulating each of her suitors to choose one of three caskets: one each of gold, silver, and lead. In order to be granted an opportunity to marry Portia, each suitor must agree in advance to live out his life as a bachelor were he to select wrongly. The suitor who correctly looks past the outward appearance of the caskets will find Portia's portrait inside and win her hand. After two suitors choose incorrectly, Bassanio makes the correct choice, that of the leaden casket, aided by a subtle hint from Portia and knowledge of the Gesta Romanorum which explains which casket to pick.

At Venice, all ships bearing Antonio's goods are reported lost at sea, leaving him unable to satisfy the bond. Shylock is determined to exact revenge from Christians after his daughter Jessica flees his home to convert to Christianity and elope with the Christian Lorenzo, taking a substantial amount of Shylock's wealth with her. With the bond at hand, Shylock has Antonio arrested and brought before court.

At Belmont, Portia and Bassanio have just been married, along with their friends Gratiano and Portia's handmaid Nerissa. He receives a letter telling him that Antonio has defaulted on his loan from Shylock. Shocked, Bassanio and Gratiano leave for Venice immediately, with money from Portia, to save Antonio's life. Unbeknownst to Bassanio and Gratiano, Portia and Nerissa leave Belmont to seek the counsel of Portia's cousin, Bellario, a lawyer, at Padova.

The dramatic center of the play comes in the court of the Duke of Venice. Shylock refuses Bassanio's offer, despite Bassanio increasing the repayment to 6000 ducats (twice the specified loan). He demands the pound of flesh from Antonio. The Duke, wishing to save Antonio but unwilling to set a dangerous legal precedent of nullifying a contract, refers the case to Balthasar, a young male "doctor of the law" who is actually Portia in disguise, with his/her lawyer's clerk, who is Nerissa in disguise. Portia asks Shylock to show mercy in a famous speech (The quality of mercy is not strained — Act IV, Scene I, l 185), but Shylock refuses. Thus the court allows Shylock to extract the pound of flesh.

At the very moment Shylock is about to cut Antonio with his knife, Portia points out a flaw in the contract. The bond only allows Shylock to remove the flesh, not blood, of Antonio. If Shylock were to shed any drop of Antonio's blood in doing so, his "lands and goods" will be forfeited under Venetian laws. Compare to this the Norse legend of the making of Mjolnir where Loki loses his head in a bet, but was not forced to give the bet since his neck was not part of the bet.

Defeated, Shylock accedes to accept monetary payment for the defaulted bond, but is denied. Portia pronounces none should be given, and for his attempt to take the life of a citizen, Shylock's property will be forfeit, half to the government and half to Antonio, and his life will be at the mercy of the Duke. The Duke pardons his life before Shylock can beg for it, and Antonio holds his share "in use" (that is, reserving the principal amount while taking only the income) until Shylock's death, when the principal will be given to Lorenzo and Jessica. At Antonio's request, the Duke grants remission of the state's half of forfeiture, but in return, Shylock is forced to convert to Christianity and to bequeath the rest of his property to Lorenzo and Jessica (Act IV, scene 1).

Bassanio does not recognize his disguised wife. He offers to give him/her a present. First she declines, but after he insists, Portia requests his ring. Reluctantly he gives the ring, although earlier he has promised his wife never to lose it, sell it or give it away.

At Belmont, Portia and Nerissa taunt their husbands before revealing they were really the lawyer and his clerk in disguise.

After all the other characters make amends, all ends happily (save for Shylock) as Antonio learns that his ships have returned safely after all.

Shylock and the anti-Semitism debate

The play is frequently staged today, but is potentially troubling to modern audiences due to its central themes, which can easily appear anti-Semitic. Critics still argue over whether the play is itself anti-semitic, or that it is merely a play about anti-Semitism.

The anti-Semitic reading

English society in the Elizabethan era was undeniably anti-Semitic. English Jews had been expelled in the Middle Ages and were not permitted to return until the rule of Oliver Cromwell. Jews were presented on the Elizabethan stage in hideous caricature, with hooked noses and bright red wigs, and were usually depicted as avaricious usurers; the best known example is Christopher Marlowe's extremely popular play The Jew of Malta, which features a comically wicked Jewish villain called Barabas. They were usually characterized as evil, deceptive, and greedy.

Many readers see Shakespeare's play as a continuation of this anti-Semitic tradition. The title page of the Quarto indicates that the play was sometimes known as The Jew of Venice in its day, which suggests that it was seen as similar to Marlowe's The Jew of Malta. One interpretation of the play's structure is that Shakespeare meant to contrast the mercy of the main Christian characters with the vengefulness of a Jew, who lacks the religious grace to comprehend mercy. Similarly, it is possible that Shakespeare meant Shylock's forced conversion to Christianity to be a "happy ending" for the character, as it 'redeems' Shylock both from his unbelief and his specific sin of wanting to kill Antonio. This reading of the play would certainly fit with the anti-Semitic beliefs of the majority of Shakespeare's audience.

The sympathetic reading

Many modern readers and theatregoers have read the play as a plea for tolerance as Shylock is a sympathetic character. Shylock's 'trial' at the end of the play is a mockery of justice, with Portia acting as a judge when she has no real right to do so. Thus, Shakespeare is not calling into question Shylock's intentions, but the fact that the very people who berated Shylock for being dishonest have had to resort to trickery in order to win.

Religious interpretation

Sympathy for Shylock can be derived from an understanding of the difference between the concept of forgiveness of sins in Judaism and Christianity. In Christianity, forgiveness comes easily, generally at any time, to those who "truly repent"; this repentance comes about primarily through Jesus, and does not involve any specific ritual. In Judaism, Jews who seek to atone for their sins (Teshuvah) are called to a deep reckoning and soul-searching, of which confession, though of paramount importance, is but one aspect. Judaism draws heavily on the exhortations of the prophets, most notably Isaiah and Jeremiah, that the repentance be an intensely personal experience; any and all associated ritual is but the means of formalizing the deeper, inner dimension of Teshuvah. This theme is brought out with particular force in the ritual of Yom Kippur, the annual Day of Atonement. See Judaism.

According to some Jewish thinkers, the laws set out by God were designed to make people happy: not to be ritualistic, cumbersome, etc. By breaking God's law, (according to this theory), you are really just harming yourself directly and in this life, so forgiveness from God is irrelevant. It is not a stretch of the imagination to see that the violation of the moral law would quickly degenerate into a chaotic society if everyone lied, killed, stole, and so on. Christianity seems to suffer from a problem: if forgiveness is freely available at any time, what incentive is there to live a moral life? Shylock and the Duke know the law is for the functioning of society, Portia believes forgiveness is the quality which maintains the wellbeing of society.

According to this interpretation, Shylock is the most morally upright character (of the main characters) in the play. Supporters of this interpretation tend to describe the other main characters in negative terms: Antonio as a repressed homosexual (immoral by the standards of the day); Bassanio as a prodigal who does no work except capitalise on his looks and live off of other people, and who ends up with Portia, who, at the end, realises that Bassanio only ever wanted her money despite all his charms; and Jessica as an ungrateful daughter who steals her father's possessions and runs away to marry Lorenzo, a proselytizing hypocrite.

Directors such as John Neville who support this interpretation tend to show the 'young love' story in which Jessica escapes her father to marry Lorenzo, ending unhappily, a reading that may be justified by careful reading of the text.

In this reading, though the play is light and funny on the surface, the Christian characters' lives are collapsing because of their immoral behaviour and disrespect for duty to God and the law. Meanwhile, Shylock does not deceive, trick, lie, kill, steal, or do anything mischievous. The promise of a pound of flesh upon default of the loan was something Antonio freely agreed to.

Many actors who are trained in early modern drama will, for the above reason, identify the Merchant of Venice as not an anti-Jewish play, but an anti-Christian play. This does not necessarily mean that Shakespeare himself was anti-Christian, but rather that he was using the story of Shylock to attack prevailing hypocrisies.

Character study

It is difficult to know whether the sympathetic reading of Shylock is entirely due to changing sensibilities among readers, or whether Shakespeare, a writer who clearly delighted in creating complex, multi-faceted characters, deliberately intended this reading.

One reason for this interpretation is that Shylock's painful status in Venetian society is emphasised. To some critics, Shylock's celebrated "Hath not a Jew eyes" speech (see above) redeems him and even makes him into something of a tragic figure. In the speech, Shylock argues that he is no different from the Christian characters. Detractors note that Shylock ends the speech with a tone of revenge: "if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?" However, those who see the speech as sympathetic point out that Shylock says he learned the desire for revenge from the Christian characters: "If a Christian wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be by Christian example? Why, revenge! The villainy you teach me I will execute".

Even if Shakespeare did not intend the play to be read this way, the fact that it retains its power on stage for audiences who may perceive its central conflicts in radically different terms is an illustration of the subtlety of Shakespeare's characterizations.

Shylock on stage

Jacob Adler and others report that the tradition of playing Shylock sympathetically began in the first half of the 19th century with Edmund Kean, and that previously the role had been played "by a comedian as a repulsive clown or, alternatively, as a monster of unrelieved evil." Kean's Shylock established his reputation as an actor.

From Kean's time forward, all of the actors who have famously played the role, with the exception of Edwin Booth, who played Shylock as a simple villain, have chosen a sympathetic approach to the character; even Booth's father, Junius Brutus Booth, played the role sympathetically. Henry Irving was among the most notable late 19th century Shylocks, and Jacob Adler certainly the most notable of the early 20th century. Adler played the role in Yiddish-language translation, first in Yiddish theater Manhattan's Lower East Side, and later on Broadway, where, to great acclaim, he performed the role in Yiddish in an otherwise English-language production.

Kean and Irving presented a Shylock justified in wanting his revenge; Adler's Shylock evolved over the years he played the role, first as a stock Shakespearean villain, then as a man whose better nature was overcome by a desire for revenge, and finally as a man who operated not from revenge but from pride. In a 1902 interview with Theater magazine, Adler pointed out that Shylock is a wealthy man, "rich enough to forego the interest on three thousand ducats" and that Antonio is "far from the chivalrous gentleman he is made to appear. He has insulted the Jew and spat on him, yet he comes with hypocritical politeness to borrow money of him." Shylock's fatal flaw is to depend on the law, but "would he not walk out of that courtroom head erect, the very apotheosis of defiant hatred and scorn?"

Some modern productions take further pains to show how Shylock's thirst for vengeance has some justification. For instance in the 2004 film adaptation directed by Michael Radford and starring Al Pacino as Shylock, the film begins with text and a montage of how the Jewish community is cruelly abused by the bigoted Christian population of the city. One of the last shots of the film also brings attention to the fact that, as a convert, Shylock would have been cast out of the Jewish community in Venice, no longer allowed to live in the ghetto.

Sexuality in the play

Antonio, Bassanio and pederasty

Antonio's unexplained depression — "I know not why I am so sad" — and utter devotion to Bassanio has led some critics to theorize that he is suffering from unrequited love for Bassanio and is depressed because Bassanio is coming to an age where he will marry a woman. In his plays and poetry Shakespeare often depicted strong male bonds of varying homosociality, which has led some critics to infer that Bassanio returns Antonio's affections despite his obligation to marry

ANTONIO: Commend me to your honorable wife:
Tell her the process of Antonio's end,
Say how I lov'd you, speak me fair in death;
And, when the tale is told, bid her be judge
Whether Bassanio had not once a love.
BASSANIO: 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. (Act IV, Scene I)

In his essay "Brothers and Others", published in The Dyer's Hand, W.H. Auden describes Antonio as "a man whose emotional life, though his conduct may be chaste, is concentrated upon a member of his own sex." Antonio's feelings for Bassanio are likened to a couplet from Shakespeare's Sonnets: "But since she pricked thee out for women's pleasure,/Mine be thy love, and my love's use their treasure." Antonio, says Auden, embodies the words on Portia's leaden casket: "Who chooseth me, must give and hazard all he hath." Antonio has taken this potentially fatal turn because he despairs, not only over the loss of Bassanio in marriage, but also because Bassanio cannot requite what Antonio feels for him. Antonio's frustrated devotion is a form of idolatry: the right to live is yielded for the sake of the loved one. There is one other such idolator in the play: Shylock himself. "Shylock, however unintentionally, did, in fact, hazard all for the sake of destroying the enemy he hated; and Antonio, however unthinkingly he signed the bond, hazarded all to secure the happiness of the man he loved." Both Antonio and Shylock, agreeing to put Antonio's life at a forfeit, stand outside the normal bounds of society. There was, states Auden, a traditional "association of sodomy with usury" with which Shakespeare was likely familiar. (Auden sees the theme of usury in the play as a comment on human relations in a mercantile society.)

Similarly, some readers interpret the relationship between Antonio and Bassanio to be paederastic. Contemporary historians say that the practice experienced a revival in the city states during the Italian Renaissance as ancient Greek documents idealizing such relationships were translated and available to commoners for the first time in nearly one thousand years.

Bassanio, Portia and fidelity

Portia and Bassanio marry, with the proviso that he will never give up her ring. The ring is a symbol of marital fidelity. The Elizabethans were obsessed with wifely fidelity, and a whole subgenre of jokes were devoted to the subject.[citation needed] An Elizabethan audience may have seen the significance of Bassanio giving Portia's "ring" back to her as an emblem of his potential for infidelity.

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