Love and revenge in a time of globalisation: The Merchant of Venice
I’m making use of my Coronoavirus social isolation to resurrect my Shakespeare project. My last essay was nearly three years ago, so just to remind people, my goal was to watch all 37 plays included in the BBC’s “Complete Dramatic Works” of William Shakespeare which were filmed in the 1970s and 1980s. I got thirteen plays in before life took over and now, well, life has been taken over by the pandemic and I’m not leaving the house, so with this time indoors why not get back to one of my great loves?
So, to The Merchant of Venice, one of the more popular plays in the canon and one that I’m very familiar with, having taught it for a number of years to my Year 9 students. It was probably written and first performed about 1596–7, having been entered into the Stationers’ Register on 22 July 1598 as “a booke of the Marchaunt of Venyce or otherwise called the Iewe of Venyce” and first published in quarto in 1600 as The Excellent History of the Merchant of Venice. With the extreame crueltie of Shylocke the Jewe towards the sayd merchant, in cutting a just pound of his flesh: and the obtayning of Portia by the choyse of three chests. That sums up a couple of the plot elements pretty well, but I think there’s more going on in this play than initially meets the eye.
For a play that in the First Folio was titled The Comical History of the Merchant of Venice, it has a rather intriguing opening, with the title character, a merchant by the name of Antonio, declaring to two of his friends, “In sooth I know not why I am so sad.” And it immediately gets us wondering: why is this guy melancholy? His friends (Salerio and Solanio; basically interchangeable, as their names might suggest) have a few ideas, such as business worries or love, but Antonio rejects the suggestions and Shakespeare doesn’t give us any particular reason to doubt him. At least if we’re talking about the love of a woman, that is, because the two friends are quick to make way when another, special friend, turns up, by the name of Bassanio.
Bassanio is with his party animal friend Graziano, who loves a bit of blokey banter and who “speaks an infinite deal of nothing.” Graziano also thinks that Antonio is worried about his business dealings, with all those ships out at sea, commenting that he has “too much respect upon the world.” Antonio responds:
I hold the world but as the world, Graziano —
A stage where every man must play a part
And mine a sad one.
Shakespeare can’t help himself with his meta-theatrical acting allusions in his plays, but I think this one is particularly telling and for me it reveals something of the mystery of this reserved character. So much of this play is about the love between men and women and how it can surmount the barriers of wealth (Bassanio and Portia) and religion (Lorenzo and Jessica), but there’s another kind of love that dare not speak its name on the stage, even if it does come through in Shakespeare’s sonnets. In a world where, publicly at least, people are forced to pass as heterosexual, if your orientation is other than the norm that you must “play a part” and act as if your desires either fit with the mainstream or don’t exist at all. That kind of role would indeed be “a sad one” for those who are forced to play it and it may not even be a conscious role for Antonio. Reading Antonio as gay is, of course, speculative, but to me it feels like an obvious answer to the way he feels. He really does love Bassanio and makes it obvious in the play, in words as well as actions, but whether we read that love as platonic or as something more is a matter of interpretation.
Antonio’s friendship with Bassanio is also interesting because Antonio seems to have the reputation of being a savvy businessman, someone who is prudent with his money, whereas Bassanio is a spendthrift and a debtor. This element of Bassanio seems to be relatively quickly glossed over and Shakespeare doesn’t seem to want us to feel too negatively about him. The debtor in literature is usually an object of scorn, their debts a sign of a moral failing even if they are otherwise a good person. Think of Tertius Lydgate in Middlemarch or Richard Carstone in Bleak House. I also think of Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman, desperately coming up with plans to get ahead in life that we know are doomed to failure.
Bassanio has his own grand plan, of course, that he outlines to Antonio. He uses the analogy of shooting an arrow into the air. He tells his friend of when he was a schoolboy playing around with his bow and arrow (as you do — I actually have fond memories of making my own bows and arrows as a child; it’s probably frowned upon these days) and he lost track of where an arrow had gone, his cunning plan for finding it would be to fire another arrow in exactly the same direction and this time pay more careful attention to where it had gone so he would be able to then retrieve that arrow as well as the original one. Maybe it’s just me, but this plan wouldn’t exactly fill me with confidence: “Remember all that money that you loaned to me, that money that I then proceeded to fritter way with my extravagant lifestyle? Well, my plan to get it back is for you to lend me another large sum of money and this time I’ll pay more attention to where I’m spending it and therefore get all the original money back as well!” Um, thanks, but I think I’ll pass.
Except Antonio doesn’t pass, because, well, he has feelings for Bassanio. He tells him that his “purse, [his] person, [his] extremest means / Lie all unlocked” for Bassanio. And okay, I get the purse part, but he is “unlocking” his “person” for him as well? That sounds pretty intimate to me. But there are a couple of problems. One problem (for Antonio’s feelings) is that Bassanio’s plan is to marry a rich heiress called Portia who lives on the nearby island of Belmont. That’s what he needs more money for: rich guys from around the world are showing up to woo her and he can’t arrive on Belmont looking all shabby. The other problem is that Antonio’s purse is actually empty at the moment: all his money is tied up in his ventures (sounds a bit risky to me, actually). However, Antonio will be able to borrow money where Bassanio can’t, because of his good credit history, so he says he’ll do this for him.
Cut to Belmont, where the aforementioned Portia is talking with her waiting woman, Nerissa, who is giving her some advice about the awkward situation she finds herself in. You see, Portia’s late father has left her a ton of money and her own island and everything, but he also decided to leave instructions that she marry only the person who correctly chooses one of three caskets that he has left for her. She is rightly concerned about this state of affairs, not being able to marry someone she actually likes and all. I am tempted to arrange something similar in my will for my son, though. Seems like a good way to mess with him. Speaking of wills, Portia laments: “so is the will of a living daughter curbed by the will of a dead father.” Shakespeare loves punning on the word “will”, not least because it’s his own name. And of course, his own will is one of the few documents that we have from him that still exist. In his will he famously left his wife Anne Hathaway his “second best bed”, so screwing people over in your will was something he really took to heart.
Portia has a good understanding of human psychology, telling Nerissa that,
If to do were as easy as to know what were good to do, chapels had been churches and poor men’s cottages princes’ palaces. It is a good divine that follows his own instructions. I can easier teach twenty what were good to be done than to be one of the twenty to follow mine own teaching.
I can confirm this observation: I can very easily tell my students to organise their time so that they’re not trying to desperately complete their work at the last minute, but when I’ve had my own book deadlines (or marking deadlines) I seem to have difficulty avoiding just such a situation.
Shakespeare does a lot of cutting between Venice and Belmont in the play. Venice is very much in the real world: the world of commerce and the world of tragedy, where things go wrong. Belmont, however, is a fairytale world, where lovers meet and things must inevitably have a happy ending. The choice of the caskets is a familiar trope from the world of fairytales and Shakespeare probably got the story from a collection called the Gesta Romanorum, first written in Latin in the 13th and 14th centuries. A selection of the stories was printed in English (c. 1577 and 1595) by Richard Robinson.
I love the way Portia mocks the collection of suitors who have turned up to woo her. Shakespeare plays on national stereotypes: the Neapolitan who is obsessed with his horse, the German who is a drunkard, the miserly Scot (although, fun fact: in the 1624 Folio edition of the play, “Scottish” was changed to “other” for fear of offending King James). There’s even some potential self-mockery from Shakespeare, with the English lord described as having “neither Latin, French, nor Italian.” In a poem included in the First Folio of Shakespeare’s works, Ben Jonson famously observed that Shakespeare had “small Latin and less Greek.”
In many ways, the real star of The Merchant of Venice is not the title character, but the villain: Shylock the Jewish money-lender. Shylock is one of Shakespeare’s most fascinating villains because of the sympathy he is afforded. It is eminently possible, probably more so for modern audiences, to feel sorry for Shylock and the position he finds himself in. Although there are definitely anti-semitic elements to the portrayal of Shylock, such as his obsession with money, he is a complex and human figure, not just a caricature. So although he tells us in an aside that he hates Antonio because “he is a Christian” and because he lends out money for free and thus drives down the interest rates that Shylock can charge, Shakespeare also allows Shylock to outline a case for genuine grievance:
Signior Antonio, many a time and oft
In the Rialto you have rated me
About my moneys and my usances.
Still I have borne it with a patient shrug,
For sufferance is the badge of all our tribe.
You call me ‘misbeliever’, ‘cut-throat dog’,
And spit upon my Jewish gaberdine;
And all for use of that which is mine own.
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.
Antonio spitting on Shylock’s clothes and on his beard, calling him a dog, and now coming to ask him if he can borrow money from him clearly seems like an act of hypocrisy. We can feel for Shylock in this at least, if not in his suggestion that if Antonio defaults in payment he will take “an equal pound / Of your fair flesh, to be cut off and taken / In what part of your body pleaseth me.” This is clearly driven by a desire for bloodthirsty revenge that goes beyond Antonio’s actions towards Shylock. Of course, Antonio readily agrees to the bond, confident that he will never have to pay up, so he does bring this revenge upon himself.
I was wondering how much Shakespeare actually knew about Jews, given that he almost certainly never travelled to a cosmopolitan port like Venice himself. According to Rosalind Croucher,
The villainy of Jews was a familiar idea to Shakespeare’s audience, although at the time the play was written, in the late 1590s, there were very few Jews in officially in England. In Shakespeare’s day there were a few hundred Jews of Spanish and Portuguese descent living in London, professing a nominal Christianity to get around the residence laws, and generally accepted as members of the community.
So, apart from watching plays like Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta and his own reading, Shakespeare probably had very little direct experience of Jews and instead played with stereotypes that he nevertheless infused with humanity and pathos.
Part of that pathos arises from the fact that Shylock is scorned not just by Antonio and the other Christians in the play (many of whom liken him to “the devil”), but also by his own daughter, Jessica. She herself declares, “Our house is hell” and says that she is “ashamed to be [her] father’s child” (although she recognises that this is a sinful thought). She not only runs away from him, but she elopes with a Christian friend of Bassanio’s, Lorenzo, and to make matters even worse, she steals a casket (hmm, another casket, interesting parallel…) of his jewels and money. Shylock’s reaction to all of this is hardly commendable, lamenting the loss of his ducats as much as his daughter and even suggesting at one point,
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!
Well, that’s not a very nice thing to say about your daughter, even if that daughter has stolen a turquoise ring that your dead wife gave you when you were courting and exchanged it for a monkey.
One of the two most famous speeches in the play comes just before his declaration about wishing his daughter dead, in Act 3, Scene 1, when Shylock is arguing with Salerio and Solanio over whether or not he will pursue his bond against Antonio:
He hath disgraced me, and hindered me half a million; laughed at my losses,
mocked at my gains, scorned my nation, thwarted my bargains, cooled my friends, heated mine enemies; and what’s his reason? I am a Jew. 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, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled 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? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that. If a Jew wrong a Christian, what is his humility? Revenge. If a Christian wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be by Christian example? Why, revenge. The villainy you teach me, I will execute, and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction.
It’s a remarkable and powerful speech, not only for the humanity that is in it, that asserts the equality of all, regardless of their religion, but also for the way that sense of equality becomes twisted into a justification for a barbaric action. Shylock’s point is that he is like a Christian for good and ill: he is human and therefore vulnerable but he is also petty and driven by revenge, just as many Christians are. He can emulate the worst of Christians as well as the best and that slowly shifts our sympathy away from him in this speech, I think.
Aside from discrimination against Jews, the play interestingly touches on racism in a way that will be explored more fully in Shakespeare’s other Venetian play, Othello: The Moor of Venice. One of Portia’s suitors, and the first one to have a go at choosing the casket, is the Prince of Morocco, described as “a tawny Moor.” His very first line in the play is a plea not to be judged on the basis of his skin colour: “Mislike me not for my complexion.” He seems to be proud of who he is, pointing out that his blood is not only as red as anyone else’s but “redder” (implying he is more valiant), and he declares, “I would not change this hue / Except to steal your thoughts, my gentle queen.” Portia, for her part, declares that she is not so shallow as to judge him on his looks, asserting that “In terms of choice I am not solely led / By nice direction of a maiden’s eyes.” Yet when he chooses the (obviously incorrect) gold casket (cue famous and now slightly altered line: “all that glisters is not gold”) and leaves in ignominious failure, Portia gives him what is known in cricketing terms as a send-off:
A gentle riddance! Draw the curtains; go.
Let all of his complexion choose me so.
Apparently that last line is often cut from performances because it detracts from audience sympathy for the otherwise admirable Portia, exposing her as a racist after all (at least in the eyes of modern audiences).
Bassanio obviously selects the right casket (the lead one, of course), correctly recognising that “The world is still deceived with ornament.” He seems willed on by Portia, just as she willed the Princes of Morocco and Aragon to choose wrongly. So she gets her desire after all and her father’s will is not the burden she imagined it to be (father is always right). But before you can say, “And they lived happily ever after” (it’s still only Act 3, after all), Bassanio receives news that Antonio has unluckily lost all of ships at sea and Shylock will be taking his pound of flesh, at a trial presided over by the Duke of Venice (actually known as the Doge and famous for his funny hats).
Luckily, Bassanio is not the only person in the play who can come up with a cunning plan. Portia has one of her own, and in a development that will not shock fans of Shakespearean comedies, it involves women dressing up as men. In this case, Portia becomes a young lawyer called Balthasar and Nerissa a law clerk, saving the day with a bit of clever argumentation that turns what should be Shylock’s clear legal victory into an abject failure.
What strikes me as most interesting about the trial is that it is so clearly biased against Shylock but before Portia turns up it seems like he will prevail anyway. Even before the trial begins, Antonio makes this observation:
The duke cannot deny the course of law:
For the commodity that strangers have
With us in Venice, if it be denied,
Will much impeach the justice of his state;
Since that the trade and profit of the city
Consisteth of all nations.
This is where I got the globalisation part of the title from. The implication is that the Duke no doubt would intercede on Antonio’s behalf and prevent the case from going to trial if it weren’t for the annoying aspect of global trade and the need for Venice to at least make a show of justice in order to keep their trading partners happy. I think this cuts both ways for people interested in the processes of globalisation and its impact on things like human rights. It seems clear that, at least in some respects, the commercial interests that Venice is bound up in (“the trade and profit of the city”) work to enforce laws that might be otherwise overlooked. Venice (the Duke) can’t simply act as they please if they want people to keep on doing business with them. On the other hand, the desire of the Duke to bail out Antonio (who is the sixteenth century equivalent of a multinational corporation, with his trade interests stretching across the world, including to Mexico) makes me think of the companies getting bailed out after the GFC for being “too big to fail.”
What with the pesky law getting in the way of their innate prejudice, the state needs a high-priced lawyer to step in and make sure that the trial goes the way they want it to. Luckily, Portia/Balthasar is up to the task, and it turns out all she charges is a bit of humiliation for her new husband, Bassanio. Shylock is again given powerful arguments by Shakespeare in this scene, which primarily go to the rights of the property holder and again serve to expose the hypocrisy of of the people arguing against him, as he points out that most of them are no doubt slave-owners who happily mistreat their “property” but then start whining as soon as he does something bad that is seemingly within the remit of the law.
Shylock’s main failing, and the one that he is ultimately harshly punished for, is his failure to exhibit mercy. The Duke asks him to show mercy and then Portia/Balthasar repeatedly gives him the opportunity, which he declines. This leads into the other most famous speech from the play:
Shylock’s earlier speech had made a case for the equality of all human beings, but here Portia makes a similar appeal that goes further in asking him to show empathy and imagine himself on the other side of the ledger. Wouldn’t he want someone to show him mercy when they hold power over him? That’s why he should show mercy to Antonio now, says Portia.
The argument speaks to a divine justice that goes beyond what most humans are able to manage and it’s certainly beyond Shylock, who continues to insist upon his pound of flesh until Portia/Balthasar, in one of the all-time great dramatic court scenes stops him as he is about to insert his knife into Antonio’s breast, pointing out that it doesn’t specifically mention blood in his bond, so if he takes any blood then he will lose all of his money and property.
Oh, and furthermore, his measurement would have to be exactly precise concerning the weight of the flesh he cuts out.
Oh, and by the way, now that he’s tried to do it it’s attempted murder so he loses all of his property and possibly his life unless the Duke deigns to spare him.
All of this strikes me as plainly legally ridiculous and shows why Shylock should have had his own legal representation so someone could yell out “Objection!” at this point. Not only is Shylock reduced to abjection at this point, losing half of his money, but he is forced to leave the rest in a will to Lorenzo and Jessica and, this is where Antonio drives the metaphorical knife in, he is forced to convert to Christianity. If the play were to end at this point it would very much have the force of a tragedy: a man brought low by his own hubris and his unwillingness to show empathy.
There’s still another Act to come, though. And here Shakespeare pulls us back to comedy and to a battle of the sexes between the now ascendent women and their hapless new husbands (Graziano has also married Nerissa). While still pretending to be men, and partly because Bassanio and Graziano have both said in their hearing that they would rather their wives die than their good friend Antonio, Portia and Nerissa decide to take a little playful revenge on them. They demand the rings they gave them as payment for services rendered in the courtroom and then on their return to Belmont when they are once again dressed as women, they demand them back. There’s obvious humour to be had in seeing the men squirm and we get a few good cuckold jokes as well, which everyone takes in good spirit. The married couples head off to bed together, promising to pay more attention to their partners’ rings (oo,er!), leaving poor Antonio alone with just the consolation of a letter informing him that some of his ships have amazingly turned up after all. It’s a shame that money can’t buy him happiness.
The BBC production of the play was the second programme in Series 3 and first aired in December 1980. The most notable casting was Warren Mitchell as Shylock. Mitchell was a British/Australian comic actor, best known for his role of the bigoted cockney Alf Garnett in the sitcom Till Death Us Do Part (1965–1975), so the shift from bigot to victim of bigotry was probably something they had in mind with the casting here. Wikipedia informs me that that he did in fact come from a family of Russian Jews (whose original name was Misell).
John Franklyn-Robbins seemed a little insipid as Antonio, but that’s partly the character. John Nettles didn’t strike me as a particularly compelling Bassanio either. Gemma Jones played Portia well and I didn’t recognise her as a young woman, but it turns out I have seen her in quite a few film roles in more recent years and she may be familiar to some people as Madam Poppy Pomfrey from the Harry Potter film franchise.
The sets were about what you’d expect from the series: utilitarian and stagy with a gesture towards the architecture of Venice that their budget wasn’t really able to capture. The do a decent job with lighting and colour palette to suggest the location changes between Venice and Belmont but they really can’t compete with the actual wonders of Venice, which linger in the mind of anyone who has been lucky enough to visit there. They manage a few authentic Venetian masks in the scene where Jessica absconds with Lorenzo, but for some reason several of the characters are wearing fishnet stockings on their faces in lieu of masks. I didn’t realise the budget was that constrained.
The prominent film adaptation of the play dates from 2004 and was directed by Michael Radford, who also wrote the screenplay. It has a star-studded cast, including Al Pacino as Shylock, Jeremy Irons as Antonio and Joseph Fiennes as Bassanio.
The Radford film has the great advantage of filming on location in Venice for some scenes, and many of the scenes have a painterly quality to them (the above still seems to be modelled on Caravaggio). It also plays up the homoerotic angle between Antonio and Bassanio, something that Joseph Fiennes thinks was legitimate (he kisses Irons in once scene, apparently ad-libbing) but Jeremy Irons does not.
There’s a lot going on in this play (which is why I’ve gone on about it for so long) and I think Shakespeare was really starting to hit his straps at this point in his career. It probably doesn’t make it into my top five Shakespeare plays but it’s a contender for the top ten, and his next play after this one was, to my mind, his first genuine masterpiece (stay tuned).
