The Space Between Justice and Mercy: A Qualities of Mercy Dispatch
by Vanessa I. Corredera
The U.S. Supreme Court giveth, and the U.S. Supreme Court taketh away, or so it was regarding employer discrimination this summer (2020). On June 15, the court ruled that the 1964 Civil Rights Act protects LGBTQ employees against employment discrimination on the basis of sex. On July 8, however, the court upheld the “ministerial exemption” allowing religious institutions to discriminate against their employees without fear of being sued in return, even if the employees fired were not ministers themselves. This second ruling may not, on the face of it, seem to have implications when it comes to LGBTQ rights. If considered together, however, the Court has left the door open for LGBTQ employees to be fired with impunity if they work for religious institutions. The potential defanging of the first ruling in light of the second (regardless of how improbable to some that likelihood might seem) draws attention to the longstanding use of religion as a tool for discrimination, a dynamic at the heart of The Merchant of Venice.
Indeed, in Act 4, Scene 1 of The Merchant of Venice, Portia delineates what she calls the “quality of mercy,” which is “gentle,” thereby blessing “him that gives and him that takes” (4.1.187–91). Portia establishes this argument on distinctly religious grounds, claiming that mercy comes from God, so that when “mercy seasons justice,” humankind reflects God’s nature. It is prayer for mercy — without which no one would be saved — that “doth teach us all to render / the deeds of mercy” (4.1.201–05). Yet famously, Portia does not abide by her own proclamation, instead capitalizing upon Shylock’s religious and racial outsider status as Jew in order to justify eschewing the quality of mercy when declaring his punishment. Religion thus serves as a vehicle for grace extended both from above (God himself) and down below (person to person). But when a challenge goes too far, religion equally works to discriminate.
My students at Andrews University (AU) were especially poised to interrogate this dynamic. Each year, approximately 1,500 undergraduates come from all over the globe to this parochial, liberal-arts based school in southwest Michigan. Even though not all students who attend AU are religious, most have been raised in Christian homes and would know Jesus’s New Testament command, “Judge not, and ye shall not be judged: condemn not, and ye shall not be condemned: forgive, and ye shall be forgiven” (Luke 6:37, KJV), an assertion for interpersonal compassion similar to Portia’s. Yet many of them are equally familiar with spiritual advocations for behavioral parameters discarded when convenient, and taken even further, used for exclusion from rather than invitation to community. It was this understanding of and discomfort with Christian hypocrisy that resonated with students as we considered how to re-imagine what the second half of 4.2 would mean for our local community: a rural village with deeply religious ties but where spirituality is practiced in myriad ways.
Who then, would be our equivalent of “the Jew”? This was the hardest question we confronted, one so difficult that it stalled our momentum in reimagining the courtroom scene. Certainly, a Jew would be an outsider in a largely Protestant community. But we took seriously the project’s request to consider our specific community and how it demarcates inclusion and exclusion. AU has longstanding ties with Jewish communities in the area, so keeping Shylock as a Jew did not truly reflect our potential exclusionary practices. Exclusion based on racial difference also did not fit with our community. AU is notably one of the most diverse universities per capita in the U.S. While we have struggles with inclusion, the virulent racism experienced by and enforced upon Shylock also did not align with the challenges faced here. Finally, after grappling with who truly would be an outsider, students settled on two categories for Shylock — either an atheist or a LGBTQ+ person.
The former choice seemed obvious given the division between the categories “religious” and “not religious.” But the class did not want to “let Merchant of Venice off the hook,” so to speak. For them, Merchant of Venice was not a comedy but rather a tragedy of exclusion and marginalization enacted by a Christian society. They arrived at that conclusion after weeks spent interpreting the play through a range of theoretical lenses since this project was part of Approaches to Theoretical Discourse rather than a Shakespeare course. We began by considering the tension between Merchant of Venice’s classification as a history on its title page and a comedy in the First Folio. Over the subsequent four weeks, we devoted a week to examining the play through each of the following theoretical lenses: new historicism, feminist criticism, queer theory, race and ethnic studies, and adaptation theory.
After reading a series of articles, they found resonance with claims such as Derek Cohen’s that “Current criticism notwithstanding, The Merchant of Venice seems to me a profoundly and crudely anti-Semitic play” (193); or James O’Rourke who observes how due to a “social obsession with sexual purity,” Antonio is “compelled to live in the role of an internal exile” (288); or Kim F. Hall’s assertion that in Venice, “Aliens must be either assimilated into the dominant culture (Shylock’s and Jessica’s conversions) and/or completely disempowered (Shylock’s sentence)” (300); or Alan Sinfield’s argument that Antonio’s exclusion at the hands of “hetero-patriarchy” demonstrates that “It is the Shakespearean text that is reconfirming the marginalization of an already marginalized group” (274).
These arguments drove students to choose an “Other” that a modern Christian community would not simply exclude but persecute. Ultimately, the class drew inspiration from debates about the integration of LGBTQ+ people in traditionally conservative communities of faith to have Shylock become Shyla, a queer young woman brought to a campus tribunal and, while advocating for her rights, oppressed because of her sexuality. With this choice, my students wanted to call out Christian communities for their hypocrisy in disregarding the very “quality of mercy” upon which they build their faith when called to extend it to outsiders.
We thus crafted a backstory informing our scene while also deciding on the production choices that would build viewer sympathy for Shyla rather than Portia. Regarding the former, we chose to set the narrative at an extremely religious school with strict gender hierarchies and staunchly heterosexist school rules; it would be the logical extreme underpinning the historically held religious traditions of the small village in which our university resides. In service of the latter, we had my colleague, Shakespeare and adaptation scholar L. Monique Pittman, visit our class and discuss adaptation as a field and process. We used that foundation to ensure our artistic decisions helped elevate rather than confuse our narrative ones.
As such, students avoided close ups of Portia, assigning them to Shyla instead, and chose affective music only for Shyla in order to privilege her experience. Informed by the queer theory they read, students also wanted to be ethical in their depiction of an LGBTQ+ student by avoiding even inadvertent stereotyping. Shyla’s costume thus did not stand out in any way, and in fact conformed to traditional norms of femininity in order to highlight the constructed nature of her differentiation. Another place where narrative and adaptation came together was in the shot of the Dean forgetting the Bible. The point was to communicate how religious authority “forgets” the very premises supposedly undergirding the quest for justice and mercy in a Christian setting.
My students thus embraced the chance to use Shakespeare — whom many said they had never before considered in relation to issues of gender, sexuality, religion, race, or social justice — to speak back to abuses of power by communities of faith. That said, the project also raised lingering difficult questions, most especially this: Even as people try to change inequitable institutions or systems that they nevertheless see as meaningful, at what point do they become complicit by remaining within these structures?
Pedagogically, this meant I had to accept ceding content for discussion, opening up space for questions rather than answers, being uncomfortable and not entirely in control. Even now, I must admit discomfort that despite discussing the issue at length, we did not come up with a consensus. But for first- and second-year students from vastly different backgrounds, perhaps raising the question was enough. For, how many early modern scholars must likewise grapple with similar questions as they confront their institutions’ imbrication in systemic racism, capitalist exploitation, and even without any ministerial exemption, discrimination on the basis of sex and gender? And yet, like my students and me, they too stay. My hope is that by examining how communities lack the qualities of mercy to which they ask others to adhere, my students have a stronger foundation to shape a future in which the discrimination sanctioned by the Supreme Court this summer will be part of a distant rather than an all too familiar past.
Vanessa I. Corredera is an Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of English at Andrews University. Her work has been published in Borrowers and Lenders, The Journal of American Studies, Literature/Film Quarterly, The Routledge Handbook of Shakespeare and Global Appropriation, Shakespeare Quarterly, and Early Modern Literary Studies. She has a book on appropriations of Othello in post-racial America forthcoming with Edinburgh University Press. You can follow her on Twitter @vicorredera.
