Reviewers of the first two seasons at the Globe in Southwark, whether in the printed and electronic media or in formal and informal talks at the International Shakespeare Conference in Stratford-upon-Avon, focused more on the new theater's audience than on its productions. Cf. Shakespeare's own father is believed to have been among these recusants,17 indicating that the issues of religious conversion for political and social reasons may have been more experiential than theoretical for our playwright. But the scene suggests that Jessica may not get away from her father's house with the mere consequence of the shame of cross-dressing. But it is not the case that in order to state one conditions one must be able to love. Portia observes wryly, “You should in all sense be much bound to him, / For (as I hear) he was much bound to you.” Emotional loyalty is identified with the money that has passed between Shylock and Antonio. Salerio is saying that lovers are much more eager to consummate the marriage than they are to remain faithful (‘keep obliged faith’) subsequently. I refer to Shylock's famous ‘aside’, labelled as such in every modern edition of the play I have seen: In Understanding Shakespeare's Plays in Performance, Halio writes that, omission of this passage is usually a clear indication of how the director has conceived Shylock's role—and with it, much else in the play. If Shylock's religion, in itself, is not enough to give him automatically the attributes of a Herod or a Barabas, there is still the matter of Shylock as usurer to be considered. 202-9, for an analysis of the discursive struggles of the courtroom scene. Shylock: A Legend and Its Legacy. What's more, it is readily accessible, indebted as it is to the popular conceit of the sea as fortune and built on two simple metaphorical vehicles, “broth” and “church” (22, 29). ———. Shakespeare changes the inscription to “Who chooseth me must give and hazard all he hath” (II,vii,9). What happens in The Merchant of Venice is that the accepted definition of self by way of contradistinction to the excluded other is buoyantly sustained, as one might expect in a comedy, while the two-sided representation of Shylock flashes an intermittent, stroboscopic light on a radically antithetical possibility of identity. A certain measure-for-measure backlash redeemed the legalities of marriage when many women found themselves facing such realities as the need for child support payments. Michael Ferber, “The Ideology of The Merchant of Venice,” ELR 20 (1990): 448. The same images continued to be invoked by opponents of the bill, Shapiro notes, and led to its repeal barely two years after its passage, despite arguments in its favor drawn from more enlightened thinkers such as John Toland, Daniel Defoe, and John Locke. The body's blood-flow is the authenticating sign of his intense responsiveness which cannot at that moment find its way into language. ): Early Shakespeare. Arragon fixes on the silver casket because its inscription, ‘“Who chooseth me shall get as much as he deserves”’ (II.ix.36), prompts him into enunciating his own worth: The metaphor of ‘the stamp’ refers to the authenticating of a document, and its validation for social use: Arragon thinks of himself as inscribed.18 In this metaphor of Arragon as a document on which is written the account of his value lies the fantasy that his body has received a ‘stamp of merit’. Cf. Throughout the trial scene, Antonio continues to display what Lyon calls his “talent for the … self-advertising whine.”22 His demeanor of long suffering is undercut by his repeated plays for Bassanio's affection, as well as by startling reminders of how ill at ease he feels in the world. ], The law and literature movement now involves hundreds of scholars across the disciplines.1 Among the movement's contributions to scholarship and teaching in literature has been its attention to several well-worked “legalistic” stories. During a conversation with me in his London home on 15 June, Olivier reflected on his approach to directing Merchant at the New Globe on Bankside this summer. Marianne Novy (Urbana: University Illinois Press, 1990) is a collection in which Jessica is not mentioned at all; in the few allusions to Merchant throughout the volume, it is Portia who is the subject. Although women could be praised for being as virtuous or intelligent as men, or Jews for converting to Christianity or behaving as Christians ought, nevertheless femaleness and Jewishness as qualities in themselves had negative meanings in this tradition—both were associated with the flesh, not the spirit, and therefore with impulses toward sexuality, aggression, and acquisitiveness. Bassanio at one and the same moment has broken Antonio's spell and become a man, responsible for himself and the moral character of his actions. My last category, theatrical limitations imposed upon the range of performance options, requires discussion of another argument that has been offered for the traditionally villainous Shylock—perhaps the most potent argument in that it relies, to a degree, on the text itself rather than things external to it. In fact, he seems either to be giving Shylock the income benefit or else himself. “‘A Foolish Consistency’: Antonio and Alienation in The Merchant of Venice.” In Particular Saints: Shakespeare's Four Antonios, Their Contexts, and Their Plays, pp. In his next speech he refers to the “enforced” character of his gift, but no longer is the doctor implied to be the source of the compulsion. Yet the play remains a comedy. And now, in scene three, we are in Shylock's Venice; and we hear, for the first time, what will become an unmistakable voice—addressing, as it were, the bottom line in Venice: “three thousand ducats—well”. All these sources point to the origins of legal analysis of the play dating to the natural lawyer Von Ihering (who took Shylock's side in the late 19th century) and various English and American explanations of the contract formation scene (I. iii). Cloten—like Lorenzo, but in direct, ribald, language—alludes to the musicians as surrogate seducers: “Come on, tune. Rather than respond to Portia and the trial scene by rendering mercy, Antonio continues his business competition with the man and uses his rival's vulnerability to assert further dominance. If Portia is indeed trying to achieve private ends without doing damage to public structures, if her deliberations are directed toward serving both the law's spirit and letter and toward bringing Jew and Christian closer to mutual understanding, then earlier scenes would seem to allow her a fighting chance to make some progress on those fronts. If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that. Plato Symposium 177-185; Tovey, “Golden Casket,” 233. On this reading, however appropriate it is to the play's comic medium, which mandates the defeat of Shylock's bond, Portia is at trial always alert to the Jew's constancy and ethics in the domain of human relations. He makes the point perfectly explicit: his “love” is to be weighed against Portia's “commandment.”69 In accord with his declaration Bassanio accedes. …. In 2.9, he is said to be approaching Belmont with “(besides commends and courteous breath), / Gifts of rich value,” which he cannot afford, and arriving like a “day in April … / To show how costly summer” is approaching (90-91, 94-95). The comparison is rejected because the angel on the English coin is merely on the surface of the metal, and therefore not truly part of it. Clearly, Jessica wishes to hide her cross-dressing from her lover, and this seems natural. All upper-class men married. His self-lessness is only a more subtle form of selfishness, for he wishes not merely to possess the object of his love, but to establish himself as the most lovable human being, as the one most worthy of love and thus as the one whose love supplants all others and lasts indefinitely.40. That is, the Duke attributes to Shylock a sense of theatrics. The pun on “trial” enables the word to refer to both the trial over which Portia will preside and the scrutiny with which the audience is urged to evaluate her judgments by virtue of participating in 4.1 as audience-accomplices. Shylock's reaction to the elopement and the robbery, as reported in II. I still found it to be about anti-Semitism under mercantile capitalism, but now just as clearly it was also about homosexual eroticism in conflict with heterosexual marriage, about the rivalry of romantic male friendship with the claims of conventional marriage. The tedious, tolling reiteration of the word ‘bond’ has an effect which musicians know as ‘devaluation through repetition’. Contra Geary, “Nature of Portia's Victory,” 62. In the trial scene, Portia's advance knowledge of how to overturn the bond not only buys her the time to try coaxing Shylock out of his vengeance; it also rigs the other characters' responses to the court's proceedings—or, at least, severely limits the possibilities of their responses. 500,000 ducats, yielding approximately 5٪ a year, provides an annual income of some 25,000 ducats to Antonio for as long as Shylock lives. But even more to the point, Portia's control over the trial's outcome, artistic in its breadth and resourcefulness, alerts us to how provisional—illusory, really—are all the constructs that are relied upon to stave off social and personal disorder.18 Countless details of the scene—from Shylock's pathetically blind trust in the law's letter to the deliberate instruction with which Portia calls upon first the duke, then Antonio, to sentence Shylock—point up how easily the verdict, but for Portia's firm hand, might have gone the other way. There are only two such directions in the various Quartos, both within one speech in Pericles qi, as Simonides addresses Thaisa, the first ‘aside’ sitting one line below where it should be: As in Titus, the context implies thinking aloud rather than addressing the audience.31, While the very word ‘soliloquy’ indicates that only the speaker is on stage, there are countless examples in Shakespeare, unmarked by any stage direction, of this other convention for which we have no convenient label—thinking aloud while others are present. Fischer-Lichte, Erika. In our times—and not only in ours—both unconditional love (as long as it lasts) and liberal contractualism have been applied to marriage with a vengeance and often with an uneasy sense that they were not quite compatible. He has said that he wants to “catch him once upon the hip” (I,iii,43) for the way in which Antonio has damaged his business reputation; and here he finds himself subjected to worse scorn. Instead, he leaves Antonio solely to his own devices and, through Portia's acquiescence to Antonio's sentences on Shylock, portrays her as sanctioning them. Yet her awareness that human inadequacy requires compassion comes and goes. Portia, the new Pilate, breaks with her predecessor on one central point: unlike Pilate, who sacrificed his judgment of the law to fear of the mob or concern for politics, she sticks to the law, the Jewish-become-Venetian law.65 Under that law Antonio is free from Shylock's bond. Invoking the story of Hercules' rescue of Hesione from the sea monster (Ovid, Metamorphoses, xi) she effects a metaphorical transformation on the scene. As Tyre, so Venice. Such is the reconciling potency of Belmont; and Portia seals the happy marriage with a ring. In scene two, we are in Belmont, and Portia is weary. His passionate attachment to Bassanio is now inscribed in the bond, and authenticated by the body with the promise of his corporeal ‘person’ in exchange for three thousand ducats. But Shakespeare himself polices Shylock's phonic language. Whatever sense of their impregnability may be afforded to the Venetians by their luxury, leisure, and power, it is continually undermined and exposed as contingent. Cf. According to Andrew's admittedly unconventional analysis of the play, Shylock would like nothing better than to marry his daughter Jessica to a nice Jewish husband. Gratiano, whose name recalls the comic doctor of commedia dell'arte,12 and who speaks, as he says, like ‘the fool’ (79), generates diagnostic fantasies on Antonio's self-presentation, the first of which suggests a cause for melancholy in the body's inactivity. For example, perhaps Portia cannot take control of a trial otherwise dominated by patriarchs without having first been immersed in and irritated by a patriarchal structure like the will. Does Jessica's response to the music at the end of the beginning of act 5 confirm that a Jewish soul is “not happily born,” unmusical? But the more one is aware of what the play's whole design is expressing through Shylock, of the comedy's high seriousness in its concern for the grace of the community, the less one wants to lose the play Shakespeare wrote for one he merely suggested. Thematic criticism of The Merchant of Venice has touched on a wide range of subjects. If they had been more honest with themselves both of these things might have been more difficult for them. If in Shylock the diabolic is made human, perhaps what the culture assumes definitionally to be human may have its own dark part in the diabolic. At moments like these, Shylock's authority weighs in equal to, if not greater than, his opponents'. The legally irrelevant opening rhetorical gambit might be understandable in one untrained in the law. In spite of Portia's scruples and her determination to live by the rules, her discussion with Nerissa in Act I admits the possibility of rebellion against her father's authority. The modern line is articulated by J. W. Lever: intense male friendship at the end of the sixteenth century in England emerged as a major literary theme; the new seriousness about friendship owed much to Italian Platonism, to the idea of a new kind of love marked by an “absence of physical homosexuality,” Amor Razionale.9 Platonic homosexuality belonged to an Italianate culture that was casual about bisexuality, but the new love was not a euphemism for erotic homosexuality. Although the play eschews the direct representation of the Moor as villain, it enforces suspicion of Morocco by linking him dramatically with Shylock the Jew, a strategy which blurs the boundaries between one outsider and the other. The suitors all struggle with the same problem of how to arrange the signifying elements arranged before them—caskets of different metals, and inscriptions—into an order which arrives at the ‘correct’ answer which is already determined by the father.