Shakespeare didn’t make this one easy. Try to enjoy The Merchant Of Venice as a crafty comedy, and you risk being insensitive. See it as a subversive tragedy, and you trip over author’s intent.
Pretend as many do that the play isn’t anti-Semitic, and there is still a lot of weirdness to navigate, like a rich dead father forcing his daughter to marry the first man who guesses which coffin hides her portrait, and a man so lustful and greedy he risks his best friend’s life to hook up with that daughter (we are supposed to root for this guy, by the way.)
As for me, I like it, even more once it gets going. I just don’t feel good about saying so.
We begin on a street in Venice, where one Bassanio asks his wealthier friend Antonio to loan him a large sum so he can court this lady with the coffins. While cash-poor at the moment as his fortune rides the world’s seas aboard several sailing vessels, Antonio accepts the request. To get the needed money, Antonio reaches out to Shylock, a Jewish moneylender.
The two men have tangled in the past, so Shylock somewhat bitterly, somewhat in jest tells Antonio he will make a loan, but in lieu of interest take a pound of Antonio’s flesh if he defaults. Antonio, either unable or unwilling to look after himself, accepts this devil’s bargain:
ANTONIO
I
hold the world but as the world, Gratiano;
A stage where every man must play a part,
And mine a sad one.
[Act I, scene i, lines
77-79]
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| Norwegian actor Kjell Stormoen suggests Antonio's stoic bearing, not to mention his deadly inertness, in a 1969 staging. "In sooth I not know why I am so sad," is Antonio's first line, and he is just as much a blank to everyone else. Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kjell_Stormoen |
One oddity about the play is that Antonio, its hero and title character, hardly figures in it. He may be a big wheel on the Rialto, but he is also the stiffest protagonist in all Shakespeare, basically telling friends to charge all expenses to him and suffering the consequences with total acquiescence. He makes Hamlet look like Rambo.
The real hero of the play is the woman Bassanio is chasing, Portia. Once she is sprung from her late father’s arrangement of waiting for a man to happen upon the right coffin (Bassanio, happily for her), she is one of the most vigorously enjoyable of Shakespearean characters, and the one great reason for reading (or watching) this play.
Even before the coffin riddle gets solved, Portia wittily makes conversation with a series of vain suitors, sneaking in catty asides to her devoted lady-in-waiting Nerissa:
PORTIA
How oddly he is suited!
I think he bought his doublet in Italy, his round
hose in France, his bonnet in Germany and his
behavior everywhere. [I, ii, l. 72-75]
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| Portia with Bassanio, one of her many suitors. She wants him, too, but as she explains: "In terms of choice I am not solely led/By nice direction of a maiden's eyes."[I, ii, 13-14]. Image of 1831 painting by Gilbert Stuart from wikioo.org. |
The character most people know, more than they know the play itself, is neither Portia nor Antonio but Shylock, also called “The Jew.”
The nature of Shylock’s beef with Antonio is complex. On the one hand, he is a professional money-lender, and if not exactly a loanshark as his name would become synonymous with to this day, he is a cheap and spiteful fellow. Antonio loans money without interest, and even bails out those in debt to Shylock. Plus he berates Shylock regularly, even spitting on him on occasion.
Shylock’s famous soliloquy about how Antonio treats his fellow human points this out, if with more than a dollop of unlikeable self-pity:
SHYLOCKtickle 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. [III, i, l. 61-69]
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| Shylock has been portrayed more sympathetically in modern times than he had been traditionally. Al Pacino took the part of Shylock in a 2004 movie adaptation directed by Michael Radford. Image from https://bostonreview.net/articles/alan-stone-redeeming-shylock/ |
Readers of this passage often note Shylock’s plea of a shared humanity and overlook his embrace of villainy. In the introduction to my old Signet paperback, there are essays about how Shakespeare was not anti-Jewish per se; just pushing against a harshly legalistic view of life.
But the play’s main business for four of its five acts involves not merely calling out Shylock for his bad religion but cheering the act of stealing away his daughter, Jessica, who makes clear she has no patience for her father or his faith. When Shylock complains about losing her, and a ring that had belonged to his late wife which he wouldn’t have parted with for “a wilderness of monkeys” [III, i, l.116], we are meant to be amused.
That said, Shakespeare’s handling of Shylock does work, both for the purpose of the play (you need his threat to Antonio) and a subdued, perhaps unconscious subversion not of anti-Semitism but of a group of bright young things finding love and merriment at the expense of others.
He’s a tough bird, anyway:
SHYLOCK
I
will buy with you, sell with you, talk with you,
walk with you, and so following, but I will not eat
with you, drink with you, nor pray with you. [I, iii, l. 33-35]
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| The title page of the first known published edition of the play to reach us, printed 16 years before its author's death. A line in the play about a ship called the Andrew may reference a 1596 capture of a vessel by that name, but speculation runs thick. Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Merchant_of_Venice |
I have left myself little space to explain why I like this play. That is appropriate, because I have less to say on the subject. Shylock is, as noted, admirable in his defiance, however detestable in manner. However fantastic in conception, the plot itself is very solid in its design, with credible suspense and brisk handling of its many twists and turns.
Surprisingly for Shakespearean comedy, the jokes land a lot of the time, especially as we get to the big story climax in Act IV and the happy-ending wrap-up in Act V. Portia and Nerissa have some fun with the boys after saving the day, and this results in some clever comedy.
Portia learns from her man Bassanio that he gave his ring, a token of Portia’s love, to a doctor of law for helping Antonio. Portia knows this because she was the doctor, in disguise, but can’t help herself letting him dangle in the breeze awhile, playing to the audience:
PORTIA
Watch me like Argus.
If you do not, if I be left alone –
Now by mine honor which is yet mine own,
I’ll have that doctor for mine bedfellow. [V, i, 230-233]
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| Portia in a lawyer's disguise, from a 1888 painting by Henry Woods. "The quality of mercy is not strained," she tells the court. "It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven/Upon the place beneath." [IV, i, l. 183-184] Image from https://sites.google.com/site/shakespearedisguisesolutions/personal-statements/merchant-of-venice |
One odd misfire in the comedy department is a clown, Launcelot Gabbo, who makes a handful of bad puns and goofs on his blind old dad before disappearing almost completely from the second half of the play. As a former servant of Shylock, he serves a marginal plot purpose. Did one of the comedians in Shakespeare’s acting troupe need work?
I hated this play the first time I read it, and it required some effort to appreciate it more. In the 1965 introduction to my Signet edition, scholar Kenneth Myrick suggests it is meant to be taken as the stuff of fantasy. I think he has a point.
“We cannot understand it in terms of modern realism,” he writes. “Strange and wonderful are the stories of the caskets, the pound of flesh, and the beautiful girl disguised as a wise young judge – not to mention the miser’s daughter who blossoms into a delightful and virtuous lady, filled with the joy of life.”
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| The three couples who make up the center of the plot share a happy final scene together. Despite the smug unlikability of most of these characters, Shakespeare manages to make this happy ending work. Image from a 1980 BBC-TV production at http://bbcshakespeare.blogspot.com/2014/04/the-merchant-of-venice-series-3-episode.html |
In fact, the final scene, the only one in Act V, is a wonderful roundelay of singing, joking, and fine poetic verse which feels of a piece with the best of A Midsummer Night’s Dream:
LORENZO
How
sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank!
Here will we sit and let the sounds of music
Creep in our ears; soft stillness and the night
Become the touches of sweet harmony. [V, i, l. 55-58]
When you add to this Portia’s famous speech on the “quality of mercy” [It is twice blest;/It blesseth him that gives and him that takes [IV, i, l. 185-186], the play can be enjoyable just so long as you overlook the pork jokes and sneers about “his Jewish heart.” [IV, i, l. 80]
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| This 1876 painting by Maurycy Gottlieb depicts Shylock more humanely than past images, which often aimed for exaggerated comic and/or ethnic effect. What gives this painting interest is how his daughter Jessica is depicted. Trapped, or conniving? You be the judge. Image from https://journeys.dartmouth.edu/exploratoryshakespeare/2015/07/14/gentle-shylock-and-jessica/ |
Which is a shame. I’m not one who likes judging Shakespeare with modern-day standards, but it can’t be helped. You need Shylock’s Jewishness to create a reason for the debt (moneylending was not a Christian occupation in that time and place.) The nasty sectarian bullying he undergoes would work better if Shakespeare wasn’t so clearly taking sides. The guy is even forced to convert, which even the more positive Myrick admitted was a bridge too far.
It’s a glass half-full/half-empty kind of thing.
There’s enough dimension to Shylock to discredit the notion of him as mere
Hebrew whipping boy, just not enough to make one believe Shakespeare intended a
sympathetic interpretation. While not one of the Bard’s best, The Merchant
Of Venice is fine in parts, however, and interesting throughout, a
reflection of ugly people in an ugly time that captivates you with extended moments of
true beauty.
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