Ken Colston on Shylock, usury and The Merchant of Venice.
Sacramental Usury in The Merchant of Venice
by
Ken Colston
[Editor's Note: This article is also published in Logos Magazine. We would like to thank Logos for allowing us to publish it here as well. Also note: The Theater of the Word will be performing Scenes from The Merchant of Venice at the Shakespeare Festival at Aquinas College, produced by the Center for Faith and Culture on April 22, 2017, with commentary by Joseph Pearce.]
by
Ken Colston
[Editor's Note: This article is also published in Logos Magazine. We would like to thank Logos for allowing us to publish it here as well. Also note: The Theater of the Word will be performing Scenes from The Merchant of Venice at the Shakespeare Festival at Aquinas College, produced by the Center for Faith and Culture on April 22, 2017, with commentary by Joseph Pearce.]
That use is not forbidden usury
Which happies those that pay the
willing loan. (Sonnet IV)
In
the last two decades, critics have begun to explore the religion of William
Shakespeare. In particular, the old suspicion, advanced by his first
biographer, that he “dyed a Papist,” has been revived by Catholic partisans,
mainstream biographers, and even secular academics, some of whom speculate that
he was baptized, married, and housed as one. The evidence is mostly from the
biography, and it is slippery and circumstantial.[1]
The plays are the thing, however, and increasingly they themselves are yielding
concrete evidence of Catholic affiliations, long suspected intuitively by such
literary giants as Chateaubriand, Newman, and Chesterton. David Beauregard has
glimpsed such Catholic differences as the specific elements of sacramental
auricular confession and of condign merit;[2]
Claire Asquith has seen an elaborate, winking Catholic recusant code systematically
at work;[3]
Stephen Greenblatt has elaborated the “social energy” of that most contested
Reformation bugbear, “purgatory,” in Hamlet;[4]
Beatrice Groves has found a key to Shakespeare’s “incarnational aesthetic” in
the Catholic mystery plays that he may have well seen in his youth at Coventry;[5]
Allison Shell has reviewed hints that persecuted Elizabethan Catholics
criticized their fellow, well-placed literary sympathizer for not writing
enough on behalf of their common Catholic cause;[6]
Peter Milward, laboring on the Catholic thesis for several decades, has even
recently proposed an inventive correspondence between Shakespeare’s plays and
the holy Rosary.[7]
In general, Shakespeare’s plays
reveal important “field identification markers” of a Catholic dramatist in a
Protestant land, I contend, not necessarily as code words but as a working
theological vocabulary of a thinker formed, loosely and popularly, more in the
traditional Augustinian-Thomist tradition than in the Calvinist-Lutheran reform.
Where divergences between the Catholic and Reformation theologies arise,
Shakespeare leans Catholic: toward hierarchy, natural law, cooperative grace
(pilgrimage, penance, purgatory, indulgence), sacraments, liturgical pageantry,
religious authority, supererogatory acts of supernatural gift-love, and laxity.[8]
To the presence and current relevance of these markers, which abound both as
central themes and as casual allusions in a variety of plays, may be added a
salient but surprisingly ignored one: the traditional Catholic understanding of
economic order in Merchant of Venice,
proceeding from sacramental union rather than from capitalistic contract, a
contrast, partly imagined, partly reflecting a changing social reality, between
a newer anxious economy of debt (Venice) and an older easy economy of
sacrificial gift (Belmont), a difference expressed by dichotomous meanings of
“bond” organizing the idea pageantry of the play: the legal “bond” as a
temporary, limited, breakable written agreement between two hostile parties,
and the “marriage bond” as a permanent, infinite, indissoluble spoken promise
between lover and beloved, a total sacrifice of self that proceeds both by
God’s operative grace and by an effect of man’s cooperative grace that we may
call sacramental usury.
The word Catholic here does not
necessarily mean that Shakespeare’s religious longing was ultramontane,
recusant, seditious, underground, Marian Roman Catholic, theologically precise,
clearly demarcated, coded in a winking argot transparent to fellow Papist
sympathizers, or confident about narrow propositions. It rather reflects a
general, traditional Catholic orientation or play of mind, some of which can be
found within, for example, even the (at times) Thomistic Richard Hooker or the
Lutheran Tudor court itself (both Cecil and Elizabeth venerated the crucifix),
but clearly opposed to radical Protestantism, represented by Calvinistic
Puritans, the theology of which was ushering in a view of usury, moneylending,
and money itself more friendly to capitalism. Shakespeare’s mind was fashioned
in a conservative mold, orthodox but not rigid, skeptical of change and
newness, biased toward older formulations, a popular-agrarian-feudal
religiosity. If Shakespeare and his audience thrashed about in the “great muddled
middle” between Protestant and Catholic extremes,[9]
the theological expression in his drama is clearly orthodox. At the same time,
Shakespeare often seems simultaneously an heir of Thomistic essentialism and a
forerunner of existential personalism, a religious thinker somewhat
surprisingly relevant even to contemporary economic thought, with capitalism
under scrutiny again in the wake of the Great Recession.
Melancholia
and Capitalism
Antonio’s
melancholy (1.1.1) is not so mysterious.[10]
The medieval theory of the four humors made melancholy a characteristic
psychological condition that needed no further explanation, but Shakespeare has
also arrayed sufficient circumstances to make Antonio’s “want-wit sadness” a
consequence of capitalism. While Antonio denies his friend Salerio’s claim that
he “is sad to think upon his merchandise” hazarded at sea (1.1.39), surely the
merchant protests too much when he boasts that diversifying his ventures into
several bottoms (1.1.41) has made him “thank his fortune” (1.1.40). The play as
a whole shows that worry about enterprise is not unfounded. Capital-market
commerce, investing in products at several removes from their production, is a
game of constant risk and uncertainty. Salerio not only foreshadows Antonio’s
misfortune but also depicts the entire anxious atmosphere of emerging
capitalism:
My
wind cooling my broth
Would
blow me to an ague when I thought
What
harm a wind too great might do at sea.
I
should not see the sandy hourglass run
But
I should think of shallows and of flats,
And
see my wealthy Andrew docks in sand,
Vailing
her high top lower than her ribs,
To
kiss her burial. Should I go to church
And
see the holy edifice of stone
And
not bethink me straight of dangerous rocks,
Which
touching but my gentle vessel’s side,
Would
scatter all her spices on the stream,
Enrobe
the roaring waters with my silks—
And
in a word, but even now worth this,
And
now worth nothing. (1.1.21–35)
Salerio inverts the image of the Church,
the traditional rock of security instituted by Christ and founded upon the
flinty Peter; in this puffy new international economy, even its stability
cannot calm thoughts of danger. Secular commercial anxiety threatens the old
religious serenity. “Argosies with portly sail,” “pageants of the sea” flying
“with woven wings” (1.1.8,10,13), might suddenly wreck and “vail” their high
tops lower than their ribs (1.1.27), seen as the exposed rib cage of a corpse,
and require “burial (1.1.28); that is, sudden death might kill and rot away the
“precious vessel” of silken cargo, seen as a feminine vehicle. The “sandy
hourglass” of time drips a constant reminder that economic ventures might be
reduced to “nothing” at any second. Antonio’s anxiety, despite his hubristic
dismissal, has thus a well-founded economic basis. Moreover, Salerio’s choice
of spices and silks as cargo reveals moral disdain for an economy founded on
consumption of showy but empty superfluities to puff up the sails of mercantile
“signiors and rich burghers on the flood,” fixing commerce in the aspirational
upper-middle-class that “overpeer the petty trafficers/That curtsey to them, do
them reverence” (1.1.9–13). At the same time, Salerio’s metaphor gently
discloses the bountiful, mysterious God of nature as the creator of surplus
value: the wind blowing fortune, as it were, like a Venetian glassmaker.
However much Portia and Shylock
dominate the drama, Antonio possesses the title. He is the Merchant of Venice,
and his personal economic angst, an insistent death-dread unrelieved apparently
by an insurance system, stands for the city’s emotional vulnerability—a
peculiar setting with which to introduce a “comical history” (as the first
published Quarto entitled it). While engaged in the new global economy, Antonio
possesses the values of the old feudal order. Gratiano’s accusation that he is
a Puritanical killjoy, a “Sir Oracle” of “wisdom, gravity, profound conceit,”
does not really stick on this figure of the aristocratic past, whose values are
those of love and gift, not contract and exchange. His frustration lies
therein: he is a traditionalist in an uncomfortable business suit. Friendship
with Bassanio is where his treasure resides; the “petty” acquaintances
immediately yield to this deeper relationship when Bassanio, the jocular
prodigal, bounces on stage and lightens Antonio’s dark mood. Bassanio’s
self-accusation that he has spent his “time something too prodigal” connects
with Salerio’s “portly sail” metaphor of line 9:
‘Tis
not unknown to you, Antonio,
How
much I have disabled mine estate
By
something showing a more swelling port
Than
my faint means would grant continuance (1.1.122–25).
Bassanio
does not present himself as a victim of a credit economy; he recognizes that
his own prodigality, his “willful youth,” has caused his “great debts” and that
Antonio’s love has enabled it, and yet neither does he “make moan to be
abridged/From such a noble rate” (1.1.126–27). Thus, we have here economy
understood in its traditional way: as an expression of morality.
Catholic
and Protestant Markers
Something,
however, has changed in Bassanio’s credit history. On his secret pilgrimage to
Belmont, this prodigal son has found a “lady richly left” (1.1.161). Often
actors and commentators read Bassanio as a gold-digging playboy, but his
emphasis in describing Portia to Antonio for the first time is on her “wondrous
virtues, nothing undervalued/To Cato’s daughter” (1.1.163, 165–66). The words
“undervalued” and “worth” for Portia are meant in their moral rather than in their
commercial sense. The economic palette from which Portia’s values are colored
shows how even Venice’s capitalistic atmosphere grasps at the transcendentals
beauty and goodness. To be sure, Bassanio is not unaware of Portia’s wealth,
but he sees it as an obstacle and her personal beauty and virtue as his true
objects. Antonio’s deep friendship with Bassanio doesn’t prevent him from
raising the question of Bassanio’s “secret pilgrimage” (a field identification
marker of a Catholic practice condemned by the Church of England as idolatrous,
the first connection of Belmont to Catholicism), listening patiently to his
hyperbolic praise of his newest infatuation, and then, with his liquid assets
at zero, offering an unlimited credit line with no twinge of jealousy of “fair
Portia.”
What have we learned of the
text’s attitude toward the commodities market? It is associated with waste,
acedia, and frivolity—consumer debt to purchase silk and spices, precisely one
objection that Aristotle and Aquinas raised about trade as a state of life. Aristotle
writes about the psychological turbulence of trade in the Politics: “Some people suppose that it is the function of household
management to increase property, and they are continually under the idea that
it is their duty to be either safeguarding their substance in money or
increasing it to an unlimited amount. The cause of this state of mind is that
their interests are set upon life but not upon the good life.”[11]
Trade itself “is justly discredited, for it is not in accordance with nature,
but involves men’s taking things from one another.” Usury was even worse than
trade in the ancient and medieval tradition, “most reasonably hated,” because
it is “the most unnatural form of wealth,” for its gain comes from money breeding
on money.[12]
Christ’s criticisms of trade in the Gospels occur in many places, but perhaps
the most salient here is “Consider the lilies how they grow: they labor not,
neither spin they” (Lk 12:27, Geneva version). Aquinas objected to trade’s
serving “the lust for gain.”[13]
In contrast, some Protestant
preachers softened this traditional Catholic opposition against both usury and
commerce itself.[14]
For example, Daniel Price argued against the anti-commercial classical and
medieval tradition, wherein St. Jerome called Arabian merchants “the thieves of
the world,” Plato banned them from his Republic,
Cicero blamed them for ruining Greece with pride, covetousness, luxury, and
wickedness, and Erasmus denied them anything good or holy. Price’s sermon
instead praises the Christian vocation of the merchant: “the stories and
customs of Jews and gentiles, Grecians and barbarians, infidels and Christians,
do acknowledge the necessity, dignity, and excellency of merchants . . . the
most diligent for his life, the most assiduous in his labor, the most
adventurous on the sea, the most beneficial to the land, the glory of his
country, and the best pillar of his commonwealth.” The merchant is the type of
the Pauline active Christian who runs the race for Christ: “We are all merchants.
We cannot find the pearl of great price until we have fought for many good
pearls. O then run, wrestle, strive, sail, toil, labor, fight the good fight,
finish the course, seek to be like to the good merchant.” [15]
While this sermon was preached nearly a decade after Merchant was written, Shakespeare does
not share its commendation of commerce. While he was himself a businessman, his
text exploits that traditional Catholic prejudice against trade. Antonio is
decidedly not Price’s merchant crusader or Max Weber’s ascetic Protestant. He
cares for friendship, not ships; his concern is neither consumption nor
production but sharing of his goods, his own person, and even his friend. The
emotional register of Venetian commodities trading here moves from antic
verbosity to unexplained angst; at any moment, fortunes may be lost. Wealth
derives from capital and speculation, not labor and intrinsic value. A negative
attitude towards the commodities market, if not against a proto-consumer
society, in which Antonio’s unstable fortune exists, emerges in this first
scene. This overvalued world of silly gentlemen of a nobility deeply in debt[16]—is
a vulnerable, anxious world ruled by the blind chance of insubstantial wind and
fickle weather arbitrarily yielding increase or loss (literally as windfall)
and peopled with light acquaintances who come and go quickly, without labor or
leisure, and an unfair world like
ours, where we constantly check our smartphones for capital market updates. Against
it rises like a distant dream the “richly left” and “undervalued” fair lady’s Belmont, a world not of
business “venture” but of sacred “pilgrimage,” the home of a priceless heroine
named after a classical figure known for her shrewd goodness, a land more
appropriate for Antonio and Bassanio than their avaricious Venice.
Gabriel Egan points out that
miserliness was especially wicked in the Elizabethan 1590s, which were
experiencing serious inflation. In such circumstances, hoarding was a sure way
to lose capital, and therefore Bassanio’s prodigality may be seen in the more
favorable biblical light of the parables of the prodigal son and of the talents.[17]
In contrast, Shylock later turns his ducats into a “commodity fetish,”[18]
arguing that his right to Antonio’s must be upheld by the Venetian practice of
slavery (4.1.89ff). Against Shylock’s narrow accountancy of a limited fortune,
which he must borrow in turn from Tybalt and the success of which is the
information economy of the Rialto (“What news on the Rialto?” [3.1.1]), stands
Portia’s fabulous, boundless wealth. Her property, shared immediately with her
betrothed and his circle, stands opposed to Shylock’s narrow, deadly sin of
avarice. Who would be hated more than a moneylender? Her spontaneous offer of
36,000 ducats has been calculated to be worth almost ten million dollars in
today’s money.[19]
No wonder that Venice is anxious and Belmont is bored!
Some critics have claimed that
Shakespeare has attributed to Shylock qualities associated by his
contemporaries not with Jews but with Puritans. E. E. Stohl was the first,
Peter Milward informs us, to assert that Shylock would have reminded
Shakespeare’s audience of the Puritans, who were the “precisians and Pharisees
in [their] midst.”[20]
Milward develops the association more fully and finds seven parallels between
Shakespeare’s Shylock and Elizabethan representations of Puritans: occupation
of usury, habit of proof texting, reliance on Mosaic Law, application of cruel
legalistic justice, emphasis on sobriety and thrift, demonstrations of
pietistic hypocrisy, and refusal to eat and drink with common churchgoers.[21]
(Milward has found ample evidence of Shakespeare’s animus against Puritans
throughout his plays.[22])
Paul Siegel notes that the Puritans, like Shylock, were often seen by
Elizabethans as usurious Pharisaic hypocrites and misers contemptuous of
merrymaking and revelry and that Shakespeare’s Jew also has a modern parallel
as a ruthless capitalist because his lending money gratis brings down the rate
of usance.[23] Max Weber himself called Shakespeare “a
connoisseur of Puritanism who observed it with the keen eye afforded by
hatred.”[24]
One can see why: Weber’s Puritan ascetic eschewed sensuality, the feudal landed
economy, ostentatious wealth, sport, and art itself—all a part of the medieval
Shakespearean aesthetic.
The Anglican socialist economic
historian R. H. Tawney refined Max Weber’s famous thesis within sixteenth
century English circumstances. He attributed the rise of individualistic
capitalism in England to Calvin and his English Puritan followers, whose
participation in trade and finance and eventual cultural supremacy over landed
aristocracy removed the stigma attaching to those domains considered vulgar and
vicious by the medieval Catholic tradition. Of course, this revolution took
centuries to complete, but Protestant economic individualism was beginning to
split away from Catholic corporatism in Shakespeare’s day. While Calvin himself
distinguished between legitimate moderate interest for loans to businessmen and
usurious interest on loans to the poor, Calvinism opened the door to usury “by
enabling its critics of the traditional doctrine to argue that religion itself
spoke with an uncertain voice.”[25]
Some members of Parliament regarded the usury laws as “an antiquated remnant of
popery.”[26]
Whereas medieval councils and early Protestant preaching condemned usury as a
sin, with even small interest on loans condemned as late as Benedict XIV’s
encyclical Vix pervenit in 1745, the
Elizabethan House of Commons redefined usury to be the taking of interest above
ten percent as early as 1571.[27]
Even the Tudors favored the traditional Catholic distributist state of
Chesterbelloc’s small craftsmen and peasant farmers, praised by Francis Bacon.[28]
Aquinas (Summa Theologiae 2 q. 2, a. 77,
ad 4) criticized the occupation of merchant for confusing means with ends and
serving the lust for gain.[29]
The traditional medieval model was the communist ideal, society as the body of
Christ, trade was legitimate in a fallen world but dangerous to the soul, and
finance was sordid.[30]
English Catholic monarchs had controlled the economy through the Privy Council
to protect stability and hierarchy against merchants and financiers and
continued to do so against Puritan capitalists in the Restoration.[31]
Shakespeare demonstrates much of
this traditional Catholic bias against commerce in his depiction of Shylock as
the real merchant of Venice, transforming Antonio into an aristocratic lord who
eventually is brought into the gracious world of Belmont. Antonio’s success as
a merchant has obviously not been due to the burgher’s vulgar skills of
mathematical shrewdness, tough bargaining, and eye for value, but rather to the
lord’s virtues of trust, generosity, and friendship—and, so far, simple good
luck or Providence. Venice represents this emerging capitalistic economy, an
economy, moreover, that causes textual anxiety maybe in particular because
Shakespeare himself was a part of it as a stock-holder in a theater company, as
the son of a usurer for whom he sought a coat of arms,[32]
and as a usurer himself, both demanding and suing for payments on exorbitant
interest rates.[33]
In 1597, he was found guilty of hoarding ten quarters of malt during famine
times in Stratford.[34]
The Weber-Tawney thesis continues
to have its partisans among historians of early modern England. Norman Jones
upholds the broad relationship drawn between capitalism and Calvinism,[35]
and Craig Muldrew and Delloyd Guth argue that an “Age of Debt” was giving way
to an “Age of Contract” as a result of the Protestant de-emphasis of works to
pay off the debt of sin: the written word of a legal contract was replacing the
unspecified trust and works exchanged between creditor and debtor.[36]
It is not, however, that Shakespeare is necessarily winking at his Catholic
audience or attempting to represent a social reality in fine detail. To be
sure, Calvinist theologians and the Church of England’s own Book of Homilies urged generosity toward
the poor and railed against avarice. Crucial for the audience instead is
Shakespeare’s use of the broad perception of social reality and of Christian
theology. In the agon or idea pageantry of literature, ideas about social
reality carry the burden. Most importantly, it is the combination of the
critical view of capitalism and the praise of aristocratic generosity that most
plausibly marks Shakespeare’s religious thought as traditionally Catholic. The
opposition between bourgeois Protestant Venice and aristocratic Catholic
Belmont is a construction consistent with the social reality in early modern
England, where Protestantism was strongest in London and Catholicism strongest
in the countryside,[37]
and where Puritans might have been seen as “middling classes.”[38]
Shakespeare employs ideas as a playwright, however, not as an historian.
Belmont
and Sacrificial Gift
Belmont
represents the counterpart, the landed past, mythologized, to be sure, but
carrying the moral center of the play. It is usually seen as the land of ease,
grace, beauty, harmony, music, bounty, and generosity, but it also carries less
obvious traditional meanings: prudence, entail, oaths, arranged marriages,
laxity, infinity, timelessness. Whereas Venice is specific to actual geography,
however unlike sixteenth-century Venice it may have been, Belmont is entirely
mythical and gives the play the fairy tale character that many have observed. The
suitors are lords hailing from the wide world, from Protestant, Catholic, and
even Muslim countries, but the economic world is that of the passing feudal
tradition. In contrast to pressing usury and trade of Venice, Belmont stands
for natural wealth and wise if demanding entail. Its fortune is vague and
mysterious but secure and natural: “beautiful mountain,” one of those places in
the Mediterranean that is rich not because of industry but because of
providential endowment—a wealth managed not by risky business ventures but by
good marriages and paternal foresight. The ultimate source of its wealth is
never explicit, lost in the mists of mountains, an uncountable accumulation and
cornucopia[39]
that neither toils nor labors nor spins. Gold and silver cannot purchase it,
although three thousand ducats appear its qualifying opening bid or the travel
money to venture there. Above all, Belmont offers the infinite,
incommensurable, divine wealth of the human person; Bassanio’s suit is for
Portia’s “wondrous virtues” (1.1.163), not her estate, as the Argonaut Jason
(1.1.171–73) sails off in an extravagant, romantic quest, which, of course,
marriage essentially is. Among several other associations of Portia with a
Catholic lady, the suitor Morocco, Moorish but perhaps converted, employs two
transgressive Catholic field identification markers in his comparison of her to
a “shrine” and “mortal living saint” (2.7.40).
Belmont is the rich land of
traditional family-building marriage aligning choice with prudence; Venice is
weakened by such family-destroying elopement as Jessica’s and Lorenzo’s. It is
not, of course, that Shakespeare is writing an economic treatise or ethics
manual, but his sympathies are clear: Portia’s dead father is not seen as a
tyrant but as a “holy” and wise father (1.2.27), nor can his entail be
construed as constraining but should be rather interpreted as freeing the young
betrothed, “unlessoned, unschooled, unpracticed” (3.2.159), from an
inexperienced decision. It is a way of correcting infatuation with virtue. He
knows that her fortune will make her prey to gold diggers and that marriage
must be founded on a permanent thing, a total commitment demanded by the lead
casket: “Who chooseth me shall give
and hazard all he hath” (emphasis mine). In a Catholic emphasis on the
cooperative grace of man’s effort rather than on the operative grace of God’s
will, Shakespeare stresses here human self-donation by substituting it for
God’s providence in his Gesta Romanorum
source, “Whoso chooseth me shall find that God hath disposed.”[40]
The word give insists on the essence of the suitor’s quid pro quo: he receives
a chance on everything by risking everything in a donation unrestricted in
every direction and dimension: “all he hath.” In requiring the risk of lifelong
celibacy on a bet for infinite joy, it even echoes the Catholic priest’s
evangelical counsel rejected by the Reformation. It is not, in worldly terms, a
fair contractual lottery because, as marriage and love always do, it requires
giving everything for the only one. While Antonio’s credit is a foreshadowing
of generosity and self-gift, it is partial: a pound of flesh for three thousand
ducats—as Shylock insists, no more, no less. Belmont’s casket lottery is the
true lottery of chance requiring one to be all in, but it is grounded in an
entail that rewards not luck but traditional wisdom—Chesterton’s famous
“democracy of the dead in Orthodoxy—that can still live and act, whereas the
notarized bond is subject only to the immediate desires of the current parties.”
Antonio’s bond with Shylock is
time-sensitive at three months, and the action in Venice in general moves
quickly, like bidding at a stock market. Shakespeare may be reflecting the
rapidly increasing use of the bond in early modern England, which sometimes
included even penal clauses and usurious penalties for tardiness as high as 100
percent.[41]
In contrast, Belmont’s ventures draw on, like simple interest-free “oral
credit” that had characterized the earlier feudal economy.[42]
When Bassanio approaches the caskets, Portia wishes that he would “tarry” and
“pause a day or two”; she would “detain [him] some month or two.” A day or two,
a month or two, Shylock is not there to count. He will be in the courtroom,
however, when Portia asks him to “tarry a little” (4.1.301) before executing
his bond; a few extra minutes to read the bond more scrupulously render it null
and void. What Shylock claims as the greatest violation of the bond is not that
Antonio has failed to pay but that he has failed to pay on time! (Weber’s first
noted maxim of Benjamin Franklin was, “Time is money.”[43]
Which, for a usurious money lender, it most certainly is.) Belmont’s very
language is cast under the timeless spell—almost entirely poetry, long batches
of blank verse, riming tetrameters, even song, whereas the copious prose in
Venice is choppy, nervous, manic, whether Lancelot’s wayward inanity or
Shylock’s nervous repetitions: “Ho, no, no, no, no: my meaning in saying he is
a good man is to have you understand me that he is sufficient: he hath an
argosy bound to Tripolis, another to the Indies. I understand, moreover on the
Rialto, he hath a third at Mexico, a fourth for England, and other ventures he
hath squandered abroad,” (1.3.14–19) or “I will buy with you, sell with you,
talk with you, and so following. But I will not eat with you, drink with you,
nor pray with you. What news on the Rialto? Who is he comes here?” (1.3.31–33).
In contrast, Belmont is rich with leisurely set pieces to accompany long
ceremonious pageants: Morocco’s (2.7.13–60), Arragon’s (2.9.19–52), Portia’s
(3.2.1–23, 39–62), Bassanio’s (3.2.73–107), and Lorenzo’s and Jessica’s (5.2.1–88).
Order, control, harmony, and timelessness are the linguistic rule at Belmont.
Infinity and totality are the
modes of love’s sacrifice. An oath of celibacy, silence, and exile binds the
suitors if they choose wrong. If they choose rightly, Portia tells Bassanio as
he deliberates, she in turn will bestow her entire being:
One
half of me is yours, the other half yours—
Mine
own I would say—but if mine then yours,
And
so all yours. (3.2.16–18)
In
contrast to the pound of flesh demanded by Shylock as forfeit on three thousand
ducats, Portia promises an unspecified but immediate totality of self-donation:
Myself
and what is mine to you and yours
Is
now converted. But now, I was the lord
Of
this fair mansion, master of my servants,
Queen
o’er myself: and even now, but now
This
house, these servants, and this same myself,
Are
yours, my lord’s. (3.2.166–71)
“This
same myself”—Portia gives, it is important to see, not merely her entire fiscal
and landed inheritance, but her very self, her entire being, forgoing,
Katharine Maus points out, the common Elizabethan custom of “coverture,” by
which the bride could reserve a portion of the estate to a male trustee to
protect her from a spendthrift husband like Bassanio.[44]
If Venice represents the everyday
workaday world, Belmont represents festival—marriage festival specifically:
holiday, the Catholic excess to which Luther objected.[45]
Joseph Pieper elaborates on the meaning of festival as the antithesis of
utilitarian existence in its sacrifice of labor for the sake of the love of
God:
The
antithesis between holiday and workday, or more precisely, the concept of the
day of the day of rest, tells us something further about the essence of
festivity. The day of rest is not just a neutral interval inserted as a link in
the chain of workday life. It entails a loss of utilitarian profit. . . . The
day of rest, then, meant not only that no work was done, but also that an
offering was being made of the yield of labor. It is not merely that the time
is not gainfully used; the offering is in
the nature of a sacrifice; and therefore the diametric opposite of utility.
. . . A festival is essentially a
phenomenon of wealth; not, to be sure, the wealth of money, but of existential
richness. Absence of calculation, in fact lavishness, is one of its elements.
. . . We
do not renounce things, then, except for love.[46]
(emphases mine)
Pieper
cites an early work by Aquinas (Commentary
on the Sentences [of Peter Lombard], 3 d. 37, I, 5, I and I) in which he
makes the beatific vision the object of contemplation of festival days and
reproaches the Jews, agreeing with Seneca, for filling the Sabbath with empty
rituals and missing the divinorum
contemplatio.[47]
Marriage in Belmont reconstitutes
an idealized feudal world of bonds not through notarized contracts but by
oaths, with fealty, in vassalage, of the entire person. The difference is
immense—it is immensity itself. Bassanio will be Portia’s lord, governor, and king
(3.2.165), whereas Shylock will control only a precisely measured pound of
flesh. The marriage bond, in contrast to the contract bond, has no exit clause,
no surety, no forfeit penalty: two souls are indissolubly united into one
common life and fortune. It is a supernatural arrangement, not contrary to
nature like usury but perfecting it, a sacramental union insisted upon by Trent
and rejected as a sacrament by the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of
England. Shylock’s narrow imagination wants only a pound of flesh, whereas
Antonio would have been willing to give him his entire body, as Portia gives
Bassanio hers. He fails to see the totality of the human person, which, as
Portia intimates, is of infinite and not fungible value. Instead of a written
legal document specifying limiting terms, the symbol of the wedding bond, the
ring, confirms an open-ended but life-and-death (rather than piece of flesh)
commitment, the perfect circle of love. Not writing anything down and therefore
free from a legalistic and narrowed interpretation, Bassanio promises his own
ontological totality in a spoken, open vow:
But
when this ring
Parts
from this finger, then parts life from hence.
O
then be bold to say Bassanio’s dead. (3.2.183–85)
The
marriage bargain, as Gratiano calls it, yields immediate infinite increase, not
limited interest, for he announces that his own spontaneous decision to marry
Nerissa came as love bred love: “You loved; I loved” (3.2.199). These explicit
monetary metaphors to describe the mutual self-gift of marriage are meant to
contrast with the bargain that Shylock has struck with Antonio. Portia does a
different kind of arithmetic to parody, not emulate, the accounting language of
commercial transaction:
Though for myself alone
I would not be ambitious in my wish
To
wish myself much better, yet for you
I
would be trebled twenty times myself—
A
thousand times more fair, ten thousand times
More
rich; that only to stand high in your account
I
might in virtues, beauties, livings, friends
Exceed
account. But the full sum of me
Is
sum of something, which to term in gross
Is
an unlessoned girl, unschooled, unpracticed. (3.2.150–59, emphases mine)
When
she learns that Antonio’s losses at sea have made him forfeit the bond, she
immediately offers, “Pay him six thousand and deface the bond;/Double six
thousand and then treble that, . . .” (3.2.298–99). Extravagant inexact
increase was curiously the condition of Shylock’s own inapposite defense of
usury to Antonio on biblical grounds; his money, he claims, “breeds as fast” as
the “work of generation” of Jacob’s flocks, an allusion that shows that
Shakespeare was aware of the traditional Church objection against usury, going
back to Aristotle, that it was sinful because it was unnatural for money to
breed money. It is supernatural, however, for love to breed love. Shylock’s biblical
proof texting, like that of Puritan money lenders,[48]
fails according to the infinite promises of Belmont. His choice of a text
ironically reveals the ultimate source of worldly wealth: beyond human
ingenuity or duplicity to God’s fertility expressed in animal husbandry, a
natural miracle implicitly more represented by mythical Belmont than by
money-crazed Venice.
The world of supernatural grace,
however, is not a fairy world without “sufferance,” as Shylock calls the pain
of his escaped daughter and stolen ducats. Hazarding all may mean losing all. One
cannot give, so the Incarnation and the Cross teach, without complete sacrifice.
Portia does not shrink. She testifies to this existential flesh-and-blood
commitment just before the song accompanying Bassanio’s perusal of the caskets:
I
stand for sacrifice,
The
rest aloof are the Dardanian wives
With
bleared visages come forth to view
The
issue of th’exploit. (3.2.57–60)
She
is the giving sacrificed thing itself, her entire person, like that of the
Homeric warrior, and we are reminded both of Antonio’s partial flesh-and-blood
sacrifice for Bassanio and of Shylock’s later contrasting self-characterization
in the Venetian court: “I stand here for law” (4.1.141). The sacrifice of grace
is not the exact quid pro quo of exchange
but the indefinite hope and trust of an oath. The first two false caskets are
money caskets of silver and gold, the metals of the New World inflating the
Venetian economy of commerce and usury, commodities and finance.
Shakespeare makes Portia a lady
on a landed estate of traditional, somewhat mysterious, but immeasurable
wealth, whose source is not human speculation but heaven itself. Portia lives
not in the doges’ republic but in the Pope’s domain, unspecified Italy, a
country of sacramental marriage, virtue, and blessing in contrast to the city
of vice, idle bachelorhood, and curse. Jessica makes the association of Belmont
and its lady with heaven in the comic scene following the marriage scene, a
scene that will yield three marriages, for Belmont proliferates self-gift:
.
. . It is very meet
The
lord Bassanio live an upright life,
For
having such a blessing in his lady
He
finds the joys of heaven here on earth. (3.5.66–69)
Thus,
in its embrace of sacramental marriage as a foretaste of the heavenly banquet,
Belmont may represent one of the great Catholic estates in Lancashire, a
“hotbed of recusancy,” that Shakespeare might have enjoyed in his twenties as a
tutor, such as Hoghton Tower, whose recusant and ultimately exiled owner may
have bequeathed Shakespeare a small annuity.[49]
Applying Shakespeare’s use of
ideas in Merchant, Sean Lawrence
analyzes the binary opposition between “gift” and “exchange,” or the two
meanings of “bond” as contract or marriage, in the frameworks of the major
anthropologists and philosophers Mauss, Douglas, Levinas, and Derrida. Lawrence
reviews the arguments that Bassanio’s and Portia’s mutual gifts are really
self-serving, that total and pure gift is impossible, and that Belmont is a
satirical aristocratic mirror of middle-class Venice, embroiled in the same
mercenary and mercantile anxiety and stratagems, and that the Reformation
theology of radical grace fails in the courtroom scene.[50]
Without engaging in this philosophical and anthropological controversy,
Karoline Szatek argues that Belmont’s green, fairy world is a mere disguise for
its own, and especially Portia’s, Venetian commercial bondages.[51]
A Catholic Christian reading of the play, however, works against such
interpretations.
First, Bassanio wins the lottery,
it must be noticed, because he follows, as it were, the evangelical counsel of
hazarding his sexuality, the beatitude of meekness in choosing lead and
receiving Portia’s heavenly kingdom, and the Gospel principle of seeking the
last in order to become the first. Second, the “special deed of gift” (5.1.292)
of all of Shylock’s remaining possessions that Portia, through Nerissa, enjoins
upon him to pass to Jessica and Lorenzo in the trial scene (4.1.384ff), is
called by this rewarded gentleman “manna” (5.2.293), which is of course, a
typological figure of Christianity’s most significant sacrament, the Eucharist,
the source and summit of divine love: “Fair ladies, you drop manna in the way
of starved people” (5.1.293–94).[52]
Like Portia’s “mercy,” landed wealth “droppeth like the gentle rain of heaven
upon the place beneath” (4.1.189–90); Holy Eucharist is thus a special figure
of Belmont’s mysterious, miraculous wealth. Human effort may augment it, but
heaven endows it—indeed, an aristocratic estate is a working example of that
traditional Catholic category, cooperation with grace. Shylock’s “title” or
justification of usury, the animal breeding of Laban’s flocks, ironically
applies rather to Belmont’s agricultural wealth of “husbandry” (3.4.25). The
anthropologists and philosophers may see all gifts as impossible, but the
theologians can see them as supernatural.
Third, Shakespeare explicitly
associates Belmont’s lady to the lost Catholic world with specific Catholic
practices condemned by Protestants. After “commending” the “husbandry and
manage of [her] house” to Lorenzo, Portia, to whom Bassanio had earlier gone on
“secret pilgrimage,” uses the language of forbidden Popish religion to deceive
Lorenzo:
.
. . For mine own part,
I
have toward heaven breathed a secret vow
To
live in prayer and contemplation,
Only
attended by Nerissa here,
Until
her husband and my lord’s return.
There
is a monastery two miles off,
And
there we will abide. (3.5.26–32, emphases mine)
In
act 5, the messenger Stephano brings the news that Portia, “a holy hermit” of
Catholic monasticism, is tarrying over Stations of the Cross on her return to
Belmont:
.
. . She doth stray about
By
holy crosses where she kneels and prays
For
happy wedlock hours. (5.1.30–32)
Portia
is treating the banned pilgrimage cross as a forbidden Catholic sacramental:
her marriage preparation, as it were, includes contemplation and penance. Prayer
cannot be considered a necessary part of a system of exchange. Contemplatio is yet another Catholic
field identification marker.
Fourth, yes, sacramental marriage
involves obligations, debts, duties, and sacrifice, but can Portia’s selfless
service to Bassanio, the infinite opening of her purse, the free outpouring of
gift upon gift in the Belmontification of Venice, really be reduced to a system
of mutual exchange? The exchange is neither equal nor proportionate nor even
rational; it is hazarded recklessly and freely; it cannot be bound by quantity
or time. While Portia does submit originally to the concept of an arranged marriage,
Shakespeare frees her absolutely from that bondage of her will by having
providence grant her Bassanio, the object of her personal desire, whereas in
Shakespeare’s likely source Il Pecorone
she is a figure of duplicity and avarice.[53]
Moreover, in an act gratuitously beyond her father’s entail, she freely accepts
Bassanio a second time in act 5, despite his subsequent pseudo-infidelity in
giving away her marriage ring. Thus, she personifies both the sacrificial and
superfluous dimensions of grace.
Finally, a more Catholic theology
of grace, characterized by mercy, laxity, and accompanying works (Portia’s
“deeds of mercy” in her famous speech), operates in Merchant differently from Calvinistic irresistible grace and in
opposition to Puritan rigorism—the latter represented, according to Peter
Milward, by Shylock’s strict observance of law. Milward quotes Matthew
Sutcliffe’s depiction of Puritans (Answer
to a Certain Libel, 1592) as guilty of inhuman cruelty in racking rents,
demanding usury, and “skinning the poor” generally.[54]
He quotes the moderate Anglican John Whitgift (Defence of the Answer to the Admonition, 1574) in charging the
Puritan Thomas Cartwright of wishing to apply the strict Mosaic law of capital
punishment upon idolators, adulterers, and moneylenders.[55]
Shylock boldly proclaims in the trial, “I stand for law.” His rigorism stands
thus explicitly contrasted with Portia’s earlier generous promise to Bassanio,
“I stand for sacrifice.” Sacrifice is spoken gift; law is written demand. Sacrifice
is a pledge, an oath; law is a bond, a contract. Perhaps Shakespeare was aware
of the post-biblical tradition that Baltasar, which he adds to his course, was
one of the three gift-bearing wise men to the Christ child, for Portia in her juris
doctor disguise dispenses gifts in her table-turning of narrowly interpreted
but generously applied justice: through the executive arm of the Duke and
plea-bargaining with Antonio, the gift of life and property to Antonio, of a
stay of execution or pardon of Shylock’s own forfeited life and property, a
deed to Lorenzo and Jessica, and of Christian conversion to Shylock. Portia’s
justice as mercy operates through forced legalism for the goal of generosity. Her
mercy, departing from the Lutheran formulation against works righteousness, is
the traditional Catholic understanding of freely offered works cooperating with
grace. She tells the “Jew” that God’s grace is of course not deserved but
itself teaches corporal works of mercy:
But
mercy is above this sceptered sway;
It
is enthroned in the hearts of kings;
It
is an attribute to God himself,
And
earthly power doth then show likest God’s
When
mercy seasons justice. Therefore, Jew,
Though
justice be thy plea, consider this—
That
in the course of justice none of us
Should
see salvation. We do pray for mercy,
And
that same prayer doth teach us all to render
The
deeds of mercy. (4.1.189–98, emphasis
mine)
Earlier,
the silver casket contained the image of a “blinking idiot,” Pelagian fool’s
silver, as it were: he who thinks he deserves heaven’s graces, like the
arrogant Aragon who “assumes desert” (2.9.50), is giving trust to the efforts
of a fool.
Imitating the duplicitous means
of the unjust steward (Lk 16:1–13), Portia’s justice ultimately yields mercy,
forgiveness, pardon, cancelled debts—all gifts, since they are not due in
strict justice. These are in addition to the gifts of life that Antonio and
Bassanio have made to each other in the trial scene. Antonio’s offer of
self-sacrifice has been somewhat grandiloquent:
Say
how I loved you; speak me fair in death.
And
when the tale is told, bid her be judge
Whether
Bassanio had not once a love.
Repent
but you that you shall lose your friend
And
he repents not that he pays your debt;
For
if the Jew do cut but deep enough,
I’ll
pay it instantly with all my heart. (4.1.271–77)
Bassanio’s
reply was to make a substitute sacrifice of total self-gift:
Antonio, I am married to a wife
Which
is as dear to me as life itself;
But
life itself, my wife, and all the world
Are
not with me esteemed above thy life.
I
would lose all—aye, sacrifice them all
Here
to this devil—to deliver you. (4.1.278–83)
The
total mutual friendship of Bassanio and Antonio does not really threaten the
marriage of Portia and Bassanio, which must be seen as a higher union, for both
Bassanio and Antonio are transported by rhetorical excess that envisions a
contrary-to-fact hypothetical. Shylock would not accept any substitute for his
pound of flesh. Moreover, Portia witnesses this betrayal full on, and yet she
not only pardons Bassanio for this rhetorical infidelity but also bears the
letter with the news of Antonio’s three argosies “richly come to harbor”
(5.1.277). Her forgiveness and restoration of the ring with no sign of jealousy
(she merely teases later) are further gifts, and Antonio declares, “Sweet lady,
you have given me life and living” (5.1.286), his melancholy restored, and
friendship not endangering but rather adding to married love. Indeed, Gratiano
appeals to the Catholic doctrine of the intercession of saints to deliver
Antonio from Pharisaic legalism:
I
have a wife who I protest I love—
I
would she were in heaven so she could
Entreat
some power to change this currish Jew. (4.1.286–88)
The Duke characterizes this world
of immediate and proliferating gift as Christian in essence and in contrast to
Jewish law:
That
thou shalt see the difference of our spirit,
I
pardon thee thy life before thou ask it.
For
half thy wealth, it is Antonio’s;
The
other half comes to the general state,
Which
humbleness may drive unto a fine. (4.1.364–68)
In
other words, the state itself offers to reduce its title in law to half of
Shylock’s estate to a small fine, itself acting generously beyond its due. When
Shylock points out that taking the means whereby he lives is to take his life,
Antonio makes a second stay of execution by immediately forswearing his half of
Shylock’s goods until his death but holding them in “use” or trust, where the
estate will go to the new Christian couple of his Jewish house, Lorenzo and
Jessica, as a “gift . . . of all he dies possessed” (4.1.385). For this
“favor,” Antonio proposes terms that would have been seen as generous then but
strike most readers today as cruel: that Shylock “presently become a Christian”
(4.1.383). They are ironic to either set of readers, for Antonio stipulates
that Shylock “record a gift” of his estate in writing to the Christian couple,
and Portia orders a clerk to “draw a deed of gift” (4.1.384, 390). The “mercy”
that Portia preaches in her famous set piece returns in Act V when she
practices it herself in forgiving Bassanio’s infidelity, after teasing him
mightily, and in herself remaining true to her own marriage vow. Her last words
in the play perhaps pun on the exclusivity requirement of the marriage bond:
“And we will answer all things faithfully” (5.1.299). Mercy and gift have
stretched—but not broken—justice and law.
The hell of Venice has given way
to the heaven of Belmont, confirmed by Lorenzo’s poetry in act 5 as the
traditional Platonized Catholic “state of music” and “perpetual cosmic dance”
that E. M. W. Tillyard found in the words of the medieval encyclopedist Isidore
of Seville: “҅Nothing exists without music; for the universe itself is said to
have been framed by a kind of harmony of sounds, and the heaven itself revolves
under the tones of that harmony.’”[56]
Lorenzo exudes thus:
Sit, Jessica—look how the floor
of heaven
Is thick inlaid with pattens of
bright gold;
There’s not the smallest orb
which thou behold’st
But in his motion like an angel
sings,
Still quiring to the young-eyed
cherubims. (5.1.58–62)
Love
and Marriage as Supernatural Usury
What
can be said about Shakespeare’s moral-economic thinking concerning emerging
capitalism from this analysis of Merchant?
First, capitalism engenders an atmosphere of anxiety, greed, Pharisaic
legalism, and revenge in contrast to the atmosphere of ease, generosity,
laxity, and mercy surrounding traditional landed wealth. Second, it proceeds by
blind chance (sailing winds) rather than wise Providence (entail and prudent
choice). Third, it reduces human relationships to narrow contracts rather than
broad oaths of fealty, prohibiting friendship as self-gift and making persons
into things. Fourth, it privatizes economics and obscures the common good. Antonio,
for example, begins the play as a profiteer who is certainly not a miser but is
the private entrepreneur whose purse is open only to one who has penetrated his
lonely heart. At the end, he has become not only a trustee for a new family beyond
his deepest friendship, Lorenzo, Jessica, and even his sworn enemy Shylock, but
even, in ratifying the stiff fine of the Duke upon Shylock’s usurious estate at
the rate of fifty percent, an agent of the state as what we would now call a
financial regulator. Whereas Tawney attributes to Calvinists (more, he says,
like Weber, than to Calvin himself)[57]
the gradual separation of economics from ethics that culminates in laissez-faire
free-market capitalism,[58]
even to the point where friendship itself was seen as threatening thrift,
diligence, and frugality,[59]
Shakespeare follows more traditional Catholic thinking that commerce must be
oriented toward the public good and that the state or Crown must intervene in
the economy to maintain order and render justice.[60]
In fact, Antonio’s movement as a merchant who seeks gain for the private end of
liberal friendship to one who becomes concerned with public goods is consistent
with Aquinas’s tolerance of commerce despite its propensity toward greed. Commerce
may be turned toward a virtuous end, such as the maintenance of a household or
of the state, “public advantage,” and so it cannot be condemned as
intrinsically evil.[61]
Antonio’s and Shylock’s wealth and their very persons become part of Belmont’s
protected households: Jessica and Lorenzo’s, Nerissa and Gratiano’s, and Portia
and Bassanio’s—protected by the state and endowed by the musical heavens and
favorable winds of Providence. Above all, in eschewing interest absolutely
(“lends out money gratis” 1.3.39 and “I do never use it” 1.3.65), Antonio is
explicitly identified with the stricter, more conservative, medieval tradition
of canon and pontifical law that defined usury as any taking of interest, not
with the more liberal, contemporary Calvinistic interpretation (followed by the
Elizabethan Thomas Wilson) that defined it as extortionate interest or of
interest on loans to the poor.[62]
Shakespeare makes Antonio’s refusal of not only usury but also legal interest
(yet accepting to pay it to an enemy out of friendship) a romantic gesture of
the idealized economic past.
Whereas nearly all the characters
in the play give freely, Shylock and Tybalt alone lend strictly. Shylock looks
down upon Antonio’s generosity as unintelligent business practice, “low
simplicity” (1.3.39), and understands Antonio’s own hatred of the Jews to be
grounded in economics, specifically the hypocrisy of engaging in commerce while
condemning the engine of commerce, lending at interest:
He
hates our sacred nation and he rails,
Even
there where merchants most do congregate,
On
me, my bargains, and my well-won thrift,
Which
he calls interest. (1.3.44–47)
As
Tawney has shown, “well-won thrift” is precisely the economic virtue extolled
by Calvinistic Protestants from the merchant classes.[63]
Moreover, it was Calvin, whose departure from the scholastic condemnation of
usury (upheld firmly in Sixtus V’s Detestabilis
avaritia in 1586), who provided the theological reasoning necessary to
allow moneylending on interest in Protestant countries such as England,
although many schemes and dodges had existed in Catholic countries for
centuries.[64]
In England, two Protestant wings, one following Calvin, another Aquinas,
emerged, and Jones claims that the liberal wing following Calvin eventually
prevailed over the conservative wing because of the more radical Protestant
ecclesiology, opposed by Hooker, that neither the church nor the state could
provide salvation, thus “loosening the theoretical bonds that made human law
answerable to God’s law.” Pragmatically, too, it was argued that the state
could no more eradicate usury than it could eliminate pride or drunkenness.[65]
While Shakespeare shows no signs of splitting hairs in this debate, he clearly
leans to the traditional scholastic side that condemns usury wholesale as any
sort of interest taking.
In the Catholic tradition, usury
is violence against the body and its goods. Dante put usurers with the violent
even lower than murderers (Inferno,
Canto XVI), and Trent equated usury with murder.[66]
Conversely, to a Christian and especially a Catholic audience, one nearly overt
analog of Antonio’s flesh sacrifice, a loving offer of atonement for Bassanio’s
spendthriftness, would have been the bloodless sacrifice of the Holy Eucharist.
To a Catholic, the Eucharistic sacrifice is not a personal possession but a
communal sharing, and it is opposed to the market. In a recent book opposing
Christian economic teaching to the new world “free market” economy, William
Cavanaugh writes that “the abundance of the Eucharist is inseparable from the
kenosis, the self-emptying, of the Cross. The consumer of the body and blood of
Christ does not remain detached from what he or she consumes, but becomes part
of that body: ‘Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in
them’ (John 6:56).”[67]
Antonio’s gesture of crucifixion for his friend has been dramatized in
productions of Merchant as a
Christ-like act, and the allusion is made explicit in Bassanio’s and Antonio’s
offers of mutual self-sacrifice in the trial scene:
Bassanio:
Good cheer, Antonio! What, man, courage yet:
The
Jew shall have my flesh, blood, bones and all,
Ere
thou shalt lose for me one drop of blood.
Antonio:
I am a tainted wether of the flock,
Meetest
for death; the weakest kind of fruit
Drops
earliest to the ground, and so let me. (4.1.110–15)
John
Drakakis sees in Antonio’s comparison of himself to a sick castrated ram a
conflation of the Abrahamic substitution of the ram for Isaac (Gen 22:13) and
the Johannine Lamb of God sacrifice, which takes away the sin of the world (Jn
1:29).[68]
Catholic sympathizers in the audience might have seen in Shylock’s merciless
bond on Antonio’s life the bloodless sacrifice of the Mass denied to them by
the English Reformation and deemphasized by its desacralized celebration of the
Last Supper.
Throughout his work, however, Shakespeare
also employs usury as a fanciful metaphor for the miraculous increase of love
and marriage, which make something out of nothing.[69]
We may call this kind of usury, in contrast to Shylock’s, good or sacramental
usury. Its increase comes from self-giving love, not from the extorted sweat of
man’s labor exacted by merciless financiers. It is sought freely by the debtor,
and it yields happiness. Unlike Shylock’s usury, it follows the supernatural
law; it is an effect of cooperative grace. Shakespeare draws this comparison
out in several places. In Sonnets IV and VI, the persona enjoins the unnamed
bachelor “niggard” to forgo the selfish “forbidden” usury of celibacy and to
take up the sacramental usury of marriage:
Then,
beauteous niggard, why dost thou abuse
The
bounteous largess given thee to give?
Profitless
usurer, why doest thou use
So
great a sum of sums yet canst not live?
For
having traffic with thyself alone,
Thou
of thyself thy sweet self dost deceive. (Sonnet IV, 5–10.)
That
use is not forbidden usury
Which
happies those that pay the willing loan;
That’s
for thyself to breed another thee,
Or
ten times happier be it ten for one. (Sonnet VI, 4–8)
In
“ten times happier” Shakespeare may be playing on the Elizabethan legal limit
of ten percent annual interest set on a loan; the sudden unfolding of increase
“that happies” is like Portia’s extravagant promise to be “A thousand times
more fair, ten thousand times more rich” (3.2.154) when Bassanio chooses wisely
and wins her hand in marriage: she will be “trebled twenty times” herself
(3.2.153). In Romeo and Juliet
(probably written just after the Sonnets
and just before Merchant), Friar
Lawrence contrasts the true use of life for married love with the evil usury of
suicide, which Romeo contemplates after Mercutio’s death and his own banishment
from Verona for killing Tybalt:
Fie,
fit, thou shamest thy shape, thy love, thy wit,
Which,
like a usurer, abound’st in all,
And
useth none in that true use indeed,
Which
should bedeck thy shape, thy love, thy wit. (3.3.122–25)
It
is not merely the increase of progeny that grounds sacramental usury in these
examples, but the increase of love in marriage, which cannot be bound or
counted but must be used: sacramental usury leaps to excess, but, unlike
Shylock’s, has no precise terms and yields infinitely beyond its scheduled
payments. It requires indefinite sacrifice, not named costs, and it never
expires. It increases through both God’s operative and man’s cooperative or
created grace, merited by man’s works of love,[70]
a Thomistic doctrine ignored by the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of
England, repudiated by the Reformers, and endorsed by Trent in Canon 32 of the
“Decree Concerning Justification” in 1547.[71]
The prodigal Bassanio’s original request was in fact less for a loan than for
an outright gift, and that gift was not a down payment on a material possession
but a chance on an eternal reward. It was for Holy Matrimony, which grows “in
use.” Portia’s own generous responses of
her entire self and then 36,000 ducats to Bassanio’s lottery victory were
themselves absolute gift borne of married love, even before the marriage was
technically made. Sacramental usury breeds love from love like the Eucharist,
which falls like the mercy of manna on the place beneath, in what Pope Emeritus
Benedict XVI has called the “nuclear fission in the heart of being.”[72]
Notes
[1] Michael Wood, Shakespeare (New York: Basic Books,
2003).
[2] David N. Beauregard, Catholic Theology in Shakespeare’s Plays
(Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2007).
[3] Claire Asquith, Shadowplay (New York: Public Affairs,
2005).
[4] Stephen Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2001).
[5] Beatrice Groves, Texts and Traditions: Religion in
Shakespeare 1592–1604 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007).
[6] Alison Shell, Shakespeare and Religion (London: Arden
Drama, 2010).
[7] Peter Milward, The Pattern in Shakespeare’s Carpet
(Hyogo, Japan: Bookway, 2012).
[8] See my “A Catholic Dramatist in
a Protestant Land,” New Oxford Review
(Fall 2014).
[9] Arthur F. Marotti, “Shakespeare
and Catholicism,” Theatre and Religion:
Lancastrian Shakespeare eds. Richard Dutton, Alison Findlay, and Richard
Wilson (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2003), 219.
[10] All references to Merchant of Venice are to the Third
Arden Series, ed. John Drakakis (London: A & C Black, 2010).
[11] Politics, 1, 3, 1257b, trans. H. Rackham for the Loeb Edition (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1922).
[12] Politics, 1, 3, 1258b.
[13] STII-II, q.77, a. 4.
[14] Norman Jones, God and the Moneylenders: Usury and Law in
Early England Modern (Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, Inc., 1989), 166.
[15] Daniel Price, The Merchant: A Sermon Preached at Paul’s
Cross on Sunday the 24 of August, being the Day Before Bartholomew
Fair, 1607, excerpted in The Merchant
of Venice, Norton Critical Edition, 110–14.
[16] R. H. Tawney, “Introduction” to
Thomas Wilson, A Discourse Upon Usury
(New York: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1925 [1572], 34.
[17] Gabriel Egan, Shakespeare and Marx (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2004), 99.
[18] Egan, 106.
[19] Egan, 105.
[20] Peter Milward, The Mediaeval Dimension in Shakespeare’s
Plays (Edwin Mellen Press, 1990), excerpts reprinted in Readings on The Merchant of Venice ed.
Claire Swisher (San Diego: Greenhaven Press, 2000), 69–70.
[21] Milward in Swisher, 72–76.
[22] Peter Milward, Shakespeare’s Religious Background
(Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1973), 144–63.
[23] Paul N. Siegel, Shakespeare in His Time and Ours (South
Bend: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990) excerpted in Swisher, 53–59.
[24] Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the “Spirit” of Capitalism eds. Peter Baehr and Gordon C. Wells (New York: Penguin,
2002 [1905]), 268.
[25] R. H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (Harcourt,
Brace & World, 1926 [Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1962]), 120.
[26] R. H. Tawney, 35.
[27] R. H. Tawney, 160.
[28] Tawney, Religion, 151.
[29] Tawney, Religion, 35.
[30] Tawney, Religion, 33.
[31] Tawney, Religion, 166–68.
[32] Anthony Holden, William Shakespeare: The Man Behind the
Genius (Boston, New York, and London: Little, Brown and Company, 1999), 146,
153.
[33] Charles Edelman, “Which Is the
Jew that Shakespeare Knew?: Shylock on the Elizabethan Stage,” Shakespeare Survey 52, ed. Stanley Wells
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 103–04, excerpted in The Norton
Critical Edition of Merchant of Venice,
ed. Leah S. Marcus, 243–45.
[34]
Ian Mortimer, The Time Traveller’s Guide
to Elizabethan England (New York: Viking, 2012), 212.
[35] Jones, 166.
[36] Craig Muldrew, The Economy of Obligation: The Culture of
Credit and Social Relations in Early Modern England (New York: St. Martin’s
Press, 1998), 131–32.
[37] Adrian Morley, The Catholic Subjects of Elizabeth I
(Totowa, New Jersey: Rowman and Littlefield, 1978), 14.
[38] Philip Benedict, “The
Historiography of Continental Calvinism,” Protestant
Ethic: Origins, Evidence, Contexts ed. Hartmut Lehmann and Guenther Roth
(Washington, DC: German Historical Institute, Cambridge University Press,
1993), 317.
[39] Marc Shell, “The Wether and the
Ewe: Verbal Usury in The Merchant of
Venice in Money, Language, and Thought
(Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1993), 79.
[40] A Record of Ancient Histories Entitled in Latin Gesta Romanorum,
trans. Richard Robinson (1571; rpt. London, 1595), “The 32nd History,” sigs.
02-05r., excerpted in The Norton Critical Edition of Merchant of Venice, ed. Leah S. Marcus (New York: W. W. Norton,
2006), 83–84.
[41] Muldrew, 109–110.
[42] Muldrew, 106.
[43] Weber, 9.
[44] Katharine Eisaman Maus, Being and Having in Shakespeare (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2013), 61–62.
[45] Tawney, Religion, 92.
[46] Joseph Pieper, In Tune With the World: A Theory of Festivity [Kosel-Verlag, 1963] trans.
Richard and Clara Winston (South Bend: St. Augustine’s Press, 1999), 18–21.
[47] Pieper, 18.
[48] Jacob is extolled as a “man of
grace” by Shakespeare’s Puritan contemporary Thomas Adams in Works of the Puritan Divines ed. Richard
Baxter, cited in Weber, 188.
[49] Holden, 53–55.
[50] Sean Lawrence, Forgiving the Gift (Pittsburgh: Duquesne
University Press, 2012), 40–82.
[51] Karoline Szatek, “The Merchant of Venice and the Politics
of Commerce,” in ‘The Merchant of
Venice’: New Critical Essays, eds.
John W. Majon and Ellen Macleod Mahon (New
York and London: Routledge, 2002), 325–52.
[52] John 6: 31; 1 Corinthians 10:3;
Revelation 2:17.
[53] Ser Giovanni Fiorentino, “Il
Pecorone,” excerpted in The Merchant of
Venice (Norton Critical Edition), 84–99.
[54] Milward, The Medieval Dimension, 74.
[55] Milward, The Medieval Dimension, 71–72.
[56] E. M. W. Tillyard, The Elizabethan World Picture
(Cambridge: Macmillan, 1944 [New York: Vintage Books, 1959] 101.
[57] R. H. Tawney, “Introduction” to
Thomas Wilson, A Discourse Upon Usury
(New York: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1925 [1572], 118.
[58] Tawney, Religion, 278
[59] Tawney, Religion, 243.
[60] Tawney, Religion, 262.
[61] Aquinas, ST, II-II, q. 77, a. 4.
[62] R. H. Tawney, “Introduction” to
Thomas Wilson, A Discourse Upon Usury,
116–19.
[63] Tawney, Religion, 110.
[64] John T. Noonan, Jr., The Scholastic Analysis of Usury
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957), 220.
[65] Norman Jones, God and the Moneylenders: Usury and Law in
Early Modern England (Oxford, UK and Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell), 166–67.
[66] “Seventh Commandment,” The Catechism of the Council of Trent trans.
John McHugh, OP and Charles Curran, OP (Fort Collins: Roman Catholic Books,
1923), 445–46.
[67] William T. Cavanaugh, Being Consumed: Economics and Christian
Desire (Grand Rapids, MI and Cambridge, UK: William B. Eerdmans, 2008), 95.
[68] Drakakis, 341.
[69] John Russell Brown,
“Introduction,” The Arden Merchant of
Venice (London: Methuen, 1955),liii–lv.
[70] Thomas Aquinas, ST I–II, q. 111, a. 2
[71] Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent: Original Text with English
Translations, trans. H. J. Shroeder (St. Louis: B. Herder, 1941), excerpted
in Confessions and Catechisms of the
Reformation, ed. Mark A. Noll (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1991),
188.
