Chapter One: "The devil can cite Scripture": Capitalism and the Spectre of Shylock
Carol Leventen argues that The Merchant of Venice "responds to and participates in contemporary anxieties about women, money and power" (59). Portia’s "formidable intelligence" is, for example, neutralized by her "deference" to patriarchal authority, and Jessica, Shylock’s turned-Christian daughter, nearly disappears from the final scene as punishment for her extravagant ‘prodigality’. On the other hand, Bassanio’s prodigality is rewarded with the "golden fleece" of Portia, a difference "unobtrusively" posited as natural—as a given—in an attempt to "deflect" attention from the material and historical constructions of gender (59). In this way the play constructs both gendered subjects and the proper ways to use (spend and get) wealth; a construction underwritten by social, political, and economic anxieties. And it is this concern with contemporary social issues—arising from a shift in economic relations—which, arguably, characterizes Merchant as a proto-city comedy. For Alexander Leggatt defines Jacobean ‘citizen comedy’ on the basis of its concern with "practical social issues: how to get money, and how to spend it; how to get a wife, and how to keep her" (4). The Merchant of Venice, then, proleptically speaks to some of the very issues that Jacobean comedy develops, including anxieties about women and money. By the late 1590s and into the early 1600s, comedy shifted from an interest in aristocracy and court oriented plays to ones set "in a predominately middle-class social milieu" (Leggatt 3). This broad grouping of plays constituting the ‘genre’ known as Jacobean city comedy is often characterized by satire and social criticism; it is, as Leggatt notes, concerned with "social rather than religious issues, attacking such abuses as usury and corrupt justice" (6). Although written contemporaneously, Shakespeare’s plays typically are not seen as belonging in the city comedy genre: class and topical social issues are not overtly presented, and he often employs ‘romantic’ or fanciful material, unlike city comedy. However, inasmuch as it contains conflicts between the older aristocracy and the newly emerging citizen class, The Merchant of Venice is, arguably, a pre- or early city comedy. This play reveals a growing nervousness of social and economic changes, arriving at a conclusion which engenders the audience to believe in the stability of traditional—aristocratic and patriarchal—life.
Reading Merchant as a city comedy can help expose it to further interpretation: to view the play as being centrally concerned with contemporary social issues, including the conflict between ‘country’ and ‘city’ life, enables one to then explore the mechanisms at work to ‘patch up’ these competing forces. As Leventen notes, Merchant does not "occupy a historical vacuum"; the attempt to strengthen patriarchal authority—through Portia’s marriage and the expulsion of Shylock the usurer—is an indication of social change and, possibly, anxious criticism. By the time city comedy reaches maturation, the ‘fantasy resolution’ has shifted and become more cynical; Middleton’s A Chaste Maid in Cheapside (1612) for example, deals directly with class and sexual conflict even as it displays a lessened attempt to reinscribe traditional moral values. The Merchant of Venice (1596) is, then, situated directly in the rift between glorification and reinscription of the traditional order and cynical satire directed towards this same aristocracy: it partakes in the (ongoing) discussion about the loss of morality in the face of rapid economic and social growth, although without the later cynicism. Thus, similar to city comedy, Merchant reveals "deeper sources of conflict and change" (Gibbons 17); unlike city comedy, it attempts to reconcile patriarchal aristocracy —embodied by Portia—and the pre-capitalist activities and orientation seen in Venice. The visible clinch to the union between aristocracy and capitalism is, of course, the marriage of Portia to Bassanio, financed by the merchant Antonio. Less visible, but arguably more central to this (symbolic) reconciliation, is the alienation and exclusion of the ‘devil Jew’ Shylock. For in the process of ‘demonizing’ and then alienating Shylock, conservative forces at work in the play satisfy patriarchal aristocracy of its continued power and existence while simultaneously enabling the emerging capitalist system to continue unhindered.
To see Shylock as the "demonized other" is not a new interpretation by any means, especially when he is cursed often and vehemently: "O, be thou damn’d, inexecrable dog!" (IV.i.128). Indeed, his punishment for demanding the pound of flesh is based on this ‘otherness’: "If it be proved against an alien/ That by direct or indirect attempts/ He seek the life of any citizen" his property shall be seized (IV.i.350; my emphasis). But the overt hostility towards Shylock is less a matter of racism, as both Daryl Palmer and Alan Rosen argue, as it is an indication of contemporary anxieties towards economic practices and forces in society. Palmer notes that beginning in the 16th century, the idea of cannibalism dominated the English imagination as a result of trade venturing and contact with other cultures. As a form of racism, cannibalism "exists as the ultimate practice of the ultimate Other" (38). Hence, Shylock’s cannibalistic impulses serve as a means—and fulfillment—of Othering. Rosen, like Palmer, links Shylock and the Moor together in their ‘marginalization’ and argues that "Marocco and Shylock mobilize the very discourse that enforces the distinction between insider and outsider and which confers on them…the status of Other" (76). Both focus on ‘ethnic difference’ (to avoid the ahistorical definition of racism based on skin color) as justification for exclusion, a focus which, I feel, looks only at the outward manifestation of Shylock’s Othering. Rather than his cannibalism/Othering being a resultant fear of racial or ethnic difference, Shylock’s presence, as a proto-capitalist, threatens the established economic and "moral" order: as Jonathan Hall argues, Shylock’s exclusion is informed by ‘debate’ between two "opposing concepts of wealth" (Anxious Pleasures 31). Othering him is an anxious, conservative attempt to banish rapidly developing forces of production which upset the stability and known pattern of an agrarian-based society.
The Venetian "purging" of mercantile capitalism, in the form of Shylock, is thus integral to the reinscription of agrarian, patriarchal relations. In sixteenth century England, the localized agrarian economy began crumbling as production of goods shifted from small craft and agriculture to large-scale and export manufacturing. National power depended on centralized markets and expansion of trade for goods and raw materials, a trend which disrupted ties to the land and community. In other words, the agricultural cycle—the "seasonal cycle of abundance and scarcity"— progressingly gave way to the "unpredictable cycle of trade," a trend which destroyed the "traditional economy of local production and consumption" (Hall 30). Furthermore, mercantilism was marked by a fear of total loss balanced by the hope for enormous gains due to the amount of risk involved in exporting and importing material from (newly discovered) foreign lands. This unpredictability of trade venturing can, perhaps, be seen as the root of Antonio’s depression at the opening of the play. For Salario and Salanio suggest that it is the risk of losing his ships which causes this melancholy:
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 (I.i.26-30).
Antonio denies that the prospect of loss causes his despondent attitude; however, his answer reveals that he has taken precautions against the chances of failed ventures. This initial exchange is significant because, for the play, Antonio represents the class of trade venturing merchants—his loss is not merely personal, for merchants were not only risking their own wealth but the nation’s as well, since national power depended upon expansion of trade and the "monetarization of society."
Since the newly emerging capitalist order depends upon accretion and expansion of wealth, Shylock’s thrifty and stingy behavior can, perhaps, be seen as a personification of capitalism. Hall describes the mercantile system as being a "substantial loss" in terms of immediate consumption, for the accumulation of capital depends on the "non-fulfillment of desires" (31). Shylock, as representative of this rising mercantile system, and as a usurer whose existence is completely bound in the accumulation of capital, depends also on this "non-fulfillment of desires." His one desire is, of course, revenge on Antonio: "I’ll have my bond; I will not hear thee speak; I’ll have my bond…I will have my bond" (IV.iii.12-14). But this intensifying demand for the fulfillment of his bond is that of the mercantile system personified in the "devil Jew": it is a desire subsumed within the desire for accumulation. As such, Shylock rejects the carnival cycles of agricultural society—the indulgence in or ‘fulfillment’ of bodily desires—in order to continue his existence as a usurer. In act two, scene five, Shylock tells his daughter Jessica to lock the doors of the house in order to keep out the masques:
Lock up my doors; and when you hear the drum
And the vile squealing of the wry-neck’ed fife...
…stop my house’s ears, I mean my casements:
Let not the sound of shallow foppery enter
My sober house (II.v.29-6).
Symbolically, he does not want the carnivalesque "shallow foppery" to touch his "sober house" and, by extension, his money, as if the very nature of it would corrupt or harm his wealth. Rather than simply a representation of stereotypical Jewish mentality, Shylock perhaps evokes that of the capitalist ideology which depends upon deferral of immediate consumption. In locking out the masque figures, he attempts to protect his hoard from the influence of both the (bodily) pleasure and the consuming nature of carnival.
However, the carnival influence comes from the inside of his house as well. When eloping, Shylock’s daughter Jessica dresses as a boy, upturning the "natural" order of gender roles in a typical carnivalesque tradition: "Cupid himself would blush/ To see me thus transformed to a boy" (II.vi.39) she says. And not only does Jessica upend gender roles, but she squanders the money and jewels stolen from her father on purely fanciful things like monkeys (III.i.122). In his essay on the value of risking love and money for the sake of what can be gained—termed "love’s wealth"—John Russell Brown remarks that Jessica is "generous" in her spending, for it is a "joyful celebration" of wealth and love (70). As Brown points out, this ‘celebration’ is clearly opposed to the "Fast bind, fast find" and "thrifty mind" of her father (II.v.54). When Shylock rejects Jessica he is, then, also rejecting carnival: "I would my daughter were dead at my foot, and the jewels in her ear!" (III.i.95). With Jessica and her "unthrift love" (V.i.16) under control, literally buried, Shylock hopes to gain back his wayward jewels.
Another example of Shylock’s anti-carnival qualities can be seen in his denial of eating or feasting. Although Shylock declines to dine with Antonio and Bassanio on the basis of religion, it could also be seen as another instance of his rejection of bodily desires: "I will buy with you, sell with you, talk with you…but I will not eat with you [or] drink with you" (I.ii.35). This strict adherence to selling and buying and talking (presumably to arrange business deals), as well as his excessive demand for upholding the law of his bond with Antonio, marks Shylock as an ‘extreme’ capitalist. Thus, as Brown continues, "willing, generous, and prosperous transactions of love’s wealth are compared and contrasted with Shylock’s wholly commercial transactions in which gain is the object…and even human beings are merely things to be possessed" (67). It is precisely because of this ‘wholly commercial’ method of social interaction that Shylock becomes the site of displacement for the Venetian fear of the developing capitalist system. In other words, in order to purge society of the dangerous aspects of capitalism, what Hall calls the "killing power of abstract legality," Shylock gets misrecognized as a "devil" and he, like a magnet, takes the evil capitalist relations with him as he gets marginalized.
It is this (mis)perception of Shylock as the sole source of danger which offers reassurance to the Venetians, and to the watching audience, that emerging mercantile-capitalism is innocuous. Walter Cohen views the theater as a mechanism for "communal affirmation and social ratification," and more importantly, as "a means of confronting fear and anger in a manner that promoted reassurance about the existence and legitimacy of a new order" (783). Thus while The Merchant of Venice excludes and alienates the usurer Shylock—a product of the new order—in actuality the play legitimates mercantile capitalism by ‘reassuring’ its audience that the old and the new social orders are compatible. In this, Merchant differs from fully developed city comedy. Most often the resolution of city comedy reestablishes a semblance of order—Chaste Maid in Cheapside for example ends with a funeral turned marriage and the pandering knight Whorehound in jail—but suggests a lack of conviction; instead, restoration of order serves as a ‘comic resolution’, a formal convention. These playwrights, it would seem, use trite or superficial endings in order to highlight the (very real) likelihood of continued corruption, of continued tensions in society: satire permeates the ‘restored’ social order of city comedies. Thus the conventional city comedy conclusion— marriage, feast, unmasking and punishment of villains—become empty signifiers. Merchant, however, seems intent upon securing the stability of an older economy. Shylock is most definitely over-thrown and Bassanio wins Portia (and her estate), gaining not only his own financial security but also indirectly Antonio’s since the ‘arrows ventured’ have finally hit a wealthy target: only after the usurer is marginalized, is Antonio’s mercantilism ‘wedded’ to Portia’s aristocracy.
This exclusion of Shylock and paralleled acceptance of the merchant Antonio, in part is a result of contradictory discourses regarding mercantilism and usury. Thomas Moisan demonstrates the intensity of the debate centered on the (thin) distinction between trade venturing and usury: trade venturing was widely acceptable because of its prospect for enriching the nation; however, usury was regarded as heresy and violently condemned (197). The promotion of mercantile venturing points to an already pervasive (unconscious) acceptance of capitalism’s basic transaction: "For if it is granted that the fruits of trade enhance the ‘commonweal’, then it only follows that the ills attendant upon the increase in trade and venture capitalism should be treated, not as inherent in the system, but as excesses or abuses, or even subversions of the system" (Moisan 196). Usury and usurers, then, "absorb" the negative aspects of proto-capitalism. Thus Shylock’s outrageous demand for his bond—a pound of Antonio’s flesh—is regarded as an ‘abuse’ of the system rather than an effect of the system itself: through a process of ‘misrecognition’ the negative consequences of the mercantile system are symbolically embodied in the form of the usurer Shylock.
To regard Shylock as the "misrecognized" capitalist (the symbolic manifestation of all ‘evil truths’ of this rising social order), it is useful to consider both Gilles Deleuze’s theory of "schizophrenia" or the competing pull between dissociative and recontaining drives (in his term "molar desire"), and Slavoj Zizek’s explanation of the spectre, that which interrupts our attempt to create a complete-unified ‘reality’. Zizek’s primary thesis is that ideology is not an illusion—an opaque veil— which hides an underlying ‘truth’, but instead, is that which allows us to experience ‘reality’, for ideology gives meaning and structure to the encounters and desires we experience. In other words, reality is not a pre-represented thing in itself, it is always-already represented or symbolized. As such, "if (what we experience as) ‘reality’ is to emerge, something has to be foreclosed from it—that is to say, ‘reality’, like truth, is, by definition, never whole" (Mapping Ideology 21). For in the process of organizing ‘reality’ into meaningful structures, something always escapes symbolization. This escaped or non-symbolized material is the spectre which ‘emerges’ from the gap that reality never quite ‘covers over’. Thus, "what the spectre conceals is not reality but its ‘primordially repressed’, the irrepresentable X on whose ‘repression’ reality itself is founded" (Zizek 21; author’s italics). Shylock occupies the space of the spectre for the citizens of Venice and, perhaps, for the Shakespearean audience. He is, of course, the major site of anxiety about power and money, about the misuse (or danger) of power based strictly on legality. In this way, Shylock comes to represent the ‘unmentionable’ aspects of capitalism. More specifically his presence enables the citizens of Venice to continue ignoring the "truth" of their society—Antonio purges Venice of the Real (the ‘irrepresentable X’) in the form of Shylock, ultimately without facing the fact that commodification is at the center of his reality. For as the spectre, the ‘unrepressed body’, Shylock shows that what society is constructed around, what it represses, is the arbitrariness of commodification and exchange—of capitalism.
As the spectre, an un-symbolized force which disrupts (the symbolically constructed) reality, Shylock reveals the hypocrisy of Antonio who wants to use the forces of capitalism but also be a ‘good’ Christian. When Shylock invokes the tale of thrifty Jacob and Laban to explain how his silver and gold "make breed as fast" as ewes and rams, Antonio replies, "This was a venture, sir, that Jacob served for;/ A thing not in his power to bring to pass, But sway’d and fashion’d by the hand of heaven" (I.iii.90). What Antonio cannot admit is that making capital accumulate is a totally human production; it is not a divine favor bestowed upon the deserving or ‘fashion’d by the hand of heaven’. And this denial is directly related to the more primary denial that society is based on ‘idolization of money’ rather than on religious ideals. As Zizek writes, the "irrepresentable X" that capitalism is built around is the fact that money is the basis of our society: "the commodity universe provides the necessary fetishistic supplement to the ‘official’ spirituality: it may well be that the ‘official’ ideology of our society is Christian spirituality, but its actual foundation is none the less the idolatry of the Golden Calf, money" (20). Antonio’s heated interjection "O, what a goodly outside falsehood hath" (I.iii.100) denies that Shylock speaks any ‘truth’ about their system; Shylock’s open acceptance of capitalism, in the form of interest, is equated with "falsehood" and "rotten" cores, with the accusation that "the devil can cite Scripture for his purpose" (I.iii.99).
Yet, Shylock very nearly wins his bond because he is within the boundaries of the law; he is citing scripture, if by scripture we mean the ‘truth’ of how the system works, when he delivers the following speech:
What judgement shall I dread, doing no wrong?
You have among you many a purchased slave,
Which, like your asses and your dogs and mules,
You use in abject and in slavish parts,
Because you bought them: shall I say to you,
Let them be free, marry them to your heirs …You will answer
‘The slaves are ours": so do I answer you:
The pound of flesh, which I demand of him,
Is dearly bought (IV.i.89-100)
Shylock’s short answer, then, to why he would rather have "a weight of carrion flesh" than money is that ‘I bought it’ and "it is my humour" (IV.i.45). Antonio’s unwillingness to accept this Real—the foundations of capitalism—and instead, justifying his wealth on the basis of other-worldly favor, shows the ‘primordially repressed’: his ‘reality’ depends upon (mis)recognizing the inherent, negative elements of capitalism as external or Other.
When the Duke tells Antonio, "I am sorry for thee: though art come to answer/ A stony adversary, an inhuman wretch/ Incapable of pity, voice and empty from any dram of mercy" (IV.i.3), the play reveals the attempt to equate "Christian mercy" with the interests of the state. The Real of capitalism—the ‘kernel’ around which reality is built—is buried by the symbolic formulations or structures of Christianity. In other words, Christian ethos is the ‘official ideology’ of Venice. For as Portia disguised as Balthasar states, "Then must the Jew be merciful…mercy is not strain’d,/ It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven…it is twice blest;/ It blesseth him that gives and him that takes" (IV.i.180). Thus, moral or religious justification for human’s actions creates the reality of Venice (most notably Antonio’s)—to cover over the arbitrary essence of capitalism, mercy is posited as the primary basis of society and Shylock’s deviation from this ‘natural’ state conveys on him the status of Other. This disjunction or antagonism between mercy and legality is, as Zizek explains, the Real or "trauma around which social reality is structured" (26). And capitalism, society, functions through this negating of the fact that its ‘reality’ is constructed rather than a universal, ahistorical truth. Or as Deleuze would say, capitalism’s "molar desire" is to cover over (or misrecognize) its arbitrary, contingent basis.
In Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Deleuze states that "the prime function incumbent upon the socius, has always been to codify the flows of desire, to inscribe them, to record them, to see to it that no flow exists that is not properly dammed up, channeled, regulated" (33). This coding of the ‘flows of desires’ structures society for it determines the acceptable desires and behaviors (i.e. gender and class) of every historical age. However, capitalism is a massive "decoding" of desire; it deliberately perpetuates deterritorialization, for "by substituting money for the very notion of a code" it "unleashes" more "flows of desire" (Deleuze 33). Thus, capitalism mobilizes forces which continually undermine established representations because it places monetary exchange at the center of all relations. Of course, capitalism must also recontain these flows of desire; in order to resist reaching its limit, it strains to recode or "inhibit this inherent tendency" (Deleuze 34). This is, then, the recoding or reterritorialization of desires (and the pull between desires for de- and re-coding creates the ‘schizophrenic’ subject). Re-territorialization is a ‘molar desire’ of subjects who want to counteract the uncertainty of the decoding forces which reveal the arbitrary or "historically contingent arrangement" of social structures (Hall 27). Feudal relations, for example, depended upon preestablished and lasting systems of hierarchy. The social relationships from peasant to lord were fixed such that their social position, their identity, was stable and recognized as ‘fated’. As the single representative of landed aristocracy, Portia never seriously challenges her father’s "will" for she does not see that she has a choice; the wish to choose her own husband is seen as a "transgressive" desire which she quickly, and rather easily, suppresses. And Portia’s identity—social status—is strengthened by upholding her father’s will (she occupies a central position during the latter part of the play). Whereas, Leventen notes, Jessica is first welcomed into the Christian community by rejecting her tyrannical father only to ultimately fade into ‘dismissed silence’, perhaps just as much for her ‘escape’ from patriarchal authority as for wasting her (stolen) wealth. In this way, patriarchy itself is posited as an ‘eternal truth’, as existing independent of social conditions. However, capitalism disrupts—decodes—that stable hierarchy and shows the established positions to be social constructions. And hence the reactionary or anxious attempt to reterritorialize and stabilize society—to reform an identity.
To (re)form identity, capitalism uses those old structures as reterritorialization forces, thus hiding its own historical construction by invoking older structures as legitimization of its existence. Capitalism, then, works to construct or symbolize (its) reality at the same time as it also deconstructs preestablished structures. As Deleuze points out, money as the ‘center’ undermines any sort of social stability, for capitalism always strives to extend itself by further decoding as it needs new sources and new markets. Consequently, as Marx writes in German Ideology, the capitalist system has to work through laws since the bonds between men are no longer personal, but instead are based upon monetary exchange and the "domination of labor" (68). That is, the ‘domination of labor’—as a released or uncontained ‘flow’ of labor force— is a decoded desire. Unlike pre-capitalist economies in which ‘labor’ has only ‘use-value’ worth (to produce food) in the capitalist economy labor itself becomes an ‘exchange-value’ product. Thus it is based on an implied exchangeability of flesh and monetary value; an exchangeability which Shylock makes evident: "If you repay me not…let the forfeit/ Be nominated for an equal pound of your fair flesh" (I.iii.149). Of course, Antonio denies the real of this fact, and when confronted with Shylock’s persistence in upholding the law—Shylock’s only source of power—he resorts to ‘demonizing’ Shylock as the cause of harm: "An evil soul producing holy witness/ Is like...A goodly apple rotten at the heart" (I.iii.100). A rotten apple, of course, spreads its rot to others; Shylock is, by a mere extension, the source of ‘evil’ in the ‘heart’ of society. As Lars Engle writes, "the diabolism forced on Shylock" is caused by "Antonio’s near-hysterical resistance to any formal acceptance of the nature of the economic system he lives in" (32). Shylock, then, has to take on this "monstrous and archaic appetite" (Hall 58) in order for the mercantile system to continue, but in a safer or purged form: he is the pharmakon that allows his "nervous" society to continue becoming capitalist.
This symbolic marginalization of the capitalist relations results from a conflict between two differing societies—the older, patriarchal culture of Belmont, and the emerging mercantile-capitalist system of Venice. The difference between pre- and capitalist societies is explained by Marx and Engels in The German Ideology as: "The first case presupposes that the individuals are united by some bond: family, tribe, the land itself, etc.; the second, that they are independent of one another and are only held together by exchange" (68). This ‘nonpersonal’ relationship between people is most obvious in the exchanges between Antonio and Shylock. When Antonio comes to borrow money from Shylock, he says that he will continue to "spit" on him and call him "dog" but still expects Shylock to lend money (I.iii.130). Thus, as Marx continues, "In the first case, the domination of the proprietor over the propertyless may be based on a personal relationship, on a kind of community; in the second, it must have taken on a material shape in a third party—money" (68).
Zizek further elaborates on this ‘material shape’ of social relations in The Sublime Object of Ideology, noting that in pre-capitalist societies the relations between people are ‘fetishized’ (identity is perceived as inherent, ‘intimate’, rather than a social effect), whereas, conversely, in the capitalist society it is the ‘relation between things’ that is mystified (money is embued with a Universal, inherent value). Thus, individuals are ‘only held together by exchange’ because in capitalism relations are "between ‘free’ people, each following his or her proper egoistic interest...the other person is for him wholly delivered of all mystical aura" (Sublime 25). In other words, the pre-capitalist relations between lord and peasant are ‘demystified’, the peasant’s identity is no longer misrecognized as a natural state of ‘being-a-peasant’, an identity existing independently of social relations. Thus, the feudal interrelations of "domination and servitude" are replaced with the bonds of exchange, with a subject who "sees in his partner another subject who follows his interest and interests him only in so far as he possesses something—a commodity—that could satisfy some of his needs" (Sublime 25). This ‘market exchange’ between ‘free subjects’ is clearly stated in The Merchant of Venice:
If thou wilt lend this money, lend it not
As if to thy friends; for when did friendship take
A breed for barren metal of his friend?
But lend it rather to thine enemy (I.iii.133-36).
Because their friendship and ‘barren metal’ have no connection, Antonio points out the arbitrariness of capitalist exchange: what matters is the act of exchange, not the relations between the men who are exchanging. Thus, Antonio can say that Shylock is just as able to lend money to an enemy as a friend.
But, obviously, Bassanio and Antonio cut against this arbitrary exchange. Their relationship is closely bound in the exchange of "money and in love" as Bassanio says, and because of this, "although I neither lend not borrow/ By taking nor by giving of excess,/ Yet, to supply the ripe wants of my friend, I’ll break a custom" says Antonio (I.iii.62-5). Rather than speculating about their ‘homosocial’ bond (sexual or father-son), it is possible to read their relationship as an attempt to fuse Christian virtue and capitalist venturing. As Moisan points out, "Merchant seems to inscribe and affirm an ideological calculus that fused the interests of the state and the assertions of a providentialist Christianity with the prerogatives of an increasingly capitalist marketplace" (188). This fusing of state interests and Christian assertions is one manifestation of molar coding—of reterritorialization—such that the effects of pure capitalist desire are (mis)recognized as being "acts of God." Therein the acceptance of merchant venturing and denial of usury, which, because of its nature, always profits and so takes ‘God’s will’ out of the event. Antonio invokes God, or more often "Fortune"—"herein Fortune shows herself more kind than is her custom"— as legitimization of his trade: the fact that his lost "agosies" miraculously appear ("richly laden") at the end of the play further speaks to the assumption that risk deserves great reward. However, Shylock’s safe and secure profit from "interest" (capitalism undisguised) is uncomfortable to the Christian ideology that wealth is "manna" from heaven, for those worthy of deserving it. And of course, Antonio’s habit of lending money "gratis" for the sake of friendship is balanced again Shylock’s greed—he still lends money to a man who spits on him.
In language that echoes Bassanio and Antonio ("I would be friends with you and have your love"), Shylock suggests that Antonio contract a pound of flesh in exchange for the three thousand ducats. Although Shylock at first convinces Antonio that a pound of human flesh is of no use to him—"A pound of man’s flesh taken from a man/ Is not so estimable, profitable neither,/ As flesh of mutton, beefs, or goats" (I.iii.164)—he comes to demand that pound of flesh on the assertion that he paid for it. Likewise, wanting Antonio’s flesh could be seen as a shift from seeing only the use-value of a commodity to the phenomenon whereby the value of something is determined by the labor put into it. Hence, buying Antonio’s flesh is really not so outrageous because that is, in effect, what labor is: selling of the body in exchange for money. Thus, Shylock can say "The pound of flesh, which I demand of him/, Is dearly bought; ‘tis mine and I will have it. If you deny me, fie upon your law!" (IV.i.99-101). This revelation of the stark possibilities of developed capitalism arises from Shylock’s position as ‘un-symbolized material’—he does not (and arguably cannot) operate within the structures of ‘reality’, and thus escapes symbolization. As such, he becomes the ‘other’, or as Deleuze might say, his desires have to be (mis)recognized as external.
Shylock escapes symbolization precisely because of his position in society; as both a usurer and a Jew he cannot employ the same privileges as the (Christian) merchant class. As Rosen points out, from the very beginning Shylock enters into a "drama whose discourse is already in place to distinguish insider from outsider" (75). Rosen is solely speaking of exclusion based on racial and ethnic otherness; however, taken a step further, this same ‘discourse of exclusion’ can be seen as a molar desire to repress the ‘primordial other’ in Zizek’s terminology. Shylock’s unsymbolized presence/desires threaten the reality of Venetian citizens and, thus, misrecognition of him as an external Other is a result of molar construction. For in the attempt to legitimate (symbolic) reality, molar forces create the spectre; the act of ‘repressing’ what reality depends upon is a reterritorializing force. The spectre is, then, always inherently present in reality. And thus, the usurer does not hide ‘reality’ so much as he embodies that which is inadmissible in their society.
Antonio, as a merchant trading in commodities rather than capital, is acceptable to the older system, unlike Shylock. Brown explains this is because Antonio is able to give and to receive, whereas by contrast, Shylock is overly possessive and sticks too closely to the law: "Shylock and Antonio get their livelihood by commerce, Antonio is ready to submit rights of commerce to claims of love; he lends freely to his friend Bassanio without security… although it involves risking his own life" (62). Whereas Shylock, in his own words, says "I stand for judgment…I stand here for law" (IV.i.100; 142) and no appeal to mercy or kindness will change his demand for his rights according to the law of the bond (IV.i.240). Furthermore, when Portia/Balthasar asks Shylock if he has a surgeon nearby to "stop" Antonio’s wounds, and suggests it would be a gesture of charity to do so, Shylock says, "I cannot find it; ‘tis not in the bond" (IV.i.462). Absolute legality is a manifestation of capitalism, for it depends upon ‘abstract’ bonds between people; just as money takes the place of the personal exchange bond, the Law takes the place of personal or subjective resolutions. Thus Antonio, because he risks his life as well as lends money "gratis" for the sake of friendship, is sanctioned by the play, whereas Shylock "must still be defeated, because he is an enemy to love’s wealth and its free, joyful, and continual giving" (Brown 73). For this reason, then, Shylock is served by the same justice he demanded of Antonio and "must be hang’d at the state’s charge" (IV.i.368) for his awful ‘appetite’.
If Shylock’s awful appetite—absolute legality—is a capitalist demand, then the play rewards and reinscribes the older pastoral life through the triumph of Portia during the trial, and through the movement back to the country estate in Belmont at the end of the play. This reactionary or reterritorializing movement is an attempt to re-establish the authority of the older, agrarian system by demonizing Shylock. In order to ignore, or cover up, the truth of the capitalist society, Shylock must be demonized in order to become the only source of threat to the patriarchal authority. Hall writes that "Repression…should really be understood not as an attempt to resist the truly primordial other but the literally alienating construction as "other" of all desires that cannot be openly accommodated with the dominant social formation" (20; my emphasis). Shylock is so openly desiring—"[I whet my knife] To cut the forfeiture from that bankrupt there" (IV.i.120)—that he ‘decodes’ the carefully constructed structures through which the other characters operate and shows that absolute legality is (part of) the "repressed" center of capitalism. Because Venice is a mercantile state it depends on upholding laws; "If you deny me, fie on your laws! There is no force in the decrees of Venice," says Shylock (IV.i.101). Even Antonio has to admit that the Duke must uphold the law because "if it be denied,/ Will much impeach the justice of his state;/ Since that the trade and profit of the city/ Consisteth of all nations" (III.iii.29)— but taken to the extreme, as Shylock does, the law brings ‘death’; both literally in Antonio, but also symbolically in that capitalism undermines patriarchal relations. The act, then, of alienating Shylock reveals molar desires that wish for the re-establishment of traditional patriarchal order, and, significantly, signifies an apprehension of capitalism.
Portia, waiting for some suitor to choose the correct casket and ‘win’ her, and her property, upholds the agrarian, pre-capitalist system where ‘laws’ are based on patriarchal relations. As Leventen notes, Portia "possesses the fortune on which much of the plot turns, and is the sole representative of the landed aristocracy whose values and privileges the play may be inscribing" (60). Thus, although Portia’s father is dead, Portia has internalized and upholds this tradition; "If I live to be as old as Sibylla, I will die as chaste as Diana, unless I be obtained by the manner of my father’s will" (I.ii.25). Because of this internalization, the old patriarchal order remains strong—so strong that Portia overthrows the newer mercantile laws, the abstract bonds which Shylock claims, during the pound of flesh trial.
Leventen reads Portia’s upholding of patriarchal authority as a "male fantasy" which attempts to posit patriarchal power as "existing independent of time and place, independent of history" (69). In so far as Merchant enacts a ‘male fantasy’, it also reveals anxieties (dys- and utopian visions) of Elizabethan society: "the fairy-tale mode inscribes and serves the interest of a patriarchy threatened by forces of change…thus, the victim of one ‘old tale’ is the demystifier of the other’ (Leventen 71). I would argue, however, that she serves as a force of reterritorialization in both ‘old tales’. Rather than demystifying the conflict between Shylock and Antonio, she, in effect, "miraculizes" it as Deleuze would say. For although Portia does solve the bond-flesh problem—"she catches [Shylock] in laws wider than those he has provoked" (Engle 35)—she deflects attention from the fact that absolute legality is a factor of capitalist exchanges. Shylock’s demand, which is legitimate according to the law, turns into a (darkly) humorous joke on him: "A Daniel, still say I, a second Daniel! I thank thee, Jew, for teaching me that word" (IV.i.140). Suffice to say that immediately after the trial the play turns to ‘domestic’ scenes which engender comic enjoyment in seeing the ‘good guys’ duped, and forgiven, by their wives.
Thus, the deterritorialization force of capitalism—in its decoding of traditional ‘moral’ relations—seems to be contained and banished with the exorcision of Shylock; Antonio’s continued presence as a merchant is, of course, firmly established with both the safe return of his lost ships and the marriage of Portia and his friend Bassanio. Consequently, as Engle writes, "the play offers reassurance that, while the world may change, inherited blessings will be preserved" (37). However, Engle neutralizes this reading of the play’s conservative ending with the assertion that "more than any other Shakespearean play, Merchant of Venice shows a woman triumphing over men and male system of exchange: the male ‘homosoical desire’ of Antonio is almost as thoroughly thwarted in the play as is Shylock’s vengefulness" (37). While Portia does ‘triumph’ over men at the trial and in her ring trick, this ultimately is itself a conservative movement, a "fantasy" as Leventen suggests, which hides the true concern—the nature of economic exchange itself. In a sense, Portia’s triumph is the ‘lesser of two evils’ because, in the end, she embodies and upholds the patriarchal tradition; rather than being a "radical" force demonstrating Shakespeare’s "progressiveness," she acts as the blind to hide the Real of capitalist relationships. As such, Portia is also part of the reterritorialization movement: she represents the attempt to reconcile two conflicting societies, and more importantly, to misrecognize the truths that Shylock utters about capitalist relations.
In this respect Merchant prefigures more radical discussions of Renaissance concern with changing conditions—of money, women, and power, to return to Leventen’s argument. For Merchant, in the end, misrecognizes the source of cultural anxiety and ultimately legitimates capitalism. However, in so far as Venice/Belmont attempts to reconcile these two ‘concepts of wealth’ or rather, two methods of social interaction, the play does speak to an underlying criticism of contemporary conditions. Later city comedy, like The Dutch Courtesan and A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, extends this critique to the middle class (which Merchant legitimates) and directly satirizes the contradiction between socially sanctioned and propounded morals and the actions of ‘corrupt’ people. Consider Freevill’s sardonic lecture to Malheureux: "[a] bawd lives by other’s pleasures and only grows rich by other’s risings" and this makes prostitution a trade "most honorable" (The Dutch Courtesan I.ii.38). Of course, this is shown to be rhetoric by the end of the play. City comedy does have conservative elements—satirizing denotes a desire for change, an unhappiness with social conditions—but it differs from Merchant in the extent to which it attempts to reinstate traditional morals. Courtesan satirizes and critiques the double standards surrounding prostitution—commodification of sex—without necessarily attempting the ‘utopian’ vision of coexisting forces as does The Merchant of Venice.
With Bassanio and Portia married and the "devil Jew" reduced to a pauper and "turned Christian," the two societies join happily. However, Hugh Richmond in Shakespeare’s Sexual Comedy, states that only "superficial readers" would see the last scene as the "serene idyll" it propounds to be (133). He uses Bassanio’s "humiliation" for having given away Portia’s ring as a central example: "By heaven, I will ne’er come in your bed/ Until I see the ring" (V.i.190). Furthermore, Richmond sees Belmont not as the "magical" escape from reality, but as the place where "truth" is found, for Shylock learns to accept " the Christian principal of mercy" (136). The lines which Richmond cites are spoken by Antonio who says he will not claim "one half [Shylock’s] goods" as long as "He presently become a Christian" (IV.i.380). Implied of course, is that Shylock learns mercy by Antonio’s example.
However, I think this reading ignores why Shylock’s "hatred breaks through his commercial realism" (Richmond 127); it ignores the fact that Shylock is deliberately marginalized in the fourth act in order to give the illusion of the restored power of the patriarchal order. For The Merchant of Venice is an attempt to overcome, or misrecognize the negative aspects of capitalism, and only the demonizing of Shylock allows for this reconciliation. As Hall explains, the "scapegoating of Shylock…provides for the misrecognition of the truths he utters. And the marriage of mercantile capital with aristocratic lineage is also made possible only on the basis of these misrecognitions" (58). And the "truth" that they do not want to hear is that the emerging mercantile state of Venice is based upon ‘non-human’ exchanges:
You, that did void your rheum upon my beard
And foot me as you spurn a stranger cur
Over your threshold: moneys is your suit…
Should I not say ‘hath a dog money? is it possible
A cur can lend three thousand ducats?’ (I.iii.120).
Shylock is dangerous here because he points out the hypocrisy of Antonio who wants to be a Christian and a capitalist too; Antonio’s mercy and ‘free giving’ are only skin deep. Also, he nearly exposes the truth which Antonio’s existence depends upon; the arbitrariness of capitalist exchanges—that there is no center other than the quest for wealth.
This value of money, and by extension abstract bonds rather than human beings, is what the play’s ‘displacement’ has shifted onto Shylock in a ‘demonic’ form: "Ay his breast:/ So says the bond: doth it not, noble judge?/ ‘Nearest his heart’: those are the very words" (IV.i.253). In "cruelly" relishing the removal of what amounts to Antonio’s heart, and in incessantly mentioning the claims of the bond in order to justify his demand, Shylock is cast as a revengeful, monstrous man; a unique abnormality of nature (although formed by the capitalist system) who is eventually and dramatically overcome: "Down therefore and beg mercy of the Duke" (IV.i.373). Thus Shylock’s marginalization allows for the Venetian society to continue, secure in its knowledge that the ‘evil’ capitalist element is gone and they are a merciful and just society.
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