The Merchant of Venice

Venice, late sixteenth century. Antonio, a wealthy Christian merchant, is inexplicably sad. His ships are out at sea on routine trading voyages; his friend Bassanio has come to ask for a loan. Bassanio has spent his fortune and now intends to win Portia, a rich heiress at Belmont, and clear his debts; he needs money for the courtship. Antonio has no liquid cash — everything is at sea — but offers his credit. They will borrow against him.

At Belmont, Portia is bound by her dead father’s will: she may not choose her own husband. Suitors must pick from three caskets — gold, silver, lead — and only the man who picks rightly may marry her. She and her companion Nerissa run through the suitors who have come and gone (a Neapolitan obsessed with horses, a frowning German, a French fop, a drunken Saxon) with the relief of two intelligent women watching mediocrity sail home. Of all the men either has met, only the Venetian Bassanio is remembered with any warmth.

Back in Venice, Bassanio approaches the moneylender Shylock for three thousand ducats, with Antonio bound. Shylock is a Jew. Antonio has spat on him, called him dog, and railed against him in public for lending money at interest. Shylock agrees to the loan — and offers what he calls a “merry bond”: no interest, but if the money is not repaid in three months, the forfeit is a pound of Antonio’s flesh, to be cut from any part of his body Shylock chooses. Antonio, certain his ships will return in time, signs.

The Princes of Morocco and Arragon try the casket lottery and choose wrong (gold and silver, in turn). Meanwhile, in a Venetian sub-plot, Shylock’s daughter Jessica elopes with the Christian Lorenzo, taking with her a casket of her father’s ducats and jewels. Shylock’s reaction in the streets — reported, not shown — mingles grief at his daughter, fury at his money, and a new, harder resolve: news arrives that Antonio’s ships have foundered. The bond’s forfeit is no longer hypothetical.

Bassanio reaches Belmont. He chooses lead and wins Portia; his friend Gratiano, in parallel, wins Nerissa. The wedding is interrupted by news from Venice: Antonio’s ships are lost, the bond is forfeit, Shylock is demanding his pound of flesh in court and refusing every offer of repayment, however many times the principal. Bassanio rides for Venice. Portia, with Nerissa, secretly follows in disguise as a young male doctor of laws.

The trial scene (4.1) is the play’s long centre. The Duke of Venice presses Shylock to relent; Shylock refuses. Bassanio offers six thousand ducats, then ten times the bond; Shylock refuses. Portia, disguised as the lawyer Balthazar, delivers the famous speech on the quality of mercy — and, when Shylock will not yield, traps him in his own contract. The bond stipulates a pound of flesh; it does not stipulate a single drop of blood, and any drop spilled will forfeit Shylock’s lands and goods to the state. Shylock asks for the principal back; Portia refuses. He asks merely to leave; the court turns the law on him as a Jewish alien who has plotted against a Venetian citizen’s life. Half his estate goes to Antonio, half to the state, and — on Antonio’s “mercy” — he is ordered to convert to Christianity. Shylock leaves the courtroom: I am not well. He does not appear again.

The fifth act returns to Belmont and to comedy — or to comedy’s outline. Portia and Nerissa, having tricked their husbands into giving away their wedding rings to the “lawyer” and his “clerk,” reveal the deception by lamplight in the garden. Letters arrive: Antonio’s ships, after all, have come safely home. Lorenzo and Jessica are told they have inherited Shylock’s estate. The play ends in moonlight and music — though one chair on the stage is empty, and stays empty.

Written between 1596 and 1598, The Merchant of Venice sits at the centre of Shakespeare’s middle period: the comedies are darkening, the great tragedies are not yet written. The play was first registered in 1598 and printed in 1600; the title page advertises both the “extreme cruelty of Shylock the Jew” and the casket lottery, billing it as a comedy on the strength of the second plot. Its Elizabethan audience would have understood the genre cue: a comedy ends in marriage, and this one does (three of them).

The Jewish community of England had been formally expelled in 1290, three centuries before Shakespeare wrote, and would not be readmitted until the 1650s. There were almost certainly no openly practising Jews in London in 1597 — perhaps a handful of converted Sephardim hiding their religion. The Jew of the Elizabethan stage was therefore largely a literary and theological figure, inherited from medieval miracle plays, from Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta (c. 1589), and from the libellous tradition of the “blood-libel.” In 1594 the Queen’s Portuguese physician Roderigo Lopez, who was of Jewish descent, was hanged at Tyburn after a politicised trial for allegedly poisoning Elizabeth I; The Jew of Malta was revived during his trial. Shakespeare’s play arrives within a few years of that public execution, and into a London that was actively imagining Jews as a category without having to encounter actual Jewish neighbours.

Venice itself, which Shakespeare never visited, was understood across Europe as the great commercial republic: a city built on contracts, on the rule of law applied to merchants of all nations, and on a kind of religious cohabitation impossible elsewhere. Venice had a real ghetto, established in 1516 — the word ghetto originates there — in which the city’s Jewish moneylenders and traders were required to live, but within which they had recognised legal status. The play’s legal climax depends on this: a Venetian Christian and a Venetian Jew arguing a bond before a Venetian court, with the law at first appearing to side with the Jew, before the law turns. Shakespeare uses the cosmopolitan reputation of Venice to stage a confrontation that sixteenth-century English law would not have permitted.

The two plots — the bond and the caskets — come from older sources. The pound-of-flesh bond is in the late-fourteenth-century Italian tale Il Pecorone by Giovanni Fiorentino, and Shakespeare’s borrowing is close enough that he probably read it (in Italian, or in a manuscript translation that has not survived). The casket choice is in the medieval Gesta Romanorum, an English-Latin collection of moral tales. What Shakespeare adds is everything that has made the play hard for four centuries: Shylock’s interiority, his daughter, his lost wife’s ring, and the speech that begins Hath not a Jew eyes?

Money, credit, and value. The play opens with a man whose wealth is on ships he cannot see and ends with a courtroom debating the value of a pound of human flesh. In between, every relationship is denominated in something: love in ducats, marriage in caskets of gold/silver/lead, friendship in “my purse, my person, my extremest means.” The play is interested in what cannot be bought, but the discovery that ducats can buy almost everything — including, in the end, Shylock’s religion — is closer to its real subject. The ring plot of Act V replays the question on a smaller scale: a wife’s ring given away as a fee is the marriage bond redefined as commerce, and the comedy of the resolution does not erase what it has revealed.

Christian and Jew. The play’s central confrontation is between Antonio (the Christian merchant who lends without interest) and Shylock (the Jewish moneylender who lends at interest). Around that opposition the play distributes its other oppositions: mercy and justice, love and law, generosity and contract, body and soul. The danger of the play, then and now, is that it appears to load each opposition on the Christian side — that to argue for mercy, generosity, and love is automatically to argue against Shylock. Shakespeare complicates this at every turn (the Christian merchants spit and curse; the Christian friend is willing to die for his friend; the Jewish father loses his daughter and his ducats; the Jewish moneylender claims an injury too long borne to forgive) but does not undo it. The verdict the play returns is Christian Venice’s; the case it makes for that verdict is divided, audible, and marked.

Mercy and justice. Portia’s “The quality of mercy is not strain’d” (4.1) is one of the most famous speeches in the canon, and the play’s great religious-philosophical claim: that mercy is what the strong owe the weak, that the law unmediated by mercy condemns the lawful, that Christianity’s moral advantage over a strict reading of contract law is its acceptance that no one is solvent in absolute terms. The complication is that mercy is then asked of Shylock and not extended to him; the merciful court strips him of his estate and his religion. Whether the speech is the play’s ethics or the play’s irony has been argued for four centuries, and the text supports both readings.

The bond. A bond, in Elizabethan law, was a written promise enforceable in court, with a stated penalty for breach. The play takes the metaphor of bondage in its full range: Antonio is bound to Shylock by contract; Bassanio is bound to Antonio by love and debt; Portia is bound to her dead father by a will she did not write; Jessica is bound to Shylock by blood and faith and, by play’s end, no longer is. The casket lottery is a bond too — whoever picks wrong must swear never to woo any woman afterwards. The play is full of contracts trying to govern feelings, and feelings stretching, evading, or breaking the contracts that hold them.

Disguise and authority. Portia and Nerissa enter the trial scene disguised as a male lawyer and his clerk; they win the case the men cannot. The disguise is the comic engine that resolves the bond plot, and it is also the play’s quietest argument: that a young woman trained in the law would, if permitted to enter a courtroom, be more useful than the entire bench. The ring trick that follows is the same insight in domestic key: the husbands, asked to surrender what they swore never to part with, do, and the wives know it.

Belmont and Venice. The play splits cleanly between two locations: Venice, the masculine commercial city of contracts, courtrooms, and bonds; Belmont, the feminine country house of music, moonlight, and inherited wealth. The two locations watch each other across the play’s acts. Belmont is what Venice’s commerce is supposed to be in service of — a place to retire to, with a wife, with money, with friends. Venice is what makes Belmont possible. The fifth act is unusual in that it returns to Belmont and refuses to leave; the bond is settled, the marriages are saved, and Antonio is given news of his returned ships, but the chair labelled Shylock is unfilled, and the moonlight has to do the work of completing a comedy that has shed its third act.

The Merchant of Venice is Shakespeare’s most morally divisive comedy. It contains some of the most beautiful verse he ever wrote — Portia on mercy in 4.1, Lorenzo on the music of the spheres in 5.1 — and it contains some of the most disturbing stage business in the canon: the spitting on Shylock, the chant of the Jew, the Jew, the Jew, the forced conversion, Jessica’s casual exchange of her dead mother’s turquoise ring for a monkey. The play’s greatness and its difficulty are the same thing. To read it well is to refuse the easy path of either condemning it as a relic or absolving it as comedy.

Shylock is the play’s gravity. He has six scenes; he speaks fewer lines than Portia; he leaves the play, broken, with a single short line. And yet the role has been a touchstone for the great actors of every generation since Edmund Kean stopped playing him as a comic villain in 1814 and made him a tragic figure. Hath not a Jew eyes? — the speech in 3.1 — is one of the few moments in Shakespeare where a character speaks past the play and to the audience directly, and what it claims is not innocence but humanity. The play around the speech does not always honour what the speech claims. Productions have negotiated this tension in opposite directions: some leaning on the comedy and the romance, some unable to play 5.1 as comedy at all once 4.1 is over. Both are legitimate readings; neither solves the play.

For first-time readers, The Merchant of Venice is one of the more linguistically accessible Shakespeare plays — the verse is direct, the prose is sharp, the legal stakes are immediate — and one of the most ethically demanding. The play does not tell you what to think about Shylock; it requires you to think about him. It also requires the same effort about the Christian Venetians who appear, by the standards of comic resolution, to have won. After 1945 the play’s difficulty became unavoidable: it was banned in some places, taught in others as a study in prejudice. It continues to be performed, often by Jewish actors and directors, often with framing devices, and almost never without a programme note. None of those choices have settled the question. The play’s permanence is in the question.

Critically, The Merchant of Venice has been read as antisemitic propaganda, as a critique of Christian hypocrisy, as a study of capital and credit at the moment commerce was reshaping early modern Europe, as a feminist comedy disguised as a romance, and as a play whose own irreconcilability is the point. Its phrases have escaped into ordinary English: all that glisters is not gold; the quality of mercy; a Daniel come to judgement; pound of flesh. Modern productions have set it in 1930s Berlin, in Mussolini’s Italy, on Wall Street, and in present-day Venice; the casting of Shylock and Jessica registers the production’s reading the way the casting of Caesar registers a production of Julius Caesar. The play does not get easier with rereading. It gets more exact.