The Merchant of Venice is a plea for religious and racial tolerance. Set in the most famously cosmopolitan city of the time, Shakespeare’s play begins with two sides, Jew and Christian, at loggerheads; it ends with an attempt at peace, but one achieved at too high a price.
‘I hate him for he is a Christian,’ declares Shylock of Antonio at his first appearance – but Shylock’s hatred has been force-fed a rich diet of constant abuse from the Christians:
‘Fair sir, you spet on me on Wednesday last,
And called me dog,’ he reminds Antonio.
There is a brief and suspect rapprochement between the two sides when Antonio seeks Shylock’s financial help and the ‘merry bond’ is proposed in lieu of interest on the loan of three thousand ducats, but suspicion and hatred remain in spite of Shylock’s dubious olive branch. To reinforce the idea of alienation between races and creeds, there is Portia’s response vis-à-vis the caskets – ‘a young Venetian’ is her preferred choice over all foreigners, from English lord to Moroccan prince; but Bassanio’s involvement with Antonio and his double motives do not allow us to relax into her choice with the romantic certainty that is necessary for pure comedy.. Part of his appeal is that he is simply one of her ‘own’.
Into the international ferment of Venice fall…..two lovers, one from each side of the Jewish-Christian divide, and we find ourselves in familiar Shakespearean territory. ‘Romeo and Juliet’ was probably written a year or two earlier than ‘The Merchant’ and its denouement is darker; but the theme of young love, opposing poisonous division and the need for forgiveness and understanding, is the same. The reconciliation of the Montagues and the Capulets at the end of ‘Romeo and Juliet’ is more complete because it is easier, for in the place of ‘two households both alike in dignity’, ‘The Merchant’ presents two great religious groups entrenched in a centuries-long hostility, each resolutely refusing to acknowledge the dignity of the other. The argument is personal, not theological, and its implications resonate down the centuries to our own troubled times.
‘I will not eat with you, drink with you, nor pray with you,’ says Shylock, remarking that Jesus ‘conjured the devil’ into the herd of pigs – hardly an unprovoked insult in the light of such routine remarks as Solanio’s
‘Let me say amen betimes, lest the devil cross my prayer, for here he comes in the likeness of a Jew.’
Like Romeo and Juliet, Lorenzo and Jessica bravely defy the fearsome barrier to their love as Jessica ‘marries out’, but this time, no-one dies.- Everyone remains alive to face the consequences. Perhaps Shakespeare felt that the ending of Romeo and Juliet deserved a second look! In any case, this time the marriage flouts very different rules and there is the question of theft as well as emotional loss with its attendant hurt pride.
Portia’s plea for mercy falls on deaf ears as an enraged and vengeful Shylock seeks Antonio’s heart to ease his own. Antonio looks death directly in the face and it is not until the tables are turned on Shylock that the Duke and the lately-redeemed Antonio are finally moved to exercise a measure of mercy, the ‘attribute to God himself’, and to re-establish a kind of shabby order.
‘I pardon thee thy life before thou ask it,’ the Duke tells Shylock, and Antonio rejects the offer of the court to take all Shylock’s wealth and leave him destitute.
We are back to ‘normality’, but with Shylock humiliated and reduced, and we feel intensely for him at his final, lonely exit from the stage. We have witnessed something cheap, for all the cleverness of Portia, for there is a justice which remains undone and wrongs which remain to be acknowledged.
If this play was meant to be a comedy, there are not many laughs! It has more in common with problem plays such as ‘Measure for Measure’, which reveal the unattractive underbelly of humanity. Even the comic scene between Gobbo and Son has its cruel side. But as Shylock leaves the stage with his ambivalent, ‘I am content,’ our attention is turned to the natural order of things. Before the comic struggle for harmony which accompanies Portia’s homecoming, we are reminded of our longing for something better than our deeply flawed humanity, as the two lovers, symbolically united, marvel at ‘the floor of Heaven’ and its stars. It is only the floor – Lorenzo reminds us that we are barred by our mortality from reaching beyond ‘this muddy vesture of decay’ – and the loneliness of both Shylock and Antonio at the close of the play is testimony to the enduring imperfection of human society. Jessica, too, is melancholy at the sound of ‘sweet music’ and we wonder how she will fare alone among the Gentiles of Venice. If Shakespeare has not succeeded in resolving the difficult questions posed by ‘The Merchant of Venice’, he is not alone. The important thing is, surely, to have the questions posed and to continue to attempt to resolve them with generosity and a fair perspective.
Whatever the success or failure of justice in the play, however, we are left with the consoling knowledge that in Shylock, we have been in the company of one of the most human, charismatic and memorable creations that the stage has ever seen, and that his vitality can never be extinguished.
The Plot
Bassanio borrows from Shylock the money-lender to woo the wealthy Portia – with his friend Antonio as surety. If Antonio defaults, Shylock will demand a pound of his flesh. But Antonio`s ships will come home `a month before the day`…or will they?
Resuming our tradition of a Shakespeare summer production, we take a new look, through present sensitivities, at the quality of mercy, justice and love in this contentious masterpiece.
The Merchant of Venice
Annie Duarte