A Pelican Book: This Is Shakespeare

by Emma Smith

  HERMIA: I frown upon him, yet he loves me still.

  HELENA: O that your frowns would teach my smiles such skill!

  HERMIA: I give him curses, yet he gives me love.

  HELENA: O that my prayers could such affection move!

  HERMIA: The more I hate, the more he follows me.

  HELENA: The more I love, the more he hateth me.

  (1.1.194–9)

  The rhetoric of this sequence converges to the third couplet, where the parallel structures and the use of the same word – ‘me’ – as the rhyme enact the same collapse of difference that the play develops elsewhere. Linguistic and rhetorical doubling, through parallel syntax and through the heavy use of rhyme, show us the way that Shakespeare’s language is a microcosm of his wider dramatic art: what happens at the level of a sentence or speech often miniaturizes a wider theme or debate.

  That larger-scale repetition includes the prominent use of actor doubling. Most of Shakespeare’s plays have more characters than there were actors available to perform them, and are therefore structured to allow efficient use of acting two parts to cover the roles (see The Comedy of Errors and Hamlet chapters for more examples of how this might have worked). But sometimes that doubling seems to have an interpretative, as well as a practical, pay-off. Most notably, A Midsummer Night’s Dream seems to be constructed to allow Theseus and Hippolyta, the rulers of Athens, to be doubled with Oberon and Titania, monarchs of the fairy realm. They’re already cross-connected – Oberon and Titania each accuse the other of entanglements with Theseus and Hippolyta – but they also function as their doubles. The silenced Hippolyta might be recuperated in the fiery Titania, for instance, while the languorously authoritarian Theseus, as Oberon, meets a mischievously disrespectful servant Robin. There are technical consequences too. We can see, for instance, that Puck delivers an unnecessary speech when the stage has cleared after the performance of ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’: the purpose here seems to be less the content of his words than the time they take, in order to cover a challengingly quick backstage costume change for Theseus and Hippolyta to return as Oberon and Titania.

  The doubling of the rulers of the two worlds has broader implications. The fairy world comes to stand as the night-time to the court’s day, with productions often also doubling Thesesus’ master of ceremonies Philostrate with Oberon’s sprite factotum Puck. It’s also suggested that the Athenian workmen who are practising their play would have been the same actors as those playing Titania’s fairy entourage – so that Flute and Snug and Snout would have played Peaseblossom and Mote and Mustardseed. Seeing these heavy-booted working men as the distinctly human-sized fairies is another challenge to romanticized ideas about the play’s magical world.

  Dreams, sex, death: A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a comedy with unexpectedly adult themes. Comedy here is a displacement of illicit, transgressive or excessive sexual desire, ultimately regulated in marriages that we suspect will be less thrilling and less dangerous than the liminal woodland dreams they repress. Perhaps that’s really a bit too much information for children.

  CHAPTER 7

  The Merchant of Venice

  Bassanio is in a fix. This rakish spendthrift has mortgaged his best friend Antonio’s credit back in Venice to finance a speculative trip to Belmont to woo a woman he describes, frankly, as ‘a lady richly left’ (1.1.161). His ‘argosy’ to win this ‘golden fleece’ (1.1.170) simply has to succeed. And when he arrives in Belmont he discovers another hurdle. He has to choose correctly between ‘three chests of gold, silver, and lead’ (1.2.29). One of them contains the prize – the image of Portia – that means the suitor has been accepted. There are hopeful suitors before Bassanio arrives. We watch, as first the Prince of Morocco chooses, unsuccessfully, and learn in passing that ‘all that glisters is not gold’ (2.7.65); next the Prince of Aragon also picks the wrong – silver – casket. Bassanio, by far the most indigent of these exotic suitors, cannily chooses the inauspicious lead casket and hits the marital and financial jackpot. The play itself gives over almost a quarter of its entire length to the lottery plot, and its longest speeches take place in contemplation of the weighty choice between gold, silver and lead. Nevertheless, readers and audiences have tended to minimize this part of the plot. Since at least the nineteenth century, the play’s major interest, for good and ill, has been its representation of the moneylender Shylock, Shakespeare’s only central Jewish character. But the title page of its first edition places this theme in direct conjunction with the casket competition, advertising the play as ‘The most excellent history of the Merchant of Venice. With the extreme cruelty of Shylock the Jew towards the said Merchant in cutting a just pound of his flesh: and the obtaining of Portia by the choice of three chests’. Understanding Bassanio’s unlikely choice of the lead casket helps us see some important themes of The Merchant of Venice: its interplay of romance and realism, its structural dependence on debt, speculation and credit, and its understanding of the comic genre.

  So why does the one man who is attracted to Portia precisely because she is wealthy choose the worthless casket? Well, of course, he’s read his fairy tales. Anyone who is familiar with the genre knows that’s the right one to choose. Folklore stories are preoccupied with testing their hero, often with a reiterated choice between three options (think Goldilocks and those bears, or Paris’s judgement of the fairest goddess, or the common fairy gift of three wishes). Sigmund Freud noticed in his essay on the caskets in The Merchant of Venice that Shakespeare has shifted the gender roles from his source, the Gesta Romanorum – a popular medieval Latin collection of stories and legends – in which a woman has to choose between three caskets of gold, silver and lead to be allowed to marry the emperor’s son. Freud argues that the three caskets represent different versions of woman, and that the three women they suggest are the classical Fates: Bassanio is choosing his own destiny by confronting a nightmarish vision of mortality. The lead casket confronts this Venetian playboy with a morbid decoration of ‘crispèd, snaky, golden locks’ ghoulishly bred ‘in the sepulchre’ (3.2.92, 96). The choice test is thus already deeply familiar in formal terms, and just as he models himself on mythology and the questing Jason seeking the golden fleece, Bassanio here recognizes the genre in which he is operating: fairy tale.

  And he has to choose lead because the play has already shown us the two other caskets being chosen. Even though the mathematical probability of picking any one of the caskets is the same with each choice – that’s to say, just because Morocco has picked gold it doesn’t mean statistically that Bassanio is any less likely to pick gold – it is, of course, formally and structurally inevitable that three suitors each pick one of three available choices. Having already seen the revelation of the gold and silver caskets, it is time for us, like Bassanio, to see what is behind the lead casket’s exterior.

  So, like Bassanio, we know the drill: third time lucky. But maybe he also has a little help from Portia. The casket test is set up as a patriarchal attempt to control Portia’s marriage choice. She tells her first suitor, Morocco, that ‘In terms of choice I am not solely led / By nice direction of a maiden’s eyes’ (2.1.13–14). Instead, ‘the lott’ry of my destiny / Bars me the right of voluntary choosing’ (15–16). Portia’s dead father has established her as a fairy-tale princess to whom suitor-knights must come to complete a quest. But this is also a scenario which enables Portia neatly to dispatch those suitors she doesn’t want and to ally herself with the one we’ve already been told she likes best. (To underline this, the casket scenes are intercut with the elopement of Jessica against her father Shylock’s will, and she too throws her portable dowry in the form of a valuable stolen ‘casket … worth the pains’ to her nogoodnik lover (2.6.33).) When Portia is reminded of ‘a Venetian, a scholar and a soldier’ who once came to visit her father, she recalls, ‘Yes, yes, it was Bassanio’, adding hastily to cover this apparent overeagerness, ‘– as I think, so was he called’ (1.2.110–12).

  Portia h
as thus already identified Bassanio as her preferred suitor, and her foreign suitors are established as clearly impossible marriage partners for her in a play so concerned with racial difference and intermarriage. Portia’s reply when the Prince of Morocco withdraws, beaten, from the contest, is deeply uncomfortable: ‘Let all of his complexion choose me so’ (2.7.79). Critics who admire Portia have spent ages trying to suggest that ‘complexion’ does not mean skin colour here, but it’s an effort, especially since Morocco uses the word himself in precisely that sense, in anticipating her racial antipathy: ‘Mislike me not for my complexion, / The shadowed livery of the burnished sun’ (2.1.1–2). Portia clearly has her own views about the husband she wants, under the guise of pliant submission to her father’s authority. And when she calls for music to accompany Bassanio as he ponders the choice, might there be a particular emphasis on the final, heavily rhyming syllables of the lyric: to point Bassanio to the correct casket? ‘Tell me where is fancy bred, / Or in the heart, or in the head? / How begot, how nourishèd?’ (3.2.63–5). (We might also recall here her words to Morocco: ‘I am not solely led’ (2.2.13).) Again, Portia fans don’t like to see her in this light, but would a woman who dresses as a lawyer and bosses the whole Venetian establishment really let her dead father’s metallic fairy tale govern her choice of husband?

  Despite the fact that, on the face of it, Bassanio seems deeply unlikely to choose lead over gold and silver, he does. It’s a miniature form – what the Elizabethans might have thought of as an emblem – of his own motives, and of the role of his romantic quest in the play’s wider themes. The calculated risk of investing in lead is the romance version of the buccaneering mercantilism that structures the Venetian plot, a kind of high-risk financial gaming. Like the merchant of the play’s title, Bassanio knows he has to speculate to accumulate. And that willingness to ‘hazard’ is the key to this play, in which human friendship and romantic love are consistently expressed through financial interdependence. Mercantilism and its twin, credit or moneylending, forms the connective tissue of The Merchant of Venice. Unusually among Shakespeare’s deeply familial comedies of fathers and daughters, cousins and siblings, this play depicts no family relationships apart from the cheerless examples of Shylock and his daughter Jessica, and his servant Gobbo and his father. In the absence of blood ties, what binds is money: relationships are financial rather than affective. When, for example, Bassanio needs money, he goes to Antonio, who goes to Shylock, who goes to his business contact Tubal: what connects and implicates these people is a series of transactions constructed via intermediaries. Bassanio never meets Tubal, but his romantic quest is entirely dependent on his investment. In an otherwise sterile world, it is money that breeds and multiplies. ‘Or is your gold and silver ewes and rams?’ Antonio asks scornfully after Shylock’s parable of Jacob’s own astute financial management. ‘I make it breed as fast’, is the exultant reply (1.3.94–5).

  Bassanio’s marital plans for Portia combine the two worlds of Venice and Belmont. The play’s entire premise is based on his desire to appear wealthier than he really is, in order to gain more wealth, and he needs to borrow money to make this happen. Bassanio’s expensive wooing of Portia is a kind of confidence trick, funded by the credit economy of Venetian moneylending and underwritten by expectations of mercantile gain. Like Antonio’s argosies sent to the East to bring back valuable cargoes that will recover their costs and make a fat profit, Bassanio sails off to rich shores, supported by venture capital, hoping for large returns. He is, he admits, a credit risk. Bassanio tells us that he has ‘disabled mine estate /By something showing a more swelling port / Than my faint means would grant continuance’ (1.1.123–5): there’s something wheedlingly evasive about this pompous diction, which over-promises, bigging up the statement just as Bassanio bigs up his own status. He persuades Antonio to support him by means of a childhood simile:

  In my schooldays, when I had lost one shaft,

  I shot his fellow of the selfsame flight

  The selfsame way, with more advisèd watch,

  To find the other forth; and by adventuring both,

  I oft found both.

  (1.1.140–44)

  This same counsel of sending good money or arrows after bad, and the language of adventuring, is applied to his romantic quest. The down payment on Portia is 3,000 ducats – a sum that Shylock, like Antonio, ‘cannot instantly raise up’ (1.3.53) – and perhaps worth around £300,000 now. It is a substantial splurge, for Bassanio is pitching against some very wealthy men. The Prince of Morocco is described in the stage direction as ‘a tawny Moor all in white, and three or four followers accordingly’ (2.1): it’s a cue for a showy entrance. At the moment when Aragon is dispatched for mistakenly choosing silver – the motto of the silver casket is, ironically, ‘Who chooseth me shall get as much as he deserves’ (2.7.7) – the messenger tells Portia that yet another suitor is at her gates, bringing ‘gifts of rich value’: ‘A day in April never came so sweet / To show how costly summer was at hand’ (2.9.90–93). That adjective ‘costly’ is apposite. Since we have witnessed the loan of the money, we know exactly what this grand arrival has cost: 3,000 ducats, with a pound of human flesh pledged as collateral. The bright, natural imagery of spring and summer clashes uneasily with this strategic display of conspicuous consumption.

  The language of the caskets scenes echoes with hazard, speculation and investment. Romantic relationships here are monetized along with everything else. Perhaps in this sense, Bassanio takes seriously the motto on the lead casket: ‘Who chooseth me must give and hazard all he hath’ (2.9.20). The noble virtues of self-sacrifice and generosity suggested here have not been particularly prominent aspects of Bassanio’s characterization. And indeed, his willingness – genuine or strategic – to commit himself to this motto takes on a different quality when we remind ourselves that he doesn’t have anything of his own to hazard. If Bassanio is speculating, he is being bankrolled by others in a credit economy. Giving and hazarding all you have is easy to do when it’s not yours to lose in the first place.

  The play continues to trade in images of gambling and risky investments, from Shylock’s Old Testament story of sheep-breeding to his daughter Jessica’s prodigal expenditure in Genoa, ‘fourscore ducats at a sitting’ (3.1.103). And although for Karl Marx Shakespeare’s most powerful economic critique was in the morose fable Timon of Athens, perhaps he should have looked instead to The Merchant of Venice. There’s very little ‘use value’ in the commodities and persons connected through financial speculation in this play. Salerio imagines the marketable ‘spices’ and ‘silks’ of Antonio’s Venetian trade, but the main economic focus here is in investigating and negotiating exchange value. Is a turquoise worth a monkey? Is a pound of human flesh worth 3,000 ducats? Even the play’s most powerful expression of humanity seems to partake of this bookkeeping morality. ‘If you prick us do we not bleed? If you tickle us do we not laugh? If you poison us do we not die? And if you wrong us shall we not revenge?’ (3.1.59–62). Extracted from its context, the speech is often used as a paean to fundamental humanity and equality. In context, amid Shylock’s raging about Jessica’s expensive elopement, and the first rumours that Antonio’s business is in trouble, it emerges rather as a bargaining tool to negotiate equivalent values within this mercantile economy of profit, loss and speculation. If this, then that. Pay this, owe that. Shylock’s parallel sentences ‘if … do’ all pivot with the syntactical equivalent of a merchant’s weighing scale or moneylender’s balance.

  In this way we can see that Shylock’s despised profession of moneylending is only the professional expression of a more thoroughgoing speculative economy in the play. He serves less as a real person, still less a real Jewish person, and more as a convenient personification of the play’s fiscal energies. Perhaps, too, he is a kind of scapegoat. The opprobrium attached to him is the play’s way of blaming him for its own thoroughgoing investment in financial matters. Everyone is doing it, but Shylock must carry
the ethical can. And perhaps part of Shylock’s implacable opposition to Antonio from the start is not only sectarian – ‘I hate him for he is a Christian’ (1.3.40) – but also economic:

  But more, for that in low simplicity

  He lends out money gratis, and brings down

  The rate of usance here with us in Venice.

  (1.3.41–3)

  Shylock is often charged with the ultimate conflation of emotional and financial bonds – ‘My daughter! O, my ducats! O, my daughter! / Fled with a Christian! O, my Christian ducats!’ (2.8.15–16) – although it’s worth remembering that this is an unsubstantiated and malicious report of the reaction of ‘the dog Jew’ (14) to news of Jessica’s elopement, rather than something we actually witness him say. He is indeed clear about price, worth and value when itemizing her thefts: ‘A diamond gone cost me two thousand ducats in Frankfurt … Two thousand ducats in that and other precious, precious jewels’ (3.1.78–82). Marriage, as Jessica and Bassanio doubtless would agree, is an expensive business. But Shylock does also acknowledge another system of value – sentimental value – when he tells Tubal he would not have given the turquoise ring he ‘had … of Leah when I was a bachelor’ ‘for a wilderness of monkeys’ (3.1.113–14).

  Shylock is not driven entirely by money – otherwise he would have accepted Portia’s offer. ‘For thy three thousand ducats here is six’, proffers Bassanio in the courtroom. Shylock is contemptuous:

  If every ducat in six thousand ducats

  Were in six parts, and every part a ducat,

  I would not draw them. I would have my bond.

  (4.1.84–6)

  The play’s structure makes it clear that the pay-off for all this speculation – its accumulation – follows quickly from Bassanio’s success in Portia’s marriage lottery. News that Antonio’s merchant ships have ‘miscarried’ is interleaved with the scene of Bassanio’s successful casket choice; his friend Graziano married off to Portia’s gentlewoman Nerissa as kind of free gift, along with Bassanio’s acquisition of Portia, immediately suggests another bet, conflating human and financial fertility: ‘We’ll play with them the first boy for a thousand ducats’ (3.2.213). Immediately, Jessica and Lorenzo arrive in Belmont with Antonio’s letter, and Bassanio admits himself utterly emotionally bankrupt: ‘worse than nothing, for indeed / I have engaged myself to a dear friend, / Engaged my friend to his mere enemy, / To feed my means’ (3.2.258–61). Portia is herself conscious of her new husband as a cost: ‘Since you are dear bought, I will love you dear’ (3.2.311). Her repetition of ‘dear’ tries to recuperate it away from being a financial term meaning ‘expensive’ to an emotional term meaning ‘beloved’, but despite this the word remains saturated with monetary meaning. Portia now needs to buy the bad debt undertaken by Bassanio to buy her in the first place. At least she shows no inclination to submit to her new, prodigal husband in matters of financial management.