The Merchant of Venice

Introduction

A comedy by William Shakespeare, first performed c. 1596, and published in Quarto (Q1) in 1600 as well as in the First Folio of 1623. A main source was a story by Giovanni Fiorentino. The casket episode is from Gesta Romanorum, and Shakespeare may also have had in mind Marlowe's The Jew of Malta and the scandalous contemporary reputation of Roderigo Lopez, a Jewish physician executed in 1594 on suspicion of attempting to poison Queen Elizabeth I. This paper discusses the differences between Portia's three caskets and Shylock's pound of flesh in terms of success in “The Merchant of Venice”.

Discussion

The courtroom conflict between Shylock and Portia has been seen as representative of a debate between justice and mercy or between the letter and spirit of the law, even as a dramatization of the contrasting judicial approaches of the more equitable Court of Chancery, on the one hand, and the stricter Common Law courts, on the other. But critics have bypassed the immediate dilemma informing the disagreement between Shylock and Balthasar: what does it mean to own what one is owed when the thing in question is a human being, or what legal scholars deem "an animated gage"? Although Shylock regards this as a transparent question that will yield a straightforward answer, his assumption is shown to be naïve; this is hinted at by the etymology of the word "debt," which derived from the Latin debitum, past participle of debere, derived from de, from, and habere, to have, meaning to be away from having or to not have something. The word confusingly suggests that the person who took on a debt possessed but did not have that which he had been loaned, while the person who enabled the loan no longer had that which he continued to own. Shylock believes he is now due his forfeit because it never occurs to him that he could own something that he may never have. The second half of the trial takes up this conundrum as it investigates under what conditions ownership may give rise to possession and thus to the civil entitlements propriety implied. (Bulman, 12-15)

In order to set in motion the terms of this debate, as well as lay the ground for its monumental resolution, the play first establishes that the full enjoyment of civil liberties hinges on fiscal solidity. Indeed, property, proprietary, and personhood appear at the onset to be tightly linked. We see Antonio marched off to debtor's prison and are left with the impression that even if Shylock relinquished his claim to his forfeit, Antonio would nonetheless remain incarcerated, having defaulted to various creditors who "grow cruel" (3.2.313-14). The drastic state of Antonio's reputation is confirmed by Tubal, who reports of Antonio's "divers" unsatisfied creditors (3.1.84). While much critical attention has been devoted to the specificities of Antonio's bond with Shylock, little has been made of Antonio's general state of insolvency at the play's opening, at which point he already has neither "money nor commodity" ...