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Synopsis of the Play

The wealthy merchant Antonio is inexplicably depressed. His young friend Bassanio, whom he dotes on, is a spendthrift who has run through his inheritance and already owes Antonio a considerable sum. Now he comes to Antonio with a proposition: He has recently met a young woman, Portia, who has inherited vast wealth from her late father, and he believes that she cares for him. If Antonio will advance him still more money, he will present himself among the suitors at Portia’s estate, at Belmont, and enter the competition for her hand in marriage. As we learn from Portia’s conversation with her maid, Nerissa, her father has left an odd stipulation in his will: Each suitor must choose among three caskets – one gold, one silver, one lead – and Portia must marry the suitor who chooses the right one. Because Antonio’s wealth is all temporarily tied up in ships at sea, expected to bring valuable goods back to Venice, they borrow the funds for Bassanio’s trip from the Jewish moneylender, Shylock, despite their hostile view of him and his co-religionists. Although the contempt is mutual, Shylock agrees to make the loan as long as Antonio stands surety for it, insisting, however, on the addition of an unusual clause: If Antonio should fail to repay the money within the specified time, Shylock will be allowed to carve from his body a pound of Antonio’s flesh.

At Shylock’s home, his Gentile servant, Launcelot Gobbo, complains of his master’s penurious and reclusive ways, finds alternative employment with the newly prosperous Bassanio. Leaving the house, he carries a letter from Shylock’s daughter, Jessica, to Lorenzo, a friend of Bassanio’s who has made overtures of love toward her. Despite great misgivings, Shylock attends a supper party given to celebrate the departure of Bassanio and his friend,Gratiano, for Belmont. While the party is in progress, Jessica, disguised as a boy, robs her father’s house of gold and jewels, and runs away with Lorenzo, who has come to the house with a party of young men disguised as masqueraders.

In Belmont, Portia’s first suitor, the Prince of Morocco, submits to the trial of the caskets; he makes the wrong choice and is dismissed. Meantime, in Venice, merchants spread news of Jessica’s elopement, Shylock’s furious reaction to the loss of his daughter and his riches, and, more ominously, the failure of Antonio’s ships to return safely. In Belmont, Portia’s second suitor, the proud Prince of Aragon, submits to the test and likewise fails, but Portia is heartened by the news of Bassanio’s arrival with a lavish retinue. In Venice, Antonio continues to receive bad news of his ships, while Shylock’s fury and bitterness at his daughter’s betrayal, raging unabated, now begin to be directed towards Antonio.

To Portia’s delight, Bassanio chooses the right casket, and the two quickly marry, while a similar match is arranged for Gratiano and Nerissa. As pledges of love, the two women give their new husbands rings, which the men are made to swear they will never give away under any circumstances. Lorenzo and Jessica arrive, and are made welcome, but the situation turns awkward when a letter comes from Antonio, telling Bassanio that the term of the agreement with Shylock has expired. As his ships have failed to return, Antonio is penniless and has no choice but to pay the penalty, which will kill him; his only desire is to have Bassanio by his side as he dies. Shylock has had him thrown into prison and gloats openly over his coming revenge. Bassanio and Gratiano postpone their honeymoons and set sail immediately for Venice. Inviting Lorenzo and Jessica to remain at her estate, Portia too makes plans for a journey. As soon as Bassanio and Gratiano have departed, she and Nerissa dispatch her servant Balthazar to obtain from a lawyer some hasty legal instruction, and robes in which the two women may disguise themselves as a brilliant young lawyer and his clerk.

Antonio’s trial is in progress when they arrive. Obdurately, Shylock refuses all attempts to alleviate the penalty, unresponsive to Portia’s plea for mercy, and even to her offer of three times the amount of the original loan. He believes the law to be firmly on his side. Then Portia reveals a flaw in the contract: While it allows Shylock to carve a pound of Antonio’s flesh, it says nothing about his right to shed any blood in the process: One drop would make him guilty of attempted murder. Further, his refusal to accept an alternative to the penalty has now placed his life and goods in jeopardy, since the legal punishment for an alien who endangers the life of a Venetian citizen is death and the confiscation of his entire estate. A chastened Shylock must now plead for mercy, which the Duke of Venice and Antonio grant, allowing him to live, and to keep half of his estate, so long as he converts to Christianity and agrees to accept Lorenzo and Jessica as his heirs. Defeated, Shylock accepts and leaves the courtroom. The joyful Bassanio and Gratiano are shocked when the “lawyer” and “clerk” insist they will accept, as their fee for winning the case, nothing except the two men’s wedding rings, which they surrender with great reluctance.

Returning to Belmont in haste, Portia and Nerissa resume their normal clothes and proceed to confront their now-ringless husbands, taxing them with infidelity. At length the deception is revealed, Antonio is made welcome, and the lovers celebrate their newfound matrimonial happiness.

Perspectives on The Merchant of Venice

“In the ancient world, the first major example of anti-Semitism occurred during the reign of Antiochus IV Epiphanes (175_163 BC). This Seleucid ruler’s attempt to hellenize Jews of his day met with stiff opposition. Jews were monotheists and thus, for the most part, aloof from their Gentile neighbors[...] Antiochus’s attack on Jewish religion resulted in the desecration of the Temple. A swine was sacrificed on the altar and its blood sprinkled upon Jewish scrolls[...] Jews found the idolatry of the Greek world abhorrent and later, under the Romans, rejected emperor worship. Thus, Jews were viewed as the great dissenters of the Mediterranean world. To pagans they became personae non gratae, victims of discrimination and contempt.”
– M. R.Wilson Elwell, Evangelical Dictionary (1992)

“We published yesterday an article from our Constantinople correspondent, which showed that the notorious Protocols of the Elders of Zion one of the mysteries of politics since 1905, were a clumsy forgery, the text being based on a book published in French in 1865. The book, without title page, was obtained by our correspondent from a Russian source, and we were able to identify it with a complete copy in the British Museum.

“The disclosure, which naturally aroused the greatest interest among those familiar with Jewish questions, finally disposes of the Protocols as credible evidence of a Jewish plot against civilization. We publish below a second article, which gives further close parallels between the language of the Protocols and that attributed to Machiavelli and Montesquieu in the volume dated from Geneva.
– editor’s introduction to article by Philip Graves, The Times (London), August 17th, 1921

The claim of the Jews that the Protocols are forgeries is in itself an admission of their genuineness, for they never attempt to answer the facts corresponding to the threats which the Protocols contain, and, indeed, the correspondence between prophecy and fulfillment is too glaring to be set aside or obscured. This the Jews well know and therefore evade.”
– Introduction to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion by Sergei Nilus, translated by Victor Marsdan, 1921, reprinted at http://www.biblebelievers.org.au/przion1.htm

The report says Gibson then launched into a barrage of anti-Semitic statements: “F*****g Jews… The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world.” Gibson then asked the deputy, “Are you a Jew?”
– report on Mel Gibson’s arrest for driving while intoxicated, reprinted on www.TMZ.com

“If fans wish to know the trouble with American baseball, they have it in three words: too much
Jew.”
– Henry Ford, The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem (1920)

“A kike is a Jewish gentleman who has just left the room.”
– said to have been the reply of banker and philanthropist Otto H. Kahn, when asked late in life to sum up what he had learned from his decades as a leader of New York society

“The Jew only serves him [the anti-Semite] as a pretext; elsewhere his counterpart will make use ofthe Negro or the man of yellow skin. The existence of the Jew merely permits the anti-Semite to stifle his anxieties at their inception by persuading himself that his place in the world has been marked out in advance, that it awaits him, and that tradition gives him the right to occupy it. Anti-Semitism, in short, is fear of the human condition. The anti-Semite is a man who wishes to be a pitiless stone, a furious torrent, a devastating thunderbolt – anything except a man.”
– Jean-Paul Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew (1948), tr. George Becker

“There can be no doubt that two thousand or so Jews, the remnants of what had been a larger and thriving community, were in fact expelled from England in 1290. There can also be no doubt that in the decades leading up to this banishment the Jews were brutally mistreated, and the Jewish communities in England impoverished and eviscerated. But it is this final, “sanitizing” act of expulsion of the last two thousand or so Jews, rather than the gradual and often brutal disintegration of medieval English Jewry which preceded it, that has entered into history, and it has done so because of what it came to symbolize for the peoples who continued to inhabit England, and for their descendants in search of a satisfying narrative of their national past.”
– James Shapiro, Shakespeare and the Jews (1996)

“But the Jew represents not only reality. He is the target onto whom are projected the viciousness of Antonio and Portia, the treachery and covetousness of Lorenzo and Jessica, and the greediness of Bassanio. Even in the utopia of Belmont, wives trick and humiliate their husbands.

The Oedipal theme appears here in the struggle of the daughters, Portia and Jessica, to escape from the efforts of their fathers to restrict their choice of lover. And it is the daughter, Portia, who bests the father, Shylock. Ironically, after all the turmoil about choosing one’s lover freely, each woman marries a feckless parasite.”
– Mortimer Ostow, M.D., Myth and Madness: The Psychodynamics of Anti-semitism (1996)

“It must be clear that the goal of obtaining his pound of flesh [becomes] more important to Shylock than any financial considerations, and he makes that goal nothing less than a religious obsession, swearing an oath to heaven in regard to it. [...] And it is the more devout in its conspicuous contrast to virtually all the other oaths in the play, which are made with ease and broken with impunity. Indeed, Shylock’s fealty to his oath has a dark and lonely courage about it, a kind of inverted nobility that would be heroic if it were not perverse, and pious if it were God-inspired…
– Anthony Hecht, Obbligati: Essays in Criticism (1986)

“Marlowe was already dead when Shakespeare began, sometime after 1594 and before 1598, to write The Merchant of Venice. Though a successful revival of The Jew of Malta probably prompted him to try his hand at a play about Jews, Shakespeare was not only glancing over his shoulder at his erstwhile rival… [Something more] must serve to explain why Shakespeare’s play turned out to be the peculiarly disturbing achievement that it is….

Shakespeare may have long had it in mind that he would write a play about a usurer. He may not have known any Jews, but he would certainly have known usurers, beginning with his own father, who had twice been accused of violating the law by charging usurious interest. The regulations against moneylending had been eased in 1591, and after he grew wealthy from the theater, Shakespeare himself seems to have been involved in at least one such transaction…

…[T]he realm’s mercantile economy could not function without the possibility of moneylending… Christian usurers, even when they were not directly called by that name, occupied a position roughly comparable to the one held by the Jews: officially, they were despised, harassed, condemned from the pulpit and the stage, but they also played a key role, a role that could not be conveniently eliminated. It was possible for usurers to live more or less respectable lives, as Shakespeare’s father did, but the deep contradiction between stigma and esteem, contempt and centrality, was probably always there in the shadows, ready to emerge….

… On February 1, 1594 [...] the Queen’s personal physician, Portuguese-born Roderigo (or Ruy) Lopez, was arrested on the charge that he was intriguing with the King of Spain [...] Lopez was tried and promptly convicted of conspiring to poison his royal patient. [...] Strangely enough, the supposed agent of this Catholic conspiracy, Lopez, was not a secret Catholic. He was – or rather, since he now professed to be a good Protestant, he had once been – a Jew. [...] On the scaffold, he roused himself and declared, according to the Elizabethan historian William Camden, that “he loved the Queen as well as he loved Jesus Christ.” “Which coming from a man of the Jewish profession,” Camden adds, “moved no small laughter in the Standers-by.”

This laughter, welling up from the crowd at the foot of the scaffold, could well have triggered Shakespeare’s achievement in The Merchant of Venice. It was, for a start, exceptionally cruel: In a matter of moments, a living man would be hanged and his body torn into pieces. The crowd’s laughter denied the solemnity of the event and treated violent death as an occasion for amusement. More specifically, it denied Lopez the end he was trying to make. [...] The last words a person spoke were ordinarily charged with the presumption of absolute honesty [...] The laughter turned Lopez’s last words from a profession of faith into a sly joke, a carefully crafted double entendre [...] In the eyes of the crowd, Lopez was a Jew, and a Jew does not in fact love Jesus Christ. [To them] he was trying to protect his family and reputation by fraudulently insisting on his innocence while at the same time subtly telling the truth. These laughing spectators, in other words, thought they were watching a real-life version of The Jew of Malta.

… Was Shakespeare attracted or repelled by what went on at the foot of the scaffold? Did he admire the way Marlowe’s dark comedy had helped to shape the crowd’s response, or was he sickened by it? The only evidence is the play that Shakespeare wrote in the wake of Lopez’s death, and the answer it suggests is that he was both intrigued and nauseated. He borrowed heavily from Marlowe [...] but he created a set of characters and a range of emotions utterly alien to Marlowe’s art. He wanted, it seems to excite laughter at a wicked Jew’s discomfiture [...] and he wanted at the same time to call the laughter into question, to make the amusement excruciatingly uncomfortable.”
– Stephen Greenblatt, Will and the World (2004)