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    The Merchant of Venice
    The Merchant of Venice
    The Merchant of Venice
    Ebook340 pages6 hours

    The Merchant of Venice

    By Joseph Pearce and William Shakespeare

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    About this ebook

    Edited by Joseph Pearce

    Contributors to this volume:
    James Bemis 
    Raimund Borgmeier 
    Michael G. Brennan 
    Crystal Downing 
    Anthony Esolen 
    James E. Hartley 
    Daniel H. Lowenstein 
    Michael Martin

    The Merchant of Venice is probably the most controversial of all Shakespeare's plays. It is also one of the least understood. Is it a comedy or a tragedy? What is the meaning behind the test of the caskets? Who is the real villain of the trial scene? Is Shylock simply vicious and venomous, or is he more sinned against than sinning? Can the play be described as anti-semitic? What exactly is the quality of mercy? Is Portia one of the great Christian heroines of western literature? And what of the comedy of the rings with which Shakespeare ends the play? These questions and many others are answered in this critical edition of one of the Bard's liveliest plays.

    The Ignatius Critical Editions represent a tradition-oriented alternative to popular textbook series such as the Norton Critical Editions or Oxford World Classics, and are designed to concentrate on traditional readings of the Classics of world literature. Whereas many modern critical editions have succumbed to the fads of modernism and post-modernism, this series will concentrate on tradition-oriented criticism of these great works. Edited by acclaimed literary biographer, Joseph Pearce, the Ignatius Critical Editions will ensure that traditional moral readings of the works are given prominence, instead of the feminist, or deconstructionist readings that often proliferate in other series of 'critical editions'. As such, they represent a genuine extension of consumer-choice, enabling educators, students and lovers of good literature to buy editions of classic literary works without having to 'buy into' the ideologies of secular fundamentalism. The series is particularly aimed at tradition-minded literature professors offering them an alternative for their students. The initial list will have about 15 - 20 titles. The goal is to release three books a season, or six in a year.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherIgnatius Press
    Release dateSep 3, 2009
    ISBN9781681495200
    Author

    Joseph Pearce

    Joseph Pearce is the author of numerous literary works including Literary Converts, The Quest for Shakespeare and Shakespeare on Love, and the editor of the Ignatius Critical Editions series. His other books include literary biographies of Oscar Wilde, J.R.R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, G. K. Chesterton and Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

    Read more from Joseph Pearce

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    Reviews for The Merchant of Venice

    3.5/5

    2,322 ratings31 reviews

    What did you think?

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    • 4/5
      A fantastic, star-studded cast recreating this classic play. The performance of John de Lancie is downright chilling. I loved it.
    • 5/5
      This was great fun, although it was quite hard keeping all the characters straight in my mind because so many of them had unfamiliar Roman/Latin names.
    • 5/5
      I am doing some preliminary research and decided to start with Shakespeare.
    • 4/5
      Reason to read: Shakespeare Category Challenge, ROOT
      This was actually enjoyable to listen to. Some great lines that are very familiar and of course the story is as well. Caesar, Anthony, Brutus, the Ides of March. One should probably read this one in March..
    • 5/5
      One of Shakespeare's greatest and most accessible plays. Marc Antony's speech is one of Shakespeare's best, especially as it follows what would otherwise seem a pretty good speech by Brutus. Cutthroat politics goes back a long way....
    • 3/5
      Not Shakespeare's best, but then even his lesser works are better than 99% of the rest out there. Not my favorite, but still recommended.
    • 4/5
      It's Shakespeare, so pretty much everyone dies.
    • 5/5
      One begins to understand cultural references the more one reads Shakespeare, and Julius Caesar is no exception to this rule (this is perhaps especially true for Star Trek fans). The fault being not in our stars but in ourselves is a great bit of poetry that everyone should heed.
    • 5/5
      I love the Folger editions w awesome illustrations from the library. This is a larger sized paperback which is easy on the eyes. I have to say that Shakespeare is fairly neutral in presenting the main characters.

      Was happy to see "Let loose the dogs of war", though I previously thought that was from one of the Henry's.
    • 5/5
      A wonderful classic that truly speaks to the duality of man and his eternal search for not only power, but those that are truly pure at heart. Amazing how many quotes and sayings have come from this piece of literature.
    • 3/5
      Enh I don't know what I can tell you about this. Antony's funeral oration is fairly amusing.
    • 4/5
      'Tis happened upon chance that mine eyes have read the tale of Julius Caesar. For sooth, a great tragedy were 't. Yet happiness was clutch't betwixt mine hands that such wordsmithings are imbued into my corpus of knowledge. Brutus was not a noble understood, know that I now. It has cometh to pass that Royal Antony's quotes sitteth in upon my vernacular at the ready. What pleasure shall I give mine eyes to scan upon next? Be it, I prayeth, one of Sir William's comedies, for these tragedic readings have ravaged vexings upon my soul. Twelfth Night? Much Ado About Nothing? Instruct me, fellow plebeians.
    • 5/5
      “Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears. Et tu, Brute. Beware the ides of March.” I'm a little embarrassed to admit that this is all I knew of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar up to this point in my life. There's so much more to this play. Shakespeare captures the tension and drama of the last years of the Roman Republic and the role of Julius Caesar's ambition in hastening its end. The L.A. Theatre Works audio production is outstanding. The cast includes Richard Dreyfuss, Kelsey Grammar, Stacy Keach, John De Lancie, and JoBeth Williams. I will listen to this recording again. Next time I will plan to do my listening when I'm able to follow along in the printed text.
    • 5/5
      Shakespeare’s dissection of the damage that idealism can do in politics is still relevant.
    • 4/5
      Cassius is quickly able to plant the idea of overthrowing Julius Caesar in the mind of Brutus, a man who claims to love Caesar. Cassius and Brutus gather a group of the Caesar's friends, who they join together to murder the leader, then tell each other that they did the man a favor and will be remembered for their courage in removing a tyrant. But then Marcus Antony gives a clever eulogy at the funeral, which causes the public to question the motives of the assassins, the conspirators no longer trust one another and Brutus finds his position threatened.

      A good example of how power corrupts, as even the good guy, Antony, tries to manipulate his friends to gain more for himself.
    • 3/5
      My favourite part of this play is the "Antony is an honest man" speech. Excellent.
    • 2/5
      So dry. What a mistake to cram this down 15-year old throats just because it's short. How many 10th graders have been completely turned off by Shakespeare because this is over their head. I really didn't care much for this. Many of his history plays are far superior. Should've been called "The Rise and Fall of Brutus" because Caesar is such a minor character -- no development either.
    • 4/5
      In the book Julius Caesar, a group of conspirators lead by a man named Brutus plot to kill Julius Caesar. After succeeding in killing him, Brutus sees Julius Caesar's ghost who promises to see him in Philippi. On a battlefield in Philippi, Brutus fights with Cassius's army. Cassius being overthrown, commits suicide. When one member of Cassius's army finds Cassius dead, he then also kills himself. Brutus is defeated and runs upon his sword. Conflict in Rome is at an end.

      As a twelve year old this wasn't the best book I've ever read. It was a little confusing with a lot of characters and action. I thought the book was going to be about Julius Caesar but it was more about the conspirators getting rid of him. One of the morals was don't murder anyone because you will have to live with the guilt the rest of your life. This play taught me a little about Rome and war. I really enjoy reading Shakespeare. Overall this was a good book.
    • 4/5
      Good story.
    • 4/5
      I read this play just after finishing Goldsworthy's excellent biography of Caesar. The play focuses much more on the conspirators, especially Brutus and Cassius, rather than the titular subject, who indeed hardly appears in person and is only about three scenes, one of them as a ghost. It is splendid stuff, largely, at least in the initial acts based on the premise that the conspirators were freeing Rome of a tyrant through their act; only, when Antony makes his famous "friends, Romans, countrymen" speech does a more nuanced view of Caesar's positives and negatives enter the scene. Not one of the meatier plays, but a good supplement to other reading about the period.
    • 4/5
      One of the most powerful of his plays. Yes, the characters are set in black and white in true Shakespearean style and there is no room for hman error, but therein lies the beauty and power of this drama.
    • 5/5
      I hope to see this again soon. The first time I saw it as a high school play, the next time in 1997 at a Pub theater (more members of the cast than the audience) next to the railroad station in Greenwich England...with a wonderful redo as a Mafia,
      Chicago script.
    • 3/5
      1599, meest klassieke tragedie, bron is Plutarchus; perfecte tekst (bijna helemaal rijm), later verketterd als schooltekst
      Brutus is de hoofdrolspeler, maar Caesar beheerst wel de handeling. Brutus is een idealist die ten onder gaat door een gebrek aan praktisch doorzicht; het tegendeel is Cassius, maar toch meer medevoelen met hem; Antonius is de gehaaide opportunist, demagoog.
      Brutus’ motieven: II,1 (p 820)
      Moord III,1
      Verheven pathetiek van Marcus Antonius na de moord, p 826, 827 (maar wel vals)
      Redevoeringen bij begrafenis III,2 vormen het hoogtepunt, vooral die van Antonius (p 828-29): opruiend door details over de dood van Caesar en een verwijzing naar zijn testament, tegelijk vriendelijk ten aanzien van de samenzweerders.
    • 2/5
      I read this play during my Sophomore year of high school. I loved it! "Et tu, Brute!" I thought of it again because I'm reading "A Long Way Gone", and this play is referenced frequently.
    • 5/5
      At this point (I've not yet read King Lear or Othello), this is my favorite of Shakespeare's tragedies. Unlike the essentially silly situation of Romeo and Juliet or the artificially dragged out events of Hamlet, Brutus' struggle to reconcile patriotism and friendship, passion and honor mesmerized me right from the beginning.

      This is a high point in my quest to read/re-read all of Shakespeare's plays.
    • 3/5
      I read this due to my interest in HBO's Rome series (which has been cancelled after only 2 seasons - why TV gods, WHY???). Anyway, as an English major I read tons of Shakespeare, so it wasn't a challenging read for me and I found my mind analyzing language/passages as I would have been required to do in school. Let's just say the history plays have never been my favorites; maybe knowing the ending spoils the play?
    • 3/5
      Great Play, could easily see this as a modern re-telling set in the Italian Mob or as hotile financial take over...I see Macbeth the same way.

      But betrayal is a hell of a thing.
    • 3/5
      This is the best William Shakespeare that I have ever read. I haven't read much but this one was really appealing to me. Even though I knew the ending, I couldn't put the book down until the end.
    • 4/5
      "Yon Cassius has a lean and hungry look." This was one of Shakespeare's more excellent books in my opinion. While historical it wasn't as bad as one of the Richard books--it had a timeless story without being too historical or too political, especially British-ly political. One of the original eponymous tragedy, a story of a man's success and betrayal. A wonderful masterpiece and underrated.
    • 5/5
      Wow that Brutus was one sneaky guy he just wanted to be like Caesar. and then the scene when they killed Caesar was like WOW

    Book preview

    The Merchant of Venice - Joseph Pearce

    INTRODUCTION

    Joseph Pearce

    Ave Maria University

    The Merchant of Venice was first registered¹ on July 22, 1598, but was probably written and first performed a few years earlier, perhaps as early as 1594 or 1595. It is likely that Shakespeare’s initial inspiration for writing the play arose, in part, from the gruesome executions of two traitors on the orders of Queen Elizabeth. The first traitor was Roderigo Lopez, the queen’s personal physician, who was hanged, drawn, and quartered on June 7, 1594; the second was Robert Southwell, the Jesuit priest and poet who was hanged, drawn, and quartered on February 20, 1595. Whereas the former may have served as the inspiration for Shylock, the latter can be seen as a ghostly presence flitting through the play as an allusion to the deeper meanings to be gleaned from the drama.

    Roderigo Lopez, a converted Portuguese Jew, had been appointed personal physician to the queen in 1586. Two years later he became official interpreter to Antonio Perez, pretender to the throne of Portugal, after Perez had sought sanctuary in England from the clutches of his enemy, King Philip of Spain. In 1590 Lopez seems to have become embroiled in a Spanish plot to assassinate both Antonio Perez and Queen Elizabeth. Although he protested his innocence, he was found guilty and was sentenced to death. At his execution a large crowd bayed for his blood and bellowed anti-Semitic abuse.

    In the wake of Lopez’s trial and execution, the Admiral’s Men, an acting company, revived Christopher Marlowe’s Jew of Malta as an entrepreneurial response to the tide of anti-Semitism that was sweeping through London. The play was a huge success, playing fifteen times to packed houses during 1594. It seems reasonable to assume, therefore, that Shakespeare wrote The Merchant of Venice in the same entrepreneurial spirit, seeking to cash in on the upsurge of anti-Semitism by writing his own play about a villainous Jew. Such a supposition is supported by the fact that many critics have identified the Venesyon Comodye, staged at the Rose Theatre in August 1594, with Shakespeare’s play. From a purely business perspective, it makes sense that Shakespeare might write a play for his own company of players, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, to compete with the success of the revival of Marlowe’s play by the Admiral’s Men. Even if the Venesyon Comodye has nothing to do with Shakespeare’s play but is merely a comedy set in Venice by an unknown playwright, it still seems likely that The Merchant of Venice was written as a response or reaction to Lopez’s conviction for treachery. Such a view is supported by a clue embedded within the text of the play that seems to connect Lopez to Shylock. In Act 4 of The Merchant of Venice, Gratiano describes Shylock as a wolf . . . hang’d for human slaughter (4.1.134),² which appears to be a pun on Lopez’s name, the Latin for wolf being lupus. Lopez was indeed hanged for plotting human slaughter, and it is difficult to conclude anything but the obvious with regard to the connection between the real-life Jewish villain and Shakespeare’s counterpart, especially considering that someone named Antonio is the intended victim in both cases.

    Much more needs to be said about the alleged anti-Semitism of The Merchant of Venice, which has been greatly exaggerated.³ First, however, let us look at the other real-life character who seems to have influenced the writing of the play.

    There is an abundance of evidence to show that Shakespeare knew the Jesuit poet Robert Southwell prior to the latter’s arrest in 1592, and it is possible that Shakespeare might have been among the large crowd that witnessed Southwell’s brutal execution in 1595.⁴ Furthermore, Shakespeare would have been writing The Merchant of Venice shortly after Southwell’s execution or, if we accept the earliest possible dates for the play’s composition, during the period in which the Jesuit was being tortured repeatedly by Richard Topcliffe, Elizabeth’s sadistic chief interrogator. It should not surprise us, therefore, that we see Southwell’s shadow, or shade, in Shakespeare’s play. It is present most palpably in the haunting echoes of Southwell’s own poetry, which Shakespeare evidently knew well and which he introduces into The Merchant of Venice on numerous occasions.⁵ Take, for instance, Portia’s words after the Prince of Arragon’s failure in the test of the caskets: Thus hath the candle sing’d the moth (2.9.79). And compare it to lines from Southwell’s Lewd Love is Losse:

         So long the flie doth dallie with the flame,

         Untill his singed wings doe force his fall.⁶

    Not only does the phraseology suggest Shakespeare’s indebtedness to Southwell, but the very title of the poem from which the phrase is extracted suggests a connection to Shakespeare’s theme that lewd love is loss. Arragon’s love is lewdly self-interested, and his choice leads to the loss of his hopes to marry Portia. Shakespeare is not simply taking lines from Southwell; he is apparently taking his very theme from him.

    In the final act, as Portia and Nerissa return to Belmont, they see a candle burning in the darkness. When the moon shone, we did not see the candle, says Nerissa, to which the sagacious Portia responds: So doth the greater glory dim the less (5.1.92-93). Compare this to Southwell’s seeking the sunne it is . . . booteles to borrowe the light of a candle.⁷

    It is also intriguing that an expression ascribed by the Oxford English Dictionary to Shakespeare’s coinage was actually coined originally by Southwell, to whom Shakespeare was presumably indebted. The phrase is Shylock’s a wilderness of monkeys (subsequent to a wilderness of Tygers in Titus Andronicus), which presumably owed its original source to Southwell’s a wilderness of serpents in his Epistle unto His Father.⁸

    If the foregoing should fail to convince the skeptical reader of Southwell’s ghostly presence, the pivotal scene in which Bassanio triumphs in the wisdom of his choice to hazard all he hath, i.e., lay down his life for his love, should prove sufficient to allay the most hardened skepticism. The Shakespeare scholar John Klause has shown how this scene resonates as an echo of Southwell’s Marie Magdalens Funeral Teares, in which the saint is of a mind to venture [her] life for her love of her Lord. Klause shows many suggestive parallels between Shakespeare’s scene and Southwell’s earlier work, and yet nowhere is the allusion to Southwell more evident than in the exchange between Bassanio and Portia before Bassanio makes his choice:

    Bassanio.     Let me choose,

         For as I am, I live upon the rack.

    Portia. Upon the rack, Bassanio! then confess

         What treason there is mingled with your love.

    Bassanio. None but that ugly treason of mistrust,

         Which makes me fear th’ enjoying of my love;

         There may as well be amity and life

         ’Tween snow and fire, as treason and my love.

    Portia. Ay, but I fear you speak upon the rack,

         Where men enforced do speak any thing.

    Bassanio. Promise me life, and I’ll confess the truth.

    Portia. Well then, confess and live.

    Bassanio.     Confess and love

         Had been the very sum of my confession.

         O happy torment, when my torturer

         Doth teach me answers for deliverance!

         But let me to my fortune and the caskets.

    Portia. Away then! I am lock’d in one of them;

         If you do love me, you will find me out.

    (3.2.24-41)

    Since this exchange between the lover and the longed-for beloved comes in the midst of an array of references to Southwell’s poem, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that it represents a clear allusion to Southwell’s own recent experience upon the rack at the hands of a torturer seeking to force him into a confession of the alleged crime of treason with which he had been charged. Such a conclusion is reinforced still further when juxtaposed with Southwell’s own words in his Humble Supplication to Her Maiestie:

    What unsufferable Agonies we have bene put to upon the Rack. . . . [One so tortured] is apt to utter anything to abridge the sharpnes and severity of paine. [Yet even an] unskillful Lay man . . . [would] rather venture his life by saying too much, then hazard his Conscience in not answering sufficient.⁹

    What else is Bassanio doing, as he ponders the choices presented to him by the caskets, if not venturing his very life in the choice of death (lead) over worldly temptations (gold and silver)? He is willing to hazard all he hath, as the casket demands, if it is the only way to gain his love. The parallels with Robert Southwell’s willingness to die for his faith, hazarding all he has in his willingness to lay down his life for his friends, is obvious. And it is made even more so by the way in which Shakespeare artfully intersperses phrases from yet another Southwell poem, Saint Peters Complaint, into the words that Portia sings as Bassanio prepares to make his choice.¹⁰

    It has been necessary to commence our exploration of The Merchant of Venice with the role that the Jew and the Jesuit played in its inspiration because, as we shall see, many of the mistakes made about the play have been the result of seeing the Jew and not the Jesuit. So much of the nonsense written about this most controversial of Shakespeare’s plays arises from the opening of the wrong casket by worldly minded critics. The truth of the play, and the key to understanding it, is not to be found in the golden gaudiness of a materialistic perception of its meaning but from the lead-laden truth of the play’s underlying Christian message. If we wish to understand where Shakespeare is leading us, we have to take up our cross and follow him. In doing so, we will be led by him to a region where hazarding all we have is the path to perception.

    Before we follow Shakespeare to where he seeks to take us, let us take a short detour in the company of the critics. We will begin by taking a look at the literary sources for The Merchant of Venice and will continue by examining the way in which the play has been perceived throughout the four centuries of its dramatic and critical history.

    There is no single source for The Merchant of Venice, the plot of which seems to be a melding of three distinct stories: the story of the suitor and the usurer, the story of the caskets, and the story of the pound of flesh. It seems, however, that Shakespeare’s principal source was Il pecorone (The dunce or The simpleton), a fourteenth-century story by Ser Giovanni Fiorentino. This is set in Belmonte and involves a quest by a suitor to win his mystical, otherworldly bride. As in Shakespeare’s play, the suitor (Giannetto) receives money, in this case from his godfather, which has been borrowed from a Jewish usurer. Giannetto wins his bride with the assistance of the treachery of the lady’s maid; the usurer demands payment, a lawyer intercedes, the lady appears in disguise, and the play ends with the business of the ring. It is, however, interesting that Shakespeare injects a specifically Christian morality into his recasting of the tale. Neither the hero nor the heroine is particularly devout in Il pecorone, and they choose to affront Christian morality by casually fornicating prior to their marriage. In comparison, the chastity of Portia and the chivalry of Bassanio stand in stark contrast to the moral obliquity of their literary prototypes, indicating Shakespeare’s conscious decision to baptize his hero and heroine with Christian virtue.

    Although the bare bones of much of the plot of The Merchant of Venice is to be found in Il pecorone, there is no trial of the suitors by means of the caskets in the earlier tale. This aspect of the drama might have been derived from any of several well-known versions of the casket story, such as John Gower’s Confessio amantis, Boccacio’s Decameron, or the anonymous Gesta Romanorum. In any event, as we have seen above, Shakespeare retold the casket story in his own inimitable fashion, injecting a Jesuitical metadramatic subtext into the tale.

    The pound-of-flesh story was also widely known. Shakespeare might have read it in the anonymously authored Ballad of the Crueltie of Geruntus or in an oration, recently translated from the French, entitled Of a Jew, who would for his debt have a pound of flesh of a Christian. It was also included in the Gesta Romanorum, suggesting that this might have been the single source for both the casket and the pound-of-flesh stories. An earlier version appears in the tale of the fourth wise master in the Seven Wise Masters of Rome in The Thousand and One Nights, but since the Nights were not translated from the Arabic until the early eighteenth century, this version was presumably unknown to Shakespeare.

    There is also the beguiling possibility that Shakespeare might have derived his own plot from an earlier play called simply The Jew, which was described by the English satirist Stephen Gosson in 1579 as representing the greediness of worldly choosers and the bloody minds of usurers.¹¹ This description would suggest that the earlier play had a version of both the casket and the pound-of-flesh stories, but since the play is no longer extant, any further speculation is fruitless.

    Finally, of course, there is the presence of Christopher Marlowe’s Jew of Malta, which Shakespeare must have known very well. Although it seems likely that the successful revival of Marlowe’s Jew in the wake of the Lopez trial served as the motivation for Shakespeare’s decision to write his own Jewish play, it would be a mistake to conflate the two plays. They have much in common, but it is in their differences, as distinct from their similarities, that we begin to perceive the injustice that has been done to Shakespeare’s play by its critical misinterpretation over the centuries.

    John Klause highlights "the moral vision of The Merchant of Venice, which is in some ways as idealistic as the ethos of Marlowe’s play is cynical".¹² Whereas Marlowe made the antagonism between Christian and Jew the central element of his play, cynically portraying Christian, Jew, and Turk as villains all,¹³ the conflict between the two religions is very much a secondary theme in Shakespeare’s play, subsumed within the main episodes of the story line and subservient to the dominant moral theme. Take, for instance, the three main points of dramatic focus: the test of the caskets, the test of the trial, and the test of the rings. The conflict between Christian and Jew is entirely absent from the first and last of these dramatic nodal points, and it is present as a foil and not as the focus of the trial scene.

    The moral focus during the drama of the trial revolves around notions of justice and mercy, or questions concerning the nature of law and ethics, and not about the hostilities between gentile and Jew. These hostilities are present, of course, and even prominent, but they are present as accidents, philosophically speaking,¹⁴ and are not essential to the moral thrust of the plot. Unfortunately, the expression of these hostilities has distracted most critics from the essential morality of the play in pursuit of the red herring of its accidental qualities. Uncomfortable with the invective leveled against Shylock, the critics have leapt to his defense, enthroning him as the play’s downtrodden hero and as its principal focus. This is absurd. Shylock is entirely uninvolved in two of the three pivotal turns in the plot and is only marginally and implicitly involved in the play’s climactic denouement. To make Shylock the hero or the principal focus is to miss the whole point of the play. The play, we should remember, is called The Merchant of Venice, the merchant in question being Antonio and not Shylock, and is not called The Jew of Venice as an echo of Marlowe’s Jew of Malta. Marlowe’s play focuses on the Jew; Shakespeare’s does not. In focusing too closely on Shylock, we lose the wider focus necessary to see the play as a whole.

    This Shylockian heresy, to give it a name, is nothing less than a critical blindness. By way of analogy, let us look at two parallel characters in the works of Dickens that might be said to exhibit Shylockian attributes. The character of Ebenezer Scrooge in A Christmas Carol is so much at the center of the story line that stage and screen adaptations have adopted the title Scrooge. Though something of the artistic integrity of the work is lost in such a use of literary or dramatic license, one’s critical sensibilities are not overly affronted by such an imposition. Scrooge is the principal focus of the work and his becoming its eponymous hero seems understandable enough. If, on the other hand, screen adaptations of Oliver Twist had altered the focus of the story to such an extent that Fagin became the principal focus, we would immediately protest that an act of gross literary vandalism had been committed against the meaning and integrity of Dickens’ novel. Since Fagin is not the principal character or focus but merely a powerful and integral part of the wider plot, we would be justifiably outraged at the grotesque parody of the original work inherent in such a shift of focus. And yet Shylock’s role in The Merchant of Venice is much more akin to that of Fagin in Oliver Twist than it is to that of Scrooge in A Christmas Carol. It is, therefore, shocking that it has been the sad fate of The Merchant of Venice to suffer from the effects of the blindness of this Shylockian heresy on the part of those who have read the play and staged it down the years.

    From William Hazlitt’s critical inversion of the play’s deeper meaning in his defense of Shylock¹⁵ to Henry Irving’s celebrated stage portrayal of a Jew who is conscious of his own superiority in all but circumstance to the oppressor,¹⁶ it has been the play’s fate to have its heroes demonized and its villain lionized. Perhaps this is the price that Shakespeare had to pay for his pandering to the anti-Semitic prejudices of his audience in the wake of the Lopez trial. If so, after two hundred years of substance abuse, in which the substantial meaning has been abused by the elevation of the accidental, it is surely time to insist that Shakespeare’s debt has been paid. His words, having been made a pound of flesh, must now regain the spirit that gave life to the flesh in the first place. It is assuredly time to see The Merchant of Venice as Shakespeare saw it, as a work overflowing with Christian morality. In order to do so, we must shift our attention from the play’s villain to its heroes.

    If Antonio is the eponymous hero of The Merchant of Venice, it is generally agreed that he is upstaged by the play’s heroine, the fairer-than-fair Portia.

    Among Portia’s numerous admirers is Fanny Kemble, the celebrated Shakespearean actress and sometime critic, who waxed lyrical, elevating Portia’s wondrous virtues until she seems a veritable icon of idealized femininity:

    I chose Portia [as] my ideal of a perfect woman . . . the wise, witty woman, loving with all her soul, and submitting with all her heart to a man whom everybody but herself (who was the best judge) would have judged her inferior; the laughter-loving, light-hearted, true-hearted, deep-hearted woman, full of keen perception, of active efficiency, of wisdom prompted by love, of tenderest unselfishness, of generous magnanimity; noble, simple, humble, pure; true, dutiful, religious, and full of fun; delightful above all others, the woman of women.¹⁷

    Such effusiveness is echoed by characters in the play itself, most particularly by Bassanio and Jessica, and is reinforced by the name assigned to Portia’s home.¹⁸ The atmosphere of Belmont is so different from the worldly dross that preoccupies the residents of Venice that its literal meaning, mountain of beauty, seems singularly appropriate. The perspective of life that we attain from the beautiful heights of Belmont, in the company of the heavenly Portia, is so different from the venality and vendettas of Venice. If Venice wallows in the gutters of life, Belmont seems to point to the stars, and to the heaven beyond the stars, and ultimately, suggests Shakespeare scholar Fernando de Mello Moser, to the Love that moves the heaven and the stars:

    It is surely significant that Shakespeare kept the place-name of Belmont, implying Beauty and the Heights! Poetically and symbolically, Belmont stands for a state of overpowering Joy, a joy that grows with Love and through Love, and—as elsewhere in Shakespeare—is revealed and communicated primarily through the heroine. Because Shakespeare, different as he is from Dante in so many ways, is like the great Florentine . . . both seem to have experienced what may be described as the Beatrician vision . . . and Shakespeare, again and again, wrote about Love in terms that imply something more than merely human love, rather, beyond it, something like l’amor che move il sole e l’altre stele.¹⁹

    Fernando de Mello Moser’s appraisal of the moral dimension of the play is as fresh and refreshing as it is rare and unusual. The problem that afflicts so much other Shakespearean criticism is that the so-called post-Christian age has lost the ability to see as Shakespeare sees, from the beautiful heights of Belmont. Lacking perspective, these critics are left with nothing but the perplexity that leads to apoplexy. They do not see Venice, as Portia sees it, from the heights of Belmont; they see only Belmont from the gutters of Venice. And from the gutters of Venice you cannot really see Belmont at all. You have to hike to the heights to get Portia’s perspective, and the true perspective of Portia’s character. The bella vista can be seen only from the summit, and the summit can be reached only through an understanding of Christianity and an appreciation and apprehension of the Christian imagination that Shakespeare shared with his audience.

    From a worldly perspective, and particularly from a postmodern worldly perspective, the whole business of the caskets is nothing less than a denial of Portia’s freedom to make her own choices. And from a feminist

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