THE MERCHANT OF VENICE: Choice, Hazard and Consequence THE MERCHANT OF VENICE Choice, Hazard and Consequence JOAN OZARK HOLMER Macmillan Education ISBN 978-0-333-52264-6 ISBN 978-1-349-23846-0 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-23846-0 © Joan Ozark Holmer 1995 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1s t edition 1995 All rights reserved. For information, write: Scholarly and Reference Division, St. Martin's Press, Inc., 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 First published in the United States of America in 1995 ISBN 978-0-312-12411-3 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Holmer, Joan Ozark. The Merchant of Venice: choice, hazard and consequence / Joan Ozark Holmer. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-312-12411-3 (cloth) 1. Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616. Merchant of Venice. I. Title. PR2825.H64 1995 822.3'3-dc20 94-33031 CIP To my family, for all their love and support Contents List of Figures viii Preface ix Acknowledgements xix List of Abbreviations xxi 1 'Truth will come to light': The Historical Prism 1 2 '0 me, the word "choose''': Structure and Language 40 3 'Give and hazard': Friends and Lovers 95 4 'Pardon this fault': Antonio and Shylock 142 5 A Daniel come to judgement': The Trial 183 I 6 'Joy be the consequence': Union and Reunion 246 Notes 285 Bibliography 342 Index 356 vii List of Figures 1 Diagram of structural unity 50 2 Diagram of biblical genealogy 74 viii Preface In the course of this book I will embrace Hamlet's conclusion that 'the play's the thing' (2.2.604). In my focus on the playa difficult question will be debated: does Shakespeare fashion an artistic unity out of the richly varied and often contradictory el ements that constitute The Merchant of Venice? This fundamental question, voiced in sundry ways, vexes both textual and perform ance criticism up to the present moment and will probably con tinue to do so. The more we discover about this play and its significant contexts, the more we realise we need to know about Shakespeare, sixteenth-century literature, Elizabethan England, Renaissance Europe, and ourselves. I will explore Shakespeare's artistic choices and risks, analysing how and why Shakespeare refashioned materials available to him (both old and new sources) as well as what novelties he added to create what has become his most frequently performed comedy, and for our century, what has also become his most controversial comedy. This study will attempt to demonstrate that this play possesses a profoundly complex dramatic unity. What most effectively prevents our appreciation of this complexity is quite simply oversimplification, whether through lack of knowledge or lack of perception, and all of us may be guilty of oversimplification to various degrees. The play's inherent dynamic energy almost attacks us as we confront the many twists and turns in the staging of its intricately interrelated plots. Wrestling with this play over the years has confirmed for me that there shall probably never be a 'final' interpretation or any single reading or approach that does justice to the orchestrated whole of The Merchant of Venice. Perhaps the most daunting chal lenge that scholars, directors, actors, and teachers face is keeping the 'whole' of the play in 'play', whether in one's own mind and heart or on stage in the minds and hearts of many others. It is always easier to get a relative grip on 'parts' of the play, such as its 'economics' or the Christian-Jew issue, but the consequent danger lies in fallaciously substituting the part for the whole. I suggest that The Merchant of Venice is paradoxically more than the sum of its parts. The play in its entirety is bigger, more inclusive ix x Preface and elusive, than anyone of us, including myself, who spend countless hours in the library and in the theatre, enjoying it, wondering about it, and trying to pluck out the heart of its mys tery. Therefore, this study suffers from no delusion of pretend ing to be 'the final word' on the play. New discoveries will always be forthcoming, and pre-existing interpretations will have to be refined to accommodate new evidence. However, any 'perform ance', whether of an actor or a critic, must become temporarily 'fixed' for the moment of its reception by another. Different modes of production vary in degree of fluidity; although the actor can revise a gesture in the next day's performance, the critic will have to wait considerably longer before revising in print. Therefore, Hiis particular study of the play at this point in time is intended to explore new ways of seeing the play in light of the question of dramatic unity and therein contribute to what I see as the on going debate over this inexhaustible play and the unending search it provokes for me and for others. But if we are going to focus on 'the play', what do we mean by 'the play'? The play-script as performed? The play-text as written and as read? In the past thirty years literary criticism and re search have witnessed some extraordinary changes in questions asked, methods used, approaches taken, and ideas examined, proliferating sites of meaning as well as fundamental reconsider ation of such formerly basic terms as 'performance', 'meaning', 'text', and 'play'. Both aspects of the play, as script and as text, necessarily complement each other, go hand-in-glove, as it were. However, script and text allow for different modes of question ing and representation of response. The greater the separation in time between the play's two historicities - the immediate era of its production versus subsequent eras of its production - theo retically the greater the need for mediation, whether that mediation concerns stage conventions, language, social customs, or ideas. In other words, Shakespeare's audiences presumably needed much less 'glossing' than we do. Although his audiences were by no means homogeneous, they enjoyed an arguably lesser degree of heterogeneity than audiences today, especially regarding differ ences in races, religions, politics, and languages. An actor, for example, has to find a dramatic gesture, intonation, or facial ex pression that will convey to a modern audience the bawdy innu endo of some word (e.g., 'ring') now no longer perceived as bawdy but whose former bawdy sense has been sufficiently glossed by Preface xi Shakespearian scholars. The actor is 'spared' the drudgery of work in the library's stacks, but the scholar is also 'spared' the actor's imaginative work of active 'translation'. In an ideal world both should collaborate, sharing each other's wealth, and positive signs of such collaboration are increasingly visible in various guises - dramaturgs in repertory companies and actors in the classrooms. But in the real world of rehearsal deadlines and page limits we too often need to pick and choose, to become increasingly focused or specialised. As my wise men tor, Dan Seltzer, was fond of observing in class, the study of Shakespeare involves the art of amputation. No one can do it all, and some of the deliberate limitations of my book concern gen eral theoretical debates about Shakespeare and the review of per formance criticism, matters large enough and important enough to constitute separate books in their own rights. The Merchant of Venice already enjoys an extensive history of performance criti cism, which I have not the space to review. However, James C. Bulman's recent book on the subject opens, not surprisingly, by calling attention to the 'crucial problem in staging The Merchant of Venice', namely 'how to balance its two distinct and seemingly unrelated plots' because 'Venice and Belmont seem to belong to different plays,.1 This is the very problem I seek to understand here. I, therefore, have chosen to focus on the play-text and to at tempt to provide new information of an analytical and descrip tive nature that could prove useful to a director, actor, or performance critic. But I try to stop short of prescribing how this information could or should be enacted on stage. Let us consider briefly one example that illustrates my rationale. One of the most exciting and provocative videocassettes to use in teaching this play derives from the 'Playing Shakespeare' series, coordinated by John Barton. In this videotape, entitled 'Exploring a Charac ter', Patrick Stewart and David Suchet, who take turns playing Shylock, discuss with Barton how they envision the role and why they make the choices they do. Stewart and Suchet, in a work shop format, enact pivotal moments from the play, back-to-back and exchanging roles with each other. The viewer is privileged to witness simultaneously fine acting and alternative interpreta tions, despite identical text and essentially identical direction from Barton. In their discussion of Shylock, however, emphasis is placed on the subject of money, but virtually no emphasis is placed on modes of money, the importance of how money is obtained, whether