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This chapter examines the commodity potential of white Europeans in multiracial trading environments. Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice and Massinger’s The Renegado register anxieties about Eastern trade, invoking the specter of captivity to explore the racial, religious, and sexual effects of commoditizing Christian bodies. Both plays resolve crises of personal commoditisation by discursively removing chastity from the commercial realm, a development that mitigates the potentially miscegenational circulation of Christian women and works to reclaim the intrinsic personal value of Christian men. The tragicomic trajectory of each play depends upon transforming chastity from a potential commodity to an inherently Christian—and increasingly white—virtue. As such, the plays’ redefinition of chastity informs their articulation of racial whiteness, which emerges as a repository of intrinsic personal value that exempts certain subjects from the most objectifying aspects of the market, leaving others even more vulnerable to its commoditising energies.

This chapter argues that The Merchant of Venice's representation of Jews begins and ends with the issue of conversion, and its most dramatic scene threatens to replay the killing of Christ, the theological event that for Christians defined the relation between Christian and Jew. For despite the serene triumph that some critics attribute both to the doctrine and to the play as a document in “Christian apologetics,” the chapter claims that Christian supersessionist theology seems to carry its own residue of anxiety with it, anxiety that William Shakespeare's play traces back to the vexed familial relations between Judaism and Christianity. The book approaches these issues via those literal strangers within English Christianity: the conversos in London. The promise—or threat—of Jewish conversion that is at the heart of Merchant is a primary site of the anxieties it describes. This chapter speculates about some possible consequences of the shadowy presence of the conversos within two texts—Sir Thomas More and Robert Wilson's The Three Ladies of London—that have a proximal relation to The Merchant of Venice.

This chapter examines Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice. This play as a whole is not shaped by festivity in the relatively direct way as in Love's Labour's Lost and A Midsummer Night's Dream. The play's large structure is developed from traditions which are properly theatrical; it is not a theatrical adaptation of a social ritual. And yet analogies to social occasions and rituals prove to be useful in understanding the symbolic action. The chapter pursues such analogies without suggesting, in most cases, that there is a direct influence from the social to the theatrical form. Shakespeare here is working with autonomous mastery, developing a style of comedy that makes a festive form for feeling and awareness out of all the theatrical elements, scene, speech, story, gesture, role which his astonishing art brought into organic combination.

William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice pitches melancholy oddly between opportunity, challenge, and therapeutic responsibility, its fundamentally epistemological mystery anticipating the apparent causelessness central to Robert Burton’s portable definition of atrabilious disease in his 1621 book The Anatomy of Melancholy. The melancholy felt by Shakespeare’s protagonist, Antonio, creates and resists knowledge at the same time. In terms of psychoanalysis, early modern “melancholy” is translated into Freudian “melancholia.” However, the interpretive pathway into Antonio’s self-defeating sadness that psychoanalysis implies should tackle the antagonism and difficulty of this character, rather than proceed along the standard route toward its preordained answer. This chapter examines melancholy assemblage, sadness, masochism, fantasy, sacrifice, and subjection in The Merchant of Venice as observed in Antonio.

In The Merchant of Venice, written between Richard II and 1 Henry IV, Shakespeare considers some of the same issues from a different generic point of view. Merchant can highlight the question of what can be bartered for, exchanged, contracted for, and what can’t, in a way that is even more pointed, because more counterfactually vivid, than the history plays can accommodate. As a comedy, it is more interested in intimate and domestic relations than in power politics; Merchant focuses particularly on how property figures in the intimacy between marriageable or married couples, the intimacy between parent and child, and the intimacy between friends of the same sex. This chapter focuses particularly on the property transfers that attend the marriage of heiresses such as Portia and Jessica, and the mixed emotions that those transfers generate on the part of the heiresses’ fathers, their new sons-in-law, and the heiresses themselves.

The chapter begins with an account of how religion forms as a conceptual category in early modern England, and goes on to consider Shakespeare’s two Venice plays, The Merchant of Venice and Othello, with their two alien figures that challenge the sophisticated form of cosmopolitanism, which did indeed mark early modern Venice’s own self definition. The chapter focuses in large part on the issue of conversion: Shylock is ordered to convert to Christianity as the condition of the “mercy” he is shown in the trial scene, and Othello, seemingly a willing convert to Christianity, ends with a complex identification with the Islamic Ottoman threat, from which he is charged to protect Venice.

Both recent and older criticism has focused on The Merchant of Venice’s Antonio as a typical representative of various forms of early modern sexuality, friendship, economic culture, and subjectivity. This essay explores the inverse premise: that Antonio’s sexual, affective, and economic depiction as atypical and distinctive stages important fantasies of indifference and aggression toward central early modern institutions, from mercantilism and proto-capitalism to conventional understandings of both friendship and enmity. Analysis of Antonio’s masochistic and self-interested behavior enlarges our sense of the possibilities for agency and teleology within male friendship and for queer subjectivity. Shakespeare’s play does not punitively link male same-sex bonds with sadness, as it has been read as doing; rather, it invests Antonio’s efforts to secure his own disappointment and even destruction at the hands of Shylock and Bassanio with a nearly Marlovian regard for agents who delineate the very cultural institutions they work to exploit and subvert.

This chapter considers ideas about how texts open and close possibilities, and uses them to read some of Shakespeare's work. It first focuses on the Sonnets, on the rhetoric of possession and dispossession through which the poet tries to represent his relationship with the ‘lovely boy’, often rather desperately redescribing betrayal as fidelity, and indifference as love. It then turns to Shakespeare's dialogue with the homoerotic poems of Richard Barnfield, tracing how Shakespeare adapts some of Barnfield's simplistic images and scenarios into his much more emotionally and rhetorically complex forms. The chapter explores how Shakespeare transformed the source materials for Twelfth Night and The Merchant of Venice in way which offered homoerotic scenarios which were not available in the originals.

Paul’s sexed exception of Christ from the Christian prohibition against male bodily penetration vexes Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, a comedy about the power of marriage to simultaneously masculinize and Christianize. Dressed as a boy, Jessica elopes with Lorenzo, and later argues that she has thereby become a Christian. Also cross-dressed, Portia saves her husband’s friend Antonio from Shylock’s emasculating excision of flesh. Responding to Janet Adelman’s argument that the play shores up a Pauline ideology of Christian masculinity through Portia’s courtroom defeat of Shylock, this chapter juxtaposes contemporary queer biblical and Renaissance Protestant readings of Romans 1 to argue that the play instead perverts this ideology through its presentation of Christ as a penetrable eunuch in the character of Balthasar. As Portia/Balthasar’s ring trick opens the dyad of the married couple to the triad of married couple and friend, the “Pauline” distinction between monogamous, marital, Christian sexuality on the one hand, and sodomitical Jewish sexuality on the other, begins to erode.

This chapter argues that in William Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, anxiety about the status of circumcision as a reliable marker of difference plays itself out in the incision that Shylock would make on Antonio's body. It argues that Jessica cannot make the transition from Jew to Christian without undergoing a symbolic circumcision of sorts: as though she must be marked as a member of the circumcised race before she can be allowed to leave Shylock's house. The play takes pains to transform Jessica into a boy even as it insists that her transformation is quite gratuitous from the point of view of the plot. Jessica appears to be made into a boy as she attempts to leave her father's house just so that she can be returned to his body, firmly (if only momentarily) under the sign of circumcision. But from one point of view, her “gelding” is perfectly superfluous. Lorenzo courts the punishment of Shechem; that punishment is anticipated in the second story of intermarriage and conversion for love that seems to haunt the edges of Merchant.

This chapter discusses drama as ‘speech-writing’. It identifies the dramatic construction of moral ambiguity, which led to the concept of the ‘problem play’ as a major strand in 20th-century Shakespeare criticism, tracing it back to the Greek rhetorical exercises known as progymnasmata. Latin versions of these, the controversiae and suasoriae of the elder Seneca, referred to in English as ‘declamations’, became a staple of 16th-century education and taught Elizabethan schoolboys to argue on both sides of the question. Silvayn’s collection of declamations, The Orator (1596), is discussed in relation to Measure for Measure, The Merchant of Venice, and Coriolanus. The older concept of the ‘problem play’ is described in terms of the ‘controversial plot’, and it is argued that rhetorical training was responsible for the dramatic construction of opposing points of view.

In William Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, Lancelot's escape from Shylock's house serves as a necessary prelude to Jessica's, a comic warding off of the anxiety that might otherwise be provoked by reading conversion as a betrayal of the father-Jew: for only Jessica can say “my father Jew” and mean it literally, and only she must literally leave the Jew's house in order to convert. In fact, the story that Lancelot enacts as he leaves his father's house turns up in a more attenuated form in Jessica's conversion. When Lancelot tells Jessica that she cannot be saved as long as Shylock is her father, he literalizes the terms of the conversion that he has enacted earlier: she too cannot become a Christian without changing fathers. However, Lancelot is forgetting the place of the mother in his “hope” for Jessica's salvation, for Lancelot's solution can save her only by invoking the infidelity of her mother. Conversion, danger to the commonwealth, race, and miscegenation come together in Jessica's body in the last Belmont scene before the scourging of Shylock.

This chapter begins with Chaucer’s Man of Law’s Tale, an account of an heiress that imagines a relationship between genealogical narrative and international trade, as Custance’s passage away from, and back towards, her identity as daughter of the Emperor of Rome is initiated by the intervention of a group of Syrian merchants. I also consider a variety of late-medieval texts preoccupied with the relationship between England’s burgeoning wool trade and traditional aristocratic ideologies. From here, I pass forward to consider Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice. Shakespeare’s play presents us with a world of inheritance, of fathers and heiresses and their suitors; and with a world in which money grows through trade or by being lent at interest. It thus offers an account of the relationship between inheritance and an emergent world of capital, in which inheritance is not displaced but instead transformed by its passage into modernity.

This chapter examines how plays and treatises reflected on their construction of vantage points from which an economic system is visible. Mercantile writers described their treatises as ‘maps’ and claimed to give readers a totalising view of commercial activity. They contrasted ‘maps’ to ‘utopias’, fictional representations that only simulated this vantage point. Distinct from maps or utopias, Renaissance plays could foreground the problem of abstraction by simulating a synchronic view necessarily undercut by the diachronic experience of live theatre. The chapter culminates in an examination of two Shakespeare plays that present what at first appears to be a panoptic view of exchange before reinforcing the impossibility of such a view. The panoptic view of the casket test in The Merchant of Venice allows audiences to predict which casket holds Portia's picture, but the fantasy nature of this vantage point is underscored by the obscurity of the offstage mercantile transactions. Cymbeline suggests that a panoramic vantage point would be necessary to track and predict changes of value undergone by its principal characters, but reinforces the impossibility of achieving such a view by insisting on the limited perspective of characters and audience members alike.

Whereas numerous infidel women convert to Christianity on the early modern English stage, relatively few infidel men convert. Chapter 5 explores the interplay of race, gender, and salvation in William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, John Fletcher’s The Island Princess, and Philip Massinger’s The Renegado. The frequency with which Jewish, Turkish, and Moorish women convert to Christianity in English drama more generally responds to the convergence of theological and medical discourses that highlighted the role of male seed in creating a child’s identity, and reflects as well Reformation theology’s linkage of spiritual and sexual reproduction. Nonetheless, anxieties about what an infidel mother might pass on to her children, even when she is married to a Christian man, prompt Fletcher’s and Massinger’s plays to employ the discourse of martyrdom in order to verify the women’s acquisitions of true Christian faith.

The discourse of self-help in Shakespeare’s era was deeply immersed in questions of what it was possible to control and how to effect a reshaping of the self in accordance with objective ideals. Accordingly, self-cultivation, as it was outlined in many vernacular English Renaissance guides to health and happiness, was profoundly concerned with the exercise of moral agency. This chapter begins with a discussion of the philosophical context for early modern writings on emotion, one that stems from self-help texts’ own emphasis on lifelong self-cultivation that was understood in eudaimonistic terms, that is to say, concerned with moral flourishing. It then turns to Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice and the question of moral flourishing in that play. Typically, questions of moral thriving in Merchant have been tied to Christian allegory, but this chapter proposes a reading of the play that foregrounds the ethnographic identity of Shakespeare’s characters within a larger discussion of eudaimonistic flourishing and ‘way[s] to thrive,’ as Shylock refers to it. Shakespeare takes up that conversation about thrift, I argue, in complex ways by giving voice to two distinct models of moral flourishing in The Merchant of Venice: Christian and Jewish.

Conversion from Judaism to Christianity in William Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice—at least before Shylock's enforced conversion—is represented as a child's deception and then abandonment of a father. This representation is most explicit in Jessica, but she is not the only child who leaves Shylock's house and deceives a father in the process: Lancelot does the same thing. As Lancelot manages the transition from Shylock's house to Bassanio's, and hence secures his status as Christian rather than Jew, his passage obliquely reiterates one of the central narratives through which Christian tradition understands that transition at its point of origin: a narrative that turns radically on a son's deception of his father in order to secure the blessing intended for his older brother. This chapter examines why Lancelot's decision to leave Shylock's house should be so much more difficult, and so much more fraught with guilt, than Jessica's. It suggests that Shakespeare shapes Lancelot's throwaway scene of conversion in terms that encapsulate Christianity's anxieties about its vexed paternity in Judaism.

Situating its analysis of The Merchant of Venice within recent critical discussions over Shakespeare’s place within a wider early modern dramatic culture, this chapter reads the play as a response to Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta. It focuses on how Marlowe’s great merchant, Barabas, is split by Shakespeare into two characters, Shylock and Antonio, who make money in different ways. By linking commercial ventures to romance notions of adventure, it argues, The Merchant of Venice manages to valorize Antonio’s business model while demonizing Shylock’s. Finally, the chapter asks whether the ‘romancing’ of Mediterranean commerce is something undertaken by the play itself, or by its Venetian characters.