The Dyers Hand and Other Essays

Furthermore, while Belial is malevolent without any cause except love of malevolence for its own sake, Shylock is pre­sented as a particular individual living in a particular kind of society at a particular time in history. Usury, like prostitution, may corrupt the character, but those who borrow upon usury, like those who visit brothels, have their share of responsibility for this corruption and aggravate their guilt by showing con­tempt for those whose services they make use of.

It is, surely, in order to emphasize this point that, in the trial scene, Shakespeare introduces an element which is not found in Pecorone or other versions of the pound-of-flesh- story. After Portia has trapped Shylock through his own insistence upon the letter of the law of Contract, she produces another law by which any alien who conspires against the life of a Venetian citizen forfeits his goods and places his life at the Doge's mercy. Even in the rush of a stage per­formance, the audience cannot help reflecting that a man as interested in legal subdeties as Shylock, would, surely, have been aware of the existence of this law and that, if by any chance he had overlooked it, the Doge surely would very soon have drawn his attention to it. Shakespeare, it seems to me, was willing to introduce what is an absurd implausi- bility for the sake of an effect which he could not secure without it: at the last moment when, through his conduct, Shylock has destroyed any sympathy we may have felt for him earlier, we are reminded that, irrespective of his personal character, his status is one of inferiority. A Jew is not regarded, even in law, as a brother.

If the wicked Shylock cannot enter the fairy story world of Belmont, neither can the noble Antonio, though his friend, Bassanio, can. In the fairy story world, the symbol of final peace and concord is marriage, so that, if the story is concerned with the adventures of two friends of the same sex, male or female, it must end with a double wedding. Had he wished, Shakespeare could have followed the Pecorone story in which it is Ansaldo, not Gratiano, who marries the equivalent of Nerissa. Instead, he portrays Antonio as a melancholic who is incapable of loving a woman. He deliberately avoids the classical formula of the Perfect Friends by making the rela­tionship unequal. When Salanio says of Antonio's feelings for Bassanio

I think he only loves the world for him

we believe it, but no one would say that Bassanio's affec­tions are equally exclusive. Bassanio, high-spirited, elegant, pleasure-loving, belongs to the same world as Gratiano and Lorenzo; Antonio does not. When he says:

I hold the world but as the world, Gratiano,

A stage, where everyman must play a part,

And mine a sad one

Gratiano may accuse him oЈ putting on an act, but we believe him, just as it does not seem merely the expression oЈ a noble spirit oЈ self-sacrifice when he tells Bassanio:

I am a tainted wether of the flock, Meetest for death; the weakest kind of fruit Drops earliest to the ground, and so let me.

It is well known that love and understanding breed love and understanding.

The more people on high who comprehend each other, the more there are to love well, and the more love is there, and like a mirror, one giveth back to the other.

CPurgatorio, xv.)

So, with the rise of a mercantile economy in which money breeds money, it became an amusing paradox for poets to use the ignoble activity of usury as a metaphor for love, the most noble of human activities. Thus, in his Sonnets, Shakespeare uses usury as an image for the married love which begets children.

Profitless usurer, why does thou use

So great a sum of sums, yet canst not live?

For having traffic with thyself alone

Thou of thyself they sweet self dost deceive.

(Sonnet rv.)

That use is not forbidden usury Which happies those that pay the willing loan, That's for thyself, to breed another thee, Or ten times happier, be it ten for one.

CvO

And, even more relevant, perhaps, to Antonio are the lines

But since she pricked thee out for women's pleasure Mine be thy love, and thy love's use their treasure.

Cxxxin.)

There is no reason to suppose that Shakespeare had read Dante, but he must have been familiar with the association of usury with sodomy of which Dante speaks in the Ninth Canto of the Inferno.

It behoves man to gain his bread and to prosper. And because the usurer takes another way, he contemns Nature in herself and her followers, placing elsewhere his hope .... And hence the smallest round seals wdth its mark Sodom and the Cahors ....

It can, therefore, hardly be an accident that Shylock the usurer has as his antagonist a man whose emotional life, though his conduct may be chaste, is concentrated upon a member of his own sex.