Abstract
Acomplex set of factors, including conceptions of femininity, cultural expectations, political expediency, and perhaps personal inclination, shaped an image of Elizabeth as an exceptionally merciful queen. This image was constructed in and by a culture that at times resisted the very clemency that it enshrined. For example, the love poetry discussed in the previous chapter shows that a courtier could simultaneously demand the queen’s mercy for himself and repudiate her clemency when it was extended to others. The resistance to mercy was strongest from fervent Protestants who wanted their queen to take much harsher measures to protect the realm from Catholicism, whether that meant punishing dissenters more rigorously, seeking out treason more vigorously, or taking military action on the continent or in Ireland. Originally, the image of Elizabeth as a clement queen suggested her role as a champion of transnational Protestantism; eventually, however, that image was at odds with the actions demanded by her militantly Protestant subjects. Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice engages these tensions by staging a queenly figure, Portia, whose judgments drive the play and in whom mercy and rigor are apparently reconciled.
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Notes
Thomas Drant. Two Sermons Preached (London 1570), K2r.
Leah S.Marcus, Puzzling Shakespeare: Local Reading and Its Discontents (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 97. Perhaps there is even a sly nod to the contrast between this nostalgic vision and the reality of the present when Portia says to Nerissa, “If I live to be as old as Sybilla, I will die as chaste as Diana, unless I be obtain’d by the manner of my father’s will” (I.ii.106–8). As my student Francine Koenig pointed out to me, this allusion to a chaste but ancient Sybil reflects the reality of Queen Elizabeth’s image in the 1590s: in her 60s and unmarried, she was an aging Virgin Queen.
Linda Shenk, Learned Queen: The Image of Elizabeth I in Politics and Poetry (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010)
John Hayward, The Beginning of the Reign of Queen Elizabeth (1636).
Quoted in Donald Stump and Susan M. Felch, Elizabeth I and Her Age (New York: W. W. Norton, 2009), 642.
See John D. Rea, “Shylock and the Processus Belial,” Philological Quarterly 8 (1929): 311–13.
James O’Rourke explains that the cult of virgin was a phenomenon contemporaneous with the eleventh-century rise of anti-Semitism. “Racism and Homophobia in The Merchant of Venice,” ELH 70.2 (Summer 2003): 384.
Sir John Harington, Nugae Antiquae Volume 1 (London, 1804; rpt. AMS Press, 1966), 358–59.
Stephen Greenblatt, “Invisible Bullets: Renaissance Authority and Its Subversion,” in Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism, ed. Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1985), 44.
Gunter Walch, “Henry V as Working-house of Ideology.” Reprinted in Shakespeare and Politics, ed. Catherine M. S. Alexander (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2004), 198–205.
R. Scott Fraser, “Henry V and the Performance of War,” in Shakespeare and War, ed. Ros King and Paul J. C. M. Franssen (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 74.
See for example a letter of Robert Cecil reprinted in Arthur Dimock, “The Conspiracy of Dr. Lopez,” The English Historical Review 9.35 (July 1894): 466.
See for example Chris Jeffery, “Is Shylock a Catholic?” Shakespeare in Southern Africa 16 (2004): 37–51.
Also Lawrence Danson, The Harmonies of The Merchant of Venice (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), 78–81.
Danson also mentions that Shylock has been read as a Puritan by many critics. For a recent example, see Cedric Watts, “Why Is Shylock Unmusical?” in Henry V, War Criminal? And Other Shakespearean Puzzles, ed. John Sutherland and Cedric Watts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 148–53.
David S. Katz, The Jews in the History of England, 1485–1850 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 90.
Godfrey Goodman, The Court of King James I, Volume 1 (London: Richard Bentley, 1839), 154.
Paul E. J. Hammer, The Polarisation of Elizabethan Politics: The Career of Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, 1585–1597 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 138 and 159.
Richard C. McCoy, The Rites of Knighthood: The Literature and Politics of Elizabethan Chivalry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 79–102.
Paul Hammer, “The Smiling Crocodile: The Earl of Essex and Late Elizabethan ‘Popularity,’” in The Politics of the Public Sphere in Early Modern England, ed. Peter Lake and Steven Pincus (Manchester: Manchester University Press 2007), 103.
See John Drakakis in the introduction to the Arden Merchant of Venice. Merchant of Venice, Arden Shakespeare Third Series, ed. John Drakakis (London: Methuen and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2010), 31. See also the footnote on “Andrew,” 172.
Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, An Apologie of the Earle of Essex (London 1600) D4v.
W. Nicholas Knight reads the entire courtroom scene as representing Chancery procedure and argues that Shakespeare means to advocate for common law and show that Chancery should not impinge upon it. “Equity, ‘The Merchant of Venice,’ and William Lambarde,” Shakespeare Survey 27 (1974): 95–96.
Maxine MacKay also argues that the courtroom scene emphasizes the conflict between Chancery court and courts of law in Elizabethan England. “The Merchant of Venice: A Reflection of the Early Conflict between Courts of Law and Courts of Equity,” Shakespeare Quarterly 15.4 (Autumn 1964): 371–75.
Richard Wilson analyzes the conflict between Chancery and common law in this scene and finds common law’s victory limited. He characterizes Elizabethan Chancery as a court where the bourgeoisie were fighting to curtail royal power and make the common law an agent of protection for their economic liberty. Wilson characterizes the common law as victorious in Merchant but finds the mercantile society of Venice merciless as it uses a strained legalism to cripple Shylock. “The Quality of Mercy: Discipline and Punish in Shakespearean Comedy,” Seventeenth Century 5.1 (Spring 1990): 1–42.
The seminal article on this is Karen Newman, “Portia’s Ring: Unruly Women and Structures of Exchange in Merchant of Venice,” Shakespeare Quarterly 38 (1987): 19–33. Newman uses anthropological theory to show how the gift-giving in Merchant is a bid for power. By giving more than can be reciprocated, Portia unsettles the gender hierarchy and short-circuits the system of exchange that conventionally solidifies male bonds and positions women as objects of exchange.
See Bevington’s introduction. John Lyly, Endymion, ed. David Bevington (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), 33. All quotations from the play refer to this edition.
John D. Staines, The Tragic Histories of Mary Queen of Scots, 1560–1690: Rhetoric, Passions, and Political Literature (Burlington: Ashgate, 2009), 112–15.
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© 2014 Mary Villeponteaux
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Villeponteaux, M. (2014). “A Goodly Musicke in Her Regiment”: Elusive Justice in The Merchant of Venice. In: The Queen’s Mercy. Queenship and Power. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137371751_4
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