Abstract
The Merchant of Venice perhaps rivals King Lear as the Shakespearean play that has most often been interpreted as an allegory of economic transition. Typical transitional readings of Merchant posit an ideological opposition between two broadly defined economic modes of production, and then locate the principal characters along these ideological axes. In the most sophisticated, counterintuitive of such readings, Walter Cohen argues that Antonio, the usurious merchant-financier, is the “harbinger of modern capitalism,” while Shylock is a retrograde, neo-feudal figure: “marginal, diabolical, irrational, archaic, medieval.”1 More recently, John Drakakis has argued that Shylock contradictorily embodies seigneurial and capitalistic qualities: “Shylock looks both backwards and forwards in the play. It is this double perspective that obscures what we think of as the passage to modernity, since it both challenges and facilitates a secular teleology.”2 Eric Mallin has complicated things further, suggesting that Shylock’s capitalist ethos manifests itself in his ability to realize a Christian “plutocratic fantasy” of extravagant spending.3
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Notes
Walter Cohen, “The Merchant of Venice and the Possibilities of Historical Criticism,” in New Casebooks: The Merchant of Venice, ed. Martin Coyle (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998), 45–72.
John Drakakis, “‘Jew, Shylock is my name’: Speech Prefixes in The Merchant of Venice as Symptoms of the Early Modern,” in Shakespeare and Modernity: Early Modern to Millennium, ed. Hugh Grady (London: Routledge, 2000), 105–121.
For other interpretations that rely on transitional schemas or that find symptoms of a market economy in the play, see Michael Nerlich, Ideology of Adventure: Studies in Modern Consciousness, 1100–1750, vol. 1, trans. Ruth Crowley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), chap. 7;
and Frederick Turner, Shakespeare’s Twenty-First Century Economics: The Morality of Love and Money (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), chap. 5.
Eric Roll, A History of Economic Thought (London: Faber and Faber, 1938), 46.
Odd Langholm, Price and Value in the Aristotelian Tradition: A Study in Scholastic Economic Sources (Norwegian Research Council for Science and the Humanities, 1979), 32.
For an earlier critique of the theory of intrinsic value, see Joseph A. Schumpeter, History of Economic Analysis (New York: Oxford University Press, 1954), 60–62.
Hannah Robie Sewall, The Theory of Value Before Adam Smith, in Publications of the American Economic Association, Third Series, vol. II, n. 3 (New York: Macmillan Company, 1901), 15.
On the relationship between labor and the just price see Lewis H. Haney, History of Economic Thought (New York: Macmillan Company, 1949), 99–100; Raymond de Roover, “The Concept of the Just Price: Theory and Economic Policy,” Journal of Economic History 18 (1958): 418–434; and Langholm, Price and Value, 61–84.
Karl Marx, Capital III (New York: International Publishers, 1967), 378
cited in Jon Elster, Making Sense of Marx (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 489. As Elster remarks, “Although the view that money might generate profit independently of production is indeed preposterous, it was the foundation of mercantilist reasoning for a long time. We find the seventeenth-century cameralists arguing that wars would never run an economy down so long as the money remained in the country, as if soldiers could be fed on gold and silver” (489).
Thomas Mun, England’s Treasure by Forraign Trade (London, 1663), 20, cited in Bruno Suviranta, The Theory of the Balance of Trade in England: A Study in Mercantilism (Helsingfors, 1923), 72–73.
Cited in Lars Magnusson, Mercantilism: The Shaping of an Economic Language (London: Routledge, 1994), 162. Bacon, though, was quick to point out, along with Machiavelli, that money is decidely not the sinews of war: “Neither is money the sinews of war (as it is trivially said), where the sinews of men’s arms, in base and effeminate people, are failing.”
Francis Bacon, “Of the True Greatness of Kingdoms and Estates,” in Francis Bacon: The Essays, ed. and intro. John Pitcher (London: Pengin Books, 1985), 148.
Eli F. Heckscher, Mercantilism, 2 vols., trans. Mendel Shapiro (London: George Allen & Unwin, Ltd., 1935), 2: 138–139.
Henry Dunning Macleod, Principles of Economical Philosophy, 2 vols. (London: Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer, 1872–1875), 1: 50, cited in Suviranta, The Theory of the Balance of Trade, 115.
Adam Smith, An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of The Wealth of Nations, ed. Edwin Cannan (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1976), 4.1, 472, cited in Suviranta, The Theory of The Balance of Trade, 115.
All citations taken from William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, ed. Brents Stirling (Baltimore, MD: Penguin Books, 1990). All citations are noted in text.
Richard Halpern, Shakespeare Among the Moderns (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), 190.
Bernard Grebanier, The Truth About Shylock (New York: Random House, 1962), 250–251.
Hugo Grotius, The Law of War and Peace, trans. Francis W. Kelsey (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1925), 2.12, 351.
I owe much of this summary of the usury debates to Norman Jones, God and the Moneylenders: Usury and Law in Early Modern England (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989); and R.H. Tawney’s introduction to his edition of Thomas Wilson’s Discourse Upon Usury, intro. and ed. R.H. Tawney (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1925).
See also John T. Noonan, The Scholastic Analysis of Usury (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1957);
and Benjamin Nelson, The Idea of Usury (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1969).
C.L. Barber, Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy: A Study of Dramatic Form and its Relation to Social Custom (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1958), 168.
A.D. Moody, “The Letter of the Law,” in The Merchant of Venice: Critical Essay, ed. Thomas Wheeler (New York: Garland Publishing, 1991), 86.
René Girard, A Theater of Envy: William Shakespeare (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 246.
Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 82.
For a foundational essay on the role of New Testament morality in the play, see Barbara K. Lewalski, “Biblical Allusion and Allegory in The Merchant of Venice,” Shakespeare Quarterly 13 (1962): 327–433.
Karen Newman, “Portia’s Ring: Unruly Women and Structures of Exchange in The Merchant of Uenice,” Shakespeare Quarterly 38 (1987): 26.
Claude Levi-Strauss, Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss, in The Logic of the Gift, ed. Alan Schrift (New York: Routledge, 1997), 55–56.
Northrop Frye, The Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), 162.
On the “two worlds” of comedy, see Elliot Krieger, A Marxist Study of Shakespeare’s Comedies (London: Macmillan Press, 1979), 1–7.
Ernst Bloch, The Utopian Function of Art and Literature: Selected Essays, trans. Jack Zipes and Frank Mecklenburg (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996), 41.
Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), 3–23.
I owe much of my understanding of Lovejoy’s notion of the genesis of ideas to Michael Bristol’s excellent overview of Lovejoy’s study in Michael D. Bristol, Shakespeare’s America, America’s Shakespeare (London: Routledge, 1990), 145–151.
See Georges Bataille, “The Notion of Expenditure,” in Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939, trans. Allan Stoekl, with Carlo Lovitt and Donald M. Leslie, Jr. (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 116–129.
For a critique of Bataille’s theory of expenditure, see Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Contingencies of Value: Alternative Perspective for Critical Theory (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 134–149.
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© 2004 Paul Cefalu
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Cefalu, P. (2004). Shylock as Homo Sacer?: Mercantilist Fallacies and Subjective Demand in The Merchant of Venice . In: Revisionist Shakespeare: Transitional Ideologies in Texts and Contexts. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403973658_4
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