Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations Th e Adventures of Great Expectations One Flew over the Huckleberry Finn Th e Great Gatsby Cuckoo’s Nest Th e Age of Innocence Gulliver’s Travels One Hundred Years of Alice’s Adventures in Hamlet Solitude Wonderland Heart of Darkness Othello All Quiet on the Th e House on Mango Persuasion Western Front Street Portnoy’s Complaint Animal Farm I Know Why the Pride and Prejudice Th e Ballad of the Sad Caged Bird Sings Ragtime Café Th e Iliad Th e Red Badge of Beloved Invisible Man Courage Beowulf Jane Eyre Romeo and Juliet Black Boy Th e Joy Luck Club Th e Rubáiyát of Omar Th e Bluest Eye Julius Caesar Khayyám Th e Canterbury Tales Th e Jungle Th e Scarlet Letter Cat on a Hot Tin King Lear A Separate Peace Roof Long Day’s Journey Silas Marner Catch-22 Slaughterhouse-Five into Night Th e Catcher in the Song of Solomon Lord of the Flies Rye Th e Sound and the Th e Lord of the Rings Th e Chronicles of Fury Love in the Time of Narnia Th e Stranger Cholera Th e Color Purple A Streetcar Named Macbeth Crime and Desire Th e Man Without Punishment Sula Th e Crucible Qualities Th e Sun Also Rises Cry, the Beloved Th e Merchant of Th e Tale of Genji Country Venice A Tale of Two Cities Darkness at Noon Th e Metamorphosis “Th e Tell-Tale Heart” Death of a Salesman A Midsummer Night’s and Other Stories Th e Death of Artemio Dream Th eir Eyes Were Cruz Miss Lonelyhearts Watching God Th e Diary of Anne Moby-Dick Th ings Fall Apart Frank My Ántonia Th e Th ings They Don Quixote Native Son Carried Emerson’s Essays Night To Kill a Mockingbird Emma 1984 Ulysses Fahrenheit 451 Th e Odyssey Waiting for Godot A Farewell to Arms Oedipus Rex Th e Waste Land Frankenstein Th e Old Man and the Wuthering Heights Th e Glass Menagerie Sea Young Goodman Th e Grapes of Wrath On the Road Brown Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations William Shakespeare’s Th e Merchant of Venice New Edition Edited and with an introduction by Harold Bloom Sterling Professor of the Humanities Yale University Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations: The Merchant of Venice—New Edition Copyright © 2010 by Infobase Publishing Introduction © 2010 by Harold Bloom All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher. For more information contact: Bloom’s Literary Criticism An imprint of Infobase Publishing 132 West 31st Street New York NY 10001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data William Shakespeare’s The merchant of Venice / edited and with an introduction by Harold Bloom. — New ed. â p. cm. — (Bloom’s modern critical interpretations) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-60413-885-6 (hardcover) ISBN 978-1-4381-3435-2 (e-book) 1. Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616. Merchant of Venice. 2. Shylock (Fictitious character) 3. Jews in literature. I. Bloom, Harold. 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Contents Editor’s Note vii Introduction 1 Harold Bloom Marriage and Mercifixion in The Merchant of Venice: The Casket Scene Revisited 9 Harry Berger Jr. The Cuckoo’s Note: Male Friendship and Cuckoldry in The Merchant of Venice 19 Coppélia Kahn Portia’s Belmont 29 Richard A. Levin The Merchant of Venice 65 Robert Ornstein A Garden in Belmont: The Merchant of Venice, 5.1 97 Harry Levin Which Is the Merchant Here? And Which the Jew?: The Venice of Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice 117 Tony Tanner The Merchant of Venice 139 W. H. Auden vi Contents The Merchant of Venice and the Value of Money 151 Peter D. Holland Law and Self-Interest in The Merchant of Venice 173 Grace Tiffany Chronology 187 Contributors 189 Bibliography 191 Acknowledgments 195 Index 197 Editor’s Note My introduction dwells on Shylock’s conversion, a critique of Marlowe that costs the play dearly, destroying the plausibility of Shakespeare’s comic vil- lain as a character. Harry Berger Jr. revisits the casket scene in discerning Portia’s divine powers of mercifixion, after which Coppélia Kahn explores male friendship and betrayal in the play. Richard A. Levin traces how the misfortunes of Venice follow the char- acters to idyllic Belmont, the setting of Portia’s villa. Robert Ornstein locates the work’s climactic resolution in the fourth act, which clears the way for the delusions of the play’s ending. Harry Levin returns us to the concord of Belmont and the play’s final act, followed by Tony Tanner’s parsing of Portia’s telling question, upon enter- ing court, “Which is the merchant here? and which the Jew?” W. H. Auden suggests that a society built on speculative trade encour- ages frivolity and impulsiveness in the personal affairs of its citizens, after which Peter D. Holland also meditates on the ducat-mad world of the play. Grace Tiffany concludes the volume exploring the ways self-interest and the law intersect in The Merchant of Venice. vii HAROLD BLOOM Introduction Of Shakespeare’s displaced spirits, those enigmatic figures who some- times seem to have wandered into the wrong play, Shylock clearly remains the most problematical. We need always to keep reminding ourselves that he is a comic villain, partly derived from the grandest of Marlovian scoun- drels, Barabas, Jew of Malta. In some sense, that should place Shylock in the Machiavellian company of two villains of tragedy, Edmund and Iago, yet none of us wishes to see Shylock there. Edmund and Iago are apoca- lyptic humorists; self-purged of pathos, they frighten us because continu- ally they invent themselves while manipulating others. Shylock’s pathos is weirdly heroic; he was meant to frighten us, to be seen as a nightmare made into flesh and blood, while seeking the audience’s flesh and blood. It seems clear to me that if Shakespeare himself were to be resurrected, in order to direct a production of The Merchant of Venice on a contemporary stage in New York City, there would be a riot, quite without the assistance of the Jewish Defense League. The play is both a superb romantic comedy and a marvelously adequate version of a perfectly Christian, altogether murderous anti-Semitism, of a kind fused into Christianity by the Gospel of John in particular. In that latter assertion, or parts of it, I follow after the formidable E. E. Stoll, who observed that Shylock’s penalty was the heaviest to be discovered in all the pound-of-fl esh stories. As Stoll said, in none of them “does the money-lender suff er like Shylock—impoverishment, sentence of death, and an outrage done to his faith from which Jews were guarded even by decrees of German Emperors and Roman pontiff s.” Of all the enigmas presented by 1 2 Harold Bloom Th e Merchant of Venice, to me the most baffl ing is Shylock’s broken acceptance of forced conversion. Is it persuasive? Surely not, since Shakespeare’s Shylock, proud and fi erce Jew, scarcely would have preferred Christianity to death. Consistency of character in Shylock admittedly might have cost Shakespeare the comedy of his comedy; a Shylock put to death might have shadowed the ecstasy of Belmont in act 5. But so does the forced conversion, for us, though clearly not for Shakespeare and his contemporary audience. Th e diffi cult but crucial question becomes: Why did Shakespeare infl ict the cruelty of the false conversion, knowing he could not allow Shylock the tragic dignity of dying for his people’s faith? I fi nd it astonishing that this question has never been asked anywhere in the published criticism of Th e Merchant of Venice. No other Shakespearean character who has anything like Shylock’s representational force is handled so strangely by Shakespeare and ultimately so inadequately. Th at Shylock should agree to become a Christian is more absurd than would be the conversion of Coriolanus to the popular party or Cleopatra’s consent to become a vestal virgin at Rome. We sooner could see Falstaff as a monk than we can contem- plate Shylock as a Christian. Shakespeare notoriously possessed the powers both of preternatural irony and of imbuing a character with more vitality than a play’s context could sustain. I cannot better the judgment on Christian conversion that Launcelot Gobbo makes in his dialogue with the charmingly insuff erable Jessica, that Jewish Venetian princess: Jessica: I shall be sav’d by my husband, he hath made me a Christian! Launcelot: Truly, the more to blame he; we were Christians enow before, e’en as many as could well live one by another.