The Merchant of Venice also plays on the semantic doublings (relatively recent at the time) of terms such as “interest” and “credit”. (Note that the cash debt is mentioned before the love debt.) For his part, Antonio says to Salarino: “Your worth is very dear in my regard.” There does not seem sufficient rhetorical quarantine established between these usages and Shylock’s naked announcement of a deliberate trade (“To buy his favour, I extend this friendship”) to keep the former as innocent as a sunnily redemptive interpretation of the play would wish. Not only romantic love but friendship, too, is metaphorically securitised in this play, as when Bassanio says: “to you Antonio / I owe the most in money and in love”. At the outset, Bassanio has announced his scheme to marry Portia with the words: “I have a mind presages me such thrift / That I should questionless be fortunate.” Thrift means mercenary profit in particular (Shylock refers to his own “well-won thrift”) as well as success more generally while Bassanio’s “fortunate” is the kind of pun a man makes with dollar signs in his eyes.
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Yet it’s surely a deliberately uncomfortable echo of Shylock’s reference, in the trial scene, to his “dearly bought” pound of flesh.Īfter the game of rings in the play, the Arden editor concludes: “Love is not like merchandise it is not simply a question of possessor and possessed.” This is nice to think, but it sounds more like Brown’s uplifting moral than Shakespeare’s. For example, Portia promises to pay off Antonio’s debt and then says: “Since you are dear bought, I will love you dear.” Alexander Pope thought this line unworthy of Shakespeare, but Brown calls it “a joyful acknowledgement of the pleasures of giving for love”. There seems an awful lot of room to doubt this interpretation. Yet most critics – including the editor of the Arden Shakespeare edition, John Russell Brown – have assumed that the Portia story represents a redemptive and happy version of finance, shown to be harmonious with true love. It seemed obvious, in that production’s aftermath, that Shakespeare was satirising the commercialisation of love relations, the infection of ordinary life by money-talk. Nadia Albina and Patsy Ferran in the RSC’s Merchant of Venice.
At the end, Portia tells Antonio that he is going to be Bassanio’s “surety”, to guarantee his faithfulness. He marvels: “Look on beauty, / And you shall see ’tis purchas’d by the weight.” And while Shylock demands the fulfilment of the “bond” that Antonio signed, the pledged lovers twitter happily about “love’s bonds”, and Graziano speaks of the “bargain” of their faith. He refers to Portia’s famed “worth”, and calls her a “rich” “gem”. Bassanio’s pursuit of Portia is first announced as his scheme “to get clear of all the debts I owe”, because Portia is rich. The scenery-chewing eccentricity of Pacino’s performance turned out to be a compelling match for his outcast character, but the production’s most striking aspect was the ironic weight the actors gave to all the financial metaphors that Shakespeare deploys in the love plot.
But more specifically, it is all about the danger of allowing ideas associated with money to reign over our non-economic lives.Ī few years ago, I saw Al Pacino playing Shylock in an open-air production in New York’s Central Park. Shakespeare’s play, of course, is all about money. But they did know the UK was going to have a general election that would largely focus on the right way to manage the country’s money. In planning new productions at the Globe in the spring and the RSC this summer – the latter to be broadcast live in cinemas on 22 July – theatrical producers didn’t necessarily have the battle between Greece and the EU in mind. A s a tale of debt mercilessly pursued, The Merchant of Venice, it seems, will always be topical.
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