Shakespeare's Comedies

Explorations in Form

Ralph Berry

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317310839
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire

In this lucid and original study, first published in 1972, Ralph Berry discusses the ten comedies that run from The Comedy of Errors to Twelfth Night. Berry's purpose is to identify the form of each play by relating the governing idea of the play to the action that expresses it. To this end the author employs a variety of standpoints and techniques, and taken together, these chapters present a lively and coherent view of Shakespeare's techniques, concerns, and development. This title will be of interests to students of literature and drama.

CHAPTER VI
The Merchant of Venice

Of few Shakespeare plays, I suppose, does our experience vary so widely as with The Merchant of Venice. We come to it, at school, as a simple melodrama. We may retain this interpretation into adult life, intellectualized as allegory. Justice versus mercy is a respectable codification of the issues generated in the trial scene.¹ Or we can view the play as a potentially subversive study of human relationships mediated by money. It is a difficult play.² Though it is not normally discussed in the context of All's Well That Ends Well and Measure for Measure (its dating is secure to about 1596), The Merchant of Venice seems to belong to the world of the problem comedies.

The problems start with the title. Shakespeare normally identifies the play's protagonist by name in his title. To identify by category may pose a covert question. What sort of "Gentlemen" are The Two Gentlemen of Veronal? Who is the real "Shrew" in The Taming of the Shrew—Katherina or Bianca? Here, one asks: who is the "Merchant"? Surely, Antonio: the cast list makes it clear that Antonio is "a Merchant of Venice," and Shylock "the rich Jew." But it is reasonable to regard Shylock as a merchant of sorts. The parallelism, and latent confrontation of the two is evident throughout the play.³ And Portia enters the Court of Justice with the striking question: "Which is the merchant here? and which the Jew?" IV, 1, 172)⁴ Thus the trial presents a dramatic ikon that expresses the latent question of the title: who is the merchant of Venice? And what sort of person is he?

Our experience of the title, I suggest, is analogous to our experience of the play. The "obvious" reading fails to still our questions. In the theater, we may participate readily in the excitements of the trial, and respond to the almost unflawed lyricism of the final Act. But afterwards: commentator after commentator has written of the unease that the play leaves with him. The alien Shylock and the alienated Antonio; the patness, almost glibness, of the accord between Portia and Nerissa, and their forsworn men, so different from the conclusion of Love's Labour's Lost; Jessica, who has done so well out of robbing her father, whispering with Lorenzo of Cressida, of Dido, of Medea. . . . These are shadows over the moon of Belmont. I think that we must plainly recognize that ambivalence is central to our experience of The Merchant of Venice. I do not seek to explain away this ambivalence, to find a solution that smoothes away the difficulties. What I propose to do is to investigate, and try to define, some of the areas of difficulty in this play.

I

The most inviting approach to The Merchant of Venice lies, I suggest, through its linguistic texture. It is clear that the play's linguistic identity, as it were, is manifest not so much in images as in a small group of associated words of mainly literal status. The key word I take to be "venture"; and it is obviously linked with "hazard," "thrift," "usury," "fortune," "lottery," and "advantage." These terms recur steadily throughout the play. What they have in common is the idea of gain, with a varying degree of risk attached. Suppose, then, that we conceive of the play as a conjugation of the verb to gain. All the relationships in the play (with, I think, the sole exception of Old Gobbo and Launcelot) dramatize this verb. The nominal activity of the dramatis personae is in considerable part, love. What the play demonstrates is the interconnections of love and money. So the terms I have cited extend from commerce to personal relations. The formal principle of The Merchant of Venice, then, I take to be a series of mutations of "venture."

"Venture' virtually opens the play. As a noun, it means a commercial enterprise involving some risk; and its specific application is to overseas trading. It is in this sense that "venture" is introduced, forming the staple of the conversation of Antonio and his friends. Thus the word is fixed to Antonio's trading operations, and to the literal world of commerce, (I, 1, 15, 21, 42) But the associated words refuse to be so fixed. Portia, employing "venture" as a verb, associates it with "hazard" in her dialogue with Bassanio: "Before you hazard, . . ./ Before you venture for me." III, 2, 2 ... 10) The context is love, and the meaning of "venture" here is simply "risk." Again, "thrift" is essentially a commercial term, meaning "profit"; it is in this sense that Antonio and Shylock debate its application in I, 3. The word is however employed in the more general sense of "success," especially in love. Thus Bassanio: "I have a mind presages me such thrift/That I should questionless be fortunate!" (I, 1, 175-176) And Morocco: "Thrive I as I may . . ." (II, 7, 60) Bassanio does a little more to erode the firm, literal status of "venture." Elaborating his "arrow" metaphor, he introduces the verb "adventure": "and by adventuring both/I oft found both." (I, 1, 143-144) The word is thus linked with "hazard," in "Or bring your hazard back again" (I, 1, 151), and so to the casket scenes and the repeated motto: "Who chooseth me must give and hazard all he hath." The point I seek to establish is that "venture," in conjunction with its associated terms, has no really firm basis of meaning (as the play unfolds). It tends to slide away from the literal, commercial sense to the more generalized sense of personal gain; almost, indeed, to the overtly metaphoric. The drift of the play is to suggest that "venture," so firmly literal in the opening scene, is in fact a figure for human activity. The ambivalence that we detect as the central experience of the play applies to its core of language.

II

This argument is buttressed if we agree to regard "ships" (the nominal embodiment of "venture") as the symbolic extension of Antonio. There is a very broad hint that we should do so in the opening scene. Salerio introduces a crucial simile:

Your mind is tossing on the ocean,
There where your argosies with portly sail—-
Like signiors and rich burghers on the flood, . . .

(I, 1, 8-10)

This is a clear enough instance of the associative, i.e., metaphor-making mind in action. State the trope, "A merchant is like a ship," and few will miss the point. State "A ship is like a merchant" and as few will hit it. Yet both statements are the same, not in logic, but in the realm of the imagination. One must certainly distinguish, technically, between symbol and metaphor so far as it is possible.⁵ Ships are a literal presence in the play, off stage, and thus gather to themselves a symbolic weight. They also furnish metaphors in a few passages, notably Gratiano's image. (II, 6, 14-19) My view is that symbol and metaphor tend to fuse in this play (as they do, for example, in the flower-humanity analogies of The Winter's Tale, IV, 4), and that the "ship" allusions form a collective figure, a running parallel to the situation of Antonio. When, therefore, Solanio says

Believe me, sir, had I such venture forth,
The better part of my affections would
Be with my hopes abroad.

(I, 1, 15-17)

we are to understand the true situation of the distrait Antonio. He, in plain terms, is the "wealthy Andrew," whose personal calamity is symbolically foreshadowed in the apprehensions of Salerio. But the parallelism of a ship and Antonio is not a blatant and restricted symbolic equation. The great masters of symbolism do not create thus. Sartre, discussing Tintoretto, makes the point:

Tintoretto did not choose that yellow rift in the sky above Golgotha to signify anguish or to provoke it. It is anguish and yellow sky at the same time. Not sky of anguish or anguished sky; it is an anguish become thing, an anguish which has turned into yellow rift of sky, and which thereby is submerged and impasted by the proper qualities of things, by their

impermeability, their extension, their blind permanence, their externality, and that infinity of relations which they maintain with other things. That is, it is no longer readable.⁶

Similarly, the ship is Antonio, and his hopes, disaster, and salvation. The parallels, which are scattered throughout the play, are too obvious to warrant discussion here. I should add, however, that I find entirely convincing N. Nathan's speculation that Shakespeare knew that "Goodwins" meant "good friends":⁷

Salerio: Why, yet it lives there unchecked that Antonio hath a ship of rich lading wracked on the narrow seas—the Goodwins I think they call the place, a very dangerous flat, and fatal, where the carcasses of many a tall ship lie buried as they say, if my gossip Report be an honest woman of her word.

(III, 1, 2-7)

So Antonio is wrecked on the shoals of friendship. The alternative to Nathan's suggestion is a happy accident of, to me, a high degree of improbability. And the play ends, for Antonio, on this cadence:

Sweet lady, you have given me life and living!
For here I read for certain that my ships
Are safely come to road.

(V, 1, 286-288)

III

I now return to "venture." First, I want to examine the implications of "venture" (in its literal sense of "commercial enterprise") that are touched on, if not properly investigated, in the confrontation between Antonio and Shylock in I, 3. All arguments, it is said, are arguments about words. So it is here. There are two words that Antonio and Shylock apply respectively to their professional activities: "Venture" and "thrift." These are both hurrah-words. (Bassanio even applies "thrift" to his project of marrying Portia, I, 1, 175.) In the clash between Antonio and Shylock, "venture" and "thrift" are opposed to "usury" and "interest." These are boo-words, and Shylock's muttered "my well-won thrift,/Which he calls interest" establishes the antithesis, (I, 3, 46-47) The real question, naturally, is how far these emotive labels describe the same process.

The opposition is between "venture" and "interest." "Venture" applies to overseas trading with an apparent element of risk attached. "Interest" is a fairly safe means of ensuring steady profits, at home. At first sight, the two modes of profit-making are quite different. That is the line that Antonio takes. He holds to it stoutly when Shylock probes him:

Methoughts you said you neither lend nor borrow Upon advantage.

I do never use it.

affirms Antonio, (I, 3, 65-66) Shylock then proceeds to the spun-out tale of Jacob's dealings with his Uncle Laban's sheep. (It is curious that this passage is often cut in performance: the metaphoric association of money-making and breeding is intellectually at the center of the play.) He concludes with "This was a way to thrive, and he was blest;/And thrift is blessing if men steal it not." (I, 3, 85-86) The implicit question is: isn't this a legitimate (if sharp) means of profit-making? But Antonio will have none of Shylock's attempt to annex his (intellectual, and thus moral) territory.

This was a venture, sir, that Jacob served for,
A thing not in his power to bring to pass,
But swayed and fashioned by the hand of heaven.
Was this inserted to make interest good?
Or is your gold and silver ewes and rams?

(I, 3, 87-91)

This is clear enough. A "venture" is morally defensible because it has an uncertain outcome, i.e., requires the decision of Heaven; it is, as we should say, something of a gamble. Whereas interest-taking, apparently, is stigmatized by the relative certainty of its profits.

But the matter isn't as simple as that. Antonio's position, that a "venture" is respectable because of the risk attached, is extremely feeble. Moral distinctions are not established by gradation of risk. Antonio's line sounds oddly reminiscent of the tendency, which J. K. Galbraith noted, for the chairmen of vast corporations, each possessing more stability than half the members of the United Nations, to laud the virtues of enterprise and competition, i.e., risk. The aim of commerce, in the past no less than now, has always been to reduce if possible to zero the uncertainties attendant upon making money. But we ought to examine Antonio's claim in the light of the associations an Elizabethan would bring to it. For him, "venture" would connote the spectacular State/ private-enterprise syndicates of the late sixteenth century: the voyages, part-war, part-exploration, part-trade of Raleigh, Frobisher, Fenton, and many others. This form of investment enjoyed the highest repute. The Queen backed such voyages; the Court backed them; the great city magnates backed them. The risks were admittedly substantial. But if only one ship in three returned home, the investor might show a sound profit. If the enterprise were lucky, a number of fortunes would be made. Fortunes could be lost, certainly—though not by any one man, unless he were exceptionally rash—and nothing afterwards matched the profits of Drake's voyage of 1577-1580, which yielded a return of £47 on every pound invested. That, however, was only the most spectacular of the ventures. Far less ambitious alternatives existed. By 1596, the merchants of Bristol had for years been making very considerable, steady profits from the imports of luxury goods from the Indies—spice, hides, sugar. To stress the element of "risk" in that context—a context of which the Merchant's original audience would be fully aware—would be rather naive. Furthermore, the element of risk would be minimized by spreading one's investment over a number of ventures: this is the principle Antonio alludes to in "My ventures are not in one bottom trusted." (I, 1, 42) Given normal ventures in Tripoli, Mexico, England, Lisbon, Barbary, and India (III, 2, 268-269), one would have to be quite astonishingly unlucky to lose the lot. This is what happens to Antonio in Act III; quite. But it is hardly a convincing way of winning an argument in Act I.

IV

So Antonio, who had stressed the element of safety while discussing his ventures with Salerio and Solanio, stresses the element of risk with Shylock. It is not a position distinguished for intellectual consistency, or conviction. And underlying the literal, or manifest meaning is the metaphoric. This undercurrent of debate is obliquely hinted at by Shylock, and perhaps understood by Antonio.

The prevailing custom, in the Venice of the play as in England, was that money was lent gratis to friends and with interest to strangers. That is a way of putting it. Another is to say that by lending out money gratis, one makes the recipient one's friend. It was, no doubt, a congenial way of cementing amity between the high-born and those, however cultivated, in trade. Shylock does not speculate overtly on Antonio's motives, but he r...