Tragicomic Redemptions

Global Economics and the Early Modern English Stage

Valerie Forman

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780812240962, 9780812240962
• eBook ISBN: 9780812201925
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire anglaise

In the early modern period, England radically expanded its participation in an economy that itself was becoming increasingly global. Yet less than twenty years after the highly profitable English East India Company made its first voyage, England was suffering from an economic depression, blamed largely on the shortage of coin necessary to exploit those very same profitable routes. How could there be profit in the face of so much loss, and loss in the face of so much profit?In Tragicomic Redemptions, Valerie Forman contends that three seemingly unrelated domains—the development of new economic theories and practices, especially those related to global trade; the discourses of Christian redemption; and the rise of tragicomedy as the stage's most popular genre—were together crucial to the formulation of a new and paradoxical way of thinking about loss and profit in relationship to one another.Forman reads plays—including Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, The Merchant of Venice, Pericles, and The Winter's Tale, Fletcher's The Island Princess, Massinger's The Renegado, and Webster's The Devil's Law-Case —alongside a range of historical materials that provide a fuller picture of England's participation in a global economy: the writings of the country's earliest economic theorists, narrative accounts of merchants and captives in the Spice Islands and the Ottoman Empire, and documents that detail the development of the English East India Company, the Levant Company, and even the very idea of the joint-stock company. Unique in its dual focus on literary form and economic practices, Tragicomic Redemptions both shows how concepts fundamental to capitalism's existence, such as "free trade, " and "investment, " develop within a global context and reveals the exceptional place of dramatic form as a participant in the newly emerging, public discourse of economic theory.

Part I

Tragicomedy and Generic Expansion

Chapter One

Stasis and Insularity in The Merchant of Venice and Twelfth Night

The Merchant of Venice and Twelfth Night might at first appear an unusual pairing. The Merchant of Venice is deeply steeped in economic questions and concerns, and it could be said that the plight of its main lovers, which is resolved early, is in many ways in service to the economic concerns that dominate the play.¹ Given the role of a pound of flesh as collateral for a loan at the center of a conflict between Jews and Christians, it, unlike Twelfth Night, seems a play one could not possibly leave out of a study on the economics of redemption. Twelfth Night, though it has its dark moments, could easily be described as a comedy whose focus is on pairing off its lovers into acceptable couples. Given this focus and its seeming lack of interest in foreign trade in particular, and economic concerns in general, Twelfth Night might even seem an odd play to include in a study about the relationship between genre and economic practices.² Yet what unites these otherwise divergent plays and what makes them important to begin this study is their relationship to the tragicomic. I begin with these plays because both gesture toward a tragicomic pattern in which losses can be redeemed, but then do not stay on that course. I read both plays as partial generic hybrids that ultimately foreclose their tragicomic potential, not by being too tragic but by conforming too closely to the conventions of comedy. Both plays seem to imagine possibilities for profit, but fail to do so because comedic closure requires the elimination of sources of tensions and conflict. These comedies, then, produce safely insular, but also static, economies. As a result, neither play fully recognizes the redemptive, that is, fortunate, potential of loss to lead to productive transformations.

This chapter’s purpose is thus, in part, to show how the limitations that develop from comedy’s insistence on closure as a form of resolution prevent the plays from formally solving the problems that motivate them. And yet in pointing to what the genre lacks, these plays—as I will argue throughout this chapter—nonetheless serve as stepping stones to the genre of tragicomedy, which tries to imagine expansion as a safe source of profitability, precisely by transforming potential loss into profit. In my reading of The Merchant of Venice, I explore how the play’s implementation of the economic logic of Christian redemption in the infamous pound of flesh reinvisions the play’s economic problems and helps to illuminate the formal limitations that keep the play from resolving those problems. I then turn to Twelfth Night, a play that abstracts similar economic problems into the form as a means of more explicitly representing the problems as the limitations of comedy itself.

Loss and Redemption in The Merchant of Venice; Or, Who Needs Shylock

Of all the plays in this study, The Merchant of Venice is the one in which trade most explicitly threatens to have tragic consequences, that is, in which trade itself is explicitly foregrounded as a potential cause of great loss and suffering. Indeed, the play opens with Salerio and Solanio speculating that the cause of Antonio’s sadness is the potential danger that his ships and all of the goods within them face on the seas. Putting himself in Antonio’s place, Solanio insists,

. . . had I such venture forth

The better part of my affections would

Be with my hopes abroad.

. . . And every object that might make me fear

Misfortune to my ventures out of doubt

Would make me sad.³

Salerio reinforces and intensifies this connection by going on to note that, were he Antonio, anything that might remind him of his ships and the dangers on the seas would make him sad—for example, his own breath cooling broth would remind him of the wind, or the “holy edifice” of stone he entered when he went to church would remind him of dangerous rocks. Harmless, even beneficial or sacred, things become reminders of things potentially tragic. Thus, he imagines that the rocks / holy edifice would “scatter all her [the ship’s] spices . . . / Enrobe the roaring waters with [his] silks, / And, in a word, but even now worth this, / And now worth nothing?” (1.1.33–36). In his account, overseas trade provides a potentially tragic perspective; in a world that trade dominates, all things can be signs of loss. In such a world, a rich cargo—so rich as to be indexed sufficiently by the all encompassing “this”—can, in a moment, be transformed into nothing.

The opening scene does not, however, imagine loss to be a permanent condition. The scene’s focus shifts from Antonio’s ships to Bassanio’s plan to “get clear of all the debts [he] owe[s]” (1.1.134). Bassanio’s plan is to borrow money from Antonio in order to woo Portia, a “lady richly left” (161). But before he gets to the literal details, Bassanio explains his plan through an analogy to boyhood games of shooting arrows. In those days, if he “lost one shaft,” he would shoot another the same way, watch it more carefully, and thus by “adventuring both,” find both (140, 143). Connecting the analogy to Antonio, he explains, “That which I owe is lost; but if you please / To shoot another arrow that self way / Which you did shoot the first, I do not doubt, / As I will watch the aim, or to find both / Or bring your latter hazard back again, / And thankfully rest debtor for the first” (147–52). After finally revealing the content of his plan (i.e., Portia) he concludes: “I have a mind presages me such thrift / That I should questionless be fortunate” (175–76). Bassanio’s plan, then, is primarily one to redeem losses. Portia is rich. Bassanio, however, emphasizes not only his future wealth if he wins her, but especially the possibility of redeeming himself from his debts. Indeed, he emphasizes his future wealth as the outcome of such a redemption. What is most significant in this moment is the potential to redeem loss and to transform potential loss (the second arrow) into a source, even a means, of redemption.⁴

Bassanio’s arrows thus might be, in part, a response to Antonio’s potential losses discussed in the play’s opening exchange: the arrows signify an alternative to the permanence of loss (even if it is not exactly the same loss). More explicitly, the need for another arrow, that is, to borrow money from Antonio, returns the scene to its opening discussion in a more practical sense. All of Antonio’s money is already at sea invested in ships conducting foreign trade, most likely bringing foreign goods to Venice. Thus, while it might seem that the loss foregrounded in the scene’s opening is not directly connected to Bassanio’s plan to redeem himself, I want to suggest that it is intimately so. My aim here is in part to call our attention to two interrelated functions of the first scene. First, from its opening moments the play is already ruminating on the relationship between loss and the possibilities for redemption. Second, what the two parts of the first scene suggest is that the play might resolve its primarily economic problems (here introduced as the tragic potential of trade, but complicated throughout the play) through the logic of redemption in which a further loss or expenditure can “pay back” what is owed, or ideally even lead to a greater profit.⁵ Thus, even before the play’s conflict is introduced through Shylock and the infamous pound of flesh, we can see how the play sets up both the need and the possibilities for redemption, even if precisely who needs to be redeemed and why alters throughout the play.

As the play continues, the tragic potential of trade seems to recede from the foreground and is displaced, in part, by the pound of flesh, which is at the center of the agreement Antonio makes with Shylock. In place of interest on the loan, Antonio agrees to give up a pound of flesh if he cannot repay the principal on time. Of course, Antonio is at risk of having to give up his flesh only if his ships do not return. But when he defaults, the pound of flesh occupies the center of the play’s conflicts as if the trade itself has ceased to be significant. In what follows, I argue that the pound of flesh both takes the place of the tragic potential of the ships and is the vehicle through which that loss remains and, even becomes, meaningful. If symbolically the pound of flesh registers the deeper fears that the loss of the ships would invoke, it contains within it the cultural contradictions surrounding the early modern understanding of overseas trade. How then does thinking about the pound of flesh within this context add to our understanding of the play’s interest in the problems, especially the economic problems, it raises? If Shylock’s bargain with Antonio becomes the lens through which foreign trade is viewed, a new potentially comic perspective as opposed to the purely tragic one of Salerio and Solanio, how does this substitution of a pound of flesh for ships allow the play to resolve its concerns about foreign trade—about the ubiquity of loss and illegitimate profits—differently?

Collateralizing Christian Flesh

The Merchant of Venice seems to have three major interrelated problems: first, the religious conflict between Christians and Jews; second, the tragic potential of trade; and third, the related concern about the ethical basis of commercial profit, especially, but not only, profit made through usury. Though the pound of flesh partially signifies the tragic potential of trade, it is introduced into the play oddly not as a problem, but as a solution to the conflict between two different ways of doing business that the play essentially divides along religious lines. To oversimplify, the Christian way is to lend money as to friends without charging interest; the Jewish way is to charge interest, that is, to profit financially from the transaction. In order to reconcile the conflict between the two ways of doing business, the pound of flesh needs to serve as the means by which Jews give up interest or needs to make profit compatible with Christianity, or both. On the surface, the pound of flesh provides an easy solution to the conflict between these two ways of doing business by allowing Shylock a means of forgoing interest. Antonio insists that he only lends money gratis. According to their arrangement, Shylock will imitate Christian behavior and principles and he, too, will forgo interest on the loan. In exchange, Antonio agrees to give up a pound of flesh only if he cannot repay the loan on time. In effect, Antonio’s flesh would serve as repayment of the debt—not as interest, but as a substitute form of redemption: Antonio substitutes for Bassanio, and the pound of flesh substitutes both for interest (in the very idea behind the arrangement) and, if Antonio defaults, for the money that cannot be repaid. Antonio accepts the arrangement against Bassanio’s better judgment, because he is certain that he will be able to repay the loan; enough of his ships should come in by that time. Moreover, he remarks that the Hebrew grows “kind”—that is, more like Christians—because in this instance he lends money freely, the practice that according to the play’s Christian characters differentiates Jews from Christians. While it has become commonplace to say that Antonio acts as a sort of Christ figure by offering his flesh as the means for redeeming another, what is more important here is the way that Christ’s self-sacrifice serves as a model for resolving economic conflicts. Antonio’s insistence that he lends money gratis (and thus Shylock’s offer to do so in kind) is very likely modeled on Christ’s blood freely given. Indeed, the early modern injunction to lend expecting nothing in return was explicitly modeled on Christ’s own charitable behavior.

In effect, the model of Christ’s redemption is already on the table before the pound of flesh, which, in turn, I want to argue, even more explicitly instantiates the logic of Christian redemption. The Christian model of redemption is deeply embedded in the pound of flesh in particular, and the play’s economics in general. The pound of flesh as collateral seems shocking; as many critics have suggested, it is evidence of Shylock’s inability to distinguish properly between categorically different domains—the personal and the economic.⁶ As evidence, critics often point to the conflation in his simultaneous lament over his two seemingly incommensurable losses when his daughter Jessica runs off to marry the Christian Lorenzo: “my daughter! O, my ducats!” (2.8.15). While the pound of flesh most certainly seems intended to highlight Shylock’s inability to distinguish between the spiritual and affective on the one hand, and the economic on the other, it would also have signified differently given that the religious and the economic were not so explicitly separate in the early modern period. For a modern audience perhaps nothing seems more remote, that is, categorically separate, from Christian redemption than an economic transaction. “Redemption” (“the act of buying back”), though, as the word itself suggests, had long been an economic concept, that is, understood in economic terms. As I discussed at some length in the introductory chapter, the redemption of mankind by Christ was at least since Anselm understood explicitly as the repayment of a debt to God for the price of mankind’s sins, for mankind’s defrauding or robbing God of what was owed him. Christ’s flesh and blood were (and still are) the “satisfaction.”⁷ While the situation among mankind, God, and Christ is obviously not identical to that among Bassanio, Antonio, and Shylock, one could understand Antonio’s paying freely with his flesh to cover the debts that Bassanio owes to Shylock as analogous to Christian redemption. Clearly the play does not intend to make Shylock God, but the value of the comparison is in understanding the pound of flesh not as a villainous outrage with no analogue, but as a way of bringing the Christian model of redemption to bear on the economic problems and conflicts the play has already raised with its discussion of perilous trade.⁸ The pound of flesh refocuses trade through the lens of the economics of redemption.

While there is a long critical tradition of reading the play’s economic conflicts in dialogue with its religious conflicts, there is almost complete critical silence on the stronger connection between the economics of the play and Christianity itself, that is, that Christ purchases mankind’s sins. This omission is striking given the frequency with which a connection has been made between Antonio’s flesh and Christ’s flesh. Critics have focused on the categorical differences the play ascribes to the economic practices of Jews and Christians, differences the play then undermines. However, it is not just the case that the religious conflict plays out through the economic one or vice versa, but that the narrative of Christian redemption becomes a means to think through economic problems. One exception to my representation of the critical history is Peter Stallybrass, who has insightfully noted the relationship between the pound of flesh and the economics of redemption.⁹ To my knowledge, however, no critic has linked the connection between Christian redemption and Antonio’s offer back to the play’s concerns with perilous trade, nor has the connection been linked to the play’s genre and formal properties. In what follows I seek to demonstrate how an analysis of Christian redemption reworks our understanding both of the play’s economics and of the play’s formal limitations to resolve those economic problems.¹⁰ My intent is not merely to illuminate an economic theme (e.g., whether the play promotes or is resistant to certain kinds of economic practices). Nor am I attempting only to provide a context (e.g., the emergence of capitalism or reformation doctrine) to illuminate the play’s thematics. Instead I am interested in exploring both the way that the thematics of trade and redemption are impacted (and even limited) by formal questions and how the play works through formal problems by thinking through religious and economic questions. I am thus reading the play’s thematics in the context of formal negotiations. In particular, I read the play as a comedy whose formal problems relate to, and even anticipate, problems faced by early modern economic theorists in their attempts to understand and explain why financial losses can be impermanent rather than unredeemable.

Revenge and Fortune

As I discussed in the Introduction, the story of Christian redemption has a particular narrative arc. The fall of mankind (a tragic loss) and the resulting debt to God are not only paid but also overpaid by Christ, who is both man and God. Anselm’s rebuttal of the argument in which the devil has the right to man not only reassigns man to God but also emphasizes the plenitude of God’s grace and mercy and the profit that man accrues th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction. The Economics of Redemption: Theories of “Investment” and Early Modern English Tragicomedy
• Part I: Tragicomedy and Generic Expansion
• Part II. Eastern Engagements
• Epilogue. Webster’s The Devil’s Law-Case, the Limits of Tragicomic Redemption, and Tragicomedy’s Afterlife
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Acknowledgments