Contracted Time: Apocalypse and Identity in The Merchant of Venice

In the courtroom scene of  The Merchant of Venice, Shylock refers to Portia/Balthasar as “Daniel come to judgement.” This Scriptural citation is then thrown back at Shylock when the judgment turns against him: “A second Daniel, a Daniel, Jew,” says the graceless Graziano.¹ In his pathbreaking Shakespeare and the Jews, James Shapiro discusses the significance this reference to the apocalyptic prophet Daniel would have had in a play about the conversion of two Jews to Christianity. As Shapiro shows, the millenarian hope for the conversion of the Jews that reached a peak with the formal readmission of Jews to England in the 1650s was “well established,” and even “flourished,” in the popular imagination by the time Merchant was first performed.² Antonio gives voice to this hope at the beginning of the play when he agrees to Shylock’s bond: “The Hebrew will turn Christian” (1.3.175). Spurred by Paul’s remark that “all Israel shall be saved” (Romans 11.26), millenarian speculations held the conversion of the Jews to be a sign of the coming end and testament to the providential rightness of the Church of England under its Virgin Queen in the struggle against the Antichrist.³ In light of the eschatological significance of the conversion of the Jews in the Elizabethan imagination, the reference to Daniel at this climactic moment in the play, Shapiro writes, “called to mind first and foremost the Jewish prophet who foresaw the final judgement, an event precipitated by the conversion of the Jews.”⁴

This essay seeks to develop this eschatological sense of the “second Daniel” into a reading of the play’s comedic-apocalyptic form. The allusion to the apocalyptic prophet Daniel—a name that means “Judgment of God” in Hebrew and that the Geneva Bible glosses as “Judge of the Lord”—in a scene concerned with the conversion of the Jews turns the courtroom scene of the play into a scene of Last Judgment.⁵ I aim to show how the several allusions to Daniel in the courtroom scene resonate outward to the thematic and temporal structure of the play more broadly. Though crucial to the thematic structure of the play, this apocalyptic register has received little sustained attention. Interpretation of the play has often put its core Pauline dichotomies (flesh and spirit, debt and grace, law and mercy, old and new) at the center, and the emphasis on Paul in philosophy and critical theory over the last two decades has given new life to understanding Shakespeare’s imaginative engagement with the Pauline epistles.⁶ But these Pauline dichotomies must be understood alongside Paul’s eschatological expectation.⁷ For Paul, as Shakespeare appears to read him, these dichotomous terms are not statically opposed but overlap in a dialectical tension between suspension and fulfillment of the contracted time between Christ’s resurrection and his second coming. I argue that in The Merchant of Venice, this contracted time, wherein the various terms of the old and new covenants overlap, is analogous to the contracted time of the play, which condenses the three months of the contracted time of the bond into the two hours’ traffic of the stage. Dramatic time and its realization of comic union depend on the audience’s “imaginary forces” to transcend the chronological time that precedes it. Chronological time, however, is never fully transcended but rather persists alongside the dramatic time, just as the old conditions of the time before Christ persist in the new time between his resurrection and second coming.⁸ The trajectory of the play’s comic conclusion, with the Christians newly enriched thanks to the state’s seizure of Shylock’s wealth, echoes the formulation for the conversion of the Jews in Romans 11.12: “If the fall of [the Jews] be the riches of the world, and the diminishing of them be the riches of the Gentiles, how much more shall their abundance be?”⁹ The play’s literalization of Paul’s economic metaphor underscores the irony of its vision of Christian unity. As the play makes explicit, the conversions of Shylock and Jessica are not without qualification. They hold before the audience the image of the comic-apocalyptic fulfillment of history in its last judgement, while this image is simultaneously shown to be limited to the dream-world time of the drama, whether Portia’s or Shakespeare’s.

Grasping the apocalyptic dimension of Merchant expands the scope of interpretations surrounding the question of its anti-Semitism and anti-Judaism or, rather, sheds light on the conditions that make this question’s wide range of interpretations possible. The forced conversion of Shylock, which is the primary key to the play’s apocalyptic associations, has no parallel in Shakespeare’s source texts. The dissonance it produces in the play’s comic conclusion poses a challenge to readers, critics, and directors alike. Apologetic readings of the play—that is, readings that argue for a more sophisticated depiction of Shylock than anti-Semitic farce or philo-Semitic pathos—have tended to fall into two categories. In one, the allegorical or typological reading, the play’s Pauline oppositions between law and mercy, flesh and spirit, Old Testament and New, are seen to figure Shylock as the former term to be transcended and surpassed in its universal fulfillment.¹⁰ This reading transposes anti-Semitic farce into a theological key: the Jew is the fleshly remainder to be discarded and surpassed in the spiritual covenant and heavenly bliss of the final act. In the other, the ironic reading, the persecution of Shylock is seen to expose the hypocrisy of the Christian Venetians, who are proved to be as vile as Shylock.¹¹ Such a reading also fails to exonerate the play of the charge of anti-Semitism. At best, the Venetian Christians are shown to be as bad as the Jew, with Jewishness functioning as the benchmark of wickedness.¹²

Of course, such readings are not wrong because they fail to exonerate the play of anti-Semitism. On the contrary, I argue that they accurately describe the play, but within certain horizons that it then transcends. On the one hand, Shakespeare appears happy to pander to the most vulgar anti-Semitism of the audience even as he pulls one over on them—this is why the play could never be properly performed on the modern stage without awakening the anti-Semitism of the Grazianos of the crowd—and he appears equally prepared to reproduce the more sophisticated but no less vulgar theological anti-Semitism that relegates the Jew to the covenant of flesh to be surpassed and left over. On the other hand, Shakespeare seeks to surpass and thematize this Protestant typological reading in order to subsume it into a more comprehensive, eschatological fold. In thematizing the appearance and failure of these interpretive horizons within his Jacob’s ladder of a vision, Shakespeare lays an artful series of snares to entrap the wisest who try either to condemn or exonerate him. The critic seeking to one-up him will find the play has yet another hold.

The argument that follows unfolds in three parts. In the first part, I outline the general apocalyptic theme that runs through the play and its legibility to Shakespeare’s audiences. In the second part, I discuss the analogous relationship between eschatological and dramatic time in order to demonstrate how the apocalyptic register opens new understandings of the play’s presentation of its two intertwined universalisms, Christianity and global commerce. This somewhat technical argument paves the way for the third section’s demonstration of how the divine-comedic form both effects and undermines union at the individual and societal levels. Here, the relation between the play’s apocalyptic register and its treatment of Christian universalism becomes clear.

I. The Merchant of Venice as Apocalyptic Comedy

The allusion to Daniel that links the trial scene with a scene of eschatological judgment is made more pronounced by the fact that Portia’s pseudonym, Balthasar, closely resembles both the name imposed upon the apocalyptic prophet Daniel while he is captive in the Babylonian court (1.7), and the Babylonian king whose dreams Daniel later interprets (5.1).¹³ Portia’s pseudonym, that is, deepens the apocalyptic allusion to Daniel.¹⁴ Despite the connection between the conversion of the Jews and Christian eschatology, and its amplification by the appearance of Portia as the final judge under the same pseudonym given to the quintessential eschatological prophet, the apocalyptic elements of The Merchant of Venice have not been recognized as readily as elsewhere in Shakespeare’s works.¹⁵ I suspect this is because our ears are more tuned to the cosmic violence of the Johannine apocalypse than the kairotic subtleties of Pauline eschatology. Rather than the great struggle against Antichrist, The Merchant of Venice primarily adopts Pauline eschatology’s emphases on dissolution of difference, temporal anticipation, and covenantal suspension and fulfillment.

The dissolution of difference underway in the contracted time between Christ’s ascension to heaven and his second coming become, in Shakespeare’s dramaturgy, the contracted time of the play and its actors’ transcendence of personal identity. The “putting on” of the costumes and play takes the place of Paul’s motif of “putting on” Christ as a garment (Galatians 3.27).¹⁶ The time of Paul’s universalist maxim—when there is “neither Jew nor Grecian, … neither bond nor free, … neither male nor female” (Galatians 3.28)—is fulfilled on the stage where men and boys dress up as men, women, boys, or women disguised as boys. When Jessica disguises herself as a boy to run away with Lorenzo, we have a Christian boy actor playing a Jewish woman disguised as a Christian boy in order to become a Christian woman. At this point we begin to wonder, with Lancelot Gobbo and St. Paul, at the limits of personality—the flesh, the garment, the veil—and whether they really can uphold the “difference” of the case or are torn to reveal something radically new. The answer is deferred beyond the frame of the play, when the actors take off their disguises and Bassanio at last, in the off-stage consummation of his covenant, encounters the naked flesh of Portia, the gate (porta) of the apocalypse, the “second Daniel,” the eschatological judge and bride. Within this dense cluster of eschatological tropes, Lorenzo’s arrival in Act 2 to lead Jessica to her conversion and steal her father’s valuables signals to the audience that the day of the Lord has come, like a thief in the night.

This eschatological expectation is heightened by the pacing of the play, which condenses the three months contracted for Antonio’s debt bond into the time of the performance. This condensation of time is made conspicuous as an accelerating tension of deferred fulfillment in the lead-up to the courtroom scene. When Graziano and Salarino arrive on the night of the various flights from Venice, we learn that Lorenzo is late: “[H]is hour is almost past” (2.6.2). The characters have all been preparing for a masque, but Antonio arrives at the end of the scene to inform Graziano that the pressing hour and its rushing winds have thwarted this anticipated revelry:

The anticipated comic revelry is cut short, as it will be in Belmont when news from Venice interrupts the marriage rites. The scenes with the suitors Morocco and Aragon stress unveiling and re-concealing of metals (2.7.1, 2.7.78, 2.9.1, 2.9.83). The mystery of the metals, especially with the added weight of the later allusions, is itself a likely echo of Daniel’s prophetic deciphering of Nebuchadnezzar’s dream of metals (Daniel 2.31–45). The veil and Nerissa’s urgency—“Quick, quick, I pray thee; draw the curtain straight” (2.9.1)—add to the gravity of a pending mystery about to be revealed. This twice-deferred apocalyptic anticipation begins to be fulfilled when, after Aragon’s departure, a messenger announces the arrival of a “young Venetian” (presumably Lancelot Gobbo) who “comes before / To signify th’approaching of his lord” (2.9.86–87). But this anticipated fulfillment is again cut short. We learn in the next scene of the impending doom that is to follow Antonio’s shipwreck, and by the time Portia is trying to “tarry” the accelerating time and keep Bassanio from taking his turn at solving the mystery of the metals, the three months of contracted time has suddenly and imperceptibly elapsed (3.2.1). The happy resolution to follow the successful deciphering of the mystery is again cut short. Shylock’s bond, with the repeatedly emphasized authority of the apocalyptically weighty “seal,” is due.¹⁷ The day of judgement and the artfully developed suspension of its “last hour of act” have arrived (4.1.18).

The apocalyptic register I have been highlighting would have been readily legible within what was by the 1590s a recognizable if varied apocalypse tradition on the English stage and in the Elizabethan imagination.¹⁸ The composition, publication, and first performance of The Merchant of Venice coincided with the wave of renewed apocalyptic fervor following the Spanish Armada in 1588.¹⁹ The defeat of the Armada gave new life to the national narrative, voiced most prominently in John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments of These Latter and Perilous Days, that England represented the front of the true Church in its struggle toward the eventual overthrow of the papal Antichrist.²⁰ The tradition on the popular stage of this apocalyptic national optimism culminates in Thomas Dekker’s 1605 The Whore of Babylon and includes Thomas Kyd’s 1592 The Spanish Tragedy, one of the most popular plays of the period.²¹ This post-Armada apocalypse tradition also fits within a wider tradition of apocalyptic anti-Catholicism in English drama that extends long before and long after the Armada.²² Although not limited to a particular genre, this tradition lends itself especially to comedy, which suits the divine-comedic structure of the Christian Bible and its apocalyptic conclusion. The prefatory material and subtitle to Foxe’s own dramatic rendering of his apocalyptic vision, Christus Triumphans (1556), categorizes the play as a comoedia apocalyptica.²³ As Adrian Streete glosses the term in his account of English apocalyptic drama, comoedia apocalyptica “fuses the spiritual and the temporal, national and international concerns … combining the Classical genres of Old and New Comedy with Christian allegory and typology.”²⁴

I suggest that The Merchant of Venice may fit within this broadly understood tradition of the apocalyptic comedy: it stages conventional comic types alongside theological questions, while the apocalyptic expectation tied to the conversion of the Jews is fulfilled by its virgin heroine. One can see why this dovetailing of conventional Elizabethan national narratives and religious themes appealed to James VI/I, who wrote his own Foxean interpretation of Revelation in the year of the Armada and republished it in 1603.²⁵ After seeing The Merchant of Venice performed on Shrove Sunday 1605, James was so taken with its religious tenor that he had it re-performed on Shrove Tuesday, the day before Ash Wednesday and the beginning of Lent.²⁶ But if The Merchant of Venice participates in a recognizable English apocalyptic tradition, it also stands apart from it by rejecting triumphalist millenarian visions of Christian apocalypse. Whereas the national apocalypticism of Foxe and James stresses that the long-awaited end has finally arrived, the eschatological time of The Merchant of Venice, as I will show in the next section, is characterized not by the apocalypse itself but by its continual ironic deferral.²⁷

II. Eschatological and Dramatic Time

The persistence of history was a serious problem for the earliest followers of Jesus in the years after his death. Despite the miraculous event of Christ’s resurrection, people continued to die, to endure marital strife, to suffer oppression. The Messiah had come, so why had the kingdom not been delivered? When advising the church at Corinth about how to understand the previous order of the world and the law of Moses in light of the new age brought forth by the Gospel, Paul makes use of the figure of contracted or folded time. Previous conditions, Paul says, will persist alongside the time of Christ’s second coming. The two times, that is, overlap: “And this I say, brethren, because the time is short, hereafter that both they which have wives, be as though they had none: And they that weep, as though they wept not: and they that rejoice, as though they rejoiced not: and they that buy, as though they possessed not: And they that use this world, as though they used it not: for the fashion of this world goeth away” (1 Corinthians 7.29–31). When Paul refers to time having grown “short” (1 Corinthians 7.29), the Greek word sunestalmenos can also have the sense of “folded together.”²⁸ That is, the time between the death of Christ and the total fulfillment of his promise exists alongside the time that came before, as though the two are folded together. This folding together creates an overlap of the past difference (most notably, between Jew and Gentile) and the future unity that is realized in Christ. The incomplete movement from difference to unity is articulated in these verses by Paul’s famous “as not,” where the rupturing event of Christ’s resurrection has rendered each identity or characteristic, paradoxically, as though it were its negation. The end has not fully arrived to leave the past behind but rather overlaps with the historical time that came before and persists.

This overlap of eschatological with historical or chronological time is analogous to the temporal overlap of dramatic performance, whose reality depends on the imaginary force or awakened faith of the audience in the play and playwright. The time of the play exists alongside the chronological time outside the performance, when the actors put on their costumes and audience members find their seats. Detecting a deployment of this dramatic-eschatological parallel in The Winter’s Tale, Ken Jackson has powerfully demonstrated how Shakespeare renders the onset of Leontes’s jealousy at the beginning of the play as a confrontation with this overlap of chronological time and the redeemed time of Christ’s death, resurrection, and second coming. Unable to comprehend the “as not” of grace-inflected time, Leontes can comprehend Hermione’s gesture of universal love toward Polixenes only in terms of the hard differences and rivalries of chronological time.²⁹ The experience of the Pauline eschatological time that Leontes must learn to inhabit to experience the resurrection of Hermione (staged by the aptly named Paulina) resembles the faith or imaginative engagement demanded of a theater audience.³⁰ The play’s dramatic time, the players’ brief moment upon a stage that can condense sixteen years into an hourglass, is analogous to the contracted, difference-dissolving time between Christ’s death and second coming.

The apocalyptic themes of The Merchant of Venice bring about a similar structural relationship between dramatic and eschatological time, although its effect in this earlier comedy is considerably more ironic. The transcendence of the bonds of chronological time is offered up only to be cut down or deferred. The character of Jessica reminds the audience throughout the play of this limitation of stagecraft to effect this total transcendence. In running off with Lorenzo, she is undergoing baptism and leaving her fleshly inherited Jewish difference behind to join the unity of the Christians. In light of the other apocalyptic themes of the play, her marriage to Lorenzo is an image of her membership in the Church, which is the bride to be mystically joined with Christ.³¹ Like Portia’s adoption of the role of Balthasar, Jessica’s “garnish of a boy” points toward the fulfillment of the expectations of the arrival of the apocalyptic bridegroom while at the same time evoking the stagecraft of the theater (2.6.45). Her appearance disguised as a boy reminds the audience that the actor playing her is himself a boy. The character’s disguise is in fact the removal of the actor’s disguise, and this irony accounts in part for Jessica’s expressed anxiety that the disguise cannot properly conceal her: “[M]ust I hold a candle to my shames? / They in themselves, good sooth, are too too light. / … / … I should be obscured” (ll. 41–44). This limitation of the disguise, a marker of the limitations of the theater itself, is paired with the idea reinforced by Lancelot later in the play, that Jessica’s Jewish ancestry bars her from membership in the mystical body of the Church, despite her baptism and marriage. When she leaves to better conceal herself, Graziano sarcastically taunts Lorenzo about his Jewish bride: “Now, by my hood, a gentile and no Jew” (l. 51).³² The boy playing Jessica cannot fully escape the fleshly marker of his identity just as Jessica cannot fully escape her Jewish identity.³³ Both the play and Christian eschatology approach comic unity but are brought up short by the “muddy vesture of decay” that cannot fully transcend the historical time that came before the dramatic or eschatological time (5.1.64).³⁴

The play’s treatment of the Pauline dichotomies—between law, debt, flesh on one hand, and mercy, grace, spirit on the other—must be understood within the double temporality of Pauline eschatology and its counterpart of dramatic time. Critics have long noted the ironies by which these dichotomies break down. The mercy transcendent of law to which Portia appeals in the courtroom proves to be a more scrupulous application of Venetian law. These two ways of reading the play, as either genuine comic resolution or ironic dissonance, turn on the play’s thematization of dramatic-eschatological time. If we accept the time of the play and the time of the end as events of dissolution of difference, then we are watching a comic resolution. If we look with the anamorphic perspective that allows us to see the skull concealed in the surface, then we must recognize that we are still stuck in an endless sequence of historical rivalry. The fulfillment of history in the coming of Christ in glory coincides with the stubborn persistence of the chronological time that came before. Just as Shakespeare can give the Grazianos in the audience what they want (although they will regret not seeing Shylock hanged), he can also ensure that those committed to the truth of this allegorized Christian Gospel, say, perhaps, the Antonios in the audience, can walk away pleased as well.³⁵

But Shakespeare is not prepared to stop at a crude Protestant typology, and his careful reading of his Scriptural source texts will not allow it. Whereas Luther, Calvin, and the Protestant exegetical tradition more broadly stressed the opposition between law and gospel and its corresponding binaries, critical Bible scholarship has emphasized how mistaken this understanding of the early authors of the New Testament, especially Paul, is. The grace emphasized in the New Testament is not a radically new innovation to the early followers of Jesus but was already an active part of first-century Judaism, as it was in the Hebrew Bible and would be in the subsequent Rabbinic tradition. Paul’s denunciation of the “works of the Law,” so central to Luther, is not a rejection of the law in itself but rather of a particular understanding of the law as functioning solely as a marker of difference.³⁶

If a perceptive reader like Shakespeare could perhaps not get this far, he could certainly see that there was a great deal more continuity between Christianity and the first-century Judaism that came before it than is assumed by the dominant typological framework.³⁷ As Julia Reinhard Lupton has discovered, when Portia announces the legal technicality that will hold Shylock’s bond and “force” him to show mercy—“This bond doth give thee here no jot of blood” (4.1.303)—Shakespeare quite brilliantly slips into her line a citation of Jesus’s own rejection of any crudely conceived typological surpassing of the law: “Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy them but to fulfill them. For truly I say unto you, Till heaven and earth perish, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled” (Matthew 5.17–18, emphasis added).³⁸ In seeking revenge through the law, Shylock couples law and revenge. Far from suspending and resolving revenge, Portia betters this instruction. Shylock’s options are either death or to have his means of life, and with it his very being, stripped. The Gospel that is supposed to resolve the sequence of revenge turns out to be another iteration of its bloody logic. The appearance of the Christian transcendence of the rivalries and discord is really an effect of Portia’s masterful stagecraft.³⁹ She stages the appearance of the law’s suspension—the law being “as not”—while enacting its scrupulous fulfillment. Such an appeal to the sovereignty of theater is one way Shakespeare seems to make sense of the Christian Bible’s various and sometimes outright contradictory positions on the status of the law.

III. The Ring: Rivalry and Identity

As a comedy, The Merchant of Venice ends in a wedding. The various discords within Venetian society between the lovers and friends resolve themselves in social and festive harmony of nuptial unity. As an apocalyptic comedy, or at least as a comedy with strong apocalyptic resonances, the play gestures in its climactic nuptials toward the final and total unity of the apocalyptic marriage of Christ and the Church, when God shall be “all in all” (1 Corinthians 15.28). Paul sees the event of Christ’s resurrection as effecting this movement from difference to identity: “There is no difference between the Jew and the Grecian” (Romans 10.12; see also Galatians 3.28, quoted above). But he also holds this total dissolution of difference into identity to be not yet complete, which is why he continues just a few verses later to declare his Jewish difference from the Gentiles: “I also am an Israelite, of the seed of Abraham, of the tribe of Benjamin” (Romans 11.1). Difference remains alongside or overlapping with the unity of the coming end. For both Paul and The Merchant of Venice, the movement toward comedy is undermined by the persistence of difference.

The symbol of the ring offers a scheme for grasping these overlapping temporalities and their structural significance for the play’s treatment of difference, identity, and the Christian supersession of the former by the latter. A ring is a closed circle of exchange, like the long, circuitous route Antonio’s loan to Bassanio takes before resulting in a sizable profit, or the cycle of exchange Portia’s ring makes from Portia to Bassanio to Portia’s double Balthasar to Antonio and finally back to Bassanio. The ring is a symbol for the various marital, social, and commercial reunions at the end of the play. These reunions culminate in the return to marital and social union in the Neoplatonic celestial harmonies of Lorenzo’s speech in Act 5. But the ring is not only a symbol of plain identity or unity; it is also a symbol of identity that integrates difference. It is a unity that resolves itself through a circular movement of self-difference. Antonio begins the play with a statement of an identity crisis to be resolved by such a movement:

This concludes with an echo of the Delphic inscription, nosce te ipsum. As the wording of the casket riddles (“Who chooseth me”) in Act 2, scene 7, emphasizes, the mystery of the play is the mystery of self-knowledge. In order to know myself, I must find a point outside of myself from which to know myself. This ring-structure figures the movement of self-reflection, of thinking itself. ⁴⁰ The movement or journey of self-difference resolves itself in a return to unity when one arrives at self-knowledge. One talks to oneself as self-different and thus returns to oneself. This movement of self-difference is also the basic structure of Christian history (the so-called exitus-reditus structure): God, before all creation, contains the all in himself; he becomes self-different in the drama of creation; and finally at the end of time all things return to him in his original unity, when God shall be “all in all” (1 Corinthians 15.28).⁴¹

In The Merchant of Venice, the structural significance of the ring motif is articulated most clearly in the resolution of the ring exchange in the final act of the play. In Act 4, Bassanio gives to Balthasar (the legal doctor who is Portia’s alternate identity) the ring that Portia had earlier given to him (Bassanio). At the height of Portia’s trick on Bassanio, Bassanio sees himself in her reflection, the zenith of self-difference, before Portia unveils her trick and allows him to return to himself and to marital unity:

When Portia reveals that the ring has returned to her, she explains that Balthasar gave it to her and “by this ring the doctor lay with me” (l. 259). That is, Portia received the ring from herself as Balthasar, and laid with this self-different Balthasar upon returning from Venice. The ostensible return to marital unity (to whose ironies and complication I will return) unifies both of these “double selves”: the unveiling of the trick resolves Portia/Balthasar into the singular Portia, and the “double self” of Bassanio, divided between Portia and Antonio, returns to himself. Both identities then join in the unity of the marital couple.

Just as Leontes understood himself to be in a rivalry with Polixenes over Hermione, Portia and Antonio are in a rivalry over Bassanio. Whether or not we interpret Antonio’s affection for Bassanio as erotic, Antonio clearly crafts his letter to make Bassanio’s return from Belmont an affirmation of his love for him at least on par with his love for Portia. Before the arrival of the letter detailing Antonio’s misfortune, Bassanio had kept Antonio and his gratis bond to him carefully concealed from Portia (3.2.257–61). Now, he must decide between seeing his friend for the last time and marrying Portia. Uneasy about this newly introduced rival, Portia urges him to “[f]irst go with me to church and call me wife, / And then away to Venice to your friend” (ll. 301–302). After Bassanio reads Antonio’s letter aloud, its melodrama wins out: “O love, dispatch all business, and be gone!” Portia exclaims (l. 320). Rather than going to church as originally proposed, Bassanio rushes off, without sacramentally affirming or sexually consummating the marriage. The promised nuptial-comic ending is deferred once again.

If Shylock were to succeed and Antonio die for Bassanio’s sake, Bassanio could never return to a happy marriage bought with his friend’s life. So great a sacrifice by Antonio for Bassanio is an expression of love that Portia could never hope to surpass. If Antonio is killed, therefore, he wins out over Portia.⁴² This must be Portia’s primary motivation for the plan to secure Antonio’s deliverance. But having already suffered one loss to Antonio, she suffers another during the trial when Bassanio gives the upper hand of affection to Antonio by offering his life for him:

Before the omniscient “Judge of the Lord,” Bassanio, along with Shylock, is on trial. Having endured this double loss to Antonio, Portia must save her chances for a happy marriage. This is the motivation behind the ring trick. Her careful calculations in this rivalry are wholly within the restricted economy of Venetian exchange. As Shylock happily points out, this is the reality of slaveholding Venetian society (ll. 89–97). Everything, from newborns (3.2.213) to human flesh more generally, is reducible to terms of exchange. That is the law of Venice. Portia abides by this same principle in her scrupulous application of Venetian law and her careful scorekeeping between herself and Antonio.

If a genuine grace should abound beyond the law, beyond rivalry and exchange, it is only fitting that it should occur in the aftermath of the courtroom scene, in the ring exchange at the end of Act 4. When, after Portia/Balthasar’s request, Bassanio refuses to give the ring and thus stays faithful to his marital bond, Portia has won out over Antonio. No matter how great a gift Antonio’s life (which Portia/Balthasar has saved) may be, it cannot surpass the token of Bassanio’s bond to Portia. Bassanio reiterates this significance in terms of its transcendence of the economy of exchange: “There’s more depends on this than on the value” (4.1.430). Antonio, still wanting to get the upper hand, entreats Bassanio to give the ring: “Let his deservings and my love withal / Be valued ’gainst your wife’s commandment” (4.4.446–47). In the last moment of the scene, the economy of grace at last appears to intervene, purely by virtue of the theatrical disguise. In spite of both Antonio’s and Portia’s intentions, the gift is universal: in giving the ring to Balthasar, Bassanio is giving it back to Portia, while also giving it on behalf of Antonio. The gift abounds beyond the boundary of identity and difference. The theatrical disguise dissolves the differences that divide them. Fittingly, Graziano, whose name is otherwise wholly ironic, is the one sent to deliver the gift to Portia. Antonio, freed from his own bond, can rest assured of Bassanio’s affection for him. Portia, having craftily overridden the bond of her father, can now be married to the man of her choice. Thanks to the dramatic disguise’s dissolution of difference, grace has intervened and resolved the rivalry. Or has it? Has Antonio entreated Bassanio to an act of abounding charity, or have the men simply succumbed to what Lars Engle terms Portia’s “triumphant manipulation”?⁴³ Does the fact that this grace is delivered by the man who most loudly demanded revenge against Shylock serve to remind us that we are in the same world as before? The delivery of the ring after the courtroom scene moves toward a grace that abounds beyond the law, but just as the heavens begin to part in a vision of comic union, it is cut down by the inescapability of chronological rivalry and exchange.

The two representational modalities—one with the disguise, one without—at play here mean that the two options coincide. The movement from self-difference to identity turns on the time of the drama. While her trick is in play, Portia is self-different from Balthasar. So long as this is the case, Bassanio is in big trouble, for he has given the ring away to another man and broken his contract, as M. Lindsay Kaplan emphasizes.⁴⁴ But this is only one side of the curtain. Insofar as Balthasar is in fact Portia, the “as not” of disguise dissolves the differences that divide and give need for contracts in the first place. Thanks to Portia’s stagecraft, the ring abounds beyond difference and circulates in the community of love. In giving the ring to Portia/Balthasar, Bassanio is affirming his love for Antonio while also giving the ring back to his wife. Having given herself and all she has entirely to Bassanio with the ring (3.2.165–66), Portia now receives it all back in the self-actualizing return to identity that confirms her liberation from the bond of her father. When she unveils the act, the ring completes its expansive circular movement of exchange: from Portia to Bassanio to Graziano to Balthasar to Portia to Antonio and finally back to Bassanio.⁴⁵ The lovers return to comic unity and finally consummate their marriage. Here, the pun on “ring” as suggesting vulva—a connection made explicit in the word’s appearance as the play’s final word—is particularly revealing.⁴⁶ The time of the play coincides with this time of self-difference, and the unveiling of the disguise closes the ring of exchange and difference. The conclusion appears to return to identity and unity, just as at the play’s end marks the actors’ return from their self-different characters to themselves. The comic resolution is an image of the “all in all” consummation of the apocalyptic wedding.

This comic union depends on the integration of Shylock, the play’s central term of persistent difference. The comic resolution of the play would be the completion of the movement from self-difference to identity at both the individual and societal levels. The restoration of harmonious social union depends on Antonio’s completion of this personal-level movement. Shylock’s status as the term of self-difference at these two levels is made especially clear in the difference between Shylock’s ring from Leah and the ring Bassanio receives from Portia. Shylock’s ring transcends the cycle of exchange. Cast out never to return, it represents a cut circle of exchange, a ring that fails to close on itself (3.1.111–16). On this point, the ironic reading is instructive. If we see Shylock as a mirror of Venetian society, he is its, and particularly Antonio’s, exteriorized double. The Jewish character is the point of exteriorization in whose expulsion the Christians show themselves “the difference of [their] spirit” (4.1.364). The true “difference” of the legal “cause” to be settled in the court is Portia’s question: “Which is the merchant here, and which the Jew?” (l. 171). The comic resolution involves not just the assertion of the difference between the Jew and the Christian but the subsequent integration of the former into the latter. Here, theology and dramatic genre coincide. The dissonance that the audience is made to feel beneath the surface of the play’s ostensibly comic ending has the same cause as the incomplete fulfillment of Christ’s comic-apocalyptic promise: the incorporation of the two Jews into the body of Christ is incomplete. The clownish exchange between Lancelot and Jessica before the courtroom scene makes this point clear in a comic register, while Shylock’s “I am not well” portrays it more darkly (l. 392). The imperfections of Jessica’s and Shylock’s conversions govern the incompleteness of the promised comic ends of both Christian history and the play.

In terms of genre, the counterthrust that resists comic finality is the move toward tragedy. The mechanism of this movement is revenge, and Shylock is its agent. It is obvious that Shylock sees his attempt to get the pound of flesh as revenge for Antonio’s kicking and spitting at him, and against Christian Venetians generally for the loss of his daughter, but it is easily overlooked that Shylock sees the abuse against him to be itself an act of revenge. In his famous speech, Shylock mentions the abuse Antonio and other Christians inflict upon him, and states that this “villainy” is an act of revenge that he will emulate: “[I]f you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that. If a Jew wrong a Christian, what is his humility? Revenge. If a Christian wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be by Christian example? Why, revenge. The villainy you teach me I will execute, and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction” (3.1.62–69). For the Christians to be enacting revenge, there must have been a prior crime that is to be avenged. What crime does Shylock think Antonio and the Christians are avenging? The answer can only be the event that established Shylock’s difference in a Christian-majority Venice: the death of Jesus, so many centuries before. In spitting at, kicking, and calling him dog in the street, Antonio, Shylock figures, is taking his revenge on the “Jew” for killing his savior. Shylock is intimately familiar with the Christian Bible, and he knows what the Christians hold the “Jews” of John’s Gospel responsible for.⁴⁷ He recognizes Antonio’s anti-Semitic hatred and his vengefulness to be, in this manner, one and the same. We are not given to know Antonio’s motivation, but he need not consciously recognize this diagnosis. Shylock’s answer a few lines earlier appears to be an apt description of Antonio’s conscious motive: “[W]hat’s his reason? I am a Jew” (l. 55). But Shylock’s reference to revenge a few lines later completely alters this appeal to identity as sole cause. Rather than playing the victimized other, Shylock reframes their animosity as steps in a transhistorical rivalry. His reference to Christian revenge revises the sense of his “I am a Jew” to “I am of the stock of Barabas” (cf. 4.1.292–94). Each side, the Christian and the Jew, seeks to better the other’s instruction, going back all the way to the scene at Golgotha.

By the “last hour of act” and Portia’s famous “Tarry, Jew,” the spirit of revenge could tip the action of the play to tragedy (ll. 18, 342). The Merchant of Venice invites the anticipation of a tragic outcome up until the moment of Portia’s legal intervention, which saves the comedy and fulfills the variously deferred promise of festivity. But is the forced conversion a resolution to unity or another iteration of the endless sequence of revenge? This is the central question that governs the play’s presentation of Christian supercessionism. The apocalyptic themes that I have been developing hold the two answers to this question together. In his instruction against revenge, Paul does not condemn revenge in itself but rather instructs Christians to defer their revenge with forgiveness, so that it can be fulfilled at the Last Judgement: “Dearly beloved, avenge not yourselves, but give place unto wrath: for it is written, Vengeance is mine: I will repay, saith the Lord” (Romans 12.19). The apocalyptic resonances of the courtroom render Portia as this eschatological “Judge of the Lord.” The play ends with divine-comic union and marriage because the scene of revenge becomes, or seems to become, the scene of the avenging eschatological judge. Portia’s mandate for mercy is fulfilled in the “promised end” of divine vengeance, or its “image.”⁴⁸ The ironies or ambivalences turn on the various representational modalities at play in the scene. If it really is the end, the play endorses the conversion of Shylock as an act of genuine mercy. The ring of history is closed. If it is only its image, then the conversion is a thinly veiled act of revenge. The sequence of rivalry continues.

IV. Conclusion

The apocalyptic resonances of The Merchant of Venice point toward the comic union of the promised, typological end: mercy has superseded law; the Jews have turned Christian; the comic social unity has been restored. But the explicit stagecraft behind Portia’s intervention underscores that the appearance of the apocalyptic suspension and fulfillment of the law is simply that, an appearance, one of the “signs and wonders” deceptively pointing to a promised end that is always “not yet” (Matthew 24.4–23, Mark 13.4–22). The play’s apocalypticism, in other words, expresses an ironic typology, one that undermines its seeming fulfilment.

This tension is borne out in the disjunction between the various roles in the typological or apocalyptic allegory of the play and the characters themselves. In Shylock’s case, this tension (reflected in the variations of his speech prefixes) is between the “Jew,” the raw flesh to be converted in the Christian apocalyptic-typological scheme, and “Shylock,” the defiant personality whose destruction by forced conversion presents an unmitigated loss to so many readers and playgoers. Unlike the spendthrift Lorenzo and the wavering Bassanio, Shylock knows the pricelessness of the token of his wife’s love: “I would not have given it for a wilderness of monkeys” (3.1.115–16). Graziano’s name and role in delivering the ring as a gift to Balthasar suggest a type manifesting the genuine Christian caritas, but we are not able to forget that just minutes before he was calling for Shylock to be hanged. Although Portia’s mercy speech stands as a beautiful piece of poetry that points to the fulfillment of comic-apocalyptic expectation, its glittering surface conceals her merciless application of the law and her own wily, rivalrous intentions. The sweeping romance of Lorenzo and Jessica’s dialogue (“in such a night”) and its Neoplatonic harmonies in Act 5 cannot escape the ironies intimated by its catalogue of unhappy lovers (5.1.1–65).

The clearest indicator that the Christian transcendence of rivalry and difference is not what it seems to be is the fact that material wealth is the vehicle of the play’s Christian apocalyptic resonances. Those redeemed in Portia’s last judgment are whisked away not to heaven but to the aristocratic luxury of Belmont. When Jessica fears that her disguise does not sufficiently transform her Jewish self, she seeks to make her conversion complete by “gild[ing]” herself in “more ducats” (2.6.49, 50). Jessica’s “exchange” (l. 35) turns her into gold that is then transferred to Lorenzo, much as how Shylock’s conversion transfers what remains of his wealth to the Christians. In a literalization of Romans 11.12, the conversion or “fall” (for Shylock they are one and the same) of the Jews is the transferring of their wealth to enrich the Gentiles: “If the fall of them be the riches of the world, and the diminishing of them be the riches of the Gentiles, how much more shall their abundance be?” In becoming Christian, Shylock and Jessica are exchanged into gold. Jessica’s “gilding” disguise makes this exchange literal. In The Merchant of Venice, Paul’s promised dissolution of difference, the long-awaited apocalyptic fulfillment of history, is realized, not in Christ, but in ducats.

Lucas Simpson is supported in part by funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Footnotes