Whether The Merchant of Venice is an anti-Semitic play is a question endlessly debated. Given the fact that Shakespeare most certainly never met a Jew would seem to render the issue moot, inasmuch as his Shylock necessarily, then, becomes a caricature (albeit a complex one) of any societal bogeyman – a convenient foil with whom to contrast (and, uncomfortably, compare) us. For sure, Shakespeare utilizes stereotypical aspects of what was thought to be Jewish: money-lending, parsimony, tribalism, ethnocentrism, etc., but clearly the main thrust of the play is not to muster contempt for Jews. Instead, his intent is to uncover facets of our own cultural and philosophical thinking that rarely are exposed or pondered. In this play, Shakespeare acutely explores the attitudes, prejudices, fears, and fascination with what it means to be foreign.
Shakespeare made sure we didn’t miss the point: there are a lot of foreigners in The Merchant of Venice. Indeed, when we are first introduced to Portia, she and Nerissa are enumerating (and denigrating) the foreign suitors who have traveled to Belmont to woo Portia: a Neopolitan prince, the County Palatine, a French lord, a young Englishman, a Scottish lord, a German duke, and a Morrocan prince.
But it is anatomical foreignness – the difference between the circumcised and uncircumcised – between Venetian Jew and Christian – that Shakespeare cleverly plays upon and then expands into allusions of castration. The vague nature of Antonio’s bond creates the first hint of such:
SHYLOCK:
Go with me to a notary, seal me there
Your single bond, and (in a merry sport)
If you repay me not on such a day
In such a place, such sum or sums as are
Express’d in the condition, let the forfeit
Be nominated for an equal pound
Of your fair flesh, to be cut off and taken
In what part of your body pleaseth me. [I, iii, 143-150]
The fact that Shylock is forcibly converted to Christianity at the end of the play compels us to assume that such mandated conversion was a kind of eye-for-an-eye Shakespearean consequence for Shylock contemplating cutting the genitals of Antonio in fulfilment of the bond. Note that this ritualized cutting of the genitals of the "gentle" gentile would have resulted in a kind of symbolic, perverse circumcision that, in turn, would have forcibly rendered Antonio, at least physically, to be "converted" into the Jewish world of male genital mutilation. This allusion is in no way attenuated when Portia, disguised as the judge Balthazar, reads the bond:
PORTIA:
Why this bond is forfeit,
And lawfully by this the Jew may claim
A pound of flesh, to be cut off
Nearest the merchant’s heart... [IV, i, 228-231]
Shylock seems to be momentarily surprised by the reading – as if it was not how he remembered the bargain:
SHYLOCK:
Ay, his breast,
So says the bond, doth it not noble judge?
"Nearest his heart," those are the very words. [IV, i, 250-252]
Clearly there is a joke here. Shakespeare knew that to continue the scene with any decorum, he would have to divert the focus of the bond from the genitals to the breast. The reference in the lines above to the flesh that is "nearest the merchant’s heart" can of course refer to the breast, but it can also idiomatically refer to that package of muscle and tissue that is "nearest" (and dearest) to the heart of any red-blooded male.
But these are by no means the only references to castration in the play. Antonio’s apparent homosexuality and the anguish of his unrequited affection for Bassanio provide still another symbol of sexual emasculation. Indeed, at the trial scene, Antonio resignedly declares:
I am a tainted wether of the flock,
Meetest for death... [IV, i, 114-115]
A "tainted wether" was a castrated ram, a good candidate to be sacrificed for a meal since it could no longer provide breeding services to increase the flock. (The Christian Eucharistic allusion to the celibate Lamb that is to be killed and eaten resonates here too.) Antonio’s self-reference to a kind of de-sexed sheep subtly evokes a homophone with Antonio’s destroyed ships. This is not the first time that Shakespeare played with the sheep/ship pun. In Love’s Labour’s Lost, Boyet and the ladies exchange indecent quips that begin with a woman referred to as a ship that could be boarded, and then quickly evolves into a woman’s body metaphorically serving as open pasture upon which Boyet, as a sheep, can graze:
MARIA:
That last is Berowne, the merry mad-cap lord:
Not a word with him but a jest.
BOYET:
And every jest a word.
PRINCESS:
It was well done of you to take him at his word.
BOYET:
I was as willing to grapple as he was to board.
KATHERINE:
Two hot sheeps, marry!
BOYET:
And wherefore not ships?
No sheep, sweet lamb, unless we feed on your lips.
KATHERINE:
You sheep, and I pasture: shall that finish the jest?
BOYET:
So you grant pasture for me.
KATHERINE:
Not so, gentle beast:
My lips are no common, though several they be. [II, i, 214-222]
(To fully appreciate the ribaldry here, we must remember that when Katherine refers to "common" she is referring to uncut, "common" [or "waste"] ground that was not enclosed and open to everyone’s use. Cf., Measure For Measure, [II, ii, 169-171] where Angelo’s "Having waste ground enough,/Shall we desire to raze the sanctuary/And pitch our evils there?" puns on "waist" ground as an allusion to prostitution.)
Antonio is not expressly linked to the reference to a ship in The Merchant of Venice, but the allusion to sexual waste and impotency that is caused by a whore’s [strumpet's] venereal disease and tied to the metaphor is plainly meant to connect him with his lost ships and with his emasculation:
How like a younger or a prodigal
The scarfed bark puts from her native bay –
Hugg’d and embraced by the strumpet wind!
How like the prodigal doth she return
With over-weather’d ribs and ragged sails –
Lean, rent, and beggar’d by the strumpet wind! [II, vi, 14-19]
The echo of "wether" in "over-weather’d" in the penultimate line neatly ties the sheep/ship nexus to Antonio.
But in typical Shakespearean irony, Antonio is not the only one whose "family jewels" – in the literal and figurative sense – are the subject of a symbolic chopping block. Indeed, Shylock makes the unintended connection between the two in expressing his distress that his daughter has run off with her gentile lover and – worst of all – with his riches:
My daughter! O my ducats! O my daughter!
Fled with a Christian! O my Christian ducats!
Justice, the law, my ducats, and my daughter!
A sealed bag, two sealed bags of ducats,
Of double ducats, stol’n from me by my daughter!
And jewels, two stones, two rich and precious stones,
Stol’n by my daughter! Justice! – find the girl,
She hath the stones upon her and the ducats. [II, viii, 15-22]
What with "stones" being Elizabethan slang for testicles, coupled with the reference to bags wrenched from his possession, it is small wonder that mischievous boys found it irresistible not to tease him about the sexual innuendo:
SALERIO:
Why all the boys in Venice follow him,
Crying his stones, his daughter, and his ducats. [II, viii, 23-24]
And still others in this play are – at least symbolically – bereft of their manhood. It cannot escape any reader of The Merchant of Venice that Portia is vastly more mature than the gold-digging profligate, Bassanio, whom she marries, and for that matter, is decidedly more mature than any other male in the drama. Disguised as Balthazar at the trial scene, she assumes two traditionally "masculine" roles, a scholar ("doctor") and a judge – roles that supply and supplant the masculinity wanting in the men around her. Knowing that among the several meanings of the word "accomplish" was the notion of "completing with an external appurtenance," Shakespeare has Portia and Nerissa metaphorically don what they, as women, do not anatomically own: penises.
PORTIA:
Come on Nerissa, I have work in hand
That you yet know not of; we’ll see our husbands
Before they think of us!
NERISSA:
Shall they see us?
PORTIA:
They shall Nerissa: but in such habit,
That they shall think we are accomplished
With that we lack. [III, iv, 57-62]
This shortly thereafter permits Shakespeare to give us a clue as to how best to read this often-troubling "comedy," inasmuch as to "turn," not only meant to "turn or convert into," but in its obscene sense, meant to "sexually accommodate":
NERISSA:
Why, shall we turn men?
PORTIA:
Fie! What a question’s that.
If thou wert near a lewd interpreter! [III, iv, 78-80]
Not only was he here tweaking the nose of the censor of his day (the dour Edmund Tilney, Queen Elizabeth’s Master of Revels), but Shakespeare was clearly inviting us to play the lewd interpreter in this play. To do so leads to a greater cognizance of the genitalia themes in the work. For example, the indentured boy, Launcelot, too, acquires – by puberty – what he previously "lacked," as is subtly portrayed by Shakespeare when Launcelot’s aging father, visiting him for the first time in a while, (and blinded by blowing sand), fails to recognize him. Phallic symbols serve as a prelude to the old man’s recognition:
GOBBO:
Marry God forbid! the boy was the very staff of
my age, my very prop.
LAUNCELOT: [aside]
Do I look like a cudgel or a hovel-post,
a staff, or a prop? Do you know me father? [II, ii, 63-66]
When Gobbo recognizes his son, he notes the changes that puberty has wrought:
GOBBO:
I’ll be sworn thou be Launcelot, thou art mine own flesh and blood:
Lord worshipp’d might he be, what a beard hast thou
got! Thou hast got more hair on thy chin, than Dobbin
my fill-horse has on his tail.
LAUNCELOT:
It should seem then that Dobbin’s tail grows backward. [II, ii, 87-92]
This exchange thematically takes on more significance when we learn that a "fill-horse" is a "shaft-horse" (that ventured into mine shafts) and that the word "penis" etymologically comes from the Latin for "tail." Thus, just as Portia's and Nerissa’s assumption of male disguise and authority fills the masculine vacuum left by the immature men in Venice, so Launcelot’s puberty supplants the waning masculinity, generationally and anatomically, of his aging father.
But the most sublime reference to castration is in the last scene of the play when Portia and Nerissa pretend to discover that their new husbands have given away (unwittingly to Portia and Nerissa, disguised as Balthazar and her young "male" clerk, respectively) the rings that each man vowed by marital fidelity that he would never relinquish. This last scene is adumbrated by the earlier betrothal (and ring-giving) scene where the procreative purpose of an erect phallus is jocularly alluded to when Gratiano immediately announces his engagement to Nerissa following the betrothal of Portia and Bassanio:
PORTIA:
Is this true, Nerissa?
NERISSA:
Madam it is, so you stand pleas’d withal.
BASSANIO:
And do you Gratiano mean good faith?
GRATIANO:
Yes – faith my lord.
BASSANIO:
Our feast shall be much honoured in your marriage.
GRATIANO:
We’ll play with them for the first boy for a thousand ducats.
NERISSA:
What! And stake down?
GRATIANO:
No, we shall ne’er win at that sport and stake down. [III, ii, 208-216]
The proposal of the wager – as to who will produce the first male offspring, (i.e., "play with them for the first boy") -- with the making of the bet ("stake down") – dissolves into a crude phallic joke when it is noted that one cannot produce a baby with the "stake" in the down position. This earlier sexually-charged badinage carries over into the last scene when the ladies pretend to be incensed upon discovery of the relinquished rings. Nerissa is the first to display her contrived disgust, and in response her new husband protests:
GRATIANO: [to Nerissa]
By yonder moon I swear you do me wrong,
In faith I gave it to the judge’s clerk, –
Would he were gelt that I had it for my part,
Since you do take it (love) so much at heart. [V, i, 142-145]
"Gelt" here is the past participle of "geld" – to castrate. The irony of Gratiano’s words is manifestly evident inasmuch as the clerk (Nerissa in disguise) to whom he had given the ring is, as a woman, gelt (as it were) by nature, and when Gratiano wishes he had "it for my part," he says more than he intends, inasmuch as the "it," as penis, is indeed his "part," (not only anatomically but as a role in the mating rite of the marriage). Note, too, that when he says that Nerissa takes it "so much at heart" he is echoing the words of the bond – "nearest the heart" – that earlier played on the phallic significance of the phrase. The sublimity (and erotic perversity) deepens when we recognize that "ring" was an Elizabethan term for a vagina, so that when Portia taunts Bassanio about the relinquished ring (that she now secretly possesses) and about the "doctor" to whom Bassanio gave it, she tells him:
Let not that doctor e’er come near my house –
Since he hath got the jewel that I loved,
And that which you did swear to keep for me,
I will become as liberal as you,
I’ll not deny him any thing I have,
No, not my body, nor my husband’s bed:
Know him I shall, I am well sure of it.
Lie not a night from home. Watch me like Argus, –
If you do not, if I be left alone,
Now by mine honour (which is yet mine own),
I’ll have that doctor for my bedfellow [V, i, 222-233]
With the interplay (and sexual significance) of "ring," "jewel," and "thing" (as sexual organ), Portia describes to us -- the audience who knows that she was the doctor in disguise -- a fantasy of hermaphroditic onanism. A husband then – in the fantasy – becomes unnecessary, and brings the emasculation theme full circle. It comes as no surprise, then, that Shakespeare – again emphasizing the "ring" as vagina – ends the play with a caveat to husbands to satisfy their wives, even if it hurts. He has Gratiano declare:
Well, while I live, I’ll fear no other thing
So sore, as keeping safe Nerissa’s ring. [V, i, 306-307]
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