The Two Stories Shakespeare borrows for his Merchant of Venice.

A Study in the Raw Material of the Romantic Drama.

THE starting-point in the treatment of any work of literature is its position in literary history: the recognition of this gives the attitude of mind which is most favourable for extracting from the work its full effect. The division of the universal Drama to which Shakespeare belongs is known as the 'Romantic Drama,' one of its chief distinctions being that it uses the stories of Romance, together with histories treated as story-books, as the sources from which the matter of the plays is taken; Romances are the raw material out of which the Shakespearean Drama is manufactured. This very fact serves to illustrate the elevation of the Elizabethan Drama in the scale of literary development: just as the weaver uses as his raw material that which is the finished product of the spinner, so Shakespeare and his contemporaries start in their art of dramatising from Story which is already a form of art. In the exhibition, then, of Shakespeare as an Artist, it is natural to begin with the raw material which he worked up into finished masterpieces. For illustration of this no play could be more suitable than The Merchant of Venice, in which two tales, already familiar in the story form, have been woven together into a single plot: the Story of the Cruel Jew, who entered into a bond with his enemy of which the forfeit was to be a pound of this enemy's own flesh, and the Story of the Heiress and the Caskets. The present study will deal with the stories themselves, considering them as if with the eye of a dramatic artist to catch the points in which they lend themselves to dramatic effect; the next will show how Shakespeare improves the stories in the telling, increasing their dramatic force by the very process of working them up; a third study will point out how, not content with two stories, he has added others in the development of his plot, making it more complex only in reality to make it more simple.

In the Story of the Jew the main point is its special capability for bringing out the idea of Nemesis, one of the simplest and most universal of dramatic motives. Described broadly, Nemesis is retribution as it appears in the world of art. Nemesis as a dramatic idea.In reality the term covers two distinct conceptions: in ancient thought Nemesis was an artistic bond between excess and reaction, in modern thought it is an artistic bond between sin and retribution. The distinction is part of the general difference between Greek and modern views of life. Ancient conception: artistic connection between excess and reaction.The Greeks may be said to be the most artistic nation of mankind, in the sense that art covered so large a proportion of their whole personality: it is not surprising to find that they projected their sense of art into morals. Aristotle was a moral philosopher, but his system of ethics reads as an artistically devised pattern, in which every virtue is removed at equal distances from vices of excess and defect balancing it on opposite sides. The Greek word for law signifies proportion and distribution, nomos; and it is only another form of it that expresses Nemesis as the power punishing violations of proportion in things human. Distinct from Justice, which was occupied with crime, Nemesis was a companion deity to Fortune; and as Fortune went through the world distributing the good things of life heedlessly without regard to merit, so Nemesis followed in her steps, and, equally without regard to merit, delighted in cutting down the prosperity that was high enough to attract her attention. Polycrates is the typical victim of such Nemesis: cast off by his firmest ally for no offence but an unbroken career of good luck, in the reaction from which his ally feared to be involved; essaying as a forlorn hope to propitiate by voluntarily throwing in the sea his richest crown-jewel; recognising when this was restored by fishermen that heaven had refused his sacrifice, and abandoning himself to his fate in despair. But Nemesis, to the moral sense of antiquity, could go even beyond visitation on innocent prosperity, and goodness itself could be carried to a degree that invited divine reaction. Heroes like Lycurgus and Pentheus perished for excess of temperance; and the ancient Drama startles the modern reader with an Hippolytus, whose passionate purity brought down on him a destruction prophesied beforehand by those to whom religious duty suggested moderate indulgence in lust.

Such malignant correction of human inequalities is not a function to harmonise with modern conceptions of Deity. Yet the Greek notion of Nemesis has an element of permanency in it, for it represents a principle underlying human life. It suggests a sort of elasticity in human experience, a tendency to rebound from a strain; this is the equilibrium of the moral world, the force which resists departure from the normal, becoming greater in proportion as departure from the normal is wider. Thus in commercial speculation there is a safe medium certain to bring profit in the long run; in social ambition there is a certain rise though slow: if a man hurries to be rich, or seeks to rise in public life by leaps and bounds, the spectator becomes aware of a secret force that has been set in motion, as when the equilibrium of physical bodies has been disturbed, which force threatens to drag the aspirant down to the point from which he started, or to debase him lower in proportion to the height at which he rashly aimed. Such a force is 'risk,' and it may remain risk, but if it be crowned with the expected fall the whole is recognised as 'Nemesis.' This Nemesis is deeply embedded in the popular mind and repeatedly crops up in its proverbial wisdom. Proverbs like 'Grasp all, lose all,' 'When things come to the worst they are sure to mend,' exactly express moral equilibrium, and the 'golden mean' is its proverbial formula. The saying 'too much of a good thing' suggests that the Nemesis on departures from the golden mean applies to good things as well as bad; while the principle is made to apply even to the observation of the golden mean itself in the proverb 'Nothing venture, nothing have.' Nevertheless, this side of the whole notion has in modern usage fallen into the background in comparison with another aspect of Nemesis. The grand distinction of modern thought is the predominance in it of moral ideas: they colour even its imagination; and if the Greeks carried their art-sense into morals, modern instincts have carried morals into art. In particular the speculations raised by Christianity have cast the shadow of Sin over the whole universe. It has been said that the conception of Sin is unknown to the ancients, and that the word has no real equivalent in Latin or Classical Greek. The modern mind is haunted by it. Notions of Sin have invaded art, and Nemesis shows their influence: vague conceptions of some supernatural vindication of artistic proportion in life have now crystallised into the interest of watching morals and art united in their treatment of Sin. The link between Sin and its retribution becomes a form of art-pleasure; and no dramatic effect is more potent in modern Drama than that which emphasises the principle that whatsoever a man soweth that shall he also reap.

Now for this dramatic effect of Nemesis it would be difficult to find a story promising more scope than the Story of the Cruel Jew. It will be seen at once to contain a double nemesis, attaching to the Jew himself and to his victim. The two moreover represent the different conceptions of Nemesis in the ancient and modern world; Antonio's excess of moral confidence suffers a nemesis of reaction in his humiliation, and Shylock's sin of judicial murder finds a nemesis of retribution in his ruin by process of law. The nemesis, it will be observed, is not merely two-fold, but double in the way that a double flower is distinct from two flowers: it is a nemesis on a nemesis; the nemesis which visits Antonio's fault is the crime for which Shylock suffers his nemesis. Again, in that which gives artistic character to the reaction and the retribution the two nemeses differ. Let St. Paul put the difference for us: 'Some men's sins are evident, going before unto judgment; and some they follow after.' So in cases like that of Shylock the nemesis is interesting from its very obviousness and the impatience with which we look for it; in the case of Antonio the nemesis is striking for the very opposite reason, that he of all men seemed most secure against it.

Antonio must be understood as a perfect character: for we must read the play in the light of its age, and intolerance was a mediÆval virtue. But there is no single good quality that does not carry with it its special temptation, and the sum of them all, or perfection, has its shadow in self-sufficiency. It is so with Antonio. Of all national types of character the Roman is the most self-sufficient, alike incorruptible by temptation and independent of the softer influences of life: iii. ii. 297.we find that 'Roman honour' is the idea which Antonio's friends are accustomed to associate with him. Further the dramatist contrives to exhibit Antonio to us in circumstances calculated to bring out this drawback to his perfection. In the opening scene we see the dignified merchant-prince suffering under the infliction of frivolous visitors, to which his friendship with the young nobleman exposes him: his tone throughout the interview is that of the barest toleration, and suggests that his courtesies are felt rather as what is due to himself than what is due to those on whom they are bestowed. i. i. 60-64.When Salarino makes flattering excuses for taking his leave, Antonio replies, first with conventional compliment,

and then with blunt plainness, as if Salarino were not worth the trouble of keeping up polite fiction:

The visitors, trying to find explanation for Antonio's seriousness, suggest that he is thinking of his vast commercial speculations; Antonio draws himself up:

Antonio is saying in his prosperity that he shall never be moved. But the great temptation to self-sufficiency lies in his contact, not with social inferiors, but with a moral outcast such as Shylock: confident that the moral gulf between the two can never be bridged over, Antonio has violated dignity as well as mercy in the gross insults he has heaped upon the Jew whenever they have met. i. iii. 99 &c.In the Bond Scene we see him unable to restrain his insults at the very moment in which he is soliciting a favour from his enemy; i. iii. 107-130.the effect reaches a climax as Shylock gathers up the situation in a single speech, reviewing the insults and taunting his oppressor with the solicited obligation:

There is such a foundation of justice for these taunts that for a moment our sympathies are transferred to Shylock's side. But Antonio, so far from taking warning, is betrayed beyond all bounds in his defiance; and in the challenge to fate with which he replies we catch the tone of infatuated confidence, the hybris in which Greek superstition saw the signal for the descent of Nemesis.

To this challenge of self-sufficiency the sequel of the story is the answering Nemesis: the merchant becomes a bankrupt, the first citizen of Venice a prisoner at the bar, the morally perfect man holds his life and his all at the mercy of the reprobate he thought he might safely insult.

So Nemesis has surprised Antonio in spite of his perfectness: but the malice of Shylock is such as is perpetually crying for retribution, and the retribution is delayed only that it may descend with accumulated force. In the case of this second nemesis the Story of the Jew exhibits dramatic capability in the opportunity it affords for the sin and the retribution to be included within the same scene. iv. i.Portia's happy thought is a turning-point in the Trial Scene on the two sides of which we have the Jew's triumph and the Jew's retribution; the two sides are bound together by the principle of measure for measure, and for each detail of vindictiveness that is developed in the first half of the scene there is a corresponding item of nemesis in the sequel. Charter v. statute. iv. i. 38; compare 102, 219.To begin with, Shylock appeals to the charter of the city. It is one of the distinctions between written and unwritten law that no flagrant injustice can arise out of the latter. If the analogy of former precedents would seem to threaten such an injustice, it is easy in a new case to meet the special emergency by establishing a new precedent; where, however, the letter of the written law involves a wrong, however great, it must, nevertheless, be exactly enforced. Shylock takes his stand upon written law; compare iii. iii. 26-31.indeed upon the strictest of all kinds of written law, for the charter of the city would seem to be the instrument regulating the relations between citizens and aliens—an absolute necessity for a free port—which could not be superseded without international negotiations. But what is the result? As plaintiff in the cause Shylock would, in the natural course of justice, leave the court, when judgment had been given against him, with no further mortification than the loss of his suit. He is about to do so when he is recalled:

Unwittingly, he has, by the action he has taken, entangled himself with an old statute law, forgotten by all except the learned Bellario, which, going far beyond natural law, made the mere attempt upon a citizen's life by an alien punishable to the same extent as murder. Shylock had chosen the letter of the law, and by the letter of the law he is to suffer. Humour v. quibble.Again, every one must feel that the plea on which Portia upsets the bond is in reality the merest quibble. It is appropriate enough in the mouth of a bright girl playing the lawyer, but no court of justice could seriously entertain it for a moment: by every principle of interpretation a bond that could justify the cutting of human flesh must also justify the shedding of blood, which is necessarily implied in such cutting. But, to balance this, we have Shylock in the earlier part of the scene refusing to listen to arguments of justice, and taking his stand upon his 'humour': iv. i. 40-62.if he has a whim, he pleads, for giving ten thousand ducats to have a rat poisoned, who shall prevent him? The suitor who rests his cause on a whim cannot complain if it is upset by a quibble. Similarly, throughout the scene, every point in Shylock's justice of malice meets its answer in the justice of nemesis. He is offered double the amount of his loan:

he answers, he would not accept them in lieu of his bond. iv. i. 318, 336.The wheel of Nemesis goes round, and Shylock would gladly accept not only this offer but even the bare principal; but he is denied, on the ground that he has refused it in open court. They try to bend him to thoughts of mercy:

He dares to reply:

The wheel of Nemesis goes round, and Shylock's life and all lie at the mercy of the victim to whom he had refused mercy and the judge to whose appeal for mercy he would not listen. Exultation v. irony.In the flow of his success, when every point is being given in his favour, he breaks out into unseemly exultation:

The ebb comes, and his enemies catch up the cry and turn it against him:

Such then is the Story of the Jew, and so it exhibits nemesis clashing with nemesis, the nemesis of surprise with the nemesis of equality and intense satisfaction.

In the Caskets Story, which Shakespeare has associated with the Story of the Jew, the dramatic capabilities are of a totally different kind. In the artist's armoury one of the most effective weapons is Idealisation: Idealisation:inexplicable touches throwing an attractiveness over the repulsive, uncovering the truth and beauty which lie hidden in the commonplace, and showing how much can be brought out of how little with how little change. the exhibition of a commonplace experience in a glorified form.A story will be excellent material, then, for dramatic handling which contains at once some experience of ordinary life, and also the surroundings which can be made to exhibit this experience in a glorified form: the more commonplace the experience, the greater the triumph of art if it can be idealised. The point of the Caskets Story to the eye of an artist in Drama is the opportunity it affords for such an idealisation of the commonest problem in everyday experience—what may be called the Problem of Judgment by Appearances.

In the choice between alternatives there are three ways in which judgment may be exercised. The first mode, if it can be called judgment at all, is to accept the decision of chance—to cast lots, or merely to drift into a decision. An opposite to this is purely rational choice. But rational choice, if strictly interpreted as a logical process, involves great complications. If a man would choose according to the methods of strict reason, he must, first of all, purge himself of all passion, for passion and reason are antagonistic. Next, he must examine himself as to the possibility of latent prejudice; and as prejudice may be unconsciously inherited, he must include in the sphere of his examination ancestral and national bias. Then, he must accumulate all the evidence that can possibly bear upon the question in hand, and foresee every eventuality that can result from either alternative. When he has all the materials of choice before him, he must proceed to balance them against one another, seeing first that the mental faculties employed in the process have been equally developed by training. All such preliminary conditions having been satisfied, he may venture to enquire on which side the balance dips, maintaining his suspense so long as the dip is undecided. And when a man has done all this he has attained only that degree of approach to strictly rational choice which his imperfect nature admits. Such pure reason has no place in real life: judgment in practical affairs is something between chance and this strict reason; it attempts to use the machinery of rational choice, but only so far as practical considerations proper to the matter in hand allow. This medium choice is what I am here calling Judgment by Appearances, for it is clear that the antithesis between appearance and reality will obtain so long as the materials of choice are scientifically incomplete; the term will apply with more and more appropriateness as the divergence from perfect conditions of choice is greater.

Judgment by Appearances so defined is the only method of judgment proper to practical life, and accordingly an exalted exhibition of it must furnish a keen dramatic interest. How is such a process to be glorified? Clearly Judgment by Appearances will reach the ideal stage when there is the maximum of importance in the issue to be decided and the minimum of evidence by which to decide it. These two conditions are satisfied in the Caskets Story. In questions touching the individual life, that of marriage has this unique importance, that it is bound up with wide consequences which extend beyond the individual himself to his posterity. With the suitors of Portia the question is of marriage with the woman who is presented as supreme of her age in beauty, in wealth and in character; ii. i. 40, &c.moreover, the other alternative is a vow of perpetual celibacy. So the question at issue in the Caskets Story concerns the most important act of life in the most important form in which it can be imagined to present itself. and a minimum in the evidence.When we turn to the evidence on which this question is to be decided we find that of rational evidence there is absolutely none. The choice is to be made between three caskets distinguished by their metals and by the accompanying inscriptions:

However individual fancies may incline, it is manifestly impossible to set up any train of reasoning which should discover a ground of preference amongst the three. And it is worth noting, as an example of Shakespeare's nicety in detail, that the successful chooser reads in the scroll which announces his victory,

Shakespeare does not say 'more fair,' 'more true.' i. ii. 30-36.This equal balancing of the alternatives will appear still clearer when we recollect that it is an intentional puzzle with which we are dealing, and accordingly that even if ingenuity could discover a preponderance of reason in favour of any one of the three, there would be the chance that this preponderance had been anticipated by the father who set the puzzle. The case becomes like that of children bidden to guess in which hand a sweetmeat is concealed. They are inclined to say the right hand, but hesitate whether that answer may not have been foreseen and the sweetmeat put in the left hand; and if on this ground they are tempted to be sharp and guess the left hand, there is the possibility that this sharpness may have been anticipated, and the sweetmeat kept after all in the right hand. If then the Caskets Story places before us three suitors, going through three trains of intricate reasoning for guidance in a matter on which their whole future depends, whereas we, the spectators, can see that from the nature of the case no reasoning can possibly avail them, we have clearly the Problem of Judgment by Appearances drawn out in its ideal form; and our sympathies are attracted by the sight of a process, belonging to our everyday experience, yet developed before us in all the force artistic setting can bestow.

But is this all? Does Shakespeare display before us the problem, yet give no help towards its solution? The key to the suitors' fates is not to be found in the trains of reasoning they go through. As if to warn us against looking for it in this direction. Shakespeare contrives that we never hear the reasonings of the successful suitor. By a natural touch Portia, who has chosen Bassanio in her heart, is represented as unable to bear the suspense of hearing him deliberate, and calls for music to drown his meditations; iii. ii, from 43; esp. 61.it is only the conclusion to which he has come that we catch as the music closes. The particular song selected on this occasion points dimly in the direction in which we are to look for the true solution of the problem:

'Fancy' in Shakespearean English means 'love'; and the discussion, whether love belongs to the head or the heart, is no inappropriate accompaniment to a reality which consists in this—that the success in love of the suitors, which they are seeking to compass by their reasonings, is in fact being decided by their characters.

To compare the characters of the three suitors, it will be enough to note the different form that pride takes in each. ii. i, vii.The first suitor is a prince of a barbarian race, who has thus never known equals, but has been taught to consider himself half divine; as if made of different clay from the rest of mankind he instinctively shrinks from 'lead.' ii. vii. 20.Yet modesty mingles with his pride, and though he feels truly that, so far ii. vii. 24-30.as the estimation of him by others is concerned, he might rely upon 'desert,' yet he doubts if desert extends as far as Portia. ii. vii, from 36.What seizes his attention is the words, 'what many men desire'; and he rises to a flight of eloquence in picturing wildernesses and deserts become thoroughfares by the multitude of suitors flocking to Belmont. But he is all the while betraying a secret of which he was himself unconscious: he has been led to seek the hand of Portia, not by true love, but by the feeling that what all the world is seeking the Prince of Morocco must not be slow to claim. Very different is the pride of Arragon. ii. ix.He has no regal position, but rather appears to be one who has fallen in social rank: compare ii. ix. 47-9.he makes up for such a fall by intense pride of family, and is one of those who complacently thank heaven that they are not as other men. The 'many men' which had attracted Morocco repels Arragon:

He is caught by the bait of 'desert.' It is true he almost deceives us with the lofty tone in which he reflects how the world would benefit if dignities and offices were in all cases purchased by the merit of the wearer; yet there peeps through his sententiousness his real conception of merit—the sole merit of family descent. His ideal is that the 'true seed of honour' should be 'picked from the chaff and ruin of the times,' and wrest greatness from the 'low peasantry' who had risen to it. He accordingly rests his fate upon desert: and he finds in the casket of his choice a fool's head. iii. ii, from 73.Of Bassanio's soliloquy we hear enough to catch that his pride is the pride of the soldier, who will yield to none the post of danger, compare i. ii. 124.and how he is thus attracted by the 'threatening' of the leaden casket:

Moreover, he is a lover, and the threatening is a challenge to show what he will risk for love: his true heart finds its natural satisfaction in 'giving and hazarding' his all. This is the pride that is worthy of Portia; and thus the ingenious puzzle of the 'inspired' father has succeeded in piercing through the outer defence of specious reasoning, and carrying its repulsion and attraction to the inmost characters of the suitors.

Such, then, is Shakespeare's treatment of the Problem of Judgment by Appearances: while he draws out the problem itself to its fullest extent in displaying the suitors elaborating trains of argument for a momentous decision in which we see that reason can be of no avail, he suggests for the solution that, besides reason, there is in such judgments another element, character, and that in those crises in which reason is most fettered, character is most potent. An important solution this is; for what is character? A man's character is the shadow of his past life; it is the grand resultant of all the forces from within and from without that have been operating upon him since he became a conscious agent. Character is the sandy footprint of the commonplace hardened into the stone of habit; it is the complexity of daily tempers, judgments, restraints, impulses, all focussed into one master-passion acting with the rapidity of an instinct. To lay down then, that where reason fails as an element in judgment, character comes to its aid, is to bind together the exceptional and the ordinary in life. In most of the affairs of life men have scope for the exercise of commonplace qualities, but emergencies do come where this is denied them; in these cases, while they think, like the three suitors, that they are moving voluntarily in the direction in which they are judging fit at the moment, in reality the weight of their past lives is forcing them in the direction in which their judgment has been accustomed to take them. Thus in the moral, as in the physical world, nothing is ever lost: not a ripple on the surface of conduct but goes on widening to the outermost limit of experience. Shakespeare's contribution to the question of practical judgment is that by the long exercise of commonplace qualities we are building up a character which, though unconsciously, is the determining force in the emergencies in which commonplace qualities are impossible.