Shakespeare and the Economic Imperative by Grav Peter F.;

Author:Grav, Peter F.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Language & Literature
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2008-02-22T00:00:00+00:00

This offer is followed up with another: “You shall have gold / To pay the petty debt twenty times over” (304–5). As in her betrothal speech, her discourse stresses multiplicative quantifications with the “how much” aspect of an issue holding sway. Leggatt argues that Portia “does not yet understand how money is used in Venice. It is not the amount that matters: she could bury Shylock in a heap of ducats without once touching his real need, which is for vengeance.”39 Or to put it more simply, this is not a problem that can be solved by throwing money at it.

The allusion in Leggatt’s statement to the difference between the Venetian and Belmont attitudes towards wealth is germane to the consideration of Merchant’s primary love story. Venice is a world of want, untoward fiscal circumstances and animosity, with complex patterns of human behavior the result. In contrast, Belmont represents surplus, bounty and what seems to be a simplicity to human motivation. The offer to purchase Antonio’s salvation suggests that money holds potential to be a positive force in the world; Portia possesses limitless resources, and her willingness to use her wealth to do good would seemingly contradict all talk of agendas of acquisition, such as the one implicit in Bassanio’s voyage to Belmont. In short, generosity in a fiscal sense would appear in Portia to correspond with a generosity of spirit. Yet, in context, the belief that money can solve this problem implies only that wealth is a fountainhead of naiveté and that a reliance on fiscal solutions is reductive in a way that, at best, ignores and, at worst, negates the complexity of human behavior. As M. M. Mahood correctly points out, “A major irony of the play is … that in the end Antonio is saved by Portia and not by her money.”40 The type of reductionism espoused by Portia within Merchant, i.e. applying simplistic economic solutions to irreducible situations, extends to our perception of the play’s love story from without. While it may be preferable to believe in the mystery of true love, the economic subtexts in Merchant offer a way of simply explaining what in other Shakespearean comedies is inexplicable. A return to a comparison made earlier illustrates this: when Orlando is struck dumb at his first meeting with Rosalind in As You Like It, his ardor lacks a reason, and we are confronted with that aspect of love and human behavior that defies all rationale. In contrast, Bassanio’s speechlessness, as argued earlier, may be prompted simply by his economic good fortune or it may be the result of something nobler. The problem is that we are constantly able to ask questions such as this in Merchant; in this case, the combination of Portia’s wealth and Bassanio’s penury invites us to do so. If it is possible to reduce the inexplicability of human emotion that exists elsewhere in Shakespearean comedy and tragedy alike to questions of economic exigencies, it cannot be happenstance. The end result is that Merchant’s main love story invites a degree of cynicism, rather than wonder.

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