But it is when he reasons against gold that love takes her over, banishing all other emotions. She responds with a beautifully articulated self-revelation: ignore my riches, virtues, beauty, status, she says: “the full sum of me / Is sum of nothing, which to term in gross / Is an unlessoned girl, unschooled, unpractisèd.” Yet even in rejecting the notion that people should be measured by the size of their bank balances, she cannot avoid using the language of money that suffuses the whole play (“sum,” “gross”). The lesson of Belmont is actually a cynical one: choose wealth and you won’t get it, appear to reject it and it will be yours. The Prince of Morocco, who takes things at face value, is roundly rejected. It will not be the last time that Shakespeare pits an honest Moor against a world of Italian intrigue.

For all their fine words, both Bassanio and Portia are engaged in “practice,” a word that the Elizabethans associated with the figure of Machiavelli, archetypal Italianate schemer for self-advancement. Bassanio is the gold-digger he pretends not to be, while Portia has no intention of letting any man become “her lord, her governor, her king” in the way that she says she will. At the end of her submission speech, she gives Bassanio the ring (symbol of both wealth and marital union) that will later be the device whereby she tricks him and thus establishes her position as the dominant partner in the relationship. She may speak about giving him all her property—which is what marriage meant according to the law of the time—but when she returns from Venice to Belmont at the end of the play she continues to speak of “my house” and the light “burning in my hall.”

As for Portia’s claim that she is “unlessoned” and “unschooled,” this is wholly belied by her bravura performance in the cross-dressed role of Balthasar, interpreting the laws of Venice with forensic skill that reduces the duke and his magnificoes to amazement. On leaving Belmont, she says that she and Nerissa will remain in a nunnery, the ultimate place of female confinement, until Bassanio’s financial difficulties are resolved. She actually goes to the public arena of the Venetian court, moving from passive (the woman wooed) to active (the problem solver). In the robes of a lawyer instead of those of a nun, she excels in the art of debate, deploying a rhetorical art calculated to delight Queen Elizabeth, who loved nothing more than to outmaneuver courtiers, diplomats, and suitors in the finer points of jurisprudence and theology.

“The quality of mercy is not strained”: the quality of Portia’s argument (and Shakespeare’s writing) unfolds from the several meanings of “strained.” Mercy is not constrained or forced, it must be freely given; nor is it partial or selective—it is a pure distillation like “the gentle rain from heaven,” not the kind of liquid from which impure particles can be strained out. As in Measure for Measure, Shakespeare explores the tension between justice and mercy, here interpreted in terms of the opposition between the Old Testament Jewish law of “an eye for an eye” and Christ’s New Testament covenant of forgiveness. When Shylock refuses to show mercy and stands by the old covenant, Portia’s art is to throw his legal literalism back in his face: the corollary of his demand for an exact pound of flesh is that he should not spill a drop of Venetian blood. But if the quality of mercy is not strained, then neither should be that of conversion: a bitter taste is left when Shylock is constrained to become a Christian.

“… AND WHICH THE JEW?”

Commerce, with which Venice was synonymous, depends on borrowing to raise capital. Christianity, however, disapproved of usury, the lending of money with interest. The Jewish moneylender was early modern Europe’s way out of this impasse. Venice was famous for its ghetto in which the Jews were constrained to live, even as they oiled the wheels of the city’s economy. Shakespeare does not mention the ghetto, but he reveals a clear understanding of how the system worked when Shylock refuses Antonio’s invitation to dinner: “I will buy with you, sell with you, talk with you, walk with you, and so following, but I will not eat with you, drink with you, nor pray with you.” There is sociability and commerce between different ethnic and religious groups, but spiritual practices and customs are kept distinct. Shylock will not go to dinner because his religion prevents him from eating pork, but ultimately he regards questions of business as more important than those of faith: he hates Antonio “for he is a Christian, / But more, for that in low simplicity / He lends out money gratis and brings down / The rate of usance here with us in Venice.”

The historical reality in the age of Shakespeare was that Christians did lend money to each other with interest, while Judaic law as well as Christian frowned upon extortion. What one person regards as immoral exploitation another may regard as legitimate business practice. Shylock makes exactly this point when referring to “my bargains and my well-won thrift, / Which he [Antonio] calls interest.” There are Christian usurers in other plays of the time. Besides, Shylock does not charge interest on the three thousand ducats he lends Antonio: instead, he takes out a bond, albeit of a rather unusual kind, as his insurance policy. One of the play’s key puns, alongside those on terms that are both commercial and emotional such as “dear” and “bond,” is “rate,” which in the dialogue between Bassanio and Shylock about Antonio refers first to the question of interest rates and then to berating in the sense of abuse. The berating of Jew by Christian, and vice versa, is a screen for the real issue, which is the question of who has money and hence power (including the power to win a wealthy, clever, and beautiful wife).

We should therefore be wary of crude generalizations about the anti-Semitism of the play or of the age. It is often said that the original stage Shylock would have had a wig of red hair and a long bottle-like nose, making him into a stereotypical Jew. He was certainly represented thus when the play was revived after the theaters reopened following the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660, but there is no evidence that this is how he looked in Shakespeare’s own theater. Portia’s line on arriving in the courtroom, “Which is the merchant here, and which the Jew?,” suggests that in terms of superficial appearance Antonio and Shylock are not readily distinguishable. It is not easily compatible with a caricature Jew. Nor does the dialogue at any point allude to the anti-Semitic propaganda that has defiled the centuries. There are no allusions to the story of Hugh of Lincoln, to poisoning wells, desecrating the host, ritual murder, crucified children.