1

Coppelia Khan, "The Absent Mother in King Lear," in Rewriting

the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference, ed.
Margaret Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy Vickers
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985)

The Absent Mother in King Lear
Coppelia Kahn
Fleeing Gonerils sharp-toothd unkindness, .Lear arrives at
Gloucesters house in search of Regan, still hoping that she will
be kind and comfortable, although she was inexplicably not at
home when he called before. He finds his messenger in the stocks, a humiliation that he
rightly takes as directed at him personally. At first he simply denies what Kent tells him,
that Regan and her husband did indeed commit this outrage. Then he seeks to understand
how, or why. Kent recounts the studied rudeness, the successive insults, the final
shaming, that he has endured.
For a moment, Lear can no longer deny or rationalize; he can only feel feel a
tumult of wounded pride, shame, anger, and loss, which he expresses in a striking image:
O! how this mother swells upward toward my heart!
Hysterica passio! down, thou climbing sorrow!
Thy elements below.
(2.4 56-58)1
By calling his sorrow hysterical, Lear decisively characterizes it as feminine, in
accordance with a tradition stretching back to 1900 B.C. when an Egyptian papyrus first
described the malady. Fifteen hundred years later in the writings of Hippocrates, it was
named, and its name succinctly conveyed its etiology. It was the disease of the hyster, the
womb. From ancient times through the nineteenth century, women suffering variously
from choking, feelings of suffocation, partial paralysis, convulsions similar to those of
epilepsy, aphasia, numbness, and lethargy were said to be ill of hysteria, caused by a
wandering womb. What sent the womb on its errant path through the female body, people
thought, was either lack of sexual intercourse or retention of menstrual blood. In both
cases, the same prescription obtained: the patient should get married. A husband would
keep that wandering womb where it belonged. If the afflicted already had a procreation is
eclipsed by the fathers, which is used to affirm male prerogative and male power.9 The
aristocratic patriarchal families headed by Gloucester and Lear have, actually and
effectively, no mothers. The only source of love, power, and authority is the father an
awesome, demanding presence.
But what the play depicts, of course, is the failure of that presence: the failure of a
fathers power to command love in a patriarchal world and the emotional penalty he pays
for wielding power.10 Lears very insistence on paternal power, in fact, belies its
shakiness; similarly, the absence of the mother points to her hidden presence, as the lines
with which I began might indicate. When Lear begins to feel the loss of Cordelia, to be

2
wounded by her sisters, and to recognize his own vulnerability, he calls his state of mind
hysteria, the mother, which I interpret as his repressed identification with the mother.
Women and the needs and traits associated with them are supposed to stay in their
element, as Lear says, below denigrated, silenced, denied. In this patriarchal world,
masculine identity depends on repressing the vulnerability, dependency, and capacity for
feeling which are called feminine.
Recent historical studies of the Elizabethan family, its social structure and
emotional dynamics, when considered in the light of psychoanalytic theory, provide a
backdrop against which Lears family drama takes on new meaning as a tragedy of
masculinity. Recently, several authors have analyzed mothering the traditional
division of roles within the family that makes the woman primarily responsible for
rearing as well as bearing the children as a social institution sustained by patriarchy,
which in turn reinforces it. Notably, Nancy Chodorow offers an incisive critique of the
psychoanalytic conception of how the early mother-child relationship shapes the childs
sense of maleness or femaleness. She argues that the basic masculine sense of self is
formed through a denial of the males initial connection with femininity, a denial that
taints the males attitudes toward women and impairs his capacity for affiliation in
general. My interpretation of Lear comes out of the feminist re-examination of the
mothering role now being carried on in many fields, but it is particularly indebted to
Nancy Chodorows analysis.
According to her account, women as mothers produce daughters with mothering
capacities and the desire to mother, which itself grows out of the mother-daughter
relationship. They also produce sons whose nurturant capacities and needs are curtailed
in order to prepare them to be fathers. A focus on the primacy of the mothers role in ego-
formation is not in itself new. It follows upon the attempts of theorists such as Melanie
Klein, Michael and Alice Balint, John Bowlby, and Margaret Mahler to cast light on that
dim psychic region which Freud likened to the Minoan civilization preceding the Greek,
grey with age, and shadowy and almost impossible to revivify. Chodorows account
of the mother-child relationship, however, challenges the mainstream of psychoanalytic
assumptions concerning the role of gender and family in the formation of the childs ego
and sexual identity.
Because I find family relationships and gender identity central to Shakespeares
imagination, the most valuable aspect of Chodorows work for me is its comparative
perspective on the development of gender in the sexes. For both, the mothers rather than
the fathers role is the important one, as crucial to the childs individuation (development
of a sense of self) as to the childs sense of gender. It is only for the purpose of analysis,
however, that the two facets of identity can be separated. Both sexes begin to develop a
sense of self in relation to a mother-woman. But a girls sense of femaleness arises
through her infantile union with the mother and later identification with her, while a
boys sense of maleness arises in opposition to those primitive forms of oneness.
According to Robert Stoller, whose work supports Chodorows argument, Developing
indissoluble links with mothers femaleness and femininity in the normal mother-infant
symbiosis can only augment a girls identity, while for a boy, the whole process of
becoming masculine... is endangered by the primary, profound, primal oneness with
mother.14 A girls gender identity is reinforced but a boys is threatened by union and

3
identification with the same powerful female being. Thus, as Chodorow argues, the
masculine personality tends to be formed through denial of connection with femininity;
certain activities must be defined as masculine and superior to the maternal world of
childhood, and womens activities must, correspondingly, be denigrated. The process of
differentiation is inscribed in patriarchal ideology, which polarizes male and female
social roles and behavior.15
The imprint of mothering on the male psyche, the psychological presence of the
mother in men whether or not mothers are represented in the texts they write or in which
they appear as characters, can be found throughout the literary canon. But it is
Shakespeare who renders the dilemmas of manhood most compellingly and with the
greatest insight, partly because he wrote at a certain historical moment. As part of a wide-
ranging argument for the role of the nuclear family in shaping what he calls affective
individualism, Lawrence Stone holds that the family of Shakespeares day saw a striking
increase in the fathers power over his wife and children. Stones ambitious thesis has
been strenuously criticized, but his description of the Elizabethan family itself, if not his
notion of its place in the development of affective individualism, holds true.16
Stone sums up the mode of the fathers dominance thus:
This sixteenth-century aristocratic family was patrilinear,
primogenitural, and patriarchal: patrilinear in that it was the male line
whose ancestry was traced so diligently by the genealogists and heralds,
and in almost all cases via the male line that titles were inherited;
primogenitural in that most of the property went to the eldest son, the
younger brothers being dispatched into the world with little more than a
modest annuity or life interest in a small estate to keep them afloat; and
patriarchal in that the husband and father lorded it over his wife and
children with the quasi-absolute authority of a despot. 17
Patriarchy, articulated through the family, was considered the natural order of things.18
Rut like other kinds of natural order, it was subject to historical change. According to
Stone, between 1850 and 1640 two forces, one political and one religious, converged to
heighten paternal power in the family. As the Tudor-Stuart state consolidated, it tried to
undercut ancient baronial loyalty to the family line in order to replace it with loyalty to
the crown. As part of the same campaign, the state also encouraged obedience to the
paterfamilias in the home, according to the traditional analogy between state and family,
king and father. James I stated, Kings are compared to fathers in families: for a king is
truly parens patriae, the politic father of his people.19 The state thus had a direct
interest in reinforcing patriarchy in the home.
Concurrently, Puritan fundamentalism the literal interpretation of Mosaic law in
its original patriarchal context reinforced patriarchal elements in Christian doctrine and
practice as well. As the head of the household, the father took over many of the priests
functions, leading his extended family of dependents in daily prayers, questioning them
as to the state of their souls, giving or withholding his blessing on their undertakings.
Although Protestant divines argued for the spiritual equality of women, deplored the
double standard, and exalted the married state for both sexes, at the same time they
zealously advocated the subjection of wives to their husbands on the scriptural grounds

4
that the husband beareth the image of God. Heaven and home were both patriarchal.
The Homily on the State of Matrimony, one of the sermons issued by the crown to be
read in church weekly, quotes and explicates the Pauline admonition, Let women be
subject to their husbands, as to the Lord; for the husband is the head of the woman, as
Christ is the head of the church.20 In effect, a womans subjection to her husbands will
was the measure of his patriarchal authority and thus of his manliness.
The division of parental roles in childrearing made children similarly subject to
the fathers will. In his study of Puritan attitudes toward authority and feeling, David
Leverenz finds an emphasis on the mothers role as tender nurturer of young children, as
against the fathers role as disciplinarian and spiritual guide for older children. Mothers
are encouraged to love their children openly in their early years but enjoined to withdraw
their affections at just about the time the fathers instructional role becomes primary.
Thus the breaking of the will is accomplished by the father, rather than by both parents
equally. This division of duties, Leverenz holds, fostered a pervasive polarity, involving
associations of feared aspects of oneself with weakness and women, emphasis on male
restraint and the male minds governance of female emotions, the separation of head
from body, ...a language of male anxiety, rather than of female deficiency.
A close look at the first scene in King Lear reveals much about lordliness and the
male anxiety accompanying it. The court is gathered to watch Lear divide his kingdom
and divest himself of its rule, but those purposes are actually only accessory to another
that touches him more nearly: giving away his youngest daughter in marriage. While
France and Burgundy wait in the wings, Cordelia, for whose hand they compete, also
competes for the dowry without which she cannot marry. As Lynda Boose shows, this
opening scene is a variant of the wedding ceremony, which dramatizes the bond between
father and daughter even as it marks the severance of that bond. There is no part in the
ritual for the brides mother; rather, the brides father hands her directly to her husband.
Thus the ritual articulates the fathers dominance both as procreator and as authority
figure, to the eclipse of the mother in either capacity. At the same time, the father
symbolically certifies the daughters virginity. Thus the ceremony alludes to the incest
taboo and raises a question about Lears darker purpose in giving Cordelia away.
In view of the ways that Lear tries to manipulate this ritual so as to keep his hold
on Cordelia at the same time that he is ostensibly giving her away, we might suppose that
the emotional crisis precipitating the tragic action is Lears frustrated incestuous desire
for his daughter. For in the course of winning her dowry, Cordelia is supposed to show
that she loves her father not only more than her sisters do but, as she rightly sees, more
than she loves her future husband; similarly, when Lear disowns and disinherits Cordelia,
he thinks he has rendered her, dowered only with his curse, unfit to marry and thus
unable to leave paternal protection. In contrast, however, I want to argue that the socially-
ordained, developmentally appropriate surrender at Cordelia as daughter-wife the
renunciation of her as incestuous object awakens a deeper emotional need in Lear. the
need for Cordelia as daughter-mother.
The plays beginning, as I have said, is marked by the omnipotent presence of the
father and the absence of the mother. Yet in Lears scheme for parceling out his kingdom,
we can discern a childs image of being mothered. He wants two mutually exclusive
things at once: to have absolute control over those closest to him and to be absolutely

5
dependent on them. We can recognize in this stance the outlines of a childs pre-oedipal
experience of himself and his mother as an undifferentiated dual unity, in which the child
perceives his mother not as a separate person but as an agency of himself, who provides
for his needs. She and her breast are a part of him, at his command. In Freuds
unforgettable phrase, he is his majesty, the baby. 24
As man, father, and ruler, Lear has habitually suppressed any needs for love,
which in his patriarchal world would normally be satisfied by a mother or mothering
woman. With age and loss of vigor, and as Freud suggests in The Theme of the Three
Caskets, with the prospect of return to mother earth, Lear feels those needs again and
hints at them in his desire to crawl like a baby toward death. Significantly, he
confesses them in these phrases the moment after he curses Cordelia for her silence, the
moment in which he denies them most strongly. He says, I lovd her most, and thought
to set my rest / On her kind nursery (I. i. 123-24).
When his other two daughters prove to be bad mothers and dont satisfy his needs
for nursery, Lear is seized by the mother a searing sense of loss at the deprivation
of the mothers presence. It assaults him in various ways in the desire to weep, to
mourn the enormous loss, and the equally strong desire to hold back the tears and,
instead, accuse, arraign, convict, punish, and humiliate those who have made him realize
his vulnerability and dependency. Thus the mother, revealed in Lears response to his
daughters brutality toward him, makes her re-entry into the patriarchal world from which
she had seemingly been excluded. The repressed mother returns specifically in Lears
wrathful projections onto the world about him of a symbiotic relationship with his
daughters that recapitulates his pre-oedipal relationship with the mother. In a striking
series of images in which parent-child, father-daughter, and husband-wife relationships
are reversed and confounded, Lear re-enacts a childlike rage against the absent or
rejecting mother as figured in his daughters.
Here I want to interject a speculation inspired by Stones discussion of the custom
of farming children out to wet nurses from birth until they were twelve to eighteen
months old; at that time they were restored to the arms of their natural mother, who was
by then a stranger to them. Many if not most people in the gentry or aristocracy of
Shakespeares day must have suffered the severe trauma of maternal deprivation brought
on by the departure of the wet nurse. We know the effects of such a trauma from the
writings of John Bowlby; a tendency to make excessive demands on others, anxiety and
anger when these demands are not met, and a blocked capacity for intimacy. Lear
responds to the loss of Cordelia, the nurse he rejects after she seems to reject him, by
demanding hospitality for his hundred knights, by raging ac Goneril and Regan when
they refuse him courtesy and sympathy, and by rejecting human society when he stalks
off to the heath. After the division of the kingdom, he re-enters the play in the fourth
scene with this revealing peremptory demand: Let me not stay a jot for dinner; go, get it
ready (1.4.9 10): he wants food, from a maternal woman. I believe that Lears
madness is essentially his rage at being deprived of the maternal presence. It is
tantalizing, although I can imagine no way of proving it, to view this rage as part of the
social pathology of wet-nursing in the ruling classes.
The play is full of oral rage: it abounds in fantasies of biting and devouring, and
more specifically, fantasies of parents eating children and children eating parents. The

6
idea is first brought up by Lear when he denies his propinquity and property of blood
with Cordelia; that is, he denies that he begot her, that he is her father, as he also denies
paternity of Regan and Goneril later. He assures her,
The barbarous Scythian,
Or he that makes his generation messes
To gorge his appetite, shall to my bosom
Be as well neighbourd, pitied, and relievd,
As thou my sometime daughter.
(I.I.116-20)
The savagery of the image is shocking; it indicates Lears first step toward the primitive,
infantile modes of thinking to which he surrenders in his madness. When Cordelia
doesnt feed him with love, he thinks angrily of eating her. Lear again voices this
complex conjunction of ideas about maternal nurture, maternal aggression, and
aggression against the mother when he looks at Edgars mutilated body, bleeding from its
many wounds, and remarks,
Is it the fashion, that discarded fathers
Should have thus little mercy on their flesh?
Judicious punishment! twas this flesh begot
Those pelican daughters.
(3.4.72-75)
Lear seems to think that Edgar first transgressed against his father by discarding him as
Regan and Goneril discarded Lear, and that Edgars father then got back at his child, his
flesh, in the flesh, as Lear would like to do. But this fantasy of revenge calls forth an
answering fantasy of punishment against his own flesh a punishment he deserves for
begetting children in the first place. The image of the pelican may have been suggested to
Shakespeare by this passage in a contemporary text, which I will quote because it
elucidates both the reciprocating spiral of aggression and revenge and the close
identification between parent and child, which possesses Lears mind:
The Pellican loueth too much her children. For when the children
be haught, and begin to waxe hoare, they smite the father and mother in
the face, wherefore the mother smiteth them againe and slaieth them. And
the thirde daye the mother smiteth her selfe in her side that the bloud
runneth out, and sheddeth that hot bloud upon the bodies of her children.
And by virtue of the bloud the birdes that were before dead, quicken
againe. 28
The children strike their parents, the mother retaliates, then wounds herself that the
children may nurse on her blood. Ist not, Lear asks, as this mouth should tear this
hand / For lifting food to t? (3.4. 15-16) referring to filial ingratitude. His daughters
are the mouths he fed, which now tear their fathers generous hand; but at the same time,
he is the needy mouth that would turn against those daughters for refusing to feed him on
demand. Lears rage at not being fed by the daughters whom, pelican-like, he has

7
nurtured, fills the play. It is mirrored in Albanys vision of all humanity preying upon
itself, like monsters of the deep (4.2.46-49), a vision inspired by the reality of Goneril
turning her father out in the storm and shortly confirmed by the more gruesome reality of
Regan and Cornwall tearing out another fathers eyes.
Bound up with this mixture of love and hate, nurture and aggression, is Lears
deep sense of identification with his daughters as born of his flesh. When Goneril bids
him return to Regans house rather than disrupt her own, his first thought is absolute
separation from her, like his banishment of Cordelia; Well no more meet, no more see
one another. But immediately he remembers the filial bond, for him a carnal as much as
a moral bond:
But yet thou art my flesh, my blood, my daughter;
Or rather a disease thats in my flesh,
Which I must needs call mine: thou art a boil,
A plague-sore, or embossed carbuncle,
In my corrupted blood.
(2.4. 223-27)
Gloucester echoes the same thought when he says wryly to Lear on the heath, Our flesh
and blood, my lord, is grown so vile, / That it doth hate what gets it (3.4, 149 50).
Children are products of an act that, in Elizabethan lore, was regarded as the
mingling of bloods. In the metaphor of Genesis, repeated in the Anglican wedding
service, man and wife become one flesh. With regard to mother and child, however, the
fleshly bond is not metaphorical but literal. Lear (like Gloucester) ignores the mother-
child fleshly bond and insists that his children are, simply, his flesh and blood. In the
pelican image, he assimilates maternal functions to himself, as though Goneril and Regan
hadnt been born of woman. Like Prospero, he alludes only once to his wife, and then in
the context of adultery. When Regan says she is glad to see her father, he replies
if thou shouldst not be glad
I would divorce me from thy mothers tomb,
Sepulchring an adultress.
(2.4.131-33)
These lines imply, first, that Lear alone as progenitor endowed Regan with her moral
nature, and second, that if that nature isnt good, she had some other father. In either case,
her mothers only contribution was in the choice of a sexual partner. Thus Lear makes
use of patriarchal ideology to serve his defensive needs: he denies his debt to a mother by
denying that his daughters have any debt to her, either.
Lears agonizing consciousness that he did indeed produce such monstrous
children, however, persists despite this denial and leads him to project his loathing
toward the procreative act onto his daughters, in a searing indictment of womens
sexuality:
The fitchew nor the soiled horse goes to t

8
With a more riotous appetite.
Down from the waist they are centaurs,
Though women all above:
But to the girdle do the Gods inherit
Beneath is all the fiends: theres hell, theres darkness,
There is the sulphurous pit burning, scalding,
Stench, consumption; fie, fie, fie! pah, pah!
(4. 6. 124-31)
Even if he did beget these daughters, Lear implies, hes not answerable for their
unkindness, because they are, after all, women and women are tainted, rather than
empowered as men are, by their sexual capacities. Thus he presses into service another
aspect of patriarchal ideology, its misogyny, to separate himself from any feminine
presence.
To return for a moment to the social dimensions of Lears inner turmoil, it is
important here that generational conflicts entwine with and intensify gender conflicts.
Lear and his daughters, Gloucester and his sons are pitted against one another because the
younger generation perceives the authority of the elder as the oppression of aged
tyranny (1.2.47-52). Stephen Greenblatt remarks that this period has a deep
gerontological bias, revealed in numerous claims that by the will of God and the
natural order of things, authority belonged to the old. At the same time, however,
sermons, moral writings, and folk tales of the kind on which King Lear is based voice the
fear that it parents hand over their wealth or their authority to their children, those
children will turn against them.29 The common legal practice of drawing up maintenance
agreements testifies that this fear had some basis in actual experience. In such contracts,
children to whom parents deeded farm or workshop were legally bound to supply food,
clothing, and shelter to their parents, even to the precise number of bushels of grain or
yards of cloth. Thus the law put teeth into what was supposed to be natural kindness.
Lears contest of love in the first scene functions as a maintenance agreement in that he
tries to bind his daughters, by giving them their inheritance while he is still alive, into
caring for him. This generational bargain is then complicated by the demands proper to
gender as well the fathers emotional demand that his daughters be his mothers and
perform the tasks of nurture proper to females.
Regan and Goneril betray and disappoint Lear by not being mothers to him, but in
a deeper, broader sense, they shame him by bringing out the woman in him. In the
following speech, Shakespeare takes us close to the nerve and bone of Lears shame at
being reduced to an impotence he considers womanish:
You see me here, you Gods, a poor old man,
As full of grief as age; wretched in both!
If it be you that stirs these daughters hearts
Against their father, fool me not so much
To bear it tamely; touch me with noble anger,

9
And let not womens weapons, water-drops,
Stain my mans cheeks! No, you unnatural hags,
I will have such revenges on you both
That all the world shall I will do such things,
What they are, yet I know not, but they shall be
The terrors of the earth. You think Ill weep;
No, Ill not weep;
I have full cause of weeping, but this heart
Shall break into a hundred thousand flaws
Or ere Ill weep.
(2.4.274-88)
He calls his tears womens weapons not only as a way of deprecating women for using
emotion to manipulate men but also because he feels deeply threatened by his own
feelings. Marianne Novy has argued that Lawrence Stone, in calling attention to the
distance, manipulation, and deference that characterized the Elizabethan family,
identified a cultural ideal of Elizabethan society... a personality type that on the one
hand kept feelings of attachment and grief under strict control, but on the ocher was more
ready to express feelings at anger. The model, she comments, ideas primarily a
masculine .ideal.30 In agreeing, I would suggest that this masculine ideal was produced
by the extreme sexual division of labor within the patriarchal family, which made women
at once the source and the focus of a childs earliest and most unmanageable feelings.
Despite a lifetime of strenuous defense against admitting feeling and the power of
feminine presence into his world, defense fostered at every turn by prevailing social
arrangements, Lear manages to let them in. He learns to weep and, though his tears scald
and burn like molten lead, they are no longer womens weapons against which he must
defend himself. I will conclude this reading of the play by tracing, briefly, Lears
progress toward acceptance at the woman in himself, a progress punctuated by his
hysterical projections of rage at being deprived of maternal nurture. In the passage that I
just quoted, as he turns toward the heath, Lear prays that anger may keep him from
crying, from becoming like a woman. He also, in effect, tells us one way to read the
storm as a metaphor for his internal emotional process: I have full cause of weeping,
but this heart / Shall break into a hundred thousand flaws / Or ere Ill weep (2.4.286-88).
Shakespeare portrays the storm as the breaking open of something enclosed, a break that
lets out a Rood of rain; it thus resembles Lears heart cracking, letting out the hungry,
mother-identified part of him in a flood of tears. Lear exhorts the winds to crack their
cheeks and the thunder to crack Natures moulds and spill their seeds; he envisions close
pent-up guilts riven from their concealing continents (3.2. 1-9, 49-59). He wants the
whole world struck flat and cleft open, so that the bowels of sympathy may flow. What
spills out of Lear at first is a flood of persecutory fantasies. He sees everyone in his own
image, as either subjects or agents of persecution. Only daughters like his, he thinks,
could have reduced Poor Tom to naked misery; Poor Tom and the Fool are, like him,
stern judges bringing his daughters to trial. Gloucester is Goneril, with a white beard,

10
and then, someone who might weep along with Lear although he has only the case of
eyes.
Before Shakespeare allows Lear to feel the weeping woman in himself or to face
his need for Cordelia and his guilt for the wrong he did her, he evokes and excoriates a
world full of viperish women. Interwoven with Lears indictments of women during acts
3 and 4 are the imaginary lustful mistresses of Poor Toms sophisticated past, the wearers
of plackets and rustling silks, as well as the real Regan tearing out Gloucesters eyes, and
the real Goneril, stealthy and lustful, seducing Edmund and sloughing off Albany. It is as
though Shakespeare as well as his hero must dredge up everything horrible that might be
imagined of women and denounce it before he can confront the good woman, the one and
only good woman, Cordelia.
Cordelias goodness is as absolute and inexplicable as her sisters reprovable
badness, as much an archetype of infantile fantasy as they are. When she re-enters the
play, she is described as crying with pity for her fathers sufferings, yet in her tears she is
still queen over her passion. Whereas Lear thought weeping an ignoble surrender of his
masculine authority, Cordelia conceives her tears as a source of power:
All blest secrets,
All you unpublished virtues of the earth,
Spring with my tears; be aidant and remediate
In the good mans distress!
(4.4.15-18)
In these scenes Cordelia becomes, now in a benign sense, that daughter-mother Lear
wanted her to be. Like the Virgin Mary, she intercedes magically, her empathy and pity
coaxing mercy from nature. Yet finally, as the Doctors words imply, she can only be
the foster-nurse of Lears repose.
Lear runs from the attendants Cordelia sends to rescue him, who appear just after
he poignantly evokes the crying infant as a common denominator of humanity:
Thou must be patient; we came crying hither.
Thou knowst, the first time that we smell the air
We wawl and cry...
When we are born, we cry that we are come
To this great stage of fools.
(4.6.178-80, 182-83)
Here he comes closest to admitting his vulnerability, but he must immediately defend
against it and see the proffered help as a threat. Stanley Cavell has argued that the
reluctance to be recognized by those whom they love most, which characterizes Lear,
Kent, Edgar and Gloucester, lies at the heart of this play; he holds that they are reluctant
because they feel that their love bespeaks a demeaning dependency.* I agree and I
regard that embarrassed shrinking from recognition as part of a masculine identity crisis
in a culture that dichotomized power as masculine and feeling as feminine.

11
And so Lear exits running in this scene, asserting his kingship (Come, come, I
am a king) but behaving like a mischievous child who makes his mother run after him
(Come, and you get it, you shall get it by running, 4.6. 199, 201-202). When he
reappears, he is as helpless as a child, sleeping and carried in by servants. He awakes in
the belief that he has died and been reborn into an afterlife, and he talks about tears to
Cordelia:
Thou art a soul in bliss, but I am bound
Upon a wheel of fire, that mine own tears
Do scald like molten lead.
(4-7-45 47)
These are the tears of ashamed self-knowledge, manly tears caused by a realization of
what his original childish demands on his daughters had led to. In this scene, which I
want to compare with the next scene with Cordelia, Lear comes closer than he ever does
later to a mature acceptance of his human dependency. He asserts his manhood, and
admits Cordelias separateness from him at the same time that he confesses his need for
her. he can say I am a very fond foolish old man and yet also declare, For (as I am a
man) I think this lady / To be my child Cordelia (4.7.59, 69). I want to pause at those
three words man, lady, and child. Lear acknowledges his manhood and his
daughters womanhood in the same line and the same breath. He can stop imagining her
as the maternal woman that he yearned for and accept his separateness from her. Yet he
also calls her his child, acknowledging the bond of paternity that he denied in the first act.
He need not be threatened by her autonomy as a person nor obsessed by the fleshly tie
between them as parent and child.
Lears struggle to discover or create a new mode of being based on his love for
Cordelia continues to his last breath. Imagining their life together in prison, he transcends
the rigid structure of command and obedience that once framed his world:
Come, lets away to prison:
We two alone will sing like birds i th cage;
When thou dost ask me blessing, Ill kneel down
And ask of thee forgiveness. So well live,
And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh at gilded
butterflies...
(5. 3. 8-11)
Parent and child are equal, the gestures of deference that ordinarily denote patriarchal
authority now transformed into signs of reciprocal love. Moreover, Lear now views all
power from a quasi-divine perspective that charmingly deflates pretension or ambition as
mere toys, while nevertheless carrying a certain grandeur of its own. On the other hand,
Lears characteristically fierce defensiveness continues to shape his fantasy, which is
provoked by Cordelias request that they confront their enemies: Shall we not see these
daughters and these sisters? The prospect of facing his bad mothers as well as his good
mother impels Lear to conceive of Cordelia and himself as forming an impregnable dyad

12
bound together by a complete harmony of thought and feeling more than by the
circumstances of captivity. If he did agree to meet Regan and Goneril, he would have to
abandon the fantasy that one good woman like Cordelia can triumph over or negate her
evil counterparts, as well as the fantasy that a prison can be a nursery in which Cordelia
has no independent being and exists solely for her father as part of his defensive strategy
against coming to terms with women who are as human, or as inhuman, as men.
Cordelias death prevents Lear from trying to live out his fantasy, and perhaps
discover once again that a daughter cannot be a mother. When he enters bearing
Cordelia in his arms, he is struggling to accept the total and irrevocable loss of the only
loving woman in his world, the one person who could possibly fulfill needs that he has, in
such anguish, finally come to admit. No wonder that he cannot contemplate such utter,
devastating separateness, and in the final scene tries so hard to deny that she is dead. At
the end of King Lear, only men are left. It remains for Shakespeare to re-imagine a world
in his last plays in which masculine authority can Find mothers in its daughters, in
Marina, Perdita, and Miranda the world of pastoral tragicomedy and romance, the
genres of wish-fulfillment, rather than the tragic world of King Lear.
Notes
I am grateful to David Leverenz and Louis Adrian Montrose for their sensitive
comments on drafts of this essay.
1. This and all subsequent quotations are taken from the Arden edition of King Lear, ed. Kenneth Muir
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1952).
2. See Ilza Veith, Hysteria: The History of a Disease (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965).
3. As Veith (ibid.) shows, during the Middle Ages, hysteria had ceased to be known as a disease and was
taken as a visible token of bewitchment. Jordan wrote his treatise to argue for a distinction between the
two. Both his work and the pamphlet by Samuel Harsnett denouncing the persecution of witches (from
which Shakespeare took much of Poor Toms language) have the effect of pointing up parallels between
hysteria and witchcraft as deviant kinds of behavior associated with women, which are then used to justify
denigrating women and subjecting them to strict control. In her essay on the literary and social forms of
sexual inversion in early modern Europe whereby women took dominant roles and ruled over men, Natalie
Zemon Davis notes that such female unruliness was thought to emanate from a wandering womb and
comments, The lower ruled the higher within the woman, then, and if she were given her way, she would
want to rule over those above her outside. Her disorderliness led her into the evil arts of witchcraft, so
ecclesiastical authorities claimed... See Women on Top, in Society and Culture in Early Modem France
(Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1975), p. 125. Hilda Smith notes that a gynecological text
published in 1652 calls the entire female sexual structure The Matrix, subordinating female sexuality to
its reproductive function; see her Gynecology and Ideology in Seventeenth Century England, in
Liberating Womens History, ed. Berenice Carroll (Urbana: Illinois University Press, 1976), pp. 97-114.
For a theory of hysteria as a disorder that makes complex use of contemporaneous cultural and social
forms, see Alan Krohn, Hysteria: The Elusive Neurosis (New York: International Universities Press,
1978).
4. Dianne Hunter, Psychoanalytic Intervention in the History of Consciousness, Beginning with 0, The
(M)Other Tongue: Essays in Feminist Psychoanalytic Interpretation, ed. Shirley Nelson Garner, Claire
Kahane, Madelon Sprengnether (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985). Freud suggests that
attachment to the mother may be especially intimately related to the aetiology of hysteria, which is not
surprising when we reflect that both the phase and the neurosis are characteristically feminine. Female
Sexuality (1931), Standard Edition 21:223-45.
5. Gayle Rubin, The Tragic in Women: Notes on the Political Economy of Sex, in Toward An
Anthropology of Women, ed. Rayna Reiter (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975), pp, 184 85.

13
6. C. L. Barber, The Family in Shakespeares Development, in Representing Shakespeare: New
Psychoanalytic Essays, ed. Murray Schwartz and Coppelia Kahn (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1980), pp. 199.
7. See my article, Excavating Those Dim Minoan Regions: Maternal Subtexts in Patriarchal Literature,
Diacritics (Summer 1982), 32 41, which contains a much condensed version of this essay, The idea of a
maternal subtext was first suggested to me by Madelon Gohlkes essay, I wooed thee with my sword,
Shakespeares Tragic Paradigms, in Representing Shakespeare: New Psychoanalytic Essays (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980). She writes of a structure of relation in which it is women who
are regarded as powerful and men who strive to avoid an awareness of their vulnerability in relation to
women, a vulnerability in which they regard themselves as feminine (p. 180).
8. The True Chronicle Historic of King Leir and His Three Daughters, in Narrative and Dramatic Sources
of Shakespeare, ed. Geoffrey Bullough, 7 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1973), 7: 337-402.
9. In his brilliant and wide-ranging essay in this volume, Shaping Fantasies. Figurations of Gender and
Power in Elizabethan Culture, Louis Adrian Montrose explicates the patriarchal ideology threaded through
A Midsummer Nights Dream, whereby the mothers part in procreation is occluded and men alone are held
to make women, and make themselves through the medium of women. He interprets this belief as an
overcompensation for the natural fact that men do indeed come from women; an overcompensation for the
cultural facts that consanguineal and affinal ties between men are established through mothers, wives, and
daughters.
10. Murray Schwartz explored this idea in a series of talks given at the Center for the Humanities,
Wesleyan University, February-April 1978.
11. Lawrence Stones The Family, Sex, and Marriage in England, 1500-1800 (New York: Harper & Row,
1978) offers a picture of Elizabethan filial relationships which is both highly suggestive for readings of
Shakespeare and much at variance with him; see especially pp. 151-218. For a convenient summary of
Stones account of the Elizabethan patriarchal family, see his essay, The Rise of the Nuclear Family in
Early Modern England, in The Family in History, ed. Charles E. Rosenberg (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 1975), pp. 25-54.
12. Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (New York: W. W.
Norton, 1976; reprint, Bantam, 1977); Dorothy Dinnerstein, The Mermaid and the Minotaur: Sexual
Arrangements and Human Malaise (New York: Harper & Row, 1976); Nancy Chodorow, The
Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender (Berkeley and Los Angeles:
University at California Press, 1979). My article, Excavating Those Dim Minoan Regions, mentioned
above is in part a review of these books.
13. Sigmund Freud, Female Sexuality (1931), Standard Edition 21:228.
14. Robert Stoller, Facts and Fancies: An Examination of Freuds Concept of Bisexuality, in Women and
Analysis: Dialogues on Psychoanalytic Views of Feminity, ed. Jean Strouse (New York: Grossman, 1974),
p. 358.
15. For a reading of Shakespeare in light of this differentiation and the ideology connected with it, see my
Mans Estate: Masculine Identity in Shakespeare (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California
Press, 1981).
16. See reviews by E. P. Thompson, Radical History Review 20 (Spring-Summer 1979): 42-50; Alan
MacFarlane, History and Theory 18 (no. 1, 1979): 103-26; Randolph Traumbach, Journal of Social History
13 (no. 1, 1979): 136 43; Richard T. Vann, Journal of Family History 4 (Fall 1979): 308-15.
Lawrence Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558-1641, abridged ed. (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1967), p. 271.
18. This and the following paragraph appear in Mans Estate, pp. 13-14.
19. Quoted from Political Works of King James I, ed. C. H. McIlwain (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1918), p. 307; cited in Lawrence Stone, The Rise of the Nuclear Family, p. 54.
20. An Homily of the State of Matrimony, in The Two Books of Homilies Appointed to be Read in
Churches, ed. John Griffiths (Oxford, 1859), p. 505.

14
21. David Leverenz, The Language of Puritan Feeling: An Exploration in Literature, Psychology, and
Social History (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1980), p. 86. Leverenz gives a fuller and more
psychologically astute interpretation of childrearing than does Stone. Though he is specifically concerned
with the Puritan family, he relies on the same sources as Stone Elizabethan and Jacobean manuals of
childrearing and domestic conduct, holding that almost any point made in Puritan tracts can be found in
non-Puritan writings (p. 91).
22. Lynda Boose, The Father and the Bride in Shakespeare, PMLA 97 (May 1982): 325-47.
23. For a subtle and lucid account of pre-oedipal experience, see Margaret S. Mahler, Fred Pine, and Anni
Bergman, The Psychological Birth of the Human Infant: Symbiosis and Individuation (New York; Basic
Books, 1975), pp. 39-120.
24. Sigmund Freud, On Narcissism (1914), Standard Edition 14:69- 102.
25. Sigmund Freud, The Theme of the Three Caskets, Standard Edition 12:289-300.
26. Stone, Marriage, Sex, and the Family, pp. 106 109.
27. John Bowlby, Attachment and Loss, 2 vols. (New York: Basic Books, 1969).
28. Batman upon Bartholeme (1582), cited in the Arden edition, p. 118. The kind life-rendring pelican
was a familiar image of Christ in the Middle Ages, wounding herself with her beak to feed her children.
Even today, the blood bank of the city of Dublin, administered by an organization called Mother and
Child, is known as the Pelican. (I am indebted to Thomas Flanagan for this information.)
29. Stephen J. Greenblatt, Lears Anxiety, Raritan Review (Summer 1982), 92-114.
30. Marianne Novy, Shakespeare and Emotional Distance in the Elizabethan Family, Theatre Journal 33
(October 1981): 316-26.
31. See. C. L. Barber, The Family in Shakespeares Development: Tragedy and Sacredness, in
Representing Shakespeare: New Psychoanalytic Essays, for the idea that the very central and
problematical role of women in Shakespeare and the Elizabethan drama generally reflects the fact that
Protestantism did away with the cult of the Virgin Mary. It meant the loss of ritual resource for dealing
with the internal residues in all of us of the once all-powerful and all-inclusive mother (p. 196).
Stanley Cavell, The Avoidance of Love, in Must We Mean What We Say? (Cambridge: At the University
Press, 1976).
33. This reading of the play suggests that Shakespeare departed from his sources and let Cordelia die
because he wanted to confront as starkly as possible the pain of separation from the mother.
The Medusa Complex in Shakespeares King Lear

Head of Medusa, Caravaggio (circa 1598)



To decapitate = to castrate. The terror of castration is thus a terror of castration that is linked
to the sight of something. [] the occasion for this [] occurs when a boy, who has hitherto
been unwilling to believe in the threat of castration, catches a glimpse of adult female
genitalia, surrounded by a bush of hair, essentially those of his mother. [] The sight of
Medusas head makes the spectator stiff with terror, turns him to stone. [] For becoming
stiff means an erection. Thus in the original situation it offers consolation to the spectator: he
is still in possession of a penis, and its stiffening reassures him of this fact. [] If Medusas
head takes the place of a representation of a females sexual apparatus [] it may be recalled
that displaying the genitals is familiar in other connections as an apotropaic act. What
arouses horror in oneself will produce the same effect upon the enemy against whom one is
seeking to defend oneself.

Freud, Sigmund (1922/1940) [Ed. 1991] The Head of Medusa in Complete Works, p. 161.
22
!"#$%&'($&)*$&+, &-+%.+/&01+'%+1234
04'5&3"&6247$'(&2"#&83".&9$2%
!"#$%&'()*#+',"-./,01&$
2$'+,"('30-&4-5'+,"6&&/
!
the theme o Medusa has not ceased!rom Antiquity
throughout the Renaissance to the present day!to inspire
and to act as a catalyst or a whole mass o studies in the
domain o arts, literature and social sciences, it is astonishing to
note that Medusa has been largely neglected in the realm o
Shakespearean Studies. Indeed, in my inestigating work or this
paper, I ound that there is only, to my knowledge, one study in
which the theme o Medusa is directly treated and analysed in the
context o a Shakespeare tragedy: Macbeth, the Male Medusa,`
by Marjorie Garber.
1
"#$%&'() lends itsel both releantly and
opportunely to a study relating to the myth o the Medusa when
one recalls the words o Macdu, who on discoering the corpse
o his king, Duncan, exclaims horriied,
O horror, horror, horror! 1ongue nor heart
Cannot conceie nor name thee!
Approach the chamber, and *&+',-.).-/,)+01('
20'()#)3&4)5-,1-3: do not bid me speak,
See, and then speak yourseles. ,2.3.1-3 |my emphasis|,
I Garber oers a brilliant reading o the Medusa complex in
"#$%&'(
2
!to which I shall return later to look at more closely so
as to propose alternatie and complementary points o analysis-
this reading constitutes, as I hae pointed out, a rarity, een an
exception in Shakespeare annals. lor, generally speaking, and
,almost, with one oice, Shakespeare critics hae tended to describe
and research artistic and literary techniques in what I could call '(&
6-,$&+)-6 )7-8&7&3')#3*9-,)'(&)#307#'&*!i.e., allowing statues o stone
to take on lie,lesh-rather than the opposite-i.e. ,the moement
which leads lie in the direction o immobility and turns lesh to
stone. In order to illustrate this clear orientation o Shakespeare
criticism towards the animation,enliening o stone, suice it to
note the enthusiasm shown with respect to the amous scene in
23
:(&) 203'&,;+) :#<&) ,inspired by the ancient myth o Pygmalion by
Oid,,
3
when King Leontes discoers that the statue o his dead
queen, lermione, suddenly becomes animated and returns to lie.
Also, rather than continuing to search how and why ,Shakespearean,
critical language has allowed itsel so quickly and so lastingly to be
drawn into,enclosed in this rhetoric o animation,`
4
it seemed to
us quite releant and useul to consider the opposing case and to
examine the point where Medusa inally triumphs completely in
the annulment o that traditional expectation or moement,lie,
lesh and comes to create a speciic aesthetic by achieing, as
Macdu will say beore his murdered king, the great doom`s
image,` horror`s masterpiece` itsel ,2.3.68,.
I hae selected or discussion speciic scenes where the Medusa
Complex lends itsel to be analysed properly. Let us then irst o
all consider the amous Banquet Scene in act 3 o "#$%&'(. Placed
directly in ront o the banqueting room, we are present at the
entry o a procession o Scottish lords making ready to east at
the table o their new king, Macbeth. laing beorehand ordered
the murder o his rial, Banquo ,or whom, according to the
prophecies o the three witches, een though lesser than Macbeth
and |yet| greater,` he shalt get kings, though |he| be none`,,
Macbeth addresses himsel to the assembled guests to express-
with blatant insincerity or the spectator and reader-his anxiety
with regard to the absence,lateness o his riend, Banquo:
lere had we now our country`s honour rooed,
\ere the graced person o our =#3>/-)?,&+&3',
\ho may I rather challenge or unkindness
1han pity or mischance! ,3.4.40-43 |emphasis my own|,
1o which Ross replies,
@0+)#%+&3$&A)sir,
Lays blame upon his promise. Please`t your highness
1o grace us with your royal company.
,3. 4.44-46 |emphasis my own|,
No sooner has this game o repartee noting Banquo`s absence
ended than his spectre makes its appearance and installs itsel in
King Macbeth`s place:
"#$%&'(B Prithee see there! Behold! Look! Lo! low say you
\hy what care I I thou canst nod, speak too.
I charnel-houses and our graes must send
1hose that we bury back, our monuments
Shall be the maws o kites. ,3.4.69-0,
2$7,"-38,-90,-&4-.&":&
22
!"#$%&'($&)*$&+, &-+%.+/&01+'%+1234
04'5&3"&6247$'(&2"#&83".&9$2%
!"#$%&'()*#+',"-./,01&$
2$'+,"('30-&4-5'+,"6&&/
!
the theme o Medusa has not ceased!rom Antiquity
throughout the Renaissance to the present day!to inspire
and to act as a catalyst or a whole mass o studies in the
domain o arts, literature and social sciences, it is astonishing to
note that Medusa has been largely neglected in the realm o
Shakespearean Studies. Indeed, in my inestigating work or this
paper, I ound that there is only, to my knowledge, one study in
which the theme o Medusa is directly treated and analysed in the
context o a Shakespeare tragedy: Macbeth, the Male Medusa,`
by Marjorie Garber.
1
"#$%&'() lends itsel both releantly and
opportunely to a study relating to the myth o the Medusa when
one recalls the words o Macdu, who on discoering the corpse
o his king, Duncan, exclaims horriied,
O horror, horror, horror! 1ongue nor heart
Cannot conceie nor name thee!
Approach the chamber, and *&+',-.).-/,)+01('
20'()#)3&4)5-,1-3: do not bid me speak,
See, and then speak yourseles. ,2.3.1-3 |my emphasis|,
I Garber oers a brilliant reading o the Medusa complex in
"#$%&'(
2
!to which I shall return later to look at more closely so
as to propose alternatie and complementary points o analysis-
this reading constitutes, as I hae pointed out, a rarity, een an
exception in Shakespeare annals. lor, generally speaking, and
,almost, with one oice, Shakespeare critics hae tended to describe
and research artistic and literary techniques in what I could call '(&
6-,$&+)-6 )7-8&7&3')#3*9-,)'(&)#307#'&*!i.e., allowing statues o stone
to take on lie,lesh-rather than the opposite-i.e. ,the moement
which leads lie in the direction o immobility and turns lesh to
stone. In order to illustrate this clear orientation o Shakespeare
criticism towards the animation,enliening o stone, suice it to
note the enthusiasm shown with respect to the amous scene in
23
:(&) 203'&,;+) :#<&) ,inspired by the ancient myth o Pygmalion by
Oid,,
3
when King Leontes discoers that the statue o his dead
queen, lermione, suddenly becomes animated and returns to lie.
Also, rather than continuing to search how and why ,Shakespearean,
critical language has allowed itsel so quickly and so lastingly to be
drawn into,enclosed in this rhetoric o animation,`
4
it seemed to
us quite releant and useul to consider the opposing case and to
examine the point where Medusa inally triumphs completely in
the annulment o that traditional expectation or moement,lie,
lesh and comes to create a speciic aesthetic by achieing, as
Macdu will say beore his murdered king, the great doom`s
image,` horror`s masterpiece` itsel ,2.3.68,.
I hae selected or discussion speciic scenes where the Medusa
Complex lends itsel to be analysed properly. Let us then irst o
all consider the amous Banquet Scene in act 3 o "#$%&'(. Placed
directly in ront o the banqueting room, we are present at the
entry o a procession o Scottish lords making ready to east at
the table o their new king, Macbeth. laing beorehand ordered
the murder o his rial, Banquo ,or whom, according to the
prophecies o the three witches, een though lesser than Macbeth
and |yet| greater,` he shalt get kings, though |he| be none`,,
Macbeth addresses himsel to the assembled guests to express-
with blatant insincerity or the spectator and reader-his anxiety
with regard to the absence,lateness o his riend, Banquo:
lere had we now our country`s honour rooed,
\ere the graced person o our =#3>/-)?,&+&3',
\ho may I rather challenge or unkindness
1han pity or mischance! ,3.4.40-43 |emphasis my own|,
1o which Ross replies,
@0+)#%+&3$&A)sir,
Lays blame upon his promise. Please`t your highness
1o grace us with your royal company.
,3. 4.44-46 |emphasis my own|,
No sooner has this game o repartee noting Banquo`s absence
ended than his spectre makes its appearance and installs itsel in
King Macbeth`s place:
"#$%&'(B Prithee see there! Behold! Look! Lo! low say you
\hy what care I I thou canst nod, speak too.
I charnel-houses and our graes must send
1hose that we bury back, our monuments
Shall be the maws o kites. ,3.4.69-0,
2$7,"-38,-90,-&4-.&":&
24
Macbeth`s instantaneous reaction o stupeaction, horror and right
is occasioned by the ision o Banquo`s ghost, which, moreoer,
Shakespeare describes as a head detached rom its body, his throat
is cut` ,3.4.16,, and harbouring curls clotted with blood, gory
locks` ,3.4.50,, bearing a certain resemblance to the decapitated
head o Medusa. Indeed, i this appearance preigures Macbeth`s
own decapitation, it takes us back aboe all to the gorgon sight,
site o the tragedy itsel, i.e., to the murder o Duncan. 1his seems
to be conirmed by the utterances o Lady Macbeth when she,
deploring her husband`s agitation, declares, telescoping to some
extent the two eents, 1his is the air-drawn dagger which, you
said, , Led you to Duncan` ,3.4.63-64,.
1he reintroduction o this dagger at this particular point in
the tragedy-which made its ery irst appearance ,under the orm
o an hallucination, in act 2, scene 1, line 33, inciting Macbeth to
commit the murder o his king-maniests here a hoering,loating
!"#$"%"&'(which ceaselessly indicates to us and points us in a certain
direction ,backwards once more, and which stries "$( )*"$( to
materialize into a !"#$"%"&+,(the place o Gorgo ,the place where the
king was murdered,. 1his place could be apprehended as a pictural
space wherein is exhibited, as Lady Macbeth will point out, the
ery painting o y|our| ear` ,3.4.62, and wherein Medusa`s lopped
o head hoers, leaing in its wake, in the ery conolutions o its
passage, drips and
traces o blood. It
would need only one
more step to see
Caraaggio`s -&*+(.%
/&+0!*( appear ,%"#1
2,.
5
\e know that
this picture o
Medusa in the
Galeria Uizi in
llorence was irst o
all commissioned by
Cardinal del Monte
and that he
aterwards made a
git o it to
lerdinand, Grand
Duke o 1uscany,
on the occasion o
his marriage in 1608.
!"#$%&'()*#+',"- ./,01&$
!'23",-45 !'23",-45 !'23",-45 !'23",-45 !'23",-45
6'78,/#$2,/&-6,"'('-9#-:#"#+#22'&;-<,#9-&=
6,93(#;-75-4>?@;-&'/-&$-7#$+#(;-AB-C>>-7D5;
E=='1'-.#//,"0;-!/&",$7,;-FG#/05 55 55
25
Caraaggio gies us on a '.3&44*,
6
a round or oblong surace, the
head o Medusa at the ery moment, at the precise and ininitesimal
instant o her decapitation by Perseus. \hat Caraaggio gies us
in this representation is an instant portrait,` a portrait suspended
in time, in which the ery gaze o Medusa is seized in the right o
her own relection ,representation, and decapitation.

In this way
Caraaggio places us in the presence o a moment which is precisely
5*6"3*4, an interal,moment situated hal-way between an action
and a state, i.e., just ater the sword-stroke hewn by Perseus` and
just beore the death o Medusa.` In act, by this quite peculiar
process o construction, Caraaggio manages to make o this
representation o Medusa a captured,rozen` moment which,
certainly, seems to become stagnant and yet does not cease-in
the mind,the eyes o the spectator-torepeat itsel in the pictural
space assigned to it. 78"!( "$!3*$3( $&)&'( &$+!9*$+( /&+0!*( $&)&'( !3.6!
4..:"$#(*3(8&'!&4%1( Listening to such an argument and conronted by
the eiciency, the power and, indeed, the danger o such an image,
we must, in the manner o the masterly study by Louis Marin on
Medusa, wonder how to proceed so as to look on that head with
its eyes wide open without being changed to stone in our turn.
Marin asks himsel the question and answers as ollows:
-.;( !8.04+( .$&( 4..:(*3( 78&(-&*+( .%( /&+0!*<(=$&(>0!3( ?&
50$$"$#,( ?&( &@3'&>&4A( *33&$3")&( *$+( )"#"4*$3: at eery moment
aoid the trap inherent in Caraaggio`s picture which
represents the trap o Perseus "$(.'+&'(3.(8.4+(.03(3'*6!(%.'("3
.0'!&4)&!,("% (38&(!3'&$#38(.% (38&(!3'.$#(5*$(?&(38&"'(;&*:$&!!(*$+(38&
;&*:$&!!(.% (38&(;&*:(38&"'(!3'&$#381((B.(>058(%.'(38&(#*C&(.% (/&+0!*,
!.(>058(%.'(38&(&A&,(38&(#4*$5&(.% (D&'!&0!1
78"!( "!( >A( %"'!3( 3'"5:E( F!3*'3G( %'.>( 38&( #*C&-*$+( %'.>( 38&
.'"&$3*3".$( .% ( 38&( 8&*+( "$( 38&( ;.':-!"$5&( ;&( *'&( 3*4:"$#( *?.03
/&+0!*(8&'&(*$+(38&(!0?H&53(.% (38&(6"530'&("!(*(#*C&,(>"$&,(8&'!,(38*3
.% (D&'!&0!,(38*3(.% (38&(6*"$3&'1(78&(8&*+("!(30'$&+(38'&&(I0*'3&'!(3.
38&(4&%31(-.;&)&',(!3'"534A(!6&*:"$#,(/&+0!*(+.&!($.3(4..:(*3(>&1(.
J(3'A(3.(6.!"3".$(>A!&4% ("$(8&'(#*C&1 . . . J>6.!!"?4&1(I am transparent
to her. She looks at me as i I were nothing, as i I were not
there1
8
O course, Louis Marin will not stop there and will wonder,
with the usual sophistication we associate with him, why the
construction o the picture contains that slight deiation o
Medusa`s head, that diagonal, oblique moement rom let to right
o the picture. Len though 78&(-&*+(.% (/&+0!*(is undeniably a
ull rontal picture, Marin reminds us that it was painted on a
conex, rounded surace which entails a slight rotation o the
painting. Indeed, i the gaze o the subject depicted ,Medusa, is
E$9,"-G8,-H0,-&=-.&"2&
24
Macbeth`s instantaneous reaction o stupeaction, horror and right
is occasioned by the ision o Banquo`s ghost, which, moreoer,
Shakespeare describes as a head detached rom its body, his throat
is cut` ,3.4.16,, and harbouring curls clotted with blood, gory
locks` ,3.4.50,, bearing a certain resemblance to the decapitated
head o Medusa. Indeed, i this appearance preigures Macbeth`s
own decapitation, it takes us back aboe all to the gorgon sight,
site o the tragedy itsel, i.e., to the murder o Duncan. 1his seems
to be conirmed by the utterances o Lady Macbeth when she,
deploring her husband`s agitation, declares, telescoping to some
extent the two eents, 1his is the air-drawn dagger which, you
said, , Led you to Duncan` ,3.4.63-64,.
1he reintroduction o this dagger at this particular point in
the tragedy-which made its ery irst appearance ,under the orm
o an hallucination, in act 2, scene 1, line 33, inciting Macbeth to
commit the murder o his king-maniests here a hoering,loating
!"#$"%"&'(which ceaselessly indicates to us and points us in a certain
direction ,backwards once more, and which stries "$( )*"$( to
materialize into a !"#$"%"&+,(the place o Gorgo ,the place where the
king was murdered,. 1his place could be apprehended as a pictural
space wherein is exhibited, as Lady Macbeth will point out, the
ery painting o y|our| ear` ,3.4.62, and wherein Medusa`s lopped
o head hoers, leaing in its wake, in the ery conolutions o its
passage, drips and
traces o blood. It
would need only one
more step to see
Caraaggio`s -&*+(.%
/&+0!*( appear ,%"#1
2,.
5
\e know that
this picture o
Medusa in the
Galeria Uizi in
llorence was irst o
all commissioned by
Cardinal del Monte
and that he
aterwards made a
git o it to
lerdinand, Grand
Duke o 1uscany,
on the occasion o
his marriage in 1608.
!"#$%&'()*#+',"- ./,01&$
!'23",-45 !'23",-45 !'23",-45 !'23",-45 !'23",-45
6'78,/#$2,/&-6,"'('-9#-:#"#+#22'&;-<,#9-&=
6,93(#;-75-4>?@;-&'/-&$-7#$+#(;-AB-C>>-7D5;
E=='1'-.#//,"0;-!/&",$7,;-FG#/05 55 55
25
Caraaggio gies us on a '.3&44*,
6
a round or oblong surace, the
head o Medusa at the ery moment, at the precise and ininitesimal
instant o her decapitation by Perseus. \hat Caraaggio gies us
in this representation is an instant portrait,` a portrait suspended
in time, in which the ery gaze o Medusa is seized in the right o
her own relection ,representation, and decapitation.

In this way
Caraaggio places us in the presence o a moment which is precisely
5*6"3*4, an interal,moment situated hal-way between an action
and a state, i.e., just ater the sword-stroke hewn by Perseus` and
just beore the death o Medusa.` In act, by this quite peculiar
process o construction, Caraaggio manages to make o this
representation o Medusa a captured,rozen` moment which,
certainly, seems to become stagnant and yet does not cease-in
the mind,the eyes o the spectator-torepeat itsel in the pictural
space assigned to it. 78"!( "$!3*$3( $&)&'( &$+!9*$+( /&+0!*( $&)&'( !3.6!
4..:"$#(*3(8&'!&4%1( Listening to such an argument and conronted by
the eiciency, the power and, indeed, the danger o such an image,
we must, in the manner o the masterly study by Louis Marin on
Medusa, wonder how to proceed so as to look on that head with
its eyes wide open without being changed to stone in our turn.
Marin asks himsel the question and answers as ollows:
-.;(!8.04+( .$&(4..:(*3( 78&( -&*+(.%( /&+0!*<( =$&(>0!3( ?&
50$$"$#,( ?&( &@3'&>&4A( *33&$3")&( *$+( )"#"4*$3: at eery moment
aoid the trap inherent in Caraaggio`s picture which
represents the trap o Perseus "$(.'+&'(3.(8.4+(.03(3'*6!(%.'("3
.0'!&4)&!,("% (38&(!3'&$#38(.% (38&(!3'.$#(5*$(?&(38&"'(;&*:$&!!(*$+(38&
;&*:$&!!(.% (38&(;&*:(38&"'(!3'&$#381((B.(>058(%.'(38&(#*C&(.% (/&+0!*,
!.(>058(%.'(38&(&A&,(38&(#4*$5&(.% (D&'!&0!1
78"!( "!( >A( %"'!3( 3'"5:E( F!3*'3G( %'.>( 38&( #*C&-*$+( %'.>( 38&
.'"&$3*3".$( .% ( 38&( 8&*+( "$( 38&( ;.':-!"$5&( ;&( *'&( 3*4:"$#( *?.03
/&+0!*(8&'&(*$+(38&(!0?H&53(.% (38&(6"530'&("!(*(#*C&,(>"$&,(8&'!,(38*3
.% (D&'!&0!,(38*3(.% (38&(6*"$3&'1(78&(8&*+("!(30'$&+(38'&&(I0*'3&'!(3.
38&(4&%31(-.;&)&',(!3'"534A(!6&*:"$#,(/&+0!*(+.&!($.3(4..:(*3(>&1(.
J(3'A(3.(6.!"3".$(>A!&4% ("$(8&'(#*C&1 . . . J>6.!!"?4&1(I am transparent
to her. She looks at me as i I were nothing, as i I were not
there1
8
O course, Louis Marin will not stop there and will wonder,
with the usual sophistication we associate with him, why the
construction o the picture contains that slight deiation o
Medusa`s head, that diagonal, oblique moement rom let to right
o the picture. Len though 78&(-&*+(.% (/&+0!*(is undeniably a
ull rontal picture, Marin reminds us that it was painted on a
conex, rounded surace which entails a slight rotation o the
painting. Indeed, i the gaze o the subject depicted ,Medusa, is
E$9,"-G8,-H0,-&=-.&"2&
26
eer so slightly out o kilter, aected on the surace by its support,
the iconic relation between the seeing subject and the seen subject-
the atal isual exchange-will ineitably be vi..ea. 1he eect that
the depiction o Medusa creates could thereore be said to be
almost incongruous, accidental, or a picture a fortiori apotropaic,
or, een though she is acing me, Medusa does not look at me,
not completely-there is, in eect, no relection, no exchange o
looks, we are transparent to her.
Now, to come back to the tragedy o Macbetb, and to the banquet
scene in particular, we can detect a striking analogy when the
Gorgon-like ghost o Banquo produces the same eect on Macbeth
himsel. Also, ater the ghost`s second appearance, Macbeth seems
to gie a more obserant second glance at the blood-drenched
head he sees appearing in ront o him. And despite the ear and
the eeling o horror that the sight o this head calls up, Macbeth-
just like Louis Marin, i I may say so-will start biv a. rett with his
gaze, to declare to him directly,
1bov ba.t vo .ecvtatiov iv tbo.e e,e.
\hich thou dost glare with me. ,3.4.96-9,
Indeed, i the gaze o that ghostly head,ace, just like
Caraaggio`s eaa of Meav.a, is henceorth attenuated, depried
o power by the application o the oregoing analysis,
deconstruction, I could almost argue that the whole eectie,
eicacious dimension o the power o horror and right is tac/ivg
in this image,apparition. But perhaps it is precisely here, in this
relection and, as lecate will say with regard to Macbeth, in this
eeling o security which is or mortals the greatest o dangers
,3.5.32-33,, that the whole power o Medusa resides. lor what is
well and truly tac/ivg in this image o Medusa`s head, and is
suggested ,potentially, to the gaze, is Perseus`s gesture in its entirety:
i.e., the gesture at one and the same time ab.evt yet roavctire, o a
blade coming to cut o a head and coming neertheless to produce
the ery image o tbi. head-the gesture then which prompted us
to conceie o the picture o Medusa in the irst place as a ca.vra
,interruption,suspension,, but which rom then on, only takes on
its ull meaning under the paradigm o the cvt,
9
o something
missing, i.e., ca.tratiov.
10
On this subject, lreud in 1922 dictated a
note ,published posthumously in 1940, in which the theme o
Medusa`s head` crops up in relation to castration. Perectly
conscious o the ,almost, oerused character o this text in
reerence terms, I hae been content just to quote here one single
extract, modestly expressing the hope o establishing an
!"#$%&'()*#+',"- ./,01&$ 2
enlightening correlation,connection with a passage rom the
banquet scene in Macbetb:
1o decapitate ~ to castrate. 1he terror o castration is thus
a terror o castration that is linked to the sight o
something.. |1|he occasion or this . occurs when a boy,
who has hitherto been unwilling to beliee in the threat o
castration, catches a glimpse o adult emale genitalia,
surrounded by a bush o hair, essentially those o his
mother..1he sight o Medusa`s head makes the spectator
sti with terror, turns him to stone. . . . lor becoming sti
means an erection. 1hus in the original situation it oers
consolation to the spectator: he is still in possession o a
penis, and its stiening reassures him o this act..I
Medusa`s head takes the place o a representation o a
emale`s sexual apparatus . . . it may be recalled that
displaying the genitals is amiliar in other connections as
an apotropaic act. \hat arouses horror in onesel will
produce the same eect upon the enemy against whom
one is seeking to deend onesel. !e reaa iv Rabetai. of bor
tbe Derit too/ to bi. beet. after tbe rovav .borea to biv ber rvtra.
11
In point o act, to attach and apply lreud`s note to the tragedy
with which we are concerned, we know that in the banquet scene
the appearance o Banquo`s Medusa-like head will not only render
rigid with right, etrif, Macbeth with ear, but will also-as Marjorie
Garber`s article demonstrates, in conormity with lreud`s analysis
and interpretation-allow Lady Macbeth to bring up the whole
theme o castration by means o an untimely interrogation o her
own husband`s masculinity,irility.
12
Indeed, no sooner will she
hae called into question ,placed in doubt, Macbeth`s sexual identity
as a man, than a desexualising outburst ,an emasculation, we might
dare say, will ollow:
aa, Macbetb: .re ,ov a vav.
. . . . . . . . . .
O, these laws and starts
. would well beome
. rovav`. .tor, at a winter`s ire,
Authorized by ber gravaaave .
bave itsel.
,3.4.58, 64-6 |emphasis my own|,
1he sight o this Medusa`s head may be said to rob Macbeth
o all male attributes, o all o his evi.. It is thereore, as lreud
writes, the representation o the emale genital apparatus that repels
and prookes ear by its castration. In order to illustrate and alidate
his argument, lreud will hae recourse to Rabelais-and i we are
2$3,"-45,-60,-&7-.&"8&
26
eer so slightly out o kilter, aected on the surace by its support,
the iconic relation between the seeing subject and the seen subject-
the atal isual exchange-will ineitably be vi..ea. 1he eect that
the depiction o Medusa creates could thereore be said to be
almost incongruous, accidental, or a picture a fortiori apotropaic,
or, een though she is acing me, Medusa does not look at me,
not completely-there is, in eect, no relection, no exchange o
looks, we are transparent to her.
Now, to come back to the tragedy o Macbetb, and to the banquet
scene in particular, we can detect a striking analogy when the
Gorgon-like ghost o Banquo produces the same eect on Macbeth
himsel. Also, ater the ghost`s second appearance, Macbeth seems
to gie a more obserant second glance at the blood-drenched
head he sees appearing in ront o him. And despite the ear and
the eeling o horror that the sight o this head calls up, Macbeth-
just like Louis Marin, i I may say so-will start biv a. rett with his
gaze, to declare to him directly,
1bov ba.t vo .ecvtatiov iv tbo.e e,e.
\hich thou dost glare with me. ,3.4.96-9,
Indeed, i the gaze o that ghostly head,ace, just like
Caraaggio`s eaa of Meav.a, is henceorth attenuated, depried
o power by the application o the oregoing analysis,
deconstruction, I could almost argue that the whole eectie,
eicacious dimension o the power o horror and right is tac/ivg
in this image,apparition. But perhaps it is precisely here, in this
relection and, as lecate will say with regard to Macbeth, in this
eeling o security which is or mortals the greatest o dangers
,3.5.32-33,, that the whole power o Medusa resides. lor what is
well and truly tac/ivg in this image o Medusa`s head, and is
suggested ,potentially, to the gaze, is Perseus`s gesture in its entirety:
i.e., the gesture at one and the same time ab.evt yet roavctire, o a
blade coming to cut o a head and coming neertheless to produce
the ery image o tbi. head-the gesture then which prompted us
to conceie o the picture o Medusa in the irst place as a ca.vra
,interruption,suspension,, but which rom then on, only takes on
its ull meaning under the paradigm o the cvt,
9
o something
missing, i.e., ca.tratiov.
10
On this subject, lreud in 1922 dictated a
note ,published posthumously in 1940, in which the theme o
Medusa`s head` crops up in relation to castration. Perectly
conscious o the ,almost, oerused character o this text in
reerence terms, I hae been content just to quote here one single
extract, modestly expressing the hope o establishing an
!"#$%&'()*#+',"- ./,01&$ 2
enlightening correlation,connection with a passage rom the
banquet scene in Macbetb:
1o decapitate ~ to castrate. 1he terror o castration is thus
a terror o castration that is linked to the sight o
something.. |1|he occasion or this . occurs when a boy,
who has hitherto been unwilling to beliee in the threat o
castration, catches a glimpse o adult emale genitalia,
surrounded by a bush o hair, essentially those o his
mother..1he sight o Medusa`s head makes the spectator
sti with terror, turns him to stone. . . . lor becoming sti
means an erection. 1hus in the original situation it oers
consolation to the spectator: he is still in possession o a
penis, and its stiening reassures him o this act..I
Medusa`s head takes the place o a representation o a
emale`s sexual apparatus . . . it may be recalled that
displaying the genitals is amiliar in other connections as
an apotropaic act. \hat arouses horror in onesel will
produce the same eect upon the enemy against whom
one is seeking to deend onesel. !e reaa iv Rabetai. of bor
tbe Derit too/ to bi. beet. after tbe rovav .borea to biv ber rvtra.
11
In point o act, to attach and apply lreud`s note to the tragedy
with which we are concerned, we know that in the banquet scene
the appearance o Banquo`s Medusa-like head will not only render
rigid with right, etrif, Macbeth with ear, but will also-as Marjorie
Garber`s article demonstrates, in conormity with lreud`s analysis
and interpretation-allow Lady Macbeth to bring up the whole
theme o castration by means o an untimely interrogation o her
own husband`s masculinity,irility.
12
Indeed, no sooner will she
hae called into question ,placed in doubt, Macbeth`s sexual identity
as a man, than a desexualising outburst ,an emasculation, we might
dare say, will ollow:
aa, Macbetb: .re ,ov a vav.
. . . . . . . . . .
O, these laws and starts
. would well beome
. rovav`. .tor, at a winter`s ire,
Authorized by ber gravaaave .
bave itsel.
,3.4.58, 64-6 |emphasis my own|,
1he sight o this Medusa`s head may be said to rob Macbeth
o all male attributes, o all o his evi.. It is thereore, as lreud
writes, the representation o the emale genital apparatus that repels
and prookes ear by its castration. In order to illustrate and alidate
his argument, lreud will hae recourse to Rabelais-and i we are
2$3,"-45,-60,-&7-.&"8&
28
not mistaken in our minutious reading, lreud seems to make
particular reerence to Chapter 4 o the Qvart irre ,Comment
le diable ut tromp par une ieille de Papeiguiere` , or tbe Derit
ra. aeceirea b, av ota rovav of Poefigtava`,, in which an old woman
conuses the Deil himsel by showing him her ula ull on:
She then lited her clothes to the chins, .|like| mothers
used to o old when they saw their sons leeing rom the
battle, and showed him her what`s-its-name. \hen the deil
saw this huge and continuous caity extending in all
directions, he cried out: Mahound, Demiurge, Megaera,
Alecto, Persephone, they won`t ind me here! I`m o! I
relinquish the ield to her!`
13
\e must at this point bear in mind and put aside or a moment
Rabelais` illustration that lreud uses so as to juxtapose Macbeth`s
reply to his wie`s question, Are you a man` lor there is a thematic
correlation shared by lreud, Rabelais, and Shakespeare whose
interplay and encounter ,triangulation, seem to simultaneously
conirm in an een more cogent and perhaps pertinent manner
the presence o the Medusa ,complex, in Macbetb,Macbeth:
reva: Medusa`s head takes the place o the representation
o the emale genital apparatus.. \e read in
Rabelais o how tbe Derit too/ to bi. beet. after tbe rovav
.borea to biv ber rvtra.
Rabetai.: .and showed him her what`s-its-name. \hen tbe
aerit saw this huge and continuous caity extending
in all directions, he cried out: . `v off! retivqvi.b
tbe fieta to ber.
ba/e.eare aa, Macbetb: Are you a man
Macbetb Ay, and a bold one, tbat aare to
too/ ov tbat
\hich might appall the deil.
,3.4.58-60,
As I hae already shown, Macbeth, during the banquet scene,
will see appear beore him the head o Banquo as a eritable head
o Medusa, and it behooes us now to ollow the particular
trajectory that this head traces in the tragedy. lor this igure with
Medusan qualities does not appear and is not uniquely contained
in the banquet scene that we hae just analysed-it moes, migrates,
and becomes detached rom the stage space and hoers in the
shadows o the tragedy to reappear once more under the inluence
and at the instigation o the three sister witches. Also, to lay hold
o this trajectory and to witness the reappearance o Gorgo in the
!"#$%&'()*#+',"- ./,01&$
29
tragedy, it behooes us also to recall that ater the horror that this
apparition,ision prooked, Macbeth will decide to set o to meet
the atal sisters so that the latter can predict to him his uture. I
the three witches oblige themseles to respond to Macbeth`s
interrogation, it is only through a series o apparitions, the ery
irst o which has no other unction than to eoke the image o a
head, an arvea beaa` ,4.1.4,, the head o Gorgo. I the image o
this head is, without any doubt, the proleptic and apotropaic
oreshadowing o Macbeth`s own decapitation at the end o the
tragedy, it is also the symbol o his tragic destiny-as legel would
put it, awareness o sel but o sel as an enemy.`
14
I the two
other apparitions that ollow ,a bloody child` as well as another
crowned with a tree in his hand`, will not hae gorgonesque`
characteristics, we will then hae to wait or the ery last o the
apparitions or a eritable spectacle o eight crowned heads to be
oered to our sight: eigbt /ivg., ava tbe ta.t ritb a gta.. iv bi. bava:
avqvo`. Cbo.t fottorivg.` It is this last apparition that I now want to
concentrate on, or the theme o Medusa is deinitely intense in it,
but another singular element or moti also appears: that o the
mirror, glass.` I Marjorie Garber has also analysed this apparition
in a highly releant manner, I can only return to this passage today
in the hope o suggesting a aifferevt interpretation, a aifferevt analysis
which, as we shall see, is diametrically opposed to Garber`s.
It should be remembered in the irst place that this spectacle,
this ision o crowned heads interenes only ater Macbeth has
hinted to the three witches to allay his ear with regard to Banquo`s
lineage: \et my heart , 1hrobs to know one thing: tell me . . .
shall Banquo`s issue eer, Reign in this kingdom` ,4.1.101-103,.
1his questioning, this inquietude, which has neer ceased to gnaw
at Macbeth, will ind its atal resolution-in the apparition,the
ision conjured up by the three witches. loweer, we will pick up
on the act, like Garber, that the insistence o the witches on
showing this apparition is so oer the top that, right away, we know
that what Macbeth is on the point o contemplating can only be
taboo.
15
1
.t
!itcb: Show!
2
va
!itcb: Show!

ra
!itcb Show!
.tt tbe !itcbe.: Show his eyes, and griee his heart:
Come like shadows, so depart.
. .bor of eigbt /ivg., ava tbe ta.t ritb a gta.. iv bi. bava: avqvo`.
Cbo.t fottorivg
2$3,"-45,-60,-&7-.&"8&
28
not mistaken in our minutious reading, lreud seems to make
particular reerence to Chapter 4 o the Qvart irre ,Comment
le diable ut tromp par une ieille de Papeiguiere` , or tbe Derit
ra. aeceirea b, av ota rovav of Poefigtava`,, in which an old woman
conuses the Deil himsel by showing him her ula ull on:
She then lited her clothes to the chins, .|like| mothers
used to o old when they saw their sons leeing rom the
battle, and showed him her what`s-its-name. \hen the deil
saw this huge and continuous caity extending in all
directions, he cried out: Mahound, Demiurge, Megaera,
Alecto, Persephone, they won`t ind me here! I`m o! I
relinquish the ield to her!`
13
\e must at this point bear in mind and put aside or a moment
Rabelais` illustration that lreud uses so as to juxtapose Macbeth`s
reply to his wie`s question, Are you a man` lor there is a thematic
correlation shared by lreud, Rabelais, and Shakespeare whose
interplay and encounter ,triangulation, seem to simultaneously
conirm in an een more cogent and perhaps pertinent manner
the presence o the Medusa ,complex, in Macbetb,Macbeth:
reva: Medusa`s head takes the place o the representation
o the emale genital apparatus.. \e read in
Rabelais o how tbe Derit too/ to bi. beet. after tbe rovav
.borea to biv ber rvtra.
Rabetai.: .and showed him her what`s-its-name. \hen tbe
aerit saw this huge and continuous caity extending
in all directions, he cried out: . `v off! retivqvi.b
tbe fieta to ber.
ba/e.eare aa, Macbetb: Are you a man
Macbetb Ay, and a bold one, tbat aare to
too/ ov tbat
\hich might appall the deil.
,3.4.58-60,
As I hae already shown, Macbeth, during the banquet scene,
will see appear beore him the head o Banquo as a eritable head
o Medusa, and it behooes us now to ollow the particular
trajectory that this head traces in the tragedy. lor this igure with
Medusan qualities does not appear and is not uniquely contained
in the banquet scene that we hae just analysed-it moes, migrates,
and becomes detached rom the stage space and hoers in the
shadows o the tragedy to reappear once more under the inluence
and at the instigation o the three sister witches. Also, to lay hold
o this trajectory and to witness the reappearance o Gorgo in the
!"#$%&'()*#+',"- ./,01&$
29
tragedy, it behooes us also to recall that ater the horror that this
apparition,ision prooked, Macbeth will decide to set o to meet
the atal sisters so that the latter can predict to him his uture. I
the three witches oblige themseles to respond to Macbeth`s
interrogation, it is only through a series o apparitions, the ery
irst o which has no other unction than to eoke the image o a
head, an arvea beaa` ,4.1.4,, the head o Gorgo. I the image o
this head is, without any doubt, the proleptic and apotropaic
oreshadowing o Macbeth`s own decapitation at the end o the
tragedy, it is also the symbol o his tragic destiny-as legel would
put it, awareness o sel but o sel as an enemy.`
14
I the two
other apparitions that ollow ,a bloody child` as well as another
crowned with a tree in his hand`, will not hae gorgonesque`
characteristics, we will then hae to wait or the ery last o the
apparitions or a eritable spectacle o eight crowned heads to be
oered to our sight: eigbt /ivg., ava tbe ta.t ritb a gta.. iv bi. bava:
avqvo`. Cbo.t fottorivg.` It is this last apparition that I now want to
concentrate on, or the theme o Medusa is deinitely intense in it,
but another singular element or moti also appears: that o the
mirror, glass.` I Marjorie Garber has also analysed this apparition
in a highly releant manner, I can only return to this passage today
in the hope o suggesting a aifferevt interpretation, a aifferevt analysis
which, as we shall see, is diametrically opposed to Garber`s.
It should be remembered in the irst place that this spectacle,
this ision o crowned heads interenes only ater Macbeth has
hinted to the three witches to allay his ear with regard to Banquo`s
lineage: \et my heart , 1hrobs to know one thing: tell me . . .
shall Banquo`s issue eer, Reign in this kingdom` ,4.1.101-103,.
1his questioning, this inquietude, which has neer ceased to gnaw
at Macbeth, will ind its atal resolution-in the apparition,the
ision conjured up by the three witches. loweer, we will pick up
on the act, like Garber, that the insistence o the witches on
showing this apparition is so oer the top that, right away, we know
that what Macbeth is on the point o contemplating can only be
taboo.
15
1
.t
!itcb: Show!
2
va
!itcb: Show!

ra
!itcb Show!
.tt tbe !itcbe.: Show his eyes, and griee his heart:
Come like shadows, so depart.
. .bor of eigbt /ivg., ava tbe ta.t ritb a gta.. iv bi. bava: avqvo`.
Cbo.t fottorivg
2$3,"-45,-60,-&7-.&"8&
30
Macbetb: 1hou art too like the spirit o Banquo: down!
1hy crown aoe. .ear vive e,ebatt.. And thy hair,
1hou other gold-bound brow, is like the irst.
A third is like the ormer. lilthy hags!
\hy do you show me this - A ourth Start, e,e.
!bat, ritt tbe tive .tretcb ovt to tb`crac/ of aoov.
Another yet A seenth `tt .ee vo vore:
And yet the eighth appears, rbo bear. a gta..
\hich shows me many more, and some I see
1hat two-old balls and treble sceptres carry.
orribte .igbt! . Now I see tis true.
lor tbe btooabotter`a Banquo smiles upon me,
And points at them or his. \hat, is this so
,3.1.10-24,
No doubt about it, the ision o these crowned heads which
loat and pass one ater the other in ront o Macbeth`s startled
eyes reeals a theme inherent to Gorgo ,.ear vive e,ebatt.,Start,
e,e.,orribte .igbt,. Moreoer, and judging by Macbeth`s stupor,
eerything would lead one to beliee that Macbeth is witnessing
the setting in motion o a truly gorgove.qve nebula. But here it is the
mirror that the eighth king harbours, relecting on its surace many
more |kings| to come,` that I shall now ocus on. 1he
aorementioned study by Marjorie Garber explains that the
relecting glass` is in the play a means o transgression o the
inside,outside boundary, crossing the barrier that separates the
play and its spectators |as well as| the boundary between stage and
reality.`
16
laing established this circulatory moement between
the external and the internal in the play, Garber then goes on to
point out that, or Llizabethans and Jacobeans, the word glass`
was not completely contained semantically by the word mirror,`
or another deinition can be ound or it along the lines o model`
or example,`
1
which seems, besides, to it with the speech made
by James I on 21 March 1609 beore Parliament when he asked o
them to look not pon my Mirrour with a alse light.`
18
Still, with
reerence to the mirror shown by the eighth king and according to
the research carried out in this ield, Macbetb would hae been
perormed by the King`s Company at lampton Court, and
consequently, it is permissible to think that the mirror in question
would hae been held out directly to King James, thus relecting
the royal person.
Basing her obserations on these elements, Garber suggests
that the relecting glass or mirror in this scene is the counterpart
o Perseus`s relecting shield. . . . In the context o Macbetb . . . the
glass |that relects the person o King James| is a ba, .ectacte
!"#$%&'()*#+',"- ./,01&$
31
demonstrating the long line o kings descended rom Banquo, a
line which James would doubtless hope to hae stretch out to
th`crack o doom.``
19
1he episode may thereore be said to
constitute a desire, according to Garber`s own words, to gratif, and
ftatter, on Shakespeare`s part, his king, James I. In other words,
James would hae ound, in the specular instrument that
Shakespeare addresses and tends to him, the recognition and the
legitimacy o his Ma;e.ta. regia., o his lineage, o his status and his
power.
20
loweer, it will be agreed, such interpretations leae out the
caitat unction played by the mirror in the iconography o Medusa.
lor the mirror remains, as Perseus has taught us, aboe all an
instrument, a aerice compounded o cunning, a surreptitious and
pernicious machine-cum-machination in which Medusa, the subject
seizes hersel, i. trav.fiea in her own relection. Also, in a context
as etrif,ivg as that o Macbetb, it would perhaps be possible to state
,counter to Garber`s study, that this scene seems to bring into play
a certaiv retatiov.bi of force, both tvrbvtevt and riotevt, rom one side
to the other, on both sides o the mirror, iz., between Shakespeare
the dramatist and King James I. lor it will be agreed that rom the
imaginary ictional scene o the tragedy to the real,royal political
scene, what Shakespeare i. aivivg at through the bias o the mirror
,in a moement, it seems, that both transgresses and suberts, is
the image o the king himsel, i.e., the image o power itsel ,James
I, so as to .vi geveri. isolate,capture,seize all his power. 1be ivage
of orer ava orer of,tbrovgb ivage, it is precisely here in this chiasmus,
this crossing place, that all Shakespeare`s art will be concentrated,
the whole political and poetic project o Shakespeare.
Also, when the eighth king slowly walks orward in ront o
the audience, presenting a mirror, James .vaaevt, and iv.tavtaveov.t,
discoers and identiies himsel in the relectie ,circular or oblong,
surace that Shakespeare deploys beore his ery eyes. 1he eect
produced will be, without any doubt, o the order o .tvefactiov,
o avaevevt. In addition, projected into ictitious stage-space, is
not James at this ery moment a subject placed ovt.iae biv.etf, a
subject to.t, immobilised and captured,rozen in the circular band
o the mirror In this way, does he not contemplate, just like
Medusa, the aativg perormance,representation o his own
power, carried to its culmination and een to ece.. In other words
or alternatiely o.tvtatea, does not the last apparition produced
and put on stage by Shakespeare reeal a eritable desire to petriy
the king himsel
2$3,"-45,-60,-&7-.&"8&
30
Macbetb: 1hou art too like the spirit o Banquo: down!
1hy crown aoe. .ear vive e,ebatt.. And thy hair,
1hou other gold-bound brow, is like the irst.
A third is like the ormer. lilthy hags!
\hy do you show me this - A ourth Start, e,e.
!bat, ritt tbe tive .tretcb ovt to tb`crac/ of aoov.
Another yet A seenth `tt .ee vo vore:
And yet the eighth appears, rbo bear. a gta..
\hich shows me many more, and some I see
1hat two-old balls and treble sceptres carry.
orribte .igbt! . Now I see tis true.
lor tbe btooabotter`a Banquo smiles upon me,
And points at them or his. \hat, is this so
,3.1.10-24,
No doubt about it, the ision o these crowned heads which
loat and pass one ater the other in ront o Macbeth`s startled
eyes reeals a theme inherent to Gorgo ,.ear vive e,ebatt.,Start,
e,e.,orribte .igbt,. Moreoer, and judging by Macbeth`s stupor,
eerything would lead one to beliee that Macbeth is witnessing
the setting in motion o a truly gorgove.qve nebula. But here it is the
mirror that the eighth king harbours, relecting on its surace many
more |kings| to come,` that I shall now ocus on. 1he
aorementioned study by Marjorie Garber explains that the
relecting glass` is in the play a means o transgression o the
inside,outside boundary, crossing the barrier that separates the
play and its spectators |as well as| the boundary between stage and
reality.`
16
laing established this circulatory moement between
the external and the internal in the play, Garber then goes on to
point out that, or Llizabethans and Jacobeans, the word glass`
was not completely contained semantically by the word mirror,`
or another deinition can be ound or it along the lines o model`
or example,`
1
which seems, besides, to it with the speech made
by James I on 21 March 1609 beore Parliament when he asked o
them to look not pon my Mirrour with a alse light.`
18
Still, with
reerence to the mirror shown by the eighth king and according to
the research carried out in this ield, Macbetb would hae been
perormed by the King`s Company at lampton Court, and
consequently, it is permissible to think that the mirror in question
would hae been held out directly to King James, thus relecting
the royal person.
Basing her obserations on these elements, Garber suggests
that the relecting glass or mirror in this scene is the counterpart
o Perseus`s relecting shield. . . . In the context o Macbetb . . . the
glass |that relects the person o King James| is a ba, .ectacte
!"#$%&'()*#+',"- ./,01&$
31
demonstrating the long line o kings descended rom Banquo, a
line which James would doubtless hope to hae stretch out to
th`crack o doom.``
19
1he episode may thereore be said to
constitute a desire, according to Garber`s own words, to gratif, and
ftatter, on Shakespeare`s part, his king, James I. In other words,
James would hae ound, in the specular instrument that
Shakespeare addresses and tends to him, the recognition and the
legitimacy o his Ma;e.ta. regia., o his lineage, o his status and his
power.
20
loweer, it will be agreed, such interpretations leae out the
caitat unction played by the mirror in the iconography o Medusa.
lor the mirror remains, as Perseus has taught us, aboe all an
instrument, a aerice compounded o cunning, a surreptitious and
pernicious machine-cum-machination in which Medusa, the subject
seizes hersel, i. trav.fiea in her own relection. Also, in a context
as etrif,ivg as that o Macbetb, it would perhaps be possible to state
,counter to Garber`s study, that this scene seems to bring into play
a certaiv retatiov.bi of force, both tvrbvtevt and riotevt, rom one side
to the other, on both sides o the mirror, iz., between Shakespeare
the dramatist and King James I. lor it will be agreed that rom the
imaginary ictional scene o the tragedy to the real,royal political
scene, what Shakespeare i. aivivg at through the bias o the mirror
,in a moement, it seems, that both transgresses and suberts, is
the image o the king himsel, i.e., the image o power itsel ,James
I, so as to .vi geveri. isolate,capture,seize all his power. 1be ivage
of orer ava orer of,tbrovgb ivage, it is precisely here in this chiasmus,
this crossing place, that all Shakespeare`s art will be concentrated,
the whole political and poetic project o Shakespeare.
Also, when the eighth king slowly walks orward in ront o
the audience, presenting a mirror, James .vaaevt, and iv.tavtaveov.t,
discoers and identiies himsel in the relectie ,circular or oblong,
surace that Shakespeare deploys beore his ery eyes. 1he eect
produced will be, without any doubt, o the order o .tvefactiov,
o avaevevt. In addition, projected into ictitious stage-space, is
not James at this ery moment a subject placed ovt.iae biv.etf, a
subject to.t, immobilised and captured,rozen in the circular band
o the mirror In this way, does he not contemplate, just like
Medusa, the aativg perormance,representation o his own
power, carried to its culmination and een to ece.. In other words
or alternatiely o.tvtatea, does not the last apparition produced
and put on stage by Shakespeare reeal a eritable desire to petriy
the king himsel
2$3,"-45,-60,-&7-.&"8&
32
In the same way and,or urthervore ,or shall we say here
urtherte..,, i we admit that Shakespeare puts in place quite a
aavgerov. circulation o power by means o which the internal aspect
o stage-space relects an bi.toricat external reality and ice ersa,
he also puts in place a .aceai.tavcega which is eactt, the condition
on which the portrait o the king in the mirror, the representation
o the king, is based and is rendered possible,isible. I am deinitely
talking here o a hole, o an O, o an empty space, o a nothingness
betreev the king and his portrait, but which can be nothing other
than a trap through which the racture o the royal subject is
exposed, the schism shown between the theological and political
unity o the king`s double body ,diine body,political body, and
whose malign intention is to indicate in an ininitesimal, almost
imperceptible moment the yawning chasm` o King James`s power
in his portrait-or, in other words, to expose and to signiy his
own castration.
In the preious pages, it seemed important to go through the
key passages in the tragedy o Macbetb in which the Medusa
Complex lent itsel directly to be analysed. It is now time to turn
to another Shakespearean tragedy where the igure o Medusa
deseres a well-oerdue and carefvt scrutiny: Kivg ear. It will
thereore now be my task to mark out and conirm the existence
o this complex with precise and concrete examples taken rom
the text itsel.
\hen King Lear walks orward onto the stage carrying in his
ebrile arms the body o Cordelia, nothing is comparable in intensity
to that tragic oice which breaks out into a cry beore the transixed
audience, O you are men o stones` ,5.3.256,. Lerything acts as
i the oice o Lear, at that precise moment, uneiled with a tearing
breath the true petriied landscape o the tragedy. loweer, it
would be wrong to beliee that the awareness o this petriication
signiies Medusa`s caitat vovevt in the tragedy, or this is only about
tbe aftervatb of Meav.a. In other words, what Lear contemplates is
nothing other than the result o Medusa`s action ovce orer. Also, it
will be agreed that the reaction, Lear`s awareness, seems quite
belated, een out o phase, or clues relating to the myth o Gorgo
hae not stopped being inserted throughout the tragedy and the
king`s eldest daughters being stigmatized thereby. In order to grasp
and to realise what is inoled in the process o petriication, in
the moement o Medusa iv it. baevivg, I would take as my starting
point the descriptions that Lear, in his anger, speaks out when he
perceies that his daughters reuse him all the attention and the
priileges that a ather ,-king, would be entitled to expect. On
!"#$%&'()*#+',"- ./,01&$
33
learning that Goneril wants to reduce his retinue by hal, Lear
becomes indignant and exclaims,
Ingratitude, thou varbtebeartea fieva,
More hideous when thou show`s thee in a child
1bav tbe .eavov.ter! ,1.4.242-44 |emphasis my own|,
In three lines it is granted to us to see the process o petriication
at work in Goneril, whom Lear compares to a certain sea-monster.
1he maritime paradigm used here certainly reminds us, in the irst
place, o Medusa`s genesis. 1he ruit o the union o two maritime
diinities, Phorcys and Ceto, Medusa was transormed into a
monster by the goddess Athena, or haing succumbed to the
charms o the sea-god, Poseidon. But it should also be remembered
that it was the decapitated head o Medusa which allowed Perseus
to kill the horrible sea-monster, Cetus. 1his last point would perhaps
it in een more appropriately and releantly with the words o
Lear when the latter describes his daughter, Goneril, as a creature
erev vore repulsie and hideous than the sea-monster itsel. Len
though such a chain o reasoning or such a mutation o the
daughters o Lear into monstrous creatures inds itsel asseerated
much later in the play by the words o Regan`s serant, \omen
will turn into monster` ,3..101,, and o Albany, Proper deormity
seems not in the iend,So horrid as in woman` ,4.2.60-61,, it may
also be noted that a certain tension, an ambiguity, an indecisieness
does not cease to work the image, the apparition o Goneril and
Regan. It is Lear himsel who, conronted by them, will underline
this sort o oscillation-acillation o the aesthetic judgement.
Indeed, when Regan sides with her sister, Goneril, and with
the same malignant erour, to pare down een urther her ather`s
royal retinue, his two daughters will appear to Lear`s eyes as ric/ea
creatures |and| yet |who| do look rettfarovr`a ,2.4.250,. 1his
essentially double-edged ambialence o character o the king`s
daughters, which aries between beauty` and monstrosity,` is
also, as has already been pointed out in the introduction to this
section, an intrinsic characteristic o the igure and the story o
Medusa, at the heart o which opposites come ace to ace and
expose each other.
21
lurthermore, i Medusa, the progeny o
Mythology, and the medusas o Kivg ear by Shakespeare share
this peculiar aesthetic o the double ,janusian, ace in which beauty
is coupled with horror and horror with beauty, they also and in the
same way ind a common denominator in the destructie power
o sight. And it is in the realm o the isual that, in a quasi-
systematic manner, Lear`s retorts are organised, aced with the
2$3,"-45,-60,-&7-.&"8&
32
In the same way and,or urthervore ,or shall we say here
urtherte..,, i we admit that Shakespeare puts in place quite a
aavgerov. circulation o power by means o which the internal aspect
o stage-space relects an bi.toricat external reality and ice ersa,
he also puts in place a .aceai.tavcega which is eactt, the condition
on which the portrait o the king in the mirror, the representation
o the king, is based and is rendered possible,isible. I am deinitely
talking here o a hole, o an O, o an empty space, o a nothingness
betreev the king and his portrait, but which can be nothing other
than a trap through which the racture o the royal subject is
exposed, the schism shown between the theological and political
unity o the king`s double body ,diine body,political body, and
whose malign intention is to indicate in an ininitesimal, almost
imperceptible moment the yawning chasm` o King James`s power
in his portrait-or, in other words, to expose and to signiy his
own castration.
In the preious pages, it seemed important to go through the
key passages in the tragedy o Macbetb in which the Medusa
Complex lent itsel directly to be analysed. It is now time to turn
to another Shakespearean tragedy where the igure o Medusa
deseres a well-oerdue and carefvt scrutiny: Kivg ear. It will
thereore now be my task to mark out and conirm the existence
o this complex with precise and concrete examples taken rom
the text itsel.
\hen King Lear walks orward onto the stage carrying in his
ebrile arms the body o Cordelia, nothing is comparable in intensity
to that tragic oice which breaks out into a cry beore the transixed
audience, O you are men o stones` ,5.3.256,. Lerything acts as
i the oice o Lear, at that precise moment, uneiled with a tearing
breath the true petriied landscape o the tragedy. loweer, it
would be wrong to beliee that the awareness o this petriication
signiies Medusa`s caitat vovevt in the tragedy, or this is only about
tbe aftervatb of Meav.a. In other words, what Lear contemplates is
nothing other than the result o Medusa`s action ovce orer. Also, it
will be agreed that the reaction, Lear`s awareness, seems quite
belated, een out o phase, or clues relating to the myth o Gorgo
hae not stopped being inserted throughout the tragedy and the
king`s eldest daughters being stigmatized thereby. In order to grasp
and to realise what is inoled in the process o petriication, in
the moement o Medusa iv it. baevivg, I would take as my starting
point the descriptions that Lear, in his anger, speaks out when he
perceies that his daughters reuse him all the attention and the
priileges that a ather ,-king, would be entitled to expect. On
!"#$%&'()*#+',"- ./,01&$
33
learning that Goneril wants to reduce his retinue by hal, Lear
becomes indignant and exclaims,
Ingratitude, thou varbtebeartea fieva,
More hideous when thou show`s thee in a child
1bav tbe .eavov.ter! ,1.4.242-44 |emphasis my own|,
In three lines it is granted to us to see the process o petriication
at work in Goneril, whom Lear compares to a certain sea-monster.
1he maritime paradigm used here certainly reminds us, in the irst
place, o Medusa`s genesis. 1he ruit o the union o two maritime
diinities, Phorcys and Ceto, Medusa was transormed into a
monster by the goddess Athena, or haing succumbed to the
charms o the sea-god, Poseidon. But it should also be remembered
that it was the decapitated head o Medusa which allowed Perseus
to kill the horrible sea-monster, Cetus. 1his last point would perhaps
it in een more appropriately and releantly with the words o
Lear when the latter describes his daughter, Goneril, as a creature
erev vore repulsie and hideous than the sea-monster itsel. Len
though such a chain o reasoning or such a mutation o the
daughters o Lear into monstrous creatures inds itsel asseerated
much later in the play by the words o Regan`s serant, \omen
will turn into monster` ,3..101,, and o Albany, Proper deormity
seems not in the iend,So horrid as in woman` ,4.2.60-61,, it may
also be noted that a certain tension, an ambiguity, an indecisieness
does not cease to work the image, the apparition o Goneril and
Regan. It is Lear himsel who, conronted by them, will underline
this sort o oscillation-acillation o the aesthetic judgement.
Indeed, when Regan sides with her sister, Goneril, and with
the same malignant erour, to pare down een urther her ather`s
royal retinue, his two daughters will appear to Lear`s eyes as ric/ea
creatures |and| yet |who| do look rettfarovr`a ,2.4.250,. 1his
essentially double-edged ambialence o character o the king`s
daughters, which aries between beauty` and monstrosity,` is
also, as has already been pointed out in the introduction to this
section, an intrinsic characteristic o the igure and the story o
Medusa, at the heart o which opposites come ace to ace and
expose each other.
21
lurthermore, i Medusa, the progeny o
Mythology, and the medusas o Kivg ear by Shakespeare share
this peculiar aesthetic o the double ,janusian, ace in which beauty
is coupled with horror and horror with beauty, they also and in the
same way ind a common denominator in the destructie power
o sight. And it is in the realm o the isual that, in a quasi-
systematic manner, Lear`s retorts are organised, aced with the
2$3,"-45,-60,-&7-.&"8&
34
pererse ingratitude o his eldest daughters. In the passage that I
am just about to quote, Lear will point directly at the bad eye,` at
the dark and unwholesome look o Goneril, in order to add two
other elements relatie to the myth o Medusa.
She . . .
oo/`a btac/ vov ve; struck me ritb ber tovgve,
Mo.t .erevtti/e, upon the ery heart.
All the stor`d engeances o heaen all
On ber ivgratefvt to! Strike her young bones.
\ou taking airs, with lameness!
,2.4.153-159 |emphasis my own|,
I this chain o images ,destructie gaze-ipers-head, is
ollowed, eerything would lead us to beliee that 1be eaa of
Meav.a by Caraaggio would reappear beore our eyes with the
acial traits o Goneril. loweer, the glance cast at him by the
latter is or Lear a ision at once unacceptable and unbearable,
also he will call orth, in the ire o his anger, lashes o lightning
in the sky so that these-endowed with the power to blind-rush
orward into the eyes o his daughter:
Kivg ear: \ou nimble tigbtvivg., dart your btivaivg lames
vto her scornul e,e.!
,2.4.159-160 |emphasis my own|,
I the powers o the literally gorgonesque sight o Lear`s
daughters are proen and conirmed by the examples we hae
analysed aboe, may it also be pointed out that Albany, the husband
o Goneril, seemed already-as proleptically as concretely-to lay
a oundation or them when he declared in the presence o his
wie, low ar your eyes may pierce I cannot tell` ,1.4.328,. But
here the powers inherent in the piercing gaze o Goneril and Regan
are still engaged in a process o maturation and preparation. 1hey
are only maniested in a state, i I can put it this way, evbr,ovic and
tatevt and hae not applied or the moment their ull eects on the
play. 1he powers inherent in this look will, howeer, be liberated
and materialise in their literal and symbolic totality at the moment
o the iolent enucleation that will strike Gloucester down.
As ar as Medusa is concerned, this episode is o caitat
importance, decisie, or it is organised around a sort o ocvtocevtri.v
and underlines at one and the same time the danger that the eye
runs aced with Lear`s medusas. 1he scene in question comes in
the middle o the play when Gloucester is taken captie by Goneril
and Regan or haing sent Lear to Doer so that the latter can
eade the plot being hatched against him or, as Gloucester will say
!"#$%&'()*#+',"- ./,01&$
35
himsel, because I would not see thy cruel nails, Pluck out |Lear`s|
poor old eyes` ,3..53-54,. No sooner will that remark be uttered
than a terrible acting out o it will be sparked o, and Regan and
Cornwall, echoing Goneril`s irst suggestion, will aidly tear his
eyes out. Let us also remember this: beore the terrible blinding
takes place in the person o Gloucester, we should also note
anecdotally or een hypothetically that a noteworthy desire to ix,
to immobilise comes into play-a desire to petriy we might say-
i Regan`s iolent exhortation or Gloucester to be bound and
held ast een more be remembered: bara, bara` ,3..32,. But,
whateer the case may be, Gloucester, henceorth, is a blind man.
lis eyeballs saagely torn out o their sockets, Gloucester now
exhibits two gaping and bleeding wounds. 1hese two oriices-
these two bleeding rings , 1heir precious stones new lost`
,5.3.183-84,, as his son, Ldgar, will describe them two acts urther
on, rom which oozes a iscous and gelatinous substance, a ile
jelly` ,3..82,-indicate, without any doubt, the loss o the male
genitalia, i.e., castration. Indeed, Gloucester`s iolent enucleation
proceeds as a substitute or castration in which there is a sort o
correspondence between, on the one hand, eyeballs and male
genitals and, on the other, iscous, gelatinous liquid and sperm.
1he genital strength o this scene is such that it seems also to
reeal characteristics analogous to a passage rom Greek mythology
in which Ouranos, mutilated by Chronos, sees his genitals cut up
and thrown ar away into the sea. It is this rothy liquid ,abro.,-
this mixture o water and salt, this eerescent whiteness which,
incidentally, gies birth to .brodite, that must now be emphasized.
lor, as ar as it concerns Kivg ear, this aqvatic regvavce springing
rom castration, is certainly an echo o the maritime paradigm
that Lear made use o beore, relating to his daughter, Goneril: tbe
.ea vov.ter! ,1.4.244,. 1he whole enucleation ,castration, scene that
we then took to be the acme o the gorgonesque now seems to
shit and proceed to engage in a cov.tavt ror/ of ai.tacevevt so as to
point us in the direction o another scene that is undamentally
varitive. It is not by chance, thereore, that Gloucester was sent to
smell his way` ,3..92, to the clis o Doer where the sea is
audible ,ar/, do you hear the sea` |4.6.5|, and reeals all sorts
o vov.ter. ava varret., all sorts o iscous substances and gelatinous
masses swimming around in the depths o its cold waters-all
sorts o ;ett, ishes` then, or, as lrench would term them, veav.e..
22
\e are now on the clis o Doer, next to the sea.
Accompanied by Poor 1om,Ldgar, the man worm` ,4.1.33,, the
naked ellow` ,4.1.51, who has let his shelter two acts beore,
2$3,"-45,-60,-&7-.&"8&
34
pererse ingratitude o his eldest daughters. In the passage that I
am just about to quote, Lear will point directly at the bad eye,` at
the dark and unwholesome look o Goneril, in order to add two
other elements relatie to the myth o Medusa.
She . . .
oo/`a btac/ vov ve; struck me ritb ber tovgve,
Mo.t .erevtti/e, upon the ery heart.
All the stor`d engeances o heaen all
On ber ivgratefvt to! Strike her young bones.
\ou taking airs, with lameness!
,2.4.153-159 |emphasis my own|,
I this chain o images ,destructie gaze-ipers-head, is
ollowed, eerything would lead us to beliee that 1be eaa of
Meav.a by Caraaggio would reappear beore our eyes with the
acial traits o Goneril. loweer, the glance cast at him by the
latter is or Lear a ision at once unacceptable and unbearable,
also he will call orth, in the ire o his anger, lashes o lightning
in the sky so that these-endowed with the power to blind-rush
orward into the eyes o his daughter:
Kivg ear: \ou nimble tigbtvivg., dart your btivaivg lames
vto her scornul e,e.!
,2.4.159-160 |emphasis my own|,
I the powers o the literally gorgonesque sight o Lear`s
daughters are proen and conirmed by the examples we hae
analysed aboe, may it also be pointed out that Albany, the husband
o Goneril, seemed already-as proleptically as concretely-to lay
a oundation or them when he declared in the presence o his
wie, low ar your eyes may pierce I cannot tell` ,1.4.328,. But
here the powers inherent in the piercing gaze o Goneril and Regan
are still engaged in a process o maturation and preparation. 1hey
are only maniested in a state, i I can put it this way, evbr,ovic and
tatevt and hae not applied or the moment their ull eects on the
play. 1he powers inherent in this look will, howeer, be liberated
and materialise in their literal and symbolic totality at the moment
o the iolent enucleation that will strike Gloucester down.
As ar as Medusa is concerned, this episode is o caitat
importance, decisie, or it is organised around a sort o ocvtocevtri.v
and underlines at one and the same time the danger that the eye
runs aced with Lear`s medusas. 1he scene in question comes in
the middle o the play when Gloucester is taken captie by Goneril
and Regan or haing sent Lear to Doer so that the latter can
eade the plot being hatched against him or, as Gloucester will say
!"#$%&'()*#+',"- ./,01&$
35
himsel, because I would not see thy cruel nails, Pluck out |Lear`s|
poor old eyes` ,3..53-54,. No sooner will that remark be uttered
than a terrible acting out o it will be sparked o, and Regan and
Cornwall, echoing Goneril`s irst suggestion, will aidly tear his
eyes out. Let us also remember this: beore the terrible blinding
takes place in the person o Gloucester, we should also note
anecdotally or een hypothetically that a noteworthy desire to ix,
to immobilise comes into play-a desire to petriy we might say-
i Regan`s iolent exhortation or Gloucester to be bound and
held ast een more be remembered: bara, bara` ,3..32,. But,
whateer the case may be, Gloucester, henceorth, is a blind man.
lis eyeballs saagely torn out o their sockets, Gloucester now
exhibits two gaping and bleeding wounds. 1hese two oriices-
these two bleeding rings , 1heir precious stones new lost`
,5.3.183-84,, as his son, Ldgar, will describe them two acts urther
on, rom which oozes a iscous and gelatinous substance, a ile
jelly` ,3..82,-indicate, without any doubt, the loss o the male
genitalia, i.e., castration. Indeed, Gloucester`s iolent enucleation
proceeds as a substitute or castration in which there is a sort o
correspondence between, on the one hand, eyeballs and male
genitals and, on the other, iscous, gelatinous liquid and sperm.
1he genital strength o this scene is such that it seems also to
reeal characteristics analogous to a passage rom Greek mythology
in which Ouranos, mutilated by Chronos, sees his genitals cut up
and thrown ar away into the sea. It is this rothy liquid ,abro.,-
this mixture o water and salt, this eerescent whiteness which,
incidentally, gies birth to .brodite, that must now be emphasized.
lor, as ar as it concerns Kivg ear, this aqvatic regvavce springing
rom castration, is certainly an echo o the maritime paradigm
that Lear made use o beore, relating to his daughter, Goneril: tbe
.ea vov.ter! ,1.4.244,. 1he whole enucleation ,castration, scene that
we then took to be the acme o the gorgonesque now seems to
shit and proceed to engage in a cov.tavt ror/ of ai.tacevevt so as to
point us in the direction o another scene that is undamentally
varitive. It is not by chance, thereore, that Gloucester was sent to
smell his way` ,3..92, to the clis o Doer where the sea is
audible ,ar/, do you hear the sea` |4.6.5|, and reeals all sorts
o vov.ter. ava varret., all sorts o iscous substances and gelatinous
masses swimming around in the depths o its cold waters-all
sorts o ;ett, ishes` then, or, as lrench would term them, veav.e..
22
\e are now on the clis o Doer, next to the sea.
Accompanied by Poor 1om,Ldgar, the man worm` ,4.1.33,, the
naked ellow` ,4.1.51, who has let his shelter two acts beore,
2$3,"-45,-60,-&7-.&"8&
36
Gloucester inally arries at what he takes to be the ery edge o
the highest cli o Doer. Just at that moment Poor 1om,Ldgar
elaborates rigorously and precisely a remarkable erbal perspectiist
representation ,albeit imaginary,, a !"#$!"%&'()*)#&'+'%'),'$-*o a iew
looking down.
23
Gloucester, at the end o his tether, leans oer
and +),,$*into the illusion:
Come on, sir, here`s the place. Stand still. low earul
And dizzy `tis to cast one`s eyes so low!
1he crows and choughs that wing the midway air
Show scarce so gross as beetles. lalway down
langs one that gathers sampire-dreadul trade!
Methinks he seems no bigger than his head.
1he ishermen that walk upon the beach
Appear like mice, and yond tall anchoring bark,
Diminish`d to her cock, her cock, a buoy
Almost too small or sight. 1he murmuring surge
1hat on th`unnumb`red idle pebble chaes
Cannot be heard so high. I`ll look no more,
Lest my brain turn, and the deicient sight
1opple down headlong.
. . . . . . . . . .
.,/0%"$&"#*+),,$*+/#1)#2-*)32*$1//3$4*54.6.12-24, 42,
1he perspectiist construction o this illusory spectacle seems
to reach its ulilment and to ully attain its objectie when
Gloucester kneels down and hits the ground o the stage. loweer,
at the sight o Gloucester lying unconscious on the ground, one is
entitled to ask why so much art and technical cleerness has been
expended in the creation o this illusion-why so much detail, so
much sophistication in the eocation,description o this iew rom
the top o the cli to end up with such an outcome-tragic
certainly, but, it must be admitted, $/*#",)&'(",6*032#)7)&'%*'3*'&$*$&)8'38
Ironically, the illusion o Poor 1om,Ldgar would appear to +),,
$9/#&*or +),,*+,)&*and oer )+&"#*&9"*"("3&*|)!#:$*%/0!| a spectacle that is
somewhat comical, almost pathetic, een sadistic, at the expense
o an old blind man. 1he erbal power o Poor 1om`s,Ldgar`s
depiction, thereore, terminates at a single $&#/;" |%/0!|* with the
noise o Gloucester`s body collapsing on the ground. But just
then-%/0!*2"*&9<=&#"-the perspectiist representation resumes and
comes not only to oer another panel but also another angle,
another point o iew on the picture that Poor 1om,Ldgar had
painted beorehand. \e are no longer henceorward on top o the
cli-this time we are beneath, on the same leel as the shore, and
it is Poor 1om,Ldgar, disguised as a Cornish peasant, who will
reascend, so to speak, the imaginary clis o Doer and open, in a
sort o retroactie and inerted dynamic, a new representational,
!"#$%&'()*#+',"- ./,01&$ 3
pictural space in which igures and is delineated the agent who has
orchestrated the initial illusion, i.e. Poor 1om,Ldgar or, in other
words, 9'7$",+4
>28)#: As I stood here below, methought his eyes
\ere two ull moons. le had a thousand noses
lorns whelked and waed like the enridged sea.
It was some iend. ,4.6.69-2,
lere Ldgar interpellates and exorcises himsel with the
description, the image he gies o himsel. And it is indeed during
this sequence o auto-exorcism that Ldgar conjures up the demon
|+'"32| o himsel, which has allowed Christopher Pye to argue in
his noteworthy study, ?9"*@)3'$9'38-*that this singular description
o Ldgar oerturns the isual scheme: as i one iewed one`s sel
rom the other end o the perspectie cone.` Ldgar, then, becomes
the object o his own gaze, he sees himsel seeing himsel.` 1his
episode clearly recalls-still according to Christopher Pye-
Lacan`s claim that . . .a consciousness ounded on the illusion o
the sel seeing itsel see|ing| itsel ` makes itsel elt in the . . .
uncanny, reerting, inside-out structure o the gaze.`
24
But it is precisely this image, this 8#)!9'%*echo, which, with regard
to the subject o this study, is currently about to capture our ull
and undiided attention. \hat is it "A)%&,6*about the image o this
monster \hat does this perectly incongruous and physically
absurd image haing thousands o noses, eyes like moons as well
as horns |that| whelked and waed like the enridged sea` signiy
It is this same kind o questioning, this same erent enthusiasm
regarding this image that can also be ound in the rich study by
Scott \ilson on 1he Nature o Britain in B'38*C")#4` laing as
its starting point Philip Armstrong`s thesis postulating that the
image oered by Ldgar at the bottom o the cli is an anamorphic
apparition thus denoting the radical alterity inhabiting the scopic
ield`,
25
and with writing that is sharp and precise, and thought
without detours, Scott \ilson writes the ollowing:
But what beyond ,or perhaps beore, radical alterity` does
this . iend signiy . . .|1|he three main elements-the
two moons, the thousand whelked and horny noses` and
the sea itsel-suggest both eminine and phallic
signiications reminiscent o Medusa..|1|he image o the
iend denotes the radical alterity o the gaze o the Other,
since the interpellatie power o Medusa`s gaze was so
strong it turned indiidual subjects into concrete.
26
lor Scott \ilson the image is assuredly gorgonesque. But he
will alidate his argument and, in so doing, deploy all his speed o
2$3,"-45,-60,-&7-.&"8&
36
Gloucester inally arries at what he takes to be the ery edge o
the highest cli o Doer. Just at that moment Poor 1om,Ldgar
elaborates rigorously and precisely a remarkable erbal perspectiist
representation ,albeit imaginary,, a !"#$!"%&'()*)#&'+'%'),'$-*o a iew
looking down.
23
Gloucester, at the end o his tether, leans oer
and +),,$*into the illusion:
Come on, sir, here`s the place. Stand still. low earul
And dizzy `tis to cast one`s eyes so low!
1he crows and choughs that wing the midway air
Show scarce so gross as beetles. lalway down
langs one that gathers sampire-dreadul trade!
Methinks he seems no bigger than his head.
1he ishermen that walk upon the beach
Appear like mice, and yond tall anchoring bark,
Diminish`d to her cock, her cock, a buoy
Almost too small or sight. 1he murmuring surge
1hat on th`unnumb`red idle pebble chaes
Cannot be heard so high. I`ll look no more,
Lest my brain turn, and the deicient sight
1opple down headlong.
. . . . . . . . . .
.,/0%"$&"#*+),,$*+/#1)#2-*)32*$1//3$4*54.6.12-24, 42,
1he perspectiist construction o this illusory spectacle seems
to reach its ulilment and to ully attain its objectie when
Gloucester kneels down and hits the ground o the stage. loweer,
at the sight o Gloucester lying unconscious on the ground, one is
entitled to ask why so much art and technical cleerness has been
expended in the creation o this illusion-why so much detail, so
much sophistication in the eocation,description o this iew rom
the top o the cli to end up with such an outcome-tragic
certainly, but, it must be admitted, $/*#",)&'(",6*032#)7)&'%*'3*'&$*$&)8'38
Ironically, the illusion o Poor 1om,Ldgar would appear to +),,
$9/#&*or +),,*+,)&*and oer )+&"#*&9"*"("3&*|)!#:$*%/0!| a spectacle that is
somewhat comical, almost pathetic, een sadistic, at the expense
o an old blind man. 1he erbal power o Poor 1om`s,Ldgar`s
depiction, thereore, terminates at a single $&#/;" |%/0!|* with the
noise o Gloucester`s body collapsing on the ground. But just
then-%/0!*2"*&9<=&#"-the perspectiist representation resumes and
comes not only to oer another panel but also another angle,
another point o iew on the picture that Poor 1om,Ldgar had
painted beorehand. \e are no longer henceorward on top o the
cli-this time we are beneath, on the same leel as the shore, and
it is Poor 1om,Ldgar, disguised as a Cornish peasant, who will
reascend, so to speak, the imaginary clis o Doer and open, in a
sort o retroactie and inerted dynamic, a new representational,
!"#$%&'()*#+',"- ./,01&$ 3
pictural space in which igures and is delineated the agent who has
orchestrated the initial illusion, i.e. Poor 1om,Ldgar or, in other
words, 9'7$",+4
>28)#: As I stood here below, methought his eyes
\ere two ull moons. le had a thousand noses
lorns whelked and waed like the enridged sea.
It was some iend. ,4.6.69-2,
lere Ldgar interpellates and exorcises himsel with the
description, the image he gies o himsel. And it is indeed during
this sequence o auto-exorcism that Ldgar conjures up the demon
|+'"32| o himsel, which has allowed Christopher Pye to argue in
his noteworthy study, ?9"*@)3'$9'38-*that this singular description
o Ldgar oerturns the isual scheme: as i one iewed one`s sel
rom the other end o the perspectie cone.` Ldgar, then, becomes
the object o his own gaze, he sees himsel seeing himsel.` 1his
episode clearly recalls-still according to Christopher Pye-
Lacan`s claim that . . .a consciousness ounded on the illusion o
the sel seeing itsel see|ing| itsel ` makes itsel elt in the . . .
uncanny, reerting, inside-out structure o the gaze.`
24
But it is precisely this image, this 8#)!9'%*echo, which, with regard
to the subject o this study, is currently about to capture our ull
and undiided attention. \hat is it "A)%&,6*about the image o this
monster \hat does this perectly incongruous and physically
absurd image haing thousands o noses, eyes like moons as well
as horns |that| whelked and waed like the enridged sea` signiy
It is this same kind o questioning, this same erent enthusiasm
regarding this image that can also be ound in the rich study by
Scott \ilson on 1he Nature o Britain in B'38*C")#4` laing as
its starting point Philip Armstrong`s thesis postulating that the
image oered by Ldgar at the bottom o the cli is an anamorphic
apparition thus denoting the radical alterity inhabiting the scopic
ield`,
25
and with writing that is sharp and precise, and thought
without detours, Scott \ilson writes the ollowing:
But what beyond ,or perhaps beore, radical alterity` does
this . iend signiy . . .|1|he three main elements-the
two moons, the thousand whelked and horny noses` and
the sea itsel-suggest both eminine and phallic
signiications reminiscent o Medusa..|1|he image o the
iend denotes the radical alterity o the gaze o the Other,
since the interpellatie power o Medusa`s gaze was so
strong it turned indiidual subjects into concrete.
26
lor Scott \ilson the image is assuredly gorgonesque. But he
will alidate his argument and, in so doing, deploy all his speed o
2$3,"-45,-60,-&7-.&"8&
38
analysis when, by starting aresh rom the irst description o Ldgar
stated rom the top o the Doer cli, he goes to contemplate and
examine the image in question-rame by rame-in all its alue
o moement and regression,diminution:
\ond tall anchoring bark
Diminished to her cock, her cock a buoy
Almost too small or sight ,4.6.18-20 Q, 4.5.18-20,
1he anishing point, the point towards which the gaze is
directed. the point where the gaze rests at its limit, as the
spectacle disappears into the distance, is this anchoring
bark` reduced to the size o its cock boat. But is there not
another way o looking at, or hearing, this perectly
proportioned body at the limit o the gaze Bark` is a
requent metaphor or the human body, here gendered
emale. It is phallic, it is diminished to a cock, or rather
diminished to her cock, which is itsel a boy` almost too
small or sight.
2
It is then that in ollowing with great exactitude the metonymic
ai.tacevevt o the elements ,bark-cock-buoy, in their sexual
meanings, Scott \ilson will see appear-at the anishing point o
the perspectiist construction painted by Ldgar-the shape o a
ctitori.. lor it is true that the deeply phallic nature o that bark`
which goes on diminishing, becoming almost indiscernible, should
gie rise not only to the idea o a atal reduction-o a castration
then-but, aboe all, should yield to the gaze, as lreud`s .briagevevt
of P.,cboavat,.i. indicates, a penis, almost inisible and all .brirettea
v,` i.e. a clitoris.
28
In conjunction with the iolent enucleation
,symbolic castration, o Gloucester, which has occurred a ew
scenes earlier, as well as the systematic bedeilment o Lear`s
daughters in the play, the image o this clitoris would signiy that
this fieva that Ldgar made us see,hear rom the bottom o the
cli, would be-\ilson argues most remarkably-the monstrous
igure or emale ;ovi..avce`: that is to say, to conclude this paper,
the sexual omnipotence o Medusa in Kivg ear.
!"#$%
1. 1he study in question is to be ound in Marjorie Garber, ba/e.eare`.
Cbo.t !riter.: iteratvre a. |vcavv, Cav.atit, ,London: Routledge Literature,
198,, 8-123. I hae not taken into account the studies which simply make
allusion to the myth o Medusa.
2. I point out ,one last time, that the whole expression Medusa complex`
was coined by Gaston Bachelard in La Rerie Ptriiante` in a terre et te.
rrerie. ae ta rotovte ,Paris: Jos Corti, 1948,, 208. 1his seems to hae totally
escaped the notice o Marjorie Garber.
.
!"#$%&'()*#+',"- ./,01&$ 39
3. I will not insist urther on the ancient and mythical sources which
inspired Shakespeare`s 1be !ivter`. 1ate. I reer the reader in the irst place to
Oid`s Metavorbo.e., XV.168-202, but also-something which is all too oten
orgotten in relation to 1be !ivter`. 1ate-to Prometheus, that exemplary
sculptor, who, as myth would hae it, gies lie and soul to his statues by
animating them with his breath ,avivae, ,I.363-64,.
4. Lynn Lnterline, \ou Speak a Language 1hat I Understand Not`:
1he Rhetoric o Animation in 1be !ivter`. 1ate,` ba/e.eare Qvartert, 48, no.
1 ,199,: 1-44. Also repeated in 1be Rbetoric of tbe oa,: rov Oria to
ba/e.eare, ed. Stephen Orgel and Ann Barton,Cambridge Cambridge
Uniersity Press, 2000,.
5. I point out that Leonardo da Vinci had also painted a head o Medusa
on a rotella,circular surace, as Giorgio Vasari tells us in the bibliography he
deotes to it:
Leonardo . commincio a pensare quello chi i si potesse
dipignere su, che aesse spaentarechi le enisse contra,
rappresentando lo eeto che la testa giadi Medusa. Porto dunque
Leonardo per questo eeto ad una sua stanza, doe non entraa
se non egli solo, lucertole, ramarri, grilli, serpe, aralle, locuste,
nottole, ed altre strane spezie di simili animali, da la moltitudine
de` quail ariamente adatta insieme cao uno animalaccio molto
orribile e spaentoso. e rite aei iv eccettevti ivtori, .cvttori ea
arcbitettori ;1::01:), ol. 4 ,lirenze: 1esto,, 21. ,eovarao begav
to tbiv/ rbat be .bovta aivt ov it, ava re.otrea to ao tbe Meav.a beaa iv
oraer to terrif, att bebotaer.. 1o a roov, to rbicb be atove baa acce..,
eovarao too/ tiara., vert., vaggot., .va/e., bvtterftie., tocv.t., bat.,
ava otber avivat. of tbe /iva, ovt of rbicb be roavcea a borribte vov.ter.,
6. 1he term rotella`also has the meaning in Italian o shield` 1he
picture may thereore be said to play, in the present case, an apotropaic role
and, in this sense, has the power to petriy all those who look on it. Medusa
is thus an oensie as well as a deensie weapon. On this theme, we
remember that when Perseus oered the head o Medusa to the goddess
Athena, the latter placed it at the centre o her aegei. shield so as to triumph
oer her enemies. Conronted by the picture o 1be eaa of Meav.a, I shall
show, in the course o our analysis, the limits o this apotropaic picture.
. On the theme o decapitation in Caraaggio`s work, I reer the reader
to the article by Louis Marin, L`Lpreue du 1emps,` special issue, ^ovrette
Rerve ae P.,cbavat,.e 49 ,1990,: 55-68, and his work Detrvire ta eivtvre ,Paris:
Galile, 19,, 152 and ollowing.
8. Marin, L`Lpreue du 1emps,` 154 and ollowing.
9. Let us also remember that the term used in rhetoric, caesura,` comes
rom the Latin caeaere, meaning to cut.`
10. lor a psychoanalytical analysis o the theme o decapitation in the
work o Caraaggio insoar as it relates to castration, I reer the reader to the
study by Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, Losing it,` in Cararaggio`. ecret.
,Cambridge, MA: 1he MI1 Press, 1998,, 85-99.
11. Sigmund lreud, La 1te de Mduse` in Gvrre. covtete., ol. 16 ,1922,
1940, Paris: Presses Uniersitaires de lrance, 1991,, emphasis my own.
12. Garber, ba/e.eare`. Cbo.t !riter., 108. \e must also ask ourseles a
question about Lady Macbeth`s unction in this passage, or she seems to
2$3,"-45,-60,-&7-.&"8&
38
analysis when, by starting aresh rom the irst description o Ldgar
stated rom the top o the Doer cli, he goes to contemplate and
examine the image in question-rame by rame-in all its alue
o moement and regression,diminution:
\ond tall anchoring bark
Diminished to her cock, her cock a buoy
Almost too small or sight ,4.6.18-20 Q, 4.5.18-20,
1he anishing point, the point towards which the gaze is
directed. the point where the gaze rests at its limit, as the
spectacle disappears into the distance, is this anchoring
bark` reduced to the size o its cock boat. But is there not
another way o looking at, or hearing, this perectly
proportioned body at the limit o the gaze Bark` is a
requent metaphor or the human body, here gendered
emale. It is phallic, it is diminished to a cock, or rather
diminished to her cock, which is itsel a boy` almost too
small or sight.
2
It is then that in ollowing with great exactitude the metonymic
ai.tacevevt o the elements ,bark-cock-buoy, in their sexual
meanings, Scott \ilson will see appear-at the anishing point o
the perspectiist construction painted by Ldgar-the shape o a
ctitori.. lor it is true that the deeply phallic nature o that bark`
which goes on diminishing, becoming almost indiscernible, should
gie rise not only to the idea o a atal reduction-o a castration
then-but, aboe all, should yield to the gaze, as lreud`s .briagevevt
of P.,cboavat,.i. indicates, a penis, almost inisible and all .brirettea
v,` i.e. a clitoris.
28
In conjunction with the iolent enucleation
,symbolic castration, o Gloucester, which has occurred a ew
scenes earlier, as well as the systematic bedeilment o Lear`s
daughters in the play, the image o this clitoris would signiy that
this fieva that Ldgar made us see,hear rom the bottom o the
cli, would be-\ilson argues most remarkably-the monstrous
igure or emale ;ovi..avce`: that is to say, to conclude this paper,
the sexual omnipotence o Medusa in Kivg ear.
!"#$%
1. 1he study in question is to be ound in Marjorie Garber, ba/e.eare`.
Cbo.t !riter.: iteratvre a. |vcavv, Cav.atit, ,London: Routledge Literature,
198,, 8-123. I hae not taken into account the studies which simply make
allusion to the myth o Medusa.
2. I point out ,one last time, that the whole expression Medusa complex`
was coined by Gaston Bachelard in La Rerie Ptriiante` in a terre et te.
rrerie. ae ta rotovte ,Paris: Jos Corti, 1948,, 208. 1his seems to hae totally
escaped the notice o Marjorie Garber.
.
!"#$%&'()*#+',"- ./,01&$ 39
3. I will not insist urther on the ancient and mythical sources which
inspired Shakespeare`s 1be !ivter`. 1ate. I reer the reader in the irst place to
Oid`s Metavorbo.e., XV.168-202, but also-something which is all too oten
orgotten in relation to 1be !ivter`. 1ate-to Prometheus, that exemplary
sculptor, who, as myth would hae it, gies lie and soul to his statues by
animating them with his breath ,avivae, ,I.363-64,.
4. Lynn Lnterline, \ou Speak a Language 1hat I Understand Not`:
1he Rhetoric o Animation in 1be !ivter`. 1ate,` ba/e.eare Qvartert, 48, no.
1 ,199,: 1-44. Also repeated in 1be Rbetoric of tbe oa,: rov Oria to
ba/e.eare, ed. Stephen Orgel and Ann Barton,Cambridge Cambridge
Uniersity Press, 2000,.
5. I point out that Leonardo da Vinci had also painted a head o Medusa
on a rotella,circular surace, as Giorgio Vasari tells us in the bibliography he
deotes to it:
Leonardo . commincio a pensare quello chi i si potesse
dipignere su, che aesse spaentarechi le enisse contra,
rappresentando lo eeto che la testa giadi Medusa. Porto dunque
Leonardo per questo eeto ad una sua stanza, doe non entraa
se non egli solo, lucertole, ramarri, grilli, serpe, aralle, locuste,
nottole, ed altre strane spezie di simili animali, da la moltitudine
de` quail ariamente adatta insieme cao uno animalaccio molto
orribile e spaentoso. e rite aei iv eccettevti ivtori, .cvttori ea
arcbitettori ;1::01:), ol. 4 ,lirenze: 1esto,, 21. ,eovarao begav
to tbiv/ rbat be .bovta aivt ov it, ava re.otrea to ao tbe Meav.a beaa iv
oraer to terrif, att bebotaer.. 1o a roov, to rbicb be atove baa acce..,
eovarao too/ tiara., vert., vaggot., .va/e., bvtterftie., tocv.t., bat.,
ava otber avivat. of tbe /iva, ovt of rbicb be roavcea a borribte vov.ter.,
6. 1he term rotella`also has the meaning in Italian o shield` 1he
picture may thereore be said to play, in the present case, an apotropaic role
and, in this sense, has the power to petriy all those who look on it. Medusa
is thus an oensie as well as a deensie weapon. On this theme, we
remember that when Perseus oered the head o Medusa to the goddess
Athena, the latter placed it at the centre o her aegei. shield so as to triumph
oer her enemies. Conronted by the picture o 1be eaa of Meav.a, I shall
show, in the course o our analysis, the limits o this apotropaic picture.
. On the theme o decapitation in Caraaggio`s work, I reer the reader
to the article by Louis Marin, L`Lpreue du 1emps,` special issue, ^ovrette
Rerve ae P.,cbavat,.e 49 ,1990,: 55-68, and his work Detrvire ta eivtvre ,Paris:
Galile, 19,, 152 and ollowing.
8. Marin, L`Lpreue du 1emps,` 154 and ollowing.
9. Let us also remember that the term used in rhetoric, caesura,` comes
rom the Latin caeaere, meaning to cut.`
10. lor a psychoanalytical analysis o the theme o decapitation in the
work o Caraaggio insoar as it relates to castration, I reer the reader to the
study by Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, Losing it,` in Cararaggio`. ecret.
,Cambridge, MA: 1he MI1 Press, 1998,, 85-99.
11. Sigmund lreud, La 1te de Mduse` in Gvrre. covtete., ol. 16 ,1922,
1940, Paris: Presses Uniersitaires de lrance, 1991,, emphasis my own.
12. Garber, ba/e.eare`. Cbo.t !riter., 108. \e must also ask ourseles a
question about Lady Macbeth`s unction in this passage, or she seems to
2$3,"-45,-60,-&7-.&"8&
40
actiely participate in the Medusa Complex, i not to actually play the part
o understudy to it. Such a hypothesis could ind a most interesting echo i
it is remembered that Lady Macbeth inoked the orces o eil by crying
out, Unsex me here`-it would seem that in this passage it is well and truly
her husband whom she desires to unsex.` Lady Macbeth would appear on
this basis to be the incarnation o castration. Such suggestions would be,
howeer, partly contrary to Garber`s argument when the latter writes, !"#$%&'
resists . . . the tendency to |read| the play in terms o anxiety about emale
power. Power in !"#$%&' is a unction o neither the male nor the emale but
the suspicion o the undecidable` ,110,. lor a comparable discussion about
the theme o emale power` in !"#$%&', I reer the reader in particular to
the study by Janet Adelman, Born o \oman`: lantasies o Maternal Power
in !"#$%&'` in !"#$%&'() *+,&%-.+/"/0) */1&1#"2) 344"04, ed. Alan Sinield
,Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 1992,, 53-68. Adelman argues that the whole
o the play represents in ery powerul orm both the antasy o a irtually
absolute and destructie maternal power and the antasy o absolute escape
rom this power.`
13. lranois Rabelais, Le Quart Lire,` Chap. 4 in 567/%4) #+-.28&%49
Bibliotheque de la Pliade ,Paris: Gallimard, 1955,, 666-6. I also stress that
the emale genitalia as Rabelais indicates and underlines, son comment a
nom` ,her what`s-its-name `,, is not named or determined by a name
here. 1he agina comes under the realm o the taboo, the orbidden-o
what, such as Medusa, cannot and must not be named or een seen.
14. Georg \ilhelm lriedrich legel, Le Chatiment comme destin,` in
:;34./1&) <6) #'/14&1",14-%) %&) 4+,) <%4&1,, trans. Jean Martin ,Paris: Librairie
Philosophique J. Vrin, 2003,, 53.
15. Garber, 115, emphasis mine.
16. Ibid., 116.
1. On the subject o the term glass,` it could be added that this term
also had a particular meaning in the popular Llizabethan spectacles called
Mummers` plays or, yet again, among other expressions, Sword dances.`
It was a particular kind o dance that consisted o placing swords around
the neck o a dancer to depict his decapitation. 1his inormation oreshadows,
as we shall see, the conclusion o our argument. lor an analysis o the term
glass` with regard to the spectacles and easts o Shakespeare`s time, I can
reer the reader to the seminal work by lranois Laroque, Shakespeare et la
te,` in 344"1)<;"/#'=+2+>1%)<6)4.%#&"#2%)<",4)2;?,>2%&%//%)=21@"$=&'"1,% ,Paris: Presses
Uniersitaires de lrance, 1988,, 56.
18. Charles loward, ed., A'%)B+21&1#"2)C+/D4)+E )F"-%4)G9)/%./1,&%<)E/+-)&'%
3<1&1+,)+E )HIHI ,Cambridge, MA: larard Uniersity Press, 1918,, 325, also
cited by Garber, J'"D%4.%"/%;4)K'+4&)C/1&%/4, 11.
19. Garber, J'"D%4.%"/%;4)K'+4&)C/1&%/4, 11, emphasis my own.
20. lor a reading o Macbeth considered rom the angle o lattery,
gratiication with regard to James I, I reer the reader to the study by J.\.
Draper, Macbeth` as a Compliment to James I,` 3,>214#'%)J&6<1%, 2 ,193-
1938,: 20-20.
21. lor an in-depth study o the eolution o Medusa as a theme inherent
to Art listory, I reer the reader once again to the work by Jean Clair, !=<64%9
#+,&/1$6&1+,)L)6,%)",&'/+.+2+>1%)<%4)"/&4)<6)7146%2 ,Paris: Gallimard, 1989,.
22. It is interesting to note that at the beginning o the seenteenth century
,the MNE+/< 3,>214')O1#&1+,"/0 also draws attention to it,, the association o
!"#$%&'()*#+',"- ./,01&$ 41
ideas jelly,sperm` only seems to ind its semantic setting in an aquatic,
maritime context, as John Donne`s 1601 work, 1he Progresse o the Soule,`
attests to, in which one can read, A emale ishes sandie Roe, \ith the
males jelly, newly le`ned was.` ,A. J. Smith, ed., F+',) O+,,%() A'%) *+-.2%&%
3,>214')B+%-4 |London: Penguin Classics, 1996|,.
On the subject o jellyish with regard to the Medusa myth, I would
remind the reader that Roland Barthes, in his work P+2",<)Q"/&'%4)$0)P+2",<
Q"/&'%4, also relies on this correspondence between the myth o Gorgo and
the gelatinous sea-creature, surrounded by tentacles with stinging and urticant
powers, in order to ormulate a metaphorical representation o Doxa` ,public
opinion,. ,Lric Marty, ed., P+2",<)Q"/&'%49)567/%4)*+-.28&%4, ol. 4, 192-196
|Paris: Lditions du Seuil, 2002|, 69-98,.
It is also important to remember that this correspondence is not just due
to lrench serendipity. \e also ind it in Lnglish poetry. Sylia Plath`s 1962
poem entitled Medusa` plays on the similarity between Aurelia and Aurela,
the irst word being the Christian name o Sylia Plath`s mother and the
second being the Latin name o a genus o jellyish. ,Plath, Perseus` and
Medusa` in A'%)*+22%#&%<)B+%-4, ed. 1ed lughes, ,New \ork: larper & Row,
1981,, 206-208, 224-26.
23. 1he study by Jonathan Goldberg has shown, remarkably, that this
spectacular iew aorded by Poor 1om,Ldgar to the imagination,gaze is
rigorously constructed around the Albertian principles o perspectiist
construction. See Jonathan Goldberg, Perspecties: Doer Cli and the
Conditions o Representation` in J'"D%4.%"/%;4)R",< ,Minneapolis: Uniersity
o Minnesota Press, 2003,, 142.
24. Christopher Pye, A'%)S",14'1,>()J'"D%4.%"/%9)&'%)J6$T%#&9)",<)3"/20)!+<%/,
*62&6/% ,Durham: Duke Uniersity Press, 2000,, 93.
25. Philip Armstrong, Uncanny Spectacles: Psychoanalysis and the 1exts
o King Lear,` A%N&6"2)B/"#&1#% 8 no. 2, ,1994,: 414-34.
26. Scott \ilson, Lnjoying 1he Nature o Britain in King Lear,` Chap.
in *62&6/"2) !"&%/1"214-9) A'%+/0) ",<) B/"#&1#% ,Oxord: Blackwell Publishing,
1995,, 162.
2. Ibid.
28. A work o Sigmund lreud written in 1938, published posthumously,
?$/=>=)<%).40#'","204%)U?$/1<>%-%,&)+E )B40#'+","20414V ,Paris: Presses Uniersitaires
de lrance, 1949,, 65.
2$3,"-45,-60,-&7-.&"8&
40
actiely participate in the Medusa Complex, i not to actually play the part
o understudy to it. Such a hypothesis could ind a most interesting echo i
it is remembered that Lady Macbeth inoked the orces o eil by crying
out, Unsex me here`-it would seem that in this passage it is well and truly
her husband whom she desires to unsex.` Lady Macbeth would appear on
this basis to be the incarnation o castration. Such suggestions would be,
howeer, partly contrary to Garber`s argument when the latter writes, !"#$%&'
resists . . . the tendency to |read| the play in terms o anxiety about emale
power. Power in !"#$%&' is a unction o neither the male nor the emale but
the suspicion o the undecidable` ,110,. lor a comparable discussion about
the theme o emale power` in !"#$%&', I reer the reader in particular to
the study by Janet Adelman, Born o \oman`: lantasies o Maternal Power
in !"#$%&'` in !"#$%&'() *+,&%-.+/"/0) */1&1#"2) 344"04, ed. Alan Sinield
,Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 1992,, 53-68. Adelman argues that the whole
o the play represents in ery powerul orm both the antasy o a irtually
absolute and destructie maternal power and the antasy o absolute escape
rom this power.`
13. lranois Rabelais, Le Quart Lire,` Chap. 4 in 567/%4) #+-.28&%49
Bibliotheque de la Pliade ,Paris: Gallimard, 1955,, 666-6. I also stress that
the emale genitalia as Rabelais indicates and underlines, son comment a
nom` ,her what`s-its-name `,, is not named or determined by a name
here. 1he agina comes under the realm o the taboo, the orbidden-o
what, such as Medusa, cannot and must not be named or een seen.
14. Georg \ilhelm lriedrich legel, Le Chatiment comme destin,` in
:;34./1&) <6) #'/14&1",14-%) %&) 4+,) <%4&1,, trans. Jean Martin ,Paris: Librairie
Philosophique J. Vrin, 2003,, 53.
15. Garber, 115, emphasis mine.
16. Ibid., 116.
1. On the subject o the term glass,` it could be added that this term
also had a particular meaning in the popular Llizabethan spectacles called
Mummers` plays or, yet again, among other expressions, Sword dances.`
It was a particular kind o dance that consisted o placing swords around
the neck o a dancer to depict his decapitation. 1his inormation oreshadows,
as we shall see, the conclusion o our argument. lor an analysis o the term
glass` with regard to the spectacles and easts o Shakespeare`s time, I can
reer the reader to the seminal work by lranois Laroque, Shakespeare et la
te,` in 344"1)<;"/#'=+2+>1%)<6)4.%#&"#2%)<",4)2;?,>2%&%//%)=21@"$=&'"1,% ,Paris: Presses
Uniersitaires de lrance, 1988,, 56.
18. Charles loward, ed., A'%)B+21&1#"2)C+/D4)+E )F"-%4)G9)/%./1,&%<)E/+-)&'%
3<1&1+,)+E )HIHI ,Cambridge, MA: larard Uniersity Press, 1918,, 325, also
cited by Garber, J'"D%4.%"/%;4)K'+4&)C/1&%/4, 11.
19. Garber, J'"D%4.%"/%;4)K'+4&)C/1&%/4, 11, emphasis my own.
20. lor a reading o Macbeth considered rom the angle o lattery,
gratiication with regard to James I, I reer the reader to the study by J.\.
Draper, Macbeth` as a Compliment to James I,` 3,>214#'%)J&6<1%, 2 ,193-
1938,: 20-20.
21. lor an in-depth study o the eolution o Medusa as a theme inherent
to Art listory, I reer the reader once again to the work by Jean Clair, !=<64%9
#+,&/1$6&1+,)L)6,%)",&'/+.+2+>1%)<%4)"/&4)<6)7146%2 ,Paris: Gallimard, 1989,.
22. It is interesting to note that at the beginning o the seenteenth century
,the MNE+/< 3,>214')O1#&1+,"/0 also draws attention to it,, the association o
!"#$%&'()*#+',"- ./,01&$ 41
ideas jelly,sperm` only seems to ind its semantic setting in an aquatic,
maritime context, as John Donne`s 1601 work, 1he Progresse o the Soule,`
attests to, in which one can read, A emale ishes sandie Roe, \ith the
males jelly, newly le`ned was.` ,A. J. Smith, ed., F+',) O+,,%() A'%) *+-.2%&%
3,>214')B+%-4 |London: Penguin Classics, 1996|,.
On the subject o jellyish with regard to the Medusa myth, I would
remind the reader that Roland Barthes, in his work P+2",<)Q"/&'%4)$0)P+2",<
Q"/&'%4, also relies on this correspondence between the myth o Gorgo and
the gelatinous sea-creature, surrounded by tentacles with stinging and urticant
powers, in order to ormulate a metaphorical representation o Doxa` ,public
opinion,. ,Lric Marty, ed., P+2",<)Q"/&'%49)567/%4)*+-.28&%4, ol. 4, 192-196
|Paris: Lditions du Seuil, 2002|, 69-98,.
It is also important to remember that this correspondence is not just due
to lrench serendipity. \e also ind it in Lnglish poetry. Sylia Plath`s 1962
poem entitled Medusa` plays on the similarity between Aurelia and Aurela,
the irst word being the Christian name o Sylia Plath`s mother and the
second being the Latin name o a genus o jellyish. ,Plath, Perseus` and
Medusa` in A'%)*+22%#&%<)B+%-4, ed. 1ed lughes, ,New \ork: larper & Row,
1981,, 206-208, 224-26.
23. 1he study by Jonathan Goldberg has shown, remarkably, that this
spectacular iew aorded by Poor 1om,Ldgar to the imagination,gaze is
rigorously constructed around the Albertian principles o perspectiist
construction. See Jonathan Goldberg, Perspecties: Doer Cli and the
Conditions o Representation` in J'"D%4.%"/%;4)R",< ,Minneapolis: Uniersity
o Minnesota Press, 2003,, 142.
24. Christopher Pye, A'%)S",14'1,>()J'"D%4.%"/%9)&'%)J6$T%#&9)",<)3"/20)!+<%/,
*62&6/% ,Durham: Duke Uniersity Press, 2000,, 93.
25. Philip Armstrong, Uncanny Spectacles: Psychoanalysis and the 1exts
o King Lear,` A%N&6"2)B/"#&1#% 8 no. 2, ,1994,: 414-34.
26. Scott \ilson, Lnjoying 1he Nature o Britain in King Lear,` Chap.
in *62&6/"2) !"&%/1"214-9) A'%+/0) ",<) B/"#&1#% ,Oxord: Blackwell Publishing,
1995,, 162.
2. Ibid.
28. A work o Sigmund lreud written in 1938, published posthumously,
?$/=>=)<%).40#'","204%)U?$/1<>%-%,&)+E )B40#'+","20414V ,Paris: Presses Uniersitaires
de lrance, 1949,, 65.
2$3,"-45,-60,-&7-.&"8&
Anamorphic Hamlet
!
!
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Hans Holbein the Younger, The Ambassadors, 1533, Oil on oak, 207 cm ! 209.5 cm (81 in ! 82.5 in), National Gallery, London
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=>'(-#?*@/$A&4"'$=.",B&4
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I>H,6*(".$HP/$Q465"#*6'P$-;$3&,6;-#46&$I#"**
C'&H,"$Q0R/$http://www.jstor.org/stable/3176084
=11"**"./$MLSGGSKLLT$LN/UK
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Representations.
http://www.jstor.org
JANET
ADELMAN
Her Father's Blood:
Race, Conversion,
and Nation
in The Merchant
of
Venice
I most
humbly
beseeche
Almightie God,
that he will not
onely vouchsafe
his
gracious
encrease to this
glorious
worke
begunne
with this Israelite
stranger,
but also to allure the
whole remnant
of
the circumcised
Race, by
this his
example,
to be desirous
of
the same
communion: So that at the
length,
all
nations,
as well
Jewes,
as
Gentiles, embracing
the
faith,
and Sacramentes
of
Christ
Jesu, acknowledging
one
Shephearde,
united
together
in
one
sheepefold, may
with one
voice,
one
soule,
and one
generall agreement, glorifie
the
only begotten
sonne our sauiour
Jesue
Christ.
John Foxe,
A Sermon
preached
at the
Christening of
a Certaine
Jew,
at London1
LANCELOT:
Truly
I
thinkyou
are damned. There is but one
hope
in it that can
doyou
any good,
and that is but a kind
of
bastard
hope,
neither.
JESSICA:
And what
hope
is
that, Ipray
thee?
LANCELOT:
Marry, you may partly hope thatyourfathergotyou not, thatyou
are not
the
Jew's daughter.
JESSICA:
That were a kind
of
bastard
hope
indeed. So the sins
of my
mother should be
visited
upon
me.
-The Merchant
of
Venice2
IMMEDIATELY BEFORE THE SCENE THAT
famously
ends with
Shylock's
forced conversion to
Christianity, Jessica
and Lancelot debate the status
ofJessica's
own conversion in the lines I have
just quoted.
In
sharp
contrast to Foxe's wish that
all nations
might
be united in the
body
of
Christ,
Lancelot can
imagine only
one
condition under which
Jessica might
become Christian: that she had some other
father. This is the clown's
point
of
view,
but it is not
easily dismissed;
as I
hope
to
demonstrate,
it
opens
out onto the vexed
territory
that lies between the universaliz-
ing
claims of
Christianity
and the
particularities
of
blood-lineage and, increasingly,
of nation. Nor is Belmont as distant from
England
as one
might suppose: though
they
were few in
number,
the conversos in London
may
have
posed
their own kind
of blood-conundrum and their own
challenge
not
only
to Christian universalism
but also to the idea of nationhood.3 Whether or not
Shakespeare
and his audience
knew of their
presence-and
it is hard to believe that
they
could have
gone
alto-
REPRESENTATIONS 81 * Winter 2003 ? THE REGENTS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA
ISSN 0734-6018
pages
4-30. All
rights
reserved. Send
requests
for
permission
to
reprint
to
Rights
and
Permissions, University
of California
Press,
4
Journals Division,
2000 Center
St.,
Ste.
303, Berkeley,
CA 94704-1223.
gether
unnoticed after the
Lopez
affair of 1594-Jessica's entrance into Belmont
and her would-be entrance into
Christianity provokes
a
response
that would have
been
entirely
familiar to the conversos themselves.
Jessica
herself seems to assume that her conversion will be an
unproblematic
consequence
of her
marriage.
Well before she assures Lancelot that her husband
has made her a Christian in
3.5,
she
appears
to
imagine marriage
and conversion
as
interchangeable,
as
though
the laws
governing
the material conditions of women
could
unproblematically
be
applied
to her
spiritual state,
and her husband-rather
than the church-had the
power
to make her a Christian:
Alack,
what heinous sin is it in me
To be ashamed to be
my
father's child!
But
though
I am a
daughter
to his
blood,
I am not to his manners. O
Lorenzo,
If thou
keep promise
I shall end this
strife,
Become a Christian and
thy loving
wife.
(2.3.15-20)
Though
her
escape
from her father's house to her lover fits
conveniently
into the
conventions of a romance
plot,
these are not the
love-longings
of a
typical
romance
heroine: Lorenzo is invoked in this
speech
not as the solution to
Jessica's
erotic
desire but as the solution to the
problem
of her father's blood.
Though
we
might
expect
her to convert in order to
marry,
the rhetorical
weight
of this
speech
moves
in the
opposite direction, suggesting
that she would
marry
in order to convert.
Lancelot's answer to
Jessica's expectation
becomes
explicit
in the lines with
which I
opened
this
essay:
the
only way
out for
Jessica
is not to have been born of
the
Jew
at all. But his
assumption
is so
deeply
embedded in him
(and
so endemic
to the culture in which his author
operates)
that it occurs in a muted form even
here,
while he is
ostensibly serving
as the
helpful agent
of her
escape.
Lancelot's
response
to
Jessica's request
to
carry
a letter to Lorenzo-"If a Christian do not
play
the knave and
get thee,
I am much deceived"
(2.3.11-12)-anticipates
that
later formulation as it hovers
unstably
between
"get"
in the sense of
"possess"
and
"get"
in the sense of
"beget," despite
the
temporal illogic
that
"get"
as
"beget"
would introduce: how can
Jessica
be
begotten by
a Christian in the
present
tense?
The Second Folio
(F2) reading-"ifa
Christian did not
play
the knave and
get thee,
I am much deceived"
(emphasis added)-suggests
how
readily Shakespeare's
near
contemporaries
would have heard the
pun;
it stabilizes the
meaning by choosing
"beget"
over
"possess"
and then
altering
the tense to solve the
problem
of
tempo-
ral
illogic.4 By securing "get"
as
"beget"
and
eliminating
the
temporal illogic,
F2's
reading
underscores the
way
in which Lancelot's
pun
answers
Jessica's fantasy
of
escape
from her father's house: at least for an
instant,
that
pun gives
her the Chris-
tian father that she seems to be
longing
for. For a
dizzying moment, through
its
Her Father's Blood:
Race, Conversion,
and Nation in The Merchant
of
Venice 5
elision of
getting
in the
present
with
begetting
in the
past
and its duck-rabbit flick-
ering
of father and husband as the
subject
of
"get,"
Lancelot's
pun
fuses the Chris-
tian husband who
might (now) get Jessica
with the Christian father who
might
have
begotten
her-as
though Jessica's
Christian husband could do
away
with the em-
barrassment of her
Jewish
birth
only by becoming
her Christian
father, literally
rebegetting
her in the
present
with Christian rather than
Jewish
blood.
Insofar as it articulates the terms of this
impossibility,
Lancelot's
pun-which
seems to
give Jessica
what she wants-serves not to realize but to set the
limiting
condition to her
fantasy
of
conversion-through-marriage.
For in its insistence that
Lorenzo can
get
(and
hence
convert) Jessica only
if he can
simultaneously rebeget
her,
thus
effecting
what amounts to a literalization of the
trope
of Christian re-
birth-"except
a man be borne
againe,
he can not se the
kingdome
of God"5-
Lancelot's
pun
returns
Jessica
to the strictures of her father's blood once
again.
And
Lancelot is not alone: his version of conversion seems closer to the state of
things
in Venice-and
especially
in Belmont-than
Jessica's assumption
that her mar-
riage
will do the trick or Foxe's wish for a union of "all
nations,
as well
Jewes,
as
Gentiles" in Christ.
Jessica's
would-be
escape
from her father's
Jewishness
seems
to
begin
well
enough; only
a few moments after she has declared her desire to be-
come a Christian
through marriage,
her husband-to-be
imagines Shylock's "gentle
daughter"
as her father's ticket to
heaven,
as
though
she had the
power
to convert
not
only
herself but him
(2.4.34).
Graziano also seems
willing
to
grant
her
fantasy
of instantaneous conversion when he
proclaims
her
(depending
on one's
text)
"a
gentle [or
"a
gentile"]
and no
Jew" (2.6.51).6
But when she arrives in Belmont with
Lorenzo and
Salerio,
it becomes clear that
Jessica's
status as
no-Jew
is as evanes-
cent as her transitional status as a
gilded boy:
Graziano himself identifies her as
no-Christian, signaling
their arrival with "who comes here? Lorenzo and his infi-
del!"
(3.2.217).
Graziano
may
later
prove
to be the
play's
most
outspoken anti-Semite,
but he
is not alone in
regardingJessica
as an alien creature whose
marriage
has done noth-
ing
to convert
her; Shakespeare
seems to take
pains
in 3.2 to indicate the extent to
which she is an outsider in Portia's
Belmont,
Merchant's
xenophobic
stand-in for
England
with its
virgin-queen (3.2.169).
At least Graziano notices that she
exists;
neither Bassanio nor Portia
register
her
presence
here or elsewhere in the
play.
(Even
when Portia learns
Jessica's name,
she never addresses
Jessica directly; see,
for
example, 3.4.38,
where she addresses the
couple standing
before her as
"you
and
Jessica.")
Bassanio's
welcome,
reiterated
by Portia,
extends
only
to Lorenzo
and
Salerio;
neither Bassanio nor Portia
speak directly
to her either at her entrance
or
anywhere
else in this scene. Graziano's somewhat belated instructions to Ner-
issa-"cheer
yon stranger.
Bid her welcome"
(3.2.236)-in
fact function as a
stage
direction
indicating
her
physical
isolation on
stage
and her demeanor
during
the
awkward moments in which she is
pointedly
not introduced:
"yon"
makes sense
only
if she is
standing
at some distance from the others who are welcomed into
6 REPRESENTATIONS
Belmont,
and "cheer"
suggests
that she is in need of
cheering. Moreover,
if Grazi-
ano's earlier "infidel" underscored
Jessica's
status as alien
by religion,
his
"stranger"
here underscores her status as alien
by country: though
the term could
function to indicate
simply
that she is unknown to the
present company,
she is after
all known at least to
Graziano,
who could introduce her
by name;
and other uses
of the term in the
period
tend to circulate around the
concept
of
foreignness by
blood or nation rather than
simply
lack of
recognition.7
Bassanio has
greeted
Lo-
renzo and Salerio as
"my very
friends and
countrymen" (3.2.222);
Graziano's
"stranger" suggests
how far
Jessica
is from inclusion both in the
present company
and in the
category
of Bassanio's
countrymen, though
she too comes from Venice.
His term in fact allies
Jessica specifically
with her
father,
who
complains
that he is
spurned by
Antonio like a
"stranger
cur"
(1.3.114)-and perhaps
with the con-
versos of
London,
to whom the term was
frequently applied.8
No
wonder, then, thatJessica
tries to dissociate herself not
only
from her father's
religion
but also from his
"countrymen"
in her
only speech
in this scene:
When I was with him I have heard him swear
To Tubal and to
Cush,
his
countrymen,
That he would rather have Antonio's flesh
Than
twenty
times the value of the sum....
(3.2.283-86)
Jessica
here
attempts
to
ingratiate
herself into the
company
from which she is ex-
cluded not
only by confirming
their sense of her father's blood-thirstiness but also
by defining
his
"countrymen"
as
specifically his,
not hers: as
though
her conversion
(however questionable
in
itself)
could have the effect of
changing
her
country along
with her
religion
and thus could enable her inclusion as one of Bassanio's coun-
trymen
after all. At her initial
appearance, Jessica
had
distinguished
between blood
and
religion, taking seriously
the Christian universalist
promise
that she could free
herself from her father's
religion
if not from his blood. But
here,
in the face of contin-
ued
designation
of her as an infidel and
stranger,
she
appears
to absorb the lesson
implicit
in Lancelot's
pun-and
as
though
in
response,
she fantasizes a radical
sepa-
ration from her father's blood and nation as the
price
of inclusion in the social club
to which her husband
belongs,
and as the
only way
to cast off her status as a
Jew.
The
play carefully
does not
distinguish
a moment after which
Jessica
is con-
verted;
and that omission allows for a chronic tension between
Jessica
and the oth-
ers,
in which she
persistently regards
her conversion to
Christianity
as
complete,
and
they persistently regard
her as a
Jew.
If the crucial distinction for
Jessica
is
religious,
the crucial distinction for them is of race or nation. But this much she
might
have heard even in Graziano's initial
riddling praise
of her as "a
gentle/
gentile
and no
Jew."
As the word slides between
"gentle"
and
"gentile,"
it enters
the
territory
of what we
might agree
to call a
protoracial
distinction:9
although
"Jew" might
function
primarily
as a
religious category
when it is
opposed
to "Chris-
Her Father's Blood:
Race, Conversion,
and Nation in The Merchant
of
Venice 7
tian,"
it becomes an
incipiently
racial
category
when it is
opposed
to
"gentle/
gentile."
For in that
opposition, "gentile" invariably
functions as a marker of those
races or nations that are not
Jewish'?-as
in Foxe's wish that "the whole remnant
of the circumcised Race"
might convert,
so that "all
nations,
as
wellJewes,
as Gen-
tiles"
might
be united in one
sheepfold.
Graziano's
implied opposition
between
"gentle"
and
"Jew"-she
is no
Jew
because she is a
gentle-thus
underscores the
"gentile"
in
"gentle"
and racializes both
"gentle"
and
'Jew" by construing
them
as
mutually
exclusive: while
"gentle"
and
"Jew" might conceivably
be
compatible
terms
(Jessica appears
to
imagine
herself with
gentle
manners in her
opening
scene), by
definition
Jessica
cannot be both a
gentile
and a
Jew.
And
only
status as
"a
gentile"
can
guarantee
her status as "no
Jew": Jessica hopes
for a conversion
from
Jew
to
Christian;
Graziano
implies
that the
necessary
conversion will have to
be
fromJew
to
gentile, shifting
the
grounds
of conversion from
religion
to race even
as he seems to
grant
her the conversion she wishes for.
Graziano thus establishes her status as
gentile
as the
necessary-and impossi-
ble-condition for her
escape
from
Jewishness: although Jews might
become
Christian, they are, axiomatically,
not
gentiles.
His
apparently liberatory
comment
thus returns her to the strictures of her father's blood as
firmly
as Lancelot's con-
tention that the
problem
of her
Jewishness
could be solved
only
if a different father
had
gotten
her. And this return to her father's blood is a move the
play continually
makes;
her beloved Lorenzo no sooner calls her a
"gentle"
than he recalls her to
her
position
as her father's issue.
If e'er the
Jew
her father come to heaven
It will be for his
gentle daughter's sake;
And never dare misfortune cross her foot
Unless she do it under this excuse:
That she is issue to a faithless
Jew.
(2.4.33-37)
The more
Jessica appears
to be "a
gentle
and no
Jew,"
the more
vigorously
her
problematic lineage
needs to be asserted. Lorenzo
initially
entertains the
possibility
that
Jessica
will be able to convert not
only
herself but her
father, reversing
the
trajectory-"the
sins of the father are to be laid
upon
the children"
(3.5.1)-that
Lancelot insists on. But blood wins out in the end. As soon as Lorenzo
distinguishes
her
gentleness/gentileness
from
Shylock'sJewishness,
he must undo the distinction:
if misfortune visits
her,
it will be because she is her father's issue and hence a
Jew
after all.
By
the end of Lorenzo's
speech,
her
lineage
has
trumped
her
"gentleness";
as soon as the
possibility
of her
gentleness/gentileness
is
invoked,
it
inevitably
calls
up
her father's
Jewishness
and
subjects
her to its taint.
In its attentiveness to
Jessica's
continued status as outsider and
infidel,
Merchant
seems to me
extraordinarily
attuned to the
plight
of the outsider who would assimi-
8 REPRESENTATIONS
late and to the
price
of
assimilation, registered
not
only
in 3.2 but also in
Jessica's
melancholy
in 3.5
("how
cheer'st
thou, Jessica?"
Lorenzo asks after Lancelot has
insisted that she is still a
Jew),
in the
absurdly self-denigrating paean
to
heavenly
Portia with which she
apparently
answers his
question,
and
perhaps especially
in
her final line in the
play-"I
am never
merry
when I hear sweet music"
(5.1.68)-
a line that
simultaneously registers
her distance from the
merry company
at Bel-
mont and returns her to her father's
melancholy
and musicless house.
Nonetheless,
despite
these hints of
sympathy
with her
plight,
the
play's
treatment of her is at least
partly
in the service of the
ideologies
that
prevent
her
escape
from that
house,
con-
vert or
not, making
her a
figure
for the anxieties attendant
upon
conversion. In that
sense,
her situation
poses
the conundrum of the conversos
(including
London's
own
conversos)
and
provokes
the discourse of blood that their historical
presence
engendered.
Despite
claims that
"Jew"
was
purely
a
theological category
in
Shakespeare's
England,
and that racialized
thinking
about
Jews
is an
inappropriate piece
of
anachronism, protoracialized thinking
about the conversos
appears
to have been
both
conceptually
available and
conceptually
useful to
Shakespeare's contempo-
raries. For whatever
theological category
those conversos fit
into,
whether or not
they
were
thought
to
practice
secret
Jewish rites, they
were
typically
described not
only
in terms of their "sect"
(religious belief)
and their "nation"
(in
this
context,
usually
the
country
in which
they
had most
recently lived)
but also in terms of their
"descent";
and the
genealogical language
of "descent" shades into what would be-
come the newer
language
of "race." The Clerk of the
Privy
Council does not have
to have available to him an entire scientific discourse of race in order to describe
Pedro
Rodriguez,
a converso
living
in
Lyons
who
planned
to
marry Lopez's daugh-
ter,
as "a
Portugal by
nation and
aJew by
race" in 1597.1 Gabriel
Harvey
accounts
for
Lopez's suspicious
success as a
physician-the
trickiness of what
Harvey
calls
his
'Jewish practis"-by noting
that he was "descended
ofJews,"
as
though Jewish
deception
were a
biological
inheritance.'2
Harvey's incipient biologisim
is similar
to,
if less
explicit than,
Foxe's
exasperated speculation
that
Jewish
unbelief is so
ineradicable that it must be inherited from the womb:
'Jewish
Infidelitie ...
seemeth after a certaine maner their inheritable
disease,
who are after a certaine
sort,
from their mothers
wombe, naturally
caried
through peruerse frowardnes,
into all malitious
hatred,
&
contempt
of
Christ,
& his Christians."'3 If
testimony
offered to the
Inquisition
in Madrid in 1588 is
any
indication of the state of affairs
in London
(as
it claims to
be),
Foxe's
implied
link between
religion
and race was
not
conceptually
difficult to make. One such witness
alleges
of some members of
the
Sephardic community
in London that "it is
public
and notorious in
London,
that
by
race
they
are all
Jews,
and it is notorious that in their own homes
they
live
as such
observing
theirJewish
rites."'4
Though
"rites" and "race"-the
theological
and
protobiological categories-are
distinct
categories,
the
notoriety
of the con-
versos' "race" is
apparently
used to secure the
notoriety
of their "rites":
they
are
Her Father's Blood:
Race, Conversion,
and Nation in The Merchant
of
Venice 9
Jews by race,
and "as such"-that
is,
as racial
Jews-practice
their
rites,
as
though
one
simply
entailed the other.
No wonder that
poor Jessica's
would-be conversion doesn't succeed in
freeing
her from the strictures of her father's blood:
only
a Christian father could do that.
Oddly,
the
play
itself seems to
toy
with its own fulfillment of this
fantasy-solution
when it "converts"
Shylock
in the scene after Lancelot articulates this
condition,
giving
her a Christian father in the same ex
post
facto
way
as Lancelot's initial
pun
does. But the
play
never takes the
possibility
of
Shylock's
conversion
seriously;
despite
his last-minute court-ordered
conversion,
his
Jewishness
seems to be fixed
and immutable. And if Graziano's
"gentle/gentile
and no
Jew"
fixes the
limiting
conditions
ofJessica's conversion,
Antonio's initial
joke
about
Shylock's
conversion
uses the same terms to underscore the
immutability
of
Shylock's Jewishness.
Anto-
nio
greets
the news of
Shylock's
substitution of the
"merry
bond" for the usual
penalties
of
usury
with these words: "Hie
thee, gentle Jew.
/ The Hebrew will turn
Christian;
he
grows
kind"
(1.3.173-74). Shylock's
aside at
1.3.36-47,
with its insis-
tence on his "ancient
grudge"
and its reference to his cursed
"tribe,"
has
already
schooled the audience in his immutable
Jewishness,
his distance from the
gentle/
gentile,
the
kind,
and the Christian. Antonio's formulation reenforces that school-
ing,
for
though Shylock may
be forced to
convert,
he will never
(Antonio's
set of
puns suggests) change
his nature and
"grow
kind." The
paradox
of
"gentle Jew"
marks this
impossibility:
for
though
a Hebrew
might ostensibly
become a
Christian,
becoming "gentile"
(and
hence no
longer Hebrew)
would
require
a
change
in kind.
Like his nature
(kind),
his nation
(gens)
and
type (genus)
are
reassuringly fixed;
what-
ever his
pretense
of
gentility
or
kindness, everyone
knows that this
Jew
can never
join
the kind of the Christian. And insofar as
Shylock
will remain
Shylock,
con-
verted or
not,
he secures the
important
distinction between Christian and
Jew,
the
distinction that
Jessica
threatens to dissolve both
through
her conversion and
through
her
gentleness-and
he secures it
exactly through
an
appeal
to a
protora-
cial difference. For whether or not racial
categories
were
fully
in
place by
the time
of
Merchant,
the
puns through
which Antonio introduces the
topic
of conversion
into the
play suggest
the set of anxieties-about sameness and
difference,
about
nature and nations-for which racialized
thinking provides
a
remedy.
By
the time of
Merchant,
Christian societies had been
worrying
about the insta-
bility
ofJewish
difference for
generations.
Jews,
for
example,
are
generally depicted
throughout
the Middle
Ages
as
physically unmistakable,
with red or black
curly
hair, large noses,
dark
skin,
and the
infamousfoetorjudaicus,
the bad smell that iden-
tified them as
Jews.
But
apparently Jews
could not be counted on to be
reliably
different:
although allegedly physically unmistakable, Jews throughout Europe
were nonetheless
required
to wear
particular styles
of
clothing
or
badges
that
graphically
enforced their
physical unmistakability-as though they
were not
quite
different
enough.'5 Archbishop Stephen Langton's
1222 council in Oxford seems to
10 REPRESENTATIONS
have instituted
clothing regulations
in
England explicitly
for this
reason, following
both the Fourth Lateran Council
regulations
of 1215 and a
particularly troubling
local case in which a deacon married a
Jew,
was
circumcised,
and was burned for
his
apostasy.
E W. Maitland
paraphrases
the institution of the
English regulations
thus: "there
being unfortunately
no visible distinction between
Jews
and Chris-
tians,
there have been mixed
marriages
or less
permanent unions;
for the better
prevention whereof,
it is ordained that
everyJew
shall wear on the front of his dress
tablets or
patches
of cloth four inches
long by
two
wide,
of some colour other than
that of the rest of his
garment."16
The
regulations
thus
appear
to have been an at-
tempt
to make a difference where none was
reliably visible, presumably
on the as-
sumption
that no one would
knowingly marry
a
Jew.
Even
apparently
reliable
physical signs
of difference were
tricky:
some
thought,
for
example,
that
thefoetorjudaicus might disappear
at
baptism, effectively undoing
the immutable difference between Christian and
Jew."7
And not
every
Christian
would
greet
this news with
joy: despite
the
promises
of a
universalizing Christianity,
the difference between Christian and
Jew
was too
important
a
part
of the mental
map
to be
given up lightly. Already
too different and too much the
same, Jews
were
a contradiction that
conversion-particularly
state-enforced conversion-turned
into a crisis. And insofar as Merchant worries the contradiction between
Jessica's
conversion and her
blood,
it
responds
in its own
way
to the
pressures
that
were,
elsewhere in the sixteenth
century, forcing
a
protoracialized
definition of
Jewish
difference.
Although
one
theological justification
for hatred of
Jews
had
always
been their stiff-necked refusal to
convert,
it turned out that massive conversion
brought
on its own
problems.
In
sixteenth-century Spain,
the
danger
was not that
Jews
would remain an isolated
community refusing
Christian
grace
but that
they
would convert and infiltrate
Spanish society
at all
levels, becoming indistinguish-
able from their
Spanish
hosts as
they
entered into the mainstream. For conversion
threatened to do
away
with the most reliable
signs
of
difference, provoking
a crisis
in a
very
mixed
society obsessively
concerned with
purity
of
lineage.
In
response
to which crisis and the
category
confusions it
entailed,
the
Spanish Inquisition
at-
tempted
to establish difference
just
where it was least
visible,
in the unstable arena
of
blood, through
the
imposition
of a series of so-called
"pure
blood laws."
Jerome
Friedman's account of these laws identifies a
pattern
that
precisely duplicates
Mer-
chant's insistence on
Jessica's Jewishness just
when she is most liable to be mistaken
for
gentle/gentile
or Christian: "The more
ardently Jews sought acceptance
as
Christians,
the more
ardently
Christians identified them as
Jews";
"The more New
Christians assimilated into their new
surroundings,
the more
biological
distinctions
were needed to
separate
New Christian from Old Christian."'8
In the face of massive
Jewish
conversion and
acceptance
into
Spanish society,
the
pure
blood laws were a strenuous
attempt
to
ground
an
increasingly
invisible
difference
specifically
in the realm of biological
inheritance;
in Friedman's
account,
Her Father's Blood:
Race, Conversion,
and Nation in The Merchant
of
Venice 11
with their
emergence,
the sixteenth
century
succeeded in
transforming
"medieval
religious anti-Judaism
into a racial antisemitism"
precisely
at the
point
that the
religious
difference between Christian
andJew
threatened to
disappear. According
to the
logic
of the
pure-blood laws,
All descendants of converts were
really
still
Jews
because
they
came from
Jewish
ancestors.
The
sixteenth-century "purity
of blood" laws
stipulated
that
anyone
with at least one
Jewish
ancestor was himself still a converso and therefore not a real Christian.... In
1628,
one
Grand
Inquisitor
noted that
"by
converso we
commonly
understand
any person
descended
fromJews
... be it in the most distant
degree."
... These new
exclusionary legal
conventions
were called
"pure
blood laws" because it was maintained that
degenerate Jewish
blood was
impervious
to
baptism
and
grace.
If mixed with Christian
blood,
the
Jewish
blood would
contaminate
subsequent generations
and would continue to do so
indefinitely...
The result
of this racialist
thinking
was that the courts of
Inquisition
were
increasingly
involved with
determining
if a
given
individual was
geneologically 1/16, 1/32,
or
l/64th part Jewish.
The
Toledo court of
Inquisition
for
instance, devotedfour
times more
space
in its records to this than
to actual court
procedures
involving
charges ofjudaization.19
It is emblematic of the entire
enterprise
that the laws
enforcing
difference at the
point
of its
disappearance employ
a
metaphorics
of
blood,
since the blood of vari-
ous individuals is not
only notoriously
miscible but also
notoriously
hard to distin-
guish.
The
King
instructs the
lineage-obsessed
Bertram on this
paradox
with some
precision
in All's Well That Ends Well:
"Strange
it is that our
bloods,
/ Of
colour,
weight,
and
heat, poured
all
together,
/ Would
quite
confound
distinction, yet
stands off / In differences so
mighty" (2.3.114-17).
England
did not face the massive
problem
that
Spain did,
nor is it clear how
many
of the
English
knew
about,
or would have been
sympathetic to,
the
pure-blood
laws of its traditional
enemy. Certainly
the
Spanish
obsession with
purity
of
lineage
was the butt of
English
satire.
Aragon obligingly
reenacts this
aspect
of the national
stereotype
when he enters Belmont
insisting
on his differentiation both from the
"barbarous multitudes" and from those whose
"estates, degrees,
and offices" are
"deriv'd
corruptly" (2.9.32, 40-41): though
he insists on
employing
a standard of
"merit"
(lines 38, 42),
his
language collapses
the discourse of merit into the dis-
course of
blood-lineage,
in which those "deriv'd
corruptly"
must be
distinguished
from "the true seed of honor"
(lines 41, 46).20
For an
English audience,
the
joke
of
his boast-like the
joke
of the
pure-blood
laws and the ambition
they
encode-
would be on the
Spanish.
In the
anti-Spanish propaganda prevalent
in
England,
Spaniards
had
good
reason to be concerned about
being
ranked with the barbarous
multitude:
they
are "this scumme of
Barbarians,"
"this
mongrel generation,"21
"sprong
fro the race of the Iewes";22
far from
being
"the true seed of
honor," espe-
cially
the aristocrats
among
them are contaminated
by
their debased historic inter-
nal others
("All
the worlde beleeveth ... that the
greatest part
of the
Spanyards,
and
specially those,
that counte themselves
Noblemen,
are of the blood of the Moores
and
Iewes").23
For audience members familiar with this
propaganda, Jessica
would
not be the first
Jew
to enter
Belmont,
nor would Morocco be the last Moor.
12 REPRESENTATIONS
Through Aragon,
Merchant allows its
English
audience to mock the
Spanish
simultaneously
for their
mongrel
blood and for their obsessive concern with uncon-
taminated
lineage.
But if Merchant is
any indication,
the blood-laws
put
in
place by
the
Inquisition
addressed anxieties not
altogether
unfamiliar to
English audiences;
whether or not the
English
knew about-or
approved
of-the
Inquisition's pure-
blood
laws,
the
play
itself at least
partly replicates
their
logic
and hence the racializ-
ing
structure that underlies them. I have
already
cited evidence that the
English
regarded
their own conversos as racial
Jews
and read their
alleged lapses
from
Christianity-or
from fair business
practices-as
a
consequence
of their
race;
the
play's repeated
insistence that
Jessica
cannot
escape
her father's blood
puts Jessica
in the
company
of those
conversos, Jewish
whether or not
they
convert. But if the
play
often insists on
Jessica's Jewishness,
it nonetheless
sharply distinguishes
her
blood from her father's in one
striking
moment: when
Shylock
himself claims
Jes-
sica as his own "flesh and
blood,"
Salerio
answers,
"There is more difference be-
tween
thy
flesh and hers than
betweenjet
and
ivory;
more between
your
bloods than
there is between red wine and Rhenish"
(3.1.33-35).
How are we to understand this
moment?
Salerio
clearly
recoils
(perhaps
on behalf of his friend
Lorenzo)
from the asso-
ciation between
Shylock's
flesh and
Jessica's,
and in his desire to make a difference
between
them,
and
perhaps simultaneously
to taunt
Shylock
with the "naturalness"
and
inevitability
of his
loss,
he invokes the
language
of blood-difference. Not
quite
a
Christian, Jessica
is in Salerio's formulation no
longer entirely
a
Jew
and her
father's
daughter:
as
though
the transfer from father to husband could unbind her
from her father's blood after all. Some have read the distinction between
Shylock's
immutable
Jewishness
and
Jessica's apparent convertability (vexed
as it
is)
as a
sign
of the tension between the
officially universalizing
doctrines of
Christianity
and
the
emerging
discourses of race.24 But if this is the moment when the
play
seems
most to allow for the
possibility
of
Jessica's escape
into
Christianity,
it's worth
noting
that it does so
only by simultaneously reinstating
the discourse of race. In
fact Salerio
merely
reiterates the terms of
escape
set
by
Lancelot: for
Jessica
can
be different from her
father,
he
implies, only
if her flesh and blood are different
from his.
And
oddly,
Salerio can insist on that difference
only by giving Shylock
skin of
"jet"
in
comparison
to
Jessica's "ivory." Jessica's
"fairness" has been much re-
marked before this
comparison:
she is
"fairJessica"
at 2.4.28 and
2.4.39,
and "fair"
again
at 2.6.54. When Lorenzo receives her
letter,
he reiterates her fairness in lines
that
protest
too
much,
as
though
he needs her whiteness to
justify
and
legitimate
their union:
I know the hand. In
faith,
'tis a fair
hand,
And whiter than the
paper
it writ on
Is the fair hand that writ.
(2.4.12-14)
Her Father's Blood: Race,
Conversion,
and Nation in The Merchant
of
Venice 13
But if
Jessica
is to be
hyperbolically
white and hence
marriageable,
then her fa-
ther-"my
father
Jew"
as Lorenzo soon calls him
(2.6.25)-must
be blackened:
otherwise there is no reliable
way
to
distinguish
between father and
daughter.
Saler-
io's
metaphor
does the work of
blackening, working
to secure the difference be-
tween them
by moving
from the invisible
ground
of blood to the visible
ground
of
skin
color,
in the
process making Shylock
into the
equivalent
of a Moor. And insofar
as
blackening Shylock grounds
the difference between father and
daughter
in the
visible difference of the other
great category
of converts troublesome to the
Spanish,
Merchant once
again eerily replicates
an
Inquisitorial logic.
For in its
attempt
to
mark distinctions in the
blood,
the fantasmatic carrier of ancient distinctions that
in itself is
maddeningly indistinguishable,
the
Inquisition
too turned to the
analogy
of skin color:
Who can
deny
that in the descendants
oftheJews
there
persists
and endures the evil inclina-
tion of their ancient
ingratitude
and lack of
understanding, just
as in
Negroes [there persists]
the
inseparability
of their blackness. For if the latter should unite themselves a thousand
times with white
women,
the children are born with the dark color of the father.
Similarly,
it is not
enough
for the
Jew
to be three
parts
aristocrat or Old Christian for one
family-line
[that is,
one
Jewish ancestor]
alone defiles and
corrupts
him.25
Fray
Prudencio
indulges
himself in a
fantasy
of the
Negro's permanent
and visible
difference in order to underwrite his
fantasy
of the
Jew's equally permanent
but
invisible difference: as
though
the
apparently
stable
ground
of skin color could
per-
manently guarantee
the fiction of differentiation
by
blood.
"There is more difference between
thy
flesh and hers than between
jet
and
ivory;
more between
your
bloods than there is between red wine and Rhenish":
Salerio uses the same
enabling
fiction-that one can read blood-differences
through
differences in skin
color-apparently
to undo the
Inquisition's
insistence
that the taint
ofJewishness
is
permanent, persisting through
the
generations.
But
the
undoing
is
deeply equivocal.
He elides
Jessica's
"whiteness" with her differen-
tiation from her father and thus with her
potential
to become "one of us" in both
religion
and race-a
potential
that the
play
elsewhere denies. But he can do so
only
by insisting simultaneously
on the
permanence
of
Shylock's difference, making
him
hyperbolically black, against
all evidence: if his skin was
reliably jet-if
his differ-
ence was
permanently
and
visibly
marked like the
proverbial Ethiope's-would
Portia have to ask which is the merchant and which the
Jew?
As
though counterpho-
bically anticipating
and
warding
off Portia's
question,
Salerio blackens
Shylock
in
order to stabilize invisible
Jewish
difference in visible Moorish difference. And
then,
in an
impossible attempt
to
satisfy
the
contradictory
mandates
provoked by
conversion,
he transmutes the difference between
Jew
and Christian into a differ-
ence between
Jew andJew, distinguishing fantasmatically
between the
"black"Jew-
by-race,
who will
always
be a
Jew
even if the state forces his
conversion,
and the
"white"Jew-by-religion
who could
perhaps
become a Christian and one of us-if
only
she were not in fact her father's flesh and blood.2"
14 REPRESENTATIONS
If
Shylock
is in effect made into a Moor to secure the
permanence
of his invisi-
ble blood-difference
through
the visible
sign
of skin
color, perhaps
it is not
entirely
coincidental that a literal Moor is the first of Portia's suitors that we
see,
and that
his first words
explicitly question
the relation between skin color and blood:
Mislike me not for
my complexion,
The shadowed
livery
of the burnished
sun,
To whom I am a
neighbor
and near bred.
Bring
me the fairest creature northward
born,
Where Phoebus' fire scarce thaws the
icicles,
And let us make incision for
your
love
To
prove
whose blood is
reddest,
his or mine.
(2.1.1-7)
Morocco
begins by invoking
one of the familiar
tropes
of skin color
(he
is
black,
like
Cleopatra,
because he is close to the
sun).
But if
Fray
Prudencio or Salerio
would use skin-color difference to
guarantee blood-difference,
Morocco's
proce-
dure is
just
the reverse:
by
turning
Portia's
glance imaginatively
inward toward the
red blood he shares with "the fairest
creature,"
he invites her to overlook the
super-
ficial differences of
complexion.
His
xenophobic
hostess is
famously
unable to ac-
cept
his invitation: the
"gentle
riddance" she bids him
(2.7.78)
is
entirely
on the
basis of his skin color
("If
he have the condition of a saint and the
complexion
of
a
devil,
I had rather he should shrive me than wive
me," 1.2.127-28;
"Let all of
his
complexion
choose me
so," 2.7.79).
But for one
moment, through
the force of
his
formulation,
the
play produces
the vivid
image
of blood-sameness beneath skin-
color difference.
Morocco's claim to blood as red as the fairest creature northward born
might
be understood as
underwriting Shylock's
later claim to the
universality
of blood
("if
you prick us,
do we not bleed?"
3.1.54):
if Salerio would use skin-color difference to
secure blood
difference,
Morocco
gestures powerfully
toward the common blood
lying just
beneath the skin of difference. Morocco's entrance
might
then be taken
as a refutation of the kind of racist
logic
that we see
played
out not
only
in Portia's
rejection
of him but also in Antonio's conviction that
Shylock
would have to
change
"kind"
orgens-nature, kin,
and nation-in order to become Christian. Morocco's
articulation of blood-sameness in fact follows
immediately
after Antonio's bitter
joke
to that effect at the end of
1.3;
and
although
conversion is not an issue for
Morocco,
his insistence on blood-sameness
implicitly responds
to Antonio's as-
sumption
that
only gentiles
can be Christian
by evoking
Paul's
great
refutation of
biological particularism
in Acts 17:26: God "hathe made of one blood all man-
kinde,
to dwell on all the face of the earth." But
perhaps
Morocco is allowed to
articulate this claim
precisely
because his skin is so
reliably
different? As Shake-
speare's
next Venetian
play
about conversion
suggests,
a Christianized Moor is still
a Moor and still bears the visible-and hence
reassuring-signs
of
difference;
one
Her Father's Blood:
Race, Conversion,
and Nation in The Merchant
of
Venice 15
cannot
imagine
a
messenger, say, walking
into the Duke's chambers in Othello's
Venice and
asking
"Which is the Senator and which the Moor?"
Fray
Pruden-
cio's-and Salerio's-move to
groundJewish
difference in skin color
depends pre-
cisely
on the fact that
Moriscos,
or converted Moors like
Othello,
were far less
threatening
to
category stability
than their
Jewish counterparts.
Since Morocco's
difference is secured
by
his
complexion-since
no one would mistake him for "one
of
us"-perhaps
he can be allowed to make the claim of blood-sameness: he
can,
after
all,
do so without
compromising
visible racial difference.
Though
it
may
seem
arbitrary
to read Morocco's
opening speech
in Belmont
as a
commentary
on
Jewish blood,
the association between blacks and
Jews
that
both
Fray
Prudencio and Salerio draw on seems to have been common in the
pe-
riod.27 And
although
Morocco's Marlovian martial
vigor
would seem to
pose
him
as
maximally
different from
Shylock,
he is
specifically
allied with
Shylock
not
only
through
Salerio's skin-color
analogy
but also
through Jessica's
bizarre
positing
of
a familial
relationship
between them: in
Belmont,
she lists Ham's son Cush/
Chus-who would have been Morocco's ancestor
according
to common
interpre-
tations of Genesis 10-as one of her father's
countrymen (3.2.284).28
But how does
this association function here? Does Morocco's
appearance
secure
Shylock's
racial
difference or
challenge
it? Does the darkness of his skin make
Shylock's
"white"
by
contrast,
or does it "blacken"
Shylock by analogy,
as Salerio would have it? I
suggest
that Morocco's entrance into the
virgin-kingdom
of Belmont reiterates the conun-
drum of
Jewish
difference in a different
register, serving
in
part
as a stand-in for
the distinction Salerio would make between the
play's
two
Jews,
and hence for the
tension between Christian universalism and racial
particularity.
The redness of
Morocco's blood is allied to the "red wine" of
Jessica's
(3.1.35) and-through
its
allusion to Paul's "one blood"-to the
universalizing
strain of
Christianity played
out in the
possibility
of her
conversion,
however
vexed;
but his skin color stabilizes
the difference essential to the
emergent
racist discourses that
keep
a Moor a
Moor-and a
Jew
a
Jew.
But Morocco is not
Shylock's only surprising
relative.
Though
critics interested
in race in
Shakespeare
have
recently
commented on
Chus, Shylock's
other
country-
man, Tubal,
has
largely gone
unnoticed. But the force of these names lies in their
combination;
taken
together, they
allude not
only
to an associative link between
Jews
and blacks but more
broadly
to the so-called
dispersal
of nations after the
flood-and hence to a
complex
narrative of national difference and
origin
in a
common blood. For Chus and Tubal are both
grandsons
of
Noah,
named as such
in Genesis
10,
the
genealogical
account of the formation of
separate
nations after
Noah's flood. If Genesis 11 locates the
origin
of distinct nations in the
linguistic
divisions after the Tower of
Babel,
and thus in
supernatural punishment
for human
arrogance,
this
chapter
locates national difference
purely
in the "natural" realm of
kinship groupings deriving
from Noah's three
sons, Shem, Ham, andJapheth.
The
rubric for Genesis 10 is "The increase of mankinde
by
Noah and his sonnes. The
16 REPRESENTATIONS
beginning
of
cities, contreis,
and
nations";
and the
chapter concludes, "These are
the families of the sonnes of
Noah,
after their
generacions among
their
people:
and
out of these were the nacions diuided in the earth after the flood"
(Genesis 10:32).
The
progeny
of Noah's three sons divide the known
world;
national
history
be-
gins
with them. Thus William Warner
begins
his
history
of
England
in 1612 with
"the division of the World after the
generall Flood," specifying
that "To Asia
Sem,
to
Affrick Cham,
to
Europe lapheth
bore / Their families. Thus
triple
wise the world
deuided was."29
Chus and Tubal are both
grandsons
of
Noah,
but
they
derive from different
sons
(Chus
from
Ham,
and Tubal from
Japheth)
and are
progenitors
of
radically
different lines-and both would be
recognizably
distant from Shem's descendant
Eber,
"of whome
[Geneva's marginal gloss
to Genesis 10:21 tells
us]
came the
Ebrewes or
Iewes."
This is not an
insignificant
detail. At a time of
increasingly
self-
conscious nationalist formation Biblical commentators and
genealogically
minded
historians often
expended
a
good
deal of effort
trying
to
pin
down
exactly
which
peoples
derived from which
grandsons; any
careful auditor of Genesis and of Mer-
chant would
recognize
the
incongruity
of mixed
lineages implied by
the names of
Shylock's countrymen.30
And when a descendant first of Chus and then of Tubal
appears
on
stage
as a suitor to Portia-for if Morocco would have traced his ances-
try
to
Chus, Aragon
would have traced his to Tubal31-we can be
reasonably
cer-
tain that
Shakespeare
is
engaging
in a
complex
conversation with Genesis 10 and
the
dispersal
of nations.
It would be
easy
to read this
complex
allusion to the
dispersal
of nations in
Shylock's incongruous countrymen
as a reenforcement of Paul's "one blood" claim
and thus as a refutation of those who would attribute
specifically 'Jewish"
blood to
Shylock
and his
daughter.
At least one Bible commentator reads the
dispersal
of
nations that
way
in 1592:
Though
we see heere divisions of
Countreys
made
amongst them,
and some
dwelling here,
some
there,
as
they liked, yet
one bloud remained
amongst them,
as a knot evere to
ioyne
them,
what distance of
place
soever severed them. And is it not so still ... ? We be all as we
see of one bloud and
parent.32
But Holinshed's narrative of the
displacement
of the
"originall beginner"
of En-
gland-naturally enough
a descendent of
Japheth, by
"Albion son of Cham"-
suggests
that a "one blood"
reading
of the
dispersal
of nations was far from inevita-
ble.33 And from the
English point
of
view, Morocco, Aragon,
and
Shylock
are in
any
case all outsiders:
construing
their blood as "one" would do little to destabilize
the blood-distinctions otherwise in evidence in the
play.
In
fact, given
the
frequency
with which both
Jews
and Moors were
depicted
as contaminants in the
Spanish
bloodstream, characterizing Morocco, Shylock,
and
Aragon
as kin under the skin
is as
likely
to function as a
joke
about
Spanish mongrelization
as it is to serve as a
reminder of the
universalizing potential
of
Christianity-especially
since all three
Her Father's Blood: Race,
Conversion,
and Nation in The Merchant
of
Venice 17
represent religions sharply divergent
from normative
Christianity
in
England. (Shy-
lock's
"countrymen"
and their
contemporary
descendants sound like the
beginning
of a
joke
that
might
have circulated in
xenophobic England,
as in Belmont: a
Jew,
a
Catholic,
and a Muslim....
)
The discourse
surrounding
the
dispersal
of nations
may
sometimes serve to
mediate between a universalist
impulse (we
are all one
blood,
derived from Adam
through
his descendant
Noah)
and a
developing
concern with
divisions,
with na-
tional
particularities
traceable to the lines of the
separate
sons
("out
of these were
the nacions diuided in the
earth,
after the
Flood,"
in the words of Genesis
10:32,
or,
in Genesis 10:5's more
specific
account of the
Japhetic divisions,
"Of these were
the
ysles
of the Gentiles deuided in their
landes,
euerie man after his
tongue,
and
after their families in their
nacions").
But that last reference to both
tongues
and
families underscores the tensions that need
mediating here,
for the two different
accounts of the
dispersal
of nations offered in Genesis 10
(the generations
of
Noah)
and Genesis 11
(the
Tower of
Babel)
themselves encode the tension between com-
peting
claims for-and therefore
competing
valuations of-the
origins
of differ-
ence. If national differences are a
consequence
of man's sin and God's
punishment
in Genesis
11, they
are cause for marvel at God's
grace
in Geneva's
marginal gloss
to Genesis
10:1,
where the
postdiluvial
derivation of nations from the
generations
of Noah serves "to declare the maruelous increase in so smale a time." And
though
not
precisely equivalent,
the tension between these
competing
accounts of the ori-
gin
of difference
maps
back onto the tension between a
universalizing
Christian
discourse in which conversion is
open
to
all,
and a
protoracial particularism
in
which blood-differences make all the difference: one account allows for an
original
unity, spoiled by
sin and in effect recoverable
through grace,
so that
(in
Foxe's
words)
"at the
length,
all
nations,
. . .
acknowledging
one
Shepherde,
united
together
in
one
sheepefold, may
with one
voice,
one
soule,
and one
generall agreement,
glorifie
the
only begotton sonne";
the other allows for the
glorification
of differences as a
basis for cohesive identities-for
pride
in
precisely
those distinctions between na-
tions that Foxe would like to see subsumed into oneness.
Combined with the discourse of blood that I have been
tracing, Shakespeare's
reference to the
dispersal
of nations not
only
in
Shylock's
odd
countrymen
but in
the
persons
of Morocco and
Aragon signals
Merchant's
participation
in a meditation
on nations and national
difference, just
when the idea of the nation was in flux.
Initially firmly
linked with
kinship-and
thus
blood-through
its Latin
root,
dur-
ing
this
period
"nation" was well on its
way
to
becoming
a
political term,
in which
the artificial
"family"
within a
country's
territorial boundaries borrows its force
from the
presumptively
natural
family groupings
of
kinship.34
We can hear the
stresses inherent in this shift in McMorris's
indignant response
to Fluellen's refer-
ence to his "nation"-"Of
my
nation? What ish
my
nation? Ish a villain and a
bastard and a knave and a rascal? What ish
my
nation? Who talks of
my
nation?"
(Henry
V
3.3.61-63)-where language, ancestry,
and
place-origin may
all be sus-
18 REPRESENTATIONS
pected
of
pulling against
the
political
and territorial
unity
of the
nation,
"our na-
tion," that
Henry
V would like to achieve
against
the French.35
Jews provide
an
interesting
test case for the idea of a nation as it
migrates
from a
kinship-based
to
a land-based
collectivity; perhaps
it is not fortuitous that the tale of the
Wandering
Jew
is reinvented or
consolidated,
and becomes
newly popular,
at a time when na-
tionhood was
increasingly
consolidated and
increasingly
identified with
country-
that
is,
with land boundaries.36 For
Jews famously
constitute a "nation" of blood
(Shylock
himself uses the term three times to describe his fellow
Jews
in
Merchant,
and his use is
perfectly
consistent with Foxe's references to the "nation" of the
Jews
in his
Sermon),37
and
they equally famously
have no
land; indeed, Shylock's
"coun-
trymen"
Chus and Tubal trace the routes of
Jewish diaspora through Spain
and
northern Africa-the
secondary "dispersal"
that has the effect of
undoing
the first
"beginning
of
cities, contreis,
and nations" for them. Whatever
Jessica's
inten-
tion-perhaps
her use of the term
coming
so soon after Bassanio
pointedly
wel-
comes his
"countrymen"
but not her
(3.2.222) registers
her desire for
something
so
normal as a
country?-the naming
of these two as
Shylock's "countrymen"
has the
effect of
underscoring Shylock's countrylessness:
of what
country
could these three
be
countrymen?
The landless status of the "nation" of the
Jews presents
an
implicit challenge
to the
emerging
idea of a land-based nationhood: if a nation is not a nation of
blood,
then what
exactly
is it? We
might
hear a hint of uneasiness about land-based
nationhood in Foxe's
repeated taunting
of the
Jews
for their "fantasicall
hope
of a
terrene
kingdome";38
the uneasiness in Foxe's attacks on
Jewish pride
in
ancestry-
a
topic
to which Foxe returns in the Sermon as
though
it were a
persistent
itch or a
scab-is much more
audible,
and much more
understandable, given
not
only
the
period's generalized
fascination with
genealogies
but also Elizabeth's own dubious
ancestry.39
At one
point
in his Sermon he mimics the voice of an
imagined Jew:
"Will
ye
flee backe
againe
to
your
rotten wormeaten
poesies?
we are the seede of
Abraham.... well
may
we
wander,
but we can neuer
perish.
The
holy
Patriarches
are our
progenitours:
we are the
yssue
of an
holy
roote"
(Eiiv).
Foxe has to make
up imaginary Jews
in his church audience to be the butt of his attacks on
Jewish
pride
in
ancestry;
in
effect, Shakespeare obligingly
makes one
up
for him in Mer-
chant.
Shylock
refers to
Jacob
or "our
holy
Abram"
(1.3.68)
as
though they
were his
near
kin, pointedly using
the name of the
patriarch
before he became Abraham
and father to all
nations;
for
him,
"nationhood" rests
securely
in the
continuity
of
the "tribe" to which he
belongs,
a term that he uses
interchangeably
with "nation"
(see 1.3.46, 52, 106).
And
though
"tribe" is more
subject
to
derogation
than "na-
tion"-even
Shylock
uses it with an odd mix of
contempt
and
irony
when he con-
ceals his
plan
for
revenge
under the claim that "suff'rance is the
badge
of all
my
tribe"
(1.3.106),
with its allusion to the
badge Jews
were forced to wear-the word
in his mouth
unmistakably
serves to
register
not
only
the
blood-kinship
of the
Jews
but more
particularly
their derivation from the tribes of Israel and hence their claim
Her Father's Blood:
Race, Conversion,
and Nation in The Merchant
of
Venice 19
to a nationhood based in
ancestry.4"
Against
the newer sense of nationhood as
attached to what Foxe would call a "terrene
kingdom," Shylock poses
a claim to an
older nationhood of blood and
ancestry:
an
apparently
self-contained nationhood
through
time that mere
dispossession
from the land-mere
"wandering,"
as Foxe's
imaginary Jew
would have it-is not able to
destroy.
And like Foxe's
imaginaryJew, Shylock poses
a blood claim not
only
to nation-
hood but
specifically
to "sacred"
nationhood,
the term
Shylock
introduces
early
in
the
play (1.3.48)
in contestation of the Christian
understanding
of
Jewish history.
Jewish
landlessness had
long
been read as God's
punishment
for the
Jews'
stiff-
necked refusal of Christ and thus as the
sign
that the
promise
has
passed
from
Jew
to
gentile,
the
sign
that "the nations"-or "us
Gentiles,"
as Foxe
repeatedly
calls
them41-have
replaced
the sacred nation of the
Jews
as God's chosen
people.
Foxe
reads it this
way,
and Foxe's converted
Jew
Nathanael
(formerly Yehuda) signals
his
conversion
by reading
it the same
way
in the
opening
of his
"Confession," ap-
pended
to Foxe's Sermon.42 But if the landless status of the "nation" of the
Jews pre-
sents an
implicit challenge
to the
emerging
idea of a land-based
nationhood,
it
pre-
sents a
particular challenge
to the idea of sacred nationhood as it
might
be embodied
in the
newly emergent
nations. While I don't want to claim that
anyone
in Shake-
speare's
audience would have been
likely
to take
Shylock's
claim to sacred nation-
hood as
anything
other than another
sign
of his
benightedness,
his claim
opens
the
idea
up
to
question:
if the "sacred nation" status of the
Jews
was
originally
based
in
kinship,
what is the status of new claims to sacred nationhood? and if
Jewish
dispossession
and
dispersal
is indeed the
sign
that the
promise
has
passed
to "us
Gentiles," what
exactly
is the relation between "the nations" of the
gentiles
and the
nations that were
gradually taking shape
in
Europe
within land boundaries?
The narrative of the
dispersal
of nations could
provide
some
comforting
an-
swers to both these
questions,
in effect
shoring up
the transfer of sacred nationhood
to the
gentiles-and specifically
to the
European
nations-in a
period
when reli-
gious
difference was
increasingly
defined in national terms. Genesis 10
grounds
the
founding
of the individual nations in
kinship
and identifies the descendants of
Japheth
with the
gentiles (10:5 specifies,
"Of these were the
ysles
of the Gentiles
deuided in their
landes");
as Biblical commentaries and national histories became
increasingly
determined to find the
origin
of the
European
nations in
Japheth's
line, "the
Gentiles"-originally
all the
non-Jewish
nations taken
together-were
increasingly
defined as the
European
nations.43
Though
John
Calvin is a bit
impa-
tient about
attempts
to trace the
genealogy
of each of the nations from Noah's
prog-
eny ("some interpreters
haue not
unprofitably spent
their labour and trauell
herein,"
but "it seemeth to be vaine
curiositie,
to seeke for seuerall nations in
euery
name"),
he nonetheless
suggests
what is at stake in these
attempts
when he con-
cludes his
commentary
on
"ysles
of the Gentiles" with
"whereby
we
gather
that we
sprang
from those nations": his
generalized pride
in his
Japhetic lineage
is unmis-
takeable,
and his "we"
perfectly
reflects the
ambiguity
of "Gentiles" as it shifts from
20 REPRESENTATIONS
its
original signification
to the more exclusive
category
of a
specifically European
Christianity.44
And if the "Gentiles" who are
Japheth's
descendants are the Euro-
pean nations,
then Genesis 9's famous
prophecy
that
Japheth
will "dwel in the
tentes of Shem"
(9:27)-a prophecy widely
understood to refer to the transfer of
the
promise
from Shem's line to
Japheth's-has
the effect of
grounding
this transfer
in both
blood-lineage
and
political nationhood,
thus in effect
trumping Shylock's
claim to sacred nationhood on both counts.
If the narrative of the
dispersal
of nations had the
potential
to shore
up
the
universalizing
tendencies of Paul's "one blood"
claim,
it also had the
potential
to
make
religious triumphalism
one with nationalist
triumphalism-especially per-
haps
in
England,
where the head of the state was also the head of the church. And
as Christian
identity
is
increasingly grounded nationally
rather than
supranation-
ally,
in secure
possession
of "a terrene
kingdome"
or its
equivalent, Jewish
blood
increasingly
becomes the mark of what cannot be assimilated into that
identity,
in
Spain
or
(Merchant
suggests)
in
England;
and
Jewish countrylessness-the
loss of
"Israel"-becomes
increasingly
available as the
great counter-example against
which
national/religious identity
can be measured. While Foxe himself in the Ser-
mon does not mistake
earthly kingdoms
for the
spiritual kingdom
of
God,45
his
mockery
of the
Jews
for their "fantasicall
hope
of a terrene
kingdome" inevitably
functions
partly
in the service of a
specifically English triumphalism,
of a
piece
with
Queen
Elizabeth's
representation
of herself as head of the new "sacred nation" that
replaces Shylock's-as specifically
"the
nursing
mother of Israel."46
But what sort of sacred
collectivity
can be based in land boundaries? If
England
is a new sacred nation founded in a terrain
kingdom,
how is it constituted? And
what are its boundaries under the new
dispensation
in which nationhood-like
Christianity-is potentially open
to all? If
Shylock's
blood
suggests
one sort of dan-
ger
in
response
to these
questions,
Antonio's
body
seems to me to
suggest
another.
At one crucial
moment,
Antonio
explains
that his
body
is
open
to
Shylock's
knife
as a
consequence
of Venice's
"openness"
to
strangers:
the Duke cannot overrule
Shylock,
Antonio tells
Solanio,
For the
commodity
that
strangers
have
With us in
Venice,
if it be
denied,
Will much
impeach
the
justice
of the
state,
Since that the trade and
profit
of the
city
Consisteth of all nations.
(3.3.27-31)
Antonio's use of "nations" here hovers between the old and the new
dispensation:
though
it still carries the
meaning
of
kinship groups
and hence is
equivalent
to
strangers
or
foreigners,
his
sequence
of
terms-commodity, state, trade, profit,
na-
tions-implies
a
political economy
in which states exist to insure trade conditions
among
"nations" conceived as
political
and economic units.
By
the end of his
Her Father's Blood:
Race, Conversion,
and Nation in The Merchant
of
Venice 21
speech,
Antonio's
"strangers"
have in effect become
foreign
nationals whose trade
interests must be
protected by
the state. But nations so conceived are
dangerously
porous, dangerously subject
to the
strangers
in their midst: the
exigencies
of trade
are a threat to the national
body, epitomized
here
by
Antonio's
body,
which must
be
subject
to
Shylock's
knife
precisely
to
keep open
the trade routes
by
which he
and the state thrive. Like Venice
itself,
with all nations
mingling
in its
markets,
the
thoroughfares
of Antonio's
body
are
subject
to the invasion of others who cannot
be
kept
at
bay.
This is the
danger
of the
newly
modern
nation,
its
porous
boundaries
no
longer
defined
by kinship
and
race,
its blood no
longer
intact.
The
virginal
realm of Belmont would
appear
to be the antidote to this
danger.
Though strangers
from all nations come to it in a
barely
idealized imitation of
Venice's
merchants-they
are all
Jasons seeking
the fleece
(1.2.172)-they
are
quickly dispatched
without
damage
to this enclosed
body.
And if
they
read like a
catalog
drawn from
Shylock's
kinsmen and the
dispersal
of
nations,
it is the work-
and what
passes
for the wit-of the first Belmont scenes in effect to
ratify
not their
one blood but the differences between
them,
to
dispatch
them for us
cleanly
in a
group
while
identifying
each as
reassuringly
distinct from the others. And
although
Portia's dismissive
stereotyping
of them creates the illusion that she is
doing
the
patroling
of her own
boundaries,
we all know that her father's will is
operating
behind the
scenes, maintaining fidelity
to a
kinship
line and
eventually enabling
just
the
right
amount of
exogamy
in Bassanio. What a
satisfying fantasy
of
England
this
is,
with its
virgin queen
and its bloodlines
protected by
the
operations
of a
father absent but still
mysteriously efficacious;
and no wonder Portia is so
unwilling
to
recognize Jessica's
entrance into her realm. For
Jessica brings
with her
exactly
that
muddying
of bloodlines that is deflected
by
Portia's banter and her father's
will-a fact that the
play half-acknowledges
in one of its most
peculiar
moments.
Lancelot has been
reassuring
himself
(in
the lines cited at the
beginning
of this
essay)
that
Jessica
will be
Jewish
as
long
as her father is
Jewish,
in effect that her
marriage
to Lorenzo will not convert her
blood;
and when
Jessica reports
on this
conversation to
Lorenzo, adding
Lancelot's
charge
that he is
damaging
the com-
monwealth
by converting Jews
to
Christians,
Lorenzo answers
by accusing
Lancelot of his own
damage
to the commonwealth: "I shall answer that better to
the commonwealth than
you
can the
getting up
of the
Negro's belly.
The Moor is
with child
by you, Lancelot"(3.5.33).47
How does this Moor
get
into Belmont? We
have not met her
before;
she is
apparently produced through
a
handy-dandy
retort
structure that makes
marrying Jessica
and
impregnating
the Moor
equivalent
terms.
Emblematically,
if not
literally, then,
she
appears
to have been let in
byJessica
by
the back
door,48
as
though
the
category-confusions
and blood-mixtures atten-
dant
upon Jessica's marriage
and conversion were
contagious
and had reawakened
the
specter
deflected in the
person
of Morocco-or as
though
the
danger
to the
realm
required
that
Jessica
herself needed to be
collapsed
into the
category
of the
Moor in order to stabilize her
vanishing difference,
like her father before her.
22 REPRESENTATIONS
The move to
groundJewish
difference in the
apparently
immutable and visible
category
of race rather than the mutable and invisible
category
of
religion
antici-
pates Shakespeare's
turn to his next
play
about
conversion,
where a Moor remains
reassuringly
black whether or not he is Christianized. But even without this
turn,
Merchant has its own
way
of
grounding
difference and
protecting
the common-
wealth-and
given
that Portia
represents something
like the
principle
of the en-
closed
state,
it is
fitting
that the task of
maintaining
boundaries falls to her. I have
suggested
that Antonio's
body subject
to
Shylock's
knife
epitomizes
the
boundary-
dangers
of the new
hybrid nation,
no
longer
a nation of blood and
perforce perme-
able
by strangers.
But this
image
of the nation vulnerable at its borders
maps
uncan-
nily
onto the central icon of a universal
Christianity
in
4.1,
where the
vulnerability
of Antonio's
body
to the
Jew's
knife makes him
briefly
a
type
of Christ. The flick-
ering
between the
images-for
Antonio's threatened
body
cannot
represent
both
at
once-may
serve to underscore the tension between the new mercantile state
that would become a "sacred nation" and the old dream of "all
nations,
... ac-
knowledging
one
Shepherde,
united
together
in one
sheepefold,
... with one
voice,
one
soule,
and one
generall argreement, glorif[ying]
the
only begotton
sonne." In
the face of this
unifying dream,
Merchant rushes to reinstate the differences of
blood,
first
through
an allusion to the
founding
moment of
Jewish
blood-difference and
then
through
Portia's
legal ploy. "My
deeds
upon my
head!"
Shylock says (4.1.201),
echoing
the
cry long
attributed to his ancestors-"His blood be on
vs,
and on our
children"
(Matthew 27:25)-to
which the Geneva
gloss adds,
"and as
they wished,
so this curse taketh
place
to this
day."
And in a
response
that
simultaneously
insists
on the
integrity
of
protonational
states and ratifies the blood-difference between
Jew
and
Christian,
Portia saves the
day
and the
integrity
of Antonio's
body by citing
not
only
the absence of blood in
Shylock's
contract and the law that
protects
citizens
from aliens
(4.1.344-46)
but also the law
against shedding specifically
Christian
blood
(4.1.305)-the
blood that
inevitably
excluded
Jessica
and her
father,
like the
conversos of
London,
from Foxe's dream.
Notes
I am
very pleased
to have this
oppurtunity
to honor Paul
Alpers,
not
only
for his enor-
mously generative
work but also for the enormous intellectual
generosity
he has
always
extended to others. I have
long
been the
beneficiary
of that
generosity.
This
essay
is far
too
provisional
to be
any
kind of return for that
great gift;
I nonetheless dedicate it
to him.
1.
John Foxe,
A Sermon
preached
at the
Christening of a Certaine ew, at London
(London,
1578),
1Av. The Sermon is # 11248 in A. W. Pollard and G. R.
Redgrave, eds.,
A Short- Title Cata-
logue of
Books Printed in
England, Scotland,
and Ireland and
of English
Books Printed
Abroad,
1475-1640
(London, 1956),
hereafter
STC,
and it is microfilm reel #543.
Her Father's Blood:
Race, Conversion,
and Nation in The Merchant
of
Venice 23
2. The Merchant
of
Venice 3.5.4-9. All references are to The Norton
Shakespeare,
General
Editor
Stephen
Greenblatt
(New York, 1997),
unless otherwise
noted;
Merchant is edited
by
Katharine Eisaman Maus.
3. The
presence
of a
community
of conversos in London had
long
been known to
Anglo-
Jewish
historians and should have been
brought
into mainstream
Shakespeare
studies
by
C. L. Sisson's
essay,
'A
Colony ofJews
in
Shakespeare's London," Essays
and Studies
23
(1938):
41-51.
Although
G.K. Hunter's 1964
essay
"The
Theology
of Marlowe's
The
Jew of Malta," Journal of
the
Warburg
and Courtauld Institutes 27
(1964):
211-40 cites
Sisson's,
Hunter's claim that "the whole Elizabethan frame of reference
discouraged
racial
thinking" (215)
seems to have blinded him to the
presence
of "racial"
Jews
in
London and had the effect of
assuring
that Sisson's
essay
was
consigned
to the critical
dustbin; it, together
with the
conversos,
has
recently
been retrieved
by James Shapiro's
wonderfully
informative
Shakespeare
and the
Jews (New York, 1996).
In fairness to
Hunter,
it's worth
noting
that his
widely
influential claim that
Judaism
was a
theologi-
cal rather than a racial
category
for the Elizabethans
(216) may
have been in
part
a
response
to Hitler's racialization
oftheJews; certainly "Judaism
is a
religion,
not a race"
was a mantra of
my youth.
4. Quarto
1, Quarto 2,
and the First Folio all have
"do";
for convenience's
sake,
I will
refer to the line in these editions as Lancelot's
pun,
and the Second Folio's variant as
F2's
reading.
The Arden edition of Merchant
notes,
"If F2's 'did' is
accepted, get
is used
for
beget,
as in
III.v.9";
Arden
Merchant,
ed.
John
Russell Brown
(London, 1988),
46.
5.
John
3:3. As with all
subsequent
citations from the
Bible,
this one is from The Geneva
Bible: A Facsimile
of
the 1560 Edition
(Madison, Wisc., 1969).
Nicodemus's literalist an-
swer-"How can a man be borne which is olde? can he enter into his mothers wombe
againe,
and be borne?"
(John 3:4)-emphasizes
the
peculiarity
of the
image,
and the
literalist
imagination
behind Lancelot's insistence.
6. Norton
appears
to be alone in
substituting "gentile"
for
"gentle,"
a substitution that
does not have the
authority
of Folio or
Quarto 1,
Norton's usual
authority, though
it
does
appear
in
Quarto
2. In
proximity
to
'Jew,"
as at 1.3.173 and
4.1.33, "gentle"
virtually always
carries the residue of
"gentile."
Arden notes that "the words were not
completely distinguished
in
spelling
at this time"
(49);
its note to 2.4.34 calls
gentle
"a
pun
on Gentile" and directs the reader to Graziano's use of
gentle
here.
Though
Nor-
ton's substitution of F2's
"gentile"
for the more familiar
"gentle"
does not
appear
to
have much textual
authority
on its
side,
normative
usage
as well as the
implied opposi-
tion between
gentile
andJew suggest
that
Shakespeare's
audience would have heard "a
gentile"
at least as
readily
as "a
gentle"
in Graziano's line. The
Oxford English Dictionary
(OED), Compact
Edition
(Oxford, 1971),
s.v.
"gentle,"
notes that the use of
"gentle"
as a substantive in the
singular ("a gentle")
is rare
(see
definition B.
1);
it is in fact never
used as a substantive in the
singular
elsewhere in
Shakespeare.
Since
"gentile"
can
function
easily
as a substantive in the
singular,
"a
gentile"
would
appear
to be a more
familiar formulation than "a
gentle."
7. The
OED,
s.v.
"stranger,"
in fact lists these latter
meanings
as dominant in the
period:
it
gives
as the first definition for
stranger
"one who
belongs
to another
country,
a for-
eigner; chiefly (now exclusively),
one who resides in or comes to a
country
to which he
is a
foreigner;
an alien." The second definition
similarly emphasizes
nonnativeness over
lack of
familiarity;
the sixth is "a
person
not of one's
kin;
more
fully, stranger
in blood."
(The
latter
gives
added richness to Lear's
proclaiming
Cordelia
"stranger'd
with our
oath,"
"a
stranger
to
my
heart and me"
[1.1.204, 1.1.115];
he is
proclaiming
her not
only
exiled and
unrecognizable,
but also not of his blood. Cordelia is thus one with
24 REPRESENTATIONS
her
sisters,
whose filial disobedience counts for Lear as evidence of their mother's
infidelity.)
8.
See,
for
example, Sisson,
"A
Colony,"
51.
9. The claim that racism as we know it could not exist until the
development
of the full
intellectual
apparatus
that
supported
it in the
eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries is
often
made; see,
for
example,
Ivan Hannaford's Race: The
History of
an Idea in the West
(Washington, D.C., 1996). Though
this claim seems to be
axiomatically true,
the trou-
ble with such claims is that
they
are often used to make certain kinds of
questions
un-
askable. Hannaford himself
suggests
that the idea of race "was cobbled
together
as
a
pre-idea
from a wide
variety
of
vestigial
sources
during
the thirteenth to sixteenth
centuries"
(8),
which would
appear
to make the
period
in which Merchant was written
decisive for its
development;
see
esp.
his
chapter 6,
"New
Methods,
New
Worlds,
and
the Search for
Origins,"
which deals in
part
with the
sixteenth-century "pre-ideas"-
several of them clustered in the decades
immediately
before and after Merchant-on
which later
concepts
of race drew. Hannaford's insistence that "race" in this
period
generally
referred to the ancient
lineage
of
kings
and
bishops (see, e.g., 147)
and more
particularly
his claim that "race" in Foxe
always
has this
meaning
(155)
is contradicted
by
evidence cited in note 37 as well as
by
the
quotation
that
opens
this
essay.
But what-
ever the
precise
status of the term "race" in this
period, Jewish
difference had
long
been
expressed
in a
language
of
(usually immutable) physical
difference that
mapped very
easily
onto
emerging concepts
of race. For recent
literary
studies that contest the claim
that "race" was not a
conceptual category
in the
early
modern
period, see,
for
example,
Kim Hall's
"Reading
What Isn't There: 'Black' Studies in
Early
Modern
England,"
Stanford
Humanities Review 3
(Winter 1993): 23-33, expanded
in
Things of
Darkness:
Economies
of
Race and Gender in
Early
Modern
England (Ithaca, 1995)
and several of the
essays
collected in
Women, "Race,"
and
Writing
in the
Early
Modern
Period,
ed.
Margo
Hendricks and Patricia Parker
(London, 1994), esp. Dympna Callaghan's "Re-Reading
Elizabeth
Cary's
The
Tragedie of Miriam,
Faire
Queene of ewry," 163-77,
and Verena
Stolcke,
"Invaded Women:
Gender, Race,
and Class in the Formation of Colonial Soci-
ety," 272-86,
both of which
specifically
address the
racializing
of the
Jews.
10. OED, s.v.
"gentile,"
notes the word's derivation from the
Vulgate
and lists as its first
meaning
"Of or
pertaining
to all of the nations other than the
Jewish." Though
it could
also mean
"heathen, pagan"
in the
period (see OED,
definition
A.2),
in
proximity
to
"Jew,"
it functions
protoracially,
to
distinguish Jews
from
non-Jews.
11. Cited in Lucien
Wolf, "Jews
in Elizabethan
England,"
Transactions
oftheJewish
Historical
Society of England
11
(1928):
22.
12. Cited in David S.
Katz,
The
Jews
in the
History of England,
1485-1850
(Oxford,
1994),
58.
13.
Foxe, Sermon,
Biiir.
14.
Wolf, "Jews
in Elizabethan
England,"
7.
15. For
thefoetorjudaicus, see, e.g., Joshua Trachtenberg,
The Devil and the
Jews
(1943;
re-
print, Philadelphia, 1983),
48-50.
Shapiro, Shakespeare
and the
Jews,
characterizes belief
in this
hereditary
smell as
"unusually persistent"
in
England (36).
Katz also comments
that "it was a
universally accepted
fact that
Jews
had a
peculiar smell,
an odour which
was not
dissipated by baptism,
but was instead a racial
characteristic";Jews
in the
History
of England,
108. Not
quite
universal
perhaps;
see
Shapiro's
account of Thomas
Browne's
wrestling
with this issue in
Shakespeare
and the
Jews, 37,
172. For the
imposition
of distinctive
clothing, see, e.g., Trachtenberg,
Devil and the
Jews, 44-46;
or Leon Polia-
kov,
The
History of Anti-Semitismfrom
the Time
of
Christ to the Court
Jews,
trans. Richard
Her Father's Blood:
Race, Conversion,
and Nation in The Merchant
of
Venice 25
Howard
(New York, 1974),
64-67. Cecil Roth claims that the Lateran IV
regulations,
including
the
wearing
of the
badge,
were enforced more
rigorously
in
England
than
elsewhere; A
History of
the
Jews
in
England (Oxford, 1941), 76,
95. It is a
commonplace
that the
badges
were
necessary because, despite
the
physical stereotypes, Jews
were not
readily distinguishable
without them.
See, e.g., John Edwards,
The
Jews
in
Europe,
1400-1700
(London, 1988), 23; Poliakov, History ofAnti-Semitism, 93;
and
Roth, History
of
the
Jews,
95.
Here,
for
example,
is a
description
of William
Aries,
one of the London
Sephardic community:
"He is a
young
fellow of
twenty,
well
built,
with a fair and hand-
some face and a small fair
beard";
cited in
Wolf, 'Jews
in Elizabethan
England,"
16.
Since this
description
is written
by
a
Spaniard
to a
Spaniard,
its standard for
light
skin
and hair
may
be different from an
English standard; nonetheless,
it
strongly suggests
that
Jews
were not
necessarily physically
distinct from their
English
hosts.
16. E W.
Maitland,
"The Deacon and
Jewess; or, Apostasy
at Common
Law,"
Transactions
of
the
Jewish
Historical
Society of England
6
(London, 1912),
261-62.
Presumably
these
regulations
went into
abeyance
once
Jews
themselves were
exiled;
but
knowledge
of
them-and of the case that motivated
them-may
have been common in Shake-
speare's
time. Maitland comments that "the old law-books were
being put
into
print"
at the
beginning
of Elizabeth's
reign,
and
"everyone
could read ... how
Langton
burnt
a deacon who
turnedJew
for
love,
and the love of
aJewess" (276); specifically they
could
read about it in
Holinshed,
who
reports
on a deacon who "was accused to be an
apos-
tata,
and for the loue of a woman that was a
Iew,
he had circumcised
himselfe";
see
Holinshed's
Chronicles, England,
Scotland and Ireland
(London, 1807),
2: 351-52.
17. See
Trachtenberg,
Devil and the
Jews, 48-50,
for stories about the
disappearance offoetor
judaicus
at
baptism.
18.
Jerome Friedman, "Jewish Conversion,
the
Spanish
Pure Blood Laws and Reformation:
A Revisionist View of Racial and
Religious Antisemitism,"
Sixteenth
Century Journal
18
(1987): 3,
26.
19. Friedman,
"Jewish Conversion,"
16-18
passim; emphasis
in the
original.
20.
Particularly
in combination with
"seed,"
which refers to semen as well as
offspring,
the
genealogical
thrust of "deriv'd" is
clear; see, e.g.,
Two Gentlemen
of
Verona
5.2.23,
Midsummer
Night's
Dream
1.1.99,
or
Henry
V
1.1.90,
for normative
Shakespearean
uses
of "deriv'd" in the
genealogical
sense. Norton obscures the concern with
blood-lineage
here
by glossing
"deriv'd" as
"gained."
21. A
Comparison of
the
English
and
Spanish
Nation
(London, 1589),
STC #
13102,
reel
#304,
19,
20.
22. Antonio
Perez,
A Treatise Paraenetical
(London, 1598),
STC
#19838,
reel
#388,
22.
23. The
Apologie
or
Defence, of
the Most Noble Prince William
(Delft, 1581),
STC #
15209,
reel
#240,
02r. The
Coppie of
the
Anti-Spaniard (London, 1590),
STC
#684,
reel
#304,
calls
the
King
of
Spain
"this demie
Moore,
demie
Jew, yea
demie Saracine"
(9).
24. See
especially Mary Janell Metzger,
who
argues
that
Jessica's "multiplicitous
na-
ture ... can illuminate how
Shakespeare may
have
struggled
with
competing
notions
ofJewishness circulating
in
early
modern
England
and how he worked to resolve them
by creating
not one
Jew
but two":
Jessica
to sustain the universal
promise
of conversion
to
Christianity
and
Shylock
to sustain the idea of an
England
founded on nascent racial
identity;
"'Now
by My Hood,
a Gentle and No
Jew': Jessica,
The Merchant
of
Venice,
and the Discourse of
Early
Modern
English Identity,"
PMLA 113
(1998): 52-63;
the
quotation
is from 53. I encountered this fine
essay
in an
early
form when I was
working
on
many
of the same materials and found it
very helpful
to
my
own
thinking
about
these issues. Critics often construe
Jessica
as more "convertible" than her father
(see,
26 REPRESENTATIONS
e.g.,
Kim Hall, "Guess Who's
Coming
to Dinner? Colonization and
Miscegenation
in The Merchant
of
Venice," Renaissance
Drama, n.s.,
23
[1992]: 102-4)
and therefore
by
implication
as "less racialized" than he is
(Callaghan, "Re-reading," 170).
But often
the mark of difference in
arguments
that
distinguish
between
Jessica
and
Shylock
in
these
arguments
is circumcision rather than inheritable racial
characteristics; see, e.g.,
Shapiro, Shakespeare
and the
Jews,
132.
Lynda
Boose uses circumcision
specifically
to
trouble the association between racial difference and skin color in "'The
Getting
of a
Lawful Race': Racial Discourse in
Early
Modern
England
and the
Unrepresentable
Black
Woman,"
in Hendricks and
Parker, Women, "Race,"
and
Writing
in the
Early Modern
Period,
40-41.
25.
Fray
Prudencio de Sandoval
writing
in
1604,
cited in
Friedman, "Jewish
Conver-
sion,"
17.
26.
Metzger's reading
of "fair"
Jessica's escape
into
Christianity
is more
optimistic
than
mine. In her
view,
"her whiteness and femaleness make
possible
her
reproduction
as a
Christian in the
eyes
of the
'commonwealth,"'
in
part
because her "conversion from
dark infidel to fair Christian is
required by
the
play's ideology
of order
through
mar-
riage";
"'Now
by My Hood,'"
57. This
play
seems to me to
put nearly
as much strain
on the idea of order
through marriage
as on the idea of conversion.
27. This has become
something
of a critical
commonplace. See,
for
example, Metzger,
" 'Now
by My Hood,"' 55; Shapiro, Shakespeare
and the
Jews, 7, 171;
and
Hall, "Guess,"
100-101. Kim F Hall also cites an instance from 1600 in
Things of
Darkness
(Ithaca,
1995),
39. Sander Gilman asserts that "the association of the
Jew
with blackness is as
old as Christian tradition"; Difference
and
Pathology:
Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race, and Mad-
ness
(Ithaca, 1985), 31;
whether or not the assertion was as invariable as he
suggests,
the
strong
association between
Jew
and Moor as the two
great
alien
populations
in
Spain probably
increased its force.
28. Folio's "Chus" is followed
by
most
editors;
Norton's "Cush" does not
appear
to have
textual warrant. But the
spellings appear
to have been
interchangeable: John
Calvin's
commentary
on Genesis
10,
for
example,
has "Cush" in the text
quoted
from the
Bible,
and "Chus" in the
commentary;
A Commentarie
of
John Caluine, upon the
first
booke
of
Moses called
Genesis,
trans. Thomas
Tymme (London, 1578),
STC
#4393,
reel
#488,
240. Commentators followed
Josephus
in
making
Chus ancestor of the
Ethiopians;
Flavius
Josephus,
The
Antiquities of
the
Jews,
book 1
(1736; reprint, Peabody, Mass.,
1987),
37.
See,
for
example,
the Geneva Bible's
gloss
on Genesis
10:6,
or Nicholas
Gibbon, Questions and
Disputations Concerning
the
Holy
Scripture (London, 1601),
STC
#11814,
reel #1380, 410. For
Calvin,
"It is certeine that this Chus was the Prince of
the
Aethiopians"; Commentarie,
240. This is not obscure
knowledge:
Arnold Williams
notes that
"Cush, Mizraim,
and Caanan
among
the sons of Ham are
quite
well known
as names of the
Ethiopians,
the
Egyptians,
and the
Caanonites";
The Common
Expositor:
An Account
of
the Commentaries on
Genesis,
1527-1633
(Chapel Hill, N.C., 1948),
160.
Critics interested in race
frequently
note
Shylock's surprising countryman, usually by
way
of
positing
an association between blackness and
Jewishness; see,
for
example,
Hall, "Guess," 101; Shapiro, Shakespeare
and the
Jews, 172;
and
Metzger,
"'Now
by
My
Hood,'"
55.
29. William
Warner,
Albions
England (Hildesheim, 1971),
table and 1. This division was
commonplace, though
it was under
pressure
from the
discovery
of new lands.
See, e.g.,
Holinshed's
attempt
to reconcile these discoveries with the old
tripartite division;
Holin-
shed's Chronicles
(New York, 1965), 1,
2-4.
30. See Colin Kidd's extensive
analysis
of "the Mosaic foundations of
early
modern Euro-
Her Father's Blood:
Race, Conversion,
and Nation in The Merchant
of
Venice 27
pean identity"
as based on Genesis 10 in British Identities
Before
Nationalism: Ethnicity
and Nationhood in the Atlantic
World,
1600-1800
(Cambridge, 1999), esp. 9-72;
Kidd
cites Gibbon's
wonderfully
dismissive comment: "On a narrow basis of
acknowledged
truth,
an immense but rude
superstructure
of fable has been
erected;
and the wild Irish-
man,
as well as the wild
Tartar,
could
point
out the individual son
ofJaphet
from whose
loins his ancestors were
lineally
descended"
(9-10).
Half a
century ago,
Arnold Wil-
liams noted that "In
nearly
all the works on
English history
and
antiquities,
one finds
fairly
extensive treatments of this matter.
Ralegh, Drayton, Warner, Purchas,
and
Hey-
lyn
all devote
greater
or lesser
space
to
ascertaining
which of the Gentile
people sprang
from which of the descendants
ofJapheth";
Common
Expositor,
155.
31.
Josephus
had the
figure
he calls Thobel
founding
"the
Thobelites,
who are now called
Iberes"; Antiquities,
36. The misidentification of "Iberes" with
Spain
caused most later
commentators to consider Tubal the
progenitor
of the
Spanish;
see
Williams,
Common
Expositor,
157-58. The
Spanish
themselves
proudly
claimed Tubal as their ancestor and
rested their claim to
antiquity
and
pure
blood on
him;
see Marc
Shell,
"Marranos
(Pigs),
or From Coexistence to
Toleration,"
Critical
Inquiry
17
(1991):
311. In the hands
of at least one
anti-Spanish propagandist,
this
ancestry
should be no cause for
pride:
"It is certaine that
Spaine
is of
great antiquitie, bearing
that name vnder the first Mon-
archie;
but when we shall consider the
significations
of her and of her first
inhabitant,
we shall find her
age
no ornament ... but a
great
deformitie
considering
her incom-
modities,
and
peruerse qualities
of that
people
all naturall defects
being
made more
imperfect by
continuance or alteration of times.
[Spain]
was not
long
after the diuision
of
tongues
first inhabited
by
the third sonne of
laphet
named lobel or
Tubal, signifying
worldly,
or of the
world,
confusion and
ignominie";
Edward
Daunce,
A
Briefe
Discovrse
of
the
Spanish
State
(London, 1590),
STC
#6291,
reel
#880,
Blr. Daunce in fact
orga-
nizes his entire condemnation of
Spain according
to the various wicked characteristics
associated
etymologically
with Tubal.
32. Gervaise
Babington,
Certain
Plaine, Briefe
and
Comfortable
Notes
upon
Everie
Chapter of
Gen-
esis
(London, 1592),
STC
#1086,
reel
#195,
38r.
33. He
laments,
"And thus was this Iland bereft at on time both of hir ancient
name,
and
also of hir lawfull succession of
princes
descended of the line
ofJaphet"; Chronicles,
6-
7, 9.
Kidd,
British Identities
Before Nationalism,
stresses the "one blood"
interpretation
as
part
of his
general
claim that "beneath the
superficial variety
of mankind
early
modern
literati
sought
a
hypothesized
and
Biblically
authorized
unity" (289)
and that therefore
neither racialist nor nationalist
thinking
were
prominent
in the
period.
34. As with the
concept
of
race,
the full
development
of the
concept
of the nation came
well after the
early
modern
period;
but
(again,
as with
race)
the
early
modern
period
is in
many ways
the crucible out of which a
protonationalism
is formed.
E.J.
Hobs-
bawm,
for
example,
thinks that the
characteristically
modern nation-state was "in
many ways anticipated by
the
evolving European principalities
of the sixteenth-
seventeenth
century"
and finds in
Shakespeare's history plays "something
close to mod-
ern
patriotism";
Nations and Nationalism Since 1780:
Programme, Myth, Reality (Cam-
bridge, 1990), 80,
75. The OED notes in its first definition of "nation" that "in
early
examples,
the racial idea is
usually stronger
than the
political";
the first citation in which
the
political
sense
appears
to be
decisively present
is from 1538.
35. The
phrase
is
Canterbury's,
but his
worry
lest "our nation lose / The name of hardiness
and
policy" (1.2.219-20)
reflects the national
unity
that
Henry-and
the
play-appar-
ently
wish to achieve.
36. For this
consolidation, see,
for
example,
Richard
Helgerson's magisterial
account of the
28 REPRESENTATIONS
transition from "universal
Christendom,
to
dynastic state,
to land-centered nation" as
it is reflected in the work of
early
modern
cartographers
and
chorographers;
"The Land
Speaks," 107-47,
in his Forms
of
Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of
England (Chi-
cago, 1992);
the
phrase
cited occurs on 120. The
precise
moment when the various
legends concerning wandering
coalesced into the
story
of the
Wandering Jew
is hard
to
determine,
but there seems to be some
agreement
that the
story
either took its defini-
tive form or
got
a new lease on life in the
early
seventeenth
century.
Poliakov dates its
spread through Europe
from
1602,
when The
BriefAccount andDescription of
a ew Named
Ahasuerus first
appeared
"and
enjoyed
tremendous
popularity";
"within the
year [it]
went
through eight
editions in German
[and]
was
quickly
translated into
every
Euro-
pean language"; History of Anti-Semitism, 183,
242.
George
K. Anderson's extensive
study
cites a
variety
of
early
forms of the
legend,
not all of them associated with
Jews,
and concludes that the Reformation and fears of the Antichrist
gave
the
legend
a new
impetus
after 1550. He too finds the
publication
of the German
pamphlet
in 1602 the
decisive event in the
resurgence
of the
legend's popularity;
The
Legend of
the
Wandering
Jew (Providence, R.I., 1965),
41-42. Anderson
reports
on his
discovery
of a 1620 En-
glish prose
version of the
legend
in
manuscript,
which alludes to a number of
early-
seventeenth-century sightings
of the
legendary figure
and
reports
that "all the cuntrie
was full of
Ballads, expressing
the same"
(63-65).
Venetia Newall locates its
beginnings
in the thirteenth
century,
"when mass
expulsions
of the
Jews
from Western
Europe
were in
progress,"
but she too
reports
on renewed interest in the
early
modern
period,
noting
that
"during
the sixteenth
century
there were
reports
of visits
by
the
Wandering
Jew
from the
leading
cities of
Europe," including
"local variants ... collected in Brit-
ain";
"The
Jew
as a Witch
Figure,"
in The Witch
Figure,
ed. Venetia Newall
(London,
1973),
98.
Shapiro
cites the return of the
legend
to
England
in the
early
seventeenth
century
in connection with his discussion of the
puzzling
national status of the
Jews;
see
Shakespeare
and the
Jews,
174-77. Whenever it
began,
the
legend
does not
appear
to
have been
widespread
in the Middle
Ages, despite
the old association
ofJews
with the
wandering Cain; perhaps
it took not
only
the Reformation and fears of the Antichrist
but also a national
identity
attached to land for the
legend
to reach its full force in the
popular imagination.
37. See
Merchant, 1.3.43, 3.1.48,
and
3.1.73,
and
Foxe, Sermon, Biiiv, Bvr, Ciiv,
and
Liiiv;
in each of these
instances,
Foxe uses "nation" in close
proximity
to "race" and seems
to
regard
them as
equivalent
terms.
38. This
phrase
is from
Foxe, Sermon,
Civ.
39. For Foxe's assaults on
Jewish pride
in
ancestry, see,
for
example, Sermon,
Civ and Ciiv.
40. This was still one of the dominant associations of the word in
English: OED,
s.v.
"tribe,"
notes that the word enters
English through
this Biblical
usage
and retains this associa-
tion for some time. See OED's first definition
("a group
of
persons forming
a commu-
nity
and
claiming
descent from a common
ancestor; spec.
each of the twelve divisions
of the
people
of
Israel, claiming
descent from the twelve sons
ofJacob"),
which is fol-
lowed
by many
medieval and Renaissance
examples.
41. Foxe uses the
phrase
"us Gentiles" with notable
pride, e.g.,
at
Sermon,
Aiiiv and
Aivr,
because he is
speaking
on the
authority
of
Paul, Apostle
to the Gentiles
(Aiiv);
in this
context,
"the nations" and "the Gentiles" are
interchangeable
terms.
42. The
Confession of Faith,
which Nathanael A
Jew Borne,
Made
Before
the
Congregation
in the
Parish Church
ofAlhallowes, appended
to
Foxe, Sermon,
Biv-Biiiv.
43. See
Williams,
Common
Expositor,
155.
44.
Calvin, Commentarie, 238,
240.
Her Father's Blood:
Race, Conversion,
and Nation in The Merchant
of
Venice 29
45. For Foxe's insistence that God's
mercy
is not the inheritance of
any
one
nation, see, e.g.,
Sermon,
Kiiir or
Kviv;
at least in the
Sermon,
this insistence seems to be more in the
service of
displacingJewish
claims than of
opening
the
kingdom
of God
up
to all
"peo-
ple, nations,
and
tongues,
whether
they
be
Iewes,
or
Gentiles, Scythians
or Indians"
(Kiiir).
William Haller's claim in Foxe's Book
of Martyrs
and the Elect Nation
(London,
1963)
that Foxe
played
a central role in the
ideology identifying England
as an "elect
nation" has
recently
been
challenged; see, e.g., Helgerson,
Forms
of Nationhood,
263.
Helgerson
nonetheless concedes that Foxe
"grants England
a
quite extraordinary place
in the universal scheme"
(263)
and "contributes to the
making
of a
specifically English
community
of faith"
(268).
46. Cited in
Haller,
Foxe's Book
of
Martyrs,
245.
47. Kim Hall
puts
this moment at the center of her
reading
of Merchant as a
commentary
on
"growing
concerns over
English
national
identity
and culture as
England develops
political
and economic ties with
foreign
(and
'racially' different) nations"; "Guess,"
88-
89; though
our
emphases
are somewhat
different,
I am
very
much indebted to this
essay.
48. In
Shakespeare's England,
if not in
Belmont,
it
may
have been
literally:
at least some
of the Moors in
England appear
to have arrived as servants to the conversos. See Wolf's
description
of the household of Hector
Nufiez,
which
consisted,
in
1582,
of "his
wife,
three
clerks,
a
butler,
and two
negresses"; "Jews
in Elizabethan
England,"
9. These or
other "blackamores" were
apparently
still there in the
1590s,
when Thomas Wilson's
account to the Court of
Chancery
of secret
Jewish practices
in that household relied
on what "their blackamores which
they kept
told
me"; Sisson, "Colony
of
Jews,"
45.
Sisson
reports
of another converso household
(that
of Ferdinand
Alvares,
one of the
merchants in his
Chancery
Court
case)
that in 1594 it included "his wife
Philippa,
a
widow Anne
Alvarez,
Alvares de Lima and his
wife,
his servant Thomas
Wilson,
two
other
servants,
Lewis Alvarez and Grace
Anegro,
and several blackamoors"
(45).
Does
Grace
Anegro's
name contain the hint that racial
mixing
of the kind Lancelot
engages
in had
already
occurred in this household?
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Biblical Allusion and Allegory in
The Merchant of Venice
BARBARA K. LEWALSKI
ERHAPS no other
play
in the
Shakespeare
canon has
pro-
voked
greater controversy regarding
its fundamental moral
and
religious
attitudes than has The Merchant
of
Venice. As
everyone knows,
acrimonious critical debates have
long
been
waged concerning whether Shakespeare's attitude in the play
is humanitarian or
antisemitic,
whether
Shylock
is
presented
as the persecuted hero or as a crude monster and comic butt, whether Antonio
and Bassanio are portrayed as worthy Christians or as crass hypocrites.
Recently, however, some critics have in part transcended the controversies
arising out of the literal story by concentrating upon certain allegorical and sym-
bolic aspects of the play, reflecting in this approach the modern critical emphasis
upon Shakespeare's use of Christian themes and imagery and his debt to the
medieval tradition. In a most illuminating essay, Nevill Coghill' discusses several
of Shakespeare's comedies, including MV, in terms of the medieval comic form
described by Dante-a beginning in troubles and a resolution in joy, reflecting
the fundamental pattern of human existence in this world. Moreover, he traces
in MV the direct influence of the medieval allegorical theme of the "Parliament
of Heaven", in which Mercy and Justice, two of the four "daughters of God",
argue over the fate of mankind after his fall. In somewhat similar vein, Sir
Israel Gollancz2 sees the play as Shakespeare's largely unconscious development
of certain myths implicit in the original sources-the myth of the Parliament of
Heaven, and the related Redemption myth in which Antonio represents Christ,
Shylock, Evil, and Portia, Mercy and Grace. These suggestions shed considerable
light upon the trial scene, but they hardly provide a comprehensive account of the
entire play.3 The question of the extent and manner in which allegory may
organize the total work has yet to be investigated, and constitutes the subject of
the present inquiry.
The overingenuity and the religious special pleading that has marred some
"Christian" criticism of Shakespeare make manifest the need for rigorous stand-
ards of evidence and argument in such investigations. The present study does
not claim that all of Shakespeare's plays approach as closely as MV appears to
'"The Basis of Shakespearean Comedy", Essays and Studies III (London, i950), pp. I-28. See
also Northrup Frye, "The Argument of Comedy", English Institute Essays, 1948 (N. Y., 1949),
pp. 58-73.
2 Allegory and Mysticism in Shakespeare, reports of lectures edited by A. W. Pollard (London,
1931), pp. 13-68.
3 As J. R. Brown points out, "Introduction", The Merchant of Venice, Arden edition (London,
1955), p. li. All subsequent references to the text are to this edition.
328
SHAKESPEARE QUARTERLY
do to the themes and methods of the morality play. Nor does it imply anything
about Shakespeare's personal religious convictions, since the religious signifi-
cances dealt with in the play are basic to all the major Christian traditions and
were available to any Elizabethan through countless sermons, biblical commen-
taries, and scripture annotations. Nor, again, does it assume Shakespeare's direct
contact with medieval allegory, since the general Elizabethan assimilation and
perpetuation of this tradition is clearly evidenced in Spenser, Marlowe, and
many other poets. The study does, however, uncover in MV patterns of Biblical
allusion and imagery so precise and pervasive as to be patently deliberate; it
finds, moreover, that such language clearly reveals an important theological
dimension in the play and points toward consistent and unmistakeable allegori-
cal meanings.
The allegorical aspects of The Merchant of Venice can, I believe, be greatly
illuminated by the medieval allegorical method exemplified by Dante. Indeed,
though it omits MV, a recent study by Bernard Spivack has persuasively argued
the utility of the Dante comparison in comprehending the allegorical origins
and characteristics of many Shakespearian villains.4 In contrast to personifica-
tion allegory wherein a particular is created to embody an insensible, Dante's
symbolic method causes a particular real situation to suggest a meaning or mean-
ings beyond itself. In MV Shakespeare, like Dante, is ultimately concerned with
the nature of the Christian life, though as a dramatist he is fully as interested in
the way in which the allegorical dimensions enrich the particular instance as in
the use of the particular to point to higher levels of meaning. The various dimen-
sions of allegorical significance in MV, though not consistently maintained
throughout the play and not susceptible of analysis with schematic rigor, are
generally analogous to Dante's four levels of allegorical meaning: a literal or
story level; an allegorical significance concerned with truths relating to humanity
as a whole and to Christ as head of humanity; a moral or tropological level
dealing with factors in the moral development of the individual; and an anagogi-
cal significance treating the ultimate reality, the Heavenly City.5 Moreover, com-
prehension of the play's allegorical meanings leads to a recognition of its funda-
mental unity, discrediting the common critical view that it is a hotchpotch which
developed contrary to Shakespeare's conscious intention.
The use of Biblical allusion to point to such allegorical meanings must now
be illustrated in relation to the various parts of the work.
Antonio and
Shylock
At what would correspond in medieval terminology to the "moral" level,
the play is concerned to explore and define Christian love and its various
antitheses.6 As revealed in the action, Christian love involves both giving and
4
Shakespeare and the Allegory of Evil: the History of
a Metaphor in Relation to his Major
Villains (N. Y., i958), pp. 50-99.
5 H. Flanders Dunbar, Symbolism in Medieval Thought (New Haven, 1929), pp. 19, 497. Cf.
Dante, "Letter to Can Grande della Scala", in Dante's Eleven Letters, ed. G. R. Carpenter (N. Y.,
1I892).
6 Many critics have. suggested that the play is essentially concerned with the contrast and evalua-
tion of certain moral values--such as money, love, and friendship; appearance and reality; true love
and fancy; mercy and justice; generosity and possessiveness; the usury of commerce and the usury
of love. See Brown, Arden ed., pp. xxxvii-lviii; M. C. Bradbrook, Shakespeare and Elizabethan
Poetry (London, 1951), pp. 170-179; Cary
B.
Graham, "Standards of Value in the Merchant of
BIBUCAL ALLUSION AND ALLEGORY IN THE MERCHANT OF VENICE
3
forgiving: it demands an attitude of carelessness regarding the things of this
world founded upon a trust in God's providence; an attitude of self-forgetfulness
and humility founded upon recognition of man's common sinfulness; a readiness
to give and risk everything, possessions and person, for the sake of love; and a
willingness to forgive injuries and to love enemies. In all but the last respect,
Antonio is presented throughout the play as the very embodiment of Christian
love, and Shylock functions as one (but not the only) antithesis to it.
Antonio's practice of Christian love is indicated throughout the play under
the metaphor of "venturing", and the action begins with the use of this metaphor
in a mock test of his attitude toward wealth and worldly goods. The key scrip-
ture text opposing love of this world to the Christian love of God and neighbor
is Matt. vi. Ic921, 31-33:
Lay not up treasures for your selves upon the earth, where the moth and
canker corrupt, & where theeves dig through, and
steale./
But lay up treas-
ures for your selves in heaven.... / For where your treasure is, there will
your heart be also/ .... Therefore take no thought, saying, what shall we
eate? or what shall we drink? or wherewith shall we be clothed?/ .. . But
seeke ye first the kingdome of God, and his righteousnesse, & all these things
shalbe iniistred unto your
In language directly alluding to this passage, Salario suggests that Antonio's
melancholy may result from worry about his "ventures" at sea: "Your mind is
tossing on the ocean,/ There where your argosies [are]", and Solanio continues
in this vein: "had I such venture forth,/ The better part of my affections
would/
Be with my hopes abroad" (I. i.
8-9,
15-i7).8 Gratiano repeats the charge-"You
have too much respect upon the
world:/
They lose it that do buy it with much
care" (I. i. 74-75)-a speech also recalling Matt. xvi. 25-26, "Whosoever will save
his life, shall lose
it..../
For what shall it profite a man, though he should
winne the whole
worlde,
if he lose his owne soule?" Yet the validity of Antonio's
disclaimer, "I hold the world but as the world Gratiano" (I. i.
77)
-that is, as
the world deserves to be held-is soon evident: his sadness is due not to worldly
concern but to the imminent parting with his beloved friend Bassanio. After
witnessing this parting Salerio testifies, "I think he only loves the world for
him" (II. viii.
50).
Gratiano's second playful charge, that Antonio's melancholy may be a pose
to feed his self-importance, to seem a "Sir Oracle" with a wise and grave de-
meanor (I. i. 88-io2), recalls the passage in i Cor. xiii. 4-5 where Paul charac-
Venice", Shakespeare Quarterly, IV (N. Y., i953), 145-151, C. R. Baskervill, "Bassanio as an
Ideal Lover", Manly Anniversary Studies, pp. 90-i03. All these, however, may be subsumed under
the central concern, Christian Love.
TUnless otherwise indicated, scripture quotations are from the Geneva Bible (London, 1584;
ist ed., 1560). Richmond Noble, Shakespeare's Biblical Knowledge (London, 1935), notes that all
of Shakespeare's Biblical allusions are drawn from one or more of the following versions-Geneva,
Geneva-Tomson (ist ed., 1576), and the Bishops Bible (ist ed., I568),
and that the first two, being
quartos, had the widest circulation during the period. For this play, the Geneva renderings seem
on the whole dosest, though occasionally the phraseology suggests that of the Bishops Bible, which
Shapeskeare may have recalled from the church services.
8ain these speeches they testify to their own failure to come up to the standard of Christian
perfection achieved by Antonio. Shylock's later speech concerning Antonio's "sufficiency" also
alludes to the imagery of this Biblical passage
in describing the transiency of worldly goods:
"Ships are but boards, sailors but men, there be land-rats, and water-rats, water-thieves and land-
thieves" (I. iii. 19-21).
33o
SHAKESPEARE
QUARTERLY
terizes Christian love in terms of humility and self-forgetfulness: "Love suf-
fereth long: it is bountifull: love envieth not: love doth not boast it selfe: it is
not puffed
up:/
It disdaineth not: it seeketh not her owne things." But this
charge against Antonio is quickly dismissed by Bassanio as "an infinite deal of
nothing" (I. i. I i4-i I 8).
The quality of Antonio's love is then shown in the positive forms of charity
and benevolence, according to the following requirements of scripture:
Give to every man that asketh of thee: and of him that taketh away thy
goods, aske them not againe./ And if ye lende to them of whom yee hope to
receive, what thanke shal ye have? for even the sinners lend to sinners, to
receive the like./ Wherefore . . . doe good, & lend, looking for nothing
againe, and your reward shall be great (Luke vi. 30,34-35).
Greater love then this hath no man, then any man bestoweth his life for his
friendes (John xv. 13).
Though his first loan to Bassanio has not been repaid, Antonio is willing to
"venture" again for his friend "My purse, my person, my extremest means"
(I. i. 138), even to the pledge of a pound of his flesh. And when this pledge (and
with it his life) is forfeit, he can still release Bassanio from debt: "debts are
clear'd between you and I" (III. ii. 317). Furthermore, Antonio lends money in
the community at large without seeking interest, and often aids victims of
Shylock's usurious practices (I. iii. 39-40; III. iii. 22-23).
Shylock's "thrift" poses the precise contrast to Antonio's "ventures". His is
the worldliness of niggardly prudence, well-characterized by his avowed motto,
"Fast bind, fast find,-/ A proverb never stale in thrifty mind" (II. v.
53-54).
He
locks up house and stores before departing, he begrudges food and maintenance
to his servant Launcelot, he demands usurious "assurance" before lending money.
This concern with the world poisons all his relations with others and even his
love for Jessica: the confused cries, "My daughter! 0 my ducats! 0 my daugh-
ter!" after Jessica's departure (II.iV.-
15), reveal, not his lack of love for his
daughter, but his laughable and pitiable inability to determine what he loves
most. Shylock also manifests pride and self-righteousness. He scorns Antonio's
"low simplicity" in lending money gratis (I. iii.
38-39),
despises the "prodigal"
Bassanio for giving feasts (II. v. 15), and considers the "shallow fopp'ry" of the
Christian maskers a defilement of his "sober house' (II. v. 35-36).
The moral contrast of Shylock and Antonio is more complex with reference
to that most difficult injunction of the Sermon on the Mount-forgiveness of
injuries and love of enemies. Recollection of this demand should go far to re-
solve the question as to whether an Elizabethan audience would regard Shylock's
grievances as genuine?: presumably an audience which could perceive the Bibli-
cal standard operating throughout the play would also see its relevance here.
The text is Matt. v. 39, 44-47):
9
For the argument that Shylock could have been nothing but a monster and comic butt to an
Elizabethan audience steeped in antisemitism, see E. E. Stoll, Shakespeare Studies (N. Y., 1927),
pp. 255-336. This argument has been challenged on the ground that there was little ordinary anti-
semitism in England in Shakespeare's time, because few Jews resided there, and also on the ground
that Shylock is, for a part of the play at least, made human, complex, and somewhat sympathetic.
See H. R. Walley, "Shakespeare's Portrayal of Shylock", The Parrott Presentation Volume (Prince-
ton, N. J., 1935), pp. 211-242, and J. L. Cardozo, The Contemporary
few
in Elizabethan Drama
(Amsterdam, 1926).
BIBLICAL ALLUSION AND ALLEGORY IN THE MERCHANT OF VENICE 331:
Resist not evill: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheeke, turn to
him the other also/ . . . . Love your enemies: bless them that curse you: do
good to them that hate you, and pray for them which hurt you, and perse-
cute you./ That ye may be the children of your Father that is in heaven:
for hee maketh his sunne to arise on the evill, & the good, and sendeth raine
on the just, and
unjust./
For if ye love them, which love you, what reward
shall you have? Doe not the Publicanes even the
same?/
And if ye be
friendly to your brethren onely, what singular thing doe ye? doe not even
the Publicanes likewise?
Antonio at the outset of the play is rather in the position of the publican de-
scribed as friendly to his brethren only-he loves and forgives Bassanio beyond
all measure, but hates and reviles Shylock.10 For evidence of this we have not
only Shylock's indictment, "You call me misbeliever, cut-throat
dog,/
And spet
upon my Jewish
gabardine,/
. . . And foot me as you spurn a stranger cur"
(I. iii. io6-io7,113), but also Antonio's angry reply promising continuation of
such treatment: "I am as like to call thee so
again,/
To spet on thee again, to
spurn thee too" (I. iii. i25-i26). Indeed, the moral tension of the play is lost if
we do not see that Shylock, having been the object of great wrongs, must make a
difficult choice between forgiveness and revenge-and that Antonio later finds
himself in precisely the same situation.
Ironically, Shylock poses at first as the more "Christian" of the two in that,
after detailing his wrongs, he explicitly proposes to turn the other cheek-to
"Forget the shames that you have stain'd me with,/ Supply your present wants,
and take no doit/ Of usance for my moneys" (I. iii. i35-i37). Of course it is
merely pretence: Shylock had declared for revenge at the first sight of Antonio
(I. iii 41-42), and, according to Jessica's later report, he eagerly planned for the
forfeit of Antonio's flesh long before the bond came due (III. ii.
283-287).
And in
this fixed commitment to revenge, this mockery of forgiveness, lies I believe the
reason for the often-deplored change from the "human" Shylock of the earlier
scenes to the "monster" of Act IV. At the level of the moral allegory Shylock
undergoes (rather like Milton's Satan) the progressive deterioration of evil; he
turns by his own choice into the cur that he has been called-"Thou call'dst me
dog before thou hadst a cause,/ But since I am a dog, beware my fangs" (III. iii.
6-7). Conversely, Antonio in the trial scene suffers hatred and injury but fore-
goes revenge and rancor, manifesting a genuine spirit of forgiveness-for Shy-
lock's forced conversion is not revenge, as will be seen. Thus, his chief deficiency
surmounted, Antonio becomes finally a perfect embodiment of Christian love.
The Shylock-Antonio opposition functions also at what the medieval theorists
would call the "allegorical" level; in these terms it symbolizes the confrontation
of Judaism and Christianity as theological systems-the Old Law and the New
-and also as historic societies. In their first encounter, Shylock's reference to
Antonio as a "fawning publican" and to himself as a member of the "sacred
nation" (I. iii. 36, 43) introduces an important aspect of this contrast. The refer-
ence is of course to the parable of the Pharisee and the Publican (Luke xviii. 9-13)
which was spoken "unto
certayne which trusted in themselves, that they were
ryghteous,
and
despised other".1" Shylock's words are evidently intended to sug-
IOHence Shylock's reference to Antonio as a "Fawning publican" may allude to the passage
cited above (Matt. v. 47) as well as, more obviously, to the parable
of the Pharisee and the Publican.
11 Bishops Bible (London, 1572).
332
SHAKESPEARE
QUARTERLY
gest the Pharisee's prayer, "God I thank thee that I am not as other menne are,
extorcioners, unjust, adulterers, or as this Publicane:/ I fast twyce in the weeke,
I geve tythe of al that I posesse", and his scornful reference to Antonio's "low
simplicity" relates Antonio to the Publican who prayed with humble faith, "God
be merciful to me a sinner". The contemporary interpretation of this parable is
suggested in Tomson's note :12 "Two things especially make our prayers voyde
and of none effect: confidence of our owne ryghteousnesse, and the contempts
of other.... we [are] despised of God, as proude & arrogant, if we put never so
little trust in our owne workes before God." Through this allusion, then, the
emphasis of the Old Law upon perfect legal righteousness is opposed to the
tenet of the New Law that righteousness is impossible to fallen man and must
be replaced by faith-an opposition which will be further discussed with refer-
ence to the trial scene.
Also in this first encounter between Antonio and Shylock, the argument
about usury contrasts Old Law and New in terms resembling those frequently
found in contemporary polemic addressed to the usury question. Appealing to
the Old Testament, Shylock sets forth an analogy between Jacob's breeding of
ewes and rams and the breeding of money to produce interest.1" Antonio, deny-
ing the analogy with the query, "is your gold and silver ewes and rams?" echoes
the commonplace Christian argument (based upon Aristotle)14 that to take
interest is to "breed" barren metal, which is unnatural. Antonio's remark, "If
thou wilt lend this money, lend it not/ As to thy friends, for when did friend-
ship take/ A breed for barren metal of his
friend?/
But lend it rather to thine
enemy" (.iii.mi27-i3o), prescribes Shylock's course of action according to the
dictum of the Old Law-"Unto a stranger thou mayest lend upon usury, but
unto thy brother thou shalt not lend upon usury" (Deut. xxiii. 20). However, ac-
cording to most exegetes, the Gospel demanded a revision of this rule. Aquinas
declares, "The Jews were forbidden to take usury from their brethren, i.e., from
other Jews. By this we are given to understand that to take usury from any man
is evil simply, because we ought to treat every man as our neighbor and brother,
especially in the state of the Gospel, whereto all are called."15 Furthermore, the
Sermon on the Mount was thought to forbid usury absolutely by the words,
"Lend, looking for nothing againe",
a text which is glossed as follows in the
Geneva Bible-lend, "not only
not
hoping
for
profite, but to lose ye stocke, and
principall, for as much as Christ bindeth him selfe to
repaie the whole with a
most liberall interest."
At this same encounter, Shylock's pretense
of
following the Christian pre-
12
The New Testament.... Englished by L. Tomson (London, 1599).
IsAgain they refer to their characteristic metaphors: Shylock argues that Jacob's trick to win
the sheep from Laban (Gen. xxx. 31-43) was justifiable "thrift", whereas Antonio (citing a later
verse, Gen. 1111.9, referring the trick to God's inspiration) declares that it was rather a "venture
. A thing not in his power to bring to pass, /
But sway'd and fashion'd by the hand of heaven."
14Politics, Lico. i258b. I-8. Cf. Francis Bacon, "Of Usury", Essays (i625), "They say . . . it is
against Nature, for Money to beget Money."
15 Summa Theologica 11-11, Ques. 78, Art. I, in The Political Ideas of -St. Thomas Aquinas, ed.
Dino Bigongiari (N. Y., 5953), P. 149.
As R. H. Tawney points out in Religion and the Rise of
Capitalism (N. Y., 5953), P. 535, the arguments
of the schoolmen were in constant circulation
during the sixteenth century, and the medieval view regarding usury was maintained by an over-
whelming proportion of Elizabethan writers on the subject (pp. 528-549). See Sir Thomas Wilson,
Discourse upon Usury (5572), Miles Mosse, The Arraignment and Conviction of Usurie
(595),
H. Smith, Examination of Usury (5595).
BIBLICAL ALLUSION AND ALLEGORY IN THE MERCHANT OF VENICE
333
scription regarding forgiveness of injuries again contrasts Old Law and New
as theological systems, for it recalls the fact that Christ in the Sermon on the
Mount twice opposed the Christian standard to the Old Law's demand for
strict justice: "Ye have heard that it hath bene saide, An eye for an eye, & a
tooth for a tooth./16 But I say unto you, Resist not evill: but whosoever shall
smite thee on thy right cheeke, turne to him the other also / .... Ye have
hearde that it hath bene saide, Thou shalt love thy neighbour, & hate thine
enemie. / But I say unto you, Love your enemies" (Matt. v. 38-39, 43-44). Later,
some of the language of the trial scene alludes again to the differing demands
of the two dispensations with regard to forgiveness of enemies:
Bass: Do all men kill the things they do not love?
Shy: Hates any man the thing he would not kill?
Bass: Every offense is not a hate at first!
Shy: What! wouldst thou have a serpent sting thee twice?" (IV. i. 66-69)
And the Duke reiterates this opposition almost too pointedly when he tenders
Shylock the mercy of the Christian court, observing that Shylock could recog-
nize from this "the difference of our spirit" (IV. i. 364).
This allegorical dimension encompasses also the historical experience of the
two societies, Jewish and Christian. After Jessica's departure, Shylock explicitly
assumes unto himself the sufferings of his race: "The curse never fell upon our
nation till now, I never felt it till now (III. i. 76-78). This curse is that pro-
nounced upon Jerusalem itself-"Behold, your habitation shalbe left unto you
desolate" (Matt. xxiii.38). First Shylock's servant Launcelot leaves the "rich Jew"
to serve the poor Bassanio; then his daughter Jessica17 "gilds" herself with her
Father's ducats and flees with her "unthrift" Christian lover; and finally, all of
Shylock's goods and his very life are forfeit to the state. Shylock's passionate
outcries against Antonio (III. i. 48 ff.) also take on larger than personal signifi-
cance: they record the sufferings of his entire race in an alien Christian society-
"he hath disgrac'd me ... laugh'd at my losses, mock'd at my gains, scorned my
nation, thwarted my bargains, cooled my friends, heated mine enemies-and
what's his reason? I am a Jew!" This is followed by the eloquent plea for recog-
nition of the common humanity Jew shares with Christian, "Hath not a Jew
eyes? . . .", and it concludes with the telling observation that despite the
Christian's professions about "humility" and turning the other cheek, in practice
18
Christ refers to Exod. xxi.24; Levit. XXiV.20; Deut. XiX.2I.
17
It has been plausibly argued that Jessica's name derives from the Hebrew Jesca, a form of
Iscah, daughter of Haran (Gen. Xi.29), glossed by Elizabethean commentators as "she that looketh
out" (Gollancz, p. 42, G. L. Kittredge ed., Merchant of Venice, Ginn, i945, p. ix). A direct play
upon this name seems to occur in II. v. 31-32, where Shylock directs Jessica, "Clamber not you up
to the casements then / Nor thrust your head into the public street", and Launcelot prompts her to
"look out at window for all this (II. v. 40) to see Lorenzo. Her departure thus signifies a breaking
out of the ghetto, a voluntary abandonment of Old Law for New. This significance is continued in
III. v. 1-5, when Launcelot quips that Jessica will be damned since (according to Mosaic Law,
Exod. xx.5)
the "sins of the father are to be laid upon the children," and she replies (11. 17-18),
"I shall be sav'd by my husband"-reecting Paul's promise in the New Law, i Cor. ViiJ.4, "the
unbeleeving wife is sanctified by the husband". Shylock's name is probably taken from Shalach,
translated by "cormorant" (Levit. xi.17, Deut. xiv.J7)-an epithet often applied to usurers in
Elizabethean English. The name "Tubal", taken from Tubal Cain (Gen. X.2, 6) is glossed
in
Elizabethan Bibles as meaning "worldly possessions, a bird's nest of the world" (Gollancz, pp.
40-4I; Kittredge, p. ix).
334 SHAKESPEARE QUARTERLY
he is quick to revenge himself upon the Jew. The taunts of Salario, Solanio, and
Gratiano throughout the play give some substantiation to these charges.
Yet overlaying this animosity are several allusions to Shylock's future con-
version, suggesting the Christian expectation of the final, pre-millennial con-
version of the Jews. The first such reference occurs, most appropriately, just
after Shylock's feigned offer to forego usury and forgive injury. Antonio salutes
Shylock's departure with the words, "Hie thee gentle Jew"-probably carrying
a pun on gentle-gentile-and then prophesies, "The Hebrew will turn Christian,
he grows kind" (I. iii. 173-174). "Kind" in this context implies both "natural"
(in foregoing unnatural interest) and "charitable"; thus Antonio suggests that
voluntary adoption of these fundamental Christian principles would lead to the
conversion of the Jew. The second prediction occurs in Lorenzo's declaration,
"If e'er the Jew her father come to heaven, / It will be for his gentle daughter's
sake" (II. iv. 33-34) -again with the pun on gentle-gentile. As Shylock's daugh-
ter and as a voluntary convert to Christianity, Jessica may figure forth the filial
relationship of the New Dispensation to the Old, and Lorenzo's prediction may
carry an allusion to Paul's prophecy that the Jews will ultimately be saved
through the agency of the Gentiles.'8 At any rate, the final conversion of the
Jews is symbolized in just such terms in the trial scene: because Antonio is able
to rise at last to the demands of Christian love, Shylock is not destroyed, but,
albeit rather harshly, converted. Interestingly enough, however, even after
Portia's speeches at the trial have reminded Antonio and the court of the
Christian principles they profess, Gratiano yet persists in demanding revenge.
This incident serves as a thematic counterpoint to the opposition of Old Law
and New, suggesting the disposition of Christians themselves to live rather
according to the Old Law than the New. Such a counterpoint is developed at
various points throughout the play-in Antonio's initial enmity to Shylock, in
the jeers of the minor figures, in Shylock's statements likening his revenge to the
customary vengeful practices of the Christians and his claim to a pound of flesh
to their slave trade in human flesh (IV. i. 90-ioo). Thus the play does not present
arbitrary, black-and-white moral estimates of human groups, but takes into
account the shadings and complexities of the real world.
As Shylock and Antonio embody the theological conflicts and historical inter-
relationships of Old Law and New, so do they also reflect, from time to time,
the ultimate sources of their principles in a further allegorical significance.
Antonio, who assumes the debts of others (rescuing Bassanio, the self-confessed
"Prodigal", from a debt due under the law) reflects on occasion the role of
Christ satisfying the claim of Divine Justice by assuming the sins of mankind.
The scripture phrase which Antonio's deed immediately brings to mind points
the analogy directly: "This is my commandement, that ye love one another,
as I have loved you. /19 Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay
down his life for his friends" (John xv.i2-i3). And Shylock, demanding the
"bond" which is due him under the law, reflects the role of the devil, to whom
the entire human race is in bondage through sin-an analogy which Portia
makes explicit when she terms his hold upon Antonio a "state of hellish cruelty".
18
See Richard Hooker's paraphrase of this prophecy, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity Bk. V,
Appen. I, Works, ed. John Keble (Oxford, 1845), II, 587-588.
19
Italics mine.
BIBLICAL ALLUSION AND ALLEGORY IN THE MERCHANT OF VENICE
335
The dilemma which that delightful malaprop Launcelot experiences with regard
to leaving Shylock, whom he terms the "devil incarnation" (II. ii I-30), springs
directly from the implications of this analogy. According to i Pet. xii.i8-i9, one
must serve even a bad master "for conscience toward God": thus Launcelot's
conscience bids him stay and the fiend bids him go. But on the other hand, to
serve the devil is obviously damnation; so he concludes, "in my conscience, my
conscience is but a kind of hard conscience to offer to counsel me to stay with
the Jew", and determines flight. Similarly, Jessica declares, "Our house is hell"
(II. iii. 2), thus placing her departure in the context of a flight from the devil to
salvation. As E. E. Stoll points out,20 the identification of Jew and Devil is
repeated nine times in the play, and was a commonplace of medieval and
Elizabethan antisemitic literature. Yet it seems to function here less to heap
opprobrium upon the Jew than to suggest the ultimate source of the principles
of revenge and hatred which Shylock seeks to justify out of the Law. Again
the meaning is clarified by a Biblical quotation-Christ's use of the same
identification in denouncing the Jews for their refusal to believe in him and
their attempts to kill him-"Ye are of your father the devill, and the lustes of
your father ye will doe: Hee hath bene a murtherer from the beginning" (John
viii. 44).
Bassanio and the Caskets
The story of Bassanio and the casket choice also appears to incorporate a
"moral" and an "allegorical" meaning. At the moral level, the incident explores
the implications of Christian love in the romantic relationship, whereas Antonio's
story deals with Christian love in terms of friendship and social intercourse.
Morocco, in renouncing the leaden casket because it does not offer "fair advan-
tages", and in choosing the gold which promises "what many men desire",
exemplifies the confusion of love with external shows :21 like most of the world,
he values Portia not for herself but for her beauty and wealth. However, the
death's head within the golden casket indicates the common mortality to which
all such accidents as wealth and beauty are finally subject. Aragon, by contrast,
represents love of self so strong that it precludes any other love. He renounces
the gold because he considers himself superior to the common multitude whom
it attracts; he disdains the lead as not "fair" enough to deserve his hazard; and
in choosing the silver which promises "as much as he deserves" he declares
boldly, "I will assume desert" (II. ix. 5i). But the blinking idiot in the casket
testifies to the folly of him who supposes that love can be bargained for in the
pitiful coin of human merit. Bassanio, on the other hand, chooses the lead casket
which warns, "Who chooseth me, must give and hazard all he hath" (II. ix. 2I)
-thus signifying his acceptance of the self-abnegation, risk, and venture set up
throughout the play as characteristics of true Christian love. And the metaphor
of the "venture" is constantly used with reference to Bassanio and Portia just as
it is with Antonio. Bassanio proposes to venture like a
Jason
for the golden fleece
of Portia's sunny locks (I. i. i69-I77), and, though Portia complains that it is
20
Shakespeare Studies, pp. 270-271.
21
Morocco amusingly displays the illogic in his own position. He begs that he be not judged
by his tawny complexion but rather by his valor and inner worth (II. i. I-12), and then argues that
the picture symbolic of Portia could be fittingly placed only in a golden casket (II. vii. 48-55).
336
SHAKESPEARE
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hard to be subject to the lottery of the caskets, she accepts the premise that this
hazard will reveal her true lover (I. ii. I2-34; III. ii. 41). Finally, when Bassanio
goes forth to choose she likens his venture, upon which her own fate depends, to
that of Hercules striving to rescue Hesione from the sea-monster :22 "I stand for
sacrifice, / The rest aloof are the Dardanian wives, / With bleared visages come
forth to view / The issue of th'exploit: go Hercules" (III. ii.
57-6o).
At the "allegorical" level, the caskets signify everyman's choice of the paths to
spiritual life or death. This analogy is explicitly developed in the "Moral" ap-
pended to the casket story in the Gesta Romanorum which is almost certainly
Shakespeare's source for this incident.23 In the Gesta the casket choice tests the
worthiness of a maiden (the soul) to wed the son of an Emperor (Christ). The
moral declares, "Tle Emperour sheweth this Mayden three vessells, that is to
say, God putteth before man life & death, good and evill, & which of these he
chooseth hee shall obtaine."24 This passage contains a reference to Deut.
xxx. 15-20, wherein Moses warns, after delivering the commandments to the
Jews:
Beholde, I have set before thee this day life and good, death and
evill/...
But if thine heart turne away, so that thou wilt not obey, but shalt be se-
duced and woorship other gods, and serve them,/ I pronounce unto you this
day, that ye shall surely perish. . .
./
Therefore chuse life, that both thou
and thy seede may
live./
By loving the Lord thy God, by obeying his voyce,
and by cleaving unto hym: For he is thy life, & the length of thy dayes: that
thou mayest dwell in the lande which the Lord sware unto thy fathers.
As a note in the Bishops Bible indicates, the last promise was taken to refer not
only to the "land of Chanaan, but also the heavenly inheritance, whereof the
other was a figure". That Shakespeare intended to recall this Biblical allusion so
pointed in the Gesta, and thus to make the caskets symbolize the great choices
of spiritual life and death, is evident by the constant references in the lovers'
conversation to "life" and "death" just before Bassanio's venture. Bassanio
declares, "Let me choose, / For as I am, I live upon the rack"; Portia continues
the "rack" metaphor, urging, "Confess and live", a phrase which Bassanio
immediately transposes to "Confess and Love" (III. ii. 24-35).
When he goes
forth to venture, Portia calls for music to celebrate whichever result, death or
life, will attend his choice: "If he lose he makes a swan-like end, / Fading in
music" into the "wat'ry deathbed" of her tears. If he win, music will celebrate
his Hercules-like victory and the life of both-"Live thou, I live". That the casket
choice represents Everyman's choice among values is further emphasized by the
multitude at Portia's door: some of them refuse to choose (like the inhabitants
of the vestibule of Hell in Dante); others choose wrongly and, having demon-
strated by this that they are already wedded to false values, are forbidden to
make another marriage. Furthermore, Antonio's action in making possible
Bassanio's successful venture reflects the role of Christ in making possible for the
true Christian the choice of spiritual life, the love of God.
22
Interestingly, Morocco also compares the casket choice to an exploit of Hercules, but not to
one fairly testing strength and true worth, as does Portia. Rather, he sees it as a dice game wherein
by pure chance Hercules might loose out to his valet (II. 1.31-34).
23 A selection of stories from the Gesta was printed in English translation by Richard Robinson
in 1577 and again in 1595. See Arden MV, pp. xxxii, 172-174.
24
Arden MV,
p. 174.
BIBLICAL ALLUSION AND ALLEGORY IN THE MERCHANT OF VENICE
337
The meaning of the symbolic caskets is further illuminated by James v. 2-3:
"Your riches are corrupt: and your garments are motheaten. / Your golde and
silver is cankred, and the rust of them shall be a witness against you."25 Morocco,
the pagan, with his boasts of bravery in battle and of the love of the "best-
regarded virgins of our clime", with his sensuous imagery and dashing superla-
tives (II. i. I-38) is a fit type of worldliness, Mammon. The warning of the
death's head is that such a life is spiritual death: "Many a man his life hath sold /
But my outside to behold,-/ Gilded tombs do worms infold." Aragon, the
Spaniard-the very embodiment of Pride according to the Elizabethan carica-
ture-is the type of Pharisaical self-righteousness: his sonorously complacent
language about the "barbarous multitudes" and the faults of others (II. ix. 19-52)
rather suggests the "sounding brasse" and "tinckling cymbale" of Paul's image
(i Cor. xiii. i), and certainly recalls the Pharisee's prayer. But through its first
line, "The fire seven times tried this", the scroll refers Aragon to the twelfth
Psalm,26 which denounces vanity and proud speaking. It then refers to the
casket as merely "silver'd o'er"-thus suggesting Christ's comparison of the
scribes and pharisees to "whited sepulchres" (Matt. xxiii. 27). Also, the blinking
idiot within the casket mutely testifies that since all men are sinners pharisaical
pride is folly.27 This defeat and lessoning of Morocco and Aragon foreshadows
the defeat and conversion of Shylock, for he represents in somewhat different
guise these same antichristian values of worldliness and self-righteousness.28
Bassanio's choice of the lead casket is the choice of life, the love of God. The
use of romantic love as a symbol for divine love is of course a commonplace in
mystical literature, deriving chiefly from the example of the Song of Solomon,
which was understood to treat, as the caption in the Bishops Bible expresses it,
"The familiar talke and mystical communication of the spiritual love between Je-
sus Christe and his Churche". Bassanio's meditation on the caskets (III. ii. 73-107)
symbolically suggests his understanding and renunciation of the two kinds of
"Ornament" which oppose this love: his description of the silver as "thou
common drudge between man and man" suggests his knowledge of the pretense
of righteousness with which men generally cover their vices when presenting
themselves to others, and the skull image which he uses in denouncing the gold
indicates his awareness of the transience and corruptibility of worldly goods.
Also clarifying the significance of Bassanio's choice is Portia's remark, "I stand
for sacrifice", made in relation to her Hercules-Hesione simile as she sends
Bassanio forth to choose (III. ii. 57). The word "stand" is ambiguous, suggesting
at once that she occupies the position of a sacrificial victim whose life must be
25
The same imagery appears in Matt. Vi.25, the passage alluded to in testing Antonio's contempt
for worldly goods (p. 329 above).
26 Psalter for the Book of Common Prayer, in Bishops Bible, 1584, verses 3, 7: "Tle Lorde shal
roote out al deceptful lippes: and the tongue that speaketh proude thinges / .... The woordes of
the Lord are pure woordes: even as the silver whiche from the earth is tryed, and purified seven
times in the fyre."
27 The Gesta's moral points to the same meanings though the inscriptions on the caskets are
somewhat different: the gold is said to represent "worldly men, both mightie men & riche, which
outwardly shine as golde in riches and pomps of this world", the silver stands for "some Justices &
wise men of this world which shine in faire speach but within they be full of wormes and earth"-
as were the whited sepulchres (Arden MV, Appendix V, p. 174; Cf. Matt. xxiii.24).
28 Aragon's appeal to Portia after his defeat, "Did I deserve no more than a fool's head? / Is
that my prize? are my deserts no better" (II. ix. 59-60), foreshadows Portia's role in the trial scene
as opponent and judge of the claim based upon righteousness.
338
SHAKESPEARE
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saved by another, but also that she "represents" sacrifice-the very core of
Christian love. The exact counterpart of Portia's remark, both in form and
ambiguity of meaning, is Shylock's later comment, "I stand for judgement....
I stand here for law" (IV. i. i03, I42).
The Trial
The trial scene climaxes the action at all the levels of meaning that have
been established. As has been suggested, it portrays at the moral level
Shylock's
degradation to a cur and a monster through his commitment to revenge, and
by
contrast, Antonio's attainment of the fullness of Christian love
through his
abjuration of revenge. Allegorically, the scene develops the sharpest opposition
of Old Law and New in terms of their respective theological principles, Justice
and Mercy, Righteousness and Faith; it culminates in the final defeat of the
Old Law and the symbolic conversion of the Jew.
Throughout the first portion of Act IV, until Portia begins the dramatic
reversal with the words, "Tarry a little, there is something else-" (IV. i. 301),
the action is simply a debate between Old Law and New in terms of Justice and
Mercy-but that debate is carried forth in a dual frame of reference. The phrase
in the Lord's Prayer rendered by both the Bishops and the Geneva Bibles as
"Forgeve us our dettes, as we forgeve our detters", is alluded to twice in this
scene, making the debtor's trial in the court of Venice a precise analogue of the
sinner's trial in the court of Heaven. The Duke inquires of Shylock, "How shalt
thou hope for mercy rend'ring none?" (IV. i. 88), and Portia reiterates, "Though
justice be thy plea, consider this, / That in the course of justice, none of us /
Should see salvation: we do pray for mercy, / And that same prayer, doth teach
us all to render / The deeds of mercy" (IV. i. i94-i98). In his Exposition of the
Lord's Prayer a contemporary clergyman, William Perkins,29 works out a
similar analogy: "For even as a debt doth binde a man, either to make satis-
faction, or els to goe to prison: so our sinnes bindes us either to satisfie Gods
justice, or else to suffer eternall damnation." Shylock is referred for this analogy
not only to the Lord's Prayer but also to his own tradition: Portia's language
(IV.i.i8o ff.) echoes also certain Old Testament psalmists and prophets whose
pleas for God's mercy were explained by Christian exegetes as admissions of the
inadequacies of the Law and testimonies of the need for Christ.80 For example
the striking image, "Mercy ... droppeth as a gentle rain from Heaven upon the
place beneath", echoes Ecclesaisticus xxv. i, "0 how fayre a thyng is mercy in
the tyme of anguish and trouble: it is lyke a cloud of rayne that commeth in the
tyme of drought." This reference should also remind Shylock of the remarkable
parallel to the Lord's Prayer contained in a
passage following close upon this
one: "He that seeketh vengeance, shal finde vengeance of the Lord.... / For-
geve thy neyghbour the hurt that he hath donne thee, and so shal
thy sinnes be
forgeven thee also when thou prayest / .... He that sheweth no mercie to a
29
Cambridge, i605, p. 410.
30
See Psalms 103, 136, 143. With reference to such passages, Henrie Bullinger declares (Fiftie
Godlie and Learned Sermons, trans. H. I., London, 1587, p. 403), "The ancient Saints which lived
under the old testament, did not seeke for righteousness and salvation in the works of the lawe, but
in him which is the perfectnes and ende of the law, even Christ Jesus."
BIBLICAL ALLUSION AND ALLEGORY IN THE MERCHANT OF VENICE
339
man which is lyke himselfe, how dare he aske forgevenesse of his sinnes"
(Ecclus. xxiii. I-24).31
Through these allusions, Antonio's predicament in the courtroom of Venice
is made to suggest traditional literary and iconographical presentations of the
"Parliament of Heaven" in which fallen man was judged. Both sides agree that
Antonio's bond (like the sinner's) is forfeit according to the law, and that the
law of Venice (like that of God) cannot be abrogated. Shylock constantly
threatens, "If you deny me, fie upon your law" (IV. i. ioi), and Portia concurs,
"there is no power in Venice / Can alter a decree established" (IV. i. 2I4-2I5).
The only question then is whether the law must be applied with strictest justice,
or whether mercy may somehow temper it. In the traditional allegory of the
Parliament of Heaven,32 Justice and Mercy, as the two principal of the four
"daughters" of God, debate over the judgement to be meted out to man; Launce-
lot Andrewes in his version of the debate33 aligns these figures with the Old
Law and the New respectively-"Righteousnesse, she was where the Law was
(for, that, the rule of righteousnesse) where the Covenant of the Old Testament
was, doe this and live (the very voyce of Justice)", whereas "The Gentiles they
claim by Mercy, that is their virtue." So in the trial scene Shylock as the embodi-
ment of the Old Law represents Justice: "I stand for Judgment. .. . I stand here
for Law" (IV. i. I03, I42), whereas Portia identifies herself with that "Quality
of Mercy" enthroned by the New Law. Also, another conception of the Heavenly
Court is superadded to this by means of several references during the trial to
Shylock as Devil (IV. i. 2I3, 283). The scene takes on something of the signifi-
cance of the trial described in the medieval drama, the Processus Belial, in which
the Devil claims by justice the souls of mankind due him under the law, and the
Virgin Mary intercedes for man by appealing to the Mercy of God.34
In either formulation, the demands of Justice and Mercy are reconciled only
through the sacrifice of Christ, who satisfies the demands of justice by assuming
the debts of mankind, and thus makes mercy possible. Therefore it is not sur-
prising that the courtroom scene also evokes something of the crucifixion scene-
as the moment of reconciling these opposed forces, as the time of defeat for the
Old Law, as the prime example of Christian Love and the object of Christian
Faith. Both plot situation and language suggest a typical killing of Christ by
the Jew. Antonio, baring his breast to shed his blood for the debt of another,
continues the identification with Christ occasionally suggested at other points in
the play. Shylock's cry, "My deeds upon my head" (IV. i. 202) clearly suggests
the assumption of guilt by the Jews at Christ's crucifixion-"His blood be on us,
and on our children" (Matt. xxvii. 25)-and his later remark, "I have a daughter
-
/ Would any of the stock of Barrabas / Had been her husband, rather than a
Christian" (IV. i. 29I-293) recalls the Jews' choice of the murderer Barrabas over
Christ as the prisoner to be released at Passover (Matt. xxvii. I6-2I). A similar
fusion of the symbols of debtor's court and crucifixion occurs in a Christmas
sermon by Launcelot Andrewes on Gal. iii. 4-5:
If one be in debt and danger of the Law, to have a Brother of the same
31
Bishops Bible
32
For a resume of this tradition see Samuel C. Chew, The Virtues Reconciled (Toronto, 147).
33
"Christmas, i6i6", XCVI Sermons, 3rd Edn. (London, I635), p. I04.
34
See John D. Rea, "Shylock and the Processus Belial", PQ, VIII (Oct., I 929), 3 I I -3I3.
340
SHAKESPEARE
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bloud ... will little avail him, except he will also come under the Law, that
is, become his Surety, and undertake for him. And such was our estate. As
debtors we were, by vertue of . . . the handwriting that was against us.
Which was our Bond, and we had forfeited it.... Therefore Hee became
bound for us also, entred bond anew, took on Him, not only our Nature,
but our Debt.... The debt of a Capitall Law is Death.35
Throughout the action thus far described, Shylock has persistantly denied
pleas to temper justice with mercy-to forgive part of the debt, to accept three
times the value of the debt rather than the pound of flesh, or even to supply a
doctor "for charity" to stop Antonio's wounds. His perversity is rooted in his
explicit denial of any need to "deserve" God's mercy by showing mercy to others,
for he arrogates to himself the perfect righteousness which is the standard of he
Old Law-"What judgment shall I dread doing no wrong?" (IV. i. 89). Accord-
ingly, after Portia's "Tarry a little", the action of the scene works out a systematic
destruction of that claim of righteousness, using the laws of Venice as symbol.
Shylock is shown first that he can claim nothing by the law: his claim upon
Antonio's flesh is disallowed by the merest technicality. This reflects the Chris-
tian doctrine that although perfect performance of the Law would indeed merit
salvation, in fact fallen man could never perfectly observe it, any more than
Shylock could take Antonio's flesh without drawing blood. According to Paul,
Romans iii.
9-i2,
"all, both Jewes and Gentiles are under sinne, / . . . There is
none righteous, no not one.
/.
. . there is none that doth good, no not one. /
Therefore by the workes of the Law shal no flesh be justified in his sight". Next,
Shylock is shown that in claiming the Law he not only gains nothing, but stands
to lose all that he possesses and even life itself. He becomes subject to what Paul
terms the "curse" of the Law, since he is unable to fulfill its conditions: "For as
many as are of the workes of the Lawe, are under the curse: for it is written,
Cursed is every man that continueth not in all things, which are written in the
booke of the Lawe, to do them" (Gal. iii. io).
The names applied to and assumed by Portia during the trial reinforce these
meanings. When Portia gives judgment at first in
Shylock's favor, he cries out,
"A Daniel come to judgment: yea, a Daniel! / 0 wise young judge", in obvious
reference to the apocryphal Book of Susanna, wherein the young Daniel con-
founded the accusors of Susanna, upholding thereby the justice of the Law. The
name, Daniel, which means in Hebrew, "The Judge of the Lord", was glossed
in the Elizabethan Bibles as "The Judgment of God"."6 But the name carries
other implications as well, which Shylock ironically forgets. Portia has assumed
the name "Balthasar" for the purposes
of her
disguise, and the name given to
the prophet Daniel in the Book of Daniel is Baltassar-a similarity hardly
accidental.37 According to Christian exegetes, Daniel in this book foreshadows
the Christian tradition by his explicit denial of any claim upon God by righteous-
ness, and his humble appeal for mercy: "O my God, encline thyne eare, &
hearken, open thyne eyes, beholde howe we be desolated . . . for we doo not
present our prayers before thee in our owne righteousnesse, but in thy great
35
"Christmas i609", XCVI Sermons, p. 28.
86
See glossary, Geneva Bible.
37
The slight variation may be due to imperfect memory: the king whom Daniel served was
named Balthasar.
BIBLICAL ALLUSION AND ALLEGORY IN THE MERCHANT OF VENICE
341
mercies" (Daniel iX. I8).*8 These implications greatly enrich the irony when
Gratiano flings the title back in Shylock's face-"A second Daniel, a Daniel,
Jew" (IV. i. 329).
Shylock's "forced conversion" (a gratuitous addition made by Shakespeare
to the source story in Ii Pecorone) must be viewed in the context of the symbolic
action thus far described. Now that Shylock's claim to legal righteousness has
been totally destroyed, he is made to accept the only alternative to it, faith in
Christ. Paul declares (Gal. ii.i6), "A man is not justified by the workes of the
Lawe, but by the fayth of Jesus Christ", and a note in the Bishops Bible explains,
"Christ hath fulfylled the whole lawe, and therefore who so ever beleeveth in
him, is counted just before God, as wel as he had fulfylled ye whole law him
selfe." Thus the stipulation for Shylock's conversion, though it of course assumes
the truth of Christianity, is not antisemitic revenge: it simply compels Shylock
to avow what his own experience in the trial scene has fully "demonstrated"-
that the Law leads only to death and destruction, that faith in Christ must
supplant human righteousness. In this connection it ought to be noted that
Shylock's pecuniary punishment under the laws of Venice precisely parallels the
conditions imposed upon a Jewish convert to Christianity throughout most of
Europe and also in England during the Middle Ages and after. All his property
and goods, as the ill-gotten gain of usury, were forfeit to the state upon his
conversion, but he was customarily allotted some proportion (often half) of his
former goods for his maintenance, or else given a stipend or some other means
of support.Y9
There is some evidence that Shylock himself in this scene recognizes the
logic which demands his conversion, though understandably he finds this too
painful to admit explicitly. His incredulous question "Is that the law" (IV. i.
309)
when he finds the law invoked against him, shows a new and overwhelming
consciousness of the defects of legalism. Also, he does not protest the condition
that he become a Christian as he protested the judgment (soon reversed) which
would seize all his property: his brief "I am content" suggests, I believe, not
mean-spiritedness but weary acknowledgement of the fact that he can no longer
make his stand upon the discredited Law.
Indeed, Portia's final tactic-that of permitting the Law to demonstrate its
own destructiveness-seems a working out of Paul's metaphor of the Law as a
"Schoolemaster to bring us to Christ, that we might be made righteous by faith"
(Gal. iii. 24). The metaphor was utilized by all the major Christian theological
traditions, and received much the same interpretation in all of them:
The law was our pedagogue in Christ.... So also did he [God] wish to
give such a law as men by their own forces could not fulfill, so that, while
38
Bishops Bible. A note on this passage declares that it shows how "the godly flee only unto
gods mercies and renounce theyr owne workes when they seeke for remission of their sinnes." Cf.
Bullinger, Fiftie Sermons, p. 434: "And although they did not so usually call upon God as wee at
this day doe, through the mediatour and intercessour Christe Jesus . . . yet were they not utterly
ignorant of the mediatour, for whose sake they were heard of the Lord. Daniel in the ninth Chapter
of his prophecie maketh his prayer, and desireth to bee hearde of God for the Lordes sake, that is,
for the promised Christ his sake."
89
James Parkes, The Jew in the Medieval Community (London, I938), pp. IOI-I46; Michael
Adler, Jews of Medieval England (London, I939), pp. 280-334; Cecil Roth, A History of the Jews
in England (Oxford, I949), p. 96.
342
SHAKESPEARE
QUARTERLY
presuming on their own powers, they might find themselves to be sinners,
and,
being humbled, might
have recourse to the
help
of
grace. (Aquinas)40
Another use of the law is . . . to reveale unto a man his sinne, his blindnes,
his misery, his
impietie, ignoraunce, hatred and contempt of God, death,
hel, the judgment and deserved wrath of God to the end that God might
bridle and beate down this monster and this madde beaste (I meane the pre-
sumption of mans own righteousness) . . [and drive] them to Christ.
(Luther)4'
Some . . . from too much confidence either in their own strength or in
their own righteousness, are unfit to receive the grace of Christ till they
have first been stripped of every thing. The law, therefore, reduces them to
humility by a knowledge of their own misery, that thus they may be pre-
pared to pray for that of which they before supposed themselves not desti-
tute. (Calvin)42
And, from the contemporary sermon literature the following commentaries are
typical:
The law... was given because of transgression. out of the which they
might learn the will of God, what sin, right, or unright is; and to know
themselves, to go into themselves, and to consider, how that the holy works
which God requireth are not in their own power; for the which cause all
the world have great need of a mediator.... Thus was the law our school-
master unto Christ. (Myles Coverdale)48
The law. . . . shewes us our sinnes, and that without remedy: it shewes us
the damnation that is due unto us: and by this meanes, it makes us despaire
of salvation in respect of our selves: & thus it inforceth us to seeke for helpe
out of our selves in Christ. The law is then our schoolemaster not by the
plaine teaching, but by stripes and corrections. (Perkins)44
T7hus Shylock, as representative of his entire race, having refused the earlier
opportunity to embrace voluntarily the principles of Christianity, must undergo
in the trial scene the harsh "Schoolmastership" of the Law, in order to be
brought to faith in Christ.
The Ring Episode and Belmont
The ring episode is, in a sense, a comic parody of the trial scene-it provides
a means whereby Bassanio may make at least token fulfillment of his offer to
give "life itself, my wife, and all the world" (IV. i. 280) to deliver Antonio. The
ring is the token of his possession of Portia and all Belmont: in offering it Portia
declared, "This house, these servants, and this same myself / Are yours . . . I
40
Summa Theologica, H1I. Ques. 98. Art. 2, in Basic Writings, ed. Anton Pegis (N. Y., I944),
p. 809.
41 A Commentarie of M. Doctor Martin Luther upon the Epistle of S. Paul to the Galathians
(London, Thomas Vautroullier, 1575), n.p.
42
Institutes of the Christian Religion, II, Chap. 7, trans. John Allen (Philadelphia, Pa., I936),
I, 388.
43
"The Old Faith", trans. by Myles Coverdale from H. Bullinger. I547, Writings and Transla-
tons, ea. George Pearson (Cambridge,
IN44),
pp. 42-43.
44
A Commentarie, or Exposition upon the first five chapters of the Epistle to Galatians (London,
i6I7), p. 200. See also, John Donne, Sermon I7, Sermons, ed. E. Simpson and G. Potter, VI
(Berkeley, Calif., I953), 334-345; John Colet, An Exposition of St. Paul's Epistle to the Romans,
1497, trans. J. H. Lupton (London, I873), pp. I-I8.
BIBLICAL ALLUSION AND ALLEGORY IN THE MERCHANT OF VENICE
343
give them with this ring, / Which when you part from, lose, or give away, / Let
it presage the ruin of your love, / And be my vantage to exclaim on you"
(III. ii. I70-I74). So that in giving the ring to the "lawyer" Balthasar-which he
does only at Antonio's bidding-Bassanio surrenders his "claim" to all these
gifts, even to Portia's person, and is therefore taunted at his return with her
alleged infidelity. But Belmont is the land of the spirit, not the letter, and
therefore after Bassanio has been allowed for a moment to feel his loss, the
whole crisis dissolves in laughter and amazement as Antonio again binds
himself (his soul this time the forfeit) for Bassanio's future fidelity, and Portia
reveals her own part in the affair. At the moral level, this pledge and counter
pledge by Bassanio and Antonio continue the "venture" metaphor and further
exemplify the willingness to give all for love. At the allegorical level, despite the
lighthearted treatment, Bassanio's comic "trial" suggests the "judgment"
awaiting the Christian soul as it presents its final account and is found deficient.
But Love, finally, is the fulfillment of the Law and covers all defects-Bassanio's
(Everyman's) love in giving up everything, in token at least, for Antonio, and
Antonio's (Christ's) love toward him and further pledge in his behalf.
Belmont functions chiefly at the anagogical level (if one may invoke the
term): it figures forth the Heavenly City. Jessica points to this analogy explicitly
-"It is very meet / The Lord Bassanio live an upright life / For having such a
blessing in his lady, / He finds the joys of heaven here on earth" (III. v. 67-70).
Here Gentile and Jew, Lorenzo and Jessica, are united in each other's arms,
talking of the music of the spheres:
How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank!
Look how the floor of heaven
Is thick inlaid with patens of bright gold,
There's not the smallest orb which thou behold'st
But in his motion like an angel sings,
Still quiring to the young-eye'd cherubins;
Such harmony is in immortal souls (V. i. 54, 58-63)
And Portia's allusion upon returning, "Peace!-how the moon sleeps with
Endymion, / And would not be awak'd" (V. i. i08-i09) also suggests eternity,
for Diana, enamoured of Endymion's beauty, caused him to sleep forever on
Mount Latmos. In Belmont all losses are restored and sorrows end: Bassanio
wins again his lady and all Belmont; Antonio is given a letter signifying that
three of his argosies are returned to port richly laden; and Lorenzo receives the
deed naming him Shylock's future heir. Lorenzo's exclamation, "Fair ladies,
you drop manna in the way of starving people", together with the reference to
"patens" in the passage quoted above, sets up an implied metaphor of the
heavenly communion. Here all who have cast their bread upon the waters in the
"ventures" of Christian love receive the reward promised:
Whoever shall forsake houses, or brethren, or sisters, or father, or mother,
or wife, or children, or landes, for my names sake,
hee shal receive an
hundreth folde more, and shal inherite everlasting life (Matt. XIX.:29).
Brown University
George Washington University
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