/lit/ - Literature

The portraiture of the tragedian is always an expression of a desirous flux that inevitably sweeps across the society. Written after, and possibly in reaction to, Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta, Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice is such a portrait. It is an interrogation of usury: its individual and social consequents; its political, religious and philosophical arguments.

Aristotle condemned usury; for money was intended to be used in exchange, but not to increase at interest, and this birth of money from money, whereby the offspring is identical to the parent, is thus the most unnatural mode of money-making.1 Saint Thomas Aquinas denounces money-lending as a sin of injustice; for the use and ownership of the thing must not be reckoned apart from the thing itself.2 Yet Aquinas does recognise the lawful argument to exact compensation for a loan, where the value of that compensation cannot be measured by money – benevolence, love for the lender, and so on.3

Il Sommo Poeta, Dante Alighieri, places sodomites and usuers in the same seventh circle of hell in his Divina Commedia. For both the sodomite and usurer commit unnatural and sterile actions, and are thus condemned to an endless sand and scorched by a rain of flames; barren actions have bred barren punishment.4

The beginning of the twelfth century brought a resurgence of trade with Constantinople and the Orient to the Italian cities upon the Adriatic Sea, especially Venice. This growth of wealth revived banking in these cities, and the financial patterns of the classical world quickly recurred. At first, bankers respected the juridical principles of the Romans and conducted lawful trade; they wholly avoided the illicit use of demand deposits. Only time deposits – loaned money from the banker’s perspective – was used or lent by bankers.5

Nevertheless, bankers gradually succumbed to the temptation of abusing demand deposits. The banks degenerated into the resumption of fractional reserves. The authorities were unable and unwilling to enforce the legal principles; for they derived personal and governmental benefits by their encouragement and privileging of improper banking.

The marbleous splendour of Shakespeare’s Venice is founded upon such usury. The Merchant of Venice is thus an inquiry into the economic interactions of Antonio, the titular merchant; Shylock, the usurer; and Portia, the landlord. For the shift from feudalism to mercantilism was simultaneously a movement from a ritual to a market system of social organisation. Shakespeare’s Venetian portrait is midway through this shift; its characters in various stages of apprehension as these witness the unfettering of individuals from the constraints of ritual.