| This dissertation examines the significance of site in Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice. For three centuries England and Venice shared an enduring, though evolving, connection--shaped by religious, military, educational, economic, and diplomatic ties, and chronicled in contemporary travel accounts, private communications, diplomatic correspondence, and histories of the two states, as well as in modern research. By the 1590s, Venice experienced a pronounced ebb in her maritime and commercial prowess, a result of internal stasis and external incursions, particularly the audacious attacks by English pirates and privateers and England's legitimate usurpation of the Serenissima's trade routes. Recognizing England's rivalry with Venice, we profit in our examination of Shakespeare's Venice and his merchant. Even as he sketches the outlines of what, despite its frailties, was a universally recognized mercantile center of the age, Shakespeare draws Antonio, a representative of the Venetian commercial milieu, but even more a character indebted to Elizabethan London.;Rather than a culture whose every citizen participates in trade, this Venice harbors a distinctly hierarchical society. Instead of a Venetian royal merchant, equal or superior to all whom he encounters, Antonio appears far more likely the London trader, anxious to maintain a reputation as a "good" man and desirous of strengthening his ties with his more aristocratic companions. Contemporary documents illustrate the ambiguous position of the merchant in London and even, by this period, in Venice. They also confirm a merchant/usurer/Jew conflation current in Shakespeare's London and pertinent to the Christian merchant's struggle to distinguish himself from the Jewish usurer. In Belmont, the play's aristocratic purlieu, Antonio's isolation from his rich and idle companions achieves highest relief. From Portia he receives "both life and living," the opportunity to resume his business, a reassertion of his ties with commercial Venice and his irrevocable identity as merchant. In The Merchant of Venice we witness an illusory world colored by the quirks of trade, the virulence of racism, the complacencies of religion, the anxieties of class. Acknowledging the valuable perspective social and economic history offers, we come closer to understanding why Shakespeare created this Venice, a local habitation derived from two cultures in transition--an island city and an island nation. |
