Tag: Venice

  • Marx and Shakespeare: The Merchant of Venice

    Marx and Shakespeare: The Merchant of Venice

    Farewell; and if my fortune be not crossed,
    I have a father, you a daughter, lost.

    —Jessica, Act 2, Scene 5.

    It is known that Timon of Athens was Karl Marx’s favourite Shakespeare play, due to its powerful treatment of the effect of money on our individual lives. It is referenced extensively in Marx’s Philosophic and Economic Manuscripts and also makes an appearance in Capital. The Merchant of Venice is the runner up for many of the same reasons: it animates Marx’s observations about money, anti-Semitism, the social relations of capitalism, and it earns multiple citations throughout his work.

    The Merchant of Venice ranks among Shakespeare’s “problem plays”—it is officially labelled a comedy but the justification for this is mainly the absence of a death toll typical of Shakespearean tragedies. In the Elizabethan era a comedy meant a happy ending; a story without loose ends and where harmony prevails. Like every Shakespeare play, The Merchant of Venice has humorous plot devices. But it is a serious meditation on the economic relations and financial precarity of Renaissance Europe, as illustrated by a cast of duplicitous characters who plunge headlong into an uncertain future.

    Venetian Waves

    First there is the titular merchant of Venice, Antonio, who has his capital invested in ships importing goods from afar. His friend Bassanio is handsome but cash-poor. He requires a loan from Antonio in order to travel to Belmont and court Portia, the wealthy heiress of the manor. With Antonio’s money at sea, he turns to the Jewish usurer, Shylock, for a loan that he can give to Bassanio. Here we learn that Antonio has often publicly abused and insulted Shylock on account of his Jewish identity. For this, Shylock is willing to forgo interest on the loan but demands a pound of flesh from Antonio should he default. At the same time, Shylock’s daughter Jessica is preparing to abandon her Jewish faith and the legal restrictions that go with it. She steals her father’s ducats and jewelry, elopes with Lorenzo and the pair abscond to Belmont as part of Bassanio’s entourage. 

    In Belmont, Portia’s deceased father has set up a sort of lottery of caskets that Portia’s potential suitors must win. Despite this, Portia is a woman with a lot of agency in the story which is a pleasant departure from the stifling patriarchal air of a play like Othello. Portia manipulates her suitors to her liking and subtly aids Bassanio to the correct choice of casket so that he wins her hand. She favours Bassanio because she sees him as pliable, lacking fancy hereditary titles or a fortune of his own. We then learn of great misfortune striking Antonio—all three of his ships at sea have met with doom, leaving him vulnerable to his bond with Shylock. 

    When Shylock drags Antonio to the Duke of Venice’s court to acquire his pound of flesh, Portia arrives in disguise to adjudicate the case. Through rhetorical trickery and technical loopholes, she absolutely devastates Shylock, as he is denied his pound of flesh and is stripped of all his wealth. He is also subject to a forced conversion to Christianity, rendering him socially and economically destitute. She saves Antonio but it is implied that Portia has had a hand in manipulating events when she produces a letter stating that all three of Antonio’s ships had arrived safely to port after all.1 We learn that Lorenzo had an eye on Shylock’s money when pursuing Jessica, just as Bassanio had an eye to Portia’s wealth when pursuing her. Antonio exits the play alone and isolated from his newly-wedded friends.

    “On The Jewish Question”

    The character that has attracted the most controversy in The Merchant of Venice is undoubtedly Shylock. A Jewish usurer hungry for the Christian blood of Antonio has provoked much discomfort in post-World War II audiences allergic to overcooked stereotypes around moneylending and blood libels. But Shylock is anything but a one-dimensional caricature. Shakespeare endows him with a humanity and honesty that is unique amongst the characters of the play and this makes sympathy toward his plight difficult to resist:

    He hath disgraced me, and hindered me half a million;
    laughed at my losses, mocked at my gains, scorned my nation,
    thwarted my bargains, cooled my friends, heated mine enemies—
    and what’s his reason? I am a Jew.
    Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions;
    fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons,
    subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means,
    warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is?
    If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh?
    If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?
    If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that.
    If a Jew wrong a Christian, what is his humility? Revenge. 
    If a Christian wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be by Christian example? Why, revenge.2

    Although Jews have worn a certain money-grubbing stereotype thanks to the material realities of the Middle Ages, Shakespeare endows Shylock with a transparency of intentions absent in the other characters of the play. He has an integrity that contrasts sharply with Antonio, Bassanio, Jessica, Lorenzo and Portia, who are all prone to degrees of hypocrisy: they marry for money, they engage in theft, they seek loans from those they abuse, they leverage their fortune to manipulate others.3 Shylock points out the hypocrisy of Christian society in general, as attendees of the Duke’s court sit in possession of involuntarily enslaved humans yet cast judgement on his voluntarily signed, mutually agreed upon contract. 

    It has been pointed out that Renaissance England did not have Jewish moneylenders but they did have Italian ones and they were much loathed: “It was not axiomatic to an Elizabethan theatre audience that Italian merchants were more economically virtuous than Jews; Robert Wilson had a good deal of success in the 1580s and 1590s with The Three Ladies of London, a play that pitted a morally upright Jewish merchant against a thoroughly unscrupulous Venetian.”4

    Through the play, Shakespeare reveals that Jews and Christians are at least as equal in ethics as they are in body. In doing so, he renders the foamy saliva and slurs hurled at the Venetian Jews of his play to be completely unjust.

    Marx, separated from the Renaissance by centuries, was writing during a period of heightened anti-Semitism in Germany and across Europe. Although he had a rabbinical heritage, his family was forced to convert to Christianity so that his father could evade a ban on Jews practicing law. Like Shakespeare, Marx recognized this social discrimination to be unjust, with anti-Semitism only masking a collective distaste toward the capitalist economy and predatory finance. 

    Scapegoating as Capitalist Projection

    In Capital, Marx twice likens the capitalist seeking the sweat of labour to Shylock seeking his pound of flesh: “Aye his heart. So says the bond.” Marx also delivers one of his most misunderstood lines in Chapter Four: “The capitalist knows that all commodities, however scurvy they may look, or however badly they may smell, are in faith and in truth money, inwardly circumcised Jews, and what is more, a wonderful means whereby out of money to make more money.” 

    Marx’s reference to “inwardly circumcised Jews” is a direct citation of Romans 2:29 in the New Testament: a Christian, a follower of Jesus, is circumcised by an inward, spiritual cut to the heart instead of the genitals.5 Similarly, commodity production and trade seeks an inner value that will express itself in surplus.6

    Surplus value is what Antonio needs his ships to deliver and it is what every capitalist needs to reproduce their class. Marx makes this analogy in order to emphasize the universal profit motive of capitalist commodity production. Marx and Shakespeare converge on the idea that profit-seeking is not some noxious Jewish attribute—it’s capitalism.

    By setting his play in Venice, the commercial capital of Renaissance Europe, Shakespeare had foreshadowed the total conquest of commerce over global society. The result is a world where, in Marx’s words: “Money is the pimp between need and object, between life and man’s means of life…Money appears as an inverting power in relation to the individual and to those social and other bonds which claim to be essences in themselves. It transforms loyalty into treason, love into hate, hate into love, virtue into vice, vice into virtue, servant into master, master into servant, nonsense into reason, and reason into nonsense.”7

    As we observe in our own world, so it is in The Merchant of Venice. Marriages, familial bonds, friendships and even hatreds are all mediated by the need of money. With money as our pimp, the reduction of individuals into venal objects can always be justified. Morality is inextricably bound to how we collectively produce and reproduce our lives. It is not the characters of The Merchant of Venice who are amoral—it is the economic system that produces them.

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    1. Robin Russin, “The Triumph of the Golden Fleece: Women, Money, Religion and Power in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice,” Shofar Vol. 31, No. 3: 124. ↩︎

    2. See Act 3, Scene 1. ↩︎

    3. For Antonio is full of hubris when he offers a pound of flesh to secure a loan against even Shylock’s advice; Bassanio and Lorenzo seek women to stabilize their financial standing and Portia uses her wealth to misinform Antonio about the fate of his ships, even going so far as to orchestrate a dramatic courtroom standoff where she casually destroys Shylock after a passionate speech about the value of mercy. ↩︎

    4. It is also worth noting that Shylock consistently forgoes profit in order to maintain the prospect of exacting revenge on Antonio for his abuse. Shylock is therefore much less “money hungry” than others in the play—including his daughter Jessica as well as Bassanio and Lorenzo. ↩︎

    5. From the New King James version of the Bible: “He is a Jew who is one inwardly; and circumcision is that of the heart, in the Spirit, not in the letter; whose praise is not from men but from God.” ↩︎

    6. Expressed in the formula: M-C…C’-M’ (money to commodity, commodity + surplus value to money + surplus value). The principal sum of money is thus transformed into a greater quantity. ↩︎

    7. Karl Marx, “The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844” in Essential Writings of Karl Marx (Red and Black Publishers, 2010): 137, 140. ↩︎
  • Marx and Shakespeare: Unracing Othello

    Marx and Shakespeare: Unracing Othello

    If virtue no delighted beauty lack,
    Your son-in-law is far more fair than black.

    —Duke of Venice, Act 1, Scene 3.

    The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice is a Shakespeare play that carries an echo of the European imagination that lasted beyond Karl Marx’s lifetime. “Moor” was a term used by Europeans to refer to the Muslim North Africans who had conquered and ruled the Iberian Peninsula between 711 and 1492. The Muslim population of Al-Andalus—modern day Spain and Portugal—were quite heterogeneous and did not use the Moor identifier themselves. Even after the Christian reconquest of the Iberian Peninsula, “Moor” was a common European designate applied to continental Africa and the Middle East.

    The term was derived from the ancient Roman province of Mauretania—modern day Morocco and Algeria— and it eventually came to denote virtually anyone of a darker complexion. Marx, a German and ethnic Ashkenazi, was nicknamed “the Moor” by friends and family owing to his swarthy skin tone, hair and eyes.

    The Moor label—applied to Marx but also by Shakespeare to his Othello title character—is emblematic of European perceptions of race as they evolved through centuries. Since the era of ancient Rome, people of North African, Middle Eastern and sub-Saharan African origin worked and lived in continental Europe. Yet “the ancients did not fall into the error of biological racism; black skin colour was not a sign of inferiority.”1

    The ancient world was hardly free of prejudice; individuals were judged harshly according to their occupation, cultural identity or status as citizens. But the concept of race did not exist and physical differences between groups were thought only to be the effects of climate on the human body. This view of race and ethnicity largely held through Europe’s medieval era and into Elizabethan England: “The theory of the humours, the basis of Elizabethan psychology, maintained that men were of different complexions, statures, and countenances of mind and body according to the climate of their birth.”2

    Lacking a social construction of race, ancient Rome based their in-group identity on citizenship. And medieval Europe and Renaissance England did much the same thing, only with Christianity as the defining in-group characteristic. This began to change in many parts of Europe during Shakespeare’s lifetime with the advent of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Othello therefore occupies a blurry space somewhere at the dividing line between the western religious sorting of peoples and the systematic racial categorization that would later come.

    A World of Sighs

    At the open, we learn that Othello has married Desdemona, the daughter of a Venetian senator. Othello descends from a vague “Moorish” nobility but lives as “a Christianized black in Venice” who has risen to the rank of an esteemed general in the Venetian military.3 Iago serves as Othello’s trusted ensign but he has an axe to grind: Othello has passed him over for the position of lieutenant in favour of Cassio. This enrages Iago but he carefully keeps his feelings hidden. With discretion, Iago alerts Desdemona’s father to her betrothal and appeals to him with charged language in order to rouse opposition: “You’ll have your daughter covered with a Barbary horse…I tell you your daughter and the Moor are making the beast with two backs.”4

    Desdemona’s father, betrayed by his daughter marrying without his permission, appeals to the Venetian senate to overturn the ceremony. However, the senators are not persuaded. Desdemona had married with full consent and besides, they require the “valiant Moor” to defend Cyprus from an invading Turkish fleet. Iago then embarks upon a set of hateful schemes designed to ruin Cassio’s reputation, snatch money from Roderigo and destroy Othello’s otherwise happy marriage to Desdemona.

    Iago holds the crown amongst Shakespeare’s villains because of the sociopathic manner in which he weaponizes the trust that other characters place in him. Eventually snared by his own web of lies, Iago’s malevolent nature is laid bare in the last act before a bed loaded with the lifeless bodies of Desdemona, Othello and even Emilia, Iago’s wife.

    There is exceptional wickedness displayed here, as Iago ruthlessly manipulates Desdemona, Emilia, Cassio and Roderigo in order to convince Othello that his wife was unfaithful to him. But interest in Othello lingers due to the uniqueness of Shakespeare’s choice of protagonist. Shakespeare did not invent the character of Othello whole-cloth; he was devised from a “Moorish” character in a short story by the Italian poet Cinthio. Shakespeare’s version leaves open the possibility that Othello is an Arab or Berber noble of some type, but there are also a number of references to Othello’s appearance that suggest a black complexion.5 This was a bold choice for Elizabethan audiences as only an estimated 300-500 Black people are thought to have resided in England over that period of time. 

    Bootless Grief

    Shakespeare takes measures to ensure that the foreign Othello is perceived favourably by his audience. He possesses a Christian identity, his nobility and rank bless him with a majesty of speech and his bravery in battle has earned him the respect of the Venetian ruling class.6 Even spiteful Iago acknowledges Othello’s virtues that would make him a good husband to Desdemona:

    The Moor, howbeit that I endure him not,
    Is of a constant, loving, noble nature,
    And I dare think he’ll prove to Desdemona
    A most dear husband.7

    When Othello capitulates to jealousy and slays Desdemona, the labour that Shakespeare undertook establishing his merits persuade the audience to interpret Othello’s horrendous act as contrary to his nature. It is Iago’s scheming that appropriates the blame for this crime and Othello’s motivations are not presented by Shakespeare as “different from any white husband.”8 The extremely patriarchal relations of Renaissance Europe are fully displayed in Othello, without question. But despite the use of vulgar language on the part of antagonistic characters, Othello is assuredly not a racist play.

    While Shakespeare lived in a time just prior to the establishment of the concept of race, by Marx’s age this terrible social construction had reached a zenith. It is difficult to imagine that a story like Othello could be devised during the Victorian era without being subsumed by the social relations of race. In Capital, Marx asserted that racism and the capitalist mode of production shared a common origin during the age of colonial exploitation:

    The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signalized the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production.9

    While Elizabethan society viewed Christianity as a positive civilizing force, by the Victorian era Marx found a Christian society that was completely subordinate to capital accumulation and its accordant crimes:

    The barbarities and desperate outrages of the so-called Christian race, throughout every region of the world, and upon every people they have been able to subdue, are not to be paralleled by those of any other race, however fierce, however untaught, and however reckless of mercy and of shame, in any age of the Earth.10

    Destructing the Construction

    We can therefore assert that race and racism is a byproduct of economic relations born from the spiral of capital accumulation which early on necessitated colonial subjugation, forced labour and abject slavery. The impoverishing impacts of these economic forces have had profound effects upon global society into the present day, where we remain haunted by these spectres of history. If race is a social construction burnished by the capitalist paradigm then its demolition can only commence with the creation a new economic order.

    It was the Nigerian-British poet Ben Okri who said it best: “If Othello did not begin as a play about race, then history has made it one.” Indeed, Othello’s own race is as shapeless as the concept was during Shakespeare’s lifetime. But the aspiration today cannot be a return to feudalism or mercantilism or the harsh economies of antiquity. 

    Concerning race-based slavery, Marx wrote: “Labour cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded.” Ending the systematic subjugation of labour along racial lines is one step of a larger emancipatory project. A society that does not sort individuals by race is one thing; a society that does not sort individuals by class is quite another.

    Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream of universal liberty will be seen through the eyes of a classless people that recognize the interconnectedness of the universe, of humanity, of all things living. Once the predatory fetters of competition are shed, cooperation will prevail by the motto: “The free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.”11

    Thanks for reading!


    1. Frank Snowden, Blacks in Antiquity: Ethiopians in the Greco-Roman Experience (Harvard University Press, 1970): 169. ↩︎

    2. Philip Butcher, “Othello’s Racial Identity” in Shakespeare Quarterly Vol. 3, No. 3: 246. ↩︎

    3. Peter Erickson, “Representations of Blacks and Blackness in the Renaissance” in Criticism Vol. 35, No. 4: 505. ↩︎

    4. Excerpts from Act 1, Scene 1. ↩︎

    5. Philip Butcher goes as far as saying that Othello is “undeniably black” in “Othello’s Racial Identity,” 247. ↩︎

    6. Russ McDonald writes, “Early-seventeenth century Europeans thought of Moors, Turks and Africans as pagan, but Othello is a Christian, a baptized convert whose Christianity is an important marker of his assimilation into Venice and the values of “civilization.” Russ McDonald, ed. Othello (Penguin, 2016): xxxvi. ↩︎

    7. From Act 2, Scene 3. ↩︎

    8. Ruth Vanita quoted in Rebecca Olson, “‘Too Gentle’: Jealousy and Class in Othello” in Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies Vol. 15, No. 1: 6. ↩︎

    9. Karl Marx, Capital Vol. One (Ancient Wisdom Publishing, 2019): 533. ↩︎

    10. Ibid, 534. Quoting W. Howitt. ↩︎

    11. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto. ↩︎