Anxious householders: theft and anti-usury discourse in Shakespeare’s Venetian plays

Abstract

Usury occupies a centrality in early modern culture that no mere professional practice, however innovative or controversial, could have occupied. As recent scholarship has shown, the reason has to do with the fact that, in the final analysis, usury constitutes a mental disposition, a worldview. This article seeks to refine our understanding of the psychological phenomenon of usury by examining its troubled relationship with theft as enacted in Shakespeare’s Venetian plays. Both The Merchant of Venice and Othello link the usurious mindset to an anxious sense of dispossession: Shylock is represented as a householder whose paranoid concern with burglars has not been sufficiently emphasised; usurious Iago is revealed to act on a compulsive need to instil into his victims, most notably Othello, an equally irrational fear of theft. The article argues that the emergent monetary economy is thus associated with a nightmarish dread of deprivation that is shown to destabilise the domestic space of the oikos.