Calculating Shylock: Commerce, Captivity, and the Free-Born Subject

Abstract

This essay argues that George Granville's adaptation of The Merchant of Venice (1701) exploited the significance of imperiled liberty to Shakespeare's original play. The drama around Shylock acquired both a new shape and sharpened significance, the essay proposes, in relation to changing ideas about individual and collective freedom—questions that recent developments supplied with both acutely personal and more broadly politicized significance for early eighteenth-century theatergoers. Building upon precedents including John Dryden's Amboyna (1673) and Thomas Southerne's Oroonoko (1695), the adaptation of Shakespeare's play that held the stage for the opening decades of the eighteenth century appeared at a moment of expanding global commerce as well as the pervasive unfreedom, bondage, and violence that was the corollary of that trade. At a moment when appeals to English liberty were ever more trenchantly asserted, even as unfreedom became more pervasive and stringently enforced, the adapted play channeled the dynamics of Shakespeare's drama, this essay sets out to show, into an affirmative staging of the English subject, in which freedom appeared as an undisputed but precariously maintained birthright in ways that looked back to Magna Carta and ahead to the American Declaration of Independence.