Merchant machine: reaping Shakespeare’s minor cash

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis essay reads Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice as a machine: a machine made of connectors, disruptors, reversible engines and agentive parts. Starting from a minor detail in the play (from the inscription inside Gratiano’s ring, or ‘cutler’s poetry’), it attends to the non-separability between form and expression as conceptualized by Deleuze and Guattari in Kakfa. Towards a Minor Literature. Partly based on Nicholas Royle’s resistance to finding ‘puns and quibbles’ in Shakespeare, it revisits language as asemiotic sound-design from an intermedial angle, connecting a critique of signs to the becoming-animal. It interrogates the play’s semiotic and machinic breakdowns and stutterings, and connects Shakespeare’s writing machine to its exterior – to its ‘outside’: to the reversible name of Shakespeare, broken into molecules, reverse-engineered into a proto-venture capitalist’s schizoname – linking the playwright’s name to the way Deleuze and Guattari read capitalism as a social machine in Anti-Œdipus.