Shylock as Homo Sacer?: Mercantilist Fallacies and Subjective Demand in The Merchant of Venice

Abstract

The Merchant of Venice perhaps rivals King Lear as the Shakespearean play that has most often been interpreted as an allegory of economic transition. Typical transitional readings of Merchant posit an ideological opposition between two broadly defined economic modes of production, and then locate the principal characters along these ideological axes. In the most sophisticated, counterintuitive of such readings, Walter Cohen argues that Antonio, the usurious merchant-financier, is the “harbinger of modern capitalism,” while Shylock is a retrograde, neo-feudal figure: “marginal, diabolical, irrational, archaic, medieval.”1 More recently, John Drakakis has argued that Shylock contradictorily embodies seigneurial and capitalistic qualities: “Shylock looks both backwards and forwards in the play. It is this double perspective that obscures what we think of as the passage to modernity, since it both challenges and facilitates a secular teleology.”2 Eric Mallin has complicated things further, suggesting that Shylock’s capitalist ethos manifests itself in his ability to realize a Christian “plutocratic fantasy” of extravagant spending.3KeywordsObjective TheoryPrice TheorySymbolic CapitalSubjectivist TheoryGift ExchangeThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.