The Quality of Whiteness: The Thief of Bagdad and The Merchant of Venice

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article reads Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice through a framework of critical whiteness studies, addressing the invisibility by which whiteness operates as a racial formation. Using the Aarne-Thompson taxonomy of folk-tale types, it analyzes the structural parallels between Merchant and the hyperbolically Orientalist 1924 silent film The Thief of Bagdad, with which it shares the archetypal plot motif of the Suitor Test. In articulating the unacknowledged debts of both the silent film and the Shakespeare play to Islamic folklore, the article opens up a reading of Merchant in which Portia and Bassanio are made visible as figures of white feminine virtuousness and masculine entitlement. It argues that whiteness in The Merchant of Venice is dramatized as a way of being, a set of values and behaviors (hazarding with others’ resources, re-casting good luck as moral virtue) rewarded and celebrated in the text. The article culminates in a new reading of Portia’s “quality of mercy” speech as an apologia for nascent ideologies of whiteness in Shakespeare.