Not to take the term in too narrowly confessional a sense we may identify three Puritans in Shakespeare: they are Shylock, Malvolio, and Angelo. The problem of usury in Shakespeare's time, dramatized in the relation of Shylock to Antonio, is one that had arisen specifically as a result of the new Calvinist social ethics. The capitalist individualism of Shylock and his distance from the aristocratic world of Belmont indicate that he represents to an important degree the new Puritan middle class and their problems. 'Lord Angelo', we are told, is 'precise', i.e., a precisian. As for Malvolio, he is indeed once actually named a Puritan by Maria (though she soon afterwards modifies the charge) but even without this we would have recognized him as a Puritan by his kill-joy attitude to the Twelfth Night celebrations of the merry folk. ' Thinkst thou because thou art virtuous there shall be no more cakes and ale'-could stand as a warning against what Puritanism threatened to do in the seventeenth century to the tradition of Merrie England.