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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 December 2020
A study of two motifs—prodigality and time—may help to reveal some of the meanings of The Merchant of Venice. Scornful of generosity, Shylock sees Bassanio and Antonio as prodigals, and thus he resembles somewhat the self-satisfied elder brother of the parable of the Prodigal Son. Bassanio's prodigality is in harmony with time; he does not calculate, as Shylock does, but acts intuitively, and because his wants are “ripe” he reaps a reward. Two examples: though he plans to attend a masque, to the audience's surprise he suddenly seizes the moment and departs for Belmont when the wind changes; at Belmont, in contrast to Morocco and Aragon, who offer reasons for their choices, Bassanio offers no reason for choosing as he does, except that the lead casket “moves” him. Such uncalculated responses to the present moment are fruitful, in contrast to the usurer's calculations about the future, and especially in contrast to the usurer's practice of risking nothing while (in Elizabethan terminology) “selling time.”
1 All quotations from The Merchant of Venice are from the Signet Classic edition by Kenneth My rick (New York: New American Library, 1965).
2 Admittedly, my comments on Bassanio's abrupt departure proceed from the assumption that there must be a point. The only explanation I have heard is that Shakespeare here altered his plot and did not bother to expunge the earlier (and, in this view, superfluous) references to the masque.
3 Wilson, A Discourse Upon Usury, introd. R. H. Tawney (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1925), p. 271.
4 Essays, ed. Samuel Harvey Reynolds (Oxford: Clarendon, 1890), p. 292.
5 There may be a complication here, or, rather, a bit later when the idea is reintroduced. To Shylock's assertion that Antonio has called him dog and has spat upon him, Antonio replies, “I am as like to call thee so again, / To spet on thee again, to spurn thee too. / If thou wilt lend this money, lend it not / As to thy friends—for when did friendship take / A breed for barren metal of his friend?— / But lend it rather to thine enemy, / Who if he break, thou mayst with better face / Exact the penalty.” The distinction between free lending to friends and lending at usury to enemies, where apparently money may legitimately breed, may be indebted to the controversy over the significance of Deuteronomy xxiii.19–20, which in part says, “Unto a stranger thou mayest lend upon usury; but unto thy brother thou shalt not lend upon usury.” Renaissance treatises on usury regularly fret about whether or not the distinction still exists, all men now perhaps being brothers in Christ. See Benjamin N. Nelson, The Idea of Usury (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1949). On this business of the barrenness of gold and silver, Frank Kermode (“The Mature Comedies,” in Stratford-upon-Avon Studies 3: Early Shakespeare, ed. John Russell Brown and Bernard Harris, London: Edward Arnold, 1961, pp. 222–23) has a shrewd comment: “Bassanio, rejecting the barren metals which appear to breed, avoids the curse of barrenness himself (for that is the punishment of failure).”
