Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth (16 page)

There’s a whole genre of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama known as the Revenge Tragedy, and if you look at some of these plays you can see the principles of revenge in action. In general, the plots go in for overkill — quite literally — since one revenge leads to another, and the bodies pile up at an almost industrial rate. It’s not just tit for tat, it’s tit-for-tat for tit-for-tat for rat-a-tat-tat, as in the early crime stories of Dashiell Hammett. In previous chapters, I mentioned the trickle-down theory of wealth and the trickle-down theory of debt, but the Revenge Tragedy illustrates the trickle-down theory of revenge: relatively innocent bystanders get the stuff splashed all over them.
Hamlet
is among other things a Revenge Tragedy, but as usual Shakespeare takes something from elsewhere and redoes it in a surprising way: it’s the slowness of the revenge, not its rapidity, that results in the dead-body pyramid at play’s end.

Shakespeare also rewrites the Revenge Tragedy in
The Merchant of Venice
— a play so many-levelled and prickly that it’s still inspiring heated controversy today. It’s usual to say that every actor aspires to play Hamlet, but playing Shylock — who is either the hero or the villain of the piece, or possibly both, or neither — is arguably a greater challenge, for Shylock’s complexities are many, and they’ve become more complex over time. How to play Shylock after the Nazis? Indeed, how to play Shylock, now that the interest-charging for which he’s despised and reviled has become standard business practice?

The Merchant of Venice
has all those props we’ve come to recognize as integral to debtor/creditor balances, both moral and financial — going way back to the weighing of the heart by the Ancient Egyptians and to the goddess Justice hoisting her scales outside the courts of law, and proceeding to the pledge left with the pawnbroker, and to the dubious written contract. The action of the play turns on the borrowing of a sum of money, and on the peculiar collateral demanded, and on the notion of fairness.

Shylock is a Jew and a moneylender. Two strokes against him for an Elizabethan author, or so you’d think. But Shakespeare is a very dodgy writer: ambiguity is his middle name. Did he realize that Shylock and Antonio are each other’s Shadow figures? They are the only two characters who are left alone and uncoupled at the end of the play: everyone else marries someone. Are Antonio and Shylock married in a sense to each other? Unfortunately Shakespeare isn’t around to give author interviews, so we’ll never know.

The plot, insofar as it concerns a debt and the three main characters involved in this debt, is fairly simple. Antonio wishes to lend money to his friend Bassanio, but doesn’t have ready cash, so he stands security for a loan from a third party: the moneylender Shylock, his longtime enemy. But instead of a money guarantee, Shylock requires a pound of Antonio’s flesh, to be cut off next to his heart and weighed out in a scales if the loan isn’t repaid by the due date. The merchant ships Antonio was counting on for cash flow go astray, the due date arrives, and Shylock demands his pound of flesh. Even when offered three times the money instead — as the price of “redeeming” Antonio, so he won’t have to pay the forfeit of his life — Shylock still demands what’s written in the contract. Money is not the point here. Only revenge will do.

Portia — the wife Bassanio has won with the aid of Shylock’s money and his own wits — dresses up as a lawyer and pleads the case. First she urges mercy: the Jew must be merciful, she says. Shylock quite reasonably says, “Why must I?” Portia makes a lovely speech about mercy, which is however unconvincing, as such speeches usually are. Then she puts on her fine-print nitpicking lawyer boots: Shylock can have what’s been agreed to, she says, but not a tittle more: he must weigh out the flesh, but he can’t spill any blood, because it’s not in the contract.

Shylock thus gets neither the pound of flesh nor the sum of the original debt. Not only that, as an “alien” designing against the life of a Venetian, his own life is forfeit by law. Portia and the judge let him off that one, as long as he turns Christian. But he has to give half of his wealth to the state — so often the beneficiary in such judgements — and will the other half of his worldly goods to his disobedient and thieving runaway daughter, Jessica, and the Christian man she’s married.

Shylock isn’t a Faust figure: he’s made no pact with the Devil. There’s a stock miser figure that goes all the way back to Roman New Comedy and persists through the medieval morality play as the character who portrays the sin of covetousness, and then turns up again as the Pantalone of Venetian
commedia dell’arte
, and thence to Molière’s seventeenth-century play
The Miser
, but although Shylock shares a few of their outward characteristics, he isn’t one of these. Previous miser figures are miserly because they’re miserly, but Shylock is a Jew, and that changes much. From what I’ve said about the persecution of the Jews at the hands of rampaging mobs, it’s clear that Shylock has legitimate reasons to worry about whether his house and his worldly goods and his daughter are locked up tight. If I’d been Shylock, I’d have been cautious about doling out the house keys too.

Antonio is usually interpreted as a good guy because he lends money without charging interest, but why give him points on that? As a Christian in the play’s pretend “Venice” of that time, he wasn’t
allowed
to charge interest! He needn’t have lent any money at all, of course. So by lending it he’s undercutting Shylock’s business, but not as a business rival. He isn’t a business rival: he isn’t in the
business
of moneylending at all, since he doesn’t make anything by it. As far as I can see, he’s doing it out of antiSemitism. From the evidence in the play, he’s been acting viciously toward Shylock for some time, both in word and in deed. He has projected onto Shylock — as his Shadow — the malice and the greediness that he himself possesses but can’t acknowledge. He’s made Shylock his whipping boy. That’s why Shylock hates him — not just because he’s been bringing down the rate of exchange.

Shakespeare does spell such things out for us. In
Othello
, for instance, the key to Iago’s bad behaviour is in his name. Iago was the Spanish name for Saint James, who was known in Spain as Santiago the Moor-Killer. So Iago is a racist: that’s why he does what he does. And Antonio does what he does in the moneylending way not only out of good fellowship toward the lendees but out of spite and vengefulness toward Shylock and all Jewish moneylenders, and all Jews.

Playing Antonio is as much of a challenge as playing Shylock: how to show Antonio as a nice guy but still keep in view the underlying motives for Shylock’s vengeful actions as Shakespeare wrote them? Most productions downplay Antonio’s anti-Semitism and that of his pals, but Richard Rose’s version, presented at Stratford, Ontario, in 2007, gave this aspect its full due. Shylock was played by a Native North American, who didn’t go in for the whining and grovelling and overacting that in the past made Shylock a semi-comic though despicable character, but instead presented a dignified, withdrawn Shylock who’s been maimed and indeed driven somewhat crazy by the hatred of the society he’s had to function in — much as many a Native North American has been. I thought this approach made total sense of the play. Most critics didn’t like it, though: they so much wanted Antonio to be a regular fellow.

All three of the central characters violate the religions they purport to believe in. Antonio violates what is surely the central tenet of Christianity: love thy neighbour as thyself. Jesus pointedly told the story of the good Samaritan in this respect. Your neighbour wasn’t just your co-religionist —
neighbour
was a category that included even those with whom you were at theological odds. Shylock is Antonio’s neighbour, but Antonio does not treat him as such. As the old joke goes, “Christianity — great religion, just never been tried.” Shylock is right when he says he’s learned his vengefulness from the Christians that surround him: he has.

As for Shylock, he violates Mosaic law — the Deuteronomic law that says you shouldn’t take a man’s means of livelihood as pledge; that is, you can’t — as part of a loan deal — imperil his life. It’s a point Shylock himself makes at the end of the play, when he points out that Portia has deprived him of his power to make a living: “You take my life,” he says. “When you do take the means whereby I live.” This very same principle is incorporated in debt and bankruptcy law today — you can’t seize the tools necessary to a person’s trade or business. Shylock is twice so deprived: first, by the loss of his money — that is, his working capital, which is his toolkit — and second, by the stipulation that forces him to turn Christian, which cuts him off from the ability to charge interest.

Portia would seem to be the best of the threesome. She does make a lovely speech about mercy, which we had to memorize in high school — the one beginning “The quality of mercy is not strained.” Nobody told me “strained” meant “constrained,” that is, forced, compelled, or bound, so I came away with the image of a sieve, which I’ve had some difficulty getting rid of ever since.

The counterpart to this speech of Portia’s is Shylock’s famous speech:

I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions; fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, heal’d by the same means, warm’d and cool’d by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, do we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that.

When I studied this in school, I thought Shylock was saying he was just as good as everyone else, which isn’t quite accurate. Instead he is saying he’s just as human. His body is the same as a human body, and his vengefulness, too, is the same as that of other people.

Portia’s speech urges the claims of mercy over justice, and it sounds very sweet; but what it’s saying is, in effect, that Shylock has to be more merciful than everyone else has been to him. When Shylock can’t manage this, Portia undercuts her elevation of the quality of mercy by reverting to eye-for-an-eye tit-for-tattery justice, and more. True, some mercy does come out of the affair: Antonio is the one who seems to have had his vindictiveness blunted by his near-death experience, and Shylock remains alive; though how he will manage to make a living in future is an interesting question.

He must, however, be absolved of the charge of covetousness. He’s offered three times the sum of the debt to buy off the pound of flesh, and he refuses. He thus violates the code of business practice — make a profit, whatever else — as well as the Mosaic code of the redemption of pawned objects, and opts for vengeance instead. As James Buchan comments, in his astute analysis of
The Merchant of Venice
in
Frozen Desire
, his fascinating book about the nature of money, “At precisely that moment when he must succeed, Shylock falls prey to that violence that money was invented to replace. I cannot stress the point too fully. The pound of flesh is not a collateral security . . . for it cannot be sequestered and turned into money. Instead it is an insane and primitive forfeit . . . in which money does not compensate an insult to the body but the other way around: not blood-money but money-blood.”

THERE ARE TWO
antidotes to the endless chain reaction of revenge and counter-revenge. One is through the courts of law, which are supposed to settle questions of the weighing and measuring and resolving of debtor/creditor issues in a fair and equitable way. Whether they always do so is of course open to a lot of questions, but in theory that is their function.

The other antidote is more radical. It is told of Nelson Mandela that, after much persecution, and when he was finally freed from the prison where he’d been put by the apartheid government in South Africa, he said to himself that he had to forgive all those who had wronged him by the time he reached the prison gates or he would never be free of them. Why? Because he’d be bound to them by the chains of vengeance. They and he would still be twin Shadow figures, joined at the hip. In other words, the antidote to revenge is not justice but forgiveness. How many times must you forgive? someone asked Jesus of Nazareth. Seventy times seven, or as many times as it takes, was the answer. So Portia was right in principle, although she herself could not follow through.

Muslim religious law allows the family members of a murdered person to participate in the sentencing of the murderer: they can choose clemency if they wish, and it is recognized that this choice is a noble one, and will free them from their anger and sense of victimization. There are many other cultural examples in which a life is not taken in exchange for a life. A Native North American group presented a Proclamation of Forgiveness to the United States as recently as 2005, for instance — if they listed all the things to be forgiven I expect it was rather long — and I need hardly mention the astonishing Truth and Reconciliation process that has gone on in South Africa since the end of apartheid. You may think that all of this forgiveness stuff is watery-eyed idealism of the clap-if-you-believe-in-fairies variety, but if the forgiveness is sincerely given and sincerely received — both parts are admittedly difficult — it does appear to have a liberating effect. As we’ve noted, the desire for revenge is a heavy chain, and revenge itself leads to a chain reaction. Forgiveness cuts the chain.

Now take a deep breath, close your eyes, and try the following exercise in historical revisionism. It’s the eleventh of September 2001. After two planes have flown into them, the Twin Towers have collapsed in billows of smoke and fire. Vengeful messages have been disseminated by al-Qaeda. The president of the United States goes on international television and says,

We have suffered a grievous loss — a blow has been struck at us that was motivated by a obsessive desire to harm us. We realize that this was the work of a small group of fanatics. Other nations might bomb the stuffing out of the civilian population where those fanatics are at present located, but we recognize the futility of such an action. Nor will we accuse any bystander nation of having been involved. We realize that acts of vengeance recoil upon the heads of the inventors, and we do not wish to perpetuate a chain reaction of revenge. Therefore we will forgive.