Biblical echoes in Merchant of Venice

A.R. Braunmuller offers some suggestive comments in his introduction to the Merchant of Venice in the Pelican Shakespeare. Having summarized Portia’s speech (which he suggests might be a “setup that turns on a technicality” that “turns back on Shylock a legal rigidity he had been duped into demanding”), he notes that the Elizabethan audience would likely have taken the turnabout differently:

“the blood/flesh distinction that defeats Shylock’s agreement with Antonio has ample biblical precedent: Genesis 9:4, Leviticus 7:26, Deuteronomy 12:32, Acts 15:29, among others. These Scriptural distinctions and prohibitions give rise to many important Judeo-Christian practices.”

Further, “considered as comic action, Act IV, scene 1 has a long history in Western and Elizabethan drama. It exemplifies what folklorists might call ‘the Biter Bit’ – Shylock, seemingly in command of his enemies, himself becomes a victim through the very means he employed to gain that victory, now empty and reversed upon him.” Though Braunmuller does not note it, this comic plot twist also has biblical precedent, in the countless stories of wicked falling into the pit they dig and the stories of Yahweh employing the lex talionis against Israel’s enemies.

Braunmuller does recognize the echoes of Romans 11 in the convrsion of Shylock: “to understand how an Elizabethan audience might have understood Shylock’s forced conversion, we must remember that such conversions were regarded as beneficent. Only converted could a Jew hope for (Christian) salvation, and Christian belief held that the ‘conversion of the Jews’ (Andrew Marvell’s phrase) would precede the end of tme and the world’s final return to eternal joy.”

Portia’s adopton of the name “Baltassar” is also significant, since this is the name of the prophet Daniel, though the Daniel in view is the Daniel of Bel and the Dragon or Susanna rather than of the canonical Daniel.