Riassunto esame Cultura inglese, Prof. Squeo Alessandra, libro consigliato Shakespeare's textual traces. Patterns of «exchange» in «The merchant of Venice» , Alessandra Squeo

The problem of assessing and exchanging value in early modern thought

This notion of "exchanging value" leads to the thorny problem of assessing value by establishing shared standards of commensurability, a notion that we find, over and over again in Shakespeare's corpus. Words such as "value" and "worth" have multiple meanings in Shakespeare's plays and they are related both to market price and to moral evaluation. All the characters face the difficulty of assessing, evaluating and weighing up things which possess incommensurable forms of value.

An instance of this can be found in Act 1, scene 1 when Bassanio lays emphasis on Portia's worth (164-166) and when he unveils the real monetary meaning of his secret pilgrimage to Belmont (126-129). In act 2 the Prince of Morocco tries to weigh the value of the three metals against Portia's intrinsic worth, his own merit and what he himself deserves on account of.

il testo formattato con i tag html:

his love for her(23-34). He arrives at the erroneous conclusion that the lady's worth corresponds to the value of precious gold (48-55). In Act 3, scene 1, Shylock himself proves to be aware of the essential value of what exceeds mere principles of commensurability when he finds out that his daughter has bartered his turquoise for a monkey (93-96). In the trail scene (Act IV, scene 1, 278-281) Bassanio equates the value of his own life and of his love for Portia and weighs them up against the worth of Antonio's existence. At the end of the same act and scene, Antonio persuades Bassanio to give Balthazar the ring and violate Portia's command by establishing a form of commensurability between Balthazar's merits and Portia's will (445-447). It is in this context that Shylock proposes the macabre equation of three thousand ducats and a pound of Antonio's flesh, even recognizing its absurdity by recognizing their different market value (I, 3,158-160). This is

Shylock's impossible translation. Shylock's proposal captures the central idea of the play, that is the pervasive exchangeability between life and money. In the trial scene Shylock argues that the distinction between life and livelihood is both cruel and hypocritical (IV,1, 370-373). Antonio even goes so far as to argue that life and property are so inextricably entwined that a wretched man should take death as a sign of Fortune's kindness (IV, 1, 262-268). He had expressed the same view in Act I, scene 1 by joining "purse" and "person" (138). Other instances of this pervasive equivalence are the three thousand ducats that Bassanio borrows from Antonio which are both the price Bassanio pays to enter the marriage and the contractual equivalent of the pound of flesh Antonio signs away to Shylock; the leaden casket stands and the portrait it contains stand for the right to marry Portia. That right is, in her eyes. A sign of possession of her property and person.

symbolized by the wedding ring she gives Bassanio. She then demands Bassanio’s ring as the wages for this service. So, Antonio’s pound of flesh has now been transmuted into Portia’s ring.

When she gives Bassanio back the ring, she gives it to Antonio to give back to Bassanio, thus bringing Antonio back to the market. Another emblem of this pervasive logic of exchange is Shylock’s scales which he implicitly evokes in the opening act (1, 3, 142) and carries to court in the trial scene. The scales were a very familiar object in Venice, and they were used by moneychangers. Their trustworthiness was such a crucial issue that it was a direct responsibility of the government itself. Another proof of their relevance is the inscription on the church of S. Giacomo “may […] the weights be just”.

In a wider perspective, Venice embodied the spirit of exchange, where money and life were hardly separable. The basic unit of business life in Venice were family partnerships,

such as the so called fraterna or the collegantia in which members of families liked by ties of friendship banded together to share the risks and profits of trade business and formed the first joint ventures. There’s also another one, “compagnia”, which was widely diffused in general (slide 221-222). The collegantia lasted only for the duration of a sea venture: the co-venturer contributed capital and the other provided labour. NB. Slide 224 fraterna, collegantia forniva il capitale e l’altro faceva materialmente il viaggio. Theunokind of bond that connects Antonio and Bassanio is a venture that might be defined, according to the venetian definition of collegantia. La loro è una “venture” agli occhi di Bassanio e un “pilgrimage” agli occhi di Antonio. Antonio provides the capital and Bassanio goes there and succeeds. They both share the profits. Non possiamo tuttavia affermare che Shakespeare sia stato direttamente influenzato dalle partnership veneziane.ma possiamo dirlo in una logica di circulation of social energy. So, the relationship existing between Antonio and Bassanio may be largely imagined in terms of this familiar partnership. Fraternaewere known in England, as proved by the exchanges with the Venetian Priuli fraternal. Slide 225In fact the word compagnia acquires a commercial meaning. Si tratta di una traduzione dell'italiano all'inglese. Another instance of the omnipresent logic or profit and economic exchange is the Charter (Condotta) that the Venetian Republic granted to Jewish Merchants in 1589. It was the result of the many petitions submitted by the Jewish merchant Rodriga and was well known in England and it contributed to portraying Venice as a model of toleration towards foreigners; on closer inspection, however, it explained that the privileges were granted to Jews for the sole reason that they could bring benefits to the commerce of Venice. Shylock's appeal to the charter in the trial scene echoes.

such ideas (IV, 1, 102-103). Antonio remarks this concept in Act III, 3, 26-31). Shakespeare's critique is directed not to capitalism itself, but to the corruption of capitalism that infected Renaissance Venice and could plague Belmont (England). Even the language of lovers is contaminated by this logic of exchange "to give and to receive" (Act III, 2, 139-140) declares Bassanio after opening the casket. And even Portia's premarital discourse adopts Venice's mercantile use of language (account, exceed account, sum, gross...) (III, 2, 149-165). Jessica stealing her father's ducats, Launcelot abandoning the miserable Jew for free-spending Bassanio and his observations on the monetary effects of the girl's conversion to Christianity (III, 5, 17-20) are all instances of a world where all relationships carry a pecuniary connotation. Launcelot himself embodies the desire to always make another change.

Chapter 3: Merchant's discourse and practices

trade 3.1 Portraits of the “Good” Merchant Antonio’s presence in the play is a cryptical and passive one: he is the absent centre around which the action revolves, and this is unprecedented in the literary sources of the play (the main one being Il Pecorone). Antonio’s melancholy has been given a variety of different critical interpretations:

• A sign of his anxiety caused by the commercial enterprise;
• a presentiment of the loss of his friend Bassanio, who will marry Portia;
• a symptom of Antonio’s homosexual love for Bassanio (debated, as idealized friendship was a fairly common theme in Renaissance literature)

has been related to the economic background of Elizabethan England: the sudden growth of global trade and the resulting migrations of people and commodities across national borders largely account for early modern writers’ tendency to imagine disease as a foreign agent. Some hints of this pathological accent concealed in the play can be found inAct II, 2, 103 when Old Gobbomisuses the word "infection" when he means "affection" or when Bellario cannot appear in court because he is supposedly "very sick" (IV, 1, 151) AND Shylock leave the courtroom complaining that he is no "very well" (IV, 1, 392); the knight vs the merchant: it can be read in the light of the cultural context of the ecclesiastical condemnation of the merchants' activities on the one hand, and the acknowledgement of their crucial role as pillars of economic life. Merchants were in fact torn between a yearning for riches and a fear of being punished after their death for the accumulation of wealth in life. The knight and the merchant embodied incompatible cultural attitudes and manners and Antonio embodies the failure to combine two different social and cultural codes. 14th century Venice, unlike most European cities, the majority of merchants had a noble origin. In the 16th century the nobility detached.itself from trade due to its inability to absorb the new rising values of trade. In this period, commercial interests came to be seen as incompatible with any honourable political function, to the point where Giovanni Maria Memmo stated that merchants should be excluded from government because they would put their interests before the good of the Republic. The Knights of Malta were also warned to stay away from ignoble practices such as trade. Nobles began to invest in land, which offered more secure returns. The notion that the wealth that was inherited was more respectable than the wealth one accumulates himself was widespread (Sardo's Discorso della bellezza della nobiltà) as was the idea that avarice (a merchant's characteristic), which is a vice, does not fit a nobleman ("a nobleman does not rake, he gives"). Therefore, efforts were made to re-define the identity and role of the merchant, thus creating an idealized image of the merchant as a generous and

In Della mercatura e del mercante perfetto, a treatise written in 1458 and published in 1573, Contrugli offers a faithful picture of the ideal merchant circulating at the time. He describes the activity of the merchant as a noble and useful one, points out the precious social function of trade, stresses the merchant's virtues of temperance and moderation and devotes a whole chapter to the philanthropy and benevolence of the ideal merchant. A similar portrait of the merchant is offered by Il Pecorone. Contrugli also describes the proper religious behaviour of the ideal merchant and in the opening section of chapter 9 he leaves us a definition of the "good" merchant in which he reiterates the word "good" ("buono pagatore", "chi è buono in danari è buono in ogni cosa", "col bene pagare si acquista buona fama et credito", "il buono pagatore è signore della borsa del compagno"). His

mention of the proverbs is significant, as proverbs were a crucial instrument of the circulation of Italian cultural models in Renaissance England. Contrugli celebrates the merchant as a perfect Christ