The thesis of this essay is simply stated: The Merchant of Venice is a Christian play and a comedy that ends well for all. I argue for this reading not because I am a Christian—I’m not—but because Shakespeare was, his audience was, and the play is. The great majority of critics who interpret Shakespeare’s plays from an ideological stance strive to make him accord with them and it: Catholics will have a Catholic Shakespeare, Marxists discover a proto-Marxist Shakespeare, Queer Theorists have outed a queerish Shakespeare (vide Shakesqueer: The Queer Companion to the Complete Works of Shakespeare, 2010). Unlike such critics I am not proselytizing for any credo I hold, seeking rather to provide a disinterested analysis of this highly contested play. Or as they say down home, I got no dog in this theomachia. Nevertheless my thesis, put simply, is that Antonio’s stipulation that Shylock convert to Christianity stands as the greatest act of kindness and mercy that he could have possibly rendered his tormentor. Antonio saves Shylock from eternal damnation.At least in the Globe, in the 1590s.
Some years ago, in John Gross’s Shylock, an exemplary study of the four hundred year long career of this vexing character, I encountered this claim by a French critic, Pierre Spriet: “It is unthinkable to imagine that today’s audiences could…