The Merchant of Venice is a key text for demonstrating that race was inextricable from early modern considerations of societal organization. Shakespeare stages his Venice with complex and interconnected economic, legal, and social systems, each of which take difference into account. The play considers these systems in both local and global terms, particularly given Venice’s position as a center for trade in an expanding mercantile and colonial economy. The play is also attentive to the intercultural, interreligious, and interracial entanglements inherent to such a space.

Social organization and the other

Merchant includes a number of moments that bring these dynamics into light. I often draw students’ attention to Antonio’s rationale for why Shylock’s bond will likely be upheld. As Antonio explains,

The Duke cannot deny the course of law;
For the commodity that strangers have
With us in Venice, if it be denied,
Will much impeach the justice of the state,
Since that the trade and profit of the city
Consisteth of all nations.

 
Antonio describes a Venice that takes its treatment of “strangers” into careful consideration to serve particular priorities. The moment allows students to see that the play weighs the affordances and limitations of extending rights to those it otherwise marginalizes. In tracing how Shylock is ultimately denied legal recourse on the basis of his Jewish identity in the subsequent court scene, students can also see how rapidly such priorities shift, with the maintenance and reinforcement of hierarchical power structures taking precedence.

Racialization at the margins

Even and sometimes especially when positioned at the margins, discussions of race in the play carry particular significance to broader societal issues. A key example is the exchange between Jessica, Lancelot, and Lorenzo, in which Lancelot disparages Lorenzo’s marriage to Shylock’s daughter and Lorenzo in turn reveals that Lancelot has been engaged in a relationship with a Moor.

The moment can be an uncomfortable one, especially for a modern-day reader. It trades on racism, antisemitism, and misogyny for an attempt at humor. Lorenzo, for example, is characterized by Lancelot as being "no good member of the commonwealth, for in converting Jews to Christians [he]raise[s] the price of pork.” Lorenzo’s reply, that he “shall answer that better to the commonwealth than [Lancelot]” because “the Moor is with child by [Lancelot]” prompts the clown to attack the woman’s character by mobilizing her difference.

When teaching this moment, I ask students to hold its flippant tone in tension with its evocation of the “commonwealth.” Interracial and interreligious relationships are both the subject of ridicule and a formation deemed of interest to broader Venetian society. Considering the exchange’s equivocal tenor can help students recognize that early modern English culture, and Shakespeare, are familiar with concepts of race and racial mixing. It shows students that there was historical attention paid to concerns about social organization and race—how are hierarchies disrupted when received racial boundaries are blurred?

Separating citizens from strangers

Shakespeare’s Venice groups its characters into a limited set of racial and religious categories, despite a range of ongoing and potential intermixture in the play. These intermixture possibilities include Morocco’s courting of Portia as well as the recurring suggestion that Shylock is not Jessica’s father.

Lancelot and Lorenzo’s discussion might be understood as representative of ongoing procedures that reconcile mixed identity to Venice’s overarching racial schema. In that sense, this brief exchange highlights a key site through which Venice separates its citizens from “strangers,” creating the kinds of divides its economic and legal systems pivot around. Even as Lancelot and Lorenzo engage in the only explicit discussion of “commonwealth” in the play, their partners in the intermixture that occasions that discussion appear to be excluded from that grouping.

Engaging these moments in Merchant can help students get a sense of why and how discrete racial categories arise and are reinforced, particularly in contexts where such boundaries otherwise routinely collapse.

Doing so can also encourage students to trace the histories that engender the categories our own 21st-century societies tend to recognize and operate around. When teaching Merchant, I ask students to reflect through journaling exercises on the recurring inability of such categories to account for the complexity of many peoples’ actual heritage. Thinking through these questions with The Merchant of Venice can help demonstrate that these categories have a long history of being constructed, and, maybe more importantly, their constructions have historically been grounded in maintaining and reproducing particular structures of power.