"He Grows Kind": Reimagining Community in Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice

Abstract

abstract:This essay takes up the question of community in William Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice (ca. 1600) to explore alternative models that challenge the violently homogenizing and xenophobic society of Christian Venice. Through Antonio and Shylock's bond-of-flesh, the play invites audiences to witness the genesis and development of a new mode of interrelationality, evoked by the melancholic condition, propelled by desire for violence, and ensured through risking death. Drawing from Georges Bataille's "law," which insists that human beings are only united to each other through rents and wounds, this article details the way that The Merchant of Venice mobilizes an imaginative possibility whereby damage and vulnerability constitute communion. Contrasting such communion with Venetian sociality, this essay identifies the paradox that sociality—premised as it is on the protection of integral, bounded selves and undergirded by the ideology of possessive individualism—disallows the union for which sacrificial communion strives. Unexpectedly, the destruction and self-abnegation expressed by both Antonio and Shylock catalyze a costly and crucial rethinking of community, one that privileges risk and loss over the rational self-preservation essential to the Christian republican view of community.