The Trap of Law

Marjorie Garber (Shakespeare After All, 300–2) nicely captures the Pauline resonances of the trial scene in Merchant of Venice: “Shylock will provide a scale to weigh the pound of flesh, but not a surgeon to staunch the wound. He will, that is, provide the emblem of justice, the balances, or scales, but not the emblem of mercy. If Saint Paul’s celebrated dictum ‘the letter kills, but the spirit gives life’ is seen to underpin this tension between Shylock and Portia, justice and mercy, it is all the more pertinent when restored to its context in 2 Corinthians, where Paul distinguishes between the New Testament and the Old Testament. God, he says, has made him and the other apostles ‘ministers of the new testament; not of the letter, but of the spirit; for the letter killeth but the spirit giveth life (2 Corinthians 3:6). By contrast, Moses ‘put a veil over his face, that the children of Israel could not steadfastly look to the end of that which is abolished,’ and ‘until this day remaineth the same veil untaken away in the reading of the old testament, which veil is done away with in Christ’ (2 Corinthians 3:13–14).”

She notes the connection between the pound of flesh “nearest to the heart,” and Paul’s “fleshly tables of the heart.” Ironically, Shylock insists “on literalizing what Paul, equally insistently, asserts to be a matter of figure.” This means that “Shylock . . . is a bad reader; he reads the letter, not the spirit.” Shakespeare could have footnoted Augustine’s de doctrina.

Shylock’s literalistic insistence on the letter is a trap. The letter does indeed kill. The life of Shylock the Jew ends. For Shakespeare’s original audience, though, this death by the letter would be seen as a step toward new life. Shylock the Jew dies in order to be raised as Shylock the Christian, as the old covenant killed in order to be raised up into a ministry of reconciliation. Bassanio chooses death voluntarily when he chooses the lead casket. Like Paul, Shylock is killed by the law. For both, death is the path to life.