Day 10: No Jot of Blood

Of the eight or ten abridged illustrated comic-book style Shakespeare plays I owned as a kid, my favorite was The Merchant of Venice. I loved how the leading women averted tragedy in the courtroom and possibly in their own love-lives by dressing up as a lawyer and a clerk and “saving the day” in a day when women were banned from the bar and bench. The climax of the plot and the turn of Fortune’s wheel for Shylock and Antonio happen during these lines (from the grown-up version with all words and no pictures, Act 4 Scene 1) spoken by Portia in disguise:

A pound of that same merchant’s flesh is thine.
The court awards it, and the law doth give it.

And you must cut this flesh from off his breast.
The law allows it, and the court awards it.

Tarry a little; there is something else.
This bond doth give thee here no jot of blood;
The words expressly are “a pound of flesh.”
Take then thy bond, take thou thy pound of flesh,
But in the cutting it if thou dost shed
One drop of Christian blood, thy lands and goods
Are by the laws of Venice confiscate
Unto the state of Venice.

Suddenly, Shylock, who has been appealing for justice according to the exact terms of the contract, and has been calling out compliments to the visiting lawyer who is most exacting, realizes that this exacting lawyer has turned the situation upside down. The contract which stipulated that Antonio must pay back a loan with a pound of his own flesh if he did not have the cash on hand, admittedly does not say anything about blood. Portia has shown what happens to those who urge on justice according to the letter of the law. You shall have justice, then, she says, more than you desire.

So the tables are turned and Shylock is required to carve out exactly one pound of flesh, and shed no blood. If the weight of flesh is under or over by a hair on the scale, or if blood comes out, Shylock has forfeited the contract and will have to pay the consequences.

The movie production that I saw in which Al Pacino plays Shylock, shows Portia as thinking on her feet. It seems she had expected that Shylock would show mercy the closer she brought him to satisfaction of the terms of the contract. But Shylock refuses even an offer of three times the money to pay back his loan. Now Antonio has his shirt open, his hands tied down and Shylock has sharpened his knife. She is stuck. What to do now? Shylock’s longing for vengeance and justice and dignity among his anti-Semitic neighbors has given him the tunnel-vision of insisting that only Antonio’s flesh will make things right. How brilliant that she suddenly thinks to turn the tables by using the very loyalty to the contract that Shylock is insisting upon. Ok, cut, Shylock, but by the way, the contract doesn’t say anything about blood.

It is easy to feel sorry for Shylock, who by the end of that scene, loses everything because of his faith in a world where Justice can only win when a fair contract is written up and the penalties of failing its terms are carried out without mercy or amendment. But Shylock failed to see that Lady Justice is tricky, and she can use “a jot of blood” to turn this play from tragedy to comedy.