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  • "A Gentle and No Jew":Jessica, Portia, and Jewish Identity
  • Lara Bovilsky (bio)

"A Gentle and No Jew"

Descending from the windows of her father Shylock's distasteful home to the welcoming arms of her Christian suitor Lorenzo, Jessica does not allow the demands of haste to prevent her from appropriating some of her father's wealth. Lorenzo and she turn out to have different ideas about the nature of the disguise she will employ in her escape—dressed as a boy, she'd prefer secrecy and the cover of darkness, while he has her masquerading as his torchbearer in the company of his Venetian friends. They wrangle about how desirable her disguise, or display, "in the lovely garnish of a boy" (2.6.45) makes her.1 Nonetheless, the two have agreed about the assets Jessica will bring to her marriage, assets that offset the loss of the dowry she has forfeited through elopement. In an earlier letter to Lorenzo, Jessica has carefully specified "what gold and jewels she is furnish'd with" (2.4.31) alongside matters of rendezvous and disguise. Still, during the elopement, after tossing Lorenzo a casket of valuables, Jessica delays her descent from the stage's gallery space in order to supplement these, to "gild myself / With some moe ducats" (2.6.49-50). This prudent act immediately precedes a hearty welcome below from Lorenzo's friend Gratiano, whom the extra provisioning of gold, perhaps, encourages: "now (by my hood) a gentle, and no Jew" (2.6.51).

The episode is, on the surface, lighthearted and playful. Against the backdrop of bloodthirsty and vengeful contract negotiation that elsewhere [End Page 47] propels The Merchant of Venice, Jessica and Lorenzo provide what may seem to be a more hopeful premise for interaction between members of different religions in Venice and a marriage plot more representative of the comedy the Folio promises in its version of the title. Gratiano's endorsement of their match through a mock award of non-Jewish status to Jessica is remarkable for its emphatic immediacy, as though Jessica's transformation from Jew to "gentle" can occur in the space of a moment, simply by exiting her Jewish home, as she has hoped. Amid the play's conflicts and contests between religions, ethnicities, and genders, Gratiano seems to support a pragmatically expansive and flexible model for self-fashioning through conversion. That is, Gratiano's welcome seems to suggest that conversion is gratifyingly absolute—bestowing a new identity and group membership given new circumstances of time, place, and intent. As we will see, Jessica herself has employed this very model of conversion as she imagines her own future.

But at the same time, the sequence here—the proffered dowry and the enthusiastic welcome by the Christians below—may appear to tell an overdetermined story. In this story, assimilationist Jewish insecurity literally makes a bid for acceptance by Christians whose open-mindedness is proportional to the extent of their prospect of gain. In this more cynical reading, the abruptness of Gratiano's claim for Jessica's transformation signals the provisional, phatic, or disingenuous nature of his acceptance and, therefore, the provisional, performative, or tenuous status of Jessica's acceptability. As I will argue, this possibility is made more likely by Gratiano's significant choice of approving name for Jessica—to which I will return at length below—given by the First Quarto's and First Folio's "gentle," Second Quarto's "gentile." Modern readers expect the latter word as antonym to "Jew," and modern editions generally meet these expectations by adopting the Second Quarto's text. The play's Arden editor assumes the first spelling is an archaic variant of the second—distinct—word, which he too assumes is intended; his note tells us the two words were "not completely distinguished in spelling at this time" (2.4.34n).2 Yet the overlap between "gentle" and "gentile" is not limited to the orthographic. In this chapter, I will consider the extent of their mutual conceptual indebtedness—and, at the narrative level, their cumulative saturation of one another.

I argue that Merchant's presentation of the boundary between Jewishness and Christianity reflects an equation of...

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