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Caravel Undergraduate Research Journal

Abstract

In this article, I take Shakespeare’s play The Merchant of Venice as my backdrop to explore and illuminate how the commercialization of flesh and body in the play can only fully be understood through its contextualization in sociological concepts of gift-exchange, early modern contract law, and the rise of the merchant class during this period. At this time, English economy, contract law, and cultural notions of agency/autonomy were all shifting and expanding both theoretically and pragmatically, and much has been said about the historical consequences these changes caused – how mercantile culture permeated English society, how the reexamination of contractual relationships challenged English Law both judicially and politically, how legal/economic implications of a man’s word, his promise, engendered the need for ‘free-agency’. My goal here is to interrogate how within such written and spoken texts these phenomena may negotiate and perhaps reconcile coexistence. That is to say, I attempt to discover how the body becomes a commodity, how this commercialized flesh is exchanged, economized, contracted, and then ultimately how Portia, by partaking in such trade, develops her own subjective agency in a seemingly homosocial and patriarchal milieu. This argument should not be confused with “the traffic in women” paradigm or with a mere analysis of how women are objectified by images of flesh, conversations of exchange, and use of the law, important as these analyses are. Rather, I question, like historian Patricia Crawford does, the theoretical obsession with oppression and suffering, to argue instead for The Merchant of Veniceas a text that positions women as mercantilists who capitalize on the historicity of commercialized flesh in the service of economic agency.

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