In The Merchant of Venice, there are two references to music that call Shylock’s humanity into question. Scattered in Act 2 Scene 5 and Act 5, they may easily fall into obscurity if the reader is not paying attention. This essay tries to explore the relationship between music and humanity, which Shakespeare uses to dehumanise Shylock.
In Act 2 Scene 5, Shylock realises there may be a Christian masquerade near his house while he is having a farewell feast with Bassanio and others. He is irritated and names the masqueraders ‘Christian fools’. He dislikes the ‘wry-necked fife’ (an instance of hypallage), that is, a flute player. Christian music, festivity, and joy will contaminate his ‘sober house’, whose ‘tediousness’ his daughter Jessica ironically complains about. In the scene, Shylock personifies his house, marking it as the extension of his own body. Shylock’s desperate attempt to safeguard the house’s ears, that is, the casements, recalls his ‘ancient grudge’ towards the Christian community in Venice. By rejecting music, Shylock looks down on the way Christians enjoy themselves.
In Act 5, Lorenzo has a subtle dig at Shylock. After Jessica says she is never merry when hearing music, Lorenzo explains she is tranquil (‘spirits are attentive’. Here spirits refer to the soul, the mind, and the intellect). Whereas music has a stronger sway on the brute and savage. If a man has no music in him, ‘his affections are dark as Erebus’ and he is ‘fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils’, thinks Lorenzo. A man with no music and a dark heart of flints refers to no one but Shylock. Lorenzo seems to imply that Shylock is even worse than animals which music can still ‘change [their] nature’. In this sense, Gratiano’s slur of an ‘inexecrable dog’ and Antonio’s ‘cut-throat dog’ are not that demeaning; they at least animalise Shylock. The ultimate social exile is to be viewed as an entity unworthy of bearing a comparison to a savage animal.
Lorenzo also links immorality to music.
Sit, Jessica. Look how the floor of heaven
Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold:
There's not the smallest orb which thou behold'st
But in his motion like an angel sings,
Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubins;
Such harmony is in immortal souls;
But whilst this muddy vesture of decay
Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it.
Lorenzo explains to Jessica the idea of a universal music, that is, the rotation of stars and their interaction create the music of the universe, which the renowned polymath Pythagoras believes in. The sudden stretch to a cosmic relation is a bit out of place after Shylock has just received his verdict in Act 4, though the celestial images indeed heighten romance and joy in Belmont. Humans with their ‘muddy vesture[s]’, human bodies, cannot hear it, but the immortal soul is receptive. Though modern science proves that sound cannot travel in space, Shakespeare alludes to the music of the spheres to highlight Shylock’s outcast state in Act 5. If the ‘wry-neck fife’, the flute player, cannot even please Shylock, how can his soul even feel the cosmic background music? Shylock’s soul is damned and mortal, which Christianity cannot even help. We may wonder if the conversion opens him up to music; but I doubt it.