Usury
Usury was not for Elizabethans a pretty word or notion. It was also a complicated one. Though lending out one’s money for one’s own financial return was very difficult not to class as usury, it was still a tricky thing to define precisely – in part because so many inventive minds and ingenious practitioners had spent centuries trying to get round it, finding loopholes in the law. The nearest we have to a dictionary definition of usury as Elizabethans understood it is by Dr Thomas Wilson, writing in 1572, a year after the law in England was relaxed to allow for an increase of interest up to 10 per cent: ‘usury is committed only where lending and borrowing is, and that when any overplus or excess is taken over and above the principal that was lent, for the very respect only of lending, and in consideration of forbearing money for time’. The ‘principal’ was the capital sum lent and the ‘overplus or excess’ the interest charged for the loan of it. But was all interest usury, as Wilson seemed to be suggesting, or was it really just excessive interest? Did it extend to more than money? Wrestled with for centuries, questions like these (and many more too) occupied anxious Elizabethans.
The Merchant of Venice (1596/97) illustrates beautifully Elizabethans’ ambivalence over usury, interest and money. The brilliance of Shylock is that he is an outsider, embittered and isolated – a rich Jew, that stock figure of fear and hatred in sixteenth-century Europe, who despises Christian society and its codes and values. In the characters of Shylock and the merchant Antonio, Shakespeare gives us two extreme positions on money. Where one is monstrously grasping, the other is admirably generous but hopelessly naive.
Antonio and Shylock operate their two businesses on entirely opposing principles. Shylock grumbles that Antonio’s Christian scruples are bad for the city’s moneylenders:
By ‘usance’ Shylock means the period of the loan that determined the amount of interest to be paid on it. Easy to miss – but in fact the most significant thing to notice – is how being a merchant is very different from being a moneylender. Antonio is an old-fashioned merchant adventurer: he trades in commodities and puts ships out to sea. He is an amateur lender of money (and for good and just reasons), where Shylock is the professional moneylender, grasping and unscrupulous. There is a world of difference between the methods employed by the two men. Shylock simply uses his money to make even more of it. Trade plays no part in his business, and he is contemptuous of it. Where the moneylender is in this sense passive, the merchant is active. Antonio takes risks, whereas in merely lending money Shylock risks nothing. What Shylock calls his own ‘well-won thrift’ (I. iii. 50–51), Antonio calls ‘interest’. It was a word and a concept that would have been as offensive and oppressive as usury to many in Shakespeare’s audience.