“You Have Rated Me” : The Insults of The Merchant of Venice

Résumé En

Insult in Shakespeare's plays is usually an entertaining subject to work on. This paper focuses on the specificities of insults and the insulting mechanisms in The Merchant of Venice and discusses why it is not funny to study insults in this play. Here abuse seems to have no imagination and insults do not constitute a world of linguistic invention and innovation but rather of repetition. The text seems to be endlessly recycling the words “dog” (with its variant, “cur”), “devil” and “Jew” that seem to be hollow but are full of sound and fury. Far from signifying nothing, they mean a lot and their insulting impact and content are inescapable. More importantly, insults in The Merchant of Venice are a source of unrest, as the play dramatizes their traumatic effect and their impact on memory. Discomfort and trauma come from the fact that the play contains anti-Semitic abuse and that, notably after the Shoah, one cannot hear the word “Jew,” which is at the heart of this play and of the abuse of the play, in the same way as Shakespeare’s contemporaries. In this article insults are studied in the light of theoretical concepts and tools such as Évelyne Larguèche's “effet injure,” Judith Butler's “hate speech” and Denise Riley's “impersonal passion.” Closely inspected, the word “rate” in The Merchant of Venice reveals that insults are inscribed in a world of negotiation and exchange that has a lot in common with the world of commerce.