Shakespeare’s Legal Masks: A Reading of The Merchant of Venice

Abstract This article explores the concept of legal personality in William Shakespeare’s play The Merchant of Venice. Borrowing from John T. Noonan, Jr.’s concept of the masks of the law, this article suggests that the law plays a role in shaping the legal person. It further suggests that the law had this effect on Antonio and Shylock when it empowered Shylock, a Jewish merchant of lower social status in Christian Venice, to enforce a contract that permitted him to recover a pound of Antonio’s flesh. The law enforced a legal persona that exceeded Shylock’s social status. After examining these literary themes, this article examines the debate between Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas in Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association (2011), a United States Supreme Court case that determined that a California law prohibiting the sale of violent video games to children was a violation of the freedom of speech. In the case, minor children and video game manufacturers were both affixed with the legal mask of a full legal person, without consideration of the vulnerable reality of the minor children. This egalitarian model of interpersonal relationships ironically marginalizes a person by affixing a mask of supposedly expanded legal persona while simultaneously concealing the specific needs of the individual beneath the mask.