Nearly halfway into the pivotal Act IV, scene i courtroom scene of The Merchant of Venice, after the Duke and Bassanio unsuccessfully plead with Shylock to drop his pound-of-flesh bond against Antonio and mercifully accept more or less of the principal, Portia, disguised as Balthasar – “a young [legal] doctor of Rome”Footnote ¹ – arrives with a lifesaving lesson about Venetian law. Despite everyone's assumption that the economically necessitated evenhandedness of the justice system compels the Duke to honor the bond, Portia, after much suspense about the virtues of extralegal mercy, teaches them that the law privileges Christians after all. To the joyous relief of the Christians and the economic and religious devastation of Shylock, “Balthasar” reveals the two legal statutes that prohibit spilling Christian blood or threatening Christian life.

While this pivotal scene is central to any analysis of the play, it has rarely been examined primarily as a pedagogical one. In that regard, I would like to think seriously about the pedagogical implications of introducing Portia as a “young and learnéd doctor”Footnote ² with a letter of recommendation from her cousin Bellario, an older “learnéd doctor”Footnote ³ from, as Shakespeare describes in an earlier pedagogical comedy, the “fair [city of] Padua, nursery of the arts.”Footnote ⁴ As the letter describes,

Itself a material symbol of learning, the letter vividly describes an intergenerational collaboration of two scholars working through the life-saving production of legal knowledge. Accomplishing something like Castiglione's recommendation that the ideal courtier – in effect, a teacher to a prince – should “see to it that a good [reputation] precedes him and that men there know that he is highly esteemed in other places,”Footnote ⁶ it also leaves the courtroom waiting, to borrow Geoffrey Canada's description of his own desperate adolescent educational fantasy, for its educational Superman, its “Super[Balthasar].”Footnote ⁷

Whereas the jury is still out on the broadly applicable superpowers of Canada's Harlem Children's Zone and, in general, the charter-school movement,Footnote ⁸ The Merchant’s “Super[Balthasar]” unquestionably turns the play's fantasy of Christian power and privilege over the threatening complexity of Venetian diversity into the reality of a comic resolution. However, “he” is only ironically able to do so by officially perpetuating the fantasy of male intellectual superiority. Indeed, that Portia can only save Antonio by publicly disguising herself as a man reflects, as Lisa Jardine identifies, “the pervasive ambivalence about ‘woman's place’ in Renaissance intellectual life.”Footnote ⁹ That is, although there were a number of medieval and early modern women celebrated for their learning, the variously documented justifications for that learning ranged from developing the moral fiber and fitness for public life to “the equally clearly expressed position that there is something intrinsically indecorous about a woman who … transgresses the social code which require[d] her … modest silence and passivity in public.”Footnote ¹⁰ This “cultural confusion,” as Jardine also describes it, is “reproduced in the [cross-dressing] plot strategies of Shakespeare's learned women,”Footnote ¹¹ as well as the early modern convention of barring “real” women from the stage and having adolescent boys play their fictional parts.

Jardine comes close to the pedagogical implications that I am suggesting, but ultimately reaches the conservative and somewhat pessimistic conclusion that Portia amounts to a rich and powerful noblewoman who borrows the knowledge and attire of learning only to advance her own sexual subordination. While this is an arguable enough assessment, I would like to complicate it with Judith Butler's theory of gender performativity to suggest that something more potentially empowering is going on. As Butler works out in her seminal study Gender Trouble, gender does not represent essential or foundational prediscursive identity categories “often presumed to be foundational to feminist politics”;Footnote ¹² instead it is a social construction that only comes to seem biological or natural through performative repetition. Specifically, in a heteronormative society, that repetition is compelled as the presumptive man–woman fiction through various forms of punishment. Despite and because of these punitive consequences, Butler concludes,

So, although Portia fulfills the play's public fantasy of a male-dominated, Christian world, her ironic performance of male pedagogical power – her “teacher trouble” – opens up, even if only imaginatively, the strategic possibilities for a radically different outcome. This is the power that Portia and all precariously situated nontraditional teacher–scholars possess. However, as I will discuss specifically in terms of race, if they choose to exploit, as Portia does, the cultural ambivalence in subversive performances of the normative identity constructions that oppress them, they risk the range of punitive consequences deeply built into the “imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarch culture” of the American academy.Footnote ¹⁴

As with gender, there continues to be a pervasive ambivalence about the question of race in Shakespeare studies and, by extension, about the many teacher–scholars of color committed to exploring it. In a 2016 special issue of Shakespeare Quarterly, Peter Erickson and Kim F. Hall identify that, despite the more than two decades’ worth of good scholarship on early modern race, the responses to the several race-themed sessions, seminars, and workshops at the 2013 Shakespeare Association of America (SAA) meeting in Toronto were so negative and even dismissive that the meeting “marked a profound and disillusioning moment of alienation for many [of the] people of color” in attendance.Footnote ¹⁵ As Erickson and Hall further explain, “Even as the SAA had one of its largest meetings ever, with a correspondingly larger gathering of people of color, the sense of belonging for longtime attendees was revealed as precarious, and our sense of progress was shattered.”Footnote ¹⁶ In response, these teacher–scholars have recommitted themselves to combating this “pathological averseness to thinking about race” as applicable to the early modern period by,Footnote ¹⁷ as Erickson and Hall propose,

As one of the respondents to the Shakespeare in Black America seminar at the 2017 SAA meeting in Atlanta, I have benefited immensely from this commitment to making 2025 better than 2013. Indeed, the wonderful range of papers that made up that seminar helped me more deeply understand my particular struggle as a black male Shakespearean within the long history of black scholars, creative writers, and performers employing various subversive strategies within an almost always oppressive and alienating white world.Footnote ¹⁹

With Portia's “teacher trouble” in mind, it is important that our efforts to establish the field of early modern race studies also include our primary role as teacher–scholars in the Shakespeare classroom. For instance, although I did not attend the 2013 SAA meeting, I was not at all shocked by what Erickson and Hall describe, because I have been experiencing it as a black man teaching Shakespeare in majority-white classrooms for over two decades. In fact, there has never been an occasion when I didn't have to help my students literally see early modern representations of race before struggling, often against complete silence or stiff resistance, to engage them in a discussion of the past and present interpretive value of race. The obvious question that this raises for me (and I'd like to think any honest, radically oriented teacher–scholar) is that if students have been miseducated enough to miss – that is, “to observe, but not to see”Footnote ²⁰ – the workings of race in early modern representations, then what does that say about their capacity or inclination to understand and ethically respond to the difficult and complex realities of race in society more broadly?

In my experience, majority-white institutions of higher education, feigning a kind of “sanctioned ignorance,”Footnote ²¹ work really hard to avoid this question, or at least perpetuate the futility of black people attempting to answer it. Because of this convenient, not entirely conscious, tactic of avoidance, getting at the reason is extremely difficult. However, my sense is that it is rooted in an inability or unwillingness to admit that student racism is not an always conscious personal defect easily identified and dealt with, but a subtle and insidious normative result of a lifelong, cultural and educational process. Additionally, the corporatization of higher education, managed in part by the customer-satisfaction survey of teaching evaluations, protects institutions from confronting the way that they are implicated in the decreasing number of African American faculty and students, specifically at majority-white research institutions.Footnote ²² The logic is: if students are paying customers and customers are always right, then educational institutions can't afford to confront their student customers with the well-researched conclusion that racist perceptions explain why they consistently evaluate black faculty as less qualified and effective teacher–scholars.Footnote ²³

These are the punitive circumstances that pressure black teacher–scholars into a racialized version of Portia's public performance of male pedagogical power. In other words, reflecting our society's ambivalence about the black teacher–scholar, these circumstances pressure us into affirming the twin myths of our white students’ racial innocence and cognitive superiority with stereotypical performances focussed on allaying their anxieties about race. And if we resist the pressure to comfort and entertain them,Footnote ²⁴ if we insist on engaging them in a serious process of identifying and questioning the racial and cultural assumptions generated by those stereotypical performances, we are all too often rewarded, as I have already indicated, with career-threatening low teaching-evaluation scores and the harsh comments that go along with them. For instance, over the past three years, my mean scores for the two questions perhaps most important for tenure and promotion decisions – “Instructor's respect for student's viewpoint” and “Overall effectiveness of the instructor” – have almost always fallen below my institution's average, and a significant percentage of students have harshly characterized me in the comment section as “rude and arrogant,” “patronizing,” “condescending,” “intimidating,” “demeaning,” “pompous,” a “bully,” unable “to respect students [sic] viewpoints,” “[cutting] students off,” and “repeatedly interrupt[ing] … students to ask questions.” While reflecting, as Ronald L. Jackson and Rex Crawley argue, stereotypical fears about black male aggression and violence,Footnote ²⁵ these comments, especially as revealed in the last one, also suggest that the performative script for black teacher–scholars does not allow the disruption of white students’ performance of innocence and superiority with thought-provoking, deconstructive questions.

Now, as I near the end of the tenure process, it is difficult for me not to identify with and anticipate the fate of The Merchant’s other nontraditional teacher–scholar, Shylock. Much like my own, Shylock's pedagogical strategy centers on the kinds of inconvenient questions intended to get the Christians to reassess their deepest, defining racist and anti-Semitic assumptions. In this and other ways, Shylock attempts to turn just about every scene in which he appears into an academic disputation with transformative pedagogical potential. For instance, with a biblical analogy and a series of questions like “Hath a dog money?”Footnote ²⁶ he attempts to turn the loan negotiation with Bassanio and Antonio into a discussion about the economic and religious contradiction at the heart of Venetian society. With the series of questions that make up the more famous “Hath not a Jew …”Footnote ²⁷ speech, he attempts to defend his right to Antonio's pound of flesh by ironically insisting on a radical philosophy of physical, sensory, and emotional commonality; and with his courtroom “What judgement shall I dread, doing no wrong?”Footnote ²⁸ he again attempts to defend the bond by analogizing it to a seemingly gratuitous moral question about the Christian possession and “abject” treatment of slaves.Footnote ²⁹ All of these questions go unanswered and their transformative, pedagogical complexity along with them, because to answer or even acknowledge them would require the Christians to rise above their anti-Semitism enough to acknowledge Shylock as a legitimate teacher–scholar. Instead, they kick him, spit on him, “steal” his daughter along with some of his wealth, and ultimately, with the threat of death and poverty, force him to become a Christian.

Of course, also motivated by a deep mix of religious and economic hatred, Shylock is not a simple victim. Indeed, as he admits in Act I, scene iii and as Jessica confirms in Act III, scene ii, there's no getting around his villainous desire to someday be able to “catch [Antonio] once upon the hip”Footnote ³⁰ and “feed fat the ancient grudge [he] bears him.”Footnote ³¹ But that is precisely what makes his pedagogical proclivity so valuable, for even in the depths of cultural, religious, and racial hatred, it suggests a lingering faith in, and creates, as Portia's “teacher trouble,” the conditions for, the miracle of a just reconciliation. It is also arguable that that faith – mixed in with the hateful “kindness” of the bond itselfFootnote ³² – pulls him beyond his own comprehension to accept the Christians’ invitation to supper. That is, despite doubt (“But wherefore should I go?”Footnote ³³) and then disinclination (“I have no mind of feasting forth tonight”Footnote ³⁴), he concludes to the daughter who is secretly in the process of betraying him, “But I will go.”Footnote ³⁵

In that way, “Shylock is not a unanimous man,”Footnote ³⁶ for there are “several Shylocks pulling Shylock in several directions.”Footnote ³⁷ Again, as with Portia's “teacher trouble,” this is the kind of ambivalent complexity that literary studies teaches us to value and that critical theory helps us understand. And if there is any hope for the nontraditional teacher–scholar committed to potentially transformative pedagogy, it is that majority-white colleges and universities will reject the fantastical corporate-serving logic of numerical certainty and the anti-intellectual rhetoric of customer-service (dis)satisfaction and honestly begin to rethink teaching evaluations in these terms: that is, in terms of our society's ambivalence or cultural confusion about those teacher–scholars. For instance, that would mean giving me the benefit of that ambivalence by critically assessing all of my low scores and negative comments in relation to all of my high scores and positive comments: comments like “open-minded about subjects a majority of previous professors of mine [didn't] even talk about, let alone express their opinions [about]” and “He is uncompromising in his intellectual honesty and should serve as a force for progress within the English Department and the University at large.” I have been trying to make this point for my entire career. However, against the punitive circumstances I have described, my efforts have largely been in vain. And now, as I take this time to reflect, I'm beginning to wonder whether it makes any sense for me to keep trying. In other words, I'm not sure if I still have a “mind of” continuing to teach under these seemingly hopeless circumstances. But I will teach.