ABSTRACT
Monetary ewes and rams point to the paradigmatic golden ram, of course: the Golden Fleece. The Fleece continually “breeds” new meanings and connections across the play’s Wooled Web. The ram could only travel so far as the object of trade, enclosed in the realm of mythic metaphor, able to wander within anthropocentric epistemologies alone. The wooly breeders, both Jacob and the sheep, breed more wool. As a money breeder, Shylock is a metaphorical Jacob. Early modern playwrights and travelers were taken—in all senses of the word—with the Fleece. Several early modern animal studies have recently counted sheep in order to point out the gaps between material and metaphorical human–animal interactions. New economic criticism, in other words, although seeming to be an ideal sympathizer, narrates the English Argonauts’ charted courses of proto-capitalism, right off into modernity’s sunset—not quite the terra incognita of Serresian metaphor.
