A letter from Antonio is brought to Bassanio. In this letter, writing is understood as both an act of inscription and as an act of incision, as an act of construction and of destruction, as a hopeful act of preservation and at the same time as an act of absolute violence:

Sweet Bassanio, my ships have all miscarried, my creditors grow cruel, my estate is very low, my bond to the Jew is forfeit, and (since in paying it, it is impossible I should live), all debts are clear'd between you and I, if I might but see you at my death: notwithstanding, use your pleasure,—if your love do not persuade you to come, let not my letter.¹⁹

Here is the hope for presence-in-writing, the hope for the body made immanent in the letter. And yet, at the same time—and as Bassanio understands—this is the letter that kills:

Here is a letter lady,
The paper as the body of my friend,
And every word in it a gaping wound
Issuing life-blood.
                                (3.2.262-65)

Writing's dream of presence always inscribes its double: erasure. Commenting on the verse line, "Your penknife as stay in left hand let rest," that prefaces A Booke Containing Divers Sortes of Hands, Jonathan Goldberg discusses this double-nature of writing:

"Stay" suggests that the knife is the support of writing (it keeps the place, marks the line, sharpens the quill, smooths the paper: there can be no act of writing without the knife); but "stay" also suggests that the knife impedes the quill (erasure lies within its domain). As Derrida has argued, what is true of the knife is true of the quill: these are the writer's weapons for a scene in which the production of script also effaces such production to produce the writer's hand—to produce the illusory presence of writing. "Stay" remarks the double structure of the mark, and the scriptive domain that (dis)locates the writer.²⁰

Antonio is similarly (dis)located by the letter he has sent to Bassanio. In the letter he identifies his imminent death as embodied in the bond to Shylock; he also both proclaims and rejects Bassanio's debt to him, and uses the letter to request, indeed virtually to command, Bassanio's presence, even as he rejects the notion of such efficacy in a mere "letter": "if your love do not persuade you to come, let not my letter." This is precisely Antonio's predicament in his forfeited bond (the letter) that situates him even as it guarantees his erasure: he stands, as he says, prepared to die.

This assertion—that Antonio's letter manifests both the desire for and the impossibility of presence-in-writing—is also clear on a material level in the Hayes Quarto. Dover Wilson recognized that the letters and scrolls in Merchant are "bibliographically speaking, textually distinct" from the rest of the play-text.²¹ While I disagree with Wilson's argument that such distinctness serves to identify the letters as either scribal or playhouse additions, their bibliographical distinctness does stand as a material manifestation of the impossibility of the dream of presence-in-writing: these texts that seek to embody or to locate characters are themselves radically disembodied and dislocated from the surface of the play-text. Antonio's letter (which we can now see was mis-quoted above) actually appears in the 1600 Quarto thus:

[Por.] But let me heare the letter of your friend.
Sweet Bassanio, my ships have all miscarried, my
Creditors growe cruell, my estate is very low, my
bond to the Jewe is forfaite, and since in paying
it, it is impossible I should live, all debts are
cleerd betweene you and I if I might but see you
at my death: notwithstanding, use your pleasure,
if your love do not perswade you to come, let
not my letter.
Por.      O love! dispatch all busines and be
gone.²²

The text of Antonio's letter is clearly distinct from the rest of the passage: it stands materially apart from the rest of the text most obviously by virtue of its use of italic typeface. At the same time, it separates itself from the rest of the text—and from the rest of the text's normal grammar—by virtue of being unassigned: Portia is given a speech tag both before and after the text of the letter, and there is no speech tag for the letter itself. ²³

In his discussion of Hamlet's letter to Claudius, especially the signature that either does (in the Folio) or does not (in the second quarto) accompany it, Jonathan Goldberg discusses a similar instance of a letter and its typographical relationship to the rest of the play-text in which it occurs:

In the Folio [as compared to the second quarto], Hamlet's signature is printed in the same type as the rest of the text of the play and the same type as the names "Horatio," "Rosincrance," and "Guildensterne" that appear in the letter; save for them, the entire body of the letter as well as the subscription is in italics. Do italics therefore mark the letter as not part of the play, or not part of the script produced by the hand that wrote the rest of the text? But in that case, to whom does the letter belong when the signature is not in the same hand as the letter, but instead marked the same way as the hand that produces the rest of the text?²⁴

Unlike the Folio Hamlet's letter, Antonio's letter is both unassigned and unsigned; it has no voice (that Portia or Bassanio voices the letter on stage is either purely conjectural or merely convenient), and the signature that would authorize it exists only under erasure. Though this is the letter that claims to be the body of its author, it is, finally, the letter that inscribes instead the impossibility of presence-in-writing. This is the disembodied letter.

The appearance of Antonio's letter represents a violent eruption of tragedy into the scene of romance surrounding Bassanio's choice. But before we see Portia's Belmont as wholly idyllic, it is important to recognize the ways in which Portia's world is in fact organized around a central but unstaged scene of writing/violence: her father's will mandating the test of the three caskets—the very thing that introduces further instances of violence or its implicit threat.

If we can speculate on the nature of this specular scene of writing/violence—as indeed the play invites us to do, particularly in those moments in which Portia herself contemplates her father's mandate (his will and his writing) and its effects on her: "I may neither choose who I would, nor refuse who I dislike, so is the will of a living daughter curb'd by the will of a dead father"
(1.2.22-25)—Portia's father's will stands as an exemplary instance of a profound faith in the metaphysics of writing, its supposed ability to figure the presence of the body as immanent in writing itself.²⁵

There is little doubt that Portia's father's will has more to do with Portia's father than it does with Portia herself, as is clear in Nerissa's early comment on the test of the three caskets: "Who chooses his meaning chooses you" (1.2.30-31). What is at stake, then, in the suitor's choice is the father's meaning—and the father's wealth, all of which Portia gives over to Bassanio, "Myself, and what is mine, to you and yours / Is now converted" (3.2.166-67). Portia signifies in this economy of male desire merely as the embodiment of wealth and as heir to her father's seemingly limitless fortune, as Bassanio's prioritized list of Portia's characteristics perhaps intimates: "In Belmont is a lady richly left, / And she is fair" (1.1.161-62). To the materialistic Bassanio (or Morocco, or Arragon), the correct casket holds the license to assume the position of the father, as well as his possessions marked by the representation of its "real world" signifier: Portia's portrait. The logic of Portia's father's will is predicated upon an informing faith in the myth of presence-in-writing executed across the figure of Portia as its signifier. It is this logic (with which I take exception) that was read so influentially by Freud in his famous essay "The Theme of the Three Caskets."²⁶

Freud read well the intentions informing Portia's father; he understood, that is, that the caskets really do for him represent Portia herself. But there is no reason that we need to see the same thing in the three caskets. The caskets can be said to hold different versions of the preserved paternal will—that is, different versions of that will, or, even, of the father himself. What is more (and quite unlike the caskets in the source tale of the Gesta Romanorum), these caskets contain two sorts of material representations of the suitors's fates: the death's head, the "portrait of a blinking idiot," and Portia's portrait constitute the first sort, while writing constitutes the second.

Morocco had earlier announced another test to determine true from false love, the worthy from the unworthy:

Mislike me not for my complexion,
The shadowed livery of the burnish'd sun,
To whom I am a neighbour, and near bred.
Bring me the fairest creature northward born,
Where Phoebus' fire scarce thaws the icicles,
And let us make incision for your love,
To prove whose blood is reddest, his or mine.
                                      (2.1.1-7)

Morocco's boast (and it is perhaps more than a mere boast; it may speak earnestly to the very prejudice of which Portia seems to be a mouthpiece—"Let all of his complexion choose me so" [2.7.79], she says upon Morocco's "thus losers part") displays an understanding of the ways in which truth is aligned with writing, or, as he says, inscribing. Much as a writer cuts into a page with the quill/knife, Morocco imagines that the resolution of the racial obstacles he faces lies in incising his body, in a writing both on and of the body—a writing that will embody or make present a truth (his virtue as equal to and deserving of Portia) symbolized for him in the redness of his blood.

It is a faith in real bodies, and their persistence even in absence—their immanence, that is, in the dream of presence-in-writing—that motivates Portia's father and his will. At the same time, a faith in real bodies motivates Shylock's passionate pursuit of the forfeiture of the bond, underwriting, as it were, Shylock's much-discussed adherence to "the letter of the law." Shylock very clearly understands there to be an intimate relationship between the body and writing, even as he hopes to kill Antonio by inscribing upon his body the costs of both the forfeited bond and the wages of Antonio's anti-semitism. At the same time, Shylock understands that there is an equally intimate relationship between the body and the state, which are mutually dependent and discursively figured: Antonio's fate lies in Shylock's hands to the extent that Venice as a political entity lies embodied in its laws, hence Shylock's repeated appeals to law and justice. The Duke necessarily finds this argument compelling and is left no choice but to endorse what he thinks is the young doctor's sentence against the merchant. Antonio, for his part, seems to accept the inevitability of his death at Shylock's hands; in fact, Antonio recognizes that Shylock's execution of the forfeiture constitutes a writing on his body that will inscribe a specific meaning:

I am a tainted wether of the flock,
Meetest for death,—the weakest kind of fruit
Drops earliest to the ground, and so let me;
You cannot better be employ'd Bassanio,
Than to live still and write mine epitaph.
                                    (4.1.114-18)

For Antonio, the antidote to death is a kind of immortality in writing: his epitaph. He later invokes this imagined presence in his farewell to Bassanio:

Commend me to your honorable wife,
Tell her the process of Antonio's end,
Say how I lov'd you, speak me fair in death:
And when the tale is told, bid her be judge
Whether Bassanio had not once a love:
Repent but you that you shall lose your friend
And he repents not that he pays your debt.
For if the Jew do cut but deep enough,
I'll pay it instantly with all my heart.
                                           (4.1.269-77)

Antonio's faith in presence-in-writing, like Portia's father's and Shylock's, construes the body as the ultimate ground of writing, whether that writing literally occurs on the body (Morocco's incision, Antonio's pound of flesh) or is understood as immanent in writing itself (Portia's father's will, Shylock's bond). In both instances, writing promises presence in absence and articulates its promise on the level of Ietterai configurations within the play.

Another significant instance of this is Portia's embodiment as Balthazar, the young doctor of laws. Portia's disguise as Balthazar is of particular interest because it is, like Jessica's and Nerissa's corresponding changes, a cross-gender embodiment: by virtue of the letter (first Portia's letter to Bellario and then, in turn, Bellario's letter to the Duke), Portia and Nerissa will both appear as men ("accomplished / With what we lack" [3.4.61-62]) before the Venetian court.²⁷

In her transformed shape, Portia manifests a profound ability to exploit the hypostatized relationship between the body, writing, and the state by recasting the narrative of embodiment Shylock and the others have imagined. Portia intervenes in Shylock's narrative (and Antonio's, too, as he projects his embodiment in Bassanio's epitaph) by appropriating Shylock's linguistic practice: he has insisted upon the letter of the law (the logic, that is, of presence-in-writing) and it is precisely this literalism ("letteralism") that Portia turns upon him:

This bond doth give thee here no jot of blood,
The words expressly are 'a pound of flesh':
Take then thy bond, take thou thy pound of
  flesh,
But in the cutting it, if thou dost shed
One drop of Christian blood, thy lands and
  goods
Are (by the laws of Venice) confiscate
Unto the state of Venice.
                                   (4.1.302-8)

While the outcome perhaps startles—it is Shylock and not Antonio who will die by the violence of the letter—the logic of that violence is no surprise as it has in fact underwritten the entire play, even here in the moment of its evident reversal.²⁸

Portia draws the play toward its conclusion with a final letter telling Antonio of the safe return of his ships.²⁹ But if this letter represents the moment of comic closure in which even the failure of Antonio's merchant venture (by now perhaps a moot issue) is recuperated, it also represents a profound mystification of the letter and all that it is held to signify:

       Antonio you are welcome,
And I have better news in store for you
Than you expect: unseal this letter soon,
There you shall find three of your argosies
Are richly come to harbour suddenly.
You shall not know by what strange accident
I chanced on this letter.
                                (5.1.273-79)

Though this final letter carries a certain signifying and sensational content, like Antonio (and perhaps like Portia) we cannot account for its presence. The play forecloses any such accounting; the letter simply exists as the final sign of comic resolution. While this letter may stand emblematically for the various operations of the letters we have encountered throughout the play—particularly the desire for presence-in-writing upon which they are founded—this letter comes from nowhere and from no one's hand. It serves, then, to destabilize the very philosophy of the letter and its epistemology of presence; it betrays the mystical or, more aptly, the theological nature of the letter. In the end, the letter inhabits the realm of the conjectural, not the contractual, and our confidence in the letter is actually our profound and desperate faith in it. Rather than serving to guarantee desire and anchor it in the material, the mystical letter affords only the vision of such grounding always just beyond reach. And its only pleasures are the pleasures of the dream of immanence that the letter inscribes as the condition of its, and perhaps our own, ontology.