SOURCE: "Giving and Taking in The Merchant of Venice" in Love's Argument: Gender Relations in Shakespeare, The University of North Carolina Press, 1984, pp. 63-82.

[In the following essay, Novy argues that the play criticizes the self-denial Antonio demonstrates throughout the play in favor of Portia's self-assertion and her acceptance of sexuality.]

Many critics describe The Merchant of Venice as contrasting taking to giving. Shylock to Portia and Antonio.¹ A few have begun to note that the play also contrasts two kinds of giving, and that neither Portia nor Antonio is uncritically portrayed as an ideal of perfect generosity. Antonio's attempt at total self-sacrifice is different from Portia's willingness to give and take while setting limits.² Antonio's words in the trial scene suggest a rivalry between himself and Portia.³ I believe that the personal rivalry dramatizes a struggle between two types of giving which was a central issue in the historical, religious, and psychological conflicts of Renaissance Europe. As a further sign of the centrality of this conflict in The Merchant, not only is Bassanio at the pivot of the personal rivalry between Antonio and Portia, but he also mediates between them in his mode of giving and moves his closest alliance from Antonio to Portia during the play. If these types of giving are rivals, it is Portia's that wins; Antonio cannot maintain the attitude of self-sacrifice all the time, and his depression, as well as his antagonism to Shylock, casts doubt on the attractiveness of his attempts. Thus I would argue that The Merchant of Venice implies a criticism of the ideal of self-denial in favor of the more comprehensive attitude of Portia, who is not only more assertive than Antonio but also more accepting of sexuality.

In this reading, Antonio's anti-Semitism is closely related to the denial and projection required by his attempt at total self-sacrifice. The play's outsiders by race and sex, Shylock and Portia, are paralleled as well as contrasted. Portia's echoes of Shylock in the final ring episode cohere with the self-assertion she has shown throughout, as well as with Shakespeare's use and revaluation of his culture's association of both women and Jews with the flesh.

Both W. H. Auden and C. L. Barber make some interesting connections between The Merchant and the socioeconomic changes of its time, and these, with related psychological and religious changes, are the best context in which to see the oppositions within the play.⁴ The traditional ethic of Shakespeare's society was still that of the medieval theologians who found it sinful both to lend money for personal profit rather than out of generosity and to have sexual relations for pleasure rather than for procreation. On usury, Aquinas, for example, had said. "To take usury from any man is simply evil, because we ought to treat every man as our neighbour and brother."⁵ And summing up the thought of many other theologians, Saint Raymond said, "One ought to lend to one's needy neighbor only for God and principally from charity."⁶ In Elizabethan England the condemnation of usury was repeated both by caricaturing dramatists and also by such preachers as Henry Smith, Miles Mosse, Roger Fenton, Nicholas Sanders, Philip Caesar, and Gerard Malynes.⁷ On sex, Aquinas had said, "The end, however, which nature intends in copulation is offspring to be procreated and educated, and that this good might be sought it has put delight in copulation, as Augustine says, Marriage and Concupiscence, 1.8. Whoever, therefore, uses copulation for the delight which is in it, not referring the intention to the end intended by nature, acts against nature."⁸ Various medieval theologians made various accommodations to mixed motives, but in general both money-lending and sex were supposed to be for the benefit of others more than for oneself. Actual behavior, of course, fell short of these ideals, but in the Middle Ages the feudal socioeconomic system supported them, while in the Renaissance socioeconomic changes pulled in the opposite direction.

Although some of our pictures of the community life from which the Elizabethans were emerging may be over-simplified, nevertheless it seems clear that they experienced an increasing individualism, acquisitiveness, and competitiveness. Of course, Shakespeare's audience did not make a sharp break with the past and give up the ideals of charity and self-sacrifice. Rather, their very retention of traditional ideals added to their sense of inner conflict. The need to define charity so that it could be combined with greater self-consciousness and a changing socioeconomic system led many theologians, both Protestant and Catholic, to new formulations; the struggle between communal and individualistic social systems had its analogue in psychic struggle.⁹The Merchant of Venice provides a dramatic reflection of these struggles, and in its resolution of them, as apparently in history, the role of the outsider is particularly important.

Value systems that emphasize self-sacrificial giving—like the Christianity still honored in the world of The Merchant and its audience—often differentiate sharply between the community of those who give and the outsider, who has what they consider the uncivilized habit of taking and uncivilized anger at the excluding community. But of course those within the community are also taking from each other—and from those outside—although they may not admit it. Thus they may project their own acquisitiveness—and all the aggressions they cannot acknowledge—onto the outsider and persecute him or her as a scapegoat. Here Shakespeare draws on the Elizabethan theater's frequent identification of Venice with acquisitiveness to suggest its paradoxical similarity to Shylock, the outsider it calls a devil.¹⁰

There are many kinds of outsiders in The Merchant of Venice. Not only Shylock, but also most of Portia's suitors are ethnic outsiders to Venice. Although a citizen of Venice, Antonio as well can be seen as a psychological outsider.¹¹ Portia, as a woman, is different in a more obvious sense, although in Belmont the proper metaphor for the limitation on her actions is confinement rather than exclusion, and in Venice she passes for a Roman male. Insofar as her society is structured in patriarchal terms, it justifies its subordination of her by beliefs similar to those that justify its subordination of Shylock. Women and Jews could be seen as symbolic of absolute otherness—alien, mysterious, uncivilized, unredeemed. In this tradition, femaleness and Jewishness as qualities in themselves were associated with the flesh, not the spirit, and therefore with impulses toward sexuality, aggression, and acquisitiveness.¹²

However, ... the attitude toward women in Shakespeare's society was not simply patriarchal, nor is it in this play. Nor could the attitude toward sexuality, aggression, or acquisitiveness have been monolithic. I believe that The Merchant of Venice likewise shows a divided attitude toward these qualities and distinguishes among their manifestations. Portia's active capacity for mutuality integrates and transforms associations of women with the flesh. Her self-assertion promises energies to sustain a more realistic love and community. In her betrothal speech to Bassanio, she explicitly denies the egoism of the isolated self, but suggests that her loving marriage to Bassanio multiplies her wishes for what she can share with him.

Though for myself alone
I would not be ambitious in my wish
To wish myself much better, yet for you
I would be trebled twenty times myself,
A thousand times more fair, ten thousand times more rich.

(3.2.150-54)

Shylock, however, both speaks for and suffers from the most threatening possibilities of self-assertion. He is portrayed as one who is ambitious for himself alone.

Shylock's main role is to speak for the aggressive and acquisitive motives that his society follows but does not admit. His powerful appeal to human commonality that begins "Hath not a Jew eyes?" (3.1.51) makes its climactic point "And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that" (3.1.57-59). In his first scene with Antonio and Bassanio he explains his anger at being treated like a dog, as if they might remember their own anger at being insulted and understand him. But insofar as his audience considers anger one of the seven deadly sins, his defense fails; it plays into the tendency to project anger onto an outsider and becomes a justification for further exclusion.

While his hostility and acquisitiveness are most evidently what his society fears in him, he suggests other qualities important in the transition to the Renaissance. When he tells about Jacob's breeding of spotted sheep by sympathetic magic, Shylock emphasizes the potency of Jacob's cleverness: "Mark what Jacob did . . . the skillful shepherd" (1.3.73, 80). By contrast, Antonio, the spokesman for his society's traditional values, denies Jacob's power and emphasizes his risk—using, of course, the same word that applies to his own attempts to make money:

This was a venture, sir, that Jacob served for,
A thing not in his power to bring to pass,
But swayed and fashioned by the hand of heaven.

(1.3.87-89)

What Shylock stresses and Antonio denies is precisely the element of individual mastery that became more important in the Renaissance; such mastery correlates with the humorous vitality of Shylock's speech, which, as Sigurd Burckhardt has pointed out, contrasts with the somberness and ineffectiveness of Antonio's.¹³ On the other hand, Antonio's emphasis on the uncertainty of Jacob's ventures corresponds to the fact that the scholastic analysis of usury distinguished it from other more lawful forms of money-making, like Antonio's, by its lack of risk.¹⁴

Although he profits financially from the new acquisitive society, Antonio cannot admit that he is anything but a giver, whether to Bassanio or to his other debtors.¹⁵ At the start, he says to Bassanio, "My purse, my person, my extremest means / Lie all unlocked to your occasions" (1.1.138-39). Suggesting a coalescence with classical Roman ideals of generosity, Bassanio describes him to Portia as

The best-conditioned and unwearied spirit
In doing courtesies, and one in whom
The ancient Roman honor more appears
Than any that draws breath in Italy.

(3.2.293-96)

Courtesy and honor demand a minimizing of the giver's own needs and risks; Antonio plays down the danger of taking Shylock's bond and refuses to accept Bassanio's promise of a speedy return from Belmont. Thus his generosity denies a need for mutuality and tends toward an attitude of combined self-effacement and self-sufficiency. (As policy he lends money without taking interest.) When the wreck of his ships entitles Shylock to claim a pound of his flesh, according to their contract, Antonio plays the role of one who endures and gives all for the love of his friend; he is following an ideal of self-sacrifice and imitation of Christ.¹⁶ Benjamin Nelson has suggested that this, as well as his general willingness to lend money without taking interest, links Antonio closely with predominant medieval ethical emphases. He would have been viewed critically by such reformers as Luther, who said, "Standing surety is a work that is too lofty for a man; it is unseemly, for it is presumptuous and an invasion of God's rights."¹⁷ The weakness of his language and his opening complaint of a sadness whose cause he does not know suggest other grounds for viewing him critically, and, in general, using a psychological perspective.

Many contemporary critics have seen homosexual feelings in Antonio's love for Bassanio.¹⁸ But it is important to note that Shakespeare's language can go much further in suggesting sexual undertones between men than Antonio's does. The sonnets play with far more witty double entendre than do Antonio's serious and asexual words. Antonio is one of the most reluctant punsters among Shakespeare's major characters and also one of the least given to talking about sex in any way.¹⁹ If we think of how Shakespeare's men usually talk about women among themselves—Benedick and Claudio, Oliver and Orlando, Romeo and Mercutio, Berowne and his fellows—it is remarkable that Antonio refers to Portia only at the beginning of the conversation: "What lady is the same / To whom you swore a secret pilgrimage," (1.1.119-20) and at the end as "fair Portia" (1.1.182). Nor does Antonio make punning references to male sexuality like those at the end of Sonnet 20:

But since she pricked thee out for women's pleasure,
Mine be thy love, and thy love's use their treasure.

Antonio typically presents himself as completely asexual, as if following an ideal of celibacy; he behaves like the altruists described by Anna Freud who have given up to another person, with whom they identify, the right to have their instincts gratified.²⁰ Nevertheless, there is one point at which Antonio finds it impossible to maintain his attitude of total self-sacrifice; the wreck of his ships finally forces him to make a request of Bassanio. Even then he tries not to ask it directly: "My bond to the Jew is forfeit. And since in paying it, it is impossible I should live, all debts are cleared 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" (3.2.317-22). For all Antonio's self-effacing posture, this wording makes Bassanio's appearance a test of his love.²¹ In spite of his intent, Antonio expresses a need for a mutuality of relationship in which he can receive as well as give. And it is interesting that this is also a point where sexual double entendre may lurk in Antonio's language. Bassanio has just betrothed himself to Portia, and in that context "use your pleasure" sounds a little more like the end of Sonnet 20.²²

But if in general Antonio denies or sublimates his own sexuality and instead supports Bassanio's pursuit of Portia, he also denies the acquisitiveness inherent in being a merchant and instead attacks Shylock, the double who shares and exaggerates his mercantile profession and marginal social status. Even in this respect, however, he generally presents himself as selfdenying, patiently holding in check his hostility to Shylock everywhere but in the scene where he arranges the loan. In his verbal attack on Shylock there, his speech takes on unusual energy; this is the one scene in which Antonio does not speak about being sad. His temporary recovery resembles the relief from a sense of powerlessness and depression that modern psychologists have often found to be one function of anti-Semitic outbursts.²³

Subject to the conflicting forces of Antonio and Portia, Bassanio mediates between them in his attitude toward giving. His giving is responsive rather than self-sacrificing; impoverished as he is, he is quite willing to take as well, but the juxtaposition of the two men ultimately emphasizes Bassanio's frivolity as well as Antonio's somberness. With Antonio's help, he can indulge in inviting his friends and even Shylock to dinner, taking on the hungry Lancelot Gobbo as an extra servant, and sending gifts to Portia. His attempt at unlimited generosity with his words complements Antonio's attempt at unlimited generosity with his money and his life. Bassanio's spontaneity is appealing, but there is something of a naive love of fine gestures in it, a romanticism of risk, magnanimity, and promise unqualified by a sense of responsibility.²⁴ In a comparison he himself uses in asking money from Antonio, he gives and takes like a child at play—who believes that he can give anything away and have it to give again.

Juxtaposed with these three male characters, however admirable, fascinating, or charming they may be at their best, Portia seems much better able to cope with the world in which she lives—indeed, to protect it from the dangers of extreme asceticism, individualism, or irresponsibility. From the beginning of the play, where she mocks all her suitors, she would fall short by traditional standards of perfect charity, but she succeeds by the standards of romantic comedy. We first meet her complaining about one of the limitations traditionally set on women—patriarchal control of marriage choice.²⁵ When she finds a way of dealing with this problem, it is not the blithe unconsciousness of limits that Bassanio shows, any more than it is passive self-sacrifice like Antonio's. In a situation that makes her an object to be chosen, her mockery of her suitors shows that she preserves her own wish to choose, and she defines her own requirements in a husband by observing what her suitors lack. For all the xenophobia in her wit, what she criticizes most are qualities that hinder mutuality of social interchange: "he doth nothing but talk of his horse. . . . He doth nothing but frown—as who should say, 'An you will not have me, choose!' He hears merry tales and smiles not; ... he will fence with his own shadow. . . . You know I say nothing to him, for he understands not me, nor I him" (1.2.38-39, 43-45, 57, 63-64).

And because of her own skill in talking with people, she learns how to work with the limitations of the casket test. Although in its choice of imagery it seems to dramatize a definition of woman as an object, she can use it to disqualify those who so define her and would deny her an active role in a mutual relationship.²⁶ With Morocco and Arragon, she speaks much more of the rules of the game than of her own feelings, and by hurrying them to the caskets, she exposes their susceptibility to the possession-oriented mottos: "Who chooseth me shall gain what many men desire" and "Who chooseth me shall get as much as he deserves."

With Bassanio, by contrast, Portia can be much more than the passive object of quest. There is a new spontaneity in her language as she feels her way into trusting him with her thoughts:

There's something tells me, but it is not love,
I would not lose you; and you know yourself
Hate counsels not in such a quality.

(3.2.4-6)

By speaking of his company as something she does not want to lose, she first puts herself in the position of one who receives and asks for gifts; at the same time her language is generous. Perhaps by her own risk-taking, more than by any verbal hint, she reinforces his love of risk and encourages the frame of mind in which he chooses the casket demanding that he "give and hazard all he hath." Although she feels herself already his, she then speaks as active giver of herself. In light of all the economic imagery in this scene, it is interesting that her words to him here—"Myself and what is mine to you and yours / Is now converted" (3.2.166-67)—echo a medieval etymological pun often found in scholastic writings against usury: "A loan [mutuum] is so called from this, that mine [meum] becomes yours [tuum]"²⁷ As in a purely financial partnership, however, she can ask for a share in the outcome of his ventures: "I am half yourself, / And I must freely have the half of anything / That this same paper brings you" (3.2.248-50). When what it brings is news of Antonio's losses, her decision to help comes not from an impersonal generosity but from a personal sense of relationship, through Bassanio, with Antonio, "the semblance of my soul" (3.4.20). Antonio's friendship with Bassanio has been basically one-sided, since generosity with money and life costs more than generosity with words; Portia tries to make their relationship more mutual as she both insists that Bassanio meet his obligations and enables him to do so.

In the trial scene, Venice continues to emphasize its own generosity in trying to deal with Shylock. Each of the male characters tries to play out his role to the extreme, and limitations suggested earlier become apparent; only Portia can act effectively. Shylock talks only about a side of human existence the Venetians would prefer to forget—impulses to destroy. "Hates any man the thing he would not kill?" (4.1.67). While earlier he could explain his anger as a response to Antonio's contempt, here he refuses to make his case in public terms—"I'll not answer that, / But say it is my humor" (4.1.42-43)—except to point out the dependence of the Venetian slaveholding system on the inviolability of private bonds analogous to his with Antonio. Antonio also refuses to argue his case in the court. Initially he presents his surrender as a kind of moral victory:

 I do oppose
My patience to his fury, and am armed
To suffer with a quietness of spirit
The very tyranny and rage of his. . . .

(4.1.10-13)

However, as the scene proceeds, some telling lines suggest that his sadness has its basis in his own anger turned inward, and they hint at the psychological basis for the peculiarly compelling quality in the confrontation between Shylock and Antonio:

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.

(4.1.114-16)

The startling self-disgust of these lines suggests the limits of Antonio's solution to the conflict between self-sacrifice and self-assertion.

Earlier Antonio's language made him seem asexual; now he makes the image more concrete by calling himself a "wether"—castrated. Both "tainted" and the likelihood of rottenness in "the weakest kind of fruit" that "drops earliest to the ground" suggest disease and corruption. Whether he is criticizing himself for his asexuality and sense of powerlessness—tainted because he is a wether—or for the sexuality that makes him feel tainted and that he therefore tries to deny—a wether because he is tainted—he is clearly accusing himself of both disease and weakness. Oddly echoing his earlier attack on Shylock as "a goodly apple rotten at the heart" (1.3.97), Antonio here seems to be calling himself a failure by two different sets of standards, goodness as valued by Christianity and power as valued by individualism. Again his words call for a psychological interpretation, and psychoanalytic theory directly connects such self-criticism and depression with idealism and self-sacrifice. Freud explains self-criticism in melancholia by saying that "the more a man controls his aggressiveness, the more intense becomes his ideal's inclination to aggressiveness against his ego."²⁸ Applying this concept to the suicidal melancholic, A. Alvarez describes his harsh internal ego-ideal as "an unappeased Doppelgänger, not to be placated, crying out to be heard."²⁹ Some of the power of the trial scene comes from the confrontation between Antonio and a character very much like this unappeased doppelgänger. The demands Shylock makes on Antonio coalesce with the demands Antonio makes on himself.

Both Antonio and Shylock appear to want the same outcome for the trial. Antonio's death would, apparently, be a victory for both of them according to their own opposite standards. The values they speak for are, of course, very much in conflict, and thus the conflict seems an impossible one to resolve. Where the play seems most clearly to be dramatizing the conflict between the opposing values of self-sacrifice and individualism, it dramatizes the conflict as a deadlock.³⁰ Both the Duke and Bassanio attempt to mediate, but they are too openly hostile to Shylock and too similar to Antonio in their rhetoric and surface values.

Only Portia, using her outsider's perspective, can act effectively. She closes her "quality of mercy" speech with an admission such as none of the other characters has made that Shylock has a case in justice, and this prepares for her final ability to defeat him. Unlike the other characters, she can establish a common language with him; an outsider herself, she must be able to use language for more purposes than communion with friends or anger at other outsiders.

After words of self-sacrificing devotion from Antonio and Bassanio, it is Portia's disguised self-assertion that first hints that something may prevent Antonio and Shylock from acting out to the end their roles of giver and taker. Bassanio responds to Antonio's emotional farewell by declaring:

 life itself, my wife, and all the world
Are not with me esteemed above thy life.
I would lose all, ay sacrifice them all
Here to this devil, to deliver you.

(4.1.282-85)

Portia draws back from the immediate situation and reminds us of the greater awareness and detachment her disguise gives her, like the awareness and detachment that come from recognizing that one is playing a game in which the rules can be manipulated. She says, "Your wife would give you little thanks for that / If she were by to hear you make the offer" (4.1.286-87). The realistic literalism of her words punctures the emotional and idealistic mood. Her skepticism about self-sacrifice puts her in momentary alliance with Shylock, who says, "These be the Christian husbands!" (4.1.293). She is too vital to let her husband get away with talking about sacrificing her— even at a farewell to his best friend—and at the same time resourceful enough to voice her complaint in a joke entirely in character for the objective doctor of laws she is playing. While Shylock, observing her insistence on the law and her outsider's irony here, may think he has met his ally, we can see that he has actually met his match. Her use of language here—detached, witty, literal to the point of being unfair—directly prepares for her use of language to save Antonio herself rather than being sacrificed for him. "This bond doth give thee here no jot of blood; / The words expressly are 'a pound of flesh'" (4.1.304-5). Thus reading very literally the words that Shylock and Antonio agreed to as partners in the bond, she finds a way to force them out of their extreme positions—to compel Antonio to take and Shylock to give—for of course the court will seize on any means an apparently objective lawyer gives to defeat Shylock.

It is interesting to compare the trial scene with the somewhat similar deadlock that occurs in Richard II in the confrontation between Richard and Henry Bolingbroke, often seen as emblematic of the conflict between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Richard, like Antonio, presents himself as self-sacrificing, and even more explicitly compares himself to Christ. He says to Bolingbroke ironically, "They well deserve to have / That know the strong'st and surest way to get" (3.3.200-201). That play heads toward an outcome in which both win on their own terms, but the emphasis on conscience and sympathy is so great that whoever takes the throne appears to be in the wrong. In The Merchant of Venice, by contrast, Shakespeare avoids giving either Antonio or Shylock the victory on his own terms. Instead, the victory goes to Portia, and in spite of the cost to Shylock, it does not evoke the guilt of a purely egoistic victory of an isolated individual, since Portia wins it for Antonio's life as well as for the success of her marriage. Yet in the punishments she and Antonio can impose on Shylock for his intent because he is an outsider, we can see how pervasive the spirit of vengeance is in this play. No character is an ideal of perfect charity, although Antonio tries to be; the aggressive forces within and without are too strong.³¹ It has been suggested that Antonio is an ethical ideal because his attempt to sacrifice himself for his friend can be seen as an imitation of Christ. Yet by making him a melancholy and at times self-hating figure on the comic stage, Shakespeare deliberately exposes some of Antonio's limitations even to an audience uncritical of his anti-Semitism. Furthermore, it is not only her defeat of an adversary against which he is powerless that puts Antonio and Portia into direct contrast; Antonio makes the contrast both implicitly and explicitly. He presents his impending death as a defeat for Portia in a competition about who loves Bassanio most.³²

Commend me to your honorable wife.
Tell her the process of Antonio's end,
Say how I loved you, speak me fair in death;
And when the tale is told, bid her be judge
Whether Bassanio had not once a love.

(4.1.271-75)

After he escapes death, furthermore, he continues to suggest that it is he, and not Portia, who loves Bassanio; he begs Bassanio to reward the lawyer with Portia's ring by saying, "Let his deservings, and my love withal, / Be valued 'gainst your wife's commandement" (4.1.448-49). Bassanio's choice to give away the ring he has promised Portia to keep until death—a choice made only after the lawyer has left and Antonio has made this request—prepares for the fifth act's further development of the contrast between Portia and Antonio.

"I pray you know me when we meet again" (4.1.417) is Portia's farewell to Bassanio in the trial scene, and the pun on "know," which relates sexuality to recognition, anticipates her emphasis on sexual identity in the return to Belmont and her implicit victory over Antonio. In the trial, the threat of aggression has been removed by projection onto a scapegoat; at Belmont, it can be dissolved in play—mock hostility that unites the married couples more closely. In the trial the characters presented a general show of liberality from which only Shylock was excluded; at Belmont, Portia and Nerissa will incorporate some of Shylock's self-assertion and demand for his rights into their relationships with their husbands.³³ In the trial there has been a demonstration of agape, love that gives without asking for any return, in Antonio's willingness to die;³⁴ in the fifth act the focus is on love as eros, which desires also to receive.

When the returning wives make their husbands account for giving away their rings, the strongly sexual tone of the threats and counter-accusations makes it clear that the argument is in some way working out—or rather playing out—threats from sexuality at the same time that it is parodying threats from Shylock. Portia pretends possessiveness and promiscuity, parallels to the financial acquisitiveness and irresponsibility of earlier scenes. She assumes an inexorability like Shylock's, and Bassanio thinks she even makes a similar threat on his bodily integrity: he says, "Why, I were best to cut my left hand off / And swear I lost the ring defending it" (5.1.177-78).

But at the same time the threat is all controlled. Portia's quick conversational repartee with Bassanio has the formal parallelism of structure that one might find in a ritual or a rhetorical exercise. While acting angry at Bassanio, she is actually uniting the two of them more closely by emphasizing their sexual relationship. "Lie not a night from home" (5.1.230) is more an expression of desire than a warning.

Portia's play with Bassanio is echoed by Nerissa's with Gratiano: both of them include a number of jokes and equivocations about sexual identity.

Nerissa The clerk will ne'er wear hair on's face that had it.
Gratiano He will, an if he live to be a man.
Nerissa Ay, if a woman live to be a man.

(5.1.158-60)

Nerissa is exuberating in her own disguised participation in the trial scene; her jokes and Portia's break down the general identification of the Christians against Shylock in the trial, where no sexual distinctions or relationships appeared. The wordplay on change of sex calls attention to sexual differentiation, a physical parallel to the mock-hostility and playful self-assertion of this scene.

The joking byplay creates an atmosphere in which Antonio feels uncomfortable. "I am th'unhappy subject of these quarrels" (5.1.238), he says, in a line that seems somewhat presumptuous at first. In a sense, however, they are quarreling about him. It was Antonio whose trial caused Bassanio's departure from Portia on their wedding day; it was Antonio who finally persuaded Bassanio to give the lawyer the ring. Even when Bassanio tries to conceal Antonio's intervention in his explanation to Portia, the motives he gives are words he used earlier in describing Antonio's virtues:

I was beset with shame and courtesy.
My honor would not let ingratitude
So much besmear it.

(5.1.217-18)

These values of public generosity and individual reliability here confront the value of mutuality identified with Portia and marriage; we see Antonio's generous self-effacement causing his lack of participation in the vitality of both jokes and sexuality.³⁵

In the final reconciliation between husband and wife, the threats of possessiveness and promiscuity are both dispelled, and the vision is one of a sexual relationship in which both partners can maintain their own identity. At the same time we are reassured that the idealism about self-sacrificing friendship that Antonio and Bassanio express and the reciprocal sexual relationship that Portia demands need not finally conflict with each other. Portia makes Antonio the intermediary when she returns her ring; afterwards she announces that his argosies are safe, and he pays tribute to her power, relinquishes his earlier depreciation of her, and acknowledges that he himself can receive as well as give. "Sweet lady, you have given me life and living!" (5.1.286).

Like Shylock's, Portia's role involves both power and powerlessness. Portia appears powerless at the beginning, and Shylock at the end, as reflections of a society in which women and Jews do not have equal rights; at other points in the play we see them possessing a power that is partly money, partly wit, and partly what Shakespeare's imagery makes of the magic that their society projects onto them. While the conclusion of the trial repeats the official power relationships between Christians and Jews, the working out of marriage relationships, by contrast, balances the official power in society. This reverses the situation in the other early comedy that ends with an emphatic ritual acknowledgment of marital power, The Taming of the Shrew, where Petruchio's roles as game-leader and patriarchal husband coalesce. But Portia's purpose in her final game is not, like Petruchio's, to get the spouse to play along; Bassanio, flexible and responsive, always follows the game-leader. It is, more accurately, to demonstrate to Antonio that she and Bassanio are in one game that excludes him—their marriage gives them a bond that takes precedence over other friendships—but that he can still play the role of friend to both of them. In trying to get Antonio with his ascetic idealism to accept the value of marriage, Portia and Shakespeare are acting analogously to those Renaissance humanists and puritans who were writing in praise of marriage, modifying traditional devaluations of women, and criticizing the application of the ideal of celibacy.

Earlier Gratiano and Salerio agreed that love was a constant and unstable pursuit of something new, and Gratiano added that like all other desires it leaves one "lean, rent, and beggared" (2.6.19), but the opposition between such passion and asceticism—between taking and giving—is transcended in the image of mutuality in love with which the play ends. Momentarily the three main characters fall into a tableau that could resemble the image of the Graces as deities of gifts, explained by Seneca in "De Beneficiis."³⁶ In this image, important in Renaissance iconology and especially in the Neoplatonic philosophy of love of Marsilio Ficino,³⁷ Seneca explains that the arrangement of the Graces "in a ring which returns upon itself shows "that a benefit passing in its course from hand to hand returns nevertheless to the giver" ("De Beneficiis," 3:13, 15). Yet we are free to think of the psychology of the characters as in tension with the image of harmony, just as the psychology of the trial scene is clearly opposed to the ritual significance of Shylock's baptism.

Michael Goldman has suggested that the great characters of both comedy and tragedy act out an attitude to the extreme, live out a wish of the audience beyond the bounds of ordinary life, and then find their self-definition questioned.³⁸ The self-surrender of Antonio, the aggression of Shylock, and the responsiveness of Bassanio are all attitudes Shakespeare's audience had within themselves: alternative possible reactions to social change and personal loss. They are attitudes we all have within ourselves, and the play gives us a chance to dramatize our internal conflicts about them. It is the triumph of comic wish fulfillment that Portia can combine all three attitudes and finish the play bound in love and friendship with the representatives of the two attitudes the audience of Shakespeare's time honored most. Throughout, Portia is operating within limits—her father's will, her husband's departure, the laws of Venice, and the decision of the judge and Antonio. Yet she maneuvers superbly within those limits, and, unlike the other characters we have discussed, she is never humbled for going too far in any direction. In the final scene, she stops playing the role of the jealous and promiscuous wife at her own decision. Having already pronounced her submission to Bassanio with no prejudice to her autonomy in the trial scene or the ring game, she does not even make the gestures of self-subordination with which Rosalind and Beatrice end their plays.

Shakespeare's early poems and comedies, with their twins and their images of friendship, love, and marriage as double identity, show a fascination with the element of identification in love.³⁹ Their structure and themes also suggest a concern for ideals of community. But he, like his society, was also fascinated by the separateness and the desire for self-assertion of the individual. Shakespeare's characters must face the fact that they are different, other, separate from those they love; they must recognize that the possibility of giving and receiving requires this separate identity, that love involves a risk that identification, whether possessive or generous, would deny.⁴⁰ Like the threat of Shylock, whose trial postpones the consummation of marriages, otherness may seem an obstacle to love—and indeed, Shylock's conversion may be intended, among other things, as an exorcism of its threat. But the acceptance of Portia's self-assertion in The Merchant of Venice is also a celebration of the ways that people manage to love one another with all their differences. In the words of a nun who taught me in grade school, "Marriages are always mixed." In the tragedies, such acceptance is harder for the heroes to achieve.

Notes

¹ See, for example, John Russell Brown, Introduction to The Merchant of Venice, ed. John Russell Brown, Arden ed. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1955), pp. lvii-lviii; Barbara Lewalski, "Biblical Allusion and Allegory in The Merchant of Venice" Shakespeare Quarterly 13 (1962): 328-36, 339; Sylvan Barnet, Introduction to Twentieth-Century Interpretations of "The Merchant of Venice" ed. Sylvan Barnet (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1970), pp. 3-6.

² Cf. Robert Hapgood, "Portia and The Merchant of Venice: The Gentle Bond," Modern Language Quarterly 28 (1967): 29. Sigurd Burckhardt makes an analogous contrast of their attitudes toward the law in Shakespearean Meanings (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968), pp. 208-36.

³ Lawrence Hyman, "The Rival Lovers in The Merchant of Venice" Shakespeare Quarterly 21 (1970): 109-16.

⁴ W. H. Auden, "Brothers and Others," in The Dyer's Hand (New York: Random House, 1962), pp. 223-32; C. L. Barber, Shakespeare's Festive Comedy (New York: Meridian, 1963), pp. 167-68. For background, see L. C. Knights, Drama and Society in the Age of Jonson (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1937); R. H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1926).

⁵Summa Theologica 2^a.2^ae.78:l-2m, quoted in Benjamin Nelson, The Idea of Usury (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1949), p. 14.

⁶ St. Raymond of Pennaforte, Summa Casuum Conscientiae (Verona, 1744), 2.7.2, quoted in John T. Noonan, Jr., The Scholastic Analysis of Usury (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1957), p. 33.

⁷ Nelson, The Idea of Usury, pp. 83-85.

⁸On the Sentences 4.33.1.3., quoted in John T. Noonan, Jr., Contraception (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1965), pp. 241-42. Another licit purpose of sexual intercourse was described as "paying the marriage debt"; the phrase suggests both other-centered motivation and the financial analogy. Noonan, Contraception, pp. 284-85.

⁹ Cf. Zevedei Barbu, Problems in Historical Psychology (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1960), pp. 114-15; Richard P. Wheeler, "History, Character and Conscience in Richard III" Comparative Drama 5 (1971-72): 318-19.

¹⁰ G. K. Hunter, "Elizabethans and Foreigners," Shakespeare Survey 17 (1964): 46-47. On "devil" as a common anti-Semitic epithet, see Joshua Trachtenberg, The Devil and the Jews (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1943), pp. 18-31.

¹¹ For discussion of Bassanio too as outsider, see Kirby Farrell, Shakespeare's Creation (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1975), pp. 146-47, 152-55.

¹² See, for example, Ian Maclean, The Renaissance Notion of Woman (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980), pp. 16-22; Rosemary Ruether, Liberation Theology (New York: Paulist Press, 1972), pp. 6, 16, 19-21; Rosemary Ruether, "Misogynism and Virginal Feminism in the Fathers of the Church," in Religion and Sexism, ed. Rosemary Ruether (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1974), pp. 156-69. See also Leslie Fiedler, The Stranger in Shakespeare (New York: Stein and Day, 1972), for a different view on Portia's relation to this tradition.

¹³ Burckhardt, Shakespearean Meanings, p. 208.

¹⁴ Noonan, Usury, p. 135.

¹⁵ Auden, "Brothers and Others," p. 232.

¹⁶ See Lewalski, "Biblical Allusion," pp. 328-36, 339; Nelson, The Idea of Usury, pp. 141-51. He is also aspiring to the Renaissance ideal of friendship, which involves elements from both classical and medieval traditions; see Laurens J. Mills, One Soul in Bodies Twain (Bloomington, Ind.: Principia Press, 1937). However, his relationship with Bassanio falls short of this ideal because of its inequality.

¹⁷ Martin Luther, Von Kaufshandlung und Wucher, quoted in Nelson, The Idea of Usury, p. 152.

¹⁸ See, for example, Graham Midgley, "The Merchant of Venice: A Reconsideration," Essays in Criticism 10 (1960): 125; Norman Holland, Psychoanalysis and Shakespeare (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964), pp. 238-39.

¹⁹ Cf. Fiedler, The Stranger in Shakespeare, p. 89.

²⁰ Anna Freud, The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence (New York: International Universities Press, 1946), pp. 132-36.

²¹ Cf. J. D. Hurrell, "Love and Friendship in The Merchant of Venice," Texas Studies in Literature and Language 3 (1961): 339; Hapgood, "Portia," p. 26.

²² Cf. Auden, "Brothers and Others," p. 230, and Fiedler, The Stranger in Shakespeare, p. 90.

²³ See Nathan W. Ackerman and Marie Jahoda, Anti-Semitism and Emotional Disorder (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1950), p. 26.

²⁴ Cf. Auden, "Brothers and Others," p. 232.

²⁵ Posthumous constraints on marriage were common in Elizabethan aristocratic families, but with the increasing concern for compatibility the trend was to loosen them; see Lawrence Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558-1641 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), pp. 597-99.

²⁶ For the view that the casket image defines woman as a sexual object, see Sigmund Freud, "The Theme of the Three Caskets," Complete Psychological Works, trans. James Strachey, 24 vols. (London: Hogarth Press, 1953-74), 12:292.

²⁷ Noonan, Usury, p. 39.

²⁸ Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id, trans. Joan Riviere, rev. ed. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1962), p. 44; see also Holland, Psychoanalysis and Shakespeare, pp. 234-35.

²⁹ A. Alvarez, The Savage God (New York: Bantam, 1973), pp. 105-6.

³⁰ The conflict is a deadlock in an additional sense to that used by Harriett Hawkins in Poetic Freedom and Poetic Truth (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), p. 71, of situations in which "opposed characters . . . each elicit both admiration and criticism." She discusses Richard II, to which I later compare The Merchant of Venice.

³¹ Antonio is self-controlled enough not to mock Shylock like Gratiano, and he does not take his share of the fine permanently, just on trust for Lorenzo during Shylock's lifetime. But however much the original audience preferred Lorenzo and Jessica to Shylock, honored Christianity, and condemned Judaism, they could see that the forced deed of gift and baptism punish Shylock, though ostensibly for his own good. Living in an age of religious persecution and of religious reform that stressed the individual conscience, many of them understood the difference between a free conversion and a forced one.

³² Cf. Midgley, "The Merchant of Venice" p. 203; Alvarez, The Savage God, p. 103.

³³ See Burckhardt, Shakespearean Meanings, pp. 234-35.

³⁴ Cf. Lewalski, "Biblical Allusion," p. 339.

³⁵ Cf. E. M. W. Tillyard, Shakespeare's Early Comedies (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1965), p. 199.

³⁶ Seneca, "De Beneficiis," in Moral Essays, trans. John W. Basore, 3 vols. (1928-32; reprint, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963-65), 3:13. The importance of this treatise in Renaissance doctrine of liberality is discussed by James Calderwood in Shakespearean Metadrama (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1971), p. 75n. On this point as on many others, I find myself in agreement with Lawrence Danson's The Harmonies of "The Merchant of Venice" (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978).

³⁷ Edgar Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance (New York: Norton, 1968), pp. 36-39.

³⁸ Michael Goldman, The Actor's Freedom (New York: Viking, 1975), p. 133.

³⁹ Cf. C. L. Barber, "An Essay on the Sonnets," reprinted from The Laurel Shakespeare, The Sonnets (Dell, 1960), in Elizabethan Poetry, ed. Paul Alpers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), p. 314; James Winny, The Master-Mistress (London: Chatto and Windus, 1968), pp. 170-96.

⁴⁰ Recently, Linda Bamber, in Comic Women, Tragic Men: A Study of Gender and Genre in Shakespeare (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1982), p. 28, has also argued that in Shakespeare's comedies women can be other without really being outsider and alien. In general, I find Shakespeare's female characters more psychologically developed than she does; at this point I believe Portia's otherness as a woman has become identified with the unmergeable selfhood of the individual, male or female—what Stanley Cavell calls, from another perspective, "the sadness within comedy. . . . Join hands here as we may, one of the hands is mine and the other is yours"; see Must We Mean What We Say? (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1969), pp. 339-40.