SOURCE: "Doubling Cross-Gender Disguise: The Merchant of Venice" in Gender in Play on the Shakespearean Stage, The University of Michigan Press, 1996, pp. 93-118.

[In the following essay, Shapiro explores the varying purposes and effects of the three instances of cross gender disguise (Portia, Nerissa, and Jessica) in The Merchant of Venice.]

Although Shakespeare gave three different types of male identity to the three heroines in his second play to use the motif of a boy heroine in male disguise, none of them became the Lylian page of Two Gentlemen. Multiplying the cross-dressed heroine in a single work called attention to its artificiality as a literary convention and a theatrical construction and probably made spectators more aware of something they "always knew": the female characters they accepted as mimetic illusions in the world of the play were constructed by male performers in the world of the playhouse. In Shakespeare's time, when audiences knew full well that all performers were male, even a single heroine in male disguise like Julia could function as a sign of self-referentiality. Some playwrights, such as Sharpham and Fletcher, followed Shakespeare's lead and amplified that sign by multiplying female pages. Others, such as Middleton and Dekker in The Roaring Girl, contrasted a conventional female page with a more original kind of cross-dressed heroine, while still other dramatists, such as Haughton and Shirley, included both a boy bride and a female page. These repetitions and contrasts announced that cross-gender disguise was more of a dramaturgical contrivance than a mimetic representation of cross-dressing practices in the world outside the playhouse. But such variations not only encouraged parodic effects but also permitted the use of different kinds of male disguise as a way of contrasting different kinds of heroines.

Early Duplication of Cross-Gender Disguise: Lyly's Gallathea

One of the first English plays to duplicate cross-gender disguise was Lyly's Gallathea (1583-85), performed by the Children of Paul's at court and probably in their own private playhouse. The idea for duplication was evidently Lyly's, for in his source (the tale of Iphis and Ianthe in book IX of Ovid's Metamorphoses), only one girl is raised as a boy, and she is transformed into a male in order to marry the other. Lyly has both girls, Phillida and Gallathea, disguised as boys and then makes them fall in love with each other but leaves open the question of which one Venus will change into a boy.

This uncertainty preserves the symmetrical balance between the two heroines, symmetry being as central a feature of Lyly's dramaturgy as euphuism is of his prose style. In parallel scenes, Lyly shows that each girl has been disguised as a boy by her father so that she will not be taken as "the fairest and chastest virgine in all the Countrey" (I.i.42-43), who must be sacrificed to Neptune. At the beginning of act II, Lyly brings the two disguised heroines together. From this point, they are always onstage at the same time and usually speak and act as mirror images of one another. Each girl has fallen in love with the boy that the other pretends to be and so feels trapped within her own cross-gender disguise. In their second meeting, each one hints at her true gender, and they do so with such success that they suspect each other of being a girl in male disguise:

Phil. Suppose I were a virgine (I blush in supposing my selfe one) and that under the habite of a boy were the person of a mayde, if I should utter my affection with sighes, manifest my sweete love by my salte teares, and prove my loyaltie unspotted, and my griefes intollerable, would not then that faire face pittie thys true hart?

Galla. Admit that I were as you woulde have mee suppose that you are, and that I should with intreaties, prayers, othes, bribes, and what ever can be invented in love, desire your favour, would you not yeeld?

Phil. Tush, you come in with "admit."
Galla. And you with "suppose."
Phil. (Aside.) What doubtfull speeches be these?
I feare me he is as I am, a mayden.
Galla. (Aside.) What dread riseth in my minde!
I feare the boy to be as I am a mayden.

(III.ii.17-31)

Continuing in the same parallel fashion, Lyly makes each girl try to deny the growing suspicion that the other is also a girl. Their confessions that they both prefer "a fonde boy" (1. 55) to any of Diana's nymphs throw the relationship into a quandary, as Phillida acknowledges in the last speech of the scene: "Come let us into the Grove, and make much one of another, that cannot tel what to think one of another" (11. 58-59).

In their next scene, they seem to have vanquished these fears and have returned to the starting point of their relationship, each believing that the other is male. Once again they speak in parallel:

Phil I marvell what virgine the people will present, it is happy you are none, for then it would have faine to your lot because you are so fair.

Galla. If you had beene a Maiden too I neede not to have feared, because you are fairer.

(IV.iv.1-5)

Their exaggerated relief suggests a strained effort to deny what they fear. Within a few lines, Phillida tells Gallathea that "I love thee as a brother, but love not me so," and Gallathea readily declares that "I cannot love as a brother" (IV. iv.12-14). Phillida then proposes for the sake of "showe" that one of them pretend to be a woman, as Rosalind will offer to do to cure Orlando of his lovesickness in As You Like It:

Seeing we are both boyes, and both lovers, that our affection may have some showe, and seeme as it were love, let me call thee Mistris.

(IV.iv.15-17)

This asymmetry is of short duration and balance is quickly restored when both admit fear of attending the sacrificial rite.

Lyly is sometimes compared unfavorably to Shakespeare for preferring to manipulate his characters into intricate patterns instead of exploring their psychological states. For G. K. Hunter, who emphasizes the debate structure underlying Lyly's plays, their artistry lies in the juxta-position of contrasting attitudes toward a central issue:

Where all the characters are arranged to imitate one another, and where the focus of interest is on the repetition and modification and rearrangement of a basic pattern of persons, we do not ask how the persons will develop individually, but how the situation can be further manipulated.¹

In Gallathea, where the central debate topic is the relative superiority of love or chastity, several strands of plot serve, in Anne Lancashire's words, "to balance against one another different modes of loving."² The chaste and miraculously fulfilled love of the two disguised heroines is contrasted with two other plots: (1) Cupid inflames Diana's nymphs with lust for the two girls disguised as boys before he is punished by the Goddess of chastity and returned to his rightful place under the dominion of his mother, Venus; and (2) Rafe and his brothers outwit a series of pedantic dolts, but in displaying the cynical and bawdy wit typical of Lyly's pages, they also lightly suggest the impossibility of chastity as an ideal for human beings.

The complex interlacing of these plot lines is accompanied by an equally complex use of theatrical reflexivity. In choosing to double the heroine in male disguise, and also to make Cupid disguise himself as a nymph, Lyly highlights the presence of boy actors in female roles and so stresses the artificiality of his design. But at the same time, the multiple gender identities of male actors and female characters, and of male disguises in the cases of Phillida and Gallathea, create additional confusions of gender. The competing claims of love and chastity may also be perceived in terms of the tensions between homosexual desire and intense but Platonic friendship. These ambiguities of gender identity created by cross-gender casting and cross-gender disguising add poignancy to what Ellen Caldwell defines as the overriding question of the play: is there a kind of love that does not violate chastity, one that allows union with another without loss of self?³

From this viewpoint, there need be no contradiction between the ingenuity of Lyly's design and the urgency of the problem he is exploring. By act V, where both heroines are revealed by their fathers to be girls, sexual relationships in the play have become so tangled that they can only be resolved by the intervention of divine power, as in Ovid. Diana and Neptune propose to resolve the problem by ending what seems to them an unnatural relationship. But Lyly makes Venus, her supremacy over Cupid reestablished, approve Phillida's and Gallathea's relationship as an example of Love and Faith triumphing over Nature and Fortune. When they swear to her that their "loves [are] unspotted, begunne with trueth, continued wyth constancie, and not to bee altered tyll death," she overrules Diana and Neptune and promises to "turne one of them to be a man" (V.iii. 133-40). She does not specify which one.⁴ In the world of the playhouse, where both characters have always been boys, the indeterminacy of the ending echoes the love between Gallathea and Phillida before Venus's intervention transformed it into a conventionally heterosexual relationship.

Lyly's playful and sophisticated duplication of cross-gender disguise is rare for the mid-1580s and does not recur in his later works. Nor does such duplication occur in the 1590s in the first plays of adult troupes to use the heroine in male disguise, Greene's James the Fourth and Shakespeare's The Two Gentlemen of Verona. Duplication in The Merchant of Venice

In writing his second play with a heroine in cross-gender disguise, Shakespeare discovered the technique of varying the motif through repetition. Shakespeare had already discovered the efficacy of replication in writing The Comedy of Errors (Strange's, 1591?), where he doubled Plautus's single set of twins in order to multiply opportunities for confusion. There, because such doubling is so obviously mechanical, it helps to create an atmosphere appropriate for farce, a genre requiring a world apparently governed by equally mechanical principles that nevertheless baffle characters caught up in them precisely because they are so arbitrary and rigid.⁵ In adding a second and a third woman in cross-gender disguise to The Merchant of Venice (Chamberlain's, 1596-98),⁶ Shakespeare transcended the simple duplications of farce, but used repetitions to achieve more sophisticated kinds of cross-referencing.

Nerissa's disguise is part of a simultaneous shadowing or echoing of Portia's cross-gender disguise. Jessica's disguise is part of a sequential arrangement, offering an abbreviated and ironic preview, or what Joan Hartwig calls a "proleptic parody," of what is to come. Jessica's disguise as a torchbearer or page also contrasts with Portia's disguise as a much more powerful male, a highly educated and assertive doctor of the law.⁷ These parallels and contrasts not only underscore the conventionality of the literary motif but also evoke awareness of the three play-boys and appreciation of their theatrical skills.

These additional cross-gender disguises do not occur in the narrative sources. Shakespeare added Nerissa's cross-gender disguise to the pound of flesh plot, novella 3.1 of Ser Giovanni's Il Pecorone (1378), perhaps taking a hint from Anthony Munday's Zelauto (1580), where both maid-servant and mistress don male disguise. Whatever its genesis, Nerissa's presence in the courtroom as clerk to Portia's "young doctor of Rome" (IV.i.153) results in the presence onstage of a second female character in male disguise. Using Nerissa's disguise as an echoing or shadow effect calls attention to the conventionality of a familiar motif, especially when the spectators have already seen another heroine—Jessica—appear in male disguise.

Jessica's disguising is also "Shakespeare's addition," as Kenneth Muir puts it,⁸ to the elopement of the usurer's daughter, in number 14 of Masuccio Salernitano's Novellino (1476) or in Munday's Zelauto. Jessica's escape in "the lovely garnish of a boy" (II.vi.45) is a particularly gratuitous addition, for the plot supplies the slenderest of reasons for Jessica to disguise herself—to attend Bassanio's feast undetected by Shylock. But in fact her plans for the disguise are laid even before Shylock receives the invitation to dinner.⁹ Earlier, Lorenzo tells friends he was "provided of a torch-bearer" (II.iv.23) and spoke to Gratiano of a "page's suit she hath in readiness" (II.iv.32). When we next see Jessica, in III.ii in Belmont, she seems to have resumed female attire and no subsequent mention is ever made of her having worn a page's suit when she eloped from Shylock's house. Extraneous with respect to plot, Jessica's brief appearance in male attire invites directors to make a theatrical and thematic point. The romantic quality of the cross-gender disguise was underscored by the lavish visual spectacle added to the scene in the nineteenth century, while modern productions use it to establish Jessica's vulnerability.¹⁰

Jessica's adoption of male disguise underscores the precariousness of her situation but does not, like Julia's or Alathe's, allow her the compensating wit of a saucy lackey. That precariousness is suggested even before Lorenzo arrives, when Gratiano and Salerio, commenting on his tardiness, suggest that their friend's "obliged faith" lacks the passion of "love's bonds new made" (II.vi.6-7). Her short exchange with Lorenzo questions the reliability of men's love for women like herself and Portia, who are "richly left." In response to Lorenzo's call, "Ho! who's within?" (II.vi.25), Jessica—located "above"—asks that he identify himself with "more certainty, / Albeit I'll swear that I do know your tongue" (11. 26-27), evidently finding his voice alone, or perhaps his words, not sufficient basis for trust. Lorenzo answers by name and styles himself "thy love," but Jessica wonders "whether I am yours?" (11. 29, 31). His reply, "Heaven and thy thoughts are witness that thou art" (1. 32; emphasis added), has a slightly evasive tone, while her action, "Here, catch this casket, it is worth the pains" (1. 33), may indicate a desire to secure Lorenzo's love by means of a self-granted dowry, an impulse repeated a few lines later in her offer to "gild myself / With some moe [sic] ducats" (11. 49-50).

The scene also raises other questions about Lorenzo's commitment to Jessica. While she descends, Lorenzo expresses his love for her to Gratiano in "a figure of words" artificial enough to cast doubt on the sincerity or depth of his feelings. Whether or not Lorenzo's "On, [gentleman,] away!" includes his torchbearer, perhaps as affectionate teasing,¹¹ more urgent attention is directed toward his male friends and their rendezvous with Bassanio: "But come at once, / . . . we are stay'd for at Bassanio's feast . . . / Our masquing mates by this time for us stay" (11. 46-48, 59). Unlike Bassanio's constancy, Lorenzo's is never tested, although it is challenged, bitterly or in jest, in the mythological "out-nightings" that begin act V.¹²

Finally, although Jessica comments on the impropriety and possible shame of wearing male attire, she is willing to join other lovers in committing such "pretty follies" (1. 37), risking her reputation for the sake of her beloved. Wearing male attire although not yet actually in her male identity, Jessica hesitates—either banteringly or thoughtfully—at the idea:

Jes. What, must I hold a candle to my shames?
They in themselves, good sooth, are too too light.
Why, 'tis an office of discovery, love,
And I should be obscur'd.
Lor. So are you, sweet,
Even in the lovely garnish of a boy.

(11. 41-45)

Lorenzo's last words are rich in significance, for "garnish," according to the OED, can mean "outfit [or] dress," as well as "embellishment or decoration in general," although he later uses the word to disparage Launcelot's new livery or "army of good words" (III. v.65-70). In reassuring Jessica that her disguise is impenetrable enough to prevent her being shamed by discovery, Lorenzo seems also to be saying that in his eyes it embellishes her natural loveliness. In Shakespeare's day, the entire passage might also have reminded the audience that Jessica's appearance in male disguise was indistinguishable from the play-boy's resumption of his own identity. Unlike the speaker in Donne's elegy, "On His Mistres," who prefers his beloved to "Be my true Mistris still, not my faign'd Page,"¹³ Lorenzo's delight in finding Jessica's female identity "obscur'd" may also have suggested to some spectators a stronger sexual interest in the play-boy than in the female character.

Jessica's vulnerability as a powerless female page highlights the more assertive version of male identity of "worthy doctor" (V.i.222) that Shakespeare and his sources assigned to Portia. Whereas most other disguised heroines serve men as youthful companions, Portia invents a role that will give her authority over the men in the play. To quote Catherine Belsey, in the guise of a "civil doctor" (V.i.210) "Portia fights Bassanio's legal battles from him—and wins."¹⁴ Portia is also the only one of Shakespeare's heroines to adopt and relinquish male disguise "not under pressure of events from outside . . . but by her own choice of time and circumstance."¹⁵ From the moment Portia broaches the idea of male disguise in III.iv, she reveals an energy, vitality, and playfulness that will enable her to control all relationships in the play. Whereas her counterpart in Il Pecorone dominates by inviting her suitors to bed and then drugging them, Portia manipulates events by the audacity and wit she displays while in male disguise, both in her legal battle with Shylock and in the ring episode that follows.

Portia in Belmont

Portia's first words in the play seem to echo Antonio's melancholic opening of the previous scene: "By my troth, Nerissa, my little body is a-weary of this great world" (I.ii.1-2). The scene goes on to explain the source of this weariness—Portia's husband will be selected by a lottery devised by her late father, who was, as Nerissa reminds her, "ever virtuous, and holy men at their death have good inspirations" (Lii.27-28). Her only release is purely verbal—a satiric cataloging of her wooers according to national stereotypes—and is as conventional as Lucetta's catalog of Julia's suitors in I.ii of The Two Gentlemen of Verona. It permits Portia to exercise her wit upon her suitors, one of whom will win her hand in accordance with her father's dictates. The mood is abruptly changed by Nerissa's innocent or teasing inquiry as to whether or not she remembers a visitor "in your father's time, a Venetian, a scholar and a soldier?" (I.ii.1 12-13). Portia's reply—"Yes, yes, it was Bassanio—as I think, so was he call'd" (11. 115-16)—contains a rush of enthusiasm followed by some sort of second thought, perhaps an attempt to appear nonchalant, even though neither the folio nor the first two quartos include the midline dash. She is reminded of her father's scheme by the servant's announcement of the departure of "four strangers" and the arrival of "a fift [sic], the Prince of Morocco" (11. 123, 125).

Unless stage business to the contrary is added, the casket scenes themselves stress Portia's helplessness. Submissive to the will of her dead father, she has even less control over these events than does her counterpart in the tale in Gesta Romanorum, who is herself forced by the emperor to choose the vessel that will prove her a suitable bride for his son. As she tells Morocco, she is barred from the "right of voluntary choosing" and "hedg'd . . . by his [her father's] wit" (II.i.16, 18). Relieved when Morocco and Aragon make wrong choices, she is hopeful at the news of Bassanio's arrival but reveals considerable anxiety at their first meeting:

One half of me is yours, the other half yours—
Mine own, I would say.

(III.ii.16-17)

She makes an adroit recovery, for the slip is not coyness but indicates her fear that she might either lose Bassanio forever or succumb to the temptation to violate her father's will. Unable to persuade Bassanio to delay his choice, she identifies herself with "the virgin tribute paid by howling Troy / To the sea-monster," and adds a declaration of complete passivity: "I stand for sacrifice" (III.ii.56-57). Nevertheless, although some critics and directors think she steers Bassanio toward the leaden casket, her conduct during the casket scenes, according to the text, is ritualistically correct.¹⁶

After Bassanio's choice, many critics sense an emergence of self-assertiveness in Portia, and some find it enhanced by the planning and donning of disguise. Richard Wheeler notes a hint of Portia's power where others see only submissiveness: "when her likeness emerges from the lead casket, Portia, like the jinni emerging from the wonderful lamp, puts herself in the absolute service of 'her lord, her governor, her king'" (III.ii.165).¹⁷ Lynda Boose describes Portia's speech as a "showpiece demonstration of . . . deferential rhetoric" and notes how this "unlesson'd girl, unschool'd, unpractic'd" (1. 159), exploits advantages of birth and wealth to usurp male prerogatives:

[She] deftly proceeds to appropriate the husband's role and the husband's ring vow as she endows Bassanio with all her worldly goods inside a contract to which she appends conditions for converting the vows of wifely obedience into a wife's "vantage" and a husband's ingratiated debt.¹⁸

Shakespeare makes Portia flex her power more explicitly when she hears of Antonio's plight, for as several critics have pointed out, she recognizes Antonio as her rival for Bassanio. Whereas Ansaldo (Antonio) of Il Pecorone is the childless godfather of Giannetto (Bassanio), who has often asked the young man's real father to send him his godson, Shakespeare makes him a friend of unspecified age.¹⁹ The text is open enough to allow one to explain Antonio's love melancholy as stemming from one of several forms of male love: the jealousy of a homosexual lover, the frustration of an unacknowledged homoerotic attraction, or the possessiveness of a clinging friend.

At the very outset of the play, moreover, as Ruth Nevo has observed, marriage to Portia is presented as the way for Bassanio to clear himself of indebtedness to Antonio.²⁰ Up until Antonio's reversals, he has given Bassanio generously of his wealth and recklessly of his credit, but his inability to pay Shylock, as he makes clear in the letter he sends to Bassanio, forces him to make explicit demands on his friend's love. His farewell speech in the courtroom scene is a challenge to Portia, for in sacrificing his life for Bassanio he levies an unpayable claim on Bassanio, a gift that his living wife can neither match nor repay. Only by saving Antonio's life can she prevent that drain on her husband's emotional capital. To do so, she must encounter her adversary not as his female rival but as his male deliverer.

Her first move, however, is to consolidate her position as Bassanio's wife before he returns to Venice, even if consummation must be deferred until later, as it is not in Il Pecorone:

First go with me to church and call me wife,
And then away to Venice to your friend.

(III.ii.303-4; emphasis added)

Boose points out that Portia's entire speech, beginning with "What, no more?" (1. 298), exhibits a sudden shift in Portia's rhetorical style: "In the space of sixteen lines she uses thirteen imperative verbs and four times subjugates male options to the control of her authoritative 'shall.'"²¹

In her next scene, Portia informs Nerissa that they will see their husbands "in such a habit / That they shall think we are accomplished / With what we lack" (III.iv.60-62), a clear reminder to Elizabethan spectators that the boy actors onstage were already so equipped. Unlike Jessica's shameful but necessary disguise as Lorenzo's torchbearer, this second scheme of male disguise is first envisaged as the occasion to parody outrageous excesses of swaggering masculinity:

 I'll hold thee any wager,
When we are both accoutered like young men,
I'll prove the prettier fellow of the two,
And wear my dagger with the braver grace,
And speak between the change of man and boy
With a reed voice, and turn two mincing steps
Into a manly stride; and speak ofïrays
Like a fine bragging youth, and tell quaint lies,
How honorable ladies sought my love,
Which I denying, they fell sick and died.
I could not do withal. Then I'll repent,
And wish, for all that, that I had not kill'd them;
And twenty of these puny lies I'll tell,
That men shall swear I have discontinued school
Above a twelvemonth. I have within my mind
A thousand raw tricks of these bragging Jacks,
Which I will practice.

(III.iv.62-78)

We never see these "raw tricks," for once Portia enters the courtroom disguised as Balthazar, she conducts herself with the gravity befitting a precocious legal scholar. The speech is a release of frustration, an eruption of high spirits. From now on, Portia's wit is no longer her recompense for helplessness before men but an instrument for taking over the male domain of the law. Her ridicule of men for their competitive rivalries, as well as for exaggerating their sexual prowess, indicates the superior sophistication that will bring her victory over Shylock in the legal arena and over Antonio in the battle for her husband's deepest loyalty.

But the speech has important theatrical effects. Whether given by a boy or a woman, it invites broadly parodic vocal and bodily mannerisms, certainly at "I could not do withal," perhaps in the style of the cheeky Lylian page. Portia answers Nerissa's question, "Why, shall we turn to men?" by pointing up the sexual innuendo in "turn," a subtler joke than Julia's and Lucetta's remarks about breeches, farthingales, and codpieces. On the Elizabethan stage, the phrase had rich reflexive possibilities, for the boy actors had not yet themselves become men or had only recently done so, and so might be understood to be asking about their future as female impersonators or to be wondering, perhaps with mock horror or mock innocence, whether they should turn sexually to (toward) men. Such ironies could have transformed Portia's mimicry of swaggering virility into self-parody by a young male performer, reflexively alluding to his presence even before Portia's appearance in male disguise.²²

Portia Doctor Balthazar

Such reflexivity gives Portia considerable power when she actually enters the courtroom, not as the theatricalized cheeky page, but as the sober legal prodigy. As Keith Geary puts it, the boy actor discarded the mannerisms of Portia, along with female costume, donned a lawyer's gown, and simply played Balthazar, a young doctor of laws.²³ For most of the trial scene, to look only at the text, Shakespeare does to submerge Portia in the fused male identities of Balthazar and the young male performer. In this regard, Portia differs from Julia and Rosalind, who have numerous asides both as themselves and as their male alter egos, as well as from Viola and Imogen, who address the audience as themselves in soliloquies while in male garb. In her own person and as Balthazar, Portia has no soliloquies nor obvious asides, nor are there any unconscious reversions to female identity, "no funny, foolish slips when she plays the man; .. . no charming lapses into girlhood," as Chris Hassel puts it.²⁴ If Portia was physically absent on Shakespeare's stage during the courtroom scenes, the female character was nonetheless present in the minds of the spectators, just as they remained conscious (at some level) of the play-boy while Portia's female persona monopolized the stage.

Although the trial scene contains many nonverbal opportunities for the performer to oscillate between female character and male persona, Portia's absent presence is explicitly invoked only once, in a digression from the legal proceedings, a two-line remark on the willingness of husbands to sacrifice their wives. No such remark occurs in Il Pecorone, but Shakespeare seems to have added it not only to sharpen the rivalry between Portia and Antonio, but also to counterbalance the heavy emphasis on the male performer and male disguised persona by granting the female character a moment of rapport with the audience.

This crucial section begins with Antonio's farewell to Bassanio, which contains an explicit challenge to Portia:

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.

(IV.i.273-77)

Bassanio's reply is an equally passionate elevation of male love over any other value, especially marriage:

Antonio, I am married to a wife
Which is as dear to me as life itself,
But life itself, my wife, and all the world,
Are not with me esteem'd above thy life.
I would lose all, ay, sacrifice them all
Here to this devil, to deliver you.

(11. 282-87)

Bassanio's rhetoric includes Portia, not by her name but merely by the generic title of "wife."

Portia's response, if spoken as an aside, may have authorized the male performer to revert briefly to the mannerisms of the female character, but whether he did so or continued to play the doctor of law, the lines bring Portia's presence to the audience's mind:

Your wife would give you little thanks for that
If she were by to hear you make the offer.

(IV.i.288-89)

The lines, which chastise Bassanio for offering to sacrifice his wife in order to free Antonio, can be spoken by Balthazar directly and perhaps only to Bassanio, but they might also be spoken aside to Nerissa, or to the audience. With or without a performer's explicit return to Portia, the lines point up Portia's presence. On the early modern stage, reminders of the female layer of identity probably underscored the virtuosity of the male performer in negotiating such rapid shifts and may thus have added depth or resonance to the character as well.

Bassanio's sacrificial offer is echoed in Gratiano's wish that his wife were in heaven to "entreat some power to change this currish Jew" (IV.i.292), just as Portia's (or Balthazar's) is echoed by Nerissa (or the clerk), who may address Gratiano directly, or offer an aside to Portia, or to the audience:

'Tis well you offer it behind her back,
The wish would make else an unquiet house.

(11. 293-94)

The whole discussion is rounded off by Shylock's contemptuous reflection, "These be the Christian husbands!" and sealed shut by his demand that the court no longer "trifle time [but] . . . pursue sentence" (11. 295-98).

This thirty-line segment, embedded in the trial scene, is the only scripted opportunity for Portia to remind the audience of her female identity. Elsewhere in the trial scene, Portia might find other occasions to exchange knowing glances with Nerissa, to mime a hurried consultation with her clerk, to allow her disguise to slip, or in other ways to play upon the audience's awareness of her layered gender identity. For example, she can react nonverbally to Bassanio's eagerness to pay double and then ten times the sum Antonio owes, offering money Portia gave him before he left Belmont. While Giannetto in Il Pecorone made only one offer to reimburse Shylock, Bassanio twice more offers to pay off the loan. Each time Bassanio does so, Balthazar insists that Shylock has chosen justice. From a thematic point of view, Portia's legal tactics are part of a theological debate with Shylock over the claims of mercy and justice, in which she will maneuver him into a trap created by strict interpretation of an obscure statute.²⁵ But the immediate effect of rejecting Bassanio's several offers to repay the loan is to bring her into direct confrontation with her husband over the use of money she bestowed upon him.

Despite the deliberate blurring of Balthazar with the boy actor, the trial scene also reminded spectators of Portia's presence, whether or not the performer chose to embellish such signals nonverbally. When a performer of either gender acknowledges such reminders, spectators usually find it amusing, enjoying their superior knowledge vis-à-vis the characters, although making the effect too overt or too frequent can tilt any scene toward farce. During the trial, Shakespeare relied less on his heroine's movement in and out of cross-gender concealment and more on subtler reminders of her presence. He used more obvious reminders of Portia's feminine identity after the conclusion of the legal proceedings, when Portia, still in male disguise, discovers that Bassanio is still emotionally bound to Antonio.

Balthazar Obtains Bassanio's Ring

However one imagines the atmosphere during the trial, a sense of relaxation and relief must follow Shylock's departure and that of "the Duke and his train" seven lines later. Bassanio and Antonio, instructed by the duke "to gratify" Balthazar, linger onstage with the lawyer and, one assumes, her clerk. At this point, in a moment of informality and intimacy, Shakespeare releases the comic, almost carnivalesque, potentialities of cross-gender disguise that had been hinted at but kept more or less bottled up during the actual legal proceedings.²⁶ Explicit play on Portia's multiple sexual identities begins when Bassanio addresses his wife as a "most worthy gentleman." Whether or not the performer chooses to respond to this mode of address in any way that indicates Portia's reaction, the audience's awareness of her presence would provide a strong undercurrent of irony. Such irony may arise from the casual posttrial atmosphere that encourages Bassanio to stand closer to Portia than he was when he offered to pay Shylock. Similarly, during the actual trial, the text required Portia to distribute her attention not only to him, but also to the lawbooks, to Shylock, to the duke, to Antonio, and possibly in other directions as well. In this segment of some forty lines until she leaves the court, she speaks almost exclusively to Bassanio.

Again Bassanio is lavish with his wife's money. His initial offer of the three thousand ducats due to Shylock to "freely cope your courteous pains withal" (1. 412) is immediately seconded by Antonio's offer of "love and service to you evermore" (1. 414). Portia refuses both gestures, but it is not clear to whom she addresses the line, "I pray you know me when we meet again" (1. 419). The line could point in several directions: a polite but ironic wish for further acquaintance directed to Antonio, an implicit challenge to Bassanio to recognize her, and, as the context activates bawdy connotations, both a wish and a dare that Bassanio sleep with her at their next encounter. Balthazar tries to take his leave but is prevented by Bassanio. In a gloss on Bassanio's next line, "Dear sir, of force I must attempt you further" (1. 421), one editor imagines that "Bassanio now runs after Portia, and the ensuing dialogue gains its effect from the audience knowing that they are husband and wife."²⁷

At the equivalent point in Il Pecorone, the reader is also playfully reminded of the real identity of the judge (Portia). In refusing Giannetto's (Bassanio's) offer of money, the judge says, "Keep it, so that your lady may not say that you have squandered it." When Giannetto replies that his lady is "so kind and generous . . . that if I spent four times as much as this, she would not mind," the judge asks him if he is "happy with her." He answers that "she is as beautiful and wise as anyone Nature ever made" and invites him to come home with him to see for himself.²⁸ When the invitation is refused, Giannetto again offers the money, at which point the judge notices the ring and asks for it. The narrative provides no indication of the reactions of Giannetto's wife underneath her male disguise but simply assumes that reader's awareness of her presence will allow them to savor the irony. Similarly, Shakespeare also relied on the audience to supply the presence of Portia, whether or not the male performer chose to make that presence visible through nonscripted shifts in and out of the female character.

But Shakespeare expanded the moment in adapting it to the stage, perhaps to give greater opportunities to the actor moving between Portia and Balthazar. In an addition to the source material, Shakespeare makes Balthazar refuse a cash payment for his services and ask instead for a pair of gloves before requesting the ring:

Give me your gloves, I'll wear them for your sake,
And for your love I'll take this ring from you.

(11. 426-27)

The gloves can belong to either Antonio or Bassanio. If they are Antonio's, "your sake" would refer to him and "your love" to Bassanio, creating a playable antithesis that builds up to the request for the ring. If they are Bassanio's, Portia's focus on her husband's gloves, which he holds, or perhaps wears and removes, leads her to notice the ring on his finger.²⁹ Unlike Gianetto, Bassanio refuses to part with a ring "given me by my wife" (1. 441) and Portia's last speech in the scene plays as wittily upon her hidden identity as her counterpart in Il Pecorone does:

And if your wife be not a mad woman,
And know how well I have deserv'd this ring,

She would not hold out enemy for ever
For giving it to me. Well, peace be with you.

(11. 445-48)

Unlike the judge in the narrative, she accepts Bassanio's refusal as definitive, disappointed as Balthazar but undoubtedly pleased as Portia, and leaves the stage, presumably with Nerissa.

In Il Pecorone, Giannetto (Bassanio) fears that his wife will believe "I have given it [the ring] to some other woman . . . and fallen in love elsewhere" (1:474). The judge seems to defend the wife but reiterates her doubts: "I am sure that she must love you well enough to believe you when you tell her that you gave it me. But perhaps you wanted to give it to one of your old loves here?" (1:474-75). Challenged to prove both his own fidelity and his faith in his wife's perfection, Giannetto gives the ring to the judge.

Shakespeare defers the surrender of the ring until after Portia leaves, in order to make Antonio pressure Bassanio into giving it to the lawyer, again pitting male lover against wife:

Let his deservings and my love withal
Be valued 'gainst your wive's commandement [sic].

(11. 450-51)

Shakespeare invented a short scene in which Gratiano delivers the ring to Balthazar. Portia begins the scene by speaking to Nerissa, but the performer must abruptly shift back to Balthazar mannerisms when Gratiano addresses the lawyer as "Fair sir" (IV.ii.5). When Balthazar accepts the ring, Nerissa as the clerk asks for a private conference with the lawyer: "Sir, I would speak with you" (1. 12). Drawing Portia away from Gratiano, Nerissa proposes to get her husband's ring and clearly succeeds in doing so offstage while still disguised as a boy. Shifting gender identities, as the text did not require them to do during the actual trial, both women now resume their male attitudes, Nerissa turning back to Gratiano—"Come, good sir" (1. 19)—to request directions.

Portia's Return to Belmont

In the resolution of the ring plot in the final scene, the male performers represent Portia and Nerissa rather than the lawyer and clerk, although these male identities are as strongly present in the audience's memory as the female characters were in the courtroom. The audience's awareness of the male performers is also piqued throughout the scene by bawdy innuendoes, most of which refer to markers of male gender. Gratiano is the agent of the most overt bawdry, whether threatening to "mar the young clerk's pen" (1. 237) or vowing to "keep . . . safe Nerissa's ring" (1. 307).³⁰ Portia first announces her intention to "have that doctor for [my] bedfellow" (1. 233) and within thirty lines confesses that "the doctor lay with me" (1. 259). Nerissa echoes both statements with regard to "that same scrubbed boy, the doctor's clerk" (1. 261), quoting Gratiano's earlier description of the clerk. When the men learn that they gave their rings to their own wives, they join Portia and Nerissa in jests about the maleness of doctor and clerk, which are also playful allusions to the gender of the two actors:

Gra. Were you the clerk that is to make me cuckold?
Ner. Ay, but the clerk that never means to do it,
Unless he live until he be a man.
Bass. Sweet doctor, you shall be my bedfellow—
When I am absent, then lie with my wife.

(11. 281-85)

Unlike the trial scene, which depended on the audience's multiconsciousness of actor, character, and disguise, the final scene derives its humor and its thematic force from explicit allusions to the heroines' various gender identities, and also from frequent use of bawdry—not as a conventional gender marker but to highlight all of the layers of gender in play.

Despite these differences, the final scene, like the trial scene, draws on the dexterity and energy of the performer in the world of the playhouse to enhance Portia's power as a character in the world of the play. Unlike other heroines in male disguise, she retains her authority when she returns to Belmont and resumes her identity as Bassanio's wife, and she uses her power to seal her victory over Antonio once and for all.³¹ As in the case of Julia in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, a female character's power can be reinforced by the theatrical vibrancy produced when opposing layers of gender identity are invoked on stage or actively evoked in the spectators' minds.

Unaware that it was his wife who canceled his debt to his friend, Bassanio introduces Antonio to Portia as the "man .. . to whom I am so infinitely bound" (11. 134-35). Portia's reply revives Shylock's insistence on the literal terms of his bond:

You should in all sense be much bound to him,
For as I hear he was much bound for you.

(11. 136-37; emphasis added)

Antonio's disclaimer, "No more than I am well acquitted of (1. 138), even if genuinely self-effacing rather than smugly self-satisfied, cannot eradicate Bassanio's sense of obligation to the man who offered to sacrifice his life on his friend's behalf. To rescue Bassanio from his wife's displeasure over the parting with the ring, Antonio makes an even more extravagant offer:

I once did lend my body for his wealth,
. . . I dare be bound again,
My soul upon the forfeit, that your lord
Will never more break faith advisedly.

(11. 249-53)

Seeming to accept Antonio's offer to be her husband's "surety" (1. 254),³² Portia then undercuts it: she makes Antonio her unwitting agent by asking him to deliver to Bassanio a second ring, which her husband recognizes as the first. After some teasing, Portia explains all, reducing Antonio to a three-word statement of speechless wonder, "I am dumb" (1. 279), his next-to-last speech in the play. Shakespeare invents two more trump cards for her to play: her news for Antonio that "three of your argosies / Are richly come to harbor suddenly" (11. 276-77), followed by her gratuitously mystifying refusal to tell Antonio how she aquired this information: "You shall not know by what strange accident / I chanced on this letter" (11. 278-79). By restoring her rival's wealth, as Monica Hamill comments, Portia "removes the last vestige of Antonio's role as martyr."³³

In addition to endowing Portia with an aura of mystery, Shakespeare also gives her a final use of legal terminology to recall her appearance in the courtroom, and perhaps to allow the performer a momentary reversion to Balthazar:

 Let us go in
And charge us there upon inter'gatories
And we will answer all things faithfully.

(11. 297-99)

Whether Balthazar is also invoked by vocal or physical traits, as well as linguistically, the legalistic "inter'gatories" represents a final allusion to Portia's male disguise and so ends the play by calling attention to the layered complex of boy actor, female character, and male disguise. In the trial scene, male disguise reflexively illuminated the play-boy and also transformed the female character into a Bradamante or a Britomart jousting in the courtroom rather than in the lists or on the battlefield. In the final scene, rather than allow her to dwindle into a wife, Shakespeare not only endows her with superior knowledge but makes frequent and lively play with her complex identity as a boy heroine recently in male disguise, having already italicized this convention by using it proleptically and contrastively with Jessica and simultaneously with Nerissa. Shakespeare reminded his audience of the presence of several talented play-boys, one of whom represented both the loving, powerful, and now mysterious lady of Belmont and her alter ego, the witty and resourceful doctor of law. In so rich a field of theatrical play, I believe that many spectators would have noted the destabilization or disruption of gender roles but would have had difficulty extracting a single, consistent attitude toward the role and status of women. . . .

Notes

¹ Hunter, John Lyly, 199.

² Anne Begor Lancashire, ed., John Lyly, Gallathea and Midas (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1969), xxvi.

³ Ellen M. Caldwell, "John Lyly's Gallathea: A New Rhetoric of Love for the Virgin Queen," ELR 17 (1987): 22-40. Cf. Leah Scragg, The Metamorphosis of "Gallathea": A Study in Creative Adaptation (Washington: University Press of America, 1982).

⁴ Joel B. Altman, The Tudor Play of Mind: Rhetorical Inquiry and the Development of Elizabethan Drama (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1978), 209, argues that Gallathea is the one who will be transformed to a boy, for she seems to him to be more "heroic" in act I than the more "feminine" Phillida. Caldwell, "John Lyly's Gallathea" 34 n. 17, however, justifies the indeterminacy because of the "arbitrary nature and relative unimportance of the physical transformation in a play which celebrates Platonic union."

⁵ Jessica Milner Davis, Farce (London: Methuen, 1978), 62-63, explains the frequent use of twins and doubles in farce: "The artificiality .. . signals both a distancing of the characters from the audience and a lessening of their humanity: they lack the flexibility and the individuality of life."

⁶ Believing Antonio's "wealthy Andrew" to refer to the ship captured by Essex at Cadiz in mid-1596 and renamed The Andrew, most scholars now think the play was probably written in the latter half of that year. See M. Mahood, ed., The Merchant of Venice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 1-2.

⁷ Joan Hartwig, Shakespeare 's Analogical Scene (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983), 12. As Bradbrook, "Shakespeare and the Use of Disguise," 166, comments, Shakespeare observes "a scale of contrast between Jessica's purely formal disguise, Nerissa's imitative one, and the significant robing of Portia."

⁸ Kenneth Muir, Shakespeare's Sources, 2 vols. (London: Methuen, 1957), 1:51. See also Bullough, Sources, 1:457.

⁹ John Dover Wilson, "The Copy for The Merchant of Venice, 1600," in The Merchant of Venice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1926), 110-11, 179-80, proposed that a scene of feasting at Bassanio's house, including the disguised Jessica and Shylock, was cut during revision.

¹⁰ Jessica's disguising was very important in Mark Lamos's 1984 production in Stratford, Ontario, as described by Paul Gaudet, "Lorenzo's 'Infidel': The Staging of Difference in The Merchant of Venice," TJ 38 (1986): 275-90. Ellis Rabb's New York production (1973) also stressed Jessica's vulnerability in the elopement scene, whereas Irving invented stage business and devised elaborate pictorial effects to emphasize the pathos of Shylock; see James C. Bulman, The Merchant of Venice (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991), 36-38, 147.

¹¹ Mahood, ed., The Merchant of Venice, 97-98nn. Unlike the first quarto, on which the Riverside text is based, the second quarto and the folio print "On, gentlemen, away," which may exclude or include Jessica.

¹² For other parallels and contrasts between Lorenzo/Jessica and Portia/Bassanio, see Keith Geary, "The Nature of Portia's Victory: Turning to Men in The Merchant of Venice," ShS 37 (1984): 61-62; and Harry Berger, "Marriage and Mercifixion in The Merchant of Venice," SQ 32 (1981): 160. As Norman Rabkin notes, Shakespeare and the Problem of Meaning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 5, 17-19, readers differ as to whether Jessica and Lorenzo liberate or steal Shylock's money and jewels, whether they are attractively or foolishly prodigal. Mahood, ed., The Merchant of Venice, 29-31, believes that discordant elements eliciting moral judgment are ignored by a theatrical audience, which always "loves a lover whatever his actions" (31). Paul Gaudet, in two conference papers (Shakespeare Association of America, 1985, 1989), sees ironies too trenchant to ignore in each of Jessica's appearances.

¹³ John Donne, "Elegie: On His Mistres," in The Complete Poetry, ed. John T. Shawcross (Garden City NY: Anchor Books, 1967), 62, 1. 14. One manuscript version is entitled "On his mistres desire to be disguised, and to goe like a Page with him" (439). The speaker fears the scheme will not work, because "the rightest company / Of Players . . . / Will quickly know thee, / and no lesse, alas! / Th'indifferent Italian . . . / well content to thinke thee Page, / Will hunt thee with such lust, and hideous rage, / As Lots faire guests were vext" (11. 35-41).

¹⁴ Belsey, "Disrupting Sexual Difference," 179.

¹⁵ Vera Jiji, "Portia Revisited: The Influence of Unconscious Factors upon Theme and Characterization in The Merchant of Venice," L&P 26 (1976): 8.

¹⁶ Diane Elizabeth Dreher, Domination and Defiance: Fathers and Daughters in Shakespeare (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1986), 131; and Christopher Spencer, The Genesis of Shakespeare's "Merchant of Venice" (Lewiston NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1988), 59-62.

¹⁷ Richard Wheeler, "'. . . And my loud crying still': The Sonnets, The Merchant of Venice, and Othello," in Rough Magic, 196-97.

¹⁸ Lynda E. Boose, "The Comic Contract and Portia's Golden Ring," ShakS 20 (1988): 247. Karen Newman, "Portia's Ring: Unruly Women and Structures of Exchange in The Merchant of Venice," SQ 38 (1987): 26, argues that "Portia gives more than Bassanio can ever reciprocate." See also Dreher, Domination and Defiance, 132-33, 135.

¹⁹ Coppélla Kahn, "The Cuckoo's Note: Male Friendship and Cuckoldry in The Merchant of Venice," in Rough Magic, 104-12. On the rivalry between Portia and Antonio, see also Geary, "The Nature of Portia's Victory"; Graham Midgley, "The Merchant of Venice: A Reconsideration," EIC 10 (1960): 119-33; John Hurrell, "Love and Friendship in The Merchant of Venice," TSLL 3 (1961): 328-41; Marc Shell, "The Wether and the Ewe: Verbal Usury in The Merchant of Venice," KR, n.s., 1, no. 4 (1979): 65-92; and Jan Lawson Hinely, "Bond Priorities in The Merchant of Venice" SEL 20 (1980): 217-39. In the opening scene, in what may be a trace of the source, Bassanio is referred to as Antonio's "most noble kinsman" (I.i.57).

²⁰ Nevo, Comic Transformations, 132.

²¹ Boose, "Comic Contract," 248.

²² Katherine E. Kelly, "The Queen's Two Bodies: Shakespeare's Boy Actress in Breeches," TJ 42 (1990): 87, glosses the line to refer to "the professional vulnerability of the boy player . . . [with] his dangerously changeable voice."

²³ Geary, "The Nature of Portia's Victory," 58. The stress on Balthazar's maleness is necessary, Geary argues, because "Portia's disguise allows her to intervene directly to recover her husband, not, of course, from another woman, but from another man" (64). But he overstates the case, as in the following assertion, by ignoring the audience's mental retention of layers gender not visible at the moment: "the theatrical fact of the boy actor in the Elizabethan theatre makes Portia's sexual transformation complete" (58).

²⁴ R. Chris Hassel, Faith and Folly in Shakespeare's Romantic Comedies (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1980), 198.

²⁵ Shy lock's position in this duel is a Pauline distortion of Judaism; see John R. Cooper, "Shylock's Humanity," SQ 21 (1970): 117-24; Bernard Glassman, Anti-Semitic Stereotypes without Jews: Images of the Jews in England, 1290-1700 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1975), 14-83; and Michael Shapiro, "Shylock the Jew Onstage: Past and Present," Shofar 4, no. 2 (1986): 1-11. In a conference paper (Shakespeare Association of America, 1991), Randall Martin points out that once Shylock drops his claim to Antonio's flesh, Portia has freed Bassanio from any obligation and thus no longer has a clear motive for further action against Shylock other than generalized hostility toward an alien or personal revenge, much to the distress of the actresses he interviewed.

²⁶ Mahood, ed., The Merchant of Venice, 40.

²⁷ Mahood, ed., The Merchant of Venice, 151n. See also Marianne L. Novy, Love's Argument: Gender Relations in Shakespeare (Chapel Hill: University of North Carlina Press, 1984), 77.

²⁸ I quote from the translation of II Pecorone in Bullough, Sources, 1:474. Subsequent references to this translation will appear in the text.

²⁹ John Russell Brown, ed., The Merchant of Venice, 121n.

³⁰ Joan Landis, "'By Two-headed Janus': Double Discourse in The Merchant of Venice," conference paper (Shakespeare Association of America, 1990), 3, points out that the Latin word for ring is ano or anulus, and Howard Jacobson has referred me to a passage in one of Cicero's letters (Epistulae ad Familiares IX.xxii.2), that plays on anulus and anus. See also Frankie Rubinstein, A Dictionary of Shakespeare's Sexual Puns and Their Significance (London: Macmillan, 1984), 220-21.

³¹ Several critics have commented on Portia's retention of power and authority in the final act after she has dropped male disguise. See Richard Horwich, "Riddle and Dilemma in The Merchant of Venice" SEL 17 (1977): 191-200; Dusinberre, Shakespeare and the Nature of Women, 267; and Kirby Farrell, "Self-Effacement and Autonomy in Shakespeare," ShakS 16 (1983): 78. On her use of fear of cuckoldry, see Kahn, "The Cuckoo's Note," 109; and Anne Parten, "Re-establishing Sexual Order: The Ring Episode in The Merchant of Venice," Selected Papers from the West Virginia Shakespeare and Renaissance Association 6 (1981): 27-34. For negative views of Portia's tactics, see Frank Whigham, "Ideology and Class Conduct in The Merchant of Venice," RenD, n.s., 10 (1979): 110; Thomas Cartelli, "Ideology and Subversion in the Shakespearean Set Speech," ELH 53 (1986): 16-21; and Hassel, Faith and Folly, 207.

³² Benjamin Nelson, The Idea of Usury, 2d ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), 141-42, describes Antonio's offer as the kind "denounced by Luther as a challenge to God's total authority [and] . . . an inexcusable effort to imitate Christ's inimitable goodness." The Geneva Bible (1560), Hebrews 7:22, refers to Jesus as "a surety of a better Testament." See also Harry Morris, "The Judgment Theme in The Merchant of Venice" Renascence 39 (1986): 310.

³³ Monica J. Hamill, "Poetry, Law, and the Pursuit of Perfection: Portia's Role in The Merchant of Venice," SEL 18 (1978): 243. See also Berger, "Marriage and Mercifixion," 162. Portia's triumph over Antonio is often suggested in production by having him remain onstage alone for a moment. . . .