SOURCE: Lewis, Cynthia. “‘A Foolish Consistency’: Antonio and Alienation in The Merchant of Venice.” In Particular Saints: Shakespeare's Four Antonios, Their Contexts, and Their Plays, pp. 51-87. Cranbury, N.J.: Associated University Presses, 1997.

[In the following excerpt, Lewis regards The Merchant of Venice as an ironic tragicomedy, concentrating on Antonio as the focus of the drama's ambiguities, contradictions, and equivocations, while also tracing developments in Shakespeare's characterization of Portia.]

I

Antonio opens the play by speaking three times in seven lines of how little he understands himself:

In sooth, I know not why I am so sad;
It wearies me, you say it wearies you;
But how I caught it, found it, or came by it,
What stuff 'tis made of, whereof it is born,
I am to learn;
And such a want-wit sadness makes of me,
That I have much ado to know myself.

(1.1.1-7; emphasis added)

Thus, he immediately establishes the play's keen interest, which runs throughout, in the inadequacy of human knowledge. As readers and audiences, our first impulse is to provide the reason for Antonio's sadness—in most cases (cases too numerous to mention individually), the cause advanced is Bassanio's imminent departure. To assume so, however, is to remain deaf to Antonio's emphasis and to the dynamic of the entire first scene, which points to the absence of adequate explanations for Antonio's melancholy.¹ In the first part of the scene, Salerio, Solanio, and Gratiano all repeatedly guess at what is ailing Antonio. Clearly, none of them wholly succeeds. In rejecting their theories, Antonio reaffirms his self-estrangement: he does not know himself.

Nor does he appear to know the world in which his ships traffic. Salerio's speech about the perils of the sea (22-40), although familiar to the point of cliché, is nevertheless compelling. What's more, it is readily accessible, indebted as it is to the popular conceit of the sea as fortune and built on two simple metaphorical vehicles, “broth” and “church” (22, 29). A rhetorical tour de force, it speaks true: earthly life and goods, “even now worth this, / And now worth nothing,” are at the mercy of earthly change (1.1.35-36). Yet, Salerio's persuasive speech does not move Antonio, who, although manifestly steeped in what Lyon calls an “ordinary and ‘worldly’ world” (31), is nonetheless out of step with that world. He is imprudently confident of his “fortune” (41):

My ventures are not in one bottom trusted,
Nor to one place; nor is my whole estate
Upon the fortune of this present year:
Therefore my merchandise makes me not sad.

(42-45)

Two scenes later, with like oblivion, he impawns his flesh to Shylock.

Antonio's unskillful maneuvering in a world fraught with danger is pronounced but hardly unique. If he is, as his friends assert, a “strange fellow” and “marvellously chang'd” (51, 76), then he reflects the alienation and unpredictability portended even by the well-adjusted Bassanio as he greets his friends: “Good signiors both, when shall we laugh? say, when? / You grow exceeding strange. Must it be so?” (66-67). All human attachments, the play demonstrates from the start, are precarious. Nor does Venetian Christian culture fully protect its members from social alienation. For, although to themselves they are all natives, to an Elizabethan audience they would have been considered “merchant-strangers,” the term applied by Londoners from midcentury on to “foreign or alien traders.”² The concepts of native and foreign are relative, dependent upon perspective. Whatever sense of their impregnability may be afforded to the Venetians by their luxury, leisure, and power, it is continually undermined and exposed as contingent.

The effect of such undermining is dramatic irony, the tone that, in turn, dominates the play. In the particular case of the opening scene, the audience is being prepared for the crucial irony to follow, when the Venetians, themselves “strangers” in a variety of senses, treat the Jewish usurer increasingly as a foreigner, naming him “Jew” (passim), then “stranger” (3.3.27), finally “alien” (4.1.349).³ Moreover, one of the chief purposes of such dramatic irony is to expose ostensible binaries in Merchant—like Christian versus Jew, or Venice versus Belmont—as suspicious, perhaps artificial. The more an audience probes the characterization of the Christian Italians in act 1, which Shakespeare takes obvious pains to elaborate at length before introducing Shylock at all, the more they resemble their Jewish counterpart.

Take, for example, the conversation in 1.3 where Bassanio, approaching Shylock in Antonio's behalf, misunderstands Shylock's remark, “Antonio is a good man,” by replying, “Have you heard any imputation to the contrary?” (12-14). Almost universally, critics have cited this passage to show the difference between Jew and Christian, who, as Shylock's retort to Bassanio implies, do not even speak the same language: “Ho, no, no, no, no! my meaning in saying he is a good man is to have you understand me that he is sufficient” (15-17). Shylock's orientation is financial, we read repeatedly in the criticism on Merchant, whereas Bassanio's is moral. But this interpretation is misleading because it ignores Bassanio's attitudes and language as early as 1.1. There, in fact, Bassanio's request to Antonio and his description of Portia appear every bit as mercenary as are Shylock's ruminations over Antonio's suitability as a borrower. Only Bassanio's language is dressier. It is the language of spiritual venturing put to the service of obscuring his motive, which is to gain financial independence from Antonio by attaching himself to “a lady richly left” (161). Read closely, Bassanio's plans to woo Portia through Antonio's renewed generosity are couched in metaphors that are misleadingly high-minded and big-hearted: he wants to “get clear of all [his] debts” to Antonio by “hazard[ing]” another loan from Antonio (134, 151); his object is a woman of “worth” (167); and his “thrift” promises to render him “fortunate” (175-76). Not coincidentally, thrift is Shylock's word for “usury,” as the audience is about to hear in 1.3 (50, 90).⁴

In effect, Bassanio and Shylock do not speak differently but share the same vocabulary, which Bassanio seems better at manipulating to blur his intent. He may well be attracted to Portia's “fair” looks and “wondrous virtues”—additional elements of her “worth”—as well as to her inheritance (1.1.162-63, 167). Yet, his language of financial speculation in 1.1 fits his professed love for Antonio and Portia only uncomfortably, if at all.

The immediate purpose of the dramatic irony that such implicit comparison between Jew and Christian creates is to puncture any character's pretensions to being essentially different from any other. Such claims to distinctiveness are often made in earnest—for instance, by the duke of Venice, as he pronounces Shylock's sentence at the trial: “That thou shalt see the difference of our spirit, / I pardon thee thy life before thou ask it” (4.1.368-69). They are also parodied by Launcelot Gobbo in 3.5. According to the clown, the conversion from Jew to Christian is of no more consequence than an increase in the price of pork (21-26). In the same scene, moreover, Launcelot is revealed to have easily crossed racial boundaries himself by impregnating the Moor (37-42). In no case are the actual similarities between apparently disparate characters more extensive, however, than in that of Shylock and Antonio, who are far less divided by cultural barriers than bound naturally by their strangeness and estrangement. The one is alienated from Christian society, the other from this world altogether.

Antonio's discomfort in this world has its positive associations with ideal charity, like that of Saint Anthony, and, generally, unlike Shylock's miserliness. The merchant's willingness to dispense interest-free loans is legendary in Venice (1.2.43-45), and his devotion to Bassanio is widely recognized within his social sphere (2.8.35-50). Indeed, a large part of the point about Antonio's willingness to practice hypocrisy in borrowing from Shylock in the first place is that his high regard for Bassanio compels him to. In this sense, he is a conventional wise fool, ruled by irrational love.⁵ At the same time, however, his is an obsessive attachment to Bassanio; as Solanio says, Antonio “only loves the world for” his friend (2.8.50). Such recklessness proves at least as harmful to some other characters—Shylock and Portia especially—as Shylock's overt hostility. And perhaps not all of Antonio's indiscretions can be attributed to his heedlessness; some seem every bit as calculated as Shylock's aggressions.

Antonio's affinity with Shylock is first evinced in 1.3, where his nature is disclosed through his open hypocrisies. He will “neither lend nor borrow / By taking nor by giving of excess”—that is, unless he needs to (61-64). He will also borrow from a man he has publicly abused, both verbally and physically, and will likely mistreat again (106-31). He will, in other words, practice the usury he reviles. Presumably, he satisfies his conscience by rationalizing the interest he will owe Shylock as adequate payment for his persecution of the Jew:

If thou wilt lend this money, lend it not
As to thy friends, for when did friendship take
A breed for barren metal of his friend?
But lend it rather to thine enemy,
Who if he break, thou mayst with better face
Exact the penalty.

(132-37)

Antonio thus justifies the contemptuous “face” with which he uses Shylock's money. Worth noting here is Shylock's unwillingness to practice hypocrisy of his own until this point. He has refused Bassanio's hollow invitation to dinner and drawn a telling comparison between himself and the prototypical trickster Jacob, alerting the careful listener to his attitude toward his would-be clients (33-38, 71-90).⁶ In addition, he confronts Antonio's hypocrisy directly (106-29). Only after Antonio insists on contracting with Shylock despite his loathing does Shylock assume his own mask of “kindness” (143):

                                                                      Why, look you how you storm!
I would be friends with you, and have your love,
Forget the shames that you have stain'd me with,
Supply your present wants, and take no doit
Of usance for my moneys, and you'll not hear me.

(137-41)

Shylock can match Antonio move for move, ever deepening his resemblance to him.

In fact, Shylock's shift in attitude toward the bond—from “merry sport” to earnest—hinges on another Christian hypocrisy, the central one in Shakespeare's plot (1.3.145). Having finally consented to dine with the Christians in the spirit of “hate” (2.5.14), Shylock discovers too late just how much they have “flatter[ed]” him with their invitation (2.5.13). The dinner turns out to have been a subterfuge to expedite Jessica's elopement, as Shylock bemoans to Salerio and Solanio upon entering after she has fled: “You knew, none so well, none so well as you, of my daughter's flight” (3.1.24-25). Significantly, at no time hereafter is this hoodwinking of Shylock addressed. Even though it is, in the best light, a morally questionable ruse, the Christians are never held in the least bit accountable for it. Only Shylock is reproached in subsequent scenes for his violent, vengeful reaction to it. What might have happened to Shylock's “stony” heart if a Christian or two in the trial scene had apologized for participating in the earlier scheme against him (4.1.4)? Shylock's public humiliation of Antonio—and the firm control over his nemesis that it requires—are partly, as the usurer maintains, “villainy” that the Christians “teach” him (3.1.71).

I am not excusing Shylock's vengeance, which he clearly harbors from the very beginning: he “hates” Antonio “for he is a Christian; / But more, for that … / He lends out money gratis” (1.3.42-44). Nor do I intend to vilify Antonio and his Christian company. Neither do I mean to ignore conventional sixteenth-century depictions of Jews as monstrous or to pass over or minimize genuine cultural differences in any society, including Shakespeare's Venice.⁷ They do exist. Yet, differing cultural practices may be mistaken as human differences. I am trying to show that many of the supposed distinctions in Merchant, which attach themselves to categories like Christian and Jew, or victim and villain, are just such mistaken disparities. They are relatively superficial, and they invite disproof. For all the acrimony they arouse among the characters and the disagreement they elicit in audience members, attempts to validate them turn quickly into vain exercises in hair-splitting and, worse yet, detours from recognizing the dramatic irony at hand and the uses to which it is put. The profound correspondences among the characters in Merchant ultimately redirect the audience's attention from a cultural dilemma to a universally human one.⁸ It is the larger problem of feeling at home in the inhospitable world of the flesh, beginning with the body, which, as Shylock's unpleasant analogy to his vengeful humor indicates, may easily betray and “shame” us: “Some men there are … / … when the bagpipe sings i' th' nose, / Cannot contain their urine” (4.1.47-50). The worldly world of Merchant imposes such severe difficulties as to encourage withdrawal from it.

Put another way, Shylock's social alienation—in some ways caused by himself as much as by others—leads him to a madness much like Antonio's folly.⁹ Both become increasingly isolated, even imprisoned. As Shylock becomes enslaved to vengeance, his passion finds bizarre reflection in Antonio's passive resignation to it:

The Duke cannot deny the course of law;
For the commodity that strangers have
With us in Venice, if it be denied,
Will much impeach the justice of the state,
Since that the trade and profit of the city
Consisteth of all nations.

(3.3.26-31)

The essential truth of these lines notwithstanding, Antonio's specific explanation as to why Shylock must take his pound of flesh, rendered nearly impenetrable by his tortuous language, provides further evidence of his maladjustment to the material world. Yes, he must be shaken here by Shylock's carnivorous presence in the scene, but his contorted syntax owes to more than his present situation. For instance, is the subject of “will impeach” the “denial of commodity” or “the denial of the course of law”? The construction is muddled. Furthermore, the reason that the court might be “impeached” for a decision against Shylock is not, exactly, that Venice relies on “all nations” for trade; more specifically, it is because Venice must protect the foreigners who have relocated in Venice and who contribute to Venetian wealth and security, as Antonio means, but only vaguely relates.¹⁰ His wording mirrors his malaise, seen especially in his consistent impulse to deal half-heartedly with the complexities of his existence by evasion, if not altogether removing himself. His readiness to die at Shylock's hands in the trial scene is expressed in the terms of Pauline wise folly: “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). As numerous sequels to this speech demonstrate, however, Antonio's self-negation is not wholly sincere: “You cannot better be employ'd, Bassanio, / Than to live still and write mine epitaph” (4.1.117-18). Antonio still has an ego; in this case, he channels it toward raising himself in others' opinions.

What Antonio projects as his wisely foolish abandonment of self-interest is actually a truly foolish sacrifice of self-protection. He would rather die self-righteous than engage with Shylock, the law, and other worldly concerns, saving whatever face he can by manipulating Bassanio's public display of gratitude toward him. Likewise, the Shylock of acts 3 and 4 foolishly forfeits whatever standing he does enjoy in Venice to satisfy his loathing, as Stephen Greenblatt writes, “against all reason and self-interest.”¹¹ In 1.3, Shylock has appeared attuned to and adept at dealing with life's perils, enumerating the reasons that contracting with Antonio would be unwise (17-25), while Antonio blithely ignores the dangers to his ships and to himself. But by act 4, both men have lost their heads. They are equally at odds with, adrift in, this world.

Their unease, merely an extreme version of that visiting all the major characters, also emerges in Belmont. There it is handled more lightly and yet is enough in evidence to erode the apparent dissimilarities between the play's two settings. Portia's first line echoes Antonio's—both are “weary,” predisposed by their fatigue in “this great world” to retreat from it (1.2.2). As reasonable as are Nerissa's objections to Portia's complaints (1.2.3-9, 27-35), we may well sense, as Portia rehearses the relentless list of suitors to whom she has extended entertainment, that her world-weariness is deserved (1.2.39-111). Being stuck in a country house with a pack of unattractive suitors (one of whom just might choose the right casket) is no one's idea of fulfillment. Yet it is one of the play's many metaphors—others including the Venetian law—for the constrictions that accompany this life. No wonder, in a sense, that Antonio is so ready to leave it.

Still, Portia seems gently mocked for traces of the same characteristics that eventually render Antonio ineffectual in the world. Foremost is her tendency to rush headlong into judgments based on shallow differences, especially race and culture. That Bassanio, a Christian Italian, eventually chooses successfully among the caskets should not be misread as the play's complicity in Portia's xenophobia (3.2). For indeed, as Sinead Cusack has written of her own challenges in performing 1.2, the script leaves little opportunity to rescue Portia from close-mindedness:

For Portia [the problem] is to escape the effect of a spoilt brat maliciously destroying her suitors. Both in rehearsal and in performance this scene [1.2] caused me more trouble than any other. I think we finally made it work, although it was at the price of cutting out the Scotsman, and perhaps one or two others.¹²

Those “others” are all Others—foreigners who, although they may fail the casket test and make miserable husbands, are deemed “strangers” in Portia's household not on those grounds but for reasons more trivial, like, “He hears merry tales and smiles not” (1.2.123). Portia's crush on Bassanio is also implicitly derided when Nerissa omits his name, citing him as the companion of the Marquis of Montferrat (1.2.114)—an “evocative family name,” writes Moelwyn Merchant, for its associations with a powerful but financially drained Italian aristocracy.¹³ Marquis Boniface of Montferrat had accumulated quite a debt of his own, at the turn of the thirteenth century, while participating in the Crusades; he eventually paid what he owed Venice by scheming with King Philip of Swabia, pocketing in the process “considerable personal gain” (all in the name of Christ, of course).¹⁴

The dramatic irony at work in scenes where Antonio and Shylock judge each other, then, is also operating in 1.2. Portia, too, falls back on false or incomplete assumptions about what constitutes genuine difference from one person to the next and about how much difference is acceptable. Through involving her in the problem of feeling alienated in the world, Shakespeare adds a new element to the equation. Not only is she wistful by virtue of her immersion in the world, and not only does she long to skirt the difficulties of navigating this life that tire her—difficulties implicit in her father's will. But also, like Antonio and Shylock, she copes with the daunting complexities, dangers, and pain of her situation with oversimplifications: all suitors are worthless but Bassanio, who is flawless. Such a response to the complicated challenge of enlightened courtship is particularly characteristic of youths, who, as Portia herself says, “skip o'er the meshes of good counsel the cripple” (1.2.20-21). In addition, her next line implies that it is a mannerism that she will outgrow, cooling her “hot temper” and accepting responsibility for herself: “But this reasoning is not in the fashion to choose me a husband” (1.2.21-22).

The extent to which Portia does manifest growth in discernment over the play's course is a question set in motion by her first scene. Whatever the final answer to it, Shakespeare has illustrated many times over, in act 1 and beyond, that, when faced with confusion, the human inclination is to impose an order that can only fail to contain the confusion. The unruly world defies the characters' strategies for ordering it. The ultimate effect of the dramatic irony in Merchant is perhaps to alienate the audience from the characters enough to confuse and delay its judgment of them, lest that judgment, too, decay quickly into false appearance.

II

Shakespeare's dominant metaphor in Merchant for artificial constructs that appear to promise stability is the theater. The stage metaphor recurs throughout the first scene, persistently calling attention to the affectation about Venetian manners. First, Salerio fashions an image of Antonio's argosies as the “pageants of the sea,” playing “signiors and rich burghers” to the “petty traffickers,” or smaller ships (10-12). That tableau of courtliness and control, however, instantly gives way to Solanio's reminder that Antonio's ships are indeed vulnerable (15-22), whereupon Salerio abandons his initial scenario and pursues another (22-40), this one more in tune with “[w]hat harm a wind too great might do at sea” (24).

Only a few lines later, Antonio makes his own comparison between the world and the stage: “I hold the world but as the world, … / A stage where every man must play a part, / And mine a sad one” (77-79). Like Salerio's first description of Antonio's argosies, and like Jaques's celebrated “All the world's a stage …,” Antonio's analogy too is reductive.¹⁵ Through casting himself in a “sad” “part” (78-79), he believes he has satisfied curiosity as to his melancholy and cleared his future of mystery. Gratiano's reply, fittingly, is to try to break down Antonio's reserve by enacting the part of the “fool”; he also accuses his friend of playing another role than he admits to, that of “sir Oracle,” a man whose “wisdom, gravity, profound conceit” are merely feigned, through his deceptively august silence, in order to cloak his ignorance (92-93). When Gratiano concludes his lecture by advising Antonio to “fish not with this melancholy bait / For this fool gudgeon”—that is, for an inflated “opinion” of his sagacity—he assumes that Antonio has a choice and is not necessarily so scripted as he maintains into a certain way of life (101-2).

Bassanio follows on the heels of this speech with his own categorization of Gratiano, who, he says, “speaks an infinite deal of nothing.” This is a tag that critics have, to my knowledge, never questioned but that seems dubious (114). Gratiano's depiction of Antonio appears on target. Bassanio is about to ask Antonio for money, however, and would thus hasten to smooth any feathers that Gratiano had ruffled. What's more, Bassanio, as we have seen, is himself largely performing here, play-acting, as Gratiano has just described Antonio. He would naturally want to write off the perceptiveness of Gratiano's speech. As Bassanio unfolds his plans to Antonio for wooing Portia, he sets up his characterization for the rest of the play as someone who is always, in part, putting on a show and around whom theatrical language hovers. When he later welcomes Launcelot Gobbo into service by giving him a new “livery,” it is with flair purchased by Antonio's loan, which also, presumably, underwrites his final Venetian “feast” for his “best esteem'd acquaintance” (2.2.154, 171-72). In 2.9, he is said to be approaching Belmont with “(besides commends and courteous breath), / Gifts of rich value,” which he cannot afford, and arriving like a “day in April … / To show how costly summer” is approaching (90-91, 94-95). Such are the “fair ostents of love” (2.8.44)—Antonio's words for the production he has subsidized—that later embarrass Bassanio when, having won Portia's hand and learning of Antonio's distress in Venice, he must own up to his role-playing:

                                                                                                    dear lady,
Rating myself at nothing, you shall see
How much I was a braggart: when I told you
My state was nothing, I should then have told you
That I was worse than nothing.

(3.2.256-60)

To argue that Bassanio chooses the lead casket because he knows firsthand that “outward shows [may] be least themselves” is too cynical (3.2.73). Clearly, his character is delineated to illustrate how even the best of men—including one worthy of Portia's love—may easily be tempted to lie rather than risk rejection. He at least eventually tells her the truth about owning “nothing.” And that he continues, even after his confession of his indebtedness, to deal with his discomfort through “outward shows” serves at least one positive purpose: it presents Portia with repeated perceptual tests and lessons through which she can gain experience (3.2.73). Having discovered the element of play-acting in his financial situation (3.2), she is then privy during the trial to his reneging on his vow of love to her (4.1.282-87), and after that to his forfeiting her ring for love of Antonio and for gratitude to Balthazar (4.1.450-51). These instances can only temper her earlier, girlish conviction in Bassanio's perfections, which, just before he makes his choice of caskets, she likens to those of Hercules.¹⁶

But, even more than providing a catalyst for both Bassanio's and Portia's maturation, Bassanio's continual reliance on theatrics to make his way in the intimidating world forms part of a much larger web in Merchant, where action is usually acting. I have discussed already the pressures on both the Christians and Shylock in 1.3 to alternate between honesty and hypocrisy as they formulate the bond. Other instances abound. Jessica elopes disguised, while the Christians, “with varnish'd faces,” plan to put on a masque (2.5.33). Portia's father's lottery serves as a skeletal script: it repeatedly prompts suitors to write their own lines within a narrowly defined formula, and it deposits Portia within similar legal confines, which are represented by the casket that encases her picture.¹⁷ Portia's own attempt to swindle her ring from Bassanio is a consciously staged event (4.1). But the theatrical extravaganza in Merchant is, of course, the trial, which Portia, with Bellario's help, carefully orchestrates.

The specifics of Portia's conduct in the trial scene temporarily set aside, we should not miss several of the episode's general traits as calculated performance. Much like the final scene in Measure for Measure, where Duke Vincentio secretly directs his subjects' reactions to his gestures, 4.1 of Merchant is also a virtual play-within-a-play. It thus necessarily reminds the audience that the larger work is also fiction, thereby inviting inspection of the characters' various uses of theatrics. In the trial scene, Portia's advance knowledge of how to overturn the bond not only buys her the time to try coaxing Shylock out of his vengeance; it also rigs the other characters' responses to the court's proceedings—or, at least, severely limits the possibilities of their responses. Shylock, for example, never truly has a chance to persuade his “second Daniel” of his cause. But even more to the point, Portia's control over the trial's outcome, artistic in its breadth and resourcefulness, alerts us to how provisional—illusory, really—are all the constructs that are relied upon to stave off social and personal disorder.¹⁸ Countless details of the scene—from Shylock's pathetically blind trust in the law's letter to the deliberate instruction with which Portia calls upon first the duke, then Antonio, to sentence Shylock—point up how easily the verdict, but for Portia's firm hand, might have gone the other way. Having done her homework and prepared for the worst, she has guarded against loss; her strategy, akin to that of the contract or bond, is meant to minimize risk.

So is, I would argue, the love for Bassanio that Antonio flaunts in the courtroom, which is of suspicious mettle, if only because of its proximity to so many other examples of feigning, like Portia's role-playing. But Antonio himself offers more grounds for doubting his professions of liberality in love because his words and actions hint of the role-playing he has discussed with Gratiano as the play began. Furthermore, in styling himself a saint, ready to sacrifice his life for friendship, he employs the sort of absolute and ideal terms that, like Salerio's metaphor of “pageants” for “argosies” (1.1.11, 9), suggest a pose. No one can be that virtuous—not in the menacing waters of this world, vividly portrayed in Merchant. Like Antonio's casting of himself in the role of a sad man and like Portia's close direction of the trial, Antonio's playing the martyr seems devised to eliminate risk—the risk of not having his love returned. Significantly, this lack of risk was the factor that made Christian moralists deem usury corrupt.¹⁹ Once again, for all of Antonio's labors to distance himself from such worldly imperfections, he appears far more like than unlike Shylock. At the same time, cultural stereotypes receive another lick: Christian liberality, hazarding in love, and perhaps even mercy, versus Jewish miserliness, legalism, and revenge seem more than ever like so many theatrical props. As for Antonio, unless the image of himself that he projects is truer than it seems, it will sooner or later crack. In this case, it is sooner, and the exposure of the man behind the staged type shows much about how the rest of Merchant is played out.

III

The height of Antonio's role-playing coincides with the point where he most manipulates Bassanio's emotions—that is, when his letter, horrendously timed, intrudes upon the betrothal of Bassanio and Portia, usurping center stage. As Bassanio reads the letter aloud, he may as well be reading a part from a script—in this case, a revision of his life's course:

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

(3.2.315-22)

The letter shows Antonio's love to be conditional. His Christian “kind[ness],” trumpeted by his loyal supporters Salerio and Solanio (2.8.35), craves Bassanio's gratitude in return. It thus represents what Thomas Wilson's Discourse Upon Usury refers to as “Mentalis usura, an usurie of the mynde, when one hopeth for gayne although no contracte be made,” gain not in money but in “thankfull recompense.”²⁰ Antonio's protestations of charity, although they surely embrace some truth about his esteem for Bassanio, also reveal, as Geary puts it, “a desperate attempt to hold on to Bassanio”²¹ and thereby raise himself in Bassanio's esteem. Such angling may be read as self-interest disguised as selflessness. It compares to his statement in the next scene, 3.3, that he has “oft deliver'd from [Shylock's] forfeitures / Many that have at times made moan to me” (22-23)—a line that appropriates the religious language of salvation (“deliver'd”), that stresses the abundance of his benevolence (“oft,” “Many,” “at times”), and that, therefore, sets himself up to appear a kind of Christ. But Antonio's self-consciousness mars his charity.

Throughout the trial scene, Antonio continues to display what Lyon calls his “talent for the … self-advertising whine.”²² His demeanor of long suffering is undercut by his repeated plays for Bassanio's affection, as well as by startling reminders of how ill at ease he feels in the world. His melodramatic puns, which Portia's verbal adroitness throws into relief, again betray his distress at the prospect of not belonging:

Most heartily I do beseech the court
To give the judgment.
For if the Jew do cut but deep enough,
I'll pay it instantly with all my heart.

(4.1.243-44, 280-81; emphasis added)

Such painful awkwardness portrays Antonio at his most foolish, unable to feel or to express a love that entails true risk—unconditional love—and unable to trust that he could be loved without manipulating Bassanio into it.

Antonio's masquerade as a man of infinite patience, toleration, and charity is loaded with implication in a scene that takes up the “quality of mercy” at its center. How much of what passes for Christian kindness in 4.1, the audience might well ask upon witnessing Antonio's exhibition, is the real thing? That question is urged by no character's attitude in the scene more than by Gratiano's. With a name connoting grace itself, Gratiano is the enemy of Antonio's pretensions to love, echoing Shylock's denigration of Antonio's false humility as the fraudulence of a “fawning publican” (1.3.41). Gratiano, in fact, is the entire play's enemy to theatrical spectacle. Shakespeare's alteration of Il Pecorone, wherein the Antonio figure (Ansaldo) marries the lady's maid, tempts an audience to think of Gratiano as a branching off of Antonio's character, a kind of twin. Both characters, indeed, expose the play-acting in Merchant for what it is—the one, through pretense; the other, through brutal honesty.

I believe that Gratiano has yet to be explored satisfactorily in criticism, though his behavior, especially during the trial, bears significantly upon Antonio's characterization. Gratiano is almost unfailingly regarded as, at best, a Jew-baiting boor and, at worst, proof that Christians can hate as violently as Jews. In either case, he is seen as socially coarse and strident. But depictions of him that stop here take their cue, as implied above, from Bassanio's curt dismissal of Gratiano's observations as “chaff” (1.1.116). In reality, however, not only do Gratiano's statements in 1.1 hit home, but, later, he also speaks the most eloquent lines in Merchant. Significantly, that same speech encapsulates most faithfully the play's constant concern with the desolation that results in a world of change and instability:

                                                            All things that are,
Are with more spirit chased than enjoy'd.
How like a younger or a prodigal
The scarfed bark puts from her native bay,
Hugg'd and embraced by the strumpet wind!
How like the prodigal doth she return,
With over-weather'd ribs and ragged sails,
Lean, rent, and beggar'd by the strumpet wind!

(2.6.12-19)

In addition to prophesying the fate of Antonio's argosies, Gratiano discloses the kernel of truth in Merchant that perhaps comes closest to being unimpeachable: that as worldly conditions change, so do human appetites.

This gift of Gratiano's for tapping into the essence of things looks forward to another such unlikely truth-teller in Shakespeare's canon: Lucio, the “fantastic” who dogs the friar/duke throughout Measure for Measure. Many differences attain between the two—most especially, that Lucio receives a stiff comeuppance for slandering Duke Vincentio, while Gratiano is never judged for what he says. Yet, much as Lucio has an odd way of speaking factually about the duke (or seeming to)—even as, in ignorance of the duke, he manufactures lies about him—so Gratiano remains mysteriously incapable of forgery. And, like Lucio, he sometimes appears to mirror the truth without trying or meaning to.²³ In 2.6, for instance, just after Jessica exits to “gild” herself with “some moe ducats,” Gratiano muses, “Now by my hood, a gentle, and no Jew” (49-51). Although he intends to compliment Jessica, he inadvertently characterizes Gentiles as “gilded,” preoccupied with the material wealth that Jessica is now adding both to her costume and to Christian coffers.

Gratiano's irrepressible honesty, again like Lucio's, adheres where it is least wanted, though possibly where it is most needed. Duke Vincentio tries in vain to shake off this “bur,” who will nevertheless “stick” (4.3.179), and although reprehensible for slurring the duke, Lucio is still valuable for what he can teach the duke about how his subjects really see him. In a sense, Lucio unveils the duke verbally and does so quite literally in 5.1, when he physically lifts the friar's hood, discovering the real duke beneath his theatrical disguise. Such, I think, is also Gratiano's dramatic function: to resist attempts to suppress truth under a veneer of civility. Bassanio suggests as much when he cautions Gratiano about being himself in Belmont and advises him to play a part instead:

                                                            But hear thee, Gratiano:
Thou art too wild, too rude, and bold of voice—
Parts that become thee happily enough,
And in such eyes as ours appear not faults,
But where thou art not known, why, there they show
Something too liberal. Pray thee take pain,
To allay with some cold drops of modesty
Thy skipping spirit, lest through thy wild behavior
I be misconst'red in the place I go to,
And lose my hopes.

(2.2.180-89)

This is all eerily familiar. Wild? Rude? Bold of voice? Thus far, Gratiano has not born out Bassanio's adjectives, although he will fulfill all such epithets during the trial; Bassanio has reason to exaggerate here because, as a nervous suitor, he wants his “show” to be just so (185). Otherwise, he stands to lose his “hopes” (189)—yet another perfectly ambiguous word for what he could gain, financially or spiritually, through marriage to Portia. And the cost to Gratiano of dispelling Bassanio's illusion of suitability? Life as a social outcast, cut off from Portia's fortune and the conduit of Bassanio's friendship. Naturally, he agrees to “put on a sober habit,” to role-play along with his benefactors (2.2.190).

Yet, ironically, Gratiano seems to have less to hide than anyone. Never mind that, until the trial scene, he appears, objectively, to be the most socially well adjusted character in Venice; never mind that Gratiano sails into marriage, which eludes Antonio. He is persona non grata. His very presence is seen to imperil the charades that promise wealth, stability, and prosperity amidst the flux. In the end, however, Gratiano proves unable to don a socially acceptable façade, such that his character comes to embody a principle that pervades the play—the habit of truth to assert itself. His impulse to be himself and to utter the realities that other characters may intuit, but would rather suppress, calls to mind Launcelot's words to Old Gobbo in 2.2, as he attempts, finally, to reveal himself to his father: “truth will come to light; … in the end truth will out” (79-80). Whatever particular truth Gratiano may impart in a given scene, he always somehow displays the darker forces at work behind the cloak of order, normalcy, and reason. Ultimately, Gratiano's truth is the same truth that spoils the masquers' play when, Antonio announces, “the wind is come about” (2.6.64)—the truth that human artifice can exert precious little control over nature's vagaries.

This trait of Gratiano's does not surface fully until 4.1, where he becomes obstreperous: “O, be thou damn'd, inexecrable dog!” (128). On the face of things, the abrupt switch in his characterization may seem puzzling: the only overt link between the Gratiano of the first three acts and that of act 4 are Bassanio's depictions, which, we have seen, do not square with the actual Gratiano on the page, who initially appears well-meaning, perceptive, and even capable of poetry.²⁴ How appropriate if the play's chief mouthpiece for discontinuity were himself Janus-faced, composed of irreducible and inexplicable contradictions. That possibility notwithstanding, at least one common thread does unite the earlier and later Gratianos, however sensible or vicious they may be. As in the first three acts, Gratiano can still be counted on in one way or another to demystify what he, along with the audience, sees, thereby uncovering certain truths. Once he and Bassanio have become engaged in Belmont, for instance, Gratiano does not hesitate to use the candid terms of material gain for their “success”: “We are the Jasons, we have won the fleece” (3.2.240-41). In the trial scene, Gratiano is likely unaware of how effectively he continues to disrupt illusion. Yet he does so by giving frank, passionate voice to the hostility and racism that the trial as play-within-a-play and Antonio as spurious saint are concealing. Gratiano's aspersions may be vile, but, like Shylock's malicious attack on Antonio, they have the virtue of honesty. In this, Gratiano strangely, paradoxically, lives up to his name. “Mercy is not itself, that oft looks so”; Gratiano's inability to pretend is, in some sense, grace indeed. Recalling the socially repugnant fool in book 1 of Utopia, who blurts out the proposition that churchmen ought to minister to the needy rather than to their own desires,²⁵ Gratiano may well be the character in Merchant who most closely approximates the Pauline wise fool. In this he is a foil to the folly-fall'n Antonio.

Yet this is not to say that Gratiano's insults toward Shylock speak equally accurately for all the characters' feelings at the trial or that whatever mercy surfaces during the trial is purely sham. The perspective lent by Gratiano on the multiple, complex occurrences in 4.1 is but a wedge of the entire circle, albeit a sizable wedge. It invites examination of the court proceedings as to their real, versus their ostensible, fairness. How do we understand more precisely the degree to which Shylock's treatment under first Portia, then Antonio, translates into either justice or travesty? The letter from Bellario that introduces Balthazar to the court—another disguised script, juxtaposed against Antonio's letter to Bassanio (3.2)—not only commends the young judge's precocious achievement. It also suggests that the youth's judgment is still being tested: “I leave him to your gracious acceptance, whose trial shall better publish his commendation,” writes Bellario to the duke (4.1.164-66). The pun on “trial” enables the word to refer to both the trial over which Portia will preside and the scrutiny with which the audience is urged to evaluate her judgments by virtue of participating in 4.1 as audience-accomplices.

Measuring Portia's success at dispensing authentic justice, as opposed to fakery, requires further explanation of what, exactly, she aims to accomplish in court. Foremost, as indicated at the close of 3.2, she seeks to release her husband's friend from Shylock's tyranny, as much to benefit Antonio (3.4.10-21) as to comfort Bassanio (3.2.305-6). Although her primary goal is private, however, she also clearly takes care while pursuing her own ends to preserve the law's integrity, as when she denies Bassanio's request to bypass the contract entirely and “[w]rest once the law to [her] authority” (4.1.215). Already, then, even before she enters the courtroom, she is at pains to balance private against public concerns. Once the trial is underway, she quickly confronts another, similar challenge—the summons to arbitrate between the letter and the spirit of the law, an objective all the more vexed by the demands on her from both private and public spheres.

At merely a cursory glance, Portia's predicament, caught as she is between opposing and equally valid claims, registers as difficult. Indeed, it epitomizes the situation in which all the characters in Merchant repeatedly find themselves: that of making impossible choices. At every turn, various characters face one impasse or another. Jessica must choose between restrictive loyalty to her father or a carefree life with a Christian, a dilemma recapitulated in Portia's deciding whether or not to abide by her father's will. Portia's line in that context—“O me, the word choose!” (1.2.22-23)—expresses her dismay at lacking, rather than having, free choice. But she will soon covet the structured choice afforded her by her father's lottery, since she will freely turn to Bellario, her father reincarnated as uncle, for preinstructions about handling the intricacies of the trial. Choice between seemingly irreconcilable options also presses upon Bassanio, dividing his loyalties between Portia and Antonio. That dilemma is more playfully refigured later, in Bassanio's double desire to keep his word to Portia and yet still reward Balthazar, who are, doubly perplexingly, one and the same (4.1, 2). Furthermore, as 3.2 begins, Bassanio, in what can only be construed as the play's near self-parody, must even choose whether and when to choose. Finally, he would rather know his fate than delay it: “Let me choose, / For as I am, I live upon the rack” (24-25). The trial scene, then, is a culmination of this pattern of impossible choice.

Launcelot Gobbo, further fulfilling his dramatic function in Merchant as the mirror of crucial themes, takes the parody of feeling deadlocked to new heights as he struggles with whether to exchange masters:²⁶

The fiend is at mine elbow and tempts me, saying to me, “Gobbo, Launcelot Gobbo, good Launcelot,” or “good Gobbo,” or “good Launcelot Gobbo, use your legs, take the start, run away.” My conscience says, “No; take heed, honest Launcelot, take heed, honest Gobbo, … do not run, scorn running with thy heels.” … “Bouge,” says the fiend. “Bouge not,” says my conscience. “Conscience,” say I, “you counsel well.” “Fiend,” say I, “you counsel well.”

(2.2.2-9, 19-22)

The terms of this parody are those of the old morality drama, Launcelot the Everyman being torn between heavenly and hellish alternatives. The point of the parody is how much more troublesome is the problem of choice in the new drama, which more faithfully renders the world's complexities than do the clear-cut absolutes of moral allegory. In his own rudimentary way, Launcelot suggests the overwhelming confusion that choice entails when he scrambles his moral categories: he aligns the “fiend” with the decision to abandon Shylock, who himself is called “devil” and whose house is “hell” (1.3.98, 2.3.2). “Confusions” continue to reign in 2.2 once Old Gobbo enters and Launcelot plays the role of a befuddling God to his father's blind humankind (37). Launcelot's game of ventriloquizing his own shifting identity in his father's mind cleverly mimics all the characters' sense of dislocation as they fade in and out of apprehension, as well as the audience's continual feeling that reliable knowledge of the characters eludes them (33-101). The punch line that resolves this episode of mistaken identity in 2.2 underscores the very fluidity of identity; Old Gobbo exclaims, on feeling Launcelot's beard: “Lord, how art thou chang'd!” (99).

However humorous is Launcelot's rendition of the quandaries that human judgment visits on the other characters, the problem of choice in Merchant is no laughing matter. It is the plight that, perhaps more than any other condition of being human, most binds the characters together as human, underlying and belying their more superficial differences. It is, in other words, the truth behind the mask of racial, cultural, and sexual distinctions that, in this treacherous world of deceptive exteriors, transience, and myopia, to boot, everyone must not only choose but choose between two cherished possibilities, letting one go forever, and also make such choice in a mist. This is the hard, tragic fact at the core of human existence in Merchant. The cruel necessity of choosing blindly and with finality informs every character's experience equally and, totally without discrimination, alienates them all from their world and from one another. “Joy” is sometimes the “consequence” of judgment, as in Bassanio's happy choice of caskets (3.2.107). One false move, however, and his history would play out like Shylock's, which illustrates how easily a decisive stance, like complete faith in a bond's legality, may bring loss and sorrow. In Merchant, choice persistently entails the possibility of lost and irretrievable opportunity. At its most cynical, the play can even imply that neither of two choices will prove gratifying. Launcelot, again, offers a light handling of a dark notion when he tells Jessica that she is damned whether she claims kinship to Scylla, her father, or to Charybdis, her mother (3.5.15-18). Maneuvering through such narrow straits leaves a wide margin for error.

A comic vision, in which extremes are shown to be reconcilable, is not entirely alien to Merchant. Under a comic star, two opposites give enough to produce cosmic or social harmony, as Portia is attempting to do in the trial scene: she works to negotiate a slender pass between the Scylla of Shylock's fury, lack of pity, and adherence to an unjust law, and the Charybdis of Antonio's peculiar passivity, the Christians' readiness to dispense with the law, and her own private bias in the defendants' favor. In striving to mediate between the letter and the spirit of the law, she is hoping to vindicate Antonio through strictly legal means and, perhaps, add Shylock's education in flexibility to the bargain: she does, after all, give him plenty of time to withdraw his claim voluntarily before she subjects him to his own legalese.²⁷

But what is so remarkable about Portia in the trial scene is her very willingness to take on such a formidable task, especially since, no matter how well, or comically, she satisfies the various, contrary demands upon her judgment, she will likely fall short of the mark. Her partial inadequacy is virtually guaranteed. Whatever comic impulse may inform Portia's skill at judgment or her inclination to effect peace, it will remain at odds with the tragic discontent sown in the play's first lines and cultivated thereafter. For, in addition to whatever personal failings may inhibit Portia's clearer judgment, she has been placed here, as judge, in an untenable position. If the quibble on “blood” that she plays close to her vest stacks the deck against Shylock, then Portia herself has been no less finessed. Any decision she handed down to the court would be hard-pressed to elude the circumstances handed down to her by the play: namely, the unlikelihood that any choice can fully resolve antipathy or thoroughly erase a sense of bereavement.

Put another way, Portia's judgment, no matter how wise, is bound to savor of some theatrical artificality because she cannot hope to reach an ideal ruling—that is, a thoroughly convincing resolution. She is not so foolhardy as Antonio, whose display of spirituality is at least partly counterfeit. Her performance in court is far more substantial and credible. Indeed, her appearance at the trial exhibits genuine self-sacrifice, as opposed to Antonio's hollow shows of generosity; she has forfeited her wedding night and now risks considerable damage to everyone by taking the responsibility for Antonio that he refuses to take for himself.²⁸ This substitution, truly Christian in spirit, evinces her noble recognition that, come what may, someone must step up, settle the contest between Antonio and Shylock, and save Antonio's life. But the conditions of her choice—which are largely out of her control—stipulate that, in some measure, her verdict be implicated as mere pretension to truth, pretension signaled even by her theatrical costume. That disguise brings into incisive focus the bind in which Portia finds herself: she must lean on the power of fiction to perform her office and yet can never shake free of the element of fiction—of untruthfulness to the ideal of justice—in her arbitration.

Judgment in Merchant, particularly in the trial scene, most resembles theatrical illusion in this way, in its failure to contain all desires, to embrace all aspects of truth, to satisfy from all points of view. To be sure, some strategies minimize error and narrow-mindedness: slow and patient deliberation, mature awareness of life's impermanence, adopting the widest possible angle from which to perceive. Executed with even the best of intentions and with optimal tactics, however, human judgment is merely relative in quality. So must be, then, the quality of mercy. For this imperfection the audience is prone to hold Portia and her fellow Christians wholly responsible. Yet, if the audience, too, is invested in making the best possible judgment of the proceedings, it may benefit from carefully sorting out the factors for which the characters can be held accountable from those for which they cannot. Finally, the “poor rude world” stakes its claim on Portia as forcibly as it does on Antonio, and human nature, hers included, tends to deny the unpleasant realities of that world through substituting a fiction for them. At the same time, those realities persist, gnawing away at the fragile fictions. Although Portia's shortcomings as an individual and as a member of her culture are conspicuous, her human weaknesses encourage sympathy. If, for the former, she remains a foolish fool, then, for the latter, she becomes a wise one, undertaking a largely thankless job at considerable personal expense and at high risk of the censure that Antonio abhors.

IV

Portia's development as a character over the course of the play traces, in essence, her growing familiarity with and ease in the “poor rude world.” At her youngest, in 1.2, her lack of sophistication is implied by Nerissa's more extensive worldly experience (“for aught I see,” [5]) and intuition about the advantages to Portia of her father's will (27-33).²⁹ Even here, however, Portia's appreciation of human limitations is realistic beyond her years: “If to do were as easy as to know what were good to do, chapels had been churches and poor men's cottages princes' palaces” (12-14). Yet her awareness that human inadequacy requires compassion comes and goes. Intolerant of her suitors' gullibility, for instance, she fires off a comment to Arragon that not only puts him down but also runs counter to her own convictions: “To offend and judge are distinct offices, / And of opposed natures” (2.9.61-62). If such were the case, then human sympathy would never be able to temper rigid judgment, as Portia strenuously argues it should when promoting mercy in 4.1 (for example, 184-205). Then again, Portia's suitors, intent as they are on idealizing her into a “mortal breathing saint,” do little to discourage her curt dismissals (2.7.40). For Portia, as for Morocco and Arragon, the other is not fully human.

Not until Bassanio enters in 3.2 does Portia noticeably begin to bend, growing more accepting of another's weaknesses and more modest toward her own. Without any cooling of ardor for Bassanio, she acknowledges that he stands to choose the wrong casket (1-24), and she readily forgives him his indiscretion on learning of his indebtedness (299-314). Likewise, she offers herself to Bassanio acknowledging both her merits—“the full sum of me / Is sum of something”—and her shortcomings: she is “unlesson'd …, unschool'd, unpracticed,” though “she can learn” (157-59, 162). Such concessions to imperfection are intermixed with Portia's increased willingness to accommodate the demands on her of living in a flawed society and an unpredictable world. During Bassanio's choice of caskets, she first pronounces the warning to “tarry,” to “pause”—that is, to approach choice as the perceptual challenge it is (1). She will later, of course, reprise this sound advice in the courtroom: “Tarry a little,” “Soft, no haste,” “Tarry” (4.1.305, 321, 346). In 3.2 she confides to the audience her attempt to heed her own counsel by curbing her “joy” at Bassanio's success:

[Aside.] O love, be moderate, allay thy ecstasy,
In measure rain thy joy, scant this excess!
I feel too much thy blessing; make it less,
For fear I surfeit.

(111-14)

These are the words of a budding realist. Still inclined toward fantasies of Bassanio as a Herculean hero (53-62), she has nevertheless undertaken to mature from and learn through experience, as she promises Bassanio she will (149-65).

And indeed, even in 3.2, which is a prelude to the trial scene, Portia's fortitude of mind and character are clearly superior when measured against her peers'. The other characters surrounding her at the scene's end, all of whom have their own attractions, cannot compete with her impressiveness. Bassanio appears more mature when, earlier in the scene, he chooses “substance”—the real and imperfect Portia—over her effigy, a poor “counterfeit” in which she is drawn as a “demigod” (115-30). But having thus rejected mere “show” at last, his former theatrics ambush him when he is forced to confess his debt to Antonio and is once again brought low in the audience's opinion (256-63). Bassanio's good judgment has somehow outstripped his practical behavior, leaving his actual experience to catch up; he is destined now to learn through trial and error what his choice of truth over “ostent” means pragmatically. At the same juncture in the scene, Jessica has just entered with her Lorenzo (219), the couple presenting a portrait of stolen love next to the earned love of Portia and Bassanio, who seem their elders. Add to this company Antonio, who even in absentia makes his presence felt through his cloying letter (315-22). In a telling gesture, Portia asks to hear the letter read aloud (314). She probably craves to know what she is up against. Here again, she sets herself apart in this group of seemers, all of whom seek out ways to skirt the practical difficulties and responsibilities, the complexities of human life. Never again is the specific contrast between Portia and Antonio more lucid than at the close of 3.2: for, while Antonio can conceive of realizing his devotion to Bassanio only through sacrificing his existence, Portia intends to enlist her “little body” in the service of saving Antonio's, toward the ultimate end of physically consummating her marriage with a tranquil husband.³⁰

Portia's characterization as one who braves the hard vicissitudes of life in order to enjoy its rewards reaches a turning point in 3.4. Easily deceiving Lorenzo and Jessica, she proposes to “abide” in a “monast'ry two miles off,” where she may “live in prayer and contemplation” (26-32). In context, her choice to do just the opposite is crucial. Given the play's larger contention between the active life, which requires risk and flexibility, and the passive life, wherein contemplation breeds dangerous idealism, the monastery is richly symbolic. It represents the literal origins of Antonio's martyrdom, implicitly connecting his saintly behavior with the likes of Saint Anthony, and it suggests the figurative roots of his maladjustment to the material life in which he is engaged. By rejecting the monastic, contemplative life in the guise of embracing it, Portia rejects much about Antonio's values without denying his feelings their validity. She separates the man from his conduct, explicitly extolling his “spirit” (3.4.11-21), though implicitly condemning his destructive behavior by electing to participate in the life he shuns. Affirming her attachment to that life, as well as her self-conception as a servant in it, she borrows as her pseudonym the real name of her man Balthazar.

Such signs bode well. In particular, the suggestions in Portia's choices of reconciling extremes—withdrawal and engagement, censure and approval, master and servant, even male and female—adumbrate an official verdict at the trial that just might avoid the pitfall of all other judgments in the play: that of choosing one option at the exclusion of another. If Portia is indeed trying to achieve private ends without doing damage to public structures, if her deliberations are directed toward serving both the law's spirit and letter and toward bringing Jew and Christian closer to mutual understanding, then earlier scenes would seem to allow her a fighting chance to make some progress on those fronts. Her first substantive statement in the trial scene, which is actually a question, also appears to uphold the characterization of Portia/Balthazar as impartial and poised to recognize the legitimacy in each of two opposing perspectives: “Which is the merchant here? and which the Jew?” (174). What less biased opening could she employ than this one, which denies outward appearance as a factor in her arbitration? Her question indicates her readiness to look beyond misleading racial and cultural distinctions and into the pith of the arguments before her.

Yet I would argue, first, that Portia's question is far more complicated in its significance than I have just said and, second, that the question's tonal ambiguity speaks accurately for that, running throughout the scene, toward Portia's approach to judgment. For not only does her question imply her disinterestedness, but it also exemplifies her theatricality, which continually flirts with false sincerity. In fact, the most obvious point to make about her initial question is that it is a gag—and at Shylock's expense: in late sixteenth-century performance, Shylock's gaberdine and accompanying stage-Jew costuming would have stood out in a crowd of Gentiles.³¹ Operating simultaneously on a more serious level, however, Portia's apparently innocent question even more subtly raises suspicions about her neutrality, since her terms for Antonio and Shylock—that is, “merchant” and “Jew”—are not comparable, the one referring to a common means of sustenance in Venice and the other to a set of religious and cultural traits that help to alienate Shylock from within Venice. Thus, Portia, from the start, throws the proceedings somewhat athwart the search for justice. She also alerts the audience to the tension, which prevails from here on out, between catering to private interests and heeding the interests of others.

One way to talk about this tension is in terms of how Portia instructs Shylock. Does she, for example, truly attempt to include Shylock's viewpoint in her consideration? Her speech on the “quality of mercy” can be read as such a gesture (184-205), a generous effort to “mitigate” Shylock's severe legal rigor (203). It also contains undeniable elements of tribalism. In a very real sense, before the trial concludes, Shylock “must … be merciful” (183; emphasis added). He can either volunteer to render mercy as an ideal Christian does, without “strain” (184), or he will be required to give it “by compulsion,” legally (183). In any case, his dissent from the “[w]e” who “do pray for mercy” will not be so much as minimally tolerated. Once Portia unhinges Shylock's leverage, depriving him of legal recourse, his forfeiture of his bond and his control of his fortune, are, absolutely, enforced. One could argue that Shylock always has the opportunity, until Portia plays the trump card of her quibble on “blood” (306-7), to relent and soften his cruel demands of Antonio. And many have so argued. But the only authentic opportunity that Shylock has in the trial is to become a Christian—and not the sort of flawed, real Christian represented by other characters in the courtroom but a perfect Christian who lets go of grudges, sprinkles mercy and good will freely, has no property to speak of, and therefore can pose no threat to organized Venetian society. He is also expected to turn the other cheek to those who deceived him in promoting Jessica's elopement and who themselves make no apologies. In effect, Shylock finally has no choice at all and, as a consequence, no audible voice in Venice, no visible role in its fashioning.

All of this reasoning, of course, perverts the audience's direct experience of the scene because it rests on selective evidence. Naturally, we do not want Antonio to die, we do not want Shylock to commit a killing, and we do not want Portia to fail. But what, in our most enlightened moments, we do want instead—the execution of an unbiased justice that validates Shylock's anger as well as Antonio's right to live despite that anger—is not going to happen. Such a resolution of conflict is the stuff of fantasy, not The Merchant of Venice. In fact, if Portia is going to rescue Antonio, she will not—cannot—succeed completely through reconciling him to Shylock. She must resort to hard choices, choices that effectively exclude Shylock, empowering Antonio and his peers to run roughshod over Shylock's feelings of betrayal and desertion and involving Portia's final treatment of the Jew as the “alien” to whom she finally, explicitly, gives the name (349). Many of Portia's statements in 4.1 are capable of being read as judiciously inclusive of Shylock's sentiments; some of those statements may well contradict that ostensible meaning beneath their outward show.

Why Portia must make decisions that exclude and then even misrepresent some of Shylock's identity is the crucial question. Without doubt, she is compelled to her behavior partly by the peculiar weaknesses of her character that have surfaced earlier. To go from despising “all” of Morroco's “complexion” to manipulating Shylock on grounds that he is an “alien” is a fairly small move (2.7.79, 4.1.349). Moreover, Portia's objectivity toward Shylock is surely challenged by the dynamic she witnesses firsthand between Antonio and Bassanio, who needs little coaxing to switch his devotion from his wife to his friend:

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.

(282-87)

Not only has Bassanio adopted Antonio's self-sacrificial stance, but he has also absorbed from Antonio the religious language of love—as in “deliver” (257)—that marks the very removal from this world and its stringent responsibilities that have brought Portia to court in the first place. Here Shakespeare seems deliberately to confound Portia's identities as both judge and wife, demonstrating how lightly the rules of either marriage or of civilization can be abandoned once they prove challenging, as they inevitably and quickly do. Bassanio would just as soon “[w]rest once the law” and “sacrifice” his material life than accept what he cannot change (215, 286). Such far-reaching denial exerts no little stress on Portia's judgment, both private and public. Something has to give or go, lest even the mere semblance of domestic and social order evaporate. That something is Shylock's personality.

Portia's capacity for resolving the controversy at all, given its magnitude, thus deserves admiration. But neither will the attentive audience be able to ignore the abundant details of the scene that tarnish the vision of Portia as custodian of law and marriage alike, because during the trial she is revealed to have compromised standards that, as a judge, she purports to defend. When Shylock denounces morally flaccid “Christian husbands” in an aside, for instance, he briefly transports us to a small but valid arena of dissent against Portia's values (295-97). He fleetingly displays how she has gone to all of this trouble for a man who will disappoint her. At moments like these, Shylock's authority weighs in equal to, if not greater than, his opponents'. Hence, when he is later defeated altogether by Portia's trick and then stripped of legal rights as an “alien,” the audience perforce senses grievous loss. Venice preserved means Shylock dismissed.

Such is Shakespeare's strategy for characterizing Portia's mixed triumph in 4.1. Refusing to retreat from Shylock's savagery, as Antonio and Bassanio are wont to do, she proceeds to make good on her theatrical portrayal of a judge to a point. That point lies somewhere beyond fulfilling only her private agenda and yet falls short of accommodating the public good, in the widest sense. She may slip across that point here and there throughout the trial, but she plants herself there solidly when she dredges up “yet another hold” of the law on Shylock (347), whereupon, in Lyon's words, her perseverance at the “ceremonial formalities of the trial to the end” and her “humiliating denial of Shylock's dignity” exhibit a certain “sadism.”³² Beyond that point, then, her pose as judge is empty affectation. Yet Shakespeare enlarges on the issue of what motivates Portia's actions in the trial and of how to assess her actions with a second strategy: by implicitly comparing and contrasting them with Antonio's judgments on Shylock. The overall outcome of this additional strategy, overlayering the other, is to enhance the positive perspective on Portia's performance as arbiter. To watch the duke and Antonio follow Portia in delivering verdicts is to be reminded of the perils that confound not just Portia but anyone who presumes to pass judgment. In this context, relative to her rival Antonio, Portia seems unusually bold and competent.

Still, confusion of tone dominates as Antonio assumes judicial power. That Portia should relay it to Antonio in quite the way she does, for example, underscores her sacrifice of justice for expediency's sake: by handing over formal, legitimate control to Antonio, she seems to license Shylock's elimination from Venetian society by the very man who has most despised him. If so, she has dispensed with justice. Since Shakespeare is making up his own Venetian law to suit his purposes, he could have seen to it that Portia was legally bound to collaborate with Antonio, rather than surrender her judicial office to him; he could have written the scene so that Portia was interjecting obviously fair, friendly advice to help shape Antonio's judgments. Instead, he leaves Antonio solely to his own devices and, through Portia's acquiescence to Antonio's sentences on Shylock, portrays her as sanctioning them. Perhaps Shakespeare is generously creating the chance for Antonio to display how much he has learned about kindness through his own suffering, as Holmer and others have argued.³³ At the same time, however, Shakespeare exposes Portia to greater disapproval from her audience than she has already elicited, should that audience recoil from Antonio's responses to Shylock. It probably does.

As for those responses, neither are they clear-cut; they are not unabashedly steeped in the loathing that Antonio formerly paid Shylock or that Shylock has been directing at Antonio. For starters, that Antonio is willing to take an active step of any kind toward Shylock testifies to his renewed spiritual health; even his honest expression of spite would be preferable to utter passivity, since it would plant Antonio firmly in the world that threatens him and perhaps inaugurate a life-altering introspection. Yet the privilege over Shylock that Portia has surrendered to Antonio is absolute, in that Shylock is suddenly and thoroughly in Antonio's debt, under his control. Such conditions do not make for a true test of Antonio's moral growth any more than they justify whatever ruling he settles on Shylock, since he is now free of imperative to treat Shylock humanely. This lack of constraint coats any apparent kindness on Antonio's part with a sheen of magnanimity, as though he “droppeth” mercy “as the gentle rain from heaven / Upon the place beneath” (4.1.185-86). But for all we know, Antonio may again be feigning charity; if Shylock were at liberty to rebel against his pronouncements, Antonio might once again shrink from, rather than deal with, a challenge to his professed kindness. In truth, Antonio is taking no risk in judging Shylock, unless it be that of garnering his peers' disapproval. And since Gratiano is already being the boor, nearly anything Antonio says will seem enlightened by contrast. The only real pressure on Antonio is to keep up appearances, conforming outwardly to the rules of civilized conduct that Gratiano has, conveniently, already blurred through transgressing them himself.

Not surprisingly, then, the substance of Antonio's response to Shylock is enwrapped in equivocation:

So please my lord the Duke and all the court
To quit the fine for one half of his goods,
I am content; so he will let me have
The other half in use, to render it
Upon his death unto the gentleman
That lately stole his daughter.
Two things provided more, that for this favor
He presently become a Christian;
The other, that he do record a gift,
Here in the court, of all he dies possess'd
Unto his son Lorenzo and his daughter.

(380-90)

In fact, the very concept of halving that Antonio takes from the law on which he is putting his personal stamp suggests doubleness about his verdict. On the one hand, he hastens to meet Shylock in the middle, as though he can now see his way clear to settling his differences with his enemy by turning the other cheek. Specifically, in as much as he petitions the duke to dismiss Shylock's debt to the state of half of his wealth (380-82), Antonio opens on a note of liberality. He does not have to make this request for Shylock but, by doing so anyway, seems to favor charity over any private vendetta he may harbor. He further cancels his self-interest by turning his attention to Jessica and Lorenzo, for whom he proposes a trust founded on the other half of Shylock's estate (382-85).

Presumably, then, he intends for everyone to win: Shylock will lose little during his lifetime, since he will be sustained by half his fortune and earnings from the other half, and Jessica and Lorenzo will ultimately inherit all (388-90), including the half that Antonio, apparently, assumes he can manage to their financial benefit, despite his own recently problematic investments. This insistence on Shylock's charity not just to his flesh and blood but also to his son-in-law, is of a piece with Antonio's ultimatum that Shylock convert to Christianity (386-87). Both provisions (to borrow Antonio's word in line 386) can be interpreted as newfound broad-mindedness, a genuine attempt on Antonio's part to bridge the gulf that separates him from Shylock. Nothing about Antonio's speech invites this reading more than his choice of the word use to define the trust he means to establish for Jessica and Lorenzo (383). By selecting, rather than disparaging, the single word that most identifies Shylock as “alien,” he would seem to be supplanting his former vituperation and rejection of Shylock's person and financial practices with a new acceptance. His diction may well indicate both forgiveness and sympathy.

On the other hand, even while Antonio employs the word, he also redefines it, much as he seeks, in effect, to recreate everything about Shylock in his own image, even if doing so entails forcible baptism. To take control over half of Shylock's investments and to demand his religious conversion is to halt his usury altogether and to coerce his conformity with the rest of Venetian society. From this angle, Antonio's conditions for Shylock are not liberal, liberated, or liberating. They are suffocating. They step up Portia's approach to treating Shylock as an “alien” by prohibiting even that meager distinction, which, though not much, is at least Shylock's proper. Withholding even so much as alienation from Shylock, he doubly alienates him; exacting his own figurative pound of flesh, Antonio pushes Shylock into a culture where full participation is, as we have seen, a mixed blessing. Nor does Antonio's vision of Shylock's future at all obligate the existing society to include the newly converted Jew: as Antonio snidely reminds Shylock, Lorenzo “stole” his daughter (385); now he is going to be rewarded for it with everything Shylock can earn until he dies. Some incentive.

In this light, Antonio has not grown in understanding.³⁴ Were he truly merciful to Shylock, as the whole dramatic situation is set up here to imply he is, he would simply be merciful without meddling in Shylock's personhood. His penchant for doing so, however, recalls his attitude toward Bassanio, to whom he promises unconditional love that, in reality, involves plenty of urgent provisos. In 4.1, as well, Antonio places conditions on his “favor” toward Shylock (386), conditions so restrictive as to bind the other party in virtually total obligation to his terms. Once released from his bond to Shylock and given the chance to act freely, he even takes it upon himself to advise and manipulate the duke's decision about the half of Shylock's goods that are forfeit to the state. Portia has just told the court in no uncertain terms that the half in question is properly “for the state, not for Antonio,” although “humbleness” on Shylock's part may induce the duke to lower such a large sum to only a “fine” (373, 372, 371). As though deaf, Antonio immediately presumes to address his first statement not to his own business but to whether the duke should collect all that the state is owed or just the fine (380-82); furthermore, he makes his next judgment, which does concern himself (382-85), contingent upon the duke's enactment of his opening request: thus, between lines 380 and 385 he tells the duke, in so many words, “Please reduce what Shylock owes the state so long as I am permitted to do what I wish with what he owes me.” Subtly but surely, Antonio has interposed himself again where he might take over, whether or not he belongs there.

Such bids for control suggest that, even now, Antonio remains subject to his fears of exclusion. He seems threatened, rushing to alienate Shylock first, as if doing so will preclude his own dispossession. In a matter of minutes, he has pivoted from dealing with the world through emotional paralysis and death-wish to reentering the hardships and confusions of this life by stage-managing. Calm as he may outwardly seem in this scene, his inner panic would appear to endure as he dictates once again how Bassanio should demonstrate his love for his friend: “My Lord Bassanio, let [Balthazar] have the ring. / Let his deservings and my love withal / Be valued 'gainst your wive's commandement” (4.1.449-51).

Thus, a definable pattern in Antonio's characterization from beginning to end comes into focus. His eleven lines about Shylock in 4.1 go by quickly and are overly dense for a first-time audience to grasp fully, but, studied carefully, they, too, substantiate his determination to direct the play's events or to die trying. The theatrical metaphor with which he describes himself in 1.1 has become completely apt by the end of 4.1. Whether Antonio is behaving submissively or asserting himself, he is often practicing some form of passive aggression. The only occasion on which he displays his antagonism outright is in 1.3, and even there it is second-hand, glimpsed through the window of Shylock's narration and affirmed by Antonio himself, who almost, but not quite, loses his temper (106-31). Ordinarily, he is not given to confessing his feelings openly, a habit behind his hypocrisies, like professing love for Bassanio, whose wife he discounts. For his lingering social awkwardness, Antonio is pitiable. But for resorting to misleading emotional and moral theatrics, which are nothing akin to the wise folly he pretends, he verges on abusiveness. In his foolish consistency, he is, at least potentially, as dangerous to social cohesiveness as are large rocks to argosies. Here, too, he is an unrecognized version of Shylock, who differs mainly in that he wears his anger on his sleeve.

If Portia both shares in and countenances Antonio's hypocrisy toward Shylock, she does not abide it toward her marriage. Through appending the substance of act 5 to the action of the trial, Shakespeare fleshes out just how much more competent in judgment has been Portia than we may have thought or than Antonio has proved to be. She accomplishes with the ring trick far more nearly the reconciliation of opposites that also occupied her in the trial. Earlier, her choice resulted in the almost tacit exile of Shylock's variety, albeit menace, from the Venetian order. In act 5, where she forms the triple bond among herself, Bassanio, and Antonio, she comes closer to harmonizing antinomies—here, those of marital love and male friendship.³⁵ The most prominent feature of Portia's judgments, however, as well as all instances of choice in Merchant, is their relative failure or success. No single judgment is completely satisfactory. Some are simply more satisfying than others.

V

The whole of act 5 is informed by the notion of relativism. Introduced as it is by the rhapsody between Jessica and Lorenzo (1-24), the scene is designed to subvert confidence in the image of an ideal world or ideal love within it. The tragic note sounded by each reference to mythical lovers—Troilus and Cressida, Pyramis and Thisby, Dido and Aeneas, Medea and Jason—resonates with the misunderstanding that has plagued the characters' relationships prior to this point, as well as with the distrust sown by Antonio between Bassanio and Portia. Much as the sweetness in the rhapsody is qualified, but not subsumed, by the bitter, so is the ensuing music (68), symbolic of universal harmony, tempered by Portia's remark that Lorenzo recognizes her “as the blind man knows the cuckoo, / By the bad voice!” (112-13). Her self-effacing humor, while not thoroughly at odds with Lorenzo's more grandiose references to “the poet,” “Orpheus,” and the power of music to raise human nature (79-82), nevertheless introduces a realistic element of flawed human nature into Lorenzo's more philosophic (and naive) meditations.

Portia herself values the idealism and romanticism about Lorenzo's vision, if for no other reason than that it supplies a fixed standard of judgment and a goal for human ambition:

A substitute shines brightly as a king
Until a king be by, and then his state
Empties itself, as doth an inland brook
Into the main of waters. …
Nothing is good, I see, without respect.

(94-97, 99)

Even so, Portia expresses keen awareness that human action is destined to fall short of the ideal. The perspective that she brings to the scene's idealism, a perspective “season'd” by her recent experiences, repeatedly adds an antiromantic, slightly deflating dimension to the higher-flown diction and sentiments of the characters in her midst (107). The moon seems to the less experienced Jessica and Lorenzo to light the sky as though setting the stage for love. To Portia, however, this night, which is “such a night” to the others, seems hardly extraordinary: “This night methinks is but the daylight sick, / It looks a little paler. 'Tis a day, / Such as the day is when the sun is hid” (124-26). Same night, different impressions.

The difference, moreover, amounts to much. Most important, it characterizes Portia as one who can accept imperfections not by ignoring hobgoblins but by flexing standards just enough to make them attainable. For Bassanio, her attitude means a mild chastening and the forgiveness that yields a second chance (199-255). For Antonio, it also means another chance but not a chance to interfere again in her marriage. When Antonio admits, “I am the unhappy subject of these quarrels,” Portia does not disagree but lends him hospitality despite his error: “Sir, grieve not you, you are welcome notwithstanding” (239). Portia's graciousness and grace expand further, as far as they will go, while she witnesses Antonio rebind himself in friendship to Bassanio, this time spiritually instead of physically but, more to the point, to safeguard, not spoil, the marriage (249-53).

This is something of a breakthrough for Antonio, since his pledge to uphold Portia's faith in Bassanio requires his own acceptance of imperfection and, at that, a difficult form of imperfection for him to tolerate: his desire to be included is only partly realized, and his dread of being left out thus only partly allayed. Yet the necessary consequence of Portia and Bassanio's choice to wed is Antonio's loss of status. Although not rejected, he must remain second in Bassanio's regard. As if to represent the compromise at hand, Portia announces (through what agency, who knows?) that three of Antonio's original six argosies have come to port (275-79).³⁶

In his last line, Antonio would seem to be commemorating not only his final ostracism from the social bonds that continuously elude him but also, for once, his unwillingness to indulge in play-acting: “I am dumb” (279). Not even a sixteenth-century audience, for whom that word had yet to connote witlessness, could be expected to hear the line without a shudder or an uncomfortable laugh. Owing to his peculiar personality and to the conditions urged on him by Portia, Antonio is still somewhat alienated. His situation, like his muteness, is embarrassing. And yet his silence, recalling the harsh choice yoked upon the resigned Shylock in 4.1, also betokens Antonio's moment of greatest happiness and fulfillment. Settling for what he has been given without another word, he finally becomes a wise fool—dumb and dumbfounded, content with his place in a world whose vastness cannot be overestimated and, when it cannot be controlled, must evoke awe. Paradoxically, Antonio now seems more at ease with his alienation.

What Portia's acceptance of such human limitation means for her is the luxury of sleeping at night without an “unquiet soul” (3.2.306). Whether she planned all along to dispose swiftly of Shylock toward expediting the retrieval of her marriage or whether she did her best and still failed to cajole Shylock out of his destructive humour, Portia never looks back. Many of us, of course, do. The aftertaste of gall is the play's most potent reminder to the audience of the fact of choice and all that it intimates—our lost opportunities and our misgivings that the wrong history is being made, inexorably, against our wishes. Perhaps, ideally, Portia could and should have refrained from conspiring to alienate Shylock. Yet she, too, is ultimately an alien, held hostage by a mutable world and the submission of her judgments to fickle standards. If she undertook another judgment in act 6, she might go on evolving, never fully reaching the “right praise and true perfection” that she herself envisions as the crown of experience (5.1.108). Finally, I do not quite think, as Lyon contends, that Merchant portrays “different” and incompatible Portias.³⁷ Rather, the play seems to me to record fictionally, though impressively realistically, a segment of time during which a capable young woman, in contrast to her foil Antonio, makes repeated, active forays into the distressing territory of judgment and, by fits and starts, becomes a bit better at an essentially impossible task. With every trial of her skills, she sees more clearly and speaks more frankly.

To censure Portia for her inadequate choices, in fact, is a form of self-disgust, unfair though understandable. The Merchant of Venice, a tragicomedy until the end and even after the end, assaults the audience with the inherent injustice of its own situation, so much like Portia's, in a mercurial world so much like the play's, a world that consistently makes fools of us all. By implying that apparent differences belie deep-seated likenesses, Merchant coaches us to think of presumed opposites as a cinch to reconcile. In the same breath, it takes back what it gives, indicating that the material, mortal world will always prove unruly, will always swerve wayward of forms like law, government, choice—even poetry and drama.

Antonio's efforts to remove himself from such frustrating contradictions or to believe his choices can evade or rise above them are, though understandable, a fruitless turn at cheating human life. That sort of arrogant callowness is the object of no little irony, as it is one last time, now in Lorenzo's response to learning of his inheritance: “Fair ladies, you drop manna in the way / Of starved people” (5.1.294-95). This unsettling line betrays the speaker as flagrantly self-absorbed, misapplying sacred terms to his own worldly needs (as has been Bassanio and Antonio's wont) and misadvertising himself as needy at all, coddled as he is at present in the lap of Portia's luxury. Lorenzo's line escapes the explicit retort that it deserves (although Portia might well wince at it). But the play isn't about to let us forget that the self-satisfied speaker is ripe for sobering, if not now, then soon. For the pattern of Merchant has been that of disabusing credulity and overturning such self-idealizations as Antonio's saintliness and Lorenzo's fond portrait of himself and Jessica as God's chosen. The closer Portia ventures toward acknowledging the disparity between “what were good” and what actually is, the more trust she earns from her audience and, unavoidably, the more sorrow she elicits for fading illusions. As if to ratify the abiding value of such earthiness, however, the play's last word belongs to Gratiano, who has always been most at home in the “rude world” and who concludes with a final demystification, calling a “ring” a “ring” (5.1.307). His candid reference to Nerissa's anatomy purges the air of any residual delusions about love and securely grounds spiritual faith where it is “riveted”—in the “flesh” (5.1.169).

Notes

1. Moreover, as John Doebler points out, the “melancholy man without cause” was a Renaissance “stock character” (Shakespeare's Speaking Pictures: Studies in Iconic Imagery [Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1974], 41).

   Since John Russell Brown attributed Antonio's melancholy to Bassanio's departure for Belmont (The Merchant of Venice, by William Shakespeare, New Arden ed. [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1955], xlvi on 1.1.119), many critics have followed, thereby raising the inevitable question about the nature of Antonio's and Bassanio's feelings for each other. Are those feelings friendly or erotic, at least on Antonio's part, if not on Bassanio's? Here is likely an instance where labels are more self-defeating than helpful, as Marjorie Garber has recently argued about the futility of efforts to categorize sexual identity (Vice Versa: Bisexuality and the Eroticism of Everyday Life [New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995]). Even so, I must agree with Joseph Pequigney about the absence of any recognizably erotic language in Antonio's and Bassanio's speeches to and about each other (“The Two Antonios and Same Sex Love in Twelfth Night and The Merchant of Venice,” English Literary Renaissance 22 [1992], see especially 210-21). Their relationship seems a friendship. In any case, I am relying on the assumption that the emotional bond between the two men as it conflicts with Bassanio and Portia's marriage bond is of central concern, whatever the specific nature of the male bonding at hand. Shakespeare is perennially interested in how male-female relationships are negotiated with same-sex relationships to form a workable (if neither completely harmonious nor absolutely fixed) social structure—as in, for example, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Much Ado about Nothing, and other works, including two more in this study, Twelfth Night and Antony and Cleopatra. In my opinion this negotiation is both troublesome and troubling in Merchant; I disagree with Pequigney's assertion that the resolution brought about in the love relationships here is relatively trouble-free (see “The Two Antonios,” especially 218-21). On these relationships see also the essays of Alice N. Benston (“Portia, the Law, and the Tripartite Structure of The Merchant of Venice,” Shakespeare Quarterly 30 [1979]: 367-85), Geary (“The Nature of Portia's Victory”), and Newman (“Portia's Ring”).

2. The Oxford English Dictionary (1989).

3. Christopher Spencer shows that the Christians refer to Shylock as “Jew” sixty-one times in Merchant and only fifteen times call him by his proper name (The Genesis of Shakespeare's “Merchant of Venice,” in Studies in British Literature, vol. 3. [Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen, 1988], 95).

4. For a reading of Bassanio's motives similar to mine, see Terry Eagleton: “Having improvidently thrown his money around, Bassanio has come to Belmont to buy up the well-heeled Portia with the aid of Antonio's loan, rashly jeopardizing his friend's life in the process” (William Shakespeare [Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986], 45).

5. David Beauregard has recently read Antonio as an Aristotelian-Thomistic embodiment of the very virtue of liberality. Beauregard adds to the list of Antonio's sacrifices his patient endurance in 4.1 in the face of injustice (Virtue's Own Feature: Shakespeare and the Virtue Ethics Tradition [Newark, Del.: University of Delaware Press, 1995], 88, 99).

6. So much has been written about Shylock's appropriation of Jacob and Laban's story that some acknowledgment of the variety in critical opinion is in order. In brief, critics tend to disagree over whether Shylock's apology for usury is in any sense defensible or is, rather, specious; the latter view is adopted more often, most notably by Joan Ozark Holmer in a brief article (“‘When Jacob Graz'd His Uncle Laban's Sheep’: A New Source for The Merchant of Venice,” Shakespeare Quarterly 36 [1985]: 64-65). My own sense of Shakespeare's purpose is informed by other parallels in Merchant between Shylock and Jacob. In particular, that Shylock's wife was named Leah does not reflect ironically on Shylock but positively (see Gross, Shylock, 68-69). All told, neither the association between the two men nor Shylock's narration of the story in 1.3 seems to me to be charged with a particular tone, but, rather, both seem mixed in tone, capable of evoking irony and sympathy. Hence my use of the word trickster for Jacob and Shylock both: it incorporates several overtones and looks forward to Shylock's defeat by Portia, another trickster.

7. Evidence that Jews were regarded in Elizabethan England as the devil's kin continues to arise, as in Ruth Samson Luborsky's recent note “The Pictorial Image of the Jew in Elizabethan Secular Books” (Shakespeare Quarterly 46 [1995]: 449-53).

8. One recent director of the play has observed that it “can be seen as a warning, as a picture of how we allow our religious beliefs to mask our God-given humanity” (quoted in Felicia Hardison Londré, “Confronting Shakespeare's ‘Political Incorrectness’ in Production: Contemporary American Audiences and the New ‘Problem Plays,’” in Staging Difference: Cultural Pluralism in American Theatre and Drama, ed. Marc. Maufort, American University Studies, series 26, vol. 25 [New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 1995], 90).

9. Many critics remark on Shylock's role in alienating himself, perhaps most interestingly Mullaney, “Brothers and Others,” 82. Other critics have also noticed, as I do, Antonio and Shylock's deeper resemblance beneath their enmity—for example, Jan Lawson Hinely: “Antonio, looking at Shylock, sees himself, distorted but still recognizable” (“Bond Priorities in The Merchant of Venice,” Studies in English Literature 20 [1980]: 223).

10. See Brown, Merchant, note to 3.3.27. Brown also notes the difficulty of Antonio's language here in notes to 3.3.19, 30-31.

11. Stephen J. Greenblatt, “Marlowe, Marx, and Anti-Semitism” in Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture (New York: Routledge, 1990), 43. In fairness to Greenblatt, I must admit that I have lifted his words from a context antithetical to mine, where he is arguing that “the Jew seems to embody the abstract principle of difference itself” (43).

12. Sinead Cusack, “Portia in The Merchant of Venice,” in “The Merchant of Venice”: Critical Essays, ed. Thomas Wheeler (New York: Garland Publishing, 1991), 342-43.

13. W. Moelwyn Merchant, ed., The Merchant of Venice, by William Shakespeare (Middlesex: Penguin, 1967), note to 1.2.108.

14. John Julius Norwich, A History of Venice (New York: Knopf, 1982), 129-31.

    Most critics who have taken up the matter of Portia's racism have apologized for it, but I think it is pronounced in 1.2 by being repeated through hints in 2.1.1-3 and more overtly in 2.3.79. Furthermore, why would all the suitors except Bassanio be foreigners to Italy unless to present a perceptual problem to Portia comparable to that posed by the casket test (of which she is herself skeptical)? Surely the lesson that appearances can deceive is not confined to young men.

15. As You Like It, 2.7.139-66. As Anne Barton has stated so well: “[Jaques's] words are no sooner spoken than Orlando enters bearing old Adam: a man enfeebled by his years, dependent now upon a younger life, but also the living image of all that Jaques has left out of his type picture: loyal, honest, and discriminating” (introduction to The Merchant of Venice, by William Shakespeare, in The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans [Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974], 367).

16. The dramatic irony of Portia's comparison of Bassanio to the “young Alcides” is subtle but true (3.2.54-57): as the note in The Riverside Shakespeare (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974) points out, “Hercules' motive in rescuing the Trojan princess Hesione [the “virgin tribute” of 1. 56] … was not love for her but a desire to possess the horses which Laomedon, her father, had promised him as a reward.” Here again is the familiar strain of Bassanio's mixed motives (unless, of course, Shakespeare did not know or remember the story faithfully, which is a distinct possibility).

17. Many critics have read Bassanio's casket choice as a complete theatrical performance, contending that Portia drops pregnant hints to her love throughout 3.2, which include her reference to Bassanio's choice as a “hazard,” echoing the inscription on the lead casket (2); her admonition to “[b]eshrow your eyes” (14); the rhyme of “lead” with “bred” and “head” in the round sung during Bassanio's apparently sincere deliberations (63-107); and Portia's line, “I stand for sacrifice” (57). Yet I must agree with other critics who believe that Bassanio's decision is relatively free of assistance and that Portia does her best to uphold the letter and spirit of her father's will. For me, the most convincing evidence lies in her having used the word hazard in describing the same lottery to both Morocco (2.1.45) and Arragon (2.9.18). Surely she does not intend to coach either one of them.

18. For much of the material in this paragraph, I am indebted to the fine work of Mullaney and Eagleton. Throughout “Brothers and Others, or the Art of Alienation,” Mullaney remains intrigued by the confluence of fictions in the Merchant, especially that in the staged trial scene and that in the regime of Elizabeth I. He also notices the benighted Shylock's impotence in the face of an opponent, Portia, who only appears impartial (82-84). Eagleton stresses the notion that systems such as language and law are, in Merchant as well as in life, always subject to interpretation (William Shakespeare).

    The idea that the play's systems are as mutable as are its concepts about issues like individual identity and human existence is refracted in the feminist criticism of Catherine Belsey and Newman. The latter wonders whether certain aspects of the “Elizabethan sex/gender system” are in fact questioned by this play's peculiar version of transvestism (Newman, “Portia's Ring,” 32). Belsey speculates that all examples of transvestitism in Shakespearean comedy “can be read as disrupting sexual difference, calling in question that set of relations between terms which proposes as inevitable an antithesis between masculine and feminine, men and women” (“Disrupting Sexual Difference: Meaning and Gender in the Comedies,” in Alternative Shakespeares, ed. John Drakakis [New York: Methuen, 1985], 167).

19. See, e.g., Joan Ozark Holmer, “The Education of The Merchant of Venice” (Studies in English Literature 25 [1985]), 312, and Walter Cohen, “The Merchant of Venice,” 768. Holmer also calls Antonio's love for Bassanio a kind of “surfeit” (307).

20. Thomas Wilson, A Discourse Upon Usury, ed. R. H. Tawney (New York: A. M. Kelley, 1963), 292. Although I have gone straight to Wilson for my reference, I should acknowledge Holmer for the information; Holmer herself is actually discussing the views of Hineley (Holmer, “Education,” 326-27; Hinely, “Bond Priorities,” 229), but expands on her own ideas in “The Merchant of Venice”: Choice, Hazard, and Consequence (New York: Methuen, 1995), 249-50.

21. Geary, “The Nature of Portia's Victory,” 63.

22. Lyon, “Merchant,” 48.

23. Evidence of Lucio's uncanny insight into the duke's identity and machinations is scattered throughout the play but concentrated in 3.2.86-184. I have argued elsewhere that Lucio reflects the duke's aloofness from his subjects and his corresponding need to become more directly involved with his subjects; Lucio's lies about the duke, in a profound sense, tell the truth about the duke's weaknesses as governor (see Cynthia Lewis, “‘Dark Deeds Darkly Answered’: Duke Vincentio and Judgment in Measure for Measure,” Shakespeare Quarterly 34 [1983]: 271-89).

24. Interestingly, in this aspect too Gratiano parallels Lucio, whose apparent split in personality from the beginning of Measure to the end makes his characterization seem incoherent. In the first two acts, he is Claudio's friend and Isabella's advocate; later, his character turns much darker as he slanders the duke and is revealed to have fathered a child for whom he intends to take no responsibility.

25. More, Utopia, 27-28.

26. Richard Horwich has observed that “The Merchant of Venice is filled with difficult choices” (“Riddle and Dilemma in The Merchant of Venice,” Studies in English Literature 17 [1977]: 191), although he builds differently on this point than I do, citing that, “where Belmont is full of riddles, Venice is the natural habitat of dilemmas” (197). He also maintains that, in the case of dilemmas, “the alternatives are equally desirable or … undesirable,” availing themselves of no solutions (196), while “riddles have single and wholly correct answers, … however hard those answers may be to come by” (198). As useful as I find this distinction, I still think that Belmont is not devoid of dilemmas, as I believe my examples testify. Hinely offers yet a different approach to the play's interest in the “problem” of “evaluating the claims of contradictory demands” (“Bond Priorities,” 218-19)—that of how this problem influences the presentation of bonds in Merchant. Both Horwich and Hinely notice that Launcelot Gobbo's initial speech in 2.2 mimics lightly the difficult decisions, as that between “fiend” and “conscience,” forced upon all the characters (Horwich, “Riddle and Dilemma,” 197; Hinely, “Bond Priorities,” 219).

27. Cusack, “Portia,” 349.

28. Holmer, “Education,” 328.

29. I do not mean to glide over the implications of the father's lottery as if they were exclusively advantageous to Portia. As Leventen, Newman, and others have shown, the will is an especially enticing metaphor for patriarchy, including the most stifling, repressive confinements thereof. I do believe, however, that the negative and positive connotations of the will are inseparably entangled. For example, perhaps Portia cannot take control of a trial otherwise dominated by patriarchs without having first been immersed in and irritated by a patriarchal structure like the will.

30. Lawrence Normand, in his provocative essay on the body as scripture in Merchant, phrases this idea thus: “Were [Antonio] to realize the scenario he projects, his love for Bassanio would be inscribed in his living body, and its truth proved by incisions which would be neither deletable nor reversible. … [This] exchange … would turn his physical death into social discourse aimed at recording and validating a certain meaning for it” (“Reading the Body in The Merchant of Venice,” Textual Practice 5 [1991]: 67-68). In other words, Antonio is attempting to freeze emotion in a fluid world; the act of preservation, ironically, perverts the feeling.

31. Exactly how to understand this passage dramatically is a bit baffling, since, in its entirety, it suggests that Portia's question—“Which is the merchant here? and which the Jew?” (174)—is offhand and posed before she has taken opportunity to look about the room. Hence, probably, the duke's follow-up order: “Antonio and old Shylock, both stand forth” (175). By the same token, however, she has too much to lose by not speaking deliberately to begin with; her question is no doubt partly calculated to produce one effect or another. Finally, no matter how harmless may be Portia's intent, her question cannot avoid all dramatic irony, since to the audience (at whom Shakespeare aims the joke) Shylock is so very prominent in appearance.

32. Lyon, “Merchant,” 110.

33. Holmer, “Education,” 316-17.

34. My remarks about Antonio in act 4 are meant in part to address the sanguine conviction of Holmer and others that, when Antonio judges Shylock, “We observe none of Antonio's former vindictiveness” (Holmer, “Education,” 317). Cf. Beauregard, who envisions Antonio's “division of [Shylock's] wealth,” which jeopardizes Shylock's very “life” (4.1.376), as a just recompense for Shylock's having sought to take Antonio's life (Virtue's Own Feature, 100-101).

35. While I see Walter Cohen's point that the “romantic comedy” of act 5 acts to “obliterate the memory of what has preceded” it (“The Merchant of Venice,” 777), I also agree with the many critics who see act 5 as integrated thematically and through its action into the whole play. In particular, Lyon senses that the ties between act 5 and the body of the play are even more intricately knit than is often thought—for instance, by the recapitulation between Bassanio's wedding ring and the ring that Leah once gave Shylock (“Merchant,” 117).

36. I hesitate to overread this detail, lest I commit the same sort of indiscretion that I have taken to task at the beginning of this chapter. One does wonder, however, whether Shakespeare was conscious of the delicious parallel between this numerical detail and all manner of references to relativism throughout act 5. Why three out of six, only half?

    The name of the rocks on which Antonio's ships wreck is also an intriguing detail in view of any personal growth that may be seen to result for Antonio from his ordeal: the name “Goodwins”—or Goodwin Sands—literally means “good friends” (The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Place Names [Oxford: Clarenden Press, 1960]).

37. Lyon, “Merchant,” 112.