SOURCE: Normand, Lawrence. “Reading the Body in The Merchant of Venice.” Textual Practice 5, no. 1 (spring 1991): 55-73.

[In the following essay, Normand contends that the tensions and conflicts of The Merchant of Venice are depicted through references to the body and its association with language.]

When Morocco challenges a hypothetical fair-skinned suitor ‘to make incision for [Portia's] love, / To prove whose blood is reddest, his or mine’ (II.i.6-7),¹ he invokes the human body as a place where certain disputed questions can be tested and decided: ‘What is Morocco's real nature?’, ‘What is Morocco's real value?’ The question who the better man is, the ‘fairest creature northward born’ (II.i.4) or the ‘tawny Moor’ (s.d. II.i), might be settled by cutting their bodies and comparing their blood: Morocco's redder blood will show his greater courage, and prove his personal value despite his devalued skin colour. His challenge is couched in the Petrarchan rhetoric he uses throughout this scene, and the ‘body’ is merely verbal; yet a fleeting threat to bring his real body into the scene is voiced. Morocco is challenging the prevailing racist depreciation of his ‘complexion’ by turning to another conventional corporeal sign, redness of blood. The call for incision invokes a figurative body as a means of asserting personal value, and is typical of many moments in the play when a body is invoked.

Stephen Greenblatt has written that Shakespearean comedy ‘constantly appeals to the body and in particular to sexuality as the heart of its theatrical magic’.² But, he goes on to argue, there ‘is no unmediated access to the body’, for sexuality ‘is itself a network of historically contingent figures that constitute the culture's categorical understanding of erotic experience’.³ It is through the mediation of a commonplace cultural figure concerning blood that Morocco brings his body into play in order to demonstrate a case about his human value. When Launcelot scrutinizes the palm of his hand (II.ii.150ff.), he reads his destiny through the figure of palmistry inscribed in his body. Greenblatt's notion that the body makes its appearance through the mediation of familiar cultural figures in language is the starting-point for this essay, which is concerned not only with sexuality but also with wider questions of human value and identity. It is a startling exception to this rule of mediation when Portia commands Antonio in the courtroom to ‘lay bare your bosom’ (IV.i.248), and Antonio's naked human body appears in the actor's person. A concern with the culturally figured body focuses attention on the relation between language and reality, the interactions between verbal bodies and real ones. But language and its relation to reality is clearly problematized in the play, as the plot's depending on the interpretation of difficult words on the caskets and in the bond easily shows. Language is a bar to communication as much as its easy medium, and its manifestations (speaking, writing, and silence) are areas in which conflicts are actualized and resolutions sought.⁴ The play's bodily discourse interpenetrates linguistic discourses such as the legal, theological, and amatory, functioning as a supplement to language, or offering an alternative articulation of the struggles of desire and dominance. The entanglements of the action are brought about through a discourse of figured and real bodies; and disentanglement requires a systematic rearticulation of this discourse in order to arrive at a resolution.

I

Portia starts the play with the power to dispose her own property and voice, but not her body in a sexual relation of her own choosing. She experiences this subjection in her body: ‘By my troth Nerissa, my little body is aweary of this great world’ (I.ii.1-2). Language and body interact as her father's will holds her in confinement. Portia is caught within the inscribed word of patriarchal power, ‘under the bind of the law, deprived of her will because of her father's will, inscribed in the living force of his dead letter, locked in a leaden casket’.⁵ Opposed to the restriction of his ‘cold decree’ (I.ii.18-19) are pitted the warm desires of her body, her ‘blood’ and ‘hot temper’ (I.ii.18). Portia's resistance to these restrictions lies in mocking, subversive wit, what Lacan calls deriding the signifier.⁶ She finds a kind of freedom in mocking the doltish suitors and deriding her father's word by punning on ‘will’ itself: ‘I may neither choose who I would, nor refuse who I dislike, so is the will of a living daughter curb'd by the will of a dead father.’ (I.ii.22-5). The opposed meanings of ‘will’ as ‘sexual desire’ and ‘testament’, reveal the conflicting desires of a physically active body and a dead father. Portia's mockery of the suitors has no perlocutionary force since it is powerless to change her situation. Like the speech of a Fool, it makes no mark on the world. In her linguistic play Portia protests at her situation without being able to imagine any solution to it:

he hears merry tales and smiles not, (I fear he will prove the weeping philosopher when he grows old, being so full of unmannerly sadness in his youth), I had rather be married to a death's-head with a bone in his mouth, than to either of these: God defend me from these two.

(I.ii.46-51)

It is Shylock who most consistently draws the body into his discourse. As Portia is subjected by her father's will, so Shylock is subjected by the dominant antisemitic discourse of Venice, which characterizes him as inhuman. To Launcelot ‘the Jew is the very devil incarnation’ (II.ii.26); and to Solanio he is ‘the dog Jew’ (II.viii.14) and ‘the devil … in the likeness of a Jew’ (III.i.19-20). Characterization of Shylock as sub-human voices itself in Launcelot's catachresis (‘incarnation’ for ‘incarnate’), which ungrammatically misbodies the idea of the monstrous. In the court scene, Gratiano imagines Shylock's birth as a monstrous fusing of human and animal, as a wolf's soul enters his mother's womb. Shylock becomes Antichrist in this parody of the anomalous human-divine union of the Virgin Birth:

                                                                                                    thy currish spirit
Governed a wolf, who hang'd for human slaughter—
Even from the gallows did his fell soul fleet,
And whilst thou layest in thy unhallowed dam
Infus'd itself in thee …

(IV.i.133-7)

When Shylock comes to defend himself, his counter-definitions entail the body.

Shylock defends his practice of usury to Antonio and Bassanio in I.iii when he is asked to lend money, by arguing that the increase it involves is analogous to the natural processes of animal procreation. Antagonism erupts over the word ‘interest’ as Shylock and Antonio attempt to arrange a loan, and there is a struggle over the interpretation of certain biblical texts. Shylock's account of the story of Jacob and Laban in Genesis seeks to present a counter-gloss of Antonio's word ‘excess’ (57) as Shylock's ‘thrift’ (45). The crux of Shylock's interpretation of Jacob's actions lies in its representation of production as a bodily process.⁷ Shylock thinks of Jacob's skill in sticking ‘wands’ (79) before the sheep while they are mating, which exploits an analogy in nature between ‘parti-colour'd lambs’ (83) and partly stripped twigs, as demonstrating both human skill in understanding those laws of analogy, and divine approval in Jacob's profiting from the resulting lambs. Shylock's narrative remains open to various interpretations, but his idea of thrift lies in seeing production which takes place through the body, of either sheep or coins, as natural and ultimately part of God's will. Coins are like sheep in that their use may produce profit. For Shylock the body, understood to be the physical substance of something and its powers of generation, is a site of truth, evidencing human and divine nature. The argument over interest ends with neither side winning. Antonio merely stops Shylock from speaking further: ‘Mark you this, Bassanio, / The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose.’ (92-3).

‘Shylock does treat Antonio as if he were from a group of human beings other than his own Jewish one, but Antonio treats Shylock as if he were from a species of animal other than the human one (a dog)’.⁸ Shylock is denied a human body, and therefore possession of human rights. At the same time he is denied the right to coherent speech. In III.i, when he enters distraught at news of his daughter's ‘flight’ and accuses Solanio and Salarino of complicity in it, they attack the integrity of his speech by cruel quibbling:

SHYLOCK:
You knew, none so well, none so well as you, of my daughter's flight.
SALERIO:
That's certain,—I (for my part) knew the tailor that made the wings she flew withal.

(III.i.22-5)

As Shylock's words are rendered ineffectual and their coherent sense destroyed, he resorts to the literal meanings of words, in an attempt to make a perlocutionary utterance with the force of assertion:

SHYLOCK:
She is damn'd for it.
SALERIO:
That's certain, if the devil may be her judge.
SHYLOCK:
My own flesh and blood to rebel!
SOLANIO:
Out upon it old carrion! rebels it at these years?
SHYLOCK:
I say my daughter is my flesh and my blood.

(III.i.29-33)

Shylock's assertion is the discursive counterweight to the disintegrating attacks being made on his speech and on his body in general by the two Christians, whose replies subvert his discourse and dissipate its emotional and ideological force. In the face of this, Shylock foregrounds the very act of speaking in order to affirm that his daughter partakes of the same physical substance as himself, and so shares the same racial identity. But Salarino denies even the biological relatedness of father and daughter:

There is more difference between thy flesh and hers, than between jet and ivory, more between your bloods, than there is between red wine and Rhenish …

(III.i.34-6)

Shylock's relatedness to his daughter is threatened by Salerio and Solanio's assaults on the integrity first of his speech, then of his figured body. Shylock defends his speech by apparently literal statements, and by presenting family ties as irrefutably corporeal. The attack on the cultural meanings of Shylock's body prompts another defence which again uses his body as evidence, this time of human identity. ‘I am a Jew’, Shylock states and goes on to claim a human identity with the Christians on the basis of shared parts and functions of the body: ‘eyes … hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions’ (III.i.53-4). Since the Venetians do not see a Jew as being human, Shylock anatomizes himself, disintegrating his body into separate functionings which are then presented as neutral and innocent of guilt that attaches, in Christian eyes, to a Jewish body. The Jewish Gestalt, more than the sum of its parts, is offensive; but bodily parts might seem innocent of the general guilt.⁹ But to Christians who do not recognize a Jew as human this argument is unpersuasive, as Stanley Cavell explains: ‘one who does not already know that the other's body “is connected with” sentience cannot be convinced by this argument, or rather cannot understand what it is an argument about, the existence of others’.¹⁰ In this scene the struggle for the recognition of one's speech is implicated in the struggle for the recognition of one's body. The violations of Shylock by the Venetians are directed at his physical body (‘You that did void your rheum upon my beard, / And foot me as you spurn a stranger cur’ (I.iii.112-13)), his speech, and his cultural body. Shylock ends the scene by swerving from a rhetoric seeking empathy for himself as a human body to a declaration of spiritual affinity for Christian revenge: ‘If a Christian wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be by Christian example?—why revenge! The villainy you teach me I will execute, and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction.’ (III.i.63-6).

The forfeit Shylock asks, should Antonio default on the loan, is a fragment of his body: ‘an equal pound / Of your fair flesh, to be cut off and taken / In what part of your body pleaseth me’ (I.iii.145-7). When he suggests this condition, Shylock can have no expectation of ever claiming the forfeit, for Antonio confidently expects his ships to return with handsome profits. For Shylock the bond is a carnivalesque bargain, a form of words which is indeed at the moment he mentions it a ‘merry sport’, for the terms are self-evidently absurd and unreal. Despite the malice Shylock voices in an aside that he ‘will feed fat the ancient grudge’ he bears Antonio (I.iii.43), no narrative extension is imaginable between words and flesh, between the condition inscribed in the bond and the real body which might suffer its effect. Yet the terms of the bond spring from the real relations between Shylock and Antonio, for they will return to Shylock the mutilation of the self which he has suffered from Antonio in the past, and suffers again in this scene. As Cavell argues, Shylock's terms for ‘A pound of flesh, to be by him cut off / Nearest the merchant's heart’ (IV.i.228-9) is the exact counterpart of what he thinks Antonio in particular has done to him. Shylock ‘is telling us that he perceives Antonio's refusal of acknowledgement as mutilation—the denial, the destruction, of his intactness.’¹¹

Shylock is a subject mutilated by the Venetians' hostile discourse; Antonio is a subject not securely in discourse at all. Shylock counters Venice's denigration of him, by asserting a secure counter-self in the deployment of his cultural body. Antonio is a decentred self who speaks of himself as inscrutable and mysterious: ‘In sooth I know not why I am so sad’ (I.i.1). He sees himself as an actor whose part is ‘a sad one’ (I.i.79) and whose true self is therefore at one remove from his role. His mental state at the start of the play is a pre-discursive one, for its origin and nature are not yet articulated: ‘But how I caught it, found it, or came by it, / What stuff 'tis made of, whereof it is born, / I am to learn’ (I.i.3-5). While Antonio offers no discursive version of himself, his friends give voice to possible selves for him. In a deliberate game of speech-making he is the subject of attempts to account for his being ‘marvellously chang'd’ (76). The speeches project verbal forms meant to capture the mysterious melancholy, and they are offered as half-serious self-explanations. Gratiano, whose name recalls the comic doctor of commedia dell'arte,¹² and who speaks, as he says, like ‘the fool’ (79), generates diagnostic fantasies on Antonio's self-presentation, the first of which suggests a cause for melancholy in the body's inactivity. His garrulous discommendation of silence warns that a body which is still and silent turns into a funerary statue, as the blood cools and the living form becomes an effigy: ‘Why should a man whose blood is warm within, / Sit like his grandsire, cut in alablaster?’ (I.i.83-4). Accordingly, Antonio's alienation from Venetian speech threatens a sort of death. Gratiano focuses on Antonio's ‘wilfull stillness’ (90) and ‘saying nothing’ (97), and associates silence with sexual impotence, in allusions to a shrivelled penis and an old maid: ‘for silence is only commendable / In a neat's tongue dried, and a maid not vendible’ (111-12).¹³

The real source of Antonio's sadness, of course, springs from the change in his relation with Bassanio. His identity as Bassanio's friend is put at risk by Bassanio's imminent journey to Belmont to win a wife, for Antonio would thereupon be displaced from first place in Bassanio's affections. Antonio's passionate declaration that ‘My purse, my person, my extremest means / Lie all unlock'd to your occasions’ (I.i.138-9) represents a way of reaffirming his love for Bassanio and remaining involved in his affairs at the very moment when Bassanio's ‘venture’ might lead to Antonio's displacement. It is under threat of this displacement that Antonio agrees so recklessly to Shylock's bond. Antonio brushes aside his friends' attempts to put him into words, and offers no discursive version of himself; instead, he responds to his melancholy by putting his body into the bond. The terms of the bond which Shylock suggests implicate Antonio's body into the financial and legal practices of Venetian society:

Go with me to a notary, seal me there
Your single bond, and (in a merry sport)
If you repay me not on such a day
In such a place, such sum or sums as are
Express'd in the condition, let the forfeit
Be nominated for an equal pound
Of your fair flesh, to be cut off and taken
In what part of your body pleaseth me.

(I.iii.140-7)

Antonio's promise to commit his flesh for three thousand ducats reaffirms his bond of friendship with Bassanio at the very moment when Bassanio's turning to the lady might well lead to its dissolution. His passionate attachment to Bassanio is now inscribed in the bond, and authenticated by the body with the promise of his corporeal ‘person’ in exchange for three thousand ducats. Antonio breaks his silence by means of the bond in which his love is invisibly lodged in a displaced discourse, a financial-cum-legal agreement. What Foucault writes of the workings of sixteenth-century language is true of the bond, for ‘what it says is enclosed within it like a promise, a bequest to yet another discourse’.¹⁴ The ‘condition’ (141) writes Antonio's body as a figure which is a joke, whose transformation into reality is unimaginable. As events will show the body latent in the bond becomes manifest and that body itself ‘speaks’.

II

Freud thought that the caskets symbolize the body of a woman: ‘If we had to do with a dream, it would at once occur to us that caskets are also women, symbols of the essential thing in woman, and therefore of a woman herself.’¹⁵ The caskets not only symbolize what the suitors seek, they also have inscribed on them texts which the suitors must successfully interpret in order to reach their desired object. As in the case of the bond, textuality and the body are overlaid. The caskets are simultaneously the destination of the suitors' desire, as symbols of woman, and the path along which desire must travel to reach its destination. The reward for correct textual interpretation is possession of Portia's body and her wealth.

Portia's picture is hidden in one of the caskets, shielded by the metal and by her father's inscription. The suitors trace a perilous path through language to seek to arrive at the body. They struggle with a complex set of inscriptions which invites definition of the woman as well as themselves, and in which the body is crucially involved. Morocco's unsuccessful negotiation of the casket test results from his ideological orthodoxy, which holds that there should be a correspondence between the fairest lady and the fairest metal, ‘never so rich a gem / Was set in worse than gold’ (II.vii.54-5). In Petrarchan terms the choice of the gold casket is logical, but Morocco's way of thinking makes him ignore the person herself and re-present her in coded love-language. Portia's physicality disappears and she is re-inscribed as a purely transcendent value: a ‘breathing saint’, whose ‘heavenly picture’ Morocco seeks, and ‘an angel’ (II.vii.40-58). Edmund Spenser uses the image of woman as an angel swathed in gold in Epithalamion, published in 1595, the year before The Merchant of Venice was probably first produced:

Some angell had she beene.
Her long loose yellow locks lyke golden wyre,
Sprinckled with perle, and perling flowers a tweene,
Doe lyke a golden mantle her attyre …(16)

Spenser inscribes his future wife as a creature of pure spirit, as Morocco does to Portia. But this aristocratic mode of writing is misplaced in the bourgeois world of the play in which money has a precise value. In fact, Morocco specifically rejects comparison of Portia with another kind of angel which is a coin—‘They have in England / A coin that bears the figure of an angel / Stamp'd in gold, but that's insculp'd upon’ (II.vii.55-7). The comparison is rejected because the angel on the English coin is merely on the surface of the metal, and therefore not truly part of it. In Morocco's trope of the angel inside the casket, the angel is like the soul which lies deep inside the body, as what animates it and is its truest reality.¹⁷ In this way of thinking, the soul is accorded a far greater value than the body, the angel much more than the gold casket. His discourse of love separates spirit and body, and privileges spirit over body. The figure of the monetary angel, which Morocco specifically rejects, stands in fact as a more accurate image for Portia, for the coin has its beauty marked on its surface, and once put into exchange has financial value, just like Portia herself when she marries.

Arragon fixes on the silver casket because its inscription, ‘“Who chooseth me shall get as much as he deserves”’ (II.ix.36), prompts him into enunciating his own worth:

And well said too; for who shall go about
To cozen Fortune, and be honourable
Without the stamp of merit?

(II.ix.37-9)

The metaphor of ‘the stamp’ refers to the authenticating of a document, and its validation for social use: Arragon thinks of himself as inscribed.¹⁸ In this metaphor of Arragon as a document on which is written the account of his value lies the fantasy that his body has received a ‘stamp of merit’. The stamp is irreversible and publicly attested, and Arragon imagines he can invoke his powers as an imaginary document and employ them to win Portia: he can exchange himself for a fortune—‘I will assume desert; give me a key for this, / And instantly unlock my fortunes here’ (II.ix.51-2).

The suitors all struggle with the same problem of how to arrange the signifying elements arranged before them—caskets of different metals, and inscriptions—into an order which arrives at the ‘correct’ answer which is already determined by the father. Morocco aims too high, assembling the elements into a discourse of the transcendent, splitting the spiritual from the material. Portia's body is thereby lost in the Petrarchan mode into which she is cast. Arragon's response combines the material and immaterial in an image which represents his body textually as a legal document; but he excludes Portia from his response and mistakes his own social value. Morocco reads the gold casket as being Portia, Arragon reads the silver casket as being himself, but Bassanio reads the lead casket and its inscription as being a comment on the ironic discourse of choosing. Bassanio is in the best position to grasp the ironic meaning of the lead casket's inscription, and of lead itself, because he is the figure ‘in whom outside appearance and inside reality are most unlike’:¹⁹ ‘So may the outward shows be least themselves’ (III.ii.73). Bassanio and Portia have already discovered each other by falling in love, demonstrated in the amorous banter which precedes the choice. There is no need, then, to involve ‘ornament’ in the choice when love has already been discovered and actualized in verbal exchanges:

          ornament is but the guiled shore
To a most dangerous sea …
                                                                                                    in a word,
The seeming truth which cunning times put on
To entrap the wisest.

(III.ii.97-101)

Bassanio does not seek a secreted signified in the inscriptions or the metals themselves. He recognizes lead as signifying the redundancy of ‘ornament’ to symbolize a love which has already been realized: ‘but thou, thou meagre lead / Which rather threaten'st than dost promise aught, / Thy paleness moves me more than eloquence, / And here choose I,—joy be the consequence!’ (III.iii.104-7).

The process of choosing nevertheless presents dangers which are expressed as threats to the lovers' living bodies. As Bassanio moves towards the caskets to make his choice Portia participates by announcing herself to be threatened at that moment by death. Invoking the story of Hercules' rescue of Hesione from the sea monster (Ovid, Metamorphoses, xi) she effects a metaphorical transformation on the scene. In this textual superimposition she becomes Hesione, and Bassanio Hercules; and just as Hesione was mortally threatened by the sea monster, so she is threatened with an emotional death if Bassanio fails to overcome the monstrous impositions of the will:

                                                                                I stand for sacrifice,
The rest aloof are the Dardanian wives,
With bleared visages come forth to view
The issue of th' exploit: go Hercules!
Live thou, I live.

(III.ii.57-61)

If Hercules fails to slay the sea monster then Hesione will be its victim. The threat of death, albeit a figurative one, recalls Antonio's figurative death-in-silence at the start of the play.

Bassanio's response to discovering the picture of Portia focuses on his body; he speaks of the dissolution of the corporeal boundaries between himself as perceiving subject, and the picture as perceived object:

Fair Portia's counterfeit! What demi-god
Hath come so near creation? move these eyes?
Or whether (riding on the balls of mine)
Seem they in motion?

(III.ii.115-18)

Bassanio imagines the picture not simply as a static similitude but a source of power in its own right, with painted hair ‘t'entrap the hearts of men’ (III.ii.122); and as it was being painted it threatened to disable the painter who was painting it, depriving him of his eyes:

                                                                                                    but her eyes!
How could he see to do them? having made one,
Methinks it should have power to steal both his
And leave itself unfurnish'd.

(III.ii.123-6)

The picture, the image of a body, is imagined as entering into relationships with real bodies and capturing parts of them for itself. Bassanio's speech plays over the interrelationships of bodies and their representations. At this moment of most intense pleasure, Bassanio focuses on the tremulous relation of his body and the image of Portia's; and announces a moment of blissful physical merging with Portia. The bliss is the counterpart of erotic bliss, but it is doubly displaced: Bassanio's body moves only in his language, not his actions, and Portia appears as a picture not as herself. The fullness of erotic pleasure which his language implies falls away in the end as language's inability fully to represent experience reasserts itself. Bassanio ends by articulating a chain of representations—his praise, the picture of Portia, and Portia herself—which shows his desire pursuing its object along the chain and always failing to capture its fullness:

                                                                                yet look how far
The substance of my praise doth wrong this shadow
In underprizing it, so far this shadow
Doth limp behind the substance.

(III.ii.126-9)

Bassanio is completely in control of his discourse; indeed, his value as Portia's lover is demonstrated dramatically by this very discursive dominance and subtlety. This part of the scene, the expressive climax of Portia and Bassanio's love, achieves its dramatic persuasiveness through its intelligent self-consciousness about language. Bassanio's discourse advertises the inadequacy of language to capture the real; expressing love not as full of self-presence, but as something beyond and outside the play of language. It does not inscribe love directly, but speaks instead of the impossibility of love's full inscription in language, picture, or bodies.

Words fail Bassanio when Portia hands everything, including herself, over to him: ‘Madam, you have bereft me of all words’ (III.ii.175). The consequent ‘confusion’ in Bassanio's ‘powers’ (177) is a disruption of the normal workings of his body, and it is represented as the noise of a crowd in which the meanings of the separately spoken sentences of praise are lost in a blur of speech-noise:

                                                                      there doth appear
Among the buzzing pleased multitude,
Where every something being blent together,
Turns to a wild of nothing, save of joy
Express'd, and not expressed.

(III.ii.179-83)

Bassanio's sense of joy has temporarily exceeded his body's ability to muster the power of language to capture and express it. The experience nevertheless exists as a confused energy inside his body which is stirred like the crowd, but unable to direct it to a coherent speech act. But Bassanio still communicates his feelings in the pre-linguistic state of the body's own workings, which form another kind of speech: ‘Only my blood speaks to you in my veins’ (III.ii.176). The body's blood-flow is the authenticating sign of his intense responsiveness which cannot at that moment find its way into language. These ambiguities are resolved by a simple return to the body, the note in the casket commanding the successful suitor to ‘Turn you where your lady is, / And claim her with a loving kiss’ (III.ii.137-8). The body authenticates the moment. Gratiano's suggestion for a wager on the first boy the couples can produce anticipates the lovers' physical absorption into the social life of Venice.

At this moment when a double marriage is anticipated another body enters the scene which blocks that outcome. Bassanio receives a letter from Antonio giving news that he is subject to Shylock's forfeit. Bassanio describes the letter to Portia as a mutilated and dying body:

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

(III.ii.262-5)

Bassanio represents the letter as Antonio's body, and that body in turn as a kind of writing. The paper marked with inked words is like a body cut with wounds from which flows its ‘lifeblood’. Each wound is also ‘gaping’, a mouth shaped for speaking, or signalling pain. This is truly a speaking body. The letter's material signifiers—paper and inkmarks—produce meaning prior to its signifieds, and are more emotionally compelling. The wounds gaping like mouths are an emptiness that cries out for Bassanio's presence. Bassanio's strong writerly response, tracing a figurative dying body, shows his profound emotional responsiveness to Antonio's plight. However, the entry of this spectral body, represented in writing, disrupts the imminent marriage and signifies the emotional and practical obstacles that will have to be overcome before it can take place.²⁰ This letter has a similar power to the bond, for each calls in its debt, and each has as its real aim something in excess of what it seems to signify. In his letter Antonio's focus is on Bassanio, not on the money owed nor his own impending death: ‘Sweet Bassanio, … 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’ (III.ii.314-18). Antonio's letter points to the real nature of the favour he did Bassanio in borrowing money for his venture: it seeks the return in the form of love on Antonio's pledging of ‘person’. Antonio's claim for Bassanio's presence represents the calling in of the excess of their agreement, that for Antonio is Bassanio's love. For Antonio the process is now in hand by which the writing of his body into the bond to maintain his place in Bassanio's affairs, now unexpectedly promises to realize the desires underlying it.

Antonio does not explicitly speak of his relation to Bassanio; but others do. Lorenzo had evidently been discussing the subject with Portia when he enters at the start of III.iv. His phrase ‘god-like amity’ (3), derives from Renaissance neo-platonic ideas of friendship, and shows ‘the exalted tone of much Renaissance writing on male friendship’.²¹ In such accounts of male friendship the sexual is banished, leaving only the spiritual.²² However, the account which Portia proceeds to give of this kind of male friendship does recognize a particular sort of shared physicality in friendship:

                                                                                          for in companions
That do converse and waste the time together,
Whose souls do bear an egall yoke of love,
There must be needs a like proportion
Of lineaments, of manners, and of spirit;
Which makes me think that this Antonio
Being the bosom lover of my lord,
Must needs be like my lord. If it be so,
How little is the cost I have bestowed
In purchasing the semblance of my soul
From out the state of hellish cruelty!

(III.iv.11-21)

Her notion of friendship is that between friends who love equally there must also be a similarity of bodies, manners, and spirit. Two friends are supposed to be alike physically and temperamentally, and are also supposed to correspond in their souls. Portia can therefore call paying off Antonio's debt, ‘purchasing the semblance of my soul’, for she and Bassanio, now married, are one soul, and Antonio's soul exactly corresponds to Bassanio's. The conflict of friendship and marriage arises precisely out of two different kinds of merging that are represented by marriage and friendship. In Christian marriage two different bodies and souls are thought of as becoming one; in neo-platonic friendship two similar bodies and souls become as one in an identity of exact similarity. Bassanio is here poised between the conflicting demands of marriage and friendship. It is Portia's assuming the male sexual identity of Balthazar which enables her ‘to displace Antonio's hold on Bassanio's affections and loyalties’,²³ and to replace friendship with marriage.

The action in the courtroom is an interpretive contest over the bond. Shylock's refusal to tell the hostile court his reasons for pursuing the bond to its bloody conclusion in Antonio's body should be seen in the same light as Bassanio's warning to Gratiano, before they leave for Belmont, not to be ‘too rude, and bold of voice’ (II.ii.172) when he goes ‘where [he is] not known’ (175), and thus risk being ‘misconst'red’ (179). Shylock refuses to risk being ‘misconst'red’ by the court, and represses any historical account of himself. Instead he short-circuits the question by locating his motives in nature rather than culture, in corporeal humours not historical influence:

You'll ask me why I rather choose to have
A weight of carrion flesh, than to receive
Three thousand ducats: I'll not answer that!
But say it is my humour,—is it answer'd?

(IV.i.40-3)

Shylock's refusal to answer has similar effects to Antonio's silence in the first scene in that both thereby become inscrutable to others. The incomprehensibility to the Christians of Shylock's seeking his bond is expressed as his having an irregular body which is both unnaturally hard and empty. The Duke calls him a ‘stony adversary’ (IV.i.4) and speaks of his being like those with ‘brassy bosoms and rough hearts of flint’ (IV.i.31). For Antonio Shylock's impenetrability is located at the vital organ of the heart: ‘You may as well do any thing most hard / As seek to soften that—than which what's harder?—/ His Jewish heart!’ (IV.i.78-80). And Gratiano demands, ‘can no prayers pierce thee?’ (IV.i.126). Along with hardness goes emptiness. The Duke wonders if Shylock can be ‘void, and empty / From any dram of mercy’ (IV.i.5-6). When Shylock's resistance is greatest to the persuasions of Portia/Balthazar and the insults of Gratiano and Antonio, he declares himself to be immune from the effect of their words. Secure in the absolute efficacy of the bond, he declares himself to be beyond the reach of language: ‘by my soul I swear, / There is no power in the tongue of man / To alter me’ (IV.i.236-7).

In the courtroom Antonio is willing to lose his life for Bassanio's sake: ‘Grieve not that I am fall'n to this for you’ (IV.i.262), he says. Facing death, Antonio makes his farewell to Bassanio; but his attention is actually focused beyond death, for the corporeal mutilation he is about to suffer is to have its real point of arrival in social discourse, as a narrative. He is not concerned with Shylock's malevolence, but rather at the way in which his death will be transformed into discourse.²⁴ Furthermore, his attention is directed not at Bassanio but at Portia who will hear the story of his death which Bassanio will tell. Antonio utters a string of imperatives which lay down the track and destination for the story which his death will produce, projecting a hypothetical process which runs from bodily mutilation through death to discourse:

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

(IV.i.269-73)

Antonio projects a transformation of his death into a story and a question, in which the word ‘love’ is finally uttered. Were he 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. The speech anticipates an exchange which would turn his physical death into social discourse aimed at recording and validating a certain meaning for it. On the brink of death, Antonio imagines a future scene in which his physical mutilation would be productive of a certain created value of ‘love’. That authenticated love, passing through his physical body to a transcendent verbal body of Bassanio's discourse, would require Portia's response, interpretation, and judgement; and would thereby produce its own life-after-death effects. Antonio's rhetorical question would make Portia the judge in the case of the competing claims between her love and Antonio's for Bassanio; and in his scenario she would deliver and face a judgement already weighted against herself.

Of course, Portia-Balthazar releases Antonio from the bond. She takes the bond's signifiers and reduces them to their barest signifieds, at which point the bond breaks down in non-sense. When Portia prevents Shylock's forfeit by telling him that he may take ‘a pound of flesh’ and no more, she is setting limits to the meanings of words and to the interpenetration of bodies: words are defined with absolute literalness; the integrity of a body is defended. Exchange, one of the characteristic actions of the play, is halted: a pound of flesh is not taken in exchange for three thousand ducats.

It is then Shylock's turn to have his life endangered for the offence of seeking the life of a Venetian citizen: ‘the offender's life lies in the mercy / Of the Duke only’ (IV.i.351-2). Although the Duke's pardon frees him from the threat of judicial violence, it subjects him to the power of the court's words. Shylock is not beyond the reach of language as the court strips him of half his wealth, confirms the stealing of his daughter, and enforces his conversion to Christianity. The court does not destroy Shylock's physical body, but destroys instead the complex cultural body in which his identity inheres. By his forced conversion to Christianity (in which he will be silenced as the words of baptism are spoken over him) he loses the power to define himself as a Jew; at the same time as he loses the offspring of his body to Lorenzo, who ‘lately stole his daughter’ (IV.i.381). He protests at the destructiveness of the court's conditions:

Nay, take my life and all, pardon not that,—
You take my house, when you do take the prop
That doth sustain my house: you take my life
When you do take the means whereby I live.

(IV.i.370-3)

The ‘house’, as a metaphor for life, has the double sense of building and clan; ‘the image and the thing imaged fuse with great dramatic force’.²⁵ Shylock has earlier shown the same habit of fusing image and thing in the figure of his house as a body when he tells Jessica not to ‘thrust [her] head into the public street / To gaze on Christian fools’ (II.v.32-3):

But stop my house's ears, I mean my casements,
Let not the sound of shallow fopp'ry enter
My sober house.

(II.v.34-6)

His house is his body which he would defend from penetration by the sounds of Christian music. These links between house as body, clan, and life itself show the interconnectedness of the parts of Shylock's identity, and are precisely what the court destroys in its judgements on him.²⁶ The court's mercy in sparing his body must be set against its decisions which disintegrate his social identity: livelihood, religion, and succession will all be barred. Shylock's body is not destroyed but his self-identity is disintegrated and deleted, and this deletion is confirmed by Act V.

III

In the first four Acts the body is written into the interlocking struggles of personal desire and social practices; and its power is real but uncertain as long as those struggles continue. In Act V, out of the crises of entanglement posed by the interdependence of bodies, resolutions are offered which define the boundaries of body and spirit, and articulate what is socially legitimate and dominant. As Walter Cohen has shown, the dramatic effects of the last act are radical and extensive, as the ‘construction of the pastoral world’ of Belmont ‘ideologically reconciles the socially irreconcilable. … The aristocratic fantasy of Act V, unusually sustained and unironic even for Shakespearean romantic comedy, may accordingly be seen as a formal effort to obliterate the memory of what has preceded.’²⁷ Shylock's person (and name) disappears from Act V along with traces of Jewishness. Lorenzo's reference to manna when he is told of the will of ‘the rich Jew’ (V.i.292) is the exception—‘Fair ladies, you drop manna in the way / Of starved people’ (V.i.294-5)—which shows the appropriation into Christian discourse of the Jewish element that with Shylock's undoing has been deleted from Belmont. Christian dominance is thereby confirmed.

Lorenzo's notion of music has effects which assume the interpenetration of corporeal and incorporeal: he calls for music to ‘Creep in our ears’ with ‘touches of sweet harmony’ (V.i.56-7), and directs Stephano, ‘With sweetest touches pierce your mistress' ear’ (V.i.67). But boundaries between bodies and the abstract harmonies of music are clearly established as he directs Jessica's (and the audience's) attention to the music of the spheres:

Sit, Jessica,—look how the floor of heaven
Is thick inlaid with patens of bright gold,
There's not the smallest orb which thou behold'st
But in his motion like an angel sings,
Still quiring to the young-ey'd cherubins …

(V.i.58-62)

The harmony of the spheres is a figure in Act V which effects ideological reconciliation. The spheres are a totalizing image which renders unimaginable anything which is not of it. It is thus a falsifying general analogy for the conflictual social scenes of Venice and Belmont grounded on differences of religion, citizenship, and race. Lorenzo goes on to define the relationship between the music of the orbs and its perception:

Such harmony is in immortal souls,
But whilst this muddy vesture of decay
Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it.

(V.i.63-5)

The play invokes the music of the spheres as an image of universal harmony, but it places the perception of that harmony in the soul, a human part which lies outside ordinary human consciousness; and simultaneously debases the body by calling it the ‘muddy vesture of decay’, an impediment to perceiving the ‘highest’ truth. In Lorenzo's rhetorical construction the idea of comprehensive harmony, located in ‘cherubins’ and human ‘immortal souls’, is concomitant with devaluing the human body. Heavenly bodies are supposed to produce music representing fullness and highest truth, while the corporeal is debased and the truth it can produce ignored.

In Act V words and bodies are redefined in the new circumstances of Belmont, a name which suggests ‘the ‘beautiful mountain’ of a fairy-tale’²⁸, as well as the beautiful female pubic mound. The redefinition of the value of bodies is seen in the ring episode. Portia threatens to give her body to the lawyer since her husband has given the lawyer their ring:

Since he hath got the jewel that I loved, …
I will become as liberal as you,
I'll not deny him any thing I have,
No, not my body, nor my husband's bed.

(V.i.224-8)

The threat expresses the impossibility of a wife's sharing her body with another man and still being a wife. Bassanio learns the lesson of bodily exclusivity that marriage signifies, and as part of this process friendship is subordinated to marriage. Portia's clear view of friendship sees that male friends exactly correspond—‘a like proportion / Of lineaments, of manners, and of spirit’ (III.iv.14-15)—and it is the impulses of friendship that prompted Antonio ‘to lend [his] body for [Bassanio's] wealth’ (V.i.249), and Bassanio to give the ring to Balthazar-Portia. Bassanio learns that in terms of marriage men are not identical and equivalent and therefore not freely exchangeable by their wives. Friendship, on the other hand, imagines men as equivalent to each other. In the microdrama of the return of the rings Bassanio is inducted into the ideology of marriage which represents each husband as separate and different, and accorded unique right of sexual access. Understanding this idea is said by Portia to be more than just a matter of words, but as being a fusion of words, ring, and body itself: she tells Bassanio that his ‘wife's first gift’ of the ring is ‘A thing stuck on with oaths upon your finger, / And so riveted with faith unto your flesh’ (IV.i.167-9). The ring riveted to flesh fixes the body's meaning within the ideology of marriage; it creates a self embodied in marriage. The separation of Antonio's body from the scene of his friendship with Bassanio is effected when he pledges his soul that Bassanio will be true to his wife:

I once did lend my body for his wealth,
Which but for him that had your husband's ring
Had quite miscarried. I dare be bound again,
My soul upon the forfeit, that your lord
Will never more break faith advisedly.

(V.i.249-53)

Antonio's body disappears from the scene and with it his material involvement in Bassanio's affairs. His penultimate words—‘I am dumb’ (279)—echo Shylock's defeated last words, ‘I am content’ (IV.i.389), and ominously return him to the silence in which he began.

The play ends with words and the body being put into parodic conflict. As the two married pairs prepare to leave the stage Gratiano sets up a question:

—the first inter'gatory
That my Nerissa shall be sworn on, is,
Whether till the next night she had rather stay,
Or go to bed now (being two hours to day) …

(V.i.300-3)

The question is a real one inasmuch as the pleasure of the night will lie in talking about making love as well as in making love itself. No doubt consummation will take place, but for a moment consummation is teasingly delayed. In a play in which the body has passed fleetingly in and out of discourse it is appropriate that the telos of desire in the body should once more be deferred. Gratiano's last words bring back the body—‘Well, while I live I'll fear no other thing / So sore as keeping safe Nerissa's ring’ (V.i.306-7)—and recall the knowledge that bodies continue to produce problems of value and identity even after marriage.

Notes

1. All references are to the Arden edition of The Merchant of Venice, ed. J. R. Brown (London: Methuen, 1955). All other Shakespeare references are to The Complete Works, Compact Edition, gen. eds Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988).

2. ‘Fiction and friction’, in Shakespearean Negotiations: the Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), p. 86.

3. ibid.

4. See Keir Elam, Shakespeare's Universe of Discourse: Language-games in the Comedies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 202-9, for an analysis of the discursive struggles of the courtroom scene.

5. Jonathan Goldberg, ‘Shakespearean inscriptions: the voicing of power’, in Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman (eds), Shakespeare and the Question of Theory (New York and London: Methuen, 1985), p. 122.

6. Jacques Lacan, Ecrits: a Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Tavistock, 1977), p. 158: ‘man defies his very destiny when he derides the signifier’.

7. For a full discussion of the play in terms of generation and production, see Marc Shell, Money, Language and Thoughts: Literary and Philosophical Economies from the Medieval to the Modern Era (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1982), pp. 47-83.

8. ibid., p. 53.

9. Cf. King Lear's wish to discover if the body will show the source of guilt if it is anatomized: ‘Then let them anatomize Regan; see what breeds about her heart. Is there any cause in nature that make these hard-hearts?’, King Lear, III.vi.34-6.

10. The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Scepticism, Morality and Tragedy (Oxford and New York: Clarendon Press and Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 479.

11. ibid., p. 480.

12. See note to I.i.79 of The Merchant of Venice ed J. R. Brown.

13. M. M. Mahood's note on these lines is ‘lack of activity is only proper to a sexually impotent old man or a sexually unmarketable woman’, The Merchant of Venice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 62. She also notes that ‘neat's tongue dried’ is ‘cured ox tongue (and so a withered penis incapable of excitement)’, ibid.

14. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: an Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London and New York: Tavistock, 1970), p. 41.

15. ‘The theme of the three caskets’, in Collected Papers, vol. 4 (London: Hogarth Press, 1925, pp. 245-56).

16. Epithalamium, 11.153-6, in Poetical Works, ed. J. C. Smith and E. de Selincourt (London: Oxford University Press, 1970).

17. Cf. John Donne's ‘Aire and Angels’, which uses the trope of the relation of angels to corporeal things to complicate and thereby diminish clear boundaries between flesh and spirit.

18. Shell, op. cit., p. 57.

19. ibid.

20. For a discussion of the love-versus-friendship débat-theme see Keith Geary, ‘The nature of Portia's victory: turning to men in The Merchant of Venice’, Shakespeare Survey, 37 (1984), pp. 55-68.

21. Note to III.iv.3. of The Merchant of Venice, ed. Mahood. For a full account of Renaissance ideas of friendship see ‘The virtue of friendship and the plan of Book Four’, in The Works of Edmund Spenser: A Variorum Edition, ed. Edwin Greenlaw et al., The Faerie Queene, Book Four, special editor Ray Heffner (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1935), pp. 281-313, passim.

22. See, for instance, Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici: ‘that part of our noble friends that we love is not that part that we embrace but that insensible part that our arms cannot embrace’, in The Works of Sir Thomas Browne, ed. G. Keynes, vol. 1 (London: Faber & Gwyer, 1928), p. 92; quoted by Alan Bray, Homosexuality in Renaissance England (London: Gay Men's Press, 1982), p. 60.

23. Geary, op. cit., p. 64.

24. Cf. Hamlet's concern at the point of death that Horatio should ‘Report me and my cause aright / To the unsatisfied’ (V.ii.291-2); and Othello's providing an interpretation of his actions to be reported to the Venetian state after his death (V.ii.347-65).

25. Note to IV.i. 371 of The Merchant of Venice, ed. Mahood.

26. Other examples of Shylock's thinking of his identity as connected with his body occur when he calls the jewels Jessica stole ‘two stones, two rich and precious stones’ (II.viii.20), thus unconsciously associating them with his testicles and seed; and when he hears of his daughter's profligacy from Tubal: ‘Thou stick'st a dagger in me’ (III.i.100).

27. ‘The Merchant of Venice and the possibilities of historical criticism’, ELH, 49 (1982), pp. 765-89; p. 777.

28. J. R. Brown, Shakespeare and his Comedies, 2nd edn (London: Methuen, 1962), p. 70.