SOURCE: Patterson, Steve. “The Bankruptcy of Homoerotic Amity in Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice.” Shakespeare Quarterly 50, no. 1 (spring 1999): 9-32.

[In the following essay, Patterson maintains that The Merchant of Venice analyzes the early modern tradition of male homoerotic friendship through Antonio's frustrated passion for Bassanio.]

Rather famously, The Merchant of Venice opens with a pitiful Antonio bemoaning his outcast state but unable to articulate just what has caused his disenchantment. His very identity seems to be at stake as he complains, “I have much ado to know myself” (1.1.7).¹ Indeed, his worries over how much and in what terms he matters in Venice may be much ado about nothing—about the possibility of his being nothing. Antonio speaks as a man at odds with the changing values of his culture, someone whose role as virtuous friend has no serious register with his fellow men but whose identity as merchant has premium value. He has entered the stage in dialogue with himself as much as with his two companions, and as the scene progresses, Antonio is repeatedly unable to connect with those he encounters. His melancholy is diagnosed immediately as an effect of money woes by Salerio and Solanio, who swoon over their histrionic visions of how the course of a rich merchant's humors is surely tied to the swell of his argosies' sails. In keeping with this stress on Venice as a world in which even feelings are valued mainly in commercial terms, Gratiano intimates that Antonio uses his public displays of moodiness to “fish … with this melancholy bait / For this fool gudgeon, this opinion” (ll. 101-2). In short, his strange affect must be a calculated bid to gain attention—as if melancholy is best understood as an entrepreneurial gambit. Small wonder that Antonio protests the theory that his sighing must indicate some variety of love, since even love is a cheap commodity in Venice, something one puts on like a “sober habit” or the “boldest suit of mirth” (2.2.181, 193). The passionate Antonio can hardly fathom, let alone endorse, such a devaluation of his desires.

Despite Antonio's protestations, literary critics have debated the object and nature of his love. For some time it was held that Antonio has no particular referent in mind at all, that the subject is raised mainly as a dramatic device to cue the theme of romance or that it stands as “a relic of an earlier version of the play.”² But this analysis has been superseded by the modern cliché (and, some insist, the anachronism) of Antonio as a lovelorn homosexual vainly in pursuit of the obviously heterosexual Bassanio. Certainly there is enough textual ambiguity to lend validity to almost any diagnosis of Antonio's melancholy, and the present understandings of the ways that same- and cross-sex passions mattered in early modern England are still confused enough to allow for a convincing reading of Antonio as a prototype of the lovesick homosexual. Alan Sinfield's “How to Read The Merchant of Venice Without Being Heterosexist” addresses this interpretation as it considers the play's resonance—and its correctives—for a postmodern gay audience.³

It may be that the current confusion about eroticism and sexual practices in Renaissance England does not mean that there were no early modern systems or structures that incorporated and even valued homosexual acts. This essay will argue that Antonio's love is a frustrated sexual desire for Bassanio and, further, that his passionate love falls into an early modern tradition of homoerotic friendship, or amity. Amity represented friendship as an identity premised upon the value of same-sex love which codified passionate behaviors between men. Its tropes, while now perhaps somewhat strange or ambiguous, were at the time of the play's production topical enough for both depiction and revision in several popular formats. Central to The Merchant of Venice is a dramatization of the failure of male friendship in a radically shifting mercantile economy—an economy that seems better regulated by a social structure based on marital alliance and heterosexual reproduction. The play's uncanny resonance comes from the way it anticipates modern romantic ideals by realigning the value and nature of amity's stock literary figures: the male lover and his beloved, the female marriage partner, and the social outcast.

Friendship themes were so often the subject of poetry and prose during the last decade of the sixteenth century that it would not have taken an audience long to recognize Antonio as the prototype of the passionate friend. The tradition he represents is exemplified by Sir Thomas Elyot's story of Titus and Gysippus in his Boke Named the Governour (1531), a redaction of the friendship narrative which is remarkable for its foregrounding of the homoeroticism implicit between inseparable male companions. Elyot revised the tale, familiar from a number of sources, especially Boccaccio's Decameron, in a way that emphasized men's intimate proximity. His Titus and Gysippus enjoy a “perfect amity” or “incomparable friendship,” as the tradition would have it, but they are further represented as physically passionate and amorously drawn to one another. In what might be considered an erotics of amity, the men are described as “embrac[ing] … and sweetly kiss[ing]” one another, and crying as if their bodies “should be dissolved and relented into salt drops”; they risk their lives for one another, swoon when parted, publicly proclaim their love, and make hyperbolic vows of eternal devotion. Although Gysippus is betrothed in order to “increase his lineage and progeny,” Elyot emphasizes that he had “his heart already wedded to his friend” and that the two men enjoyed a “fervent and entire love.”⁴ The icon of embracing lovers depicted such bonding as ethically sound (these model lovers were hardly shameful reprobates) and as a boon to the commonwealth.⁵ The depth of the lovers' passions served the economic and social well-being of their kingdoms.

Amity acknowledged eroticism's power to ensure loyal service in men whose economic and social bonds would otherwise be open to question. In a Tudor court where “new men” lacked the blood and property ties to one another characteristic of feudalism, and in a social world where men were as available to same- as to cross-sex attractions, a representation of male lovers compatible with heroic masculinity and good citizenship grasped the imagination with rhetorical force. Amity did not avoid the implication that deep friendships might have an erotic component but constructed same-sex desire in ways that made it commensurate with civic conduct and aristocratic ideals.⁶ Together, loving friends embodied a new kind of man, as evident in the master trope “one soul in bodies twain.” And indeed, over the ensuing decades the credibility of such an ideal figure was taken up by a range of writers and playwrights interested in the ramifications of the theory and practices of devoted gentlemen lovers.⁷

Until recently, the only thorough study of the friendship genre was Laurens J. Mills's One Soul in Bodies Twain, but there the literature of amity is treated as variations on a plot device traced to its classical origins.⁸ Mills eschews the notion of the friends as sexually passionate and thereby bolsters the modern truism that Renaissance male friendship was a rather baroque form of platonic male bonding. Mills concludes, moreover, that amity dies out as a genre in the early seventeenth century simply because its literary possibilities were exhausted. This neutered view of male friendship is sustained in many feminist treatments of amity as part of an ongoing debate between marriage and friendship. Amity is posited as a bonding stage both prior and inferior to a mature marriage of equals. To resist marriage or maintain bachelorhood becomes symptomatic of a psychological problem peculiar to unevolved males: the narrative progress, supposedly mirroring a psychic and historical telos, is toward the comic trope of the companionate marriage. Even when a sexual component in friendship is allowed, it is typically the case that homosexuality is seen as an immature or neurotic rejection of women or as an inherently narcissistic desire.⁹ But the friend in the tradition of amity is neither sick nor lonesome. His virtue and integrity come from an enduring love for his companion, and it is only gradually that this love is seen as a peculiar elitism or at odds with marriage. For Elyot—or, to quickly cite several who shared his vision, for Richard Edwards in his tragicomedy Damon and Pithias (1564) and even, perhaps, for Shakespeare in his early friendship play The Two Gentlemen of Verona (1594)—a social system based on amorous male friendships has an integrity that can accommodate marriage and even settle disputes over fortune, progeny, and property.¹⁰ The closing line of Two Gentlemen, as the two friends and their wives appear to settle under one roof, succinctly captures the idealism of amity: “One feast, one house, one mutual happiness.”

When Shakespeare writes Two Gentlemen, however, this happy house already seems remote, perhaps impossible, as if such accommodations belong in the realm of fantasy. Janet Adelman has noted how false the play's “magical” ending seems: the problems the play sets up between marriage and friendship are simply “wished away.”¹¹ Similarly, in her introduction to The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Jean E. Howard observes “the strain under which Shakespeare labored in trying to join a tale of heroic male friendship to a tale of romantic love between men and women.”¹² Traditionally, of course, tales of amity were comedies; sudden, happy denouements were prime characteristics of the genre. Elyot's Titus fears, for example, that his desire for Gysippus's betrothed will corrupt their friendship, but Gysippus tells him that amity incorporates the “power of Venus.” Indeed, it is Gysippus's kin, unforgiving patriarchs of contract marriage, who represent the blocking agents to this loving friendship, though finally “the noise of rejoicing hearts fill[s] all the court.”¹³ Even the duped Sophronia, conveniently silent and acquiescent, settles into marriage and produces children with Titus under the aegis of amity. In Two Gentlemen, however, the path to betrothal and marriage has entailed such base treatment of the female that comic closure seems compromised. The familiar bed-trick in Elyot's tale becomes rather more serious: an audience must overlook Proteus's threat to rape Silvia. Tensions that Elyot downplayed or elided begin to resonate in a way that makes the passionate conduct between two gentlemen seem, perhaps for the first time, costly.

These tensions do not represent the emergence of a natural incompatibility between the two kinds of love. Rather, the play's problems of closure may indicate that amity as a utopian narrative can no longer contain its inherent contradictions. The theater, its market conditions financially and artistically dependent on women and other consumers varying in social status, could not bank on selling stories that represented the uncontested interests of a select few. To make Silvia quiet and compliant despite her poor treatment may be true to form, but her narrow escape from abuse also challenges amity's ameliorating power. Howard concludes her analysis by speculating that the primacy of male friendship with which the play closes has seemed strange since the eighteenth century, mainly because heterosexual romance has since enjoyed an ascendancy over all other forms of bonding. But never before were early modern consumers of amity tales asked to witness the female's cooperation as a condition of brute force or muted protests.¹⁴ In short, the strains and pressures apparent in Two Gentlemen mark a faultline in the gentle practices of amity.

The Merchant of Venice comes across as a comedy even more deeply skeptical than Two Gentlemen of the promises and prices of amity. Marriage and amity are squarely at odds because the play questions the possibility of a homoerotic bonding that produces exemplary conduct. As Coppélia Kahn observes, “Merchant … is perhaps the first play in which Shakespeare avoids [a] kind of magical solution” and turns his “attention to the conflict between the two kinds of bonds”—amity and marriage.¹⁵ It also tests the tenets of loving friendship between men of different social status—a merchant and a gentleman. Merchant raises provocative questions about virtue, rank, wealth, gender, and desire which earlier friendship literature downplayed or idealized. The play wonders whose interests are served in a vision of a world governed by the bonds of amity and how practical a solution to complex social and economic questions such a system would be. More precisely, Merchant takes to task the ideals of homoerotic male friendships, even as it raises doubts about the ability of romance and marriage to offer any radical improvements to society or to be any more inclusive. What are the limits of amity's homoerotic love, the play asks? Might a wealthy merchant become a gentleman's dear friend? What if the betrothed female were given a voice? What advantages, if any, might a marriage-based economy have over one grounded on amorous male friendships?

Such questions are raised as the play dramatizes the travails of the ideal friend in a society that is re-evaluating its definitions of love and its virtues—a shift so disruptive that Antonio as amorous lover seems sadly outmoded, himself a kind of anachronism. Elyot's Gysippus had been outcast, too, when he defied the will of his father and a patriarchal system of contract love, and that familiar plot device makes Shakespeare's Antonio seem at first somewhat conventionally at odds with the values of Venetian society, in this case a world that commodifies every human transaction. The merchant's struggle to lionize friendship, however, is decidedly different from the one patterned by Elyot. In “Titus and Gysippus” contract marriage seems antiquated, in dire need of reform, and amity's power to match like with like in both homo- and heterosexual relations reinvigorates an ailing body politic. In Merchant the part Antonio must play in the marketplace of Venice is, as he himself seems to suspect, “a sad one” (1.1.79), and his faith in the tenets of amity seems no match for his community's cynical views on the value and purpose of relationships. Lawrence Normand has observed that “Antonio brushes aside his friends' attempts to put him into words, and offers no discursive version of himself,” but perhaps the merchant's difficulty in articulating his dismay is the fault of a discourse that has lost its clarity as a medium for expressing and securing his bond with a gentleman.¹⁶

Shakespeare makes his audience aware of Antonio's marginal position not simply by dramatizing the merchant's opening complaint but also by rearranging the conventions of friendship tales. Antonio and Bassanio, his “most noble kinsman” (1.1.57), are strikingly different in both temperament and demeanor; the customary emphasis in friendship literature on exact similitude is noticeably absent.¹⁷ Their longtime association has been characterized by Bassanio's indebtedness to Antonio, not by mutual pledges of munificence which friends typically made in the most public and histrionic ways. Likewise, Antonio's refusal to charge interest on loans, a long-standing, economically awkward Christian value, may also refer to amity's now-impractical ethic of a generosity that assumes equality and reciprocity between men. The merchant who lends gratis in the spirit of friendship does not automatically signal a noble character, as does the gentle exemplar of gift-giving in a tale of amity, but seems, instead, foolhardy and impetuous.¹⁸

Even the way Shakespeare brings the pair onstage emphasizes their differences. Elyot had observed of his protagonists that “nature wrought in their hearts such a mutual affection, that their wills and appetites daily more and more so confederated themselves.”¹⁹ But in Merchant the friends each appear separately and in obviously incompatible moods. Their conversation lasts only so long as Bassanio's financial needs are expressed and met. Although he says he owes Antonio “the most in money and in love” (1.1.131), Bassanio appears mainly interested in expediting a solution to his financial bind. In short, there is no unequivocal assertion of a deeply rooted physical and spiritual kinship that would immediately identify them as emotional twins and signal a familiar comic-plot trajectory. In Edwards's Damon and Pithias, to illustrate the contrast, the servant Stephano marvels at the convergence of the friends, who

In mutual friendship at no time have fainted.
But loved so kindly and friendly each other,
As though they were brothers by father and mother.
Pythagoras' learning these two have embraced,
Which both are in virtue so narrowly laced,
That all their whole doings do fall to this issue,
To have no respect but only to virtue:
All one in effect, all one in their going,
All one in their study, all one in their doing.(20)

Stephano goes on to muse that “they have but one heart between them,” thereby invoking the familiar metaphor of a shared identity between lovers. Antonio and Bassanio lack the fusion—troped both physically and metaphysically, as a shared heart—that marks a bona fide friendship.

Despite this lack, Antonio plays the standard part of devoted friend. The pathos he evokes comes not from an ostentatious behavior that would alienate any man but from the lack of reciprocation between twinned companions. Indeed, according to the dictates of amity, Antonio exhibits an exemplary generosity in his willingness to help fund Bassanio's venture and especially in his desire to make Bassanio happy by enabling his courtship of Portia. He is that paragon who “more rejoiceth at his friend's good fortune than at his own.”²¹ That he sees no threat in his friend's profession of interest in Portia also marks Antonio's faith in the power of amity. In somewhat nervous terms, Harry Berger Jr. has complained of Antonio's ardor in gift-giving as shamelessly manipulative, as if he will “sink hooks of gratitude and obligation deep into the beneficiary's bowels.”²² Robert Hapgood also sees Antonio as “at once too generous and too possessive.”²³ If today there remains something strange about a man in passionate pursuit of another male, such pursuits may have been more ambiguously coded then. In Elyot's text, Gysippus gladly sacrifices his betrothed to Titus in recognition of the “similitude in all the parts of our body.”²⁴ His gift not only clarifies the depth of their intimacy but, eventually, contributes to social harmony.

It could be argued that there is a classical element of generosity in Antonio's willingness to bargain with Shylock. To an early modern English audience—and, indeed, to the citizens of Venice—such a venture might be recognized as beholden to the ethics of friendship, which would dictate a carefully choreographed excess of charity and sacrifice. Still, at this point in history these signs of friendship were already being tallied as strangely extreme (and perhaps the responses of Berger and Hapgood bear out this turn in values). Risk-taking is admired only insofar as it promises to deliver substantial gains—money, especially, but position or security, too—and Antonio's venture, pledging money and his own flesh for a gentleman who has given nothing in return, does not seem likely to earn a profit or produce domestic tranquillity. Indeed, Antonio's complaint that he is a “tainted wether of the flock” (4.1.114) may refer to his inability to deliver on the promise that amity's love will yoke men of equal character and virtue. The merchant's pursuit of Bassanio is wearisome and circular in a way reminiscent of Sir Thomas Wyatt's exhausted hunter in “Whoso List to Hunt”: like that frustrated lover, Antonio makes bids for a love quarry he cannot touch. It is as if noli me tangere demarcates Antonio's object of desire as it had the hunter's hind.

That an expectation of love in return for lending would hardly be an unorthodox interpretation of amity's purchasing power is, however, evinced in this quotation from Sir Thomas Wilson's Discourse vpon Vsury: “God ordeyned lending for maintenaunce of amitye, and declaration of love, betwixt man and man.”²⁵ Likewise Miles Mosse, in his sermon The Arraignment and Conviction of Vsvrie, advises that a “lender may lawfully expect the loue and good will of the borrower. For that hath he iustly deserued by his kindnesse.”²⁶ If Antonio presumes that his generosity will yoke his heart to Bassanio's, it is because humanist images of amity have taught him to do so. This promise of an intimate equity, delivered from the court and the pulpit, may account for the popularity of Elyot's tale of Titus and Gysippus in particular as well as the preoccupation with friendship themes in Renaissance prose and poetry; at any rate, it helps to make sense of Antonio's deep yearning. As Mosse preaches, “hee that expecteth loue cannot bee sayd to expect gaine from lending.”²⁷ And so Antonio, who seems to believe his lending practices will generate love, professes to lend gratis even as he complains about a bewildering sense of loss.

On the other hand, the leveling force of amity also accounts for the apparent reluctance of the financially-strapped Bassanio to act in kind: friendship may make both borrower and lender indistinguishable, but in the case of a gentleman indebted to a merchant, it also risks betraying the men as mere partners in trade—not fundamentally different from merchant usurers such as Tubal and Shylock in being bound by the marketplace realities of what Wilson called “private benefit and oppression:”²⁸ To be sure, when Bassanio visits the marketplace to beg for Shylock's backing, he risks ignoble submission; rather comically, amity diminishes Bassanio's greatness.²⁹ In 1.3, as he urgently bargains with the Jew, Bassanio's manner of speaking is notably less ornate than the euphuistics he had used in private dealings with Antonio (nor does it approach the self-aggrandizing speeches he will deliver in his suit at Belmont). His awkward traffic with a usurer is an unaccounted price of amity's laws, or, put differently, the gentleman finds himself compromised by the merchant's amiable command to “Go presently inquire (and so will I) / Where money is” (1.1.183-84). In a bond that should give rise to an “incomparable friendship” or, as Wilson puts it, would pronounce the lovers “man and man,” Bassanio's status seems tenuous, if not degraded. Once in Belmont, Bassanio solves Portia's father's riddle by rejecting gold and silver, a turn that might also describe his attitude toward the mercantile bonds that financed his venture:

                              Therefore thou gaudy gold,
Hard food for Midas, I will none of thee,
Nor none of thee thou pale and common drudge
'Tween man and man. …

(3.2.101-4)³⁰

In bargains with men below gentleman status, “perfect amity” produces a rather disorderly love: the intimacies of friendship compromise and skew hierarchical alliances and are, perhaps, intimacies best forsaken.³¹ In pointed contrast, should Bassanio marry the “lady richly left” (1.1.161), he can at least appear to maintain his rank as lord and governor, even as he is beholding to her inheritance. Conjugal amity, not companionate friendship, allows the illusion of twinship to flourish.

Thus Bassanio's risk-taking to win Portia is announced as a heroic adventure. Cast as a sort of fairy-tale, this venture in romantic love promises that the prince (not the friend) will inevitably win his love, that shows of heterosexual passion will deliver the coveted goods and preserve the gentleman's integrity. Indeed, Bassanio's access to cash in Belmont seems so enchanted that by contrast his Venetian bartering with a merchant and a usurer seems petty and haphazard. After agreeing to sign a risky contract to finance his friend's voyage, Antonio reassured an anxious Bassanio, “I do expect return / Of thrice three times the value of this bond” (1.3.154-55). But when Portia invests in Bassanio's return to Venice, her confidence dazzles: “Pay [the Jew] six thousand, and deface the bond: / Double six thousand, and then treble that. … / You shall have gold / To pay the petty debt twenty times over” (3.2.298-99, 305-6). Her generosity also compasses sexual desire and domestic comfort in a way that Antonio's act of kindness could not quite effect: “For never shall you lie by Portia's side / With an unquiet soul” (ll. 304-5). Indeed, the impossible world of Belmont excites fantasies about the regenerative powers of money in the right hands, while Antonio's marketplace, fraught with the well-known risks of “shallows and of flats, / … dangerous rocks, / … [and] roaring waters” (1.1.26, 31, 34), comes across as a strange uncharted world. The vexing problem of Bassanio's apparent disregard for his patron once in Belmont may be explained by Antonio's reassurance to the eager suitor—“Let it not enter in your mind of love: / Be merry” (2.8.42-43).³² But the memory lapse might better be explained by the way the privileges of Belmont afford him the luxury of believing his newly won riches are a sign of virtue, not bargains.

This turn to courtship and marriage at the expense of friendship fits precisely into the behaviors of a burgeoning system of alliance in which, as Lorna Hutson puts it, “the contracting of matrimony will ensure productive social relations.”³³ Marriage to an endlessly wealthy lady will allow the gentleman to avoid the awkward scene of plying a merchant for loans in a discourse that turns on an assertion of exact similitude. Thus, Bassanio expresses his interest in a language that lends Portia's wealth and her house at Belmont the mythic allure of destiny. Portia is described as having “sunny locks,” with “wondrous virtues,” “nothing undervalu'd / To Cato's daughter” (1.1.169, 163, 165-66). In pursuit of the “golden fleece” at “Colchos' strond,” Bassanio, her questing Jason, becomes “fortunate” (ll. 170, 171, 176).³⁴ From the spectacular reception Portia provides for her “Hercules” (3.2.60) to Bassanio's Petrarchan complaints of the “happy torment” in romantic love (l. 37), the fiction that this bond is a marriage of true minds becomes irresistible in the way amity's myth of twinship enjoys.³⁵ It is not that Antonio's conduct is melodramatic and wanton, while Bassanio's is sensible and shrewd: these are identical investments, the same excess of risk and passion. Rather, it is the social and economic implications of each man's desires that determine the credibility of his conduct.

Though Bassanio may seem sincere in playing the part of the virtuous suitor to Portia, Merchant does not allow for a complete mystification of his turn to romance. Bassanio is that enterprising gentleman whose courtesies and favors bond him to others only insofar as they promise to secure his wealth and station. Even Bassanio's way of begging Antonio for another loan reveals his faith in courtly artifice over amorous virtue, at least in terms of the élan necessary to ply a merchant for more money. Couching his new request in a simile extended to credibility's breaking point, he likens Antonio's lending habits to the sport of archery and then claims that his conceited request for Antonio's steady marksmanship is made out of “pure innocence” (1.1.145). The needy gentleman is pledged, or “gag'd” (l. 130), to the merchant because of prodigal spending habits, and his references to a “swelling port” (l. 124) and a “noble rate” (l. 127) reveal his concerns with maintaining a lavish lifestyle. Indeed, at the heart of his impassioned plea that Antonio “shoot another arrow” is not love but Bassanio's blunt self-interest—“to get clear of all the debts I owe” (l. 134). In Elyot, Titus's desire for Sophronia comes with passionate worry that because of his romantic love, “friendship is excluded,” a desecration he cannot forebear; and it is only when Gysippus reassures Titus that there could be no motive of “lust or sudden appetite” in matters of amity that Titus agrees to accept amity's gift of marriage.³⁶ Notably, Shakespeare's gentleman suffers no such consideration for Antonio.

When Bassanio turns to romance in Belmont, his motivations are mercenary enough to mitigate his protestations of transcendent love. Observing the reputation for “magnificent improvidence” that defamed Elizabethan aristocrats, Katharine E. Maus argues that Bassanio apparently “feels socially obliged to display himself properly … [and so] spends huge sums of borrowed money equipping himself for his trip to Belmont.”³⁷ Similarly, Bassanio worries that his traveling companion, Gratiano, may be unable to “allay with some cold drops of modesty / [His] skipping spirit” (2.2.177-78), though his friend assures him that when the time comes, he will “put on a sober habit, … / Like one well studied in a sad ostent / To please his grandam” (ll. 187-88). This facility with rhetorical flourishes and with suiting behavior to the needs of the moment undermines an audience's ability to completely invest in the romantic fantasy orchestrated at Belmont. And perhaps, too, such self-fashioning allows Portia to opine “There's something tells me (but it is not love) / I would not lose you” (3.2.4-5).

As noteworthy for its cool remove as for its enthusiasm, Bassanio's manner of speaking may belie its sincerity. Antonio, on the other hand, is repeatedly associated with language that creates an illusion of deep regard and heartfelt devotion—a common device in persuading an audience of the authenticity of a love. As the play opens, he is marked as a man of complex feeling, not only sad but worried over “What stuff [his sadness is] made of” and how it affects his ability to “know” himself. In a world “deceiv'd with ornament” (l. 74), where fashion, disguise, deception, prejudice, mistaken identity, and falsehood prevail, Antonio resists equivocation and pretense. His struggle to express his affection may be evident from the moment the merchant has Bassanio alone: Antonio momentarily loses his command of speech, a tell-tale sign of disruptive feelings, as he stutters the nonce sentence “It is that anything now” (1.1.113).³⁸ In a show of pride that alludes to friendship's values, Antonio is properly insulted by the gentleman's circumlocutions that “wind about [his] love with circumstance” (l. 154). Then, as if to verify the bounty of his love, Antonio speaks in a direct, unadorned manner, not in the circumlocutions favored by courtiers: “but say to me what I should do / That in your knowledge may by me be done, / And I am prest unto it: therefore speak” (ll. 158-60).

This impassioned resolve is how friends speak on one another's behalf. It gives an impression that what matters most is the welfare of the other, certainly not the cost of the transaction or some private interest. With just such self-denial, Edwards's Pithias reacts to the news of his lover's condemned status: “Then how near is my death also!” When later Pithias offers to die for his Damon, he wants the king to witness the depth of the friendship bond “that [he] may not say but Damon hath a friend / That loves him better than his own life, and will do to his end.”³⁹ Antonio's sacrifices and declarations are conventional signs of a friend who welcomes opportunities to make public his deep regard. Certainly the devotion becomes evident to Salerio, who observes that Antonio “only loves the world” for Bassanio (2.8.50). Unlike Bassanio's passions, however, which seem to shift as the context demands, the merchant's feelings vary only in the sense of growing more intense. He moves from risking his fortune for Bassanio to offering up his own flesh.

Antonio's grand gestures are further identified as signs of physical desire, not simply platonic love, and they help to account for the sense of competition between amorous friends and romantic lovers which this play excites. Salerio remarks on Antonio's “affection wondrous sensible” for Bassanio (2.8.48), and Antonio himself avows, “My purse, my person, my extremest means / Lie all unlock'd” to Bassanio's needs (1.1.138-39). As Seymour Kleinberg notes, the echoing pun on purse and person suggests a “sexual longing,” a love expressed in somatic terms.⁴⁰ To give all, including one's body, was a commonplace in tales of amity (as it also is in tales of romance); to be “one in having and suffering,” a sign of supreme love.⁴¹ Like his ships, Antonio's love is cast upon the “very dangerous flat” of the “Goodwins” (3.1.4-5). According to the Norton editor, “‘Goodwin’ means ‘friend.’”⁴² And at least at first, such wrecked passion seems routine: in tales of amity, friends are separated from one another so that the integrity of their love may be tested. Lorenzo alludes to such a trial as he compares Portia's fortitude (and her sexual sacrifice) when faced with her new husband's departure to “god-like amity, which appears most strongly / In bearing thus the absence of your lord” (3.4.3-4). Such fortitude cannot be measured by “customary bounty” (l. 9). Moreover, the separation of lovers traditionally promises a consummation. In tales of amity, friends inevitably reunite with embraces, kisses, and simultaneous protests of their passion. Richard Brathwait's image of two men rushing into one another's arms, univocally declaring their love, “Certus amor morum est,” was his emblem for “Acquaintance” in his 1633 conduct book The English Gentleman, and it is precisely this familiar moment of ecstatic reunion which tales of amity celebrated.⁴³ Antonio seems to believe that there must be blocking agents to this love's consummation—Bassanio's desire for a wife, for example, or, more seriously, a hostile usurer—and that they must be confronted to test the ameliorating power of amity's love.

Friendships such as those between Titus and Gysippus or Damon and Pithias allow the lovers to luxuriate in the ecstasy of painful separations and passionate reunions. Just as undying devotion is proclaimed, as kisses and embraces express what words fail to capture, as emotions burst forth publicly and unapologetically, the love of friends seems to take on a form outside the medieval (or modern) categories of transcendent brotherhood or platonic alliance.⁴⁴ As it is put on trial, such love only accrues in value with an intensification of the theme of identities merging so close as to become one and the same. Indeed, this consolidation of identities creates the illusion of a new kind of man, what Elyot called “the other I.”⁴⁵ In Damon and Pithias, Pithias explains the effects of amity's love—“when I am alone, / I forget I am Pithias, methinks I am Damon”—but this strange figure clearly confuses the uneducated, as when Dionysius inquires, “What callest thou friends? are they not men, is not this true?”⁴⁶ Friends are so exceptional in their love that they become “[a]s it were transformed into another, which [is] against kind”⁴⁷—the Ovidian metamorphosis of a new being evolved from erotic love. (Idealizations of heterosexual passion use this same device in the icon of the hermaphrodite.⁴⁸) The risks and pleasures in this friendship “against kind”—distinguished from the view of sodomites as monsters against kind—are drawn out through the pattern of separation and return. Eventually, inevitably, the two become one, erotically linked by a conjoined heart.

Shakespeare borrows this device for producing the illusion of erotic metamorphosis in friendship by emphasizing Antonio's declarations of allegiance as he faces separation from Bassanio. Antonio behaves as if the gentleman will be his loving friend and, later, as if their bond is but temporarily interrupted by a usurious tyrant ignorant of the ideals of friendship. When first offered the loan he seeks, Antonio scoffs at Shylock for mocking the hallmark generosity of amity's philosophy of exchange: “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?” (1.3.127-29). Indeed, Shylock makes Antonio agree to his “merry sport” (l. 141) by defining his offer in the vocabulary of amity, a use of language that would communicate love and virtue:

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,—
This is kind I offer.

(ll. 134-38)

“I extend this friendship,—” Shylock challenges, “If [Antonio] will take it” (ll. 164-65). In turn, as if he has taken literally Elyot's emphasis on amity as a code of ethics available for education and reform, Antonio marvels that the reprobate has become a new man. When Shylock demands his pound of flesh after all, Antonio speaks as if a Jew's heart is beyond the scope of friendship: “You may as well do any thing most hard / As seek to soften that—than which what's harder?—/ His Jewish heart!” (4.1.78-80). The anticipation of a confrontation with this enemy of friendship allows Antonio to prepare for his love to take a turn—for him an essential, even natural turn—toward public recognition and union.

Thus, in his summons to his friend, Antonio implores, “Sweet Bassanio, … 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” (3.2.314-20).⁴⁹ What may seem desperate or effeminate devices to ensnare a man are heroic actions in the friendship tradition. Antonio wants Bassanio to be present at his trial as a sign of their love, perhaps in hopes of having his friendship, like the amity between Elyot's twins, “throughout the city published, extolled, and magnified.”⁵⁰ To believe that his own society, the mercantile world of Venice, devalues the erotic possibilities of male friendship nearly to their vanishing point would not only nullify Antonio's love but turn the merchant himself into a kind of hapless, friendless “other”—possibly a sodomite but certainly a suspect character, since outside the bonds of amity and romance, his excessive behavior would seem useless or reckless. Poised at amity's limits, he does not consider that its claims on equality and reciprocity are only about nobility and love when they are also about good manners. Perhaps Portia recognizes in Antonio's letter a call for a scene of friendship since she not only urges Bassanio to go to his friend but encourages him to repay the bond twenty times over. Her reference to “an egall yoke of love” (3.4.13) may be a tribute to the “‘greater love’” of biblical heroes, as Lawrence W. Hyman observes,⁵¹ but as a description of amity, its contingencies are apparent:

                                                                                … 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. …

(ll. 11-15)

The limiting condition of amity's stress on loving bonds is its clause about the congruence of well-bred bodies.

Perhaps Shylock also understands that amity excludes even as it invites, since neither the alien Jew nor the female possesses that combination of features, breeding, and soul that would allow either to participate fully in amity's myth of twinship. When bargaining with Bassanio in 1.3, Shylock limits the term good to mean commercially sound, an equivocation that seems less a symptom of stereotypical greed when read in the context of Elyot's advice “to remember that friendship may not be but between good men” who are “engendered by the similitude of age and personage, augmented by the conformity of manners and studies, and confirmed by the long continuance of company.”⁵² In his pound-of-flesh bargain, then, there is a delicious irony that mocks Antonio's belief in the promises of friendship even as the terms of the agreement corroborate his desire as physical. Shylock wants a pound of “fair flesh, to be cut off and taken / In what part of [Antonio's] body pleaseth” him (1.3.146-47). This demand is erotic, as Alan Sinfield argues, because it can be read metaphorically as an attack on the genitals, as castration.⁵³ But it is erotic also because Shylock chooses to cut the flesh from Antonio's breast, his very heart-in amity, as in romance, the somatic sign of love. This violation will allow the Jew to expose the exclusionary rhetoric of amity: the love between the two Venetians runs no deeper than their “varnish'd faces” (2.5.33).

Even Bassanio's disregard for the merchant reveals that Antonio's expectations of requited love are both too passionate and too expensive. In Shakespeare and Ovid, Jonathan Bate argues that the details which Shakespeare chooses in order to liken Bassanio to the classic Jason figure bring to mind Jason's worst human qualities, that is, Jason as “an archetype of male deceit and infidelity.”⁵⁴ This allusion, Bate notes, foreshadows Bassanio's attempt to win and, later, to trick his female lover, Portia. But as a sign of deceit, it also refers back in time to his betrayal of Antonio's faith in friendship practices. The merchant's failure to capitalize on the tropes of amity makes his yearning less like the momentary suffering of a friendship on trial and more like some love-sickness, a bona fide Renaissance illness with its own tell-tale symptoms—a tremulous body, a distracted mind, an obsessive and futile desire for another.⁵⁵ The emphasis on Antonio's love as physical is not Shakespeare's way of innovating a homoerotic yearning peculiar to a lonesome and confused Antonio; indeed, homoerotic desire, as this essay has argued, had long distinguished the protagonists of the friendship genre. What is striking is how the amorous pursuit of a gentleman seems both strange and unproductive when risked by a merchant.

In Act 4 the trial scene becomes a showcase for exposing and manipulating the limits of amity's erotic power. To sever the love of friends is to cut deeply into the body; as Antonio puts it, if the “cut [is] deep enough, / I'll pay … instantly with all my heart” (4.1.276-77). Antonio will have a pound of his own flesh cut away and thus allow all who witness such spectacular violence to evaluate the transformative powers of male friendship, to judge “Whether Bassanio had not once a love” (l. 273). In the competitive, mercenary world of Venice, amity is in danger of being misunderstood as a rather ill-advised way to profit or, perhaps more worrisome to Antonio, to be devalued altogether as usurious appetite for self-promotion and status. The integrity of male friendship—its virtues of generosity, self-sacrifice, and intimacy—is so atrophied that only a radical staging of amity's power to secure bonds between men can reinvigorate its appeal. Antonio's willing self-sacrifice can be seen as a daring performance on behalf of an exemplary devotion. In the moment of the merchant's epic display of generosity (traditionally both grand and grotesque), amity will be memorialized as love “wondrous sensible” (2.8.48). It is Antonio's own nostalgic citation: when his “tale is told” (4.1.272), the true love between friends will be as inspirational in Venice as it was when Pithias proclaimed that no one “may … say but Damon hath a friend.” Antonio implores Bassanio to “live still and write mine epitaph” (l. 118), as if there could be no more everlasting proof that “Bassanio had … once a love” than this familiar gesture of sacrificing the body in the name of amity.

As if to travesty Antonio's belief in amity's power to yoke the heart of a merchant to a gentleman's love, Shylock demands the right “To cut the forfeiture from that bankrupt there!” (l. 122). This attack on amity from an outsider threatens to show how the social realities of Venice betray amity's ideals. However questionable Bassanio's investment in his role as friend may be, he takes his cue when an alien endangers male bonds. The gentleman arrives in time to properly reciprocate the merchant's sacrifice: “The Jew shall have my flesh, blood, bones and all” (l. 112). The sudden turn in Bassanio, from mercenary borrower to benevolent friend, would seem virtually inexplicable were it not for Portia's encouragement that he protect his own kind in the face of a foreigner's threat. Certainly, in the preceding acts, Bassanio has demonstrated that he can play any part necessary to his welfare. What is evident, too, is that Portia's quibbling with the law during the trial is not simply a means of nullifying Shylock's financial threat to Venetian mercantile practices. Portia seems aware of the trial's double bind: should Shylock expose the limits of amity, the universal values it claims will be disgraced by a foreigner; but if Antonio manages to redeem amity's appeal, her role as wife will be diminished. As Keith Geary has argued, in rescuing Antonio from public execution, she saves the merchant and subverts a classic display of ideal male friendship: “Portia has fastened the homoerotic tendency of Bassanio's sexuality and the obligations of masculine friendship on to herself.”⁵⁶ There will be no mockery of the Venetian practices of borrowing and partnership, but there will also be no public spectacle of amity as the supreme form of love.

It is as if the typically acquiescent or even absent female character from tales of amity refuses at this point in history to remain silent or vanish. Portia, like each of the characters in the competitive world of Venice, opts to recast herself on a stage where everyone plays a part. For her the “will of a living daughter [is] curb'd by the will of a dead father” (1.2.24-25), curbed by a discursive bind such that a marriageable daughter “cannot choose … nor refuse” (ll. 25-26). In short, Portia resists an enforced silence—as if she only pretends to honor a cooperative spirit in earlier scenes. Portia's bid for power depends on both Antonio and Bassanio playing their parts, but it depends, too, on the failure of amity's climactic scene of transcendence. Her clever orchestration of the trial scene—and, later, her neat turn on the stock bed-trick⁵⁷—speaks to her shrewdness and her determination. Disguised as Balthazar, she uses equivocation and illusion not only to save the merchant from the usurer but also as a way of liberating herself from a part that keeps her “little body … aweary” (l. 1), her voice faint. If the very heart of friendship is plucked from Antonio's breast for the world to witness as a sign of his deep love, Portia seems aware that then the “greater glory [will] dim the less” (5.1.93). Within the generous system of amity, marriage will not be devalued as cheap or worthless (the early tales had no complaint against marriage per se), but it will also not shine nearly so brightly as it could if elevated above amity. “A substitute shines brightly as a king,” Portia cannily observes, “Until a king be by” (ll. 94-95). What better way to effect a re-evaluation of marriage and friendship than to have an ardent devotee of amity pledge himself to ensuring the husband will “never more break faith” with the wife (l. 253).⁵⁸ The friend will enter into the service of marriage, a minor player in a reconfigured narrative.

Shakespeare takes up two key moments from tales of amity—an inspirational trial of friendship; the dissemination of amity's ideals—and presents them in altered, fairly cynical versions. Even though Antonio has behaved according to form by making a spectacle of his devotion to Bassanio, there is no sense that the power of friendship (or of any kind of love for that matter) can be trusted to reform a hardened heart. A murderer in Elyot's Titus and Gysippus fable, for example, witnesses “the marvellous contention of these two, … [and is] vehemently provoked to discover the truth.”⁵⁹ There friendship has the power to improve and to educate. The proclamation of devotion between Shakespeare's two men, however, is set against the comic presence of the disguised wives, so that the amorous vows ring more of betrayal than loyalty. These friends seem histrionic and loose-tongued. Portia has encouraged her husband to play his part in the trial of friendship, but her disguised presence and confidential asides have also allowed a new reading of that once untroubled scene. The females standing by seem cheated, not invited into some endlessly generous circle of amity; and as if to underscore this exclusion, another outsider scoffs, “These be the Christian husbands!” (4.1.291). Constructed in a way that exposes the pitfalls in the landscape of amity, the ecstatic devotion of the lovers loses the universal appeal it enjoyed in Elyot's hands. The depth and endurance of Bassanio's commitment are suspect, and they become even less credible when the gentleman abandons friendship in the last act as readily as he had turned to its rhetoric in the trial scene.⁶⁰ The presence of Shylock and Portia-in-disguise during the proceedings draws out with some force the exclusionary subtext of friendship: should amity work its magic after all, both the Jew and the Lady would be muted, if not ostracized. Understandably, neither witness is impressed by the performance of masculine love in action.

The supposedly contagious display of devotion between friends does not register at all with the citizens of Venice, whose ethic of an eye-for-an-eye strains the quality of amity's kindness. Here friendship on trial fails to elicit virtue from spectators; it seems, quite perversely, to have encouraged a cry for blood revenge, a decidedly different effect than Elyot's magical scene of conversion. Quite regularly Merchant makes it clear that few of the characters in Venice are genuinely impressed by anything that does not produce wealth or allow for a profit margin, though their rhetoric speaks to higher interests. Shylock's real crime may not be his claim on a pound of flesh but his habit of turning the platitudes of Venice against their selfish speakers. He accuses the Christians of taking interest while calling it thrift, of keeping “many a purchas'd slave” (l. 90), and of professing humility while practicing revenge. The two characters who believe deeply in values outside the marketplace, Shylock and Antonio, for all their faults and transgressions, have no place in Venice and are neither of them understood by its citizens. Thus there is something sickening in Merchant's turn on the traditional scene of conversion. If the Jewish heart cannot be inspired by amity's practices, it can at least be subjected to force—ironically by the very merchant who believes in the power of friendship to improve by example. Even though Shylock's money must be willed to his Christian son-in-law and daughter, his penalty will be represented as “a special deed of gift” (5.1.292). Forced to speak as a new man, the Christian Jew exits broken and ailing: “I am not well” (4.1.392).

This enforced transformation casts a pall over Act 5 as the married couples struggle to collect on the promise of an ecstatic reunion in such a night that seems to be “the daylight sick” (5.1.124).⁶¹ In a final twist of the conversion plot, transposing it from a staple of amity to an element of romance, Antonio himself is subjected to reform. Perhaps awestruck by the mystifying display of the law's power, the merchant is moved to alter the nature of his own love. The merchant redefines the role of the friend from lover to grateful guest, an outsider invited within the circle of marriage. When he vows to play his part in keeping safe the ring, Antonio agrees to limit the range of its symbolic value to a sign of the amity in marriage. Indeed, by the end of the play, there is an emphasis (the context of bawdy jokes and frivolity notwithstanding) on the need for overseeing certain social practices connected to friendship bonds. The early modern custom of same-sex bed companions—and a literary sign, too, of male friendship—is alluded to twice in the play's final moments (ll. 284, 305), but its homoerotic valence is drawn out as a luxury in need of surveillance.

As Jeff Masten has observed, male companions sharing a home, a bed, and even the same clothes changed from being perceived as a convention in early modern England to being an oddity, a “‘strange Production’.”⁶² In Merchant, the domestic scene is represented as conjugal in a way that highlights the turn away from the customs of companionate amity. Life at Belmont, it appears, will not include erotic male friendships, most certainly not an open intimacy between men of different status; nor will it include wives who would quietly comply with such arrangements. Essential—and essentializing—choices have been made. Bassanio is granted his bed companion not in Antonio but in Balthazar, the youth whose eloquence saved the merchant's life, and the gentleman has learned, further, that the friend is his wife: “Sweet doctor,” professes the contrite gentleman to Portia, “you shall be my bedfellow” (5.1.284). The bawdy ring jokes suggesting cuckoldry and sodomy make same-sex desires resemble infidelity, if not concupiscence. As the butt of these jokes, Gratiano heads off to his marriage bed confessing “But were the day come, I should wish it dark / Till I were couching with the doctor's clerk” (ll. 304-5).

These lines, as Coppélia Kahn has observed, “voice [a] homoerotic wish”;⁶³ perhaps, too, they voice a fantasy of social mobility, namely, a clerk and a gentleman as lover and beloved. Such relationships were briefly encouraged as a possibility when, at the end of 4.1, Antonio succeeded in using the ring to signal the deep bond, enabled by a doctor of law, between a merchant and a gentleman. An ending that exalted amity would be familiar, not radical or dissident, to an early modern audience, as when Elyot closes his comedy as an “example in the affects of friendship.”⁶⁴ But Shakespeare's version anticipates the modern convergence of homoerotic desire with secrecy—wishes made in the dark—and with betrayal. Friendship's claim on the ring seems somewhat underhanded and disruptive. If the fifth act's formal turn toward romantic closure is compromised by Shylock's sentence, it also bears the burden of having foreclosed on a conventional moment of consummation: the coupling of two friends, whose amity will “Be valued 'gainst [a] wife's commandement” (4.1.447). The play ends, furthermore, as Gratiano admits (his desires notwithstanding) that he will “fear no other thing / So sore, as keeping safe Nerissa's ring” (ll. 306-7). In these final, comic moments, even fantasies of male friendship trigger anxiety.

This skewed arrangement—two friends pledging service to a lady—offers a corrective to applications of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's theory of the homosocial.⁶⁵ Although Sedgwick did not propose her model as a lens for detecting the homophobia inherent in erotic triangles, the idea of homosociality is typically applied to every instance in literature where desire for a female affects male bonds, as if the woman serves mainly as a handy alibi for a potentially embarrassing homosexual desire. But the early representatives of English Renaissance friendship do not traffic in shame; nor do they invariably deflect same-sex desire onto a female decoy. The protestation of love between friends was public and straightforward—and perhaps this difference helps to explain why modern critics, accustomed to the homosexual tropes of the clinic and the closet, have debated whether amity could in fact be homoerotic. Indeed, shame as the necessary condition of the homosocial lends credibility to the cliché that the erotic language of male friendship was, at best, strategically ambiguous. Homophobia—in this instance an anxiety between men in intimate proximity with one another—appears to become a shaping force in erotic triangles as the sixteenth century comes to a close. There is no sense in Merchant's first three acts, and certainly none in the early tales of amity, that an expression of love between friends must yield before some heterosexual imperative. Only at the end of Merchant do the men experience, much to their bewilderment, a pressure to confess their “true” feelings as a desire for, or an allegiance to, marital fidelity.

As for the trope of well-matched or twinned lovers, Antonio finally mirrors Shylock, not Bassanio. This irony, a bonding of the merchant with the Jew, is made apparent in the way friendship's twin motif, significantly absent between Antonio and Bassanio, yokes the supposedly contrary figures of the usurer and the friend.⁶⁶ The play's title might refer to either of the two moneylenders, both of whom justify their lending practices by citing a common biblical ancestor, yet each a stranger in the marketplace. Shylock's relationship to money is, like Antonio's, not reducible to self-interest, as becomes evident when the Jew bemoans the loss of Leah's priceless ring or when he cries to his judges, “you take my life / When you do take the means whereby I live” (4.1.372-73). His “strange, outrageous” equations—“‘Justice, the law, my ducats, and my daughter!’” (2.8.13, 17)—mirror Antonio's commingled valuation of love, money, and flesh. If Bassanio and Antonio have been remarkably different in respect to their manners, Antonio's melancholy and Shylock's discontent make the two merchants seem like kinsmen in humors. Neither seems quite able to participate in the festive masquerades that dominate the Venetian streets. As if to foreground this similitude, there is a pointed instance of confusion when Portia as Balthazar sets eyes on the two men for the first time: “Which is the merchant here? and which the Jew?” (4.1.170). A strange question, perhaps, but its rhetorical power is striking, particularly as an ironic citation of amity's signature trope. In amity tales it was a mark of distinction that no one could tell the friends apart.

Merchant repeatedly draws the antagonists as one. Each seems from his entrance not only socially alienated but an obstacle to the progress of courtship and romance, though it is not until the final scene that the effect of such a kinship between ostensible enemies becomes clear. As Portia warns in a truism that might describe the disposition of either moneylender,

The man that hath no music in himself,
Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds,
Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils,
The motions of his spirit are dull as night,
And his affections dark as Erebus:
Let no such man be trusted.

(5.1.83-88)

The suspect nature of the alien Jew is ferreted out and disabled in the trial scene, and Antonio's bids for amity seem at Act 5's close to have been strategies treasonous to marital amity. In the end his spoils may be his status as bachelor. Having neither wife nor loving friend, he is accepted on terms that seem conditional. The rescripting of the friendship narrative in Venice threatens to make the presence of the needy friend as troubling as that of the greedy Jew, whose history of representation in Christian mythography has included perversion, unnatural uses of money, and an antagonism to divinely ordained bonds.⁶⁷

Indeed, as Simon Shepherd has argued, there was in Elizabethan England a growing pressure on men to exhibit masculinity by demonstrating decorum in such matters as money-handling, dress, and heterosexual desire⁶⁸—a codification of right conduct that even rhetorics of male friendship would admire, though of course to different effects. But masculinity was also demanding that men perform as if the object of their desire was naturally and exclusively the female. The excess of emotion allowed by the friendship tradition, albeit at select moments and supposedly for noble reasons, became more and more suspect in relations between men; and certainly acting as if erotic male friendships were a socially viable form became anathema. Shepherd argues that friendship behaviors were increasingly associated with womanish men and came to signal a perversion as well. As erotic preference for females became more and more an indication of productive behavior, attacks on aimless sexual conduct and approval of gender fidelity were used to regulate the varieties of male desire. Economic and social traffic between men were supposed to be uncomplicated by an active or open eroticism. Indeed, without a public show of desire for the female, there could be no masculinity, no noble friendship—and, in extreme cases, no citizenship.⁶⁹ In The Merchant of Venice, however, Shakespeare makes us aware of a tactic besides the innuendo of effeminacy or the humiliations of sodomy used against men who, like Antonio, professed excessive feelings for a dear male companion: a cultural politics of speech and silence.⁷⁰

Borrowed, perhaps, from antifeminist traditions or, equally likely, from the representation of strangers such as Shylock, silence signaled a sort of parole status for otherwise transgressive figures. The type of the demure lady traditionally signified a good woman, but this ostensibly positive image was contingent on her utter voicelessness. The woman who speaks, especially the woman who speaks out of turn, degenerates from wife or maid to shrew, whore, or virago. Similarly, when foreigners speak, they appear to plot, connive, or corrupt. In Edwards's play, Damon and Pithias are considered suspicious strangers until they can persuade the king otherwise. It is precisely this patriarchal demand for silence that confronts Portia as she worries if she can finesse the letter of her father's law in getting a husband and, also, as she voices her indecorous opinions in private quarters with her waiting woman. Her power as a female figure stems from her refusal to remain silent, whether that means she must give hints to obtain the man she desires or disguise herself to speak freely in court. At the close of Act 5, part of the pleasure of watching Portia comes from her play with language as she teases and cajoles the men.

Yet Portia remains her husband's wife. Her superiority within marriage hinges on her willingness to use tricks to prevent men from acting on desires that have been suppressed, not erased; and it is her own weary body—offering and withholding herself as bedmate—that insures fidelity. In the third act she elaborates on the vows she must make to her future husband, and even if her professed desire to be “trebled twenty times myself, / … to stand high in [Bassanio's] account” has the ring of irony, she must nevertheless move from being “Queen o'er [her]self” to accepting Bassanio as “her lord, her governor, her king” (3.2.153-54, 169, 165). After her exhilarating performance as Balthazar at the trial, where the “device” of burlesquing the “thousand raw tricks of these bragging Jacks” (3.4.81, 77) has been instead a virtuosa turn on patriarchal ethics and laws, she returns to Belmont to perform a second time. Portia's spirited wit is expressed in the final moments of the play through costume travesty and “raw tricks,” and considering her performance at the trial, such behavior (now more like the parodic device she concocted with Nerissa in 3.4) seems anticlimactic. Portia has gained the pleasure denied to Sophronia and Silvia, the pleasure of hyperbole typically enjoyed by heroes of amity and romance; certainly she is having a good time making fun of masculine vanity. But this luxury is not enjoyed “without a fee” (5.1.290): the consummate moment of the play has its costs. There is little sense that in its inversion, or reversal, of the amity model the companionate marriage will necessarily subvert its tactics and limitations.

Of course, if this play is mainly concerned with the effects of social changes on friendship, it is noteworthy that Antonio stands among the couples. He is not dismissed from the final scene, and arguably, he is even invited in, not left alone as so many modern productions insist.⁷¹ Yet it is telling that his penultimate words announce his own entry into silence: “I am dumb!” he cries (l. 279). It is as if the friend has traded places with the female character in Elyot's tale. Ostensibly, Antonio's bond with his friend Bassanio will still run deep, but there is no pledge of passionate devotion, only a vow to stand as “his surety” in the marriage bargain (l. 254). The one image he uses that recalls the friendship valuation of depth—the soul—is defined at the play's end merely as collateral, a wondrous but no-longer-sensible piece of the merchant submitted to ensure that the husband “will never more break faith” with his new-found friend, his wife. That the relationship will now be without physical intimacy becomes clear when Antonio speaks shamefully of the risk he took for Bassanio: “I am th' unhappy subject of these quarrels / … [who] once did lend my body for his wealth” (ll. 238, 249). Whether in or out of the circle, Antonio stands dumbfounded—awed by the wife's magnanimity but perhaps also by the way he has been betrayed by his own faith in amity, a system that has contained mechanisms to exclude him.

The play closes with a procession of married couples, as the munificence of marital bonds overshadows amity's claims to generosity. By some “strange accident” (but it is not love) Antonio's ships have been brought safely to port; indeed, a sense of divinely ordained economic privilege seems to proliferate like “manna in the way / Of starved people” (ll. 278, 294-95). Nevertheless, some, such as Antonio or the usurer's daughter, who might still complain “I am never merry when I hear sweet music” (l. 69), are counted as present only on a contingency of silence. Perhaps the lingering melancholy that so famously marks this play as a problem comedy arises from the way an audience becomes uncomfortably aware that the price paid for the pleasure of a happy ending has been the forfeiture of the right to speak unashamedly of fantasies and desires. To identify with Antonio, with Shylock, or with Jessica—all reduced to silence—to speak up on behalf of the identities they have lost, is to forfeit the appealing and fanciful notion that comedy's comforts are gratis. To give these characters their voices is to risk being tainted, as if somehow of their ilk.

The contrite words of the twinned merchants—“I am dumb,” “I am not well”—resound with a modern familiarity, perhaps especially to those spectators who feel themselves disregarded or silenced by culture and by literature. As Michel Foucault has observed, the sort of panoptic, reified identities that have come to define marginal figures gained credibility as “truth” largely because of an interplay between discourses of silence (including that formal promise to return to silence, the confession) and avowals of illness.⁷² The early modern period was developing powerful uses for both of these tactics. For many it became difficult to speak on behalf of same-sex passions without finding one's self falling into an abject position of immorality, illness, or incoherence; or, if these choices sound perhaps too shrill, without finding one's self represented as a minor player, as comic relief, as a stock villain or a fool. Amity's ideal of a passionate friendship that also accommodates a marriage, that has more to do with virtue and heart than with blood or breeding, is increasingly represented in subsequent Renaissance literatures as an impractical solution to economic and social problems or as a promise made to a few. Nonsexual or homosocial male friendships become a rather empty pretext for executing business and career moves, while true or reproductive love enriches the province of matrimony.⁷³ Like Antonio in Merchant, the type of the homoerotic friend becomes loveless and lonesome; only within the bounds of platonic bonding does he traffic with men. He finds himself with little to say that will make sense of his strange desires.

Notes

1. Quotations from The Merchant of Venice follow John Russell Brown's edition for the Arden Shakespeare (London: Methuen, 1955).

2. Brown, ed., 4n.

3. See Alan Sinfield, “How to Read The Merchant of Venice Without Being Heterosexist” in Alternative Shakespeares 2, Terence Hawkes, ed. (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), 122-39. Many essays have dealt with Antonio's homosexuality. In the main, they tend to treat the possibility as secondary to more pressing issues, as Catherine Belsey does when she writes, “We can, of course, reduce the metaphysical burden of Antonio's apparently unmotivated melancholy to disappointed homoerotic desire” (“Love in Venice,” Shakespeare Survey 44 [1992]: 41-53, esp. 49). Others contend with the problem of a homosexual in a heterosexual society. W. Thomas MacCary, for example, sees the “pathetic” Antonio as “arrested” in “primary narcissism” and sadly “looking for that archaic image of himself” (Friends and Lovers: The Phenomenology of Desire in Shakespearean Comedy [New York: Columbia UP, 1985], 168). See also Lawrence Danson, “‘The Catastrophe Is a Nuptial’: The Space of Masculine Desire in Othello, Cymbeline, and The Winter's Tale,” SS 46 (1994): 69-79; Keith Geary, “The Nature of Portia's Victory: Turning to Men in ‘The Merchant of Venice’,” SS 37 (1984): 55-68; Lawrence Normand, “Reading the body in The Merchant of Venice,” Textual Practice 5:1 (1991): 55-73; Seymour Kleinberg, “The Merchant of Venice: The Homosexual as Anti-Semite in Nascent Capitalism” in Literary Visions of Homosexuality, Stuart Kellogg, ed. (New York: Haworth Press, 1983), 113-26; and Joseph Pequigney, “The Two Antonios and Same-Sex Love in Twelfth Night and The Merchant of Venice,” English Literary Renaissance 22 (1992): 201-21.

4. Sir Thomas Elyot, “The wonderful history of Titus and Gisippus, whereby is fully declared the figure of perfect amity” in The Book named The Governor, ed. S. E. Lehmberg, (London: J. M. Dent and Sons; New York: E. P. Dutton and Co., 1962), 136-51, esp. 136, 145, 142, 139, 137, and 138. (My own essay uses the more common spelling Gysippus.) One of the many changes Elyot makes in the tale as he knew it from Boccaccio was to soften the female character, eliminating her protests against being “gifted” to Titus by her betrothed. Nor is she even aware of the plan, as she is in Boccaccio's version. Elyot's decision to make Sophronia ignorant and docile fuels the fantasy that amity can accommodate marriage in a way that ensures social harmony. The men's close physical resemblance is also added and emphasized, and the length of their friendship is extended in number of years. Elyot revises the tale to exalt “perfect amity,” not conjugal or romantic love. See Clement Tyson Goode, “Sir Thomas Elyot's Titus and Gysippus,” Modern Language Notes 37 (1922): 1-11.

5. Ethics is used here in a sense commensurate with Elyot's views on virtuous male conduct; that is, educable behavior that promotes ideal civic and social relationships among men in traffic with one another. Elyot was not, of course, envisioning, let alone advocating, homosexual sodomy. His ethos allowed that love between noble-minded men could be generative and conservative if properly acted out, and his concept of a heroic same-sex love set it apart from the degradations of sodomy.

6. This argument for the erotic intimacies of friendship is especially indebted to the work of Michel Foucault and Alan Bray. Foucault speculates, for example, on friendship as “a social relation within which people had … a certain kind of choice (limited of course), as well as very intense emotional relations. … You can find from the 16th Century on, texts that explicitly criticize friendship as something dangerous” (“An Interview: Sex, Power, and the Politics of Identity,” interview by Bob Gallagher and Alexander Wilson, The Advocate [7 August 1984]: 26-30 and 58, esp. 30). See also “Homosexuality and the Signs of Male Friendship in Elizabethan England” in Queering the Renaissance, Jonathan Goldberg, ed. (Durham, NC, and London: Duke UP, 1994), 40-61, where Bray argues that the sodomite as shadow figure to the masculine friend helps to explain the credibility of such criticism. For other works that take up the question of homoeroticism in male friendships, see Jeffrey Masten, Textual intercourse: Collaboration, authorship, and sexualities in Renaissance drama (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge UP, 1997); Mario DiGangi, The homoerotics of early modern drama (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge UP, 1997); and Bruce R. Smith, Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare's England: A Cultural Poetics (Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 1991).

7. The emphasis on a construct of masculinity that emphasized proximity and intimate touch—as opposed to distance and the remote gaze—is part of a larger project that includes this essay. For a discussion of the sense of touch as traditionally associated with ideological disruption and homosexuality, see Sander L. Gilman, Sexuality: An Illustrated History (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1989), 31 and passim. The coupling of the transcendent and the physical was not unique to Elyot. Irving Singer discusses various efforts to reconcile the erotic and the spiritual; see The Nature of Love 2: Courtly and Romantic, 2d ed., 3 vols. (Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 1984), 10-15. There was also a subversive or “pornographic” tradition of highlighting the eroticism in Renaissance depictions of intimate transcendence, as well as efforts by writers such as Pietro Aretino to represent the aroused body as a window to the soul; see Lynn Hunt, ed., The Invention of Pornography: Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity, 1500-1800 (New York: Zone Books, 1993).

8. See Laurens J. Mills, One Soul in Bodies Twain: Friendship in Tudor Literature and Stuart Drama (Bloomington, IN: The Principia Press, 1937).

9. Coppélia Kahn asserts that “same sex friendships, in Shakespeare (as in the typical life cycle), are chronologically and psychologically prior to marriage” (“The Cuckoo's Note: Male Friendship and Cuckoldry in The Merchant of Venice” in Shakespeare's “Rough Magic”: Renaissance Essays in Honor of C. L. Barber, Peter Erickson and Coppélia Kahn, eds. [Newark: U of Delaware P, 1985], 104-12, esp. 105). In the same volume, see also Janet Adelman, “Male Bonding in Shakespeare's Comedies,” 73-103.

10. John Lyly's Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit (1578) might be included also. His companions, Philautus and Euphues, part with their friendship severed, and neither man wins the female. But the tale may be read as cautionary, warning against true friends falling prey to unbridled desires and self-interest.

11. Adelman, 79.

12. In The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al. (New York and London: W. W. Norton and Co., 1997), 77-83, esp. 83.

13. Elyot, 140 and 149.

14. Sylvia is spared the rape. Shakespeare compounds the troubling moment with an allusion to Ovid's tale of Philomela, whose rape transforms her into a doleful nightingale who can, at least, endlessly broadcast her plight in song. As Jean Howard further observes, Sylvia is also denied this Ovidian complaint. Still, the oblique citation might prompt an audience to ask, at least momentarily, about the degree of complicity a tale of amity requires for its idealism to work. Even the context of the allusion—raised as Valentine laments that he can “sit alone … / And to the nightingale's complaining notes / Tune my distresses and record my woes” (5.4.4-6)—embarrasses amity. The bird's song, traditionally decoded as Philomela's lament, is summoned to serenade Valentine's own sadness (Greenblatt, ed., 82).

15. Kahn, 105.

16. Normand, 60.

17. Mills notes this emphasis on difference, but attributes it to “dramatic contrast” and argues further that the two men are nonetheless equal in noble character (268). Brown, ed., discusses Bassanio and Antonio as exemplars of amity and concludes that this alteration from the play's source, Il Pecorone, lends the men an air of nobility and virtue (xiv-xvi). He sees no tensions in the differences in status of the two friends, nor does he consider an erotic component in amity. Frank Whigham analyzes the play's “context of social mobility and class conflict,” but he tends to see the Christians as singular in their revisionist use of marital courtship as a vehicle for mystifying aristocratic solidarity and economic privilege (“Ideology and Class Conduct in The Merchant of Venice,” Renaissance Drama n.s. 10 [1979]: 93-115, esp. 93). This essay stresses amity's tradition of representing friends as gentlemen, the humanist rhetoric of an educable character notwithstanding. Men of lower status are often amazed, perhaps even moved to emulate amity's code of conduct, but they are never depicted as ideal lovers, let alone peers to the entitled heroes.

18. Walter Cohen discusses the politics of early modern England's awkward shift from an opposition to usurious practices to a capitalist-based economy. Equivocations are apparent in terms such as venturing, advantage, interest, and risk; see “The Merchant of Venice and the Possibilities of Historical Criticism,” ELH 49 (1982): 765-89. Henry Abelove argues that the ascendancy of marriage and reproductive heterosexuality is homologous with changes in demographics and a rise in capitalist ethics; he contends, however, that the role of “same-sex sexual behaviors” in such developments warrant “separate treatment” (“Some Speculations on the History of ‘Sexual Intercourse’ During the ‘Long Eighteenth Century’ in England” in Nationalisms and Sexualities, Andrew Parker et al., eds. [London and New York: Routledge, 1992], 335-42, esp. 340).

19. Elyot, 136.

20. Richard Edwards, Damon and Pithias in The Dramatic Writings of Richard Edwards, Thomas Norton, and Thomas Sackville, ed. John S. Farmer, Early English Dramatists (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1966), 1-84, esp. 14. Edwards's depiction of homoerotic friendship seems indebted to Elyot's idealism, although its dramatic action seems to be a defense of amity as a viable solution to social problems. The heroes must justify their friendship, which at first appears suspicious to the members of the court, and distinguish themselves from the self-serving and crass forms of alliance that define male relations in Dionysius's kingdom. The tropes of Elyot's homoerotic amity—that is, an emphasis on a transcendent physical intimacy—are advanced, and, in the end, the sovereign becomes a third friend to the gentleman heroes. The question of friendship's compatibility with marriage is not an issue in Edwards's comedy.

21. Elyot, 134.

22. Harry Berger Jr., “Marriage and Mercifixion in The Merchant of Venice: The Casket Scene Revisited,” Shakespeare Quarterly 32 (1981): 155-62, esp. 161.

23. Robert Hapgood, “Portia and The Merchant of Venice: The Gentle Bond,” Modern Language Quarterly 28 (March 1967): 19-32, esp. 26.

24. Elyot, 139.

25. Sir Thomas Wilson, A Discourse vpon Vsury (London, 1572), N7^r.

26. Miles Mosse, The Arraignment and Conviction of Vsvrie (London, 1595), M[1]^v.

27. Mosse, M[1]^v.

28. Wilson, N7^r.

29. The stage practice of playing Antonio as an older man in pursuit of a young, handsome aristocrat may arise from the play's skeptical view of amity's promises of equity, not from any reference to the men's ages. The elided tradition of an emphasis on twinship creates the sense of an imbalance between the two men, as does Antonio's unrequited yearning. The modern stereotype of age enamored of innocent youth obfuscates such inequities.

30. Whigham observes that this passage reminds an audience that Bassanio's fortune has been “bred from Shylock's gold” (101).

31. DiGangi distinguishes between “orderly” and “disorderly” homoeroticism (10-19). He argues that the value and effects of homoeroticism in early modern England can be understood only in context, not according to beliefs about its inherent unruliness or theories of its propensity for containment. This argument has further support in Masten, in Smith, and in Valerie Traub, “Lesbian Desire in Early Modern England” in Erotic Politics: Desire on the Renaissance Stage, Susan Zimmerman, ed. (New York and London: Routledge, 1992), 150-69.

32. See Brown, ed., xlvi.

33. Lorna Hutson, The Usurer's Daughter: Male Friendship and Fictions of Women in Sixteenth-Century England (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 70-71. Hutson does not consider homoeroticism as a factor in amity. Similarly, Cohen explains, “Romantic comedy, firmly founded on marital love, … dramatizes the adaptation of the nobility to a new social configuration, an acceptance of change inextricable from a reassertion of dominance” (781).

34. Bassanio's description of Portia has been often observed as a crass devaluation; see, for example, Jonathan Bate, Shakespeare and Ovid (Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 1993), 151-53; and Whigham, 95-96.

35. Adelman observes that one source of male identity in early modern England came from the friendship trope of twinship or the mirror self (75-76), but the rhetoric of the companionate marriage was appropriating that metaphor.

36. Elyot, 139 and 140.

37. Katharine Eisaman Maus in Greenblatt, ed., 1,081-88, esp. 1,084.

38. Brown, ed., tries to make sense of the line by providing missing punctuation or speculating on possible pronoun referents (11n), but its incoherence may be deliberate. Shakespeare uses confused or disrupted speech as a way to show emotional turmoil most famously in Othello, when the Moor's characteristic eloquence collapses into disjointed phrasing and obsessive repetition once Iago has seduced the Moor into believing he is a cuckold.

39. Edwards, 31 and 40.

40. Kleinberg, 117.

41. Elyot, 134.

42. Brown, ed., 70n; and Greenblatt, ed., 1,115n.

43. Richard Brathwait, The English Gentleman, 2d ed. (London, 1633). The embracing gentlemen in Brathwait's conduct book are replaced in the 1641 edition with the icon of a disembodied handshake; the title is also expanded to The English Gentleman and English Gentlewoman. Jeff Masten, whose essay in Goldberg, ed., includes a reproduction of this image, brought these changes to my attention. In the 1707 broadsheet The Woman-Hater's Lamentation a woodcut of two men embracing serves to defame the homosexual molly; see Alan Bray, Homosexuality in Renaissance England (London: Gay Men's Press, 1982), 83; and Jeff Masten, “My Two Dads: Collaboration and Reproduction in Beaumont and Fletcher” in Goldberg, ed., 280-309, esp. 281.

44. Normand argues that in the exalted tones of amity “the sexual is banished, leaving only the spiritual” (66), but amity, like romance, advanced the opposite logic: a sexual relationship expressed through exalted language. It is not unlike the excited verse Romeo and Juliet use to express their profound love and physical passion for one another. See also Allen J. Frantzen, Before the closet: same-sex love from Beowulf to Angels in America (Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 1998), where Frantzen argues for homoeroticism in Anglo-Saxon and medieval categories of male bonding.

45. Elyot, 134.

46. Edwards, 41.

47. Edwards, 18.

48. Linda Woodbridge explains that the hermaphrodite in Renaissance poetics represented “the essential oneness of the sexes,” a reference to Plato's idea of the original unity of the self (Women and the English Renaissance: Literature and the Nature of Womankind, 1540-1620 [Urbana and Chicago: U of Illinois P, 1984], 140). Although Geary sees Portia's donning of men's clothes as a homoerotic allusion to Ganymede (57), the invaginated figure might represent the heteroerotic ideal of “one sex,” especially once Portia reveals the wife's value as helpmate in reforming patriarchal law and economic order.

49. On the erotic possibilities in the tradition of letter-writing between friends, see Forrest Tyler Stevens, “Erasmus's ‘Tigress’: The Language of Friendship” in Goldberg, ed., 124-40.

50. Elyot, 149.

51. Lawrence W. Hyman, “The Rival Lovers in The Merchant of Venice,” SQ 21 (1970): 109-16, esp. 112.

52. Elyot, 151 and 149.

53. Sinfield, in Hawkes, ed., 125.

54. Bate, 153.

55. Love melancholy, also known as love-sickness or erotomania, was catalogued most famously in Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy (1655), but love troped as an illness was part of a medical heritage dating to medieval and even classical times. See D. A. Beecher, “Antiochus and Stratonice: the Heritage of a Medico-Literary Motif in the Theater of the English Renaissance,” The Seventeenth Century 5 (1990): 113-32.

56. Geary, 67. See also Karen Newman, “Portia's Ring: Unruly Women and Structures of Exchange in The Merchant of Venice,” SQ 38 (1987): 19-33.

57. Elyot uses the bed-trick as well. To fulfill his friend's desire for Sophronia, Gysippus allows Titus to replace him in the marriage bed, where the marriage ring is presented and the “girdle of virginity” removed (141). Elyot's female accepts the switch without complaint. Thus amity displays not only its charity but also its capacity to improve an outdated system of contract marriage which has failed to consider the role of (male) desire. Shakespeare complicates this motif by having Antonio usurp the ring from its romantic context, then by having Portia later reclaim its value (and bargain with her chastity) when Antonio re-presents the ring as a sign of conjugal amity.

58. For a discussion of Portia's use of her knowledge and wealth to alter the circumstances of her role as daughter, see Lisa Jardine, Reading Shakespeare Historically (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), 58-64. Louis Adrian Montrose analyzes the sexual politics in Elizabeth's court in terms similar to those used here to describe Portia—that is, her efforts to “advance or frustrate the worldly desires of all her subjects”; to exploit “[r]elationships of power and dependency, desire and fear” (“‘Shaping Fantasies’: Figurations of Gender and Power in Elizabethan Culture” in Representing the English Renaissance, Stephen Greenblatt, ed. [Berkeley: U of California P, 1988], 31-64, esp. 45 and 55). Jonathan Goldberg complicates this argument by widening the sweep of court politics to include same-sex erotic bonds (as opposed to limiting desire to heterosexual and “homosocial” relations); see Sodometries: Renaissance Texts, Modern Sexualities (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1992), 29-61.

59. Elyot, 148.

60. Bassanio resembles the false friends in Edwards's Damon and Pithias, one of whom, Aristippus, accuses his double, Carisophus, of betrayal: “My friendship thou soughtest for thine own commodity, / As worldly men do, by profit measuring amity” (68).

61. The fifth act begins with Lorenzo and Jessica trying to “out-night” one another in a scene that may be played, certainly, as a light-hearted game between newlyweds (ll. 1-23). But Jessica's way of emphasizing themes of infidelity in each of Lorenzo's citations can foreshadow the upcoming exposure of unfaithful husbands and may also recall the betrayals in scenes past.

62. Masten in Goldberg, ed., 301-4. On men as bed companions, see also Bray in Goldberg, ed., 42-43; and Bray, Homosexuality, 50-51.

63. Kahn, 111.

64. Elyot, 149.

65. See Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia UP, 1985), 1-5.

66. See Kleinberg's argument that the homosexual Antonio pits himself against Shylock because, as reviled outsiders, they are essentially the same (120). See also Thomas Moisan, “‘Which is the merchant here? and which the Jew?’: subversion and recuperation in The Merchant of Venice” in Shakespeare Reproduced: The text in history and ideology, Jean E. Howard and Marion F. O'Connor, eds. (New York and London: Methuen, 1987), 188-206.

67. Usury as an unnatural use of money was often coupled with sexual perversions. The Jewish body has a history of being depicted as monstrously deformed, a grotesque amalgam of male and female, and his lusts—a confusion of greed, sex, and profanity—as sodomitical. See Gilman, 86 and 258-59; and Marc Shell, “The Wether and the Ewe: Verbal Usury in The Merchant of Venice,” Kenyon Review 1 (1979): 65-92.

68. See Simon Shepherd, “What's so funny about ladies' tailors? A survey of some male (homo)sexual types in the Renaissance,” Textual Practice 6:1 (1992): 17-30. See also Bray, Homosexuality, 67-70.

69. Such changes were by no means steady or consistent. There was, for example, the luxurious if short-lived position of the late-seventeenth-century rake, who displayed his masculinity by flaunting his interest in boys and women. For a study of shifts in the perception of same-sex relations, see Randolph Trumbach, “The Birth of the Queen: Sodomy and the Emergence of Gender Equality in Modern Culture, 1660-1750” in Hidden From History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past, Martin Baum Duberman, Martha Vicinus, and George Chauncey Jr., eds. (New York: New American Library, 1989), 129-40.

70. For sodomy's role in defamatory politics, see Bray in Goldberg, ed.; and Goldberg, Sodometries, 40-61.

71. In Damon and Pithias the corrupt and obdurate Aristippus and Carisophus are exposed for practicing “no friendship, but a lewd liking” (68) and are, at the end, sent away.

72. See Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality Volume 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1990).

73. That men sometimes appropriate a discourse of reproduction, including claims that the male body is generative or capable of pregnancy, may not always or only be a misogynist or patriarchal assertion, nor a sign of perversion or gender confusion. In some contexts, such language and parody defend the worth of other kinds of love or bonds. Mollies who pretended to be pregnant and mimicked the female as wife or mother to the male may have been burlesquing an ideology that limits concepts of (re)generation, nurturance, and devotion as peculiar to the body and nature of the female. On the molly figure, see Bray, Homosexuality, 81-114.

A longer version of this essay was presented in February 1998 to a session of a year-long colloquium entitled “Sexuality, Subjectivity, and Representation in Early Modern Literature,” chaired by Susan Zimmerman at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC. I am grateful to the colloquium members, especially Susan Zimmerman, Jeff Masten, and Michael Neill. Gail Kern Paster and anonymous readers at Shakespeare Quarterly also offered valuable criticism and suggestions.