SOURCE: Sklar, Elizabeth S. “Bassanio's Golden Fleece.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 18, no. 3 (fall 1976): 500-09.

[In the following essay, Sklar highlights similarities between Bassanio and Shylock despite their apparent differences.]

Bassanio is probably the least prepossessing of the principal figures in The Merchant of Venice. Dwarfed by Shylock's monumental passions, Bassanio seems thin-blooded and ultimately rather trivial, and his stature is further diminished by the brilliance and panache of Portia. Yet in some respects Bassanio is as complex and ambiguous a figure as Shylock, if not as fully realized, for although he would seem superficially to be the complete antithesis of Shylock, Bassanio's values and ethic are often uncomfortably similar to those of the usurer. Bassanio shares Shylock's preoccupation with material goods, and is not always able to distinguish between worldly wealth and value of a higher order. He is affectionate, but is also something of an opportunist who uses the affection he inspires in others for material gain. Bassanio's first protestation of love to Antonio is revealing: “To you, Antonio, / I owe the most in money and in love” (I.i.130-31).¹ He is capable of generosity, yet his largesse depends on the fortunes of his friends. Although Bassanio can be properly contemptuous of material wealth when the occasion warrants, he manifests a purely Shylockian ethic when he employs Antonio's loan to marry “a lady richly left.” Surely he is using money to breed money. And if Shylock's monomaniacal obsession with his bond nearly results in Antonio's death, we cannot forget that it is Bassanio's unabashed prodigality that has led Antonio to the courtroom in the first place. Thus Bassanio's virtues are diluted by a distorted sense of values and a puerile disregard for the consequences of his actions.

The ambiguity of Bassanio lies in the fact that he is not a villain but the romantic hero of The Merchant of Venice, charming, well liked by his peers, and capable of inspiring love in the shrewd Antonio and the witty Portia. The problem is, then, can one explain the disjunction between Bassanio's rather serious moral flaws and his overtly romantic role? In general, commentators have either viewed Bassanio as incompletely conceived and thus given him short shrift, or they have attempted to plead his cause, to make him out to be a proper romantic hero, worthy of Antonio's loyalty and Portia's devotion.² But to overlook Bassanio's flaws is to ignore his real contribution to the play. For in his love of money, in his desire for wealth and a rich marriage, Bassanio is a paradigmatic inhabitant of Venice, typical of that society in a way that Portia, a woman, and Shylock, a Jew, cannot be. An understanding of Bassanio may thus provide some insight into the moral climate of The Merchant of Venice; and I should like to suggest here that an important clue as to Bassanio's function in the play—and one that accounts for both his typicality as a Venetian and the apparent clash between his romantic role and the less appealing side of his character—is the metaphorical association of Bassanio with Jason and his quest for the golden fleece.

When Bassanio first introduces the name of Portia into the play (I.i.161-67), it is her “value,” in the material sense, that really captivates him; his diction betrays his motives. He describes Portia as “a lady richly left … nothing undervalued / To Cato's daughter,” and he claims that the whole world is cognizant of her “worth.” He likens her home to Colchos and her person to the golden fleece, implying that he is the Jason who will win her:

                              … her sunny locks
Hang on her temples like a golden fleece,
Which makes her seat of Belmont Colchos strand,
And many Jasons come in quest of her.

(I.i.169-72)

This image, significantly, is picked up again after Bassanio's success with the caskets when Gratiano fairly crows: “We are the Jasons, we have won the fleece” (III.ii.244).

That those allusions hold some special interest is suggested by the fact that no other Shakespearean play alludes to Jason or his quest.³ In a play that is largely concerned with the right uses of and attitudes towards wealth, it cannot be fortuitous that Portia is compared to the golden fleece, always a symbol of desirable and sometimes ill-gained wealth, and Bassanio's quest likened to Jason's. Moreover, these references to Jason are supported by several secondary allusions to the legend of the quest for the golden fleece. Four times, in the course of the play, Antonio's ships are referred to as “argosies” (I.i.9, I.iii.18, III.i.105, V.i.276), and in the love duet that introduces Act V, Jessica is compared with Medea.

On the broadest level of interpretation, Jason is a singularly apt prototype for Bassanio in both achievement and moral character. Although he was traditionally admired for his valor, Jason was also criticized for his opportunism. Thus Jason, who, as Dante has it, gained his reputation “by courage and by guile,”⁴ is characterized by the same moral ambiguity as we find in Bassanio. Both are tainted heroes. More important, Jason, like Bassanio, exercised his talents for the winning of wealth, and it is tempting to regard Bassanio's quest as a parody of Jason's. For as Jason crosses the sea to Colchos in search of the golden fleece, Bassanio sails to Belmont in quest of wealth, the “golden fleece” of Portia and her dowry. Both heroes must undergo a testing process before achieving their respective quests, and as Medea helps Jason by providing enchanted herbs and magical advice, so Portia—according to some readings, at least—aids Bassanio by giving him clues before he selects the lead casket.⁵ Both heroes marry the women who provide them with wealth, swearing oaths of eternal fidelity, oaths that are subsequently broken: Jason deserts Medea for another woman, and Bassanio soon parts with the ring he had sworn to keep until death.

The difference between Bassanio and Jason is essentially the difference between comedy and tragedy: Jason plays for higher stakes. His sea journey is long and arduous, where Bassanio is whisked off almost magically to Belmont. Jason's testing takes the form of dangerous physical combat, while Bassanio's test is merely a guessing game in which he stands to lose no more than high hopes should he fail, and neither his own life nor his reputation is at stake.⁶ Jason's marriage is miserable, and his broken oath gives rise to murderous violence, where Bassanio has won a better wife than he deserves, and his broken oath results in another elaborate game of which he is the ultimate winner. The parodic contrast between Bassanio and his mythological prototype, which is the contrast between courage and charm, heroism and gamesmanship, provides on one level a commentary on the fate of heroism in a modern, commercially oriented society. Bassanio's heroism, if we can call it that, is vicarious; he is passive and highly dependent on others. Typically he risks someone else's life for his own profit, and it is Portia whose wit and courage finally defeat the “wolfish” Shylock. Bassanio is not entirely to blame, of course, since he is the product of a society which, dedicated to the very concrete goal of making money, apparently has no place for abstract heroic concepts.

I believe, however, that the analogy between Bassanio and Jason goes beyond the merely parodic, and in order to understand fully Bassanio's significance as a Jason, it may be useful to examine briefly the interpretations given to the legend of Jason and his quest in the medieval mythographic tradition inherited by the Renaissance. In the course of this discussion, I shall suggest that Bassanio, although not a “figure” in the allegorical sense, is modeled in part on the Jason of Book V of Gower's Confessio Amantis.⁷

While it is perhaps simplistic to suggest that there existed any one interpretation of Jason's history, since both mythographers and poets were apt to use ancient legend as it best suited their immediate purposes, there is a clearly unified body of interpretation in the moralist mythographic tradition in which Jason becomes a figure of “untrouthe.” Dante had already assigned Jason, with his “fair pledges and words of gold,”⁸ to the eighth circle of Hell, when the Ovide Moralisé, in its rather farfetched exegesis, glossed Jason as a figure of the man who has forgotten Christ and thus betrayed Him, and it is as a betrayer that Jason appears in subsequent moral interpretations of the legend. In the Middle English translation of Christine de Pisan's Epistle of Othea to Hector, for example, Jason is a villain “whoose untrouthe and doublenes al knyghtes dispyse,”⁹ and in Chaucer's Legend of Good Women he is described as a “devourer and dragoun” of love who, after swearing to Medea that “he for lef or loth / Ne sholde nevere hire false” (ll. 1639-40), abandons her for another woman, “evere in love a chef traytour.”¹⁰ Likewise, Lydgate remarks in his Troy Book that “[Jason] was false and eke unkynde” to Medea (l. 3603) whom he “hath for-sake ful unkyndely” (l. 3694).¹¹

Gower's treatment of the Jason legend in Book V of Confessio Amantis is worth examining in some detail, since the themes of Book V bear a striking similarity to thematic material in The Merchant of Venice. We know that Shakespeare was familiar with Gower's work, having drawn upon it for material in The Comedy of Errors and Pericles.¹² Book V, moreover, contains two versions of the casket motif which, while they differ in detail from Shakespeare's treatment, evince striking thematic and verbal parallels with MV [The Merchant of Venice], notably in the use of the casket motif as an illustration of the precept that “every man mot take his chance” (l. 2260). We may recall Portia's laconic “You must take your chance” (II.i.44) to Morocco as he dithers before the caskets. As a corollary, Gower's Confessor shows, through the casket stories, that the determining factor in an individual's success is often not effort or desire but a lucky toss of the dice: “So mai it schew in sondri wise / Betwen fortune and covoitise / The chance is cast upon a Dee” (ll. 2434-36). Morocco echoes this theme himself: “If Hercules and Lichas play at dice / Which is the better man, the greater throw / May turn by fortune from the weaker hand” (II.i.32-34), although he lacks the wisdom to follow his own teaching. Finally, Gower uses the casket motif to demonstrate that the concept of “just deserts” is unsound: “For ofte a man mai se this yit, / That who best doth, lest thank schal have” (ll. 2264-65). This applies equally well to Antonio, who for his generosity is almost rewarded with destitution and death, and to Bassanio, whose mere existence seems to bring him good fortune.¹³

Because of its treatment of the casket motif, Confessio Amantis has sometimes been cited as an analogue for The Merchant of Venice. Of more significance, I think, is Gower's treatment of the Jason legend and the larger themes of Book V. The principal theme of this book is covetousness in love, which is characterized by a confusion in the mind of the lover between true emotion and love of money. A man is guilty of covetousness in love if he desires a woman because of her wealth:

Riht only for the covoitise
Of that thei sen a womman riche
Ther wol thei al hire love affiche;
Noght for the beaute of hire face.

(ll. 2518-21)

Gower's Confessor uses the legend of Jason and his quest to illustrate one aspect of covetousness in love, namely the untruth that inevitably follows from a vow of love that is only half sincere. Jason, in the hands of moral Gower, becomes specifically a figure of Perjury, which “spareth nought to swere an oth / Thogh it be fals” (ll. 2867-68):

Anon he wole his hand doun lien
Upon a bok, and swere and sein
That he wole feith and trouthe bere,
To serven evere til he die.

(ll. 2889-92)

Thus we find Jason swearing to Medea that “Thei scholde nevere parte atwinne, / Bot evere whil him lasteth lif / He wolde hire holde for his wif” (ll. 3490-92). The Confessor's recounting of the remainder of the legend is a lesson in the potentially disastrous effects of Perjury in love.

The Merchant of Venice is hardly a morality play, and no character, however minor, is merely a “figure,” but the relationship between Gower's interpretation of the legend of Jason and Bassanio's role and character in MV is highly suggestive. In the first place, The Merchant of Venice is largely a play about covetousness in its various manifestations, and if Shylock represents greed in its purest form, Bassanio is clearly guilty of the lesser sin of covetousness in love as it is defined by Gower's Confessor. We need only recall Bassanio's first words about Portia: he immediately observes that she is a lady “richly left” whom he describes in terms of her “worth,” identifying her “sunny locks” with the golden fleece. In deference to Bassanio's nicer side, one must acknowledge that he loves Portia for the “beaute of hire face” as well, but one doubts if he would have wooed her with such enthusiasm had she not been wealthy since, by his own admission, he is in desperate need of money. There is—initially, at least—a confusion of wealth with love in Bassanio's mind.

As Gower's exemplum of Jason illustrates “what sorwe it doth / To swere an oth which is noght soth, / In loves cause namely” (ll. 4223-25), so does Bassanio's story, in the form of the ring plot. Like Gower's Perjury and his Jason, Bassanio swears “to serven evere til he die” when he receives the ring from Portia:

But when this ring
Parts from this finger, then parts life from hence:
O, then be bold to say Bassanio's dead!

(III.ii.185-87)

Bassanio is inevitably perjured. It is worth observing here that although Bassanio, unlike his mythical prototype, is not sexually unfaithful to Portia, adulterous overtones are present throughout the latter portions of Act V: “I'll die for't,” says Portia, “but some woman had the ring” (V.i.208). Bassanio is certainly “untrewe” for he relinquishes the ring to the “young doctor” within a matter of hours after his vow is made. Shakespeare eschews Gower's harsh moralism, of course, and converts a potentially tragic situation into comic confusion; but the perjury Bassanio commits concerning the ring is significant enough to require an entire act to mend the wrong that he has done. And while it must be noted that Bassanio, the victim of a cunningly laid trap, cannot be held morally responsible for his perjury, his “untrouthe,” like his covetousness, reflects a theme of central importance in the play.

It is through his Jasonian character that Bassanio's relationship to the world of The Merchant of Venice and to the other characters may best be explained. For Bassanio's Jasonian traits are reflected by other figures in the play, and his moral weaknesses—covetousness and perjury—are the principal flaws bred by the Venetian world of commerce and merchandise.

The confusion of money and love (Gower's covetousness in love) is expressed by a number of characters. Gratiano, for example, always Bassanio's rather unsavory double, includes himself in Bassanio's quest when he exclaims “We are the Jasons, we have won the fleece” (III.ii.244; emphasis mine). Although Antonio is the exemplar of loyal friendship, he, like Bassanio, sometimes speaks of friendship in monetary terms, as if on some level he were willing to purchase the love that Bassanio would sell: “Your worth is very dear in my regard” (I.i.60) he assures Salerio, and to Bassanio he vows “my purse, my person, my extremest means / Lie all unlocked to your occasions” (I.i.138-39). Shylock's “My daughter! My ducats!” is perhaps only an exaggerated form of the confusion of values expressed in a more subtle manner by Bassanio and Antonio. Antonio is further implicated in the Jasonian analogy in that he sails the seas in his “argosies”¹⁴ in perpetual quest of wealth, and the disastrous failure of his mercantile ventures is specifically equated with the loss of the golden fleece: Salerio retorts to Gratiano's boasting, “I would you had won the fleece that [Antonio] hath lost” (III.ii.245).

At a further remove from the central plot, the relationship between Jessica and Lorenzo reflects the legend of Jason and Medea in small. Lorenzo, like Bassanio and Gratiano, is marrying wealth. He is fully aware before his elopement with Jessica “what gold and jewels she is furnished with” (II.iv.32), and once again the lover succeeds in a tricky venture through the cleverness of his mistress: the escape and elopement are orchestrated entirely by Jessica, and all Lorenzo has to do is to follow instructions. It can hardly be coincidental that Jessica compares herself with Medea, although she misses the fine irony in the comparison: “In such a night / Medea gathered the enchanted herbs / That did renew old Æson” (V.i.13-15). Lorenzo's cynical riposte is more to the point: “In such a night / Did Jessica steal from the wealthy Jew / And with an unthrift love did run from Venice” (V.i.16-18). For like Medea, Jessica abandoned her father and her race, absconding with Shylock's carefully hoarded wealth and leaving emotional devastation in her wake.

The Merchant of Venice is as much a play about oaths as it is about love and the right uses of wealth, and Bassanio's “untrouthe,” his inability to fulfill his oath to Portia, is as thematically central as is his confusion of love and money. The play abounds in oaths: we have Shylock's “oath in heaven,” Portia's oath not to reveal the right coffer even to the man she loves, Bassanio's oath to Portia, and Antonio's double bond to Shylock. And every oath, with the possible exception of Portia's, is broken, usually against the desires of the oath-taker: Shylock cannot fulfill his unholy oath because he is outwitted by Portia; because his ships are lost at sea, Antonio cannot repay Shylock's loan, and even his willingness to pay the grim collateral is thwarted by Portia's legal sophism; and Bassanio, forced to choose between Portia's apparent whim and a compelling debt of gratitude, hands over the precious ring. The consequences of perjury, as it is defined in MV, range from Bassanio's discomfort to the near-death of Antonio and the emotional and financial destitution of Shylock. While Shakespeare is less stern than Gower—he does not overtly condemn his characters for breaking their oaths—he does suggest, through the action of the play, that “untrouthe” is inherent in the very act of taking an oath, and that unpleasant consequences attend on the inevitable perjury that follows oath-taking.

The analogy between Bassanio and Jason is admittedly limited, in that it is metaphorical rather than figural. Nonetheless, Bassanio's association with Jason and his quest for the golden fleece helps to explain his double nature, to reconcile his role with his character, and the reflection of Bassanio's Jasonian traits by other figures in The Merchant of Venice suggests his thematic function and tells us something about the values of Venice and about societies in general which “have too much respect upon the world.” Most obviously, a society dedicated to monetary profit is possessed of a perverted value system, so that affection is often measured by, or even confused with, money and property, a confusion exhibited in varying degrees by Bassanio, Antonio, Gratiano, Lorenzo, and Shylock. Nor can vows be kept, regardless of the determination or sincerity with which they are made. In the world of Venice, such ideals as unselfish love and fidelity to truth cannot exist in unadulterated form because they are incompatible with the human weaknesses fostered by such a society.

Bassanio is the product of that world and a mirror of its values, the “perfect” representative of an imperfect society. And perhaps in their Jasonian guise, Bassanio and the other Venetians comment indirectly upon Shakespeare's world as well. The Argo of classical legend has been said to represent “a single embodiment of all the pioneers who went out to seek a distant treasure, who followed a road that led past Colchis to the riches of a vast continent; and the Golden Fleece becomes a type of all these riches.”¹⁵ Elizabethan England, too, had her Argonauts.

Notes

1. Quotations from The Merchant of Venice (MV) are taken from The Complete Works of Shakespeare, ed. Hardin Craig (Chicago: Scott, Foresman and Co., 1951).

2. See, for example, Helen Pettigrew, “Bassanio, the Elizabethan Lover,” PQ, [Philological Quarterly] 16 (1937), 296-306; J. M. Ariall, “In Defence of Bassanio,” Shak. Assoc. Bul., 16 (1941), 25-28; and Charles Read Baskervill, “Bassanio as an Ideal Lover,” in The Manly Anniversary Studies (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1923), pp. 90-103.

3. John Bartlett's A Complete Concordance or Verbal Index to Words, Phrases and Passages in the Dramatic Works of Shakespeare (London: Macmillan, 1894), lists a number of allusions to Medea, but none outside MV to Jason. It is possible that Shakespeare drew the idea for his comparison of Bassanio with Jason from Marlowe's The Jew of Malta, where, in Act IV, scene ii, Ithamore says to Bellamira “I'll be thy Jason, thou my golden fleece.” However, this is the sole allusion to the legend in Marlowe's play, and he does not turn it to any thematic use, except, perhaps, to underscore Ithamore's pagan nature.

4. Laurence Binyon's translation of The Divine Comedy in The Portable Dante, rev. ed. (New York: Viking Press, 1959), Canto XVIII of The Inferno, 86 (p. 97).

5. Although Portia happily lacks Medea's penchant for hysteria and violence, she is, like Medea, an enchantress of sorts, who is willing to take courageous and unconventional action to ensure the success of the man she wishes to marry. As Medea magically protects Jason from the dragon, Portia secretly manages to extricate Bassanio from the moral dangers posed by Shylock's threat to Antonio's life. I am grateful to Professor John Velz, who suggested that there are further similarities between Portia and Medea, noting that “witchlike, [Portia] brings magical good news at the end, ‘you shall not know’ by what means she found it; and it might even be said that like Medea she brings success out of disaster, ‘renewing’ Antonio as Medea did ‘old Æson.’”

6. This assertion requires some qualification, perhaps, since apparently Portia's suitors are required to swear, should they select the wrong casket, “Never to speak to lady afterward / In way of marriage” (II.i.41-42). It is worth noting, however, that the interchange between Portia and Bassanio before he makes his selection contains no reference to the oath to which Morocco is sworn.

7. Shakespeare was undoubtedly familiar with contemporary readings of the Jason legend, such as those found in the dictionaries of Cooper and Stephanus, and, of course, with Golding's translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses. Interestingly, however, Renaissance mythographers apparently found Medea more compelling than Jason; Cooper's Thesaurus, for example, contains no entry under “Iason,” although a sizable paragraph is devoted to Medea, and Book Seven of the Metamorphoses relates the legend primarily from Medea's point of view.

8. The Portable Dante, p. 98.

9. Middle English translation attributed to Anthony Babyngton, ed. James D. Gordon (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1942); quoted from Legend LIV.

10. The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. F. N. Robinson, 2d ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957).

11. Lydgate's Troy Book, ed. Henry Bergen, EETS [Early English Text Society] es, vol. 97.

12. See Geoffrey Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1957), vol. 1, for discussion of Shakespeare's use of Gower.

13. All quotations from Confessio Amantis are taken from the edition of G. C. Macaulay, EETS es LXXXII (1901). An additional thematic parallel between MV and Gower may be the latter's discourse on usury in Book V, shortly following his tale of Jason and Medea.

14. There is some debate as to whether “argosie” in sixteenth-century usage bore any reference to Jason's ship. The editors of the NED argue that there is no connection. However, the commonest form of the word in the passages they cite is some variant of raguze, and taken in conjunction with the other allusions to the Jason legend in MV, I would argue that the use of “argosie” in this play retains its classical connotations.

15. J. R. Bacon, The Voyage of the Argonauts (London: Methuen, 1925), p. 163.