[In the following essay, originally written in 1991, Stockholder reads The Merchant of Venice as the dream of Portia's dead father in order to unravel the play's psychological and social concerns with wealth and sexual desire.]

Psychoanalytic criticism over the years has generated a refined understanding of the ways literature renders the complex, dynamic organization of human emotion. However, there are two persistent grounds on which most forms of psychoanalytic literary practice have been censured. The first is that they detach literary portrayals of human complexities from the social and political institutions, conscious values, and cognitive systems in which literature embeds them. In concentrating on a presumed latent content, psychoanalytic criticism tends to ignore the interaction between the unconscious emotions and ideas, those that would derive from the past of persons like those represented, and the present world they are depicted as confronting. By limiting meaningfulness to unconscious motivations, this critical approach depreciates representations of social reality, consciousness, and cognition. The second charge against psychoanalytic criticism is that it fails to account for the formal characteristics and aesthetic dimensions of literature. This omission generates criticism that reduces literature to authorial biography, or to characters' case histories; to projecting screens for its audiences' predilections, or to sets of rhetorical manipulations of its readers.¹

The mode of criticism that this chapter will bring to bear on The Merchant of Venice includes these otherwise excluded dimensions by taking the protagonist as the dreamer of his play.² To regard the entire configu-ration of the drama as the protagonist's dream renders significant all that he confronts as external to himself, and reads the genre form itself as expressive of the dreamer's habitual stance towards his or her emotional life. He is analogous not to us dreaming, but rather to the figure in our dreams that we identify as ourselves when we awaken. As well, the play's conclusion reveals the desire implicit in its beginning, and provides thereby the psychological concomitant to the sense of inevitability that contributes to the aesthetic force of fiction. The play's formal properties, the discourse in which the story is articulated, express the modes by which the protagonist mediates between the demands of unacknowledged desires that shape what he confronts as an external world, and his consciously espoused values. This approach makes appropriate some Lacanian and semiotic vocabulary, that is, to trace the ways in which various aspects of the text, including what one normally thinks of as characters, function as a chain of interlocking signifiers. However, unlike Lacanian approaches it centers the work in subjective human experience. Seeing each component as a signifier that collects the affect of multiple signifieds allows one to trace the changing ways in which aspects of works that are generally the focus of psychoanalytic study are linked to, or signify, the dominant ideas that constitute the social and cultural nexus of the worlds that produce them. The entire work becomes a picture of the protagonist's strategy of signification as he negotiates between the demands of unconscious drives, his conscious value systems, and what he experiences as his external worlds. The work becomes a chain of the protagonist's associations that reveals the way his self-experience is interconnected to the structure of signification that constitutes his culture (Silverman 1983). Therefore, to regard the play as the protagonist's dream keeps us closer to and takes more account of the play's surface than does a conventional psychoanalytic account. It addresses the formal patterns of action without losing sight of an experiencing human consciousness within them. By attending to the relationships between conscious and unconscious states, rather than regarding the products of consciousness as clues to what they conceal, one can ascertain some possible emotional correlates of lives shaped within a historical reality other than one's own.

While in principle one can regard any figure as the protagonist of the play, to choose a figure at the periphery of the action is to read the play as the dream of one who defines himself as observer rather than as participant in her or his world. In tragic or serious literature things fall into place more simply by choosing a figure who is at the play's emotional center, so that the choice of whom to regard as protagonist is relatively straightforward. It is, however, the nature of comedy to obscure its emotional center, and to substitute plot for feeling in a way that renders comedy, viewed in this way, as revelatory of more deeply repressed material than is tragedy. That is, while watching a tragedy we are more engaged in the action as it affects the central characters than for its own sake, while the reverse is so for comedy. Therefore, in comedy one often more deftly penetrates the play's emotional center by attending to whomever or whatever functions as the moving force of the plot, however obscure the figure may seem, rather than by focusing on the most emotionally heightened figure. In The Merchant of Venice, the central focus of this chapter, all the action stems from Portia's dead father. He arranges his daughter's marriage, and sets in motion all that flows from it. Therefore I will regard this shadowy figure as the dreamer of the play.

This choice is more heuristic than substantive. That is, one could select any of the characters, Shylock, Antonio, Portia, Bassanio, or even Lorenzo. Ultimately one would be telling the same story from different perspectives; for each figure the others would signify repudiated aspects of his or her emotional configuration. For example, if one chose Portia as dreamer, the dead but still influential father would reveal her ambivalence about the paternal authority that she contests in assuming power over the other male figures. Her psychological drama would be the mirror image of her father's, whose ambivalence about male authority is manifested in his retreat from it and in his substitution of Portia for himself (see ). However, designating the Father as dreamer draws one in more immediately to the male psychodynamic that generates the play and choosing him rather than one of the other male figures highlights the significance of the plot line that derives from his initial retreat. All the action flows from his move to control his daughter's marriage and the transmission of his wealth.

Therefore to think about the play as the Father's dream relates the central concerns with wealth and money, which shape the figures and actions he defines as external and separate from himself, to the psychological significance of the emotionally heightened aspects that more readily suggest psychodynamic meanings. To bring Portia's father from the obscurity of his grave is to locate in a subject what otherwise appear as textual gaps and breaks, and to read them as links in a semiotic chain that is bounded within the single text. In this way one can penetrate most efficaciously what one might call the play's social psychology, or its political unconscious, in relationship to the more usual concerns of psychoanalytic criticism.

To foreground this occulted figure casts light on otherwise obscure links between this play and others, some of which I will indicate in the process of the argument that follows. As the attributes of characters combine and recombine into a variety of figures in other plays, Shakespeare adopts different strategies to harmonize the conflicts that in his world inhere in romantic marriage. These links suggest that the concern with money that is so obvious in this play has submerged importance in other plays by Shakespeare, and that the conflicting ideologies of this play were not resolved, but rather were submerged in his later work. However, to move in this way from a textual to an intertextual frame, and to relate the experience of one protagonist to that of another, one clearly must consider Shakespeare to be the dreamer, and the various protagonists as avatars of one who casts himself as an invisible observer to his own vast dream.

To think about Shakespeare as the dreamer does not imply that the plays, like dreams, took shape without conscious intention and craft. Rather, to do so assumes that in addition to conscious decisions about what kind of play to write and what ideas it was to incorporate, an intuitive sense of what was fitting guided Shakespeare in making the myriad of choices from the ways his world made it possible for him to accomplish his goals.³ Such intuitive choices, ranging from the largest components, such as genre, convention, and dramatis personae, to the smallest details of language, draw on the psychic forces that shape dreams out of the contents of our waking lives. In order to elucidate these links between personal psychology and public ideology, the last part of this chapter will place in their historical context the interrelated concerns with marriage and money that emerge from this study.

Considering Portia's father as the dreamer renders The Merchant of Venice like a dream of one for whom only such a radically self-denying strategy as dying could provide a compromise between contradictory ideas and desires. His having dreamt himself dead suggests self-hatred and condemnation so intense that he cannot live with himself. Having thus avoided the challenge to become conscious of his psychic drama, he idealizes himself as a beneficent magical power reaching into the world from beyond the grave. He reveals Portia's centrality to the conflicted emotions from which he retreated by the central role he assigns her. His desires pull in two contrary directions. On the one hand, his desire that she join him in the grave to which he has retreated appears in the world-weariness of her opening words, "By my troth, Nerissa, my little body is aweary of this great world" (I.ii.1-2). She makes a more oblique but more trenchant connection between death and marriage, or death and sexuality, when she says that she would "rather be married to a death's-head with a bone in his mouth" than to her suitors. This grotesque image adds a sexual dimension to Portia's world-weariness, which indicates that the Father has initiated, but not completed, a version of a love-death romance such as is suggested when Lear wants to "crawl towards death" while living with Cordelia, and is explicit in Pericles between Antiochus and his daughter. The Father's concentration on Portia's marriage reveals not only his denied incestuous desires; the fact that his sexuality is expressed through incest connotes his association of sexuality in general with the debasement of family affection, violation, evil, and death. This last association is made through his own dream death, as well as in the risk of death incurred by those who seek Portia's hand.⁴ This aspect of his mentality remains submerged,but it is the opposite side to the idealization of Portia, who, once married, becomes the Father's surrogate magical agent to preside over Belmont, which functions as a Neoplatonic alternative to the commercial Venice.

While Portia's language manifests the Father's pull on her, his revulsion from his own desires forces a compromise formation in which he substitutes for his forbidden erotic desires control over her marriage choice and the disposition of his wealth. The tension between these contrary pulls appears in Portia's lament that she "may neither choose whom I would nor refuse whom I dislike; so is the will of a living daughter curbed by the will of a dead father" (I.ii.25-7).⁵ The Father jus-tifies his hold on her by defining himself as a benign magus whose power will serve her interests when Nerissa says that only one "who you shall rightly love" (I.i.36) will choose the right casket. By thus idealizing himself as a benign magical force, as Prospero more overtly does later, the Father achieves a sleight-of-hand reconciliation between his craving for control, which functions as a devious expression of and substitute for sexual desire, and a romantic conception of marriage. That is, Portia's father cannot forgo his paternal dominion, which is energized by his denied sexual desire; but he cannot assert it explicitly because his ideology of marriage incorporates romantic love. He exonerates himself by defining his control as a magical emanation from the grave that serves not only Portia's best interests, but also her desires. By these means the Father achieves a trickster's reconciliation of the usually mutually exclusive desires both to control his daughter's will and have her marry for love.

However, marriage based on romantic love conflicts not only with the Father's erotic claims; it conflicts as well with the function of marriage as a means of ensuring the transmission of wealth. The pivotal place of wealth in the Father's psyche first appears when Nerissa rebukes Portia for failing to appreciate the abundance of her fortunes (II.i.4-5). It is inscribed more deeply in the casket device that inaugurates the play's major action. Here the Father expresses both his espoused ideal of romantic marriage uncontaminated by material concerns and his sense of the danger of such contamination. The underlying equation of love and money appears in the elaborate denial of the casket device, which associates Portia with valueless lead and gold with "carrion death." In this configuration the Father radically separates love and marriage from money and wealth, but reveals the hidden links by associating Portia with the golden fleece. On the one hand that image presages Portia's function as representative of spiritual gold, but the denied material desires condition the plot in which Portia is a material golden fleece for Bassanio. Bassanio's need for money in order to achieve status and wealth and Antonio's presumed indifference to the money he has acquired from commerce (that is, from buying cheap and selling dear) show the opposed levels of material concerns sliding into and representing each other. The sleight of hand by which the Father reconciles the competing claims of romance and the transmission of inheritance reveals not only his erotically charged concentration on controlling his wealth, but also the self-hatred occasioned by desires that would destroy his self-image should he espouse them. The only compromise he has found for these convoluted desires has been to retreat into death while designing a fairy-tale world to perpetuate images of himself that defend him from self-hatred and self-condemnation.

As we will see later, the Father's psychological dilemma has its roots in the consequences of a romantic ideology of marriage. While marriage was conceived primarily as a financial arrangement between families, a father of daughters was required to part with some of his wealth for their dowries, but he could substitute for forbidden erotic desires an intense connection to a daughter through controlling her will. If a daughter is to marry for love, then her father loses the compensatory satisfaction of control. As Cordelia later puts it, not only will she give her husband half her heart; her love rather than only her father's choice will determine the destination of the dowry. Portia's father, however, has not only accepted romantic marriage, but spiritualized it. Having rendered it symbolic of transcendent, as opposed to material, gold, he must drive his material concerns into his unconscious where they join the guilt and shame associated with forbidden incestuous desires. Having thus fused love and wealth, the Father becomes an aristocratic version of Shylock's confusion of daughters with ducats.⁶

The emotional strife between desires and the values that render them guilty shapes the two paternal surrogates into which he splits himself, Antonio and Shylock, each of whom becomes the other's alter ego. The self-image generated by his denied desires generates Shylock, the Jew denied by society. His possessiveness of Portia appears as Shylock's of Jessica, while his shame for conflating Portia with wealth appears in Shylock's explicit equation of the two—"My daughter, my ducats." In caricaturing Shylock's ugliness and grasping possessiveness, the Father portrays his repressed self-image and the concomitant self-loathing that forced him to repudiate his desires. Though the Father foregrounds Shylock's hatred of Antonio and his love of money, it is Jessica's elopement with Lorenzo that triggers the climactic action. The play obscures whether it was in jest only that Shylock made the bond with Antonio, but it is certainly only after Jessica's marriage that the jest turns to earnest. The linked sexual and monetary components of Shylock's claim on Jessica also appear when Shylock laments that she has stolen her mother's jewels, in effect stealing the dowry that the court later forces him to give her. This configuration reveals the Father's fears that unless he retains extraordinary powers, his daughter's free choice of a husband will wrest his wealth from him and debase his family.

In a self-splitting more radical than that of King Lear, who victimizes Cordelia while victimizing himself to Goneril and Regan, in the despised Shylock the Father embodies his fierce possessiveness of both daughters and ducats, and in the melancholy Antonio he expresses his grief and drift toward death. This is the emotional consequence of having repressed both his erotic and monetary passions. He also embodies in Antonio a short-circuited quest for a homoerotic alternative to his embattled heterosexuality. However, he associates homoeroticism with a depletion of life energies that is expressed in the loss of money. Antonio betrays the same associations of love with wealth that are expressed in the casket motif. Just as the motif betrays the equation of love with money that it is intended to conceal, so do Antonio's answers to his fellow merchants when they ask why he is melancholy. To their suggestion that he is melancholy because he cannot cool his soup or go to church without bringing to mind the rocks upon which the winds might drive his ships, Antonio denies that all his wealth is at hazard. He denies as well their suggestion that he grieves for Bassanio's imminent departure. But the action belies both denials, for were all his wealth not at hazard he would have been able to meet the bond that he would not in the first place have had to make. And were he not grieving for Bassanio, he would not cast himself as competitor with Portia for Bassanio's love, as he does in the trial scene when he uses his predicament as a means by which to draw Bassanio away from Portia.⁷ He explic-itly contrasts his self-sacrificing love to Portia's when he tells Bassanio to, "Say how I lov'd you, speak me fair in death; / And, when the tale is told, bid her be the judge / Whether Bassanio had not once a love" (IV.i.276-78). As well, when he urges Bassanio to part with Portia's ring, he demands that Balthazar's "deserving, and my love withal / Be valu'd gainst your wife's commandment" (IV.i.454-55).

The action in which Antonio's coffers are drained by Bassanio's pecuniary needs associates the Father's homoerotic move with loss of wealth, which is in turn associated with the loss of the life's blood that will drain from Antonio should Shylock cut his pound of flesh. The two are further linked by the image in which Bassanio tells Portia that "I freely told you all the wealth I had / Ran in my veins" (III.ii.255-56).⁸ In Antonio's melancholy, then, the Father expresses the emotional consequence of having repressed both forms of erotic satisfaction, along with the desire for money that signifies them both. Antonio's apparently unmotivated self-denigration as a "tainted wether of the flock" surrounds his figure with an aura of self-loathing and death that reveal him as an emanation from the Father's grave.

But the intensity of hatred between the wolfish Shylock and his natural prey, the flock's tainted wether, Antonio, is so great that it raises the possibility of another and darker level of homosexuality than appears in the gentle relationship between Antonio and Bassanio. As we have seen, in Shylock the Father manifests the repressed conflation of incestuous desire and ruthless greed and consequent self-loathing that bars his access to heterosexual love. Shylock's remoteness from his own figure, both socially and in the topography of his dream, manifests his underlying vision of himself as a social outcast. Having marginalized Shylock in this way, he also expresses through the intensity of the mutual hatred of Shylock and Antonio, out of which they forge their "bond," his most deeply buried homosexual eroticism. In turn, homosexuality is also associated with Shylock's open display of the greed and possessiveness for which the Father despises himself. This complex of feeling appears in the configuration created by Bassanio, Antonio, and Shylock, in which he rejects as debasing and disgusting his unconscious desire for his socially outcast alter ego, and masks it with his attachment to the more socially acceptable Bassanio. In the figure of Bassanio he asserts his rights to membership in the aristocratic world in which generosity and insouciance about the money upon which its display depends is a necessary symbol of rank and status (Stone 1967). Representing in Antonio the frustration and self-hatred that surfaces in consciousness only as melancholy and ennui, he forges a compromise between frustrated desire and fear by moving towards a nightmare version of sexual fulfillment. In Shylock's refusal to accept reified money in lieu of Antonio's literal flesh, the Father desublimates his desire, and in the culminating scene in which Antonio bares his breast to Shylock's knife, he reveals his terror of and desire for an enactment that will simultaneously punish and gratify his guilty desires. Furthermore, by casting Antonio as Shylock's victim with Bassanio as audience he has additional gratification of seeing Bassanio feel guilt for taking his daughter and with her his wealth, while, through Antonio, simultaneously enjoying being the object both of his horrified and loving gaze and of Shylock's terrible intimacy. He assuages his guilt through Shylock's punishment, and through Antonio gets the masochistic reward of being victimized, as well as the delight of being the object of Portia's compassionate concern. In this way the Father's dream exemplifies Freud's depiction of the way the superego taps the resources of the id.⁹

The strategy of splitting enables the Father to keep both his surrogates in the land of the living, but the inadequacy of the compromise appears in the fact that both Shylock and Antonio are in the end comforted only by the wealth, without which they would, in Antonio's words, "view with hollow eye and wrinkled brow / An age of poverty" (IV.i.271-72), an odd conclusion to a play that thematically opposes Venetian reified value to Belmont's spiritual gold. Shylock has only enough money to survive in his bitter humiliation, and the Father generates no fourth female to sweep Antonio into the comedic celebration of multiple marriages. To the end he remains an isolated and melancholy figure. These hidden links between the hero and the villain, two figures who are on the surface so radically opposed, reveal that the Jew is not as alien as the Father would like him to be. The failure to resolve the conflicts that generate the play appears as well in Shylock's unsettling comparison of his rights to Antonio's flesh to the Venetian rights over their purchased slaves. The ambivalence about the commerce that characterizes Venice and that her laws are designed to protect also generates sympathy for Shylock. The underlying sense that Antonio and Shylock are twin births, that Shylock functions as scapegoat for the love of money upon which Venice is founded and Belmont is dependent, wells up in Shylock's assertion of his humanity and justifies his vengefulness.¹⁰ It also reflects the Father's ultimate unwillingness completely to forgo his unacknowledged desires, as well as his underlying rage at having been forced to repress them.

The Father's ambivalence about the ideology in terms of which he conceives his cure fractures the light that plays around Portia and problematizes the play's emotional impact. In order both to inherit her father's mantle and to remain a desirable sexual object, she must demonstrate feminine submissiveness, first to her father's will and then to Bassanio. However, her submission of herself and her estate must be token only; she must be heir to her father's power in order to cure in Venice her father's ills. The virtue that is to be therapeutic or redemptive is compassion, as it is in Desdemona, Cordelia, and Miranda, though they are denied Portia's shaping power. Portia shows her compassion first in her eagerness to rescue Antonio, and later in pleading for mercy that is "as the gentle rain from heaven." However, compassion and mercy are private and quiet virtues; to heal a sick world and the Father from whom that world has issued, these virtues must be wedded to the more active and difficult public virtue of justice. Therefore, while protecting the feminine image by having Portia don male disguise, the Father ascribes to her the wisdom and power by which he defines himself, as well as the trickster mentality that allows him to give the illusion of reconciling the conflicting demands of justice and mercy. But justice is a harsh virtue, one easily confused with cruelty. The cunning Portia inherits from him empowers her compassion, but it also entails a capacity for cruelty that threatens to tarnish her image as advocate of mercy and agent of harmony. This capacity also relates her to Shylock in a way that threatens to merge her image into his in ways dangerous to the entire configuration. Furthermore, since she punishes Shylock for his greed and cruelty, and he functions as a stand-in for repudiated aspects of the father, her punishment of Shylock fulfills the Father's fearful desire for the punishment he thinks justice demands. The Father's misgivings about the only compromise formation he has been able to generate are expressed in the precarious comedy of the trial scene when Bassanio and Shylock in turn celebrate Portia as "a Daniel come to judgment."

Portia's money also links her to Shylock. Shylock's gold allows Bassanio to win Portia and endangers Antonio, while Portia's money is the necessary, though not sufficient, condition for her activity. The final action links the two more closely, when, without explaining the source of her knowledge, Portia informs Antonio that his ships are returned and his wealth secure. This odd circumstance reveals the complicity of the idealized Neoplatonic Belmont with the commercialized Venice to which it is posited as a spiritual alternative. The polarized images of society are represented by polarized images of Portia as at once compassionate and cruel. The split in woman's image is not fully realized here, since both sides inhere in the same figure.¹¹ In King Lear the split is more radical; Cordelia,who will not give love for money, symbolizes a transcendent idealization of traditional order, while Goneril and Regan's greed, and the wealth and status to which Edmund aspires through them, demonize the actuality. Since sexuality is associated with the evil sisters, male heterosexual desires come to signify desire for every kind of violation, all of which are in turn signified by incest. As we will see later, incest taboos concern the transmission of wealth as do other marital prohibitions.

All of these motifs are inextricably knotted into the pound of flesh around which the action turns. In Freudian terms it is an overdetermined dream element; in Lacanian terms it is a floating signifier hungry for signifieds, which in turn function as signifiers for it. Its most obvious signified is the money for which it is substituted, but money, as we have seen, has been equated with both Portia and Jessica. Therefore, the passion for money is fueled by the desire for woman's body, Portia's "little body," that it also represents. Shylock's desire for it then expresses the Father's denied desire for both money and his daughter, equated with each other. The Father has also associated money with the relation between Antonio and Bassanio. Antonio's denied desires for Bassanio being signified by the money which enables him both to send him to Portia and to call him back. Shylock's refusal to accept money as a substitute for Antonio's flesh expresses the ambivalent homoeroticism with which the Father has tinged Antonio's figure. The fears that render the homosexual element elusive between Antonio and Bassanio appear in the ferocious hatred between Shylock and Antonio. Antonio's willingness to sacrifice his pound of flesh for Bassanio and Shylock's desire for it associate homosexuality with castration. In turn, castration signifies death when Portia exposes Shylock's murderous intent. In the death to which Antonio is so ready to go, the Father expresses both his self-punitive impulses and the desire to kill in Antonio the idealized self-image (generously indifferent to money and unpossessive in love) that renders guilty his desires both for money and for his daughter. At its most general level the pound of flesh represents the reified values of Shylock's Venice, whose laws are designed to protect Antonio's commerce. These values the Father contrasts to those of Neoplatonic Belmont, which express his self-idealization. But the father's dream shows self-condemnation and self-idealization to be two sides of a single coin: the self-aggrandizement by which the Father defends himself against his desires amplifies their power to defile what he defines as sacred.

In the union of Bassanio and Portia, the father envisions releasing Portia from the orbit of his desire into the arms of a younger version of himself, so finding vicarious compensation for his loss. However, his vexation about passing Portia on to another man remains apparent in the thinness of Bassanio's characterization, as well as in the postponement of the nuptial celebration beyond the limits of the text. Not only is the wedding night disrupted by Antonio's letter, but the consummation of their marriage retreats into infinite futurity when the last act substitutes for a conventional romantic reunion a more playful version of the court scene in which Bassanio replaces Shylock as Portia's victim, and is punished for dividing his allegiance between her and Antonio. In Portia's privileged knowledge of her identity, by which she reconciles the dilemma she has devised for Bassanio, the Father repeats, in a lighter vein, the earlier configuration in which his magic reconciled otherwise incompatible values. However, the improbability that defines romantic comedy expresses the father's awareness that the conflicts that generated the configuration are still in place, that he has substituted daydream fantasy for genuine dream resolution of conflicts. The incommensurateness of the conclusion to the magnitude of Shylock's figure reveals the Father's dissatisfaction with his own strategy. Shylock's resistance to containment within the comic frame reveals the pressure of the Father's desires toward fuller actualization, a pressure that appears as well in the exclusion of both Shylock and Antonio from the domestic resolution.

That these conflicts remained unresolved appears in the fact that the sleight of hand by which Portia's father generates an illusory resolution of competing value systems most fully characterizes Prospero, who even more trickily contrives to leave his daughter free to choose according to his will, and then celebrates his cleverness in having stage-managed her rebellion. Whereas Portia's father withdraws into death, Prospero withdraws into his study; whereas Portia's father bathes his world in a quasi-magical aura, Prospero emerges from his study with explicitly magical powers on which he bases the superiority that shapes his self-definition. Like his dramatic progenitors, he has only a daughter through whom to control the destiny of his lineage. Sexual passions remain linked to money, for the ideal commonwealth to issue from Ferdinand and Miranda's union is contrasted to the ordinary world in which Sebastian, Antonio, and Stephano anticipate making commercial capital out of Caliban. Caliban represents the unruly sexuality that renders him at once a lump of deformed flesh and a marketplace commodity.

The persistent, if attenuated, ways in which monetary concerns are woven into later plays suggest that Shakespeare, no more than Portia's father, could not remove the taint of money from his imagination of redeeming love and ideal authority. In various ways in different plays he tried to envision a generative heterosexual love that would inseminate a just kingdom with redeeming nurturing compassion, but he could not prevent grotesque images of cruelty and greed from attaching to the active side of multidimensional female figures. Having only daughters to inherit the considerable fortune he acquired in the process of writing and staging plays that deplored the erosion of the traditional hierarchy by the tide of commerce and related ambitions, Shakespeare himself might well have been overwhelmed by the self-loathing and world-weariness he depicts in characters from his royal merchant to his triumphant magiciap.

The momentous psychological importance I have found related to money may seem to contradict a Freudian conception in which the primacy of sexual concerns derives from their infantile sources. But as Freud often reminds his readers, the unconscious knows no time. In his topographical model of the unconscious, temporal precedence does not endow events with more affective power than later accretions to which affect may be transferred, and a literary use of the dream model is necessarily concerned with the dynamic interplay of factors within the textual time frame rather than with conceptual origins. Furthermore, though modern sensibilities may be slow to perceive money and wealth as the locus of severe psychological tension, the picture changes when one allows the plays to give emotional resonance to the relationships that existed in their own time between money, wealth, and marriage. Further to widen the frame of reference in this way, to attach signifieds from the time in general to signifying figures within the plays, is to regard Portia's father and his creator as persons experiencing and shaping the age's conflict-ridden nexus of marriage, money, and traditional wealth and status.

In a general way Georg Simmel facilitates an understanding of the pychological stresses in the Renaissance. He argues that the significance of money is that it "expresses the relativity of objects of demand through which they become economic values" (Simmel 1978, 130). Such a fear that the money nexus erodes a social system that authorizes itself on the basis of absolute value is classically expressed by Gaunt in Shakespeare's Richard II when he accuses Richard of becoming "England's landlord, not her king." Gaunt's accusation resonates more deeply in view of Simmel's statement that,

The powerful character of money . . . appears at its most noticeable, at the least at its most uncanny, wherever the money economy is not yet completely established and accepted, and where money displays its compelling power in relations that are structurally antagonistic (p. 244).

He adds that the "utilization of such a mysterious and dangerous power as capital necessarily appeared as immoral, as criminal misuse" (p. 244). Lawrence Stone's study of complex interrelations between traditional wealth and the rising tide of commerce shows the relevance of this general comment to sixteenth-century England. Stone discusses the sleight of hand necessary to bring new blood into a hereditary aristocracy, and particularly the ways in which the sale of titles by James I inflated the honours of the established orders (Stone 1967, 54). Though he says that Elizabeth was parsimonious in creating new titles, in her reign the busy market in land sales enriched a large group of people who became contenders to entry into noble ranks in the next reign (p. 76). At the same time that wealth, accumulated in commerce, might through marriage provide entrée into the ranks of the elite, membership in that elite still entailed scorn for the money that had both provided access to elite status, and that remained indispensable for maintaining the display of generosity and grandeur that "served as symbolic justifications of rank and status" (p. 266). The consequences of this dilemma can be seen in the configuration of King Lear, in which an idealized version of traditional wealth is represented by Cordelia, the "unprized precious maid," while greed for the luxury on which status depends is represented by Goneril and Regan, whose gorgeous clothing scarcely keeps them warm.

The situation Stone describes is one in which persons of trditional welath, like Portia's father, might well despise themselves for coveting money. On the one hand they required money to maintain a display that signified their status, while that same status required of them their indifference to the money upon which it depended. Money was clearly important: for the landed aristocrats it was the despised conduit that underwrote their status; for the aspiring it promised access both to status and privileges they both despised and envied; and lacking money entailed the social death envisioned by Antonio and Shylock or experienced by such "poor naked wretches" as Poor Tom. But money can be acquired by any clever trickster, by the worthy and the unworthy alike, and when land is for sale money can buy it, along with the honors associated with its ownership, and the hands of noble heiresses. Furthermore, the confusion of status and money went in two directions and threatened to erode the distinctions among the social orders as the aristocracy participated in commercial enterprise. Stone observes that it was the noblemen "still traditionalist in their views . . . and not social groups more deeply affected by the spirit of capitalism, who provided the economy with just that element of risk money without which it could not have moved ahead" (p. 182). He does not discuss the psychological conflicts possible between absolutist values and financial activities, but the situation he envisions is consistent with the weary psychology of bad conscience I have attributed to Shakespeare's characters and, more hypothetically, to Shakespeare.

Some more intimate dimensions of these economic issues are brought into focus in complementary ways by the work of Georges Duby and Jack Goody. Duby describes the conflict in twelfth-century France between the knights and the priests, or between what he calls the lay model of marriage and the clerical model that gradually gained ascendancy. The knights were engaged in a struggle to build up the wealth that would establish their families as honourable, and straight-forwardly looked upon marriage as a means of doing so. In the situation Duby describes, one son only was allowed to contract a legal marriage and to have legitimate offspring. Wives who did not produce offspring were easily discarded, for knights and princes, as well as kings, paid little heed to church regulations. In his discussion of the importance the aristocracy placed on controlling their family lines so that their honor would be inherited by their progeny, Duby comments on the difficulty facing a man who had no sons. The solitary heiress was a "target for matrimonial intrigue" among the disinherited younger sons in constant search for wealthy wives (Duby 1977, 110, 145). In this world a father of daughters might well wish he had magic at his disposal, but would feel no guilt at using whatever means he deemed expedient.

However, two factors combined to bring pressure upon what Duby calls the lay model of marriage. First, the younger sons who could not marry within the system pursued wealthy married women, often trying to abduct them. These marauding young men, who valued adventure and daring exploit and who justified their amours in the name of love, formed, Duby argues, the social base from which arose the ideology and literature of courtly love (Duby 1978, 14). Second, between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries the Church struggled to establish its authority over marriages. Condemning sexual pleasure, certainly outside of marriage and even within it, the Church defined marriage as instituted by God in order to ensure propagation. It

emphasized the union of two hearts in marriage and postulated that its validity rested more on the betrothal (desponsatio) than on the wedding, and especially on the consent (consensus) of the two individuals concerned. (Duby 1978, 17)

An unintended, and ironic, consequence of the Church's success was to encourage love matches at the expense of arranged marriages, for it was by defining marriage as a sacrament performed by consenting partners that the Church gained ascendancy over the knights (Duby 1978, 17). As the priests became more powerful, they added "certain acts of benediction and exorcism to all the solemn rites, whose climax they imperceptibly shifted from the house to the entrance gate of the Church, and eventually to its interior" (Duby 1978, 19). In the process of rendering marriage sacred in this way, the Church increased its power to define legitimate marriage. It condemned remarriage, even by widowers, as well as the practice of repudiating wives who failed to produce progeny; it undermined paternal authority over marriage by requiring the children's consent. It opposed "closed marriage," often involving marriage between first cousins, by which great families consolidated their fortunes, and asserted its authority simultaneously extending the range of prohibited relationships and inculeating a deep horror of incest.

Duby emphasizes the long struggle between these competing conceptions of marriage as the Church gradually shaped men's consciences. In the midst of such conflict a man could maintain his authority over the will of his children, as well as his rights to put aside a wife who produced no sons, but he would do so with increasingly conflicted feelings. A man who had only daughters might well encounter internal as well as external opposition in the pursuit of a new wife to give him a male heir; at the same time as his control over the destination of his wealth through his daughter would be constrained both by the increasingly wide definition of incest, and by pressure to give some measure of attention to her preferences. By the time one gets to sixteenth-century England, these developments have merged. The Church's success in redefining marriage as inclusive of love, which carried over into Protestant England, made it possible for the Church to gather in the romantic ideals spawned by courtly love. Furthermore, as Spenser's work makes clear, this combination of romantic ideals and the Christian ideal of married chastity was further spiritualized by being merged with the Neoplatonic tradition that had developed through the Florentine Platonists. One can see in the progress of Shakespeare's plays, from The Merchant of Venice to the late romances, the enormous significance of marriage as the center of spiritual value for both the participants and the society at large. However, the economic aspects of marriage were subject to the same tensions and ambivalence that Stone describes in the economic aspects of status. That is, marriage was at once a sacrament and the means by which great families controlled the transmission of wealth. It was a means of acquiring money necessary to maintain or to acquire status, and an ideal consummation of spiritualized romantic love. In this circumstance, in which the social realities are at cross-purposes both with the ideology of love and marriage and the strong emotions that ideology fuels, the bad conscience of Portia's father is comprehensible, as well as the desire to have recourse to magic to resolve otherwise intractable conflicts.

A further dimension to this murky mixture of love and money is suggested by Jack Goody. He argues that the Church served its own interests in its efforts to Christianize marriage. Its advocacy of mutual affection as the basis of marriage lifted clerical above secular authority. As well, it benefited materially from its success in preventing second marriages, for in the failure of progeny it often was the beneficiary of a dying line. Its efforts to inspire a horror of incest and to broaden its definition were also in its own interests. By complicating and enlarging prohibited degrees of kinship, it interfered with the claims of extended kin over land donated to the Church by a kinsman seeking his soul's salvation (Goody 1983, 153). As well, by acquiring power of judgment over whether a proposed or contracted marriage lay within interdicted degrees of relationship, it also secured the power to grant, and to set the price for, exceptions. Goody concludes,

For the Church to grow and survive it had to accumulate property, which meant acquiring control over the way it was passed on from one generation to the next. Since the distribution of property between generations is related to patterns of marriage and the legitimization of children, the Church had to gain authority over these so that it could influence the strategies of heirship. (p. 221)

Goody's analysis of the intermingled pecuniary and spiritual motivations behind the Church's strictures on marriage not only supports the argument that as marriage took on the aura of the sacred, the material interests of the parents could be driven underground and rendered guilty by the increasingly powerful clerical definitions. It also follows that those caught in the bad conscience engendered by competing value systems would be aware, in dim or acute ways, that their consciences were being manipulated in the interests of the Church's struggle for power and wealth. Portia's father is like a person who has internalized both value systems and at the same time resents being forced to suffer the consequent bad conscience and its related agonies. Neither Duby nor Goody explores the psychology engendered by these conflicting value systems, but the issues I have discussed in The Merchant of Venice and their links to later plays give evidence that both value systems were internalized sufficiently to survive into Protestant England and to torment the consciences of Protestant Englishmen.¹²

The assumption of this chapter has been that there are two ways by which Shakespeare drew his psychological landscapes from an inner life shaped by the contradictions inherent in his time. That is, his unique childhood experience within his particular family was conditioned by the social institutions and values governing families at the time, and as he grew his modes of dealing with his personal life were both limited and shaped by the social and cultural milicu he confronted. His way of being an artist was conditioned by the nature of the theater, the dramatic conventions, and literary traditions he inherited. All of these elements became part of the fabric of his plays. It follows from this that the kaleidoscopic recombinations of characteristics into different dramatis personae confronting their various worlds represent strategies to resolve or come to terms with conflicts that have both personal and social dimensions.¹³ Approaching literature in the way that I put forward here provides an efficient way to penetrate that which is historically distant, and to capitalize both on what makes us different from those who lived at other times and places, and on what makes us similar to them. Though there must be continuities in human experience in order for us to appreciate and respond to the products of distant times and places, the ways in which people experience common or fundamental human desires must differ in relation to different social realities. Though the dreams of people in Elizabethan England would in some respects resemble those of people living now, in other respects they would differ. Both then and now one's dreams might express resentment of authority, but an Elizabethan person's expression of that resentment would be imbued with the dense emotional matrix of the family upon which political structures were modeled. Such a person might dream of killing the king, or of killing his or her superior in the local hierarchy, but he could not dream of a president failing to win an election. That we have such an option has more psychological significance than one might suppose. Our abstract and depersonalized conception of authority renders objections to and resentment of it less guilty, because less charged with infantile emotion. Both our modern dream of unseating the president, and the older dream of killing the king, may have their roots in animosity towards one's father, but in the modern context that animosity itself involves less psychological stress because the world provides more legitimate outlets for it. There is no way to prove it, but one might well suppose that contemporary dreams reflect our relatively positive attitude towards ourselves as freely aspiring individuals, or even as potential rebels, and show less intense conflict around these issues than those of our forebears. We may dream of losing or stealing or accumulating money, and money in our dreams may express our conflicted attitude towards giving and receiving love. But money in our dreams is unlikely to carry shame so intense as to augment the infantile conflicts that initiated the dream, as it does for Portia's father, and possibly for Shakespeare, who enriched himself and advanced his status by writing plays that condemned undue social aspirations and the mercantile values that nurtured them.

To ordinary ways of thinking there can be no two realms as remote from each other as the values that are inscribed in our political and cultural institutions, and the deeply private images we recall when we awaken from our sleep. But to trace in literature the connections between them brings home to us what postmodern theory calls the social construction of reality. To approach the plays as the dreams of their protagonists is to unite a historical understanding of experience with the emotional immediacy of dreams. In this way the polarity between traditional humanist criticism and deconstruction softens, and the question of meaning is differently framed. What a work means has to do with what the structure, array of characters, language, etc., means to the protagonist, just as a dream's meaning has to do with what the various elements of the dream signify for the dreamer. A fiction, then, is like a dream that contains within itself all associations necessary for its unraveling, and the method of interpretation I have applied to The Merchant of Venice does not differ greatly from the way one might think about one's own dreams, if one thinks about them as including the associations to the dream report one has generated later. Without having associations from a dreaming person one would not know how his or her dreams related to the reality of his or her life, but one would know something about the dreamer's self-definition and strategies for dealing with other people. With associations, particularly in connection with the day's residue that occasioned the dream, one starts to know something about the ways in which the actual circumstances of the dreamer's present life signify, for the dreamer, the emotional forms of the past. One starts to know something about the dreamer's structure of signification, just as one comes to know that of a literary character. It is true that most psychoanalytic approaches to dreams deemphasize the manifest content, the aspect of the dream that is usually more present-oriented and more immediately related to the day's residue, in order to concentrate on the latent, or past, content. That is, analysts tend to be interested in early causal traumas, rather than in the linkages that can be traced between past and present forms, or the way in which one's experience of past forms is shaped by the particularities, both personal and cultural, of the present. But in principle, Freud's dream theory does not preclude such an approach, and there is considerable interest and perhaps gain to be had from the angle of vision towards one's life circumstance such a way of thinking engenders.

Finally, a word on the difference between art and dream. I do not want to give the impression that they are the same in my view. They differ not only because, as I have said, literary work incorporates and integrates the author's conscious values into the unconscious or dream dimensions of the creative process. They differ also in that an art work offers itself for judgment by standards that have nothing to do with the process of its creation or its creator. The nature of those standards constitutes a subject beyond the scope of this chapter. However, this chapter does involve the belief that the age-old intuition, expressed first in our culture by Plato, that art and dream have something to do with each other is based on a psychological reality. That psychological reality has to do not only with the process by which artists draw on their unconscious drives to advance their conscious purposes in the specific ways I believe I have demonstrated; it also has to do with the reception of the work. Immersion in a work of art combines in a unique way the unmediated experience that we have while we dream with the conscious, cognitive and esthetic values that we bring to it and judge it by. Therefore to both experience and to reflect upon an art work may be thought of as training us in self-reflection and perhaps increasing our awareness of the devious ways by which we channel, for good or ill, our inward being into the outward world.

Notes

¹ There are two exceptions: Jameson clearly attends to political and social dimensions of literary work, but denigrates the personal realm, which he regards as epiphenomenal. Holland (1968) attends to formal aspects of literature, regarding them as defense strategies which simultaneously conceal and reveal the work's core fantasy. Though my theory overlaps with Holland's in important ways, his conception of the formal is less inclusive than mine, which, by eliminating the latent/manifest distinction, renders all aspects equally expressive of the compromise between competing desires and fears.

² For a full explanation of and rationale for this mode of criticism see Stockholder, pp. 3-25.

³ As will become clear in the course of this argument, I do not agree with the perspective on Shakespeare's relation to his time favored by most new-historic ist critics such as Greenblatt, Cartelli, and Meller. While it may be true, as Cartelli says (25n), that an orthodox Shakespeare was created rather than discovered by Tillyard's school, it is just as likely that a subversive Shakespeare is created, rather than discovered, by the new-historicists.

⁴ The close parallels between this scene and the one in Pericles in which the suitors risk their lives on a correct guess suggest that the death's heads that adorn the chamber in the later play, and the overt incest of Antigonus and his daughter, make explicit what here hovers in the interstices.

⁵ Freud in "The Theme of the Three Caskets" dis-cusses Portia as a figure representing death for Shakespeare but seeing the play from my perspective renders Freud's insight more specific and relates it to the rest of the play. The father associates Portia with death because it is only in death that he can allow himself to imagine having her.

⁶ A related approach to the intertwined themes of love and money is taken by Engle, who argues that the theological terms in which economic issues are articulated "also define a system of exchange or conversion which works to the advantage of . . . those who, by religion or social situation, are placed to take advantage of exchange patterns" (Engle 1986, 21). Engle, however, sees no problem generated by the disparate value systems. A view closer to my own is held by Shell who says that "the beautiful marriage bond is not far removed from the ugly bond that made it possible in the first place" (Shell 1979, 91).

⁷ Engle also believes that Antonio lies here (Engle 1986, 22). He sees Antonio's sadness as a "market-linked phenomenon" (p. 28), and he associates his self-sacrificing stance with homosexuality (p. 24).

⁸ Whigham equates Bassanio with Shylock as a fellow social climber (Whigham 1979, 102). However, Bassanio's equation of wealth with family blood, as well as the father's apparent approval of him, makes it more plausible to think of him as an impecunious aristocratic younger son. The merchant's love of Bassanio, then, makes him, rather than Bassanio, vulnerable to the charge of social climbing. See below for the significance of this attribution.

⁹ In "The Ego and the Id," Freud's discussion of the ways in which the superego taps the repressed desires of the id and merges them with the guilt that occasioned their repression seems particularly apt for this play (Freud 1987, 394-50). As well, in the configuration of Bassanio, Shylock, and Antonio, the father nicely confirms Freud's observation that "in mild cases of homosexuality" the identification with an esteemed figure "is a substitute for an affectionate object-choice," which in turn has substituted for erotically imbued hostility and aggression among siblings (p. 377).

¹⁰ The links between Shylock and the Venetian world, and Shylock's role as scapegoat, have been seen in various ways. See Engle, Shell, Whigham, Meller, Cartelli, Sharp, and Girard.

¹¹ To regard Portia as the dreamer would be to see her as one who tries to mediate between maintaining a self-image that conforms to the conventional demands for femininity and repressing rage at men who would control and possess her. Her rage would also contain an erotic component that mirrors her father's association of sex with incest and death.

¹² Stone argues that the English clergy's emphasis on sacred marriage functioned similarly as a way to ensure social control (Stone 1977, 144), and Goody argues that despite the reduction of prohibited degrees in 1540, the Reformation had little impact on the English forms of marriage until the mid-seventeenth century (Goody 1983, 152). The persistence of the tensions from these earlier times into a Protestant England where marriage increasingly took on the sanctity that had once inhered in Catholic sacraments, suggested by Barber, is evident in the literature. Whatever gulf existed between literature and social practices, the mental sets that created literary characters formed part of the social ferment. Stone ignores this complexity in his assumption that literary renderings of romantic love had no bearing on people's management of their lives (Stone 1977, 181).

¹³ I would not, however, claim that one can construct an author's biography from his or her work. We can never know from writings the exact balance and proportion that constitute a lived self, and it should be kept in mind that the simplest person is vastly more complicated than any literary figure.

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