SOURCE: Jagendorf, Zvi. “Innocent Arrows and Sexy Sticks: The Rival Economies of Male Friendship and Heterosexual Love in The Merchant of Venice.” Hebrew University Studies in Literature and the Arts 19 (1991): 23-47.

[In the following essay, Jagendorf examines the depiction of male friendship and heterosexual love in The Merchant of Venice, arguing that Shakespeare's play features a strong contrast between the two: marriage promises profit and increase while friendship portends only debt and continued sacrifice.]

One of the oddest things about The Merchant of Venice is the mixture of dry legalism and bawdry in its closing lines. Although it is common knowledge that the lovers in Shakespeare's comedies do not usually end up in the marriage bed but somewhere nearby with business to despatch, still the ending of The Merchant of Venice is remarkable for its lack of romantic glow and anticipation. Portia's last words are more appropriate to legal than nuptial chambers:

Let us go in,
And charge us there upon inter'gatories
And we will answer all things faithfully.

[V.i.297]¹

It is almost morning, we are told. So the last scene of the play, instead of being the prelude to the night's consummation, becomes the start of a day's debriefing led by Portia. It takes Gratiano, in the role of buffoon, to raise the priapic standard and remind us with talk of bed, and of Nerissa's ring and thing that lovers in comedies are meant to end up between the sheets untying more interesting things than the knots of a comic plot.

Sex is for servants, a cynic might say; money is what interests the gentlefolk in this play. This is an exaggeration, yet there is truth in it; for clearly the search for money and the quest for love are the twin poles which sustain the world of the play and any interpretation has to deal with their interplay—indeed the commerce between them.

When Jane Austen writes, “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife,” she is both mocking and affirming, through her cunning balance of possession against want, the market relations on the basis of which marriages were arranged in the society portrayed in Pride and Prejudice. Love does get mentioned in that memorable opening conversation, but it is Mrs. Bennet, “a woman of mean understanding,” who brings this in: “But it is very likely that he may fall in love with one of them.” Thus the trivial, hysterical mother utters the romantic piety and does obeisance to the totem worshipped by mothers and daughters in the teeth of observation and experience. The fact that Jane Austen still makes love the credible foundation of a good fortune is one of the pleasures of reading her but unfortunately not the subject of this essay. Yet her lucidity on the embarrassment of genteel poverty and the necessity of falling in love with four or five thousand a year might well serve as a bench mark for an interpretation of the much less lucid, more paradoxical and sexually troubled Shakespearean inversion of the topic in our play, where the opening situation might be stated as follows: It is a truth equally universally acknowledged that a single man not in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a rich wife.

The unspoken word is again love, also first mentioned in the play by a trivial person, Solanio, whose “Why then you are in love” (I.i.46), is an attempt to find a cause for the merchant's inexplicable melancholy. Antonio's strange reply, “Fie, fie!”, as if love were some disease, is the first sign of trouble to come.

The ethos of love and the need for money, kept in such judicious balance by Jane Austen's prose, cannot be balanced so gracefully in the antagonistically violent, linguistically explosive and paradoxical world of poetic drama. On the Shakespearean stage the controlled perspective which keeps money and love in steady focus is less apparent than the pressure and anxiety which force them together, creating the unexpected combinations and reversals which are germane to all drama but are at the very heart of The Merchant of Venice.

In spite of the traditional Christian praise of poverty and suspicion, to say the least, of riches, and the influential Aristotelian notion of gold as sterile when set against the natural fecundity of the body, the languages of wealth and love have always been interdependent. The question “How much do you love me?” illustrates such contact in the most banal way. That is what Antony seems to think when he counters Cleopatra's opening question in Antony and Cleopatra with a challenge to the very notion of quantity as demeaning:

There's beggary in the love that can be reckon'd.

[I.i.15]

We may instinctively assent to his brave contempt for measure but the question how much, though it smells of the market and the counting house, cannot be excluded from love's discourse.

In the Song of Songs it appears as a strange turn in a passage which speaks of the power of love to withstand immense material weight and mass:

Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it.

[8:7]

In this figure of fire against water, the single flame (love) outlives the onslaught of what is by grammatical character plural in Hebrew (mayyim). So the multiplication of waters fails to put out the flame and quantity surrenders to intensity. But the same verse, in a movement closely parallel to what happens at the opening of Antony and Cleopatra, goes on to note the social penalty to be paid when love's extreme demands are met in terms of property:

if a man would give all the substance of his house for love, it would utterly be condemned.

Contempt, we remember, is what Philo has for Antony; who is transformed by his dotage from “the triple pillar of the world” into “a strumpet's fool.” On the one hand, then, love is unmeasurable, on the other a social measure of the extreme actions love provokes finds that the price the lover pays is excessive. All your wealth for love? A third of all the world for a strumpet? Is it worth it? Can love be reckoned after all?

Obviously, the question “how much?” is not at all out of place in the rhetoric of love. Ideally love is a simple and economically innocent exchange or barter: my love is mine and I am his. But as soon as this is sophisticated and subjected to analysis or more pertinently, when the intimate exchange of feeling is given a social setting, say in the context of an economy (London, Venice) where value is dependent on the market, then anxiety about numbers becomes apparent. When Portia confesses to Bassanio:

One half of me is yours, the other half yours
Mine own, I would say;

[III.ii.16-17]

she would dismiss calculation; she means to give herself entirely. But her language is caught up in the web of number, laboriously so, even dangerously when we remember that she is an heiress and the goal of Bassanio's voyage is her fortune, not half but the whole of it. Once love is thought of as a kind of sophisticated exchange, then notions of measure and quantity become pertinent, together with the language of debt and credit, borrowing and lending, even investment and return. When Falstaff answers Hal's “Sirrah do I owe you a thousand pound?” with

A thousand pound, Hal? a million, thy love is worth a million; thou owest me thy love

[III.iii.136-37]

he like Portia is measuring and defying measure at the same time. Speaking as someone who is chronically in debt, he clearly wants to turn the prince's love into realizable assets (a million). His hopes of riches and influence depend on such convertibility. At the same time a million, to a poor man, stands for infinity, and Hal's love is therefore beyond reckoning. The specifics of financial calculation and the bravado of its dismissal are copresent here and we do not find it grotesque to see moneybags on one side of the scale and on the other the old man's vital claim to the prince's debt of love. There's beggary in the love that can be reckoned, implies Falstaff, yet he uses the astounding number theatrically, the way a reckless gambler does, as a spell to defy ill luck and keep sober reality at bay.

If the language of how much colours the speech of Antony, the rich man, and Falstaff, the poor man, in plays which do not focus particularly on the workings of money, we would expect its presence to be doubly and insistently noticeable in The Merchant which tracks the quest for love on a map busy with the flow of goods and money. Clearly the trajectories on this map must cross each other at many points, crossings which we may take to be invitations to interpretation.

One of the most rewarding of such points is Bassanio's request for money from Antonio to finance his quest for Portia and her golden fleece. This is the point from which the play's lines of desire and indebtedness are projected. One trajectory leads from Antonio to Bassanio and to Portia, the other interpolates Shylock between Antonio and Bassanio. The first line is complicated by the implied competition between homosexual love, characterised by debt, and heterosexual love, which releases treasure. The second line is complicated by the unpleasant involvement of Jewish usury as a catalyst and go-between in the amorous commerce between both men and women.

It has always seemed to me one of the more intriguing weaknessess of the play that Bassanio, patently a prodigal and a fortune hunter, should be proposed apparently without irony for the part of beau ideal, ephebe, scholar and Christian gentleman. While Shakespeare's darker comedies offer curious studies of shadowy, fallible young men of doubtful character but handsome looks (like Bertram in All's Well) who are chosen as love objects by strong and energetic young women, The Merchant is different in its apparent acceptance of Bassanio on his own terms. We know what a Jonsonian treatment of a Bassanio would be like. He would have given us a desperate, sexually ambiguous, cynical and misogynistic fortune hunter living off his wits and his sex in the manner of Truewit and Dauphine in The Silent Woman. In that play the young men's hunger for money and even for food is blatant as they struggle to survive in London society. It gives their wit a harsh, barking quality and it strips them of all pretense in our eyes just as they strip their victims to the bone with their savage analysis of every physical, mental and social defect.

Bassanio is saved the fate of his Jacobean cousins because he is a protagonist in an apparently romantic fiction in which the golden cheese falls into the handsome fox cub's mouth because of his good breeding and healthy complexion. There is such a guarded flatness about Shakespeare's characterization of the young man that we might suspect the poet of defending him from suspicious enquiry. It is as if he is saying, leave the boy alone, he's only a breeder, a key to Portia's treasure chest. Bassanio's blandness is in fact the cause of desire in others, notably in Antonio and even in Portia, while the Jew's involvement sharpens and displaces the libidinal energy by directing it towards the suffering body of love's true victim, the merchant, Antonio. The play's strange, almost strangled sexuality may then be approached through the young man whose blandness is the negative heart at the centre of a series of positive desires. Neither wholly a man's erotic friend, nor truly a husband to a wife, he moves between them, entangling both in the consequences of his debt with which the play starts.

Bassanio's initial request for money from Antonio bears close analysis because it goes to the erotic/economic heart of the play and conceals beneath the proclaimed innocence of its rhetoric a strong analogy between debt and its return and the homosexual bond. The young man is not in a good position at the beginning of the play. He is a profligate borrower asking his benefactor to throw good money after bad; like the commonest of gamblers caught in a losing streak, all he needs is enough money for one last throw which will make him rich and redeem all his debts. The first thing one notices about the way he leads up to his actual request is its blurred and circuitous parlance:

'Tis not unknown to you, Antonio,
How much I have disabled mine estate,
By something showing a more swelling port
Than my faint means would grant continuance.
Nor do I now make moan to be abridg'd
From such a noble rate, but my chief care
Is to come fairly off from the great debts
Wherein my time something too prodigal
Hath left me gag'd.

[I.i.122-30]

This follows the prattle of the Venetians Salerio, Gratianio and Solario, whose comic descriptions of social stereotypes and various hypothetical business disasters are aimed at filling the void of Antonio's undiagnosed melancholy. If their energetic babble makes Bassanio's speech sound dull that is because it is. And it is so because he is trying to describe the plight of a prodigal antiseptically, without using any of the wounding caustic language of traditional moral assault on wastrels. The result is that Bassanio sounds like a mealy-mouthed lawyer speaking in defence of his good-for-nothing client whose desperate state he is trying to camouflage. We are meant to decipher the code of a proper young gentleman: the understatement, the good intentions, the stiff upper lip. Prodigality is made to look like a minor carelessness, a gentlemanly oversight, like not paying one's tailor. Yet the cosmetic phrasing cannot hide the cruel request at the heart of the speech:

                                                  To you, Antonio,
I owe the most in money and love,
And from your love I have a warranty
To unburthen all my plots and purposes
How to get clear of all the debts I owe.

[I.i.130-34]

In other words he needs more of Antonio's money in order to be free of Antonio's love. This is not a perverse reading, given the consistent and unresolved tension in the play between the love of men and the love of women, the former characterised by debt and sacrifice, the latter by treasure and its release.

Antonio's answer to Bassanio forces us, even if we have evaded it up to now, to contemplate the erotic aspect of debt:

My purse, my person, my extremest means
Lie all unlock'd to your occasions.

[I.i.138-39]

The assonance and alliteration could not be more assertive in this declaration of availability. “My purse, my person,” which echoed in Shylock's “my ducats and my daughter” can sound so grotesquely wrong in its juxtaposition of flesh and blood with gold, is when spoken by Antonio darkly dangerous in its blurring of the borders between the offering of gold and the offering of self. The prone openness of the unlocked, metonymic purse is embarrassingly linked with a defencelessness of person, making the availability of a sum of money a dangerous criterion for the vulnerability of a life.

We must remember Bassanio's request still has not been made. This is all foreplay. When it does come, it is with his meditation on the caskets, his most important speech in the play. And compared with that safely orthodox reflection on lead and its virtues, it is as close to self-revelation as this bland character can be allowed to come. Like many important texts it is full of redundancy. It overloads the channels of communication for the message: lend me more money could have been easily understood without the parable of the arrows. Even the sympathetic Antonio is made uneasy by its evasiveness and criticizes its unnecessary rhetoric:

You know me well, and herein spend but time
To wind about my love with circumstance.

[I.i.154-54]

What, we may ask, is this winding all about? Uncharacteristically Bassanio speaks here in a kind of parable. He tells an exemplary story and then interprets it in case his friend has missed the point.

In my school-days, when I had lost one shaft,
I shot his fellow of the self-same flight
The self-same way with more advised watch
To find the other forth, and by adventuring both
I oft found both: I urge this childhood proof,
Because what follows is pure innocence.
I owe you much, and like a wilful youth
That which I owe is lost, but if you please
To shoot another arrow that self way
Which you did shoot the first, I do not doubt,
As I will watch the aim, or to find both
Or bring your latter hazard back again,
And thankfully rest debtor for the first.

[I.i.140-52]

This tale of two arrows aims at setting before the older man a picture of a pre-sexual boyish game in which money is child's play and debt innocent and, like Peter Pan, never grows.² It is an argument for lending without profit or increase and, in a more secret way it is an allegory of homosexual commerce. The arrows whose flight the story tells are identical (“self-same”); they seek each other out through the air like the separated twins at the beginning of The Comedy of Errors. In the rhetoric of child's play the loss of the first arrow is hardly a fault. It is something that happens in a game and the remedy is at hand in the second shaft. The languages of play and commerce meet at the key word “adventuring” which is what boys do for fun and merchants for profit, unless they make a loss. The wiliness of the tale becomes apparent when Bassanio interprets it in “pure innocence” and shifts the identity of the archer from the wilful boy (Bassanio) to the merchant. It is no longer I (Bassanio) who do the shooting but you (Antonio) who will shoot sums of money after each other while I cast myself in the responsible role of watcher and retriever of at least some of the debt.

Antonio is irritated by these rhetorical flights, the only moment in the whole play when he shows impatience towards his young friend. He finds all this talk circuitous and wasteful and he counters Bassanio's fiction of innocence with a statement of adult commitment devastating in its lack of reserve:

                                        you do me now more wrong
In making question of my uttermost
Than if you had made waste of all I have.

[I.i.155-157]

How much, Antonio is saying, is not a question even for a merchant when love is concerned. The two arrows with their implied calculation of debt and its repayment are swept aside by a lover's impatient extremism which would rather imagine disaster and sacrifice than weigh profit and loss. There's beggary in the love that can be reckoned.

Given the transparency, indeed the redundancy of Bassanio's parable as a strategy of raising money, it is nevertheless interpretable in a more subversive way as an allegory of male friendship and sexual identity, placed at a point in the play where a male economy of indebtedness is about to give way to a female economy based on unlocked treasure. How then does Bassanio's tale speak of sexual identity? Essentially by stressing the sameness of the arrows in build, flight and direction. Difference has no place in this story because that would prevent the arrows finding each other. Sameness on the other hand is stressed and overstressed by the doubling of “self-same,” the trebling of “self,” the chiming repetition of both, and even, to a reader, by the way FEL in “fellow” plays against ELF in “self-same.” The arrows' sameness is an essential part of the boyish world of play which can be called innocent because undisturbed as yet by the difference of women. An analogy from The Winter's Tale will bear this out. That play also begins with two friends, and when one of them, Polixenes, describes the boyhood he and Leontes shared, he talks of a paradisal state of innocence, an idyllic pastoral in which the boys are compared to

                                        twinned lambs that did frisk i' th' sun,
And bleat the one at th' other.

[I.ii.67-68]

There too the sameness of a pair of boys is the basis for a masculine Eden secure and sealed off in its closed circle by the exclusion of women. It is a world of play before sin in which sexual identity allows for the purest and simplest kind of exchange or barter:

                                        What we chang'd
Was innocence for innocence.

[I.ii.68-69]

It is of course women who introduce temptation into this paradise and lead the boys out into the dangerous world of sexual difference, experience and the fathering of children.

Bassanio's tale of the twinned arrows does not posit the innocent game on the absence of women but it colours the borrowing and spending of money in a prelapsarian glow, economically and sexually. As well as ruling out disaster and loss, Bassanio's parable rules out interest and profit, or in other words increase. And that is where women and Jews come in.

Enter Shylock, whose apologia for interest as increase in I.iii. is aggressively, even bestially, sexual in ways which create specific and pointed contrasts with Bassanio's celibate arrows. If we juxtapose Bassanio's apologia for lending with Shylock's for interest, we contemplate a play of categories which holds true throughout the play. It is an opposition between innocence and experience, the former Christian, the latter Jewish, the one dependent on sexual similarity and profitless exchange, the other on sexual difference, breeding and increase. Although the opposition is familiar, seen as a crux where money and sexuality meet, it moves our interpretation a step forward.³

Like Bassanio's tale Shylock's is a parable, it has a lesson, although he, unlike the young Christian, does not bother to spell it out.⁴ Its design on its audience (Antonio and Bassanio) is to defend interest by citing Biblical precedent, and perhaps also to offend Christian propriety by drawing an overly graphic picture of animal sexuality. Bassanio's tale, we will remember, was noteworthy for its denial of evil. Shylock's tale of Jacob's resourceful breeding methods is set in a web of tricks and stratagems, aimed at amassing property and wealth by taking them away from others. Thus we know, though Shylock does not say so, that Jacob is the “third possessor” only because he tricked his father. We also know that Jacob's device of the sticks and the breeding ewes is a counter-stratagem to foil Laban's plan to send him away with nothing:

When Laban and himself were compremis'd,
That all the eanlings which were streak'd and pied
Should fall as Jacob's hire, the ewes being rank
In end of autumn turned to the rams,
And when the work of generation was
Between these woolly breeders in the act
The skilful shepherd pill'd me certain wands,
And in the doing of the deed of kind,
He stuck them up before the fulsome ewes,
Who then conceiving did in eaning time
Fall parti-color'd lambs, and those were Jacob's.
This was a way to thrive, and he was blest;
And thrift is blessing if men steal it not.

[I.iii.78-90]

Shylock's grotesque pastoral sexualises interest as a kind of breeding and challenges with its farmyard realism and its subtext of cheating the prettified pastoral of the Christian.⁵ The Jew's story smells of dung. Although the Bible does not tell him this, he knows that the ewes were in heat at the end of autumn and he talks approvingly as a farmer would of the work of generation. An active participant in this work is Jacob, whom we imagine moving among the woolly breeders, wielding his wands with an energy for profit every bit as avid as the rams' for propagation.

The peeled wands are Shylock's version of the boyish arrows. Whereas those fly in pursuit of each other and can mirror each other but not reproduce, the wands are props in a scene of procreation. They are witnesses to conception but not passive ones, for they effect conception by controlling the colour of the offspring. In the Bible the significance of the peeled branches is clear. In Shakespeare's version, because of the contrast with Bassanio something less obvious may be understood. Bassanio's arrows are of a piece; innocent, unreproductive male identity is their message. Jacob's rods, on the other hand, are marked by and create difference. They are motley, white peeping through black and pied like the breed they induce. They are therefore sexualised, not only by being part of a scene of procreation but in bearing the marks of contrast, the cuts and slashes that make for difference. They are therefore a factor in increase and generation and a figure for the energetic breeding of kind and money for which the Jew stands but which the gentiles (or at least Bassanio and Antonio) profess to find unnatural.⁶

The connection between the flight of arrows and deep friendship between young men is at the heart of a Biblical episode very different from Shylock's but analogous to Bassanio's tale. The episode of Jonathan and David, the arrows and the anger of Saul (1 Samuel 20) is the Bible's most poignant and detailed account of friendship between men. The episode has been the subject of much analysis and it is not my purpose here to attempt more commentary on its art. I just want to consider the arrows. Unlike Bassanio's they are not “innocent,” even though they are shot in sport. They are part of a stratagem and aim to deliver a message from Jonathan to the hidden David: flee or come back. While Bassanio's shafts are about the flight and return of money, Jonathan's mark the tragic divide between friendship and separation. They do not stand for the love between men—this is openly and directly expressed in the story—but they elaborate its peripety as it is posed between closeness and separation. Finding the arrows, for Bassanio, means the return of debts and the justification of friendship. In 1 Samuel 20 the return of the arrows signals the dispersion of the friends. The boy who gathers them does not know this but Jonathan does; the hidden David does and so does the reader. In the Biblical story, then, the arrows are not a figure of the friendship and its fate, but they bear a message which it might be too dangerous to speak face to face. They are an authenticating detail because they make it possible for Jonathan to leave his father's house to practise archery in a rural scene where David can hide. Yet the true beauty of the arrows lies in their retreat from foreground to background when the message they bear cannot contain the emotional pressure of the love between friends and David comes out of hiding to embrace Jonathan and bid him farewell:

And as soon as the lad was gone, David arose out of a place toward the south and fell on his face to the ground, and bowed himself three times; and they kissed one another, and wept one with the other, until David exceeded.

[20:41]

In their role as a rhetorical device, Bassanio's arrows trace out a message he chooses not to speak directly, a request for more interest-free credit, coloured by an ambience of innocent male friendship. Both stories occur at the separation of the ways for two loving friends. Between David and Jonathan stands the jealousy and anger of the violent father and king. Between Antonio and Bassanio comes the lady of Belmont whose treasure, once opened, makes the noble yet sterile love-debt of friendship recede into the background. It can hold its own neither financially nor erotically against heterosexual wealth and procreation.

Yet procreation is apparently not as simple for Christians as it is for rams and ewes. All kinds of things get in the way. One of the severest conditions of the law of the father in Portia's Belmont condemns choosers of wrong caskets to refrain from marriage for the rest of their lives, which translating from the language of romance is the doom of castration. The Prince of Morocco seems to realise this as he droops off the stage:

Cold indeed, and labour lost:
Then farewell heat, and welcome frost!

[II.vii.74-75]

In the Italian novella Il Pecorone, a probable source of Shakespeare's play, the Portia figure, a rich widow who can only be reached by sea, inverts the Shakespearean order. In The Merchant the wrong choice of casket leads to enforced celibacy; in Il Pecorone the widow demands proof of manhood before choosing the lucky suitor. Impotence on the crucial night costs the candidate not only his reputation but whatever wealth he has brought with him on his quest. Needless to say the lady drugs the candidates with a doctored potion before they retire and remains so to speak impregnable until the Bassanio figure, after two defeats and heavy loss of merchandise, tumbles to the stratagem, with the help of a maid, encounters the lady and wins the prize. Both in Shakespeare and in the Italian tale loss of manhood and loss of wealth are linked. In the more primitive version the phallic performance is the test; in the politer version the test is an apparently ethical one but failure unmans the suitor just as it denies him Portia's treasure.

The pleasant fiction of Shakespeare's play, that love releases money and makes children, is a way of imagining a profit motive that is legitimate, Christian and natural as opposed to the Jew's unnatural ways with ewes and money. Portia's use of a rhetoric of multiplication when she dedicates herself to Bassanio after his successful choice is an unashamed embrace of number and market value as valid criteria of worth as well as integrity and virtue:

                                        yet for you,
I would be trebled twenty times myself,
A thousand times more fair, ten thousand times more rich
That only to stand high in your account,
I might in virtues, beauties, livings, friends
Exceed account.

[III.ii.152-57]

When the Lord said be fruitful and multiply he was probably not thinking of the profit motive, yet marrying money is a way of combining God's word with sound business practice. Increase is what the sex drive and the profit motive have in common, and the play labours hard to keep clear the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate increase while, in the background, lurks the example of homosexual love which, valuing identity, offers neither profit nor increase, only debt and sacrifice.

Gratiano, Bassanio's buffoonish friend, spells out the simplest way to profit in the direct and bawdy way unavailable to polite people. He is also getting married in Act III, not to money but to money's maid, Nerissa, and true to Venetian mores he turns the conventional coincidence into a money-making proposition:

We'll play with them the first boy for a thousand ducats.
NER.
What, and stake down?
GRA.
No, we shall ne'er win at that sport, and stake down.

[III.ii.213-16]

Getting a male child is the goal in a competition and a gamble, a game which is played not only for pleasure but also for profit. This is neither the innocent play of boyish arrows nor the aggressive hubristic interventionism of Jacob's peeled wands. It is a hazard (a word much used in the play), something like setting a merchant vessel on its journey without insurance, and for security all Gratiano has is what every Christian merchant should have: faith in God and confidence in one's upright stake. But that, as we know from the traditions of comedy, is easier for servants, and in our play consummation is delayed by more than two acts as both Antonio and the Jew intrude the obligations of friendship and debt into the space between the bride and bridegroom.

The dependence of the happy end on the Jew's claim for his bond is a major feature of the play's closing action and has been the subject of much commentary. My purpose in taking another look is to reconsider the all-important erotic/financial triangle which now comes into clear focus, and weigh the implications of the intriguingly similar threesome who play out a plot of love, power and debt in Sonnet 134.

When we listen to Bassanio telling Portia the bad news in the letter from Venice, we realise with a shock that these are the first passionate and urgent words we have heard from him in the whole casket scene:

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

[III.i.263-66]

The subjection of his friend's very life to Bassanio's success gives the young man's speech a physical immediacy that was never apparent in the formal phrases he spoke as Portia's suitor. That was the language of literary love; this merges word and paper with a suffering, dying body. It substitutes a real sacrifice for the very literary one that Portia imagined herself enacting in the tense moment before Bassanio's choice.

I stand for sacrifice

[III.ii.57]

she says, comparing Bassanio to Hercules and herself to the captive Trojan maiden of the legend. Antonio's body bleeding his debt is in no legend; it is going to happen and every minute brings the sacrifice nearer.

No one can doubt the emotion the play invests in the relationship between the older merchant and his young kinsman. What is intriguing is the position of Portia vis-à-vis the two male points of the triangle. In the plot she is the saviour of Antonio and the releaser of his bond. But the sad fate she succeeds in preventing bears a strong emotional emphasis. Antonio's sacrifice would be a liebestod or a martyrdom, a lover's willing acceptance of the mortal debt which proves his love's worth and raises it above the love of women. This is what Antonio's farewell speech in court to Bassanio implies:

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

[IV.i.274-77]

When Portia intervenes to make the happy end possible, she robs the male romance of its only possible public consummation—the shedding of blood, for Shylock's cut would have fulfilled Antonio's tragic promise of purse and person to his friend. Here then as in a tragedy the boast of the hero, his willingness to go to the extreme, would become the cruel reality which vindicates his spirit and his integrity and his love even as it breaks his body. But a tragedy this is not.

As chief agent of the comic plot which is committed to happy endings, marriage beds and the release of large sums of money, Portia does her job well. But she is not only an agent of resolution; for if we put the plot of friendship in the foreground, she begins to look more like one of Frye's blocking characters whose function in comedy is to frustrate desire. Because of her, Antonio's love will not be remembered among the great love stories but will decline into a marginality best summed up by the merchant's pronounced singleness among the wedded couples who exit at the end.

The thoughts of this man so miraculously saved from death and penury but denied the enjoyment of his love cannot be put into words in the play. The enigma of the first scene's melancholy is never solved. But a reading of Sonnet 134 together with the play's closing movement offers a way of putting into words the feelings of the necessary loser in the struggle over the young man's love. If we think of the voice in the sonnet as Antonio's, we may go on to say that he is addressing someone who is a composite of both his rivals, a woman and usurer.

So now I have confess'd that he is thine,
And I my self am mortgaged to thy will,
Myself I'll forfeit, so that other mine,
Thou wilt restore to be my comfort still:
But thou wilt not, nor he will not be free,
For thou art covetous, and he is kind;
He learn'd but surety-like to write for me
Under that bond that him as fast doth bind.
The statute of thy beauty thou wilt take,
Thou usurer, that puts forth all to use,
And sue a friend came debtor for my sake,
So him I lose through my unkind abuse.
          Him have I lost, thou hast both him and me,
          He pays the whole, and yet I am not free.

The sonnet's woman is an exaggerated Portia seen through the eyes of a defeated rival. She is a powerful woman who has the formidable assets of beauty, money and the law at her command to wield in unequal battle against the loser, the weaker, poorer less resourceful male.⁷ In the sonnet the woman's sexuality and wealth, kept apart decorously in the play (but not in Il Pecorone), coalesce in predatory and unacceptable ways. Like Shylock, she does not play by the gentile rules of business but invests herself in erotic transactions which bring her profit and power, seemingly without risk. There is much anger in the “all” of “Thou usurer, that puts forth all to use” because it points to the available sexuality of a woman who can exploit it for her profit in the market place, as opposed to the inhibited sexuality of a man whose all in the love for a friend can only mean the surrender of everything in death, Antonio's total commitment of purse and person for Bassanio put forth all but expected no use. Giving up his life for his friend's debt would place Antonio in an act of exchange which belongs to the symbolic pattern of the arrows. There can be no profit; either the two find each other and rest content with a doubleness that can produce no increase, or one is lost and a debt remains. When profit is impossible loss is more than likely.

The financial and sexual battle is lost and not even the last desperate move of a bankrupt—“Myself I'll forfeit”—will achieve its purpose. The woman's wealth and sex give her complete control over the men who are clients for her services. Unlike Shylock's bond, her statute of beauty is lawyer proof, for there is no appeal to any judge or legal precedent to restrain the reach of her sex.⁸ She will take whatever its power incites her to take, and the language of law in the sonnet is sarcastic because eros will have nothing to do with the rules and codes of society.

While the analogy between poem and play holds as long as we hear the resigned male voice of loss and the image it creates of the predatory, profiteering woman/usurer, his rival in business and love, yet it becomes harder to maintain when we consider the position in the erotic triangle of the younger man, that “other self” with whose loss the sonnet tries to come to terms. Like the play's Bassanio, the young man here is something of a cipher. He is passive to the woman's predatory desire. She is “covetous” while he is merely “kind”; instead of willing something positively he “will not be free”; essentially, therefore, he is possessed, and to the discomfort of the speaker, acquiesces in this his slavish state.

The one aspect of the young man that contradicts his passivity is his activity as a go-between in the interest of his friend, an action which creates the entanglement in which he is content to rest. The language the speaker in the sonnet uses to describe this going-between, words like debt, bond, surety, is the language of Antonio's erotic/financial commitment in the play. In the play the debt and the bond put the merchant at the mercy of the Jew usurer; in the sonnet they put the young man in the power of the woman usurer. Both men bind themselves out of friendship and are trapped by statute and law. But in substituting the law of sex and beauty for the legal practices of Venice, the sonnet dramatises the necessary defeat of Antonio, for the power of the covetous woman, limited by no rules, is also based on the willingness of her victim. He will not be free because being bound to a woman is kind (remember Shylock's description of Jacob's sheep engaged in “doing of the deed of kind”), or in other words the nature of sexual relations as God intended them. In the trial scene of the play it is Bassanio who declares his willingness to “pay the whole” (Portia's money of course) but is still not able to free Antonio from Shylock's grasp. In the sonnet what is imagined is not just an offer, as in the play, but the young man's actual payment of the whole which in the transactions of sex means the placing of his body at the service of a beautiful usurer.⁹ Yet as the last line says so explicitly, such a payment frees no one, which is what we might imagine to be the subtext of Antonio contemplating, in a jaundiced way, the union of Bassanio and Portia at the end of the play.

By postulating this hybrid Jewoman, part Portia, part Shylock, Antonio's loss of Bassanio to the heiress of Belmont, inevitable and natural in the plot of romantic comedy, becomes darker and more painful. The convention of the happy ending would have us believe that the characters have been freed of the threat of ruin and death, the burdens of poverty and the unnatural state of virginity. The sonnet prompts us to view things differently. By twinning full payment of the debt with the continuation of bondage, the sonnet tells the adult story that hides behind the fairy tale. Profit in love always involves some loss. Love is not the equal exchange of either the homosexual paradise or the heterosexual innocence of “my love is mine and I am his.” Rather it is a matter of debt and possession, lending and repayment with interest out of which the stronger party emerges possessing everything. The combination of usury and beauty is devastating because the risk is always the suitor's, never the creditor's.

In the play's last scene Portia plays the Jew as well as the woman when the riddle of the rings is posed and the almost tragic entanglements of the past are recapitulated. When the impasse of the missing rings is at its crisis and everything hangs on Portia's lips, Antonio takes the action back to its very beginning, the forfeit of his body to the Jew in order to obtain credit for his friend. Seeking a way out of the impasse, Antonio proposes repeating his catastrophic gesture by binding himself once again, this time to Portia, for Bassanio's welfare:

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

[V.i.249-53]

Read one way this gallant gesture, a form of words rather than a sinister contract, is a symbolic act of healing. It replaces the evil corporal bond to Shylock with a fortunate binding of soul. Portia's act of forgiveness and Bassanio's faithfulness as a husband will ensure that this forfeit is never brought to court. Yet despite the obvious differences, Antonio's replay of his fatal move places Portia firmly in the position once occupied by Shylock, even as Antonio, “the unhappy subject of these quarrels,” comes once again between the young couple and the consummation of their marriage. On the surface this is not his wish, though it has been the case since the arrival of his troubled letter in Act III. On the surface of it Antonio's credit is what enables Bassanio to undertake his venture in the first place. But beneath the surface, the radical stance of Antonio's commitment, his talk of “extremest means,” his offer of everything, would reach its unnatural but logical conclusion in the surrender of his body for Bassanio and his consequent usurpation of Portia's place as true lover.

So the benign if melancholic Antonio of the plot may be offset by the darker Antonio, the lover whose necessarily unrequited love can only find release and expression in death. It is this voice that speaks in the sonnet, offering to tie himself in debt to the sexwealth of a ruthless beauty, but asking desperately for the young man, the quid pro quo that Antonio could never mention in the play. For a moment at the end of the play when he turns to Portia with his new offer of forfeit, Antonio could have quoted the sonnet:

Him have I lost, thou hast both him and me.

Even in the final tableau, when he has won back his wealth, he is, in the sonnet's words, still “not free.” For his release from sacrifice is an anti-climax. He has nowhere to go. So although wealth is spread around liberally, like manna, at the end it is the unfinished business between the merchant and Bassanio that occupies the mind.

Because this business provides the only selfless motive in the play, and because its burden is the only unrequited and unrequitable love, it sets up the contrasts between profit and sacrifice, interest and love, as contrasts not only between Jew and gentile but between woman and man. Both Jews and women are profiteers whose treasure grows with use, whereas the merchant can only give his purse and his person and hope for no return. Is it any wonder then that this figure, who begins his part in the play by taking refuge in ignorance:

In sooth, I know not why I am so sad

approaches its end by taking refuge in silence:

I am dumb.

Notes

1. All Shakespeare citations are to the Riverside edition, Boston 1974.

2. Auden in his essay on the play accepts Bassanio's rhetoric of innocence with no reservations. Bassanio, writes Auden, “is one of those people whose attitude towards money is that of a child; it will somehow always appear by magic when really needed” (232).

3. This conjunction is placed in its economic setting by Lars Engle. Engle sees that “A Christian merchant, preserving homosocial connection to a lord, cannot afford to understand the parable of economic relations offered by the Jew” (32). But he fails to draw a precise parallel between the rival parables. For a thorough attempt to place the play in a historical, Venetian economic and legal context (without emphasis on sexuality) see Walter Cohen's article.

4. It is interesting to note how the economic implications of the Biblical text so transparent to contemporary critics were of minimal importance to a scholar like Barbara K. Lewalski, who in a comprehensive article gives little attention to the Laban/Jacob episode, seeing it as a move in an essentially moral conflict between Christian venture (good) and Jewish thrift (bad).

5. Yet as Ruth Nevo points out (1980, 127), the contrast is also between Jacob and Bassanio as different kinds of suitors. For all his cunning Jacob labours for the hand of his bride. Bassanio, like the other young Venetians, is born into idleness. That is why he needs Portia.

6. The unnaturalness of the juxtaposition of friendship and breeding together with the undertone of barrenness (as a natural feature of friendship as well as an ideological feature of metal) is apparent in the scornful way Antonio challenges Shylock to lend him money: “… lend it not / As to thy friends for when did friendship take / A breed for barren metal of his friend?” (I.iii.128-29)

7. Writing about the sexual triangle in the sonnets, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick wishes that the sonnets were a novel so that the reader could seek refuge from their self-reflexive language in a fully rendered and described set of social and sexual relations (46). She wants to know just who these people are. My analogy with the play does not give an answer but helps to characterise the social and sexual scene.

8. But see the discussion of the sonnet in Booth's edition, pp. 463-6. In his commentary on “statute” (l. 9) Booth gives equal weight to the language of legal rights and limitations and that of sexual bondage.

9. Joel Fineman, discussing the sonnet (285-6), argues that the pun whole/hole links the sex of the young man and the woman with the emptiness or disjunction within the poet and his project of writing sonnets. Fineman's point about the sound of “whole” as “pure languageness” which denies the univocity of traditional poetic language is finely made but his fierce emphasis on the rhetoric leaves the financial and legal language largely uninterpreted.

References

Auden, W. H. “Brothers and Others.” In The Dyer's Hand. New York: Vintage Books, 1968, pp. 218-237.

Booth, Stephen. Ed. Shakespeare's Sonnets. New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1980.

Cohen, Walter. “The Merchant of Venice and the Possibilities of Historical Criticism.” ELH 49 (1982), 765-89.

Engle, Lars. “‘Thrift is Blessing’: Exchange and Explanation in The Merchant of Venice.” Shakespeare Quarterly 37 (1986), 20-37.

Evans, G. B. et al. Eds. The Riverside Shakespeare. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974.

Fineman, Joel. Shakespeare's Perjured Eye. Berkeley: U of California P, 1986.

Lewalski, Barbara K. “Biblical Allusion and Allegory in The Merchant of Venice.” Shakespeare Quarterly 13 (1962), 327-343.

Nevo, Ruth. Comic Transformations in Shakespeare. London and New York: Methuen, 1980.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New York: Columbia UP, 1985.