SOURCE: Landis, Joan Hutton. “‘By two-headed Janus’: Double Discourse in The Merchant of Venice.” The Upstart Crow 16 (1996): 13-30.

[In the following essay, Hutton studies the homosexual bawdy in The Merchant of Venice.]

The very Janus of poets; he wears almost
everywhere two faces; and you have scarce
begun to admire one, ere you despise the other.

John Dryden

To begin behind the arras of decorum, my focus here will be the bawdy connotations that abound in The Merchant of Venice and, in particular, the nether regions of the male anatomy.

First, I want to look at the pioneering, if passé, Eric Partridge. Of course I risk appearing as another Polonius, setting “springes to catch woodcocks,” for although Partridge wrote bravely enough in that Victorian year of 1948, he now sounds to our sophisticated and liberal ears peculiarly akin to Chanticleer, Chanticleer “moralisé,” at that. For example, in a section of his introduction to Shakespeare's Bawdy entitled “Homosexual,” he lets us know that the true aliens in his view are not only homosexuals but those critics who are interested at all in the claim that Shakespeare himself might have been gay. He finds this “ludicrous.”¹ He goes on to state,

Had Shakespeare, so frank and courteous, been a homosexual, he would have subtly yet irrefutably conveyed the fact. Had he even been much interested in the subject, he would have mentioned it far more often: as it is, he speaks of homosexuals in much the same way as he speaks of eunuchs.²

And later.

The male buttocks, as a sexual feature, do not interest Shakespeare at all (yet had he been a homosexual they would have done so) and as a physiological feature, only a little, as will be seen from the bum, buttocks, rump entries in the Glossary, unless it be to make a pun on ass and on posteriors: but the female buttocks, despite the paucity of the references thereto, did undoubtedly attract his attention.³

Of the female breasts he wonderfully crows that Shakespeare's interest in them exhibited “the healthy tendencies of a healthy, well-balanced male mind.”⁴ Shakespeare's own sexuality aside, Partridge's special pleading shows how peculiarly meaning lies in the eye of the beholder and that it is as hard to see through cultural bias as to pass through the eye of the needle. His guidance in regard to the buttocks is a bum steer indeed. If I were to annunciate my own certainties about Shakespeare's interest in male genitals beyond the latitudes of Venice and Belmont, beyond the sonnets and beyond comedy, I would argue that Shakespeare's theory of tragedy—insofar as he may have had one—finds its locus classicus precisely in the phallus, in that “turban'd Turk” so uncannily imaged by Othello in his final speech, in those centaurs that recur, like photographic negatives, Nessus, Lamord, Sagittarius, throughout the histories and tragedies. Shakespeare uses body images in every genre and in every registration as correlatives to his own exploration of motive and his particular obsession with the versions of desire for power and displacements of that desire.

My entry to The Merchant will be the critically recrudescent matter of Portia's ring which, like Mistress Overdone, has had much recent business.⁵ I am not going to re-argue the dynamics of the play; suffice it to say that I do read the relationship between Antonio and Bassanio as a homosexual one and, while it may be only latent, it charges the play with its tensions. Homosexuality is as much a subject of The Merchant as property, valuation, bonding, justice, or mercy. In the donné of the drama itself, Antonio's condition is linked clearly enough to sterility, gelding, self-hatred and the death wish as if “to die” were also, if Bassanio were “by,” to achieve sexual release. “I am the tainted wether of the flock, metest for death,” he admits (IV. i. 114-5).⁶ The language of the play allows it; interpretation awards it. Certainly, this view of Antonio has been current for many years although critics still write as if viewing the possibility with a “wild surmise” or, like Partridge, do not see it at all. Shakespeare's Venice is the place of male bonding that is both homosocial—to use Eve Sedgwick's term—and homoerotic, a bonding contingent on the gelding commercialism of its ethos.⁷ Homosexuality is, at one level, an effect of such a society and an aspect of Shakespeare's critique of it.

What happens to the interpretive possibilities if we review the play from the vantage point of Act V? As A. D. Nuttall asks in his discussion of The Merchant, “What gives the business of the ring-begging … its extraordinary tension if it is not the half-buried conflict between male love and heterosexual love?”⁸ Just so, and, as we all know, ring is bawdy for the pudendum, vulva, along with “circle,” “O,” “quaint,” “cherry,” “con,” “crown,” “eyes,” and “home,” among others, epithets confirmed not only by Partridge and E. A. Colman but by the relative newcomer in the world of sexual allusion, Frankie Rubinstein.⁹

Let us recall that we have seen Portia present the ring to her new “lord,” Bassanio, and warn him never to let the ring part from his finger. It stands for their marriage vows, their union, as well as that traditional circle of spherical harmony. It means, too, the actual riches bestowed on him, Portia's house, servants, and self. Next, we watch as Balthasar requests the ring in payment for his legal services. Bassanio acquiesces at Antonio's urging:

My Lord Bassanio, let him have the ring,
Let his deserving and my love withal
Be valued 'gainst your wive's commandment.

(IV. i. 449-51)

It is sent, via Gratiano, to Balthasar. Antonio has prevailed. The ring is then produced by Portia after her mock discovery that Bassanio lacks it just as Gratiano is missing his ring. Portia then manipulates its return via Antonio so that the ring makes its own circular journey through the rival and back to its proper Jason.¹⁰ These rings make the occasion for a bawdy joke that both lightens and deconstructs the sexual malaise created by a rivalry and an apparent infidelity and prepares us for the imminent reunion of husband and wife which we expect will take place in duplicate or, if we count Jessica and Lorenzo, in triplicate. Quadruplicate, if Launcelot's pregnant Moor is on the premises.

However, it is worth remembering that the Latin word for ring is “ano,” or “anulus.” If ring is bawdy for female parts it may, as well, stand for the anus, or locus amoenus of male lovemaking. The word provides an encoded lexical pun of the sort which seduced Shakespeare regularly. Taking one's cue from Partridge, one asks where else such an improbable ring joke is inscribed. One answer is—precisely in the tail of the many male names which Shakespeare chose for his characters: Bass-anio, Grati-ano, Sol-anio, Steph-ano. Antonio's name contains a ring in it too, if anagrammatically, as does that of Solarino, the Ql precursor of Salerio. If we “English” these names, we have even grosser bawdy; for Gratiano might be translated as “gracious,” “free,” or “thankful” hole. Rubinstein tells us that “gracious” meant “sexually well-endowed.” Solanio has the one-and-only or “single” hole and Bassanio's sobriquet offers us the choice between “low,” “base,” or a tongue-in-cheek jest devolving from the fact that the Latin “basium” means “kiss.” We have the option of construing his name as “kiss my arse.” Shakespeare would use this pun more openly in Henry IV, Part 2 when the Dauphin is called “Basimecu,” (IV. vii. 25). Antonio is the name of the adorer of Sebastian in Twelfth Night and the ardor he expresses is, or so it seems to me, forthrightly homosexual. (Sebastian in its Italian form contains another ring and may, therefore, have guided Shakespeare to choose it for Julia's male persona in The Two Gentlemen of Verona.) I will have more to propose about Antonio's name later, an instance of true “antonmasia.”

This kind of bawdy insight will be found improbable, unsavory, and infuriating. “Haud credo,” as Holofernes might have said. After all, one wants to argue, those are all Italianate names, quite suitable for these Venetians on a realistic basis. It proves little to remind ourselves that in Shakespeare's main source for The Merchant, Il Pecorone, Antonio's prototype was named Ansualdo, Bassanio's Gianetto and Portia's simply “the Lady.” And, it could be maintained, no one would hear the double-entendres in a performance even if the names are reiterated. When Shakespeare wants to identify bawdy characters, he calls them names as plain as Pompey Bum, Froth, Kate Keepdown, Boult, Doll Tearsheet, Pistol or Ganymede! And even if we allow the pun, does it affect or infect similar names in other plays—Bassianus, Lucianus, Coriolanus? My answer would be either “no” or “it might.” Shakespeare writes in the total context of a given dramatic situation. As homosexuality is an explicit orientation in The Merchant, his imagination, so associative, could quite consciously play in this manner. “Lancelot” is overtly bawdy. Even Tubal and Balthasar could be included as genital puns. The homosexual material is, as Nuttall suggests, “half-buried,” and many of its traces are planted obliquely as well.

If one grants that the ring exchange in Act V is identifiable not only as heterosexual bawdy—as Portia's brilliant ploy in the manipulation of her husband's bosom friend and so of Bassanio's allegiance to her—but as homosexual bawdy as well, what are the architectural consequences, what does that “do” to the play itself? Can bawdy be isolated as if in a cell? What motives could Shakespeare have had to play in this specific way in a comedy which has such deeply serious content and which ends, in some views, with such an apparently harmonious closure, the play itself as true metaphysical ring? If the names act as signifiers of a double script, the playwright must have been aware of his own strategies as early as Act I, scene i, or even before composition began.

I am going to presume here that Shakespeare was experimenting with just such a double script, that it was encoded not only because homosexuality was a volatile subject for an Elizabethan playwright but because the play itself depended on doubleness of many kinds for its hedged meanings. As Keith Geary put it in his excellent assessment of The Merchant,

All the main characters in the play have double selves, and so sustain the apparently contradictory critical readings that Rabkin has noted, one predominating, then the other, making our responses and judgments difficult, shifting, relative. This Janus-like duality is built into the larger design of the play. The Merchant of Venice contains a number of “tricks”—elements that appear to mean one thing but turn out to mean another or, more exactly, to have two meanings simultaneously.¹¹

This is wonderfully apt and points up, if inadvertently, the use of Janus, invoked by Solanio in I. i. Even the god who oversees the Venetians has a “ring” in the tail of his name. Shakespeare uses Janus with stunning efficiency, for not only is he the god of beginnings—of the year, of January, of this play—but of shipping and of doorways and entrances. “The New Year's Day presents of the Romans included coppers with two-faced Janus on one side and a ship on the other. … Janus was the inventor of agriculture, of civil laws, of religious worship, of coinage; he was the protector of shipping and trade.”¹² One might add that here he is the god of entrances that are both structural and anatomical. Perhaps this kind of deriving can illuminate Portia's name as well. She is overtly linked to “Cato's daughter,” the wife of Brutus and the politically involved Roman woman. In Julius Caesar, of course, as in history, Portia commits suicide, the honorable male mode of coping with defeat. In this comedy, Portia deflects male dominance and homosocial preference by manipulating it. She may also be characterized in The Merchant by her own synechdochic portal, gate, or doorway, be it female or male. I suggest it is both, delaying until later my own explication of the name's provenance.

There are, then, two stories being told at once in The Merchant. The first is that of the quest for Portia by Bassanio and that of the double triangle embodied in Antonio-Bassanio-Portia and Antonio-Bassanio-Shylock. This is the fiction we watch unfold on the stage or read in our studies. The second, or subtext, I shall place on the margins of the fictive or aesthetic realm. It appears only in response to the bawdy in the play and gestures, or so I will argue, towards the life lived in the world of the Globe Theatre, the actual private lives of some of the actors or audience who found the boys who played girls and women of special interest and attraction. The two worlds will mirror one another in the same way that Bassanio describes when he finds his own image reflected in Portia's eyes. That is, in the world of The Merchant of Venice, heterosexual love wins the day; homosexual love is treated as “tainted,” sterile, endemic to that male mercantile ambiance which inhibits conventionally defined “charity” or reproductive possibility. His love for Bassanio is precisely the cause of Antonio's sadness, his masochism, and his sadism. Shylock is clearly not homosexual but his “impotence,” his skewed mode of valuation and eventual symbolic castration are linked to the same ethos. Indeed, his usury, from the Christian point of view, is not only sinful or masturbatory, but is “ewe-sury,” which is considered a kind of sodomy. However, if homosexual love gets bested in Belmont, Portia's ring, in its secondary sense of anus, signals its recrudescent and ongoing presence. The ring's sly passage from one man to another can be seen as an encoded in-joke to which the actors would have been privy. As Lisa Jardine has argued so persuasively in her book, Still Harping on Daughters: Women and Drama in the Age of Shakespeare, the erotics of the stage were often overtly homoerotic, insisting on the fact that boys played female roles and that this reality underlay all Elizabethan and Jacobean drama.¹³ Such a reality breaks through the artifice of the staging in the same way as the “metadramatic” does when we watch plays-within-plays or find characters lecturing on acting on the stage. Thus, when Gratiano delivers his final odd line “Well, while I live I'll fear no other thing / So sore as keeping safe Nerissa's ring” (V. i. 306-07), his meaning is overseen by Janus; it can refer to any one of his wife's three rings or to the ring in the tail of the boy acting the role of Nerissa. If one wants to play with a tantalizing but improbable source for this line, see Genesis, XIX: 4-9. The place is Sodom. The townsmen have surrounded Lot's house and wish to know his two visitors. Lot offers to send them his two virgin daughters in place of the men-angels. As he exhorts them, they exclaim:

Stand back. And they said again, this one fellow came back in to sojourn, and he will needs be judge; now we will deal worse with thee than with them. And they pressed sore upon the man, even Lot, and came near to break the door.¹⁴

“Stand back” means to sodomize; to “press sore” needs no gloss. Again, in Bassanio's long rhapsodic speech in III. ii., discovering that he has chosen the right casket, he and Portia use the word “stand” and “stand high” three times. It is then that Portia delivers her ring. Speaking of sodomy, look closely at Gratiano's speech in response to the outraged Nerissa who has just threatened to scratch the hair from the face of the clerk who had the ring.

Now, by this hand, I gave it to a youth,
A kind of boy, a little scrubb'd boy,
No higher than thyself, the judge's clerk,
A prating boy that begg'd it as a fee.
I could not for my heart deny it him.

(V. i. 161-65)

“Scrubbed,” as Rubinstein suggests, derives from the Latin scrobis, hole, ditch, grave, vulva. Nerissa is “scrubbed” in her female guise but she is also a boy, perhaps in the sense of passive homosexual. A “prating” boy is both one who talks or prattles and one who has a “prat,” or buttocks. The boy “begg'd” the ring as a fee and so was a beggar boy or, homophonically, a bugger. The word “beggar” is used eight times in the play in some form.

As I have said, Shakespeare valued heterosexual love over homosexual love in his play. He may have done so in life as well, but the buried bawdy, encoded as it is, subverts the text, deconstructs his own fabrication and reveals, as it were, the male bodies under the female costumes. Concomitantly, he inscribes the double or “two-headed” aspect of all things.

Even if one assents to implications of bawdy as I have very generally sketched them here, one might take Partridge's line that there ought to be homosexual or bisexual connotations, gestures, and imagery everywhere. Although one is always in danger of looking too hard through the microscope of one's own bias or focus, a revisionary scan should produce clues or evidence other than the questionable names I have put forward, or the root meanings of a few tainted words. I shall amplify.

Consider, for example, Salerio's rhetoric in I. i. It has often been noted as florid, nearer to the language of love than to the realistic verbiage of merchants. Addressing Antonio, he says:

Your mind is tossing on the ocean,
There where your argosies with portly sail—
Like signiors and rich burghers on the flood,
Or as it were, the pageants of the sea,
Do overpeer the petty traffickers
That cur'sy to them, do them reverence,
As they fly by them with their woven wings.

(I. i. 8-14)

I should not see the sandy hour-glass run
But I should think of shallows and of flats,
And see my wealthy Andrew dock'd in sand,
Vailing her high top lower than her ribs
To kiss her burial. Should I go to church
And see the holy edifice of stone,
And not bethink me straight of dangerous rocks,
Which touching but my gentle vessel's side
Would scatter all her spices on the stream,
Enrobe the roaring waters with my silks,
And in a word, but even now worth this,
And now worth nothing?

(I. i. 25-36)

Although ships are usually feminine in gender, Salerio compares them to “signiors and rich burghers” to whom smaller ships curtsy. His “wealthy Andrew” is given the female pronoun. While “Andrew” was, literally, the name of a galleon captured by the English in 1596, Shakespeare has his Venetian make of it a kind of transvestite figure. It is “stone” and “rocks” that “touch my gentle vessel's side” and cause his ship to “scatter all her spices on the stream.” While this language is not explicitly bawdy, it encodes the displacement of male love for females onto the merchandise that is not only valuable in the sense of commodity but for its homoerotic aspect. The ships are clearly male in female dress and cause their owners, in fantasy, to “scatter” their spice. Again, when Gratiano describes the beauty of the chase, he makes the following analogy:

How like a younger or a prodigal
The scarf'd bark puts from her native bay,
Hugg'd and embraced by the strumpet wind!
How like the prodigal doth she return,
With over-weathered ribs and ragged sails,
Lean, rent, and beggar'd by the strumpet wind!

(II. vi. 13-18)

Overtly sexualized, his argosy is a prodigal son, dressed extravagantly, then “rent and beggar'd.”¹⁵ Gratiano, Bassanio's vulgar double (in the sense of dopplegänger), like Salerio, images his shipping in transvestite or ambisexual fashion. The merchant's language helps to create the atmosphere appropriate to Venice, a city which Elizabethans knew not only as a great commercial capital and seaport but as a place infamous for sexuality and perversion; whose very name echoes that of Venus, venery, venereal. Like Sodom, Venice was linked to buggery. Male in its geography when opposed to Belmont—or beautiful mountain—or “mons generis,” we have all come to think of the landscape as divided into sexually identifiable domains. Yet, even there the lexical basis is debatable, for “mountain” can be glossed as “buttocks”¹⁶ and has phallic connotations in its verbal form as well. There are other, better ways of describing the relationship of the two places, but once we begin to study Venice or Belmont through the lens of bawdy, odd perspectives emerge. It is seemingly far-fetched to ascribe Antonio's “my ventures are not in one bottom trusted” (I. i. 42) to bawdy, yet, if we admit that Bassanio is the “one place” in which his interest is vested, we might accept such figures as part of a system of puns that stud this play. When Antonio insists, “My purse, my person, my extremest means, / Lie all unlock'd to your occasions” (I. i. 138-39), the genital and sexual meanings seem clear and uncontestable because they belong to the play and its inner dynamics. If Shylock binds fast and locks up his treasure, it is dramatically right that Antonio wishes to spend his, in both senses of that word, for his beloved. Such allusion is not, then, “subversive” because it is apparent and intentional. It does not belong to the second kind which I am distinguishing as encoded.

Another aspect of the play clarified by sexual allusion too dark to be conventionally “bawdy” is the uncanny doubling that exists between Shylock and Antonio. It has always seemed certain to me that Antonio's hatred of Shylock and his disgusting treatment of him were motivated by the unconscious recognition of himself in the Jew. They both attempt to make barren metal breed. Behind it lurks the desire for variations on the pound of flesh. Shylock is linked to the bestial through the ram and the ewes; Antonio, the wether. Shakespeare consistently makes doubles of rivals and enemies, as René Girard has argued so forcefully.¹⁷ Neither man attains his ultimate goal. Both will suffer a gelding by gold even though Antonio does end up in possession of three of his argosies, those ships which I have called substitute transvestites. It is a trinity which stands in place of Bassanio and his triune genitals. Antonio's spitting on Shylock's gaberdine and voiding his rheum on Shylock's beard are especially perverse. Partridge confirms that “spit” refers to seminal emission.¹⁸ We learn that Antonio also “spurned” Shylock like a “dog” or “cur.” Second meanings for those words are “to copulate” or “prick” and “to sodomize.” Antonio reroutes his self-hatred outwardly against a virtual twin so that his assaults signify both masturbation—“self-abuse” would be a more apt term—and buggery. Shylock's hatred of Antonio, while not identical, is expressed as an “ancient grudge” that he desires to “feed fat.” The pound of flesh he wants to cannibalize is, concomitantly, phallic, the act one of castration. (It is probable that when Shylock speaks of raising up “the gross of full three thousand ducats,” he is, like other characters, mixing his metaphors, using the parlance of his trade that is also, simultaneously, anatomical. Raising ducats is the equivalent of male erection, male power.) Shylock, of course, will be gelded by his daughter's theft of his gold, stones and jewels; Antonio already is gelded by Bassanio's quest for the golden Portia. She is the golden fleece that is sought and won so that, on the level of bawdy, we might quibble that as that fleece belonged to a ram, Portia is connected to the male sex as well as to her own apparent female sex.

Before continuing on this revisionary progress, examining those sites that seem especially green in bawdy, I want to look briefly at two mythic heroes to whom Bassanio is compared: Jason and Hercules. Jason's similarity to the Venetian quester for gold has been nicely studied by Elizabeth Sklar, who emphasizes Jason's double reputation in medieval literary tradition.¹⁹ Dante placed him in the eighth circle of hell as a betrayer. His double-dealing was clear to Chaucer in The Legend of Good Women where Jason was described as a “devourer and a dragoun.” Moral Gower treated him as a breaker of oaths. Sklar suggests that Bassanio betrays Portia jasonically when he sends her ring to the “civil doctor” so soon after his marriage. Thus Jason and Bassanio are replications of Janus by virtue of their two-facedness in love and their valuation of gold. Hercules, too, was known in various guises, but traditionally he was known as bisexual. He was an Argonaut. It was at the beginning of Jason's voyage that Hylas, Hercules' beautiful page boy, was sent off the ship in search of water. When he failed to return, Hercules went in search of him. Unable to wait any longer, the Argo sailed without him. This is the episode on which his reputation as a homosexual is based. (He was also a transvestite by virtue of his service to Omphale.) Portia refers to Bassanio during the casket-choosing as both Alcides and Hercules. Her, “Go, Hercules” (III. ii. 60) is wonderfully moving in its context and signifies her own anxiety. Yet, as always, when we place the mythic allusion close to the play itself, to the nature of the rivalry of Portia and Antonio for this hero, we might see that there are counterpassions that she will, in potentia, have to contend with, that passion which Alcides felt for Hylas. Listen to the song which is being sung in response to this exhortation just noted and as Bassanio is in the process of choosing Portia:

Tell me where is fancy bred,
Or in the heart or in the head?
How begot, how nourished?
                              Reply, reply.
It is engend'red in the eyes,
With gazing fed, and fancy dies,
In the cradle where it lies.
Let us all ring fancy's knell.
I'll begin it, ding, dong, bell.

(III. ii. 64-70) (my italics)

It asks where infatuation or sexual desire is begun. The answers are all double-entendres. “Heart” may mean “arse or bowel,”²⁰ “head” means maidenhead, prepuce or testes. It is engendered in the “eyes.” While this organ can stand for all the human orifices, it most often means pudendum or anus. Fancy itself, we learn, means not only amorous inclination but homosexual love. Rubinstein quotes from Spenser's Fairie Queene:

The first was Fancy, like a lovely boy,
Of rare aspect, and beautie without peare's
Matchable either to the ymp of Troy,
Whom Jove did love, and chose his cup to beare,
Or that great daintie lad … so deare
To great Alcides …(21)

Ganymede and Hylas are the subjects of this periphrasis which pointedly connects fancy and catamites in one figure. The theme of Bassanio's whole cogitation is that of appearance and reality, how the world “is still deceived with ornament,” and so, as encoded meaning, doubly appropriate.

Launcelot Gobbo's circular reasoning in II. ii as he feigns a dialogue with the Devil and his conscience is easily limned as a homosexual joke. The Devil—famed for his bisexuality as well as his monstrosity—is urging the “servant” with the “lance” to “budge” or bugger. His “hard conscience” urges him not to budge. As the fiend gives the friendlier counsel, pro-buggery wins the day. (“Con,” according to Rubinstein, can signify the female or male organs and the arse.) A “servant” was a euphemism for a pimp or male whore so that Shakespeare could avail himself of this second meaning by virtue of the character's role as well as the actual word. Because Launcelot is a clown figure, one tends to dissociate the jokes of the servant (as with Launce and his dog in Two Gentlemen of Verona) from the main thrust of the play, yet Launcelot's rhetoric is a mirror of the homosexual material here and shines like the light of a candle in a “naughty world.” Launcelot does, at III. v., raise the belly of the pregnant Moor, and he has just taunted Jessica for raising the price of pork by her conversion to Christianity. Shylock, too, had refused to eat pork with Christians. Pigs and swine were, as well, connected with sodomy. The phrase bougre de cochon, was current. I suggest, though I cannot offer more than my own intuitions as proof, that the image of the pig is encoded in The Merchant's subtext in several ways, indicated by Launcelot's jokes on buggery and pork and hogs, by Shylock's reference to the forbidden meat, and his evocation of the image of a “gaping pig,” or pig with his mouth open at IV. i. 47. Antonio is the name which encodes this meaning. St. Anthony was the patron saint of swineherds. He was often represented with a pig or hog to symbolize his striving with temptation, sensual temptation in particular.²² (The name has come to be attached to the smallest pig of the litter, also known as a “tantony pig.”) If Shakespeare associated Antonio with this saint, and his pig or hog, and his striving with desire, and added in the connotations of sodomy which underscore the play in such a variety of ways, one might also cite the name of Portia. According to Karen Newman, the name is derived from the “Latin porcus, pig, and the Roman clan, the Porcii, breeders of pigs.”²³ Bassanio's two lovers are Christians, pork-eaters, and their names encode the sign of the pig and its iconic signification as sodomite. A “lewd interpreter's” fantasy, perhaps. An “ane” is also an ass. (The play's imagery is a veritable bestiary, mentioning, aside from pigs, wolves, lions, horses, dogs, oxen, rams, ewes, sheep, lambs, muttons, beefs, goats, monkeys, cats, parrots, swans, doves, geese, nightingales, the cuckoo, a rat, and the serpent.)

Bawdy is a Pandora's box. Once opened, it is hard, if not impossible, to close the lid. Each scene in the play is interpretable in ways governed by secondary and tertiary meanings of a word or action. One might prose at length on the signification of “torch” and “torch-bearer” at II. iv.²⁴ Jessica's “shames” at wearing the garb of a “boy” preface the cross-dressing of Portia and Nerissa and the language invites the reader to cross gender lines, and customary costume lines in just those provocative ways highlighted by Jardine and others who believe that Shakespeare's plays often transgressed the boundary between artifact and audience, appearance and reality, rule and misrule, inviting the elite to read as cults and sects have always read, gnostically. Or, as sensitive and canny readers and viewers have always attempted to respond, wholly.

Finally, one asks how the business of Jessica's traded ring, Shylocks's turquoise ring, is connected to the double rings that appear as both prop and symbol at the end of The Merchant of Venice. This interchange (III. i.) is not overtly “bawdy” as the second is because the incident, aside from being unstaged, the ring unseen, remains securely within the fiction of the play itself and does not, initially, refer to the homoerotic underscene. We have seen Jessica in her boy's garb, but she is reported by Tubal in Genoa to be spending his hoarded money, his diamond worth 2000 ducats. We have already heard of Jessica's theft of her father's money and his “two sealed bags of ducats, double ducats … and jewels, two stones, two rich and precious stones” (II. vii. 20-22), as well as witnessing her own “casket scene.” Related in cruel parody by Solanio, it is clear that Shylock has been robbed of both money and testicles. He is sacrificed, as it were, and being gelded, shorn of his own pound of flesh, and will now even more obsessively seek to perform the same ritual on Antonio. (The play on “wreck” and “wrack” involves the angst in all the important emotional bonding.) Just previous to the report of the “turkis” is Shylock's deadly serious speech concerning the likeness of the Jew and his organs to all other men. Yet, Tubal, Shylock's tribesman, taunts or “wracks” Shylock with the news of his daughter's profligate behavior in Genoa, interlarding his news with the placating report of Antonio's losses. One must ask whether “Tubal” can be a genital joke. It can, I think, especially in the light of his tribesman's own recent loss of “two stones.” The ring in question was Leah's betrothal gift. The fact that it contained a “turkis” has been interestingly studied by Jackson Campbell Boswell, who tells us, not surprisingly, that there were two traditions of this stone; the first, an Eastern European folk tradition, which endowed it with “safety, prosperity and love.”²⁵ Thus, Leah's gift would have been conventional. However, the European tradition connected it with sterility. On the threshold of the Christian world, on her way to Belmont, Jessica exchanges the token for a monkey which, iconographically, signified a type of lechery.²⁶ We need no gloss to see that Jessica is repudiating both parents and her tribe and inviting a new dispensation in which sexuality and, presumably, fertility, will be present. If we want to press the matter further, of course, we can find that Leah's ring has Shylock's “turkis” in it and that the word referred not only to those pagan Turks reputed to be castraters, ambisexual, and sodomites,²⁷ but to the circumcised penis which Shylock would have had. This image of the Turk, so uncannily evoked by Othello as the seat of his own vulnerability—Iago, too, was a “Turk”—is Shylock's as well. In retrospect, then, the ring does, or can, refer to the sexual organs of both parents. Its figuring prepares us for the exchange of Portia's and Nerissa's rings and enacts the dangerous truth that bonds are profoundly difficult to keep, that oaths are most often broken or forgotten, family relationships are, in the final instance, not legislatable by any law, that meaning is almost always contingent, and, in the registration of the bawdy that re-tunes the end of the play in particular, that rings may be substituted, exchanged and re-engendered in surprising ways. These ways seem very different from one another but can be seen to partake of their own “merry bond.” Rings are necessarily and functionally part of all our bodies, they appear in rituals, in our symbolism that stands for those rituals, and they provide the object and the word, par excellence, for bawdy. Bawdy insists on our bodies and also on reality at its most real and most tangible, even when cloaked with those “scarfs” that hide an “Indian Beauty” (III. ii. 98-99).

I began this essay under the aegis of the god Janus and so, in the service of roundness (which Rubinstein glosses as a code word for homosexuality²⁸) and doubleness, I will end by invoking his name once more. He is a paradigm, as Geary suggested, both for the play itself and for each character in the play. Portia takes the name of her servant, Balthasar, and dons the garb of a male with the name Balthasar.²⁹ She is of both sexes, two classes, two professions. Antonio and Shylock are doubles. Bassanio sees himself as a “double self” (V. i. 245) in both of Portia's eyes. Bawdy teaches the reader to “play” in lexical ways that are instructive and most particularly so when one dismisses the areas to which they may seem to lead. That is, to “play” in C. L. Barber's “festive” sense is surely one function of the bawdy in drama; we can misinterpret or read wildly so that we can return to the conventional more responsibly, from holiday to everyday.³⁰ For example, let us look at the neglected Morocco and Arragon and watch them, in Nerissa's phrase, “turn to men” (III. v. 78). Both Princes come to woo Portia, who is unquestionably the female heroine of the play. She is bound by her father's will to be chosen. We may ask if the legal will is connected to the “will” or sublimated incestuous wish of the dead father, or whether her father is Will Shakespeare who has engendered her and can, in all senses, choose her fate for her. What has been involved in hazarding for this rich prize? For Morocco, a Moor, a barbarian, whose name allies him with buttocks³¹ and with rocks, his failure to win Portia will exact the oath “Never to speak to lady afterward / In way of marriage” (II. i. 45). The name Arragon is also open to lexical violation for “a rag” is a “hard, rough stone” or “lopped off stone,” or a “whore.”³² Arragon finds a fool's head in the silver casket and says, “With one fool's head I came to woo, / But I go away with two” (II. ix. 75-76). Like Janus, Arragon leaves “two-headed.” But, in the contexts of the homosexual puns with which their speeches and remarks are studded and which send up all the oath-taking in The Merchant, Morocco and Arragon may now be legally released from the cultural prescriptions which send all men out to woo and marry women—they never can woo maid—and so we might congratulate them on their newly found freedom from heterosexual “will.” Morocco has uttered the following lines to Portia long since:

If Hercules and Lichas play at dice
Which is the better man, the greater throw
May turn by fortune from the weaker hand:
So is Alcides beaten by his page,
And so may I, blind Fortune leading me,
Miss that which one unworthier may attain,
And die with grieving.

(II. i. 32-38)

He invokes the Hercules who will be “beaten,” or “cudgelled sexually” by his page, or boy,³³ and so he may be said to speak in encoded script. Later, just before he will choose the golden casket, he says:

                                                  … They have in England
A coin that bears the figure of an angel
Stamp'd in gold, but that's insculp'd upon;
But here an angel in a golden bed
Lies all within. Deliver me the key.

(II. vii. 55-59)

The “angel” who stands for Portia is also the term for “catamite,”³⁴ which she is not but may be, and leads Morocco on to his fate. He has hazarded and may have won. Likewise, Arragon is lectured by the scroll in the silver casket:

Some there be that shadows kiss,
Such have but a shadow's bliss.

(II. ix. 66-67)

“Shadow,” according to Rubinstein is a “homosexual, who mates with his like. One of Plato's homosexual half-men, created when Zeus cut original men in half.”³⁵ Sending these two liberated princes not to their conventional “deaths” but to life in a land where women have no claim upon them and watching Shakespeare end his play with a Gratiano who may be gesturing toward sore rings and the love that dare speak its name only under the sign of “two-headed Janus” or of Argus, that monster with one hundred eyes in his peacock's tail (invoked by Portia at V. i. 230 to watch over her potential infidelities), one might retire with Hamlet's “the rest is silence.” Or, taking Portia's final promise to “answer all things faithfully,” one can frame the questions that ask themselves. To what do we ascribe this sort of bawdy? Does it signify Shakespeare's black sense of humor? His critique of Venice only? Is Venice London and the Globe? Does his insistence on and nearly obsessive interest in sodomy and buggery, in male love, signal his subversion of Elizabethan norms and prescriptions or his “perversion”? Partridge's injunctions to the contrary, was Shakespeare representing reality or speaking of it to a “happy few”? The safe and sensible answer would be that we cannot know. I have always argued so particularly in regard to Shakespeare's own sexual orientation. I would agree with Rubinstein, who writes:

The higher incidence of sexual, including homosexual, references in my definitions and consequent interpretations of the plays has, for me, no bearing on Shakespeare's sexuality; male writers have created great fictional women, women have created male characters, and homosexuals have created both—to say nothing of not having to be a murderer to create a Macbeth.³⁶

She does go on to point out the fact that boys under eighteen played the women's roles and the ambiguities that stemmed from such a reality. Yet, to study bawdy in this play and in all the plays is to be convinced of Shakespeare's sexual ambivalence and even of his bisexuality. The extraordinary number of double entendres and their nature are not Freudian slips; they attest to a reality behind the facade, the double vision so variously inscribed, perhaps to the scribe himself.

Bawdy, in all of Shakespeare's plays, is that facet of represented human life which, while often comic, mirrors the fact that we are all sexual beings and that gender is often less strictly defined than we might think. We accept the various messages and innuendoes of bawdy on the stage even though we might repress or deny them in reality. Bawdy is a source of subversive democratization. We can react with laughter and enjoyment, or profound horror, because it is already a part of our most intimate, or intimately imagined, experience.

Notes

1. Eric Partridge, Shakespeare's Bawdy (New York: Dutton, 1969), p. 16.

2. Partridge, p. 16.

3. Partridge, p. 16.

4. Partridge, p. 19.

5. See, for example, Karen Newman's “Portia's Ring: Unruly Women and The Structure of Exchange,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 38 (1987), 319-333; Lisa Jardine's “Cultural Confusion and Shakespeare's learned Women,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 38 (1987), 1-18; Keith Geary's “The Nature of Portia's Victory: Turning to Men in The Merchant of Venice,” Shakespeare Survey, 37 (1984), 55-68; A. D. Nuttall's chapter on the play in A New Mimesis: Shakespeare and the Representation of Reality (London: Methuen, 1983), 120-31.

6. All references to the play are from The Riverside Shakespeare (Boston: Houghton and Mifflin, 1974).

7. See Eve Sedgwick's Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1985), p. 1.

8. Nuttall, p. 126.

9. E. A. M. Colman, The Dramatic Use of Bawdy in Shakespeare (London: Longman's, 1974) and Frankie Rubinstein, A Dictionary of Shakespeare's Sexual Puns and Their Significance (London: Macmillan, 1984). I thank Susan Snyder of Swarthmore College for leading me to this indispensable book.

10. For an excellent account of the ring's journey, see Newman, p. 28.

11. Geary, p. 56. In The Rise and Fall of Anne Boleyn (New York and Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1989), pp. 193-94, René Warnicke cites the 1534 statute which came to be known as “the buggery statute” in which the act itself was not directly named. Later, Sir Edward Coke (1552-1634) would refer to sodomy as “this shameful sin,” “an act not to be named,” and a “cruelty not to be spoken.” Shakespeare would seem to demonstrate, in his own encodings, just how circumspect reference to the act had to be. (Thanks to Professor Joseph Kramer of Bryn Mawr College for this reference.)

12. Funk and Wagnall's Standard Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology and Legend (New York: Funk and Wagnall, 1949), vol. 2, p. 539.

13. Lisa Jardine. Still Harping on Daughters: Women and Drama in the Age of Shakespeare (New York: Columbia Univ. Press. 1989). It is interesting that Jardine stresses male eroticism in her book, the “women's part” being so clearly male, but fails to bring out this element in the discussion of Portia in her more recent article in the Shakespeare Quarterly where she focuses on cultural ambivalence towards smart women in the Renaissance.

14. Rubinstein quotes this same section under her definition at “stand back.” p. 253.

15. In this light, the “burghers” of Salerio's comparison are also “buggers” and the “ragged” sails of Gratiano's analogy may carry the meaning of “rough stone” or “damaged scrotum.” See Rubinstein on “rags,” p. 212.

16. Colman, p. 204.

17. René Girard, “To Entrap the Wisest,” in Literature and Society, Selected Papers of the English Institute, 1978 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1978), 100-19.

18. Partridge, p. 187.

19. Elizabeth Sklar, “Bassanio's Golden Fleece,” Texas Studies in Language and Literature, 18 (1976), 500-09.

20. Rubinstein, p. 122.

21. Rubinstein, p. 95.

22. George Ferguson, Signs and Symbols in Christian Art (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1954), 104-05. It is interesting to note that Antonio meant homosexuality to James Joyce and that he, too, read The Merchant of Venice as a tale of submerged homosexuality. In the “Eumaeus” chapter of Ulysses, the old ranconteur and sea-going liar whose purported name is Murphy, shows Stephen and Bloom a tattoo of the profile of a man, a drowned sailor, named Antonio who is also the artist of the trompe l'oeil tattoo, which, when expanded by certain manipulations of the fingers, shows not only the artist but the number sixteen. Don Gifford announces this number as European code for homosexuality. Joyce connects this artist with the Antonio of The Merchant of Venice and with Shakespeare himself.

23. Newman, p. 23. See also, Charlotte Younge, History of Christian Names (London: Macmillan & Co., 1884), pp. 151-52.

24. See Rubinstein, p. 279.

25. Boswell's article is summarized in The Garland Shakespeare Bibliography, The Merchant of Venice, compiled by Thomas Wheeler.

26. Colman, p. 204.

27. Rubinstein, p. 284.

28. Rubinstein, p. 224.

29. It is interesting to note that Portia is also called “Daniel” in the trial scene, first by Shylock and then by Gratiano. The Biblical Daniel was given the name of Belteshazzar by the master of Nebuchadnezzar's eunuchs. Even Daniel had two names, or identities. Shakespeare may have derived Portia's lawyerly name from that of Daniel's alias. It echoes “hazard” too.

30. See C. L. Barber's Shakespeare's Festive Comedy: A Study in its Relation to Social Custom (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1959).

31. Rubinstein, p. 21.

32. Rubinstein, p. 212.

33. Rubinstein, p. 22.

34. Rubinstein, p. 12.

35. Rubinstein, p. 234.

36. Rubinstein, p. xiii.