Merchant of Venice Part 5

NB  For those who have been keeping a record of this essay in many parts, there was an error recently.  I sent out two versions of the same section on the Scenes/Settings of the play.  I have now removed the unwanted section and renumbered the corrected, expanded version as Part 4.

The Dramatis Personae

Let us look at some of the key characters in Shakespeare’s comedy from this same triple perspective of the three caskets...  Among the men are Antonio, Bassanio and Shylock, and among the women Portia, Nerissa and Jessica.  Their names hint at some of the qualities they seem to represent and hide other aspects of their character and function in the play that are not evident at first glance, but the names are not allegorical personifications of their full meaning or social activity in the drama.   We will then look at some of the minor characters and how they function in the play.

The Major Characters

Antonio

Antonio is the merchant of Venice in the comedy’s title.  He is a member of the ruling elite and therefore a rich and influential man, but not an insider, that is, a native Venetian.  He begins the play expressing his sadness, a melancholia that his friends can’t seem to understand, some thinking it is due to worries about his commercial risks and others to love-sickness: but Antonio, with his pure Italian name, denies all these reasons and seems to enjoy his brooding sadness for its own sake.  He seems to be in love with his friend Bassanio,[1] not just in the sense of liking him very much, but also in a perhaps more intimate way;[2] in all events, Antonio is prepared to risk everything on helping his friend find a rich wife, and this includes dealing with a Jewish money-lender, a person he has reviled and spat upon.  He ios clearly over-confident, too trusting in his own financial security, and unable or unwilling to see the fickleness of the weather and indeed the mutable structures of the universe and history.[3]  When his several overseas ventures seem to fail and Shylock insists on the whimsical terms of the bond being executed literally, Antonio seems resigned to his fate, especially because he relishes the romantic idea of sacrificing his life for the sake of love—love of Bassanio.[4]  In the trial scene and elsewhere, many people condemn the Jew for engaging in a dirty and demonic enterprise of charging interest in order to increase his wealth, but nobody seems to see anything wrong in Antonio’s commercial ventures[5]—nor in his need to borrow from a Jew, since none of his friends are forthcoming with offers to give or back his loan to Antonio.[6] Later Antonio joins the young Venetians in their nuptial revelry in Belmont, and yet seems subdued during their celebrations of apparent triumph over Shylock.  He never actually moves out of his melancholy or sadness, except when expressing his hatred of the Jew.  If he speaks the truth, it is a questionable version of the truth, since it is marked by his visceral hatred for Shylock or dubious love for his young friends.  Rather than any Christian mercy in his dealings with others, there is only the exaggerated display of passion, whether hatred or love. 

Bassanio

Bassanio himself is a young, sprightly, ambitious Venetian.[7]  He seems to radiate around him, at least among the Christians, a sense of his own worth, and to attract to himself an intense and almost blind loyalty of love both from Portia, who he is wooing, and also from Antonio.[8]  For not the first time, when seeking to find a wealthy woman to marry and thus advance his social-climbing in Venetian society, Bassanio appeals to Antonio; and goes to woo Portia and play the game of the caskets under the pretence of being in love with her, and also of being a rich aristocrat who is not interested in her titles, money, or estates.  He has little compunction about taking money from a friend who is an awkward position and will have to borrow through a Jewish money-lender, and no shame as he presents himself under false pretensions to Portia and plays on her obvious attraction to him.  That he has a name that sounds very much like that of a family of Italian-Jewish musicians who came to London in the time of Henry VIII—and from which group seems to have come Emilia Bassano, the so-called Dark[9] Lady of Shakespeare’s sonnets[10]—may suggest that he is one of those New Christians—former Jews whose ancestors were forced to convert to Catholicism in sixteenth-century Spain or Portugal—who wheedle and parley their way into Christian society and adapt its culture of arrogance and egotism.

NOTES

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[1] Interestingly, while Antonio expresses his love for Bassanio many times, Bassanio never reciprocates.  This is one of the key points made in Christopher A. Colmo, “Law and Love in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice” Oklahoma City University Law Review 26:1 (2001) 307.  It is all part of the string of jokes that underlie the whole of the play, wherein expectations are not met and awareness is proved faulty.  We will have to examine the three kinds of knowledge recognized in ancient paradigms: the revealed wisdom of oracles, prophets and inspiration that is too often turned into dead dogma and imposed and/or internalized as common sense, or opinion; the formal logic of rational systems, that is too often accepted on the grounds of institutionalized tradition and the precedent of judicial codes; and wit and craft and other modes of mētis, that allows for duplicity, temporizing and other ironies and indirection, and therefore open to moral abuse—or hypocrisy—but necessary for those out of power by a failure of physical or social strength.  Metis also requires forethought, patience and above all cunning.

[2] Though not necessarily a homosexual way.

[3] See the famous “Cantoes on Mutabilitie” in Sir Philip Sydney’s Faërie Quene.  In sixteenth-century English, Mutability refers to the way in which all things in the created universe are subject to the wayward turns of Fortune’s Wheel, at least in superficial appearance; since from the divine perspective God’s Providence rules everything.  Above all, as readers of Shakespeare’s love sonnets knows, it is human passion which is mutable, though the poet wants to assert the steadfastness of his love based on the eternal lines of verse he creates. 

[4] There are so many levels of irony in this construction that we shall have to discuss them later in various places.  As a foolish, reckless man, Antonio thus easily becomes caught in his own contradictions, and an easy prey to Shylock’s wit.  But Shylock, too, may be an over-reacher, unprepared for the duplicity of Portia’s role as outside legal expert, and thus for unexpected twists and turns; or, as we shall see, perhaps not.

[5] What is later to be known as “venture capitalism.”  After Adam Smith’s analysis in The Wealth of Nations capitalists assume “the invisible hand” of the market-place—cumulative self-interest—will correct the faults and pout everything back into balance on a level playing field.  All of Venice is based on this commercial trust in the eventual success of their economic, political and social fate, provided they treat everyone equitably under the law.  Everyone, it would seem, except the Jews.

[6] Belle Neuwirth, “The Problem of Shylock,” American Studies Prize Essay: Research, Palo Verde: The Arizona State University West Literary Magazine 9:1 (May 2001) online at http://www.west. asu.edu/ paloverde/Paloverde1001/shylock.

[7] His name suggests various qualities about him, that he has a base/bass character, that he is an ass partly hidden by the other letters in his name,  and that he is inane, empty of true virtues.

[8] They are all classical alazons, boasters: persons who believe themselves to be smarter, more beautiful and more influential than they really are; as opposed to the eirons, pretenders, those who seem to be fated to failure and dependency, but actually present themselves as less than they are in order to catch the alazons out by pulling the rug ouyt from under their excessive self-confidence.  The alazon and the eiron are two central types to ancient comedy, but also examples for Aristotle in The Nichomachian Ethics of people who live at either extreme of “the golden mean”.

[9] Dark has several senses in the late Tudor period: it means (a)  having black hair and/or complexion as opposed to “fair”,  as well as (b) being mysterious, intricate and curious (bizarre, strange, complicated); and hence Shakespeare’s secret lover is both, that is,, raven-haired and  dark-eyed woman and a Sephardic Jewess.

[10] David Lasocki with Roger Prior, The Bassanos: Venetian Musicians and Instrument Makers in England, 1531-1665 (1995).  See also the discussions in my Crypto-Judaism, Madness, and the Female Quixote: Charlotte Lennox as Marrana in Mid-Eighteenth-Century England.  Lewiston, NY, Queenston, Ontario, and Lampeter, UK: Edwin Mellen Press, 2004.   I would like to thank Ms  Germaine Greer for pointing this out to me originally and later sending pertinent references.