Antonio’s Sad Flesh

ABSTRACT

This article examines different meanings attached to the adjective ‘sad’ in the 1590s in order to reinterpret the sexual politics of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. The play’s title character Antonio famously proclaims that he performs ‘a sad [part]’ on the world’s ‘stage’. Critics have related this apparent declaration of melancholy to Antonio’s love for Bassanio and the heartbreak he may experience when the latter marries Portia. However, by examining the word's largely forgotten physiological meanings, I show that ‘sad’ was also a non-judgmental term for a man who lacks interest in procreation. Antonio’s embrace of this label has implications both for the play’s sexual politics and for its representation of putatively non-generative market economics.

KEYWORDS:

• The Merchant of Venice
• Antonio (character)
• representations of same-sex desire
• representations of non-procreation
• critiques of reproductive futurism
• representations of commerce and market economics

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Hamit Arvas for reading an early draft of this material.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Unless otherwise indicated, Shakespeare is quoted from The New Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works, Modern Critical Edition, general editors Gary Taylor et al.

2 See ‘sad’, 1, 2, 5, 8a–8f, hereafter cited parenthetically. The root meaning, 'sated', seems no longer to have been in daily use in Shakespeare’s day, but the OED’s sample citations suggest that it would have been familiar from literary writers such as Chaucer and Mallory.

3 Auden, ‘Brothers and Others’, 229–34.

4 Patterson, ‘The Bankruptcy of Homoerotic Amity’, 9.

5 See Sinfield, ‘How to Read the Merchant’, 123–40; Engle, ‘Thrift is Blessing’, 20–37; Patterson, ‘The Bankruptcy of Homoerotic Amity’, 9–32; and Trevor, The Poetics of Melancholy, 69–71; DiGangi, ‘Shakespeare After Queer Theory’, 65–85; Daniel, ‘Let Me Have Judgment’, 206–34; Crawford, ‘Shakespeare. Same Sex. Marriage’, 255, 266; Greenstadt, ‘The Kindest Cut’, 945–80. Joseph Pequigney makes a good case for a non-erotic reading of Antonio’s and Bassanio’s friendship but, even in doing so, acknowledges that he is in the minority: see Pequigney, ‘The Two Antonios’, esp. 201–02.

6 Sinfield, ‘How to Read The Merchant’, 123–40.

7 DiGangi, ‘Shakespeare After Queer Theory’, 65–85; Daniel, ‘Let Me Have Judgment’, 233–34.

8 Masten, Queer Philologies, 15.

9 See Froide, Never Married; Chess, ‘Asexuality, Queer Chastity, and Adolescence in Early Modern Literature’. On the relative lack of such studies, and the need for more, see Froide, Never Married, 4.

10 See Edelman, No Future; Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place; Kahan, Celibacies, 56–80; Muñoz, Cruising Utopia; and Dean, ‘An Impossible Embrace’.

11 See C. L. Barber, Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy, 185–218, esp. 199.

12 On the play's Christian symbolism, see Lewalski, ‘Biblical Allusion’, 327–43, but the notion of grace pervades also Barber’s account: see Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy, 212. For a critique of the anti-Semitism implicit in the play’s contrast between Christianity and Judaism, see Cohen, ‘Shylock and the Idea of the Jew’, 305–16.

13 See Bruster, Drama and the Market, 56; Fitzpatrick, ‘Demise of Hospitality’, 40–41; Lewalski, ‘Biblical Allusion’, 332–33; Lars Engle, ‘Thrift is Blessing’, 21–28.

14 See Daniel, ‘Let Me Have Judgment’, 210–18; DiGangi, ‘Shakespeare After Queer Theory’, 73; and Lewis, ‘Antonio and Alienation’, 21–22.

15 Daniel, ‘Let Me Have Judgment’, 207; Lewis, ‘Antonio and Alienation’, 21; Patterson, ‘The Bankruptcy of Homoerotic Amity’, 9; DiGangi, ‘Shakespeare After Queer Theory’, 73; Patterson, ‘The Bankruptcy of Homoerotic Amity’, 32.

16 Holinshed et al., Chronicles, 220.

17 Salluste, Part of Du Bartas, 29. The OED quotes both Hollinshed and (a different passage from) Du Bartas: see ‘sad’, 8b.

18 Palladius, The Middle-English Translation of Palladius, 75, 69.

19 Estienne and Liébault, Maison Rustique, 673.

20 Ibid., 702.

21 Bartholomaeus and Batman, Batman upon Bartholome, 61v (my italics).

22 Wirtzung, Praxis Medicinae, 288.

23 Ibid., 287.

24 Feerick and Nardizzi, ‘Introduction’, 4 (their quotation marks refer to Bruno Latour).

25 Simons, The Sex of Men, 238–53.

26 Simons, ‘Manliness’, 348.

27 See Pequigney, ‘The Two Antonios’, 218–21; Turner, ‘The Problem of the More-Than-One’, 428–34.

28 See Crane, ‘Male Pregnancy and Cognitive Permeability’, 269–92.

29 Parker, Intersectional Shakespeare, 36. For similar arguments, see Carroll, The Great Feast of Language, 52–55 and Sasser, ‘Moth and the Pedagogical Ideal’, 164–66.

30 In the Norton Shakespeare, 3rd edition, the line is, 5.2.869.

31 DiGangi, ‘Shakespeare After Queer Theory’, 74. See also Lewis, ‘Antonio and Alienation’, 21–22.

32 Engle, ‘Thrift is Blessing’, 21–23.

33 Ibid., 21, 23–25. The Merchant quoted at 1.1.46.

34 See Engle, ‘Thrift is Blessing’, 23–26 and Sinfield, ‘How to Read The Merchant’, 124–25.

35 See DiGangi, ‘Shakespeare After Queer Theory’, 74; Lewis, ‘Antonio and Alienation’, 21–22; and Daniel, ‘Let Me Have Judgment’, 210–18.

36 Sinfield, ‘How to Read The Merchant’, 126.

37 Daniel, ‘Let Me Have Judgment’, 226.

38 Barber, Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy, 205.

39 Pequigney, ‘The Two Antonios’, 218.

40 DiGangi, Sexual Types.

41 See Cohen, ‘Shylock and the Idea of the Jew’, 307–08; cf. Barber, Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy, 199.

42 On overlaps between the two economic models, see Engle, ‘Thrift is Blessing’, 20–37; Fitzpatrick, ‘Demise of Hospitality’, 40–41. On the separate question of theological overlap between Christianity and Judaism, see Adelman, Blood Relations, esp. 3–4.

43 Lewalski, ‘Biblical Allusion’, 328–35.

44 See Tubal’s report at 3.1.91–92.