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ABSTRACT
Modern criticism tends to assume that the excess of meaning in Shakespeare’s language gives voice to forces other than the motivations of his characters. But this critical tendency diminishes Shakespeare’s approach to characterisation. Focusing on The Merchant of Venice, my essay shows how the play continually encourages spectators and readers to sense implicit meaning in a character’s speech, without clarifying whether any meaning is actually being implied. The surprise of the play is that its characters turn such ambiguity to their advantage by employing proxy forms of expression that allow them to say indirectly what they would otherwise feel powerless to say. These proxy languages, however, exact a cost: they alienate characters from themselves by distancing them from their own intentions. While moneylending, for example, helps the title character of the play, the merchant Antonio, express his love for Bassanio with increasing fervency, it also turns him suicidal; so, too, does Shylock’s moneylending empower and then disempower him. The more successful form of proxy expression in the Merchant seems to be Portia’s disguise as Balthazar. But the essay ends by asking whether Shakespeare himself thought he paid a price for speaking indirectly through disguises.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Harry Berger, Harrying: Skills of Offense in Shakespeare’s Henriad (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015), p. ix. Berger later defines ‘what a speaker’s language is doing apart from what he may be doing with it’ as an ‘objective force’ (p. 102).
2 Of all these theories, perhaps the least familiar now is the textual one. ‘When speech occurs, when the voice sounds’, writes Jonathan Goldberg, ‘there is always another in the voice, an otherness that accompanies the utterer’ – and that otherness, Goldberg claims, is ‘the text’ (‘Shakespearean Inscriptions: The Voicing of Power’, in Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, ed. Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman [New York: Methuen, 1985], p. 130).
3 See e.g. Robert Weimann, Author’s Pen and Actor’s Voice: Playing and Writing in Shakespeare’s Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Joel B. Altman, The Improbability of Othello: Rhetorical Anthropology and Shakespearean Selfhood (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010); and Lorna Hutson, The Invention of Suspicion: Law and Mimesis in Shakespeare and Renaissance Drama (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007) and Circumstantial Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). In Circumstantial Shakespeare, for instance, Hutson attributes the ‘Shakespearean effects of “psychological depth” or “inwardness”’ (p. 108) to the ways Shakespeare ‘invites actors, audiences, and readers to project, from the slightest textual hints, the fabula of the play as an extramimetic world expanding both inwardly (into “character”) and outwardly, into the “unscene” of imagined places and times’ (pp. 16–17). For Hutson, Shakespeare encouraged this projection on the part of the audience by ‘embracing the opportunities offered by the resources of the rhetorical and dialectical invention of circumstances – resources towards which classical and neoclassical practice and theory helped point the way’ (pp. 12–13).
4 I am quoting the anonymous author of the prefatory letter, ‘A never writer to an ever reader’, that appeared in one state of the 1609 edition of Troilus and Cressida; see The Riverside Shakespeare, 2nd ed., ed. G. Blakemore Evans et al. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997), p. 526. For Shakespeare’s works, I cite the Riverside edition throughout.
5 Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, 1.1.1-7.
6 For a Girardian critic such as Edward Geisweidt, the power that speaks through Antonio is triangulated desire, ‘the necessary mediation in any seemingly dyadic relationship’ (‘Antonio’s Claim: Triangulated Desire and Queer Kinship in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice’, Shakespeare 5 [2009], p. 352). I am arguing that this sort of reading tends to produce an overly structuralist and therefore anti-intentionalist account of character in the play.
7 John Northbrooke, A Treatise Wherein Dicing, Dauncing, Vaine Playes or Enterluds With Other Idle Pastimes etc. Commonly Used on the Sabboth Day, Are Reproved (1577?), ed. Arthur Freeman (New York: Garland, 1974), p. 65.
8 For a skeptical account of claims that Antonio is ‘either consciously or unconsciously homosexual’, which she finds ‘very difficult to prove from textual evidence’, see Joan Ozark Holmer, The Merchant of Venice: Choice, Hazard, and Consequence (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995, pp. 250–54. Holmer is not wrong, exactly; it’s essential to Shakespeare’s method of characterization in the play that the nature of Antonio’s ‘affection’ for Bassanio be implied only.
9 For the most powerful reading of Antonio’s tortuous relation to his own desires, see Janet Adelman’s Blood Relations: Christian and Jew in The Merchant of Venice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), esp. pp. 114–22. Adelman defines Antonio’s use of purse and bond in defensive terms, as providing an ‘excuse’ (p. 115) or ‘alibi’ (p. 120) for his desires; I want to highlight the expansive effect of such proxy expression as well.
10 When critics note that ‘love and money reflect and express each other in the play’ (Lars Engle, ‘“Thrift Is Blessing”: Exchange and Explanation in The Merchant of Venice’, Shakespeare Quarterly 37 [1986], p. 21), they generally mean that love has become contaminated by money. As René Girard puts it in his seminal essay on the play, ‘Financial considerations have become so natural’ to the characters ‘and are so embedded into their psyches that they have become not quite but almost invisible; they can never be identified as a distinct aspect of behavior’ (‘“To Entrap the Wisest”: A Reading of The Merchant of Venice’ [1980], revised in A Theater of Envy: William Shakespeare [New York: Oxford University Press, 1991], p. 245). Such critics rarely think of Shakespeare’s characters as intentionally expressing themselves through money.
11 For the opposite view, see e.g. Mark Thornton Burnett, ‘“I Know Not Why I Am So Sad”: Ideas of Character in The Merchant of Venice’, in The Merchant of Venice, ed. Linda Cookson and Bryan Loughrey (Essex: Longman, 1992), pp. 42–52. Burnett claims that ‘individuals’ in the play are ‘controlled by an economic process. Antonio is in the grip of a system where all things are reduced’ (p. 46).
12 Addressing whether Shylock is plotting to kill Antonio from the moment he conceives of the bond or whether the unforeseen circumstance of Jessica’s elopement commits Shylock ever more self-destructively to what he had originally intended as nothing more than a malicious ‘sport’ (1.3.145), John Kerrigan points out that Shylock at first ‘prepares to offer’ Antonio ‘a loan with a pro-rata payment of interest’ and that ‘it is Antonio who raises the prospect of a forfeit’ (Shakespeare’s Binding Language [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016], pp. 160–61). For a learned discussion of whether Shakespeare and his contemporaries would have thought of Shylock as bound by the bond in the way he increasingly protests he is, see Kerrigan, Shakespeare’s Binding Language, pp. 176–96.
13 Taking a more sympathetic view of Bassanio’s decision-making, Kelly Lehtonen links it to an Aristotelian account of prudence as grounded not in the cold ratiocination of ‘deliberate fools’ (2.9.80), as Portia calls her failed suitors, but in the broader and more humane assessment of gains ‘worth far more than the sacrifices’ they might require (‘The Wisdom of “Hazarding All” in The Merchant of Venice’, in Shakespeare and Virtue: A Handbook, ed. Julia Reinhard Lupton and Donovan Sherman [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023], p. 140). Lehtonen is silent, however, on the question of Bassanio’s dubious financial motivations. Geoffrey Baker conversely highlights the ironical devaluation of risk-taking that results when the play’s characters mismatch financial ‘hazard’ with instances of classical ‘heroism’ (‘Investment, Return, Alterity, and The Merchant of Venice’, in Of Levinas and Shakespeare: “To See Another Thus”, ed. Moshe Gold et al. [West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2018], p. 130). For more on the economics of risk in Shakespeare’s England and in the world of the play, see Ian MacInnes, ‘“Ill Luck, Ill Luck?”: Risk and Hazard in The Merchant of Venice’, in Global Traffic: Discourses and Practices of Trade in English Literature and Culture from 1550 to 1700, ed. Barbara Sebek et al. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), pp. 39–55; and Mark Netzloff, ‘The Lead Casket: Mercantilism and The Merchant of Venice’, in Money and the Age of Shakespeare: Essays in New Economic Criticism, ed. Linda Woodbridge (New York: Macmillan, 2003), pp. 159–76.
14 The question of Portia’s possible cheating memorably figures in William Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930; New York: New Directions, 1966), pp. 43–44.
15 Stanley Cavell reads Shylock’s ‘instant collapse’ as the result of Portia’s forcing him to recognise his intentions: Shylock can no longer ‘claim that blood was irrelevant to his invented bond, because he now sees that Christian blood is what he wanted’ (‘Saying in The Merchant of Venice’, in Living with Shakespeare: Essays by Writers, Actors, and Directors, ed. Susannah Carson [New York: Vintage, 2013], p. 254 and 257.
16 As Christopher Pye points out, even the sacrifices that Antonio and Bassanio are willing to make for each other reflect this economy of substitution, ‘for a sacrifice is by definition a substitute – the ram in the place of Isaac’ (‘Literature’s Stake: Economy, Law, and Aesthetics in The Merchant of Venice’, Shakespeare Quarterly 73 [2022], p. 89).
17 How safely, for instance, does Portia sail through the hazards of pretending to be Balthazar? Commentators on the play have often remarked upon her unexpected harshness and cruelty in the courtroom: toward Shylock, of course, but also toward her husband, whom she tortures about the ring. Portia had forewarned Nerissa that she would have to behave aggressively if she were to convince people that she was a young man (3.4.64-78), but Karen Newman, among others, detects a change in Portia even after she abandons her disguise: ‘instead of the subservient woman of elaborate pledges at III.ii, Portia’s speech at V.i.266 ff. is filled with imperatives’ (‘Portia’s Ring: Unruly Women and Structures of Exchange in The Merchant of Venice’, Shakespeare Quarterly 38 [1987], pp. 31–32). Speaking through Balthazar seems to have empowered Portia – but for better or for worse?
18 Nicholas Rowe, The Works of Mr. William Shakespear; in Six Volumes (London, 1609), vol.1, p. xx.
19 Greenblatt, ‘Marlowe, Marx, and Anti-Semitism’, Critical Inquiry 5 (1978), pp. 292–93. For recent work on Shakespeare’s representation of Shylock, see the special issue on ‘Shakespeare and the Jews’ edited by C.P.A. Heijes and Sabine Schülting in Shakespeare 18 (2022).
20 Cynthia Lewis treats ‘the vague, inscrutable feeling’ that troubles Antonio at the start of the play as a sign not of his psychological depth but rather of his ‘inadequacy’ (‘Antonio and Alienation in The Merchant of Venice’, South Atlantic Review 48 [1983], p. 21 and 30).