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coigns of vantage ‡ 67 portunity for prepositional pinpricks she can’t resist: “You should in all sense be much bound to him,/For, as I hear, he was much bound for you.” 16. coigns of vantage Portia’s gift to Bassanio is an act of self-protection “in a naughty world” (5.1.91). The ring is a something for nothing that she can transform into a weapon, or into a debt, whenever she finds it useful to disadvantage the donee. This lays the groundwork for her interlocutory victories at the end of the play. First, she frees Antonio from Shylock in order to pry Bassanio loose from Antonio. Then, after the merchant speaks up for his Bassanio, she doubly seals her double triumph by forcing Antonio to be the ring-giver, in effect the minister, who returns Bassanio to the nuptial fold (5.1.254–56). Finally, she all but steams open Antonio’s mail and mercifies him with the good news of his solvency (5.1.273–78). Antonio’s struggle with Portia over Bassanio becomes a battle of competitive donation. But poor Antonio! He loses, despite the fact that he actually stands for sacrifice several times—more often and more enthusiastically than Portia. When Shylock proposes in 1.3 to forego usury for a merry bond, he performs a bracingly sarcastic send-up of Antonio’s Christlike generosity (1.3.138–72). And when he flaunts his commitment to usury, it’s partly to show his impatience with Antonio ’s resort to the something for nothing that’s never truly free—and that is in fact aggressively aimed at Shylock. By the end of the trial scene, Antonio finds that he has placed himself and Bassanio in the very hands he feared. Before, Shylock had become a means to enable him to keep Portia from taking over his share of love. Now Shylock has become the means by which Portia imposes her bond on him as well as on Bassanio. She outclasses Antonio in the battle of donors and then humiliates him by saving him, after which she announces the good news about his ships in such a manner as to take at least stage credit for it. Critics who view The Merchant of Venice as an anti-Semitic play fail to appreciate the parodic charges that flash like lightning between Shylock and the other principals, between his direct and their devious 68 ‡ mercifixion in the merchant of venice negotiations with the modes of usury.1 His usury inverts and caricatures the negative usury practiced by Portia and Antonio. His expletory wrath inverts and parodies the lust Antonio quietly displaces to his pious gestures of self-sacrificing friendship. In the late sixteenth century, according to James Shapiro, “Jews were increasingly identified not with usury per se, but with outrageous and exploitative lending for profit.” This enabled the English “to imagine a villainous moneylender whose fictional excesses overshadowed their own very real acts of exploitation.”2 Shapiro’s characterization of Shylock fits this historical context, but it leaves other features out of account. It ignores the possibility that Shakespeare’s script encourages the actor playing Shylock not merely to play him with histrionic flair but to make Shylock play Shylock with histrionic flair. Lars Engle and Kenneth Gross argue that he recognizes “the kind of emotional ‘interest ’” Antonio exacts “from his own loans” and responds by playing the Jew as victim/revenger.3 In a finely nuanced analysis of Shylock’s rhetoric in 1.3, Danson portrays him as a witty thespian who controls his interlocutors’ responses to him.4 His raspy and theatrically expressive performance of anti-Semitic stereotypes—stereotypes of Jewish greed, wrath, and vengeance—works the same way. His portrayal of the victim/ revenger inverts and mocks the appeal to the melodramatic sacrificial pose in which Antonio dresses up his lending, his losses, and his lust.5 Antonio is asking for trouble. Shylock lets him have it. Nor does he have any patience with Portia’s talk of mercy. In the history of Merchant interpretation, Shylock is the original critic of mercifixion. Gross thinks that even as Shylock “refuses to yield to the Christians’ persuasions” he shows himself to be “their creature, their cur, the em1 . See, for example, Derek Cohen, Shakespearean Motives (London: Macmillan, 1988), 104–18. 2. Shapiro, Shakespeare and the Jews, 99. 3. Engle, Shakespearean Pragmatism, 240; Kenneth Gross, Shylock Is Shakespeare (Chicago : University of...

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