Mercifixion in The Merchant of Venice: The Riches of Embarrassment

The Merchant of Venice must be classed among Shakespeare's "Unpleasant Plays."

—W. H. Auden

In The Merchant of Venice Shakespeare spotlights shiny displays of self-sacrifice and gift giving. At the same time he lets the shadows of darker motives encroach on the glitter of those displays. The merchant Antonio borrows money from Shylock so that his young friend, Bassanio, can use it to visit and court the heiress, Portia. Portia will be Antonio's gift to Bassanio. In performing this service, Antonio ostentatiously reins in his own desire for Bassanio. But no one in the Shakespeare canon deploys the art of donation with more theatrical verve than Portia when she conquers Bassanio by giving him herself and everything she owns.

She quickly discerns that Antonio poses as much of an obstacle as Shylock does to this conquest, and she decides to outman them all. Cross-dressed as "the young and learned doctor" Balthasar, she uses the hearing in act 4, scene 1 to embarrass not only Shylock but also Antonio—and Bassanio. Although the performance of Shylock the Jew in act 1, scene 3 marks him as the villain of the piece, complicity gets redistributed throughout the play. By the end of the courtroom scene the villain could well complain that he has been victimized and that he shares the discourse of villainy with the Christians who conspired to bring him down.

Christian villainy in Merchant takes a deceptively mild form. In ancient times Jews were tied or nailed to a cross and left to hang until dead. In Shakespeare's Venice strict justice is mitigated by an act of mercy: the Jew is denied his living but granted his life (4.1.365-94). Instead of being crucified, he is mercified. Mercifixion may be more humane than crucifixion: you mercify rather than punish. Nevertheless, it inflicts its own kind of pain: you punish by mercifying. Mercy "presents a problem," Lisa Freinkel writes, because it is the grace "that imputes righteousness where none has been deserved."¹ The pain mercifixion inflicts is the pain of embarrassment.

More generally, The Merchant of Venice is a comedy of embarrassment, and the sequence of very short sections into which this chapter is divided will explore various aspects of that assertion. To embarrass is to make someone feel awkward or uncomfortable, humiliated or ashamed. Such feelings are triggered not only by specific acts of criticism, blame, and accusation but also by actions like those listed in Larousse under the French verb embarrasser: "to obstruct or block or hamper; to clutter up or weigh down." "To embarrass" is literally "to embar": to put up a barrier or deny access.² People get embarrassed when they are denied access to things, persons, and states of being they desire or feel entitled to. Portia's mastery of the art of embarrassment is hilariously on display during the encounters in which she denies the Princes of Morocco and Aragon access to herself (2.1, 7, 9).

One of the colloquial senses of embarrassé cuts close to the bone of Merchant: "short of money." Bassanio's problem is that he has first too little access to money and then too much. He is embarrassed when he has too little but becomes embarrassing when he gets too much.

Antonio's relations to money and to love, to purse and to person, are deeply embarrassed. He is embarrassed by desire for Bassanio and by a grating tendency to "stand for [self-]sacrifice" that blocks his access to our respect. As Shylock sees it, Antonio's behavior on the Rialto is oriented toward embarrassing Shylock (a claim Antonio doesn't deny). But as Shylock describes it, Antonio's behavior is itself embarrassing (1.3.101-13). The loan scene (1.3) as a whole features Antonio's embarrassment. He is embarrassed both by the need to beg a loan from the Jew he despises and by Bassanio's uneasiness during the transaction. The text itself presents his embarrassment with embarrassed reserve. It hints at but never fully reveals the extent and character of...