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30 ‡ mercifixion in the merchant of venice 5. negative usury: portia’s ring trick Poised with studied if anxious irony between the donor’s power and the victim’s plight, Portia mines the donor’s discourse of the gift more effectively than, say, Lear does in the self-pitying variations on “I gave you all” he aims at his thankless daughter Regan. Regan easily parries the blow: you took your sweet time giving it. “In good time you gave it.” She knows what he’s up to. He wants to get more than he gave by dealing her the wound of unrepayable obligation we associate with such sacrificial acts as those performed once for all time by the Christian Father and repeatedly about once a day by my Jewish mother (as in “don’t thank me, it was nothing”). Portia is initially disadvantaged by desire: “I pray you, tarry. Pause a day or two/Before you hazard, for in choosing wrong/I lose your company” (3.2.1–3). After Bassanio hazards correctly (her use of the word “hazard” doesn’t exactly stand in his way) she vows that “Myself and what is mine to you and yours/Is now converted.”1 In this exposed position she tries to regain her autonomy and authority with a menacing act of donation: But now I was the lord Of this fair mansion, master of my servants, Queen o’er myself: and even now, but now, This house, these servants and this same myself Are yours, my lord’s. I give them with this ring; Which when you part from, lose, or give away, Let it presage the ruin of your love And be my vantage to exclaim on you. (3.2.167–74) “The ruin of your love” is a harsh phrase, but Bassanio tunes it out. “Madam,” he replies, “you have bereft me of all words,” after which he lights up Belmont’s sky with a blazing six-line epic simile followed 1. “Hazard” is, of course, a clue to the correct casket because the word is part of the inscription. But Portia also uses the word when speaking with Morocco at 2.1.45 and with Aragon in 2.9. Before Aragon chooses she says, “To these injunctions everyone doth swear/That comes to hazard for my worthless self.” Aragon then reads the lead inscription aloud and responds disdainfully: “You shall look fairer ere I give or hazard” (2.9.17–22). negative usury: portia’s ring trick ‡ 31 by a pledge of undying allegiance: “when this ring/Parts from this finger, then parts life from hence./Oh, then be bold to say Bassanio’s dead” (3.2.175–85). Portia’s ring giving recalls a similar moment near the end of the preceding scene: Shylock gets deeply upset when he hears Jessica has traded his ring for a monkey (3.1.98–102). He treasures the ring because it was a gift from his wife.2 But unlike Portia he performs no ring tricks. The simplicity and directness of his sentiment stand in sharp contrast to the devious power play Portia enacts in its shadow. Her practice of donation consists in setting up a premonitory “vantage to exclaim”: she gives gifts that can be transformed to debts. The gift betrays the anxiety engendered by her vulnerable position in the “something-for-nothing” economy. It shows that “somethingfor -nothing” is a type of usury in a society whose members protect themselves and savage others through displays of generosity, kindness, benevolence, and self-sacrifice. Portia protects herself against her own ardent desire by performing an act of negative or deferred usury: she gives Bassanio more than he can give back so that at last she’ll have him perpetually in her debt. “I stand for sacrifice” (3.2.57): she stands first for her sacrifice and then for his. Her use of “when” in line 172 (“Which, when you part from”) wobbles dangerously between threat and prophecy, between the counterfactual force of “if ever you lose or give away the ring” and the predictive force of “whenever it happens (as it’s bound to) that you lose it or give it away.” What we’ve seen of Bassanio so far suggests that her precaution is as sensible as her ardor is questionable. Her aggressive strategy of donation gets wryly illuminated by Lorna Hutson in The Usurer’s Daughter: The code of “faithful friendship” which pre-dated the...

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