A Fury in the Words: Love and Embarrassment in Shakespeare's Venice

8. The First Jason

the first jason ‡ 41 dangerous in its blurring of the borders between the offering of gold and the offering of self.” The “openness of the unlocked . . . purse is embarrassingly linked with a defenselessness of person.”6 In Shakespeare’s Pragmatism. Engle shows how Bassanio, by “infantilizing himself . . . , metaphorically shifts responsibility for the previous money lost to Antonio.”7 In addition, Bassanio is a notorious poormouth. At 2.2.132–34 he wonders about Launcelot’s decision to leave Shylock’s service and “become/The follower of so poor a gentleman.” Some time between the dialogue quoted above and his nuptial exchange with Portia in 3.2, Bassanio apparently told her he was indigent . He reminds her of this before announcing the bad news about Antonio that Salerio had just delivered: Gentle Lady, When I did first impart my love to you, I freely told you all the wealth I had Ran in my veins, I was a gentleman; And then I told you true. (3.2.250–54) He now admits that even in “rating myself at nothing,” he was “a braggart”—or, in normal English, a liar—because he had “engaged” himself to Antonio and thereby forced Antonio to “engage” himself to Shylock (3.2.258–61). As Marc Shell puts it, “Portia learns that Bassanio did not give and hazard all he has. . . . He hazarded only the purse of Shylock and the person of Antonio.”8 8. the first jason The trouble with Bassanio has been soft-pedaled by calling him “a soldier of fortune”1 and “a kind of merchant-adventurer.”2 Part of what 6. Jagendorf, “Innocent Arrows and Sexy Sticks,” 22–23. 7. Engle, Shakespearean Pragmatism, 83. 8. Marc Shell, Money, Language, and Thought: Literary and Philosophical Economies from the Medieval to the Modern Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 60. 1. Shell, Money, Language, and Thought, 60. 2. Ferber, “The Ideology of The Merchant of Venice,” 447. 42 ‡ mercifixion in the merchant of venice makes The Merchant of Venice a richly embarrassing play is that one of Shakespeare’s most accomplished heroines engages herself to one of his sleaziest protagonists. Their relation is complicated by the fact that this engagement is acted out against a backdrop stitched together from allusions to the play’s central mythologeme. Although the most frequently cited source is a tale in Giovanni Fiorentino’s collection, “Il pecorone” (‘The Dunce”), Merchant reaches out several times to Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Medea’s speech at Metamorphoses 7.197–209, for example, is familiar as the source of Prospero’s incantation at Tempest 5.1.33–50. Parts of the same text, Englished in the rhymed fourteeners of Arthur Golding’s 1567 translation, also haunt several lines and images in Merchant, 5.1: Before the moon should circlewise close both her horns in one Three nights were yet as then to come. As soon as that she shone Most full of light, and did behold the earth with fulsome face, Medea with her hair not trussed so much as in a lace, But flaring on her shoulders twain, and barefoot, with her gown Ungirded, got her out of doors and wandered up and down Alone the dead time of the night . . . . . . . [she said,] “O golden stars whose light Doth jointly with the moon succeed the beams that blaze by day. . . . By charms I raise and lay the winds and burst the viper’s jaw, And from the bowels of the earth both stones and trees do draw. Whole woods and forests I remove; I make the mountains shake, And even the earth itself to groan and fearfully to quake. I call up dead men from their graves, and thee, O lightsome moon, I darken oft.”3 3. From The xv. Bookes of P. Ovidius Naso, entytuled Metamorphosis, translated oute of Latin into English meter, by Arthur Golding Gentleman . . . (1567), in William Shakespeare, The Tempest, ed. Stephen Orgel, The Oxford Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 240– 41. the first jason ‡ 43 Thus when editors gloss Lorenzo’s reference at 5.1.79–82 to “the poet” who feigned “that Orpheus drew trees, stones, and floods” with his music, they invariably supply the name “Ovid.” But these words also echo a passage at the beginning of an earlier tale of nautical venture and adventure, one familiar to both Ovid and Virgil. When Apollonius Rhodius introduces the members of Jason’s crew...