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

14. Covinous Casketeers

covinous casketeers ‡ 59 The shift in this scene from Gobboesque prose (1–152) to Bassanian verse (153–88) accentuates both the pretentiousness and the edginess of our hero’s siege of Belmont.7 14. covinous casketeers In the 2004 film by Michael Radford, the homosexual bond between Bassanio and Antonio gets expeditiously sealed with a kiss well before the plot begins to heat up. That crude giveaway shows exactly what the play refuses to do. It reminds us that the question of whether Bassanio and Antonio “have sex” is similar to the same question about Othello and Desdemona. It is both central and unanswerable.1 Do Bassanio and Antonio appear to want to have sex with each other? Does Antonio appear to want to have sex with Bassanio? Danson rejects outright “the psychosocial [sexual] explanation for Antonio’s sadness,” because it presupposes “a competition between Antonio and Portia” that he finds untenable: “The love of Antonio and Bassanio (whether or not it dares to speak its name) is a textual fact; but a sexual competition between Antonio and Portia is not.”2 This rejection prevents him from exploring such obviously homoerotic or “parasexual” issues as the one identified by Lawrence Hyman : whether or not Antonio harbors “some unconscious sexual feeling for Bassanio,” he “feels rejected when he sees that his friend is determined to marry.”3 Adelman takes this further when she emphasizes the embarrassing blockage produced by the fusion of erotic with economic affect: 7. Actually, Bassanio begins raising the tone of discourse by modulating into genteel iambics at lines 130–34 and 138– 41. 1. On this topic, see the interesting comments by Simon Palfrey, Doing Shakespeare (London: Thomson Learning, 2005), 253–58. 2. Danson, Harmonies, 38– 40. 3. Lawrence Hyman, “The Rival Lovers in The Merchant of Venice,” Shakespeare Quarterly 21 (1970): 110. Even more persuasive is Alan Sinfield’s argument that Merchant’s “traffic in boys is casual, ubiquitous, and hardly remarkable. It becomes significant in its resonances for the relationship between Antonio and Bassanio because Portia, subject to her father’s will, has reason to feel insecure about the affections of her stranger-husband”: “How to Read The Merchant Without Being Heterosexist,” in Shakespeare, Authority, Sexuality: Unfinished Business in Cultural Materialism (London: Routledge, 2006), 62. 60 ‡ mercifixion in the merchant of venice Antonio registers his longing to be opened up to—or by—Bassanio in the only terms available to him: Be assured My purse, my person, my extremest means Lie all unlocked to your occasions. (1.1.137–39) My purse, my person: the equivalence simultaneously underscores Antonio’s erotic fantasy and marks its limits: spending his wealth appears to be the only form of spending himself that he can articulate, and unlocking his purse the only form of unlocking his person. No wonder the merchant and his ships tend to become indistinguishable.4 If the issue of gendered agency is melodramatically understated in Antonio’s discussions with Bassanio, it pops up as a central strategy in the elopement of Lorenzo and Jessica. When Lorenzo shares with his friends the substance of Jessica’s letter detailing her getaway plans, his paraphrase of her instructions indicates that she is more than half the wooer: I must needs tell thee all. She hath directed How I shall take her from her father’s house, What gold and jewels she is furnished with, What page’s suit she hath in readiness. . . . Come, go with me. Peruse this as thou goest. Fair Jessica shall be my torchbearer. (2.4.29–39) Even as he demotes Jessica to his torchbearer, reducing her to an amorous symbol and a servant, he acknowledges her initiative and direction. The same confused sense of gendered agency surfaces at the beginning of the elopement scene (2.6). Gratiano and Salerio enter dressed as masquers and express surprise that Lorenzo isn’t there on time, since “lovers ever run before the clock.” After they agree that no one expects such lovers’ larks to produce stable unions, Gratiano puts his worldly wise cynicism on parade: “All things that are/Are with more spirit chasèd than enjoyed” (2.6.12–13). He precedes and follows this 4. Adelman, Blood Relations, 118. covinous casketeers ‡ 61 statement of the obvious with a trio of examples that progressively obfuscate it: Who riseth from a feast With that keen appetite that he sits...