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death in venice ‡ 79 lessly to speak as if he still owned Bassanio and as if he, not Portia, were determining Bassanio’s choices. After Shylock has been taken down, the Venetians redirect their apprehensions toward each other. Portia berates Gratiano in words aimed at Antonio and Bassanio: You were to blame—I must be plain with you— To part so slightly with your wife’s first gift, A thing stuck on with oaths upon your finger, And so riveted with faith unto your flesh. I gave my love a ring and made him swear Never to part with it; and here he stands. I dare be sworn for him he would not leave it, Nor pluck it from his finger for the wealth That the world masters. (5.1.164–74) There is a fury in these words, even as they clang with Portia’s selfsatisfaction at the success of the stratagem she herself had devised and put into play at 3.2.171: “I give . . . this ring/Which when you part from, lose, or give away,/Let it presage the ruin of your love.” Portia would be the last to acknowledge the truth of the motivation behind the ring trick: “All the ruse does, all it is designed to do, is give the wives a grudge to hold over their husbands forever: this is what the primacy of marriage depends on, this is the reason that husbands should be faithful.”3 The fury in her words is the fury of embarrassment. 21. death in venice The “stand for judgment” is a stand Shylock can’t sustain, a battle he can’t win, not because he is a villain or a clown but because he is caught in the deeper, more intense conflict between Portia and Antonio over the final disposition of Bassanio. He has let himself become the means by which, the target at which, they displace their aggression against each other. At the end, his simple straightforward tightlipped concession of defeat—“I am content”—is like a breath of fresh air in the murky 3. Orgel, “Shylock’s Tribe,” 50. 80 ‡ mercifixion in the merchant of venice moral perimeter of embarrassment Shakespeare calls Venice. It is a relief from the knavish arts of casketry practiced crudely by Jessica and Lorenzo, and more subtly or at least more cautiously by Portia and Bassanio . It’s also a relief from Antonio’s persistent tendency to show that whatever his words say, they always mean “I stand for crucifixion.” Adelman remarks that “the vulnerability of Antonio’s body to the Jew’s knife makes him briefly a type of Christ.”1 The trouble is that this is an opinion Antonio appears—at least briefly—to share and even to advertise. He takes his stand not against Shylock but against his real rival, Portia. She retaliates with an appropriate act of negative usury. She gives Antonio more than he asks for and takes from him more than he offers. The good news that he is solvent first strikes him dumb—so he says (5.1.279)—and then triggers his last words in the play: “Sweet lady, you have given me life and living,/For here I read for certain that my ships/Are safely come to road” (5.1.286–88). Why this calorific exhalation of gratitude? Portia is only the messenger. What I imagine the merchant of Venice to have on his mind but avoid saying is that she has out-bartered him. She gives him news of “life and living” and in exchange prevents him from loving. TheimportantthingPortianotesaboutGod’smercyisthatitis“twice blest.” It blesses not only givers—she describes mercy as the privilege of kings and God—but also takers (4.1.183–84). And she is a taker. During the casket scene she competes both with her late father and with Bassanio. In the courtroom she uses her attack on Shylock to embarrass Antonio, subjugate Bassanio, and tear him apart from Antonio. As the play ends, she inflicts God’s mercy in the form of the Christlike wound of mercifixion. Her salvific mercy drops on Antonio less like the gentle rain than like a ton of bricks. He understands the fury in her words. The Merchant of Venice represents “Venice” as the site of polyglot cultural activity, a trading center that brings together people of different origins. Insiders mingle with outsiders, Christians with Jews and Moors, merchants and moneylenders with...

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