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negotiating the bond ‡ 21 It hints at but never fully reveals the extent and character of his investment in his embarrassed and embarrassing protégé. These embarrassments suffer inflammation when Antonio’s access to Bassanio is obstructed by Bassanio’s access to Portia. Portia may or may not be embarrassed by her inability to attract better suitors than Bassanio and his predecessors. Nevertheless, her relationship to Bassanio , as it unfolds through the play, is itself an embarrassment. Consider , for example, the ringing phrase with which she assigns poor little Bassanio the role of Herculean savior: “I stand for sacrifice” (3.2.57). The words slither from one gesture to another: from “I stand here as my father’s sacrificial victim” through “I represent sacrifice, I stand for the principle of self-giving,” to “I advocate sacrifice and demand it from you: I expect you to give and hazard all you have.” This is said to someone whose predatory smarminess assimilates him more closely to the monster than to the hero. 1. negotiating the bond No discussion of the play can proceed without taking into account the darker implications of Shylock’s bond discussed and impressively documented by James Shapiro in Shakespeare and the Jews. He shows that it was more than possible for Elizabethan audiences, who “were entertained with catalogues of Jewish villainy,” to feel that “an occluded threat of circumcision informs Shylock’s desire to cut a pound of Antonio ’s flesh.” Furthermore, they might have associated circumcision with “ritualistic and surreptitious murder.”1 But if it’s important not to forget what may lie behind Shylock’s proposal of a “merry bond,” it’s equally important to factor in the situation that led him to propose it. Shylock hates Antonio because “he is a Christian,” but also for more specific reasons. Antonio not only “lends out money gratis and brings down/The rate of usance here with us in Venice.” He also “hates our 1. James Shapiro, Shakespeare and the Jews (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 92, 114, 117. As Shapiro points out (121), the darker implications of the bond may linger through the play because we don’t learn until the trial scene “that Shylock intends to cut from Antonio’s ‘breast’ near his heart.” W. H. Auden speculates that Shakespeare was aware of the association of usury with sodomy that Dante depicted (“Brothers and Others,” 231). 22 ‡ mercifixion in the merchant of venice sacred nation” and he despises Shylock. On the Rialto, “where merchants most do congregate,” he “rails . . ./On me, my bargains, and my well-won thrift/Which he calls interest” (1.3.36– 45). When Shylock asks him whether he takes interest, Antonio answers with tightlipped pride and a tiny pun, “I do never use it” (1.3.65). And when Shylock later berates him for his anti-Semitism and general hostility, Antonio snaps back that he is likely to continue behaving the same way (1.3.101–26). All the more reason for Shylock to want to turn the tables on Antonio by Judifying him. And what better way to Judify than to circumcise? In “lending money without interest to defaulters,” Lars Engle points out, Antonio “is generous to the point of being unbusinesslike” and puts “himself at risk.”2 But his motive is not restrictively philanthropic. It has an antagonistic edge. He himself admits that Shylock hates him not merely because he lends gratis in principle but because he has speci fically aimed this practice at Shylock: “I oft delivered from his forfeitures /Many that have at times made moan to me” (3.3.22–23). From Antonio’s standpoint, the immediate risk in signing on to the bond—what it will cost him to get his money back—is not the loss of a pound of flesh to Shylock but the loss of Bassanio to Portia. His objective appears to be to keep Bassanio permanently in his debt. In order to accomplish this he chooses to put himself in jeopardy. He knows the Jew hates him, and, during their discussion in 1.3, he provokes Shylock into exacting a harsh penalty: “I am as like . . . /To spit on thee again, to spurn thee too./If thou wilt lend this money,” lend it as if “to thine enemy” (1.3.125–30). And Shylock does. To state it colloquially, Antonio tries to goad Shylock into sticking it to him. Shylock perceives and frustrates that effort...

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