In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

26 ‡ mercifixion in the merchant of venice My wind cooling my broth Would blow me to an ague, when I thought What harm a wind too great might do at sea. I should not see the sandy hourglass run But I should think of shallows and of flats, And see my wealthy Andrew docked in sand, Vailing her high-top lower than her ribs To kiss her burial. (1.1.23–29) Antonio tries to speed the Sallies on their way with a brusque farewell : “I take it your own business calls on you,/And you embrace th’occasion to depart” (63–64). But their intrusiveness has its effect: it makes his talk of melancholy appear to be his way of protecting his privacy in a nosy world where everyone gazes and squints at everyone else and entertains theories about them. The Sallies are at least sensitive to the problem. They carefully avoid asking about the real source of Antonio’s blues except in passing, as when Solanio exclaims, “Why then you are in love” (1.1.46). Salerio’s mercatorial rhetoric establishes a context for thinking about Antonio’s relation to Bassanio. If ships interact like burghers, then burghers must interact like their ships. Bassanio is potentially Antonio’s “wealthy Andrew [‘man’] docked in sand” (1.1.27). The merchant dredges him up and fits him out so that Bassanio can sail to Belmont and win the wife who will replace Antonio in his affections. Another way to look at it is that he trades Bassanio to Portia for a return on his latest investment of three thousand ducats. 3. curiositas: the two sallies Solanio and Salerio are “the small fry of the Rialto,” as Lars Engle engagingly calls them.1 They appear together in four scenes (1.1, 2.4, 2.8, and 3.1).2 In Lawrence Danson’s fine characterization, “they may 1. Engle, Shakespearean Pragmatism, 79. Lorna Hutson calls them “the gossips of the Rialto”: The Usurer’s Daughter: Male Friendship and Fictions of Women in Sixteenth-Century England (London: Routledge, 1997), 234. 2. For a concise and annotated statement dealing with questions concerning the numbers and names of the Sallies, see Jay Halio’s textual introduction to his Oxford Shakespeare edition of the play: The Merchant of Venice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, curiositas: the two sallies ‡ 27 be lightweights but they are well-spoken.” Their descriptions of Antonio ’s “argosies” express a “pastoral mode of entrepreneurial anxiety ,” one that “calls attention to itself as comfortable poetry as much as to the unhappy state it describes.”3 Their curiositas, which Scholastic writers defined as “the passion for knowing unnecessary things,” is infectious.4 In 2.8, the one scene they have to themselves, the Sallies are well behaved. They serve up the news with admirable economy but also with the affect appropriate to partisans of the distressed Antonio. We learn that Bassanio is under sail to Belmont, Lorenzo and Jessica were seen in a gondola, Shylock threw a fit upon hearing of Jessica’s theft and affair, and Antonio—who may have lost a ship—was moved to tears by Bassanio’s departure. It is Solanio who reports Shylock’s outcry about his daughter and his ducats, and, as John Gross notes, the report “shows every sign of being a highly colored comic turn” intended to disparage Shylock.5 In their final moments alone together, before they encounter Shylock in 3.1, the Sallies are at their liveliest, but also at their silliest. They fancy themselves wit-crackers. They divulge critical information about Antonio, but their news doesn’t run smoothly before the wind. It capsizes on the shoals of rhetorical self-consciousness: solanio Now, what news on the Rialto? salerio Why, yet it lives there unchecked that Antonio hath a ship of rich lading wrecked on the narrow seas—the Goodwins, I 1993), 87. I’ve passively adopted the versions (“Salerio” and “Solanio”) in Danson’s Longman edition. Sale and sole play important roles in the Venetian climate. Salerio reminds me of salire and thus makes me think of a climber or someone who scrambles to get on board. Near the end of the casket scene in 3.2, Lorenzo and Jessica enter with “Salerio, a messenger from Venice.” Some editors speculate this is a different Salerio. But he is welcomed as an old friend and echoes the other Salerio when he briefly laments Antonio’s losses and vilifies Shylock. 3...

Share