Amity Patterson

The Bankruptcy of Homoerotic Amity in Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice
Author(s): Steve Patterson

Source: Shakespeare Quarterly , Spring, 1999, Vol. 50, No. 1 (Spring, 1999), pp. 9-32
Published by: Oxford University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2902109
REFERENCES
Linked references are available on JSTOR for this article:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/2902109?seq=1&cid=pdf-
reference#references_tab_contents
You may need to log in to JSTOR to access the linked references.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.org/terms
Oxford University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to
Shakespeare Quarterly
This content downloaded from

110.93.234.14 on Thu, 08 Apr 2021 03:57:33 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
The Bankruptcy of Homoerotic Amity in
Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice
STEVE PATTERSON
R ATHER FAMOUSLY, THE MERCHANT OF VEXICE OPENS WITH a pitiful Antonio

bemoaning his outcast state but unable to articulate just what has caused his
disenchantment. His very identity seems to be at stake as he complains, "I have
much ado to know myself" (1.1.7).1 Indeed, his worries over how much and in
what terms he matters in Venice may be much ado about nothing-about the pos-
sibility of his being nothing. Antonio speaks as a man at odds with the changing
values of his culture, someone whose role as virtuous friend has no serious regis-
ter with his fellow men but whose identity as merchant has premium value. He
has entered the stage in dialogue with himself as much as with his two compan-
ions, and as the scene progresses, Antonio is repeatedly unable to connect with
those he encounters. His melancholy is diagnosed immediately as an effect of
money woes by Salerio and Solanio, who swoon over their histrionic visions of
how the course of a rich merchant's humors is surely tied to the swell of his
argosies' sails. In keeping with this stress on Venice as a world in which even feel-
ings are valued mainly in commercial terms, Gratiano intimates that Antonio uses
his public displays of moodiness to "fish . .. with this melancholy bait / For this
fool gudgeon, this opinion" (11. 101-2). In short, his strange affect must be a cal-
culated bid to gain attention-as if melancholy is best understood as an entrepre-
neurial gambit. Small wonder that Antonio protests the theory that his sighing
must indicate some variety of love, since even love is a cheap commodity in
Venice, something one puts on like a "sober habit" or the "boldest suit of mirth"
(2.2.181, 193). The passionate Antonio can hardly fathom, let alone endorse, such
a devaluation of his desires.
Despite Antonio's protestations, literary critics have debated the object and
nature of his love. For some time it was held that Antonio has no particular ref-
erent in mind at all, that the subject is raised mainly as a dramatic device to cue
the theme of romance or that it stands as "a relic of an earlier version of the
play."2 But this analysis has been superseded by the modern cliche (and, some
insist, the anachronism) of Antonio as a lovelorn homosexual vainly in pursuit
of the obviously heterosexual Bassanio. Certainly there is enough textual ambi-
guity to lend validity to almost any diagnosis of Antonio's melancholy, and the
present understandings of the ways that same- and cross-sex passions mattered in
A longer version of this essay was presented in February 1998 to a session of a year-long colloqui-
um entitled "Sexuality, Subjectivity, and Representation in Early Modern Literature," chaired by Susan
Zimmerman at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC. I am grateful to the colloquium
members, especially Susan Zimmerman, Jeff Masten, and Michael Neill. Gail Kern Paster and anony-
mous readers at Shakespeare Quarterly also offered valuable criticism and suggestions.
1 Quotations from The Merchant of Venice follow John Russell Brown's edition for the Arden
Shakespeare (London: Methuen, 1955).
2 Brown, ed., 4n.

110.93.234.14 on Thu, 08 Apr 2021 03:57:33 UTC
10 SHAKESPEARE QUARTERLY
early modern England are still confused enough to allow for a

ing of Antonio as a prototype of the lovesick homosexual. Alan
to Read The Merchant of Venice Without Being Heterosexist" a
pretation as it considers the play's resonance-and its correctiv
ern gay audience.3
It may be that the current confusion about eroticism and
Renaissance England does not mean that there were no early m
structures that incorporated and even valued homosexual a
argue that Antonio's love is a frustrated sexual desire for Bass
that his passionate love falls into an early modern tradition of
ship, or amity. Amity represented friendship as an identity p
value of same-sex love which codified passionate behaviors
tropes, while now perhaps somewhat strange or ambiguous, w
the play's production topical enough for both depiction and
popular formats. Central to The Merchant of Venice is a dramati
of male friendship in a radically shifting mercantile economy
seems better regulated by a social structure based on marital a
sexual reproduction. The play's uncanny resonance comes from
ipates modern romantic ideals by realigning the value and nat
literary figures: the male lover and his beloved, the female m
the social outcast.
Friendship themes were so often the subject of poetry and prose during the last
decade of the sixteenth century that it would not have taken an audience long to
recognize Antonio as the prototype of the passionate friend. The tradition he rep-
resents is exemplified by Sir Thomas Elyot's story of Titus and Gysippus in his
Boke afamed the Governour (1531), a redaction of the friendship narrative which is
remarkable for its foregrounding of the homoeroticism implicit between insepara-
ble male companions. Elyot revised the tale, familiar from a number of sources,
especially Boccaccio's Decameron, in a way that emphasized men's intimate prox-
imity. His Titus and Gysippus enjoy a "perfect amity" or "incomparable friend-
ship," as the tradition would have it, but they are further represented as physical-
ly passionate and amorously drawn to one another. In what might be considered
an erotics of amity, the men are described as "embrac[ing] . . . and sweetly
kiss[ing]" one another, and crying as if their bodies "should be dissolved and
3 See Alan Sinfield, "How to Read iThe Merchant of Venice Without Being Heterosexist" in Alternative
Shakespeares 2, Terence Hawkes, ed. (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), 122-39. Many essays
have dealt with Antonio's homosexuality. In the main, they tend to treat the possibility as secondary
to more pressing issues, as Catherine Belsey does when she writes, "We can, of course, reduce the
metaphysical burden of Antonio's apparently unmotivated melancholy to disappointed homoerotic
desire" ("Love in Venice," Shakespeare Szuvey 44 [1992]: 41-53, esp. 49). Others contend with the prob-
lem of a homosexual in a heterosexual society. W Thomas MacCary, for example, sees the "pathetic"
Antonio as "arrested" in "primary narcissism" and sadly "looking for that archaic image of himself"
(Frends and Lovers: The Phenonenology of Desire in Shakespearean Comedy [New York: Columbia UP, 1985],
168). See also Lawrence Danson, "'The Catastrophe Is a Nuptial': The Space of Masculine Desire in
Othello, Cymbeline, and The Winter's lale," SS 46 (1994): 69-79; Keith Geary, "The Nature of Portia's
Victory: Turning to Men in 'The Merchant of Venice'," SS 37 (1984): 55-68; Lawrence Normand,
"Reading the body in The Me-rchant of Venice," extual Practice 5:1 (1991): 55-73; Seymour Kleinberg, "The
Merchant of Venice: The Homosexual as Anti-Semite in Nascent Capitalism" in Literary Visions of
Homosexuality, Stuart Kellogg, ed. (New York: Haworth Press, 1983), 113-26; and Joseph Pequigney,
"The Two Antonios and Same-Sex Love in Twelfth lNight and The Merchant of Venice;, English Literaiy
Renaissance 22 (1992): 201-21.

110.93.234.14 on Thu, 08 Apr 2021 03:57:33 UTC
HOMOEROTIC AMITY IN SHAKESPEARE'S MERCHANT OF VENICE 11
relented into salt drops"; they risk their lives for one another, swoon when par
ed, publicly proclaim their love, and make hyperbolic vows of eternal devotion.
Although Gysippus is betrothed in order to "increase his lineage and progeny,"
Elyot emphasizes that he had "his heart already wedded to his friend" and that
the two men enjoyed a "fervent and entire love."4 The icon of embracing lovers
depicted such bonding as ethically sound (these model lovers were hardly shame
ful reprobates) and as a boon to the commonwealth.5 The depth of the lovers' pa
sions served the economic and social well-being of their kingdoms.
Amity acknowledged eroticism's power to ensure loyal service in men who
economic and social bonds would otherwise be open to question. In a Tudor court
where "new men" lacked the blood and property ties to one another characteris-
tic of feudalism, and in a social world where men were as available to same- as t
cross-sex attractions, a representation of male lovers compatible with heroic ma
culinity and good citizenship grasped the imagination with rhetorical force. Amit
did not avoid the implication that deep friendships might have an erotic compo
nent but constructed same-sex desire in ways that made it commensurate with
civic conduct and aristocratic ideals.6 Together, loving friends embodied a n
kind of man, as evident in the master trope "one soul in bodies twain." An
indeed, over the ensuing decades the credibility of such an ideal figure was take
up by a range of writers and playwrights interested in the ramifications of the th
ory and practices of devoted gentlemen lovers.7
4 Sir Thomas Elyot, "The wonderful history of Titus and Gisippus, whereby is fully declared t
figure of perfect amity" in Tfie Book nzamed 7i'e Governor, ed. S. E. Lehmberg, (London:J. M. Dent a
Sons; New York: E. P. Dutton and Co., 1962), 136-51, esp. 136, 145, 142, 139, 137, and 138. (M
own essay uses the more common spelling Gysippus.) One of the many changes Elyot makes in the tal
as he knew it from Boccaccio was to soften the female character, eliminating her protests against bei
"gifted" to Titus by her betrothed. Nor is she even aware of the plan, as she is in Boccaccio's versi
Elyot's decision to make Sophronia ignorant and docile fuels the fantasy that amity can accommod
marriage in a way that ensures social harmony. The men's close physical resemblance is also add
and emphasized, and the length of their friendship is extended in number of years. Elyot revises
tale to exalt "perfect amity," not conjugal or romantic love. See Clement Tyson Goode, "Sir Thom
Elyot's Titus and Gysijppus Modern Language Notes 37 (1922): 1-11.
5 Ethics is used here in a sense commensurate with Elyot's views on virtuous male conduct; that
educable behavior that promotes ideal civic and social relationships among men in traffic with o
another. Elyot was not, of course, envisioning, let alone advocating, homosexual sodomy. His eth
allowed that love between noble-minded men could be generative and conservative if properly act
out, and his concept of a heroic same-sex love set it apart from the degradations of sodomy.
6 This argument for the erotic intimacies of friendship is especially indebted to the work of Miche
Foucault and Alan Bray. Foucault speculates, for example, on friendship as "a social relation with
which people had ... a certain kind of choice (limited of course), as well as very intense emotion
relations.... You can find from the 16th Century on, texts that explicitly criticize friendship as some
thing dangerous" ("An Interview: Sex, Power, and the Politics of Identity," interview by Bob Gallaghe
and Alexander Wilson, The Advocate [7 August 1984]: 26-30 and 58, esp. 30). See also "Homosexuali
and the Signs of Male Friendship in Elizabethan England" in Queering the Renaissance, Jonath
Goldberg, ed. (Durham, NC, and London: Duke UP, 1994), 40-61, where Bray argues that th
sodomite as shadow figure to the masculine friend helps to explain the credibility of such criticism.
other works that take up the question of homoeroticism in male friendships, see Jeffrey Masten, Text
intercourse: Collaboration, authorship, and sexualities in Renaissance dratm (Cambridge and New York
Cambridge UP, 1997); Mario DiGangi, lThe homoer-otics of early modert dsrama (Cambridge and New Yo
Cambridge UP, 1997); and Bruce R. Smith, Homosexual Desire in S/zakespeae 's England: A Cultural Poeti
(Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 1991).
7 The emphasis on a construct of masculinity that emphasized proximity and intimate touch-a
opposed to distance and the remote gaze-is part of a larger project that includes this essay. For a
cussion of the sense of touch as traditionally associated with ideological disruption and homosexuality

110.93.234.14 on Thu, 08 Apr 2021 03:57:33 UTC
Until recently, the only thorough study of the friendship g

Mills's One Soul in Bodies Twain, but there the literature of ami
ations on a plot device traced to its classical origins.8 Mills esc
the friends as sexually passionate and thereby bolsters the mo
Renaissance male friendship was a rather baroque form of plat
Mills concludes, moreover, that amity dies out as a genre in th
century simply because its literary possibilities were exhau
view of male friendship is sustained in many feminist treatme
of an ongoing debate between marriage and friendship. A
bonding stage both prior and inferior to a mature marriage o
marriage or maintain bachelorhood becomes symptomatic
problem peculiar to unevolved males: the narrative progress, s
ing a psychic and historical telos, is toward the comic trope o
marriage. Even when a sexual component in friendship is allow
the case that homosexuality is seen as an immature or neurotic
or as an inherently narcissistic desire.9 But the friend in the t
neither sick nor lonesome. His virtue and integrity come from
for his companion, and it is only gradually that this love is se
ism or at odds with marriage. For Elyot-or, to quickly cite se
vision, for Richard Edwards in his tragicomedy Damon and Pith
perhaps, for Shakespeare in his early friendship play The Two G
(1594)-a social system based on amorous male friendships h
can accommodate marriage and even settle disputes over fortu
property.10 The closing line of Two Gentlemen, as the two frie
appear to settle under one roof, succinctly captures the ideali
feast, one house, one mutual happiness."
When Shakespeare writes Two Gentlemen, however, this hap
seems remote, perhaps impossible, as if such accommodations
of fantasy. Janet Adelman has noted how false the play's "ma
the problems the play sets up between marriage and friendship
away."11 Similarly, in her introduction to The Two Gentlemen
see Sander L. Gilman, Sexuality: An Illustrated History (New York: John Wiley
passim. The coupling of the transcendent and the physical was not unique to
cusses various efforts to reconcile the erotic and the spiritual; see iThe Natu
Romantic, 2d ed., 3 vols. (Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 1984), 10-15
versive or "pornographic" tradition of highlighting the eroticism in Renaissan
transcendence, as well as efforts by writers such as Pietro Aretino to represen
window to the soul; see Lynn Hunt, ed., Thie Invention of Ponzog7-aphy: Obscenity an
1500-1800 (New York: Zone Books, 1993).
8 See Laurens J. Mills, One Soul in Bodies Twuain: Friendship in Tudor Lite
(Bloomington, IN: The Principia Press, 1937).
9 Coppelia Kahn asserts that "same sex friendships, in Shakespeare (as in th
chronologically and psychologically prior to marriage" ("The Cuckoo's N
Cuckoldry in The Merchant of Venice" in Shiakespeare "Rough Magic": Renaissanc
Barber, Peter Erickson and Coppelia Kahn, eds. [Newark: U of Delaware P,
In the same volume, see alsoJanet Adelman, "Male Bonding in Shakespeare'
10 John Lyly's Euphues: iThe Anatomy of Wit (1578) might be include
Philautus and Euphues, part with their friendship severed, and neither man
tale may be read as cautionary, warning against true friends falling prey
self-interest.
11 Adelman, 79.

110.93.234.14 on Thu, 08 Apr 2021 03:57:33 UTC
Howard observes "the strain under which Shakespeare labored in trying to join
tale of heroic male friendship to a tale of romantic love between men an
women."12 Traditionally, of course, tales of amity were comedies; sudden, happ
denouements were prime characteristics of the genre. Elyot's Titus fears,
example, that his desire for Gysippus's betrothed will corrupt their friendship,
Gysippus tells him that amity incorporates the "power of Venus." Indeed, it is
Gysippus's kin, unforgiving patriarchs of contract marriage, who represent th
blocking agents to this loving friendship, though finally "the noise of rejoicin
hearts fill[s] all the court."13 Even the duped Sophronia, conveniently silent an
acquiescent, settles into marriage and produces children with Titus under
aegis of amity. In Two Gentlemen, however, the path to betrothal and marriage
entailed such base treatment of the female that comic closure seems compromise
The familiar bed-trick in Elyot's tale becomes rather more serious: an audie
must overlook Proteus's threat to rape Silvia. Tensions that Elyot downplayed o
elided begin to resonate in a way that makes the passionate conduct between tw
gentlemen seem, perhaps for the first time, costly.
These tensions do not represent the emergence of a natural incompatibili
between the two kinds of love. Rather, the play's problems of closure may ind
cate that amity as a utopian narrative can no longer contain its inherent contr
dictions. The theater, its market conditions financially and artistically depende
on women and other consumers varying in social status, could not bank on sell
ing stories that represented the uncontested interests of a select few. To make
Silvia quiet and compliant despite her poor treatment may be true to form, bu
her narrow escape from abuse also challenges amity's ameliorating powe
Howard concludes her analysis by speculating that the primacy of male friend-
ship with which the play closes has seemed strange since the eighteenth centur
mainly because heterosexual romance has since enjoyed an ascendancy over
other forms of bonding. But never before were early modern consumers of ami
tales asked to witness the female's cooperation as a condition of brute force or
muted protests.14 In short, the strains and pressures apparent in Two Gentlem
mark a faultline in the gentle practices of amity.
7he Merchant of Venice comes across as a comedy even more deeply skeptical th
Two Gentlemen of the promises and prices of amity. Marriage and amity are squa
ly at odds because the play questions the possibility of a homoerotic bonding t
produces exemplary conduct. As Coppelia Kahn observes, "Merchant... is p
haps the first play in which Shakespeare avoids [a] kind of magical solution" an
turns his "attention to the conflict between the two kinds of bonds"-amity an
marriage.15 It also tests the tenets of loving friendship between men of differe
12 In 7he Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al. (New York and London: W. W. Norton
Co., 1997), 77-83, esp. 83.
13 Elyot, 140 and 149.
14 Sylvia is spared the rape. Shakespeare compounds the troubling moment with an allusion to Ovi
tale of Philomela, whose rape transforms her into a doleful nightingale who can, at least, endles
broadcast her plight in song. AsJean Howard further observes, Sylvia is also denied this Ovidian com
plaint. Still, the oblique citation might prompt an audience to ask, at least momentarily, about the de
of complicity a tale of amity requires for its idealism to work. Even the context of the allusion-rais
as Valentine laments that he can "sit alone ... / And to the nightingale's complaining notes / Tune m
distresses and record my woes" (5.4.4-6)-embarrasses amity. The bird's song, traditionally decode
Philomela's lament, is summoned to serenade Valentine's own sadness (Greenblatt, ed., 82).
15 Kahn, 105.

110.93.234.14 on Thu, 08 Apr 2021 03:57:33 UTC
social status-a merchant and a gentleman. Merchant raises pro

about virtue, rank, wealth, gender, and desire which earlier f
downplayed or idealized. The play wonders whose interests are
of a world governed by the bonds of amity and how practical
plex social and economic questions such a system would b
Merchant takes to task the ideals of homoerotic male friendship
doubts about the ability of romance and marriage to offer an
ments to society or to be any more inclusive. What are the lim
erotic love, the play asks? Might a wealthy merchant become
friend? What if the betrothed female were given a voice? What
might a marriage-based economy have over one grounded
friendships?
Such questions are raised as the play dramatizes the travails of the ideal friend
in a society that is re-evaluating its definitions of love and its virtues-a shift so dis-
ruptive that Antonio as amorous lover seems sadly outmoded, himself a kind of
anachronism. Elyot's Gysippus had been outcast, too, when he defied the will of
his father and a patriarchal system of contract love, and that familiar plot device
makes Shakespeare's Antonio seem at first somewhat conventionally at odds with
the values of Venetian society, in this case a world that commodifies every human
transaction. The merchant's struggle to lionize friendship, however, is decidedly
different from the one patterned by Elyot. In "Titus and Gysippus" contract mar-
riage seems antiquated, in dire need of reform, and amity's power to match like
with like in both homo- and heterosexual relations reinvigorates an ailing body
politic. In Merchant the part Antonio must play in the marketplace of Venice is, as
he himself seems to suspect, "a sad one" (1.1.79), and his faith in the tenets of
amity seems no match for his community's cynical views on the value and pur-
pose of relationships. Lawrence Normand has observed that "Antonio brushes
aside his friends' attempts to put him into words, and offers no discursive version
of himself," but perhaps the merchant's difficulty in articulating his dismay is the
fault of a discourse that has lost its clarity as a medium for expressing and secur-
ing his bond with a gentleman.16
Shakespeare makes his audience aware of Antonio's marginal position not sim-
ply by dramatizing the merchant's opening complaint but also by rearranging the
conventions of friendship tales. Antonio and Bassanio, his "most noble kinsman"
(1.1.57), are strikingly different in both temperament and demeanor; the custom-
ary emphasis in friendship literature on exact similitude is noticeably absent.17
Their longtime association has been characterized by Bassanio's indebtedness to
16 Normand, 60.
17 Mills notes this emphasis on difference, but attributes it to "dramatic contrast" and argues further
that the two men are nonetheless equal in noble character (268). Brown, ed., discusses Bassanio and
Antonio as exemplars of amity and concludes that this alteration from the play's source, n Pecorone,
lends the men an air of nobility and virtue (xiv-xvi). He sees no tensions in the differences in status
of the two friends, nor does he consider an erotic component in amity. Frank Whigham analyzes the
play's "context of social mobility and class conflict," but he tends to see the Christians as singular in
their revisionist use of marital courtship as a vehicle for mystifying aristocratic solidarity and economic
privilege ("Ideology and Class Conduct in Thie Merclant of Venice," Renaissance Drama n.s. 10 [1979]:
93-115, esp. 93). This essay stresses amity's tradition of representing friends as gentlemen, the human-
ist rhetoric of an educable character notwithstanding. Men of lower status are often amazed, perhaps
even moved to emulate amity's code of conduct, but they are never depicted as ideal lovers, let alone
peers to the entitled heroes.

110.93.234.14 on Thu, 08 Apr 2021 03:57:33 UTC
Antonio, not by mutual pledges of munificence which friends typically made in

the most public and histrionic ways. Likewise, Antonio's refusal to charge interes
on loans, a long-standing, economically awkward Christian value, may also refer
to amity's now-impractical ethic of a generosity that assumes equality and reci-
procity between men. The merchant who lends gratis in the spirit of friendshi
does not automatically signal a noble character, as does the gentle exemplar of gif
giving in a tale of amity, but seems, instead, foolhardy and impetuous.18
Even the way Shakespeare brings the pair onstage emphasizes their difference
Elyot had observed of his protagonists that "nature wrought in their hearts suc
a mutual affection, that their wills and appetites daily more and more so confe
erated themselves."19 But in Merchant the friends each appear separately and in
obviously incompatible moods. Their conversation lasts only so long as Bassanio's
financial needs are expressed and met. Although he says he owes Antonio "t
most in money and in love" (1.1.131), Bassanio appears mainly interested in expe
diting a solution to his financial bind. In short, there is no unequivocal assertion
of a deeply rooted physical and spiritual kinship that would immediately identi
them as emotional twins and signal a familiar comic-plot trajectory. In Edwards
Damon and Pithias, to illustrate the contrast, the servant Stephano marvels at t
convergence of the friends, who
In mutual friendship at no time have fainted.

But loved so kindly and friendly each other,
As though they were brothers by father and mother.
Pythagoras' learning these two have embraced,
Which both are in virtue so narrowly laced,
That all their whole doings do fall to this issue,
To have no respect but only to virtue:
All one in effect, all one in their going,
All one in their study, all one in their doing.20
Stephano goes on to muse that "they have but one heart between them," thereb
invoking the familiar metaphor of a shared identity between lovers. Antonio an
18 Walter Cohen discusses the politics of early modern England's awkward shift from an opposition
to usurious practices to a capitalist-based economy. Equivocations are apparent in terms such as v
turing, advantage, interest, and iisk; see " The Merchant of Venice and the Possibilities of Historical Criticism
ELH49 (1982): 765-89. Henry Abelove argues that the ascendancy of marriage and reproductive h
erosexuality is homologous with changes in demographics and a rise in capitalist ethics; he conten
however, that the role of "same-sex sexual behaviors" in such developments warrant "separate tre
ment" ("Some Speculations on the History of 'Sexual Intercourse' During the 'Long Eighteen
Century' in England" in Nationalisms and Sexualities, Andrew Parker et al., eds. [London and New Yor
Routledge, 1992], 335-42, esp. 340).
19 Elyot, 136.
20 Richard Edwards, Damon and Pithias in The Dramatic Writings of Richard Edwards, Thomas Norton, and
Thomas Sackville, ed.John S. Farmer, Early English Dramatists (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1966),
1-84, esp. 14. Edwards's depiction of homoerotic friendship seems indebted to Elyot's idealism,
although its dramatic action seems to be a defense of amity as a viable solution to social problems. The
heroes must justify their friendship, which at first appears suspicious to the members of the court,
and distinguish themselves from the self-serving and crass forms of alliance that define male relations
in Dionysius's kingdom. The tropes of Elyot's homoerotic amity-that is, an emphasis on a tran-
scendent physical intimacy-are advanced, and, in the end, the sovereign becomes a third friend to
the gentleman heroes. The question of friendship's compatibility with marriage is not an issue in
Edwards's comedy.

110.93.234.14 on Thu, 08 Apr 2021 03:57:33 UTC
Bassanio lack the fusion-troped both physically and metaphysi

heart-that marks a bona fide friendship.
Despite this lack, Antonio plays the standard part of devoted
he evokes comes not from an ostentatious behavior that would
but from the lack of reciprocation between twinned companio
ing to the dictates of amity, Antonio exhibits an exemplary gen
ingness to help fund Bassanio's venture and especially in
Bassanio happy by enabling his courtship of Portia. He is that
rejoiceth at his friend's good fortune than at his own."21 That
his friend's profession of interest in Portia also marks Antonio
of amity. In somewhat nervous terms, Harry Berger Jr.
Antonio's ardor in gift-giving as shamelessly manipulative
hooks of gratitude and obligation deep into the beneficiary's b
Hapgood also sees Antonio as "at once too generous and to
today there remains something strange about a man in pa
another male, such pursuits may have been more ambiguo
Elyot's text, Gysippus gladly sacrifices his betrothed to Titus in
"similitude in all the parts of our body."24 His gift not only cl
their intimacy but, eventually, contributes to social harmony.
It could be argued that there is a classical element of generos
willingness to bargain with Shylock. To an early modern Engl
indeed, to the citizens of Venice-such a venture might be reco
to the ethics of friendship, which would dictate a carefully ch
of charity and sacrifice. Still, at this point in history these sign
already being tallied as strangely extreme (and perhaps the re
and Hapgood bear out this turn in values). Risk-taking is admi
it promises to deliver substantial gains-money, especially, but
ty, too-and Antonio's venture, pledging money and his own fle
who has given nothing in return, does not seem likely to earn
domestic tranquillity. Indeed, Antonio's complaint that he is a
the flock" (4.1.114) may refer to his inability to deliver on the p
love will yoke men of equal character and virtue. The mer
Bassanio is wearisome and circular in a way reminiscent of Sir
exhausted hunter in "Whoso List to Hunt": like that frustr
makes bids for a love quarry he cannot touch. It is as if noli m
Antonio's object of desire as it had the hunter's hind.
That an expectation of love in return for lending would har
dox interpretation of amity's purchasing power is, however, e
tation from Sir Thomas Wilson's Discourse vpon Vsury: "God or
maintenaunce of amitye, and declaration of love, betwix
Likewise Miles Mosse, in his sermon The Arraignment and Convi
es that a "lender may lawfully expect the loue and good will o
21Elyot, 134.
22 Harry BergerJr., "Marriage and Mercifixion in The Merchant of Venice: Th
Shiakespeare Quarterly 32 (1981): 155-62, esp. 161.
23Robert Hapgood, "Portia and The Merchant of Venice: The Gentle Bond," Mo
28 (March 1967): 19-32, esp. 26.
24 Elyot, 139.
25 Sir Thomas Wilson, A Discouise vpon Vsuy (London, 1572), N7r.

110.93.234.14 on Thu, 08 Apr 2021 03:57:33 UTC
that hath he iustly deserued by his kindnesse."26 If Antonio presumes that his
generosity will yoke his heart to Bassanio's, it is because humanist images o
amity have taught him to do so. This promise of an intimate equity, delivere
from the court and the pulpit, may account for the popularity of Elyot's tale of
Titus and Gysippus in particular as well as the preoccupation with friendship
themes in Renaissance prose and poetry; at any rate, it helps to make sense o
Antonio's deep yearning. As Mosse preaches, "hee that expecteth loue cannot
bee sayd to expect gaine from lending."27 And so Antonio, who seems to believe
his lending practices will generate love, professes to lend gratis even as he com-
plains about a bewildering sense of loss.
On the other hand, the leveling force of amity also accounts for the apparent
reluctance of the financially-strapped Bassanio to act in kind: friendship may
make both borrower and lender indistinguishable, but in the case of a gentleman
indebted to a merchant, it also risks betraying the men as mere partners in trade-
not fundamentally different from merchant usurers such as Tubal and Shylock in
being bound by the marketplace realities of what Wilson called "private benefit
and oppression:"28 To be sure, when Bassanio visits the marketplace to beg fo
Shylock's backing, he risks ignoble submission; rather comically, amity dimin-
ishes Bassanio's greatness.29 In 1.3, as he urgently bargains with the Jew,
Bassanio's manner of speaking is notably less ornate than the euphuistics he had
used in private dealings with Antonio (nor does it approach the self-aggrandizing
speeches he will deliver in his suit at Belmont). His awkward traffic with a usurer
is an unaccounted price of amity's laws, or, put differently, the gentleman find
himself compromised by the merchant's amiable command to "Go presently
inquire (and so will I) / Where money is" (1.1.183-84). In a bond that should give
rise to an "incomparable friendship" or, as Wilson puts it, would pronounce the
lovers "man and man," Bassanio's status seems tenuous, if not degraded. Once
in Belmont, Bassanio solves Portia's father's riddle by rejecting gold and silver, a
turn that might also describe his attitude toward the mercantile bonds tha
financed his venture:
Therefore thou gaudy gold,

Hard food for Midas, I will none of thee,
Nor none of thee thou pale and common drudge
'Tween man and man....
(3.2.101-4)30
In bargains with men below gentleman status, "perfect amity" produces a rather
disorderly love: the intimacies of friendship compromise and skew hierarchical
26 Miles Mosse, Thie Arraignment and Conviction of Vvrie (London, 1595), M[1]v.
27 Mosse, M[1]v.
28 Wilson, N7'.
29 The stage practice of playing Antonio as an older man in pursuit of a young, handsome aristocrat
may arise from the play's skeptical view of amity's promises of equity, not from any reference to the
men's ages. The elided tradition of an emphasis on twinship creates the sense of an imbalance between
the two men, as does Antonio's unrequited yearning. The modern stereotype of age enamored of inno-
cent youth obfuscates such inequities.
30 Whigham observes that this passage reminds an audience that Bassanio's fortune has been "bred
from Shylock's gold" (101).

110.93.234.14 on Thu, 08 Apr 2021 03:57:33 UTC
alliances and are, perhaps, intimacies best forsaken.31 In

Bassanio marry the "lady richly left" (1.1.161), he can a
his rank as lord and governor, even as he is beholding to
amity, not companionate friendship, allows the illusion o
Thus Bassanio's risk-taking to win Portia is announc
Cast as a sort of fairy-tale, this venture in romantic lov
(not the friend) will inevitably win his love, that show
will deliver the coveted goods and preserve the gentl
Bassanio's access to cash in Belmont seems so enchan
Venetian bartering with a merchant and a usurer se
After agreeing to sign a risky contract to finance his f
reassured an anxious Bassanio, "I do expect return /
value of this bond" (1.3.154-55). But when Portia invests
Venice, her confidence dazzles: "Pay [theJew] six thousa
/ Double six thousand, and then treble that.... / You
the petty debt twenty times over" (3.2.298-99, 305-6). H
passes sexual desire and domestic comfort in a way t
ness could not quite effect: "For never shall you lie b
unquiet soul" (11. 304-5). Indeed, the impossible worl
tasies about the regenerative powers of money in
Antonio's marketplace, fraught with the well-known
flats, / . . . dangerous rocks, / . . . [and] roaring water
across as a strange uncharted world. The vexing problem
disregard for his patron once in Belmont may be ex
surance to the eager suitor-"Let it not enter in your m
(2.8.42-43).32 But the memory lapse might better be
privileges of Belmont afford him the luxury of believin
a sign of virtue, not bargains.
This turn to courtship and marriage at the expense of
into the behaviors of a burgeoning system of alliance in
puts it, "the contracting of matrimony will ensure pro
Marriage to an endlessly wealthy lady will allow the ge
ward scene of plying a merchant for loans in a discour
tion of exact similitude. Thus, Bassanio expresses his in
lends Portia's wealth and her house at Belmont the myth
is described as having "sunny locks," with "wondrous v
valu'd / To Cato's daughter" (1.1.169, 163, 165-66).
fleece" at "Colchos' strond," Bassanio, her questing J
31 DiGangi distinguishes between "orderly" and "disorderly" homoe

the value and effects of homoeroticism in early modern England ca
not according to beliefs about its inherent unruliness or theories of its
argument has further support in Masten, in Smith, and in Valerie
Modern England" in Erotic Politics: Desire on the Renaissance stage, Sus
London: Routledge, 1992), 150-69.
32 See Brown, ed., xlvi.
33 Lorna Hutson, The Usurer's Daughter: Male Friendship and Fictions of W
(London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 70-71. Hutson does not co
tor in amity. Similarly, Cohen explains, "Romantic comedy, firmly fo
matizes the adaptation of the nobility to a new social configuration,
cable from a reassertion of dominance" (781).

110.93.234.14 on Thu, 08 Apr 2021 03:57:33 UTC
(11. 170, 171, 176).34 From the spectacular reception Portia provides for her
"Hercules" (3.2.60) to Bassanio's Petrarchan complaints of the "happy torment
in romantic love (1. 37), the fiction that this bond is a marriage of true minds
becomes irresistible in the way amity's myth of twinship enjoys.35 It is not that
Antonio's conduct is melodramatic and wanton, while Bassanio's is sensible an
shrewd: these are identical investments, the same excess of risk and passion
Rather, it is the social and economic implications of each man's desires that deter
mine the credibility of his conduct.
Though Bassanio may seem sincere in playing the part of the virtuous suitor
to Portia, Merchant does not allow for a complete mystification of his turn to
romance. Bassanio is that enterprising gentleman whose courtesies and favor
bond him to others only insofar as they promise to secure his wealth and station
Even Bassanio's way of begging Antonio for another loan reveals his faith i
courtly artifice over amorous virtue, at least in terms of the dlan necessary to ply
a merchant for more money. Couching his new request in a simile extended to
credibility's breaking point, he likens Antonio's lending habits to the sport o
archery and then claims that his conceited request for Antonio's steady marks-
manship is made out of "pure innocence" (1.1.145). The needy gentleman is
pledged, or "gag'd" (1. 130), to the merchant because of prodigal spending habits,
and his references to a "swelling port" (1. 124) and a "noble rate" (1. 127) reveal
his concerns with maintaining a lavish lifestyle. Indeed, at the heart of his impas-
sioned plea that Antonio "shoot another arrow" is not love but Bassanio's blun
self-interest-"to get clear of all the debts I owe" (1. 134). In Elyot, Titus's desire
for Sophronia comes with passionate worry that because of his romantic love
"friendship is excluded," a desecration he cannot forebear; and it is only whe
Gysippus reassures Titus that there could be no motive of "lust or sudden
appetite" in matters of amity that Titus agrees to accept amity's gift of marriage.3
Notably, Shakespeare's gentleman suffers no such consideration for Antonio.
When Bassanio turns to romance in Belmont, his motivations are mercenar
enough to mitigate his protestations of transcendent love. Observing the reputa-
tion for "magnificent improvidence" that defamed Elizabethan aristocrats
Katharine E. Maus argues that Bassanio apparently "feels socially obliged to dis-
play himself properly.... [and so] spends huge sums of borrowed money equip
ping himself for his trip to Belmont."37 Similarly, Bassanio worries that his trav-
eling companion, Gratiano, may be unable to "allay with some cold drops of
modesty / [His] skipping spirit" (2.2.177-78), though his friend assures him that
when the time comes, he will "put on a sober habit, . . . / Like one well studied
in a sad ostent / To please his grandam" (11. 187-88). This facility with rhetorica
flourishes and with suiting behavior to the needs of the moment undermines an
audience's ability to completely invest in the romantic fantasy orchestrated
Belmont. And perhaps, too, such self-fashioning allows Portia to opine "There's
something tells me (but it is not love) / I would not lose you" (3.2.4-5).
34 Bassanio's description of Portia has been often observed as a crass devaluation; see, for exampl
Jonathan Bate, Sliakespea-e and Ovid (Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 1993), 151-53; an
Whigham, 95-96.
35 Adelman observes that one source of male identity in early modern England came from the friend
ship trope of twinship or the mirror self (75-76), but the rhetoric of the companionate marriage was
appropriating that metaphor.
36 Elyot, 139 and 140.
37 Katharine Eisaman Maus in Greenblatt, ed., 1,081-88, esp. 1,084.

110.93.234.14 on Thu, 08 Apr 2021 03:57:33 UTC
As noteworthy for its cool remove as for its ent

speaking may belie its sincerity. Antonio, on the o
ed with language that creates an illusion of deep r
common device in persuading an audience of the au
opens, he is marked as a man of complex feeling,
"What stuff [his sadness is] made of" and how it af
self. In a world "deceiv'd with ornament" (1. 74), w
prejudice, mistaken identity, and falsehood prevail,
pretense. His struggle to express his affection may
merchant has Bassanio alone: Antonio momentarily
a tell-tale sign of disruptive feelings, as he stutters t
thing now" (1.1.113).38 In a show of pride that
Antonio is properly insulted by the gentleman's c
[his] love with circumstance" (1. 154). Then, as if to
Antonio speaks in a direct, unadorned manner, not
by courtiers: "but say to me what I should do / Th
be done, / And I am prest unto it: therefore speak
This impassioned resolve is how friends speak on
an impression that what matters most is the welfar
cost of the transaction or some private interest. Wi
Pithias reacts to the news of his lover's condemne
death also!" When later Pithias offers to die for h
witness the depth of the friendship bond "that [he
friend / That loves him better than his own life, an
sacrifices and declarations are conventional signs of
tunities to make public his deep regard. Certainly t
Salerio, who observes that Antonio "only loves the
Unlike Bassanio's passions, however, which seem t
the merchant's feelings vary only in the sense of g
from risking his fortune for Bassanio to offering u
Antonio's grand gestures are further identified
simply platonic love, and they help to account for t
amorous friends and romantic lovers which this p
Antonio's "affection wondrous sensible" for Bassan
self avows, "My purse, my person, my extreme
Bassanio's needs (1.1.138-39). As Seymour Kleinb
purse and person suggests a "sexual longing," a love
give all, including one's body, was a commonplace
tales of romance); to be "one in having and suffer
Like his ships, Antonio's love is cast upon the
"Goodwins" (3.1.4-5). According to the Nort
38 Brown, ed., tries to make sense of the line by providing mis

sible pronoun referents (1 n), but its incoherence may be delibe
rupted speech as a way to show emotional turmoil most fam
acteristic eloquence collapses into disjointed phrasing and ob
the Moor into believing he is a cuckold.
39 Edwards, 31 and 40.
40 Kleinberg, 117.
41 Elyot, 134.

110.93.234.14 on Thu, 08 Apr 2021 03:57:33 UTC
'friend."'42 And at least at first, such wrecked passion seems routine: in tales of
amity, friends are separated from one another so that the integrity of their love may
be tested. Lorenzo alludes to such a trial as he compares Portia's fortitude (and her
sexual sacrifice) when faced with her new husband's departure to "god-like amity,
which appears most strongly / In bearing thus the absence of your lord" (3.4.3-4).
Such fortitude cannot be measured by "customary bounty" (1. 9). Moreover, the
separation of lovers traditionally promises a consummation. In tales of amity,
friends inevitably reunite with embraces, kisses, and simultaneous protests of their
passion. Richard Brathwait's image of two men rushing into one another's arms,
univocally declaring their love, "Certus amor morum est" was his emblem for
"Acquaintance" in his 1633 conduct book The English Gentlman, and it is precisely
this familiar moment of ecstatic reunion which tales of amity celebrated.43 Antonio
seems to believe that there must be blocking agents to this love's consummation-
Bassanio's desire for a wife, for example, or, more seriously, a hostile usurer-and
that they must be confronted to test the ameliorating power of amity's love.
Friendships such as those between Titus and Gysippus or Damon and Pithias
allow the lovers to luxuriate in the ecstasy of painful separations and passionate
Fig. 1: Detail from the frontispiece of

Richard Brathwait's he Fngih S
Gentlema (London, 1633). From the
Folger Shakespeare Library Collection.
42 Brown, ed., 70n; and Greenblatt, ed., 1,115n.

43 Richard Brathwait, 7Te English Gentleman, 2d ed. (London, 1633). The embracing gentlemen in
Brathwait's conduct book are replaced in the 1641 edition with the icon of a disembodied handshake;
the title is also expanded to e Engish Gentleman and English Gentewoman JeffMasten, whose essay in
Goldberg, ed., includes a reproduction of this image, brought these changes to my attention. In the
1707 broadsheet 7he Woman-Hater's Lamentaion a woodcut of two men embracing serves to defame the
homosexual molly; see Alan Bray, Homosexualiy n Rai England (London: Gay Men's Press,
1982), 83; and Jeff Masten, "My Two Dads: Collaboration and Reproduction in Beaumont and
Fletcher" in Goldberg, ed., 280-309, esp. 281.

110.93.234.14 on Thu, 08 Apr 2021 03:57:33 UTC
reunions. Just as undying devotion is proclaimed, as kisses an

what words fail to capture, as emotions burst forth publicly an
the love of friends seems to take on a form outside the mediev
gories of transcendent brotherhood or platonic alliance.44 As it
love only accrues in value with an intensification of the theme
so close as to become one and the same. Indeed, this consolidatio
ates the illusion of a new kind of man, what Elyot called "the o
and Pithias, Pithias explains the effects of amity's love-"when I
am Pithias, methinks I am Damon"-but this strange figure clear
ducated, as when Dionysius inquires, "What callest thou friends
is not this true?"46 Friends are so exceptional in their love that
were transformed into another, which [is] against kind"47-th
phosis of a new being evolved from erotic love. (Idealizations o
sion use this same device in the icon of the hermaphrodite.48
sures in this friendship "against kind"-distinguished from the
monsters against kind-are drawn out through the pattern of se
Eventually, inevitably, the two become one, erotically linked by
Shakespeare borrows this device for producing the illusion o
phosis in friendship by emphasizing Antonio's declarations
faces separation from Bassanio. Antonio behaves as if the gent
loving friend and, later, as if their bond is but temporarily in
ous tyrant ignorant of the ideals of friendship. When first o
seeks, Antonio scoffs at Shylock for mocking the hallmark g
philosophy of exchange: "If thou wilt lend this money, lend i
friends, for when did friendship take / A breed for barren m
(1.3.127-29). Indeed, Shylock makes Antonio agree to his "mer
by defining his offer in the vocabulary of amity, a use of langu
municate love and virtue:
I would be friends with you, and have your love,

Forget the shames that you have stain'd me with,
Supply your present wants, and take no doit
Of usance for my moneys, and you'll not hear me,-
This is kind I offer.
(11. 134-38)
44 Normand argues that in the exalted tones of amity "the sexual is banished, leaving only the spir-
itual" (66), but amity, like romance, advanced the opposite logic: a sexual relationship expressed
through exalted language. It is not unlike the excited verse Romeo andJuliet use to express their pro-
found love and physical passion for one another. See also AllenJ. Frantzen, Before the closet: same-sex love
from Beowulf to Angels in America (Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 1998), where Frantzen
argues for homoeroticism in Anglo-Saxon and medieval categories of male bonding.
45 Elyot, 134.
46 Edwards, 41.
47 Edwards, 18.
48 Linda Woodbridge explains that the hermaphrodite in Renaissance poetics represented "the essen-
tial oneness of the sexes," a reference to Plato's idea of the original unity of the self (Women and the
English Renaissance: Literature and the Nature of Womankind, 1540-1620 [Urbana and Chicago: U of Illinois
P, 1984], 140). Although Geary sees Portia's donning of men's clothes as a homoerotic allusion to
Ganymede (57), the invaginated figure might represent the heteroerotic ideal of "one sex," especially
once Portia reveals the wife's value as helpmate in reforming patriarchal law and economic order.

110.93.234.14 on Thu, 08 Apr 2021 03:57:33 UTC
HOMOEROTIC AMITY IN SHAKESPEARE'S MERCHAXT OF VEXICE 23
"I extend this friendship,-" Shylock challenges, "If [Antonio] will take it" (11. 164-65).
In turn, as if he has taken literally Elyot's emphasis on amity as a code of ethics
available for education and reform, Antonio marvels that the reprobate has
become a new man. When Shylock demands his pound of flesh after all, Antonio
speaks as if aJew's heart is beyond the scope of friendship: "You may as well do
any thing most hard / As seek to soften that-than which what's harder?- / His
Jewish heart!" (4.1.78-80). The anticipation of a confrontation with this enemy of
friendship allows Antonio to prepare for his love to take a turn-for him an essen-
tial, even natural turn-toward public recognition and union.
Thus, in his summons to his friend, Antonio implores, "Sweet Bassanio, . . . all
debts are cleared between you and I, ifI might but see you at my death: notwithstanding, use
your pleasure,-ifyour love do not persuade you to come, let not my letter" (3.2.314-20).49
What may seem desperate or effeminate devices to ensnare a man are heroic
actions in the friendship tradition. Antonio wants Bassanio to be present at his
trial as a sign of their love, perhaps in hopes of having his friendship, like the
amity between Elyot's twins, "throughout the city published, extolled, and
magnified."50 To believe that his own society, the mercantile world of Venice,
devalues the erotic possibilities of male friendship nearly to their vanishing point
would not only nullify Antonio's love but turn the merchant himself into a kind
of hapless, friendless "other"-possibly a sodomite but certainly a suspect char-
acter, since outside the bonds of amity and romance, his excessive behavior
would seem useless or reckless. Poised at amity's limits, he does not consider that
its claims on equality and reciprocity are only about nobility and love when they
are also about good manners. Perhaps Portia recognizes in Antonio's letter a call
for a scene of friendship since she not only urges Bassanio to go to his friend but
encourages him to repay the bond twenty times over. Her reference to "an egall
yoke of love" (3.4.13) may be a tribute to the "'greater love"' of biblical heroes,
as Lawrence W. Hyman observes,51 but as a description of amity, its contingen-
cies are apparent:
... for in companions

That do converse and waste the time together,
Whose souls do bear an egall yoke of love,
There must be needs a like proportion
Of lineaments, of manners, and of spirit...
(11. 11-15)
The limiting condition of amity's stress on loving bonds is its clause about the con-
gruence of well-bred bodies.
Perhaps Shylock also understands that amity excludes even as it invites, since
neither the alienJew nor the female possesses that combination of features, breed-
ing, and soul that would allow either to participate fully in amity's myth of twin-
ship. When bargaining with Bassanio in 1.3, Shylock limits the term good to mean
commercially sound, an equivocation that seems less a symptom of stereotypical
greed when read in the context of Elyot's advice "to remember that friendship may
49On the erotic possibilities in the tradition of letter-writing between friends, see Forrest Tyler
Stevens, "Erasmus's 'Tigress': The Language of Friendship" in Goldberg, ed., 124-40.
50 Elyot, 149.
51 Lawrence W. Hyman, "The Rival Lovers in ihe Merchant of Venice," SQ2 1 (1970): 109-16, esp. 112.

110.93.234.14 on Thu, 08 Apr 2021 03:57:33 UTC
not be but between good men" who are "engendered by the si

personage, augmented by the conformity of manners and stu
by the long continuance of company."52 In his pound-of-flesh
is a delicious irony that mocks Antonio's belief in the promises
as the terms of the agreement corroborate his desire as physi
pound of "fair flesh, to be cut off and taken / In what part o
pleaseth" him (1.3.146-47). This demand is erotic, as Alan Sinfi
it can be read metaphorically as an attack on the genitals, as ca
erotic also because Shylock chooses to cut the flesh from Anton
heart-in amity, as in romance, the somatic sign of love. This
the Jew to expose the exclusionary rhetoric of amity: the lov
Venetians runs no deeper than their "varnish'd faces" (2.5.33).
Even Bassanio's disregard for the merchant reveals that Ant
of requited love are both too passionate and too expensive. In Sh
Jonathan Bate argues that the details which Shakespeare choos
Bassanio to the classicJason figure bring to mindJason's wors
that is, Jason as "an archetype of male deceit and infidelity."54
notes, foreshadows Bassanio's attempt to win and, later, to tr
Portia. But as a sign of deceit, it also refers back in time to his
faith in friendship practices. The merchant's failure to capita
amity makes his yearning less like the momentary suffering of
and more like some love-sickness, a bona fide Renaissance illnes
tale symptoms-a tremulous body, a distracted mind, an obsess
for another.55 The emphasis on Antonio's love as physical
way of innovating a homoerotic yearning peculiar to a lon
Antonio; indeed, homoerotic desire, as this essay has argue
guished the protagonists of the friendship genre. What is
amorous pursuit of a gentleman seems both strange and u
risked by a merchant.
In Act 4 the trial scene becomes a showcase for exposing and
limits of amity's erotic power. To sever the love of friends is to
body; as Antonio puts it, if the "cut [is] deep enough, / I'll pay
all my heart" (4.1.276-77). Antonio will have a pound of his ow
and thus allow all who witness such spectacular violence to ev
mative powers of male friendship, to judge "Whether Bass
love" (1. 273). In the competitive, mercenary world of Venice,
of being misunderstood as a rather ill-advised way to profit or
risome to Antonio, to be devalued altogether as usurious appet
tion and status. The integrity of male friendship-its virtues o
sacrifice, and intimacy-is so atrophied that only a radical stagi
to secure bonds between men can reinvigorate its appeal. Anto
52 Elyot, 151 and 149.

53 Sinfield, in Hawkes, ed., 125.
54 Bate, 153.
55 Love melancholy, also known as love-sickness or erotomania, was catal
Robert Burton's 7we Anatomy of Melancholy (1655), but love troped as an illne
heritage dating to medieval and even classical times. See D. A. Beecher, "Ant
Heritage of a Medico-Literary Motif in the Theater of the English Renaissance,"
5 (1990): 113-32.

110.93.234.14 on Thu, 08 Apr 2021 03:57:33 UTC
HOMOEROTIC AMITY IN SHAKESPEARE'S MERCHAJVT OF VEXICE 25
sacrifice can be seen as a daring performance on behalf of an exemplary devotion

In the moment of the merchant's epic display of generosity (traditionally both
grand and grotesque), amity will be memorialized as love "wondrous sensible"
(2.8.48). It is Antonio's own nostalgic citation: when his "tale is told" (4.1.272)
the true love between friends will be as inspirational in Venice as it was when
Pithias proclaimed that no one "may ... say but Damon hath a friend." Antonio
implores Bassanio to "live still and write mine epitaph" (1. 118), as if there could
be no more everlasting proof that "Bassanio had ... once a love" than this famil-
iar gesture of sacrificing the body in the name of amity.
As if to travesty Antonio's belief in amity's power to yoke the heart of a mer-
chant to a gentleman's love, Shylock demands the right "To cut the forfeitur
from that bankrupt there!" (1. 122). This attack on amity from an outsider threat-
ens to show how the social realities of Venice betray amity's ideals. However
questionable Bassanio's investment in his role as friend may be, he takes his cue
when an alien endangers male bonds. The gentleman arrives in time to proper-
ly reciprocate the merchant's sacrifice: "The Jew shall have my flesh, blood
bones and all" (1. 112). The sudden turn in Bassanio, from mercenary borrower
to benevolent friend, would seem virtually inexplicable were it not for Portia's
encouragement that he protect his own kind in the face of a foreigner's threat.
Certainly, in the preceding acts, Bassanio has demonstrated that he can play any
part necessary to his welfare. What is evident, too, is that Portia's quibbling with
the law during the trial is not simply a means of nullifying Shylock's financial
threat to Venetian mercantile practices. Portia seems aware of the trial's double
bind: should Shylock expose the limits of amity, the universal values it claims will
be disgraced by a foreigner; but if Antonio manages to redeem amity's appeal
her role as wife will be diminished. As Keith Geary has argued, in rescuing
Antonio from public execution, she saves the merchant and subverts a classic dis-
play of ideal male friendship: "Portia has fastened the homoerotic tendency o
Bassanio's sexuality and the obligations of masculine friendship on to herself."56
There will be no mockery of the Venetian practices of borrowing and partner-
ship, but there will also be no public spectacle of amity as the supreme form of love
It is as if the typically acquiescent or even absent female character from tales of
amity refuses at this point in history to remain silent or vanish. Portia, like each
of the characters in the competitive world of Venice, opts to recast herself on a
stage where everyone plays a part. For her the "will of a living daughter [is] curb'd
by the will of a dead father" (1.2.24-25), curbed by a discursive bind such that a
marriageable daughter "cannot choose ... nor refuse" (11. 25-26). In short, Portia
resists an enforced silence-as if she only pretends to honor a cooperative spirit in
earlier scenes. Portia's bid for power depends on both Antonio and Bassanio play-
ing their parts, but it depends, too, on the failure of amity's climactic scene of tran
scendence. Her clever orchestration of the trial scene-and, later, her neat turn on
the stock bed-trick57-speaks to her shrewdness and her determination. Disguised
as Balthazar, she uses equivocation and illusion not only to save the merchant
56 Geary, 67. See also Karen Newman, "Portia's Ring: Unruly Women and Structures of Exchange
in The Merchant of enice," SQ38 (1987): 19-33.
57 Elyot uses the bed-trick as well. To fulfill his friend's desire for Sophronia, Gysippus allows Titus
to replace him in the marriage bed, where the marriage ring is presented and the "girdle of virginity"
removed (141). Elyot's female accepts the switch without complaint. Thus amity displays not only it
charity but also its capacity to improve an outdated system of contract marriage which has failed t

110.93.234.14 on Thu, 08 Apr 2021 03:57:33 UTC
from the usurer but also as a way of liberating herself f

"little body . . . aweary"(1. 1), her voice faint. If the ve
plucked from Antonio's breast for the world to witnes
Portia seems aware that then the "greater glory [w
Within the generous system of amity, marriage will no
worthless (the early tales had no complaint against marr
not shine nearly so brightly as it could if elevated above
brightly as a king," Portia cannily observes, "Until a kin
better way to effect a re-evaluation of marriage and fr
ardent devotee of amity pledge himself to ensuring th
break faith" with the wife (1. 253).58 The friend will en
riage, a minor player in a reconfigured narrative.
Shakespeare takes up two key moments from tales of a
of friendship; the dissemination of amity's ideals-and pre
ly cynical versions. Even though Antonio has behaved a
ing a spectacle of his devotion to Bassanio, there is n
friendship (or of any kind of love for that matter) can b
ened heart. A murderer in Elyot's Titus and Gysippus fa
"the marvellous contention of these two, ... [and is] veh
cover the truth."59 There friendship has the power to im
proclamation of devotion between Shakespeare's two me
the comic presence of the disguised wives, so that the
betrayal than loyalty. These friends seem histrionic an
encouraged her husband to play his part in the trial of f
presence and confidential asides have also allowed a
untroubled scene. The females standing by seem cheate
endlessly generous circle of amity; and as if to undersc
outsider scoffs, "These be the Christian husbands!"
way that exposes the pitfalls in the landscape of amity,
lovers loses the universal appeal it enjoyed in Elyo
endurance of Bassanio's commitment are suspect, and t
ible when the gentleman abandons friendship in the las
turned to its rhetoric in the trial scene.60 The presence o
guise during the proceedings draws out with some forc
consider the role of (male) desire. Shakespeare complicates this motif

from its romantic context, then by having Portia later reclaim its va
when Antonio re-presents the ring as a sign of conjugal amity.
58 For a discussion of Portia's use of her knowledge and wealth to alt
as daughter, see LisaJardine, Readzng Shakespeare Historically (London
58-64. Louis Adrian Montrose analyzes the sexual politics in Elizabeth's
used here to describe Portia-that is, her efforts to "advance or frustr
subjects"; to exploit "[r]elationships of power and dependency, desir
Figurations of Gender and Power in Elizabethan Culture" in Representin
Greenblatt, ed. [Berkeley: U of California P, 1988], 31-64, esp. 45 a
plicates this argument by widening the sweep of court politics to i
opposed to limiting desire to heterosexual and "homosocial" relations); s
Modern Sexualities (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1992), 29-61.
59 Elyot, 148.
60 Bassanio resembles the false friends in Edwards's Damon and Pi
accuses his double, Carisophus, of betrayal: "My friendship thou sough
/ As worldly men do, by profit measuring amity" (68).

110.93.234.14 on Thu, 08 Apr 2021 03:57:33 UTC
HOMOEROTIC AMITY IN SHAKESPEARE'S MERCHAJT OF VEXICE 27
of friendship: should amity work its magic after all, both the Jew and the Lad
would be muted, if not ostracized. Understandably, neither witness is impressed b
the performance of masculine love in action.
The supposedly contagious display of devotion between friends does not regis-
ter at all with the citizens of Venice, whose ethic of an eye-for-an-eye strains th
quality of amity's kindness. Here friendship on trial fails to elicit virtue from spe
tators; it seems, quite perversely, to have encouraged a cry for blood revenge, a
decidedly different effect than Elyot's magical scene of conversion. Quite regu-
larly Merchant makes it clear that few of the characters in Venice are genuinel
impressed by anything that does not produce wealth or allow for a profit margin
though their rhetoric speaks to higher interests. Shylock's real crime may not
his claim on a pound of flesh but his habit of turning the platitudes of Venice
against their selfish speakers. He accuses the Christians of taking interest while
calling it thrift, of keeping "many a purchas'd slave" (1. 90), and of professing
humility while practicing revenge. The two characters who believe deeply in va
ues outside the marketplace, Shylock and Antonio, for all their faults and trans
gressions, have no place in Venice and are neither of them understood by its ci
zens. Thus there is something sickening in Merchant's turn on the traditional sce
of conversion. If theJewish heart cannot be inspired by amity's practices, it can
least be subjected to force-ironically by the very merchant who believes in the
power of friendship to improve by example. Even though Shylock's money mus
be willed to his Christian son-in-law and daughter, his penalty will be represen
as "a special deed of gift" (5.1.292). Forced to speak as a new man, the Christian
Jew exits broken and ailing: "I am not well" (4.1.392).
This enforced transformation casts a pall over Act 5 as the married coupl
struggle to collect on the promise of an ecstatic reunion in such a night that seem
to be "the daylight sick" (5.1.124).61 In a final twist of the conversion plot, tra
posing it from a staple of amity to an element of romance, Antonio himself is su
jected to reform. Perhaps awestruck by the mystifying display of the law's powe
the merchant is moved to alter the nature of his own love. The merchant
redefines the role of the friend from lover to grateful guest, an outsider invited
within the circle of marriage. When he vows to play his part in keeping safe the
ring, Antonio agrees to limit the range of its symbolic value to a sign of the amity
in marriage. Indeed, by the end of the play, there is an emphasis (the context of
bawdy jokes and frivolity notwithstanding) on the need for overseeing certain
social practices connected to friendship bonds. The early modern custom of
same-sex bed companions-and a literary sign, too, of male friendship-is alluded
to twice in the play's final moments (11. 284, 305), but its homoerotic valence is
drawn out as a luxury in need of surveillance.
AsJeffMasten has observed, male companions sharing a home, a bed, and even
the same clothes changed from being perceived as a convention in early modern
England to being an oddity, a "'strange Production'."62 In Merchant, the domestic
scene is represented as conjugal in a way that highlights the turn away from the cus-
61 The fifth act begins with Lorenzo andJessica trying to "out-night" one another il a scene that may
be played, certainly, as a light-hearted game between newlyweds (11. 1-23). ButJessica's way of empha-
sizing themes of infidelity in each of Lorenzo's citations can foreshadow the upcoming exposure of
unfaithful husbands and may also recall the betrayals in scenes past.
62 Masten in Goldberg, ed., 301-4. On men as bed companions, see also Bray in Goldberg, ed.,
42-43; and Bray, Homosexuality, 50-51.

110.93.234.14 on Thu, 08 Apr 2021 03:57:33 UTC
toms of companionate amity. Life at Belmont, it appears, will

male friendships, most certainly not an open intimacy betwee
status; nor will it include wives who would quietly comply
ments. Essential-and essentializing-choices have been made.
his bed companion not in Antonio but in Balthazar, the you
saved the merchant's life, and the gentleman has learned, furth
is his wife: "Sweet doctor," professes the contrite gentleman t
be my bedfellow" (5.1.284). The bawdy ring jokes suggest
sodomy make same-sex desires resemble infidelity, if not con
butt of these jokes, Gratiano heads off to his marriage bed co
the day come, I should wish it dark / Till I were couching with
(11. 304-5).
These lines, as Coppelia Kahn has observed, "voice [a] homoer
haps, too, they voice a fantasy of social mobility, namely, a cle
as lover and beloved. Such relationships were briefly encourag
when, at the end of 4.1, Antonio succeeded in using the ring
bond, enabled by a doctor of law, between a merchant and a g
ing that exalted amity would be familiar, not radical or disside
ern audience, as when Elyot closes his comedy as an "examp
friendship."64 But Shakespeare's version anticipates the moder
homoerotic desire with secrecy-wishes made in the dark-a
Friendship's claim on the ring seems somewhat underhanded an
fifth act's formal turn toward romantic closure is compromise
tence, it also bears the burden of having foreclosed on a conv
consummation: the coupling of two friends, whose amity will
[a] wife's commandement" (4.1.447). The play ends, furthe
admits (his desires notwithstanding) that he will "fear no other
keeping safe Nerissa's ring" (11. 306-7). In these final, comic m
tasies of male friendship trigger anxiety.
This skewed arrangement-two friends pledging service to a
rective to applications of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's theory of t
Although Sedgwick did not propose her model as a lens for de
phobia inherent in erotic triangles, the idea of homosociality is
every instance in literature where desire for a female affects m
woman serves mainly as a handy alibi for a potentially embar
desire. But the early representatives of English Renaissance frien
in shame; nor do they invariably deflect same-sex desire onto
protestation of love between friends was public and straightf
this difference helps to explain why modern critics, accustome
al tropes of the clinic and the closet, have debated whether am
homoerotic. Indeed, shame as the necessary condition of th
credibility to the cliche that the erotic language of male frien
strategically ambiguous. Homophobia-in this instance an anxie
intimate proximity with one another-appears to become a sha
triangles as the sixteenth century comes to a close. There is no
63 Kahn, 111.
64 Elyot, 149.
65 See Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York:
Columbia UP, 1985), 1-5.

110.93.234.14 on Thu, 08 Apr 2021 03:57:33 UTC
first three acts, and certainly none in the early tales of amity, that an expression
love between friends must yield before some heterosexual imperative. Only at t
end of Merchant do the men experience, much to their bewilderment, a pressure
confess their "true" feelings as a desire for, or an allegiance to, marital fidelity.
As for the trope of well-matched or twinned lovers, Antonio finally mirrors
Shylock, not Bassanio. This irony, a bonding of the merchant with the Jew, is
made apparent in the way friendship's twin motif, significantly absent between
Antonio and Bassanio, yokes the supposedly contrary figures of the usurer and
the friend.66 The play's title might refer to either of the two moneylenders, bot
of whom justify their lending practices by citing a common biblical ancestor, y
each a stranger in the marketplace. Shylock's relationship to money is, lik
Antonio's, not reducible to self-interest, as becomes evident when the Je
bemoans the loss of Leah's priceless ring or when he cries to his judges, "you ta
my life / When you do take the means whereby I live" (4.1.372-73). His "strange
outrageous" equations-" Justice, the law, my ducats, and my daughter!"' (2.8.13,
17)-mirror Antonio's commingled valuation of love, money, and flesh. If
Bassanio and Antonio have been remarkably different in respect to their manners
Antonio's melancholy and Shylock's discontent make the two merchants see
like kinsmen in humors. Neither seems quite able to participate in the festive ma
querades that dominate the Venetian streets. As if to foreground this similitud
there is a pointed instance of confusion when Portia as Balthazar sets eyes on th
two men for the first time: "Which is the merchant here? and which the Jew?
(4.1.170). A strange question, perhaps, but its rhetorical power is striking, parti
ularly as an ironic citation of amity's signature trope. In amity tales it was a mar
of distinction that no one could tell the friends apart.
Merchant repeatedly draws the antagonists as one. Each seems from his entranc
not only socially alienated but an obstacle to the progress of courtship an
romance, though it is not until the final scene that the effect of such a kinshi
between ostensible enemies becomes clear. As Portia warns in a truism that mig
describe the disposition of either moneylender,
The man that hath no music in himself,

Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds,
Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils,
The motions of his spirit are dull as night,
And his affections dark as Erebus:
Let no such man be trusted.
(5.1.83-88)
The suspect nature of the alien Jew is ferreted out and disabled in the trial scene,
and Antonio's bids for amity seem at Act 5's close to have been strategies treaso-
nous to marital amity. In the end his spoils may be his status as bachelor. Having
neither wife nor loving friend, he is accepted on terms that seem conditional. The
rescripting of the friendship narrative in Venice threatens to make the presence of
66 See Kleinberg's argument that the homosexual Antonio pits himself against Shylock because, as
reviled outsiders, they are essentially the same (120). See also Thomas Moisan, "'Which is the mer-
chant here? and which the Jew?': subversion and recuperation in ihe Merchant of Venice" in Shakespeare
Reproduced: ilTe text in history and ideology,Jean E. Howard and Marion F. O'Connor, eds. (New York and
London: Methuen, 1987), 188-206.

110.93.234.14 on Thu, 08 Apr 2021 03:57:33 UTC
the needy friend as troubling as that of the greedy Je

sentation in Christian mythography has included perve
money, and an antagonism to divinely ordained bonds.6
Indeed, as Simon Shepherd has argued, there was i
growing pressure on men to exhibit masculinity by dem
such matters as money-handling, dress, and heterosexu
of right conduct that even rhetorics of male friendshi
course to different effects. But masculinity was also dem
as if the object of their desireas s naturally and exclusiv
of emotion allowed by the friendship tradition, albeit
posedly for noble reasons, became more and more su
men; and certainly acting as if erotic male friendships
became anathema. Shepherd argues that friendship beh
associated with womanish men and came to signal a per
preference for females became more and more an indic
ior, attacks on aimless sexual conduct and approval of g
to regulate the varieties of male desire. Economic and s
were supposed to be uncomplicated by an active or open
out a public show of desire for the female, there could b
friendship-and, in extreme cases, no citizenship.69 In Th
ever, Shakespeare makes us aware of a tactic besides th
or the humiliations of sodomy used against men wh
excessive feelings for a dear male companion: a cultu
silence.70
Borrowed, perhaps, from antifeminist traditions or, equally likely, from the rep-
resentation of strangers such as Shylock, silence signaled a sort of parole status for
otherwise transgressive figures. The type of the demure lady traditionally signified
a good woman, but this ostensibly positive image was contingent on her utter
voicelessness. The woman who speaks, especially the woman who speaks out of
turn, degenerates from wife or maid to shrew, whore, or virago. Similarly, when
foreigners speak, they appear to plot, connive, or corrupt. In Edwards's play,
Damon and Pithias are considered suspicious strangers until they can persuade
the king otherwise. It is precisely this patriarchal demand for silence that con-
fronts Portia as she worries if she can finesse the letter of her father's law in get-
ting a husband and, also, as she voices her indecorous opinions in private quar-
67 Usury as an unnatural use of money was often coupled with sexual perversions. TheJewish body
has a history of being depicted as monstrously deformed, a grotesque amalgam of male and female,
and his lusts-a confusion of greed, sex, and profanity-as sodomitical. See Gilman, 86 and 258-59;
and Marc Shell, "The Wether and the Ewe: Verbal Usury in iThe Merchiant of Venice," Kenyon Review 1
(1979): 65-92.
68 See Simon Shepherd, "What's so fumny about ladies' tailors? A survey of some male (homo)sex-
ual types in the Renaissance," 7extual Practice 6:1 (1992): 17-30. See also Bray, Homosexuality, 67-70.
69 Such changes were by no means steady or consistent. There was, for example, the luxurious if
short-lived position of the late-seventeenth-century rake, who displayed his masculinity by flaunting
his interest in boys and women. For a study of shifts in the perception of same-sex relations, see
Randolph Trumbach, "The Birth of the Queen: Sodomy and the Emergence of Gender Equality in
Modern Culture, 1660-1750" in Hidden From History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past, Martin Baum
Duberman, Martha Vicinus, and George Chauncey Jr., eds. (New York: New American Library,
1989), 129-40.
70 For sodomy's role in defamatory politics, see Bray in Goldberg, ed.; and Goldberg, Sodoetries,
40-61.

110.93.234.14 on Thu, 08 Apr 2021 03:57:33 UTC
ters with her waiting woman. Her power as a female figure stems from her refusa
to remain silent, whether that means she must give hints to obtain the man she
desires or disguise herself to speak freely in court. At the close of Act 5, part of
the pleasure of watching Portia comes from her play with language as she teases
and cajoles the men.
Yet Portia remains her husband's wife. Her superiority within marriage hinges
on her willingness to use tricks to prevent men from acting on desires that have
been suppressed, not erased; and it is her own weary body-offering and with
holding herself as bedmate-that insures fidelity. In the third act she elaborates on
the vows she must make to her future husband, and even if her professed desire
to be "trebled twenty times myself, /... to stand high in [Bassanio's] account" has
the ring of irony, she must nevertheless move from being "Queen o'er [her]self"
to accepting Bassanio as "her lord, her governor, her king" (3.2.153-54, 169, 165).
After her exhilarating performance as Balthazar at the trial, where the "device"
of burlesquing the "thousand raw tricks of these braggingJacks" (3.4.81, 77) has
been instead a virtuosa turn on patriarchal ethics and laws, she returns to Belmont
to perform a second time. Portia's spirited wit is expressed in the final moments
of the play through costume travesty and "raw tricks," and considering her per-
formance at the trial, such behavior (now more like the parodic device she con-
cocted with Nerissa in 3.4) seems anticlimactic. Portia has gained the pleasure
denied to Sophronia and Silvia, the pleasure of hyperbole typically enjoyed by
heroes of amity and romance; certainly she is having a good time making fun of
masculine vanity. But this luxury is not enjoyed "without a fee" (5.1.290): the con-
summate moment of the play has its costs. There is little sense that in its inver-
sion, or reversal, of the amity model the companionate marriage will necessarily
subvert its tactics and limitations.
Of course, if this play is mainly concerned with the effects of social changes on
friendship, it is noteworthy that Antonio stands among the couples. He is not dis-
missed from the final scene, and arguably, he is even invited in, not left alone as
so many modern productions insist.71 Yet it is telling that his penultimate words
announce his own entry into silence: "I am dumb!" he cries (1. 279). It is as if the
friend has traded places with the female character in Elyot's tale. Ostensibly,
Antonio's bond with his friend Bassanio will still run deep, but there is no pledge
of passionate devotion, only a vow to stand as "his surety" in the marriage bar-
gain (1. 254). The one image he uses that recalls the friendship valuation of
depth-the soul-is defined at the play's end merely as collateral, a wondrous but
no-longer-sensible piece of the merchant submitted to ensure that the husband
"will never more break faith" with his new-found friend, his wife. That the rela-
tionship will now be without physical intimacy becomes clear when Antonio
speaks shamefully of the risk he took for Bassanio: "I am th' unhappy subject of
these quarrels / . . . [who] once did lend my body for his wealth" (11. 238, 249).
Whether in or out of the circle, Antonio stands dumbfounded-awed by the
wife's magnanimity but perhaps also by the way he has been betrayed by his own
faith in amity, a system that has contained mechanisms to exclude him.
The play closes with a procession of married couples, as the munificence of
marital bonds overshadows amity's claims to generosity. By some "strange acci-
dent" (but it is not love) Antonio's ships have been brought safely to port; indeed,
71 In Damon and Pithias the corrupt and obdurate Aristippus and Carisophus are exposed for practic-
ing "no friendship, but a lewd liking" (68) and are, at the end, sent away.

110.93.234.14 on Thu, 08 Apr 2021 03:57:33 UTC
a sense of divinely ordained economic privilege seems to proli

in the way / Of starved people" (11. 278, 294-95). Neverthe
Antonio or the usurer's daughter, who might still complain "I
when I hear sweet music" (1. 69), are counted as present on
of silence. Perhaps the lingering melancholy that so famously
a problem comedy arises from the way an audience becom
aware that the price paid for the pleasure of a happy ending h
ture of the right to speak unashamedly of fantasies and desir
Antonio, with Shylock, or with Jessica-all reduced to sile
behalf of the identities they have lost, is to forfeit the appea
notion that comedy's comforts are gratis. To give these charac
to risk being tainted, as if somehow of their ilk.
The contrite words of the twinned merchants-"I am dumb,"
resound with a modern familiarity, perhaps especially to those
themselves disregarded or silenced by culture and by lit
Foucault has observed, the sort of panoptic, reified identities
define marginal figures gained credibility as "truth" largely b
play between discourses of silence (including that formal p
silence, the confession) and avowals of illness.72 The early
developing powerful uses for both of these tactics. For many it
speak on behalf of same-sex passions without finding one's
abject position of immorality, illness, or incoherence; or, if t
perhaps too shrill, without finding one's self represented as a
comic relief, as a stock villain or a fool. Amity's ideal of a pas
that also accommodates a marriage, that has more to do wi
than with blood or breeding, is increasingly represen
Renaissance literatures as an impractical solution to economic
or as a promise made to a few. Nonsexual or homosocial male f
a rather empty pretext for executing business and career mov
reproductive love enriches the province of matrimony.73 Like A
the type of the homoerotic friend becomes loveless and lonesom
bounds of platonic bonding does he traffic with men. He finds
to say that will make sense of his strange desires.
72 See Michel Foucault, iTie History of Sexuality Volume 1: An Introduction, tr

York: Vintage, 1990).
73 That men sometimes appropriate a discourse of reproduction, including cla
is generative or capable of pregnancy, may not always or only be a misogynist
nor a sign of perversion or gender confusion. In some contexts, such langua
worth of other kinds of love or bonds. Mollies who pretended to be pregnant
as wife or mother to the male may have been burlesquing an ideology that lim
eration, nurturance, and devotion as peculiar to the body and nature of th
figure, see Bray, Homosexuality, 81-114.

110.93.234.14 on Thu, 08 Apr 2021 03:57:33 UTC

Amity Patterson

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Description:

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Amity Patterson

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

The Bankruptcy of Homoerotic Amity in Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice

Author(s): Steve Patterson

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2902109

This content downloaded from

R ATHER FAMOUSLY, THE MERCHANT OF VEXICE OPENS WITH a pitiful Antonio

This content downloaded from

early modern England are still confused enough to allow for a

This content downloaded from

This content downloaded from

Until recently, the only thorough study of the friendship g

This content downloaded from

This content downloaded from

social status-a merchant and a gentleman. Merchant raises pro

This content downloaded from

Antonio, not by mutual pledges of munificence which friends typically made in

In mutual friendship at no time have fainted.

This content downloaded from

Bassanio lack the fusion-troped both physically and metaphysi

This content downloaded from

Therefore thou gaudy gold,

This content downloaded from

alliances and are, perhaps, intimacies best forsaken.31 In

31 DiGangi distinguishes between "orderly" and "disorderly" homoe

This content downloaded from

This content downloaded from

As noteworthy for its cool remove as for its ent

38 Brown, ed., tries to make sense of the line by providing mis

This content downloaded from

Fig. 1: Detail from the frontispiece of

42 Brown, ed., 70n; and Greenblatt, ed., 1,115n.

This content downloaded from

reunions. Just as undying devotion is proclaimed, as kisses an

I would be friends with you, and have your love,

This content downloaded from

... for in companions

This content downloaded from

not be but between good men" who are "engendered by the si

52 Elyot, 151 and 149.

This content downloaded from

sacrifice can be seen as a daring performance on behalf of an exemplary devotion

This content downloaded from

from the usurer but also as a way of liberating herself f

consider the role of (male) desire. Shakespeare complicates this motif

This content downloaded from

This content downloaded from

toms of companionate amity. Life at Belmont, it appears, will

This content downloaded from

The man that hath no music in himself,

This content downloaded from

the needy friend as troubling as that of the greedy Je

This content downloaded from

This content downloaded from

a sense of divinely ordained economic privilege seems to proli

72 See Michel Foucault, iTie History of Sexuality Volume 1: An Introduction, tr

This content downloaded from

You might also like