So this is the last of my lectures on Shakespeare for this term. I'm going to talk about The Merchant of Venice, a comedy which dates from around 50 ninety six to seven, the same sort of time as Henry, the fourth part one and flip fittings. So chronologically, I guess, between Romeo and Juliet, Midsummer Night's Dream, which is slightly earlier, and Merry Wives of Windsor, the Henry the Fourth plays Much Ado about Nothing, which is slightly later.
It's a play first published in quarto form in sixteen hundred and then again in the Folio in sixteen twenty three. So the title character of The Merchant of Venice is Antonio. A melancholic figure who undertakes to borrow money on behalf of his friend Paisano, who wants the money to woo a wealthy woman, Portia. Antonio agrees with Shylock. The Jewish moneylender that he will borrow three thousand ducats under the forfeit. If the money is not repaid, will be a pound of his flesh.
Suneo goes to Belmont to participate in a choosing or wooing ritual, which has been set up by Portia's dad father. Potential suitors must choose between a gold, silver and led casket in order to win the hand of Porsche. We see the princes of Morocco and Aragon choose gold and silver wrongly. Suneo chooses LED and thus wins Porsche for his bride. News comes almost immediately that Antonio has defaulted on his loan.
Pisania hastens back to Venice. Porsche and her gentle woman Nerissa go to the court disguised as a lawyer and his clerk. They manage to turn the tables on Shylock, who is forced to allow the bond to lapse to convert to Christianity and to give his money to his daughter, Jessica, who has meanwhile eloped with Lorenzo, a friend of Pisania, back in Belmont. The identity of the lawyer is revealed.
Now, there are lots of questions that I think Legenda Venice raises for us, and in some ways I've chosen a slightly off centre one. I decided to focus the lecture around the question, why does Pisania choose the LED casket? In part, I think, because that can help us open up the place, deep and thoroughgoing engagement with issues of money and mercantile culture, which are going to be talking about, but also help us think about the play and genre.
So why does Bartholomew choose the lead casket? There are a number of reasons I think we could propose for that right at the start. He probably chooses because like anyone who has read a fairy tale, he knows it's the right one to choose. Folklore stories are preoccupied with the choice of three. And with the reiterative process of wrong choosing. And they're also preoccupied with structures in which things which look glamorous and exciting and desirable prove, of course, not to be so.
So anybody who has read their fairy tales will probably have a pretty clear sense. Gold and silver are fake of idols in this in this choosing that led the one that doesn't seem desirable. Counterintuitively is, of course, the one you must pick. Freud notices in his essay on the caskets, A Midsummer Night's Dream that Shakespeare has shifted the gender roles in this story in Shakespeare's source.
The Jester, Roman Aurum, a woman has to choose between three caskets of gold, silver and led in order to be allowed to marry the emperor's son. So it's interesting how Shakespeare's has flipped. That apparently flipped. At least that's that scenario here. The woman is being is almost being chosen rather than choosing.
Freud old Freud, however, argues that the caskets, in fact, represent different versions of woman and that, persona's choices does interestingly paralleled by Freud, with kinglet testing of his three daughters at the beginning of the later play. So the point about that is that the choice test is, of course, already deeply familiar. Informal terms. We ampersand, you know the genre. Secondly, the Sanyo has to choose LED because the play has already shown us the other two alternatives being chosen.
So even though the mathematical probability of choosing gold, say, is the same for each of the suitors, the fact that one earlier has already chosen it doesn't make the likelihood of somebody else choosing it any less and less probable. So even though mathematically we could have three sisters who all choose gold, we know that structurally that would never happen. It will be boring. It will be it will be repetitious.
So it's structurally inevitable that the three suitors each paid one of the three available choices. And, of course, that the first two pick the two wrong ones. Otherwise, why would we have the wrong ones picked at all? So we've already seen the revelation of the gold and silver casket. Therefore, the play says it's time for us like the somnia to see what's behind the caskets and exterior.
And we might think then of a third reason, perhaps Sonia chooses LED because he has a little help from Portia. The casket test is set up as a patriarchal attempt to control Portia's marriage choice. She tells her first trip to Morocco in terms of choice. I am not solely led by nice direction of a maiden's eyes as I look at that quotation. Such quite interesting in terms of choice. I am not solely led by nice direction of a maiden's eyes. In fact, probably short as I am not at all led by what.
Interesting that word led actually isn't it. Maybe from Morocco doesn't pick that up. I'm solely led. Yeah, I hadn't heard of that before, so I'm just thinking about that as a camera. But what, what is going to say. Well she shouldn't be sanes. I'm not solely like you should be saying. I don't have any choice in this. And she, she's saying I don't have complete choice.
Instead, she says, the lottery of my destiny bars me the right of voluntary choosing, the lottery of my destiny bars me the right to voluntary choosing. So Portia's father has constructed her as a fairy tale princess, to whom Suiter Knight must come to complete a quest. And rather like the beginning, the opening scene of parallelise, I talk about them Electrum on parallelise, which is a much more obviously fairy tales or folklore story.
The King of Antiochus has set up a very similar kind of fairy story in which knights come to woo the daughter if they are wrong. If they don't answer the riddle correctly, they must forego any any chance of marrying anybody else. That's the same as is happening here. It's a situation which is fiction, which fits empirically. It's a very strange sort of old fashioned folks. Folk lore, kind of a play doesn't perhaps fit quite so well in this play about Mercantile Venis.
So Bush's father has established that as his fairy tale princess, but perhaps he has also given her a structure which enables her neatly to dispatch those suitors she doesn't want and to ally herself with one we've already been told she likes the best. Reminded by Nerissa of a Venetian, a scholar and a soldier who came to visit her father, she recalls. Yes, yes, it was bizarre. MeOh adding hastily perhaps to cover this overeagerness, as I think.
So he was he called. So Portia has already identified Persona as her preferred suitor. And clearly in this play, which is so much concerned with intermarriage and with national and racial difference, with the point where those differences can and can't be encompassed, the fact that her foreign suitors are such clearly impossible marriage partners for her is also made clear.
Portia's reply when the Duke of Morocco withdraws Beeton from the contest is uncomfortable, let all of his complexion choose me. So this is a work very hard to make complexion not mean skin colour, but I think I think it almost certainly does mean that. So let all of his complexion choose me. So Portia says any more black suitors? I hope they will pick gold. And it does an interesting background, I think, for the kind of impossibility of Desdemona as marriage choice in Othello.
So perhaps under the guise of submission to her father's authority, Portia may in reality be directing her own marriage choices. Critics have noted that at a crucial point of this scene, Act three scene to a stage direction reads a song whilst bizarre neo comments on the caskets to himself, a song whilst Pisania comments on the caskets himself is an interesting stage to actually quite an unusual sight.
I mean, Shakespeare in that it suggests that while the song is happening, something else is going on on stage. And that's not usually something that is indicated in the text of Shakespeare's play plays. The lyrics, which follow and famously with a particular rhyming syllable, tell me where is fancy bread? Or in the heart. Or in the head. How begot how nourish.
And it's very easy in performance to use this as a pretty direct hint to Byzantium about which of the caskets he should choose now idealised interpretations of Portia's character. After engaging in symbolism, Portia was the dominant Shakespearean heroine. She would have been 10 points on top trumps Shakespeare, top trumps in the Victorian cultural imagination.
So. So Portia was a great of Victorian heroine and the idealised interpretations of her character, which which we still have, I think, which we inherit from that period, tend to resist. This is an interpretation.
The Ed m m mahood in the new Cambridge editions of the current new Cambridge edition is heir to these interpretations when she glosses the lines, saying that any suggestion that the song is a direction to Pisania should be discounted because, quote, it belittles Portia's integrity and Basyouni is inside. It belittles Portia's integrity and personas inside. It's interesting to think that we only know whether Portia has integrity or persona has insight because of what they do on stage.
We can't say that they already are that and then interpret what they do onstage in the light of that apparent information. I think it's a it's an interesting it's an interesting instance of an editor actually intervening to say, no, this interpretation is not possible on character, on character grounds, something I think we should resist in plot terms.
It would, of course, make absolute sense for Portia to bypass patriarchal authority and to pick her own husband, since it would echo what Shylock's daughter Jessica does when she escapes his house to run off with her lover. And it would do something interesting, I think, to the fact about to those two women and their strange absence of kind of interaction when they're on stage together in the uncomfortable final act of the play. It would, of course, also confirm cautious control in the marriage.
And Portia goes on to assert her control dressing as a lawyer. So trancing all the legal opinion in that in the court in Venice, berating her husband about the apparent loss of his wedding ring and so on, that this is not someone who unusually perhaps for Shakespeare's heroines, we see quite a bit of Portia after she's agreed to marry. So she agrees to marry beside me in that threesome, too. So this doesn't end quite with marriage.
We see quite a lot of how she's going to behave in that role, and she certainly isn't going to be subservient to him. Interestingly, she offers the money to pay off Antonio, to pay off Shylock's, Perth, Antonio's debt, even though legally on marriage, her property would all be under the control of her husband. And she doesn't seem to have any truck with that at all. No sense. I think that Sonia will be in control here and quite right, too, since he is established as a complete spendthrift.
So perhaps, therefore, contrary to Freud and following rather than subverting his source, Shakespeare does actually make the woman the ultimate chooser between the caskets. After all. So let's just recap where we are so far. Busoni has reasons for choosing the casket are generic. It's what folklore heroes do, that narrative and structural. We've had the alternatives already, so it's time to have this third choice.
And they are personal or perhaps situational. He gets a steer from Porsche about the right answer. Now, I think the role of the caskets in the play is an interesting one, not least because it's so often understated. Up the moment, this is a play which is being interestingly and in some ways appropriately distorted by a focus on Shylock, the Shylock appears in only five scenes of this play. But he's come to completely dominate the critical reception to it.
Now, I do to suggest that Shylock isn't important. But I want to try and sort of reintegrate him into a plot which is concerned with these same themes throughout and to try and understand how the caskets might fit to that.
If we look at the play quantitatively, we can see that the three casket scenes with the unsuccessful suitors, that's active scene one, Act two, scene seven and act to see nine form a considerable portion of the play's central section and further that they look and sound very different from the rest of the play. So if we've got this kind of fairy tale setup of these choices, we've also got a strangely not necessarily fairy tale, but quite formal language used to depict them.
We get very long, formal speeches in these scenes. Morocco speaks for 43 lines without a break. Aragón for 35 lines is a very long speeches with total. Last week in Taming of the Shrew about what a long speech does in in in slowing things down and in giving raising lots of questions about what other characters are doing during it. Even a big set piece speech in this play, like Port Portia's famous courtroom speech, the quality of mercy is only about 20 lines long.
So this is not a play which goes in for people on speeches. Comedies don't tend to do that, but the casket scenes do. We can hear the change in these scenes because they tend to be juxtaposed with prose scenes. One technique I've mentioned before, but it's really worth doing is to read a play in a collected edition so you get a lot of text on the page and you can just see the shape of the language on the page.
You know, if you're reading in an individual play text with lots of notes, you never get a feeling of the rhythm because you only get a tiny bit of text on each opening of the page. But if you look at a big edition like the complete opposite of the Norten or even the RISC Shakespeare, you see a big sweep of how the language works. And you can see juxtapositions between scenes much more easily.
And what you'll see here is we get these long blocks of speech in the casket scenes and around them we get pros. There's a play with a lot of prisons and very lively and kind of energetic plays. Even Bosnia becomes rather returned in the presence of the casket, speaking by far his longest speech at around 40 lines. In three, two. And I think the slowness of the dramaturge about the casket scenes.
So I suppose what I'm trying to say is these are scenes which we want to kind of breeze over because we don't think they're important. And by contrast, the play has actually really invested in them because it's slowing the action down so that we can't just jump over them. That's a that's a kind of an interesting disjunction for me and what we tend to think of about the play and what the play seems to want us to think.
And that's disjunction. And trying to explore the dramaturge of these themes seems to emphasise a kind of a kind of Stacie's amplified by rather static or tableau type images. Let's take this stage direction from the beginning of Act two, and this is from the Foleo and to maracas a Torgny more all in white and three or four followers accordingly with Portia Nerissa and their train flourish.
Kornet so enter Morocco as a Torgny more all in white and three or four follower's accordingly with Portia Nerissa and their train flourish. Cornets the the sound of the cornet on the Elizabethan stage tends to signal the entrance of important people. What we tend to call a permissive stage direction. Three or four followers. That's saying really saying as many as you can manage. You can do it with three. You've only got three. But if you've got four, it would be better.
That suggests that the dignity and size of Morocco's accompanying train is important. These are people who never speak in the scene. So they're there to be visual. They're there to add to his dignity and the train. Similarly of Portia and Teresa, we don't know how many people that are supposed to be. But this is a very crowded stage with two very formal processions kind of meeting each other. I think that's what we're supposed to visualise. The Torgny more all in white.
With three or four followers sort of coming in from one side and Portia Nerissa and their train coming in from the other. This is a spectacle. The dark skin of the more contrasted with white robes are kind of exotic tableau. Only Morocco and Portia speak in this scene despite all these extra numerary characters. And they exchange only seven speeches. So the overall impression is of formality and stilted kind of movement.
Again, this tends to make the scene seem longer or slower than it actually is. There's also no suspense in it. We already pretty much know that these are not suitors who are going to marry Portia. Not least because as soon as Besançon mentions Portia in Act one. Scene one. We then flip and meet her is what cinema would do as a kind of shock, reverse shock, which is a way of saying this. This is the couple. This is a couple here. The where drama does it is to flip between the scenes.
So the play structure, I'm trying to say is it is a kind of curious one because the cast, it seems, are too long to static, to deliberative for the kind of the amount of plot that they carry. And as I say, I am labouring this point a bit because most analysis of the Merchant of Venice is preoccupied elsewhere, largely with Shylock.
I want I want to try and do the rest of the lecture is to think about how this how the casket sequence works in the in the whole of the plot using a range of critical tools. We might also add. So we were we said, why does Pisania choose the lead casket? You might just think about reasons why he might not have done other evidence in the play. Makes it seem actually rather implausible that that's the one that he would choose.
After all, Balzano is quite clearly somebody who is interested in money, who wants to marry Porsche because she is wealthy and who has pursued her of talked up with all the money that's been borrowed on his behalf in order to appear more wealthy than he is. He couldn't be less like the lead casket. That is what it is and has a kind of integrity to it. So his wooing of Porsche is a kind of confidence trick funded by the project capitalists credit economy of Venetian moneylending.
And it's underwritten by expectations of mercantile gain. Talking to Antonio in the opening scene about his financial situation, Pisania admits he has, quote, disabled mine estate by something showing a more swelling port than my finked means would grant continuance, something showing a more swelling port. So he spent more on appearances than his wealth could sustain. But there's a kind of pomposity to the way he expresses that, which suggests that he isn't quite.
He didn't seem very contrite about it. This is rather Wiedlin, kind of evasive. Tony has there. But he persuades Antonio by means of a childhood simile that the thing to do about this situation is actually to throw more money at it. In my school days, when I had lost one shaft, one arrow, I shot his fellow of the selfsame flight the selfsame way with more advise watch to find the other fourth. And by adventuring both, I often found both.
So a lost arrow. Shoot another one in the same direction. And watch watch it more carefully and you may find both. Of course, what was on it. It doesn't suggest is that you may also lose both. Which is also possible. This council of sending good money or good arrows after bad and more particularly the language of adventuring is a really important kind of financial sort of kind of financial considerations that the play evokes right from the start.
The language of adventuring or of risking particularly money in expectation of gain is applied to Besame as romantic quest. You'll remember his first mention of Porsche is in Belmont. Is a lady richly left? Porsche is likened to the Golden Fleece and bizarreness to a questing Jason. But he's a Jason who needs a lot of money in order to be able to go and claim his prise.
Modern critics have estimated the value of three thousand ducats, a sum even Shylock cannot instantly raise up to be in the region of three hundred seventy five thousand pounds in modern money. It's quite a lot to ask your friend to borrow on your behalf. It's also quite a lot to invest in the enterprise of going to get married, but Suneo is making a considerable investment in the success of his enterprise.
Doesn't have to do anything else with the money, so far as we can tell, apart from buying things to make his approach to Porsche look impressive. It's a big splurge, I think. Immediately, the prince of Oregon has been sent away from Belmont for wrongly choosing silver. The messenger tells Portia that another suitor is at her gate bringing gifts of rich value. A day in April never came. So sweet to show how costly summer was at hand, says the messenger.
Not a. costly. Which doesn't really quite attach itself to summer properly. Is is a really good indication of how much what a show Pisania has put on. And we haven't seen the financial backroom transactions know exactly how much this has cost. Three thousand buckets so we can go further in connecting the language of love and the language of speculation and investment in a way that works to overturn a standard understanding of the play's thematic locations.
Earlier 20th century, critics have tended to want to see Portia's realm of Belmond as the absolute opposite of Venice, a kind of fairy tale Princess Castle. Quite different from the mean streets of the urban conservation. That was a reading which would see Bellmont, an apparently imaginary place.
It's not it's not real geographical place. Belt Bellmont is the absolute opposite of Venice, made up rather than real feminine, rather the masculine romantic rather than mercantile feudal rather than capitalist, folkloric or courtly rather than modern and urban fairy tale rather than realistic. This will be it. It is a set of binaries which is quite familiar to us from the way critics have wanted to conceptualise Shakespeare's use of duel locations.
The court and the forest and as you like it, or A Midsummer Night's Dream. Rome and Egypt in Antony and Cleopatra have talked about all three of those plays. And in those lectures as here, I'm suggesting that I think what we can now see is that the similarities between those duel locations tend to be as prominent as their differences.
What Shakespeare tends seems to me to do is to set up places which look at first sight to be quite distinct, quite opposite, and really to unpick that illusion of difference and to show how closely allied they are. That's particularly true in The Merchant of Venice. I think Belmond is not an ethical alternative to the mercantile world of Venice, but it is logical extension. The language of the casket scenes is the language of hazard of speculation and investment.
Romantic relationships are monetised in this play along with with everything else. And perhaps in this sense, Baci Neoh does, in fact, take seriously the motto he reads on the led casket. Who chooses me must give and hazard all he hath. Who chooses me must give and have it hazard it all he hath. Dozens of idealised sense in which that motto suggests noble virtues of self-sacrifice and generosity.
They're not actually particularly characteristics we've seen beside you showing but persona as genuine or strategic willingness to commit himself to this motto. Who chooses me must given has it all he hath takes on a different quality when we remind ourselves he doesn't have anything of his own to hazard. At Balzano is speculating, but he is being bankrolled by other people giving and hazarding. All you have is pretty easy to do when it's not yours in the first place.
In Rupert Gould's production of The Merchant of Venice for the Royal Shakespeare Company at Stratford in 2011, Venice was replaced by Las Vegas, a perfect metaphore in the world. In the words of The Guardian's theatre critic Michael Billington, for a world of financial and romantic fantasy. And this is Billington talking about the casket scenes. The casket scenes are turned into a TV game show called Destiny. Remember, my lottery is its destiny in the quote I read earlier.
A TV game show called Destiny in which Susanna Fieldings stunning Portia dons a blonde wig and Southern accent. She becomes, as it were, the hostess of a preposterous lottery in which her marital future is being decided. This provides wonderful comedy with the prince of Morocco turning up as an avaricious contestant in golden boxing shorts. Now what? Gould's production, which. Which is a very, very controversial production, really worth Googling the reviews on that.
Very, very interesting. What what Gould production achieved was a production. What was I think of you of the play, which turned on the casket scenes, which had a way of understanding how they might work through this game show updating. And what it achieved was establishing the kind of tawdry glamour of Las Vegas as a modern corollary of the play, setting a kind of bling world.
And that must be what persona is. It is himself participating in a kind of overconsumption, a conspicuous consumption in order to try and impress. That's something that I think Gould felt we would associate with Vegas, but he was also in the production able to link together. The play is apparently disparate modes of fairy tale and realism to understand their shared financial basis. Setting up the casket scene as a kind of winner takes all game show.
She puts kind of greed and and personal advancement at the heart of both plots. Now, comedies, as we know from lots of occasions in these lectures, comedies work by inter implicating a social world of characters they bond characters together. We've gone through this lots of times, tragedies. Broadly speaking, split people off from each other. They break up relationships. They move towards solitude and isolation.
Comedies build up relationships and then move towards a busy stage at the end where everybody's there joining together in some kind of festivity and in renewed bonds. Merchant of Venice does this, too. It's a comedy in that respect. But the kinds of connexions between its comic characters that it makes are all monetary. They're all mercantile. The relationship between characters is financial.
And the title of the play makes that clear. The only one of the comedies to have a name as the title rather than a kind of mood or disposition. I'm just got to talk a little bit about mercantilism, the the activity of merchants, the economic development associated with merchants that we call mercantile ism. So mercantilism is the rise of an economic system based at its at its simplest level on merchants as middlemen between producers and consumers.
So very simple is the economics of simple societies is that either that producers and consumers are the same people so self-sufficient. A model of self-sufficiency or that they are very close to each other geographically or familiarly. So the people who produce, say, food and the people who consume that food either are the same people they produce and achieve their own food or they close together in a kind of village or a small community.
Mercantilism develops with much larger social structures, with the rise of cities and so on, and brings in an economic system which interpolate middlemen between in between that relationship. And it develops as part of the rapid expansion of London in the 16th century. London, like Venice, was a trading city oriented along its waterways. Lots of very interesting parallels. The old modern period draws between Venice and London.
And I think most people would think of the Merchant of Venice that it's got really no idea about Venice at all. It's not really very detailed about Venice. I think if Shakespeare done really any work on Venice at this time, he would have known about the ghetto, the parts of the city where Jews were required to live. That would seem so important to the theme, but it's odd that he doesn't mention it. I think Nats Park is not really very bothered about Venice as a location beyond the name.
So mercantilism is a is a recognisable feature of London contemporary urban life. It's not something which is specific to Venice. Now, the main function of the merchant is to buy and to sell, to speculate by buying goods at a low price or where they are plentiful and to sell them whether prices higher because the goods are scarce.
So much associated with sort of manipulating the market, holding things back until the price goes up, but also with importing with bringing things like spices or those kinds of things from places where they're actually very cheap, undertaking the labour of bringing them and selling them at a premium. So much in culture is crucial to the development of early modern capitalism and to the development of a credit economy.
Usery the commercial lending of money at interest had been long forbidden because of biblical strictures against it. But it was made legal in England in fifteen seventy one, with the interest rate set at 10 percent. It was not at this point in England, particularly associated with Jews, not least because the Jews had been banished in the 13th century and were not able to be part of this new economic world.
But religious controversy about the ethics of commercial moneylending continued to be a feature of late Elizabethan discourse. The 15 94 publication called The Death of Usery or the Disgrace of Use Euros is one one example of how this controversy about whether usery was a was ethically or morally good thing raged. Now, both mercantilism and its necessary companion credit or moneylending are explored in the Merchant of Venice, largely by transposing them into human relationships.
Because I think these these financial ideas as economic ideas are humanised and they are most interestingly explored in human relationships. But Suneo needs money and goes to Antonio, who goes to Shylock. Who goes to tubal. The connective bonds between these people are figured as transactions, and these are all transactions constructed via intermediaries. So if you're thinking about a plot structure, about somebody who needs to borrow some money in order to do something,
you probably wouldn't imagine all these other people. It is an unnecessary confusion unless that's your point. What's the point of tubal? There's no point to him, is there? Except it doesn't do anything in the play except to add another chain to this sort of distended links, these distended links of credit of a credit economy linking people together.
And I want to try and see the merchants intermediary role in financial matters as a sort of different key to Antonios curiously overinvolved triangulation in the relationship between Balzano and Porsche, because I want to think of Anthony as a kind of middle man in a transaction between Balzano and Porsche, which is the role we might think of the merchant in a metaphorical sense. Antonio adds value to the Sonya and sells him at a kind of profit to the wealthy heiress Porsche.
Just as personifies own credit fuelled courtship lays out three thousand Duckett's not his own to win a fortune of at least thirty six thousand ducats. The sum of the double six thousand and then treble that. That Porsche is prepared to pay to Shylock to release Antonia from his bond. So we know that Porsche has at least thirty six thousand ducats in her own dowry. So that's that's a pretty good return on the three thousand already.
Shylock himself would have been pleased to receive this return of interest when he uses the biblical example of labour and sheep to boast about how fast his money breeds Porsche is herself conscious of her new husband as something she has bought. Since You Are Dear Bought. I will love you, dear. Since you are dear bought, I will love you, dear. The repetition of dear tries to read recuperated from something very expensive.
You are dear bought out. You have been an expensive playthings, expensive toy to a more kind of emotional kind of morals. That sense of dear like a lot. I will love you a lot. I will love you nobly. But somehow other than that quite works. Not quite enough space in the line to do that 180 degree turn from cost to value that the line tries to do. Since your idea bought, I will love you dear.
So understanding the triangulated relationship between Antonia Pisania and Portia less in psychological terms and more perhaps as a metaphor for the play's understanding of the merchant and of Myrt Mercantile economics can be helpful. Of course, the potential loss of this is that we lose that psychological explanation. Antonios, you remember, opens the play with the with the lament about his sadness in sooth. I know not why I am so sad. And it's a question that the play never answers.
Why is he so sad? What's wrong with him? Many critics and directors have felt they know exactly what's wrong with him. He's in love with the SUNEO and this unrequited kind of passion is the source of this melancholy that cannot be spoken. If you think about Jeremy Irons, perhaps in our Patrinos film of The Merchant, that's a good example. We could also try and see Antonio as an older figure, a kind of equivalent to Shylock.
And that these are two rather interesting new versions of the comic tradition of the blocking figure reimagined for a kind of commercialised comedy of comedy of commerce. The blocking figure is supposed to stop things from happening, stop marriages from taking place, and in their different ways. Both Antonio and Shylock actually enable many marriages to take place. But they enabled that by translating them into financial bonds of a different sort.
So as I've said before in these lectures, there are real gains to the work of recovery of erotics, same sex relationships and Shakespeare. And one way to understand the particular charge of the bond between Antonio persona is to sexualise it. Certainly, their relationship is a good example of something I discussed in Much Ado about Nothing. The necessity of male bonds to break when faced with heterosexual marriage.
The painful breaking of those bonds when Shylock wets his knife in the courtroom, ready to take the pound of flesh from Antonio's body. But Sonia interjects Antonio, I am married to a wife which is as dear to me as life itself. But life itself. My wife and all the world are not with me, esteemed above my life. I would lose all, sacrifice them all here to this devil to deliver you. So, my love. So life itself, my wife and all the world are not with me, esteemed above thy life.
I would lose or sacrifice them all here to this devil to deliver you. Portia disguised as the lawyer remarks. Your wife would give you little thanks for that. If she were by to hear you make the offer. So after his marriage to Portia, that's to say Sonia is still identifying his primary attachment with Antonio very explicitly here, saying, I would give up my marriage, I give up everything in order to save you.
And the ending of the play is a long attempt by Portia to realign that to say all the business about the ring. Who who had the ring? Why did you give the ring away? These are ways of of breaking that bond and saying your primary bond should now be with your wife, even when Portia and Pisania are reconciled at the end of the play. And Balzano vows never to break faith with her again. The mercantile basis of their relationship is reasserted.
By having Antonio come back into it again, Antonio again becomes the intermediary. I once did lend my body for his wealth. I dare be bound again, my soul upon the forfeit that your Lord will never more. Break faith advisedly. So the language of forfeit of credit and trust is a financial vocabulary only partially here turned to the emotional realm. Why doesn't this love triangle end in Merchant of Venice by being resolved into two couples?
Why is there no marriage partner for Antonio? One answer might well be unrequited homosexuality in the character. I talk about another Antonio, also married at the end of his comedy Intellectual on Twelfth Night. But there might be another reason, which is less psychosexual and more financially structural.
It may be that the structure of mercantilism, the exploration of these kinds of financial transactional relationships is the character equivalent of those kinds of intermediaries that advance capitalism has put between producers and consumers. Antonio, that's to say, is a merchant or intermediary in the emotional realm as a metaphor for his activities as a financial intermediary.
So I've been arguing here that choosing the lead casket is a kind of symbol or it had a nexus to think about the role of finance and of mercantilism in this play. And to suggest had a bit more time could think about this, the ways that the casket scene, therefore, is interconnected thematically with the role of Shylock, the role of money lending and the bond, the notions of equivalence, whether a pound of flesh can be equal to three thousand ducats and so on.
The criticism has been very interested in in this play. And I've tried to say that the casket scene, I think, is actually a really good example of mercantile bonds. Most mercantile IT and adventuring rather than a fairy tale escape from that world. As throughout these lectures, I've tried to suggest that motivation, the question of why things happen or causality may be in these plays tends to be looked at in character terms.
That's the way we perhaps naturally feel. We want to answer these questions. But I keep, I suppose, trying to suggest that there are situational reasons. There are non character, non psychological reasons that these things happen in plays and that here, as elsewhere, the reasons why Pisania picks the LED casket are potentially historical, theatrical and generic. Thank you.