The sonnet: ruminations on form, sex, and history

Antioch Review, The, Spring, 1997 by Anthony Hecht

Male Friendship and Love. The sexual atmosphere in America at the end of the twentieth century is both more open, with people emerging from their closets, and more embattled, with problems about military service and rancor from the religious right. In such circumstances it's difficult to try to imagine a society in which values differed greatly from our own. For a very long time, from antiquity up through the Renaissance, the friendship between men was regarded, on high authority, to be not merely the equal of but superior to the love between the sexes. Not just the dialogues of Plato, but Aristotle's Ethics, the biblical story of David and Jonathan, the Homeric account of Achilles and Patroclus, the classical legend of Damon and Pythias, Montaigne's essay on Friendship, Malory's Morte D'Arthur, all advance this idea. Shakespeare uses it very wittily in The Merchant of Venice. At the very moment when Portia and Bassanio plight their troth and agree to marry, Bassanio is urgently summoned to try to help his friend Antonio, who has been arrested for failure to keep his bond with Shylock. The two lovers, Portia and Bassanio, are therefore abruptly and shockingly parted at the very moment they become united. Act III, scene iv begins with Lorenzo commending Portia for her strength of character in being able to accept so gracefully the departure of the man to whom she has just given herself and all her considerable goods. She replies to him with a statement about the physical similarities of men to one another that has behind it the authority of Aristotle:

I never did repent for doing good, Nor shall not now: for in companions That do converse and waste the time together, Whose souls do bear an equal yoke of love, There must be needs a like proportion Of lineaments, of manners, and of spirit, Which makes me think that this Antonio, Being the bosom lover of my lord, Must needs be like my lord. If it be so, How little is the cost I have bestowed In purchasing the semblance of my soul From out the state of hellish cruelty!

This argument of physical similarity will be used at the play's end as a bawdy jest when, about to wed Bassanio at last, Portia tells Antonio that if ever her husband breaks his oath in any way, she will call upon Antonio to take up all the offices and functions of her husband. But, on the serious side, Shakespeare has one more argument in behalf of the "superior" love of man for man, and it comes from Scripture, specifically from John 15:13, which in the King James translation goes, "Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends." The sensational trial scene in the play is a plain demonstration that Bassanio and Antonio are prepared to make precisely this Christ-like sacrifice for one another. And the Gospel tells us unambiguously there is "no greater love." But apart from the Bible, there was established custom, and patterns of behavior sanctioned by society. In The Waning of the Middle Ages Johan Huizinga tells us: