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Antonio's legalistic cruelty: Interdisciplinarity and "The Merchant of Venice"
College Literature, Winter 1998 by Weisberg, Richard H
Antonio's Legalistic Cruelty: Interdisciplinarity and "The Merchant of Venice"1
INTRODUCTION
The Law and Literature movement now involves hundreds of scholars across the disciplines. Among the movement's contributions to scholarship and teaching in literature has been its attention to several well-worked "legalistic" stories. Particular success has been achieved in the debates about Melville's Billy Budd, Sailor, where an established critical perspective on Captain Vere has been challenged by recourse to legal materials and closer readings of the story's legalistic passages.2
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In recent years, a similar methodology has been applied to The Merchant of Venice.3 Abjuring the mainstream critical insistence on "non-ironic" readings of what is clearly one of Shakespeare's most complex and ironic plays, Law and Literature scholars have again simply noticed what the text affords in rich abundance: passages of legalistic complexity that - once engaged-reverse traditional patterns of understanding.
So, in Poethics and Other Strategies of Law and Literature (94-104), I endeavored to show that Act V's legalistic language-epitomized by Portia's rejection of Antonio's persistent intermeddling in her relationship with Bassanio-evokes Shylock and leaves the audience wondering at Belmont's new usages: "surety"; "deed of gift"; "inter'gatories." The Jew, with his insistence on oathkeeping, bonds, and the law, must be defeated at trial, for his verbal directness contradicts Christian linguistic maneuvering as much as his excessive legality offends their notion of "mercy"; yet he seems in the final act quite to have overpowered (on the level of language) the Christian characters and their earlier rejection of him. Portia will not tolerate yet another episode of Antonio's "suretyship" for his young friend, her new husband. She prefers, and will probably enforce on Belmont as best she can, the more directly committed system of the old Jewish moneylender, who has never been able to stomach "Christian intercessors" and their flouting of the law.
On this reading, however appropriate it is to the play's comic medium, which mandates the defeat of Shylock's bond, Portia is at trial always alert to the Jew's constancy and ethics in the domain of human relations. Although she briefly becomes a fellow traveler herself along the path of Christian distortions of law-where ostensible "mercy" quickly is debased to forms of legalized cruelty unimaginable in Jewish communities-she does so merely to solve the comedy's central problem and then to move ahead as ethically as she can towards her marriage to a typical Christian whom she happens to adore. But to do this, she must reject on the island of Belmont the nagging presence of Antonio, whose main aim is, precisely, to keep Bassanio from direct commitments to others.
Debate on many of these issues ensued in a spirited exercise of interdisciplinary wit, where the likes of Lawrence Danson and Jay Halio took on some lawyers at the Association of the Bar of the City of New York in late 1992 (Proceedings). And it has spilled over into a series of readings by professional actors in which a proper emphasis has been placed on the relationship of Act IV to Act V, with their legalistic origins of course in the "contract formation" scene, I,iii.4
CHRISTIAN LEGALISM IN THE TRIAL SCENE
What I like to call "the turn to legalism" among Christian characters in The Merchant of Venice begins mid-way through the trial scene itself. Looked at this way, the prevalent critical dichotomy between some rigid Jewish "law" and some more humane Christian "mercy" breaks down on the most obvious textual level.
Portia, perhaps fascinated by Shylock's excessive yet somehow solid insistence on his bond, is committed to undoing the moneylender's extreme application of what might otherwise be a righteous and ethical reliance on written law. But she is equally repulsed by the overly flexible oathbreaking of the Christian characters, which she sees in open court before her eyes when Bassanio and Gratiano assert their willingness to sacrifice their new wives to save the beleaguered Antonio. Like the old Jew, who remarks in a striking aside (as he is supposedly hell-bent at the time for vengeance), "These be the Christian husbands," Portia notes their willingness to compromise not only the marriage vows but tons of her own ducats, which Bassanio constantly offers the obdurate plaintiff. Later in this same Act, she will deduce that Antonio's baleful influence on Bassanio has moved the latter to give her the ring that symbolized those vows; the audience to the play will also compare that easy traducement to Shylock's ethical unwillingness to give his wife's ring away "for a wilderness of monkeys."5 So Portia watches all these men in open court, and it cannot be that she wishes to adopt the easy oathbreaking of her spendthrift husband and his flighty circle of friends, nor that she comes to detest everything that Shylock represents in the domain of ethics and law.
