Strange insertions in The Merchant of Venice
When in The Merchant of Venice Antonio negotiates a loan to stake Bassanio’s courtship of Portia, he makes a point of distinguishing his bond with his friend from the one he seeks with the usurer, commanding Shylock, ‘If thou wilt lend this money, lend it not / As to thy friends, for when did friendship take / A breed for barren metal of his friend?’ (1.3.127–8). Antonio’s vivid image was typical of the period’s anti-usury discourse, which described this practice as the unnatural breeding of money. Some polemicists underscored the point by comparing usury to another unnatural sin: sodomy. Invoking this fact, critics have interpreted Antonio’s condemnation of ‘barren’ usury in light of his homoerotic feelings for Bassanio.1 In the 2011 anthology Shakesqueer, Arthur L. Little, Jr. contends that when Antonio disdains the breeding of interest he is rejecting ‘the ability of usury, of sodomy, to speak for queer friendship and desire.’2 And Lauren Garrett argues in a 2014 article that ‘Antonio’s perverse movement toward self- destruction, his solitary position outside of the marriage bond at the play’s conclusion, and the homoerotic nature of his love for Bassanio all link him … homologically to conceptions of usury as unnatural generation’, and hence to sodomy.3
These interpretations rely on influential scholarly investigations from the 1990s, which claim that the link between sodomy and usury was based on the early modern belief that both sins involved unnatural procreation (sodomy is sex without breeding; usury is breeding without sex). In what follows, I return to the sources to show that this conclusion turns out to be incorrect. While their lack of reproductive purpose was often the common ingredient uniting the sins that appeared on sodomy’s rotating menu, this was not the version of this transgression anti-usury writers loathed. Instead, they compared usury to sodomy because both violated communal values associated with friendship. Thus we should understand the usury/sodomy analogy via Alan Bray’s indispensable insight that in the Elizabethan era male friendships were vulnerable to imputations of sodomy when they appeared exploitative or to serve mercenary ends.4 The double vision that made amity difficult to distinguish from sodomy could also confuse a friendly gesture with usurious manipulation. Recognizing this version of sodomy is important because scholars have a tendency to pit homoeroticism and sodomy on the one hand against heterosexuality and procreation on the other, in a dyad that speaks more to contemporary struggles with the religious right than the complex formulations we find in Renaissance texts. By attending to its opposition to friendship – a form of intimacy whose dream of perfect equality was normatively restricted to a homogeneous male elite – we can better perceive the ways sodomy included gender difference. We know that this sin could involve male effeminacy – not just the desire to be penetrated but any craving thought to overrun masculine restraint.5 In addition, sodomy could encompass versions of heterosexuality and reproduction in which the female exceeded her prescribed role as a means for reaffirming the masculine same. Bringing this perspective to The Merchant of Venice should cause us to question interpretations that view Antonio as isolated and barren by virtue of his homoerotic urges. Instead, I will consider the merchant a strange character whose interactions with Portia, another interloper to the male friendship tradition, have queerly generative potential.
My interpretation has affinities with that of Lara Bovilsky, who has critiqued the recent tendency to argue that ‘Antonio exemplifies the friend [and hence] the competition between homosociality and heteronormativity’. Rather, Bovilsky contends that ‘Shylock’s loan increases Bassanio’s affective and financial debts to Antonio’ so that the ‘resultant asymmetries in intensity and suffering within the Bassanio-Antonio relationship make it an outlier friendship for the period, even as it continues to be classed as friendship and love by Antonio and other characters in the play’.6 Here I go further: more than an outlier, Antonio violates the code of friendship by attempting to manipulate Bassanio into a permanent state of emotional debt. Although Bovilsky does justice to the extremity of Antonio’s behaviour, like other critics she emphasizes his self-destructive tendencies, which can be assimilated into the selflessness expected of the friend.7 However, Antonio’s actions are also other-destructive; when this aspect comes into focus, they appear legibly usurious and sodomitical. Antonio admits as much when, at the climax of Merchant’s courtroom scene, he says that he is ‘tainted’ (4.1.113). I agree with critics who interpret this statement as redolent with sodomy, but I disagree that it signals Antonio’s status as scapegoated by his homosexual desires. Instead, to bind Bassanio all the more tightly to him the merchant theatrically displays his taint in an abject inversion of amity’s rhetoric.
Since in doing so Antonio paradoxically pursues a bond of masculine privilege by displaying a stain associated with both sodomy and femininity, his strategy complicates the common argument that Portia’s victory in their rivalry over Bassanio signals the triumph of heterosexual marriage over masculine friendship.8 Little, for example, claims that Antonio stands for ‘queer mourning’ while Portia represents a ‘generic fantasy world’ of ‘heterosexual marriage (and reproduction) … as the ritualistic rejection of mourning.’9 One problem with such readings is that they must downplay the extent to which Portia is not only an unusual wife in the marital equality she achieves but also a queer character through both her cross-dressing and assumption of patriarchal authority. Like Little I view Antonio and Portia as competing avatars of mourning and procreation; but in a play that, unusually for Shakespeare’s comedies, barely mentions human sexual reproduction, the lovers’ rivalry instead centers on textual reproduction. Before they ever meet in person, Antonio and Portia confront each other in the form of epistles. These letters depict alternative modes of literary influence, with Antonio representing the work of memorialization and Portia the humanist practice of imitatio, or the imaginative reinvention of sources. When, in the play’s final scene, Portia hands Antonio a letter, this does not represent a reconciliation of these modes but rather opens the question of how texts collide. Here, as elsewhere, Merchant calls attention to the conditions of its own making: the first of Shakespeare’s comedies drawn from an Italian novella – Ser Giovanni Fiorentino’s 1558 Il Pecorone – the play intercuts its main source with subplots, variations and myriad mythological, biblical and topical allusions. The interactions of these sources mirror those of the foreigners who meet on Venice’s famously cosmopolitan shores. Like these alien characters, the intertextual fragments that are often awkwardly inserted into the drama carry the sodomitical threat of difference in their potential to divert the plot from the path it takes onstage. These other, imaginary, narrative possibilities become the terrain on which, I want to hazard, early modern sodomy can open onto a queer present in which unruly, perhaps monstrous, offspring might breed.
***
Recent scholarship has formulated two, related, explanations for why anti-usury writers linked this sin to sodomy. First, critics claim, both usury and sodomy were thought to couple like with like: in usury, money breeds with itself; in sodomy, one sex copulates with itself. Second, both sins unnaturally combined breeding with barrenness: as David Hawkes elegantly puts it, ‘sodomy is sinful because it makes what is properly generative sterile, while usury is sinful because it makes what is properly sterile generative’.10 Both claims, on closer examination, prove inaccurate. Instead, anti-usury polemics compared this sin to sodomy because they perceived both to be forms of exploitation distorting a natural state of communalism among men.
According to Peter C. Herman, ‘the anti-usury tradition … recoiled at the idea of like breeding with like, money with money, which creates a further homology between usury and homoeroticism, a practice medieval and early modern discourse also figured as fundamentally “unnatural”’.11 Yet it is anachronistic to equate ‘sodomy’ with ‘homoeroticism’. The paradigm that arose in nineteenth-century sexology opposing an aberrant ‘homo’ to a normative ‘hetero’ sexual orientation was largely absent from and often antithetical to the Christian sin of sodomy, which was instead a wide and shifting category of behaviour including acts between different sexes or even species.12 Under the influence of a modern formation that so strongly associates sexual transgression with same-sex eroticism, otherwise sensitive interpreters have detected references to the coupling of like with like where they do not exist, including in Aristotle’s influential statement on usury from the Politics:
Usurie deserveth to bee hated, for that by it menne gaine and profite by money, not for that intent and purpose for which it was ordained, namely, for the exchaunging of commodities; but for the augmenting of it selfe: which hath procured it the name of τόκος, to witte, issue or engendring: because things engendred, are like the engendrers; and Usurie is naught else but money begotten of money: in so much, that amongst all the meanes of getting, this is most
contrarie to Nature.13
Aristotle plays on the double meaning of the Greek tokos as both ‘interest’ and ‘birth’ to depict usury as unnatural monetary reproduction. According to Jody Greene, ‘in the most literal reading of Aristotle’s notion of usury as the breeding of like with like, usury was linked with the fantasy of procreative homosexual sex, of getting “something” from male-male sodomy’. Aristotle, however, does not discuss the breeding of like with like. In specifying that ‘things engendred, are like the engendrers’, his sole focus is the similarity between parent and offspring, the breeding of like from like. Elsewhere in her discussion Greene contends, ‘The issue for Aristotle is that breeding like from like, “money from money,” is “unnatural”’.14 Although here Greene correctly notes that Aristotle described the breeding of like from like, he did not consider this process unnatural. Instead, his remark that ‘things engendred, are like the engendrers’ expresses a commonplace: offspring tend to resemble their parents. Since Aristotle is known for elevating this observation to a natural principle, it is odd that Greene among other astute readers has overlooked his obvious meaning when considering the usury/sodomy analogy. But a likely cause is the strong explanatory force modern categories continue to exert on our understandings of earlier sexual practices. The prevailing logic seems to be: if homosexuality is like sodomy, and sodomy is like usury, then the unnatural quality of usury must have something to do with the concept of sameness that also defines homosexuality.15 Yet neither Aristotle nor those who cited his authority thought this way.
If it was not the reproduction of sameness, what did Aristotle find unnatural about the breeding of money? Some early modern readers seem as perplexed by this question as today’s. In his gloss of Aristotle, the 1598 translator of the Politics speculates,
As Plantes bring foorth like plants, and living creatures other living creatures, every one in his kind, commonly like their Parents, as a man, a horse, and a bull doe: so in usurie, the engendrer, and the thing, is mony: which notwithstanding seemeth contary [sic] to nature, that a dead thing, as mony, should engender.16
For this writer, the idea that like breeds like is so obvious – supported by Genesis where God made each creature ‘in his kind’ – that he is at a loss as to why, ‘notwithstanding’, Aristotle would consider monetary reproduction unnatural. He speculates that the problem must be for a ‘dead thing’ to ‘engender’. Modern critics have seized on such statements to postulate that usury was, like sodomy, a sin against nature because it defied the mandate to be fruitful and multiply. According to Will Fisher, ‘The usurer’s attempt to make barren money breed is the equivalent of the sodomite’s attempts to make a non-reproductive sexual object or orifice breed. The usurer and the sodomite thus commit the same crime in different forms’.17 Such formulations, plausible as they are, seem not to have occurred to Renaissance writers. Scholars are fond of quoting Miles Mosse’s 1595 description of usury as ‘a kind of Sodomie in nature’ because ‘it is against nature, for money to begette money’; but they do so without noting that Mosse raises this idea (which he attributes to medieval biblical commentary) only to dismiss it as a poor explanation for why Aristotle, and ‘withal … the writings of many learned men’, consider usury ‘contrarie to the law of nature’. Instead, Mosse stresses that usury is unnatural because ‘it doth contrarie to the verdit of the conscience’.18 In a 1604 tract, Thomas Pie claims that ‘the Usurer maketh that breed, gender, and increase, which by nature is barren and unapt to increase’. Yet he does not connect this unnatural breeding to sodomy. Rather, Pie invokes sodomy when considering a different argument for the proposition that usury is ‘against the law of Nature’:
The Usurer perverteth that end and use of money, which is … agreeable to nature: namely commutation, for commutation was the end wherefore money was ordeined in humane societie; and is the use of it, which naturall use the Usurer turneth into that which is against nature … . Therefore it is called a kinde of Sodomie.19
Pie’s claim that usury contradicts the purpose of money, which is ‘commutation’ or equal exchange, accords perfectly with Aristotle’s assertion that
engrossing and selling againe of commodities … [is] worthily blamed, because it is not agreeable to Nature, but rather to the end one might gaine and encroch upon another. Above all the rest, Usurie deserveth to bee hated, for that by it menne gaine and profite by money, not for that intent and purpose for which it was ordained, namely, for the exchaunging of commodities.20
When Aristotle described money as ‘breeding’, this was a metaphor for what he actually considered unnatural: using Nature’s resources to ‘gaine and encroch upon another’.
Once we clear away contemporary assumptions about the relationship between sodomy and usury, we can perceive that early modern writers compared these sins because they violated not procreation, but ‘commutation’. Thus sodomy and usury converged as twinned antitheses to the virtue of friendship. Lady Conscience in Robert Wilson’s The Three Ladies of London (1584) asks, ‘if we lend for reward, how can we say we are our neighbour’s friend?’21 Wilson’s play assimilates the biblical prohibition on charging interest to ‘brothers’ to the values of classical amicitia, an ideal of male intimacy entailing selflessness. Drawing on this Greco-Roman tradition, Michel de Montaigne explained in his essay ‘Of Friendship’ that true friends, as ‘one soule in two bodies, … can neither lend or give ought to each other’ because everything is ‘by effect common betweene them’.22 Yet, a speaker in Thomas Wilson’s 1572 dialogue A Discourse on Usury lamented, ‘God ordeyned lending for maintenaunce of amitye, and declaration of love, betwixt man and man, wheras now lending is used for private benefit and oppression, & so no charitie is used at all’.23 In The Merchant of Venice, Antonio makes the distinction between friendship and usury obvious: friends lend to each other ‘gratis’, avoiding Shylock’s ‘usances’ (1.3.40; 104). A recent wealth of economic criticism has shown that in practice the distinction was far subtler. ‘Interest’ was a flexible term, allowing for types of loan arrangements that could earn profits while technically avoiding the label of usury. Wilson’s Discourse warns that the usurer ‘undoth as many as he dealeth with all under the color of amity and law’.24 There is no sure way to distinguish gestures based on virtuous ‘amity’ from those motivated by sinful avarice. For in the Renaissance usury, as Hawkes observes, ‘was first and foremost an attitude’, a sin that ‘occurred only in the mind’.25 Usury was friendship’s doppelganger.
Similarly, Bray demonstrates that although masculine friendship and sodomy might appear as the two extremes of male intimacy, the first representing the cornerstone of social order, the other its utter subversion, there had long been an ‘uncanny’ symmetry between them since the signs of each – kissing in public, being ‘bedfellows’ – were identical. Traditionally, what marked the distinction were certain assumptions: that the friends were of ‘gentle’ class and, for this reason, their relationship was ‘personal, not mercenary’.26 As these conventional guarantees were increasingly absent when wealth centred on wages and commodities rather than landed fealties, intimate male bonds were no longer protected from charges of sodomy, whose shadow ‘was never far from the flower-strewn world of Elizabethan friendship and … could never wholly be distinguished from it’.27 The economic upheavals that made it difficult to tell friendship from sodomy also confused it with usury, and for the same reason: within this mercantile economy the generosity of giving that should appear a ‘declaration of love’ could easily be exposed as a means of extortion. Sodomy and usury were not simply analogous; they were on a continuum as sins that perverted the true course of male intimacy.
***
There is ample evidence of strain between the ideal and actual in the friendship at the centre of The Merchant of Venice. Bassanio asks for the loan by admitting, ‘to you, Antonio, / I owe the most in money and in love’ – a statement crassly mingling the financial with the emotional (1.1.130–1). Intensifying the mercenary undertones of the men’s relationship is the difference in social class: ‘Lord Bassanio’ is a bankrupt aristocrat while Antonio is a wealthy merchant.28 Once the men require a usurer to intervene in their dealings, the promiscuous breeding of his interest threatens to expose something sordid about their interest in each other. Shylock appears to remove this danger by offering, ‘I would be friends with you and have your love, / … / Supply your present wants, and take no doit / Of usance for my moneys’ (1.3.134–7). He proposes a debt bond, an arrangement that, according to Amanda Bailey, was increasingly popular in Shakespeare’s time ‘because it offered an alternative to usury’.29 However, since debt bonds prescribed a penalty if the money was not repaid in a fixed amount of time, they could be regarded as a form of usury. Wilson’s Discourse offers an example in which one man lends another money for five months. If the creditor charges a cash penalty only to recoup the losses he would suffer with late payment, then this is ‘reasonable usury’ and he is a ‘frend’ who lends ‘freely’. If, however, the creditor’s motivation is profit, then he is a ‘usurer’.30 Shylock presents Antonio and Bassanio with a superficial gesture of friendship that, with a slight change in perspective, could be its opposite.
The nature of the penalty, which should clear this ambiguity, only intensifies it. In a ‘merry sport’ Shylock makes the suggestion of the forfeit with the assurance:
A pound of a man’s flesh, taken from a man,
Is not so estimable, profitable neither,
As flesh of muttons, beefs or goats. I say
To buy his favour I extend this friendship[.]
(141; 161–4)
Because there would be no point in collecting such a penalty, the loan is, in effect, ‘gratis’. Yet, as Bailey argues, by nominating a piece of Antonio’s body as forfeit, the bond skips the penalty phase and proceeds directly to punishment. For in debt bonds, if ‘the debtor was insolvent, then the creditor, unable to collect either the penal sum or principal, could lay claim to his debtor’s person’.31 According to Garrett, Shakespeare’s audience would have been aware that creditors could harbour punitive fantasies under the guise of ‘friendly’ bonds. ‘The creditor’s right to imprison a debtor was easily abused’, since it ‘often meant relinquishing any hope of repayment in exchange for the satisfaction of bodily punishment’.32 Wilson’s Discourse warns that ‘under the coloure of freindshippe, mennes throtes are cut’.33
This reality renders even more suspect not only Shylock’s but the other men’s motivations for entering, supposedly in the spirit of friendship, a contract brokered in flesh. Even before they strike the deal, Antonio has agreed to stand surety for Bassanio, who technically will owe the money to Shylock. Lars Engle points out that in England this arrangement would have been necessary because members of the nobility such as Bassanio could not be arrested for debt; therefore it was advantageous to have commoners stand surety who could bear the punishment on their behalf.34 When Antonio offers his services to Bassanio in the play’s first scene, he anticipates such corporeal sacrifice, claiming his credit shall be ‘racked even to the uttermost’, or stretched like a victim of torture (1.1.181). Antonio’s willingness to be bound is the inverse of Bassanio’s desire to ‘come fairly off from [his] great debts’, a bid for freedom foreign to the friendship code according to which, as Lorna Hutson explains, by ‘overlooking his debts, … a lord ensured that his servant would be faithful to him’.35 Rather than accepting the intimacy of owing his friend ‘in money and in love’, Bassanio expresses a wish to get clear of his debt, and so of Antonio. The extremes of bondage and liberty that characterize the men’s relationship demonstrate its distance from friendship’s traditional ties of mutual obligation.
The disparities between the men also cast a bawdy light on Antonio’s offer to Bassanio, ‘my purse, my person, my extremest means / Lie all unlocked to your occasions’ (1.1.138–9). Purse was slang for the female genitals, while Antonio’s metaphor of unlocking his ‘person’ is made explicit in the next scene when we learn that Portia’s suitors must unlock the correct casket to gain access to her body. It is possible to assimilate Antonio’s desire for penetration to the conventions of friendship; Montaigne describes how his friend ‘having seized all my will, induced the same to plunge and loose it selfe in his, which likewise having seized all his will, brought it to loose and plunge it self in mine, with a mutuall greediness, and with a semblable concurrence’.36 Noting that the English translation invites a pun on ‘will’ as erotic desire and organ, Jeffrey Masten comments: ‘the essay figures a mutual interpenetration in which each friend’s “will” acts as desire, penetrator, and receptacle’ in an ‘erotics of similitude’.37 In contrast, by being ‘bound’ as Bassanio’s surety, Antonio opens his person to penetration in a way his friend cannot reciprocate. When it is revealed in the courtroom scene that to claim his forfeit Shylock will pierce Antonio’s flesh ‘nearest the merchant’s heart’, what began as an erotic wish has transformed into a violent spectacle of emotional exposure.38
Given the ways Antonio and Bassanio breach the friendship code, The Merchant of Venice is ripe for the kind of interpretation Bray offers of Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II which, he claims, places ‘what could be a sodomitical relationship … wholly within the incompatible conventions of Elizabethan friendship, in a tension which he never allows to be resolved’.39 Like the relationship between Edward and his favorite Gaveston, that between Antonio and Bassanio involves: (1) men of different social classes; (2) one man bestowing considerable wealth on the other; (3) one man enabling the other’s marriage; (4) a rivalry between one man and the other’s wife; and (5) an act of violence that, in one case, involves anal penetration and, in the other, may evoke such an act. Yet critics who have used Bray’s work to illuminate the tensions in Merchant’s central friendship have viewed Antonio as clinging, however tenuously, to the selfless behaviour expected of the friend. In the most influential of these interpretations, Steve Patterson ably documents how far the relationship between Antonio and Bassanio falls short of ideal amity. Nonetheless, Patterson claims that Antonio ‘plays the standard part of devoted friend’, though in his world ‘only a radical staging of amity’s power to secure bonds between men can reinvigorate its appeal’.40 For this reason, Antonio does not simply enact but performs the part of the friend in a carefully choreographed ‘radical staging’ that begins with the letter he sends Bassanio in Belmont requesting his return to Venice: ‘all debts are cleared between you and I if I but might see you at my death’ (3.2.316–18). Patterson comments: ‘What might seem desperate or effeminate devices to ensnare a man are heroic actions in the friendship tradition’ because they entail the public acknowledgment of amity’s trials. ‘To believe that his own society … devalues the erotic possibilities of male friendship nearly to their vanishing point’, Patterson adds, ‘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 character, since outside the bonds of amity and romance, his excessive behavior would seem useless or reckless’.41 It is unclear whose belief Patterson is invoking here – it seems to be up to us to rescue Antonio from the taint of effeminacy and sodomy by shoring up his identity as friend, and hence hero.
If we relax our vigilance, however, we might ask whether a true friend would offer his life freely rather than using it as emotional blackmail. For we can contrast the tone of Antonio’s letter with the assurances he made to Bassanio when he left for Belmont. Responding to Bassanio’s promise to return with haste, Antonio answers,
Do not so,
Slubber not business for my sake, Bassanio,
But stay the very riping of the time;
And for the Jew’s bond, which he hath of me,
Let it not enter in your mind of love.
Be merry, and employ your chiefest thoughts
To courtship and such fair ostents of love
As shall conveniently become you there.
(2.8.38–45)
Here we have a completely standard expression of friendly caring in which Antonio puts aside his own needs for the sake of his friend’s marital happiness. These sentiments, however, are reported by Salarino to Salanio, the Tweedledum and Tweedledee of Venetian conventionality. As such, they lack the mannerist distortions we hear from Antonio himself – as in the letter where he adds an emotional debt to Bassanio’s financial one – or when, upon his friend’s arrival in court, Antonio does not declare Bassanio’s debt cleared as promised but instead grotesquely insists that he now pays it to Shylock:
Commend me to your honourable wife;
Tell her the process of Antonio’s end,
Say how I loved you, speak me fair in death,
And, when the tale is told, bid her be judge
Whether Bassanio had not once a love.
Repent but you that you shall lose your friend
And he repents not that he pays your debt.
For if the Jew do cut but deep enough
I’ll pay it instantly with all my heart.
(4.1.269–77)
Speaking what he believes will be his last words to Bassanio, Antonio frames his death not as the punishment for default but as the repayment of his friend’s loan. Yet with this sacrifice, Bassanio’s balance will not be empty; rather, he will owe an unending debt of guilt. Most critics have rightly seen Antonio as expressing rivalrous feelings toward Bassanio’s ‘honourable wife’ in wanting to make sure that she knows Bassanio ‘had … once a love.’ Some have also observed that by underscoring that he dies for Bassanio, Antonio makes his sacrifice a difficult act for Portia to follow. But no one to my knowledge has registered the full insidiousness of Antonio’s farewell. For it is one thing to maintain a rivalry with your lover’s spouse while you’re alive; it is another to perpetuate that rivalry from beyond the grave. Antonio uses his last breath to frame his murder as a lasting reminder of his greater love and to cast its lingering pall over any future intimacy between Bassanio and his bride. We might measure the distance of such destructive desires from the selfless love expected of the friend by noting Antonio’s use of the third-person: ‘your friend … / pays your debt.’ Antonio can cite, but not embody, the name of friend.
I agree with Patterson that in this scene Antonio enacts a radical staging of amity – but, in its very extremity, this becomes a performance of usury/sodomy. In the courtroom Shylock and Antonio attempt to fulfill their agreement by violating its central, authorizing term: that of friendship. When Shylock offers, and Antonio accepts, the bond as a gesture of amity, the men’s motivations are opaque. It is possible to portray both as sincerely believing this contract will set their relationship on a new footing. Likewise, it is possible to believe that Antonio stakes Bassanio in a sincere wish to see his friend happily married and cleared of his debts. Yet once Antonio defaults on the loan, it is impossible to read the bond as one of friendship. In the courtroom Shylock admits to ‘a lodged hate and a certain loathing / I bear Antonio’ (4.1.59–60). Poised with his knife to ‘cut the forfeiture from that bankrupt’, he is available to be read as the stereotypical usurer craving his neshek – the Hebrew word for interest, which (polemicists were fond of pointing out) meant ‘to bite’ (121). Though less obviously than Shylock, by this point Antonio is also actively and visibly violating the friendship ideal. Calling on Bassanio to witness his death as a sacrifice proving his unequalled love, Antonio reveals a desire for his own pound of flesh: the heart of his ‘bosom lover’ (3.4.17). Thus when Shylock is poised to cut into Antonio’s flesh, the desires of usurer and merchant are oddly aligned: both wish to possess another human being. This is not to imply that the characters’ motivations are simple; that is not my focus. Rather, they openly articulate motivations that, in their avarice, sinfully abrogate the code of friendship. In this way, Antonio engages in a form of dramatic inscription that is only possible when he acknowledges the taint of abjection he bears – and shares with the Jewish usurer.
***
In the courtroom, Antonio famously tells Bassanio, ‘I am a tainted wether of the flock, / Meetest for death’ (4.1.113–14). Since a ‘wether’ was a castrated ram, one line of criticism has read Antonio’s pronouncement as an admission that he is a sinfully ‘barren’ breeder. Seymour Kleinberg stated the case most baldly in a 1983 article, where he read the phrase as Antonio’s ‘veiled admission that he deserves to die because he is a sodomite’. According to Kleinberg, the play upholds Antonio’s self-assessment, since its ‘happy ending’ is ‘the triumph of heterosexual marriage and the promise of generation over the romantic but sterile infatuation of homoeroticism’.42 Thirty years later, Garrett similarly argues that Antonio is ‘“meetest for death” because of his place outside the play’s affective economy of production—that is, marriage’.43 While I agree that Antonio bears the mark of usury/sodomy, there is no more reason to believe he is literally impotent than that he thinks he is a sheep. Instead, we must read Antonio’s self-characterization as the distortion of a discourse that celebrated amity as a love beyond social necessities and worldly ends. Montaigne rapturously claimed that ‘friendship is enjoyed according as it is desired, it is neither bred, nor nourished, nor increaseth but in jouissance’.44 Amity involves the pleasurable transcendence of a realm of purpose Montaigne tellingly associates with breeding, nourishing and increasing. At first the merchant Antonio attempts to gain access to this aristocratic discourse of ineffable homoerotic intimacy, but when by the courtroom scene he has descended to the status of an expendable human commodity, he dramatizes this abjectly useless position to enforce his claim of friendship on Bassanio. It is in this sense that he becomes, at Merchant’s climax, a figure for friendship in the form of its sodomitical violation. In doing so, he identifies with other categories of humans – aliens and women – who, because they are treated as commodities, are also vulnerable to being deemed ‘not vendible’, worthless flesh (1.1.112).
Jonathan Gil Harris observes that when Antonio calls himself a ‘tainted wether’ or stained sheep, this recalls when, upon asking Shylock for the loan, the usurer justified his profession by citing the biblical story of Jacob’s long service for his uncle Laban:
When Laban and himself were compromised
That all the eanlings which were streaked and pied
Should fall as Jacob’s hire, the ewes, being rank,
In end of autumn turned to the rams;
And when the work of generation was
Between these woolly breeders in the act,
The skilful shepherd peeled me certain wands,
And, in the doing of the deed of kind,
He stuck them up before the fulsome ewes,
Who, then conceiving, did in eaning time
Fall parti-coloured lambs, and those were Jacob’s.
(1.3.74–84)
In the original tale Laban has agreed to give Jacob all of the ‘streaked and pied’ lambs born from the flock. Since he knows children tend to resemble their parents, Laban leaves the area with all the black and spotted sheep to prevent Jacob from collecting their similarly-coloured offspring. However, relying on the ancient belief that whatever the parents saw at the moment of conception could imprint its image onto the embryo, Jacob holds striped wands before the copulating sheep so that they bear ‘parti-coloured lambs’.
As many critics have noted, this makes for a strange parable of usury: though at Antonio’s prompting Shylock will claim that he makes money ‘breed as fast’ as Laban’s ancient livestock, in fact Jacob does not increase the flock’s fertility but instead changes its colour. If this is a story about usury, then what this practice scandalously multiplies is difference itself (1.3.92). Shylock implies as much when he describes the flock’s ‘work of generation’ as the ‘deed of kind’. ‘Kind’ could mean ‘offspring’, ‘kin’, or ‘species’, all of which the sheep’s deed produces; but ‘kind’ also simply meant ‘same’. Read this way, Jacob’s intervention in the sheep’s copulation appears unkind: interrupting the replication of white sheep from white, he introduces black marks that distinguish the parents from their young and separate him from his kind, his uncle. In the dialogue that follows, Shylock promises to reverse this differentiating process when, after Antonio responds with disgust at usury’s ‘barren’ breeding, the moneylender counters:
Why, look you, how you storm.
I would be friends with you and have your love,
Forget the shames that you have stained 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.
(133–8)
Bassanio cautiously affirms, ‘This were kindness’, and Shylock echoes, ‘This kindness will I show’; Antonio then declares ‘I’ll seal to such a bond / And say there is much kindness in the Jew’ before marveling at how the ‘Hebrew will turn Christian, he grows kind’ (139; 148-49; 174). Given the references to religious conversion, ‘kind’ here means both ‘generous’ and ‘of the same kind’.45 By offering to accept payment in kind Shylock is treating the men as if they are brothers rather than strangers. He will ‘forget the shames that you have stained me with’ – the anti-Semitic abuses Antonio has hurled at him – initiating a process of whitening comparable to erasing the black marks Jacob’s intervention imposed on the lambs (135). According to Harris, Shylock’s biblical parable reflects the ways ‘usury was repeatedly regarded as a stained and staining practice whose very condition was national and monetary hybridity’.46 The bond promises ‘kindness’ as a homogenizing antidote to such unsettling mixture.
This promise has not just religious, national, and racial, but also gendered implications. Although the original story of Jacob and Laban’s sheep reflected the ancient belief that whatever either parent saw at the moment of conception could influence the offspring, early modern commentators regularly cited Genesis 30 as evidence for the theory that the female in particular could transform her gestating embryo through the power of her imagination.47 Shylock follows this trend by deviating from his source: Genesis recounts only that Jacob placed the rods before the ‘shepe’; Shylock specifies that Jacob ‘stuck them up before the fulsome Ewes’ – a word capitalized in both the first Quarto and Folio.48 While Shakespeare may have made this change for the ready pun Marc Shell points out between ‘ewes’ and ‘use’, Shylock’s focus on the female sheep was in keeping with misogynist condemnations of usurious ‘breeding’.49
Thomas Wilson’s Discourse asks:
I pray you, what is more against nature, then that money should beget or bri[n]g forth money? Which was ordeined to be a pledge or right betwixt man & man, … and not to encrease it selfe, as a woman dothe, that bringethe foorthe a childe, cleane contrarye to the firste institution of money? … [M]oney which bringeth forth money is a swelling monster, waxing everye moneth bigger one then an other, and so horrible swelleth from time to time as no man by words is able to utter, contrary to nature, order, & al good reason.50
As Greene observes, Wilson’s oddly parthenogenic image of usury increasing ‘as a woman dothe, that bringethe foorthe a childe’ endows the ‘creature woman, like money, [with] a tendency to “increase it selfe” immoderately’, monstrously intervening in homosocial bonding ‘betwixt man & man’.51
While Wilson appears to oppose natural breeding to money’s unnatural proliferation, his description has the effect of making procreation itself appear unnatural. In fact, such a conclusion follows logically from the theory of generation upon which the usurious breeding metaphor was based. Aristotle’s claim that ‘things engendred, are like the engendrers’ was grounded in his belief that in the formation of offspring the semen provided the form and uterine lining the matter, meaning that ‘natural’ reproduction should result in children identical to the father. Yet since no child is actually identical to its father, in Aristotle’s schema all sexual reproduction deviated to some degree from its natural telos and was on a trajectory toward monstrosity. Read through Wilson’s Christian lens that condemned acts ‘contrary to nature’ this could imply that all sexual reproduction, because it involved female influence, was not only usurious but sodomitical. In this context, Antonio’s response to Shylock’s tale deserves scrutiny: ‘Was this inserted to make interest good? / Or is your gold and silver ewes and rams?’ (91–2). Antonio does not employ the standard Aristotelian metaphor of money breeding more of itself; instead he compares the joining of ewes and rams to the coupling of different metals.52 Since he goes on to condemn the barren breeding of usury as antithetical to friendship, his attention to the sheep’s sex difference suggests a particular disgust at the soiling contact of the feminine. Shylock capitalizes on this revulsion by framing his offer to forego interest as a gesture of friendship, in which ‘kindness’ expresses the generosity and likeness expected from an exclusively male exchange of intimacy.
Peggy Kamuf points out that in sealing the bond Shylock and Antonio have performed their own ‘deed of kind, that is, their contract in kind, without interest’.53 Yet the written document belies the lack of differentiation Shylock’s ‘kind offer’ promises. Since debt bonds were executed on parchment, a material generally made from the skins of sheep, his description of Jacob’s spotted flock eerily foretells the ink-stained surface of the deed the men will eventually sign. According to Harris, by the time Antonio is subject to this document’s penalty, his self-description as a ‘tainted wether’ acknowledges that he has become ‘property alienated to Shylock, legally comparable to the lambs that Jacob usuriously expropriated from Laban’.54 The merchant’s body is inscribed by the document that objectifies him, as is manifest when the characters use the terms ‘bond’, ‘forfeit’, and ‘pound of flesh’ interchangeably. Shylock defends his right to have his ‘dearly bought’ flesh by comparing it to the Venetians’ ‘purchased slave[s]’, activating the association between Antonio’s taint and the increasingly racialized skins of Africans who, as Bailey notes, served as domestics in England but, unlike native servants, were bought and sold.55 The only times Shakespeare uses the concept of ‘tainting’ explicitly to denote blackening, however, are in reference to female sexual dishonour. In Much Ado About Nothing, Leonato condemns his daughter’s apparent lewdness by lamenting,
she is fallen
Into a pit of ink, that the wide sea
Hath drops too few to wash her clean again
And salt too little which may season give
To her foul-tainted flesh!
(4.1.129–33)
As these lines indicate, in such moments Shakespeare links the taint of women’s sexual impurity to the black marks of writing, a common trope connoting the public shame of unchastity (Othello asks of Desdemona, ‘Was this fair paper, this most goodly book, / Made to write “whore” upon?’).56 In bearing such a taint, fictional women become dead letters, socially worthless and, too often, marked for slaughter. According to Kleinberg and Garrett, Antonio understands his own soiled condition as similarly casting him out from a normative economy of wedlock and procreation, from which his death will purge him once and for all.
Yet if this were true, after pointing to his taint one would expect Antonio to encourage Bassanio to move on and relish his life with his new bride. Instead he urges, ‘You cannot better be employd Bassanio, / Than to live still and write mine epitaph!’ (4.1.116–17). Antonio attempts to draw his friend into a ceaseless task of memorialization at which, apparently, he would be ‘better employed’ than in the enjoyment of his fresh marriage. As with many a fallen woman appearing on the early modern stage, Antonio’s transformation into a text also potentially enables him to occupy a new, publicly expressive, role. Hutson explains the fact that women were ‘articulated, characterized and given voice as never before’ in Renaissance drama as reflective of fears surrounding the displacement of feudal pledges of friendship, including the homosocial exchange of female bodies, by humanism’s ‘emotionally persuasive communication, or the exchange of persuasive texts’.57 This displacement enabled commoners such as Antonio to lay claim to amity’s privileges – including what Jacques Derrida describes as the ‘strange temporality opened up by the anticipated citation of some funeral oration’.58 Such forms of public tribute were traditionally reserved for men of a higher class such as Etienne de la Boétie, the exemplary companion Montaigne commemorates in his essay on friendship. As a merchant, Antonio cannot rely on Bassanio’s unspoken commitment to such eulogistic duties, so he turns the code of amity into a piece of persuasive rhetoric. Drawing a connection between ‘tainted’ and the legal term ‘attainted’, meaning ‘proved guilty’ or ‘condemned’, he suggests that as a defaulted debtor he is a commodity – or, as Shylock puts it, ‘a weight of carrion flesh’ – whose only value lies in being destroyed (4.1.40). Since as a self- proclaimed ‘wether’ or bankrupt he is equally impotent within a homosocial economy as a heterosexual one, he exists outside the realm of social obligation. Not only accepting but advertising his reduction to a textualized object, the merchant aligns himself with sexual incapacity and the stain of a worthless possession. In this way he paradoxically seeks to transform the illegible mark of the social outcast – the unchaste woman, the diseased slave – into the monumental sign of a love that transcends material necessity, including the cycle of birth and death. For Antonio, this becomes a strategy for enforcing amity as an eternally constraining commitment.
Thus Antonio may resemble Jacob’s black-and-white sheep, but rather than being a young man’s warrant to leave his stifling, even enslaving, service to his kinsman, his taint enjoins Bassanio to ‘live still’, frozen in a permanent state of emotional debt. This is not, however, the only possible application of Shylock’s biblical parable. As Shell points out, the phrase ‘fulsome ewes’ anticipates Portia’s reference to the ‘full sum of me’ – which, she tells Bassanio at their betrothal, is ‘sum of something’ (3.2.157–8). In referring to her ‘full sum’ Portia may be hinting that, like the ewes, she is fulsome in Shylock’s sense of being pheromonally ‘rank’ and ready to make babies. But, as Shell notes, she and Bassanio never discuss having children. Instead, Portia frames her betrothal offer pedagogically, calling herself an ‘unlessoned’ girl eager to learn, where the pun on ‘unlessened’ continues the financial metaphor of the ‘full sum’ and suggests that she already has ample resources, both erotic and intellectual (159). In this she resembles the ewes’ cognitive potential: as Thomas Browne would later explain, ‘Jacobs cattle became speckled, spotted and ring-straked … by the Power and Efficacy of Imagination; which produceth effects in the conception correspondent unto the phancy of the Agents in generation; and sometimes assimilates the Idea of the Generator into a realty in the thing ingendred’.59 Drawing upon the humanist ideal of imitatio, or inventive copying of sources, Browne emphasizes the mother’s creative work in translating the information gathered though an ‘intent view’ into an ‘Idea’ realized in the ‘thing ingendred’. Portia comes to represent something like this humanist model of literary influence as opposed to Antonio’s call for memorialization. So when these two characters present Bassanio with rival ways to use their full sum, it is only appropriate that they do so in writing.
***
As soon as Portia has betrothed herself to Bassanio, Salerio arrives with a letter from Antonio inked ‘with a few of the unpleasant’st words / That ever blotted paper’ (3.2.250–1). Bassanio explains:
Here is a letter, lady,
The paper as the body of my friend,
And every word in it a gaping wound
Issuing life-blood.
(3.2.262–5)
Bassanio has just unlocked Portia’s casket; now he beholds the letter as if it is Antonio’s unlocked purse/person. Refusing to measure the distance between his friend’s body and the text that predicts its violation, he seems already prepared to eternalize Antonio by penning his epitaph. Just before this, the play set up a different relationship between body and text when Bassanio opened the lead casket to discover ‘Fair Portia’s counterfeit’ (115). ‘Counterfeit’ meant ‘portrait’, and Bassanio, after praising the lifelike detail of the painting, will dismiss it as a mere ‘shadow’ compared to the original (127–8). But in calling the image ‘Portia’s counterfeit’, he ironically predicts that the next time he sees his wife, he will not recognize her as the lawyer who saves Antonio from Shylock’s knife. Since Bassanio has just discovered Portia’s false image by removing it from the additional covering of its casket, her doubly enwrapped state resembles the double cross-dressed boy actor who will soon appear.
This arrival also occurs in the form of a letter. Antonio has just commissioned Bassanio to write his epitaph when Portia’s waiting woman Nerissa shows up in the guise of a page with a letter from the ‘learned doctor’ Bellario explaining that, though he is sick, he sends a ‘young doctor of Rome’ named Balthazar who was just with him in ‘loving visitation’:
We turned o’er many books together; he is furnished with my opinion, which, bettered with his own learning, the greatness whereof I cannot enough commend, comes with him at my importunity to fill up your grace’s request in my stead. I beseech you, let his lack of years be no impediment to let him lack a reverend estimation, for I never knew so young a body with so old a head.
(4.1.154–60)
In place of Antonio’s implication that Bassanio should devote all his energy to reproducing the image of his dead friend, Bellario instead presents a collaborative pedagogical exchange between the older man and his young colleague. This ideal scene of instruction takes on a different cast when, at the play’s denouement, Portia produces another letter from Bellario revealing that ‘Portia was the doctor, / Nerissa there her clerk’ (5.1.269–70). Bassanio’s relieved solicitation, ‘Sweet doctor, you shall be my bedfellow. / When I am absent, then lie with my wife!’ removes the Platonic patina from Bellario’s earlier reference to the ‘loving visitation’ of his pupil with his ‘young body’, a comic deflation that continues when Nerissa’s new husband Gratiano more crassly would ‘wish it dark, / Till I were couching with the doctor’s clerk!’ (304–5). While it may seem that the play’s one unambiguous reference to sodomitical desire – the husbands’ gleeful anticipation of couching with boys – is protected as a heterosexual fantasy, the jokes call attention to the bodies of the boy actors playing the wives, multiplying rather than constraining the erotic possibilities created by the ‘as if’ world of the theater.
The lingering presence of Portia’s ‘Bathazar’ persona at the end of the drama is open to both cynical and, I want to emphasize, fruitfully queer interpretation. The husbands’ lascivious jokes about their wives’ boyish alter-egos serve as a bridge leading the audience out of the play’s fictional world and into the streets where boys would be available for such activities. Since, as Alan Sinfield points out, ‘Traffic in boys occurs quite casually in The Merchant’, the play also leaves open the possibility that Bassanio, like Ben Jonson’s hypothetical man of pleasure, could have ‘his ingle at home’. Indeed, Bassanio has access to two Balthazars, since Portia borrowed her name from a servant.60 Bovilsky points out that this character could have been portrayed as an African, since ‘Balthazar’ was the name commonly attributed to the youngest of the biblical Magi who was in Shakespeare’s day conventionally represented as from this continent.61 Jonathan Goldberg speculates that if Balthazar were African this would be in keeping with the well-known phenomenon of giving slaves the names of famous kings and heroes as ‘a way of pointing to their supposed utter incapacitation’.62 Whatever the servant’s status, by reducing Balthazar the great courtroom performer to a marital boy-toy, the drama appears to resolve the complex issues of oppression it has just raised by transforming the taint of difference into just another ironic pose donned by its elites as they blithely continue to buy and sell human flesh.
Alternatively, the brief reappearance of ‘Balthazar’ in the play’s final scene could provide one last flicker of subaltern defiance, even though the aliens Morocco and Shylock have been banished from the stage. For ‘Balthassar’ was also the name given to the biblical Daniel when the Babylonians took him captive as part of their conquest of the ‘children of Judah’ (Dan. 2.27). The play reinforces this association when Shylock hails Portia/Balthazar as ‘A Daniel come to judgement; yea, a Daniel!’ (4.1.219). In the episode from the Book of Daniel that most directly bears on the courtroom scene, the Babylonian king is having a feast when a hand appears from thin air and writes an illegible phrase on the wall. Daniel is able to decipher this as MENE, MENE, TEKEL, UPARSIN, or ‘Numbered, numbered, weighed, divided’, which he reads as a prediction that the king’s empire is about to be destroyed (Dan. 5.25–8). The phrase could also distill Portia’s legal solution to Shylock’s bond: the fact that, in order to get an exact pound, the flesh must, impossibly, be precisely weighed before it is divided from the body.63 While this connection aligns Portia with the hero Daniel and reinforces her defeat of the Jewish villain Shylock, it happens that in the Bible story the Babylonian king is also named Baltassar, and Portia resembles him in sharing her name with a servant. The irony deepens when we understand that the first half of the Book of Daniel recounts how, as the child renamed ‘Balthasar’, Daniel will not ‘defile himself with the portion of the King’s meat, nor with the wine which he drank’ and refuses to pray to his gods (Dan. 1.8). These actions resonate with Shylock’s demurral early in the play, ‘I will buy with you, sell with you, talk with you, walk with you and so following. But I will not eat with you, drink with you nor pray with you’ (1.3.31–4). When Portia, as Balthazar, invokes a law against aliens to assist in the forced conversion of one of Daniel’s tribe, are we sympathizing with the righteous Christian against the stubborn Jew, or the colonized subject against his tyrannical oppressor?
The story of the writing on the wall begins with the appearance of an alien hand tracing illegible script. I want to end by suggesting that such strange textual interruptions are the queer gestures of The Merchant of Venice. Their prototype is the moment when Jacob sticks up the rods before the ewes ‘in the doing of the deed of kind’ – a phrase that suggests the impossibility of doing this deed without the insertion of a wand, a pen, that gives the lie to the fantasy of sameness’s self-perpetuation and instead allows for the inclusion of difference and so the possibility of generation, of movement, of life. Antonio’s following question, ‘Was this inserted to make interest good?’ picks up on Jacob’s act of insertion and highlights the way the biblical text itself feels inserted into the men’s dialogue. Often cut from productions, Shylock’s speech interrupts an increasingly tense back-and-forth, inserting a long digression on a relatively obscure and logistically complex biblical episode with strained relevance to the matter at hand. Through these jagged and self-conscious insertions – ones that mimic the arrival of visitors and letters – the play disrupts the idealized forms of homosocial textual transmission found in the traditions of both classical friendship and humanist pedagogy.
One such moment of interruption occurs in the play’s last scene, when Portia hands a paper to Antonio, declaring ‘You shall not know by what strange accident / I chanced on this letter’ (5.1.278–9). This random occurrence happens to provide Antonio with his happy ending, since the letter reports ‘three of your argosies / Are richly come to harbour suddenly’ (276–7). The specification of three argosies, combined with the letter’s mysterious origin, make it a sly reference to the main source for Shakespeare’s play, Fiorentino’s Il Pecorone, in which the Antonio character, Anselmo, mires himself in debt to stake his godson Gianetto on three trading voyages. But Gianetto loses the merchant’s goods to the Donna del Belmonte, the widowed ruler of a rich port, who challenges any man that if, upon spending the night, he can succeed in copulating with her, he wins her hand, the land and all its wealth. Gianetto twice fails the test and must cede his ships and cargo until he at last manages to bed and wed the Donna Del Belmonte – whose name is likely Fiorentino’s joke about the path to success since, a period Italian-English dictionary explains, a ‘Mónte de vénere’ is ‘a womans quaint’.64 Shakespeare gives this Lady of the Beautiful Mons a first name, Portia, that emphasizes her identity as the embodiment of a rich harbor. Since his play introduces a different test for the Lady’s hand – Portia’s suitors must open her casket rather than her body – there is no obvious reason why she would be the one to restore the merchant’s wealth; hence the deus ex machina of Antonio’s letter.
Shakespeare’s intertextual insertion, via Portia, of this ‘happy ending’ may seem small compensation for Antonio, since it is evident by the end of the play that she has gained the upper hand in their competition for first place in Bassanio’s loyalties. Interpreters sigh over Antonio’s lonely fate in the last scene, a singleton among three married pairs. In contrast, in Fiorentino’s story Gianetto gives Anselmo his wife’s maid in marriage. This maid had helped Gianetto by tipping him off that her mistress put a sleeping draught in his wine, disabling him from passing her test. For her betrayal of her mistress for the sake of masculine conquest, the maid is rewarded by being traded among men. Antonio does not receive such a gift. In fact, Shakespeare goes out of his way to avoid this ending by inventing the character of Gratiano to marry Portia’s maid instead of Antonio. Rather than the normative comedic resolution of marriage, Antonio gets his ships – a detail left out of Fiorentino’s story. This ending leaves Antonio both independently wealthy and unmoored from any particular romantic script.
The letter, containing what was omitted from another text, arrives by a ‘strange accident’, making it appear foreign like Shylock, whose legal status as ‘stranger’ has just exiled him from the play (3.3.27; 4.1.345). Its accidental arrival is a near transparent ruse to tie up the plot’s loose threads, but one that perhaps also reminds us of a procreative potential that exceeds the mere mechanical replication of Aristotelian reproduction, be it of babies or money. ‘The female is procreated by accident’, Helikiah Crooke observed of Aristotle’s theory of generation.65 While for Aristotle such accidents occurred when the male seed was too weak to fully impose its form on feminine matter, Renaissance physiology credited instead the wayward meanderings of the imagination. In The Merchant of Venice Portia embodies this fulsome potentiality by acting as a gatekeeper – porteress, if you will – of the intertextual space between the play and its sources. This gap, like the one marking the insertion of Shylock’s Jacob story or separating Portia from her alter-ego Balthazar, can make us aware of the other directions this story could take. Through this gap, Antonio could pursue some other, perhaps as yet unarticulated, version of queer intimacy. What do I think this might look like? Fie, fie.