“What may words say …?”

A Reading of The Merchant of Venice

By Inge Leimberg

Fairleigh Dickinson University Press

Copyright © 2011 Inge Leimberg
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-61147-000-0
CHAPTER 1

The Merchant and the Maxims

Scene 1

“otherwise friendship would bee a meere merchandise

merchandise, whereas it ought to be as free as charitie.”

1–7

KNOW THYSELF

The merchant of Venice introduces himself in a brief address that might be part of an ongoing dialogue and an answer to the question: “Why are you so sad?” He confesses to the two gentlemen accompanying him that he does not know what is the nature of his sadness, nor can he give a name to either the occasion, or substance, or source of, or the reason for his condition. He might as well have at once recounted the formula quis, quid, cur, ubi, quando, etc. But the rhetorical search does not help. Something anonymous, a mere “it” (repeated seven times in three lines) is what makes him “sad” and “wearies” him as well as his friends.

“Sad” and “weary” are basically synonymous. “Sad,” which derives from OE saed (and is etymologically related to L. sat), originally does not mean sorrowful but “satisfied; sated, weary and tired.” Surely the speaker is suffering from taedium vitae. But when the epithet “sad” is attributed to a merchant of good repute, it also means (up to the seventeenth century) “of trustworthy character and judgement.”

Does the merchant see himself as a tired man? Or as a melancholy man? Or as a rich man who suffers from surfeit? Or as a serious and trustworthy trading partner? Obviously he does not know the answer to any of these questions, or he would not confine himself to that seven times repeated “it” as the reason for his complaint.

He does not know why he is so sad, but he does know that he is to learn, and a sentence from Donne’s sermon on Psalm 32:1–2 comes to mind: “No study is so necessary as to know our selves; no Schoole-master is so diligent, so vigilant, so assiduous, as Adversity.” This statement (proverbial of course) is ominously applicable to the Merchant’s study of self-knowledge; he will have to learn by bitter experience.

Moreover, some very disturbing lines from Ovid’s Metamorphoses come to mind. Asked whether Narcissus will reach old age, Tiresias replies: “Si se non noverit,” or, in Golding’s translation: “Yea, full long, so that him selfe he doe not know.” Here self-knowledge appears as a deadly danger, and when, later on (587), Ovid makes Narcissus complain: “It is my selfe I well perceyve …,” and “I am inamored of my selfe …,” and “I would to God I for a while might from my bodie part,” the whole pattern foreshadows the dilemma of the Merchant, who also suffers from taedium vitae and yearns for self-knowledge and, in this yearning, is too much concerned with himself than is good for him.

8–68

“I KNOW ANTONIO IS SAD TO THINK UPON HIS MERCHANDISE …”

The Merchant’s self-introduction is, characteristically, not a monologue. The scene has a sociable touch. Two friends (or rather acquaintances), Salerio and Solanio, are present and eager to give advice. But they have not really been listening or reflecting, because they are exclusively concerned with the Merchant’s commercial ventures, his property, whereas Antonio is discoursing with his soul. In fact, saying, “In sooth I know not why I am so sad,” he might be answering, in his soul’s name, the Psalmist’s question “O my Soule why art thou so sad?” This is an adequate introduction to the theme of self-knowledge, which affects the human soul, not a man’s body or possessions. “Cum igitur: Nosce te, dicit, hoc dicit: Nosce animum tuum,” says Cicero in the Tusculan Disputations, paraphrasing Plato, who makes Socrates say in the Alcibiades Major that, essentially, man is nothing but the soul, and that he who orders us to know ourselves, orders us to know our souls and not our belongings, our body, or our possessions. A schoolmaster like Sir Thomas Elyot (keen on “Mens sana in corpore sano“) might go so far as to maintain that the maxim nosce te ipsum includes the body, but in doing so he moves outside the Platonic (and Neoplatonic) tradition. In Ficino’s commentary on Plato’s Symposium, Narcissus’s being concerned with the mere shadow of his soul, the body, not with the soul itself, is the reason for his death. And Sir John Davies, in his long didactic poem Nosce Teipsum devoted only a few introductory pages to the study “Of Humane Knowledge” and focused principally on the theme “Of the Soule of Man, and the Immortalitie thereof.”

A fitting reply to the Merchant’s confession that he is sad and incapable of self-knowledge would have been something like: “Poor soul, …/ Why doest thou pine within …?” But the two companions do not reflect but immediately tell the Merchant what is the matter with him. They talk about his ships at sea in richly ornamented word-paintings, which in an opera might be rendered in arioso fashion after the merchant’s short, unpicturesque recitative. Rhetorically speaking, there is a shift from the genus subtile to the genus grande and, historically speaking, from Shakespeare to Newton’s Seneca. Salerio’s initial phrase, “Your mind is tossing on the ocean,” is foreshadowed in the fourth chorus of the Hercules Furens where “Tossinges of mynde” and “a mynde … toste every wave” are projected against a background of raging waves. Furthermore, the counselors exchange the merchant’s intellectual reasoning for psychological theorems. They see the wealthy merchant wrapped in sadness as, some twenty years hence, Burton will show him in his chapter on “Discontents, Cares, Miseries, etc….” There the rich man appears given over to cares because his “wealth is brittle, … his gains are uncertain,” and he “complains … of shipwreck.”

This is what the two companions now do in the merchant’s stead. They talk of sea-pageants, and shipwrecks, and tempests to make both him and the audience “think” they “see them.” And they embellish their word-paintings with emblematic, proverbial, and biblical allusions, until the rhetorical climax is reached, the daring allegory of “rocks, / Which touching but my gentle vessel’s side / Would scatter all her spices on the stream” (32–34). When this is seen in the context of an action moving forward to the ripping up of a man’s side, it conveys an ominous meaning.

A compelling kind of prospective thinking caused by imaginary seeing has led to further seeing of what “things” may happen at “sea.” And now the name of the Merchant, Antonio, rhyming with “know,” is mentioned for the first time, after “thought,” “think,” and “see” (the two latter logically coupled) have been repeated no less than three times. The English verb to know is etymologically related to L. (g)noscere and, like these words, means recognition of the Platonic kind, i.e., thinking by seeing what has been impressed before on the mind as a recognizable pattern. The imperative of to know used reflexively produces the maxim “Know thyself,” and Shakespeare uses know as a byword of the Merchant who feels compelled as well as unable to know himself. This may have been a reason for the choice of the name Antonio, which not only rhymes with know but corresponds to knowledge semantically by suggesting the paronomasia note and tone.

In his answer to Salerio, Antonio makes it very clear that, for him, the two well-meaning counselors have missed the point. His sadness has nothing to do with his ships. On the contrary. Far from being overanxious, as Salerio suggests, he is overconfident, even suicidally so. No reasonably prudent man would “thank [his] fortune” (41) before the event, or refer to fortune at all as a guarantee of his prospects. Nor would he feel absolutely safe because, obeying an age-old rule, he has not entrusted his “ventures … in one bottom” or his “whole estate / Upon the fortune of this present year” (42–44). What makes Antonio’s complacent description of his present affairs still worse is that he revokes it later on (177). And, perhaps, his denial of Salerio’s suggestion that he may be sad because he is in love (46) is not quite frank either. He knows that he will have to part from his friend soon (158–60), and that makes him sad indeed.

Antonio appears to be, from the very first, a bewilderingly inconsistent character and, accordingly, answers to Aristotle’s rule that only a man suffering from some flaw can arouse pity and fear in the equally imperfect men or women in the audience. Antonio, indeed, does “not know.” On the one hand, this does him honor; he is in the grip of Socratic doubt, which gives him a spiritual sincerity all his own. But, on the other hand, his complete disregard of the notoriously real dangers depicted so elaborately by Salerio and Solanio shows that his sincerity is void of common sense. The word-paintings of sea-pageants and shipwrecks are meant to remain before the audience’s imagination like a large backdrop. Antonio, facing the audience, does not see it, and would ignore it if he did.

When Solanio takes over from Salerio to say good-bye to Antonio, he focuses upon the metaphor of the stage which, implicitly, has already been present in the imagined sea-pageants, and storms, and shipwrecks, and is going to prove a major motif in The Merchant of Venice where it gains in urgency by being joined with the problem of Nosce teipsum. In Aristotle’s analysis of Sophoclean tragedy, catharsis is brought about by peripeteia charged with anagnorisis, which changes ignorance into knowledge. It is the very office of the theater to rouse a man out of his dream of security and make him realize his erring condition or, in other words, his want of self-knowledge.

69–112

“A STAGE, WHERE EVERY MAN MUST PLAY A PART …”

Three more persons, Antonio’s close friend Bassanio, and his acquaintances Gratiano and Lorenzo, are now on the stage. When, together with Antonio, they have bidden good-bye to the two counselors in the most amiable and courteous manner, Gratiano gives Antonio his cue for coming out with his own view of the world:

I hold the world but as the world, Gratiano,
A stage, where every man must play a part,
And mine a sad one.

(77–79)

Some years hence, Jaques will state in his famous speech that the world actually is a stage and “all the men and women merely players.” Antonio, however, does not make a statement of fact but only voices an opinion that this is so. From the very first line and throughout the first scene, the verb “know,” explicitly as well as implicitly, refers to “Antonio,” but it never does so affirmatively. It is the friends who know, Antonio does not.

For Antonio the part a man plays on the stage of the world is not of his own choosing, but “every man must play a part …” Pronounced on the stage, the two words “every man” are hardly distinguishable from the one word, or rather the name, Everyman. Antonio’s concluding half line, “And mine a sad one,” recalls some words in the famous old morality play that demonstrate the strong impact as well as, inversely, the spiritual remoteness of Everyman: “Be no more sad but ever rejoice,” said Knowledge, with complete authority, to the protagonist (636). Knowledge is Antonio’s companion as it was Everyman’s, though to him it is no longer a faithful companion, but a problem, or a hard task, or even a temptation and, viewed as a guide to salvation, completely obsolete.

When Antonio has had his say regarding his sad part on the world’s stage, Gratiano, saying “Let me play the fool” (79), offers himself to Antonio as the proverbial “Fool [who] may give a wise man counsel.” Not that he does not see the irony of his role. He himself is the man who says: “I am Sir Oracle, / And when I ope my lips, let no dog bark” (93–94). According to Bassanio (114–18), he “speaks an infinite deal of nothing,” and he makes his exit, vituperating silence (111–12).

113–160

“THEN DO BUT SAY TO ME WHAT I SHOULD DO …”

Now Antonio and Bassanio are alone together and an intimate tone prevails. Antonio wants to know about Bassanio’s courtship but, together with the audience, he will have to wait for Bassanio’s answer for more than sixty lines. It is his debts to Antonio that Bassanio wants to discuss, the old ones he still owes him as well as the new loan he is going to ask for, so that the maxim “Be surety for another and harme is at hande” comes to the fore. Antonio, using his favorite “it” to describe the subject under discussion, assures Bassanio that, as always, his means are fully at his disposal, though under one condition: “if it stands as you yourself still do, / Within the eye of honour” (132–34). This is Bassanio’s cue to illustrate by a schoolboy’s example that “what follows is pure innocence” (145). According to Cooper innocentia derives from “Noceo … To hurt or endomage” (and thus from “Neco … to kill”) and this etymology is divulged by sources as familiar as the Bible and the Tusculan disputations. Moreover, the English word noxious helps to insure an awareness of noxa as a component of “innocence.” So, when Bassanio uses the word (145), which comes disturbingly near to self-delusion, the proverbial “noxa” quite literally “praesto est.”

Former debts and a new loan are the subject of this first part of the two friends’ dialogue. But the new theme is interwoven throughout with the initial one of knowledge. As before, know rhymes with Antonio, but from now on both rhyme with owe (131–32 and 134–35). Four times Bassanio uses the expression “I owe,” which is unique in its reduction to the merest phonetic essentials and acoustically highly expressive.

Owe is a Janus-like word. Its original meaning is not debere but the opposite, habere, i.e., “to have … as a duty” or “to be under an obligation (to do something).” Paradoxically enough, this is exactly how Antonio, Bassanio’s creditor, feels. Bassanio four times repeated “I owe” to express his regret. Now Antonio declares his feeling obliged “to do something” in a stylistic tour de force comprising a fourfold do: “You know … / And … do … / Then do but say to me what I should do / That in your knowledge may by me be done …” (153–59). Since educated Elizabethans were bilingual, perhaps they were more inclined to think of English do in terms of Latin do (meaning to give) than we are. Doing is giving, and Antonio’s search for self-knowledge is now put to the test by having to do and to give.

Antonio and Bassanio converse in a style which is as intimate as it is decorous, and much of what they say sounds like a paraphrase of the chapter “Of friendship and of a friend” in The French Academie but, unfortunately, they do not always follow the rules. Bassanio, who knows that at present Antonio has neither ready money nor any realizable property whatsoever, should not have made his demand. Nor should Antonio have made his offer. According to The French Academie, friendship is the one exception to the rule that “there is a meane to be kept in all things,” but this means only that a friend has “wholie to be trusted” (138); it is not an excuse for rashly offering one’s “extremest means” (138).

Perhaps the most ominous word in Antonio’s brief speech is “prest”: “Then do but say to me what I should do / That in your knowledge may by me be done, / And I am prest unto it” (158–60). In Antonio’s mouth the word “prest” means that he is ready or even eager “to be at [Bassanio’s] service,” in other words, to give him a loan or stand surety for him. And the proverb says, “Give surety and harm is at hand,” or Sponde noxa praesto est.

161–185

“TO HAVE IT OF MY TRUST …”

(Continues…)Excerpted from “What may words say …?” by Inge Leimberg. Copyright © 2011 Inge Leimberg. Excerpted by permission of Fairleigh Dickinson University Press.
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