The Properties of Friendship in The Merchant of Venice

Abstract

This chapter continues the discussion of The Merchant of Venice, focusing particularly on the vexed category of friendship, a less legally determinate form of relationship than the commercial contract or the bond between husband and wife. What friends may owe one other is a problem that comes up again and again in Shakespeare plays, and it becomes an especially urgent issue in The Merchant of Venice. The chapter contrasts the friendship between Bassanio and Antonio both with Antonio’s relation to Shylock, as manifested in the “pound of flesh” deal, and with Bassanio’s relation to Portia, as manifested in the ring trick. The ring trick might be considered a lesson in property management to a prodigal who is going to have to learn to contain his generosity in the interests of his marriage. This chapter considers the figure of the royal or noble “vagabond,” theoretically entitled but actually dispossessed, a figure that in some Shakespeare plays becomes a conduit for questions about property relations and social organization. In 2 Henry VI, each side to the conflict over the throne construes itself as a “rightful owner” and its opponent as a “pirate” or “vagabond”; but the rightful owner is continually in danger of displacement into the “vagabond” position, at which point he must become a pirate himself. The effect is to construe the pirate and the proprietor, the landowner and the vagrant, as both contraries and as replicas of one another. In the episodes of the Cade rebellion this effect is further intensified and developed, raising questions about the origins and social desirability of the institutions of private property. King Lear revisits some of the same issues, not merely to reprise the critique of property in the earlier play, but to suggest an even more radical conclusion. Indeed the effect of Lear’s wholesale, apocalyptic disjointings is to complicate, almost to the extent of annihilating, the powerful connections between property, power, and entitlement as they have been asserted in many of Shakespeare’s other plays.