Shakespeare Vol. 5, No.

4, December 2009, 338354

Antonios Claim: Triangulated Desire and Queer Kinship in Shakespeares The Merchant of Venice
Edward J. Geisweidt*
Department of English, University of Alabama, Box 870244 Tuscaloosa, AL 35401, USA Dyadic relations are not the norm in Shakespeares The Merchant of Venice. Even desires and marriages are mediated by third parties that are necessary components of erotic and affective ties. While criticism tends to read Antonio as the excluded cast-off of Portia and Bassanios marriage, he actually becomes a necessary element in the marriages perpetuity, proffering his soul to ensure that the marriage and its offspring are legitimated. Antonio serves as a replacement for the state, which queer theorists argue has played an unacknowledged role as the third party in any marriage, conferring recognition and entitlements insofar as the marital couple reproduces the state. The states interests are masked by the marital couples naturalization as an elementary structure of kinship. As an acknowledged and desired third party in a marital love triangle, Antonio allegorically represents a queer resistance to the affective and erotic exclusions of the state-sanctioned, reproductive couple. Keywords: love triangle; desire; marriage; state; queer; kinship; Rene Girard; triangulation; mediation

When, in the resolution of the marital crisis in Shakespeares The Merchant of Venice, a ring passes from Portia, to Antonio, to Bassanio, it follows a course indicative of the triangulated nature of desire throughout the play. The moment solemnizes the plays most conspicuous iteration of a love triangle. Yet, the arrangement leaves critics uncomfortable, particularly concerning Antonios apparent exclusion from a social and romantic situation in which his claims to Bassanios love have been superseded by Portias aggressively heteronormative manipulations and possessiveness. In other words, Antonios homosexual love for Bassanio loses out in a direct rivalry with Portias heterosexual claim to him. Such readings leave Antonio as sad at the end of the play as he is in the beginning, and also as less consequential.1 Based on an assumption of the mutual exclusivity of differently gendered love objects, the notion of a zero-sum rivalry between Antonio and Portia reduces affect to a modern homosexualheterosexual binary while maintaining the normative structure of coupling as the only locus of both affect and erotic desire. Reading the relationship between Portia, Bassanio and Antonio through Rene Girards concept of triangu lated desire, and through contemporary queer theories of kinship and statesanctioned marriage, I argue that Antonio and Portia are not antipathetic rivals but indispensable elements of each others affective and erotic claims to Bassanio. Furthermore, by attending to the plays presentation of triangulated desire, we can
*Email: geisw001@crimson.ua.edu
ISSN 1745-0918 print/1745-0926 online # 2009 Edward J. Geisweidt DOI: 10.1080/17450910903374550 http://www.informaworld.com

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begin to imagine a relational basis of queer kinships that do not rely on state sanction for public legitimacy, or on the reproductive marital couple as an exclusionary elementary structure of kinship. When three characters convey a ring that betokens both an inherited estate and the promise of sexual exclusivity, the scene presents a legal fantasy a three-person marriage. Add to this mathematically anomalous arrangement the third persons integral role in legitimating the offspring of the marital unit, and the menage a trois ` challenges the very roles of traditional, marriage-based kinship, which require only a husband and wife dyad for reproduction. Yet, Antonios function within a relationship that is normally assumed to involve only two parties correlates with the states involvement in modern marriage practices. Anthropologists and queer theorists alike have critiqued the various imbrications of the marital couple, kinship formations, and state power. This articles title alludes to Judith Butlers Antigones Claim, in which Butler reads the Sophoclean heroines plight as a struggle to disarticulate kinship and the state. According to Butler, Antigone raises the question of whether there can be kinship . . . without the support and mediation of the state, and whether there can be the state without the family as its support and mediation (Antigones Claim 5). In Butlers assessment, Antigones speech and defiant acts fail to separate kinship and the state, but they also change them in ways that perhaps allow more liveability for those who previously could not speak in the voice of the state. No simple alignment of Antigone with kinship and Creon with the state rings true, as even Antigones risky and defiant speech resonates with state discourse (5). From an anthropological perspective, Jacqueline Stevens also writes about the collusion of state and kinship. Modern states, she writes, are political societies based on kinship forms (xv). Marriage is the arrangement that ensures the reproduction of both political society and kinship. Stevens explains how marriage articulates state policy and kinship rules:
Marriage continues, now as before, to reproduce the state in three ways. First, marriage provides the legitimacy that renders some children citizens and others aliens. Second, marriage is a form of kinship relations that defines the particularity of that state against others. Third, marriage is the benchmark of full citizenship. The juridical privileging of a certain kinship structure marked by marriage . . . continues to render the married couple as the ultimate unit worthy of the fullest political rights. (220)

So conceived, the marital couple of husband and wife is a political formation whose collusion with state interests is masked by its perceived naturalization as a fundamental unit of kinship networks. Following on the claims that the state is the unacknowledged but vested third party in marriages, I argue that the triangulating element as Antonio represents it lets us imagine a disarticulation of marriage and the state, and installs socially generated desire as the sustaining third term in the marital unit, at the same time queering the dyadic elementary structure of kinship. The Merchant of Venice prompts us to rethink the politics of marriage in such a way that a queered kinship becomes imaginable. Desire and Directionality 3 For its weight-baring capacities, the triangle is an exceptional geometric figure, and The Merchant of Venice tests the durability of the triangle through its depiction of familial and erotic relationships, business transactions, legal proceedings, riddles and

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other forms of interaction, all requiring mediation, stand-ins, proxies and triangulations. Tubal makes up the sum of Shylocks loan to Antonio, Lancelot is exchanged between Shylock and Bassanio, the clown is also tossed back and forth between his conscience and the fiend, Bassanio get[s] Graziano a wife in winning Portia for himself (3.2.195), he then welcomes other friends to Belmont only through the power invested in him by Portia (l. 220), and Portia represents Bellarios authority in the Venetian court while Lorenzo and Jessica stand in for their hosts at the Belmont estate. Fathers and childs desires meld in the scene where Lancelot aids and obstructs his father Gobbos suit, on Lancelots behalf, to Bassanio. And Bassanio and Portia would not desire one another without multiple mediations. The variety of activities that constitute affiance, the emotional and erotic nuances of such mediation, and the (in)directions desire may take when a third element is introduced into a dyadic relationship all of these are important to consider in the most critically conspicuous triangle of the play: the love triangle between Antonio, Bassanio and Portia. Examining the non-dyadic forms of desire in Shakespeares Venice and Belmont requires that we re-think the love triangle as neither a head-to-head competition for a mutual love interest, nor as a structure in which the female love interest serves, in Steve Pattersons words, as a handy alibi for a potentially embarrassing homosexual desire between supposed rivals (28), a situation treated at length by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick in her enormously influential Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. The Merchant of Venice presents many forms of triangulated relations, the natures of which are only partially characterized by rivalry or same-sex desire, whether homosocial or homosexual. The central love triangle comprises three types of relationship: the homosexually inflected friendship between Antonio and Bassanio, the normative marriage between Bassanio and Portia, and the definitionresistant, queer relationship between Portia and Antonio, one that is, in fact, more amicable at times even erotic and more productive than a rivalry. With apexes gendered male at two points and female at one, the central triangle of the play mirrors the structure that is the basis of Sedgwicks critique of male homosocial rivalry over, and exchange of, women. But Merchants central love triangle does not follow the logic of the traffic in women between two homosocially desiring men.2 Judith Butler speculates that, although Sedgwick has not continued to work on love triangles, she would recognize a plurality of erotic interpretations made possible by her theory of the structure. Butler writes of Sedgwick:
I cannot imagine that she would necessarily accept a logic of noncontradiction for desire, in which one either desires a man or a woman, but not both, and not both at the same time. In fact, she has helped a generation to formulate a wider compass for desire. I wonder whether her triangles might not be appropriated for another use. If we consider that the thesis of monolithic patriarchal power no longer holds unambiguously, then the triangles need not always take the form in which men relate to other men through women in this way. Indeed, where there is this homosocial triangulation of desire, it may well have other meanings than those that are possible within the Levi-Straussian model. (Capacity 11011)

Butlers point about the explanatory insufficiency of the thesis of monolithic patriarchal power is relevant to Merchants triangle insofar as desire in the play is less constrained by male homosocial interests than critics have claimed. The central

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love triangle in Merchant, instead of producing an irresolvable conflict of contradictory desires, deploys multiple desires for both genders simultaneously. In thinking about desire through the rubric of a geometric figure, it is helpful to look at Sara Ahmeds work on orientations in Queer Phenomenology. Although she does not take up triangulation in particular, Ahmed is concerned with the direction desire is thought to take when oriented towards a love object. Her theory is useful in explaining the thinking behind the logic of non-contradiction of desires, referred to by Butler. As Ahmed describes it, desire is normally thought to follow a direct line to an object sexed according to ones orientation, that is, homosexual or heterosexual:
So sexual desire orientates the subject toward some others (and by implication not other others) by establishing a line or direction. Sexual orientation involves following different lines insofar as the others that desire is directed toward are already constructed as the same sex, or the other sex. It is not simply the object that determines the direction of ones desire; rather the direction one takes makes some others available as objects to be desired. Being directed toward the same sex or the other sex becomes seen as moving along different lines. (70)

The implication is that, of course, one cannot follow two lines at the same time. Ahmed critiques the assumption of heterosexualitys naturalization, which is based on this notion of straight-lined unidirectional desire for an object: The naturalization of heterosexuality involves the presumption that there is a straight line that leads each sex toward the other sex, and that this line of desire is in line with ones sex (7071, emphasis in original). Of course, such thinking can lead to the presumptive naturalization of homosexuality as well. Ahmed suggests as much when she writes, same-sex desire has the attributes of heterosexual desire, the difference being that homosexual objects are not continuous with the line of normal sexual subjectivity (71). She continues, The discontinuity of queer desires can be explained in terms of objects that are not points on the straight line: the subject has to go off line to reach such objects. To go off line is to turn toward ones own sex and away from the other sex (71). In a love triangle in which each object, in some sense, desires simultaneously and is the simultaneous desire of the other two objects, the point A to point B (or, say, point P) direction of desire for a sex- and orientation-appropriate object becomes twisted (Ahmed 161; Sedgwick, Tendencies xii). That is to say, such desire is queered in that it follows a discontinuous path to its object. Opposite-sex desire, then, can be just as queer as same-sex desire. In light of the straitening logic of non-contradictory desires, the desires in Merchants central love triangle are queer in that even as they are oriented towards one object, given the ethos of triangulation in the play, the desires necessarily reach one object by way of another. Sedgwicks forerunner in theorizing triangulations, Rene Girard, provides models that help to explain some of desires indirections in Shakespeares play. In his classic study of triangulated desire in Desire, Deceit, and the Novel, Girards triangle consists of a desiring subject, the object of desire, and the mediator, whose desire may serve as a model for the subjects own desire (for instance, books serve as a model/ mediator for Don Quixotes hankering to live chivalrously) or as a rival who has the potential to divert the subjects desire to the rival himself, a situation that Girard refers to as internal mediation (2). Girards triangle need not be constituted by two men with (ostensibly rivalling) erotic desires for a female object, though this structure is one possibility, which Sedgwick takes up and essentializes. Although

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Merchants triangle comprises two men and one woman, Shakespeare de-essentializes the roles characters play in Sedgwicks model. A queer reading of the romantic plots triangle does not involve merely reading Bassanio in the traditionally female role of desired object and Portia and Antonio in the traditionally male roles of desiring rivals. Rather, this queer reading traces the twists and multiple directionalities of desire as it is generated by, or in some other way affected by, mediation. Multiple Mediations The economic motivations of Bassanios courtship are duly noted in his desire to rid himself of debt, and his comparison of Portias sunny locks (1.1.169) to the golden fleece betrays his economic motivation, but it also leads him to reveal another significant aspect of his desire. Instead of casting himself as the sole captain of the Argo, Bassanio positions himself among many Jasons who quest for her. He imagines many mythical men in pursuit of Portia, and he longs to hold a rival place with one of them (l. 174). Bassanio resembles Girards vaniteux in the generation of his desire for Portia. Girard writes, A vaniteux will desire any object so long as he is convinced that it is already desired by another person whom he admires. The mediator here is a rival, brought into existence as a rival by vanity, and that same vanity demands his defeat (7). Whereas Portias descriptions of her suitors depict ethnic and nationalist stereotypes, Bassanio fancies mythic questors, figures worthy of admiration. In sharing the same identity, the many Jasons are really one rival an epic rival, the product of poetic imagination interpellated into Bassanios world of sexual economics. By condensing the variety of Portias actual suitors into one representative rival figure, Bassanio creates his own Bassanio-Jason-Portia triangle. Given that Bassanio looks forward to a rivalry with a man he imagines in his own likeness, Antonios dread at sending his friend off to Belmont perhaps has as much to do with the Jasons there as it does Portia. Even after he has won the object that has attracted so many Jasons to vie for rival places, Bassanio continues to live his fantasy competition, thinking of himself
Like one of two contending in a prize, That thinks he hath done well in peoples eyes, Hearing applause and universal shout, Giddy in spirit, still gazing in doubt Whether those peals of praise be his or no. (3.2.14145)

Who, exactly, is the other of the two contenders is uncertain, but undoubtedly he is a figure that Portias previous suitors could never live up to. The mediation of his desire for Portia is also evident as he addresses her portrait with the most laudatory and loving words that he speaks of her in her presence. Actually, his words are praise for the demi-god painter who somehow, despite losing his sight to the beauty of Portias first painted eye, manages to depict her other eye (l. 115). Whether it is through an imaginary mythic rival, a lifeless cameo, or an absent portrait artist, Bassanios desire for Portia is a constantly mediated one. And whether his desire could be said to ever light directly on her is still a question, but she is a constant term in his desire.

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If Bassanios mediators redirect his desires to themselves, Portias mediators serve as models, giving an other-generated quality to her desire for Bassanio. She laments her inability to make a choice (O me, the word choose! I may neither choose who I would nor refuse who I dislike [1.2.2123]). When Portia makes this complaint about her situation, her desires have not oriented toward any one of the Jasons who have flocked to Belmont. She cannot choose not only because her fathers stipulation denies her the freedom to legitimate her desires, but also because she has not been presented with an object that is to her desirable. Given her matrimonial prospects, Portia suffers her inability to refuse equally with her inability to choose. She would rather remain a desireless subject than desire under constraint the objects who have presented themselves. Bassanio does not register as a choice in Portias heart without some mediating suggestion. Nerissa, not Portia, first mentions Bassanio in the context of potential suitors. Portias praise for Bassanio is spoken for her by Nerissa, as in the moment when a Belmont messenger relates that a resplendent Venetian messenger has announced his lords approach. Portia states that she long[s] to see / Quick Cupids post that comes so mannerly (2.9.9899), to which Nerissa responds by explicitly naming Quick Cupid (Bassanio, Lord Love) and by coupling Bassanio to Portias desires (if thy will it be! [l. 100]). Nerissa substantiates an object choice for someone whose will hitherto has been impaired, at least in part, by the very undesirability of its prospective choices. Nerissa teaches me what to believe, Portia says (5.1.207). Nerissa also teaches her what to want. Like Nerissa, Portias father models desire for her. As we see in old Gobbos advocacy on Lancelots behalf, Portias father is not the only one who speaks for his childs desires in the play. An anti-patriarchal response to the casket arrangement would have us disdain Portias fathers will as a blocking force between Portia and her romantically desired object choice, but what do we make of the apparent coincidence that the fathers desire lights on the same object as Portias? The caskets are designed so that the fathers meaning, to quote Nerissa, will no doubt never be chosen by any rightly but one who you shall rightly love (1.2.30, 3132). To know whom Portia should rightly love is to know the proper object of her desire. To leave a will stipulating a puzzle whose meaning can be deciphered only by that proper object, and to bar the daughter from participating in the courting ritual, is to pursue the proper object on behalf of the daughter. There is an uncanny consonance between fathers desire and daughters, oppositional as they appear, and though it denies her choice and refusal, Portia willingly, even wilfully, models her will after her fathers, insisting, I will die as chaste as Diana unless I be obtained by the manner of my fathers will (1.2.1035). That the father is dead indicates that the oft-critically reviled incarnations of patriarchy were (and are) mortals, capable of desire, and only tenuously orchestrating the homosocial alliances and reproductive mechanisms that support the state. According to David Cressy, It was a fathers duty to assist his children to the most suitable and advantageous marriage. But parental authority was neither arbitrary or absolute, and often crumbled in the face of youthful independence (256). Although the casket arrangement falls into a legal category that B.J. Sokol and Mary Sokol call fantastical mooting, where impossibly complex contrived legal situations are premised (8), the dramatic portrayal of dowries demonstrate how in Shakespeares society the law countenanced a great deal of patriarchal control over wives, sons, and

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daughters (64). The father who wields patriarchal authority is not the ground of his own authority; the state substantiates his power. Portias father models desire for his daughter, but he ultimately does not impel her marriage. When his will (desire) becomes his will (testament), Portias nuptials come under the management of the state. Although the paucity of characters embodying state authority belies the states presence in Venice, its authority is invoked in each recourse to the law. It reaches into the realms of business and religion, determining in particular Shylocks relation to both. And it is the understood third term in the early modern marital unit, as it is today. In The Wedding Complex, Elizabeth Freeman presents the state as a Reformation replacement of the Catholic Church as institutional marital mediator. She suggests that marriage came under state purview particularly in England with Henry VIII. While the Catholic Church saw the secular family as its primary competition, Freeman writes, Protestants saw it as a primary ally, an extension of and an analogy for the states authority (18). Portias fathers word, then, is not the ultimate authority in Portias life. The state authorizes his will, and its interest in Portia is piqued when the leaden casket is opened. The father and his will, in both senses, recede at that point; the father is not heard from or of again. The state triangulates Portias relations at this point, embedding Portia and her husband in a tangle of institutional mediations (18). As Michael Warner will help us to see later in this essay, that tangle goes unnoticed as the unacknowledged third term in the marital dyad. Marriage/Friends/Queer Girardian heuristics serve to analyse various triangulations, but they cannot fully account for the complexity of desires in the Portia-Bassanio-Antonio love triangle. The concepts of internal mediation and modelled desire remain important, but the triangulation of desires is complicated by the differently normative claims both Portia and Antonio make on Bassanio. Laurie Shannons isolation of two competing, but not mutually exclusive, and two gendered, but not diametrically opposed, norms elucidates the positions Portia and Antonio respectively occupy:
Gender constructions fundamentally concern the production and hierarchization of difference; heterosexual marital forms served as the institutional reflection of this differentiation as a law of unequals. Running athwart of the heterosexual organization of love and marriage, however, the powerfully homonormative bias in Renaissance thought favors both self-likeness (constancy) and same-sex affects. Insofar as diverse logics rendering disparate phenomena normal can coincide, given cultural moments contain competing normativities. Disparate but equally licit discourses establishing incompatible norms coexist. (Amity 5556)

We may, with reservation, characterize Antonio and Bassanios friendship as homonormative. Shannon writes that friendship discourses cast the friend as another self and merged a pair of friends as one soul in two bodies (Amity 3). Class difference complicates, and money mediates, this friendship of likes. Steve Patterson emphasizes the dissimilarity between Antonios and Bassanios class, temperament and demeanour (14), but the rhetoric of love and similitude between the men is reiterated in the play. Portia draws on the likeness topos when she imagines that there must be needs a like proportion / Of lineaments, of manners, and of

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spirit between Antonio and Bassanio, so that this Antonio, / Being the bosom lover of my lord, / Must needs be like my lord (3.4.1415, 1618). She suggests that the men are one soul with two bodies when she compares offering a cash redemption for Antonio to purchasing the semblance of my soul (l. 20). Antonios soul resembles Portias through the mediation of Bassanios soul. Portias relationship with Bassanio is normalized according to marriage and, whether we see her as solidifying an alliance between her dead father and Bassanio as a woman trafficked, or if we see her, as Shannon does, as a woman exercising some control over her own person and property through performative speech acts,3 Portia does show vested interest in the norms of marriage, particularly the sexual. In the very junction of friendship and matrimony, Antonio and Portia establish their positions vis-a-vis each ` other. In their manoeuvring between two normativities, however, Antonio and Portia enact a relationship that is outside the symbolic roles of marriage-based kinship and is, as we shall see, itself a curiously erotic, as well as affective, relationship. Critics discuss Antonio and Portias relationship as a rivalry characterized by various degrees of nastiness and premised on a notion of sexual antipathy between the two.4 Keith Geary characterizes the triangle of Portia, Bassanio, and Antonio as the struggle between heterosexual love and homosexual love (55). The constraints of a binary sexuality in such a struggle cannot define Portias and Antonios positions. Seymour Kleinbergs imprecise alignment of Portia with heterosexual marriage and the promise of generation, and Antonio with the romantic but sterile infatuation of homoeroticism, defines one position in terms of the other, reproducing a gender binary in terms of (reproductive) sexuality (124). If we characterize Antonio and Portia according to these binaries, we risk reducing their relationship to a simple rivalry and ignoring the social dynamics that generate a lasting community from their interaction. Looking at their dynamic in the frame of normativities allows for negotiation between them without straitening desire through biology and sexual identity. As queer culture teaches us, the realms of friendship and matrimony are not mutually exclusive, and marriage in particular cannot be thought to generate a stable relationship independently of the affective practices cultivated and sustained by the norms of friendship. Neither is friendship entirely innocent of the erotic desires that draw husbands and wives together (in most marriages). Warner sees the separation of marriage and friendship as an aspect of straight relationality:
The impoverished vocabulary of straight culture tells us that people should be either husbands and wives or (nonsexual) friends. Marriage marks that line. It is not the way many queers live. If there is such a thing as a gay way of life, it consists [of] a welter of intimacies outside the framework of professions and institutions and ordinary social obligations. Straight culture has much to learn from it, and in many ways has already begun to learn from it. Queers should be insisting on teaching these lessons. (116)

If the impulse to coupling arises, as Warner seems to suggest, from heteronormativity, then the prospect of a triangulated marriage comes off as all the more queer. If anything, the Renaissance norms of friendship render the friend even less easily compartmentalized by the married couple than the friend is today. The likeness that was thought to exist between friends bears the feel of an undeniable ontology perhaps the closest contemporary equivalent to which is the soulmate, a category that sometimes does, sometimes does not slip into erotic or even marital affiance.

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Queer cultures implicit motility between the sexual and non-sexual problematizes the categorical distinction between friendship and couples. Warner suggests as much when he writes that
in the way many gay men and lesbians live, quite casual sexual relations can develop into powerful and enduring friendships. Friendships, in turn, can cross into sexual relations and back. Because gay social life is not as ritualized and institutionalized as straight life, each relation is an adventure in nearly uncharted territory whether it is between two gay men, or two lesbians, or a gay man and a lesbian, or among three or more queers, or between gay men and the straight women whose commitment to queer culture brings them the punishment of the fag hag label. (115)

The words gay, lesbian and straight abound in this passage, but there is more than just heterosexuality and homosexuality in the bounty of the socio-sexual field Warner describes here. The diversity of relations helps us to imagine possibilities for how Portia and Antonio relate to each other. Does it really serve us to think of Antonio as gay and Portia as straight, and to therefore foreclose the possibility of a friendship that can slide into the erotic?5 There is more than pairing-off here, too, and it is perhaps telling that Warner uses the term queer when referring only to an overarching culture and to relations among three or more people, hinting perhaps that in couples, gays, lesbians and straights do not pose the same challenges to the state and the symbolic as that they do in a menage a trois. By refusing the rigid ` binaries of friendship and marriage, straight and gay, and sexual and non-sexual, we can begin to imagine a relationship in which Portia and Antonio negotiate the norms of marriage and of friendship that respectively characterize their relationships with Bassanio. What they create is a queer affiliation that nonetheless maintains the socially organizing capacity of a kinship formation. Treasonous Mediation and Things Portia and Antonios first encounters with each other are highly mediated. She is the lady about whom Antonio is curious the moment he gets Bassanio alone (1.1.119 21). Given that Bassanio can imagine an intimate rivalry with a Jason he has not met, we should not discount Antonios interest in Portia, even though his first encounter with her is mediated through Bassanios rather partial description of her. And even before Portia finds out about Antonios personal and financial investment in Bassanio, she suspects that her favourite suitor has not come to her without emotional attachments. Eager to conduct his business in Belmont, Bassanio wishes to shorten the courtship and proceed with the casket selection. The banter between the two raises the quite serious issue of suspicion:
BASSANIO. Let me choose, For as I am, I live upon the rack. PORTIA. Upon the rack, Bassanio? Then confess What treason there is mingled with your love. BASSANIO. None but that ugly treason of mistrust Which makes me fear thenjoying of my love. There may as well be amity and life Tween snow and fire as treason and my love.

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PORTIA. Ay, but I fear you speak upon the rack, Where men enforced do say anything. (3.2.2433) `

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Portia intuits the presence of another entity, a potential diriment impediment in Bassanios heart, and she wonders not what treasonous act Bassanios love has committed but what treason is mingled with his love. His love may not be false, but it is not comprised of just one desire. Labelling the suspected heterogeneity of Bassanios affections as treason, Portias language already registers the states interest in her coupling with Bassanio. It is as this treason that Antonio is first introduced to Portia. When the state relies on the marital dyad for its own reproduction, Antonios affective presence in that dyad poses a threat to state interests. By pressing the point, Portia testifies to the sincerity of her suspicions. As Bassanios tendency towards treason becomes more and more palpable, Portias challenge will be to establish amity between fire and snow. Soon after Bassanio has succeeded in the casket trial, Antonio reappears through a mediator. He presents himself in the form of a letter, carried by Salerio. Noticing how reading the letter changes Bassanios affect, Portia claims, I am half yourself, / And I must freely have the half of anything / That this same paper brings you (3.2.24648). Portias wording foregrounds the materiality of the paper; Bassanio materializes Antonio from that paper: Here is a letter, lady, / The paper as the body of my friend, / and every word in it a gaping wound / Issuing life-blood (3.2.26164, emphasis added). The letter resembles, or is like, Antonios body sliced open, bearing its contents, but the letter also stands in as Antonios body, with wounds inscripted all over. This is the Antonio of whom Portia freely takes a half via her engagement to Bassanio, and whom she will come to deliver whole in the Venetian court. Alan Sinfield and Richard Rambuss draw attention to the homoerotic and S&M ethos of the courtroom, Antonio splayed and ready for amatory sacrifice (Sinfield, 55; Rambuss 27273). But his letter prefigures this courtroom display with its own erotics of textual practice. When it comes time for Antonios corporeal sacrifice, even with his life in the balance and his friend and lover gazing on his wracked body, his mind is on Portia. Bassanio serves as a mediator who must not only write Antonios epitaph but also convey the experience of this erotic spectacle back to Portia. Antonio instructs Bassanio in dying wish fashion:
Commend me to your honourable wife. Tell her the process of Antonios 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. (4.1.27074)

Through their shared object of their desire, Antonio intends for Portia to participate in his amatory sacrifice. What can Portias acknowledgement of Antonio and Bassanios love accomplish? Although it can work as a concession to Antonios bounteous love for Bassanio, the invitation for Portias judgment suggests that she is to come to understand not how Antonio outloved her in rivalry for Bassanio. The tale Bassanio is to tell models for Portia how she should love Bassanio, and, by extension, how she should, in his death, love Antonio. However, Portia already

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understands how to love Antonio, having participated in the Ecce homo effect of his sacrifice not only by seeing the letter, troped as Antonios ripped and bleeding body, but also by watching Bassanios response as he reads the letter. Before the trial, she comes to the judgment of whether Bassanio once had a love, and her decision to rescue that love is not so much intended to release Bassanio from that love (as Tovey [22829] suggests) but to enjoy it herself. Portia has judged Antonio as a semblance of [her] soul by his very likeness to Bassanio, and she sees herself as getting two bodies for the price of one soul. Antonio having been exonerated, the plays post-trial action dramatizes Antonio and Portias negotiations of their positions in the triangle. In urging Bassanio to give Portias ring to Balthasar, Antonio directly pits the norms of friendship and marriage against each other: My lord Bassanio, let him have the ring. / Let his deservings and my love withal / Be valued gainst your wifes commandement (4.1.44648). There is nothing overtly sexual in the request that Bassanio value Antonios love over Portias; the same may be said of Bassanios acquiescence to Antonio. When Bassanio offers the three thousand ducats to the learned judge for saving Antonio, Antonio adds an affective dimension to their joint cash offer, saying that they stand indebted over and above / In love and service to you evermore (4.1.41011). Lars Engle finds the statement to be precious testimony that the balance of erotic credit is now hers [Portias] (36). Despite the rejection of both money and love, the ring that Balthasar demands offers access to both. Where the erotic nature of the triangle becomes explicitly evident post-trial is in Portias re-inscribing the three points in the triangle. The ring, previously endowed as a representation of Portias material and matrimonial value, in act 5 becomes explicitly a key to sexual access. Once the ring is slipped from Bassanios finger, Portia activates its erotic signification to imply that Bassanio has committed adultery with the rings new possessor while at the same time allowing the new possessor sexual access to Portia. Positioning Bassanio so that he has to admit that he gave his love token to a man, Portia activates the terms of friendship against those of matrimony. It is not so much the to whom Bassanio gave the ring but the for whom he gave it that concerns Portia (5.1.193, 194), but by making an issue out of the former, she can establish her position in the triangle without confronting or accusing Antonio directly. As Balthasar, Portia bumps Antonio out of the triangle, or, rather, assumes his role as the second male apex in the triangle. Portia manoeuvres Bassanio into foreclosing the possibility of his own homoerotic interest in Balthasar, yet she is free to direct her own sexual desire towards the position originally occupied by Antonio:
Ill not deny him anything I have, No, not my body nor my husbands bed. Know him I shall, I am well sure of it. (5.1.22729)

Portia signals two things here: that the third point in their triangulated relationship is a potential sexual partner, and that her interest in that third point can also be an erotic one. In fact, right after the trial, Portia requests a gift from Antonio, a gift with suggestively erotic meaning attached: his gloves. Cressy provides evidence of gloves given as tokens promising marriage (26364), which suggests an affiancing quality to Antonios handwear as gifts. Peter Stallybrass and Ann Rosalind Jones write about

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the Renaissance glove as a fetish, remarking that gloves materialized the power of people to be condensed and absorbed into things and of things to become persons (176). As gifts, gloves had a particular aptness for retaining a part of the giver. Stallybrass and Jones find an early modern etymological link between gloves and gifts: In his Guide to the Tongues (1617), John Minsheu derives glove from gift-love and from the Low Dutch gheloove, meaning faithfulness (178). The Oxford English Dictionary derives glove from Old Norse and Gothic for hand, but Minsheus Latinization of glove as donum amoris clearly points to a Renaissance understanding of the love in glove as amorous and not merely manual (OED glove n.; Minsheu sig. S6v). Whereas the Renaissance glove materializ[es] a womans body, male lovers repeatedly imagine themselves as the hollow forms (necklaces, shoes, shifts, gloves) into which the female beloved enters (Stallybrass and Jones 187, 188). Critics who trace the sexual implications of ring-giving in the play fail to remark upon this quick but suggestive gift-giving, in which Antonio reciprocates his second skin to thank for Portia saving his first. The gloves status as fetish, its passage between potential rivals, and the receivers transgendered identity all invite a psychoanalytic inquiry that this paper does not pursue. Psychoanalytic theory is, however, as important to Gayle Rubins argument in her seminal Traffic in Women essay as is structural anthropology, and the knowledge of the former field she brings to bear on the practices studied by the latter, including gift-giving. Explicating Lacan in terms of exchange, Rubin writes,
The phallus is, as it were, a distinctive feature differentiating castrated and noncastrated. The presence of absence of the phallus carries the differences between two sexual statuses, man and woman . . . . Since these are not equal, the phallus also carries a meaning of the dominance of men over women, and it may be inferred that penis envy is a recognition thereof. Moreover, as long as men have rights in women which women do not have in themselves, the phallus also carries the meaning of the difference between exchanger and exchanged, gift and giver. (191)

In taking Antonios gloves, Portia makes a symbolic assertion of her status as one who gives and receives gifts. This is not the moment of her claiming the phallus, nor must we insist that only as Balthasar can she claim a status as exchanger. Rather, this gesture is simultaneously one of wielding the phallus that confers exchanger status and discretely eroticizing a gift from her partner in exchange. She is not castrating Antonio but proving that she is non-castrated. Antonios glove, given as a gift, affirms phallic privilege that Portias outward garb and courtroom mastery would indicate is hers. But really, Portias exchanger status is based on her affectively and erotically substantiated desires, and her enactment of those desires. Portias outright sexualizing of her congress with Balthasar highlights by contrast the latent desire between Antonio and Bassanio. Antonio comes to recognize his role in the discord he is witnessing I am thunhappy subject of these quarrels (5.1.238) at a point when the battleground is most thoroughly sexualized territory. In an attempt to win back Portias honour (l. 232), Bassanio protests, by my soul I swear / I never more will break oath with thee (ll. 24748). Whither Bassanios soul, so Antonios, and the merchant makes a more sincere proffer of his soul to Portia than does his friend: I dare be bound again, / My soul upon the forfeit, that your lord / Will never more break faith advisedly (5.1.25153). The faith that Bassanio has broken is not within the sexual strictures of normative marriage, and

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Portia knows this. It is Portia who threatens sexual infidelity. But by giving away the ring at Antonios request, Bassanio has placed the affective claims of friendship above the materially and sexually possessive claims of marriage. He has valued Antonios soul above Portias and above his marriage bed. Antonio establishes parity between those competing norms by offering Portia that part of him that Bassanio most values his soul. In doing so, he assures the sanctity of the marriage bed. Portias plot to establish her sexual claim to Bassanio, and her insistence on framing the debate as a sexual one, demonstrates a truism of the Renaissance friendship norm against which she competes it easily slides into the sexual. As Alan Bray reminds us, the distinction between friend and sodomite was neither as sharp nor as clearly marked as the Elizabethans would have us believe (47). But to read Antonio and Portias relationship as a mere sexual rivalry ignores the ways they incorporate each other into their claims to Bassanios love. Antonio concedes the core of his relationship with Bassanio to Portia by binding his soul to her; Portia, in turn, returns her ring to Bassanio through Antonio, telling him, Give him this, / And bid him keep it better than the other (ll. 25455). The rings passage from Portia to Antonio to Bassanio sanctifies a triangulated bond among the three. On one level, the exchange works like a re-marriage of Portia and Bassanio, since their marriage has yet to be consummated, and Portia touts her honour as offering some freedom from Bassanio (l. 232). On another, given the rings sexual symbolism, the erotics of Antonios physical conveyance of the ring to his friend cannot be missed. Joan Landis reminds us of the anal erotic symbolism of a ring, which is Latinized as anus or annulus. She points out that the ring puns on both male and female body parts (15). Such polyvalence lends erotic suggestion to Portias offering the ring to Antonio and his conveyance of the token to Bassanio. Portias handing the ring to Antonio, rather than Bassanio, indicates her intentions to include Antonio as a necessary component of her matrimony, of her desire, and Bassanios desire. It is perhaps, only appropriate that the man who has given Portia his gloves should receive her ring. Recognition, Perpetuity and Legitimacy In the realm of legal fantasy, the passage of the ring from Portia to Antonio to Bassanio inaugurates, in effect, a three-person marriage, one in which the third party has an essential role in maintaining the stability of the relationship. As Warner argues, marriage is not necessarily a two-person affair:
It is always tempting to believe that marrying is simply something that two people do. Marriage, however, is never a private contract between two persons. It always involves the recognition of a third party and not just a voluntary or neutral recognition, but an enforceable recognition. We speak of entitlements when the third party is the state and of status when the third party is others. (117, emphasis in original)

There is something about the enforceable recognition offered by the state as conjugal third party that makes its role in marriage a matter of justice, not of love, and The Merchant of Venice shows how undesirable justice can be. Even in offering entitlements, through its imposition of enforceable recognition the state does coldly furnish forth the marriage tables. Antonio, on the other hand, helps us to imagine an affective alternative to the state, a third term whose presence is predicated on socially

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generated desire rather than enforced recognition. But as his own soul is at stake in the marriage, his interests are more vested. His contribution to the marriage is affective, to say the least, although Portia has made amply apparent Antonios queerly erotic appeal to both her and Bassanio. But my argument need not hinge on the speculation of a menage a trois in the Belmont bed. ` Among other reasons that people might marry, Warner writes, They might simply not trust the relationship to last without third-party assurances (106). For the normative couples to which Warner refers, that third party is the state. So, we see, that the always implicit third party in a marriage bestows entitlements and assures marital perpetuity. Antonios stated goal is securing just such a trust, assuming a role that the state has already failed in insofar as it could not keep the ring on the correct finger the first time around. Antonios embodiment of both the vigilant witness and the assurance of marital fidelity gives a soul to the third party that mediates marriage. If Antonio offers entitlements for anyone in this arrangement, it is for the (male) children of Portia and Bassanio (or even, given the arrangements, of Portia and Antonio himself). Antonio ensures the legitimacy of the children produced in this marriage. By directing his friends desires to Portia, Antonio assumes responsibility for the perpetuity of not just the marriage but of a kinship network. As Marc Shell explains in his study of kinship and incest in Measure for Measure, [i]llegitimacy leads to uncertainties about paternity, adding that if illegitimacy becomes widespread, then any man and woman risk incest when they satisfy natural desire by sexual intercourse (37). If the incest taboo operates as a foundation of Venetian kinship as it does, according to Shell, in Viennese kinship, then Antonio plays an important role in the perpetuity of kinship in Venice. Indeed, the control of incestuous affiliation was a significant early modern concern. Cressy writes, Reading the records of Episcopal administration one might think that the table of degrees of kindred and affinity was almost as important to some bishops as the table of the ten commandments (313). This concern among the early modern English means that prohibitions against marriage with ones kin depended to some extent on the laypeoples ability to self-police by knowing their paternity. Marriage and adultery were two anxious moments of relations that threatened the exogamous purity of kinship formations. To protect against adultery, Antonio binds his soul not only to the norms of marital heterosexual relations but also to the norms of kinship, even as he is affiliated with the couple through an alliance that slides between the affective and the erotic with both members. The Triangulating Soul I have argued that Merchants triangular pattern of relationships queers the structurally essentialized roles on which traditional, marriage-based kinship is grounded. The question of homoeroticism between Antonio and Bassanio underlies the queering of marital kinship structures, but it is more than homoeroticism in The Merchant of Venice that allows us to imagine a queer kinship characterized by socially generated affective and erotic desires. The central love triangle is premised on modes of relationality unmoored from the naturalized sexual identities that are the basis of the logic of non-contradictory desires and of traditional, marriage-based kinship. From a relationship that resists coupling emerges a queer form of kinship,

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one that encompasses the heterosexual reproductive mechanism of traditional kinship, but without prioritizing such reproduction and isolating it from the socially circulating, multiply mediated desires that sustain it. Indeed, queer kinship can integrate traditionally exclusive modes of relationship, such as state-sanctioned marriage and same-sex friendship, or opposite-sex friendship and same-sex marriage. Most importantly, queer kinship is positioned to be more honest about the elementary marital structure that masks the third party subtending it with the fiction of coupling. Premising affiliation on affect and desire, particularly as it is socially constituted, does not free those affects and desires from the power relations that structure them. Desire is never innocent, but neither is it, nor should it be, proscribed within the bounds of kinship rules as determined by the states reproductive demands. Furthermore, the states demands ought not to be countenanced as natural laws of kinship so that social practice is premised on sexual reproduction. By interrogating the fundamental unit of exclusion the marital dyad queer theorys critique of state exclusions necessarily addresses those of kinship as well. The dyadic relations that such a structure naturalizes efface the multiple mediations of coupling and masks in particular the states interests in couples and coupling. The marital dyad represents exclusion reified. A necessary step in challenging the structural exclusions of both state and kinship is to interrogate this fundamental unit of exclusion. The Merchant of Venice, with its insistence on the necessary mediation in any seemingly dyadic relationship, allows us to imagine modes of relations that openly recognize and include the mediators who sustain those relations. The dyadbreaking third term, as I have been trying to show, is not fixed it is neither a fixed position, a fixed role nor, even, a fixed number. Hence, Antonio is not alone in triangulating Portias and Bassanios desires, or their marriage. But he provides an allegorical figure of inclusion, the soul of human relations, including marriage. This is Antonios claim. Acknowledgements
For their engaging reception of this essay, I want to thank my anonymous readers at Shakespeare and the audience and participants of the Shakespeares Love Triangles symposium, hosted by the University of Alabamas Hudson Strode Program in Renaissance Studies. A fellowship from the Strode Program supported my work on this essay. I am grateful to Celia Daileader for her spirited response to the initial draft, and to Sharon ODair for her generously challenging and thoughtful readings of subsequent drafts.

Notes
1. Steve Patterson, for instance, says that Antonio ends up a minor player (26), a needy and troubling friend (30). Michael Zuckert writes that Bassanio gives up Antonio (31), while Keith Geary writes that in the resolution, there is no room for Antonio and that [i]n returning the ring Antonio acknowledges that he is excluded from that happiness . . . and that Portia has defeated him and displaced him in Bassanios heart (37). 2. Posited by Claude Levi-Strauss as foundational to kinship structures, the trafc in women became a great concern to feminists and literary critics alike through the work of Gayle Rubin. Criticism of The Merchant of Venice appeals to the sweeping explanatory power of the paradigm notably in inuential essays by Jyotsna Singh and Karen Newman. Although Newman ultimately concludes that Merchant interrogates the Elizabethan sex/ gender system and resists the trafc in women , she makes considerable concessions to the concept, reading Bassanios bestowal of the ring on Balthasar as afrming a

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homosocial bond in which the exchange of women, here represented by Portias ring, sustains relations between men (33, 31). She also notes, The exchange of Portia from her father via the caskets to Bassanio is the ur-exchange upon which the main bond plot is based, and when Bassanio solves the casket riddle, Portia objecties herself and thereby suppresses her own agency in bestowing herself on Bassanio (21, 25). Singh similarly argues that the casket test exemplies the concept, with Portia as the woman exchanged: Most notably, Portia herself is the gift being offered by her dead father within the terms of a patriarchal sex/gender system. She is being transacted within a marriage system, which is represented as a mythical and heroic quest, but which is implicitly exclusionary and coercive one in which only men are the exchange partners (Rubin 1975: 1735) (149, emphasis in original). Singhs blanket citation of three pages from Rubin demonstrates a critical fealty to the trafc in women. But the trafc in women, invoked more through Rubins name than her writing, does not so readily govern the Belmont society. That the patriarch in this patriarchal system is dead ought to give us pause. 3. For a reading of Portias agentive position in her own marriage arrangement, see Shannon (Likenings 16). 4. Alan Sineld pointedly characterizes Antonio and Portia as rivals in the subsection Antonio vs Portia in his chapter How to Read The Merchant of Venice without Being Heterosexist in Shakespeare, Authority, Sexuality: Unnished Business in Cultural Materialism (54). For criticism acknowledging a rivalry between Antonio and Portia, see Michael Zuckert, Jiji Vera, Murray Biggs, Barbara Tovey and Bernard J. Paris. Pariss account of the rivalry has an unusually happy resolution, but even Paris labels Portia and Antonio as blocking forces to each others desires. Triangulation, however, redirects desire, even abets its deployment and mobility, rather than blocking it. 5. In a contemporary queer study of the polymorphous nature of queer malefemale relationships, Jennifer Doyle looks at three literary and lmic mixed gender pairs to analyze [t]he effect of these oppositions [between eros and phila] in our thinking and to interrogate queer friendships between men and women as a form of attachment that can disturb . . . the opposition of desire and friendship (325). One pair, the poet Diana Di Prima and dancer Fredie Herko, whose relationship is recorded in part in Di Primas poetry, share a male lover (330) and stage . . . a wedding (330). Doyle describes the eroticism that animates Di Primas poetry as an excitement at their being not quite a couple (331).

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