Our final Antonio, even if it is very much no longer August (Antonio Augtober?) It’s Antonio of The Merchant of Venice, one of the famous Antonios who solidify the association of this name with sad, queer-coded older men.
‘In sooth I know not why I am so sad’
Antonio begins the play with a question that, under any dramatic structure we’re used to now, would then become the guiding question of the play. Why is Antonio sad, and what can be done to relieve his melancholy? His friends provide several suggestions, all rejected, in this first scene. Worried about his merchant ships? No. In love? Ha, no. Too many worldly cares? No. Maybe, he suggests, he is just meant to be sad.
Later, another answer is proffered: Antonio’s friend Bassanio. “I think he [Antonio] only loves the world for him [Bassanio],” (2.8.52) says another friend. About a third of the plot is propelled by Antonio’s unwavering devotion for Bassanio—first in his willingness to lend him money, even if it means going through his old enemy Shylock, and then to bear all the consequences for the default of the loan, which for a while seems to mean giving up his life as Shylock takes their ‘joking’ bond of a pound of flesh more literally than Antonio expected.
It all comes around to sadness again: “These griefs and losses have so bated me / That I shall hardly spare a pound of flesh / Tomorrow to my bloody creditor.— / […] Pray God Bassanio come / To see me pay his debt, and then I care not” (3.3.35-9).
‘Which is the merchant and which the Jew?’
Antonio and Shylock’s trial, which takes up the entirety of Act 4, seems at first like a race against the clock: will Bassanio make it to Antonio’s side in time to offer the money to redeem the bond? But he does, and it turns out that that isn’t enough. Antonio’s years of abuse of Shylock have turned back on him, and Shylock demands the letter of the law. As he was before the trial, Antonio is oddly resigned to this fate: “I am a tainted wether of the flock, / Meetest for death. The weakest kind of fruit / Drops earliest to the ground, and so let me. / You cannot better be employed, Bassanio, / Than to live still and write mine epitaph” (4.1.116-20). The point, once again, is Bassanio’s life and happiness. For Antonio to ever be happy is, perhaps, impossible—except in death, with the knowledge that Bassanio has witnessed his death and lives to memorialize him forever.
Antonio seems to understand himself as fundamentally unintegratable into proper Venetian society. The language of weakness, of tainting, points again to the nameless source of his aimless melancholy— a love that dare not speak its name, in some interpretations, as discussed last time. He urges Bassanio to tell his new wife Portia about him: “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” (4.1.287-9). While this kind of language is often that of straightforward friendship in this period, the single-mindedness and intensity of Antonio’s passion, his complete disregard for anything or anyone else, and of course, his unnameable sense of wrongness and sadness, give the relationship a different tone than usual. Bassanio even directly compares the love he has for his wife with the love he has for Antonio: “Antonio, I am married to a wife / Which is as dear to me as life itself, / But life itself, my wife, and all the world / Are not with me esteemed above thy life. / I would lose all, ay, sacrifice them all / Here to this devil, to deliver you”" (4.1.294-9).
But Antonio is denied the satisfaction of living forever as Bassanio’s cherished memory, and Bassanio doesn’t even have to sacrifice his wife to do it. Antonio is brought home with Bassanio to Belmont, to… silently, awkwardly watch the reunion of the play’s heterosexual couples. After the horror of the trial scene, the play bizarrely gives way to tricks and misunderstandings involving some rings. Antonio is present but silent for a very long time before he finally steps in— naturally, to plead on Bassanio’s behalf. He once more stakes his “soul upon the forfeit” (5.1.271) that Bassanio has been and will be faithful to Portia, an echo of his earlier financial stake to help Bassanio win her in the first place. Twice over, he enables their relationship— and twice, in the aftermath, is left alone. He is narratively rewarded with the news that his merchant ships, thought lost, in fact have all come home and he’s a wealthy man again— but after sharing this news, the play quickly ends, and he has no more to say. The couples leave with bawdy jokes about how they’ll pass the night. But what of Antonio?