LOVE AND FRIENDSHIP IN THE MERCHANT OF VENICE: SHAKESPEARE, ARISTOTLE AND AQUINAS Author:David N. Beauregard Date:Mar. 22, 2019 From:Renascence: Essays on Values in Literature(Vol. 71, Issue 2.) Publisher:Marquette University Press Document Type:Critical essay Length:4,708 words Content Level:(Level 5) Lexile Measure:1380L Full Text: SHAKESPEARE'S comedies and tragedies present a range of passions and emotions involving love, a point that is certainly all too obvious. Confusion and misapprehension in A Midsummer Night's Dream, rejection in Twelfth Night, impulsive rash haste in Romeo and Juliet, suspicion and jealousy in Othello, and friendship among many other concerns in As You Like It. To sort all this out with precision is perhaps impossible in the comedies, but less so in the tragedies. One comedy, however, seems amenable to analysis, and that is The Merchant of Venice. Here I will argue that the play presents a complex Aristotelian-Thomistic representation of the nature of love both as passion and as friendship. In the interests of a precise and concentrated focus, I want to bracket the two issues of homosexuality and Shakespeare's alleged anti-Semitism, mainly because they have overwhelmed interpretation of the play. (1) In Classical, Medieval, and Renaissance antiquity, there is a long tradition dealing with the passion of love between the sexes, stretching from Ovid to the Troubadours, Francesco Petrarch, and beyond. (2) Following in the footsteps of Petrarch, Thomas Wyatt and Philip Sidney in the sixteenth century express a Stoic disdain for the snare of erotic love, or more precisely the phenomenon of erotic delusion and infatuation. Shakespeare is somewhat more favorably disposed toward the passion, provided it leads to marriage. As I have said above, confused imagination and comic misperception amuse us in A Midsummer Night's Dream, and the whims of rejection in love complicate relations between the sexes in Twelfth Night, only to culminate in the sanity of marriage. In the somewhat cynical words of Ambrose Bierce, "the temporary insanity of love is curable by marriage." In Shakespeare's more benign treatment, an interchange between the Duke and Viola begins by calling attention to the impermanence of beauty: Duke: For women are as roses, whose fair flower, Being once displayed, doth fall that very hour.
Viola: And so they are; alas, that they are so. To die, even when they to perfection grow. (2.4.38-41 in Spevack) But if women's beauty inevitably fades, for Shakespeare its fleeting nature benevolently functions as a prelude to the deeper relationship of friendship in marriage. And so, after the Duke leaves off his illusory passion for Olivia, he comes to his senses and marries Viola. But a second tradition of love as friendship is apparent in The Merchant of Venice. The classical and medieval tradition of friendship is extensive and includes such figures as Aristotle, Cicero, Seneca, Augustine, and many others. (3) But here I want to concentrate on the Aristotelian tradition, which provides the most accurate and
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