Merchant of Venice and Timon of Athens are both read, in this chapter, as questioning the place of friendship in political societies and states. Classically, friendship, or friendly relations at least, between citizens has been understood as a condition of political stability; but in the early modern era an idea of friendship as a transcendent tie, indifferent to politics, and in tension with it was developing. Republican thought also questions the relationship between friendship and commerce, with some critics seeing these as antithetical, others seeing them as bound up together. Both of these plays problematize the dilemmas of exchange, of contract, of bonds in the sense of agreement and promise, in relation both to intimate ties, and to the authority of sovereign institutions. Merchant of Venice considers these matters in particular in relation to a society fissured by religious antagonism—by anti-semitism; both plays consider them in relation to a society marked by clear sex and gender distinction and exclusion.
‘Nature’s fragile vessel’
