SOURCE: Landis, Joan Hutton. “‘By two-headed Janus’: Double Discourse in The Merchant of Venice.” The Upstart Crow 16 (1996): 13-30.

In the following essay, Hutton studies the homosexual bawdy in The Merchant of Venice.

The very Janus of poets; he wears almost everywhere two faces; and you have scarce begun to admire one, ere you despise the other. 

John Dryden

To begin behind the arras of decorum, my focus here will be the bawdy connotations that abound in The Merchant of Venice and, in particular, the nether regions of the male anatomy.

First, I want to look at the pioneering, if passé, Eric Partridge. Of course I risk appearing as another Polonius, setting “springes to catch woodcocks,” for although Partridge wrote bravely enough in that Victorian year of 1948, he now sounds to our sophisticated and liberal ears peculiarly akin to Chanticleer, Chanticleer “moralisé,” at that. For example, in a section...