Bibliographic record
Abstract
The article considers the ambiguous characterizations of The Merchant of Venice in light of Protestant and Catholic interpretations of the Eucharist, and raises implications for masculine gender construction in the opposition between Jewish and Christian cultural and theological perspectives. The argument focuses on the character of Antonio, whose masochistic self-sacrifice distorts Paul’s theology of grace. The homoerotic element in Antonio’s drive toward self-sacrifice is crucial in the play’s disruption of orthodox theological positions, and the waning tradition of homoerotic amity evoked by the playwright is related to the connection between amity and Eucharistic theory suggested in the Catholic Thomas Wright’s commentaries on the Sacrament, contemporaneous with the play. Shylock’s independent masculinity, not his effeminacy, ultimately operates as the real source of anxiety for the play’s Christian men, and the narrowing of Christian atonement to the romantic self-interest and masochism of the repressed Antonio contributes to The Merchant’s key suggestion that masculine identity remains dependent on the necessary and rigorous self-discipline imposed by the “law”—theological, moral, and sexual. The play thus implicitly addresses challenges posed by a theology of grace to the process of masculine self-fashioning in the social context of the Reformation. Cet article examine du Merchant of Venice du point de vue des interprétations protestantes et catholiques de l’Eucharistie, et soulève des questions au niveau de la construction du genre masculin dans l’opposition des perspectives culturelles et théologiques juives et chrétiennes. La discussion se penche en particulier sur le cas du personnage d’Antonio, dont l’auto-sacrifice masochiste offre une image déformée de la théologie de la grâce de saint Paul. L’élément homo-érotique de l’attirance d’Antonio pour ce sacrifice est central dans la rupture avec l’orthodoxie théologique de la pièce. On observe par ailleurs un lien entre la tradition déclinante de l’amitié homo-érotique évoquée par l’auteur de la pièce et le rapport proposé à la même époque entre l’amitié et la théorie eucharistique par le catholique Thomas Wright dans ses commentaires des sacrements. La masculinité indépendante de Shylock, et non son caractère efféminé, devient éventuellement la principale source d’angoisse chez les hommes chrétiens de la pièce. La réduction de l’expiation chrétienne à l’intérêt romantique pour lui-même et le masochisme qu’éprouve un Antonio renfermé contribue à ce que le message du Merchant est sans doute que l’identité masculine demeure dépendante d’une auto-discipline nécessaire et rigoureuse imposée par la « loi », théologique, morale et sexuelle. La pièce traite donc indirectement des défis que pose la théologie de la grâce au processus de l’identification masculine dans le contexte social de la Réforme.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".