ABSTRACT
The cascade of revelations at the close of The Merchant of Venice achieves the effect of a cinematic close-up, calling attention, one last time before morning dawns in Belmont, to the unsettled semantic range and ideological mooring of gifts and gift exchange in the play-world at large. Three gifts appear, brought forth from as many origins: happy coincidence; civil law; and providential care. However one judges the worth, and the cost, of these gifts, there is more than meets the eye in the ensemble. There is an absence: the Gobbo family, Old Gobbo and his son, Launcelot. The Gobbos belong to the periphery of the play’s social world, and their lives dissolves into white noise when pitched against the dominant key of the pre-marital banter in the final act. Yet their absence discloses something that anthropologically driven notions of the logic of the gift, which have dominated the subject of gift exchange in Merchant criticism, fail to see.
