Key Quote
“"In sooth, I know not why I am so sad"”
Antonio · Act 1, Scene 1
Focus: “sad”
Antonio's opening line establishes the play's tone of unexplained melancholy — a sadness without identifiable cause that pervades the Christian merchant's world.
Technique 1 — IN MEDIAS RES / NEGATIVE EPISTEMIC
The play opens in medias res (in the middle of things): Antonio is already sad, and neither he nor the audience knows why. The negative epistemic (statement about not-knowing) — 'I know not' — creates immediate mystery. Shakespeare denies both the character and the audience the comfort of explanation, establishing a world where emotions exceed their causes and melancholy operates without rational justification.
The archaic 'In sooth' (in truth) creates a paradox: Antonio promises truth ('sooth') but delivers ignorance ('I know not'). He is truthful about his inability to understand himself — an honest confession of self-opacity (being unable to see into one's own nature). Shakespeare suggests that humans are mysteries even to themselves.
Key Words
RAD — STAGNATE
Antonio stagnates throughout the play: his sadness at the beginning remains unresolved at the end. Even after his rescue from Shylock's bond, he remains isolated — the comedy's marriages do not include him. His stagnation is emotional: surrounded by lovers, he remains alone. Shakespeare embeds a melancholy outsider at the heart of what should be a comic celebration.
Key Words
Technique 2 — OPENING LINE AS THEMATIC KEY
Like many Shakespeare plays, the opening line functions as a thematic key to the entire work. Antonio's sadness without cause establishes the play's central preoccupation: the gap between surface and depth. Venice APPEARS joyful and prosperous but is underlaid with sadness, cruelty, and injustice. Antonio's inexplicable melancholy is the emotional expression of this deeper truth — something is fundamentally wrong in Venice, even if no one can name it.
The word 'so' in 'so sad' is a qualifier that intensifies the unexplained nature of the emotion: not just sad but SO sad — excessively, disproportionately melancholy. This excess of feeling beyond explanation anticipates the play's moral excesses: excessive cruelty to Shylock, excessive generosity in friendship, excessive risk in the bond.
Key Words
Context (AO3)
ELIZABETHAN MELANCHOLY
Melancholy was considered a fashionable and even desirable condition among Elizabethan intellectuals — associated with genius, depth, and sensitivity. Robert Burton's *Anatomy of Melancholy* (1621) catalogued its many forms. Antonio's melancholy marks him as sensitive but also potentially self-indulgent.
MERCANTILE ANXIETY
As a merchant, Antonio's wealth is literally at sea — subject to storms, pirates, and chance. His sadness may reflect the existential anxiety (deep unease about fundamental conditions of life) of a man whose fortune depends on forces beyond his control.
Key Words
WOW — THE UNCANNY & REPRESSION (Freud)
Freud's concept of the uncanny (*das Unheimliche*) — the strange feeling that arises when something familiar becomes disturbing — illuminates Antonio's inexplicable sadness. Freud argued that the uncanny emerges from repression (the unconscious suppression of unacceptable desires or truths). Antonio's sadness 'without cause' may have a cause he cannot or will not acknowledge: many scholars read Antonio's feelings for Bassanio as homoerotic — a love that Elizabethan society could not openly express. If so, his melancholy is not causeless but repressed — pushed below consciousness because it cannot be safely acknowledged. The play's opening word, 'sooth' (truth), thus becomes deeply ironic: Antonio's truth is the very thing he cannot speak.
Key Words