Three Preliminary Approaches
These three critical approaches referred to in
Part 1 are not out of character with
what goes on inside the play and the hints that are given as how to understand
the meaning of the themes and images.
While the two driving plot elements are the (1) financial agreement
between Antonio and Shylock, with the money borrowed from the Jew by Antonio
needed to help his friend Bassanio win the hand of Portia in marriage, and all
the consequences of Antonio’s commercial losses at sea which force him into a
seemingly untenable situation where he must fullfil his bond by a pound of
flesh—and how this forfeit is handled in a Venetian court of law; and (2) the
conspiracy by Lorenzo and his Christian friends to remove Jessica, Shylock’s
daughter, from his home, with stolen riches, to have her become a Christian and
marry Lorenzo, the young people all rejoicing in the downfall of the wicked
Jew, and especially his own daughter to deny her race, betray her father, and
insult the memory of her mother. While
these two plots fill out most of the comic scenes in The Merchant of Venice,
there is one other element that is interwoven with them, and gives us that
clue—or justification—for the three approaches we have suggested. This is the motif of the Three Caskets.
Three Caskets
In his will, Portia’s father stipulated that
she could only be married according to a contest he details. All suitors must come to the country house in
Belmont and make a choice of three chests: one of gold, one of silver, and one
of lead. These suitors have to read the
inscription on each casket or ark and then choose one to open. One of the chests contains a portrait of
Portia and the man who chooses that casket wins the right to marry her and
inherit all her wealth and titles. If,
however, a suitor chooses one of the other caskets, he does not merely lose the
contest to have Portia as his bride, he also must leave the area immediately
and vow never to marry any woman. This
is far more than a lottery to win a bride.
It is a test of character, losers falling into disgrace and forfeiting
their right to marriage and reproduction.
As Portia’s father set out the rules, the winner is more than lucky: he
is a man who deserves his daughter—and the honor that comes with being her
husband, whatever his previous wealth and titles beforehand.
The context is in many ways unreasonable. It turns a young woman into a commodity, a
prize to be won, a trophy wife. It
denies to her the right to have any say in the choice of a husband, and so goes
beyond the usual patriarchal privileges usually granted to fathers—and often
mothers as well, along with brothers, cousins and other relatives—by putting
Portia under the dead hand of a last will and testament, against which she
cannot appeal. Any notion under church
or state law that matrimony is an institution to be entered into with voluntary
consent is lost here. For all that
Portia’s father may have genuine concern and love for his daughter and wish to
protect her from rogues, scoundrels, lechers, and fortune-hunters, as she herself
feels, the conditions go beyond reason or commonsense. Because she feels that way, and because
Portia is a clever and resourceful young woman, she does not merely resign
herself to her fate. She manipulates the
system. When suitors come to her from
all parts of the world and she finds almost everyone unacceptable to her
tastes, she hardly hides her contempt and not very subtly prods them towards
making the wrong choice. She plays on
their vanities and egos. Except in the
case of Bassanio: when he comes she guides him towards the correct choice.
Among other hints she gives is a song to encourage Bassanio that begins with a
run of three lines each with a rhyme to the word “lead”.
Tell me where is fancy bred,
Or in the heart, or in the head?
How begot, how nourished?
Reply, reply.
(II.2. 62-66)
In so doing, Portia goes against the spirit of
the regulations written down by her father; she wriggles between the lines of
his intentions. Meanwhile, of course, as
he will later admit to Portia, Bassanio has entered the context under false pretensions. He has pretended that he is a rich suitor and
is interested in her only out of love.
In reality, however, Bassanio has had to beg money from his friend
Antonio for this venture—and he also admits that this was not the first time;
at least to begin with, he is as much interested in Portia’s wealth and estate
as he is in her person (that is, her physical appearance and body) and her
mind, perhaps the last aspect of her last of all.
Now in this contest of choosing the correct
chest in which the portrait of Portia is locked, each suitor must decide
whether to open the gold, the silver or the lead casket. Usually, vanity and ego leads the foolish
suitors to pick either the gold or the silver chest because these precious
metals are on the surface the most beautiful: they can be seen to reflect the
beauty of Portia herself or the self-inflated esteem of the suitors
themselves. Either way, the choice is
wrong, since the virtue that the father was looking to fix in the man his
daughter should marry is humility, modesty, and—given the need to puzzle out
this riddle—thoughtfulness.
Extrapolating the principle of this context to
our reading of the whole play, perhaps we have to caution ourselves not to jump
to conclusions, certainly not those conclusions that seem most obvious on the
surface of The Merchant of Venice.
In fact, nothing really is as it seems at first, and almost no one tells
the truth about him or herself. The
three approaches we have suggested, based on the Three Caskets and the comments
made in and around the scenes in which the contest appears, are: (a) reading
the text very closely and imagining how the characters display themselves,
speak and act on the stage, using an awareness of contemporary Elizabethan
stage, intellectual and social conventions as a guide; (b) re-contextualizing
the play as more concerned with Venice and European themes than specifically
local English ideas and situations, and seeing that the comedy not only works
on the fiction that the English spoken on the stage is supposed to be Italian
but also manipulates the sounds and meanings of Italian words; and (c) making
another readjustment to consider The Merchant of Venice as a comedy that
knows, understands, and sympathizes with the Jewish characters, their
rabbinical and kabbalistic ideas, and thus plays with words and concepts as
though they derived from Hebrew. It has
been pointed out by critics that “The Merchant of Venice contains more
biblical allusions than any other play by Shakespeare.”[1] Therefore, as Steven Marx argues, almost
everyone and everything in this comedy resonates and reshapes the meaning of
events, persons and ideas from both the Old and the New Testaments, mostly as
they pertain to Jewish history.
This is not to toss out completely the conventional ways of approaching the
play. But there are aspects, as we have
already hinted, that show the comedy actually to be subtly different. It is not just that some of the key phrases
and speeches have a resonance in rabbinical literature or that some words even
can be punned into Hebrew and Yiddish, as Florence Amit has suggested in her
series of studies on the Jewishness of the play, but that rather than being an
anti-Semitic comedy it is a play about prejudice that lead towards acts of
violence, uncontrolled passions that drive individuals into self-destructive actions,
and confusions in love that undermine rational thoughts and even common
sense. These ironic reversals and
undercutting of expectations constitute the main comedy in Shakespeare’s
play.
[1] Steven
Marx, « ‘Dangerous Conceits’ and « Proofs of Holy Writ’: Allusion in The
Merchant of Venice and Paul’s Letter to the Romans », Chapter 6
of Shakespeare and the Bible (Oxford University Press, 2000) online at
http://cla.calpoly.edu:16080/~smarx/Shakespeare/ ShBible/ dangerous.
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