SOURCE: Zuckert, Michael. “The New Medea: On Portia's Comic Triumph in The Merchant of Venice.” In Shakespeare's Political Pageant: Essays in Literature and Politics, edited by Joseph Alulis and Vickie Sullivan, pp. 3-36. London: Rowman & Littlefield, 1996.

[In the following essay, Zuckert views The Merchant of Venice as a highly unified work that depicts Antonio and Portia as rivals for the love of Bassanio, a competition in which Portia is victorious.]

Partly because of its clever plot, striking characterizations, and moments of beautiful poetry, The Merchant of Venice has remained one of Shakespeare's best known, most often performed, and most discussed plays. It is also one of his most troubling plays. It is troubling in form because it presents a series of actions that are difficult to integrate into a coherent and unified whole.¹ It is troubling in substance because it presents a Christian society in the ugliness of its anti-Semitism, and while Shakespeare clearly has a broader view than his Venetians, his presentation of the Jew nonetheless appears to draw from the same unsavory and stereotypical prejudices that move the Christian Venetians. Moreover, among the comic resolutions of the play, the “setting to rights” of all the disruptions that have impelled the play's action, are the forced conversion of Shylock to Christianity, and the desertion by Shylock's daughter, Jessica, of both her father and her ancestral religion. Hers is a voluntary conversion to be sure, but it seems to carry the same point as Shylock's coerced conversion: Jews and Judaism are not worth the respect of Christian men and women.²

The focus on Shylock is not merely a product of our post-holocaust sensibilities, but seems to have been part of the reception of the play from the outset.³ Perhaps it is the lure of the exotic, or perhaps it is a reaction to the character who seems to suffer most and to show the strongest and most complex passions, but it is in some ways a puzzling focus, for the play's title directs us not to Shylock, but to the merchant of Venice, that is to say, to Antonio. The focus on Shylock also contributes to the formal puzzles the play has provided, for if the play is taken to revolve centrally around Shylock and the pound of flesh pledge, then aspects of the play like the courting of Portia and the casket test seem extraneous, or at least very difficult to relate to the main story.⁴

If we follow Shakespeare's indications, we see that the focus on Shylock is largely misplaced, and the puzzlement over the formal unity of the play mistaken. Indeed, The Merchant of Venice is a marvel of formal coherence, and once we grasp that, we can come to a better understanding of the substantively troubling elements of this play as well. As is frequently the case in Shakespeare's dramas, he uses the opening scenes to set the problem the main action of the play attempts to resolve.⁵ The problem is this: both Antonio and Portia love Bassanio; Antonio and Portia are rivals for the love of Bassanio. The play gives us the contest between the two for Bassanio. The winner of that contest, of course, is Portia, but judging from Shakespeare's title if nothing else, there is something about the losing contender that particularly requires attention. The various major events in the play are phases of the contest between Antonio and Portia. She triumphs in three stages: first, in the trial of the caskets, where Bassanio, with her help, selects the right casket and thus “wins” her; or rather, is won by her. Then in the legal trial of Antonio where Portia saves Antonio from Shylock and thereby saves Bassanio from an overwhelming and unending debt to Antonio; had Antonio lost his case to Shylock, he would therein have triumphed over Portia.⁶ Finally, in the ring episode, Portia triumphs for the third and final time, achieving at last Antonio's concession of defeat.⁷ Such is the story of The Merchant of Venice; of course the story of Shylock, the elopement of Jessica, and all the rest must find a place in this story, but this is the story in which they must find their place.⁸

With an economy suited to the chief site of the play Shakespeare quickly, if a bit subtly, establishes the problem of The Merchant in the opening words of each of the first two scenes. Antonio, the merchant of Venice, and therefore the central figure in Venice, the mercantile city, begins in medias res, in answer to a question he has just been posed: “In sooth I know not why I am so sad” (1.1.1).⁹ Portia, the beautiful mistress of the “beautiful mountain,” opens in a way remarkably close to Antonio's: “By my troth, Nerissa, my little body is aweary of this great world” (1.2.1-2). Despite the great difference between Venice and Belmont, the two worlds of the play, the central figures in each of these worlds are seized by the same deep sadness.

The opening laments by Antonio and Portia set in motion the chief actions of the two opening scenes—the quest for the source of the sadness of each. Antonio's sadness is something very recent and not some abiding quality of his. Solanio has just now asked about it, and even complained of it. As Antonio tells us: “you say it wearies you” (1.1.2).¹⁰ Gratiano soon after reinforces our impression of Antonio's sudden seizure by melancholy: “Believe me, you are marvelously changed” (1.1.76).

Antonio's sadness is apparently as mysterious as it is sudden. Antonio professes himself such a “want-wit” on its account that he cannot say how he “caught it, found it, or came by it.” As he concludes, “I have much ado to know myself” (1.1.3-7). Nonetheless, he thinks he knows himself well enough to reject out of hand his friends' repeated suggestions that his melancholy derives from anxiety over his mercantile ventures, a natural enough state of mind in venturesome Venice.¹¹ Almost like the birds of the air, or the lilies of the field, Antonio is not anxious over his worldly affairs; he has taken such care of them that he need not fear fortune (1.1.8-45, 73-75).¹² He parries his friends' other suggestions so they too come to accept the mystery of it (1.1.47-48).

The search to plumb Antonio's sadness ends when he is left alone with his friend Bassanio; here we indirectly discover the sudden source of his sadness when we discover what Antonio has been looking forward to, or rather dreading, all that day:

Well, tell me now, what lady is the same
To whom you swore a secret pilgrimage
That you today promised to tell me of?

(1.1.119-21)

Bassanio, a younger and “noble kinsman,” is especially dear to Antonio; the older man has been a regular benefactor to the younger and both speak of the love Antonio has shown toward Bassanio (1.1.57, 130-55). As is said later in the play, “I think he [Antonio] only loves the world for him [Bassanio]” (2.8.50). The expectation that his friend wishes to court a lady, a wish he must understand to be both rightful and inevitable, leads him to see his situation as fated, scripted, as it were, by the broader patterns and laws of life.¹³ “I hold the world but as the world, Gratiano—/ A stage, where every man must play a part, / And mine a sad one” (1.1.76-78).¹⁴

Portia's opening scene is much the same as Antonio's—the same world-weary sadness, the same effort by her companion to plumb her sadness. Yet there is an important difference, too: Portia is perfectly aware of the causes of her world-weariness; from the outset she is much more self-knowing than her Venetian counterpart. Her sadness derives from her father's will, according to which she may marry only the man who successfully passes the test of the caskets. Like Antonio, she feels her fate lies in the hands of external forces (1.2.22-25). Nerissa, her servant, has more confidence in the dead father's judgment than Portia does. Only “one who you shall rightly love” will choose rightly among the caskets. It is, Nerissa thinks, good protection for a very rich heiress against the wrong sort of gold-digger.¹⁵ Portia resents her lack of autonomy, and perhaps the lack of confidence in her judgment, but it appears she also does not wish so much protection against gold-diggers. Part of her uncommon self-knowledge consists in her awareness of the conflict within herself between what we might call her head and her heart. “I can easier teach twenty what were good to be done, than to be one of the twenty to follow mine own teaching. The brain may devise laws for the blood, but a hot temper leaps o'er a cold decree” (1.2.15-19). Portia, it appears, resents the constriction, or rather nullification of her right of choice not only in the abstract, for she has her eye on someone in particular. It is none of the six suitors already come to Belmont from all over Europe (1.2.108-9). Yet there is one whom she fancies, as even Nerissa well knows: Bassanio, who, both women agree, is “best deserving a fair lady” (1.2.117-18; cf. 2.9.100).

Antonio mopes because Bassanio wishes to court Portia. Portia mopes because the casket test may keep her from Bassanio. It is unclear at this point whether she fears that another will succeed before Bassanio can, or whether she fears he will be unwilling to take or unable to pass the test himself. Antonio and Portia both suffer for Bassanio, both want Bassanio. Although neither knows the other, they are rivals for Bassanio.

I

“‘Shall I then betray my father's throne … ?’”¹⁶

In that rivalry Antonio has the first move. At first glance his move is surprising. To Bassanio's request for aid Antonio is all cooperation, all generosity. At second glance, his reaction is perhaps not so surprising. It is, after all, his habitual way to be generous, especially to Bassanio, who prefaces his request with a reminder of how much Antonio has given him in the past. As Allan Bloom observes, “Antonio … bases his whole life on generosity. … Antonio has money; it is, however, not for his own enjoyment, but rather for his friends.” Along the same lines, David Beauregard identifies Antonio as the very embodiment of the Aristotelian virtue of liberality or generosity, the proper mean between prodigality and avarice, represented within the play respectively by Bassanio and Shylock.¹⁷

Nonetheless, the depiction of Antonio's generosity falls somewhat short of Aristotle's description of that virtue, the possessor of which “will give to the right persons the right amounts at the right times.” On this criterion, Antonio must be judged deficient in virtue, for he gives to a self-professed prodigal, one who has wasted and, for all Antonio has reason to believe, will continue to waste. “He who gives to those he should not … is not generous but may be given another name,” pronounces Aristotle.¹⁸ The genuine virtue of generosity benefits the recipient where the pseudo-virtue does not. Antonio and Bassanio illustrate Aristotle's concern, for Antonio's repeated aid does not help Bassanio become a more responsible and self-sufficient, that is to say, virtuous, individual, but instead contributes to his lack of self-control with regard to spending and appearances, and encourages in him a tendency to view others as means toward satisfying his own pressing needs.

If Antonio's aid cannot be understood as a manifestation of the virtue of liberality, his response to Bassanio's request must be examined more carefully. Although Antonio fears Bassanio rushes to make a “secret pilgrimage” to a lady, that is to say, that Bassanio wishes to journey to the lady as to a shrine, as to one he adores or reverences, Bassanio assures him that his “chief care is to come off fairly from [his] great debts,” the “most” of which are owed to Antonio. Although Bassanio speaks of Portia's beauty and virtues, he does not speak of his love for her—in marked contrast to his frequent references to the love he owes Antonio and has received from (but not given to?) Antonio (1.1.130-31, 146-47; cf. 161-76). Bassanio presents his case almost entirely as an investment opportunity for Antonio.¹⁹ He is especially concerned to convince Antonio that further supplies would not amount to throwing good money after bad: by shooting a second arrow after the lost first arrow both men might hope to recoup what has already been lost. Bassanio has reason for hope: Portia is “richly left,” and has sent him “fair speechless messages … from her eyes” (1.1.161, 163-64). Bassanio guessed Portia's feelings just as Nerissa did; he is adept at discerning, and quick to take advantage of, the love others have for him.

Antonio reacts not so much to the promise of repayment—no doubt he has heard such talk before—but he seems to be set much at ease by Bassanio's general approach to Portia: he is going a-courting not for the sake of his love for the lady, but for the sake of his obligation of money and love to Antonio. Antonio's feeling of relief is increased when Bassanio substitutes for the older man's image of a pilgrimage the new image of a “quest.” She is not a quasi-deity but the “golden fleece,” and he will become one of the “many Jasons come in quest of her” (1.1.170-72, cf. 3.2.241).²⁰ Bassanio, the new Jason, wishes to outfit an expedition like that to Colchis. He needs money, servants and finery, not a troop of heroes, but this, after all, is Christian, mercantile Venice, not pre-Trojan War Greece.

Under the circumstances of the quest, Antonio's reply to Bassanio's request is not surprising at all. Rather than a threat to their bond of friendship, as a marriage of love might be, it is an expression of Bassanio's deep sense of the continuing power and obligation of that bond. For Antonio to respond with his wonted generosity, moreover, is to bind anew in the very moment and in the very deed by which Bassanio attempts to discharge (some of) the bond already in place.²¹

Portia's first move is not against Antonio—she has no idea he is part of the story—but is, or seems to her to be against her father. To the new Jason, Portia is the golden fleece, but in her feelings and actions she is Medea, the daughter of King Aeëtes, the possessor of the fleece. Like Portia, Medea too falls in love with the Jason who visited her father's court.

… the daughter of King Aeëtes conceived an overpowering passion … and when by reason she could not rid her of her madness she cried: … “I wonder if this is not what is called love, or at best something like this.”

Like Portia, Medea sees in herself the old conflict between head and heart:

“Come, thrust from your maiden breast these flames that you feel, if you can, unhappy girl. … But some strange power draws on against my will. Desire persuades me one way, reason another.”

Indeed Portia even comes very close to stealing some of her lines from Medea's:

“I see the better and approve it, but I follow the worse.”

Like Portia's father, Medea's sets a formidable test between the questers and the object of their quest. Like Portia, Medea decries her father's test:

“For why do the mandates of my father seem too harsh? They certainly are too harsh.”²²

Medea does not merely lament her situation, however. She “gave [Jason] the magic herbs, gave him instruction / In how to use them,” helped him to yoke the “bronze-footed bulls, fire breathers,” and to sow the serpent's teeth, and to resist the armed men who spring from the teeth, and finally, to put to sleep the dragon who guarded the golden fleece itself. All this she did for love and in exchange for a promise of marriage.²³

But does Portia follow Medea's love-struck lead and help her new Jason overcome the barrier set up by her father? In the literature on the play this is surely one of the two or three most controverted questions. One of the strongest pieces of evidence against her acting the part of Medea to this extent is Portia's explicit vow to do no such thing: “I could teach you / How to choose right, but then I am forsworn. / So will I never be” (3.2.10-12). Yet there is some ambiguity in what she says here. Just what does it mean to “teach him how to choose right”: she surely does not come right out and give the correct answer, and thus under a literalist interpretation of her oath (and we see later that Portia is quite capable of giving and taking advantage of literalist interpretations) she can avoid being “forsworn” even if, as I (and many other readers) believe, she gives Bassanio a good deal of help.²⁴

Her denial is too ambiguous to settle the question whether she follows Medea this far, and thus we must consider both the casket scene and its context with greater care.²⁵ In marked contrast to the treatment the other suitors get, Portia does not rush Bassanio to undergo the test: “I pray you tarry; pause a day or two / Before you hazard” (2.7.1-3; 2.9.1; 3.2.1-2). As she thinks further on it, she would have him tarry even more: “I would detain you here some month or two / Before you venture for me” (3.2.9-10).

As eager as she is to be rid of the first two, she is welcoming of the company of her Venetian swain. Yet her desire for delay bespeaks even more than her fondness for Bassanio. She wishes him to wait, “for in choosing wrong / I lose your company. Therefore forbear a while” (3.2.2-3).

Portia here finally answers a question she left us with in her opening appearance in the play: she dreads the casket test not so much because she fears it will give her to another, but because she fears it will not give her to the one she favors. In a few moments Portia will project a new image for herself and Bassanio—not Medea and Jason, but Hesione and Heracles. Hesione was daughter of Laomedon, king of Troy in the generation before the Trojan War. In order to expiate the anger of the gods and the demands of his subjects, Laomedon chained Hesione to a rock on the Trojan shore as a “virgin tribute … / To the sea monster” (3.2.53-60).²⁶ Portia's new metaphor redefines the situation considerably; the casket is not something set up by a loving and wise father for her benefit, as Nerissa had urged, but is, to say the least, hostile to her best interests. It is easy enough to see how Portia can understand it so.²⁷ She might well envisage the intention, not just the likely effect of the casket test to be to exclude Bassanio as a suitor. The Venetian, after all, visited Belmont while the father still lived, and had he known and approved of Portia's liking, then the whole rigmarole of the caskets would make no sense. Nerissa (and Bassanio, too) knew of Portia's feelings and perhaps, she suspects, the father did, too.

Even if he did not know that Portia's affections turned in Bassanio's direction, the young Venetian seems the very sort of chap from whom he must have been attempting to guard his daughter. The wealthy heiress is a natural target for young men who are deeply in debt and without the means to continue in the style of life to which they have been accustomed. To see the application to Bassanio, we need only recall the circumstances of his quest, and his image of Portia as the golden fleece: Bassanio seeks to cut a figure in the world, or in nautical Venice, to “show a more swelling port” than he can afford (1.1.124). Marriages to such young men, a father might reason, do not promise well for young heiresses; they are anything but love matches.²⁸ Thus the father set the winning casket as the one about giving, not about getting, as the one that did not promise outward wealth.

So Portia-Hesione is threatened with the denial of her heart's desire by her father-Laomedon via exposure to the casket test-sea monster. Her sadness goes as deep as it does because she knows, or at least intensely fears that her father's ploy will succeed, as directly or indirectly intended, in eliminating Bassanio. Her doubts about Bassanio pop through the surface of things when he responds to her awkward but clearly heartfelt request for delay with an ultraconventional lover's image: “Let me choose, / For as I am, I live upon the rack.” To which she retorts: “Upon the rack, Bassanio? Then confess / What treason there is mingled with your love” (3.2.24-27).

She speaks better than she knows, for she has not heard the earlier negotiations between Bassanio and Antonio nor has she yet experienced Bassanio's treason of the ring. She knows her man … and yet. … When Bassanio returns with another stock profession of love she again opens her troubled mind: “Ay, but I fear you speak upon the rack, / where men enforced, do speak anything” (3.2.32-33). It is all so playful, and yet she speaks her real doubts here; justifiable ones at that if we recall the “force” under which Bassanio is (at least in part) acting. He is, in Belmont, as part of his “plots and purposes … to get clear of all the debts” he owes. These, not the rack, are his “necessity.”

The next exchange is the pivot of the whole scene, and we must therefore attend to its nuances with some care.

BASSANIO:
Promise me life, and I'll confess the truth.
PORTIA:
Well then, confess and live.
BASSANIO:
                                                                                                              Confess and love
Had been the very sum of my confession!

(3.2.34-36)

As many critics have noticed, Bassanio's “confession” is pretty lame: no soaring love poetry (or even love prose) here. Among the striking features of the exchange, however, is Portia's straining to allay her own doubts about Bassanio, her own suspicions about his loyalties and his sincerity. “Confess and live,” she says; perhaps against her better judgment she commits herself in advance to being satisfied with the merest gesture of an answer—which is pretty much all she gets, too, as Bassanio punningly echoes back to her promise (cf. also 3.2.54). Because he builds his answer on her answer Bassanio completes the rack image by almost reversing it: “O happy torment, when my torturer / Doth teach me answers for my deliverance” (3.2.37-38). She “taught” him the answer that freed him from the rack, where she had earlier refused to teach him the answer to the casket test. But let us note how she taught him; she gave him a clue, a word (“live”), which he is able to translate into the required profession of love. Bassanio has shown her how she can “teach” him “answers for deliverance” without telling him them directly, and therefore without being foresworn.²⁹

Bassanio is the third to try his wits at the caskets, and as in most fairy tales, the third time is a charm. Some critics go so far as to suggest that because he is third, he is the inevitable victor, and therefore has no need for Portia's help. This is surely a foolish argument. Even if there is something formally foreordained for Bassanio in coming third, this does not settle the issue of how or what makes him successful. That is an entirely separate matter. That Goldilocks finds that the porridge, chair, and bed are “just right” consistently on her third try does not imply, after all, that there is no significance to the fact that it was, consistently, the one that was the mean that was “just right.”

As has been noticed by many previous readers, Portia's hints, if there are such, come in the form of the song she sings as Bassanio ponders the alternatives. She prefaces her song, however, with an indispensable clue: “If you do love me, you will find me out” (3.2.41). To the other contestants she gave no such guidance. Just as Bassanio had taken her comment about love as a hint in the preliminary banter that was the playful foreshadowing of the casket test itself, this hint about love proves invaluable to Bassanio.

Portia's statement about love is so important because it helps set the contrast between that and “fancy.” She sings of fancy, but, she has made clear, the casket test is about something else, about love. Love is the unspoken but implicit contrast to the point she makes in her song: fancy is born in the eyes, not in the heart or head. Its birth is in the sphere of appearance, and so fragile is it that it fails to survive its infancy. Fine appearance, external promise—gold and silver—engender not love, but only its poor surrogate fancy. This is enough to tell the attentive Bassanio what he must do, but just in case he or some of the critics fail to get the point Portia opens her song with her oft-noted triple rhyme: “bred,” “head,” and “nourished.”³⁰

Not to worry, however, for Bassanio proves himself an exceedingly apt pupil. He picks up her thought exactly: “So may the outward shows be least themselves; / The world is still deceived with ornament” (3.2.73-74). After a longish survey of the many cases where fair, but false, exteriors conceal corrupt interiors, Bassanio draws just the point:

Therefore then, thou gaudy gold,
Hard food for Midas, I will none of thee;
Nor none of thee, thou pale and common drudge
'Tween man and man. But thou, thou meager lead,
Which rather threaten'st than dost promise aught,
Thy paleness moves me more than eloquence;
And here choose I.

(3.2.101-7)

If Bassanio has not been cued by Portia, then this chain of reasoning must be his own. But is that plausible? Is Bassanio the man to voice those sentiments? Does Bassanio really reject Midas's “hard food”? Does Bassanio turn away from external appearance and show?³¹

Bassanio's reflections are not only remarkably unlike himself, but they are altogether unlike the reasonings of the other suitors. Both Morocco and Aragon produced long speeches to justify their choices, and both reasoned entirely in terms of the legends on the caskets. Bassanio says nothing at all relating to the legends; his speech picks up entirely from Portia's song about fancy and appearance. In selecting the lead he shows neither understanding nor acceptance of the teaching about love its legend proclaims.³²

Portia, we must conclude, extends her Medea-like behavior to helping her Jason overcome the trial established by her father to protect his treasure from adventurers like Jason. This is relatively easy for her to do because she sees herself as Hesione, the victim of her father, and not as the beneficiary of a wise and provident plan. Nonetheless, both images, Medea and Hesione, promise poorly for her. The one won by Jason, the other by Heracles, both were deserted by their respective heroes. Both images foreshadow Portia's almost fate.

II

And when Medea saw this, Medea unsheathed her knife and cut the old man's throat; then, letting the old blood all run out, she filled his veins with her brew.³³

The second phase of the contest for Bassanio culminates in the play's most famous scene, the trial in Venice over Antonio's forfeit of his bond. This incident is thematically important, moreover, for in it the broader significance of the love contest between Antonio and Portia begins to become clear: the struggle between Antonio and Portia is concealed here beneath a struggle between Antonio and Shylock, whose struggle in turn brings in the competing visions of the Old and New Testaments.³⁴

It is not, perhaps, immediately apparent that the trial is part of the contest over Bassanio, because the antagonists are not Antonio and Portia, but rather Antonio and Shylock, with Portia as the judge who ultimately sides with Antonio. The news of the impending trial intrudes itself suddenly and violently on the scene of love; hardly have the lovers exchanged vows and rings, hardly have Nerissa and Gratiano joined the love fest than the emissaries from Venice arrive with Antonio's letter and the announcement of his default to Shylock. The letter distresses Bassanio and well it might. His friend and benefactor is to die on account of the debt Antonio incurred on his behalf. Portia notes his distress immediately.

But Bassanio's grief is not merely the grief a friend suffers at the misfortune of a friend; it is misery multiplied by guilt. As he confesses to Portia: “I have engaged myself to a dear friend, / Engaged my friend to his mere enemy / To feed my means” (3.2.261-63).

Bassanio's natural and creditable feelings are thus strong as it is, but Antonio has a knack for saying the very things that will heighten both Bassanio's misery and his guilt. Antonio's letter not only reports his situation, but refers directly to the bond of debt and guilt between them: “all debts are cleared between you and I if I might but see you at my death” (3.2.318-20). Surely there is something ironic in Antonio's wish: how can Bassanio and he be quits if Antonio goes “the last full measure” for Bassanio by dying for him? And how can Bassanio ever feel free of this debt if he is there to see this death for which, Antonio reminds him, he is responsible?³⁵ All these questions prove more than justified when we look ahead to discover what Antonio wishes Bassanio to see and, more importantly, to hear in his last moments. When it looks as though the trial will surely go against him Antonio delivers what appears to be a prepared statement. He responds to Portia's invitation to address the court as a whole, but his words are to and for Bassanio alone. He opens and closes his speech the same way: “Give me your hand Bassanio; fare you well. / Grieve not that I am fall'n to this for you …” And at the end: “Repent but you that you shall lose your friend, / And he repents not that he repays your debt” (4.1.264-65; 277-78).³⁶ Just in case Bassanio does not feel sufficiently responsible, and thus not sufficiently grateful, Antonio reminds him at this awful moment for whose sake he undergoes this fate—and how willingly at that.

He reserves the chief point of these, his dying words as he thinks, for the middle of his speech, however.

Commend me to your honorable wife.
Tell her the process of Antonio's end,
Say how I loved you, speak me fair in death;
And when the tale is told, bid her to be judge
Whether Bassanio had not once a love.

(4.1.272-76)

This speech makes perfectly clear what Antonio is doing: why does he, after all, drag Bassanio's “honorable wife” into it? Why does he insist that Bassanio recount his death to her, and wring from her a confession that indeed Antonio loved Bassanio … better than she or any ordinary lover could do. Who can match, who will match Antonio's gesture of love? As Solanio once said, Antonio “only loves the world” for Bassanio. He so loves Bassanio that facing the threat of the loss of Bassanio he will lose the world, or, better yet, to prevent the loss of Bassanio, he will sacrifice the world. In the contest with Portia, Antonio has raised the stakes, infinitely, and then has played the ultimate trump card.³⁷

It may seem a desperate and hopeless ploy, but in fact it succeeds, for Bassanio answers Antonio with the very declaration Antonio is seeking:

Antonio, I am married to a wife
Which is as dear to me as life itself;
But life itself, my wife, and all the world
Are not with me esteemed above thy life.
I would lose all, ay sacrifice them all
Here to this devil, to deliver you.

(4.1.281-86)

Antonio is not given a reply, but this must be very gratifying to him. Where earlier on Bassanio spoke much of the debts of love he owed, he never spoke of the love he felt; now, this light young man has offered to sacrifice his own life for his friend, and, it must not be overlooked, the life of his wife as well. At least for the moment Bassanio is so overwhelmed with gratitude and guilt that he renders Antonio all the esteem and attachment the older man has sought, and declares him victor in the contest for his affection between Antonio and Portia.³⁸ Antonio has gained all by “giving and hazarding all he hath.” Antonio is the true and proper winner of the casket test.³⁹

Nonetheless, the audience can see more clearly than Bassanio and probably than Antonio himself the paradoxical, if not self-contradictory, character of Antonio's self-sacrificing love. He gives up all—to get all. His self-lessness is only a more subtle form of selfishness, for he wishes not merely to possess the object of his love, but to establish himself as the most lovable human being, as the one most worthy of love and thus as the one whose love supplants all others and lasts indefinitely.⁴⁰

The only character in the play who seems clear-eyed about Antonio is Portia. From the moment that she observes Bassanio's reaction to Antonio's letter, she knows she does not have the full devotion of her husband. Portia shows the same wisdom in the face of Bassanio's feelings toward Antonio as Antonio showed when Bassanio resolved to court Portia. She does not in any way attempt to thwart Bassanio in his efforts to aid his friend. Indeed, her first words once she understands the situation is her offer to pay the debt, to pay double or more so that Antonio will be free from Shylock. We must see her offer in terms of her self-interest as well as her generosity. To keep her husband, or rather, to win from him the kind of loving attachment she seeks, she must save Antonio.⁴¹ Before they can consummate this marriage, Portia insists, Bassanio must go to Antonio; the matter of Antonio must be taken care of before the marriage of Bassanio and Portia can be properly fulfilled (3.2.303-6).

Instead of paying off the debt Portia will have to preside over a trial where Shylock prosecutes Antonio to receive legal satisfaction on his contract. As most readers of the play have noticed, this trial concerns not only the two parties to it, but their respective religions and religious laws. That is to say, in the midst of this play about the rivalry between Portia and Antonio arises this most serious and far-reaching consideration of the meaning and relative merits of the two elements of what we have come to call the Judeo-Christian tradition.

We can understand the appearance of this apparently extraneous set of themes as follows. Antonio, as has often been noted, acts upon a model of human existence rooted in Christianity. He not only engages in the acts of charity prescribed by Christian precept, but, in his willingness to undergo sacrifice of his life for the sake of his love he engages in a particularly powerful form of the imitation of Christ. Antonio's justification and explanation are to be found in Christianity.⁴² As Jesus says in order to explain his upcoming passion to his followers: “greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” This self-sacrificing love is not merely the extraordinary act of the extraordinary god-man, but is the model for all humanity: “‘This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.’”⁴³

The New Testament authors, however, understand the life, death, and teaching of Jesus in terms of their relation to the older Jewish law, as both the completion and rejection of the old Jewish law. The defense and justification of Christianity originally appears in the form of a critique and attack on Judaism. Portia must defeat Antonio, but, strangely enough, she can do this only if Antonio can defeat Shylock; that is to say, only if Christianity can defeat or appear to defeat Judaism.

Antonio not only adheres to Christian doctrine, but, as Barbara Lewalski emphasizes, he imitates or even plays the part of Christ at various important moments in the drama. “Antonio, who assumes the debts of others … reflects on occasion the role of Christ satisfying the claim of Divine Justice by assuming the sins of mankind.”⁴⁴ The trial is one such occasion: Antonio-Christ is once again put on trial, accused by the Jew, who seeks his life. Portia too has her part in this emblematic episode—in this case not as Medea or Hesione—but as Pontius Pilate. But she is a Pilate who prevents the passion of Christ. She is a new or reverse Pilate and thereby she will ultimately prove a new or nontragic Medea.

The tension between Antonio and Shylock obviously predates the action of the play and enters it from almost the very moment Shylock does. Upon first catching sight of Antonio, Shylock announces, “I hate him” (1.3.39). The feeling is, apparently, mutual, for Shylock complains of Antonio's extraordinarily uncivil treatment. “You that did void your rheum upon my beard / And foot me as you spurn a stranger cur / Over your threshold!” (1.3.114-16). The feelings of extreme enmity are related in both cases to the religion of the other: “I hate him for he is a Christian,” says Shylock; Antonio abuses Shylock in turn as a “misbeliever” (1.3.39, 108).

Shylock mentions two other reasons, reasons that have led some critics to discount the importance of the religious issue. In addition to hating him as a Christian, Shylock also says: “But more, for that in low simplicity / He lends out money gratis, and brings down / The rate of usance here with us in Venice” (1.3.40-42). Many readers conclude from these lines that Shylock's real complaint is the economic harm Antonio does to him. However, this is to read Shylock's “But more” as though he means “a greater reason for my hatred”; a better reading, given the list of reasons Shylock is presenting, is to take “more” as “in addition.” These additional points are all related: “He hates our sacred nation, and he rails, / … On me, my bargains, and my well-won thrift, / Which he calls interest” (1.3.45-48). Shylock attributes Antonio's practice of lending money gratis to “low simplicity,” that is to say, to a base motive; he almost certainly means to accuse Antonio of acting out of enmity to Jews, specifically to harm them by decreasing their earning power (also cf. 3.1.45-47).

Shylock is thus not impressed by Antonio's pretenses to virtue and high principle. This appears to be Shylock's general perspective on the Christians and particularly on Antonio. Two issues in the play specifically divide Shylock from the Christians. They refrain from taking interest, which the Jews do not, while the Jews refrain from eating pork, which the Christians do not. The dietary laws of the Jews prompt Shylock to respond harshly to Bassanio's dinner invitation: “I will buy with you, sell with you, talk with you, walk with you, and so following; but I will not eat with you, drink with you, nor pray with you” (1.3.33-35). It is most telling that Shylock conjoins eating and drinking with praying: the dietary restraints are part of the holiness of the holy people. Those who do not keep to the dietary laws are unclean, that is to say, unfit to approach God. Shylock believes he even has the testimony of Jesus on his side, for he refers to a biblical story in which “your prophet the Nazarite conjured the devil into” a herd of swine (1.3.31-33).⁴⁵ Even Jesus understood the uncleanliness of pork, yet his so-called followers fail to.

At the same time, the Christians refrain from taking interest; yet, as Shylock makes clear, the Venetians—and especially Antonio—have no hesitation about engaging in high-flying commerce aimed at economic gain. Shylock rehearses Antonio's various ventures, argosies bound for Tripoli, the Indies, Mexico, England—all directions of the compass, all continents—all with the intention of enriching himself. The Christian attitude toward money and gain is, in a word, hypocritical. Gain from lending money is in principle no different from gain for other kinds of economic activity, and, Shylock believes, the story of Jacob the patriarch testifies to the divine favoring of enterprise and the legitimacy of gain (1.3.86-87).⁴⁶ Usury is merely a way of thriving, and all thriving is legitimate, if it is not done unjustly. Such is Shylock's view.

Antonio more than returns Shylock's feelings, and sees the latter's hateful qualities as rooted in his Jewishness. Antonio's most comprehensive statement occurs at the end of the scene: “The Hebrew will turn Christian; he grows kind” (1.3.175). Antonio is unkind to Shylock because Shylock, as a Jew, is himself unkind. The greatest evidence or manifestation of that unkindness is Shylock's practice of taking interest on the loans he makes to the Christian merchants of Venice. Contrary to Shylock's theory, Antonio does not oppose usury merely to vex and harm the Jewish money-lenders, but rather he despises the money-lenders because they take interest. As he understands it, the different practices he and Shylock stand for stem from their respective faiths. Antonio seems to understand well the Jewish law regarding usury: “‘You shall not lend upon interest to your brother. … To a foreigner you may lend upon interest, but to your brother you shall not lend upon interest.’”⁴⁷ Antonio makes direct reference to this law in his negotiation with Shylock:

If thou wilt lend this money, lend it not
As to thy friends—for when did friendship take
A breed for barren metal of his friend?—
But lend it rather to thine enemy …

(1.3.129-32)

Antonio translates the law's “brother” into “friend” and “foreigner” into “enemy,” but he brings out a central thought in the Jewish law nonetheless. By forbidding usury within the people, the law recognizes the evil of usury. By allowing an evil toward the “foreigner,” the Jewish law indeed treats them as “enemies.”

The evil in charging interest to friends remains obscure so long as attention remains exclusively focused on the essentialist issue centering on the “barren” and “non-breeding” character of metal. That is relevant only indirectly; if money “bred,” that is, increased naturally, then it would not be unreasonable or unjust for the owner of the money to be able to reap the natural increase. But because money does not increase in this way, it is “unjust,” because there is an “inequality” in the transaction “which is contrary to justice.” The lender receives more than he gave.⁴⁸ The one who pays usury does not restore (a part of) natural increase, nor does he act voluntarily (as Shylock implies), but rather he acts “under a certain necessity insofar as he needs to borrow money which the owner is unwilling to lend without usury.”⁴⁹ No wonder Antonio (and Bassanio too) treats it largely as a matter of “kindness”; the usurer is unkind, for he takes advantage of the pressing necessities of his debtor.⁵⁰ In the exchange among Antonio, Shylock, and Bassanio this last aspect is much emphasized (1.3.60, 111, 152).

Thomas Aquinas expresses Antonio's understanding with great lucidity in his discussion of the “sin of usury.”

The Jews were forbidden to take usury from their brethren, i.e., from other Jews. By this we (Christians) are given to understand that to take usury from any man is evil simply, because we ought to treat every man as our neighbor and brother.⁵¹

Antonio understands Christianity to involve both a broadening and a deepening of the Jewish law. It is broader because it is universal—injunctions to treat the other as neighbor or brother are not limited to one's own narrow nation. It is deeper in that the benevolence human beings owe to one another has no calculating quality to it; it is selfless. It is more sublime in that, as becomes clear later, the ultimate expression of Christian love is not merely disinterested benevolence, but self-sacrifice. Antonio is thus an apostle of Christian love, who uses Shylock and the Jews as a foil against which to define his moral vision, and uses the issue of usury as a vehicle for that moral vision.⁵²

This is the abiding view each has of the other as the play opens. Yet almost immediately a new dynamic is introduced by Antonio's application to Shylock for a loan to aid his beloved friend. The Jew and the Christian agree to a loan with no interest, but with the pound of flesh pledge for collateral. This “deal” has led to one of the greatest controversies about the play: just what is Shylock up to in proposing these terms? Whatever Shylock's motives, after the elopement of Jessica, he is resolved to take advantage of Antonio's forfeiture of his bond.

Shylock and Antonio, Jew and Christian—just when it looks as though Shakespeare is setting up a contest between these two versions of the biblical religion, the terms of the relationship change. Most importantly, Shylock falls away from his status as paradigmatic Jew; the confrontation between the two in Portia's court in Venice is thus an aborted moment of judgment between those two great religions.

Shylock had raised two criteria to distinguish Jew and Christian. The Jews as the holy people, as the people of the law, are especially concerned with the clean and the unclean, sanctifying all their lives to God under the law.⁵³ That means, in particular, that the Jews must keep their special dietary laws; they do not eat in friendship and intimacy with other men of other nations; they are the nation set apart.⁵⁴ Shylock at first prided himself on his observance of the distinction between the clean and the unclean, the permitted and the forbidden. Yet suddenly and with little explanation, Shylock admits that he has agreed to dine with the Christians (2.5.11). We must understand this in relation to his bargain with Antonio. He has, as Antonio implied, in effect become a Christian. Just as he violates the dietary laws, so he violates the law respecting usury. True, the Jewish law legitimates interest taken from non-Jews, but it forbids what Shylock has potentially done in the “merry bond” and actually does in his resolve to collect his debt after Jessica runs off with Lorenzo: one may not indirectly, and thus a fortiori directly take what amounts to the life of another as a pledge in loan.⁵⁵ The Jewish law recognizes (at least some) moral claims of human beings as such. Shylock has done what the Law explicitly forbids. And this is to say nothing of the commandment, “you shall not kill,” a closely related provision of the law.⁵⁶ Shylock reveals himself to be a bad human being, a devil incarnate, not because he is a Jew, but because and insofar as he falls away from the Jewish law.

Portia's courtroom triumph over Antonio—that is to say, Antonio's triumph over Shylock—cannot be a triumph of Christianity over Judaism, for Shylock no longer represents Judaism, as is made perfectly clear in his most famous speech.

Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions?—fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons … ? If you prick us, do we not bleed? … And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?

(3.1.55-63)

This angry and moving speech must be contrasted with Shylock's earlier claim to Antonio: “sufferance is the badge of all our tribe” (1.3.107). So far as that is true, Shylock's speech about revenge, and his resolve to exact fully Antonio's pledge indicates a break with this forbearing attitude. Moreover, Shylock here speaks not as a Jew, nor even as a quasi-Christian; the standard is a purely human standard: “If a Jew wrong a Christian, what is his humility? Revenge! If a Christian wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be by Christian example? Why revenge!” (3.1.65-68). Despite the ways or teachings or precepts of the two biblical religions, the human way is revenge. Shylock no longer even pretends to take his bearings and find his justification in the law.⁵⁷ He has, in his own way, become a political philosopher, discerning a harsh and universal nature beneath the varying laws of the nations.

The judgment Shylock undergoes at the hands of Portia is thus not a judgment on him as a Jew, or on Judaism as such. This is not to say there is no such judgment in the play—his loss of his daughter fulfills that role. Jessica enters a forbidden relation and forsakes her family, people and God (cf. 3.1.30, 32, 80-85). Her initial situation is rather like that of so many tragic lovers—Romeo and Juliet, Pyramus and Thisbe—forbidden her love by her parents or her people, yet not Jessica the lover, but Shylock the parent suffers the tragic fate in this case. Jessica lives in a community where her love is to be controlled by the laws. She is to marry inside the community and defer to her parents in choice of mate. Yet her love escapes these restraints; love cannot be so readily bidden. Like Shylock himself in his revenge, she learns and teaches something of the universality of nature in her love. The Jewish notion of a holy people, a people set apart, gives too little notice to nature, both in its higher manifestations like love, and in its lower, like revenge. No people can be simply holy; no people can be simply set apart. This is Shakespeare's judgment on Shylock. The perspective of that judgment shares something important with the Pauline Christian condemnation of Judaism as particularistic, but it is not necessarily the same as that perspective and surely not the same as Antonio's virulent anti-Jewish pronouncements.

Shylock is a Jew who violates his own law, the observance of which would at least have saved him from the inhumanity to which he sinks in his hatred for Antonio. Likewise, just as Shylock's defeat cannot stand for the defeat of the Jewish way, so Antonio's triumph does not represent a triumph of Christian principles. Although the disguised Portia delivers a lovely speech on mercy, the outcome of the trial does not in fact depend upon mercy, Christian or otherwise. Shylock's suit fails in two respects, on two legal technicalities. Both of these derive from the Jewish law, whence Portia has imported them into Venetian law. She first grants Shylock the right to his pound of flesh, but “in the cutting of it” he is allowed not “one drop of Christian blood” (4.1.305-9). Now this literalism is frequently decried as contrary to the reasonable meaning of the law: if Shylock has a right to the flesh, he must have a right to any necessary appurtenances of the flesh. Yet this fine-honed distinction is not of Portia's making; it derives instead from the Jewish dietary laws: “‘However, you may slaughter and eat flesh … Only you shall not eat the blood.’”⁵⁸ If the distinction between the flesh and the blood is valid, as the Jewish law insists that it is, then the conclusion Portia draws is valid as well. No wonder Shylock cries out “Is that the law?” (4.1.313).

The second part of Portia's verdict comes when she turns the tables on Shylock: an alien may not directly or indirectly attempt the life of a citizen. Shylock has quite openly done that very thing, and thus must pay the penalty for it. But as we have noted above, this law, especially as applied to the circumstances at hand is part of the Jewish law as well: one may not take “‘a life in pledge.’”⁵⁹ One may supply various theological interpretations of Portia's legal maneuverings—interpreting her as attempting to illustrate, for example, the Pauline principle that righteousness under the law is not possible for sinful man. Although that interpretation resonates with Portia's speech on mercy, it does not fit so well the way the scene develops: the insistence that the Jewish law is perfectly sufficient to produce the just—and merciful—outcome.

One must instead view the trial as a reenactment of the trial of Jesus, with Antonio in the title role, Shylock in place of the Jews prosecuting Jesus, and Portia taking the part of Pontius Pilate.⁶⁰ Shylock insists on the law (“I stand here for the law”) under which Antonio must pay the penalty of his default, i.e., must die; his predecessors urged much the same: “The Jews answered [Pilate], ‘We have a law, and by that law he ought to die …’”⁶¹ In the trial of Antonio Portia urges Shylock to recognize that if he presses his claim, “this strict [code] of Venice / Must needs give sentence 'gainst the merchant there,” to which Shylock replies, “My deeds upon my head” (4.1.203-5). Wittingly or unwittingly, he thus echoes the very thought of his predecessors, who responded to Pilate's resolve to “wash his hands” of the matter, “‘His [Jesus'] blood be on us and on our children.’”⁶²

Antonio casts himself as decisively in the role of Jesus as Shylock does in the role of Jesus' Jewish accusers. From his opening lines in the scene until the moment when Portia's verdict goes against Shylock, Antonio takes the part of one who suffers a fated martyrdom, a martyrdom, as we have seen, of self-sacrifice motivated by love.

I do oppose [says Antonio]
My patience to his fury, and am armed
To suffer with a quietness of spirit
The very tyranny and rage of his.

(4.1.10-13, cf. 83)

He calls himself “the tainted wether of the flock, / Meetest for death,” like the scapegoat on whom the community heaps its sins, and which is an image of Jesus' redemptive mission (4.1.114-15).

Yet the trial of Antonio does not end as did the trial of Jesus, because Pontius-Portia plays her part differently. Two things are particularly striking in the behavior of the original Pontius Pilate. First, he repeatedly proclaims his conviction of Jesus' innocence. “And Pilate said to the chief priests and the multitudes, ‘I find no crime in this man,’” a conclusion he repeats twice more after further inquiry.⁶³ Judging Jesus under the relevant law, the Jewish law, Pilate found no grounds to condemn him. Yet he gave in to the repeated urgings of the Jews: “But they were urgent, demanding with loud cries that he should be crucified. And their voices prevailed. So Pilate gave sentence that their demand should be granted. … Jesus he delivered up to their will.”⁶⁴

Portia, the new Pilate, breaks with her predecessor on one central point: unlike Pilate, who sacrificed his judgment of the law to fear of the mob or concern for politics, she sticks to the law, the Jewish-become-Venetian law.⁶⁵ Under that law Antonio is free from Shylock's bond. Portia gives Antonio a victory of sorts, although it is also a most telling defeat, by sticking to the letter and spirit of the old law. She thus doubly thwarts the new Jesus: she neither vouchsafes him his longed-for martyrdom, nor does she appeal to specifically Christian principle to do so.

III

I am abandoned; I have lost my throne, my native soil, my home, my husband—who alone for me took the place of all!⁶⁶

The trial is a great triumph for Portia, and yet she is never closer to suffering the tragic fate of Medea—abandonment by the one she loves, by one who has sworn eternal and complete devotion to her. Despite the fact that she has prevented Antonio from rendering that “last full measure” of his devotion to his beloved, Bassanio has yet been deeply affected by Antonio's gesture. He confesses to esteeming Antonio more highly than her and would sacrifice her life (and his own) in order to save Antonio's. Bassanio apparently has taken to heart the injunction to love as Antonio has loved him.⁶⁷ Although Portia has defeated Antonio, it yet might appear that he has gotten all he could have hoped for from the episode. He has won Bassanio's love with his offer to sacrifice his life, without needing to carry through on his offer.⁶⁸

Feeling victorious, Antonio provokes the third round in his contest against Portia by intervening in the post-trial exchange between Bassanio and the disguised Portia over the ring Portia has requested from Bassanio as a reward or remembrance for her service to the two friends. Bassanio is most reluctant to part with the ring:

Good sir, this ring was given me by my wife,
And when she put it on she made me vow
That I should neither sell nor give nor lose it.

(4.1.440-43)

Should he do any of these things, Portia had meaningfully observed earlier, “Let it presage the ruin of your love …” (3.2.171-73). As soon as he hears the reason for Bassanio's refusal to surrender the ring Antonio enters the discussion in order to loosen his friend's resolve.

My lord Bassanio, let him have the ring.
Let his deservings, and my love withal,
Be valued 'gainst your wife's commandment.

(4.1.448-50)

A more calculating move can hardly be imagined. Both to register the implications of Bassanio's declaration at the trial and to reinforce his supreme position Antonio prods Bassanio to do the thing that most concretely symbolizes his triumph. He makes the point perfectly explicit: his “love” is to be weighed against Portia's “commandment.”⁶⁹ In accord with his declaration Bassanio accedes. What Bassanio said at the trial was thus not idle talk—he is more devoted to Antonio than to his wife.

Here then is Portia's greatest moment of crisis. She must act decisively in order to restore her love, a need with which the audience are in full sympathy, for we cannot willingly accept an Antonian victory in this contest.⁷⁰ Portia has our sympathies because we have seen the less attractive underside to Antonio's love. The claim he raises is the claim of sacrifice and selflessness, yet we see this to be largely fraudulent; beneath the selflessness is a deep and potent self-seeking. The deficient character of Antonio's love is visible in at least two of its effects. First is his “spoiling” of Bassanio: he seeks to render Bassanio dependent rather than good. His “selfless” love is selfish in that it does not produce the good of the beloved, but of the lover.⁷¹ Secondly, we see, perhaps with surprise, the virulence of his hatred for Shylock. While Shylock is not entirely attractive either, his most vicious acts are the consequences of the attitudes of the Antonios of the world. Antonio is a genuine anti-Semite, a genuine hater. He displays what Machiavelli had earlier denounced as “pious cruelty.” His philosophy of love ironically issues in acts of hatred.

Portia returns from Venice to Belmont in a darkly melancholy mood. Her melancholy is foreshadowed in a remarkable dialogue between Jessica and Lorenzo, in which these two newlyweds celebrate the night and their love by recounting the tales of ill-fated lovers of note from the past. These reminders of failed and betrayed loves reflect both on their own love and on the unfolding betrayal of Portia by Bassanio. It is probably no coincidence that the central item in this exchange concerns Medea: “In such a night / Medea gathered the enchanted herbs / That did renew the old Aeson” (5.1.12-14). Aeson was Jason's father, a very old and dying man to whom Medea brought new youth and salvation through her magic. Nonetheless, Jason's gratitude did not prevent his subsequent abandonment of Medea. The parallel to Portia and Bassanio is clear: as Medea saved Aeson, so Portia saved Antonio.

“In such a night as this …,” a moonlit night, a night for lovers, and yet a night that reveals the unsteadiness, the evanescence, the unreliability of love. A night for recalling disloyal lovers. Even Lorenzo's famous and quite lovely rapture on the music of the spheres fits the mood. Even though: “There's not the smallest orb which thou behold'st / But in his motion like an angel sings,” nonetheless this heavenly

Harmony is [only] in immortal souls,
[And] whilst this muddy vesture of decay
Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it.

(5.1.60-65)

Perhaps it is Jessica's keen appreciation of how far earthly love falls below Lorenzo's heavenly harmonies that leads her to confess, “I am never merry when I hear sweet music” (5.1.69). In this comic celebration of love, Shakespeare comes to the very brink of exposing love in its lunar, that is, false and fleeting, cold and changing character.

By the time Portia arrives, the brightness of the moon, which so impressed Lorenzo and Jessica, is shown for what it is—unsteady and unreliable. Not the moon, but a “little candle” from her own hall, is all she can see now. By her yet lesser light, Portia stands much deeper in her despair of love than Lorenzo and Jessica.

That light we see is burning in my hall;
How far that little candle throws his beams!
So shines a good deed in a naughty world.

(5.1.89-91)

Can there be any doubt that she is the “little candle”—Portia reduced to a little candle!—casting little light, having little good effect in herself and yet shining brightly by contrast with the “naughty world,” the betrayers, the self-promoters, adventurers and hypocrites—the Jasons and Antonios—around her. Despair gnaws at her heart; all the world empties itself of meaning and goodness. “Nothing is good, I see, without respect” (5.1.99), that is, but by contrast. The good is merely what appears better by contrast to something worse or less.⁷²

Despair gnaws at Portia, yet she does not give way to it. On hearing of the approach of her husband, she resolves, “Let me give light.”⁷³ In this now dark night, the moon obscured, “the sun … hid,” Portia will attempt to bring the world back to light. But this requires something of her as well: “Let me give light, but let me not be light” (5.1.129). Portia requires a certain weightiness, a moral seriousness, in order to bring the world back into light. One is tempted to say that she must repent her earlier lightness, that lightness that did not, for example, take sufficiently seriously her father's warnings and her father's efforts to help her find a suitable husband. Both she and Bassanio must grow beyond where they were at the opening of the play in order to be worthy of love—solar rather than lunar love, let us say. She must grow to transcend her alter-ego Medea; Medea the enchantress, associated with the moon, must give way to Portia, the Sun, source of illumination.⁷⁴ Portia resolves to be the light by being weighty; not Antonio, but she, is to be “the true light.”⁷⁵

From the moment Portia greets Bassanio on his arrival at Belmont, the delicate negotiation between them commences. Bassanio once again signals how things stand with his curt return of Portia's greeting (“I thank you, madam”) and his far more expansive introduction of Antonio: “This is the man, this is Antonio, / To whom I am so infinitely bound” (5.1.133-35).⁷⁶

Portia, however, quietly corrects him: “You should be … much bound,” but not apparently, “infinitely bound” (5.1.136). If Bassanio is infinitely bound to Antonio, then, of course, he has no bond left for Portia. She is less forthcoming to Antonio, however, than Bassanio would apparently have her be: she “scants this breathing courtesy,” that is, elaborate words of welcome. How welcome he is “must appear in other ways than words,” in part because he is welcome in order to be part of the final showdown over Bassanio, and in part because just how welcome he is will depend on subsequent events (5.1.139-41).

Before Portia even mentions Bassanio's infidelity, Nerissa and Gratiano erupt into an argument over their parallel situation. This proves most useful to Portia (did she preconcert it with her maid?), for it allows her to accuse Bassanio, indirectly at first in the guise of accusing Gratiano, of the great violation of trust he has committed.

You were to blame—I must be plain with you—
To part so slightly with your wife's first gift,
A thing stuck on with oaths upon your finger,
And so riveted with faith unto your flesh.

(5.1.166-69)

Her lines echo earlier images of the almost crucified Antonio, but it is Bassanio she casts now as the central actor in the moral drama. It is he who is “riveted”; it is he who receives “faith.” Bassanio needs to see himself as a serious moral agent in a serious moral relationship with Portia. Before the trial he was little given to this kind of moral seriousness in any form, because of the general levity of his character. In the wake of Antonio's gesture, Bassanio is equally little given to the kind of moral agency Portia calls forth, for he sees Antonio as the center and himself as the merely reflected image, infinitely bound to the original.

Bassanio at first inclines to defend himself in terms that reflect the very Antonio-centeredness she must overcome.

                                                                                                    Sweet Portia
If you did know to whom I gave the ring, …
And would conceive for what I gave the ring …
You would abate the strength of your displeasure.

(5.1.192-98)

Although many critics are entirely appeased by this defense—indeed some see it as a sign of Bassanio's understanding and acceptance of the burden of love—Portia is not in the least satisfied—and rightly not.

If you had known the virtue of the ring,
Or half her worthiness that gave the ring,
Or your own honor to contain the ring,
You would not then have parted with the ring.

(5.1.199-202)

In giving it away, Bassanio has undervalued the ring itself and what it means—“a thing held as a ceremony,” a symbol of their love and its hoped-for abidingness. As such a thing, no reasonable person would demand it and no service can be commensurable with it. It was, of course, Antonio, who prevailed on him to present the ring to Balthazar/Portia, precisely to get Bassanio to make the point Portia now blames him for. Thus Bassanio also undervalued Portia relative to Antonio in giving up the ring, whereas, she implies, she is more worthy than Antonio. Bassanio is guilty of disloyalty, but also of poor judgment; he does not see through the character of Antonio's “selfless” love, but is flattered by the appearances he does discern. He thereby misses the true source of human value. Accordingly, she also accuses him of undervaluing himself by so lightly setting aside his own oath; a man's oath and his resolve to keep it are tokens of his true dignity as a moral agent. To be bound by one's own word is to legislate for oneself and to commit oneself to being the kind of human being that can determine itself to its own commitments, to its vision of its own future. But in the shadow of Antonio Bassanio takes himself as little seriously as he took his love or the character of his wife.⁷⁷

Bassanio takes up only part of the immediate challenge posed by Portia's accusation: it was not a smirch upon his honor to give away the ring but a requirement of it (5.1.218-19). So much was this a demand of his honor that had Portia, who now claims to speak on behalf of his honor, “been there [he] thinks [she] would have begged / The ring of [him] to give the worthy doctor” (5.1.221-22). He replies to her charge about his honor, but she no doubt notices that he has said not a word about the other two points of her accusation, that he slighted both their love as symbolized by the ring, and herself. She is therefore not in the least appeased by his defense.

If he will stand on his honor as a thing apart from their marriage, then she will threaten his honor in a way that will remind him that his honor is now at least in part in her keeping:

Let not that doctor e'er come near my house.
… I will become as liberal as you;
I'll not deny him anything I have,
No, not my body nor my husband's bed.

(5.1.223-28)

This is not merely a threat to his honor, but an expression of hers: “Now by mine honor, which is yet mine own, / I'll have that doctor for mine bedfellow” (5.1.232-34). If Bassanio attempts to treat his honor as his own, that is, independent of her and their marriage, then she can treat her honor in the same way. But, of course, the premise of her speech is precisely the opposite, that both their honors are now inseparably bound up with the other's; her first need is to get Bassanio to see and understand at least this much. By standing up for her own honor, she at the same time attempts to make him see and understand something of her undervalued worth.

Before Bassanio can reply, Nerissa, Gratiano, and Antonio intervene. Antonio's brief interjection—“I am th' unhappy subject of these quarrels”—is especially important, because the discussion between Portia and Bassanio has been moving in the direction of the recognition of Antonio's role in the incident. At first Bassanio defended himself for giving the ring away “unwillingly,” constrained by the “civil doctor's” unwillingness to accept anything but the ring (5.1.196, 210). After Portia reminds him of the unreasonableness of such a gift, Bassanio subtly shifts ground. In his next speech he refers to the “enforced” character of his gift, but no longer is the doctor implied to be the source of the compulsion. It is left at the vague admission, “I was enforced to send it after him” (5.1.216). But the audience knows and Portia knows or suspects that the compulsion came from Antonio. This is just what Portia is attempting to make Bassanio see and to truly understand. She can free Bassanio from the bond of Antonio's love only by exposing its grasping underside.

As in the casket scene, Bassanio proves a remarkably apt pupil of Portia's subtle instruction. She brings him to the self-knowledge he has thus far almost completely lacked: “I swear to thee, ever by thine own fair eyes, / Wherein I see myself” (5.1.242-43). He sees himself and his situation in her eyes, that is to say, he sees himself as she does; as Portia puts it, he sees himself as a double-dealer: “In both my eyes he doubly sees himself, / In each eye one” (5.1.244-45). Because of this newly acquired self-knowledge, he capitulates completely. He no longer protests that Portia would have willed he do as he did, but twice within ten lines he asks her pardon. The first time he continues to speak of it as an “enforced” deed, but he now calls it a “wrong.” The second time he drops all reference to compulsion, and calls it not merely wrong, but a “fault” (5.1.240, 247).

Bassanio at one and the same moment has broken Antonio's spell and become a man, responsible for himself and the moral character of his actions. He has finally become worthy of Portia, who has herself become worthy of the love of another mature adult by facing her own errors and despair. By this last scene she is no longer the talented, beautiful, wealthy but spoiled heiress of the opening of the play and the casket scene, just as he is no longer the fortune-hunting adventurer. Neither Medea nor Jason, Portia and Bassanio become fit heroes of a comic world where love thrives.⁷⁸

In order to recognize his deed as a “fault,” Bassanio must see in Portia's eyes not only himself, but his susceptibility to Antonio and the character of Antonio's love game. She helps him to see both by making him relive and ponder deeply his own and Antonio's deeds, but also by making him look into himself and reconsider the nature of love. He discovers not only the underlying will to power in Antonio's professed selfless love, but he discovers a core of selfishness in love itself.⁷⁹ The lover seeks an exclusive possession—sexual, but more than sexual—of the beloved. Love is of and for the other, but it is of and for the self, as well. This was true even of Antonio's love, but only illicitly so. By becoming more self-consciously selfish in his understanding of love, Bassanio also becomes more genuinely loving. He gives up not only Antonio, but that pride that prevented him from admitting fault and asking pardon. To paraphrase a much less insightful, more modern statement, Bassanio discovers that love is learning to say you're sorry. Bassanio comes to understand the kind of risk and hazard that, according to the lead casket, love entails.

Contrary to first impression, Antonio's kind of love does that much less well. Bassanio and Portia learn that love has an indissolubly exclusive character. It can never be the foundation for society as a whole. Human beings cannot build their lives on the purely selfless or sacrificial love which Jesus and Christianity command. In the final analysis, The Merchant of Venice, while not overtly a political play, has deep political implications. Those implications are emblematized most of all in the outcome of the trial: the law provides a solider basis for just and decent social life than the replacement of the law with love can do. A humanely just society is far more the achievement of good laws than of love.⁸⁰

The promise of The Merchant of Venice nonetheless is the promise of love, through which pleasure, duty, and honor can find harmonious reconciliation. In love and the responsibility it breeds lies the good of the soul and whatever of eternity human beings can attain.⁸¹ The culminating moment of the decisive scene is Bassanio's final apology and acceptance of the meaning of his marriage. “Pardon this fault, and by my soul I swear / I never more will break an oath with thee” (5.1.248-49). In that “never more” lies the real moral of this lovely tale of love and marriage: and they lived happily ever after.

Notes

1. David N. Beauregard, “Sidney, Aristotle, and The Merchant of Venice: Shakespeare's Triadic Image of Liberty and Justice” Shakespeare Studies 20 (1988): 33, 48; John Lyon, The Merchant of Venice (Boston: Twayne, 1988), xi, xv, 1-17, 95-96; Barbara K. Lewalski, “Biblical Allusion and Allegory in The Merchant of Venice,” Shakespeare Quarterly 13 (1962): 328; Joan Ozark Holmer, “Loving Wisely and the Casket Test: Symbolic and Structural Unity in The Merchant of Venice,” Shakespeare Studies 11 (1978): 53; Herbert S. Donow, “Shakespeare's Caskets: Unity in the Merchant of Venice,” Shakespeare Studies 4 (1968): 86.

2. On The Merchant of Venice as “the most scandalously problematic of Shakespeare's plays,” and “the only one of Shakespeare's plays … which a sizable body of sane people might consider unfit to be seen or read,” see Lawrence Danson, The Harmonies of The Merchant of Venice (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), 2-3; Derek Cohen, Shakespeare's Motives (London: Macmillan, 1988), 104-18; Lewalski, “Biblical Allusion,” 333-34; Lynda E. Boose, “The Comic Contract and Portia's Golden Ring,” Shakespeare Studies 20 (1988): 241.

3. On the stage history, and Shylock's role in it, see Lyon, Merchant, xiv-xvi, and more generally, ibid., 43; on Shylock as “the play's strongest and most discussed piece of characterization,” see 106. Marion D. Perret, “Shakespeare's Jew: Preconception and Performance,” Shakespeare Studies 20 (1988): 263-64.

4. See, e.g., Harley Granville-Barker, “The Merchant of Venice,” in Prefaces to Shakespeare (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1947), ii, 89, 91.

5. Contra Lyon, Merchant, 31.

6. Barbara Tovey, “The Golden Casket: An Interpretation of The Merchant of Venice,” in Shakespeare as Political Thinker, ed. John Alvis and Thomas West (Durham, N.C.: Carolina Academic Press, 1981), 228; Donow, “Shakespeare's Caskets,” 87.

7. Thus Lyon is quite mistaken to say that the ring incident represents “a new and independent plot [that gets] fully underway only in [the] last act” (Merchant, 117); or to call it “the tangential ring plot” (118).

8. The clearest account heretofore of the structure is in Lawrence Hyman, “The Rival Lovers in The Merchant of Venice,” Shakespearean Quarterly 21 (1970), 109-10.

9. Quotations are from the Signet edition, ed. Kenneth Myrick (New York: Penguin Books, 1965).

10. Contra Allan Bloom, Shakespeare's Politics (New York: Basic Books, 1964), 19: “Antonio is sad, and life does not mean much to him” because of his Christianity. Also contra Danson, who associates Antonio's sadness with the “moral failure” of his treatment of Shylock (Harmonies, 32). Neither Bloom nor Danson account for the sudden onset of Antonio's sadness. (Also contra Thomas Fujimara, “Mode and Structure in The Merchant of Venice,” PMLA [Publications of the Modern Language Associations of America] 81 [1966]: 509.)

11. Though cf. Lars Engle, “Thrift Is Blessing: Exchange and Explanation in The Merchant of Venice” Shakespearean Quarterly 37 (1986): 21-22 and Allan Haladay, “Antonio and the Allegory of Salvation,” Shakespeare Studies 4 (1968): 111.

12. Cf. Lewalski, “Biblical Allusion,” 328-29.

13. Cf. Lewalski, “Biblical Allusion,” 329; Thomas Cartelli, “Shakespeare's Merchant, Marlowe's Jew: The Problem of Cultural Difference,” Shakespeare Studies 20 (1988): 257-58.

14. Danson rejects the conception that Antonio's love for Bassanio underpins his melancholy because this is “not coherent with the play's overall shape and tone” (Harmonies, 36, 38, 40). This is, of course, a circular argument. Lyon, Merchant, 47, accepts Antonio's love for Bassanio as the cause of sadness, however, as does Keith Geary, “The Nature of Portia's Victory: Turning to Men in The Merchant of Venice,” Shakespeare Survey 37 (1984): 58-59.

15. See Holmer, “Loving Wisely,” 54.

16. Ovid Metamorphoses 7.38; Frank Justus Miller, trans., Loeb Classical Library, 345.

17. Beauregard, “Sidney, Aristotle, and The Merchant of Venice,” 33-39, 47-48; Bloom, Shakespeare's Politics, 19; Danson, Harmonies, 51-55; Lyon, Merchant, 45; Geary, “Nature of Portia's Victory,” 60.

18. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, ed. and trans. Hippocrates G. Apostle (Grinnell, Iowa: The Peripatetic Press, 1975), 1120, 1126-130.

19. Cf. Geary, “The Nature of Portia's Victory,” 59: “Bassanio … describes his projected journey to Belmont less in terms of intended marriage than as if it were a business venture …”; also Engle, “Exchange and Explanation,” 25.

20. Boose, “Comic Contract,” 248.

21. Tovey, “Golden Casket,” 221, 223; cf. Geary's statement: “The scene is tense with an unspoken loosening of ties” (“Nature of Portia's Victory,” 59).

22. Ovid Metamorphoses 7.9-21, Loeb Classical Library, 343.

23. On the comparison of Portia and Medea, see Donow, “Shakespeare's Caskets,” 87-88.

24. Danson rejects in the strongest terms the notion that Portia can have hinted at the right answer: “The imputation … that Portia through the most blatant trick makes her … father's dying inspiration nugatory—is one which … would make the rest of the play inexplicable.” In other words, it conflicts with Danson's sense of the larger patterns and meanings in the whole (Harmonies, 117-18). This is a perfectly reasonable approach, but its circularity must again be noted. The position Danson merely takes for granted is that there is no plausible construal of the whole consistent with this “imputation.” That, I believe, is false, and indeed, to go further, it is Danson, I will suggest, who ignores many elements of the play that are not only consistent with this imputation, but insistently point toward it. A more balanced approach to the question is in Lyon (Merchant, 92-97). Lyon also contains a good discussion of the scholarly to and fro on the issue.

25. Contra Geary, “Nature of Portia's Victory,” 62.

26. On the story of Heracles and Hesione, see Robert Graves, The Greek Myths (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1966), 2:168-73.

27. So far as I know, Lewalski is the critic to pay the most attention to the Hesione image, but she does not much analyze what this implies about Portia's stance toward the casket test (“Biblical Allusion,” 336).

28. Cf. Geary, “Nature of Portia's Victory,” 62. Bassanio is a “fortune-hunter.”

29. Cf. Olivia Delgado de Torres, “Reflection on Patriarchy and the Rebellion of Daughters in Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice and Othello,” Interpretation 21 (Spring 1994): 343; Bloom, Shakespeare's Politics, 24-27.

30. Tovey, “The Golden Casket,” 217.

31. Contra Holmer: “Only Bassanio, his wisdom revealed in his soliloquy over the caskets, is capable of loving wisely, and therefore his character guarantees the right choice …” (“Loving Wisely,” 59); and Donow, “Shakespeare's Caskets,” 91.

32. Cf. the contrary reading in Lewalski, “Biblical Allusion,” 335. She does not note Bassanio's complete failure to attend to the legends or to show any signs of absorbing their point. Also contra Hyman, “Rival Lovers,” 114.

33. Ovid Metamorphoses 7.285-87, Loeb Classical Library, 363.

34. Cf. Tovey, “Golden Casket,” 229.

35. Cf. Tovey: “Such a letter is calculated to make Bassanio spend the rest of his life in remorseful remembrance” (“Golden Casket,” 225).

36. Emphasis added.

37. Hyman, “Rival Lovers,” 112; Geary, “Nature of Portia's Victory,” 63, 65.

38. Cf. Tovey: “Bassanio's preference for Antonio could hardly be stated in starker terms” (“Golden Casket,” 229).

39. Holmer, “Loving Wisely,” 60.

40. In his portrayal of Antonio, Shakespeare has come very close to Nietzsche's understanding of self-denying love in 1.13 of The Gay Science: “Even if we offer our lives, as martyrs do for their church, this is a sacrifice that is offered for our desire for power or for the purpose of preserving our feeling of power” (trans. Walter Kaufmann [New York: Random House, Vintage Books, 1974], 87); also cf. 1.14. Cf. Tovey, “Golden Casket,” 224-225, 233; Bloom, Shakespeare's Politics, 19-21; Geary, “Nature of Portia's Victory,” 64.

41. Cf. Tovey: “As soon as she hears of Antonio's predicament, Portia clearly recognizes the threat that his imminent martyrdom poses to her married life.” (“Golden Casket,” 228); cf. Bloom, Shakespeare's Politics, 29; Delgado de Torres, “Reflections on Patriarchy,” 343; Geary, “Nature of Portia's Victory,” 64; Boose, “Comic Contract,” 250.

42. See Lewalski, “Biblical Allusion,” 329, 338.

43. John 15.12 RSV. Martin Luther, The Freedom of a Christian, in Three Treatises, trans. W. A. Lambert, revised by Harold J. Grimm (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1960), 302-9.

44. Lewalski, “Biblical Allusion,” 334, cf. 339; Tovey, “Golden Casket,” 227.

45. Cf. Mark 5.1-13.

46. On Shylock's use of the story of Jacob, see Engle, “Exchange and Explanation,” 32.

47. Deut. 23.19-20; cf. Deut. 28.12. Note that Deut. 23 joins the very two issues that Shylock joins—usury and uncleanness.

48. Thomas Aquinas Summa Theologica 2-2 Q. 78, A1 Resp.

49. Ibid. A1, ad obj. 7.

50. On Shylock, see 1.3.110; on Bassanio, see 1.3.140; cf. 139, 150, 165, 175.

51. Aquinas 2-2 Q. 78 A1 ob. 2.

52. On Antonio's Christian vision see St. Paul, Letter to the Galatians, who sees Christianity as a counter-movement to Judaism along three dimensions:

    • Jewish
      • Particularistic
      • Worldly Prosperity (Flesh)
      • Law
    • Christian
      • Universalistic (cf. esp. Gal. 3.28)
      • Spiritual Prosperity
      • Faith-Love (cf. Gal. 3.13; 5.13-14)

    According to Antonio's lights at least, Shylock embodies all three of the Jewish traits, and he the Pauline triad.

53. Cf. Deut. 14.

54. Cf. Deut. 14.2, 21, 28-29.

55. Deut. 24.6.

56. Deut. 5.17 RSV.

57. Contra Bloom, Shakespeare's Politics, 23-24, 27.

58. Deut. 12.15-16 RSV.

59. Deut., 24.6 RSV.

60. See Tovey, “Golden Casket,” 232.

61. John 19.7 RSV.

62. Matt. 27.24-25 RSV.

63. Luke 23.4, 14, 22 RSV; cf. John 19.6.

64. Luke 23.23-25; cf. John 19.12-16 RSV.

65. Contra Tovey, “Golden Casket,” 237.

66. Ovid Heroides 12.161-63; Grant Showerman, trans., Loeb Classical Library, 155.

67. Cf. esp. 5.1.47: Bassanio's “horn full of good news.”

68. Thus Tovey considerably understates the situation when she says all that remains for Portia is a “chastising” of her unfaithful husband (“Golden Casket,” 230). Cf. Hyman: “The climax of the play, Portia's turning the tables on Shylock, is also the high point of Portia's victory over Antonio” (“Rival Lovers,” 112).

69. Cf. Hyman, “Rival Lovers,” 112.

70. This is quite independent of any suggestion of a homoerotic character of Antonio's feelings for Bassanio. Given the echoes of Christianity in the play, I do not believe this is the point Shakespeare is attempting to explore. Cf. Hyman, “Rival Lovers,” 110; Geary, “Nature of Portia's Victory,” 59-60, 66. Note that even though Antonio is denied his Christlike sacrifice, he continues to cast the situation in Christian (love) vs. Jewish (commandment) terms.

71. Cf. Plato Symposium 177-185; Tovey, “Golden Casket,” 233.

72. Boose misses Portia's near despair and near failure in her presentation of Portia as the source of “the castrating manipulations of the benefactress who has strategically orchestrated all such acquisitions” (“Comic Contract,” 249).

73. Cf. Gen. 1.3 RSV.

74. Robert Graves, Greek Myths, 1:335, 2:253, 258; but cf. Ovid Metamorphoses 12.208-9.

75. Cf. John 1.9 RSV.

76. Cf. John 19.5 RSV.

77. Thus Holmer seems to miss almost entirely what has happened in the ring episode when she says that in giving away the ring “Bassanio is as firmly devoted to Portia as ever; … the bond is still intact” (“Loving Wisely,” 71).

78. See Donow, “Shakespeare's Caskets,” 92.

79. Consider Hyman, “Rival Lovers,” 115; in his otherwise fine treatment of the play, Geary misses the real dynamic of this episode when he puts its weight on the revelation of Balthazar's identity (“Nature of Portia's Victory,” 66). The decisive things have happened before that revelation occurs. Also see Aristotle Ethics 1170b30-1171a21.

80. Contra Boose, who sees the ending of the play as showing “an anxiously defensive hostility directed against … the social bond itself” (“Comic Contract,” 251).

81. Contra Tovey's identification of Belmont and Portia with Platonic philosophy. At this point this otherwise excellent essay loses touch with the play, as in the judgment that Portia acts “to emancipate the potential philosopher [Bassanio!] from the religion of his city” (“Golden Casket,” 234-37).