Portia and The Merchant of Venice: The Gentle Bond
Last Updated August 15, 2024.
[In the following essay, Hapgood discusses Portia's devotion and loyalty to the letter of the law.]
In a passage which sums up the main point of his provocative article, “The Merchant of Venice: The Gentle Bond,” Sigurd Burckhardt writes:
the plot is circular: bound in such a way that the instrument of destruction, the bond, turns out to be the source of deliverance. Portia, won through the bond, wins Antonio's release from it; what is more, she wins it, not by breaking the bond, but by submitting to its rigor more rigorously than even the Jew had thought to do. So seen, one of Shakespeare's apparently most fanciful plots proves to be one of the most exactingly structured; it is what it should be: the play's controlling metaphor. As the subsidiary metaphors of the bond and the ring indicate, The Merchant [The Merchant of Venice] is a play about circularity and circulation; it asks how the vicious circle of the bond's law can be transformed into the ring of love. And it answers: through a literal and unreserved submission to the bond as absolutely binding.1
Thus boldly would Burckhardt put a new twist on the prevailing view of Portia, which sees in her a direct exponent of liberality in love as in law. To Burckhardt, hers is “the way to freedom,” but, paradoxically, that entails “a radical and literal acceptance of bondage.” To me, neither of these views of Portia seems quite right: the prevailing view mistakes the exceptions for the rule; Burckhardt discerns the general rule, but misses the exceptions that fundamentally qualify it. As I understand Portia in each of the three main sequences in which she figures—the casket-choice, the pound-of-flesh trial, and the ring-trick—her ultimate loyalties are to the law, including its most legalistic forms. Yet in each she also reveals her most appealing trait, a gift for making enlightened exceptions. These exceptions are in the service of a large-minded sense of law, one that includes its spirit as well as its letter; and it is through them, not through out-Shylocking Shylock, that she makes the bond gentle.
I
In each of the three sequences, Portia must cope with “rigorously positive laws,” as Burckhardt well puts it, “which threaten to frustrate the very purposes they are meant to serve, but which must nevertheless be obeyed” (pp. 246-47). Portia's approach is basically the same in all, but it is perhaps most clearly seen in the trial, where her enlightened exceptions derive explicitly from contemporary ideas about equity.
The loan-bond between Shylock and Antonio, though legal, is obviously not serving its intended purpose. Shylock is perverting its letter to commit legalized murder. Bassanio's remedy would be to break the law: he begs Portia to “Wrest once the law to your authority,—/ To do a great right, do a little wrong” (IV.i.211-12).2 Portia, however, is firm:
It must not be, there is no power in Venice
Can alter a decree established:
'Twill be recorded for a precedent,
And many an error by the same example
Will rush into the state,—it cannot be.
(214-18)
Her remedy is equity—not simply justice or simply mercy, but justice tempered by mercy. That is what in her “quality of mercy” speech she advocates to Shylock instead of the rigor of the law. And that is what she advocates for Shylock when the tables are turned: the Venetian law she finally invokes leaves the decision of life or death for the offender “in the mercy / Of the Duke only,” and she urges Shylock to “beg mercy of the duke” (351-52, 359). Since this much equity was built into the law, Burckhardt might well maintain that Portia was thus doing no more than fulfilling its letter. But Portia goes further, to urge: “What mercy can you render him Antonio?” (374).
Yet does Portia herself practice the equity she preaches? Is it equitable for Portia to encourage Shylock to think that his case is legally unassailable? She repeatedly assures him that “the Venetian law / Cannot impugn you as you do proceed” (IV.i.174-75). Furthermore, once Shylock has officially invoked the bond and thus decisively broken the law forbidding aliens to contrive against the lives of citizens, should not Portia have applied that law immediately? Instead, she repeatedly seems to offer Shylock the option of insisting, fatally, on the bond and suffering the consequences.
Undoubtedly, Portia's methods in the trial scene (as elsewhere) are highhanded. Yet they seem to me defensible, not as those of a judge administering the law but as those of a teacher presenting a series of lessons in it. For Portia is a born and incorrigible teacher. When we first meet her, for instance, she is trying to mock Nerissa out of her sententiousness: “Good sentences, and well pronounc'd,” she laughs, and goes on to pronounce a string of good sentences which proclaim the insufficiency of good sentences: “I can easier teach twenty what were good to be done, than be one of the twenty to follow mine own teaching” (I.ii.15-17). Nerissa of course remains as sententious as ever, the grand comic irony of Portia's pedagogy being that this master teacher finds herself surrounded by twenty who are virtually unteachable.
For the sake of her teaching, Portia is as ready to take enlightened liberties with strict equity as with strict legality. She at first represents the legality of Shylock's claim as secure in order to make graphic to him the distinction between mere justice and equity. Thus, too, she can allow him a purely equitable option when she brings her teaching to the test:
Why this bond is forfeit,
And lawfully by this the Jew may claim
A pound of flesh, to be by him cut off
Nearest the merchant's heart: be merciful,
Take thrice thy money, bid me tear the bond.
(IV.i.227-31)
At this point, Shylock fails to respond at all to her instruction, ignoring her equitable alternative and formally charging her by the law to “Proceed to judgment” (236).
It is then that Portia comes closest to the “literal and unreserved submission to the bond as absolutely binding” that Burckhardt finds to be her liberating principle. Certainly, she here invokes the letter of the bond “more rigorously than even the Jew had thought to do”:
The words expressly are “a pound of flesh”:
Take then thy bond, take thou thy pound of flesh,
But in the cutting it, if thou dost shed
One drop of Christian blood, thy lands and goods
Are (by the law of Venice) confiscate. …
(IV.i.303-307)
But she does not “submit” to it. Although we do not yet know about the law against aliens that she finally applies, Portia of course does, and she can employ it whenever necessary. Her repeated offer that Shylock take his bond is not, then, a real risk; nor does it seem like one. The effect is rather that Portia has successfully foiled Shylock's threat by presenting him with an unacceptable alternative, as Gratiano underlines by jubilantly mocking: “O upright judge!—/ Mark Jew,—O learned judge!” (308-309). There is perhaps more of a threat that Shylock will take Portia's dare after she has refused him thrice the bond and promised “nothing but the penalty” (318). But if Shylock's “pause” seems menacing, Portia seems easily equal to it, adding now the further deterrent that, if he takes more or less than a just pound, “Thou diest” (328). The effect—while Gratiano crows in triumph—is that Shylock has again been faced down by an unacceptable alternative.
To Burckhardt, it is “the apostate rather than the bond that is brought into contempt” (p. 260) by Shylock's refusal to become “a blood witness” to the letter of the law. To me, just the opposite seems true: Shylock's refusal appears to be one of Portia's more successful pieces of instruction, partial as her success may be. It is true that Shylock is extremely reluctant to face the whole truth of what it means to insist upon his bond and nothing but the bond and that he keeps seeking ways out of the confrontation, ways which Portia (all the while silencing Bassanio, who has totally missed her point) must block one by one. But she does repeatedly bring him face to face with the self-destructiveness of “all justice” in a manner that causes him to back away from this ultimate extreme of his self-deadening legalism. If this is largely expediency on his part, still his “Is that the law?” (IV.i.309) seems to register disenchantment as well as disbelief.
It remains for Portia to bring home to Shylock the enormity of the legalized murder he thought to perform, and at last she applies the Venetian law that supersedes the bond. In tempering its punishments, moreover, Portia sees the chance to let the other Christians demonstrate to Shylock the equity that she had earlier advocated. If the final results seem less than equitable, that is because—once again—her instruction is only partially successful.
The Duke comes nearest to rising to Portia's level. Even before she came to the trial, he had recommended, albeit threateningly, an equitable settlement to Shylock; and here he pardons Shylock his life before he asks it (“That thou shalt see the difference of our spirit” [IV.i. 364]) and promises that humbleness may reduce the state's half of his estate to a fine. One can only guess at Portia's reactions, but I see her beam approvingly. She is not at all pleased by Gratiano's vindictiveness, however, and not altogether happy with Antonio's doubly provisional kind of mercy. She is not happy either with the Duke's threat to “recant / The pardon that I late pronounced here” (387-88). My Portia, however, shrugs ruefully, gives Shylock a chance to appeal, and, when he says, “I am content,” backs up the more generous part of Antonio's response, settling for such equity as she has been able to get.
Not that Portia emerges as a paragon. As indulgent as Shakespeare is toward her didacticism, he does not conceal its high price. Part of our sympathy for Shylock comes from our sense that he alone has to pay for Portia's failure to lift him and the others to her own level of enlightenment.
II
In the casket sequence, Portia adheres in general to the letter of her father's will. It is true that in her first scene she repines to Nerissa at this limit on her choice: “I may neither choose who I would, nor refuse who I dislike, so is the will of a living daughter curb'd by the will of a dead father …” (I.ii.22-25). And she is not so bound by her father's rules that she cannot play with the idea of misleading the drunken German suitor by setting “a deep glass of Rhenish wine on the contrary casket …” (91-92). Still, she affirms at the end of the scene that “If I live to be as old as Sibylla, I will die as chaste as Diana, unless I be obtained by the manner of my father's will …” (102-104). Accordingly, she runs the risk of being chosen by Morocco or Arragon.
Outlandish as it seems, there is something to be said for her father's device. Its risks frighten off the overly “reasonable”; and those who are so foolhardy (Morocco) or foolish (Arragon) as to try it, fail it. Like most of Shakespeare's fathers, however, Portia's father made the great error of leaving his daughter's wishes out of account. If he had been as wise as she, he would have known, as she puts it, that “the brain may devise laws for the blood, but a hot temper leaps o'er a cold decree” (17-19), and have provided for the claims of her blood. Since he did not, when Bassanio arrives, she does it for him.
Her choice is precisely the kind of man her father most wanted to eliminate. As is borne out by the verses in each of the caskets, what he wanted above all for his daughter was a husband who was not taken in by appearances. And, from the first scene, Bassanio reveals himself to be preoccupied with false show, reminding Antonio of
How much I have disabled mine estate,
By something showing a more swelling port
Than my faint means would grant continuance. …
(I.i.123-25)
A little later we see him, with his borrowed money, ordering the “rare new liveries” that attract to his service the fool Launcelot, who appropriately receives “a livery / More guarded than his fellows' …” (II.ii.147-48). And in the same scene, Bassanio instructs Gratiano to restrain his wild behavior lest it “show / Something too liberal” in Belmont (175-76). His arrival there is preceded by an “ambassador,” of whom Portia's servant reports:
A day in April never came so sweet
To show how costly summer was at hand,
As this fore-spurrer comes before his lord.
(II.ix.93-95)
Such false shows would hardly seem to promise true love. Yet Portia sees in Bassanio the potential for such love and hence makes exceptions to her father's will. She does not go so far as to tell Bassanio the answer to the puzzle; nor (unlike the lady's maid in Il Pecorone) does Nerissa do so. The precise temptation that Portia fears will make her forsworn is more subtle: as she tells Bassanio, “I could teach you / How to choose right …” (III.ii.10-11). And to that temptation, I believe—although she denies it—she succumbs.
Bassanio's privileges stand out by contrast with the pattern established by Morocco and Arragon, who were inspired neither by a confession of the lady's love beforehand nor by music while they made their choice. I find, too, in Portia's lines to Bassanio (before he chooses) a host of subliminal suggestions, of the sort by which a skillful teacher leads a responsive student to make his own “discoveries.” Bassanio is thus made aware that the correct answer is not obvious but needs to be taught; he is brought by Portia's example to think in paradoxes (“O happy torment” [III.ii.37]); and he is prompted to think of success as involving difficulty and hazard (like an exploit of Hercules).
His chief privilege is the song, “Tell me where is Fancy bred.” I do not mean its rhymes with “lead”; they belong at most to the realm of subliminal suggestion. What the singer must convey is the song's warning against trusting the eyes—precisely the trait Portia's father designed the casket-puzzle to test. For in the lines immediately after the song, Bassanio responds directly to this warning (“So may the outward shows be least themselves,—/ The world is still deceiv'd with ornament” [73-74]) and follows it through a series of “so” and “thus” clauses to the decisive “Therefore” that precedes his rejection of the gold and silver caskets.
Thus Portia makes gentle her father's bond. He had intended to provide for a marriage founded on right love, an intention she remains true to, while adjusting his method. For the man she rightly loves, she in effect alters the casket-choice from an “achievement” to an “aptitude” test, one designed to select a husband who can be taught to love rightly. Bassanio of course passes this test brilliantly. That he is truly learning her lesson is shown immediately: although—in his old way—he spends a dozen lines admiring “Fair Portia's counterfeit” (115-26), he then catches himself up to declare how “far this shadow / Doth limp behind the substance” (128-29). Apt pupil that he is, however, he is still in need of further instruction in right love—as Portia shortly learns.
III
Bassanio still must learn to put the laws of their love before those of his friendship with Antonio. That is the upshot of Portia's final lesson, as presented in the ring-sequence. Yet she knows how to make an enlightened exception to her own laws, as well as to those of her father and the state. And it is through her willingness to forgive Bassanio's breach of their love-bond that the “ring of love” at the end is achieved.
The terms of their love-bond are very clear. When Portia first gives Bassanio her ring, she declares:
This house, these servants, and this same myself
Are yours,—my lord's!—I give them with this ring,
Which when you part from, lose, or give away,
Let it presage the ruin of your love,
And be my vantage to exclaim on you.
(III.ii.170-74)
Bassanio responds with a vow:
when this ring
Parts from this finger, then parts life from hence,—
O then be bold to say Bassanio's dead!
(183-85)
Bassanio's breach of this bond is just as clear. When he gives the ring to the “lawyer” who has saved his friend, it signifies the precedence Bassanio gives his friendship for Antonio over his love for Portia, a precedence which has by then been indicated in many ways. Although Antonio is resigned to the proposed marriage of his friend, he clings to first place in his affection. That is surely part of the reason for his mysterious melancholy and his being moved to tears by Bassanio's departure. If, according to Renaissance orthodoxy, friendship should ideally thus take priority over love, still the friendship of Antonio and Bassanio is plainly much too one-sided to be ideal. Antonio is at once too generous and too possessive. His claim on the love of his “dearest friend” interrupts the consummation of Bassanio's marriage, not because Bassanio might help to save his life but because he wants Bassanio to see him die for his sake, a last request that Antonio makes a test of love: “if your love do not persuade you to come, let not my letter” (III.ii.319-20). At the trial, Antonio bids his friend a last farewell:
Commend me to your honourable wife …
Say how I lov'd you, speak me fair in death:
And when the tale is told, bid her be judge
Whether Bassanio had not once a love. …
(IV.i.269-73)
Ever impressionable, Bassanio responds to the implied (and invidious) comparison with the declaration that
life itself, my wife, and all the world,
Are not with me esteem'd above thy life.
I would lose all, ay sacrifice them all
Here to this devil, to deliver you.
(280-83)
In Il Pecorone it is the hero himself who decides to let the lawyer have the ring; in The Merchant Bassanio at first refuses to do so and complies only at Antonio's urging:
let him have the ring,
Let his deservings and my love withal
Be valued 'gainst your wife's commandement.
(445-47)
The issue, and Bassanio's choice, could not be more sharply drawn.
Portia is never unduly concerned about Antonio's claims for precedence. At the very first, in fact, she seems ready to make a threesome. After sending Bassanio hence on their wedding day, she tells Lorenzo:
this Antonio
Being the bosom lover of my lord,
Must needs be like my lord. If it be so,
How little is the cost I have bestowed
In purchasing the semblance of my soul,
From out the state of hellish cruelty!—
This comes too near the praising of myself,
Therefore no more of it. …
(III.iv.16-23)
Yet even then she is concerned not only that Bassanio prove a good friend, but also that he prove a good husband: “For never shall you lie by Portia's side / With an unquiet soul” (III.ii.304-305). J. A. Bryant puts it too strongly when he remarks that Portia's “whole objective in coming to the trial, as her trick about the ring at the close of that scene shows, is to snare Bassanio. …”3 But there is a sense of husband-hunting as well as friend-saving about Portia's quest to Venice. She is true kin to the much less fortunate Helena, who in All's Well That Ends Well must resort to a bed-trick, as well as a ring-trick, in order to consummate her marriage.
Of course, Portia never approaches such extremes. Her rivalry with Antonio never becomes an open, direct issue at all—even through Bassanio; for when poor Bassanio is with Portia, he submits to her will, and when he is with Antonio, he submits to his. So lighthearted and tactful is Portia in dealing with Antonio's claims on her husband that one may well question whether she is concerned about them at all. The reaction of Portia-the-judge to Bassanio's grandiose exaltation of his friend over “life, wife, and all the world” is jocular: “Your wife would give you little thanks for that / If she were by to hear you make the offer” (IV.i.284-85). Yet she does not merely let it pass either. And her jocularity need not indicate a total lack of concern with the issue. It seems to me, rather, to come from a supreme (and thoroughly warranted) confidence in her ability to deal with the male world, as in her prediction to Nerissa:
we shall have old swearing
That they did give the rings away to men;
But we'll outface them, and outswear them too. …
(IV.ii.15-17)
In the last act, she fulfills her prediction and firmly reclaims her precedence with Bassanio. As playful as her ring-trickery is, Portia does not let up until her husband has fully acknowledged his fault and guaranteed, with his friend's backing, that it will not happen again. Not until his third plea is he pardoned. His first plea had been full of self-defense (as well as dramatic irony):
pardon me good lady,
For by these blessed candles of the night,
Had you been there, I think you would have begg'd
The ring of me to give the worthy doctor.
(V.i.219-22)
His second plea was more abject yet still self-justifying: “Portia, forgive me this enforced wrong …” (240). His final plea makes no qualification upon his offense, simply: “Pardon this fault, and by my soul I swear / I never more will break an oath with thee” (247-48). Antonio chimes in:
I once did lend my body for his wealth,
Which but for him that had your husband's ring
Had quite miscarried. I dare be bound again,
My soul upon the forfeit, that your lord
Will never more break faith advisedly.
(249-53)
Only then does Portia relent.
Thus Antonio enters into another “merry bond.” Friendship's martyr, he here finally gives all, renouncing out of friendship first place in his friend's affections. Once he has done so, Portia is quick to assure him of second place, making him the intermediary of their reconciliation—“Then you shall be his surety: give him this, / And bid him keep it better than the other” (254-55)—and a little later rewarding him with news of his three recovered argosies.
Bassanio's acceptance of the ring constitutes a new marriage, one more firmly safeguarded than the first. Before she is through, Portia has made her ring represent the marriage-bond in all its aspects, teaching Bassanio the rewards (including material ones, and sexual) of fidelity to it, the punishments for violating it. Although Portia is prepared to give much, she will not—unlike Antonio—give all. Just this once, however, she is prepared to make an exception and forgive Bassanio's breach of their marriage-bond, as long as it does not happen again.
IV
In the summary passage quoted at the beginning of this paper, Burckhardt goes on to draw an analogy between Portia's supposed sense of bondage and Shakespeare's own:
It is as though Shakespeare, finding himself bound to a story already drawn up for him in his source, had taken it as the test of his creative freedom and had discovered that this freedom lay … in a Portia-like acceptance and penetration of these exigencies to the point where they must yield their liberating truth.
(p. 243)
Burckhardt accordingly sets out to show that Shakespeare followed “his source religiously.” I do not feel his urgency to draw a biographical parallel since I do not see Shakespeare's use of his source materials in The Merchant of Venice as a “discovery”: his practice seems very much like what it was before and was to be after. If there is a parallel to be drawn between Portia and Shakespeare, however, it is that both know how to take poetic license.
Since Burckhardt, following prevailing opinion, regards The Jew as Shakespeare's source, and since The Jew is no longer extant, it is extremely difficult to dispute whether Shakespeare followed it religiously or not. Burckhardt does grant, however, that Shakespeare made two departures from his presumed source: he changed the inscription on the lead casket from “Whoso chooseth me shall find that God hath disposed for him” (as it appears in Gesta Romanorum) to “Who chooseth me, must give and hazard all he hath”; and he added the Jessica-story. Burckhardt denies, however, that these liberties contradict his view of Shakespeare's Portia-like sense of bondage to his source; instead, paradoxically, they confirm it. I maintain that these two instances are more consonant with my understanding of Portia than with his.
He makes my case for me in his discussion of the inscriptions, arguing eloquently that, in making the change, Shakespeare
did not alter the story but restored it to itself by freeing it from a pious falsification. For its meaning was that it sprang from a series of ventures, of hazards; it was propelled by the risks Antonio, Bassanio, Portia and, up to a point, Shylock were willing to take.
(p. 258)
I need only point out that such “restoration” is scarcely following the letter of the story's law; it illustrates instead exactly the same ability to make an exception to its letter for the sake of its spirit that I have been claiming for Portia.
Burckhardt sees the Jessica-Lorenzo affair as an inversion of true bonded love: in contrast to that of Portia and Bassanio, “Their love is lawless, financed by theft and engineered through a gross breach of trust” (p. 253). As I understand the contrast between the pairs of lovers, its function is more precise: it serves to distinguish Portia's poetic license from Jessica's simple license. Jessica defies her father's will and, as Burckhardt finely observes (p. 253), literally throws her father's casket to Lorenzo. Their love is subjected to no test. Portia tests Bassanio, makes him choose, but—as already discussed—redefines the test in a more enlightened way. She transcends her father's will.
Yet even the license of Jessica and Lorenzo is more sympathetically treated by Shakespeare than is Shylock's legalism. They are shown to be like the
youthful and unhandled colts
Fetching mad bounds, bellowing and neighing loud,
Which is the hot condition of their blood,—
If they but hear perchance a trumpet sound,
Or any air of music touch their ears,
You shall perceive them make a mutual stand. …
(V.i.72-77)
If Shakespeare were really as devoted to the bond as Burckhardt takes him to be, he would seem to be unaccountably indulgent toward these two. The same is true of Launcelot, who feels it is devilishly against his conscience to break his bond to his master and run away; yet this alteration of the bond, comically, receives the blessing of all concerned—his former master, his new one, and his father.
Thus the two alterations that Burckhardt grants need not be taken as confirming Shakespeare's general bondage to the letter of The Jew. And it is not at all certain that Shakespeare used The Jew at all. As John Russell Brown writes in the introduction to the Arden edition:
Clearly there is insufficient evidence to claim that a lost Jew play was the direct source of The Merchant of Venice, and it remains at least a strong probability that Shakespeare himself adapted the story as found in Il Pecorone. Shakespeare often used more than one source for a single play, and there is no reason why he should not have done so for The Merchant [The Merchant of Venice].
(p. xxx)
If Brown's “strong probability” is right, then Shakespeare's self-allowed latitude would be even larger. In any case, it seems to me clear that Shakespeare makes the bondage of his source gentle neither through total freedom (like Jessica and Lorenzo) nor “through a literal and unreserved submission to the bond as absolutely binding” (like Shylock) but by allowing himself the liberty to make the enlightened exceptions that will bring out its own best possibilities (like Portia).
Notes
-
ELH, XXIX (1962), 242-43.
-
The Merchant of Venice, ed. John Russell Brown, Arden Shakespeare (London, 1955); all quotations are from this edition.
-
Hippolyta's View (Lexington, 1961), p. 41.
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