SOURCE: “Lavinia's Message: Shakespeare and Myth,” in Renaissance Papers, 1981, pp. 55-69.

[In the following essay, Mowat detects the presence of classical myths from Ovid's Metamorphoses as structuring principles in Shakespeare's plays Titus Andronicus and The Merchant of Venice.]

Act IV, Scene 1, of Titus Andronicus is surely one of the more remarkable scenes in Shakespeare. It opens with young Lucius running on-stage carrying an armload of books, pursued by his mutilated Aunt Lavinia, hands cut off, tongue cut out. In his panic, the boy throws down the books and calls for help. Lavinia rummages through the books with her stumps, heaves her arms in the air, and, as her father and uncle notice with astonishment, pulls “Ovid's Metamorphosis” from the pile. Perhaps, they suggest, the book has sentimental associations for her. Then they see her try to turn the pages; they watch as she “quotes the leaves”; they read the story to which she points:

Titus: Lavinia, wert thou thus surpris'd, sweet girl,
Ravish'd and wrong'd, as Philomela was,
Forc'd in the ruthless, vast, and gloomy woods?
See, See!
Ay, such a place there is, where we did hunt—
.....Pattern'd by that the poet here describes. …(1)

Although the scene becomes increasingly bizarre as Lavinia, using a stick held in her mouth and guided by her stumps, writes the names of her ravishers in the sand, what is most striking in the scene is not its obvious grotesqueness but rather its more subtle hint of self-parody. Since Shakespeare himself, in writing Titus Andronicus, had also pulled out his copy of “Ovid's Metamorphosis” and had found and read there “the tragic tale of Philomel,”² it is hard not to see in Lavinia a shadow figure of Shakespeare himself, pointing mutely but eloquently to the “Metamorphosis.”

Interestingly, as readers or viewers of Titus Andronicus, we hardly need Lavinia's blatant reminder that her story is like Ovid's Philomela. Lavinia's ravagers had expressly re-enacted the Philomela story, with Aaron saying, as he set up her rape: “… Philomel must lose her tongue to-day” (II.iii.43). After the rape, Lavinia had been taunted with the fact that she had lost not only her tongue but also her hands (II.iv.3-10), so that, unlike Philomela, she could not weave out in a tapestry her accusations. Her uncle had noted, when he found her:

But, sure, some Tereus hath deflow'red thee,
And, lest thou should'st detect him, cut thy tongue.
.....Fair Philomel, why, she but lost her tongue,
And in a tedious sampler sew'd her mind:
.....A craftier Tereus, cousin, hast thou met,
And he hath cut those pretty fingers off
That could have better sew'd than Philomel.

(II.iv.26ff.)

And Lavinia's father, as he prepares the dreadful banquet for Tamora, says to his victims:

… worse than Philomel you us'd my daughter
And worse than Progne I will be reveng'd.

(V.ii.194-5)

We need no Lavinia, then, “quoting the leaves” to let us know that her story is Philomela's story. Why, then, this physical, urgent pointing toward Ovid? I would suggest that Lavinia's gesture focuses our attention on the fact that this play does more than allude to the Philomela myth—that the gesture forces on us an awareness that the sequence of incidents in Ovid and in Titus Andronicus are deliberately parallel. The rape and mutilation in a dark wood, the revelation of a story through a story (Philomela's woven in a tapestry, Lavinia's pointed out in a child's book), the decision by a loved one to take revenge, the use of madness as a cover for the revenger, and, finally, the terrible banquet in which a parent unknowingly eats its own child—this is the pattern that Ovid devised and Shakespeare followed. Further, this physical pointing toward the printed text—toward a story fixed and finished and known—just at the moment when Lavinia's story is only half completed, when her Procne is just learning the truth, prepares us as audience for the actions which follow and encourages us to attach to Titus and Lavinia the anguish and desperation of Procne and Philomela as they move toward their revenge.³

I have lingered over this scene—this moment—in Titus Andronicus because I believe that we can find in it instructive insights about Shakespeare's use of myth in his plays. Perhaps nowhere else in the canon does Shakespeare so overtly link a play to the story that his characters are re-enacting. But his use of the Philomela story is not unique. More than once Shakespeare turned to Ovid, or to Virgil, or to the Bible, drew out not just allusions but entire stories—using “story” here as C. S. Lewis defines it as “a series of imagined events”⁴—and used that series of events to shape his drama. Moreover, as he does with Philomela, in at least two plays he alludes at crucial moments to the myth that he is, in effect, retelling, thus allowing the myth both to fill the play with its own meaning and emotional impact and also to guide our expectations and imaginative responses to characters and to incidents.

The larger topic of Shakespeare's use of myth is a vast territory; what I will be exploring here is one small corner of that territory, Shakespeare's use of mythologems as structuring devices.⁵ I will limit my discussion to Titus Andronicus and The Merchant of Venice—two plays where Shakespeare leads us directly and repeatedly to the stories he is using, and where I therefore feel that I can speak with confidence about what he seems to be doing. Even with so small a sample, we can begin to see interesting patterns in Shakespeare's methods of shaping drama and of stirring audience response, and can begin to recognize a special quality in Shakespeare's imagination.

First, then: in both Titus Andronicus and The Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare took from Ovid a familiar story which he used to structure the play at a very deep level and to which he calls our attention at the beginning, the middle, and the end of the play. In Titus Andronicus, despite Lavinia's insistence on the centrality of the Philomela story, the larger shaping myth is actually that of Hecuba's Revenge, into which the Philomela myth and others are embedded.⁶ Ovid tells Hecuba's story in Book XIII of the Metamorphoses, and Shakespeare alludes to that story at three key points in Titus Andronicus: in the opening scene, in mid-play (where we're reminded that “Hecuba of Troy ran mad for sorrow”), and in the final scene, where Rome is likened to King Priam's Troy on “that baleful burning night.”

At first, it is Tamora who, in Titus Andronicus, is compared to Hecuba, and, in a sense, Tamora does play out the Hecuba's Revenge story. Like Hecuba, Tamora is the defeated queen of a defeated nation. Tamora's son, Alarbus, is, like Hecuba's daughter Polyxena, ritually slain in order to appease the ghosts of the dead. Like Hecuba, Tamora kneels and weeps, and like Hecuba, she hopes for help from the gods in gaining her revenge. Her son's prayer for her is that

The self-same gods that arm'd the Queen of Troy
With opportunity of sharp revenge
Upon the Thracian tyrant in his tent
May favor Tamora, the Queen of Goths,
(When Goths were Goths, and Tamora was queen)
To quit the bloody wrongs upon her foes.

(I.i.136ff.)⁷

Remember, boys, I pour'd forth tears in vain
To save your brother from the sacrifice,
But fierce Andronicus would not relent.
Therefore away with her, and use her as you will.

(II.iii.163ff.)

And Tamora's visit to Titus in the garb of Revenge is reminiscent of Hecuba's visit to the Thracian tyrant.

Yet the links between Tamora and Hecuba are superficial compared to those between Hecuba and Titus. It is no accident that, as Eugene Waith puts it, “at the end it is Titus … who produces an effect like that of Ovid's Hecuba, for whom even the gods felt pity when revenge had dreadfully transformed her” (p. 46). Titus, in I, i, compares himself to Priam, but the sequence of incidents which attach to Titus are those which Hecuba undergoes after Priam's death. Her only daughter is taken from her and stabbed; she mourns for the loss of her many children; confronted with a final and unexpected horror—the mutilated corpse of her last remaining son—she reaches a moment in which horror has so piled on horror that she can only remain silent in the midst of others' weeping,⁸ she gathers her rage about her and, despite her years, dupes the child's murderer into a secret meeting at which she digs out his eyes, plunges her fingers into his brain, and then is transformed into a howling dog. It is at this point that the gods feel pity for her. This sequence of events and this sequence of emotional states closely approximate Titus's experience once Tamora and Aaron set out to “massacre” the Andronici, to “race their faction and their family, / The cruel father and his traitorous sons” (I.i.450-2).

The general shape of Titus Andronicus is that of the destruction of a noble house where the parent is destroyed through the destruction of the children. The play recalls at some points Juno's destruction of the House of Cadmus, with Tamora reminiscent of Juno in her rage, as well as of the Fury whom Juno calls from hell. The play reminds one even more of Latona's destruction of the House of Thebes, where Niobe, a double of Hecuba, is destroyed through the slaughter of her children—Niobe, who at her story's end, sits on the ground among the dead bodies, holding her youngest daughter in her arms, weeping, turning into a stone which “weepeth still.”⁹ Titus's brother, in mid-play, looks at the ruin of the Andronici family—at Lucius banished and Lavinia mangled, at Titus's butchered hand and at the heads of Titus's two sons—and feels himself becoming, like Niobe, “a stony image, cold and numb,” and he encourages Titus to die, as Niobe's husband had died, of grief. But Titus's story is not complete. Like Hecuba, he has received a final, mocking, gratuitous blow that pushes him past despair and into rage, and he becomes a personified Vengeance. It is this final part of Hecuba's story—the revenge conclusion—that sets it apart from the other Ovidian stories of destruction of houses, and which, perhaps, made it more attractive to Shakespeare as a structuring myth than the stories that simply end with the mother's or father's anguished death.

In The Merchant of Venice, too, Shakespeare selects a familiar story—this one, the story of Jason and Medea—and calls our attention to the tale at three key points: in the first scene, when Bassanio sets his desires toward Belmont and toward Portia, the Golden Fleece; in mid-play, when Gratiano proclaims, “We are the Jasons, we have won the fleece”; and in the fifth act, where we are reminded that on one moonlit night Medea saved the life of old Aeson, Jason's father.¹⁰ As Ovid tells it, the first major incident in the tripartite story is Jason's winning of the fleece through the magic enchantments of Medea; the second part of the story is Medea's use of magic to restore Aeson to life; the final incident is the infidelity of Jason, and Medea's revenge. Shakespeare follows the general outline of this story and parallels the major incidents with some fidelity to detail.

Bassanio, like Jason, must first get a ship, collect a crew, and make his way to the land of the golden fleece. This Bassanio does in the first two acts of The Merchant of Venice. He must then survive a hazardous test. Portia, like Medea, finds herself caught between loyalty to her father's will and love for the young hero. Unlike Medea, Portia (as I read the play) remains obedient to her father and allows another kind of magic—love, perhaps—to guide Bassanio successfully through the dangers that destroyed his predecessors. But Bassanio's moment of triumph, like Jason's, is short indeed. He wins the “fleece” only to learn that his friend Antonio, like Jason's father, is near death's door. This time his Medea does use a kind of magic. She transforms herself into a lawyer and undertakes the seemingly impossible task of saving Antonio from Shylock's knife. Her lawyer's robe, her pretended “wanderings,” her quick flight to Venice and back, all are reminiscent of Medea's actions in the saving of Aeson.

Yet at key points Shakespeare makes significant changes away from the structuring myth. For Ovid's frightening ritual of blood-spilling and magic brews, Shakespeare substitutes the famous trial-scene where wit replaces witchcraft. At the end of the story, where Jason was literally unfaithful and Medea cruelly vengeful, Bassanio is only weak, only symbolically unfaithful. Under pressure, he breaks his vow and gives away Portia's ring. Portia's vengeance too is symbolic: she threatens never to consummate the marriage, she threatens to be herself an unfaithful wife, and she says harshly to Bassanio: “Even so void is your false heart of truth.” The infamous ring incident, then, is Shakespeare's major transformation in this play of the potentially tragic into its comic equivalent, a transformation in line with comparable changes in the story of the winning of the fleece, where, for example, Jason's failure would have been punished with death, Bassanio's with a celibate life.¹¹

The Merchant of Venice and Titus Andronicus, then, are alike in their dependence on a familiar myth for larger structural patterning, though The Merchant of Venice uses the myth far more skillfully, as a kind of bass continuo on which the comic themes can play. In two other ways, the plays are alike in their use of mythologems, though in general The Merchant of Venice is in all cases more subtle, more adroit. First, Shakespeare embeds in both plays allusions to parallel mythologems. In Titus Andronicus, Shakespeare alludes, for instance, to other anguished fathers and victim daughters—to Junius Brutus and Lucrece, to Inarchus, grieving for his transformed daughter Io, and to Io herself, who, like Lavinia, could speak to her father only by drawing letters in the sand.¹² In The Merchant of Venice, Portia likens herself, in the casket scene, to Hesione, sacrificed by her father, helpless, yearning for rescue (III.ii.53ff.). These inset allusions work powerfully to reinforce audience emotional response. Titus is not just a crazed Roman general; he is Pandion, Inarchus, Junius Brutus, Priam, Hecuba, Niobe; Portia is, for some little time, the maiden threatened by the sea-monster, shaken by feelings of helplessness and yearning, while Bassanio is the young Alcides who through his right choosing can release her from bondage. Portia's extended dramatic metaphor gives us unexpected insight into the intensity of her emotions, and raises Bassanio to the position of rescuing hero.

Finally, the plays are alike in that each includes not only allusions, but also overlapping inset stories. We began by looking at the Philomela story which Shakespeare embeds within the Hecuba's Revenge structure. Lavinia is Polyxena in one story, Philomela in the other. One of the problems with Titus Andronicus is that often the overlapping myths pull against each other. At the play's end, for instance, both Tamora and Titus are playing the Hecuba's Revenge role, each attempting to dupe the child-killing tyrant. Further, Titus at this point is also Procne, preparing the banquet for Tereus, a role transferred here confusingly to Tamora while the actual Tereuses are being baked in pasties. Little but confusion and fragmentation can result from such superpositions and role duplications.

In The Merchant of Venice, the inset story belongs to Shylock, and not to fragment but to augment the play. In the romantic Ovidian main plot, Shylock plays essentially the role that Death plays in the Jason-Medea myth. Antonio's time, like old Aeson's, has run out, and Shylock stands with his knife like Death with his scythe. The Jason-Bassanio figure can do nothing but vainly offer his life in the threatened one's stead. Only Medea-Portia can wield the saving magic.

But Shylock is more than an obstacle to be overcome by the heroine. He is a man with his own story, and that story complicates the play for us emotionally. The sequence of events that structure his story are found in Genesis 30-31, and they involve Jacob, Rachel, and Rachel's father Laban. Shakespeare leads us to the story early in the play with Shylock's strange tale (I.iii.66-85) of Jacob and Laban's sheep, taken from Genesis 30. Shylock, in this speech, seems to identify himself with Jacob, but the role he proceeds to play is that of Laban, the duped father whose daughters, hating him for his cupidity, escape with the son-in-law, stealing Laban's household gods. Jessica's escape from Shylock, her stealing of his “gods” (his ducats and other treasures), Shylock's frantic search for his daughter, his lamentations, his accusations—parallel the Rachel-Laban story with remarkable fidelity. When Shylock enters the trial-scene, then, he goes both as a negative death-force which Portia must destroy and as the greedy, unjust, but injured father venting his fury.

Until the trial-scene, Shakespeare keeps his Ovidian and Biblical myths quite separate. Granted, Lorenzo and Jessica have joined Portia's household in the magic land of Belmont, but there they simply become a part of the Ovidian world. But the Shylock of the trial-scene carries his role as injured father with him, and the emotional tone of the scene is therefore qualified and ambiguous. Because Shakespeare links Shylock so closely with Old Testament Judaism and with the familiar Jewish legend of the lost daughter and the duped father, he makes the trial scene emotionally complex; the strictures placed on Shylock and his final words, “I am not well,” seem particularly harsh when placed against the covenant which resolves the Jacob-Laban strife, against the words which end their dispute: “The Lord watch between me and thee, when we are absent one from another.” Interestingly, the trial-scene is given an additional twist of emotional complexity by Shakespeare's superimposing yet another Old Testament story—the familiar Apocryphal story of the young Daniel, Susanna and the Elders—onto the trial, heightening thereby our sense of Shylock's evil, of Antonio's vulnerability, and of Portia's miraculous legal expertise, promising us a clever judicial happy ending and perhaps, by placing Shylock in the role of the wicked Elders, qualifying the sympathy which his Laban-role may have called up in us.¹³

In two plays, then, Shakespeare draws from Ovid a rather intricate mythologem which has its own familiar series of incidents, its own completeness; he uses that story to shape the larger plot of his play, and, at key points, he calls our attention to the story, thus allowing the myth to enter the play directly and to point our expectations in a given direction. Further, within each play he embeds and interweaves other myths and legends—again using the series of events in the order in which he found them, and again calling our attention openly to the embedded stories. Third—and here he is like many of his contemporaries—he includes allusions to yet other myths and legends. In these two plays, though, the allusions seem especially carefully placed to add depth to a given moment or to reenforce audience emotional response to a character or to the situation being enacted.

What is striking to me about all of this is, first, that it shows pretty clearly that Shakespeare had that “special ‘ear’” for myth which C. Kerényi says one must have if myth is to work upon one fully: i.e., that Shakespeare heard in mythologems musical ground-themes inviting variations, inviting new inventions; that he perceived the pictorial quality of myth—saw in mythologems that outpouring of images which are at the same time an unfolding, a making of story, a making of meaning; that he found in the tales of Ovid and of the Bible stories that take us into the primordial.¹⁴ He found in Ovid, for example, story after story of the death of children and grief of parents. In Titus Andronicus, as I suggested, he used these stories both structurally and allusively to weave his own tale of destroyed off-spring and destroyed parents. He would return to this particular primordial story throughout his career, drawing on the image of Niobe and her dead daughter in the final scene of King Lear, drawing on Hecuba's silent gathering of her rage in Macduff's learning of his children's slaughter.

Lavinia leads us here, then, to a tendency in Shakespeare's own imagination. She leads us also to a heightened awareness of the centrality of story in Shakespeare's crafting of drama—of story-incident as a shaping device, and of story as a way of controlling audience response and expectation. We need, therefore, to take seriously what has already been made clear by Madeleine Doran, Nevil Coghill, Northrop Frye, and others: namely, that romantic story forms the foundation of Shakespeare's dramas. Moreover, we need to go yet further and recognize the care with which Shakespeare used story structurally. Further study of Shakespeare's use of story for structure will reveal, I suspect, a demonstrable difference between Shakespeare and his contemporaries—a difference which may explain, in terms other than simply greatness of vision, why it seems sometimes more natural to couple Shakespeare with Dante or Chaucer or Homer—with the great storytellers, that is—than with his contemporary playwrights.

Finally, I would suggest that Lavinia also points us to a more concrete way of examining Shakespeare's use of myth in his later plays than we have had heretofore. We can see, for instance, when we place Titus Andronicus against Ovid's Metamorphoses, that Shakespeare did not read myths in isolation. Lavinia may have been interested only in the Philomela story, but it is clear that when Shakespeare re-read that story, he also read the stories which frame it, the stories to which it is thematically linked, the stories which parallel the various parts of the Philomela myth—stories of revenge for lost children, stories of transformed or mutilated daughters, stories of grief of fathers. It is possible that a similar pattern of reading and borrowing lies behind the later plays where myths are alluded to much more subtly. It is possible, too, that although Shakespeare does not, in later plays, deliberately cite Ovidian or other stories as a way of shaping audience expectation, he may, in fact, continue to draw on myths for structuring. The stories of Persephone or Alcyone (or both) may lie behind The Winter's Tale; Jason's or Aeneas's stories behind The Tempest—both are certainly alluded to.

At this point, these are mere speculations, further areas to be explored. When I speak of Titus Andronicus and The Merchant of Venice, though, I do not feel the need to be so cautious. In those plays, Shakespeare himself points, as determinedly as does Lavinia, to the leaves which he quotes. If we mark his gesture toward his Ovid or his Bible, we can watch, in these plays, myths being released, re-shaped, re-created.

Notes

1. All quotations from Titus Andronicus are from the Arden edition, edited by J. C. Maxwell (London, 1968). As Dover Wilson noted, Shakespeare used the spelling of Ovid's “Metamorphosis” as it appears in Golding's translation (see Maxwell, p. 76, note 42).

2. Howard Baker, in his Induction to Tragedy: A Study in A Development of Form in “Gorboduc,” “The Spanish Tragedy,” and “Titus Andronicus” (University, La., 1939), discusses in detail Shakespeare's use of Ovid's Philomela story in the shaping of Titus Andronicus (pp. 121-129). For Baker, the lines which read “Forc'd in the ruthless, vast, and gloomy woods … / Pattern'd by that the poet here describes” openly acknowledge the dramatist's debt to Ovid, and make it unnecessary for us to go to Seneca for descriptions of murky woods or Thyestean banquets. I am aware, of course, that debate has long raged over rival claims of Ovidian and Senecan influences in this play, with the debate further complicated by the existence of a doubtless pre-Shakespearean chapbook which includes many of the “Ovidian”—and “Senecan”—incidents. I can only say, with Maxwell, that “it is the Ovidian story alone that is referred to in the play itself, and it is in some ways the closer analogue” (p. xxxi); “on balance, the resemblances to Ovid seem to me decidedly the more important …” (p. xxxii).

3. Shakespeare's debt to Ovid for the emotional patterns of Titus Andronicus is explored with great insight by Eugene Waith in “The Metamorphosis of Violence in Titus Andronicus,” Shakespeare Survey 10 (1957), 39-49.

4. “On Stories,” in Essays Presented to Charles Williams, ed. C. S. Lewis, (Grand Rapids, Mich., 1966), p. 90. Lewis's discussion of the impact of Story on “the whole quality of imaginative response,” his description of the “series of imagined events” as a potent device for stirring the reader's imagination, finds its way at many points into my discussion of Shakespeare's use of story.

5. I am using “mythologem” here in the sense suggested by C. Kerényi. Kerényi says that the content of mythology is “a body of material contained in tales about gods and god-like beings, heroic battles and journeys to the Underworld—‘mythologem’ is the best Greek word for them—tales already well known but not unamenable to further re-shaping.” “Prologomena,” Essays on a Science of Mythology by C. G. Jung and C. Kerényi, trans. R. F. C. Hull (Princeton, 1969), p. 2.

6. Several critics see the Philomela story as central; Gustav Cross, e.g., says that “the main plot of the play parallels that of Ovid's tale” of Philomela, Tereus and Procne (“Introduction to Titus Andronicus,” The Complete Pelican Shakespeare, ed. Alfred Harbage [Baltimore, 1959], p. 825), and see note 2, above. But as Fredson Bowers points out, “the rape of Lavinia is merely incidental to the larger plan to strike at Titus through his sons” (Elizabethan Revenge Tragedy, 1587-1642 [Princeton, 1940], p. 112).

7. The mysterious reference to the Thracian tyrant's tent, which has led to a variety of speculations and even emendations, is less mysterious if we consult Golding, where the lines read, confusingly:

             even so Queene Hecubee
                                                               … too Polymnestor went
   The cursed murtherer, and desyrde his presence too thentent
   Too show too him a masse of gold. …

   (ll. 658-662)

   where Golding's “too thentent” (his normal rendering of the phrase “for the intent”) can easily be misread as “to the tent.”

8. J. C. Maxwell, editor of the Arden Titus Andronicus, notes at Titus Andronicus III.i.263, that E. Wolff, in Die Antike 20 (1944), 143-4, “compares Hecuba's behavior as described in Ovid XIII, esp. l. 538: ‘Troades exclamant, obmutuit illa dolore’” to “Titus's momentary silence at the supreme moment of grief.” Maxwell does not find the resemblance close, even though, as he admits, “both characters go on to plan revenge,” and “the Hecuba story has already been referred to” in the first scene of the play.

9. For the story of Juno's destruction of the House of Cadmus, see the Metamorphoses, Book IV (ll. 515ff. in Golding's translation). Niobe's story is found in the Metamorphoses, Book VI (ll. 182ff., in the Golding translation), immediately preceding the Philomela story. After Niobe's death (as Ovid tells the story), Niobe's husband dies of grief, and Thebes mourns the fall of the House of Cadmus, the death of its king and “all his issue,” and every neighboring city sends its king to “go and comfort Thebes” in its grief. Only Athens sends no one. It is under siege, but is soon rescued by the warrior Tereus—Tereus, who is given the hand of Procne, King Pandion's daughter, in marriage; Tereus, who will rape and mutilate Procne's beloved sister Philomela. By way of Thebes, Niobe, destruction of children, and overwhelming grief, then, we move into the Philomela story; we move out of the story at its horrible end, by way of more suffering for lost children as Philomela's father dies of grief for his lost daughters.

10. T. W. Baldwin has discussed at some length Shakespeare's allusions to the Jason-Medea story as told in Book VII of the Metamorphoses. Curious about the three references, Baldwin hypothesizes that, “becoming aware of the parallel between Bassanio's search for a wealthy wife and that of Jason for the golden fleece, Shakespeare turns to Ovid's story in search of possible ornament for his own. …” Baldwin sees Shakespeare as picking up the phrase “Colchos strond” (I.i.170) from Golding and continuing his reading into “the next story,” where, “some twenty-five lines past Colchos strond, Medea had made a promise to Jason and is ready to begin” her incantation to the full moon and her use of sorcery to rejuvenate Jason's father. “I believe it is clear,” says Baldwin “that Shakespeare had read on, and in reading had picked up this moonlight night for pure ornamentation. Medea's moonlight night would furnish the correct setting for Medea-Portia's Belmont” (William Shakespere's Small Latine & Lesse Greeke, Vol. 2 [Urbana, 1944], pp. 436-443).

    Where Baldwin misses the mark is in his assumption that Medea's rejuvenation of Aeson is a separate story following the story of the Golden Fleece, a story referred to by Shakespeare simply for “ornament.” Actually, Medea's renewing of old Aeson is not “the next story,” as Baldwin would have it; it is, rather, a continuation of the Jason-Medea myth, a second work of beneficent magic that Medea performs because of her love for Jason.

11. I am arguing here for a reading of the play's conclusion in which Bassanio's transgression and Portia's forgiveness are more meaningful and more closely tied to the rest of the story than many assume. Norman Rabkin perhaps speaks for most critics when he refers to “the ring plot” as “Portia's stratagem against Bassanio” and notes “the triviality at best of the game she plays with the ring” (Shakespeare and the Problem of Meaning [Chicago, 1981], pp. 18-19). It is true that Portia tests Bassanio in IV.i, after he “presses” her to take a remembrance from him, (ll. 405-450), but it is also true that Bassanio fails the test. Portia had said, in giving him the ring:

                                                      even now, but now,
    This house, these servants, and this same myself
    Are yours,—my lord's!—I give then with this ring,
    Which when you part from, lose, or give away,
    Let it presage the ruin of your love. …

    (169ff.)

    And Bassanio had responded:

                                                      … when this ring
    Parts from this finger, then parts life from hence—
    O then be bold to say Bassanio's dead!

    (184ff.)

    In this context, Bassanio's acquiescing to Antonio's plea:

                                                      “… let him have the ring,
    Let his deservings and my love withal
    Be valued 'gainst your wife's commandement”

    (IV.i.445-7)

    seems weakness, a breaking of a vow, a “fault,” as Portia stresses in V, i, and as Bassanio admits, though he sees it as an “enforced wrong.” (All quotations from The Merchant of Venice are from the Arden edition, edited by John Russell Brown, 1964).

12. The allusion to Io has long been recognized. J. C. Maxwell quotes Golding's translation of the lines (Met. I, 649-50) in which Io, changed to a cow, identifies herself to her father by printing her name in the sand with her foot. The allusion to Inarchus in III, i, 122-9, is more subtle, depending as it does on the shared image of Inarchus “bewayling piteously / His daughter” and “augment[ing] the waters” “with doleful teares” (Met. I, 719-22), and Titus “sit[ting] round about some fountain … Till the fresh taste be taken from that clearness and made a brine-pit with … bitter tears” (III.i.123ff.).

13. I am here disagreeing in part with the critical assumption, expressed best by Madeleine Doran, that Shakespeare over-developed the character of Shylock through his “Hath not a Jew eyes?” speech, thereby pulling the romantic story out of line (See Endeavors of Art: A Study of Form in Elizabethan Drama [Madison, 1964], pp. 362-4). I would argue that Shakespeare deliberately interweaves two very different stories, heightens their impacts with additional embedded stories, and thus creates an extremely complex drama. The complexity that Norman Rabkin finds reflected in criticism of the play seems to me built into the play's structure (See Rabkin, pp. 1-32).

14. Kerényi, pp. 2-4.