Poetry, Law, and the Pursuit of Perfection: Portia's Role in The Merchant of Venice

Rice University

Poetry, Law, and the Pursuit of Perfection: Portia's Role in The Merchant of VeniceAuthor(s): Monica J. HamillSource: Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, Vol. 18, No. 2, Elizabethan and JacobeanDrama (Spring, 1978), pp. 229-243Published by: Rice UniversityStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/450359 .Accessed: 07/11/2013 13:41

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SEL, 18 (1978) ISSN 0039-3657

Poetry, Law, and the Pursuit of Perfection: Portia's Role in The Merchant of Venice

M O NI CA J. HA MILL

The Renaissance assumed an intimate relationship between poetry and law: the ancient poets, the found- ers of civilized society, were praised as the first legislators among men; the Renaissance poet, who endeavored tp move imperfect men to "as high a perfection" as they were capable of,' felt that his labors complemented those of the lawmaker. In The Merchant of Venice, Portia's efforts to lead characters to their "true perfection" (V.i.108)2 are realized through the course of her own devel- opment as poet-lawmaker. In the lottery episodes, the trial-scene, and the ring-play, Portia's uses of poetic language and fictions are inextricable from her upholding and interpreting law. The happy endings of all three actions, and of the play itself, depend on Portia's submitting herself to her father's will in the lottery, upholding Venetian civil law at the trial, and maintaining and clarifying the ring-bond in the final scene of the play.

It is necessary to stress the feeling of Shakespeare's own time for the vital connection between poetry and law because modern critics have too often failed to perceive this relationship. Northrop Frye, for instance, postulates an antithesis between comedy and moral law: "In comedy the moral norm is not morality but deliverance. . . The moral norm does not carry with it the vision of a free society."3 Critics who share Frye's assumption have been unable to reconcile Portia's legal maneuvering as Balthazar with her actions as the lady of Belmont. Comedy "is always asking amnesty, after showing the moral machinery of life getting in the way of life," C. L. Barber writes. "The machinery as such need not be dismissed-Portia is very emphatic about not doing that. But social solidarity, resting on the buoyant force of a collective life that transcends particular mistakes, can set the

'Sir Philip Sidney, An Apologie for Poetrie, Elizabethan Critical Essays, ed. G. Gregory Smith (London, 1959), I, 160.

2All quotations from the play are from the New Arden edition, ed. John Russell Brown (London and Cambridge, Mass., 1966).

3Northrop Frye, "The Argument of Comedy," English Institute Essays (1949), rpt. in Shakespeare: Modern Essays in Criticism, ed. Leonard F. Dean (New York, 1957), p. 87.


230 THE MER CHA N T OF VENICE

machinery aside."4 But Portia's triumph over Shylock refutes Barber's argument: far from suggesting that society's moral and legal machinery might be set aside, Portia vindicates Venice's foundation on law by using the law itself to redeem Antonio.

After the trial, music inspires two conversations about imperfection and perfection that should be considered in an assessment of all of Portia's actions. Lorenzo, speaking to Jessica about the music of the spheres, observes that so long as "this muddy vesture of decay" closes in the soul, men cannot hear that immortal harmony (V.i.63 ff.). On hearing the music made by Portia's musicians, he praises the power that terrestrial music has over its listeners: "therefore the poet/ Did feign that Orpheus drew trees, stones, and floods," he muses, "Since naught so stockish, hard, and full of rage,/ But music for the time doth change his nature" (79-82). When Portia hears the music, she is moved to meditate on the relativity of earthly perfection: "Nothing is good (I see) without respect,-/ Methinks it [the music] sounds much sweeter than by day" (V.i.99-100). Men's glimpses of perfection are fortuitous and circumstantial: "The crow doth sing as sweetly as the lark/ When neither is attended" (102-103). But it is precisely through such contingencies, Portia recognizes, that "true perfection" may be realized: "How many things by season, season'd are/ To their right praise, and true perfection" (107-108).

Portia's belief that flawed creatures can, in some sense, fulfill their yearnings for perfection was shared by the pre-eminent theologian of the time, Richard Hooker, and its foremost defender of poetry, Sir Philip Sidney. Hooker might be said to argue a theory of virtual perfectibility in his Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity. Although absolute perfection cannot be realized on earth, he reasoned, all creatures possess an unlimited capacity for increased perfection: in all things, there is "an appetite or desire, whereby they incline to something which they may be," he wrote; "and when they are it, they shall be perfecter than now they are.... And because there is not in the world anything whereby another may not some way be made the perfecter, therefore all things that are, are good."5 Sidney also maintained that humanity could

4C. L. Barber, Shakespeare's Festive Comedy: A Study of Dramatic Form and its Relation to Social Custom (1959; rpt. Princteton, 1972), p. 186.

5Richard Hooker, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, Works, ed. John Keble, 7th ed., rev. by R. W. Church and F. Paget (1888; rpt. New York, 1970), I, 215.


M O NI CA J. HA M IL L 231

become "perfecter," and argued that the poet was uniquely empowered to move men to that end by his art of delightful teaching: above all other earthly means, he wrote in his Apologie for Poetrie, poetry is able "to lead and draw vs to as high a perfection as our degenerate soules, made worse by theyr clayey lodgings, can be capable of."6

In the dialectic between imperfection and perfection, both the priest and the poet assumed that the inherently flawed nature of men required that civilized society be founded on law. Because some men are evil and all men are inclined towards sin, Hooker reasoned, laws are necessary, and they are only perfect insofar as they are framed to deal with the worst actions that men are capable of: "unless presuming man to be in regard of his de- praved mind little better than a wild beast, they [civil laws] do accordingly notwithstanding so to frame his actions, that they be no hindrance unto the common good for which societies are instituted: unless they do this, they are not perfect. Hooker's views of man and society were shared by the Renaissance apolo- gists for poetry, who claimed that the first body of civil laws was created by the first poets, Orpheus and Amphion. Because the ancient poets "were aged and graue men, and of much experience in th'affaires of the world," George Puttenham wrote, "they were the first lawmakers to the people, and the first polititens, deuising all expedient meanes for th'establishment of Common wealth, to hold and containe the people in order and duety by force and vertue of good and wholesome lawes, made for the preseruation of the publique peace and tranquillitie."8 In his translation of Hor- ace's de Arte Poetica, Thomas Lodge celebrated Orpheus and Amphion as lawmakers who drove "the sauage men from wo[o]ds,/ And made them liue aright"; in their creation of the first civilized society, Orpheus and Amphion allayed the strife among men, made the gods known to them, and taught them the law of marriage.9

Portia follows in the footsteps of the archetypal poet- lawmakers. Although she certainly fails in the attempt to convert the "savage," Shylock, to belief in a spiritual realm, she does allay the strife that he creates and even forces him "to live aright" -to

6Sidney, Elizabethan Critical Essays, I, 160. 7Hooker, Works. I, 240. 8George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, Elizabethan Critical Essays, II,

7-8. 9Thomas Lodge, Defence of Poetry, Elizabethan Critical Essays, I, 74.


232 THE MER CHA N T O F VENI CE

outward conformity of behavior. In her final action, the ring-play, Portia leads the more civilized characters to amend their flaws: using her ring-fiction to teach the laws of love, she enables herself to exorcise her own jealousy and allows Antonio to transform his attempt to possess Bassanio into a gesture that expresses love's ideal generosity. If absolute perfection remains elusive in the end, Portia has moved the various characters to successful pursuit of that "right praise, and true perfection" realizable by men.

II

Antonio represents perhaps Portia's greatest challenge. Anto- nio's sadness suggests a potentially dangerous likeness to Shylock. Shylock is one "that hath no music in himself" (V.i.83), and his ineradicable sobriety leads him to a joyless end. Antonio is spared a miserable destiny because his sadness proves to be a temporary, amendable aberration of temperament.

Although Antonio himself cannot fathom the source of his melancholy, it is apparent even in I.i. that he is sad because Bassanio is about to leave him for his new love. Just as Shylock craves to possess the objects that he values, Antonio becomes increasingly desperate to possess the friend whom he loves. His unconscious jealousy of Portia is most painfully apparent at the trial, when his death seems imminent. Antonio resigns himself to his death because he foresees that his sacrifice will forever cast Portia's love for Bassanio into the shadow of his own greater love. "Commend me to your honourable wife," he instructs Bassanio,

Tell her the process of Antonio's end, Say how I lov'd you, speak me fair in death: And when the tale is told, bid her be the judge Whether Bassanio had not once a love.

(IV.i.269-273)

Antonio's attempt to possess Bassanio proceeds from both men's initial misconceptions about love. When Antonio rouses himself in I.i. to ask Bassanio "what lady is the same/ To whom you swore a secret pilgrimage" (119-120), his question implies the cause of his sadness, but nothing more. In the friends' ensuing conversation, it is Bassanio who articulates the imperfect notions of love that will implicate both men in Antonio's near-tragedy.

Bassanio invites Antonio to think of his "pilgrimage" in terms of "all my plots and purposes/ How to get clear of all the debts I


M O NI CA J. HA M ILL 233

owe" (I.i.133-134). When his first attempt to couch his plea for more money leaves Antonio bewildered by his request for an "arrow," Bassanio proceeds to create an elaborate comparison between his pilgrimage and Jason's quest for the golden fleece, and then hints that he needs Antonio to finance his undertaking. Bassanio's ambiguous language suggests that he is unable to reconcile his disparate conceptions of his quest as a pilgrimage and as a commercial venture. He clearly intends his image of Portia as the golden fleece and his description of his suit to her as Jason's quest as idealizations of his love. But he also imagines that his own worth will be measured by his "means," which leads him to define his quest as a mercantile enterprise:

0 my Antonio, had I but the means To hold a rival place with one of them ["many Jasons":

suitors] I have a mind presages me such thrift That I should questionless be fortunate.

(I i 173-176) Later in the play, when Bassanio finally wins his lady, Portia

herself will fashion the language of money and commerce into decorous metaphors that define the ideals of love. By then, however, Bassanio's initial desperation for "means" will have led to Antonio's bondage to Shylock. However unwittingly, Bassanio makes Antonio feel compelled to buy his friendship at the cost of his principles ("Shylock, albeit I neither lend nor borrow [I.iii.56 ff.]) and, very nearly, at the cost of his life. All-absorbed in his love for Portia, he is insensitive to Antonio's need to prove his own love. His feeble protest comes too late ("You shall not seal such a bond for me" [I.iii.150]), for Antonio readily assents to Shylock's proposal that he pledge a pound of his flesh as the forfeit for the money Bassanio needs. Antonio's plight, then, is the pathetic consequence of the flaws and blindness that are rooted in the very intensity with which each of the two men pursues his love.

III

Portia's first scene (I.ii.) immediately follows Bassanio's ideal- ized description of Belmont and its lady. Although the atmos- phere of Belmont is surely more rarefied than that of Venice, Belmont is a location that actually heightens our sense of men's situation in an imperfect world. The vagaries of destiny, the constraints of law, and the inevitability of human error are all


234 THE M ER CHA N T OF VENICE

illustrated in the principal action that takes place at Belmont, the casket-lottery.

The lottery operates like destiny itself. Its apparent force is to subject both Portia and her suitors to chance, overriding Portia's presumable ability to choose her own husband and her suitors' ability to deserve love through acts of heroism: "O me the word 'choose'! I may neither choose who I would, nor refuse who I dislike . . . is it not hard Nerissa, that I cannot choose one, nor refuse none?" (I.ii.22-23; 25-26). Morocco also complains:

But alas the while! If Hercules and Lichas play at dice Which is the better man, the greater throw May turn by fortune from the weaker hand.

(II.i.3 1-34)

By consenting to participate in the lottery, Portia obeys her father's will. Like the Venetian law that will appear to allow Shylock the pound of flesh, the lottery is an apparently cruel mechanism that actually constitutes a benevolent bondage: Por- tia's father devised the lottery to ensure that she would be won by a worthy suitor-one whom "you shall rightly love," Nerissa reas- sures her (I.ii.32). But the device is also an arbitrary stay against "madness the youth" (I.ii. 19): in this sense it is the despotic imposition of the dead father's will over "the will of a living daughter" (I.ii.24). Vexed at this constraint, Portia dispels her anxiety over the lottery by mocking Bassanio's imagination of the "many Jasons" who come to woo her. She caricatures her suitors, and speaks of them as a parade of wooden men who pester her with their quest: "Whiles we shut the gate upon one wooer, another knocks at the door" (I.ii.127-128).

Portia is a better poet than Bassanio. Having mocked his legend of "many Jasons," she shows her own more discriminating use of heroic metaphor in the climactic episode of the casket-plot, where Bassanio makes his choice. Comparing Bassanio to Hercules, Portia stages his deliberation over the caskets as an heroic action:

Now he goes With no less presence, but with much more love Than young Alcides, when he did redeem The virgin tribute, paid by howling Troy To the sea-monster. . ..


M O NI CA J. HA MILL 235

. . .go Hercules! Live thou, I live-with much much more dismay, I view the fight, than thou that mak'st the fray.

(III.ii.53-57; 60-62)

In his discussion of Renaissance interpretations of the myths of Hercules, Hallett Smith points out that all of the legends were thought to illustrate moral heroism; according to the mythog- rapher Natalis Comes, for instance, "the stories about Hercules serve to encourage the strenuous life, and Hercules himself represents nothing other than that virtue and strength of mind which casts out all vices and conquers all voluptuous desires."'0 Portia's imagination of Bassanio's choice as an Herculean feat" emphasizes that the heroic lover need not undertake literally dangerous exploits; as the inscription on the lead casket implies, love's heroism is a metaphor that expresses the lover's willingness to "give and hazard all he hath" (II.ix.21).

Like Morocco and Arragon, Bassanio moralizes the inscription on the gold and silver caskets. He wins the lottery not because he is a better moralist than the other suitors, but because he does not try to rationalize the choice of lead: "Thy paleness moves me more than eloquence,/ And here choose I" (III.ii.106-107). Its inscription, he realizes, "rather threaten'st than dost promise aught" (III.ii.105). The lottery is designed not to elicit precepts, but to test dispositions; by accepting the risks and the challenge demanded by the lead casket, Bassanio shows his disposition to true heroism.

Morocco's and Arragon's reflections on the gold and silver caskets' inscriptions are similar to Bassanio's, and they do not suggest that the two men are essentially unworthy suitors.'2 They choose wrongly because, like Bassanio, they fail to recognize the

'0Hallett Smith, Elizabethan Poetry: A Study in Conventions, Meanings, and Expression (Cambridge, Mass., 1952), p. 295.

"Smith, pp. 293-299, points out that the Renaissance's favorite legend about Hercules was the story of Hercules' Choice, "a legend in which the hero is shown deliberately choosing the kind of life he will lead" (p. 293); Hercules' decision to follow the path of Virtue rather than that of Pleasure signified, among other things, his conquest of the temptations of the flesh. Although Portia does not refer to this legend, perhaps many members of Shakespeare's audience would have been inevitably reminded of it.

I2See Thomas Fujimura, "Mode and Structure in The Merchant of Venice," PMLA, 81 (1966), who argues that Morocco, like Shylock, is a "materialistic creature" who is taken with false values (p. 506) and that Arragon's flaw, like Antonio's, is hubris (p. 510).


236 THE ME R CHANT OF VEN ICE

paradoxical character of these inscriptions. As Portia realizes, Morocco and Arragon are "deliberate fools! when they do choose,/ They have the wisdom by their wit to lose" (II.ix.80-81). Morocco is not wrong to describe Portia as a "mortal breathing saint" whose worth is symbolized by gold (II.vii.40 ff.). But his idealistic rationalization denies what the substitute for Portia's portrait, the Death's-head, expresses: the fact of mortality. All men and women, even Portia, will lie in "the obscure grave" (II.vii.51). Nor does Arragon fail because he dares to "assume desert" (II.ix.51); love, itself, presupposes this. But the portrait of the blinking idiot warns that men must also recognize their limita- tions: "Seven times tried that judgment is,/ That never did choose amiss" (II.ix.64-65).

Antonio's ensnarement by Shylock is announced at exactly the moment when heroic metaphor appears to have come literally true: "We are the Jasons, we have won the fleece," Gratiano declares jubilantly (III.ii.240). "I would you had won the fleece that he [Antonio] hath lost," Salerio replies (241): reality painfully impinges on the lovely fiction of the heroes' completion of their quest. Portia can meet this challenge because she has used heroic myths poetically, as ideal truths-in Sidney's words- "either better than Nature bringeth forth, or, quite a newe, formes such as neuer were in Nature."'3 The happy instances when men's fantasies of love and happiness do come true cannot annihilate the wickedness and suffering that inevitably shadow human joy. The moments when the ideal becomes real are necessarily fleeting, and are the more precious for that reason.

IV Antonio's plight moves both Bassanio and Portia to show their

mettle. When he learns of his friend's imminent death, Bassanio immediately recognizes that this tragedy is the consequence of his own actions. "I have engag'd myself to a dear friend," he con- fesses to Portia, "Engag'd my friend to his mere enemy/ To feed my means" (III.ii.260-262).

When Bassanio sets off for Venice, he carries with him Portia's promise to provide however much gold Shylock might demand for Antonio's ransom: "Double six thousand [ducats], and then treble that," she tells Bassanio, "Before a friend of this description/ Shall lose a hair through Bassanio's fault" (III.ii.299-301).

13Sidney, Elizabethan Critical Essays, I, 156.



More than simply a generous gesture, Portia's pledge justifies her use of monetary metaphors to define the nature of love. For instance, when Bassanio playfully claims her as his lottery-prize ("I come by note to give, and to receive" [III.ii.140]), Portia transforms his fiscal imagery into language that expresses the lover's desire to perfect herself into a gift that transcends the powers of reckoning:'4 "for you," she tells Bassanio, "I would be trebled twenty times myself,"

A thousand times more fair, ten thousand times more rich,

That only to stand high in your account, I might in virtues, beauties, livings, friends, Exceed account.

(III.ii. 152-157)

After Bassanio has left her to go to Antonio, Portia uses similar language to show that her love for Bassanio embraces Antonio too. Since Bassanio is her soul, she reasons, Antonio, his bosom lover, is the semblance of her soul (III.iv. 16 ff.). Her offer to ransom Antonio is the seal that ratifies this union of lovers and friends: "How little is the cost I have bestowed," Portia concludes, "In purchasing the semblance of my soul/ From out the state of hellish cruelty!" (19-21).

v

The ideal of love's inclusiveness that lies behind Portia's offer to ransom Antonio will inform her ring-play, where she will enable Antonio to save himself from his notion of love's possessiveness. But neither love nor gold can save Antonio from Shy- lock's "hellish cruelty." Portia denies Shylock's claim to the pound of flesh by answering the villain's own demands for "merely justice" (IV.i.335); by her strict interpretation of the law, Portia not only redeems Antonio from his bondage to Shylock but also vindicates Venice's bondage to law.

Our understanding of the symbolic dimensions of the conflict between Portia and Shylock is indebted to those who have exam- ined the medieval paradigm that lies behind the trial-scene, the debate between Justice and Mercy over the issue of man's salva-

'4See C. L. Barber's illuminating discussion of the play in terms of "the conflict between the mechanisms of wealth and the masterful, social use of it," Shake- speare's Festive Comedy, pp. 166-167.


238 THE MER CHA N T O F VENI CE

tion.5 In most medieval versions of the Heavenly Parliament, Justice and Mercy are divine beings who personify God's own "characteristics." One kind of comic exploitation of the paradigm was the variation known as the Processus Belial,16 where Satan and the Virgin supplied the roles of Justice and Mercy. As E. E. Stoll pointed out many years ago, Shylock, too, is a devil-figure who travesties Justice.17 His demand that Antonio pay the forfeit of his bond creates a tragic impasse: if the law allows Shylock to take the pound of flesh, the court must award it, for the Duke cannot deny the course of justice. "If you deny me, fie upon your law!" Shylock gloats. "There is no force in the decrees of Venice:/ I stand for judgment" (IV.i.101-103).

A knowledge of the Heavenly Parliament enhances our understanding of Antonio's role. It is Antonio who plays the part of humanum genus: mankind, whose inherent lack of righteousness precludes his right to salvation. Traditionally, the debate between Justice and Mercy was resolved by Christ's Atonement: the God- man's sacrifice of himself discharged man's debt to Justice, and so brought about the reconciliation of Justice and Mercy. The es- sence of Antonio's Christ-likeness, his willingness to sacrifice himself to pay Bassanio's debt, is a measure of his own flawed

'5Hope Traver, The Four Daughters of God (Philadelphia, 1907), discussed the literary history of the paradigm; Samuel Chew, The Virtues Reconciled: An Iconographic Study (Toronto, 1947) traced its iconographic history. Later critics have used these studies to interpret the trial scene, and even the play in its entirety, allegorically. Although a critical discussion of the various allegorical schemes is beyond the scope of this article, it is perhaps sufficient to note that the most sensitive allegorists have tempered their readings of the symbolic antitheses between Christian and Jewish, Mercy and Justice, Love and Law, by their recogni- tion of the rich interplay between the symbolic and the human that finally makes the characters irreducible to "figures." E.g., Barbara Lewalski, "Biblical Allusion and Allegory in The Merchant of Venice," Shakespeare Quarterly, 13 (1962), emphasizes that Shakespeare "is fully as interested in the way in which allegorical dimensions enrich the particular instance as in the use of the particular to point to higher levels of meaning" (p. 328). In a more recent essay, "Launcelot and the Uses of Allegory in The Merchant of Venice," SEL, 14 (1974), Rene' Fortin suggests that Shakespeare has counterpointed one allegorical scheme with another to show the coexistence of Love and Law: "The Merchant of Venice suggests that, despite the truth contained in its naive allegory of love, men can expect only relative perfection in a world far too complex for naive allegory to be given full credit" (p. 270).

'6The most extensive study of the Processus Belial is Hope Traver's "The Four Daughters of God: A Mirror of Changing Doctrine," PMLA, 40 (1925), 44-92. Its applicability to The Merchant of Venice was first suggested by John D. Rea, "Shylock and the Processus Belial," Philological Quarterly, 8 (1929), 311-313.

"7E. E. Stoll, Shakespeare Studies (New York, 1927), p. 319.



humanity.'8 His situation is the more pitiable because he, himself, recognizes his inability to supply the part of Christ, the Sacrificial Lamb. His acknowledgment of his "tainted" condition is a cry of despair: "I am a tainted wether of the flock,/ Meetest for death" (IV.i.114-115). But it is Shylock who provides the most pathetic definition of Antonio's role. His prostitution of Justice makes Antonio's martyrdom a perverse travesty of Christ's saving act: the flawed Antonio's sacrifice of himself satisfies not the demands of divine Justice, but Shylock's savage desire to feed upon the Chris- tian.

Bassanio's fear lest malice bear down truth (IV.i.210) is an anguished protest against the curse that Venice's bondage to law appears to have laid on its citizens. But Portia comes to the courtroom armed with the legal acumen needed to vindicate the law should Shylock persist in his travesty of Justice. She disguises herself not as a figure of Mercy, but as Balthazar, a doctor of laws; she has prepared for her role by seeking the advice of Bellario, a real jurist. Portia's demands for mercy are a deviation- presumably-from Bellario's directives. In her speech on "The quality of mercy" (IV.i.180 ff.), Portia perfects her own role as Justice and affords Shylock one last chance to transform the courtroom's travesty of the debate between Justice and Mercy into a positive imitation of the Heavenly Parliament. Mercy is "an attribute to God himself," she explains, "And earthly power doth then show likest God's/ When mercy seasons justice" (191-193). It is as an imperfect human being, rather than as divine Mercy, that Portia speaks of salvation. She includes herself among the flawed men and women whose own need for God's mercy inspires their charity towards one another: "we do pray for mercy," she points out, "And that same prayer doth teach us all to render/ The deeds of mercy" (196-198).

But Antonio is not saved through the pleading of Mercy. When Shylock maintains his own righteousness-"My deeds upon my head! I crave the law" (IV.i.202)-Portia redeems Antonio by awarding Shylock the strict justice he has demanded: should he

'8Allegorists tend to interpret Antonio as a Christ-figure who is only incidentally flawed (see, e.g., Lewalski, pp. 331, 333, 339). I feel that this reading reverses Shakespeare's emphases. Essentally, Antonio fails to carry Christ's role because it is a humanly impossible burden; by having Antonio's longing to make a Christ- like sacrifice of himself express his yearning for human love, Shakespeare exploits, and makes more poignant, the inherent human inadequacy that limits Antonio just as it would limit any man.


240 THE ME R CHA N T OF VENICE

shed one drop of Antonio's blood or cut more or less than exactly one pound of flesh, she explains, he must forfeit his life and goods.'9 In her arguments for mercy, Portia had suggested law's spiritual function of showing to all men their inherent lack of righteousness, for "in the course of justice, none of us/ Should see salvation" (IV.i.195-196); by preventing Shylock from claiming the pound of flesh, she shows that law is also necessary to constrain those evil-doers who will not acknowledge the spiritual realm.

Having had Justice itself dictate Shylock's defeat, Portia un- earths a statute that allows her to renew her appeal for Mercy. Should an alien seek the life of a Venetian citizen, she explains, Venetian law directs that half his goods be awarded to the injured party and that his life lies at the mercy of the Duke. The Duke and Antonio are confronted with a choice: Portia prompts for mercy; Gratiano, for revenge.

Por. [To Shy.] Down therefore, and beg mercy of the duke.

Gra. Beg that thou may'st have leave to hang thyself. (IV.i.359-360)

Por. What mercy can you render him Antonio? Gra. A halter gratis, nothing else for Godsakel

(IV.i.374-375)

Allowing Shylock his life, the Duke shows Venice's liberation from the apparent curse of its bondage to law by using his obligation to enforce the statute as a chance to show mercy to the offender. The mercy Antonio renders signifies that his release from the role of martyr frees him to discover more tenable kinds of self-sacrifice; by directing that his half of Shylock's goods be held in trust for Lorenzo and Jessica, he shows that he is capable of genuinely disinterested generosity.

Critical debate about the quality of the Christians' mercy has focused on Shylock's forced baptism. Assessments range from Allan Holaday's denunciation of Antonio's "stupidity" in "forc- ing upon the embittered Jew an empty label"20 to John Cooper's apology that Shylock's baptism would have seemed an "altogether

'9See E. J. Tucker's excellent discussion of Portia's application of the law in light of Elizabethan Common Law principles of equity, "The Letter of the Law in The Merchant of Venice," Shakespeare Survey, 29 (1976), 93-101.

20Allan Holaday, "Antonio and the Allegory of Salvation," Shakespeare Studies, 4 (1969), 113.


MO NI CA J. HA MI L L 241

kindly conversion" to Shakespeare's audience because it liberates him from the dilemma of the Old Law.2' Shylock, himself, implies that his "Christianity" will be an empty label. He is not interested in saving his soul, but submits to baptism only in order to save his wealth, "the means whereby I live" (IV.i.373). The Duke's and Antonio's treatment of Shylock shows their essential goodness, but the quality of their mercy is conditioned by the nature of its recipient. Mercy cannot annihilate the existence of evil, nor transform the characters of obdurate men: Shylock can be forced to submit to the external rite of baptism, but cannot be compelled to his own salvation. At the end of Act IV, the repro- bate is abandoned to his own misery, and our attention now focuses on Portia's effort to save the Christian community of friends and lovers from their own Shylockean tendencies.

VI In her final action, the ring-play, Portia completes her labors as

poet-lawmaker. Throughout the play, she has practiced her arts of true perfection within the constraints imposed by law, destiny, and human imperfections. Her ring-play forces its participants to act out their aspirations to love within a plot that embodies these constraints. The ring-bond itself represents law. The intricacies of the plot, capped by the announcement that three of Antonio's ships have safely landed, suggest the fortuitous course that destiny charts for each man. Most importantly, Portia designs her own role to actualize, and then to exorcise, a Shylockean conception of love.22

Portia's role is a calculated posture of jealousy and hard- heartedness; her assumption of these qualities reflects men's inev- itable tendency to define love in terms of possession and exclu- sion. Antonio's possessiveness towards Bassanio persists even after the trial; it is evident in his plea that Bassanio surrender Portia's ring to Balthazar, when he urges that his love, together with Balthazar's deservings, "Be valued 'gainst your wife's commande-

2"John Cooper, "Shylock's Humanity," Shakespeare Quarterly, 21 (1970), 121. 22Richard Horwich, "Riddle and Dilemma in The Merchant of Venice," SEL, 17

(1977), 191-200, proposes that the ring-play be seen as Portia's symbolic restoration to herself of the control over her destiny that had been seemingly denied her by the casket-lottery. Although this reading is convincing, Horwich's failure to consider the ring-drama as a complex action invested with multiple symbolic dimensions reduces Portia's rich device to merely a cruel game wherein she prolongs her bafflement and rejection of Bassanio simply in order to assert her own "power of choice."


242 THE MER CHA N T OF VENICE

ment" (IV.i.447). Portia herself created the dilemma that prompts Antonio's plea: arguing that "if your wife be not a mad-woman," she "would not hold out enemy for ever/ For giving it to me" (IV.i.441; 443-444), Balthazar demanded the ring as payment for redeeming Antonio. Bassanio's surrender of the ring precipitates the quarrel that is played out in the ring-drama. By playing the role of "mad-woman," Portia admits her own inclinations towards jealousy and possessiveness; allowing herself to channel these impulses constructively, she exorcises them by acting them out in her fiction.

Portia designs her role to vindicate the ideals of love she had articulated in III.iii. and III.iv. Reconciling herself with Bassanio at Antonio's pledge of himself as surety for his friend, she stages her conversion from "mad-woman" to conciliated wife as the resolution of the latent conflict between Antonio and herself. Among the critics who have discussed this conflict, only John Hurrell has understood that Portia is essentially "no rival but a sharer in Bassanio's love, one whose claims are of such a different sort that he [Antonio] has nothing to fear from her."23 But Hurrell's statement that the revelation of Portia's part in the trial is responsible for Antonio's final acceptance of his friend's marriage is based on a misreading of the play.24 Portia does not reveal her disguise until after Antonio has made his pledge. It is Portia's own pretense of rivalry with Balthazar that affords Antonio the chance to exorcise the possessiveness of his love for Bassanio and his feelings of rivalry with Portia: seizing the opportunity, Anto- nio makes his pledge.

Recalling his pledge of his body to Shylock, Antonio offers his soul as surety for Bassanio's marital fidelity:

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.

(V.i.249-253)

23John Hurrell, "Love and Friendship in The Merchant of Venice," Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 4 (1961), 340. Other critics who discuss the conflict interpret the ring-play as Portia's final triumph over Antonio: see Robert Hapgood, "Portia and The Merchant of Venice: The Gentle Bond," Modern Language Quarterly, 28 (1967), 28-29; Lawrence Hyman, "The Rival Lovers in The Merchant of Venice," Shakespeare Quarterly, 21 (1970), 112-115.

24Hurrell, pp. 339-340.


M O NI CA J. HA M IL L 243

Antonio's pledge of his soul is an obviously symbolic gesture, one that transforms his willingness to sacrifice himself for his friend from an attempt to possess Bassanio into a gesture that realizes love's ideal generosity. In response, Portia stages the turn-about of her assumed character: "you shall be his surety," she tells Anto- nio, "give him this [ring],/ And bid him keep it better than the other" (254-255). By having Antonio present the ring to Bassanio, Portia widens the significance of the ring-metaphor: transmitted to the husband by the friend, the ring becomes a gift that ratifies the ideal of love's inclusiveness.

If the ring acquires a new symbolic dimension, it retains its initial significance. It symbolizes, first of all, the marriage-bond, a contract that stipulates the possessiveness of love. Accordingly, Portia creates the last knot in her series of tangled paradoxes to show the obvious point at which love's possessiveness displaces its generosity: at Bassanio's exclamation that this new ring is the same he gave Balthazar, Portia swears that the doctor lay with her. Nerissa's repetition of the jest draws a gross rebuke from her husband. "Why this is like the mending of highways/ In summer where the ways are fair enough!" Gratiano rails. "What, are we cuckolds ere we have deserv'd it?" (V.i.263-265). Disgusted that the women have fallen prematurely into a common pattern of love's betrayal, Gratiano implies that vows of fidelity are the merely idealistic promises of young lovers. Bassiano's very silence suggests his own more lofty idealism. Having experienced love as the realization of his ideals, he is overwhelmed by Portia's confession that she has betrayed their vows; as Portia implies, he is too "amaz'd" to speak (266). At this point, Portia acquits herself and Nerissa and resolves all of the seemingly inextricable paradoxes of her ring-plot by confessing her part at the trial: "Portia was the doctor . . ." (269 ff.).

In the same speech, Portia tells Antonio that three of his ships have come to harbor. The fortuitous return of his riches, which Portia announces as if it were a recompense for his willingness to sacrifice them, removes the last vestige of Antonio's role as martyr. "I am dumb!" (279), he responds to Portia's news, his earlier sadness displaced by an astonishment that declares a very surfeit of happiness. His life and living returned to him, Antonio can resume his pursuits as a merchant of Venice-but as one who is far happier and wiser in the ways of love.

Charleston Higher Education Consortium Charleston, South Carolina


Article Contentsp. [229]p. 230p. 231p. 232p. 233p. 234p. 235p. 236p. 237p. 238p. 239p. 240p. 241p. 242p. 243

Issue Table of ContentsStudies in English Literature, 1500-1900, Vol. 18, No. 2, Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama (Spring, 1978), pp. 201-418Front MatterThe Original Ending of The Taming of the Shrew: A Reconsideration [pp. 201-215]The "Perspective Glass" in Shakespeare's Richard II [pp. 217-228]Poetry, Law, and the Pursuit of Perfection: Portia's Role in The Merchant of Venice [pp. 229-243]Ambivalence in the Player's Speech in Hamlet [pp. 245-256]Transcendence Denied: The Failure of Role Assumption in Troilus and Cressida [pp. 257-274]Shakespeare's Octavius and Elizabethan Roman History [pp. 275-287]"As We Are Mock'd with Art": From Scorn to Transfiguration [pp. 289-305]Interpreting The Winter's Tale [pp. 307-329]The Wax Figures in The Duchess of Malfi [pp. 331-339]"Wits Most Accomplished Senate": The Audience of the Caroline Private Theaters [pp. 341-360]Recent Studies in Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama [pp. 361-418]

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Poetry, Law, and the Pursuit of Perfection: Portia's Role in The Merchant of Venice