The Merchant of Venice 3

1. The Merchant of Venice 3 The interlocking plots and how they mean

2. The two sides of the play and their relation to one another • The “tragedy of Shylock” is one side, one that cannot, should not be downplayed. • But the “comedy of Portia and Bassanio” is the other. • The “comedy” rests in both casket plot and ring plot. • Challenge is seeing the interlocking character of all this, how the play is also a play of ideas.

3. Antonio’s melancholy • “In sooth I know not why I am so sad./ It wearies me. You say it wearies you./ But how I caught it, found it, or came by it/ What stuff ‘tis made of, whereof it is born/ I am to learn.“ • “I hold the world but as the world,/ A stage, where every man must play a part,/ And mine a sad one.” • Is there melancholy in the very condition of his being a merchant?

4. Money makes the world go ‘round • Is anyone free in the play? • Antonio bound to the condition of trade. • Bassanio bound to his need of money. • Portia bound the will of her dead father. • Antonio bound to Shylock. • Shylock locked into the system of money and usury. • Venetian state bound to its laws and need for trade.

5. Portia’s melancholy • “By my troth, Nerissa, my little body is aweary of this great world.” • Nerissa: you should be weary of the world if your miseries were equal to your good fortunes. • But “fortunes” is also “a fortune” – too much money. • Fortune locks her into the nightmare of the casket choice. • “Poor little rich girl” plot.

6. “Your father was ever virtuous . ..” • Nerissa’s faith in a meaning in casket plot: “. . . and holy men at their death have good inspirations.” • Just a lottery by the “heavy” father, or an extension of a father’s protection? • A fairy tale element in the choice of three? • What does each casket “mean”?

7. “Going for the gold” • Morocco quite pleased with his strength and valor: II, 2, 24ff. • “Who chooseth me shall gain what many men desire.” • “A golden mind stoops not to shows of dross.” • “Oh hell . . . A carrion death . . .” • The melancholy of gold?

8. Silvery Aragon: “I will assume desert” • “Who chooseth me shall get as much as he deserves.” • Aragon as the quintessential aristocrat: II, 9, 22ff. • [Hamlet to Polonius: “Treat every man according to his desert and who shall scape whipping?”] • Silver smokes out the egocentricity of Aragon. • The portrait of a blinking idiot!

9. “If you do love me, you will find me out” • Desire matching desire. • “Tell me where is fancy bred.” • Bassanio’s reading of the caskets. • Caskets as mirror of self, of marriage? • Why was choosing the lead casket necessary for Portia’s suitor? • She gives up everything with the ring. • Bassanio’s vow in accepting the ring.

10. Portia v. Shylock • Completion of bond means Antonio’s death. • “Then must the Jew be merciful.” • “The quality of mercy . . .” and the quality of justice. • Bassanio’s valuing of Antonio: IV, 1, 280ff. • Shylock’s defeat and “conversion.”

11. “And for your love, I’ll take this ring from you.” • The ring’s significance. • Can Bassanio not give the ring? • Belmont v. Venice? • Bassanio’s defense of giving the ring: V, 1, 215ff. • A potential nightmare – like the nightmare of Antonio’s threatened death? 223ff. • Antonio’s being bound a second time for Bassanio: 249ff. • Antonio the agent who takes and gives the ring.

12. “Manna in the way of starv’d people” • The dilemma of the ring plot • What do Bassanio, Gratiano learn from the dilemma? • The quality of mercy once again? • What is it in regard to friendship, love, marriage, civil society?

13. Is the melancholy of Antonio dispelled by the conclusion? • But perhaps not for us, for whom the history of the 20th century has induced even more melancholy. • We don’t have the luxury to take Shylock figuratively. • And so the melancholy of his Jewishness remains, and broods over the play?