My progress:
Shakespeare Reading Project
Henry VI, parts 1, 2, 3 and Richard III
Two Gentlemen of Verona
The Taming of the Shrew
Titus Andronicus
The Comedy of Errors
Love’s Labour’s Lost
Romeo & Juliet
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Richard II
King John
The Merchant of Venice
First and foremost, The Merchant of Venice includes my favorite line in all of Shakespeare (if I had to choose):
How far that little candle throws his beams!
So shines a good deed in a naughty world.
Immortal.
When Shylock leaves the stage after being disgraced and punished in the trial scene, he never returns. And even though he’s awful, you miss him. Because he feels vital and alive in a way that the others, even and including Portia, do not. I’ve seen this play a number of times, and mostly the productions attempt to NOT be anti-Semitic, or to make the play a statement condemning anti-Semitism, which is totally understandable, although the dots don’t exactly link up. There are libraries of scholarship on Merchant, particularly this element. I mean, the Nazis loved Merchant of Venice. They’re not WRONG to have perceived it as an anti-Semitic work. When directors attempt to make productions of Taming of the Shrew a girlboss-feminist manifesto … the impulse is understandable, but you have to stretch the material to make it work. You can’t make a play be something other than what it is.
Shylock is a stereotype, but there are nuances in the portrayal. He is, actually, a human, not a cartoon. He is not sympathetic, but you don’t need a sympathetic character as the central figure: you just need someone WATCH-able, and Shylock is, way more than Antonio, who plays a much larger role. Speaking frankly, who the hell cares about Antonio? We’re supposed to be on his side – I guess? – but what’s to like? Fine, you lose all your ships, you are all about money, you gamble, you risk everything … and then you treat Shylock with contempt, hatred and violence? Kicking him, calling him a dog? Antonio is one of the male leads! Shylock’s motives are understandable, when you consider the treatment he receives and the prejudice he faces. Because Shylock “registers” so much more than Antonio does, it’s important to remember that Shylock is not the titular Merchant, because Jews weren’t allowed to be merchants. Antonio is the merchant. It’s so odd because Antonio isn’t the central figure, and yet he gets the title.
More explicitly than some of Shakespeare’s buddy comedies, Merchant “reads” as quite gay. Antonio and Bassanio clearly want to be together. A throuple with Portia might suit the trio better than anything strictly hetero and/or monogamous. Bisexuality, at any rate, runs through much of Shakespeare’s work – of course in the Sonnets, but also in the plays. Bisexuality – or sexual fluidity – is not subtext for Shakespeare. It’s text. Women dressing up as men is a constant feature, in Merchant and elsewhere. Cleopatra tries on Antony’s armor as a kind of sexy role-play. The friendship between men in Shakespeare’s work has a passionate quality lacking in whatever heterosexual romantic couple is at play (with Beatrice/Benedick and Macbeth/Lady Macbeth being notable exceptions, the latter couple has the most passionate ongoing marriage in all of Shakespeare’s work.) In Merchant of Venice, Portia barely seems interested in anyone besides herself. She is melancholy (for no apparent reason, almost like one of Evelyn Waugh’s languid privileged “bright young things”) and she has all the power. Portia is not a romantic. A contest is set up for her hand, involving three different caskets. Fortune-hunters flock to her door. When she chooses her man it will not be for love. (I hope not, because the man she chooses is gay!) Nevertheless, Portia will be fine. She is a winner. Even the contest, set up for her marital future, doesn’t seem unfairly imposed by her stern unfeeling elders (the way it comes across in Romeo and Juliet). The casket contest suits Portia’s sensibility. She gets to be a master of ceremonies, here and later in the trial scene.
One hears the title of the play and probably two things come to mind: Shylock and the “quality of mercy is not strain’d” speech. This is a play about money: debt and credit and taxes and capital. Even Portia’s caskets are made of precious metals/jewels: the only currency is financial. Shylock’s daughter steals from him before sneaking out to be with her lover. Shylock – and Jewish people – may be stereotyped as only caring about money – but everyone in this play only cares about money. However, of course, Shylock is punished while everyone else flourishes.
Jewish people were banished from England in the late 1200s, hundreds of years before Shakespeare wrote The Merchant of Venice. They weren’t a factor in Shakespeare’s everyday life, but they played a huge role in morality plays, seeping into the basic phantasmagoria of what was “pop culture” then. Around the time Shakespeare wrote Merchant, or maybe a little before, I don’t know, there was a famous trial and then execution of the Queen’s physician, a Portuguese Jew. To connect further, Portia could be seen as an allegory for Queen Elizabeth with her dead dad and suitors lining up at the door. Portia has power as a single wealthy woman. Marrying will mean she will lose that power. Shakespeare was probably influenced by Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta, although Barabas is a more obvious stereotype.
Portia and her maid Nerissa dress up like men, as per Shakespeare’s tradition, already at this early date, and they pose as lawyers, just in time for the trial. Portia’s grand moment comes when she takes the “stage” in the courtroom – like the leading lady she is – and talks about “mercy”. A gorgeous speech, usually quoted out of context, almost as much as Polonius’ “To thine own self be true” speech. People quote “to thine own self be true” as though it is deeply profound. But let’s not forget: Polonius is a blowhard who speaks in greeting-card platitudes, skipping from cliche to cliche. “To thine own self be true” is akin to “If you love something set it free …” You can picture Polonius launching into one of his word-salad speeches, and his kids rolling their eyes behind his back. Portia speaks beautifully of mercy, and turns around in the next moment to deny Shylock the mercy she espoused.
Irony is present – and biting – but unwelcome in the heady air of Belmont, where the “bright young things” loll about, mooning over love. In As You Like It, irony is the oxygen Rosalind breathes. Portia isn’t like that. Portia has irony but not Rosalind’s open impulsive romanticism. I am only pointing this out because the two characters are often treated as similar types, sisters from another mother. But they’re very different: you can’t swap Rosalind into Merchant of Venice or put Portia into As You Like It. It would be like swapping out Katharine Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby and putting in Myrna Loy. Or putting Hepburn into The Thin Man. This is a compare/contrast matter: not either/or. Both Hepburn and Loy are perfect but they are not interchangeable. Rosalind is effervescent, mischievous, intelligent, impulsive. Portia is a heavy-hitter leading lady with two capital L’s, but she’s the opposite of effervescent or impulsive.
Rosalind is a madcap screwball heroine like Hepburn, racing through a forest in the middle of the night, chasing after the man she loves, while also driving him away. Portia is Myrna Loy, making martinis, unruffled and unbothered, verbally gifted, the winner in any argument with her man.
Quotes on the play
“The Merchant of Venice may have been more of an incitement to anti-Semitism than The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, though less than the Gospel of John.”
— Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human
“The Merchant of Venice is one of a group of major comedies of Shakespeare’s middle period. Sometimes called ‘great’ or ‘festive’ comedies, a group that also includes Much Ado About Nothing, As You Like It, and Twelfth Night… it is noteworthy that in each of these plays, especially Merchant, there is much that actually resists joyous celebration.”
— Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All
“Antonio’s passion for Bassanio, whether it is carnal, idealized, or both, is not the cause of his melancholy, any more than Portia’s ‘aweary’ state is caused by love or its lack. Rather, these two characters, twinned by both their placement in the opening scene and their roles in what will become an evident or unacknowledged love triangle — are caught in something we might call ‘ennui’.”
— Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All
“Shylock is what is purged from the play’s romantic core of generosity and risk. It is his resistance to release and comic freedom, to masque and music, as much as his claim of faith and cultural heritage that banishes him. And if we leave this play with a disquieting sense of a man cruelly and publicly broken, we also leave it with the image of a triumphant heroine, willing and clever, generous to her friends, eloquent and amusing by turns.”
— Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All
“From first to last, this play is quintessentially about interpretation, about the act of decipherment.”
— Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All
“Gold, silver, and lead. The choice of the three caskets is also a choice offered to the audience of Shakespeare’s play. The gold of happy endings, of golden stars, and the golden rule and the Golden Fleece, but also of inheritance and rivalry. The silver of commerce, of the pale and common drudge ‘tween man and man, of the use of usury that makes Bassanio’s quest possible … And lead. The lead of the third casket, the choice we all have to learn that we all have to choose. The lead of mortality. The choice of death. We cannot proceed directly to the leaden casket. Choosing it first would not be the right choice. We must open the caskets in turn — Belmont, Venice, poetry, death — in order to assess the value of their contents, chooses their meaning.”
— Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All
“The Merchant of Venice is a deeply disturbing play, whose interpreters over time have sought to purge it of its most dangerous and disturbing energies.”
— Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All
“Shakespeare’s grand, equivocal comedy The Merchant of Venice is nevertheless a profoundly anti-Semitic work.”
— Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human
“I am afraid that we tend to make The Merchant of Venice incoherent by portraying Shylock as being largely sympathetic. Yet I myself am puzzled as to what it would cost (not only ethically) to recover the play’s coherence.”
— Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human
“Shakespeare, finished at last with Marlowe, contrasts against the cartoon Barabas Shylock’s realistic mimesis, which is so overwhelming that it cannot be accommodated as a stage Jew. Yet Shakespeare wants it both ways.”
— Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human
“Shylock’s prose is Shakespeare’s best before Falstaff; Shylock’s verse hews to the vernacular more than any in Shakespeare before Hamlet. The bitter eloquence of Shylock so impresses us that it is always a surprise to be told how small a part of the play is spoken by him: only 360 lines and sentences. His utterances manifest a spirit so potent, malign, and negative, as to be unforgettable. Yet it is spirit, albeit the spirit of resentment and revenge.”
— Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human
Yes. This, exactly. And I love stats like this. Shylock dominates this play so much that when he leaves the stage you keep waiting for him to return.
“Much of the play’s vitality can be attributed to the ways in which it scrapes against a bedrock of beliefs about the racial, national, sexual, and religious difference of others. I can think of no other literary work that does so as unrelentingly and as honestly. To avert our gaze from what the play reveals about the relationship between cultural myths and peoples’ identities will not make irrational and exclusionary attitudes disappear. Indeed, these darker impulses remain so elusive, so hard to identify in the normal course of things, that only in instances like productions of this play do we get to glimpse these cultural faultlines. This is why censoring the play is always more dangerous than staging it.”
— Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human
I get his point.
“Despite the Belmont fifth act, The Merchant of Venice may be Shakespeare’s first ‘dark comedy’ or ‘problem play’, forerunner of All’s Well That Ends Well, Troilus and Cressida, and Measure for Measure.”
— Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human
“Our directors go on instructing our actresses to play Portia as if she was Rosalind, which is a malfeasance. Bradsaw finds a touch of Henry James worldliness in Portia, but we would render her better by invoking Noel Coward or Cole Porter. I am not proposing that someone give us The Merchant of Venice as the first anti-Semitic musical comedy, but I do suggest that Portia, who knows better, consistently is delighted to fail all her own finely wrought self-awareness. Her moral fiber is Jamesian.”
— Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human
“[Portia] is rather wonderful bad news, a slummer by joyous choice.”
— Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human
“…all Shakespeare’s heroines are condemned to marry down.”
— Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human
“Shylock would be an Arthur Miller protagonist displayed into a Cole Porter musical, Willy Loman wandering about in Kiss Me Kate.”
— Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human
“Shylock has affinities with a strikingly varied company that includes Malvolio, Caliban, Lear’s Fool, Barnardine, and even an aspect of Falstaff … Shylock kindled Shakespeare’s imagination and became enlarged beyond comedy, though into menace rather than pathos. The stimulus for Shylock’s metamorphosis had to be Marlowe’s Barabas … Shylock is an anti-Barabas.”
— Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human
“We adore Barabas, Aaron and even Richard III because their asides make us their accomplices. Shakespeare, to prevent this, never allows us to be alone with Shylock.”
— Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human
“In such a world, or at any rate in such inhabitants of it, there is no incompatibility between money and love. Shylock cannot reconcile the two; but Shylock is not of this world as the quality of his voice so harshly discordant with the dominant voices of the play, will inform any attentive ear.”
— Mark Van Doren, Shakespeare
“As a negative psychologist, Shakespeare’s Jew prepares us for the abysses of the will in greater Shakespearean villains to come, but Shakespeare has divested Shylock of the grandeur of negative transcendence that will inform Iago, Edmund, and Macbeth. It is the ‘gaping pig’ speech, more than the wounded cry ‘I will have my bond’ that exposes Shylock’s emptying-out of his self.”
— Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human
“The sadness of [Portia’s] class is a mannerly sadness.”
— Mark Van Doren, Shakespeare
“The transformation of Shylock from a comic villain to a heroic villain (rather than a hero-villain like Barabas) shows Shakespeare working without precedents.”
— Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human
“Shakespeare has divested Shylock of the grandeur of negative transcendence that will inform Iago, Edmund, and Macbeth.”
— Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human
“The Holocaust made and makes The Merchant of Venice unplayable, at least in what appear to be its own terms.”
— Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human
“…by completing his emancipation from Marlow, Shylock made it possible to go on to Henry IV Part One, with its two characters who surpass even Shylock in ambivalence: Prince Hal and … Sir John Falstaff.”
— Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human
“Love is the natural language of these young men and women: love, and its elder brother generosity. Not generosity to Shylock, for he is of another species, and cannot receive what he will not give. But generosity to all friends, and an unmeasured love. The word love lies like a morsel of down in the nest of nearly every speech…The language of love is, among other things, intellectual.”
— Mark Van Doren, Shakespeare
“Shylock is not a monster. He is a man thrust into a world bound not to endure him. In such a world he necessarily looks and sounds ugly.”
— Mark Van Doren, Shakespeare
“Shylock is a GOOD HATER.”
— William Hazlitt, Characters in Shakespeare’s Plays
William Hazlitt’s famous essay “On the Pleasure of Hating” shows he has given the subject a lot of thought.
“Portia is not a very great favorite with us, neither are we in love with her maid, Nerissa. Portia has a certain degree of affectation and pedantry about her, which is very unusual in Shakespeare’s women … The speech about mercy is very well, but there a thousand finer ones in Shakespeare.”
— William Hazlitt, Characters in Shakespeare’s Plays
“With memories of the horrors of the last ten years and forebodings about anti-Semitism, it is difficult to look objectively at a play in which the villain is a Jew. But we must, in order to understand it.”
— W.H. Auden, 1946 lecture
“There is no sense of a stratified class structure in the play … There is free choice in personal relationships.”
— W.H. Auden, 1946 lecture
“There are few plays of Shakespeare in which the word ‘love’ is used more frequently.”
— W.H. Auden, 1946 lecture
“The Venetians are fashionably frivolous, and it is true that, like all frivolous people, they’re also a little sad.”
— W.H. Auden, 1946 lecture
“I end by repeating that it would have been better for the last four centuries of the Jewish people had Shakespeare never written the play.”
— Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human
“Shylock is an outsider because he is the only serious person in the play. He may be serious about the wrong things, the acquisition of property, since property is itself a frivolous thing. In contrast, however, we have a society that is frivolous because certain gifts are necessary to belong to it — beauty, grace, wit, riches.”
— W.H. Auden, 1946 lecture
“I am glad that Shakespeare made Shylock a Jew. What is the source of anti-Semitism? The Jew represents seriousness to the Gentile, which is resented, because we wish to be frivolous and do not want to be reminded that something serious exists. By their existence — and this is as it should be — Jews remind us of this seriousness, which is why we desire their annihilation.”
— W.H. Auden, 1946 lecture
“The thought of how the Elizabethan crowd … must have taken Shylock makes [us] shudder. And beyond doubt, whatever the poet intended, most of his audience must have made the Jew an object of ridicule or contempt or both.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare
“But there is something even worse than money under the surface of this social world. Exclusiveness — and the hypocrisy exclusiveness always involves, the pretense that that which is excluded is somehow less real than that which excludes.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare
“Dimly, in varying degrees, these Venetians and Belmontese reveal an uneasiness, a vague discontent, an unexplained sense of something wrong … Over and over they give the sense attempting to fill every chink of time with distraction of amusement, often just words, to prevent them thinking.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare
Goddard is new to me and he is very very good. His The Meaning of Shakespeare, published in 1951 or thereabouts, is two volumes. I found the chapter on Merchant to be the best of the bunch. Fascinating.
“What these people are trying to exclude is their own souls, or, as we say today, the unconscious.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare
“They project on [Shylock] what they have dismissed from their own consciousness as too disturbing. They hate him because he reminds them of their own unconfessed evil qualities. Down the ages this has been the main exploration of racial hatred and persecution, of the mistreatment of servant by master. Our unconsciousness, our foreign land. Hence we see in the foreigner what is actually the ‘foreign’ part of ourselves.'”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare
“O my Antonio, had I but the means To hold a rival place with one of them,
I have a mind presages me such thrift
That I should questionless be fortunate!
This is not exactly in the key of Romeo & Juliet.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare
lol
“‘What! Antonio like Shylock!’ it will be said. ‘The idea is preposterous. No two men could be more unlike.’ They are, in many respects. But extremes meet, and in one respect, they are akin. It is Antonio’s unconscious protest against this humiliating truth that is the secret of his antipathy. ‘Wilt thou whip thine own faults in other men?’ cries Timon of Athens. Shakespeare understood the principle, and he illustrates it here.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare
“[Shakespeare] is still out ahead of it. I marvel at critics, of whatever persuasion, old and new, who substitutes their knowingness (really their resentment) for Shakespeare’s woe and wonder, which are among the prime manifestations of his cognitive power.”
— Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human
“Editors who punctuate the line ‘Which is the merchant here? And which is the Jew?’ miss the point.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare (as opposed to ‘Which is the merchant here and which is the Jew?” which highlights their similarity.
“Who does not know an Antonio — a man too good for money-making who has dedicated his life to money-making? Antonio was created for nobler things. And so he suffers from that homesickness of the soul that ultimately attacks everyone who ‘consecrates’ his life to something below his spiritual level…Antonio is the silver casket. He got as much as he deserved: material success and a suicidal melancholy.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare
“… here is the supreme irony of this ironical play … The symbolism confirms the psychology: Shylock was the leaden casket with the spiritual gold within.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare
“It is not easy to imagine Hamlet choosing [Portia], or Othello, or Coriolanus. (Nor Shakespeare himself, I feel like adding.)”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare
“The verses inside the golden casket begin with a rhyme or long o (gold); those inside the silver casket on a rhyme on short i (this). The song sung while Bassanio is making up his mind begins with a rhyme on short e (bred). But bred, as someone has pointed out) is a full rhyme with lead.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare
“Shylock himself — and through him Shakespeare — hands us the key: to open the casket of this play we must look beneath its surface, must probe the unconscious minds of its characters.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare
“In all Shakespeare — unless it be Hamlet with ‘To be or not to be’ — there is scarcely another character more identified in the world’s mind with a single speech than Portia with her words on mercy. And the world is right. They have a ‘quality’ different from anything else in her role.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare
“Portia sinks from compassion to legality… ‘You should show mercy,’ the young Doctor says in effect, ‘but if you don’t, this court will be compelled to decide in your favor.’…It is like a postscript that undoes the letter. Thus Portia the lover of mercy is deposed by Portia the actress that the latter may have the rest of the play.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare
“Portia’s willingness to sacrifice the human to the theatrical. If there was any temptation that Shakespeare understood, it must have been that one. It was his own temptation. And as he tells us in the Sonnets, he nearly succumbed to it:
And almost thence my nature is subdu’d
To what it works in, like the dyer’s hand.
Portia was subdued.
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare
“Emily Dickinson has spoken of ‘the mob within the heart.’ Gratiano is the voice of that mob, and he sees to it that a thrill of vicarious revenge was down the spine of every person in the theatre. So exultant are we at seeing the biter bit.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare
“For a moment, at the crisis in the courtroom, she seems about to become the leaden casket with the spiritual gold within. But the temptation to gain what many men desire — admiration and praise — is too strong for her and she reverts to her worldly self. Portia is the golden casket.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare
On Act V:
“What a picture it is of the speed with which so-called happy people rush back to the idle pleasures of life after a brief compulsory contact with reality. Privilege was forced for a moment to face the Excluded. On the question [Is this a comedy?]: Those who stress the matter of construction have often pointed out that the playwright meticulously prepares for a scene in this play that he never presents — the masque at which Lorenzo was to make Jessica his torchbearer … the whole matter is dismissed in one line … when Antonio announces:
No masque tonight: the wind is come about;
Bassanio presently will go abroad.
Every performance of The Merchant of Venice might well be heralded with the cry: No comedy tonight. The winds are come about. And so the scene Shakespeare prepared for and left out is not left out after all.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare
^^ This is brilliant.
“The metaphor that underlies and unifies The Merchant of Venice is that of alchemy, the art of transforming the base into the precious, lead into gold. Everything in it comes back to that.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare
“This play anti-Semitic? Why, yes, if you find it so. Shakespeare certainly leaves you free, if you wish, to pick the golden casket.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare
“What inspired Shakespeare to introduce into this play gay entertainment, with all its frivolity and wedding bells, prototypes of those two giants of the twentieth century, Trade and Finance … to let them look in each others’ eyes, and behold — their own reflection?”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare
“More sinned against than sinning, this villain-victim now strikes us as more nearly the protagonist, a far-off forerunner of King Lear himself. Beside him, the gentleman-hero of the piece shrinks to a mere fashion-plate.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare
Quotes from the play
Now by two-headed Janus.
Nature hath fram’d strange fellows in her time,
Some that will evermore peep through their eyes,
And laugh like parrots at a bagpiper;
And other of such vinegar aspect
That they’ll not show their teeth in way of smile
Though Nestor swear the jest be laughable.
— SOLANIO, I.i.50-56
I hold the world but as the world, Gratiano,
A stage, where ever man must play a part,
And mine a sad one.
— ANTONIO, I.i.77-79
First of all, stop whining. Second of all, this sounds familiar. Hm.
There are a sort of men whose visages
Do cream and mantle like a standing pond,
And do a willful stillness entertain,
With purpose to be dress’d in an opinion
Of wisdom, gravity, profound conceit,
As who should say, “I am Sir Oracle,
And when I ope my lips let no dog bark!”
— GRATIANO, I.i.88-94
I love that image of the still pond.
And yet for aught I see, they are as sick that surfeit with too much as they that starve with nothing.
— NERISSA, I.ii.5-7
If to do were as easy to know what were good to do, chapels had been churches, and poor men’s cottages princes’ palaces. It is a good divine that follows his own instructions; I can easier teach twenty what were good to be done, than to be one of the twenty to follow min own teaching … a hot temper leaps o’er a cold decree …
— PORTIA, I.ii.12-19
The evil can cite Scripture for his purpose.
— ANTONIO, I.iii.98
I like not fair terms and a villain’s mind.
— BASSANIO, I.iii.179
If Hercules and Liches play at dice
Which is the better man, the greater throw
May turn by fortune from the weaker hand.
— PRINCE OF MOROCCO, II.i.32-34
All things that are,
Are with more spirit chased than enjoy’d.
— GRATIANO, II.vi.12-13
Men that hazard all
Do it in hope of fair advantage.
A golden mind stoops not to shows of dross.
— PRINCE OF MOROCCO, II.vii.18-20
The Hyreanian deserts and the vasty wilds
Of wide Arabia are as throughfares now
For princes to come view fair Portia.
— PRINCE OF MOROCCO, II.vii.41-43
I love that language and imagery. “Vasty wilds.”
They have in England
A coin that bears the figure of an angel
Stamp’d in gold, but that’s insculp’d upon;
But here an angel in a golden bed
Lies all within.
— PRINCE OF MOROCCO, II.vii.55-59
“My daughter! O my ducats! O my daughter!
Fled with a Christian! O my Christian ducats!
Justice! The law! my ducats, and my daughter!”
— SOLANIO, II.viii.15-17
To these injunctions every one doth swear
That comes to hazard for my worthless self.
— PORTIA, II.ix.17-18
For who shall go about
To cozen fortune, and be honorable
Without the stamp of merit? Let none presume
To wear an undeservèd dignity.
O, that estates, degrees, and offices
Were not derived corruptly, and that clear honor
Were purchased by the merit of the wearer!
— PRINCE OF ARAGON, II.ix.37-43
I would she were as lying of a gossip in that as ever knapp’d ginger or made her neighbors believe she wept for the death of a third husband.
— SOLANIO, III.i.8-10
Brutal.
I could teach you
How to choose right, but then I am forsworn.
So will I never be, so may you miss me,
But if you do, you’ll make me wish a sin,
That I had been forsworn.
— PORTIA, III.ii.10-14
One half of me is yours, the other half yours —
Mine own, I would say; but if mine, then yours,
And so all yours. O, these naughty times
Puts bars between the owners and their rights!
An so though yours, not yours.
— PORTIA, III.ii.16-20
Tell me where is fancy bred,
Or in the heart, or in the head?
How begot, how nourishèd?
— III.ii.63-65
So may the outward shows be least themselves;
The world is still deceived with ornament.
In law, what plea so tainted and corrupt
But, being seasoned with a gracious voice,
Obscures the show of evil? …
There is no vice so simple but assumes
Some mark of virtue on his outward parts.
How many cowards whose hearts are all as false
As stairs of sand, wear yet upon their chins
The beards of Hercules and frowning Mars,
Who inward searched have livers white as milk,
And these assume but valor’s excrement
To render them redoubted.
— BASSANIO, III.ii.74-85
O love, be moderate, allay thy ecstasy,
In measure rain thy joy, scant this excess!
I feel too much thy blessing. Make it less,
For fear I surfeit.
— PORTIA, III.ii.111-114
How every fool can play upon the word! I think the best grace of wit will shortly turn into silence, and discourse grow commendable in none only but parrots. Go in, sirrah, bid them prepare for dinner.
— LORENZO, III.v.43-46
To do a great right do a little wrong,
An curb this cruel devil of his will.
— BASSANIO, IV.i.216-217
Sit, Jessica. Look how the floor of heaven
Is thick inlaid with patens of bright gold.
There’s not the smallest orb which thou behold’st
But in his motion like an angel sings,
Still choiring to the young-eyed cherubins.
Such harmony is in immortal souls,
But whilst this muddy vesture of decay
Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it.
— LORENZO, V.i.58-65
Stunning.
The man that hath no music in himself,
Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds,
Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils;
The motions of his spirit are dull as night,
And his affections dark as Erebus.
Let no such man be trusted. Mark the music.
— LORENZO, V.i.83-88
How far that little candle throws his beams!
So shines a good deed in a naughty world.
— PORTIA, V.i.90-91
So doth the greater glory dim the less.
A substitute shines brightly as a king
Until a king be by, and then his state
Empties itself as doth an inland brook
Into the main of waters.
— PORTIA, V.i.94-97
And finally: in Act V, sc i – the word “ring” appears 45 times. But even more noticeable than the repetition, check out this rhyme scheme:
