“Who’s Within?”

Good stories are unified by their action, as Aristotle says in the Poetics. A mere string of episodes does not a drama make. The philosopher has harsh words for those who like double plots: this form, he writes, “is accounted the best” by some, but this is only “because of the weakness of the spectators.” One is tempted to write in the margin, “Ouch!” The point goes to the heart of Aristotle’s view: if the plot is the soul of a drama, then two plots make two dramas, not one, no matter whether they are trotted out for the same audience on the same stage.

In the pantheon of Shakespeare’s plays, The Merchant of Venice holds an unusual place. It has always been one of his most popular and most produced works, even as it has been widely criticized for its construction. The main plot elements that Shakespeare works with are two old story forms — one revolving around a task set for suitors to a fair lady, the other around the comeuppance that comes to a grasping, vindictive old man (and a Jew at that). What do these two stories really have to do with each other? However skilfully they are spliced into each other, the critics contend, in effect, that the play lacks unity of action. Robert Alter, a sympathetic and generous reader of the play, nonetheless condemns its structure: “the double plot of the creditor’s pound of flesh and the fair lady’s three caskets is a compounding of contrivance with contrivance.” His is not an unusual view.

But let us set the professional critics to one side for a moment. I put the question to myself: what does the story of the casks have to do with that of Shylock and the pound of flesh? One is about the outer vs the inner, the appearance versus the person’s inner life and character. The other is about justice and mercy, the letter of the law vs. the spirit of charity. Where and how do these themes come together?

There is a clue, I think. Portia appears at Antonio’s trial in the guise of Balthasar, a legal scholar: “a young doctor of Rome” who was supposedly visiting the learned Bellario in Padua. 

Why Rome? Why not Bologna, more celebrated and ancient as a seat of legal learning?  (It is not for metrical reasons: the letter from Bellario is in prose.) Did Shakespeare choose “Balthasar’s” city at random? I think not.

“For I delight in the law of God after the inward man.” (Romans 7:22)

“Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, because through Christ Jesus the law of the Spirit who gives life has set you free from the law of sin and death.  For what the law was powerless to do because it was weakened by the flesh, God did by sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh to be a sin offering. And so he condemned sin in the flesh,  in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fully met in us, who do not live according to the flesh but according to the Spirit.” (Romans 8:1-5)

The Epistle to the Romans is wound through The Merchant of Venice like a golden thread in a tapestry, and Portia is its chief representative. In her first scene, though the tone is bantering, her self-diagnosis is that of Romans 7:

If to do were as easy as 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 be one of the
twenty to follow mine own teaching.

Paul writes,

So I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand. For I delight in the law of God, in my inner being [KJV: the inward man], but I see in my members another law waging war against the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. (Romans 7:21-23)

Portia, I want to suggest, is introduced this way to indicate her predicament and her role throughout the play: she appears in each of the three plot elements as a teacher and exemplar of Paul’s doctrine in Romans.

Her predicament in the first plot is that her late father has bound her, by the terms of his will, to marry the man who successfully picks the right cask out of three. As it turns out, it must be the man who regards not the exterior but looks inside for the real treasure, the inward man, as it were. Her problem, then, is how to obey the written law that binds her without corrupting her heart and mind, without becoming slavish. The comic heroine finds a way: in part, simply by choosing well. She discerns that Bassanio has more of an interior life than her other suitors. But also, I think, she succeeds by the wisdom of her conversation: she is beautiful and captivating, but promises that there is more of her to be understood and loved. “But lest you should not understand me well –/ And yet a maiden hath no tongue but thought – / I would detain you here some month or two before you venture for me. I could teach you / How to choose right, but then I am forsworn.”

With her famous speech on mercy, she crowns her legal achievement in confuting Shylock. His valid claim to the letter of his bond ends up empty, because he has forgotten about the blood — the life — in the pound of flesh. I won’t elaborate the legal or the theological details here. Surely this is something all readers must see: that Portia here speaks for the new covenant, which fulfills the old law and harmonizes justice and mercy. “Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.”

In the lighthearted denouement of the play, Portia conspires to test the fidelity of her newly betrothed: in the guise of Balthasar, she asks Bassanio for his ring, which he has promised to wear as a sign of his undying faithfulness to Portia. He gives it up, feeling that refusal would be churlish and persuaded that Portia will understand. Back home, in an apparent reversal from the Shylock plot, Portia speaks up for the bond, the public and external commitment that marks the covenant between man and wife. She will have her bond! Indeed, though the tone is light and the language full of banter, the stakes are real, and the marriage bond will likely involve Portia yielding up more than one pound of flesh, in the form of children. As a wise friend of mine put it, Portia sees that her new husband needs to be taught something. So, even as she blesses herself and Bassanio in being merciful, she instructs him in his new capacity as husband. It is as the Bride insists in the Song of Songs: her lover needs to impress her both upon the inner and the outer self:

Set me as a seal upon your heart, as a seal upon your arm. (Song of Songs 8:6)

What does Portia — this young daughter, doctor from Rome, wife — teach Bassanio and us? That the external bond of marriage, rightly imposed, makes the interior commitment steady and true: it is not a mere cask or container, but a seal or a mold. Can there be such a thing for the Christian life? This is in a way the challenge of the play in all of its multifarious plot elements: the test of obedience that Portia must undergo, the test of Bassanio’s discernment, the test that the Shylock plot imposes on the Christians and their polity, and the test that Portia sets Bassanio as her betrothed. Can there be, in this life, a form of community, complete with public bonds, that properly molds the inner man, redeemed in Christ?

It’s a mark of Shakespeare’s mastery that he could treat such a profound set of questions in a comedy, with a searing and disturbing drama dropped into its center. Thematic unity, of course, does not guarantee dramatic coherence. There may be no way to defend the play’s unity of action entirely. Even Homer nods, or so we are told. But it seems to me that if the play is to hold together as a play, everything depends on the depiction of Portia. She is where the thematic ideas can become concrete in action: she finds out how to ‘follow her own teaching’, how to live in the flesh but according to the Spirit.