Standing for Sacrifice: The Casket and Trial Scenes in The Merchant of Venice

Abstract

Few readers of The Merchant of Venice would be likely to contest the claim that two scenes occupy positions of crucial importance in the dramatic structure of the play. The scenes I have in mind are those hinging on Bassanio's solution of the casket-riddle in act III, and Portia's decisive intervention in the case Shylock prosecutes against Antonio in act IV. On the face of it, these two episodes appear to have very little in common other than the personages involved in them. One has as its setting an idealized community situated somewhere beyond the sea, and represents the triumph of romantic love through a mysterious ordeal which seems to partake more of the remoter realms of dream or myth than of the brutal world of common experience; the other unfolds in the more sinister, though at the same time also much more familiar, context of a Venetian courtroom, and depicts the discomfiture of the impulse of hatred by means of a very agile exercise in juristic reasoning. Despite the obvious differences, however, these two long scenes display a number of points of affinity which shed light on the strategy and moral orientation of the play as a whole. To begin with, both might be described as broadly ceremonial in character. Secondly, each pivots on a delicate but vital act of interpretation, and in particular on the perception and implementation of the spirit rather than the letter of what is seen to be a potentially threatening, though at the same time absolutely binding, law. Both episodes are imbued with a disturbingly ambivalent quality, a problematic ambiguity which has provoked all those questions concerning motive, sincerity, and moral consistency around which critical controversy has tended to revolve in recent years. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, each of the two scenes illustrates contrasting aspects of what one commentator has described as the 'ethic of sacrificial love,' a conception which the play explores in a number of its facets.