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

DA VID LUCKING Standing for Sacrifice: The Casket and Trial Scenes in The Merchant of Venice Few readers of The Merchant ofVenice 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 ofthe 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 playas a whole. To begin with, both might be described as broadly ceremonial in character. Secondly, each pivots on a delicate butvital 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,11 a conception which the play explores in a number of its facets. It is my intention in this paper to approach The Merchant of Venice from the point of view of this underlying sacrificial theme, and more specifically to examine the manner in which Shakespeare traces the implications of the ethic of self-abnegation as it manifests itself in the arena of practical conduct. While the scope of the discussion will embrace the play in its entirety, I shall be devoting particular attention to the two scenes I have just referred to, which embody this concern in almost UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 58, NUMBER 3, SPRING 1989 356 DAVID LUCKING paradigmatic form. I shall be arguing that these episodes represent the respective culminations of two symmetrical and in some ways complementary quests, in the course of which the emissaries of radically different value systems are each compelled to subject their most deeply held assumptions to the test of an alternative world-view. More generally , Ishall try to show that the relation between the casket and trial scenes, the complex pattern ofparallels and divergences which is woven between them, reflects in microcosmic form the more comprehensive structure of relationships obtaining between the two worlds that the play depicts those of Venice and Belmont - and the systems of value they represent. Because these relationships establish themselves at the level ofimage and metaphorbefore they are enacted physicallyin the two expeditions I have mentioned, I shall begin by considering some of the ways in which they are implicit in the verbal fabric of the play. There is by now nothing particularly unfamiliar in the idea that Shakespeare often chose to dramatize his themes by provisionally assuming a system of contrasts or oppositions which are qualified or undermined or transcended altogether as his plays proceed. Nowhere is this strategy more in evidence than in The Merchant of Venice, where two possible outlooks on life are embodied in the physically distinct and poetically contradistinguished communities of Venice and Belmont. Shakespeare was living in an epoch of economic transition, during which the traditional stable conception of absolute value was yielding ground before a more dynamic and relativistic view according to which the value of an object...