Shakespeare's Women in Drag: Portia

Lee Lady

Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human
Jan Kott, Shakespeare Our Contemporary
Martin Holmes, Shakespeare's Public
Albert Bermel, Shakespeare at the Moment: Playing the Comedies
Philip Brockbank (editor), Players of Shakespeare, 1
John Palmer, Comic Characters of Shakespeare
Panny Gay, As She Likes It: Shakespeare's Unruly Women

It is very difficult for a modern audience to see the Merchant of Venice as the Elizabethans did. We see this as a play about Shylock. And in fact, Shylock is without question the most powerful role in the play, and in fact one of Shakespeare's most compelling characters. Like Falstaff in Henry IV, this is a case where Shakespeare let himself get obsessively interested in what was intended to be a minor character (Shylock in fact appears in only five scenes and has only 360 lines in the play and in Shakespeare's source story was nothing but a cartoon villain) and let that character steal the play. But what it makes it worse for us is that the main substance of the play, all the stuff about ships and commerce, seems devoid of interest, whereas for Shakespeare's audience, made up in large part of merchants and other small businessmen, it was of very real interest. (I am indebted to Martin Holmes's book Shakespeare's Public for this insight.)

It is especially difficult for us to come to terms with the character of Portia, because we tend to forget her real story and think of her as someone whose whole function in the play is to appear in the Duke's chambers disguised as a legal expert. For one thing, the courtroom scene is the only scene in the play where Portia becomes involved with the Shylock story, which today we see as the whole point of the play. Secondly, for this scene Shakespeare has given Portia one of his most famous set speeches, the one beginning, "The quality of mercy is not strained."

Sinead Cusak says the following about her experience playing Portia.

I finally worked out that the great problem for the actress playing Portia is to reconcile the girl at home in Belmont early in the play with the one who plays a Daniel come to judgement in the Venetian court. I couldn't understand why Shakespeare makes her so unsympathetic in those early scenes --- the spoilt little rich girl dismissing suitor after suitor in a very derisory fashion. The girl who does that, I thought, is not the woman to deliver the "quality of mercy" speech.

I don't want to discuss the way in which Sinead Cusak resolved this problem, except to say that I think it was very different from the way Shakespeare himself intended the play to be performed, and yet at the same time was undoubtedly a very good choice for someone playing to a modern audience.

Portia and the Suitors

I do not agree with Cusak that Portia is unsympathetic in the early Belmont scenes. I don't think it ever occurred to Shakespeare that his audience might empathize with the unfortunate men who come as suitors to Portia. Shakespeare was in the entertainment business. These man are standard comedy characters, analogous to what one finds in many contemporary sitcoms about single women, and the audience would laugh at them and find Portia's comments on them delightfully funny.

(In what follows, from Act 1 Scene 2, I have occasionally modernized the language slightly.)

Nerissa. First, there is the Neapolitan prince.

Portia. Ay, that's a colt indeed, for he does nothing but talk of his horse, and counts it as one of his chief virtues that he can shoe him himself. I am much afeared his mother played around with a smith.

Nerissa. Then there is the Count Palatine.

Portia. He does nothing but frown. He hears merry tales and does not smile. I fear he will prove to be the weeping philosopher in his old age, being so full of uncalled for sadness in his youth. I would rather be married to a death's head with a bone in his mouth than to either of these.

Nerissa. How say you by the French lord, Monsieur le Bon?

Portia. God made him, so therefore let him pass for a man. In truth, I know it is a sin to be a mocker, but this one! Why he hath a horse better than the Neapolitan's, a better bad habit of frowning than Count Palatine. He is every man in no man. If he hears a song thrush sing, he immediately breaks into dance. He will fence with his own shadow. To marry him would be to marry twenty husbands. If he were to despise me, I'd readily forgive him, for even if he loved me to madness I'd never reciprocate.

Nerissa. What say you then to Falconbridge, the young baron of England?

Portia. You know I say nothing to him, because neither of us can understand the other. Not only can't he speak Italian, but not French or Latin either. And you know full well that I speak barely a word of English. He is a fine picture of a man, but alas, who can converse with a picture? And how oddly he dresses! I think he bought his doublet in Italy, his hose in France, his hat in Germany, and his behavior everywhere.

Etc.

It is certainly possible to read these lines (or listen to them spoken on stage) and empathize with these poor suitors and feel that Portia is being cruel in making fun of them. This is a personal reaction, and depending on one's own temperament and personal experience, there will always be people who feel hurt when things happen that most people find funny, as well as people who laugh at things that most people find horrible. But what I do not find credible is to think that sympathy for the suitors is the response Shakespeare was hoping to elicit from his audience. Shakespeare was in the entertainment business.

In his characterizations, Shakespeare is in a way a very impressionistic writer. He does not delineate his characters carefully, but throws out all sorts of little snippets of information which we then assemble to create a character in our imaginations. (Or which an actor uses to create a character on stage.)  Most important of all, he distiguishes characters by the cadences of their speeches, their vocabularies, and the rest of their verbal personalities. And, perhaps precisely because of this impressionistic approach, the resulting characters seem very vivid to us, very alive. And because they seem so vivid and alive, we tend to assume that the way we see a Shakespearean character is the way that character "really" is, forgetting the fact that nowhere in the text does it actually confirm our impressions in so many words.

Centuries of criticism confirm the fact that even for the most careful thoughtful readers (and actors), who a Shakespearean character is is very much a function of the particular reader. A critic tells us his particular impression of a character, and supports his view with very careful reasoning and citations from the text, and yet his arguments are most often simply not convincing to other critics.

From Sinead Cusak's comments (which I think are very worth reading, although I have not quoted much of them here), one can see that she is unwilling or unable to accept The Merchant of Venice as a real comedy. And this is understandable. I think that presenting it as the comedy I believe Shakespeare intended would be unacceptable to almost any modern post-Holocaust audience.

I will quote here Harold Bloom's comments on Portia:

Portia, in play's center, is far more complex and shadowed than ever I have seen her portrayed as being. Herself a sophisticated ironist, she settles happily for the glittering gold digger Bassanio, contemptuously sentences poor Morocco and Aragon to celibate existences, and is delighted with her Belmont and her Venice alike. More ever than the vicious Gratiano, she incarnates the "anything goes" spirit of Venice, and her "quality of mercy" cheerfully tricks Shylock out of his life saving's in order to enrich her friends. We would see her better as something out of Noel Coward or Cole Porter. I do suggest that Portia, who knows better, is delighted to fail all her own finely wrought self-awareness. Her moral fiber is out of Henry James, but her sense of the high life wryly allows her to settle for Bassanio and tricksterism. Yes, she has the wit to flatten Shylock, Jew and alien, but her city, Venice, is completely on her side.

Although it's really irrelevant to the focus of my article here, I can't resist commenting that here Harold Bloom is practicing that form of criticism which he himself most vociferously objects to --- namely, criticism based on what he calls the Politics of Resentment.

Shakespeare does provide the actor the opportunity to play Shylock as a sympathetic character (although I doubt that it ever occurred to Shakespeare that anyone would want to, and certainly such a portrayal would have been unacceptable to Shakespeare's audience). But if one looks at the whole play through Shylock's eyes and takes the point of view that he is a totally innocent businessman who is cruelly mistreated, then it logically follows that all the other main characters in the play are a villains. And to play the Merchant in this way requires that one ignores almost everything in the play about these characters except for the end of the courtroom scene.

Certainly it makes sense to condemn the anti-semitism of Elizabethan society, but to condemn individual characters in a play because they act in accord with the generally accepted attitudes of the society the play is set in makes it impossible to ever understand the play for what it is. The fact is that Shakespeare's play was written as and perceived by its Elizabethan audience (and for audiences for at least two centuries afterwards) as an entertaining comedy, not a piece of social protest in which a bunch of vicious bullies torment an innocent victim.

To Shakespeare's audience, which consisted in large part of merchants, craftsmen, and businessmen (c.f. Shakespeare's Public by Martin Holmes), usury was an evil. Not just because it was condemned in the Bible, but because usurers lent money at high interested rates to desperate businessmen and then ruined them by foreclosing on their assets when they were unable to pay. (In the same way, bankers were acceptable villains in nineteenth century American melodrama.) Today, when usury has become a fact of life and one's mailbox is constantly filled with junk mail offering credit cards, it's hard to look at the play through Elizabethan eyes. One would have to rewrite it and make Shylock into a villain who it's socially acceptable to condemn, such as a Mafia loan shark or a drug dealer to see that Shakespeare's audience saw Portia's swindling of Shylock (and certainly she did swindle him, coming into court disguised as an impartial expert witness) as nothing less than simple justice. And certainly they saw Portia as a heroine, not a persecutor of an innocent victim.

But Harold Bloom's personal impressions (as always, very personal) are always interesting, since he is a very imaginative critic. I wish though that I could interrogate him and ask him specifically to point to those passages in the play that his impressions of Portia are based on. Because I certainly do not find lines in the text that show her as complex and shadowed, or in that in any way reminds me of Henry James. Portia is one of Shakespeare's most memorable and most admired characters, and yet when one looks through her lines in the play, it is hard to figure why. Except of the Quality of Mercy speech.

Although Portia is not primarily a comedian (not one who entertains us by telling jokes, in any case), Portia's role is a comic role. This is clear from the tone of the text in the beginning of the play and from the business with the rings.

But then the problem arises, as Sinead Cusak and so many others have pointed out, of what to do about the courtroom scene in Act 4.

I am going to suggest the that even in the courtroom scene, Portia is a lot more like Lucille Ball than Joan Plowright or Helen Mirren (or, for that matter, Sinead Cusak).

Portia in Disguise

There are a number of ways of trying to avoid confronting the apparent inconsistency in Portia's character. We might recall that Portia has borrowed her courtroom garb from her cousin Bellario in Padua, who is in fact a learned legal scholar. And at the end of Act 3 Scene 4, we see that she has also asked Bellario for some notes, which presumably are her guide in the subsequent courtroom scene. One can then try to reconcile the difference between Portia as we earlier saw her and as we see her in the courtroom by arguing that the mercy speech was written for Portia by Bellario and she is merely reading it, and that the same is pretty much true for the rest of her courtroom performance.

In my opinion, to accept this explanation is to destroy the dramatic integrity of the play. For one thing, to make the logic of the story depend this sort of explanation, which is not even stated anywhere in the text, is to basically invent a new play which is a substitute for the one that is written down. And if one of the play's leading characters, in the play's climactic scene, is functioning as a mere mouthpiece, speaking the words of a character who never even appears, then the whole play becomes meaningless and certainly Portia's role in the courtroom (i.e. the Duke's chambers) becomes completely meaningless.

To understand the play, I think we need to ask the question why does Portia appear in the courtroom disguised as a man? Why not have a true legal expert in the courtroom scene? Or have the Duke himself deliver the arguments that Portia makes?

Well, to have the crucial arguments delivered by the Duke or by some true legal expert would mean that the crucial plot point in the whole play would essentially come from a deus ex machina. In this case, the story would somehow lose its point.

And for somewhat the same reason, I think it's essential that the audience recognize from the very first moment that this supposed distinguished doctor of law is in fact Portia. I've seen it suggested that the scene be played in such a way that Portia is not recognizable by the audience, and then the truth as an amusing surprise in Act 5. In my opinion, this just won't work.

If we don't see through Portia's disguise, then in Act 4 Antonio's savior is still a deus ex machina. The play loses its power, and it's too late to say in Act 5, "Oh, it was really Portia." In fact, if the audience really didn't know the play and didn't know that the playwright was a god to be worshipped, and if the courtroom scene were won by an unknown character, much of the audience would leave at the end of Act 4 --- there would be nothing to stay for.

But moreover, we need to be able to recognize Portia while she gives the Mercy Speech because the Mercy Speech is the defining moment in the play for Portia. It is the moment when we realize that she is noble and courageous (and much more intelligent than anyone else in the courtroom). Portia loses her whole impact in the play if we don't see who she is while she's giving this speech.

And we are surprised. We'd taken Portia for a bit of a bubble head, and now we suddenly realize how intelligent she is. (Or if not intelligent, at the very least clever.) More intelligent than she realizes herself, I believe.

But why should it be Portia who defeats Shylock? Why not have Bassanio or one of Antonio's other friends, or even Antonio himself, present the crucial legal reasoning?

One can see that it wouldn't quite work. Although Portia herself is almost a deus ex machina in the courtroom, since she has not been previously involved in the Shylock plot at all and we have had no previous reason to even suspect that she had any legal expertise (which to me does seem like a genuine flaw in the plot), I think that there is no other character available who could present the winning arguments in the courtroom without having the story fall flat. Because if Antonio or any of the other characters is capable of coming up with the arguments Portia uses, then basically this says that Shylock simply underestimated his opponents and is not a worthy antagonist.

Now let me suggest a thought experiment. Let us suppose that we can ignore the Elizabethan social values and put on a very modern version of the Merchant of Venice, where Portia doesn't bother to disguise herself but is in fact a female law student (or, in fact, a distinguished jurist; why not?) and appears in the courtroom as such. This is actually much more plausible than the way Shakespeare has things. (Of course plausibility seemed to be the very last thing Shakespeare was ever striving for.)

Rewriting and performing the play this way would certainly be an interesting experiment. At the very least, one would need a completely new Act 5. But I don't believe the play would really work without Portia being in disguise. And the reason, in my opinion, is that Portia that would then completely overpower the play.

As it is, at the end of the play, Antonio and Bassanio remain the heroes of the play. Antonio had been within a few moments of losing his life, and Portia pulled off an incredible feat of legal legerdemain to save him, and now they're all back in Belmont and, astonishingly enough, after having seen Portia's true abilities in the Duke's chambers in Venice, now in Act 5 Antonio and Bassanio and the audience go back to treating her as just another silly dame. A very lovely one, to be sure, and one who Bassanio is quite in love with (although originally he said he only wanted her for her money), but still. Just a woman!

The trick with the rings is what brings the play back down from near tragedy (although I will argue that the courtroom scene is also very comic) to almost slapstick. This is the classic pattern for male-female comedies, continued in many modern sitcoms and movies. Portia, a woman, has managed to save Antonio's life by outsmarting an opponent that he himself was not able to get the better of. This delights the audience. But at the same time, we don't want to end the play with the message that a woman can be smarter than a man. Certainly not if the play is to be a comedy!

So the trick with the rings is Portia's way of showing at the end that, after all, she and Nerissa are just silly chicks. (Although in a different way, it also shows that they are not only smarter than Shylock, but smarter than their husbands.)

In the conclusion to her book, As She Likes it: Shakespeare's Unruly's Women, Penny Gay writes,

The uniqueness of Shakespearean comedy is that it operates powerfully on us through the play of a paradox: a conventional (patriarchal) community is revitalized by the incorporation, through the institution of marriage, of the remarkable energies of a charismatic female presence; yet she has spent most of the play flouting patriarchal protocols.

In fact, from all the comedies, I think that this is really only an accurate description of As You Like It, and possibly also Much Ado About Nothing. Viola, in Twelfth Night, is certainly charming, and one might conceivably describe her as charismatic, but her role in the plot is not really that of an active character who makes things happen. And, except for her cross-dressing, which she does out of desperation and with a complete lack of confidence, she certainly doesn't challenge the patriarchal conventions of society. And Katherina, in The Taming of the Shrew, certainly doesn't revitalize her community.

But for the most part Shakespeare's comedies, like many of television's pre-feminist sitcoms, do contain the subversive message that women are actually smarter than men, but wise enough to keep this a secret. Portia does not go through the Merchant blatantly flaunting patriarchal conventions, nor does she revitalize her community, and yet when the silly games of men manage to get matters thoroughly bolloxed up, it is she, a woman, who is the only one capable of fixing what has gone wrong.

On the other hand, there's also a much easier answer to the question of why Portia appears in Act 4 in disguise. Namely, Shakespeare did things the way he did because that's the way it was done in his source story. And apparently, as so often, Shakespeare was combining two different source stories and didn't bother to work out of how to combine them in a logical way. (The story logic would have been quite correct if it had been her husband's father Portia was saving from death, as in the original story, rather than someone who she didn't even know.)

And yet one can't really stop there. Even if all these explanations do explain why Shakespeare made the choices he did, we still are left with the question: How did he manage to make it work? And it does work, more or less, except that somehow there seem to be two very different Portias in the play.

If we believe in Act 1 that Portia is a shallow airhead who is cruel to her suitors, a "spoiled little rich girl," in Sinead Cusak's words, then we will not believe her credible in the courtroom. But I believe that in fact that it is Cusak's judgement (along with that of many respected critics) that is shallow. Portia is like most people in the real world, in that she's capable of being flippant and caustic and even cruel in a lot of circumstances (she would in fact have to be almost a saint to treat her suitors other than she does), but that doesn't mean she's not capable of serious thought when it's needed. The one thing we see for sure from her comments in Act 1 is that she is definitely intelligent (or, at the very least, clever).

And the fact that Portia surprises us in the courtroom scene and shows an unexpected depth is, in my opinion, an essential part of what makes the play comic. If the preceding acts had shown Portia as wise and super-competent, then as I see it, the courtroom scene would fall flat. In this case, watching Portia defeat Shylock would be like watching a professional boxer beat up a twelve-year-old boy.

Here I have to surprise myself by suggesting a feminist interpretation: Portia, like so many women, has always been the victim of the belief that it's not a good thing for women to be intelligent. She's always downplayed her intelligence, hidden it even from herself, allowed herself to express it only in socially acceptable forms, such as sarcastic banter. And now there is the moment when she really needs that intelligence, and she has a license to use it because she is masquerading as a man!

Well, I have to apologize to Shakespeare for suggesting such an interpretation. He was certainly no Ibsen or Shaw who used his plays as way of giving the audience a message. But it does seem to me that, if we see the play as a comedy, that's the way it has to work. And to be acceptable to an Elizabethan audience, and even, I believe, to a modern one, we need the comedy to disguise the feminism. (Well, no, that's not really quite correct, from Shakespeare's point of view. Shakespeare needed comedy in order to amuse his audience. But comedy somehow often becomes all the funnier when it is used to make a point that the audience agrees with. And I think it has always been acceptable, in Shakespeare and in sitcoms, to present women as being smarter than men, as long as it's done in an amusing way.)

Why Have Portia Disguised as a Male?

And yet I don't think that any of that is the real reason for having Portia disguised as a man. I believe that the ultimate reason is that having Portia in the courtroom in disguise worked for Shakespeare was not because of plot logic, but simply because it made the courtroom scene funny. It's not merely funny, of course. It's deadly serious, because Antonio's life is at stake. But I believe that to an Elizabethan audience, the idea of a woman masquerading as a man and pretending to be the crucial attorney in a courtroom scene was extremely comic. And like Buster Keaton or Harold Lloyd balancing on a ledge many stories above the sidewalk, the peril involved only made the comedy that much more intense.

We read Shakespeare's comedies in which women impersonate men and tend to think, "How could she get away with this disguise?" But the point it, she's not really supposed to, at least not as far as the audience is concerned. Modern directors, and especially filmmakers, completely ruin the comedy by finding ways of making Portia's disguise credible. But what's funny is that it's not credible, and yet the other characters don't quite see through it. This is not Eugene O'Neill, this is the stuff of sitcoms.

One can watch Hillary Swank play Brandon Teena in the movie Boys Don't Cry, and think, "Yes, I can see how people could have been fooled." But it is more useful to think of Dustin Hoffman in Tootsie. Portia is a woman in an Elizabethan society (nominally Venetian, but all Shakespeare's characters are really Elizabethans in funny clothes) where gender roles were sharply differentiated. Her masquerade would be more difficult for her than it is for a man to impersonate a woman in our society. As I see her, she tries to swagger and act like a man, but she keeps making mistakes. It constantly seems like she won't pull it off, and yet she always manages to.

Remember that Shakespeare was not playing to an audience who had paid a lot of money to sit in a darkened theatre and watch performers lit by spotlights. Shakespeare was an entertainer who had to constantly work to hold his audience's attention. Every moment in a play by Shakespeare had to be interesting. And Shakespeare, I believe, knew that a woman trying to pass for a man would always hold his audience's attention.

Shylock as a Comic Villain

But before we can understand how Portia functions in the courtroom, we have to understand Shylock. Because Portia's main role is almost that of a straight man to Shylock. (Once she has given the Mercy Speech, she has almost no good lines in the whole scene, although I claim that her nonverbal contribution is crucial.)

There are many legitimate ways of playing the courtroom scene, pretty much corresponding to the different ways of portraying Shylock.

The text of the play gives the actor considerable leeway in deciding how to play Shylock. However in choosing to play Shylock either as merely an evil villain or an innocent victim, one has to ignore certain pieces of the text, for the text contains certain lines that unmistakably show that him as a villain, and others which clearly show that he was a victim of unjustified discrimination.

But it seems to me (although I haven't seen very many performances of the play) that one is pretty much forced to either play the courtroom scene as comic or to downplay the comedy in the rest of the play, especially the business of the rings. And I can't believe that the latter would have been Shakespeare's choice.

And to see the courtroom scene as comic, we first have to be able to see Shylock as a comic villain --- as he was played throughout the seventeen and eighteenth centuries, until Edmund Kean's performance in 1814. Not comic in the sense of a comedian who makes us laugh, but rather a ridiculous figure who is that butt of our laughter.

And I believe that if we look at the language of the text rather than starting from our own attitudes about Jews and arguing about the story line or the various circumstances, we will see that Shylock was written to be comic.

I am indebted especially to John Palmer's book Comic Characters of Shakespeare (1946). In particular, Palmer draws attention to the following passage from Act 3 Scene 3 (prior to the courtroom scene):

Antonio is in the street, escorted by his jailer.

Antonio. Hear me yet, good Shylock.

Shylock. I'll have my bond! Speak not against my bond!
I have sworn an oath that I will have my bond.
Thou call'dst me dog before thou have a cause,
But since I am a dog, beware my fangs.
The Duke shall grant me justice. I do wonder,
Thou wicked jailer, that you foolishly
Come abroad with him at his request.

Antonio. I pray thee, hear me speak.

Shylock. I'll have my bond. I will not hear thee speak.
I'll have my bond, and therefore speak no more.
I'll not be made a soft and dull-eyed fool,
To shake the head, relent, and sigh, and yield
To Christian intercessors. Follow not.
I'll have no speaking. I'll have my bond.   [Exits.]

I've followed John Palmer's example in emphasizing the constant repetitions of the word bond. There's an almost childish petulance here in Shylock's anger which puts us in the realm of sitcoms. (And yet Shakespeare doesn't make things completely one-sided. He still reminds us that Shylock's grievances are indeed real.)

Because my focus here is on Portia, I don't want to devote too much space to discussing Shylock. But I believe that if one looks primarily at Shylock's language rather than arguing about situations, everything about Shylock is most naturally seen as comic as well as sinister, including the fact that his daughter runs away from him.

Certainly this is only one choice for the performers, but it is the choice sets the stage for the interpretation of the courtroom scene that makes the most sense to me.

I Love Lucy.

Since our impression of Portia as someone intelligent and courageous seems to be completely determined by the courtroom scene, I want to look at how she actually functions in this scene and what is required of her.

Put aside for a moment the Quality-of-Mercy speech, which is a whole topic to itself, and look at the rest of the scene.

Imagine seeing this play for the first time. And imagine that it has been billed not as a serious thought-provoking study of anti-Semitism, but as an entertainment.

Now we're in Act 4, Antonio standing there about to lose his life, with his chest bared and Shylock with his knife sharpened, ready to cut. (Actually, I'm taking things out of sequence a little.)

This is insanity. As yet, it doesn't seem funny, and yet it is the stuff of farce. It could be out of Molière.

Now the judge (i.e. the Duke of Venice) announces that a learned jurist has arrived to give his advice on this dispute. And the jurist walks in, and the audience quickly sees that it is in fact Bassanio's girlfriend (actually his new bride) in disguise. A apparently frivolous woman who, when we saw her earlier, seemed if anything to be a bit of a birdbrain.

We are now in I-Love-Lucy land. Lucy and Ethel have arrived in drag to try and convince the court to spare Antonio's life. Lucy (Portia) and Ethel (Nerissa) swagger around, camping it up in the process of pretending to be this learned jurist and his clerk. They seem to be two clowns who can only make the situation worse. But then, to the surprise and delight of the studio audience, Lucy (i.e. Portia) stands straight and gives the Mercy Speech, impressing the audience and everyone else. Except Shylock.

The Mercy Speech accomplishes nothing. Shylock says, "I crave the law. I ask for the penalty and the forfeiture of the bond."

And the duel continues. And Portia fails. And fails over and over again. She's smart, and she makes all the right moves, but she can't outsmart Shylock. Because in the first place she doesn't have any real ammunition, but I think that the audience should also be constantly suspecting that she can't win because she's a woman and because she doesn't really belong in that courtroom. And beyond this, I think there are constantly moments when her disguise slips a little bit and she's in danger that some of the other characters will realize that she's not who she claims to be.

For the scene to work now, at least as I see it, we have to see Shylock as not only an evil villain, but also as a comic villain. I myself see a touch of Danny DeVito at his most sinister in Shylock, especially in the courtroom scene, although Shylock does not have DeVito's signature tendency to make wisecracks. (I also find it interesting to wonder how Peter Sellers would have played Shylock.)

Consider in particular the following passage. Obviously Danny DeVito is not a Shakespearean actor and could not speak these lines as written, and yet one can almost hear his voice in them. (At the cost of destroying the meter, I have altered a few of the lines slightly to make them a little closer to modern English.) I continue to invite the reader to see this scene as an I-Love-Lucy episode. Portia can overplay the mock solemnity of the young but extremely learned jurist she is masquerading as. But she can't clown it up. The scene has to be comic and yet at the same time very serious.

Portia begins by establishing her credibility as an impartial judge. After making a few comments recommending that Shylock be merciful, she looks at the bond signed by Antonio and pretends that up to now she has been completely uninformed about the case.

Portia. Why this bond is forfeit;
And lawfully by this the Jew may claim
A pound of flesh, to be by him cut off
Nearest the merchant's heart. Be merciful.
Take thrice the money. Let me tear up the bond.

Shylock. When it has been paid, according to the tenure.
It doth appear you are a worthy judge;
You know the law, your exposition
Hath been most sound. I charge you by the law,
Whereof you are a well deserving pillar,
Proceed to judgement. By my soul, I swear
There is no power in the tongue of man
To sway me. I stand here on my bond.

Antonio. Most heartily I do beseech the court
To give the judgement.

Portia. Why then, thus it is;
You must prepare your bosom for his knife.

Shylock. Oh noble judge! Oh excellent young man!

Portia. For the intent and purpose of the law
Hath full relation to the penalty,
Which here appeareth due upon the bond.

Shylock. 'Tis very true. Oh wise and upright judge!
How much older thou art than thy looks!

Portia. Therefore lay bare your bosom.

Shylock. Ay, his breast.
So says the bond, doth it not, noble judge?
"Nearest his heart;" those are the very words.

Portia. It is so. Are there scales here to weigh the flesh?

Shylock. I have them ready.

Portia. Have you some surgeon ready, Shylock,
To stop his wounds, lest he bleed to death?

Shylock. Is it so nominated in the bond?

Portia. It is not so expressed, but what of that?
'Twere good you should do at least that, out of charity.

Shylock. I cannot find it here; 'tis not in the bond.

Somehow it is exactly in the fake naivete of the last few lines that I can most clearly hear Danny DeVito's voice and see his facial expression. ("Gee, your honor, I just can't seem to find anywhere in this paper Antonio signed where it mentions having a doctor on hand.")

At this point, just in case we were taking this scene too seriously, Shakespeare throws in a bit of comedy. Antonio makes a death speech and Bassanio and Gratiano, upset at Antonio's coming demise, both state that they would gladly sacrifice their beloved wives if doing so could save Antonio's life, not realizing, of course, that their wives are standing right there in disguise hearing their words.

And Portia and Nerissa comment on this sarcastically. Although it's not marked as such, I would have these two comments spoken as asides, so that the women can speak in their own voice and in the same tone of voice they used in Belmont when mocking the unsuccessful suitors. (I'm going to paraphrase slightly.)

Portia. Your wife would give little thanks for that
If she were to hear you make the offer.

Nerissa. It's a good thing you say this behind your wife's back. Otherwise you'd be in big trouble when you get home.

All the males in the courtroom are extremely upset, but Portia and Nerissa are making jokes. This is the final tip-off to the audience that nothing bad is really going to happen (except to Shylock, of course).

If the courtroom scene is played as deadly serious, almost realistically, as is so often done, then this comic interchange, along with the business of the rings at the end, is very hard to integrate with the rest of the scene.

I think that anyone who has much experience with listening to stories knows that Shylock is going to lose as soon as he says the line

Shylock. Oh noble judge! Oh excellent young man!

One reason why we know he is going to lose is that he is smug. And the logic of storytelling is that anytime a villain is overly smug, he will wind up being defeated.

But furthermore, this line shows that Portia has completely outfoxed Shylock, since he has now accepted Portia's authority as an impartial expert. This comment by Shylock is Portia's first moment of triumph in the courtroom scene, and I think the actress playing Portia should show this.

From a logical point of view, the person in the courtroom whose judgement is decisive is the Duke. But for effective drama, the important person to convince is Shylock himself. For the drama to work, Shylock must be convinced that the court has given him a fair hearing and that the law is against him. (And oddly enough, the audience also mostly convinced of this, even though we are quite aware that the decision against Shylock was made by a judge, i.e. Portia, who is completely partisan.)

As I see it, from this point on the courtroom scene becomes more overtly comic. I still see a hint of I-Love-Lucy.

Lucy (Portia) does a Columbo. There is just one last point.

Portia. Tarry a little; there is something else.

This is a classic sitcom line. "Just a minute, please, before you start cutting. There's one more thing I'd like to mention."

And with this one last point, she, this apparently frivolous woman in drag, manages to give an argument that proves her superior to all the males.

To me, the comedy of Shylock's language in the courtroom scene (and the rest of the play) is clear. But what is required of Portia in order to support this comedy?

Putting aside the Mercy Speech, the demands made on Portia in the courtroom scene are not very great. She must be able to maintain her masquerade as a male and, most important, she must maintain an air of absolute authority. If the other characters ever start to suspect that she doesn't know what she is talking about, or suspect that what she is saying is merely an opinion, then the whole scene falls apart.

On the other hand, her masquerade shouldn't be completely flawless. If there are no little slip ups at all, then the scene is not as interesting for the audience.

It seems to me that there is no difficulty in believing that the Portia who who makes fun of her suitors in Act 1 will be able to spoof the men in the courtroom, and that she will derive an almost malicious enjoyment from pulling the wool over the eyes of all these males. If one excludes the Mercy Speech, then one can, as Harold Bloom says, imagine Portia being played as something out of Cole Porter.

The Ring Trick.

And the thing that made me suddenly realize that the courtroom scene is like something out of I Love Lucy, and realize how the whole play works as a comedy was the ring trick. It is extremely funny if played well although like a lot of comedy it lies rather flat on the written page. And it comes right at the end of the courtroom scene, right after Portia has finished her masterful job of saving Antonio's life.

It was trying to figure out how Shakespeare could jump from the apparently sublime to the absolutely ridiculous that made me suddenly see that the whole courtroom scene had to be comedy. Either that, or, as it usually done, one downplays the comedy of the ring trick. And I cannot believe that Shakespeare, whose business was entertaining people, would write a comic interaction and not expect it to be played for all it was worth.

Furthermore, here, at the end of the courtroom scene, the androgynous eroticism of a boy pretending to be a girl pretending to be a boy can come into this play.

First note Portia's comments when she first explains her plans to Nerissa in Act 3 Scene 4, before the courtroom scene.

Portia: I'll hold thee any wager,
When we are both accoutered like young men,
I'll prove the prettier fellow of the two,
And wear my dagger with the braver grace,
And speak between the change of man and boy
With a reed voice, and mincing steps
Into a manly stride, and speak of frays
Like a fine bragging youth, and tell quaint lies,
How honorable ladies sought my love
Which I denying, they fell sick and died ---
I could not do withal.

Now, at the end of the courtroom scene, Bassanio, I think, finds himself strangely attracted to this young doctor of laws who has just saved his friend's life. And then this young legal expert asks him for his ring in a way that seems oddly seductive.

This is certainly not in the text. And yet I think that this way of playing the interchange is definitely consistent with the text. Here's the passage.

Bassanio to the young jurist. Dear sir, of force I must attempt you further.
Take some remembrance of us as a tribute,
Not as fee. Grant me two things, I pray you ---
Not to deny me and to pardon me.

Certainly Bassanio has every reason to be grateful to the young legal doctor. But is there something more to his rather strong impulse to give the expert a gift? I think it could be played this way.

Now Portia's response:

Legal Doctor [i.e. Portia]. You press me far, and therefore I'll yield.
Give me your gloves, I'll wear them for your sake.
And for your love, I'll take this ring from you.
Do not draw back your hand; I'll take no more
And you in love shall not deny me this.

My edition of the play has a footnote that says that "you in love" should be translated as "in your good will to me." And undoubtedly this is correct. And yet surely the use of the word love can also have a more suggestive overtone. And the young legal expert's plan to wear Antonio's gloves seems even more suggestive.

And Portia's line "Do not draw back your hand," (which I have italicized) certainly invites a coquettish playing.

The interchange continues.

Bassanio. This ring, good sir, alas it is a trifle!
I will not shame myself to give you this.

Legal Doctor. I will have nothing else but only this
And now I think I have a mind to it.

Certainly at this point there's something very flirtatious going on. The Legal Doctor's tone has markedly changed from what it was in the courtroom.

Bassanio. There's more depends on this than on the value.
The dearest ring in Venice will I give you,
And search it out by proclamation.
But for this, I pray you pardon me.

Portia. I see sir, you are liberal in offers.
You teach me first how to beg, and now methinks
You teach me how a beggar should be answered.

Bassanio. Sir, that ring was given me by my wife,
And when she put in on she made me vow
That I should neither sell it nor lose it.

Portia. That 'scuse serves many men to save their gifts.
If your wife be not a madwoman,
And know how well I have deserved this ring,
She would not hold out enemy forever
For giving it to me. Well, peace be with you!   [Exits]

The tone here is classic male-female flirtation. And at the same time, in her attempt to shame Bassanio, in the two speeches starting with, "I see, sir, that you are liberal in offers," Portia can once again cloak herself in all the impressive authority she used in the courtroom.

Of course we, and the audience, are very aware that this is Portia teasing her husband. But how is the actor playing Bassanio supposed to show him taking this? With a lot of confusion, certainly. But isn't there something more to his feeling toward this doctor of laws than mere gratitude? In fact, the little bit of flirtation here between the supposed legal doctor and Bassanio is actually more erotic than any interchange in the play between Bassanio and the undisguised Portia.

Well, it's a choice for the actor, of course.

But this homoerotic teasing seems to be one aspect of Shakespeare's game of women impersonating men.

The Mercy Speech

As Sinead Cusak points out, the biggest stumbling block to seeing the Portia in the Duke's chambers as the same as the Portia at the beginning of the play is the "quality of mercy" speech. It seems extremely difficult to imagine the woman who delivers this speech being the same one who was so witty and so caustic in commenting on her suitors.

Portia. The quality of mercy is not strained;
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath. It is twice blest;
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes.
'Tis mighty in the mightiest;
It becomes the thronèd monarch better than his crown.
His scepter shows the force of temporal power,
The attribute to awe and majesty,
Wherein sit the dread and fear of kings;
But mercy is above this scepter'd sway;
It is enthronèd in the hearts of kings,
It is an attribute of God himself,
And earthy power doth then show likest God's
When mercy seasons justice. Therefore, Jew,
Though justice be thy plea, consider this:
That in the course of justice, none of us
should see salvation. We do pray for mercy,
And that same prayer doth teach us all to render
The deeds of mercy. I have spoke thus much
To mitigate the justice of thy plea;
Which if thou follow, the strict court of Venice
Must give sentence 'gainst the merchant there.

This speech is, at least for audiences of the past couple of centuries, the high point of the play. It is one of the great Shakespearean arias, as it were.

Portia is commonly considered one of Shakespeare's greatest women, a noble and heroic character. And the reason for this certainly has nothing to do with her scenes in Belmont in Act 1 and Act 5. Our overall impression of Portia is primarily determined by the courtroom scene in Act 4 --- a scene in which she is impersonating someone else! And above all, it is determined, for most people, by the Mercy Speech.

In fact, aside from the Mercy Speech, Portia doesn't have a single memorable line in the whole play.

My own opinion is that Shakespeare wasn't even thinking about Portia when he wrote this speech. He knew that he needed a speech praising mercy, and these are the words he came up with. He gave it to Portia, because she was the character who needed it.

I referred to Portia's speech as an aria. Actually, I have to admit to not being much of an opera fan, so I find it more useful to compare Shakespeare's set speeches to the songs in a musical comedy. We know that in normal life, people don't suddenly start singing about what is happening. But we accept the convention that this happens in musical comedies. The song, at least ideally, needs to be in character for the personality of the character singing it. And yet, even if the world were such that people did suddenly break into song, the song, a carefully crafted work by the composer and lyricist, is not usually something which this particular character would be capable of creating.

I think that the actress playing Portia, when she delivers the Mercy Speech, has to be not embarrassed about the fact that she's grandstanding; she's meant to. She's standing in a courtroom and she's giving a carefully thought-out speech, playing to the audience as well as to the court, using every bit of energy she can muster to create an impression of charisma and stature that is a considerable achievement for the boy Portia is impersonating, much less for Portia herself. I'm sure that Shakespeare's own actresses (i.e. boy actors) played this for all it was worth.

Obviously a speech like this would be something that Portia had thought about quite a bit in advance. Logically it makes sense that such a well constructed speech would be something that she had prepared ahead of time and memorized. But I think that dramatically it's always more effective if a speech is delivered as if the speaker were thinking the thoughts as she speaks them. So that at the first moment, the only thought in Portia's mind is, "The quality of mercy is not strained." But as soon as she says this, the simile occurs to her: "It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven on the place beneath." And then it seems natural to add, "It is twice blest; it blesseth him that gives and him that takes." And at that point she starts to hit her stride, and the words start coming faster. (Just as in a musical comedy, there are often two lines that are spoken before the character really begins to sing.)

In his article "The Problem of Shylock" in The Merchant of Venice: Critical Essays, edited by Thomas Wheeler, Bill Overton writes,

[The Mercy Speech] is very much a set piece in its careful rhetorical construction, developing through nice antitheses to an impressively built climax. In context, it is a public, forensic performance rather than a private appeal. Portia is laying down the moral law, and her tone is less that of compassionate persuasion than of the sermon or lecture.

As many people have pointed out, neither in the courtroom scene nor in her treatment of her suitors does Portia seem like an especially merciful person. But I do think that she's intelligent enough so that, given the task of coming up in a few days with something persuasive to say on the subject of mercy, she could have come up with these thoughts. Like most speechwriters, her preaching is far better than her practice. The truth is that the Mercy Speech is not very profound, it's merely well expressed. And in truth, only the first four lines are all that great. The Mercy Speech doesn't show Portia as being deep (much less complex and shadowed or having a moral fibre out of Henry James, as Bloom suggests), but it does, I believe, show her as more intelligent and competent than we had expected.

For those who disparage Portia based on what we see of her in the first three acts at Belmont, and find it inconsistent that she should give the Mercy Speech, I would suggest still another experiment. I would invite the reader to wonder who else in the play Shakespeare could have given the Mercy Speech to. I think it would have been credible if spoken by the Duke, but then we know nothing about the Duke in any case, so almost anything is believable of him.

But I can't believe this speech being believable in the mouth of Antonio or Bassanio or Gratiano or in fact anyone else in the play.

And on the other hand, suppose we were to take the scenes in reverse order, so that we heard Portia give the Mercy Speech before we met her in Belmont. Would her sarcastic comments about her suitors seem unbelievable after we'd heard the in the courtroom? I don't think so, especially after the business with the rings.

But on second thought, this is still not very satisfactory. It would be much better if the Mercy Speech were delivered out of deep-rooted convicion, rather than merely being a well prepared defense lawyer's address to the court. (It would also be better if it were a better speech.) I think that Portia can in fact do this without being glaringly inconsistent with what we see of her in the rest of the play. But it's a bit like the old maxim in creative writing classes: Show, don't tell. Where else in the play do we actually see Portia behaving like someone with a deep-rooted commitment to mercy?

The fact is that we do accept the play. Critics may have their doubts, but when Portia stands in the courtroom and says, "The quality of mercy is not strained," she is credible to the audience.

In my opinion, the reason why we admire Portia is not because we are impressed the actual words of the Mercy Speech (or anything else she says), but that fact that she, who we have previously seen as pampered and frivolous, when confronted with evil, stands tall and speaks her truth. Antonio and all his friends are willing to just stand by and allow an outrage to happen, but Portia is the one person who has the guts to actually take action against it.

But I think we try to take the play much too seriously. We see it as a play about a very serious issue, but for Shakespeare and his audience, the issue was a non-issue. As Harold Bloom says, the play is out of Cole Porter. Or I Love Lucy. Or as regards Portia and her Belmont friends, maybe Dynasty or Dallas or even Beverly Hills 90201 -- one of those nighttime soap operas.