All's Well That Ends Well?

 The ending of Merchant satisfies the main requirement for a comedy: multiple marriages that ensure the continuation of the community.  Furthermore, Antonio, the titular merchant, is rescued from death and financial ruin.  Yet, there are hints in the play that the future is not all rosy.  After all, Bassanio and Gratiano fail the Ring Test (and have professed that they love Antonio more than their wives), Bassanio has a history of debt that motivated his marriage in the first place, Lorenzo and Jessica flirt by comparing themselves to doomed lovers and Antonio is left as lonely and melancholy at the end of the play as he is at the beginning.  Not to mention that Shylock is forced to convert to Christianity, cutting him off from his friends and co-religious but not welcoming him into the insider community.

While these marriages ensure community, do they ensure happiness?  While many of  the characters at the end of the play are prosperous, are they happy?  Is this a happy ending? Do you consider this play a comedy -- or a comedy in name only?

Who Wears the Pants in Portia's Family?

 When Bassanio correctly chooses the casket with "Fair Portia's counterfeit" enclosed, Portia expresses her consent to marry him when she states (in the third person), "Happiest of all, is that her gentle spirit / Commits itself to yours to be directed / As from her lord, her governor, her king" (3.2.67-69).  These words suggest a traditional marriage arrangement in which the husband is in charge and the woman is submissive.  Yet, one act later, she sneaks off to Venice, dressed in men's garments, to save Bassanio's dear friend Antonio from almost certain death.  She masterfully takes charges of the trial and cleverly sets a legal trap for Shylock. Furthermore, she tests Bassanio's fidelity by demanding her ring in the person of the young clerk Balthasar -- a test he fails.  She even teases him with the prospect of infidelity when he can't produce the ring:

I will become as liberal as you:
I will not deny him anything I have,
No, not my body nor my husband's bed.
Know him I shall, I am well sure of it (5.1.242-5)

Her thinly veiled threat of adultery is hardly part of a conservative notion of  marriage.  So what is going on in this play?  Is her consent to a traditional marriage and submission to Bassanio insincere?  Is she using subterfuge and trickery as women's weapons in a man's world? Does she change her mind?  What is it saying about marriage and male-female relationships? Who is really wearing the pants in this relationship?

Squaring the Circle: The Role of the Trials

The Merchant of Venice presents a world in conflict in which the characters need to navigate between opposing and conflicting values.  They need to attend to their romantic interests as well as their financial and legal obligations, to balance justice and mercy, to juggle their friends and their lovers. Each of the three trials in the play (the trial of the caskets, the trial of the contract of the pound of flesh and the trial of the rings)  is an attempt to resolve these dilemmas.  Each trial confronts a seemingly irresoluble conflict -- only to miraculously solve the problem.  In the world of comedy, we can have our cake and eat it, too.

Choose ONE of the trials.  What are the values at stake?  How is the conflict resolved?  What is this trial telling us the nature of these values?  Are they really conflicting?  Is there a strategy to resolve the problem?  Or is it only in the never, never land of the play that we can ever hope to square the circle?

"The World Is Still Deceived with Ornament": Appearance versus Reality in Merchant

Throughout the Merchant of Venice, characters complain that outward appearance obscures and belies the inner reality of things.  Sometimes as in Antonio's speech about Shylock, the healthy appearance conceals a rotten core (as in an rotten apple).  Sometimes, as in Morocco's speech the diversity of surface appearances (one's skin)  hides the reality of that we all share (one's blood).  Bassanio, in choosing the lead casket rather than the more shiny and attractive ones of gold and silver, states:

Thus ornament is but the guiled shore      
To a most dangerous sea, the beauteous scarf   
Veiling an Indian beauty; in a word, 
The seeming truth which cunning times put on to entrap the wisest (3.2.99.101-03).

What is the play saying about the distinction between appearance and reality -- and how is it related to the plot, characters and/or themes of the play?

"In truth I know it is a sin to be a mocker": Comedy, Mockery and the Outsider

 In Act 1, Scene 2 of  The Merchant of Venice Portia complains about her potential suitors to Nerissa.  Although she admits that "In truth I know it is a sin to be a mocker"(1.2.57), that admission doesn't prevent her mocking the foibles of her suitors to great comic effect. Her suitors are all foreign-born outsiders who fail to conform to the proper etiquette and standards of Belmont (and presumably to Shakespeare's audience as well).  One way Shakespeare's comedy operates seems to be to expose and satirize the outsider (not unlike some television sitcoms like The Big Bang Theory that satirizes geeks, another outside group)

What about the other outsiders in this play such as Morocco, Shylock and perhaps even Portia herself?  Are they too held up to ridicule for refusing to conform to conventional norms?  Are they merely stereotypical figures (the Black African, the Jew, the Single Woman) that serve as the butt of the play's jokes?  Or is there something else going on?  Do these characters have a different role in the play?  Do they rise above being a stereotype?

Amor Vincit Omnia?

 In Act 1, Scene 1 of The Merchant of Venice Bassanio finds himself in trouble: He is in debt up to his ears and he needs to escape his creditors.  His plan is to ask the person whom he owes the most to lend him even more money for a new "get rich quick" scheme.  As he explains to Antonio:

                              But my chief care
     Is to come fairly off from the great debts
     Wherein my time, something too prodigal,
     Hath left me gaged.  To you, Antonio,
     I owe the most in money and in love,
     And from your love I have a warranty
     To unburden all my plots and purposes
     How to get clear of all the debts I owe. . .
     I owe you much, and, like a willful youth,
     That which I owe is lost.  But if you please
     To shoot another arrow the self way
     Which you did shoot the first, I do not doubt,
     As I will watch the aim, or to find both
     Or bring your latter hazard back again,
     And thankfully rest debtor for the first. (1.1.134-41;153-9)

Notice how Bassanio characters his relationship to Antonio.  They have a bond of "money" and "love" and their interaction is both affectionate and financial.  This interconnection of money and love further emerges when Bassanio revels his scheme to erase his debts: to marry Portia and her fortune.

Is Bassanio "in love" with Portia or is he just "using" her to pay his debts?  Is he really a friend of Antonio or just his "gravy train"?  Or is it more complicated?  What is this play saying about the values of money and love?  Are the two opposing values?  Is one more important than the other?  Does, as the saying goes, "love conquer all"?