The Merchant of Venice

Summary

The Merchant of Venice joins two stories, a bond for a pound of flesh and a lottery of caskets, and moves between the commercial city of Venice and Belmont, the country estate of the heiress Portia. Antonio, a wealthy merchant, opens the play sad without knowing why. His young friend Bassanio, who has spent his fortune, needs three thousand ducats to court Portia, so Antonio, whose money is all at sea in his ships, borrows it from Shylock, a Jewish moneylender he has often insulted and spat upon on the Rialto. Shylock, nursing that grievance, offers the loan without interest on a merry bond: if it is not repaid in three months, he may cut a pound of Antonio's flesh. Antonio signs. At Belmont, Portia is bound by her dead father's will to marry whichever suitor chooses the right one of three caskets of gold, silver and lead. The Prince of Morocco picks gold and finds a skull with the scroll that all that glisters is not gold; the Prince of Arragon picks silver and finds a fool's portrait. Meanwhile Shylock's servant Launcelet Gobbo leaves him for Bassanio, and his daughter Jessica, disguised as a boy, elopes with the Christian Lorenzo, taking her father's ducats and jewels. Shylock's grief at the loss of his daughter and money, mocked in the streets, hardens into resolve when Antonio's ships are reported wrecked. Bassanio chooses lead, wins Portia, and receives a ring he swears never to part with; his friend Gratiano wins Portia's waiting-woman Nerissa. A letter brings news that Antonio's bond is forfeit. Portia sends Bassanio to Venice with money and follows secretly, disguised as Balthazar, a young doctor of laws sent by her cousin Bellario of Padua, with Nerissa as her clerk. In the trial scene (Act 4) Shylock refuses twice the sum and insists on his bond; Portia pleads for mercy, then grants the bond and stops the knife at the last moment: he may take flesh but no drop of Christian blood. Under a Venetian law against an alien who seeks a citizen's life, Shylock's goods are forfeit and his life lies at the Duke's mercy; he is spared on condition that he become a Christian and leave his estate to Jessica and Lorenzo, and he leaves the court saying he is not well. As a fee the disguised Portia and Nerissa demand the rings their husbands promised never to give away. Act 5 returns to moonlit Belmont for music, a comic quarrel over the rings, and the news that three of Antonio's argosies have safely come home. The play was entered in the Stationers' Register in 1598 and printed in quarto in 1600.

Top Lessons

• Mercy above the letter of the law

  Portia's great speech in Act 4 argues that mercy is an attribute of God and that no one would be saved if justice alone were applied. Yet the same scene shows mercy pleaded for and then offered on hard terms. The play makes students weigh what mercy is, who shows it, and whether the verdict lives up to the speech.

• Appearances and the caskets

  Morocco trusts gold and Arragon trusts his own deserving; Bassanio wins by choosing the plain lead that demands he give and hazard all. The casket test teaches that true love risks itself rather than seeking gain or reward.

• Injury and revenge

  In Act 3 Shylock answers mockery by insisting that a Jew bleeds, laughs and dies like a Christian, then turns that shared nature into a claim to revenge learned from his enemies. Shakespeare gives the injured man eloquence while showing how grievance closes him off to mercy.

• Bonds of friendship and marriage

  The bond of flesh, the marriage vow and the ring all test what a promise is worth. Antonio's love for Bassanio and Portia's claim on her husband meet in the ring plot, which Portia resolves by making Antonio surety a second time, now for Bassanio's faithfulness.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

The play opens with one of the best-known literary descriptions of causeless low mood: Antonio cannot say how he caught his sadness, and his friends propose period explanations (worry for his cargoes, love) which he denies. Gratiano's reply uses humoral physiology, setting a liver heated with wine against a heart cooled by groans and warning that peevishness breeds jaundice, while Portia's opening line about her little body being weary of the world gives a matching female melancholy that Nerissa answers with the proverbial medicine of the mean. In the trial Shylock defends his unreasoned hatred by comparing it to involuntary aversions, men who cannot abide a gaping pig or a cat or who lose control of their urine at the bagpipe, a passage often read as an early account of what would now be called phobic or idiosyncratic reactions, though Shakespeare frames it as affection ruling passion. The bond itself is a grim anatomy lesson: a pound of flesh cut nearest the heart, Portia's demand for a surgeon at Shylock's charge to stop the bleeding, and her ruling that the flesh cannot be taken without blood. Antonio's calling himself a tainted wether fittest for death extends the melancholy into resignation. Any modern diagnostic reading of Antonio is interpretive.

• Act 1, Scene 1

  Antonio's unexplained sadness, his friends' guesses at its cause, and Gratiano's humoral advice to play the fool.

• Act 1, Scene 2

  Portia says her little body is weary of the world; Nerissa answers that surfeit sickens as much as starving.

• Act 4, Scene 1

  Shylock compares his hatred of Antonio to men's involuntary aversions to a gaping pig, a cat or the bagpipe.

• Act 4, Scene 1

  Antonio bares his breast as a tainted wether; Portia asks for a surgeon to stop his wounds and rules on flesh without blood.