The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 16.1692 Tuesday, 4 October 2005
From: Arnie Perlstein <
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Date: Tuesday, 4 Oct 2005 10:22:13 -0400
Subject: TMOV: Portia's Mysterious Letter
I've recently reread The Merchant of Venice fairly closely, and, fresh
from my speculations about the veracity of Hamlet's report of his
interlude with the pirates, I was thunderstruck by Portia's declaration
in the climactic scene of TMOV:
"Antonio, you are welcome;
And I have better news in store for you
Than you expect: unseal this letter soon;
There you shall find three of your argosies
Are richly come to harbour suddenly:
You shall not know by what strange accident
I chanced on this letter."
At first I toyed with the conceit that Portia had, for whatever secret
purpose, acted in Prospero-like fashion and had caused Antonio's cargo
ships to be waylaid and placed in cold storage until they could be
produced at the most propitious moment. Portia after all eventually
shows herself to be quite the master dramaturge in the climactic portion
of the play. However, I see no sign that she has any tentacles extended
out into the commercial world of Venice. And, although we do learn that
she has seen Bassanio and liked what she saw, that does not seem, to me,
to be sufficient motivation for her to seek to interfere in the lives of
Antonio and Bassanio by means of a complex multi-stage scheme. Then I
was persuaded by the far simpler and elegant argument of Ronald A. Sharp
in "Gift Exchange and the Economies of Spirit in TMOV", Modern
Philology, Vol. 83 @3, Feb. '86, to wit: "It [i.e., the arrival of
Antonio's three argosies] is a strange accident indeed-too strange,
finally, to be credible, even if we grant that happy reversals are
commonplace in comedy. How, after all, did Portia know the contents of
the letter if it was sealed? One can understand why Portia might not
want to explain the accident then and there, but one has to wonder why
she makes a point of telling Antonio that he 'shall not know' the
explanation. We need not literalize the point, but at least in terms of
its figurative effect, it seems clear that Portia is giving a gift to
Antonio. For it is she who seems to be providing for him here. Just as
she earlier disguised herself on his behalf, she now disguises her gift
for him as a piece of good fortune. To preserve her husband's friendship
with Antonio requires a very delicate handling of her own relationship
with Antonio. By acting tactfully in these circumstances Portia has
managed to give Antonio a double gift: the actual fortune and the sense
that it is rightly his. 'Sweet lady,' Antonio tells her, 'you have given
me life and living.' (5.1.286)"
That sounded quite reasonable to me, nothing supernatural, and fitting
nicely with Portia's reconciliatory vision. But that then led me to
consider the curiously disastrously timed (from Antonio's pov)
disappearances of Antonio's cargo ships. Even if Portia was not
involved, perhaps those disappearances arose at the behest of another
key character in the play? Follow the money, as they say, and in this
case, consider the following curious comment:
"But ships are but boards, sailors but men; there be land-rats and
water-rats, land-thieves and water-thieves,--I mean pirates,--and then
there is the peril of waters, winds, and rocks."
I think that Shylock's "I mean" means more than it initially seems to
mean. Shylock, it is clear, has had it in for Antonio from Day One (for
good reason, of course, but that is beside my point), and it would make
a lot of sense for a canny, very rich moneylender like Shylock, someone
who has his tentacles into a lot of places in Venice and seagoing
commerce in general, to have a "working relationship" with pirates.
After all, he takes security from Venetian merchants whose lifeblood is
in seagoing commerce, and would it not be a sweet arrangement for him to
tip the pirates to the itinerary of outgoing vessels, so that they can
better do their piracy, and in return, he gets to foreclose on a lot of
valuable collateral in Venice? So I see Shylock as having authorized the
"hit" on Antonio's vessels, but this time not to get richer, but to get
revenge. So he calls in some pirate favors. And that is his tragic
overreach, because, although he correctly perceives that Bassanio and
Antonio are no match for his wiles, he does not reckon on Portia's
entering the game in the fourth quarter and submarining his best laid plans.
And finally, that, in turn, casts Salarino's (and Salanio's) earlier
comments to Antonio, which, in hindsight, seem oddly prescient, in
another light as well:
"My wind cooling my broth
Would blow me to an ague, when I thought
What harm a wind too great at sea might do."
It sure sounds like Salarino and Salanio knew a whole lot more than they
were letting on, and were trying to discreetly give Antonio a head's-up
that things were not as safe as they seem. They feared Shylock, and so
could speak openly, but in their own way, they try to help Antonio. But
he was in a weird cocky malaise, and so was easy prey for Shylock's
scheming.
But when Antonio failed to heed their veiled warnings, and they saw that
(like Claudio in MFM) Antonio was about to go down for the count, they
did what any self respecting Deep Throats would do-they sent an
emergency letter to someone with the wits and wiles to save the day. And
that is why and how Portia came to teach them both (and Bassanio, to
boot) some serious life lessons!
Arnie Perlstein
Weston, Florida
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