Portia’s Power: Exchange, Law, and Love in The Merchant of Venice

Claude Levi-Strauss: “The total relationship of exchange which constitutes marriage is not established
between a man and a woman…but between two groups of men, and the woman figures only as one of
the objects in the exchange, not as one of the partners…”

I. Introduction – Portia as the central figure of the play, logically revolves

around her existence and involvement (which must be proactive,
independent, clandestine, as seen in Act IV, V to meet the generic
formulae)
TS –The Merchant of Venice is often regarded as Shakespeare’s greatest
“problem play” because of several irreconcilable aspects. One such
problem is posed by determining Portia’s character, textual role, and
development into the chief player in the Venetian tragicomedy.
A. Structurally, the play is organized around her and thematically would
cease to hold up without her involvement (caskets, Belmont scenes,
Venetian trial, all of Act V)
B. Even within the confines of the patriarchal hierarchy—the play’s
social and political systems—she exudes virtue, resourcefulness,
rhetoric, and reasoning, which allow her to temporarily defy gender
stereotypes (trial scene) and to exercise some power before the
proper order is restored.
C. Thesis: Through her lamentations, love speeches, and legal
arguments, Portia exhibits a love of rhetoric and wholehearted belief
in the sanctity of contractual obligation. She both upholds her own
objectification as a “prize to be won” and subverts the sociopolitical
economy that transacts and secures her matrimonial bond.

II. The Will – Trial for Portia’s Hand, she is a pawn in her own marriage plot,
yet she accepts the terms of her father’s will, her marriage contract.
A. TS—Before Bassanio plays Cupid and wins the prized sum of
Belmont, Portia portrays herself as a dichotomous melancholic though
passionate figure of protestation and acquiescence
B. Portia is introduced as a melancholy figure who has at least mastered
the legal rhetoric circumscribing her maidenhead and marriage
contract. Her resistance and resignation to her father’s “lottr’y”

C. Her speeches throughout II.i, II.vii, II.ix and the language of the will
itself and what the caskets reveal about her father’s break with the
mercantile love of money, wealth, and materialism
D. Look at how she has been shaped by, repulsed by, but forced to accept
the circumstances of the paternal order; her future husband, and her
financial and personal (mis)fortune is predetermined by a contract
and staged trial
E. “Freed from the contract with her father, Portia freely “confirms”,
“signs over,” all that she freely reigned over…sand then she writes a
 new contract, which not even her father foresaw or implied,” and this
new contract has risks and conditions, too (paraphrased, ideas are
simple to glean from text (III.ii.149-174 - Portia’s speech to Bassanio
bestowing herself, her love, the sum of all herself and her possessions
to her new lord)***turn at the end of the speech)

E. “Portia objectifies herself and thereby suppresses her own agency in bestowing
herself on Bassanio…the ring is a visual sign of her vow of love and submission to
Bassanio…a representation of Portia’s acceptance of Elizabethan marriage…
characterized by woman’s subjection, their loss of legal rights, and their status as goods
or chattel. It signifies her place in a rigidly defined hierarchy of male power and
privilege; and her declaration of love at first seems to exemplify her acquiescence to
woman’s place in such a system” (Newman 25). – Background info on the Elizabethan
custom of marriage

III. TS – Portia must cross-dress, literally cross over from Belmont to Venice,
and navigate the language of the law in order to destroy the commercial
contract between Shylock and Antonio in order to secure her own
matrimonial bond.
A. “Portia…would not give up or subvert law, authority, or power. Just as she had
misgivings as to the outcome of her father’s will but decided to fulfill her obligation,
so too, she feels that Bassanio must fulfill his contracts (both the financial debt and
the bond of love), no matter what the outcome. It is because Portia has such a deep
feeling for the obligation of the It is consistent with Portia’s attitude toward the
“sanctity of contract” (Benston, 373)
B. Her legal education through Bellario
C. Making Bassanio pledge allegiance and the bond of the ring she gives
him (drawing up her own contract)
D. III.ii.149-174
E. The turn of the trial occurs with the word “blood” which Portia uses to
expose Shylock’s violation of the contract literally as well as an
attempt “to use the law for illegal purposes” of contracting the murder
of a Venetian citizen
F. If it be proved against an alien, That by direct or indirect attempts/He seek the life
of any citizen/The party ‘gainst the which he doth contrive/Shall seize one half his
goods; the other half/Comes to the privy coffer of the state/And the offender’s life
lies in the mercy/Of the Duke only, ‘gainst all other voice (IV.i.349-56)
G. “Portia’s role, then, has been to use the law to save the law…Far more significant
than the scholarly knowledge she carries as Balthazar…is what she uses her
knowledge to achieve. On the one hand, she has prevented the Venetians from
destroying the sanctity of contract; on the other, she has prevented Shylock from
perverting the law to disguise illegal actions” (Benston 379).

IV. Portia the Prosecutor, Betters the Duke, Shylock, and all the men of Venice
A. TS – During the entirety of Act IV’s trial scene, Portia exhibits her greatest
power as a woman who thinks independently, interprets and arbitrates the
law, and personifies a Biblical figure of mercy—“a Daniel”—with whom the
play’s merciless antagonist identifies her as.
 B. “Daniel” Portia’s transgression is subversive, challenging gender
stereotypes, but ultimately upholding Venetian law and order in its defeat of
the play’s villain.
C. She finds the crucial loophole and uses Shylock’s meticulousness and myopia
against him.
D. “Portia evokes the ideal of a proper Renaissance lady and then transgresses it; she becomes
an unruly woman…She engages in productive labor reserved for men, in linguistic labor, in a
profession the successful practice of which depends on a knowledge of history and
precedent, on logic and reasoning, and on rhetoric, all areas of education traditionally denied
to woman” (Newman 29, 30)
E. IV.i much of her exchange with Shylock,
F. “Portia now learns from Shylock himself the art of winning life from the
deadly letter [of the law] (259) The cost of redeeming the public bond has
been the forfeiture of the private one, the pledge of love; [Bassanio] now
stands before Portia as Antonio stood before Shylock (261) Sigurd
Burckhardt “The Merchant of Venice: The Gentle Bond
G. ***Which not the Duke himself nor any other man in the play can do…
reconcile Shylock’s bond with Antonio’s life, upholding the law and the bond
while not setting a precedent that allows Judiasm/usury/otherness (incl.
females or other disorder within social hierarchy) to undermine and triumph
over Christianity/non-usury/Venetianness/upholding patriarchical
structures/hierarchies

V. Ring Trick and Play’s Resolution in Act V

A. TS – In a way, Portia revises the contract outlined in her father’s casket
contest when she binds Bassanio to another hazardous pledge of his love by
giving him the ring. (which thematically and figuratively binds the plots of
contracts, trials, and love).
B. “Objects, like words, change their meaning in different contexts; as things pass from hand
to hand, they accumulate meanings from the process of exchange itself…Portia’s ring
becomes a sign of hierarchy subverted…” …Portia becomes an ‘unruly woman’…one who
steps outside her role and function as subservient…dresses like a man,…embarks upon
behavior ill-suited to her ‘weaker’ intellect…argues the law…insures the Venetian republic
by reconciling the principle of equity with the rigor of the law” (Newman, 27-28).

VI. Conclusion TS – As the play cannot end with Portia, in the guise of man,
trying a Jew, who both is and is not her foe, for his life in the Venetian court, the
final act must be considered within the context of Elizabethan comedy.
A. Order of Shakespearean comedy, construct of the genre of the larger genre
of the City Comedy, always ends in marriage of individuals who are in some
manner unfit for one another (socioeconomically/classwise-Portia and
Bassanio; religiously; religiously/ethnically-Jessica and Lorenzo; otherwise-
Nerissa and Gratiano)
B. As the trial scene is clearly the play’s climax though not its denouement
(scene of resolution), what is the function of Act V?
C. It has all to do with uniting the casket/contract/bond/trial/love plots,
which elevates Portia’s role above that of all the other characters
 D. She is (for the reader) the one reliable guarantor of the comedic genre
holding up, even as her actions confound and uphold the logic of Venetian
political, social and economic “law.”
E. Question: Does Portia embody the “prize to be won” or is she an arbiter
of both the law and her own love/life?

END NOTES, QUOTES, IDEAS:

Commercial language of love displays “not only the economic determinants of
marriage in Elizabethan society, but its economic climate” 23

“marriage, among the elite at least, was primarily a commercial transaction

determined by questions of dowries, familial alliances, land ownership, and
inheritance…Daughters were pawns in the political and social maneuvers of their
families” (Newman 23))

Portia’s actions in the final acts represent her manipulation of/small victory in
subverting the patriarchical order, exhibiting a woman’s resourcefulness and
rhetoric and wherewithal to learn the law, perform prosecutorial (legal doctor)
duties publicly and convincingly…even if only to save her “lord, king, governor” and
secure the arrangement of her marriage.

“Portia gives more than Bassanio can reciprocate…to Venice itself in her actions in
the trial which allow the city to preserve both its law and its precious Christian
citizen (also its precedent, doesn’t have to make a new one)…In giving more than
can be reciprocated, Portia short-circuits the system of exchange and the male
bonds it creates, winning her husband” (Newman, 26) by her own transgressive
outmaneuvering of the limits imposed upon her gender and elite status.
(Paragraph III)

“O these naughty times Put bars between the owners and their rights!” (II.ii.18-19)

“So may the outward shows be least themselves, The world is still deceiv’d with
ornament, In law, what plea so tainted and corrupt, But being season’d with a
gracious voice, Obscures the show of evil?” (II.ii.73-77).

She finds the crucial loophole, uses Shylock’s own terms against him (since he
wrote the contract)

Social relations of a partriarchical society grant men rights that women are denied
Men can choose their spouse, win their wives…women are chosen and won,
exchanged and bartered along with their dowry inheritance left only if they are the
sole surviving child of their father

Portia doubles (man/woman, Venice/Belmont, prize to be won/lord to be pledged

allegiance to by Bassanio “the indefinable being who speaks most truly when she
sounds most faithless, who frees us through an absolute literalness, who learns the
grim prose of law in order to restore it to its true function” (Benston, 262)