Above all the rest,Portia was the most interesting character to me at the end of the play. It is obvious throughout the play that she is intelligent and knows how to work her way around things she does not want to do or obey, but her intelligence seemed sort of masked by the ending. I am trying to decide which explanation to go with for the reason she still took back Bassanio after he gave up the ring.
Of course, at the end of the play we have the whole courtroom scene which Bassanio has traveled to in order to save the life of Antonio. In previous scenes, we have seen how Portia has sort of "rigged" who would be able to choose the right casket, for example, getting one of the suitors drunk so that he would have a poorer judgement when choosing. But when Bassanio chooses the right casket, it is difficult for me to tell whether she is just infatuated or if it was fate. It seems to me that the most logical explanation for the reason he chose the lead casket was because for him, she represented all the riches in the world and he did not want or need anything other than her. Or perhaps he used this mentality to win her love and then decided to give it all up when he needed to pay back the thousands of ducats he owed Antonio.
Why would Portia lend Antonio all that money two seconds after she found out she would be married to him? I believe her strategy was that she was planning on saving Antonio's life in court without having to pay all of that money or just the fact that Bassanio is giving the money out of good cause. The second opinion is the one I have stuck with in relation to the end of the play. When Bassanio and Graziano give up their rings, it would seem that Portia and Nerissa would be upset and feel unworthy, especially after telling Bassanio that was the ONE thing he was not supposed to take off. He didn't have to worry about anything else besides that, and he took it off anyway. I think that because he did it out of good will and didn't trade it for a monkey, is the reason that Portia decided to forgive him. Not just because she is a little overly in love with him, because I would like to think that she is smarter than that.
Ultimately, I think Portia is an interesting and intelligent character. However, I couldn't help but question her motives for forgiveness at the end of the play. I would like to believe that she stuck her neck out for Bassanio because of her head and not her heart.
1 comment:
Both this post and Brooke's nice post on Portia (below) raise some important questions about the contradictory role of women in this play. On one hand, they are subservient to their men, on the other, they stand as the real heroes in the action. We'll want to talk some more about what Shakespeare is doing with these relationships, and how these heterosexual relationships are working in the play.
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