Motifs are recurring structures, contrasts, and literary
devices that can help to develop and inform the text’s major themes.
The Law
The Merchant of Venice depends heavily
upon laws and rules—the laws of the state of Venice and the rules
stipulated in contracts and wills. Laws and rules can be manipulated
for cruel or wanton purposes, but they are also capable of producing
good when executed by the right people. Portia’s virtual imprisonment
by the game of caskets seems, at first, like a questionable rule
at best, but her likening of the game to a lottery system is belied
by the fact that, in the end, it works perfectly. The game keeps
a host of suitors at bay, and of the three who try to choose the
correct casket to win Portia’s hand, only the man of Portia’s desires
succeeds. By the time Bassanio picks the correct chest, the choice
seems like a more efficient indicator of human nature than any person
could ever provide. A similar phenomenon occurs with Venetian law.
Until Portia’s arrival, Shylock is the law’s strictest adherent,
and it seems as if the city’s adherence to contracts will result
in tragedy. However, when Portia arrives and manipulates the law
most skillfully of all, the outcome is the happiest ending of all,
at least to an Elizabethan audience: Antonio is rescued and Shylock
forced to abandon his religion. The fact that the trial is such
a close call does, however, raise the fearful specter of how the
law can be misused. Without the proper guidance, the law can be
wielded to do horrible things.
Cross-dressing
Twice in the play, daring escapes are executed with the
help of cross-dressing. Jessica escapes the tedium of Shylock’s
house by dressing as a page, while Portia and Nerissa rescue Antonio
by posing as officers of the Venetian court. This device was not
only familiar to Renaissance drama, but essential to its performance:
women were banned from the stage and their parts were performed
by prepubescent boys. Shakespeare was a great fan of the potentials
of cross-dressing and used the device often, especially in his comedies. But
Portia reveals that the donning of men’s clothes is more than mere
comedy. She says that she has studied a “thousand raw tricks of
these bragging Jacks,” implying that male authority is a kind of performance
that can be imitated successfully (III.iv.77).
She feels confident that she can outwit any male competitor, declaring,
“I’ll prove the prettier fellow of the two, / And wear my dagger
with the braver grace” (III.iv.64–65).
In short, by assuming the clothes of the opposite sex, Portia enables
herself to assume the power and position denied to her as a woman.
Filial Piety
Like Shakespeare’s other comedies, The Merchant
of Venice seems to endorse the behavior of characters who
treat filial piety lightly, even though the heroine, Portia, sets
the opposite example by obeying her father’s will. Launcelot greets
his blind, long lost father by giving the old man confusing directions
and telling the old man that his beloved son Launcelot is dead. This
moment of impertinence can be excused as essential to the comedy
of the play, but it sets the stage for Jessica’s far more complex
hatred of her father. Jessica can list no specific complaints when
she explains her desire to leave Shylock’s house, and in the one
scene in which she appears with Shylock, he fusses over her in a
way that some might see as tender. Jessica’s desire to leave is
made clearer when the other characters note how separate she has
become from her father, but her behavior after departing seems questionable
at best. Most notably, she trades her father’s ring, given to him
by her dead mother, for a monkey. The frivolity of this exchange,
in which an heirloom is tossed away for the silliest of objects,
makes for quite a disturbing image of the esteem in which The
Merchant of Venice’s children hold their parents, and puts
us, at least temporarily, in Shylock’s corner.
