"Gilding loam and painting lilies: Shakespeare's scruple of gold" by Gabriel
Egan
Unlike his contemporaries John Lyly (Gallathea), Ben Jonson (The
Alchemist), and Thomas Middleton (Anything for a Quiet Life), Shakespeare wrote
no play featuring an alchemist (Berger, Bradford & Sondergard 1998, 16, 110-138). Renaissance alchemy had a practical
end, the transmutation of cheap metals into gold, but it was underpinned by a complex and
subtle model of the universe derived from Aristotle and significantly modified by
Paracelsus in the early sixteenth century (Debus 1977, 63-126). The philosophical purpose of
turning base metal into gold was to prove a theory about the nature of matter, according
to which "all metals are made from the same basic matter and grow within the crust of
the earth like a giant tree or plant" (Abraham 1998, 'gold and silver'). Gold, in this
model, is merely the most refined kind of metal, one that cannot be transmuted further,
and hence unalterable even by fire. But it is also a fiery principle in itself:
In the microcosmic-macrocosmic law of correspondences, gold is the metallic equivalent
of the sun, the image of the sun buried in the earth. The sun in turn is the physical
equivalent of the eternal spirit which lodges in the heart (the 'sun' of the human
microcosm). (Abraham 1998, 'gold and silver')
Such a correspondence is part of a supposed cosmological and ideological system shared
by all educated Elizabethans that was outlined by E. M.W. Tillyard during the second world
war (Tillyard 1943). When first announced, Tillyard's model was widely criticized for its
reductivism and its failure to credit dissent, and these shortcomings were explored again
in the 1980s by critics in apparent ignorance of the success of their predecessors, as
Robin Headlam Wells showed (Wells 2000, 209-10). Shakespeare certainly gives characters
speeches about microcosmic-macrocosmic correspondence, but far from validating the
putative Elizabethan World Picture what happens to such characters as often as not
indicates the inadequacies of their explanations of the universe. A mundane way of
transforming ordinary materials into gold without recourse to alchemy--and one Shakespeare
would have known from playhouse decoration--is the technology of gold-plating, the
applying of a thin layer of real gold to the surface. By repeated hammering of a small
amount of gold, ancient Egyptian goldbeaters produced gold leaf only 40 millionths of an inch thick for the purpose
of luxurious decoration, and by the nineteenth century refinements of
essentially the technique achieved 3 millionths of an inch thickness
(Whiley, Whiley & Hunter 1951, 20-23, 53). The art of
applying gold leaf (or 'gilt') is 'gilding', and while Shakespeare shows little interest
in alchemy itself, his plays contain a rich seam of imagery connected with gold in this
attenuated and debased form. The interest is apparent in a fondness for playing on the
words employed in this kind of working of gold, 'gild', 'gilt', and 'gelt', by using them
in contexts where the meanings of their homophones and near-homophones (such as guile,
guilt, and geld) might also be understood by a playhouse audience. This essay will explore
that imagery, starting and ending with The Merchant of Venice where tawdry gold-plating is masterfully linked to an exploration of notions of purity,
commodification of flesh, and monetary inflation.
On the night of the elopement in The Merchant of Venice,
Graziano, Lorenzo, and Salerio are on the main stage and Jessica (disguised as a boy)
throws one of her father's caskets down from the stage balcony. Before leaving her family
home for the last time, Jessica decides to "gild [her]self / With some more
ducats", to which Graziano responds "Now, by my hood, a gentile, and no
Jew" (2.6.49-51)1. Jessica's suspicion that Lorenzo loves her rich outside more
than her inner self is signalled in her talk of gilding her exterior to make it more
attractive. Matching the split between her 'inner' and newly-enhanced 'outer' selves is a
split in Lorenzo, who identifies himself as "Lorenzo, and thy love" (2.6.28) as
though the man were not the embodiment of the love but something apart from it. Yet
Lorenzo has full confidence in his own powers of perception and finds Jessica wise
"if I can judge of her" and fair "if that mine eyes be true"
(2.6.53-4), which solipsism is typical of the play's young Christian men. The casket that
Jessica throws to Lorenzo, undoubtedly full of gold and a prerequisite for her planned
escape, is a counterpart to the three caskets amongst which Bassanio has to choose.
In both scenes is a barely-submerged problem of perception, for although the moral of the three
caskets might seem to be 'judge not by external appearance', this platitude is undercut
by the prize in the lead casket being a picture, a representation of the external view of
a woman.
As a young woman dressed as a boy, Jessica's decision to "gild"
herself might mean somewhat more than simply stealing ducats. The verb 'to geld', meaning
to castrate, could be spelt 'gild' until the sixteenth century (OED geld v.1),
and the noun 'geld', meaning an Anglo-Saxon tax on land, was in the seventeenth century
"confused with gelt n.2", meaning money, "which is
in fact identical in ultimate etymology" and thus 'geld' could be spelt 'gelt' (OED
geld n.). As Caroline Spurgeon showed, Shakespeare made his own connections between
phonetically similar words (Spurgeon 1931), and Ernst Honigmann argued that even graphically
similar words might cross-fertilize in Shakespeare's mind (Honigmann 1965, 71). I use this
reproductive metaphor deliberately, for with gild/geld Shakespeare made a breed of barren
metal and allowed 'gild' to suggest 'geld' in its sense of emasculation. Shakespeare's
women refer to their lacking penises most often when engaged in cross-dressing (for
example Viola's "A little thing . . . I lack of a man" Twelfth Night 3.4.294), and the wordplay in Jessica's remark is
picked up in Graziano's swearing an oath by his "hood". He might, of course,
merely swear by his masque-costume, or perhaps his manhood, but we are warranted by the
context--an eloping Jewish woman dressed as a Christian boy--to suspect that
"hood" at least hints at his foreskin, which because he is not a Jew is intact.
The foreskin is a small and relatively unvalued piece of flesh that substantiates
religious and racial identity, and one of the play's characteristic inflations is this
scrap's magnification (and Freudian displacement upwards) in the dangerously large chunk
of the human body that Shylock tries to take from Antonio. This is a kind of forced
adult circumcision of a Christian--Shylock gets to choose which part is cut and it is to
be "cut off" not 'cut out'--and in the popular imagination this was supposed to be
a
common desire of Jews, as James Shapiro showed (Shapiro 1996, 113-30), and it is dramatically
reversed when the Christians take their revenge upon the Jew with a forced conversion.
In alchemical science, gold is the most perfect of all substances
and entirely untainted by imperfections. Most frequently Shakespeare has characters refer
to personal imperfections as 'spots' that are "black and grainèd" for a
self-reflecting Gertrude (Hamlet 3.4.80) and indelible for a psychotic Lady Macbeth
(Macbeth 5.1.33). Just occasionally, however, spottedness can be a guarantee of
identity, as with Innogen's "cinque-spotted" mole that none but Posthumus
should know (Cymbeline 2.2.38) and Mowbray's insubordinate resistance to his king's
"Lions make leopards tame" with "Yea, but not change his spots" (Richard
2 1.1.174-5). The idea of a leopard's skin being the site of its unchangeable nature
is somewhat in tension with our modern sense that identity is a matter of the internal and
unseen ("that within which passes show" Hamlet 1.2.85), but
Mowbray insists that identity is necessarily outside the body in the form of
"spotless reputation" without which "Men are but gilded loam, or painted
clay" (Richard 2 1.1.178-9). The choice here is between two forms of perfected
outside, an immaterial representation in the minds of others ('reputation') and a mere
covering of gold. Much of the play hinges on Richard's spottedness, his failure to live up
to the ideal of kingship (a perfected humanity), and characters repeatedly liken the monarch to the golden
sun. This metaphor need not draw on
alchemical thinking since ordinary ideas about value and purity are sufficient to explain
it, but the alchemists' understanding of the transformative power of the sun lent the
sun/king association additional weight because the sun's rays, penetrating the earth, were
thought to provide "the generative warmth to ripen such imperfect metals as iron,
copper and lead into the perfect metal, gold" (Abraham 1998, 'sun'). When Richard's Welsh
followers give up on his return from Ireland, Salisbury imagines that Richard's "sun
sets weeping in the lowly west" (2.4.21), Bolingbroke in mid-rebellion sees Richard
as a "blushing discontented sun" (3.3.62) about to be obscured by clouds,
defeated Richard wishes Bolingbroke "many years of sunshine days" (4.1.211)
before imagining himself a king of snow melting before "the sun of Bolingbroke"
(4.1.251), and seeing in his reflection the face "That like the sun did make
beholders wink" (4.1.274). But before this sun/king rhetoric has even got off the
ground, it is undercut in the first act by Bolingbroke, who responds to banishment by
observing that the sun will still shine on him and "those his golden beams to you
here lent / Shall point on me and gild my banishment" (1.3.140-1). Thus Bolingbroke
invokes the sun/king association before anyone else has a chance to use it, and by linking
it with Mowbray's dismissal of mere gold-plating Bolingbroke slyly suggests that a king
has only the exterior signs and golden trappings of power, which are available to anyone.
For audience members who knew the ensuing history this was proleptic because Bolingbroke
goes on to replace Richard and find the same danger alighting on himself: when kingship is
treated as a possession not a right the institution is fatally weakened. The point of a
king being like the sun and like gold is that
these things were held to be unchangeable, having reached the state of perfection seldom attained in
the sublunary sphere. As the rebellion gathers head an alternative, unflattering, sun/king
rhetoric emerges: Northumberland invokes the gold-plated trappings of kinship as he
exhorts his peers to redeem the "blemished crown" and "Wipe off the dust
that hides our sceptre's gilt" (2.1.295-6). In spoken performance there is no way of
distinguishing between this kind of 'gilt and the 'guilt' of Richard's
wrongdoing, and indeed
the first five editions of the play spelt the word "guilt" and not until the
1623 Folio was it changed to "gilt" ([Shakespeare 1597, D3r; Shakespeare 1598a, D2v; Shakespeare 1598b, D2v;
Shakespeare 1608, D2v; Shakespeare 1615, D2v; Shakespeare 1623, C3v).
As well as kingship, Shakespeare's characters repeatedly associate
gold with blood, especially in the form of thin layers coating weapons. In alchemy blood
has strong associations with the principle that metals must 'die' in their original forms to
be reborn as gold, and with the life-giving red elixir (synonymous with the philosopher's
stone) achieved after the white (silver) stage, the latter transformation
featuring in alchemical treatises with the
attendant associations of moon and sun, and of virginity giving way to fecundity, that one
might expect (Abraham 1998, 'blood', 'rubedo'). Of course, the word 'blood' itself is highly
polysemous and when King John acknowledges that "There is no sure foundation set on
blood" he immediately glosses his meaning as "No certain life achieved by
others' death" (King John 4.2.104-5) but the opposite meaning is equally
active: there is no certainty based on "lineage, descent" (blood n. 9a).
After the inconclusive offstage battle of the English and French between the first two
acts of King John, the English herald sickeningly describes the once
"silver-bright" armour now "all gilt with Frenchmen's blood"
(2.1.315-6), and we might ask why Shakespeare likens gold-plating to painting in blood. An
alchemical explanation is not necessary since there is an equally viable alternative in
the inescapable 'guilt' of being caught red-handed, that is being caught in the act of
murder with the damning evidence, the red blood of one's victim, still on one's hands. For
the infamous 1981 Old Vic production of Macbeth, Peter O'Toole kept a basin of
stage blood ready in the wings for use in the scene where Macbeth returns from killing
Duncan. Out of sight, O'Toole would pour the entire basin load over himself and return to
the stage soaked in gore from head to foot. If the audience kept their composure when
Macbeth announced what is too obvious, "I have done the deed", they could be
relied upon to lose it when Lady Macbeth reassured him that "A little water clears us
of this deed" (2.2.14, 65).2 Of course,
Macbeth should have merely bloodied hands to literalize the Scottish legal expression
meaning "having the evidences of guilt still upon the person" (OED red-handed a.,
red-hand a. and n.), which kind of 'guilt' suggested to Shakespeare's
associative mind its homophone 'gilt' and hence he put together images of blood-painting
and gold-plating. Thus we can explain Lady Macbeth's "I'll gild the faces of the
grooms withal, / For it must seem their guilt" (2.2.54-55), although Macbeth's
"His silver skin laced with his golden blood" (2.3.112) does also suggest an
alchemical influence in its linking of death, the transformation of silver to gold, and
the red elixir.
The verb 'to gild' has virtually passed out of common usage except
in the form of 'gilding the lily', meaning "to embellish excessively, to add ornament
where none is needed" (OED lily n. 5). The phrase is Shakespeare's and it
arises at the beginning of King John 4.2 after the king takes the decidedly unusual
step of having a second coronation to make himself feel more secure in his possession of
the crown. Salisbury thinks this the height of pointlessness and likens it to a string of
other wasteful endeavours starting with gold and ending with the sun:
[SALISBURY] To gild refined gold, to paint the lily,
To throw a perfume on the violet,
To smooth the ice, or add another hue
Unto the rainbow, or with taper-light
To seek the beauteous eye of heaven to garnish
(King John 4.2.1-16)
The familiar phrase 'gilding the lily' is a corruption of Salisbury's speech, for he
speaks not of adding gold to the flower, but of adding gold to gold (so, a patina made of
the same substance as that it coats), which suits Salisbury's meaning that the second
coronation is superfluous. Likewise perfuming the violet, smoothing ice, adding a colour
to the rainbow, and illuminating the sun all connote the pointlessness of supererogation,
of 'more of the same'. But painting a lily entirely changes it from pure white to impure
colour, which is the opposite of Salisbury's meaning of 'more of the same'; it is,
however, rather like Mowbray's sense of men being "gilded loam, or painted clay"
(Richard 2 1.1.179). The readiest examples of painted clay known to Shakespeare
would have been the statue work of stone masons whose yards had become established near
the Globe playhouse in Southwark. Late-sixteenth century statues were invariably painted
as was the classical tradition (the continental fashion for unpainted statuary did not
reach England until the 1610s or 1620s) and B. J. Sokol argued that the supposed statue of
Hermione in The Winter's Tale--whose still-wet painted lips Leontes is warned not
to touch--shows Shakespeare's sensitivity to the continental art tastes of a circle of
courtiers around Prince Henry (Sokol 1995, 58-65). Hermione's supposed statue is, of course,
exactly "gilded loam" and "painted clay", those things that Mowbray
said were valueless without "spotless reputation". It is her reputation that is
restored to Hermione by Leontes's acknowledgement of his guilt and by his sincere
repentance for it.
The art of painting cheap things such as clay and wood to give the
appearance of luxury is one with which Shakespeare had a long and lucrative business
interest, via his one-tenth share in the Globe playhouse. The Burbage family failed
in their efforts to establish an elite indoor theatre in the Blackfriars district in 1596,
and the Globe was a decidedly second-best option that reused the main timbers (and presumably
whatever else could be salvaged) from the dismantled Theatre in Shoreditch (Wickham, Berry & Ingram 2000, 330-2,
493-4, 501-2). The precise decoration of the inside of the Globe is
uncertain but there was undoubtedly an extensive use of trompe l'oeil painting to make
wood and plaster resemble marble and gold (Ronayne 1997). Hamlet's reference to the sky above
him as a "majestical roof fretted with golden fire" (2.2.302-3) is perhaps the
most famous moment that makes little sense to a reader thinking of the world of the
play--why should the sky be "fretted" at all?--but is entirely clear if one
thinks of the gilded fretwork of the underside of an
amphitheatre playhouse's stage cover. Otherwise one might attempt to explain Hamlet's
"golden fire" as the sun or the stars of a night sky, but this would seem as
misguided as G. Wilson Knight's effort to make sense of Othello's "yond marble
heaven" (3.3.463) by "watch[ing] the figure of Othello silhouetted against a
flat, solid moveless sky" (Wilson Knight 1949, 99-100) rather than thinking of the playhouse's
eye-deceiving decoration. In such theatrical moments characters see through the imaginary
world that they and the audience have been taking for reality and come up hard against the
tawdry actuality of a gaudily-painted, neoclassical, wood-for-marble, London playhouse.
Even in our world of international standards for units of
measurement, precious materials retain their own systems of weight such as the carat,
which has one meaning in relation to purity of gold, 24 carats being 100%
purity, and another
in relation to precious stones, one carat being 200 milligrams (OED carat n.
2, 3). In Shakespeare's time a number
of weighing systems were in use for different materials, and the dissonance
created by not matching the unit to the material makes for The Merchant of Venice's most memorable
expression, a "pound of flesh", which is so striking precisely because
human
flesh does not usually go 'by the pound'. There are two ways for Shylock to fall foul of
his own bond, which Portia unreasonably determines has to be fulfilled to an impossible
exactitude. The first is by cutting more or less than a pound and the second is by
taking blood along with the flesh. The play leaves unstated what kind of pound the bond
specifies, whether troy weight (used for precious metals and bread), apothecaries' weight
(used for drugs), or avoirdupois weight (used for other materials). The subdivisions of a
pound vary in each system, but the smallest unit, the grain, was uniform across all three.
The troy pound and the apothecaries' pound weighed the same (5760 grains) while the
avoidupois pound was about one-fifth heavier at 7000 grains. There was, of course, no
standard system for weighing flesh since it could not ordinarily be traded, but the basis of
Shylock's legal argument is that since Venice permits the keeping of slaves it has already
accepted the principle that flesh can be owned. The court upholds this principle and
accepts Shylock's claim--"A pound of that same merchant's flesh is thine"
(4.1.296)--but punishes him for acting to enforce this claim since it is a crime for an
alien to "seek the life of any citizen" (4.1.348). The pound of flesh, then, has
already been alienated from the rest of the citizen who formerly owned it (but lost it by
a contractual forfeit), and what catches Shylock is the act of trying to separate his
property from Antonio's. This notion of inextricably linked properties extends to the
pound of flesh itself, since the contents of the blood vessels in the flesh are not
Shylock's and an overly-literal reading of the bond requires him to leave the blood
behind. Negotiating his punishment, Shylock successfully pleads a similar inextricable
link between his life and "the means whereby" (4.1.373-4) he lives, his property
and although the terms of the final settlement are not clear he appears to be allowed to
retain part of his wealth until he dies.
At the climax of the court scene Portia twice invites Shylock to
take his forfeit. The first time she warns him only that if he also takes even one
"jot of blood" (4.1.303) not mentioned in his bond, his lands and good will be
confiscated by the state. Repeating the invitation twenty lines later, Portia inexplicably
adds an extra stipulation and a new forfeit:
PORTIA Shed thou no blood, nor cut thou less nor more
But just a pound of flesh. If thou tak'st more
Or less than a just pound, be it but so much
As makes it light or heavy in the substance
Or the division of the twentieth part
Of one poor scruple--nay, if the scale do turn
But in the estimation of a hair
Thou diest, and all thy goods are confiscate.
(Shakespeare The Merchant of Venice 4.1.322-9)
No further legal argument has been introduced, but Portia now claims that even taking
too little of what is his own would trigger the punishment of the court and moreover the
penalty has risen to include death as well as confiscation of wealth. This repetition
might be due to the printing of imperfectly cancelled authorial first thoughts, with the
second version of the warning ratcheting up the exactitude and the penalties, and
prefiguring the Alien Statute trap to be sprung when Shylock attempts to leave.
The precision with which Shylock must measure his pound is
clearly stated as one-twentieth of a scruple, and then obscurely stated as one hair. It is
not certain whether the width or the weight of a hair is meant here, but in a parallel
usage by Falstaff it is the latter: "the weight of a hair will turn the scales
between their avoirdupois" (2 Henry 4 2.4.255-6). The word 'scruple' comes
from the Latin 'scrupulus' meaning a small rough or hard pebble that came to be a standard
unit in the apothecaries' weight system (but not the other two systems) in which it
comprised twenty grains (OED scruple n.1 1). Thus Portia specifies the
degree of accuracy Shylock has to achieve as one grain (0.017% of a troy or apothecaries'
pound, 0.014% of an avoirdupois pound), which is a unit common to all three systems of
weight. But she does so by its relation to the scruple, which exists only in the
apothecaries' system. In alchemy the word 'grain' is used for "the seed of
metals" as well as a unit of weight, and "It was said that just one grain of the
elixir could transmute immeasurable quantities of base metal into gold"
(Abraham 1998, 'grain'), which suits the argument I am about to make regarding multiplication
and division. But we can hardly expect a playhouse audience to hear the unspoken
word 'grain' behind Portia's "twentieth part of one poor scruple" and then pause
to ponder its associations, even if a dramatist in the act of composition might.
Leaving aside an
alchemical explanation based on 'grain', we might still wonder why Portia avoids
a word ('grain') that would make her stipulation independent of any particular
system of weight and uses 'scruple', which necessarily invokes the apothecaries'
system. If Portia
specified the troy weight system used for precious metals (including gold) and bread, say
by referring to a 'pennyweight' (24 grains), which exists only in this system, she would
perhaps evoke the anti-semitic 'blood libel' that Jews sacrifice Christian children at
Passover to obtain blood as an ingredient for their unleavened bread, and this would
hardly be consistent with her pretence at impartiality. And perhaps the avoirdupois system
would seem too ordinary for the weighing of flesh, but in any case there was no unit that
could identify it uniquely: its unit the 'dram' (roughly 27.3 grains) existed also in the
apothecaries' weight system, albeit denoting a different weight (60 grains). Whatever
other associations it might evoke, the apothecaries' system, which Portia uses, offers the
polysemy of 'scruple' being a unit of weight and a thought that troubles the mind,
"esp[ecially] one . . . which causes a person to hesitate where others
would be bolder to act" (OED scruple n.2 1). Such a finely balanced
response from Shylock suits Portia's entrapment, for his crime against the Alien Statute
is his being on the verge of taking the forfeit, but of course it is essential that he
does not.
Creating for Shylock an anxiety of minuteness resulting from
division upon division is Portia's new solution to the Christians' problem and it is the
flipside of an inflationary mathematics that has signally failed. As Peter Holland noted
(Holland 2001), both sides are quick with their multiplication tables, from Portia's wish that
she were "trebled twenty times myself, / A thousand times more fair, ten thousand
times more rich" (3.2.153-4) to her "Double six thousand, and then treble
that" to pay off Shylock rather than have Antonio "lose a hair"
(3.2.298-300). A hair representing the smallest part of a person that could be harmed was
proverbial, (Dent 1981, Appendix A, H26.1) but for Shakespeare human hair was also an image
for near-infinite multiplicity ("Had I as many sons as I have hairs" Macbeth
5.11.14) and for unity-in-multiplicity (singular 'hair' comprised of many 'hairs')
that may break down in time of stress, as with Hamlet's
"each particular hair to stand on end" (Hamlet 1.5.19). Shylock reputedly
swore to reject "twenty times the value of the sum" he is owed (3.2.285) and in
the court he asserts that even if every one of 6,000 ducats "Were in six parts, and
every part a ducat" (4.1.85), he would not accept them instead of his forfeit. Like a
goldbeater adding value to his material by repeatedly subdividing it, Shylock rightly
thinks of multiplication as a form of division (strictly, it is division of the inverse,
since A times B is the same as A divided by B-1), which is in keeping with
Shakespeare's sense of hair as both singularity and near-infinitude. Portia's wealth is
virtually infinite: as Holland noted 3,000 ducats is so much money that even Shylock
cannot lay his hands on it right away, yet Portia offers 60,000 ducats (3.2.304-5), which
Holland reckoned to be about £5.4 million in modern money (Holland 2001, 16, 25). The play's
Venetian ducats were "almost certainly gold" according to Holland (Holland 2001, 24),
as of course is Portia's hair, providing a rather tidy link between the main images of
wealth in the play. Bassanio pitches to Antonio his trip to Belmont by reporting that
her "sunny locks" are like a "golden fleece" (1.1.169-70) and Graziano
confirms the classical allusion with his cry "we have won the fleece" (3.2.239),
to which Salerio responds with a near-homophonic wordplay on Antonio's wealth-giving
fleets: "I would you had won the fleece that he hath lost" (3.2.240).
As with Lorenzo in the casket-catching scene, Bassanio's sense of
his wife's identity is shaped by solipsism regarding his own powers of
perception, and confronted with the picture of Portia in the lead casket he wonders
whether the liveliness of the eyes is inherent in the object or produced by the act of
looking at them: do her eyes "riding on the balls of mine" (3.2.117) only seem
to move? Her golden hair Bassanio sees not as a singularity but a multiplicity
("hairs"), and one that reverses the roles of subject and object, of seeker and sought-after: "Here
in her hairs / The
painter plays the spider, and hath woven / A golden mesh t' untrap3 the
hearts of men" (3.2.120-2). Here most plainly is visible Bassanio's mental work of
making a unity out of parts (as a spider makes a web from strands), but we should note
that Bassanio's comment on Portia's golden hair is preposterous, putting the multiplicity
first and the unity last (from hairs to hair). Bassanio uses Petrarchan language--John
Russell Brown found an analogue in Edmund Spenser's Amoretti (Shakespeare 1955, 84)--but his
movement from parts to whole is in the opposite direction to the particularizing and
disturbingly anatomizing trajectory of the poetic blazon identified by Nancy Vickers
(Vickers 1985). This is not to exculpate Bassanio, who can experience Portia only as a portion
or dowry comprised of numberless parts that to him add up to a "full sum"
rather greater than the "unlessoned girl, unschooled, unpractised" she claims
(3.2.157-9). By imagery that yokes gold and blood with hair, multiplication (woolly
breeders and golden ones), and the indivisibility of the human body (the impossibility of
Shylock getting his pound of flesh), Shakespeare treats human 'subjectivity' rather more
subtly than one would expect from the misleadingly simple three-caskets scene,
which appears to credit the Christian aristocrat with a keen insight to the difference between
that which is within and that which is without.
Notes
Gabriel
Egan . com