The Casket Plot in Merchant 169 Trivial Pursuit The Casket Plot in the Miller/Olivier Merchant June Schlueter In III.ii of The Merchant of Venice, after Bassanio has chosen the lead casket, Portia offers him her ring, sealing the union for which Bassanio has sought her endorsement. Reluctant to claim her with a loving kiss until their union is confirmed, signed, ratified by Portia, Bassanio delays responding to the gentle scroll or to the stage direction of many an editor; and in many productions he kisses Portia only after she gives him her ring. The moment of endorsement is a special one in the play, celebrating as it does not only the simultaneous fulfillment and promise of love but Portia s integrity and Bassanio's worth. Portia could have taught Bassanio how to choose right but, unwilling to be forsworn, trusted his love to find her out. Bassanio, having passed through the danger designed by Portia s father, has proven the value of both the lead casket and himself: the world may still be deceived by ornament, but Bassanio is not. Despite the importance of the casket plot in furthering the play s commentary on the mercantile morality of Venice and as a touchstone for distinguishing between fool s gold and true gold, modem directors have taken pleasure in exploiting its comic possibilities. Every recent production of Merchant I have seen has emphasized the pretentious heroics of the scimitar-wielding Morocco and the extratextual swishiness of Arragon. To their credit, directors have limited their fun to Portia's unsuccessful suitors (II. i, Il.vii, II. ix) and played the final casket scene (III.ii) as a serious pursuit: Bassanio does not know which casket contains fair Portia's counterfeit, and Portia will not compromise her father, herself, or her love for Bassanio by telling. Jonathan Miller, however, who is not known for his restraint, extends the comic handling of the casket plot into III.ii, escalating directorial pleasure into diabolic delight. In his televised Merchant of 1973, which grew out of the 1970 National Theatre production starring Sir Laurence Olivier as a Victorian Shylock, Miller's persistently comic treatment of the casket plot seriously compromises Portia's integrity and Bassanio s worth, reducing the quest for Portia to a trivial pursuit. This is not to say that the worth of Bassanio has not already been diminished by the comic treatment of Morocco and Arragon. As Jonas Barish points out in his recent SAA Bulletin comments (8:1, January 1985), reducing these suitors of rank and dignity to caricatures turns Bassanio s success into a hollow achievement: opponents must be worthy if the hero's triumph is to be sweet. Morocco and Arragon are not contemptible but limited, and they deserve credit for having the courage to choose, which previous suitors had not. Still, the limitations of the two are so apparent in their orations that a director who ignores the comic possibilities in their portrayal might well have to fight against the text. Morocco is swollen with self, mightily impressed with his
170 June Schlueter military conquests and confident that, were he able to determine the outcome through bravery, he would earn the lady. But in refusing to permit his golden mind to stoop to shows of dross, he discovers that all that glisters is not gold. Arragon, too, though he voices the lesson of inner worth that Bassanio must learn, refuses to rank himself with the barbarous multitudes and gets what he deserves though the portrait of a blinking idiot hardly coincides with his own estimation of self. There is inherent ironic humor in a situation that provides the contrary of what a character expects and a smug, self-congratulatory humor in an audience s sense of its superiority. So also is there humor in the strange appearance of these two exotic suitors: a tawny Moor all in white and a swarthy Spanish prince, both visually as well as temperamentally distant from the fair maiden of provincial Belmont. In portraying the two, though, directors might take counsel from Nerissa, who reminds her mistress (in I.ii) that they are as sick that surfeit with too much as they that starve with nothing. It is no mean happiness, therefore, to be seated in the mean.... Miller approaches Portia s unsuccessful suitors in a spirit so sick with surfeit as to be subversive. With Morocco he is perhaps no more extravagant than other modem directors, but certainly he is not less so. In our first look at Morocco in this production, the camera shows us a Moor pressing snuff to his nostrils, without yielding the proud posture of a military man. Epaulets upon his shoulders, a banner of honor around his chest, the scimitar at his side, Morocco speaks with confidence of his exploits, kissing Portia s hand hungrily as he advances toward the caskets. His right arm bent formally at his waist, he offers an occasional gesture with white-gloved hand as he reads the inscriptions. Somewhat embarrassed at his own caution, the warrior laughs at his need to survey the caskets again, as Miller allows his erratic speech rhythms to dominate the scene and to turn him into both an innocent and a fool. Rejecting the lead casket, he moves in for a camera closeup as his voice shifts into high gear for his silver casket rumination; he slows the declamatory pace only on the repeatedly mispronounced deserb. Coyly asking, What if I strayed no further but chose here, the Moor slides his arm around the startled Portia s waist, the lady recoiling from his forwardness. Morocco returns to the triple-armed pedestal on which the caskets revolve, rereads the inscription on the gold one, and summarily decides that what many men desire" is the lady. His proud bearing, boyish confidentiality, and boldly simplistic vision of self all create a theatrical pomposity that lends a special humor to his naked disappointment when he opens the gold casket. The lively rhythms of his flamboyant speeches give way, simply, to Oh Hell." If Miller exercises some restraint in the portrayal of Morocco, he is unrestrained in presenting Arragon as a comic grotesque. Traditionally played as a haughty and effete aristocrat, the Spanish prince, armed with spectacles rather than scimitar, appears in this production as a nearly blind, bent, doting old man who can barely find his way to the caskets. Coming immediately after the Morocco scene, which is a conflation of II. i and II.vii, the second
The Casket Plot in Merchant 171 suitor scene begins with playful piano music that speeds up to accompany the prince in processional on Portia s arm. The expectant Nerissa catches sight of the suitor at the same time the audience does and turns toward the camera to express her amusement at this implausible match. Clad in tails and white tie, white hair wildly erect as though responding to an electrical charge, Arragon walks blindly past the caskets, submitting to the two women s pushes in finding his way. As the impatient Portia fans herself and sighs, the lethargic prince leans his nearsighted eyes toward the inscriptions and tediously mutters them. Speaking contemptuously of the barbarous multitudes, he pulls out a knotted handkerchief, looks at it in bewilderment, then returns it to his pocket Portia offers him a cup of tea, and, as he continues his expostulation, he extracts sugar cubes from the sugar bowl she holds, one by one, depositing seven in his cup before returning the eighth to the bowl. When Arragon does choose, still not having drunk his tea, he peers into the silver casket, where he finds Miller s version of a blinking idiot, a mirror. Allowing Portia to direct him to the door, the self-pitying old man totters off, promising to keep his oath never to marry. But Miller s decrepit prince hardly seems a candidate for marriage at all. If there is any merit in Arragon s judgment or in his claim to be a suitor, Miller s rendering of him as the impotent senex amans repudiates it. In agreeing to the conditions of the test, he has hazarded nothing, for the prospect of continuing his royal line through a legitimate or any heir is as laughable as it is unlikely. The spirit of the test was to limit suing to those worthy of Portia, a strategy that has worked with the suitors from foreign lands who have earlier taken their leave. But the reduction of Arragon to dotage makes a mockery of this purpose. If under her father's conditions such a man as this may woo Portia, then the prize may be bestowed unearned. The test is merely a lottery. By the time Miller's Bassanio makes his bid, we have already seen the fault of a plan designed not merely to control Portia from the grave but to protect a richly left daughter from the undeserving. We have applauded Nerissa s fast action in turning the casket pedestal when Arragon nearly inserts the key not in the silver casket he has chosen but in the lead. The motif of hazarding all, begun in the bond plot with Antonio's sealing with Shylock for a pound of flesh for Bassanio s sake, must prevail in the earlier casket scenes if Bassanio's risk is to be respected. But the context in which Bassanio makes his choice has been established as one in which those who hazard are no worthier than those who decide Portia not worth the risk, a context in which her father's plan is hardly foolproof. If Portia does not teach Bassanio how to choose right," she may indeed miss him. Still, the scene between Bassanio and Portia begins seriously enough in the Miller production. Having just returned from riding, the two are dressed in riding habits and top hats, visually suggesting a compatibility that Portia and her other suitors did not have. The two remain outdoors for their early lines, in which Portia pleads with Bassanio to tarry, to pause a day or two and stay election so she may enjoy him longer, and Bassanio confesses that until he
172 June Schlueter chooses he lives upon the rack. Iterating her commitment to her father s will, Portia insists she will not be forsworn and then precedes her young suitor into the house, where he will survey the caskets and choose. Joined by Bassanio, Portia asks that music be played, spending some eleven lines discoursing on music, first as swan song for her unrewarded lover, then as celebration should he succeed, and finally lines spoken as she approaches Bassanio as dulcet sounds... / That creep into the dreaming bridegroom s ear / And summon him to marriage (III.ii). The song, of course, is Tell me where is fancy bred, which, with its suggestive emphases on the short e and full rhyming of bred with lead, may well cast suspicion on Portia s integrity. Is the song a hint to Bassanio, her way of assuring that her lover not miss? By this time, Portia knows which casket contains her portrait. (Indeed, in this production she clearly knows all along, sighing in relief when Morocco summarily dismisses the lead.) Does she hope that Bassanio will understand the hint in the rhyme and connect the ding dong bell with base lead? Miller staged the musical prelude to Bassanio s choice so unsubtly that Bassanio would not have been in a more privileged position to choose had all three caskets been displayed with their lids ajar. The production not only admits Portia is cheating, but challenges its audience to resist laughing at the shamelessness with which she directs her show. As Bassanio soberly surveys the caskets, a cello and other strings play off-camera. Then two identically dressed women enter, their hair swept up to frame Oriental smiles. More appropriate to a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta than to a Shakespeare play, the sopranos project their vibrato voices into the face of the astonished Bassanio as they begin the strains of fancy bred, positioned on either side of the lead casket. The two periodically bow their heads in prolonged glances at the treasured casket, so obviously pointing it out that only a blind man or a fool could miss the hint. The amused Bassanio casts a backward glance at Nerissa, who smiles in silent understanding, then patiently folds his arms, waiting for the women s exit and the moment of his choice. If we have not laughed enough at these garrulous beauties, we laugh in incredulity when the dense Gratiano, standing alongside Bassanio throughout, points decisively to the gold casket, inviting Bassanio s wise response: The world is still deceived with ornament. But Bassanio s confidence here has little to do with moral maturity, based on the recognition that outward show may not be the appropriate measure of worth, and much to do with the piece of intelligence he has acquired. Sighing and smiling, Bassanio selects the lead casket, feigning incredulity as he exclaims, What find I here? / Fair Portia s counterfeit! For the rest of the scene, fancy s knell rings false, and all that Bassanio says seems contrived. The successful suitor s poetic praise of fair Portia s eyes and lips and hair and eyes again sounds less like an expression of joy and more like a ritualistic paean to the fairytale princess he earlier described to his benefactor. But at this point, Portia should be more than a conventional princess,
The Casket Plot in Merchant 173 for the transforming power of love has moderated Bassanio s vision of her, revealing her as a partner of integrity and value. Bassanio s deference to this choked-up, watery-eyed, disingenuous ingenue, who turns to claim the husband she knew she would secure, does further injury to Bassanio, suggesting a vulnerability and a weakness one can hardly admire. And Portia s accounting of her own worth, in which she employs the language of mercantile Venice, registers not as a transformation of Bassanio s rhetoric in the service of greater worth but as testimony to the endurance of Venetian values over Belmont s. Miller, to his credit, rejected Olivier s ingenious suggestion that Bassanio play all three suitors: disguised as Morocco, he would try the gold; as Arragon, he would elect the silver; and, finally, as Bassanio, he would choose with certainty the lead, having eliminated the alternatives. Such an interpretation would lend a special significance to Bassanio s The world is still deceived with ornament, if indeed Portia were. Olivier did not say whether Portia would have been privy to the scheme that would carry out her father s wish and still assure Bassanio s success. But whether she is in on Bassanio s deception or not, this playing would mean that Bassanio was never more than a fortune seeker in pursuit of the richly-left lady. If Portia did not see through his disguise, even while the audience did, she would appear the ignorant fool; if she did, she would be accomplice to a deception that severely compromised the spirit of her father's will, leaving her forsworn. Such dismissive treatment of the relationship between Portia and Bassanio and of their characters, whether in Olivier's conception or Miller's, is rendered more perverse by the production's juxtaposition of scenes. Here the casket plot, beginning with Morocco's appearance in II. i, continues through II.vii, II.ix, and III.ii, interrupted only by III.i. In that scene, Shylock pleads for a Jew's humanity and pledges revenge. Still laughing from exposure to Miller's comic suitors, an audience is thrust into a scene of extraordinary emotional intensity, in which Olivier weeps over the loss of his daughter and dances in glee at the loss of Antonio's ships. Still haunted by the final image of Shylock wrapped in a prayer shawl, we are returned to Belmont for the amusing, but surely trifling, climax of the casket plot. With Shylock as sympathetic and as powerful a human figure as he is played here, how can Bassanio and Portia compete? Indeed, if this play is to remain on the right side of comedy, any director treating Shylock with such respect, such compassion, such admiration is almost obliged to trivialize others. But in trivializing the casket plot, Miller destroys the rich connections that plot has with the rest of Shakespeare's play. We feel little of the connection among the play's several bonds and none between the comically deflated pretensions of the casket scenes and the deep essence of commitment and sacrifice in the bond plot. The scene in which Bassanio and Portia are united creates a material connection among the three plots: casket, ring, and bond. Bassanio s choice of the lead casket ends the casket plot; Portia's giving of the ring begins the ring plot; and Antonio's unhappy letter intensifies the bond
174 J. C. Bulman plot, revealing the complication that prompts both Bassanio and Portia to rush off to Venice. Bassanio has hazarded all for Portia, Antonio has hazarded all for his friend, and Portia as Balthazar will put Bassanio in the impossible position of choosing fidelity to his friend or to his wife, in either case risking the love of the other. More importantly, the centrality of the contract should be apparent here, coming as it does as the happy consequence of Portia s keeping her moral bond, even as Shylock insists on keeping his legal but immoral agreement and the stage is set for Bassanio s breaking yet keeping faith with his wife. If Bassanio s wooing of Portia becomes a trivial pursuit, as it does in the Miller production, Shylock is free to dominate the action: the play flattens to a one-dimensional treatment of the letter and spirit of the law, and the casket plot becomes a sideshow. Theatrically delightful as Millers Morocco, Arragon, and the Gilbert and Sullivan duo might be, collectively they impoverish the play, preventing the casket plot from illuminating the value of its participants and adding to the personal, thematic, and structural riches that are the play s full sum.