Portia Flashcards
Portia character summary
Beautiful, intelligent, rich heiress, bound by her father’s will to marry whoever chooses the correct casket (suitors come from all over world)
“richly left”
“fair”
“wondrous virtues”
Portia quote: loyalty
“will of a living daughter curbed by the will of a dead father” - although wealth, powerful (mistress of Belmont) freedom is limited by father’s will, shows loyalty (levels of authority at time) Could easily tell B which casket to choose, but doesnt - respecting father’s wishes is more important than her happiness.
States B is “her lord, her governor, her king” asyndetic, submission. Shakespeares repetition of objective personal pronoun “her” emphasises P passing on all power to B, giving herself to him
“Myself, & what is mine, to you and yours is now converted” everything P owns, including her own person, becomes physical property of husband (obvious to original audience, suprising to modern)
Portia quotes: love
Tells B that “one half of me is yours, the other half yours” - rep of possessive pronoun “yours” shows readiness to devote herself entirely to B
Portia quotes: mercy
Told Shy to “beg mercy of the Duke” when Duke told Shy at beginning that he would be unlikely to receive mercy/shouldn’t ask for it when he wasn’t prepared to show mercy himself
“we do pray for mercy” - collective pronoun “we” referring to Christians, mercy is Christian value, smth Shy cannot understand. Trying to convinve Shy to be merciful
Portia quotes: prejudice, racism
Continuously refers to Shy as “the Jew” during trial - taking away identity, dismissive, insulting
Comments of the “complexion” of Prince of Morocco
Portia quotes: justice
“Thou shalt have justice more than thou desirest” “He shall have merely justice & his bond” (putting Shy in impossible position, have bond w/o dropping blood) Shy insisted on following law, P gave him many opportunities to “tear the bond” & show mercy to A but rejected them all. Now he has been defeated & P is interpreting law even more literally than Shy
Portia quotes: quick-witted, intelligent
“We’ll outface them, and outswear them too” P to N, making plans to outsmart the men by disguising as men for the trial & even accusing them of infedeility (“outswear”) – women expected to be odedient to husbands in 16th cent, P defies this by asserting dominance over B (decieving him)
