The Shakespearean Mean

In Act III, scene V of The Merchant of Venice, Jessica and Lancelet are again parts of the same household, and they enter talking. Lancelet tells Jessica that the sins of the father fall on the children and urges her to be happy because she is damned. She is damned, he says, unless Shylock is not her father. Jessica replies that in that case the sins of her mother will fall on her. Lancelet speaks of her dilemma as if it were his own. He says that when he shuns her father he falls into her mother, and tells her that she is damned both ways. Damned if you do and damned if you don’t is a kind of freedom, and to urge this freedom is testing the boundaries of innocent banter. Jessica applies the brakes by mentioning her husband, who has saved her by making her a Christian. Lancelet jokes that by doing so he only raises the price of pork. Lorenzo enters and complains to Lancelet about talking with his wife. Jessica tells him not to worry, that she and Lancelet are quarreling. She gives a summary of their talk, perhaps omitting a thing or two, but she mentions Lancelet’s accusation that Lorenzo has raised the price of pork, to which Lorenzo responds by exposing Lancelet for getting the moorish servant-girl pregnant. He and Lancelet go on, Lancelet willfully mistaking Lorenzo’s meaning as Lorenzo attempts the simple but nearly impossible task of directing his servant. When Lancelet finally exits under something like Lorenzo’s control, Lorenzo comments disdainfully on Lancelet and on better men who play with words and avoid the matter. He notices belatedly that Jessica is distressed. She recovers herself, and Lorenzo enlists her in praising Portia. Jessica responds with grace, at the same time setting a trap for Lorenzo. She imagines a wager between two gods, one of whom wagers Portia. To match that bet the other god, Jessica says, must wager in addition to whatever earthly woman he may choose something further. It would have been handsome in Lorenzo to tell Jessica that she herself was Portia’s more than equal. The opportunity escapes him and instead he boasts playfully that as Portia is for a wife so is he for a husband. They exit in raillery, Jessica promising to tell him what she thinks of him and Lorenzo dodging, hoping to litter her path with distractions. The play has given no moment to it, and the audience will remain in the dark until later, and even later awareness may be clouded, but something terrible has happened. Lorenzo has mistaken friendship toward Jessica for love, while Jessica has mistaken them the other way around, and she has just discovered her mistake. She is in love with Lancelet, and he with her. Having experienced this revelation, she sees that Lorenzo is on the slippery slope of infatuation with Portia. She is pinned. On the one side, a beloved inferior whose betrayal was the spur to the discovery that she loved him, and on the other side a husband who is infatuated with another woman. Jessica copes by assuming toward her husband the manner of friends, raillery. There has been a dance going on between happy and sad, which now shows us a new step. Merriment is forward, sadness covered up. The audience looks on as if through a devil’s single eye. If I am right about this, then the devil’s essence is blindness to love. If I am wrong, then I have misled myself through the polarity of this with another scene that with equal plausibility gives the audience a God’s-eye view. This will be plainer when we get to the polar moment. For now, let it stand as a claim, that devil or no devil, this scene is an anatomy of low comedy. There are also backward connections. One is to Bassanio’s reaction to the portrait, which we observed first, figuratively speaking, with both eyes and then by choice with one eye covered. The difference here is that we have not chosen to cover an eye. Shakespeare covered it without asking. The other backward connection is to Salarino’s and Solanio’s conversation about Antonio on the morning after the elopement. There we wanted to say that ignorance enlarged and purified; here ignorance narrows and blinds. One further note about Lancelet. We have grown accustomed to thinking of him as characteristically indifferent to the meanings of words and to the distinctions which they denote, but in order to torment Lorenzo as he does, he plays finely on the various meanings of words. This new dimension has been created in him by the shock of what has just unfolded. Going in the opposite direction from Portia, for whom distinctions have been dissolving, Lancelet has suddenly become discriminating. If neither he nor Portia is the exemplar of the true path, it lies between and perhaps above them, a sort of incommensurable that cannot be spoken or acted. We could conceive of this as the Shakespearean mean.