“Fair Portia's counterfeit! What demi-god / Hath
come so near creation? Move these eyes? / Or whether, riding on the balls of
mine, / Seem they in motion? Here are sever'd lips, / Parted with sugar breath:
so sweet a bar / Should sunder such sweet friends. Here in her hairs / The
painter plays the spider and hath woven / A golden mesh to entrap the hearts of
men, / Faster than gnats in cobwebs; but her eyes,— / How could he see to do
them? having made one, / Methinks it should have power to steal both his / And
leave itself unfurnish'd. Yet look, how far / The substance of my praise doth
wrong this shadow / In underprizing it, so far this shadow / Doth limp behind
the substance” (The Merchant of Venice III.2.1485-1498).
It’s funny, the things that go through your head
when you’re standing on stage listening to the same lines over and over again.
A lot of times they become routine, meaningless words. But other times, it
takes a while to really comprehend and understand what’s being said. This quote
is one of the latter. I understood what Bassanio was saying about the portrait
of Portia, but it never sunk in what he was really saying. It wasn’t until
after we had discussed the Divided Line on Tuesday that this monologue began to
stick out. Sometimes I wonder if Shakespeare had read Plato, because this is
eerily like Plato’s discussion on the Good. Bassanio describes for the audience
a painting of Portia. But then he remarks that his description cannot do the
picture justice, just as the picture does not truly represent the full Portia. On
Tuesday night, Plato’s forms suddenly made sense to me. As a result of this,
for those of you who saw the play, every time this scene came around, I was thinking
of Plato and the Divided Line, which may have accounted for some of my excited
facial expressions as I drew multiple awesome connections!
Tantum e tenebris receptum constabit,
~Meghan
P.S. (I commented on Katelyn’s post “Socrates on
Homer”)
P.P.S. (On a completely unrelated note, Merchant
is now officially over and I don’t know what to do with myself!!)
We don't actually know if Shakespeare read Plato, but we do know that Plato and Homer were being translated into English for the first time during Shakespeare's lifetime. It's possible that he read them, or at least that he rubbed elbows with people who did.
ReplyDelete-Dr. Schuler