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3 - Ironising the Human: The Merchant of Venice

from Part I - Denaturing Human Nature

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 September 2012

Andrew Mousley
Affiliation:
De Montfort University
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Summary

The last scene of The Merchant of Venice (1596–7), which is set in Belmont and opens with a love scene between Lorenzo and Jessica, is suffused with such ‘enchanted’ images as these, from Lorenzo:

How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank!

Here will we sit, and let the sounds of music

Creep in our ears. Soft stillness and the night

Become the touches of sweet harmony.

Sit Jessica … Look how the floor of heaven

Is thick inlaid with patens of bright gold.

There's not the smallest orb which thou behold'st

But in his motion like an angel sings,

Still choiring to the young-eyed cherubins.

Such harmony is in immortal souls,

But whilst this muddy vesture of decay

Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it.

All is well between the lovers, and between the lovers and the universe. The conventional happy ending of comedy is at work here as part of the play's celebration of the triumph of harmony over strife, love over hatred, humane values over economic ones. Although Lorenzo presents a version of human embodiment, associating the body with decay, which makes such visions of cosmic love and harmony but dimly perceptible, Belmont, it seems, goes some way towards closing the gap between the ideal and the real.

Type
Chapter
Information
Re-Humanising Shakespeare
Literary Humanism Wisdom and Modernity
, pp. 60 - 75
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Print publication year: 2007

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