The Merchant of Venice

Summary

Venice, a city of mirrored canals and mercantile mirrors, glints with the chill of a fairy-tale bazaar where gilt gondolas ferry not only spices but the scent of mortal contracts. Antonio, a marble-skinned magnate whose melancholy is as bottomless as his coffers, drifts through arcades of silk and gossip until Bassanio—youth blazing like a struck match—begs for golden dust to court the heiress Portia, whose dead sire has turned courtship into a sacramental shell-game: choose the right casket—auric flash, argent gleam, or dull lead—and win the girl, miss it and forfeit the right to wed forever. Love’s aspirant lacks liquidity; Antonio, stung by nameless ennui, stakes his own flesh as surety, borrowing from Shylock, a man whose yarmulke of dignity has been trampled by years of public scorn. The bond is inked in jocular malice: a pound of Christian flesh if ducats drown. When Antonio’s argosies are swallowed by salt and bankruptcy, the creditor sharpens his knife upon the ledger’s edge, while Portia, cloaked in jurisprudential mischief, races to the marble courthouse to outwit death with rhetoric as glittering as Venetian glass.

Synopsis

A rich merchant, Antonio is depressed for no good reason, until his good friend Bassanio comes to tell him how he's in love with Portia. Portia's father has died and left a very strange will: only the man that picks the correct casket out of three (silver, gold, and lead) can marry her. Bassanio, unfortunately, is strapped for cash with which to go wooing, and Antonio wants to help, so Antonio borrows the money from Shylock, the money-lender. But Shylock has been nursing a grudge against Antonio's insults, and makes unusual terms to the loan. And when Antonio's business fails, those terms threaten his life, and it's up to Bassanio and Portia to save him.