SOURCE: Hapgood, Robert. “Portia and The Merchant of Venice: The Gentle Bond.” Modern Language Quarterly 28, no. 1 (March 1967): 19-32.

In the following essay, Hapgood discusses Portia's devotion and loyalty to the letter of the law.

In a passage which sums up the main point of his provocative article, “The Merchant of Venice: The Gentle Bond,” Sigurd Burckhardt writes:

the plot is circular: bound in such a way that the instrument of destruction, the bond, turns out to be the source of deliverance. Portia, won through the bond, wins Antonio's release from it; what is more, she wins it, not by breaking the bond, but by submitting to its rigor more rigorously than even the Jew had thought to do. So seen, one of Shakespeare's apparently most fanciful plots proves to be one of the most exactingly structured; it is what it should be: the play's controlling metaphor. As the...