Had been the very sum of my confession:
O happy torment, when my torturer

Doth teach me answers for deliverance!
But let me to my fortune and the caskets.
Por. Away, then! I am lock'd in one of them: 40
If
you do love me, you will find me out.
Nerissa and the rest, stand all aloof.

Let music sound while he doth make his choice;
Then, if he lose, he makes a swan-like end,
Fading in music: that the comparison

May stand more proper, my eye shall be the

stream,

50

And watery death-bed for him. He may win;
And what is music then? Then music is
Even as the flourish when true subjects bow
To a new-crowned monarch: such it is
As are those dulcet sounds in break of day
That creep into the dreaming bridegroom's ear,
And summon him to marriage. Now he goes,
With no less presence, but with much more love,
Than young Alcides, when he did redeem
The virgin tribute paid by howling Troy
To the sea-monster: I stand for sacrifice;
The rest aloof are the Dardanian wives,
With bleared visages come forth to view
The issue of the exploit. Go, Hercules!

60

44. "swan-like end"; alluding to the opinion which long prevailed, that the swan uttered a plaintive musical sound at the approach of death. There is something so touching in this ancient superstition, that one feels loth to be undeceived.-H. N. H.

54. "more love"; because Hercules rescued Hesione not for love of the lady, but for the sake of the horses promised him by Laomedon.-I. G.

Live thou, I live: with much much more dismay
I view the fight than thou that makest the fray

Music, whilst Bassanio comments on the caskets to

All.

himself.

Song.

Tell me where is fancy bred,
Or in the heart or in the head?
How begot, how nourished?
Reply, reply.

It is engender'd in the eyes,
With gazing fed; and fancy dies
In the cradle where it lies.

Let us all ring fancy's knell;
I'll begin it,-Ding, dong, bell.

Ding, dong, bell.

70

Bass. So may the outward shows be least them

selves:

The world is still deceived with ornament.
In law, what plea so tainted and corrupt,
But, being season'd with a gracious voice,
Obscures the show of evil? In religion,
What damned error, but some sober brow
Will bless it, and approve it with a text,
Hiding the grossness with fair ornament?
There is no vice so simple, but assumes
Some mark of virtue on his outward parts:

80

63, 68. "fancy"; the Poet, in common with other writers of the time, often uses fancy for love.-H. N. H.

66. "Reply, reply"; this appears as a marginal direction in all the old copies.-C. H. H.

How many cowards, whose hearts are all as
false

As stairs of sand, wear yet upon their chins
The beards of Hercules and frowning Mars;
Who, inward search'd, have livers white as milk;
And these assume but valor's excrement
To render them redoubted! Look on beauty,
And you shall see 'tis purchased by the weight;
Which therein works a miracle in nature,
Making them lightest that wear most of it:
So are those crisped snaky golden locks
Which make such wanton gambols with the
wind,

Upon supposed fairness, often known

To be the dowry of a second head,

The skull that bred them in the sepulcher.
Thus ornament is but the guiled shore

90

To a most dangerous sea; the beauteous scarf

87. "Excrement," from excresco, is used for everything which appears to grow or vegetate upon the human body, as the hair, the beard, the nails.-H. N. H.

95. "dowry of a second head"; the Poet has often expressed a strong dislike of the custom, then in vogue, of wearing false hair. Several instances of this have already occurred. And his 68th Sonnet has a passage very like that in the text:

"Thus is his cheek the map of days outworn,
When beauty liv'd and died as flowers do now,
Before these bastard signs of fair were borne,
Or durst inhabit on a living brow;

Before the golden tresses of the dead,

The right of sepulchres, were shorn away,

To live a second life on second head;

Ere beauty's dead fleece made another gay."-H. N. H.

97. "Guiled" for guiling, that is, beguiling. The Poet often thus uses the passive form with an active sense, and vice versa. In Act i. sc. 3, of this play, we have beholding for beholden.-H. N. H.

Veiling an Indian beauty; in a word,

The seeming truth which cunning times put

on

100

To entrap the wisest. Therefore, thou gaudy gold,

Hard food for Midas, I will none of thee;

Nor none of thee, thou pale and common drudge

"Tween man and man: but thou, thou meager lead,

Which rather threatenest than dost promise aught,

Thy paleness moves me more than eloquence; And here choose I: joy be the consequence! Por. [Aside] How all the other passions fleet to air,

As doubtful thoughts, and rash-embraced despair,

99. "veiling an Indian beauty"; it has been pointed out that Montaigne in his Essay on Beauty says: "The Indians describe it black and swarthy, with blabbered thick lips, with a broad and flat nose." If Shakespeare gives us a reminiscence of this, he must have read Montaigne in French, as Florio's translation was not published until 1603.-I. G.

"Beauty" is probably a blunder, due to the "beauteous" of the line above.-C. H. H.

102. "Hard food for Midas," who prayed that everything he touched might turn to gold, and soon regretted his prayer.-I. G.

106. "paleness"; as Bassanio uses "pale" of silver a few lines before, Theobald, on Warburton's suggestion, proposed to read "plainness"; but "pale" is a regular epithet of lead, and there seems no reason for changing the reading here.-I. G.

The verbal inconsistency is, however, dramatic enough. Gold and silver are condemned as "ornament," and then, even in their ornamental character, disparaged as "gaudy" and "pale"; whereas the "paleness" of lead becomes a virtue, because it is associated with no pretensions.-C. H. H.