The Nature of Portia’s Victory: Turning to Men in The Merchant of Venice

Summary

Critics have often approached Portia’s disguise as Balthazar with expectations implicitly shaped by the disguises of Julia, Rosalind, and Viola. Peter Hyland remarks that in The Merchant of Venice ‘Shakespeare was still at the stage of experiment and his use of disguise here is less successful than it was in The Two Gentlemen of Verona’. Juliet Dusinberre expresses the widely held opinion that ‘Shakespeare evaded in The Merchant of Venice the problems that he created for himself in Twelfth Night and As You Like It’. Such comments assume that the dramatic nature of sexual disguise must necessarily be the same in all contexts. What is most striking about Portia’s disguise as Balthazar is the absence of the psychological and sexual ambiguity that informs the disguises of the other heroines. If we turn to Portia’s disguise looking for this quality we will inevitably conclude that it is poorer in conception and execution than the other disguises. Critics have rarely considered the possibility that Shakespeare, confronting different problems in The Merchant of Venice, conceived sexual disguise in different terms. The dramatic relation between Balthazar as a role and Portia as a character is fundamentally different from that between the other heroines and their disguises.