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Updated: May 28, 2025
"It is no use," she is told, "Shylock will have his bond, and nothing but his bond." If that be so, then must Bassanio hasten to his friend to comfort him at least. So the wedding is hurried on, and immediately after it Bassanio and Gratiano hasten away, leaving their new wives behind them. But Portia has no mind to sit at home and do nothing while her husband's friend is in danger of his life.
I hold the world but as the world, Gratiano, A stage where every man must play a part. Shakespeare does not say "may" play a part, or "can" play a part, but he says must play a part; and he has expressed the conviction of every intelligent student of humanity then and thereafter, now and hereafter.
"Ah!" murmured Capuzzi, "I see you want to make your excuses to me, Formica; you wish for my pardon well, we shall see." Doctor Gratiano expressed his sympathy, and observed that the scoundrel must have gone to work very cunningly to have eluded all the inquiries which had been instituted by Capuzzi. "Ho! ho!" rejoined Pasquarello.
Gratiano then said that he loved the lady Portia's fair waiting gentlewoman Nerissa, and that she had promised to be his wife, if her lady married Bassanio. Portia asked Nerissa if this was true. Nerissa replied: 'Madam, it is so, if you approve of it. Portia willingly consenting, Bassanio pleasantly said: 'Then our wedding-feast shall be much honoured by your marriage, Gratiano.
Bassanio and Gratiano stood aghast, and Portia simpered at them sweetly in the intervals between dispensing stage directions to the boot boy, who was clad in his best suit for the occasion, and sent to and fro to change the arrangement of the scenery.
Anthonio, Gratiano, met me at every turn; and when I confessed some of these feelings before the professor of natural history here, who had spent some time in London; he observed, that no native of our island could sit three hours, and not speak of Shakespear: he added many kind expressions of partial liking to our nation, and our poets: and l'Abate Cesarotti good-humouredly confessed his little skill in the English language when he translated their so much-admired Ossian; but he had studied it pretty hard since, he said, and his version of Gray's Elegy is charming.
And then Gratiano, who loved to copy what his lord did, thought he must make a speech like Bassanio's, and he said, in Nerissa's hearing, who was writing in her clerk's dress by the side of Portia: "I have a wife whom I protest I love. I wish she were in heaven if she could but entreat some power there to change the cruel temper of this currish Jew."
I gave my lord Bassanio a ring, and I am sure he would not part with it for all the world. Gratiano, in excuse for his fault, now said: 'My lord Bassanio gave his ring away to the counsellor, and then the boy, his clerk, that took some pains in writing, he begged my ring.
So these tragical beginnings of this rich merchant's story were all forgotten in the unexpected good fortune which ensued; and there was leisure to laugh at the comical adventure of the rings, and the husbands that did not know their own wives Gratiano merrily swearing, in a sort of rhyming speech, that ... while he lived, he'd fear no other thing So sore, as keeping safe Nerissa's ring.
Shakespeare, in the Merchant of Venice, makes Gratiano allude to the metempsychosis, where he says to Shylock: "Thou almost mak'st me waver in my faith, To hold opinion with Pythagoras, That souls of animals infuse themselves Into the trunks of men; thy currish spirit Governed a wolf; who hanged for human slaughter Infused his soul in thee; for thy desires Are wolfish, bloody, starved, and ravenous."
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