The Merchant of Venice
A suitor must choose between three caskets. Freud read the choice of the plainest as a man choosing his own death.
Who chooseth me must give and hazard all he hath.
Antonio, a Venetian merchant, borrows from the moneylender Shylock to fund his friend Bassanio's courtship of Portia, an heiress bound by her dead father's will to marry whichever suitor picks the right one of three caskets, gold, silver or lead. The loan is secured against a pound of Antonio's flesh. When his ships are lost the bond falls due and reaches a Venetian court, where Portia intervenes in disguise.
Freud's 1913 essay The Theme of the Three Caskets sets this test beside kindred scenes in myth and folktale and reads the leaden choice as a descendant of the three Fates. The play offers a clinician two linked figures: a debt pledged against the body, and a choice presented as free yet fixed by a dead father's terms. Shylock's hold on the literal bond, and Portia's plea for mercy over law, set obligation, revenge and the limits of the letter against one another. Its antisemitism, in Shylock's humiliation and forced conversion, runs through the text rather than sitting at its edge.
About the author
William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare was an English playwright and poet who worked in Stratford-upon-Avon and London. He is known for his tragedies, among them Hamlet, King Lear, and Macbeth, and for the range of his plays across comedy, history, and romance. His characters carry an unusual depth of interior life, which is part of why they still hold attention. Freud returned to these tragedies repeatedly, drawing on Hamlet, Lear, and Macbeth in his own writing.
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