A counterfeit is a representation, a theme liberally exploited by Shakespeare’s hand in his play, “The Merchant of Venice.”

The word, as represented, in part, in the “Oxford English Dictionary”, describes matters forged, or wrought after a pattern, made in imitation of the genuine, transformed in appearance, feigned, and disguised, and even a deformed or misshapen person. Thus is implied some inevitability of distortion when the inceptions of ideas and intentions become manifest.

Most notably played is the tension between justice and the law upon which Shylock’s narrative dwells. His letter-of-the law, strict interpretation of Antonio’s indenture is drawn in contrast to the other characters’ insistence that his version is remote from the original intent of justice. “I stand here for law,”(IV. i. 142), he insists, to which Antonio affirms, that taken in this fixed context, “no lawful means can carry me / Out of his envy’s reach…”(IV. 1. 9). Shylock insists that he is beyond judgment if he were to kill Antonio, for he will have done no wrong in enforcing the legal terms of his bond. He is immune to Portia’s plea that true justice includes an element of mercy, which is above the “temporal power” of man’s law, and “is an attribute to God himself”(IV. i. 194). In the end, his insistence upon the virtue of his interpretation proves his undoing, when Portia aligns her reasoning with his, and resorts to what “The words expressly are,” and reconciles law and justice, when she allows, “For, as thou urgest justice be assured / Thou shalt have justice more than thou desir’st”(IV. i. 314).

Shakespeare is not vague in portraying the habits of incongruous understandings. Of my favorite lines in the play, most can be found in Bassanio’s long grievance of deceptive appearances in Act III scene ii:

“In law, what plea so tainted and corrupt,
But being seasoned 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,”

The word counterfeit is used in the text only once, when Bassanio looks upon the likeness of Portia in the portrait that confirms his claim to her love and wealth. He invokes the creative abilities of a demigod, a near-perfection, yet somehow still a distortion of the original object of his affections. Apart from a mundane reading, that the portrait pales in comparison to Portia in the flesh, this passage in particular lends itself to a homo-social (if not homo-erotic reading in which the original object of his affection may not be Portia after all, but his friend Antonio. His words conjure a seduction and deception of sorts, as though even the woman standing near him is not the substance of his prize, but a separation from it; “Here are severed lips / Parted with sugar breath; So sweet a bar / Should sunder such sweet friends”(III. ii. 120). He continues to infuse the likeness with conceits of capture, comparing the image’s hair to a spider’s web, constructed to “entrap the hearts of men.” A reading that Portia the woman, is relegated to the realm of imitation (might she be the aforementioned deformed or mishappen person?), might be supported when Bassanio wonders how the so-called demigod painter can ever have been distracted from the original beautiful eye; “Methinks it should have power to steal both of his / And leave itself unfurnished [ie. not provided with its mate?]”(iii. ii. 125) Eve being given form by virtue of Adam’s rib might not be such a stretch in this context. Further muddying the interpretive waters is his remark that, “The substance of my praise doth wrong this shadow”(III. ii. 127).

In the spirit of disguise, one cannot fail to appreciate that Portia, confined as she is by the customs of her times, must generally express her agency and her intelligence freely only when she is portrayed as a man. When she appears in the garb of a Doctor of Laws in the court, the incongruity of her wisdom and her youth is readily overlooked, while her gender would make such a suspension of disbelief impossible. The device of her transformed appearance ironically reverses the usual direction of the distortion, as in this case, the wisdom that must be dumbed down is of an earthly, rather than heavenly source.

No doubt Shakespeare saw the dangers of, and the good fun in, the fluid and transient potentials of meaning, as he playfully warns via Bassanio, “There is no vice so simple but assumes / some mark of virtue on his outward parts”(III. ii. 81) He reminds us that things are rarely what they first appear, and perhaps that definitions devoid of distortion, will ultimately remain elusive.

Gratiano: “All things that are / Are with more spirit chased than enjoyed.”  (II. vi. 12)

– Claire