Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream is a play that reveals its scaffolding. Behavior and motives are explained for the sake of coherence and comic unity, almost as if the playwright doesn't trust our ability to guess them. This is seen most strikingly in Act V, Scene I, the "play within the play", in which the crude mechanics stage a play for the benefit of Theseus and the company of lovers. The exposed cues are dropped by the mechanisms for comic effect, as in Pyramus's verbal repetition of his visual act on stage: "I see a voice: now I go to the slit / To spy and I hear the face of my Thisby” (5.1. 192-93). It doesn't take long for the public to begin to comply with the charade. After Wall announces his departure, Theseus takes up the signal, anticipating Moonshine's entry and speaking in his place: "Now the moon is used between the two neighbors" (5.1.207-8). Shakespeare's insistence on exposing the internal structure of the play suggests the unreliability of the play's audience, that is, the aristocrats of Theseus's court and city-state; their struggle to understand motivations and behavior gives A Midsummer Night's Dream a pervasive sense of unnaturalness that extends beyond the play's dreamscape of enchantment. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why violent video games should not be banned"? Get the original essay Like A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Merchant of Venice exploits the mechanism of scene and setting to criticize the characters in the play. The parallel trial scenes can each be considered a “play within a play.” As staged performances to provoke specific action, the first two trials (the Coffin Trial and the Shylock Trial) aim to eliminate outsiders (Portia's unwanted suitors and the evil Shylock) from the comic realm so that the ends of the play can be achieved. However, the third test of the play, the test of the rings, resists and challenges our deconstruction more robustly. This happens among the initiates, and after the main dramatic action is over. As the final act and scene of the play, the Trial of the Rings is a performance staged by Portia that aims to complicate the conclusion of The Merchant of Venice. Act V opens with an exchange of dialogue between Jessica and Lorenzo. This is a classic joke between lovers exchanging examples of archetypal lovers during archetypal nights, ranging from the general and distant (Troilus and Cressida, Aeneas and Dido) to the specific and personal (Lorenzo and Jessica). We think of the exchange between Thisbe and Pyramus in A Midsummer Night's Dream, in which the lovers compare themselves favorably to their mythical counterparts. But as this progression occurs in The Merchant of Venice, something strange happens; Jessica and Lorenzo start to compete. After their set of “In Such Nights,” Jessica tells Lorenzo, “I would surpass you if no one came; / But listen, I hear the footsteps of a man” (5.1.23-4). More importantly, Jessica and Lorenzo start hinting at each other's infidelity. To counter Jessica “In such a night / Did Lorenzo swear that he loved her, / Stealing her soul with many vows of faith / And never a true one,” Lorenzo replies, “In such a night / Will pretty Jessica, like a little shrow, / Slander her love” (5.1.17-22). Even in the context of witty repartee, why do lovers insist on describing their love as not idealized but based on deception?Even if the details of their escape are a little sordid, can't we at least believe that their love is true? The dialogue between Jessica and Lorenzo sticks to the pattern of speech and communication that we have observed throughout the play. From the beginning, speech accomplished a largely negative performative task. That is to say, it serves to reveal what is not said. To illustrate this, let us look at the first line of the play, Antonio's melancholy "Truly I know not why I am so sad," and what immediately follows from it (1.1.1). Antonio's words are met with a group of minds trying to articulate a response. Why is Antonio sad? Salerio tries his hand at this, suggesting that Antonio's "spirit casts itself upon the ocean," where his fortunes are uncertain; thus Antonio “is sad to think of his merchandise” (1.1.8, 40). When Antonio denies this, Solanio then suggests, “Why then are you in love” (1.1.46). This in turn being rejected, Solanio, Salerio and later Gratiano begin to mock him, in fact arguing that he is sad because he "is not joyful", or because he voluntarily chooses this role to acquire a reputation for “wisdom, seriousness, depth”. vanity" (1.1. 48, 92). But even at the beginning of the play we know that this is not the answer, and that there really isn't one, because Antonio's first sentence does not is not a question, designed to elicit a response, but a statement and a one-line character sketch does not trust the ability of speech to articulate the unknown, and we can safely say that neither do Jessica and Lorenzo. ; they celebrate their love by expressing what it is not, by suggesting what it is “like Antonio’s melancholy? " is something higher. Like the music of the spheres, harmony cannot be heard by those encased in corporeal forms, the "muddy garment of decadence" (5.5.64). The exchanges between Antonio and the Venetians and between Jessica and Lorenzo are also similar as both conform to a pattern of interrupted speech In the previous scene, before any real conclusions can be drawn, Bassanio arrives with Antonio's request for help which puts. in motion the plot of the play We only know what does not make Antonio unhappy This pattern of interruption also shapes the dialogue between Jessica and Lorenzo, as marked by the messenger who comes to bring the news of Portia's return to. Belmont. Throughout The Merchant of Venice, the speech act is seen as unsatisfactory, a way of performing verbally without arriving at answers or understandings well characterized by Shylock during his stumbling trial scene in Act IV; he can give no reason for his passions and says to the court, very astutely: “I am not bound to please you with my answers” ​​(4.1.64). The use of the word “bound” in this line is significant because it reveals the failure of the contract based on words to constrain motivations and behavior. There will always be something that falls outside the realm of contract, and here it is a satisfying and sympathetic relationship between human beings. The trial of Portia's rings in Act V of The Merchant of Venice has the task of challenging the idea of ​​the verbal contract. Unlike the two previous tests of the play, both based on verbal contracts and addressed through speech, this is a test that cannot be resolved by verbal skill. The first test of the play, the test of the coffins, consists of the choice of the suitor when confronted with the numerous coffins of Portia's inheritance. The use of this trial to determine Portia's husband was ordered as a contract between Portia and her father, so that now "the will of a living daughter" is "checked by the will of a fatherdeceased” (1.2.24-5). . This process is an entirely verbal process of epigrams, parchments and songs; it is based on a riddle that only the privileged are able to answer. Watching the exchange between Portia and Bassanio that directly led to Bassanio's choice, we see the language of speech and its inadequacies constantly pushed to the forefront: "I talk too long, but it's to save time" ( 3.2.22); “Confess/What betrayal mingles with your love”(26-27); “Nothing but this ugly betrayal of distrust, / Who makes me fear this? enjoy my love” (28-29); and “Yes, but I fear you talk on the grate, / Where forced men talk nonsense” (32-33). This exchange between Portia and Bassanio, playfully refusing any confidence in her lover's motives, anticipates the exchange between Jessica and Lorenzo in Act V of the play. Bassanio selects correctly, but a correct choice says nothing about motive and nothing about love. The trial ends unsatisfactorily because of verbal trickery and a fundamental asymmetry of knowledge, and before the love between Portia and Bassanio can be proven or consummated, Bassanio is recalled to Venice. Like the coffin trial, Shylock's trial in Act IV ends with words and the flaws that can be found in them. The grounds that separate Shylock from the Venetians cannot be reconciled by the language of appeal or argument, the traditional idioms of court, and so the trial boils down to Portia's skillful literalization of Shylock's bond. She plots her climatic victory through a series of parallel declarations that highlight the ornamental and rhetorical power of language: “the pound of the flesh of this same merchant is yours. / The court grants it, and the law gives it,” followed by “The law permits it, and the court grants it” (4.1.298-9, 302). But as Shylock's heart rises in praise of Portia's abstract observance of justice, shaped so finely rhetorically, she changes direction: Wait a bit; there is something else. This link does not give you any blood here; the words are expressly “a pound of flesh” (4.1.304-6). Portia makes the conditions set by Shylock's bond literal as it invalidates her desires, displaying the insidious flexibility of language to adapt to any form. As Bassanio so eloquently put it during the coffin trial, there is no "damn mistake" that someone cannot "approve...with a text" (3.2.78-9). Like the Coffin Trial, Shylock's Trial ends on an unsatisfactory note, exploiting asymmetries of knowledge to find a solution without achieving a true understanding of another human being's motivations. Portia recounts the Trial of the Rings as a counterpart to these trials, revealing their inadequacies brought about by an over-reliance on verbal argument. As the third trial of The Merchant of Venice, it would seem to serve no other purpose than that of comedy, allowing Shakespeare to insert his cross-dressing and cuckolding jokes into the test of a lover's fidelity to his bond . But the manner in which this trial is resolved is significant to the message of the play. As Portia welcomes her husband Bassanio and his friend Antonio to Belmont after their trip from Venice, we hear, offside, Gratiano and Nerissa arguing about Gratiano's missing ring, which symbolizes a claim from Nerissa and an oath of Gratiano. The absence of Bassanio's ring, and the respective betrayal of his oath to Portia, only surfaces through this interruption of the rites of hospitality, as plotted by the two women. Bassanio and Portia then exchange defenses of their positions, in which the word "ring" is the ending word repeated in..