Fairy Tale Endings

You may have noticed that when Bassanio makes his choice of the leaden casket, he falls at the end of his speech of deliberation into one of those rhyming couplets that seem to signal a transition into a different mode -- perhaps one that it is more magical, more fraught with significance, more like a mythological than a realistic action.

Thy paleness moves me more than eloquence,
And here choose I -- joy be the conseqence!

Sigmund Freud, in a classic essay on the "The Theme of the Three Caskets", links this choice between three to a similar choice in another of Shakespeare's plays. Lear, however, makes the wrong choice, preferring the shiny flatteries of his two elder daughters to the silent love of Cordelia, his youngest. Freud interprets Bassanio's choice between three caskets as a choice between three women as well. (For Freud -- as you might expect! -- caskets, boxes, any sort of container stands in for woman.) But the choice of the third isn't a choice: it's inevitable that the third is chosen. Freud connects both Cordelia's silence and the pale lead of the third casket with death. Death is the inevitable third. But for Bassanio, a supremely desirable woman substitutes for death, putting off the inevitable. This is the wild wish fulfillment of dreams and of all comedies.

The wish-fulfillment woman, though, still retains something of death, and thus of the uncanny, about her. And this is something that might adhere to Portia, and make it difficult for us to picture what life will really be like for Mr and Mrs Bassanio of Belmont.