A Failure, a Success, and a Lesson: The Significance of the Rings in The Merchant of Venice Isabel Acedo College

Though it spans back centuries, nonconvention is often regarded by people as a trait belonging solely to the present day. Famous playwright William Shakespeare’s works exemplify this truth. In particular, Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice features the novel usage of rings, conventional symbols of couples’ unions, to allude to women’s respective attempts at self-empowerment. Specifically, the ring Portia gifts to Bassanio to settle their engagement acts as an untraditional stake of ownership over a man by a woman, whereas Shylock’s ring given away by Jessica after her elopement to her Christian husband stands as a metonymy for the Jewish identity she happily abandons. The flexibility of this symbolization imparted to the rings, revealed by Portia’s seeming failure to secure Bassanio’s loyalty to her and Jessica’s contrasting success, imparts a similar flexibility to Shakespeare’s message concerning female empowerment.

Encompassed in Portia’s gifting of Bassanio a, for-all-intents-and purposes, engagement ring is her grab at empowerment as a woman within a male-dominated society. And such a society it must be, as evidenced––not only by general history––but specifically by her late father’s will concerning her future husband...