Page:Merchant of Venice (1923) Yale.djvu/116

102 (Hercules) rescued Hesione from the sea-monster, not for love but for the horses promised him by her father Laomedon, King of Troy. Portia compares herself to Hesione in the words, 'I stand for sacrifice' (l. 57). The 'Dardanian wives' (l. 58) are the Trojan matrons.

 Upon supposed fairness. This may mean 'on the strength of their fictitious beauty,' as some believe; but the beauty of the hair is real, not fictitious. The phrase probably refers rather to the 'supposed fairness' of the head that the locks adorn, which is really not fair at all.

 Veiling an Indian beauty. This is regarded as a very difficult passage, but why? Bassanio has been talking about lovely golden false hair adorning an ugly head, hence concealing it too. Thus the 'beauteous scarf Veiling an Indian beauty' means the fair veil concealing a black, that is loathsome, beauty. The emphasis is on the word 'Indian,' not 'beauty.'

 In measure rain thy joy. The verb is certainly rain, not rein, as some critics have taken it. The meaning is: Pour thy joy moderately.

 You lov'd, I lov'd; for intermission No more pertains to me, my lord, than you. There has been much dispute over the meaning of these lines, all due to the punctuation of the early editions, which unanimously omit the semicolon after 'I lov'd' and insert a comma (or period) after 'intermission.' If the old punctuation is retained and understood to mark the logical relations of the parts of the sentence, the best explanation of line 200 would be to interpret 'intermission' as meaning comedy, like 'interlude.' You loved in the style of high drama, I match you with love less dignified perhaps, but real: I am to you as farce to drama. This, however, would leave line 201 far from clear; and it is much more likely that the pointing of the old editions is a striking instance of the tendency in Shakespeare's time to punctuate rhetori-