“But love is blind and lovers cannot see
The pretty follies that themselves commit.”
Here we have “the pretty follies” which is used again as “pretty wrongs” in sonnet 41. Immediately afterwards Lorenzo, another mask of Shakespeare, praises Jessica as “wise, fair, and true,” just as in sonnet 105 Shakespeare praises his friend as “kind, fair, and true,” using again words which his passion for a woman has taught him.
The fourth act sets forth the same argument we find in the sonnets. When it looks as if Antonio would have to give his life as forfeit to the Jew, Bassanio exclaims:
“Antonio, I am married to a wife
Which is as dear to me as life itself;
But life itself, my wife and all the world
Are not with me esteem'd above thy life.
I would lose all, ay, sacrifice them all
Here to this devil to deliver you.”
This is the language of passionate exaggeration, one might say. Antoniois suffering in Bassanio's place, paying the penalty, so to speak, for Bassanio's happiness. No wonder Bassanio exaggerates his grief and the sacrifice he would be prepared to make. But Gratiano has no such excuse for extravagant speech, and yet Gratiano follows in the self-same vein:
“I have a wife whom, I protest, I love:
I would she were in heaven, so she could
Entreat some power to change this currish Jew.”
The peculiarity of this attitude is heightened by the fact that the two wives, Portia and Nerissa, both take the ordinary view. Portia says:
“Your wife would give you little thanks for that
If she were by to hear you make the offer.”
And Nerissa goes a little further:
“Tis well you offer it behind her back,
The wish would make else an unquiet house.”