Shylock disappears with the end of the fourth act in order that no discord may mar the harmony of the concluding scenes. By means of his fifth act, Shakespeare dissipates any preponderance of pain and gloom in the general impression of the play.
This act is a moonlit landscape thrilled with music. It is altogether given over to music and moonshine. It is an image of Shakespeare's soul at that point of time. Everything is here reconciled, assuaged, silvered over, and borne aloft upon the wings of music.
The speeches melt into each other like voices in part-singing:—
"Lorenzo. The moon shines bright.—In such a night as this,
When the sweet wind did gently kiss the trees,
And they did make no noise, in such a night,
Troilus, methinks, mounted the Trojan walls,
And sigh'd his soul toward the Grecian tents,
Where Cressid lay that night.
Jessica. In such a night
Did Thisbe fearfully o'ertrip the dew;
. . . . . . . .
Lor. In such a night
Stood Dido with a willow in her hand;"
and so on for four more speeches—the very poetry of moonlight arranged in antiphonies.
The conclusion of The Merchant of Venice brings us to the threshold of a term in Shakespeare's life instinct with high-pitched gaiety and gladness. In this, his brightest period, he fervently celebrates strength and wisdom in man, intellect and wit in woman; and these most brilliant years of his life are also the most musical. His poetry, his whole existence, seem now to be given over to music, to harmony.
He had been early familiar with the art of music, and must have heard much music in his youth.[1] Even in his earliest plays, such as The Two Gentlemen of Verona, we find a considerable insight into musical technique, as in the conversation between Julia and Lucetta (i. 2). He must often have heard the Queen's choir, and the choirs maintained by noble lords and ladies, like that which Portia has in her palace. And he no doubt heard much music performed in private. The English were in his day, what they have never been since, a musical people. It was the Puritans who cast out music from the daily life of England. The spinet was the favourite instrument of the time. Spinets stood in the barbers' shops, for the use of customers waiting their turn. Elizabeth herself played on the spinet and the lute. In his Sonnet cxxviii., addressed to the lady whom he caressingly calls "my music," Shakespeare has described himself as standing beside his mistress's spinet and envying the keys which could kiss her fingers. In all probability he was personally acquainted with John Dowland, the chief English musician of the time, although the poem in which he is named, published as Shakespeare's in The Passionate Pilgrim, is not by him, but by Richard Barnfield.
In The Taming of the Shrew (iii. I); written just before The Merchant of Venice, he had utilised his knowledge of singing and lute-playing in a scene of gay comedy. "The cause why music was ordained," says Lucentio—
"Was it not to refresh the mind of man,
After his studies, or his usual pain?"
Its influence upon mental disease was also known to Shakespeare, and noted both in King Lear and in The Tempest. But here, in The Merchant of Venice, where music is wedded to moonlight, his praise of it takes a higher flight:—