PORTIA.
Upon the rack, Bassanio! Then confess
What treason there is mingled with your love.
BASSANIO.
None but that ugly treason of mistrust,
Which makes me fear th’ enjoying of my love.
There may as well be amity and life
’Tween snow and fire as treason and my love.
PORTIA.
Ay, but I fear you speak upon the rack
Where men enforced do speak anything.
BASSANIO.
Promise me life, and I’ll confess the truth.
PORTIA.
Well then, confess and live.
BASSANIO.
“Confess and love”
Had been the very sum of my confession:
O happy torment, when my torturer
Doth teach me answers for deliverance!
But let me to my fortune and the caskets.
PORTIA.
Away, then! I am lock’d in one of them.
If you do love me, you will find me out.
Nerissa and the rest, stand all aloof.
Let music sound while he doth make his choice.
Then if he lose he makes a swan-like end,
Fading in music. That the comparison
May stand more proper, my eye shall be the stream
And wat’ry death-bed for him. He may win,
And what is music then? Then music is
Even as the flourish when true subjects bow
To a new-crowned monarch. Such it is
As are those dulcet sounds in break of day
That creep into the dreaming bridegroom’s ear
And summon him to marriage. Now he goes,
With no less presence, but with much more love
Than young Alcides when he did redeem
The virgin tribute paid by howling Troy
To the sea-monster: I stand for sacrifice;
The rest aloof are the Dardanian wives,
With bleared visages come forth to view
The issue of th’ exploit. Go, Hercules!
Live thou, I live. With much much more dismay
I view the fight than thou that mak’st the fray.
A song, whilst Bassanio comments on the caskets to himself.
Tell me where is fancy bred,
Or in the heart or in the head?
How begot, how nourished?
Reply, reply.
It is engend’red in the eyes,
With gazing fed, and fancy dies
In the cradle where it lies.
Let us all ring fancy’s knell:
I’ll begin it.—Ding, dong, bell.
ALL.
Ding, dong, bell.