Conclusion

This chapter demonstrates through concepts such as the “aura” of Walter Benjamin that the trial is not and cannot be the culminating point in the play, that the agency of the characters and the play itself moves beyond the trial scene and culminates in the rings. This chapter points to the trial as the setting where religion fails. The trial becomes the symbolic nerve-center where the characters’ blocked paths converge. The ascending excitement leading to the trial results in a shocking non-climax, and the related exhaustion. Instead of satisfaction, the tangling of the characters leaves everyone, the audience included, disarranged and “outface[d]‌” (4.2.17). Something powerful does happen, though. At the end of the trial, the unsatisfied agency of the characters does not just stop: it continues its drive towards a completion and love beyond credal solutions, a love traditionally symbolized by the rings.

The rings advance beyond the limitations imposed by past and present symbolism and offer a new potentiality to Shakespeare’s Venice. They are “saturated phenomena” in the philosophy of Jean-Luc Marion, containing more agency than humans can realize. This chapter shows that the rings are the “joint” that can fix and expand the text, fix and expand love, reflect ravishment, and hold the drive of the trial. In the end, just as synagogue prayer “turns on” the Torah, the transcendent love between Jessica and Lorenzo “turns on” the rings. The rings revolutionize their own symbolism. The “ringing” of the rings is possibly the sound that might help Lorenzo to hear beyond his “decay.” The rings, this chapter illuminates, in their ability to transcend time, point to Shylock’s movement away from victimhood, towards the epiphany, and towards the “deed” that cannot happen without his signature. Finally, while Portia points out the cycle of the sun and its intense light, Lorenzo and Jessica, with their intense love, can possibly take us to it. Even in a world of dissatisfaction, violence, and corruption, the Merchant character can possibly access through the epiphany a natural and peaceful cycle of existence. Ultimately, this cycle points toward a foundation of a new social and political paradigm of peace.