Act 5: moonlight, music and the ring plot (5.1)

What the exam asks

In Paper 2, general questions frequently ask how and why literary works construct their endings, how they balance contrasting tones or plots, how setting shapes meaning, or how characters are left isolated or integrated at the close. Because Paper 2 is closed-book, you do not need long quotations; instead, you earn top marks in Criterion A (knowledge and interpretation) and Criterion B1 (analysis and evaluation of authorial choices) by naming specific structural and dramatic choices in Act 5—such as the classical allusions, Jessica’s silence, the visual emblem of the candle, and the ring plot as a miniature replay of the trial—and judging how they work together with the opening in Act 1.

Core ideas

The shift to Belmont: moonlight, allusion and music

Act 5 consists of a single scene (5.1) set at night in the avenue before Portia’s house in Belmont. Shakespeare uses darkness, moonlight and music to shift the play away from the commercial, legalistic daylight of Venice. Yet the language of the opening duet between Lorenzo and Jessica complicates this romantic setting before anyone else even enters.

Trading speeches that begin with the anaphora (deliberate repetition at the start of clauses) “In such a night”, the newlyweds compare themselves to four classical pairs:

When they turn the pattern on themselves—Lorenzo saying that “In such a night / Did Jessica steal from the wealthy Jew”, and Jessica replying that Lorenzo stole her soul with “many vows of faith, / And ne’er a true one”—their teasing carries an edge. Every myth they have chosen is a tale of abandonment, theft, broken oaths or death.

Music, harmony and who is left outside it

Lorenzo then calls for musicians and delivers a famous set-piece on cosmic and earthly harmony. He points to the stars as “patens of bright gold” (communion plates) singing in the “harmony” of the spheres, which mortal ears cannot hear while wrapped in “this muddy vesture of decay” (the body). When the musicians play and Jessica says, “I am never merry when I hear sweet music”, Lorenzo replies that music tames even wild colts, and concludes that anyone unmoved by music “Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils”.

For the audience, this speech looks two ways:

1. Back to Venice: It recalls Shylock, who in 2.5 ordered Jessica to lock up his doors against the “vile squealing of the wry-neck’d fife”. In Belmont’s value system, Shylock’s hatred of music marks him as an enemy of natural and divine order.
2. Directly at Jessica: Her quiet line, “I am never merry when I hear sweet music”, is the last line she speaks in the entire play. For the more than two hundred lines that remain—including when Nerissa hands over the “special deed of gift” from “the rich Jew” (one of only two references to Shylock in Act 5, the other being Lorenzo’s “the wealthy Jew” in the opening duet; he is never named)—Jessica says nothing.

The ring plot as a comic mirror of the trial

When Portia and Nerissa arrive, followed by Bassanio, Gratiano and Antonio, the mood shifts from lyric poetry to fast, bawdy comedy. On the surface, the quarrel over the rings is a lightness after the trial; structurally, it is the trial replayed in a comic register: