Portia (The Merchant of Venice) Portia (The Merchant of Venice) Portia is the protagonist of William Shakespeare's "The Merchant of Venice". A rich, beautiful, and intelligent heiress of Belmont, she is bound by the lottery set forth in her father's will, which gives potential suitors the chance to choose among three caskets. If he chooses the right casket, he wins Portia's hand in marriage. If he chooses the incorrect casket, he must leave and never seek another woman in marriage. She is said to be blonde and has curly hair. As Bassanio says to Antonio in (Act I scene I), she is more beautiful than
The Plays of William Shakespeare another in the dark." Raleigh then admitted that he "soon falls into the habit, when he meets with an obscure passage, of consulting Johnson's note before the others." T. S. Eliot wrote that "no poet can ask more of posterity than to be greatly honoured by the great; and Johnson's words about Shakespeare are great honour". Walter Jackson Bate, in his 1977 biography on Johnson, wrote: the edition of Shakespeare – viewed with historical understanding of what it involved in 1765 – could seem a remarkable feat; and we are not speaking of just the great "Preface" To see it