Portia’s Powerful Tongue: The Ethics of Lady Rhetoric in The Merchant of Venice
What Shakespeare finally understands is that in the ethical moment of disposing means to end, the rhetor is only imperfectly in command of a fallen world, and if this limitation can lead a woman of Portia’s moral and intellectual virtue to error in her sacrificing a tragic usurer to secure comic marriages, we ought not be overly confident in either the virtue of our own rhetoric or the exactitude of our own generic terms.