The New Hudson Shakespeare · William Shakespeare
PORTIA
The delineation of Portia is completed in a few brief masterly strokes. Once seen, the portrait ever after lives an old and dear acquaintance of the reader's inner man. Portia has strength enough to do and suffer for others, but very little for herself. As the daughter of Cato and the wife of Brutus, she has set in her eye a pattern of how she ought to think and act, being "so father'd and so husbanded"; but still her head floats merged over the ears in her heart; and it is only when affection speaks that her spirit is hushed into the listening which she would fain yield only to the speech of reason. She has a clear idea of the stoical calmness and fortitude which appears so noble and so graceful in her Brutus; it all lies faithfully reproduced in her mind; she knows well how to honor and admire it; yet she cannot work it into the texture of her character; she can talk it like a book, but she tries in vain to live it.
Plutarch gives one most touching incident respecting her which Shakespeare did not use, though he transfused the sense of it into his work. It occurred some time after Cæsar's death, and when the civil war was growing to a head: "Brutus, seeing the state of Rome would be utterly overthrown, went ... unto the city of Elea standing by the sea. There Portia, being ready to depart from her husband Brutus and to return to Rome, did what she could to dissemble the grief and sorrow she felt at her heart. But a certain painted table (picture) bewrayed her in the end.... The device was taken out of the Greek stories, how Andromache accompanied her husband Hector when he went out of the city of Troy to go to the wars, and how Hector delivered her his little son, and how her eyes were never off him. Portia, seeing this picture, and likening herself to be in the same case, she fell a-weeping; and coming thither oftentimes in a day to see it, she wept still." The force of this incident is reproduced in the Portia of the play; we have its full effect in the matter about her self-inflicted wound as compared with her subsequent demeanor.
Portia gives herself that gash without flinching, and bears it without a murmur, as an exercise and proof of fortitude; and she translates her pains into smiles, all to comfort and support her husband. So long as this purpose lends her strength, she is fully equal to her thought, because here her heart keeps touch perfectly with her head. But, this motive gone, the weakness, if it be not rather the strength, of her woman's nature rushes full upon her; her feelings rise into an uncontrollable flutter, and run out at every joint and motion of her body; and nothing can arrest the inward mutiny till affection again whispers her into composure, lest she say something that may hurt or endanger her Brutus.
Ideas discussed in this chapter
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.