A man walks into a room and finds three boxes waiting for him. One is gold, one is silver, one is lead. He has been told that his whole life turns on which one he opens, and that the rules forbid him to open more than one. The woman he wants stands beside the boxes, unable to help him, bound by a dead father’s will. This is the casket scene from The Merchant of Venice, and it is one of the strangest moments in Shakespeare, because the test is rigged twice over. It is rigged inside the play, where Portia’s dead father designed the riddle so that only a man who can see past surface will win her. It is rigged outside the play, in the deeper sense Freud uncovered in 1913, where the choice was never free at all, and the man was always going to reach for the box that means his death.

Continue reading → The Third Casket: How Shakespeare Taught Us to Choose the Thing We Cannot Refuse