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If to do were as easy as to know what we...

Portia

The Merchant of Venice

William Shakespeare

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Monologue Overview

Character
Gender
Female
Playing Age
Young Adult, Adult
Style
Comedic
Act/Scene
Act 1 Scene 2
Time & Place
Belmont, sixteenth-century
Length
Short
Time Period
Classical
Show Type
Play
Age Guidance
Youth (Y)/General Audiences (G)

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Context

Text

If to do were as easy as to know what were good to do, chapels had been churches, and poor men’s cottages princes’ palaces. It is a good divine that follows his own instructions: I can easier teach twenty what were good to be done, than be one of the twenty to follow mine own teaching. The brain may devise laws for the blood, but a hot temper leaps o’er a cold decree: such a hare is madness the youth, to skip o’er the meshes of good counsel the cripple. But this reasoning is not in the fashion to choose me a husband. O me, the word ‘choose!’ I may neither choose whom I would nor refuse whom I dislike; so is the will of a living daughter curbed by the will of a dead father. Is it not hard, Nerissa, that I cannot choose one nor refuse none?

William Shakespeare. The Merchant of Venice Act 1, sc.2, ll.12-26

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