Gratiano
Character Profile – At a Glance
- Role: A young Venetian gentleman of Bassanio's circle, the play's most talkative figure, suitor and then husband of Nerissa, and the loudest Christian voice in the courtroom – the "very admirable subordinate character" whose self-defence speech in A1S1 was singled out by critics for the wisdom packed into it.
- Key Traits: Witty, hot-tempered, garrulous, and given to overstatement and coarse humour, but capable of real philosophical writing when he chooses to be – and, in his most exposed moments, the comedy's most open voice of religious aggression against Shylock.
- The Core Conflict: A young man whose comic register runs inside a Christian-supremacist world the play never quite criticises – and who is the most visible carrier of that world's reflexive hostility toward the Jewish moneylender.
- Key Actions: Delivers the "Let me play the fool" self-defence in A1S1; helps with the elopement in A2S6 and calls Jessica "a gentle and no Jew"; gets engaged to Nerissa at the casket-scene in A3S2; abuses Shylock as a "second Daniel" and "infidel" in A4S1; gives away his wedding ring to the clerk in A4S2; is exposed in the ring trick in A5S1; and speaks the play's coarse closing couplet.
- Famous Quote:
"Let me play the fool:
With mirth and laughter let old wrinkles come;
And let my liver rather heat with wine,
Than my heart cool with mortifying groans."
(Act 1, Scene 1) - The Outcome: Marries Nerissa in A3S2, gives away his ring in A4S2, and is caught out in the ring trick in A5S1. He ends the play paired off in the Belmont household with the play's last word in his mouth – and that last word is one of the coarsest in any of Shakespeare's mature comedies.
"Let Me Play the Fool"
Gratiano's first real speech is the play's first piece of substantive philosophy, and it is the reason he cannot be read as a merely comic figure. Antonio has just opened the play with "I know not why I am so sad"; Gratiano, hearing it, sets out his alternative.
Original
Let me play the fool:
With mirth and laughter let old wrinkles come,
And let my liver rather heat with wine
Than my heart cool with mortifying groans.
Why should a man, whose blood is warm within,
Sit like his grandsire cut in alabaster?
…
There are a sort of men whose visages
Do cream and mantle like a standing pond,
And do a wilful stillness entertain,
With purpose to be dressed in an opinion
Of wisdom, gravity, profound conceit...
(Act 1, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
I'll play fool:
My jokes cause laughter-lines, like old-age wrinkles,
And, liver, make me hot and red with wine
Before my heart goes cold from dull complaining.
Why should a man, whose blood flows warm within him,
Sit like a stone-cut statue of his grandad?
…
There is a type of man who likes to look
Lifeless, like scum upon a stagnant pond,
And quite deliberately keeps very still
Intending to create a reputation
That he's a wise, sophisticated thinker...
The speech runs on the old medicine of the four "humours" – blood, choler, phlegm, melancholy – which were thought to set a person's temperament. Gratiano's argument is that the warm-blooded man's natural state is mirth, and that cultivating a heavy, solemn manner is a kind of disease. His image of men who "cream and mantle like a standing pond" – covered with the scum that forms on water that never moves – is one of Shakespeare's sharpest pictures of fake profundity. Men who "do a wilful stillness entertain" so as to be thought wise are, in his reading, performing wisdom rather than having it. The reproof is gentle, and aimed at Antonio, who has just called himself melancholy: Gratiano is not accusing his friend of being one of these false-wise men, only offering the cheerful alternative before the diagnosis sets. It is the play's first sign that Gratiano, for all his later noise and aggression, has a mind behind the mouth.
"A Gentle and No Jew"
A2S6 is the elopement scene, and Gratiano's part in it is small but exposing. He has come with Lorenzo to Shylock's house, watches Jessica come down to join Lorenzo, and sums her up in a single line.
Original
Now, by my hood, a gentle and no Jew.
(Act 2, Scene 6)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
I swear she is a gentile, not a Jew.
The line turns on a pun. "Gentle" and "Gentile" were near-homophones in early modern English, and Gratiano's line means both at once. On the surface Jessica is "gentle" – mild, fair, well-mannered – and underneath she is a "Gentile," because by fleeing her father's house she has, on Gratiano's reckoning, already crossed from Jew to Christian. The pun does the comedy's religious work in five words. The play never stages a formal conversion for Jessica; her change of religion is simply implied by the marriage to Lorenzo, and Gratiano's line treats it as already done the moment she chooses flight over inheritance. What makes the line revealing is its logic: she is "no Jew" not because of anything she believes but because she has shown qualities the play files under Christianity – gentleness, romance, a willingness to leave her father. Christian identity here works less as a faith than as a badge of social acceptability. And the line quietly forecasts the courtroom: the idea that Jewishness can be erased by behaviour is the same idea Portia's verdict will enforce by law when she makes conversion the price of Shylock's life.
The Courtroom Aggression
A4S1 is the play's most important scene, and Gratiano is the figure who voices Christian aggression at its most naked. Portia has turned the bond against Shylock; he is, by the scene's logic, defeated; Gratiano crows over him.
Original
A second Daniel, a Daniel, Jew!
Now, infidel, I have you on the hip.
…
A Daniel, still say I, a second Daniel!
I thank thee, Jew, for teaching me that word.
(Act 4, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
It's Daniel's second coming, Jew! It's Daniel!
I've got you by the short and curlies, heathen!
…
There's another Daniel then, a Daniel!
I thank you, Jew, for teaching me that word.
Several things happen at once. Gratiano takes Shylock's own earlier praise of Portia – "A Daniel come to judgment! Yea, a Daniel!", spoken when Shylock thought she was backing his bond – and throws it back as the instrument of his defeat. He does it in the language of religious-ethnic abuse: "Jew," "infidel" are not incidental, they are the whole vehicle of the celebration. And "I thank thee, Jew, for teaching me that word" turns Shylock into the man whose own biblical learning has been used to school him in the words of his destruction. The uncomfortable part is the mix. Gratiano is, on one level, celebrating the rescue of a friend whose life was genuinely at stake, which is understandable; but he conducts that celebration in a register the play's other scenes are far more careful about. The aggression is not what wins the case – Portia's ruling has already done that – so it adds nothing to the outcome. It only characterises the victors, and it is the clearest evidence the play gives that the Christian triumph is not as clean as its winners would like to think.
The Ring and the Closing
A5S1 brings Gratiano's exposure in the ring trick and, after it, the play's final lines. When Nerissa confronts him over the missing ring, he protests – "By yonder moon I swear you do me wrong" – swears he only gave it to the judge's clerk, and tops it off with a characteristically coarse wish, that the man who took it "were gelt" (castrated) for the trouble it has caused. Then Nerissa reveals that the clerk was herself in disguise, the trick lands, Gratiano takes his medicine, and the marriages are restored. What follows is the play's most exposed structural choice: Shakespeare gives its final couplet not to Portia or Lorenzo but to Gratiano – the loudest, coarsest voice in the Christian circle.
Original
Well, while I live I'll fear no other thing
So sore as keeping safe Nerissa's ring.
(Act 5, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Whilst I'm alive, I'll fear no other thing
As much as keeping safe Nerissa's ring.
The couplet turns on the play's central image. "Ring" means a wedding ring and, in the bawdy slang of the period, a piece of female anatomy, so the play's last words are a dirty joke. The choice is pointed. The pastoral beauty of Lorenzo's "patines of bright gold" speech and the high seriousness of Portia's "quality of mercy" – neither of these closes the play. It closes on Gratiano's anatomical pun, and that low register is what the audience is left holding. The comic resolution at Belmont is real, but its final image is no more elevated than Gratiano himself. The reading this best supports is that Shakespeare deliberately refuses to let the comedy end in Lorenzo's lyric mode – a quiet reminder that the play runs on coarse human appetite as well as celestial harmony, and that its closing arithmetic has to include both.
"Gratiano is a very admirable subordinate character. He is the jester of the piece: yet one speech of his, in his own defence, contains a whole volume of wisdom."
— William Hazlitt, Characters of Shakespeare's Plays, 1817
Key Quotes by Gratiano
Quote 1
Let me play the fool:
With mirth and laughter let old wrinkles come,
And let my liver rather heat with wine
Than my heart cool with mortifying groans.
(Act 1, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
I'll play fool:
My jokes cause laughter-lines, like old-age wrinkles,
And, liver, make me hot and red with wine
Before my heart goes cold from dull complaining.
Quote Analysis: Gratiano's most-quoted self-introduction, and the speech long singled out for the wisdom packed into a comic figure. It runs on the old medicine of the four humours, with Gratiano arguing that the warm-blooded man's natural state is mirth. The "let my liver rather heat with wine" image is exact for the period: the liver was thought to be the seat of the body's heat and vital energy, so Gratiano frames his cheerfulness as a matter of physiology rather than mere temperament. It is the play's first sign that he is more than a clown.
Quote 2
Now, by my hood, a gentle and no Jew.
(Act 2, Scene 6)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
I swear she is a gentile, not a Jew.
Quote Analysis: One of the play's most carefully built puns and one of its most exposing lines. "Gentle" and "Gentile" were near-homophones in early modern English, and the line means both: Jessica is "gentle" (mild, fair) and therefore "Gentile" (not Jewish). The pun does the comedy's religious work in five words. The play never stages a formal conversion for Jessica; Gratiano's line simply treats it as complete the moment she chooses flight over inheritance.
Quote 3
A second Daniel, a Daniel, Jew!
Now, infidel, I have you on the hip.
(Act 4, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
It's Daniel's second coming, Jew! It's Daniel!
I've got you by the short and curlies, heathen!
Quote Analysis: The play's most exposed piece of Christian-aggressive speech, and the moment Gratiano's comic register tips into religious contempt. He takes Shylock's own earlier line – "A Daniel come to judgment," spoken when Shylock thought Portia was backing his bond – and throws it back as the instrument of his defeat. The repeated "Jew" and "infidel" turn the celebration of Antonio's rescue into a piece of religious humiliation that the verdict itself never required.
Quote 4
Well, while I live I'll fear no other thing
So sore as keeping safe Nerissa's ring.
(Act 5, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Whilst I'm alive, I'll fear no other thing
As much as keeping safe Nerissa's ring.
Quote Analysis: The play's closing couplet, and one of the most-discussed structural choices in Shakespeare's mature work. The pun on "ring" – a wedding ring, and, in the slang of the period, a piece of female anatomy – turns the play's final words into a dirty joke. The choice is pointed: neither Lorenzo's moonlit lyricism nor Portia's "quality of mercy" gets the last word. Gratiano's anatomical pun does, and that low register is what the comedy finally leaves with the audience.
Key Takeaways
- The Jester With Wisdom: Gratiano is "a very admirable subordinate character" whose "Let me play the fool" speech carries real philosophy – which keeps him from being read as merely comic.
- The Gentle/Gentile Pun: "Now, by my hood, a gentle and no Jew" is the comedy's most efficient piece of religious wordplay, turning Jessica's elopement into a conversion before any formal change of religion has happened.
- The Courtroom Aggressor: Gratiano is the comedy's most exposed Christian voice – the figure whose "second Daniel" and "infidel on the hip" lines turn the defeat of Shylock into religious humiliation.
- The Coarse Closing Couplet: The play's final lines – "while I live I'll fear no other thing / So sore as keeping safe Nerissa's ring" – are among the coarsest in Shakespeare's mature comedy, and one of the most-discussed closing choices in the canon.
Study Questions and Analysis
Why is Gratiano so important if he is not a principal character?
His importance works at the level of register rather than plot. He has no central arc – he does not woo Portia (Bassanio does), does not save Antonio (Portia does), and does not generate the comic machinery (Shylock's bond and Portia's caskets do). What he does is voice the Christian community's reflexive positions at their most exposed. The "Let me play the fool" speech in A1S1 gives the comedy its philosophical opening; the "gentle and no Jew" line in A2S6 carries the religious-conversion pun that runs through the elopement; the "second Daniel" lines in A4S1 expose the aggression the more careful Christians tend to soften; the closing couplet in A5S1 sets the play's final register. William Hazlitt's phrase "a very admirable subordinate character" (1817) captures the placement exactly: Gratiano is subordinate to the principals, but his job is to say out loud the things they hold but do not always voice. Modern criticism has increasingly read him as the play's diagnostic voice – the figure who reveals what the more polished Christians are also thinking. The reading is defensible: Bassanio would not call Shylock an "infidel" in court, but he does not need to, because Gratiano does it for him. His marriage works the same way – a comic parallel to the principal match, which he announces by frankly tracking it to Bassanio's:
I thank your lordship, you have got me one.
My eyes, my lord, can look as swift as yours:
You saw the mistress, I beheld the maid;
You loved, I loved for intermission.
(Act 3, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
My thanks, my lord; for you have found me one.
My eyes, my lord, are just as fast as yours:
You saw the lady, then I saw her maid.
You fell in love; I fell in love straight after.
The friendship circle is not flat – Gratiano is the one whose register the others quietly rely on to do work they would rather not do themselves.
What is the "gentle/Gentile" pun and how does it work?
The pun works at the level of sound as well as meaning. In early modern English "gentle" and "Gentile" were near-homophones – both roughly "jen-til" – so the difference was visible on the page but not in the mouth. The meanings overlapped too. "Gentle" meant well-born (the root of the modern "gentleman"), mild-mannered, and morally fair; "Gentile" was a religious-ethnic term, non-Jewish or Christian, from the biblical Latin gentilis. The pun trades on the period's habit of treating "gentle" qualities – mildness, fairness, mercy – as Christian rather than Jewish ones, so a single word could convert ethnic identity into moral character. Gratiano's "a gentle and no Jew" uses it at its most efficient: on the surface Jessica is gentle and so not a stereotypical Jew; underneath she is a Gentile, converted by her own action, no longer needing the religion she was raised in. The line does both at once. The pun recurs across the play – Lorenzo calls her "gentle Jessica" – and it is one of the play's structural devices: a piece of wordplay that lets the religious boundary be both held (Jews are not Gentiles) and dissolved (Jews can be "gentle," at which point they have become "Gentile" in the sense the play cares about).
Is Gratiano's courtroom aggression justified?
The play does not finally justify it. William Hazlitt's 1817 chapter is blunt: Shylock is treated harshly by his judges, and the Christian aggression in court – of which Gratiano is the loudest voice – rests on principles the Christians would not accept if turned on themselves. The "second Daniel" lines and the "infidel on the hip" outburst convert what is, structurally, Portia's legal-technical win into a piece of religious humiliation, and the abuse is not necessary for the outcome: Shylock has already been defeated by the pound-of-flesh, no-drop-of-blood ruling. The aggression is therefore additional. It does not produce the victory; it characterises the victors. The choice is pointed. The play could have given Gratiano a quiet line of relief or a word of friendship to Antonio, and instead handed him the loudest, most religiously aggressive language available – which exposes the Christian triumph rather than smoothing it. Productions vary: some play him as a young hothead whose aggression is uncharacteristic of the wider circle, others as the open voice of what the more careful characters also feel. The text supports the second reading more clearly. Antonio, by his own admission in A1S3, has spat on Shylock and called him a dog; the difference between the two men is mostly one of volume, not of underlying position.
How does Gratiano compare to other Shakespearean comic friends?
The Shakespearean comic friend – the companion to the romantic lead who supplies a lighter counterpoint – is a recognisable type: Mercutio and Benvolio in Romeo and Juliet, Berowne in Love's Labour's Lost, Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing. What sets Gratiano apart is the coarseness of his register. Mercutio is verbally dazzling, but his fireworks serve a different end – the "Queen Mab" speech is some of the purest poetry in Shakespeare, and his aggression toward Tybalt is about personal honour, not religious contempt. Benedick's wit plays out in the marriage-comedy of Much Ado and is aimed mostly at Beatrice; Berowne's is aimed mostly at himself. Gratiano's coarseness is specific to his function. He is the figure handed the religious-political register the other Christians will not voice directly, and the figure whose closing couplet refuses the lyric ending Lorenzo has set up. The nearest match is probably Petruchio in The Taming of the Shrew, who shares the verbal volume and the comic-aggressive edge, though he belongs to a different play's world. Gratiano is the figure Shakespeare uses to mark the comedy's lower register – the reminder that the pastoral resolution is held together by people whose actual manner is much rougher than the resolution suggests. He is admirable in a particular way: not as a moral model, but as the play's honest voice about itself.
Why does Shakespeare give Gratiano the play's final lines?
The decision has both a structural and an aesthetic side. Structurally, Shakespeare's comedies often close on a coarse or marriage-minded couplet rather than a lyric one – A Midsummer Night's Dream ends with Puck's epilogue rather than Theseus's high register, Much Ado About Nothing with Benedick's "Strike up, pipers" and a dance. The closing couplet usually marks the comedy's quiet recognition that the lyric height of the resolution has to give way to the more grounded register of ordinary married life. Even his complaint a few lines earlier, on being caught out in the ring trick, keeps that comic-domestic register rather than any lyric one:
Why, this is like the mending of highways
In summer, where the ways are fair enough...
(Act 5, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
What? This is like repairing of the highways
In summer, prior to the winter's damage...
The aesthetic side is sharper. Gratiano's couplet takes the play's central image – the ring – and turns it into anatomical innuendo. By A5S1 the rings have carried enormous weight: Portia's as the test of Bassanio's fidelity, Nerissa's as the parallel test of Gratiano's, and Shylock's turquoise ring – Leah's gift – as the play's deepest emblem of personal loss. The closing couplet collapses all that symbolic weight back into a bodily joke. Critics have read the choice three ways: as Shakespeare's refusal to let the comedy end in Lorenzo's lyric mode; as the play's admission that it runs on human appetite as well as celestial harmony; and as a recognition that the comic resolution has been secured by a Christian community whose closing register is not as elevated as its mid-play rhetoric. All three are defensible from the text.
What does Gratiano reveal about the Christian community in Venice?
His job is to say out loud what the Christian community holds quietly. That community – Antonio, Bassanio, Lorenzo, Salarino, Solanio, Gratiano – runs on a consistent moral register: generous to each other (the friendship plot turns on Antonio's willingness to mortgage his body for Bassanio's courtship), contemptuous of Shylock, and untroubled by the contradiction. Gratiano is the one who makes the contempt audible. The others hold the same positions but voice them more discreetly: Antonio's "I am like to call thee so again, to spit on thee again" in A1S3 is said privately to Shylock; Gratiano's "infidel" and "Jew" in A4S1 are public. Lorenzo's "faithless Jew" in A2S4 is an aside to Gratiano; Gratiano's "second Daniel" in A4S1 is hurled straight at Shylock in triumph. The difference is always one of volume. What he reveals, then, is not that he holds different views from the rest – he does not – but that the community's polite manner depends on having a Gratiano to deliver the impolite version when the moment calls for it. The closing couplet does the same job in the marriage plot: the Belmont household needs someone to mark the comic-domestic ordinary alongside the lyric celebration, and he is that someone. "A very admirable subordinate character," in this sense, is exact – Gratiano is admirable not as a model but as a kind of reagent, the figure who makes the play's economy of speech visible.
Does Gratiano change across the play?
Not in the way Shylock or Portia does. He arrives in A1S1 as the comic-philosophical talker and ends in A5S1 as the speaker of the closing couplet, and the register between those two points is continuous. What changes is where he aims it. In A1S1 the "Let me play the fool" speech is aimed at Antonio's melancholy as a gentle reproof; in A4S1 the same garrulous voice is aimed at Shylock as religious aggression. The voice is the same; the target has moved. The same continuity shows in the marriage plot: confronted in A5S1 about the missing ring, he brushes off the wedding token as a trifle, exactly as the coarse comic talker of A1S1 would:
About a hoop of gold, a paltry ring
That she did give me, whose posy was
For all the world like cutler's poetry
Upon a knife, 'Love me, and leave me not.'
(Act 5, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
About a hoop of gold, a simple ring
That she had given me, which was engraved
For all to see, with jeweller's poetry
Carved with a knife, 'Love me, and do not leave me.'
The quiet point is that Gratiano does not become an aggressor so much as reveal, in the courtroom, that his comic register has always run on an economy of in-group warmth and out-group contempt the earlier scenes had not made explicit. The A4S1 outbursts are the natural extension of the A1S1 self-defence, not a break from it. So what really changes is the audience's reading of him rather than the man himself: the figure who looked like a comic philosopher in A1S1 is, by A4S1, also the voice of the play's most exposed religious aggression – and both are the same character. The play's argument is that, in this Venetian Christian world, the comic-philosophical and the religious-aggressive are not separable. Gratiano holds both because they have always worked together, and the play's quiet achievement is to make the connection visible without commenting on it.
