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I
Two scenes from Shakespeare, one from a comedy and the other from a tragedy, have lately given me occasion for posing and solving a small problem.
The first of these scenes is the suitors choice between the three caskets in The Merchant of Venice. The fair and wise Portia is bound at her fathers bidding to take as her husband only that one of her suitors who chooses the right casket from among the three before him. The three caskets are of gold, silver and lead: the right casket is the one that contains her portrait. Two suitors have already departed unsuccessful: they have chosen gold and silver. Bassanio, the third, decides in favor of lead; thereby he wins the bride, whose affection was already his before the trial of fortune. Each of the suitors gives reasons for his choice in a speech in which he praises the metal he prefers and depreciates the other two. The most difficult task thus falls to the share of the fortunate third suitor; what he finds to say in glorification of lead as against gold and silver is little and has a forced ring. If in psychoanalytic practice we were confronted with such a speech, we should suspect that there were concealed motives behind the unsatisfying reasons produced.
Shakespeare did not himself invent this oracle of the choice of a casket; he took it from a tale in the Gesta Romanorum (a medieval collection of stories of unknown authorship), in which a girl has to make the same choice to win the Emperors son. Here, too, the third metal, lead, is the bringer of fortune. It is not hard to guess that we have here an ancient theme, which requires to be interpreted, accounted for and traced back to its origin. A first conjecture as to the meaning of this choice between gold, silver and lead is quickly confirmed by a statement of Stuckens, who has made a study of the same material over a wide field. He writes: The identity of Portias three suitors is clear from their choice: the Prince of Morocco chooses the gold caskethe is the sun; the Prince of Arragon chooses the silver caskethe is the moon; Bassanio chooses the leaden caskethe is the star youth. In support of this explanation he cites an episode from the Estonian folk-epic Kalewipoeg, in which the three suitors appear undisguisedly as the sun, moon and star youths (the last being the Pole-stars eldest boy) and once again the bride falls to the lot in the third.
Thus our little problem has led us to an astral myth! The only pity is that with this explanation we are not at the end of the matter....We do not share the belief of some investigators that myths were read in the heavens and brought down to earth; we are more inclined to judge with Otto Rank that they were projected on to the heavens after having arisen elsewhere under purely human conditions. It is in this human content that our interest lies.
...Something appears in [the scene from The Merchant of Venice] that is the nature of an inversion of the theme: a man chooses between three caskets. If what we were concerned with were a dream, it would occur to us at once that caskets are also women, symbols of what is essential in woman, and therefore of a woman herselflike coffers, boxes, cases, baskets and so on....
This same content...is to be found...in one of [Shakespeares] most powerfully moving dramas; not the choice of a bride this time, yet linked by many hidden similarities to the choice of the casket in The Merchant of Venice. The old King Lear resolves to divide his kingdom while he is still alive among his three daughters, in proportion to the amount of love that each of them expresses for him. The two elder ones, Goneril and Regan, exhaust themselves in asseverations and laudations of their love for him; the third, Cordelia, refuses to do so. He should have recognized the unassuming, speechless love of his third daughter and rewarded it, but he does not recognize it. He disowns Cordelia, and divides the kingdom bet-ween the other two, to his own and the general ruin. Is not this once more the scene of a choice between three women, of whom the youngest is the best, the most excellent one?
There will at once occur to us other scenes from myths, fairy tales and literature, with the same situation as their content. The shepherd Paris has to choose between three goddesses, of whom he declares the third to be the most beautiful. Cinderella, again, is a youngest daughter, who is preferred by the prince to her two elder sisters. Psyche, in Apuleiuss story, is the youngest and fairest of three sisters. Psyche is, on the one hand, revered as Aphrodite in human form; on the other, she is treated by that goddess as Cinderella was treated by her stepmother and is set the task of sorting a heap of mixed seeds, which she accomplishes with the help of small creatures (doves in the case of Cinderella, ants in the case of Psyche). Anyone who cared to make a wider survey of the material would undoubtedly discover other versions of the same theme preserving the same essential features.
Let us be content with Cordelia, Aphrodite, Cinderella and Psyche. In all the stories the three women, of whom the third is the most excellent one, must surely be regarded as in some way alike if they are represented as sisters. (We must not be led astray by the fact that Lears choice is between three daughters; this may mean nothing more than that he has to be represented as an old man. An old man cannot very well choose between three women in any other way. Thus they become his daughters.)
But who are these three sisters and why must the choice fall on the third?...It must strike us that this excellent third woman has in several instances certain peculiar qualities besides her beauty.... Cordelia makes herself unrecognizable, inconspicuous like lead, she remains dumb, she loves and is silent. Cordelia hides so that she cannot be found. We may perhaps be allowed to equate concealment and dumbness.
...If we decide to regard the peculiarities of our third one as concentrated in her dumbness, then psychoanalysis will tell us that in dreams dumbness is a common representation of death.
...At this point I will single out the ninth story in Grimms Fairy Tales, which bears the title The Twelve Brothers. A king and a queen have twelve children, all boys. The king declares that if the thirteenth child is a girl, the boys will have to die. In expectation of her birth he has twelve coffins made. With their mothers help the twelve sons take refuge in a hidden wood, and swear death to any girl they may meet. A girl is born, grows up, and learns one day from her mother that she has had twelve brothers. She decides to seek them out, and in the wood she finds the youngest; he recognizes her, but is anxious to hide her on account of the brothers oath. The sister says: I will gladly die, if by so doing I can save my twelve brothers. The brothers welcome her affectionately, however, and she stays with them and looks after their house for them. In a little garden beside the house grow twelve lilies. The girl picks them and gives one to each brother. At that moment the brothers are changed into ravens, and disappear, together with the house and garden....The girl, who is once more ready to save her brothers from death, is now told that as a condition she must be dumb for seven years, and not speak a single word. She submits to the test, which brings her herself into mortal danger. She herself, that is, dies for her brothers, as she promised to do before she met them. By remaining dumb she succeeds at last in setting the ravens free....
It would certainly be possible to collect further evidence from fairy tales that dumbness is to be understood as representing death. These indications would lead us to conclude that the third one of the sisters between whom the choice is made is a dead woman. But she may be something else as wellnamely, Death itself, the Goddess of Death....
But if the third of the sisters is the Goddess of Death, the sisters are known to us. They are the Fates, the Moerae, the Parcae or the Norns, the third of whom is called Atropos, the inexorable.
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