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 Montferrat

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In their opening conversation, Portia and Nerissa talk about marriage. Portia takes great delight in trashing an assortment of transalpine suitors. The sly Nerissa then mentions a young Venetian, whose name Portia recognizes so rapidly that she tries to undo the results of her too good memory:

 

Ner. 
112 Do you not remember, lady, in your father's 
113 time, a Venetian, a scholar and a soldier, that came 
114 hither in company of the Marquis of Montferrat? 

Por. 
115 Yes, yes, it was Bassanio -- as I think, so was 
116 he call'd. 

Ner. 
117 True, madam; he, of all the men that ever 
118 my foolish eyes look'd upon, was the best deserving 
119 a fair lady. 

Por. 
120 I remember him well, and I remember him 
121 worthy of thy praise.  (Mev 1.2.112-121)

 

Who is the Marquis of Montferrat?  He is mentioned nowhere else in the play, and the name does not recur elsewhere in the corpus.

It is tempting to identify him as the husband of the Marchioness of Monferrato, who is the heroine in one of the sixteen stories from the Decameron that were included in Painter's Palace of Pleasure,  the most widely available anthology of European short fiction in the England of Shakespeare's youth. The King of France, trying to take advantage of the husband's absence, invited himself to her castle hoping to seduce her.  The "sage and discrete" lady prepared an opulent dinner in which all the dishes consisted of hens dressed in different fashion:

The King served with many dishes and excellent wines, beholding sometimes the Lady Marchioness, conceived great delight and pleasure. But viewing the services, and meats (although dressed in diverse sortes) to be but hens, he began to wonder, specially knowing the soil wherein they were to be so rich and plentiful, as by little travail, great abundance of fowl and venison might have been provided, and thought that she had indifferent leisure to chase and hunt, after that he had sent her word of his coming. Notwithstanding he would not take occasion to enter into talk of those wants of better cheer (her hens only exepted) who looking upon her, with merry countenance he said unto her: "Madam were all these hens bred in this country without a cock?" The Marchioness which full well understood the cause of his demand, thinking that God had sent her an apt time for answer as she desired, boldly answered the King: "No and it please your grace, but of women, albeit in honour and apparel there is some difference, yet they be all made in this country as they be elsewhere." The king hearing her answer, right well did know the occasion of the banquet of hens, and whereunto her words did tend: and considered that to bestow any further talk to so wise a lady, it were in vain, and force there could take no place. (Painter 2:340-341, modernized spelling)

The lesson of the story fits Portia. Whether one thinks of her as a model of common sense or xenophobic médisance, she is never one to fall for superficial or imagined difference, and she has no desire to look abroad for what can be got just as well and more safely at home.

In Boccaccio, the story is part of the first day and is a close neighbor of the story of the three rings (also included in Painter) with which it shares a thematic concern for real or imagined difference.[1] If the Marquis of Montferrat does indeed owe his presence in The Merchant of Venice to Shakespeare's memory of reading Painter or Boccaccio, we may ask whether the story of the three rings also hovers in the background of the play. That was  view of Lessing, whose Nathan the Wise is an Enlightenment revision of Shylock on the basis of Boccaccio's ring story. The story of the three rings is never mentioned in The Merchant of Venice,  but it is striking that in the chief source for the play, a novella from Ser Giovan­ni’s anthology Pecorone, there is no ring story. Shakespeare added a very elaborate ring motif , and in the play's closing line about the guarding of Nerissa's ring refers to a coarse coursin to Boccaccio’s parable of the ring that must be cherished even though its truth is always in doubt.[2]   It may well be the case that Boccaccio had a stronger hand in shaping The Merchant of Venice than appears at first sight and that the play existed in Shakespeare's imagination as his version of the story about a ring and a Jew that he first read in Painter.