Picture a man in a bright room in a great house. In front of him sit three boxes. One is gold, one is silver, one is lead. He may open exactly one of them. Open the right box and he marries the cleverest and richest woman in the room and clears the debt closing around his friend's neck. Open either of the others and he leaves forever, sworn never to court another woman as long as he lives. The woman who waits for him loves him, and by the terms of her dead father's will she is forbidden to give him the smallest hint. Music plays. He reads the words cut into the three lids, he talks for a while about the gap between how things look and what they are, and he lays his hand on the dullest of the three, the lead, and wins her.
That is the casket scene from The Merchant of Venice, and it may be the most rigged fair contest in the English language. Shakespeare wrote it in the fifteen-nineties. It never closed. You walked through a version of it this morning, and you will walk through another one before you sleep tonight.
