What other news adds to the general denouement of all difficulties?

Is the summing up of the Play a victory of love and intelligence over
hate and narrow-mindedness?

Show how the rings symbolize this, and music and moonlight provide the
proper atmosphere for its operation. The appropriateness of the
moonlight for a calm out of strife, brought about by women, is matched
by the fitness of music and the reference to the harmony of the
spheres to suggest that earth-harmony to which Portia was presiding
Angel.

QUERIES FOR DISCUSSION

Is any incident of Act V without relevance to the plot?

Is the Play the nobler or the weaker dramatically for the poetic and
symbolic influence shed upon it by Act V?




THE MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR


If this Comedy was written, as tradition reports at the bidding of
Queen Elizabeth in order to show Falstaffe in love, it is interesting
to see that Shakespeare confines his love-making to mercenary motives,
and by causing him to make love to two at once renders him as a lover
merely a cheat.