Thursday
I owe today’s post to my son Tobias Wilson-Bates, who saw pictures of the cargo ship blocking the Suez canal and immediately thought of a passage from Merchant of Venice. Before sharing it, however, I note that someone turned the above picture into a meme to which I can very much relate. The ship is “writing project,” the bulldozer “motivation.”
Okay, back to Shakespeare. Antonio needs money for his shipping enterprise and famously promises Shylock a “pound of flesh” if anything goes wrong and he is unable to pay him back on time. Shylock knows just how unreliable ships can be:
…he
hath an argosy bound to Tripolis, another to the
Indies; I understand moreover, upon the Rialto, he
hath a third at Mexico, a fourth for England, and
other ventures he hath, squandered abroad. But ships
are but boards, sailors but men: there be land-rats
and water-rats, water-thieves and land-thieves, I
mean pirates, and then there is the peril of waters,
winds and rocks.
No mention of canals but you get the point. Pray that the Evergreen owners have provided more reasonable collateral than Antonio as it appears that the ship won’t be going anywhere soon.
