WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE: The Merchant of Venice Remember to support your ideas with details from the text. Read this passage, and then answer the question that follows it: Portia: I pray you tarry; pause a day or two Before you hazard; for, in choosing wrong, I lose your company; therefore forbear awhile. There's something tells me but it is not love I would not lose you; and I know you yourself Hate counsels not in such a quality. But lest you should not understand me well – And yet a maiden hath no tongue but thought – I would detain you here some month or two Before you venture for me. I could teach you How to choose right, but then I am forsworn; So will I never be; so may you miss me; But if you do, you'll make me wish a sin, That I had been forsworn. Beshrew your eyes! They have o'erlook'd me and divided me; One half of me is yours, the other half yours – Mine own, I would say; but if mine, then yours, And so all yours. O! these naughty times Puts bars between the owners and their rights; And so, though yours, not yours. Prove it so, Let fortune go to hell for it, not I. I speak too long, but 'tis to peize the time, To eke it, and to draw it out in length, To stay you from election. Bassanio: Let me choose; For as I am, I live upon the rack. Portia: Upon the rack, Bassanio? Then confess What treason there is mingled with your love. Bassanio: None but that ugly treason of mistrust, Which makes me fear th' enjoying of my love; There may as well be amity and life 'Tween snow and fire as treason and my love. Portia: Ay, but I fear you speak upon the rack, Where men enforced do speak anything. Bassanio: Promise me life, and I'll confess the truth. Portia: Well then, confess and live. Bassanio: 'Confess' and 'love' Had been the very sum of my confession. O happy torment, when my torturer Doth teach me answers for deliverance! But let me to my fortune and the caskets. [from Act 3 Scene 2]