Prince of Morocco: An Analysis of Race, Identity, and Appearance in The Merchant of Venice

Nov 11, 2025 0

In Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, the Prince of Morocco is a pivotal character whose presence illuminates the themes of race, identity, and the significance of outward appearance. His interactions with Portia and his attempt to win her hand in marriage serve as a lens through which Shakespeare critiques the prejudices and biases prevalent in Venetian society.

Shylock and Portia, characters whose interactions highlight the themes of prejudice and bias.

Arrival in Belmont

The play introduces the Prince of Morocco as he arrives in Belmont to attempt to win Portia’s hand in marriage. He immediately confronts the issue of his race, asking Portia not to judge him by his dark complexion.

The prince assures her that he is as valorous as any European man. Portia responds politely, reminding the prince that her own tastes do not matter, since the process of picking chests, stipulated in her father’s will, makes the prince as worthy as any other suitor.

With a lengthy proclamation of his own bravery and heroism, the prince asks Portia to lead him to the caskets, where he may venture his guess. She reminds him that the penalty for guessing incorrectly is that he must remain unmarried forever.

The Casket Challenge

At Belmont, Portia shows the Prince of Morocco the three caskets. The first is gold and bears the words "Who chooseth me, shall gain what many men desire". The second, silver, bears the words "Who chooseth me, shall get as much as he deserves".

Morocco nervously and painstakingly ponders the caskets and their words. He rereads and debates the meaning of each, deciding, ultimately, that it must be the gold because that casket promises "what many men desire." After hesitating a moment longer, Morocco settles on the gold casket.

Portia hands him the key and tells him that if her picture lies inside, she will be his wife. Morocco opens the casket, hopefully, but finds only a skull with a scroll stuck in one of its eye sockets.

He reads its contents aloud. It is a poem, reproaching him for his choice: "All that glisters is not gold / Often you have heard that told," it chimes. Devastated, Morocco leaves.

From what we see of the Prince of Morocco’s inner debate over the correct casket, we see that he values appearance. As he sees the casket with lead, before he even reads the inscription aloud, he first calls it “dull lead.” This signifies that Morocco has some preconceived judgment about what is inside the casket, due to its lead exterior.

Read also: "When You Believe" analysis

As he debates with himself over which casket to choose, he says that many Princes come to “view fair Portia” and to “see fair Portia.” Shakespeare parallels the phrase “fair Portia” to emphasize those two phrases, which show that the Prince’s desire is to see Portia, rather than to know or build a connection with her.

However, to contrast this the Prince of Morocco also suggests that he values love in marriage. He says that he believes that a he is a man who deserves her because of his social status, wealth, graces, and “qualities of breeding.” However, he mentions in the next line that “more than these, in love I do deserve” Portia. This shows that the Prince does indeed value love in marriage. So perhaps through these values, Shakespeare suggests that the Prince of Morocco values love, but his concept of love is based on appearance.

Shakespeare prolongs the scene of riddle-decoding-which he has built up since Morocco's first appearance -making it a dramatic, as well as interpretive act, all for the sake of love. The metallic character of the caskets also implicitly links the themes of love and greed.

Race and Identity

Morocco enters the play well aware of racial prejudice, and his words ask us to interrogate the values attached to skin colour, flesh. Rather than skin, Morocco’s suggests that he should be judge by the redness of his blood - red blood was a sign of valor.

Although Morocco challenges the racial prejudice that elevates the worth of people with white skin (‘fairest creature northward born’), in drawing attention to his blood he unwittingly points to the other bodily property that signifies racial difference.

Morocco enters the play well aware of racial prejudice, and his words ask us to interrogate the values attached to skin colour, flesh.

His first words to her anticipate that she already is against him because of his race: “mislike me not for my complexion” (2.1.1), although he seems to argue that his skin tone does not define him while also praising it. He bears “the shadowed livery of the burnished sun” (2.1.2), and the word choice of ‘livery’ an interesting one.

Literally defined as “clothing or uniform” (OED), it suggests that his skin is a kind of clothing, and so nonpermanent. Because it is not permanent, it may not be essential to his character, creating the possibility that Portia need not judge him by his skin tone at all.

Additionally, the sun is described as burnished, or “having the appearance of polished metal”. This connotes an idea of wealth and status, as it takes care for metal to be polished enough to shine; it also adds a sense of beauty, as metal is more attractive when it shines. His characterization of his complexion is so odd because he speaks positively of it while simultaneously distancing himself from it.

While there were different ideas of what caused skin tone in the 1600s, the prince apparently subscribed to the concept that race was based upon climate, as he calls himself a ‘neighbor’ of the sun before asking to be compared to a person from so far north that “Phoebus’ fire scarce thaws the icicles” as a means of requesting a person who is extraordinarily light skinned.

This belief is fitting when compared to his earlier characterization of his skin tone as clothing, because if skin tone is based on the climate a person lives in, moving to another climate could change that skin tone- making it nonpermanent. This furthers the idea that the prince can escape the negative traits he assumes Portia sees in his skin color.

Additionally, the contest he suggests involves the not his skin color but the color of his blood, placing importance on his internal characteristics rather that internal. Specifically he calls for the judgement of the redness of his blood, a scale by which “virality [...] and strength” (OED) can be measured.

He uses this new aspect of his body in order to assert his masculinity, as well as his fitness for marriage to Portia: if he is virile and strong, he is able to function both as a mate as well as a protector.

Crucially, the person the prince asks to be compared against is described to be the “fairest creature northward born” (2.2.4), as opposed to asking for someone who was simply paler than he was. The prince asks specifically for the person who as white as is possible, as fits one definition of fair, but invites a number of other traits in using that word specifically.

To be fair is also to be “beautiful [and] agreeable”, as well as “admirable [and] noble” (OED). The prince’s use of a word associated with such positive traits creates a stronger dichotomy between himself and his hypothetical competitor, as in his choice to elevate the fairer man as someone to compete with is to indirectly agree that a darker skin tone carries the opposite traits.

If he is asking for the most worthy competitor to be compared to, and that competitor is beautiful and noble because of his fair skin tone, the prince agrees that the traits associated with blackness are not beauty and nobility but some form of their opposites. The prince again works to distance himself from his blackness and present himself as worthy of marrying Portia.

While he’s expressed the positives of his body and what he has been able to achieve with it, he tells Portia that he “would not change this hue / except to steal [her] thoughts” (2.1.11-12). This last statement manages to combine the sentiment of his speech above, as contradictory as it was: he is proud of his skin tone and does not see it negatively, but understands that Portia is likely to and so is willing to give up his own identity to make himself more appealing to her.

This statement does not seem to be hypothetical, rather, the prince seems willing to change himself if it will gain him Portia’s hand. Again, and oddly to the modern reader, the prince refers to race as a non-permanent trait- and while he does not propose a precise method by which he would make himself lighter skinned, he does not present it as an insurmountable obstacle. This viewpoint can be reflected in the larger context of how he values his outward appearance in relation to his internal character traits.

While the prince describes his skin with words connected to wealth and status, he ultimately requests that Portia look further than his most basic appearance. The test of his character is a test of his blood, something she would be unable to see simply by observing the color of his skin.

The presence of a proposed act of violence, although small, speaks to the motivation he has to prove to Portia that he is worthy to marry her. Additionally, his pointed comparison to himself to someone that is fairer reveals his own awareness of the way his race is perceived when compared to a white person.

He knows that Portia is viewing him from a lower starting point than a white person, and to him, a test of blood is the easiest way for him to level the playing field and hopefully have Portia judge him separately from his Moorish status and the connotations of the identity.

Beyond that, he is willing to give up his racial identity entire for her, in the hopes that it will make her desire him. The final effect is somewhat confusing, as he offers to discard the very aspect of himself he praised only lines before, but ultimately adds to the sense of his dedication in wooing her.

The Significance of Appearance

The elaborate excuse the prince of Morocco makes for his dark coloring serves to call attention to it and to his cultural difference from Portia and from Shakespeare’s audience. His extravagant praise of his own valor also makes him seem both less well-mannered and less attractive.

Moreover, his assertion that the best virgins of his clime have loved him seems calculated to make him less, rather than more, attractive to Portia. Her response to his protestations is polite, even courtly, showing her good breeding and her virtuous acquiescence to her dead father’s wishes.

The unimaginability of marriages between people of different races and religions is also expressed by Portia and her dislike of Morocco, who, according to the stage direction, is a ‘tawnie Moore all in white.’ The stage direction makes it clear that Morocco is not White and suggests that he may not be a Christian.

‘Tawnie’ tells us that he has brown skin. Labeling him a Moor creates a bit more ambiguity, but the term often refers to someone who is a non-Christian (usually Muslim) and North African - it, too, is a term that often yokes racial and religious identity.

‘Racial identity is not always visible to the eye. Although Morocco attempts to change the way Portia views skin colour, she will still deem Morocco an undesirable husband because he doesn’t have white skin. After he chooses the wrong casket and departs, Portia says to Nerissa, ‘A gentle riddance. Draw the curtains, go. / Let all of his complexion choose me so.’

When all is said and done, it is Morocco’s complexion that she finds objectionable. Both flesh and blood can mark an individual as undesirable, but Portia’s statement here, coupled with Morocco’s defense of his complexion, suggests that skin colour is the primary marker of racial difference.

Morocco as a Foil to Shylock

While the most obvious outsider in The Merchant of Venice is Shylock, the Jewish moneylender vilified for his insistence on the bodily harm of a man in his debt, a character with a much smaller role operated in a sphere similar to his. Named only as the prince of Morocco, this man sought Portia’s hand in marriage: a wealthy white woman who would be desirable for the purpose of increasing both wealth and class status.

His presence in the play is interesting, as he functions as a parallel to Shylock at times while asking Portia to view him just as she would see anyone of her own race, as well as an example of how to view Shylock in relation to the white characters as the play progresses.

Looking at the prince of Morocco through this lens, it is easier to see how he functions as a character in the relation to the rest of the play. As another version of the outsider, and thus comparable to Shylock, he serves as a way to view the rest of the characters along this same dichotomy.

The prince and Shylock both must take great pains to explain their actions and make their internal motivations blunt to the white Christians in the play, who operate from a privileged position which assumes that they are already moral and just in their actions.

Portia's Prejudice

In terms of the dramatic structure and timing of Merchant, this prejudiced pronouncement of the coming of Morocco, who does not actually appear for some time, is really a flourish of sorts for Shylock’s first entrance in the scene that comes between the announcement and the appearance of Morocco.

In this scene, Shylock rails against the anti-Semitism in Venice until the scene shifts back to Belmont, where Morocco’s very first words are a defense of his skin color. Both Morocco and Shylock are on their asses to defend their identities from their very first appearances, and their subsequent actions show some of the effects of being stigmatized.

Now, Morocco’s gold casket actually contains a skull and a grade-school lesson not to assume that things are as they appear on the outside: “Gilded tombs do worms enfold.” After this admonition, Portia’s overt racism casts a particularly bad light on her, the same bad light that shines on Salanio and Salarino in a later scene when they echo Portia’s treatment of Morocco while stigmatizing Shylock as demonic and dark, seeing him and saying, “The devil … comes in the likeness of a Jew,” hearing him lament his lost daughter and laughing, “There is more difference between thy flesh and hers than between jet and ivory.”

The casket scene, where Morocco's choice reflects the themes of appearance vs. reality.

Conclusion

The Prince of Morocco's character in The Merchant of Venice serves as a critical commentary on the racial and social biases of the time. His attempts to overcome prejudice and win Portia's hand highlight the challenges faced by those who are deemed "outsiders" in a society that values appearance and conformity.