Morocco's long speech, beginning at line 13, was no doubt inserted by Shakespeare to allow the actor plenty of time to move back and forth with much hesitation between the caskets. Talking to himself, he says, "Pause there, Morocco. . . . What if I strayed no further, but chose here?" He is postponing the moment of choice and prolonging the suspense of this dramatic moment. We have already seen Morocco and know that he is a proud and powerful prince, rich in his dress and in his language, and therefore it is no surprise to watch him move from the least beautiful and outwardly appealing of the caskets to the most beautiful; he has, he says, "a golden mind." Thus he makes the most straightforward and obvious choice — for him: the golden casket, for "Never so rich a gem / Was set in worse than gold." When he opens it and finds the skull and the scroll, Shakespeare's moral is clear — that is, wealth and sensory beauty, symbolized here by gold, are merely transitory: "Many a man his life hath sold / But my outside to behold." We shall see later that the test of the caskets contains a theme that occurs elsewhere in the play: the difference between what merely seems and what really is — that is, the difference between appearance and reality. The caskets also suggest another element in the play — namely, the illusion that material wealth (gold and silver) is of value, when, in reality, it is of ultimately little value. Yet material wealth is Shylock's obsession; gold is his real god, and therein is his tragic flaw.
