SOURCE: "Shylock in the City of God," in Character and Characterization in Shakespeare, Wayne State University Press, 1962, pp. 7-32.

[In the following essay, Kirschbaum analyzes what the words "Christian" and "Jew" meant to an Elizabethan audience and argues that Shylock is not meant to be Shakespeare's portrayal of a "real Jew " but rather resemble the Elizabethan Puritan, and is intended to symbolize the anti-social traits which threatened conventional, Anglican sensibilities.]

The Merchant of Venice is a fantasy—but it is, at bottom, a serious fantasy. Its characters are not deeply drawn; its plot is providential; its atmosphere is unrealistic—but the conflict of values it illustrates was important to Shakespeare's own time. Difficult as it may be, let us suspend our own values, our contemporary basic decencies, if you wish, and strive to become members of a 1596 audience. Let us, in short, see what Shakespeare meant by Jew and Christian in his play so that we may come to understand a fifth act which is a triumph of moonlight, music, friendship, love, and laughter—a fifth act which so many people today must regard as extraneous and, perhaps, nasty after the fall of poor, persecuted Shylock.

There were no Jewish communities in England in Shakespeare's time. The rare individuals of Hebraic origin that history discovers in sixteenth century England merely enforce the point. Theatergoers could no more encounter kinsmen of Shylock in the streets of London than they could encounter kinsmen of Caliban. To the playwright and his auditors, Jews were almost as mythical as anthropophagi. Shakespeare's source for Shylock was not life but literature and folklore. In them the Jew was typed as an anti-Christian, usurious, cruel monster. This is the stereotyped figure which Shakespeare utilized for Shylock. And these are the traits which his spectators would expect in any stage Jew. Shylock would immediately be recognized as alien to the City of God, the ideal Christian community of the Middle Ages—and of the Reformation too, as Zurich and Geneva witness. But Shakespeare put the folklore Jew to new purposes. He infused the pasteboard figure with a range of attitudes and traits which symbolize the vast disruptive forces of sixteenth century Europe. The Christian community of Venice—i.e., the City of God—which Shylock threatens is an idealized projection of a real England which felt and saw but could not completely understand what was undermining it. As scapegoat, Shakespeare's Jew would provide a London audience of the 1590's with a satisfying release of resentments and frustrations, a kind of catharsis.

In Shakespeare's time the past was breaking up. Tradition and actuality were at variance. In the City of God communal values had always superseded private ones. But in the sixteenth century there was abroad a new idea, so disturbing that it became a bugaboo to frighten grown-ups, the idea of ruthless and iconoclastic individualism, as epitomized by the real and the pseudo-Machiavelli and by the doctrine of virtù, the uninhibited exploitation of all one's innate abilities and powers. Concomitantly, in the economic realm, commerce and industry were beginning to displace agriculture as the most expedient means to wealth. The discovery of the Americas showered Europe with riches that had been neither toiled nor spun for. The force of events was creating Economic Man—but not, as yet, his justification. In short, our modern financial era of commerce and industry was beginning. Furthermore, the Reformation was fracturing the European community, by state and within state, into antagonistic pluralities. A pervasive fear of otherness began to grow. English nationalism rose to a high tide; but in England itself, Catholic, Anglican, and Puritan feared and hated one another. So Shakespeare set before his definitely Anglican, definitely patriotic, and definitely conservative audience a monster, Shylock, in whom disruptive individualism, economic aggrandizement, and perturbing uncanniness appear at their most frightening and melodramatic.

Marlowe had showed Shakespeare the way. A few years before The Merchant of Venice, the former had brilliantly indicated what could be done with the folklore Jew to exploit the fears and resentments of Elizabethan London. In the prologue of The Jew of Malta, Machiavelli describes to the spectators his follower, Barrabas. The Jew's real God in the play is not Jehovah, but gold, won not by labor but by usury and sea commerce. Reviling the Christians and their values, he has no loyalties to anyone but himself—not to his synagogue, not to his daughter. He is anarchic in his desires for power and wealth—hypocritical, cunning, and murderous. Nevertheless, Marlowe's Jew and the other inhabitants of his play lack the immediacy of Shakespeare's figures. Barrabas is a competitor rather than an antagonist of the Christians, and the latter are by no means so differentiated from him that an English audience would automatically care to identify itself with them.

Shylock is more acclimatized to England than Barrabas. Shakespeare has given Shylock certain traits that tie him closely to the actuality of the times. He has much of the popular concept of the Puritan in him. Shylock is sober, industrious, Bible-quoting, hypocritical, assertive, and ruthless—and he is ostentatiously a killjoy. He is a projection of the hatred the more easygoing Anglicans felt for the righteous sectists, whom obscurely they were beginning to associate with economic aggressiveness and cupidity.¹ Again, Shakespeare emphasizes very much Shylock's apartness from the Christian community. It is stressed again and again that he is not a citizen of Venice, that he is an alien, di foreigner, a stranger. The ordinary London citizen violently disliked the foreign craftsmen from Flanders, Germany, and France (known as aliens, strangers, foreigners) who were allowed by special governmental dispensation to live and work in London. All through the sixteenth century there were resentment, agitation, and sometimes riots against them. Ill-feeling was especially strong in 1595.

Shylock, then, is not an imitation of a real Jew. He is meant to symbolize those antisocial traits which conventional society felt were inimical to their traditional sense of the normal and the decent. The Christian community in the play is meant to symbolize the preservation of these traditional values even in an era of economic expansion. Hence, in one way, Shylock is more real than the Christians in the drama, for he after all does derive from reality. The Elizabethans could not meet Jews, but they could meet Englishmen who, they thought, by and large, stood for what Shylock stood for. The play's Christian characters and their destiny, on the other hand, are a wish-fulfillment, a vision of goodness dreamt in the reality of an increasingly acquisitive society.

Let us examine the Christian values of the play. (As a matter of fact, most of the Christian characters are more depictions of values than they are attempts at giving the illusion of substantial dimensionality. To seek psychological depth in them is not only aesthetically wrong but dramatically destructive: they are meant to be felt as the not too differentiated and discrete cells of a single organism, the Christian community.) Since it bulks so large in the play, let us begin with the subject of money. When he looks at the three caskets, Bassanio says,

 Therefore, thou gaudy gold,
Hard food for Midas, I will none of thee;
Nor none of thee, thou pale and common drudge
'Tween man and man.

Since gold is not edible, it actually represents a kind of starvation unless used properly; silver, disreputable in itself, is a necessary slave that administers to men's requirements. Wealth, therefore, should be but a means to an end, not an end in itself; hence thrift is not a virtue, and debt is not defilement. Bassanio at the beginning of the play admits to Antonio,

'Tis not unknown to you, Antonio,
How much I have disabled mine estate
By something showing a more swelling port
Than my faint means would grant continuance.

Antonio does not blame him at all. Let me know your plan, he says,

And if it stand, as you yourself still do,
Within the eye of honor, be assur'd
My purse, my person, my extremest means
Lie all unlock'd to your occasions.

Money, it is indicated, should be treated with a certain contempt, as in Portia's lines,

Pay him six thousand, and deface the bond.
Double six thousand and then treble that
Before a friend of this description
Shall lose a hair through Bassanio's fault.

Or in her refusal of ducats, when she is in disguise,

He is well paid that is well satisfied,
And I, delivering you, am satisfied,
And therein do account myself well paid.
My mind was never yet more mercenary.

Obviously, to the Christians in the play, money is a good only in so far as it serves human needs; and these needs are indirectly expressed by Portia when she speaks of "companions / That do converse and waste the time together." In other words, at the banquet of life, in innocent, pleasant, and cultured amity, sit a group of friends.

From the start of the play, the ease of such a fellowship is defined. It consists of laughter, dining, beauty, entertainment, music, conversation, gifts, and similar graces of humane society. Sometimes, this social ease takes the form of appropriate ritual: Bassanio tells Antonio that he needs "the means / To hold a rival place" with Portia's other suitors. Sometimes, this social ease takes the form of carefree expenditure: Lorenzo and Jessica spend money freely on their honeymoon in gambling and silly purchases. When they return, they are more or less penniless—but, significantly, Portia leaves "The husbandry and manage of my house" to Lorenzo. Always, if possible, in this Christian society, there should be innocent pleasure. Bassanio, for example, must have a "supper" before he leaves for Belmont. It is to be a merry occasion. Gratiano is not to try to be demure at it. Bassanio declares,

I would entreat you rather to put on
Your boldest suit of mirth, for we have friends
That purpose merriment.

Gratiano, Lorenzo, Salerio, and Salanio are preparing a surprise entertainment for the occasion. There will be masks, disguises, and torchbearers; and the masquers will be preceded by music, the drum and the fife. Music is important to these people. It plays while Bassanio chooses among the caskets. And music and the music of the spheres, those symbols of harmony, play a large part in the Lorenzo-Jessica overture to the love and friendship paean of the last act:

The man that hath no music in himself,
Nor is not mov'd with concord of sweet sounds,
Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils;
The motions of his spirit are dull as night,
And his affections dark as Erebus.
Let no such man be trusted. Mark the music.

But theirs is definitely not a hedonistic existence. Pleasure is not their chief good; it is an ancillary good. It is not so much that their religion is urbane as that their urbanity is religious. Human beings, they believe, are distinguished from animals by a natural tendency toward good and by reason. The Duke says that Antonio's bad luck would receive pity "From stubborn Turks and Tartars, never trained / To offices of tender courtesy." When Shylock refuses to give a "firm reason" why he is being so brutal to Antonio except a nonrational "certain loathing," Bassanio breaks out, "This is no answer, thou unfeeling man." A man who acts without reason or charity is like an animal; therefore, Gratiano cries at Shylock,

Thou almost mak'st me waver in my faith,
To hold opinion with Pythagoras,
That souls of animals infuse themselves
Into the trunks of men.

The Christians in the play are well aware of the religious facts of life and death: original sin, redemption, baptism, prayer, grace, damnation, and salvation. Portia links Christian eschatology and the Lord's Prayer:

Though justice be thy plea, consider this—
That, in the course of justice, none of us
Should see salvation. We do pray for mercy,
And that same prayer doth teach us all to render
The deeds of mercy.

"The course of justice" refers not merely to the individual but to mankind. She is referring to redemption from the just damnation of man by the mercy of the Christ. The prime purpose of life is salvation:

 It is very meet
The Lord Bassanio live an upright life;
For, having such a blessing in his lady,
He finds the joys of heaven here on earth;
And if on earth he do not merit it,
In reason he should never come to heaven.

Lorenzo, in speaking of the music of the spheres, refers to immortality and its place in the order of the universe:

Such harmony is in immortal souls;
But whilst this muddy vesture of decay
Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it.

A Christian can laugh at religious hypocrisy which emphasizes the outward for the sake of social approval:

If I do not put on a sober habit,
Talk with respect, and swear but now and then,
Wear prayer books in my pocket, look demurely,
Nay more, while grace is saying, hood mine eyes
Thus with my hat, and sigh, and say amen,
Use all the observance of civility
Like one well studied in a sad ostent
To please his grandam, never trust me more.

But heresy is a serious matter and must be hated:

The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose.
An evil soul, producing holy witness,
Is like a villain with a smiling cheek.

 In religion,
What damned error but some sober brow
Will bless it, and approve it with a text,
Hiding the grossness with fair ornament.

The religion of the Christian characters is reverent but not ostentatious. We hear that Portia, returning to Belmont,

 doth stray about
By holy crosses, where she kneels and prays
For happy wedlock hours.

She is accompanied, it is said, by "a holy hermit," who may or may not be part of the white lie she has told Lorenzo and Jessica:

I have toward heaven breath'd a secret vow
To live in prayer and contemplation
Only attended by Nerissa here,
Until her husband and my lord's return.
There is a monastery two miles off,
And there we will abide.

Coupled with the contempt in the play for money as money is the Christian principle that one must trust to Providence more than to mortal prudence. (Tawney suggests that the core of the ecclesiastical hatred of usury was the certainty of gain, the lack of risk on the part of the lender.—Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, Pelican Books, p. 44.) The true Christian view is finely expressed in Launcelot Gobbo's words to Bassanio:

Launcelot: The old proverb is very well parted between my master Shylock and you, sir.
You have the grace of God, sir, and he hath enough.
Bassanio: Thou speak'st it well.

He that has the grace of God has enough; God will take care of his own. And this is implicit in what Nerissa tells Portia concerning the caskets:

Your father was ever virtuous; and holy men at their death have good inspirations. Therefore the lott'ry that he hath devised in these three chests of gold, silver, and lead, whereof who chooses his meaning chooses you, will no doubt never be chosen by any rightly but one who you shall rightly love.

Thus, to hazard is to have faith in Providence. Antonio tells Shylock that Jacob's gain was due to Providence, not to human device:

This was a venture, sir, that Jacob serv'd for;
A thing not in his power to bring to pass,
But sway'd and fashion'd by the hand of heaven.

Antonio "ventures" his life to provide Bassanio with money. And the right casket, the lead one, emphatically states the principle of risk: "Who chooses me must give and hazard all he hath." The word hazard runs through the play like a refrain. Jessica and Lorenzo do not worry about the morrow, but at the end of the play they are the inheritors of Shylock's wealth.

That the Christian community is a spiritual organism is postulated by the entire play. At the beginning of 3.4, Lorenzo says to Portia, "You have a noble and a true conceit/Of godlike amity." This last phrase, godlike amity, adumbrates the ideal view of society as the living body of Christ, as the City of God: The all and the one are the same. Portia says to Lorenzo,

I never did repent for doing good,
Nor shall not now; for in companions
That do converse and waste the time together,
Whose souls do bear an egal yoke of love,
There must be needs a like proportion
Of lineaments, of manners, and of spirit;
Which makes me think that this Antonio,
Being the bosom lover of my lord,
Must needs be like my lord. If it be so,
How little is the cost I have bestow'd
In purchasing the semblance of my soul
From out the state of hellish cruelty!
This comes too near the praising of myself.
Therefore no more of it.

In saving others one is saving oneself. In loving others properly one is, in a theological sense, loving oneself properly. To be virtuous to one another is to imitate God, to resemble God: mercy, for example,

 is an attribute to God himself.
And earthly power doth then show likest God's
When mercy seasons justice.

Hence the marked expression of friendship in the play, hence the emphatic assertion of the claims of charity.

Thus, the Christians in Shakespeare's Venice make up a distinct society of Christian solicitude, each is concerned more for others than for himself, all love Antonio. "Behind the figure of Antonio," says Theodor Reik in The Secret Self, "is the greater one of Jesus Christ." At the very beginning of the play, Gratiano declares to Antonio: "I love thee, and it is my love that speaks." A few lines later, Bassanio affirms similar affection: "To you, Antonio, I owe the most, in money and in love." Salerio gives his opinion concerning their friend: "A kinder gentleman treads not the earth." Later Salanio talks of "the good Antonio, the honest Antonio—O that I had a title good enough to keep his name company!" Bassanio describes him to Portia:

The dearest friend to me, the kindest man,
The best-condition'd and unwearied spirit
In doing courtesies.

Lorenzo also describes him,

But if you knew to whom you show this honour,
How true a gentleman you send relief,
How dear a lover of my lord your husband,
I know you would be prouder of the work
Than customary bounty can enforce you.

Portia tells Bassanio to spend much money,

Before a friend of this description
Shall lose a hair through Bassanio's fault.

That all the Christians so admire and cherish Antonio is significant in relation to the values in the play. He represents the ideal standard of caritas. All true Christians are his friends, and he has saved many from Shylock's grasp. For the sake of Bassanio he is willing to give up not only his wealth but even life itself.

Race and color in themselves are not socially significant to these people. It is what a man or woman morally is and does that determines whether he or she should be accepted or not. Jessica, referring to her own concept of the good life, puts the matter succinctly: "But though I am a daughter to [my father's] blood,/I am not to his manners." Hence she adopts the faith the members of which do have the right "manners." And she is completely accepted by these members. The treatment of Jessica by the Christians is testimony that within the circumscription of the play, Jews are hated not because of their "blood" but because of their "manners." Christian virtue can so translate the individual that racial distinctions disappear:

Shylock: I say my daughter is my flesh and blood.
Salerio: There is more difference between thy flesh and hers than between jet and ivory; more between your bloods than there is between red wine and Rhenish.

Hence, in all sincerity, when Antonio discovers that Shylock wants for the sake of "friendship" to charge him no interest, he says, "Hie thee, gentle Jew. / The Hebrew will turn Christian; he grows kind." If by anti-Semitism is meant wholly irrational prejudice against Jews in general, it would be difficult to accuse any of the Christian characters in the play of that vice.

Let us now examine what Shakespeare means in the play by Jew. Observe Shylock at his first appearance in 1.3. Clad in his yellow gaberdine, he is visually the "stranger" within the gates, the "alien." He is not a citizen of the community, but a "foreigner." From the start, he is neither pathetic nor heroic but either sadistic or cringing.

Shylock: Antonio is a good man.
Bassanio: Have you heard any imputation to the contrary?
Shylock: Oh, no, no, no, no! My meaning in saying he is a good man is to have you understand me that he is sufficient.

Sufficient! Here is the essential doctrine of "economic man." Good has not merely shifted its meaning: it has shifted its deity! Yet, Shylock goes on, Antonio has not been a careful businessman. His ships are over the many seas. "And other ventures he hath, squand'red abroad." In other words, Antonio has not been prudent; he has ventured, hazarded. But men cannot be trusted, declares the Jew. There are "land rats and water rats": thieves and pirates. Nor is nature beneficent. "There is the peril of waters, winds, and rocks." In such an inimical world of men and things, Shylock refuses to hazard. He will trust only his own judgment. When Bassanio invites him to dinner to meet Antonio, Shylock gives his first example of twisting the Bible to his own uses: The swine into which Jesus sent the demons become the customary food of the Christians! Then Shylock follows with an extremely significant statement:

I will buy with you, sell with you, talk with you, walk with you, and so following; but I will not eat with you, drink with you, nor pray with you.

Business is business. It has nothing to do with fellowship or religion. Here, then, is utter rejection of those Christian values which we have just analyzed. When Antonio enters, Shylock soliloquizes: "How like a fawning publican he looks." Shylock hates Antonio's self-abnegation, and Christian courtesy he interprets as fawning. Antonio has refused to be the economic man:

I hate him for he is a Christian;
But more for that in low simplicity
He lends out money gratis and brings down
The rate of usance here with us in Venice.

Note the "more." Shylock hates Antonio more for economic reasons than for racial or religious ones. Since cunning economic man gets all that he can get, Shylock ridicules Christian charity as "low simplicity." Then, "If I can catch him once upon the hip, / I will feed fat the ancient grudge I bear him." Cannibalism in Shylock is already indicated.

He hates our sacred nation, and he rails,
Even there where merchants most do congregate,
On me, my bargains, and my well-won thrift.

This is the first evidence of Shylock's ability to rationalize Christian hatred of his immorality into Christian hatred of his Jewishness. In other words, Shylock hypocritically covers up his own criminality by charging his accusers with anti-Semitism. In similar fashion, his usury becomes "bargains" and "well-won thrift."

To defend the malpractice of usury to Antonio, Shylock wracks Scripture in referring to the cunning Jacob and the pied lambs. But notice too another Biblical reference:

This Jacob from our holy Abram was
(As his wise mother wrought in his behalf)
The third possessor.

The "wise mother" was Rebecca, who tricked the blind Isaac into blessing Jacob instead of Esau. Thus, the cunning of economic man becomes wisdom! And Shylock finishes his Biblical explication of Jacob with

This was a way to thrive, and he was blest;
And thrift is blessing, if men steal it not.

God blesses economic man, cunning is wisdom, and everything is justified except outright stealing! Will Shylock make the loan?

Signior Antonio, many a time and oft
In the Rialto you have rated me
About my moneys and my usances.
Still have I borne it with a patient shrug;
For suff ranee is the badge of all our tribe.
You call me misbeliever, cutthroat dog,
And spit upon my Jewish gaberdine,
And all for use of that which is mine own.

Antonio, it is clearly shown in this passage, hates Shylock because of his usury. But Shylock evades the issue: on the one hand, he says his Jewishness is the reason for this hatred; on the other hand, usury is not reprehensible: it is the "use of that which is mine own." Private judgment, Shylock implies, not communal judgment or welfare, should be the sole criterion in money matters.

Launcelot Gobbo is the "unthrifty knave" in whose risky care Shylock has left his house. We discover that he is so miserable as the Jew's servant that he wishes to run away. His master has not been giving him enough to eat: "I am famish'd in his service." Jessica in 2.3 indicates that we can trust the Clown's judgment: "Our house is hell; and thou, a merry devil, / Did'st rob it of some taste of tediousness." Why, from the Christian viewpoint, the house is hell is trenchantly suggested in 2.5. Shylock bullies his daughter and berates the unthrifty knave. Little food, little sleep, the frugalest necessities of clothing, constant labor for the master's prosperity—these are his theme. Launcelot hints that there will be a masque at the feast to which Shylock has been invited. Economic man is appalled at such epicureanism:

What, are there masques? Hear you me, Jessica.
Lock up my doors; and when you hear the drum
And the vile squealing of the wry-neck'd fife,
Clamber not you up to the casements then,
Nor thrust your head into the public street
To gaze on Christian fools with varnish'd faces;
But stop my house's ears—I mean my casements.
Let not the sound of shallow fopp'ry enter
My sober house. By Jacob's staff I swear
I have no mind of feasting forth tonight.

Neither his house nor its inhabitants are to hear the music or watch the procession. "Lock up my doors." A morris dance is as bad as stealing. "Stop my house's ears." Music destroys thrift. People who enjoy such vanities are "fools." His is a "sober house." And sobriety and cupidity suddenly coalesce in a reference to a Biblical personage who has already appeared as a symbol of business cunning, Jacob. Economic man in this scene is portrayed in all his unsleeping concern for frugality, rapid profit, and no leisure. In all his lack of human concern for his fellow man. And in all his aptness for proverbs of the Poor Richard type.

The patch [Launcelot] is kind enough, but a huge feeder,
Snail-slow in profit, and he sleeps by day
More than the wildcat. Drones hive not with me. . . .

 Well, Jessica, go in.
Perhaps I will return immediately.
Do as I bid you; shut doors after you.
Fast bind, fast find—
A proverb never stale in thrifty mind.

We do not see Shylock again until 3.1. However, we learn of his reaction to his daughter's flight from Salanio in 2.8:

My daughter! O my ducats! O my daughter!
Fled with a Christian! O my Christian ducats!
Justice! the law! My ducats, and my daughter!
A sealed bag, two sealed bags of ducats,
Of double ducats, stolen from me by my daughter!
And jewels—two stones, two rich and precious stones,
Stol'n by my daughter! Justice! Find the girl!
She hath the stones upon her, and the ducats!"

We may well agree with the Christian speaker that this is a strange and outrageous lament. It is not the loss of his child, nor even that she has been disloyal to him, which has sent Shylock into a passion. It is clearly the money and the jewels.

In 3.1 he rails at the bankrupt Antonio. Then comes one of Shylock's most famous—and most misunderstood!—declarations:

Salerio: Why, I am sure, if he forfeit, thou wilt not take his flesh. What's that good for?
Shylock: To bait fish withal. If it will feed nothing else, it will feed my revenge. He hath disgrac'd me, and hind'red me half a million; laugh'd at my losses, mock'd at my gains, scorned my nation, thwarted my bargains, cooled my friends, heated mine enemies—and what's his reason? I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that. If a Jew wrong a Christian, what is his humility? Revenge. If a Christian wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be by Christian example? Why, revenge. The villainy you teach me I will execute, and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction.

Only eyes so blinded with sentimental tears that they cannot pierce hypocrisy, rationalization, and savagery can read this speech as a plausible justification of Shylock. He defends his cannibalism on grounds of revenge. Why? Antonio has hated him because he is a Jew. But the phrases before tell a different story. "Losses," "gains," "bargains," and "half a million" recall the villainous business morality which Antonio has considered vile. The word is ethic, not ethnic, for Antonio's hatred. But Shylock wishes to make it ethnic. Is not a Jew a human being? The modern reader does not see here how completely Shylock is condemning himself. To be a human being means to act and feel as a human being. The more Shylock expounds on common physical attributes, the more definitely he is calling attention to the absence of common spiritual attributes. He claims that he has learned the principle of revenge from the Christians. But the "eye for an eye" Old Law has been replaced by the New Law, the Sermon on the Mount. And we shall see for ourselves later what Christian revenge is.

Shylock's egocentrism (his real concern for himself rather than his exhibited concern for his group), his placement of monetary loss skies higher than paternal loss, his fervid appetite for revenge even when it concerns his own flesh and blood—all these characteristics are brought out in his speech to Tubal:

Why, there, there, there! A diamond gone cost me two thousand ducats in Frankford! The curse never fell upon our nation till now; I never felt it till now. Two thousand ducats in that, and other precious, precious jewels. I would my daughter were dead at my foot, and the jewels in her ear! Would she were hears'd at my foot, and the ducats in her coffin! No news of them? Why, so—and I know not what's spent in the search. Why, thou loss upon loss! the thief gone with so much, and so much to find the thief; and no satisfaction, no revenge! nor no ill luck stirring but what lights o' my shoulders; no sighs but o' my breathing; no tears but o' my shedding.

Mark Shylock's blasphemy when he is informed of Antonio's ill luck: "I thank God, I thank God! Is it true? is it true?" His gaiety is obscene. "Good news, good news! Ha, ha!" "I am very glad of it. I'll plague him, I'll torture him. I am glad of it." The critics are probably right in seeing real sentiment in his exclamation when told of the ring which Jessica sold for a monkey. "Out upon her! Thou torturest me, Tubal. It was my turquoise. I had it of Leah when I was a bachelor." But the same critics are sentimental in their treatment of this detail. Any touch that postulates humanity in Shylock blackens by contrast his inhumanity all the more. This is only one detail—the cannibalistic money-lender is revealed in his next words: "I will have the heart of [Antonio] if he forfeit; for, were he out of Venice, I can make what merchandise I will." Usury and murder are two sides of the same viciousness. And then Shakespeare presents a final nasty touch. After feeing an officer to arrest Antonio when his bond comes due, "good Tubal" is to meet Shylock "at our synagogue!"

Act 5 is the beauty, harmony, rest, and satisfaction after the storm. Act 4 is the storm. The Christian group is threatened by one who is alien to its principles. No one can deny the theatrical effectiveness of Act 4, the climax of the play, its exciting melodrama. But it is a parable, and its characters are symbolic. Portia is not merely Bassanio's clever young wife in disguise. She is allegory, the voice of God, the epitome of the New Law. Shylock too is symbol. He, new-destructive, is really a harking back to the old and pre-Christ. Shylock is the Old Law. He is the letter rather than the spirit. He is legalized injustice. He is hatred and inhumanity. He is the nihilism of selfish economic aggrandizement unmasked—as criminally destructive as murder. He is most frightening because he has law on his side. (In 1571, usury of not more than 10 percent became legal in England.) The community, it seems, must not only tolerate the enemy of good society these days, but, as it were, aid him to achieve his ends. Usury is legal, and Shylock's bond is legal—but they are not moral The difference between the Tudor period and the later seventeenth century is that economic vice, legalized or not, had not yet been sanctified into social virtue.

The Duke calls Shylock, who has not yet come on, an "inhuman wretch" because he is void of "pity" and "mercy." Shylock enters. The Duke emphasizes the Jew's "strange" cruelty. He hopes that Shylock "touch'd with humane gentleness and love" will forgive Antonio not only his life but repayment of the money. The Duke expects a "gentle answer." But Shylock, emphasizing the legality of his position, refuses to give a rational answer as to why he wants Antonio's "carrion flesh." It is his "humour," his "affection"; it is a "certain loathing," and he refuses double payment of the loan.

Duke: How shalt thou hope for mercy, rend'ring none?
Shylock: What judgment shall I dread, doing no wrong?

Thus, the Duke, before Portia, invokes "measure for measure." But the law-protected Shylock foresees no punishment either on earth or in after-life. He has no sense of sin or shame for what he is doing.

While the Duke converses apart with Nerissa dressed as a lawyer's clerk, Shylock takes out his knife and whets it on the sole of his shoe. Gratiano's outbreak at this spectacle stresses the non-humanity of the Jew. Shylock scoffs, "I stand here for law." Then Portia enters as a Doctor of Laws. She tells Shylock that his suit is of "a strange nature," yet Venetian law "Cannot impugn you as you do proceed." Hence, she declares, "must the Jew be merciful." "On what compulsion must I?" asks Shylock. It is not law but humanity that must rule you, replies Portia. Mercy is above justice. But Shylock is obdurate. He again invokes "measure for measure" treatment: "My deeds upon my head! I crave the law. . . ." He hypocritically refuses repayment: "An oath, an oath, I have an oath in heaven!" Again Portia appeals to him: "Be merciful. / Take thrice thy money; bid me tear the bond." Again Shylock invokes the law:

 I charge you by the law,
Whereof you are a well-deserving pillar,
Proceed to judgment.

And yet once more Shylock refuses "charity" and reads the law narrowly and inhumanly:

Portia: Have by some surgeon, Shylock, on your charge,
To stop his wounds, lest he do bleed to death.
Shylock: Is it so nominated in the bond?
Portia: It is not so express'd; but what of that?
Twere good you do so much for charity.
Shylock: I cannot find it; 'tis not in the bond.

Antonio is spiritually ready: "I am arm'd and well prepar'd." Bassanio and Gratiano say that they would sacrifice their wives to save Antonio. In an aside, Shylock sneers at these "Christian husbands."

Note that Shylock has been given opportunity again and again to be merciful—and to be well paid in the bargain, too. But he has refused to forego cannibalism. He has constantly appealed to the law. So, when the law turns on him, he is the logical recipient of the eyefor-an-eye code. If he takes one drop of Antonio's blood, Portia declares, his lands and goods are "by the laws of Venice confiscate." Suddenly, the Jew (despite his oath!) is willing to take thrice repayment and forget the bond. No, says Portia, let the inhuman interpreter of the letter of the law proceed now according to the letter—but if he take more than a fraction of a fraction of a pound, he himself must die and his estate will be seized. Now Shylock will be satisfied with his principal. No, says Portia, follow the law and take your forfeiture of the flesh. Shylock, caught, gives up the bond snarlingly and prepares to leave. But the law which he has invoked so often has a terrible claim on him. If an "alien" has attempted the life of a "citizen," he loses all his goods (one-half to the would-be victim, one-half to the state), and his life is at the mercy of the state.

This is the ethical crux of the play. How vicious throughout The Merchant of Venice the Christians are to the Jew, say most of the critics. Well, here is the test. The Jew was merciless to the Christians. How will the Christians act now that they have Shylock on the hip? Portia advises him, "Down, therefore, and beg mercy of the Duke." But the Duke forestalls him: "That thou shalt see the difference of our spirit, / I pardon thee thy life before thou ask it." But half of his wealth is to go to Antonio, "The other half comes to the general state, / Which humbleness may drive unto a fine." Observe that the state is not at all anxious to take its legal half. But what about the other half? Legally, it belongs to Antonio. Portia turns to him, "What mercy can you render him, Antonio?" She is putting Antonio's Christianity to the severest proof. Remember that he is in judgment on one who a moment before was ready to literally cut his heart out. This is Antonio's answer:

So please my lord the Duke and all the court
To quit the fine for one half of his goods,
I am content; so he will let me have
The other half in use, to render it
Upon his death unto the gentleman
That lately stole his daughter—
Two things provided more: that, for this favour,
He presently become a Christian;
The other, that he do record a gift
Here in the court of all he dies possess'd
Unto his son Lorenzo and his daughter.

The legal phrase in use means that Antonio will manage one-half of Shylock's property until the latter's death. The inference is that he will turn over the profits to the final possessors, Jessica and Lorenzo. (At the end of the play, after Portia gives Antonio the letter announcing the safe arrival of certain of his supposedly lost ships, he cries, "Sweet lady, you have given me life and living.") Thus Antonio takes nothing for himself. And Shylock actually loses nothing. He retains his life. And he retains all his property in that it will go to those who under any circumstances have the legal and ethical right to inherit. And Shylock has the completely free use of one-half of his apparently ample wealth. Certainly this is mercy, not cold justice!

But what about Shylock's becoming a Christian? It is hard for moderns to see that this request is also part of the Christian mercy. Only if the Jew is baptized can he escape the eternal pains of hell. As the Jew wished to kill the goodness which is Antonio, so Antonio wishes to kill the Old Adam which is in Shylock.

Times have changed. One has to adopt an historical perspective for The Merchant of Venice in order not to be shocked by what today seems sentimentally chauvinistic Christianity and nasty obdurate anti-Semitism. Shakespeare wrote a meaningful fantasy about a bad ogre who tried to hurt some good people in the City of God, but Jews today are so real that they can be seized and burnt in Nazi crematoria. But what Shakespeare's Jew and Shakespeare's Antonio ethically stand for is, perhaps, also real today. And some may say that this is a conflict which must go on until the last man is exterminated by the hydrogen bomb. The tendency of the modern psyche to exculpate Shylock because he is forced by society to be what he is is to misunderstand the tenor of the whole play. To Shakespeare and his audience sociological determinism was never a valid cause. It weis always a villain's excuse.

Notes

¹ I am not the only critic who sees Shylock as evocative of the dislike of the Puritans. See E. E. Stoll, "Shakespeare's Jew," in From Shakespeare to Joyce (Garden City, 1944), pp. 126, 134, and Paul N. Siegle, "Shylock and the Puritan Usurers," in Studies in Shakespeare (Miami, Fla., 1953), pp. 129-38.