XVI. MERCHANT OF VENICE. If I were required to adduce a signal proof of the question that Shakespeare lived beyond his age as a moral and social philosopher, I should not hesitate to ground my proof upon the way in which he has worked out the story of the "Merchant of Venice," as regards the character, behaviour, and treatment of the most important person in the drama-the Jew. Shakespeare lived in an age when the general feeling towards the sect in which Shylock was born and educated could scarcely be called a prejudice-'tis too mild a term —it was a rancour, a horror, venting itself in injustice and violence, pillage, expulsion, and, if possible, extermination of the race. I cannot suppose that he was wholly untainted with the antipathy that had been fostered for centuries before him, for he was familiar with the legends of revenge and cruelty that had, at various periods, been perpetrated by Jews, when individual opportunities of gratifying their own natural lust of retaliation had presented themselves. He was familiar with the story of Hugh of Lincoln, and with the murder of the Christian babe in Chaucer's story of the Nun's Tale; and he felt that here was atrocity for atrocity com mitted, a course that never yet produced, and never will produce, the redress of an original wrong. He belonged to that faith, and throughout his writings he has urged its grand tenet, which inculcates the wickedness as well as the folly of revenge. But Shakespeare, in becoming the social and moral reformer of his species, possessed that point of wisdom in knowing, as it were by instinct, that he who desires to change a master-section in an age's code, whether it be civil or social, will not accomplish his end half so readily and effectually by an unconditional and wholesale opposition, as by a partial and rational extenuation. They who aim at reforming the masses, who desire to lead, must at all events make a show of following. Nothing does the common mind resent more vehemently than the presumption of a single individual professing to be wiser than, and to dictate to, his whole race— the experience of all ages and of every day proves this. It was not for Shakespeare, whose profession it was to provide for the intellectual entertainment of his nation, to perk in their faces his individual opinions: it was much that he did not foster their prejudices, that he did not pander to their vices and inflate their self-love,-and he has not done this. He himself has laid down the principle upon which the drama should be constructed and sustained, and upon no other will it survive. Upon this, his grand principle, therefore, it appears that the poet, in delineating the character and conduct of Shylock, as well as of his Christian opponents, has, with his large wisdom, preached a homily upon injustice to each sect and denomination of religionists, with a force and perspicuity of argument, as well as knowledge of human nature in its melancholy prejudices, that, to me, as I reflect upon his impartiality, his honest dispensation of justice, as displayed in this drama, place him centuries in advance of his age, and the production itself among the greatest efforts of human genius. If any reader have a doubt of the poet's sense of justice towards that most ill-used tribe, let him read the works of other writers of the period where the character of the Jew has been introduced. It is true, Shylock has been punished for his motive of revenge,—and justly; for it was an atrocious refinement of the passion, claimed and substantiated upon the worst of all unjust grounds-the right of legal justice;—no tyranny being equal to the wrenching of law for penal purposes. It is also true that the injuring party, in the first instance--the Christian-is brought off triumphantly; but in that age, or indeed in any age, the multitude could never have sympathised in a rigid fulfilment of such a compact, or of any compact that should sacrifice the one party for the benefit of the other. But, after all, who does not sympathise with Shylock? Who, with the most ordinary notions of right and wrong, derives any gratification from the merchant Antonio's being brought off by a quirk of law, and that law an unjust one, which decreed the demolition of the Jew's whole wealth and estate? Shakespeare has made out a strong case for Shylock,—startling, indeed, it must have been to the commonalty in his time. Shylock says the finest things in the play, and he has the advantage in the argument throughout. If the motion of revenge be justifiable, (and his own moral code, "An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth," bear him out,) he has all the odds against his adversaries: "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? |