THE MERCHANT OF VENICE.
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THIS is a play that in spite of the change of
manners and of prejudices still holds undisputed
possession of the stage. Shakespear's malignant
has outlived Mr. Cumberland's benevolent
Jew. In proportion as Shylock has ceased to
be a popular bugbear, "baited with the rabble's
curse," he becomes a half-favourite with the
philosophical part of the audience, who are disposed
to think that Jewish revenge is at least as
good as Christian injuries. Shylock is a good
hater; "a man no less sinned against than sinning."
If he carries his revenge too far, yet he
has strong grounds for "the lodged hate he
bears Anthonio," which he explains with equal
force of eloquence and reason. He seems the
depositary of the vengeance of his race; and
though the long habit of brooding over daily insults
and injuries has crusted over his temper
with inveterate misanthropy, and hardened him
against the contempt of mankind, this adds
but little to the triumphant pretensions of his
enemies. There is a strong, quick, and deep
sense of justice mixed up with the gall and bitterness
of his resentment. The constant apprehension
of being burnt alive, plundered, banished,
reviled, and trampled on, might be supposed to
sour the most forbearing nature, and to take
something from that "milk of human kindness,"
with which his persecutors contemplated his indignities.
The desire of revenge is almost inseparable
from the sense of wrong; and we can
hardly help sympathising with the proud spirit,
hid beneath his "Jewish gabardine," stung to
madness by repeated undeserved provocations,
and labouring to throw off the load of obloquy
and oppression heaped upon him and all his tribe
by one desperate act of "lawful" revenge, till
the ferociousness of the means by which he is
to execute his purpose, and the pertinacity with
which he adheres to it, turn us against him,
but even at last, when disappointed of the sanguinary
revenge with which he had glutted his
hopes, and exposed to beggary and contempt
by the letter of the law on which he had insisted
with so little remorse, we pity him, and think him
hardly dealt with by his judges. In all his answers
and retorts upon his adversaries, he has
the best not only of the argument but of the
question, reasoning on their own principles and
practice. They are so far from allowing of any
measure of equal dealing, of common justice
or humanity between themselves and the Jew,
that even when they come to ask a favour of
him, and Shylock reminds them that "on such
a day they spit upon him, another spurned him,
another called him dog, and for these curtesies
request he'll lend them so much monies"--Anthonio,
his old enemy, instead of any acknowledgment
of the shrewdness and justice of his
remonstrance, which would have been preposterous
in a respectable Catholic merchant in those
times, threatens him with a repetition of the
same treatment--
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"I am as like to call thee so again,
To spit on thee again, to spurn thee too."
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After this, the appeal to the Jew's mercy, as
if there were any common principle of right and
wrong between them, is the rankest hypocrisy,
or the blindest prejudice; and the Jew's answer
to one of Anthonio's friends, who asks him
what his pound of forfeit flesh is good for, is
irresistible--
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"To bait fish withal; if it will feed nothing else, it will
feed my revenge. He hath disgraced me, and hinder'd me
of half a million, laugh'd at my losses, mock'd at my gains,
scorn'd 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 that 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."
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The whole of the trial-scene, both before and
after the entrance of Portia, is a master-piece
of dramatic skill. The legal acuteness, the passionate
declamations, the sound maxims of
jurisprudence, the wit and irony interspersed in
it, the fluctuations of hope and fear in the different
persons, and the completeness and suddenness
of the catastrophe, cannot be surpassed.
Shylock, who is his own counsel, defends himself
well, and is triumphant on all the general
topics that are urged against him, and only fails
through a legal flaw. Take the following as an
instance:--
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"Shylock. What judgment shall I dread, doing no wrong?
You have among you many a purchas'd slave,
Which, like your asses, and your dogs, and mules,
You use in abject and in slavish part,
Because you bought them:--shall I say to you,
Let them be free, marry them to your heirs?
Why sweat they under burdens? let their beds
Be made as soft as yours, and let their palates
Be season'd with such viands? you will answer,
The slaves are ours:--so do I answer you:
The pound of flesh, which I demand of him,
Is dearly bought, is mine, and I will have it:
If you deny me, fie upon your law!
There is no force in the decrees of Venice:
I stand for judgement: answer; shall I have it?"
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The keenness of his revenge awakes all his
faculties, and he beats back all opposition to
his purpose, whether grave or gay, whether of
wit or argument, with an equal degree of earnestness
and self-possession. His character is
displayed as distinctly in other less prominent
parts of the play, and we may collect from a few
sentences the history of his life--his descent and
origin, his thrift and domestic economy, his affection
for his daughter, whom he loves next to
his wealth, his courtship and his first present to
Leah, his wife! "I would not have parted
with it" (the ring which he first gave her) "for
a wilderness of monkies!" What a fine Hebraism
is implied in this expression!
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Portia is not a very great favourite with us,
neither are we in love with her maid, Nerissa.
Portia has a certain degree of affectation and
pedantry about her, which is very unusual in
Shakespear's women, but which perhaps was a
proper qualification for the office of a "civil
doctor," which she undertakes and executes so
successfully. The speech about Mercy is very
well; but there are a thousand finer ones in
Shakespear. We do not admire the scene of
the caskets; and object entirely to the Black
Prince Morocchius. We should like Jessica
better if she had not deceived and robbed her
father, and Lorenzo, if he had not married a
Jewess, though he thinks he has a right to
wrong a Jew. The dialogue between this
newly-married couple by moonlight, beginning
"On such a night," &c. is a collection
of classical elegancies. Launcelot, the Jew's
man, is an honest fellow. The dilemma in
which he describes himself placed between his
"conscience and the fiend," the one of which
advises him to run away from his master's service
and the other to stay in it, is exquisitely
humourous.
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Gratiano is a very admirable subordinate character.
He is the jester of the piece: yet one
speech of his, in his own defence, contains a
whole volume of wisdom.
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"Anthonio. I hold the world but as the world, Gratiano,
A stage, where every one must play his part;
And mine a sad one.
Gratiano. Let me play the fool:
With mirth and laughter let old wrinkles come.
And let my liver rather heat with wine,
Than my heart cool with mortifying groans.
Why should a man, whose blood is warm within,
Sit like his grandsire cut in alabaster?
Sleep when he wakes? and creep into the jaundice
By being peevish? I tell thee what, Anthonio--
I love thee, and it is my love that speaks;--
There are a sort of men, whose visages
Do cream and mantle like a standing pond:
And do a wilful stillness entertain,
With purpose to be drest in an opinion
Of wisdom, gravity, profound conceit;
As who should say, I am Sir Oracle,
And when I ope my lips, let no dog bark!
O, my Anthonio, I do know of these,
That therefore only are reputed wise,
For saying nothing; who, I am very sure,
If they should speak, would almost damn those ears,
Which hearing them, would call their brothers, fools.
I'll tell thee more of this another time:
But fish not, with this melancholy bait,
For this fool's gudgeon, this opinion."
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Gratiano's speech on the philosophy of love,
and the effect of habit in taking off the force of
passion, is as full of spirit and good sense. The
graceful winding up of this play in the fifth act,
after the tragic business is despatched, is one of
the happiest instances of Shakespear's knowledge
of the principles of the drama. We do
not mean the pretended quarrel between Portia
and Nerissa and their husbands about the rings,
which is amusing enough, but the conversation
just before and after the return of Portia to
her own house, beginning "How sweet the
moonlight sleeps upon this bank," and ending
"Peace! how the moon sleeps with Endymion,
and would not be awaked." There is a number
of beautiful thoughts crowded into that short
space, and linked together by the most natural
transitions.
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When we first went to see Mr. Kean in Shylock,
we expected to see, what we had been
used to see, a decrepid old man, bent with age
and ugly with mental deformity, grinning with
deadly malice, with the venom of his heart congealed
in the expression of his countenance,
sullen, morose, gloomy, inflexible, brooding over
one idea, that of his hatred, and fixed on one
unalterable purpose, that of his revenge. We
were disappointed, because we had taken our
idea from other actors, not from the play. There
is no proof there that Shylock is old, but a single
line, "Bassanio and old Shylock, both stand
forth,"--which does not imply that he is infirm
with age--and the circumstance that he has a
daughter marriageable, which does not imply
that he is old at all. It would be too much to
say that his body should be made crooked and
deformed to answer to his mind, which is bowed
down and warped with prejudices and passion.
That he has but one idea, is not true; he has
more ideas than any other person in the piece:
and if he is intense and inveterate in the pursuit
of his purpose, he shews the utmost elasticity,
vigour, and presence of mind, in the means
of attaining it. But so rooted was our habitual
impression of the part from seeing it caricatured
in the representation, that it was only from a
careful perusal of the play itself that we saw
our error. The stage is not in general the best
place to study our author's characters in. It is
too often filled with traditional common-place
conceptions of the part, handed down from sire
to son, and suited to the taste of the great vulgar
and the small.--"'Tis an unweeded garden:
things rank and gross do merely gender in it!"
If a man of genius comes once in an age to clear
away the rubbish, to make it fruitful and wholesome,
they cry, "'Tis a bad school: it may be
like nature, it may be like Shakespear, but it is
not like us." Admirable critics!--
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