pose, with the character of Shakespeare himself. Human weakness requires another law than that of rigid justice. Neither in our heavenly nor our earthly relations dare we "stand upon our bond." Shylock, entrenched in the support of a lower and earthly law, fails to see upon what compulsion he "must be merciful." But Shakespeare, through Portia, points to the obligation of the higher law; he tells us that there is something " not nominated in the bond," even charity; the grace of a mutual forbearance without which human life would be literally unlivable. He enforces in his way the parable of the unjust steward, "Shouldst thou not, therefore, have had compassion upon thy fellow servant even as I had pity on thee?"

Shylock is by no means the only offender against this law of charity. His hatred against Antonio has been excited partly by wanton insults and brutality. When Shylock recounts all he had endured, and how Antonio has called him dog, he is met by the taunting answer: "I am as like to call thee so again,

To spit on thee again, to spurn thee too." *

And when after the Christian invocation of mercy in the trial scene, the Duke asks,

"What mercy can you render him, Antonio?"

Gratiano flippantly interposes,

A halter gratis; nothing else, for God's sake," †

and it may be questioned whether there is not a spice of malice in the apparently liberal terms proposed by Antonio. The play is, therefore, no mere exhibition of the Jew's hatred; it dares to show besides this the shortcomings of the Christian, and to point to all the great lesson of charity.

Characters.

The strongly opposed characters of Shylock and Portia are the principal figures in the play, around which its interest and action centre, and to which the other personages are strictly and properly subordinated. Antonio is a moping and poorspirited creature, without energy, without strength enough to hate, or, of course, to love, whose flesh is really worth nothing else but "to bait fish withal." Whatever we may think of Bassanio, there is certainly nothing about him to distract our attention from the central male character of the play.

Shakespeare would have us see something more in Shylock than the grasping and revengeful Jew, “incapable of pity, void and empty of any dram of mercy." With a force of character which we sharply contrast with the feebleness of Antonio, with that intellectual superiority which so often characterized the medieval Jew, he is the despised and ill treated member of a persecuted race, and after the loss of his daughter the very boys of Venice hoot at the old man's heels. Hunter writes: "Had the Jew been able to resent in proper time and with proper impunity, any wrongs that might have been inflicted upon. him, his resentment would have had vent, and might have left his heart capable of charity; but he had to endure, without retaliation, injury and insult, time after time, until his heart became hardened as a stone that would whet keenly the knife of vengeance should legal justice ever give him an opportunity of obtaining redress." Shylock speaks but the truth when he exclaims, "If a Jew wrong a Christian, what is his humility? Revenge"; and we cannot wonder that to him the logic of his conclusion seems unanswerable. "If a Christian wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be by Christian example? Why, revenge." But Shakespeare has not given us this

* ،، New Illustrations of Shakespeare," Rev. James Hunter, p. 15.

tragic figure of Shylock, with its bitterness, avarice, severity, and tenacity of purpose, without a hint of another side to the man's nature of which we know nothing. There is a world of suggestion in his agonized outburst, when that Job's comforter, the "good" Tubal, mentions the fate of the turquoise ring. "Out upon thee, thou torturest me, Tubal; it was my turquoise; I had it of Leah when I was a bachelor. I would not have given it for a wilderness of monkeys."* We should not then unthinkingly condemn Shylock; while we cannot excuse him, we should rather regard him as the melancholy consequence of the lack of charity among those who profess and call themselves Christians.

Portia is the centre of the beauty and charm of the play. The inheritor of wealth, not the accumulator of it, surrounded by a golden atmosphere of culture, ease, and splendor, she can give royally. She is perhaps the most intellectual of all Shakespeare's women; she alone rises to the crisis in the trial, while the court, her husband, and Antonio stand helpless. Yet, she puts off nothing of her womanhood when she puts on the lawyer's robe of Bellario's representative.

In our nineteenth century she would have run great risk of being what we call "strong-minded," but, happily for the lovers of Shakespeare's Portia, she lived in other times. A keen, high-bred, witty, charming woman, playful, dignified, and loving; with all she has-happy to commit herself to her husband "to be directed."

*Act. iii. sc. I.

Enter ANTONIO, SALARINO, and SALANIO.
Ant. In sooth, I know not why I am so sad:
It wearies me; you say it wearies you;
But how I caught it, found it, or came by it,
What stuff 'tis made of, whereof it is born,

I am to learn ;

And such a want-wit sadness makes of me,

That I have much ado to know myself.

5

I. Sooth.-Means truth; soothsayer, a truthsayer, or prophet. See character of soothsayer in "Julius Cæsar."

1. Sad. The sadness of Antonio is made so prominent that some have called it the "keynote" of the play. Dr. Furness points out that the play is a comedy, not a tragedy, as "Hamlet," or Macbeth," where the keynote is given in the midnight ghost, and the witches, and blasted heath. He finds the explanation in a note of Professor Allen, that “If Antonio were not represented as a melancholy man, and, therefore, crochety, he would not have been so extravagantly devoted to a friend, nor would he have signed such a bond." His melancholy is the keynote, not as portending disaster, but as explaining how a merchant and man of affairs could afterwards behave as a "want-wit" in signing the Jew's bond.

!

Salar. Your mind is tossing on the ocean;
There, where your argosies with portly sail,
Like signiors and rich burghers on the flood,
Or, as it were, the pageants of the sea,
Do overpeer the petty traffickers,

That curt'sy to them, do them reverence,
As they fly by them with their woven wings.
Salan. Believe me, sir, had I such venture forth,
The better part of my affections would
Be with my hopes abroad. I should be still
Plucking the grass, to know where sits the wind,
Peering in maps for ports, and piers, and roads;
And every object that might make me fear
Misfortune to my ventures, out of doubt,
Would make me sad.

Salar.
My wind, cooling my broth,
Would blow me to an ague, when I thought
What harm a wind too great might do at sea.
I should not see the sandy hour-glass run,
But I should think of shallows and of flats,
And see my wealthy Andrew docked in sand,
Vailing her high-top lower than her ribs,

10

15

20

25

To kiss her burial. Should I go to church,
And see the holy edifice of stone,

30

8. Ocean. This word is a tri-syllable. In many cases, as in words ending in tion, cion, the metre indicates that, in Shakespeare's time, both vowels were sounded.

9. Argosies.-Merchant vessels. Probably corrupted from "ragusye," a vessel of Ragusa, an old Adriatic seaport with which Venice had an early trade.

10. Signiors.-Lords; seignory, dominion. So used in Shakespeare. Eng. sire, or sir.

10. Burghers.-Citizens, freemen of a borough.

11. Pageants. In allusion to enormous machines, in the shape of castles, dragons, etc., drawn about the streets in ancient shows and miracle plays; as our floats in street processions. See description in Scott's “Kenilworth,” vol. ii. chap. vii.

27. Andrew. The name of his ship. Perhaps from Andrea Doria. See Ency. Brit., 9th ed., vol. vii. p. 366.

28. Vailing her high-top, i. e., lowering her mast by tilting over in the sand.