The Merchant of Venice Read Free Page A

versa, is a screen for the real issue, which is the question of who has money and hence power (including the power to win a wealthy, clever, and beautiful wife).
    We should therefore be wary of crude generalizations about the anti-Semitism of the play or of the age. It is often said that the original stage Shylock would have had a wig of red hair and a long bottle-like nose, making him into a stereotypical Jew. He was certainly represented thus when the play was revived after the theaters reopened following the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660, but there is no evidence that this is how he looked in Shakespeare’s own theater. Portia’s line on arriving in the courtroom, “Which is the merchant here, and which the Jew?,” suggests that in terms of superficial appearance Antonio and Shylock are not readily distinguishable. It is not easily compatible with a caricature Jew. Nor does the dialogue at any point allude to the anti-Semitic propaganda that has defiled the centuries. There are no allusions to the story of Hugh of Lincoln, to poisoning wells, desecrating the host, ritual murder,crucified children. Shylock speaks of his “sacred nation,” but no one replies with the old anti-Semitic accusation that the Jews are to be hated because they murdered Christ. There are, then, different degrees of prejudice in the play, just as there were different degrees of respect and disrespect for Jews in Shakespeare’s Europe. Some, but not all, of the Christians in the play spit upon Shylock simply because he is a Jew. They are the same Christians who don’t spend much time going to church, giving money to the poor, or turning the other cheek.
    Barabas, the Jew of Malta in the play written by Marlowe a few years before, answers to the stereotype of the Jew in love with his moneybags (though he does also love his daughter), whereas Shylock famously appeals to a common humanity that extends across the ethnic divide:
    He hath disgraced me, and hindered me half a million, laughed at my losses, mocked at my gains, scorned my nation, thwarted my bargains, cooled my friends, heated mine enemies, and what’s the 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?
    In Elizabethan England the test for a witch was the pricking of her thumb: if it did not bleed, the woman was in league with the devil. Shylock’s “If you prick us, do we not bleed” is a way of saying “do not demonize the Jews—we are not like witches.” “The villainy you teach me I will execute,” he continues: if you do demonize me, then I will behave diabolically. The alien, the oppressed minority, sees no alternative but to fight back: “And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?” This is the point of parting between the Jewish law of “an eye for an eye” and the Christian notion of turning the other cheek and showing the quality of mercy. The consequence of Shylock’s insistence on the law of revenge, his failure to show mercy whenPortia gives him the opportunity to do so, is his forced conversion. This sticks in the throat of the modern audience because it shows a lack of respect for religious difference, but for most of Shakespeare’s original audience it would have seemed like an act of mercy. Despite his willingness to murder Antonio, he is still given the opportunity of salvation.
    The representation of Shylock as monstrous villain has played a part in the appalling history of European anti-Semitism. But such a representation necessarily occludes the subtler moments of Shakespeare’s characterization. A ring is not only the device whereby Portia and Nerissa assert their moral and verbal superiority over their