COMMENTS By SHAKESPEAREAN SCHOLARS ANTONIO In Antonio, the royal merchant, who, amid all his fortune and splendor, is a victim to melancholy and spleen induced by forebodings of coming disaster, Shakespeare has certainly expressed something of his own nature. Antonio's melancholy is closely related to that which, in the years immediately following, we shall find in Jaques in As You Like It, in the Duke in Twelfth Night, and in Hamlet. It forms a sort of mournful undercurrent to the joy of life which at this period is still dominant in Shakespeare's soul. It leads, after a certain time, to the substitution of dreaming and brooding heroes for those men of action and resolution who, in the poet's brighter youth, had played the leading parts in his dramas. For the rest, despite the princely elevation of his nature, Antonio is by no means faultless. He has insulted and baited Shylock in the most brutal fashion on account of his faith and his blood. We realize the ferocity and violence of the mediæval prejudice against the Jews when we find a man of Antonio's magnanimity so entirely a slave to it. And when, with a little more show of justice, he parades his loathing and contempt for Shylock's money-dealings, he strangely (as it seems to us) overlooks the fact that the Jews have been carefully excluded from all other means of livelihood, and have been systematically allowed to scrape together gold in order that their hoards may always be at hand when circumstances render it convenient to plunder them. Antonio's attitude towards Shylock cannot possibly be Shakespeare's own. Shylock cannot under stand Antonio, and characterizes him (III, iii) in the words "This is the fool that lent out money gratis." But Shakespeare himself did not belong to this class of fools. He has endowed Antonio with an ideality which he had neither the resolution nor the desire to emulate. Such a man's conduct towards Shylock explains the outcast's hatred and thirst for revenge.-BRANDES, William Shakespeare. In the center of the actors in the play, in a rather passive position, stands Antonio, the princely merchant, of enviable and immense possessions, a Timon and Shylock in riches, but with a noble nature elevated far above the effects which wealth produced in these men. Placed between the generous giver and the miser, between the spendthrift and the usurer, between Bassanio and Shylock, between friend and foe, he is not even remotely tempted by the vices into which these have fallen; there is not the slightest trace to be discovered in him of that care for his wealth imputed to him by Salanio and Salarino, who in its possession would be its slaves. But his great riches have inflicted upon him another evil, the malady of the rich, who have never been agitated and tried by anything, and have never experienced the pressure of the world. He has the spleen, he is melancholy; a sadness has seized him; the source of which no one knows; he has a presentiment of some danger, such as Shakespeare always imparts to all sensitive, susceptible natures. In this spleen, like all hypochondriacs, he takes delight in cheerful society: he is surrounded by a number of parasites and flatterers, among whom there is one nobler character, Bassanio, with whom alone a deeper impulse of friendship connects him. He is affable, mild, and generous to all, without knowing their tricks and without sharing their mirth; the loquacious versatility and humor of a Gratiano is indifferent to him; his pleasure in their intercouse is passive, according to his universal apathy. His nature is quiet and is with difficulty affected; when his property and his management leave him without anxiety, he utters a "fie, fie," over the supposition that he is in love; touched by no fault, but moved also by no virtue, he appears passionless, and almost an automaton. The position which the poet has given him in the midst of the more active characters of the piece is an especially happy one: for were he of less negative greatness he would throw all others into deep shadow; we should feel too painful and exciting a sympathy in his subsequent danger. Yet he is not allowed, for this reason, to appear quite feelingless. For in one point he shows that he shared the choler and natural feelings of others. When brought into contact with the usurer, the Jew Shylock, we see him in a state of agitation, partly arising from moral and business principles, partly from intolerance and from national religious aversion. This sense of honor in the merchant against the money-changer and usurer urges him to those glaring outbursts of hatred, when he rates Shylock in the Rialto about his "usances," calls him a dog, "foots" him, and spits upon his beard. For this he receives a lesson for life in his lawsuit with the Jew, whom, with his apathetic negligence, he allows to get the advantage over him. His life is placed in danger, and the apparently insensible man is suddenly drawn closer to us; he is suffering, so that high and low intercede for him; he himself petitions Shylock; his situation weakens him; the experience is not lost upon him; it is a crisis, it is the creation of a new life for him; finally, when he is lord and master over Shylock, he no longer calls up his old hatred against him, and, aroused from his apathy, he finds henceforth in Bassanio's happiness and tried friendship the source of a renovated and ennobled existence.GERVINUS, Shakespeare Commentaries. SHYLOCK 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 Antonio," 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 sympathizing with the proud spirit, hid beneath his "Jewish gaberdine," stung to madness by repeated undeserved provocations, and laboring 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 favor 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 moneys."-Antonio, 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 "I am as like to call thee so again, To spit on thee again, to spurn thee too." 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 Antonio's friends, who asks him what his pound of forfeit flesh is good for, is irresistible— "To bait fish withal; if it will feed nothing else, it will feed my revenge. He hath disgrac'd me, and hinder'd me of half a million, laughed at my losses, mock'd at my gains, scorn'd my nation, thwarted my bargains, cool'd 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." 1 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 in stance: |