To anyone who has familiarized himself with the attitude of Elizabethan playgoers toward usurers and toward the Jews, it is evident that Shakspere intended the ‘Merchant of Venice’ to be a Portia play; its action begins with talk about Belmont and it ends at Belmont itself; and Shylock is absent from the final act. In spite of this intent of the author, the ‘Merchant of Venice’ has become in our eyes a Shylock play. In fact, Macready four-score years ago used to appear in a three-act version which ended with the trial scene,—a most inartistic perversion of the comedy. After all, the ‘Merchant of Venice’ is a comedy, even if its love-story is sustained and stiffened by a terrible underplot. Shakspere created the abhorrent Shylock that the lovely Portia could cleverly circumvent him and score off him and put him to shame. His hardness of heart was to make more refulgent her brightness of soul. Shylock was set up to be scorned and hated and derided; he is a vindictive moneylender, insisting on a horrible penalty; no one in the play has a good word for him or a kindly thought; his servant detests him and his daughter has no natural affection for him.
When all is said, we cannot but feel that Shakspere in his treatment of Shylock displays a callousness not uncommon in Elizabethan England. And yet—and yet Shakspere is true to his genius; he endows Shylock with life. The Jew stands before us and speaks for himself; and we feel that we understand him better than the genius who made him. Our sympathy goes out to him; and altho we do not wish the play to end otherwise than it does, we are almost ready to regard him as the victim of a miscarriage of justice, guilty though he is. Ellen Terry has quoted from a letter of Henry Irving’s a significant confession: “Shylock is a ferocity, I know—but I cannot play him that way!” Why couldn’t he? It was because the nineteenth century was not the sixteenth, because Victorian audiences were not Elizabethan, because the peoples who have English for their mother-tongue are less callous and more civilized than their forebears of three hundred years ago.
III
While it is more than three hundred years since Shakspere wrote the ‘Merchant of Venice,’ it is less than a hundred and fifty since Sheridan wrote the ‘School for Scandal.’ The gap that yawns between us and Sheridan is not so wide or so deep as the gulf that divides us from Shakspere; but it is obvious enough. Even a hundred years ago Charles Lamb declared that the audiences of his time were becoming more and more unlike those of Sheridan’s day, and that this increasing unlikeness was forcing the actors to modify their methods, a little against their wills. Sheridan’s two brilliant comedies continue to delight us by their solidity of structure, their vigor of characterization and their insistent sparkle of dialog. In the ‘Rivals’ Sheridan is following in the footsteps of his fellow Irishman, Farquhar, and in the ‘School for Scandal’ he is matching himself against Congreve. In both he was carrying on the tradition of Restoration comedy, with its coldheartedness, its hard glitter, its delineation of modes rather than morals. It is perhaps too much to assert that most of his characters are unfeeling; but it is not too much to say that they are regardless of the feelings of others—perhaps because their own emotions are only skin-deep.
It is true that in the ‘Rivals’ Sheridan threw a sop to the admirers of Sentimental Comedy and introduced a couple of high-strung and weepful lovers, Falkland and Julia, who are forever sentimentalizing. But this precious pair have been found so uninteresting that in most of the later performances of the ‘Rivals’—all too infrequent, alas!—they have been omitted altogether or disgraced by relegation to the background.
The vogue of Sentimental Comedy was waning when Sheridan wrote, and it disappeared before he died, yet the playgoers of London and of New York were becoming more tender-hearted than their ancestors who had delighted in the metallic harshness of character-delineation customary in Restoration comedy. They were beginning to look for characters with whom they could sympathize and to desire the villains to remain consistent in their villainy. They were unwilling to remain in what Lamb termed “the regions of pure comedy, where no cold moral reigns.” Lamb called the ‘School for Scandal’ incongruous in that it is “a mixture of sentimental incompatibilities,” Charles Surface being “a pleasant reality” while Joseph Surface was “a no less pleasant poetical foil to it.”
The original performer of Joseph was John Palmer; and Lamb asserted that it required his consummate art “to reconcile the discordant elements.” Then the critic suggested, and this was a century ago, that
a player with Jack’s talents, if we had one now, would not dare do the part in the same manner. He would instinctively avoid every turn which might tend to unrealize, and so to make the character fascinating. He must take his cue from the spectators, who would expect a bad man and a good man as rigidly opposed to each other as the death-beds of those geniuses are contrasted in the prints.
A little later in the same essay—the incomparable analysis of ‘Artificial Comedy’—Lamb pointed out that “Charles must be loved and Joseph hated,” adding that