And if we attribute this outburst to her love we must not forget that, when it comes to the test in court, and she holds the Jew in her hand and might save her gold, she again reminds him:
“Shylock, there's thrice thy money offered thee.”
A boundless generosity is the characteristic of Portia, and Bassanio, the penniless fortune-hunter, is just as extravagant; he will pay the Jew's bond twice over, and,
“If that will not suffice,
I will be bound to pay it ten times o'er,
On forfeit of my hands, my head, my heart.”
It may, of course, be urged that these Christians are all prodigal in order to throw Shylock's avarice and meanness into higher light; but that this disdain of money is not assumed for the sake of any artistic effect will appear from other plays. At the risk of being accused of super-subtlety, I must confess that I find in Shylock himself traces of Shakespeare's contempt of money; Jessica says of him:
“I have heard him swear
To Tubal and to Chus, his countrymen,
That he would rather have Antonio's flesh
Than twenty times the value of the sum
That he did owe him.”
Even Shylock, it appears, hated Antonio more than he valued money, and this hatred, though it may have its root in love of money, half redeems him in our eyes. Shakespeare could not imagine a man who loved money more than anything else; his hated and hateful usurer is more a man of passion than a Jew.
The same prodigality and contempt of money are to be found in nearly all Shakespeare's plays, and, curiously enough, the persons to show this disdain most strongly are usually the masks of Shakespeare himself. A philosophic soliloquy is hardly more characteristic of Shakespeare than a sneer at money. It should be noted, too, that this peculiarity is not a trait of his youth chiefly, as it is with most men who are free-handed. It rather seems, as in the case of Antonio, to be a reasoned attitude towards life, and it undoubtedly becomes more and more marked as Shakespeare grows older. Contempt of wealth is stronger in Brutus than in Antonio; stronger in Lear than in Brutus, and stronger in Timon than in Lear.
But can we be at all certain that Antonio's view of life in this respect was Shakespeare's? It may be that Shakespeare pretended to this generosity in order to loosen the purse-strings of his lordly patrons. Even if his motive for writing in this strain were a worthy motive, who is to assure us that he practised the generosity he preached? When I come to his life I think I shall be able to prove that Shakespeare was excessively careless of money; extravagant, indeed, and generous to a fault. Shakespeare did not win to eminence as a dramatist without exciting the envy and jealousy of many of his colleagues and contemporaries, and if these sharp-eyed critics had found him in drama after drama advocating lavish free-handedness while showing meanness or even ordinary prudence in his own expenditure, we should probably have heard of it as we heard from Greene how he took plays from other playwrights. But the silence of his contemporaries goes to confirm the positive testimony of Ben Jonson, that he was of “an open and free nature,”—openhanded always, and liberal, we may be sure, to a fault. In any case, the burden of proof lies with those who wish us to believe that Shakespeare was “a careful and prudent man of business,” for in a dozen plays the personages who are his heroes and incarnations pour contempt on those who would lock “rascal counters” from their friends, and, in default of proof to the contrary, we are compelled to assume that he practised the generosity which he so earnestly and sedulously praised. At least it will be advisable for the moment to assume that he pictured himself as generous Antonio, without difficulty or conscious self-deception.
But this Antonio has not only the melancholy, courtesy and boundless generosity of Shakespeare; he has other qualities of the master which need to be thrown into relief.