“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? and if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?”
But if Shakespeare was far in advance of his age in this intellectual appreciation of the brotherhood of man; yet as an artist and thinker and poet he is particularly contemptuous of the usurer and trader in other men's necessities, and therefore, when Antonio meets Shylock, though he wants a favour from him, he cannot be even decently polite to him. He begins by saying in the third scene of the first act:
“Although I neither lend nor borrow
By taking nor by giving of excess,
Yet to supply the ripe wants of my friend,
I'll break a custom.”
The first phrase here reminds me of Polonius: “neither a borrower nor a lender be.” When Shylock attempts to defend himself by citing the way Jacob cheated Laban, Antonio answers contemptuously “The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose.” Shylock then goes on:
“Signor Antonio, many a time and oft,
In the Rialto you have rated me
About my moneys and my usances:
Still, I have borne it with a patient shrug,
For sufferance is the badge of all our tribe.
You call me mis-believer, cut-throat dog,
And spit upon my Jewish gaberdine,
And all for use of that which is mine own.
Well then, it now appears you need my help:
Go to, then; you come to me, and you say,
'Shylock, we would have moneys:' you say so
You that did void your rheum upon my beard
And foot me as you spurn a stranger cur
Over your threshold: moneys is your suit.
What should I say to you? Should I not say
'Hath a dog money? is it possible
A cur can lend three thousand ducats?'”
Antonio answers this in words which it would be almost impossible to take for Shakespeare's because of their brutal rudeness, were it not, as we shall see later, that Shakespeare loathed the Jew usurer more than any character in all his plays. Here are the words:
“Ant. I am as like to call thee so again,
To spit on thee again, to spurn thee too.
If thou will lend this money, lend it not
As to thy friends; for when did friendship take
A breed for barren metal of his friend?
But lend it rather to thine enemy
Who, if he break, thou mayst with better face
Exact the penalty.”
Then Shylock makes peace, and proposes his modest penalty. Bassanio says:
“You shall not seal to such a bond for me:
I'll rather dwell in my necessity.”
Antonio is perfectly careless and content: he says: