In which predicament, I say, thou stand’st.
Down, therefore, and beg mercy of the Duke.”
Antonio intercedes on behalf of his enemy, and allows him to retain the use of one half of his goods, on condition that he become a Christian and bequeath his property to his Christian son-in-law and his daughter. The Jew perforce accepts these terms, leaves the Court crestfallen, and every good man and woman is expected to rejoice at his discomfiture.
Such is the Jew in Shakespeare’s eyes, or rather in the eyes of the public which Shakespeare wished to entertain. Yet, despite the poet’s anxiety to interpret the feelings of his audience, his own humanity and sympathetic imagination reveal themselves in the touching appeal put into the victim’s mouth: “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? 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.”
But few, if any, of Shakespeare’s contemporaries shared his own broad sense of justice. The Jew was popularly regarded as the quintessence of all that is foul, grim, and greedy in human form. In him the Elizabethan Englishman saw all the qualities that he detested: covetousness, deceitfulness, and cruelty. Moreover, the Jew was still identified with the typical usurer, and usury continued to be regarded in England with all the superstitious horror of the Middle Ages. ♦1546♦ It was not until the reign of Henry VIII. that a law was reluctantly passed, fixing the interest at 10 per cent. But the prejudice against lending money for profit was so strong that the law had to be repealed in the following reign. All loans at interest were again pronounced illegal under Edward VI. by an Act which defeated its own purpose, and was in its turn repealed during the reign of Queen Elizabeth, when, despite the law, the rate of interest was 14 per cent. A second Act, passed in 1571, while violently condemning usury, in the modern sense of the term, permits an interest of 10 per cent. This rate remained in force under James I.
Bacon has recorded for us the opinions and the sentiments of his contemporaries on the subject. In his essay Of Seditions and Troubles, written some time between 1607 and 1612, he says: “Above all things, good Policie is to be used, that the Treasure and Moneyes, in a State, be not gathered into few Hands. For otherwise, a State may have a great Stock, and yet starve.... This is done, chiefly, by suppressing, or at least, keeping a strait Hand, upon the Devouring Trades of Usurie, etc.” In this passage Bacon objects to usury on economic grounds. Elsewhere he sets forth objections of a totally different nature. In the essay Of Riches, published in 1625, he says: “Usury is the certainest Meanes of Gaine, though one of the worst; As that, whereby a Man doth eate his Bread; In sudore vultûs alieni; and besides, doth Plough upon Sundaies.” Aristotle’s mischievous metaphor was still quoted as an argument against usury. It is mentioned by Bacon among the many “witty invectives against usury”[129] current in his time, and it is embodied by Shakespeare in the phrase that usurers “take a breed for barren metal.”[130]
At that time the question was engrossing public attention. In 1621 a Bill for the abatement of usury had been brought into Parliament, and two years later a second Bill to the same effect passed the Commons. Bacon seized the opportunity for the publication of his essay Of Usurie, which appeared in 1623. In a letter to Secretary Conway he states that his object in writing it was to suggest means, whereby “to grind the teeth of usury and yet to make it grind to his Majesty’s mill in good sort, without discontent or perturbation.” In consonance with this view, Bacon describes usury as an evil, indeed, but as an inevitable evil: “For since there must be Borrowing and Lending, and Men are so hard of Heart, as they will not lend freely, Usury must be permitted.” He proceeds to balance the advantages and disadvantages of the practice and comes to the conclusion that it should be recognised and controlled by the State, for “It is better to mitigate Usury by Declaration, than to suffer it to rage by Connivance.” Bacon’s advocacy was not wasted. ♦1624♦ In the following year Usury was once more sanctioned by the Legislature and interest was reduced to 8 per cent. But this measure did not obliterate the deep-seated hatred of the money-lender, nor did it weaken the popular idea that usury was the peculiar attribute of a Jew. Bacon in the same essay tells us that there were among his contemporaries men who recommended “that Usurers should have Orange-tawney Bonnets, because they doe Judaize.”
However, the abhorrence of the Jew was that which is inspired by a repulsive abstraction rather than by a concrete individual. The Jew in the flesh was practically an unknown creature to the ordinary English man and woman of the age. If he was hated as a blood-sucking ghoul, he was not more real than a ghoul. But scarcely had the generation that hissed Barabas and Shylock on the stage passed away, when the Jew reappeared as a human reality upon the soil which his fathers had quitted more than three centuries before.
Meanwhile a great change had come over England. The protest against authority, both in its intellectual and in its spiritual form, had crossed the Channel and been welcomed by responsive souls on our shores. When Erasmus came to England in 1498, he found here more than he brought with him. Grocyn had learnt his Greek in Italy, and Colet had returned from that country breathing scorn for the “ungodly refinements” of theology. In these scholars, and scholars like these, Erasmus found kindred spirits; hearty allies in the struggle for light. Colet enchanted him with his Platonic eloquence, and Sir Thomas More with the sweetness of his temper. And the band of these three noble men—Colet, Erasmus and More—all eager for reform and for purification of mind and soul, sowed the seed from which was to spring a plant that even they little dreamed of. The characteristic compromise between the new and the old under Henry VIII., grew into the purer Protestantism of Elizabeth and James I., and, though in Shakespeare we still see a world essentially Catholic in tone and ideas, it is a world that is fast dying away. Yet a few years more and Protestantism, under its most militant and morose aspect, has banished the last vestiges of mediaeval Catholicism and merriment from Merry England. King Charles is gone, and Oliver Cromwell has inherited the realities, if not the pomp, of royalty.