Shakespeare meets a difficulty of this kind by a double treatment. On the one hand, he puts no limits to the blackness of the character itself; on the other hand, he provides against repulsiveness by giving it a special attraction of another kind. In the present case, while painting Shylock as a monster, he secures for him a hold upon our sympathy by representing him as a victim of intolerable ill-treatment and injustice. The effect resembles the popular sympathy with criminals. The men themselves and their crimes are highly repulsive; but if some slight irregularity occurs in the process of bringing them to justice—if a counsel shows himself unduly eager, or a judge appears for a moment one-sided, a host of volunteer advocates espouse their cause. These are actuated no doubt by sensitiveness to purity of justice; but their protests have a ring that closely resembles sympathy with the criminals themselves, whom they not unfrequently end by believing to be innocent and injured. e.g. in iii. i, iii; iv. i; ii. 5.In the same way Shakespeare shows no moderation in the touches of bloodthirstiness, of brutality, of sordid meanness he heaps together in the character of Shylock; but he takes equal pains to rouse our indignation at the treatment he is made to suffer. e.g. iii. i.; iv. i, &c.Personages such as Gratiano, Salanio, Salarino, Tubal, serve to keep before us the mediæval feud between Jew and Gentile, and the persecuting insolence with which the fashionable youth met the money-lenders who ministered to their necessities. i. iii. 107-138.Antonio himself has stepped out of his natural character in the grossness of his insults to his enemy. iii. i. 57, 133; iii. iii. 22; and i. iii. 45.Shylock has been injured in pocket as well as in sentiment, Antonio using his wealth to disturb the money-market and defeat the schemes of the Jew; according to Shylock Antonio has hindered him of half-a-million, and were he out of Venice the usurer could make what merchandise he would. Finally, our sense of deliverance in the Trial Scene cannot hinder a touch of compunction for the crushed plaintiff, as he appeals against the hard justice meted out to him:—the loss of his property, the acceptance of his life as an act of grace, the abandonment of his religion and race, which implies the abandonment of the profession by which he makes his living.
iv. i. 374.
Nay, take my life and all; pardon not that:
You take my house when you do take the prop
That doth sustain my house; you take my life
When you do take the means whereby I live.
By thus making us resent the harsh fate dealt to Shylock the dramatist recovers in our minds the fellow-feeling we have lost in contemplating the Jew himself. Dramatic Hedging.A name for such double treatment might be 'Dramatic Hedging': as the better covers a possible loss by a second bet on the opposite side, so, when the necessities of a story involve the creation of a monster, the dramatic artist 'hedges' against loss of attractiveness by finding for the character human interest in some other direction. So successful has Shakespeare been in the present instance that a respectable minority of readers rise from the play partisans of Shylock.
Difficulties connected with the pound of flesh.
We pass on to the crop of difficulties besetting the pound of flesh as a detail in the bond. That such a bond should be proposed, that when proposed it should be accepted, that it should be seriously entertained by a court of justice, that if entertained at all it should be upset on so frivolous a pretext as the omission of reference to the shedding of blood: these form a series of impossible circumstances that any dramatist might despair of presenting with even an approach to naturalness. Yet if we follow the course of the story as moulded by Shakespeare we shall find all these impossibilities one after another evaded.
Proposal of the bond.