Portia, one of the most attractive of all Shakespeare's women is a perfect flower of the Italian Renaissance, beautiful, rich, splendor-loving, cultured, and courteous. It would take too long to enter into a detailed analysis of her character; but two points may be noticed in which she contrasts strongly with Shylock. The first is her attitude toward money. With Shylock money is an end in itself. His whole life, until disturbed by the passion for revenge, is devoted to acquiring wealth. At home he starves his servant and grudges his daughter the pleasure that her youth demands. Portia, on the other hand, regards her inherited fortune simply as a means to an end, the rich and varied life of the Renaissance. Her home is a palace surrounded by a noble park, she keeps a company of trained musicians, she entertains nobles and princes. Yet she is so far from being spoiled by the circumstances of her life that she passes over her princely suitors to bestow her heart upon a bankrupt gentleman and rejoices to strip herself of her fortune in order to bestow it upon her lover. Since money to her is only a means of obtaining happiness she accounts it a mere trifle in comparison with love and friendship, and offers to pay Antonio's debt twenty times over rather than have Bassanio grieve for him. The Socialist might perhaps quarrel with the accumulation of so much wealth in the hands of an individual, even when the individual chances to be a Portia, but most of us will long continue to regard her as Shakespeare's ideal picture of the true relation of man to money.

Again Portia is shown in strong contrast to Shylock in her conception of law and justice. Shylock is a worshipper of the letter that slayeth; and his notion of justice is a scrupulous fulfillment of the exact requirements of the law no matter what the consequences may be. Portia, on the other hand, stands as the representative of the

higher justice of the spirit which saveth alive.

Her rela

tion to Shylock has been compared to that of Equity to the Common Law: it would be better, I think, to liken it to the relation existing between Judaism and Christianity. The law of the Jews was a written law, exact, formal and precise; and in the development of Judaism righteousness came to consist in the literal observance of every jot and tittle of the law. This formal righteousness found its complete development in the Pharisees of Christ's day; and it was against this sect above all others that Christ launched his most passionate denunciations. The essence of Christianity, on the other hand, is spiritual. It does not abolish the law, but explains and interprets it in a spiritual sense. The very conception of God changes in the translation from Judaism to Christianity; to the Jew the Almighty was a jealous God visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children; to the Christian God is Love. And as justice was the highest attribute of the Jewish conception of God, so mercy is that of the Christian. Portia's famous address to Shylock is, in fact, an appeal to the Jew to embrace the ideals of Christianity.

To this view of the relation between the two chief characters of the play, it has been objected that Portia overcomes Shylock not by love, but by insisting, with a vigor equal to his own, upon the letter of the law, and, moreover, that she shows no mercy to the Jew when in her power. These objections are specious but not, I think, well grounded. It is true that the Jew is by a legal quibble forbidden to take his legal penalty on pain of death; but this is part of the old story which Shakespeare did not invent and could not alter. On the other hand, Shakespeare's own addition to the trial scene is as I have already pointed out, no legal quibble, but a true interpretation of the spirit of the law. In essence, Shylock's bond was

void, because under cover of the law he sought to commit a heinous crime. Shakespeare expresses this in dramatic form by Portia's citation of the old law punishing with death and confiscation any attempt upon the part of an alien against the life of a Venetian citizen.

The second objection is equally unfounded. Portia herself, it is true, extends no direct offer of mercy to Shylock. But such an offer did not lie within her power; she had simply to announce the penalty. The Duke, however, as the representative of the Christian state of Venice, at once steps into her place and grants the Jew his life even before he asks it. The confiscation of his goods is reduced to an appropriation of one-half of them for the benefit of his daughter; and the obligation which is laid upon him of becoming a Christian was, of course, in that day considered as an act of the highest mercy, since it would result in the salvation of his soul. We must be careful not to attribute to Shakespeare the feelings of our day, and speak of this obligation as something worse than death itself. Here at least Shakespeare was a man of his own time. Yet if we wish to realize how far superior he rose to the fierce Anti-Semitism of his day, we have but to compare the judgment passed upon Shylock with the brutal and heartless treatment which Barrabas receives, with the evident approbation of the poet, at the hands of the Christian governor of Malta.

In fact it is not too much to say that the Anti-Semitism which appears in the Merchant of Venice is confined to the inferior characters and to the lower classes. Shylock, though a Jew, has a recognized status under the Venetian law. The Duke rises from his bed at night to help him find his runaway daughter; the courts of Venice are open to him as to a Christian, and he appeals to the law with the full certainty of obtaining justice. Antonio's attitude

toward him has already been accounted for; Bassanio, the best representative of the gentlemen of Venice, invites him to dinner both before and after the negotiation of the loan; and Portia, who stands out as the champion of Christian ideals, utters no word which reveals anything like race-hatred on her part. Yet the existence of such race-hatred in Venice is by no means concealed. To Launcelot Shylock is the devil incarnate, and Jessica is likely to be damned merely because she is the Jew's daughter. The rabble of Venice follow Shylock through the streets mocking his lamentations over his loss of his daughter and his ducats. Salanio who has no private cause of hatred calls him the "dog Jew," and in the trial scene Gratiano, the rude and bold-voiced jester, exhausts upon him a rich vocabulary of abuse. We can,

I fancy, without a very great stretch of imagination conclude from this array of witnesses what was Shakespeare's own attitude toward the Anti-Semitism of his day. As one might expect of the gentle poet, the profound philosopher, the sympathetic student of humanity, he takes his stand with Portia against the rabble of the streets and the hot young bloods of Venice; and Portia's eulogy of mercy might well express the poet's own plea for tolerance of the persecuted Jews. Certainly no poet, tinged in the least with Anti-Semitism would, or could, have put into Shylock's mouth that famous vindication of a Jew's humanity which, in the words of a German critic, sums up the judgment of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in condemnation of the oppressors and in apology for the oppressed.

CONCLUSION.

In conclusion then, it seems plain that the Merchant of Venice had its origin in the outburst of the Anti-Semitism

which accompanied the trial and execution of Dr. Lopez, and the revival of Marlowe's Jew of Malta. Lopez was not the original of Shylock, nor was the Jew of Malta the prototype of Shakespeare's play. But we may safely say that the events of this year impelled Shakespeare to give a realistic picture of the Jew as he then existed; that in accordance with his prevailing methods of composition he took up an old play and worked it over to suit his purposes; that in accordance with the prevailing tone of his dramas at this time he set his portrait of the Jew in a framework of romantic comedy; and, finally, that his play contained a veiled, but to the understanding eye, clearly apparent, acknowledgment of the Jew's humanity and a plea for tolerance. That this acknowledgment and plea were discerned by the playgoing populace of his time it would be too much to say. We know that Burbage, the first impersonator of Shylock was 'made up' to resemble Judas in the old miracle plays in order to impress spectators with the Jew's villainy. After the Restoration, Shylock was degraded into a grotesque comic character. From this shameful misconception of Shakespeare's purpose the character was rescued by the great tragedian Macklin, and in our own times the pendulum has swung to the other extreme and the tendency has been to exalt the character of Shylock and portray him as the martyr-representative of his race.

Early in the nineteenth century Heine, the famous Jewish poet, saw a performance of the Merchant of Venice at Drury Lane. Behind him in the box there stood a beautiful English girl who at the end of the trial scene burst into tears and sobbed out: "The poor man is wronged." Here we have a true representative of the modern spirit, somewhat too susceptible, indeed, to the impression of the moment, but, on the whole, sympathetic