pliment into conference with him, and asked him his opinion of Christ, and why he did not receive him for his Messias; he made me the same answer that the Turk did at Lyons, of whom I have before spoken, that Christ forsooth was a great Prophet, and in that respect as highly to be esteemed as any Prophet amongst the Jews that ever lived before him; but derogated altogether from his divinity, (and would not acknowledge him for the Messias and Saviour of the world, because he came so contemptibly, and not with that pomp and majesty that beseemed the redeemer of mankind.) I replied that we Christians do, and will even to the effusion of our vital blood confess him to be the true and only Messias of the world, (seeing he confirmed his Doctrine while he was here on earth, with such an innumerable multitude of divine miracles, which did most infallibly testify his divinity.) Withal I added that the predictions and sacred oracles both of Moses, and all the holy Prophets of God, aimed altogether at Christ as their only mark, in regard he was the full consummation of the law and the Prophets, and I urged a place of Esay unto him concerning the name Emanuel, and a virgin conceiving and bearing of a son; and at last descended to the persuasion of him to abandon and renounce his Jewish religion and to undertake the Christian faith, without the which he should be eternally damned. He again replied that we Christians do misinterpret the Prophets, and very perversely wrest them to our own sense, and for his own part he had confidently resolved to live and die in his Jewish faith, hoping to be saved by the observations of Moses' Law. In the end he seemed to be somewhat exasperated against me, because I sharply taxed their superstitious ceremonies. For many of them are such refractory people that they cannot endure to hear any terms of reconciliation to the Church of Christ.

If we consider the above, it will not astonish us that Antonio, a Christian gentleman, found it not incompatible with ordinary good manners to spit at a Jew on the Rialto.

Nay more, the Church held it right to proselytise Jews and bring them to the Christian fold even by force. The reader will doubtless recall Browning's Holy-Cross Day, written around the historical fact that the Jews in Rome

were forced to attend an annual Christian sermon down to the nineteenth century; and this fact will cast a light back upon the alternative penalties pronounced by the Courts in Marlowe's Jew of Malta, and in the Merchant of Venice.

In Marlowe's play the State of Malta levies its tribute to the Turks by mulcting the Jews on the following conditions: (a) every Jew must hand over one-half of his estate, or (b) straightway become a Christian; or (c) if he refused either of these terms, his whole estate must be forfeited. Let this be compared with the penalties imposed on Shylock in Act 4 of our play.

We have said enough to indicate the general attitude of Christians towards Jewry, though perhaps this enmity is better indicated in its grudging and gradual relaxation as Browning suggests this in his Filippo Baldinucci on the Privilege of Burial-dated by him 1676, a hundred years or so later than The Merchant:

'No, boy, we must not'-so began
My Uncle (he's with God long since)
A-petting me, the good old man!

'We must not'-and he seemed to wince,
And lost that laugh whereto had grown
His chuckle at my piece of news,
How cleverly I aimed my stone-
'I fear we must not pelt the Jews!'

This above all should not be forgotten, that the Plantagenets who all along protected, by special enactments, their financiers, the Jews, were compelled by popular hatred to banish them from the realm, never to return until re-admitted under Oliver Cromwell. But there seems in 1594 to have been a particular recrudescence of this general hatred over one Roderigo Lopez, a Portuguese of Jewish descent, physician to Queen Elizabeth, accused of plotting against the life of Her Majesty and of the Pretender to the throne of Portugal, one Antonio. The trial of this Lopez aroused wild

popular excitement, fomented by Essex and his party. The poor man was tried in the Guildhall, Essex presiding; he was condemned; hanged, drawn and quartered in June, 1594. Sir Sidney Lee was the first to suggest this Lopez as the original of Shylock. Dr Furness has followed up this suggestion in his Variorum edition; and the textual editor (see note on copy, p. 117) has added further confirmation by pointing out the pun on Lopez = Lupus Wolf in Gratiano's address to Shylock:

=

thy currish spirit

Governed a Wolf, who hanged for human slaughter,
Even from the gallows did his fell soul fleet,
And whilst thou layest in thy unhallowed dam,
Infused itself in thee; for thy desires

Are wolvish, bloody, starved, and ravenous.

On all this we have here but three remarks to make. In the first place, Gratiano's words may easily have been an interpolation by an actor making a topical hit after June, 1594; or indeed, Shakespeare may possibly have been responsible for the insertion. He was after all a working dramatist, and we know that he often played up to his audience while despising himself for doing so.

Alas, 'tis true I have gone here and there

And made myself a motley to the view,

Gored mine own thoughts, sold cheap what is most dear, Made old offences of affections new.

In the second place it is just possible but no more than this that early in 1594 and before this interpolation Shakespeare was pleading very subtly for mercy on this man. It is observable that all Portia's pleas addressed to Shylock are Christian pleas, with which a Christian audience might be expected to sympathise, certainly not the Hebrew she addresses. This however can lead only to speculation. What concerns us is that Shakespeare had a chord in him which vibrated to music whenever

he appealed to mercy as divinely tempering justice. Hear, for instance, Isabella in Measure for Measure:

Angelo. Your brother is a forfeit of the law,
And you but waste your words.

Isabella.
Alas, alas...
Why, all the souls that were were forfeit once,
And He that might the vantage best have took
Found out the remedy: how would you be,
If He, which is the top of judgement, should
But judge you, as you are?

But, most important of all, Lopez was a particular man, and died long ago. Whatever kind of man he was, he was not Shylock, who is an immortal universal creation and lives yet.

VI

Now for the individual Shylock, who in our opinion has been over-philosophised and over-sentimentalised, we may start upon the simple, obvious text that Shakespeare (who, in an age when Jews were forbidden this country, had probably never met with one in the flesh) makes him an intelligible if not a pardonable man; a genuine man, at any rate, of like passions with ourselves, so that we respond to every word of his fierce protest:

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?

-makes him entirely more human than the conventional Jew of Il Pecorone or than the magniloquent monster created by Marlowe-makes him, up to the moment of his defeat by a woman's art, the tall dominating man of the play, tall as Coriolanus and nearer to us than Coriolanus in his scorn, sense of injury and motive of revenge. That Shakespeare knew Marlowe's play well seems a certain supposition, even if he had not so plainly 'bor

rowed' Marlowe's scène à faire in which Abigail lowers the treasure to her father from the convent window1. The 'alternative' sentences, too, pronounced in the end upon Barabas and upon Shylock, with the choice allowed, surely suggest imitation. But, anyhow, Shakespeare must have been well acquainted with Marlowe's play.

How, then, does Shakespeare do it?—how contrive to make Shylock sympathetic to us as Barabas never is? Well, Marlowe's Jew, as Shakespeare's, has one only daughter who is the apple of his eye: and this Jew with one only daughter, ancient as balladry and repeated in Ivanhoe by Scott, whom we always find intimate in, not merely with, Shakespeare. His Isaac the Jew had one fair daughter, as had Jephthah according to Hamlet2.

But here Shakespeare comes in. His audience, conventionally minded, may accept the proffer of the bond (Act 1, Scene 3) as a jesting bargain made with bloodthirsty intent, to be blood-thirstily enacted; but a gentle Shakespeare cannot. There must be more incentive to hate, to lust for a literally bloody vengeance, than any past insults, however conventional, put upon him on the Rialto by Antonio, mildest of men, can dramatically supply. Sufferance is the badge of his tribe.

But he is a fierce Israelite and has an adored daughter. In the interim between the signing of the bond and its falling due this daughter, this Jessica, has wickedly and most unfilially betrayed him. Abigail in The Few of Malta is a good girl, a true staunch daughter until she

1 For this scene, and for once, Shakespeare borrowed without improving. There is in The Jew of Malta a real reason for this stealthy transportation. There is none in The Merchant. Jessica, already dressed for flight, might even just have walked downstairs and handed the moneybags to her lover.

And we know now that Hamlet was jigging upon an actual ballad.

Q.M. V.