III.

i.iii. 134.when did friendship takeAbreedforbarren metalof his friend?i.iii. 72.Shylock illustrates usury by citing the patriarch Jacob and his clever trick in cattle-breeding; showing how, at a time when cattle were the currency, the natural rate of increase might be diverted to private advantage. Antonio interrupts him:i.iii. 96.Is your gold and silver ewes and rams?Shylock answers:I cannot tell; I make itbreedas fast;both parties thus showing that they considered the distinction between the using of flesh and metal for the medium of wealth to be the essential point in their dispute. With this notion then of fleshversusmoney floating in the air between them the interview goes on to the outbursts of mutual hatred which reach a climax in Antonio's challenge to Shylock to dohis worst;i.iii, from 138.this challenge suddenly combines with the root idea of the conversation to flash into Shylock's mind the suggestion of the bond. In an instant he smoothes his face and proposes friendship. He will lend the money without interest, in pure kindness, nay more, he will go to that extent of good understanding implied in joking, and will have a merry bond; while as to the particular joke (he says in effect), since you Christians cannot understand interest in the case of money while you acknowledge it in the case of flesh and blood, suppose I take as my interest in this bond a pound of your own flesh. In such a context the monstrous proposal sounds almost natural. It has further been usheredin amanner which makes it almost impossible to decline it. When one who is manifestly an injured man is the first to make advances, a generous adversary finds it almost impossible to hold back. A sensitive man, again, will shrink from nothing more than from the ridicule attaching to those who take serious precautions against a jest. And the more incongruous Shylock's proposal is with commercial negotiations the better evidence it is of his non-commercial intentions. In a word, the essence of the difficulty was the incongruity between human flesh and money transactions: it has been surmounted by a discussion, flowing naturally from the position of the two parties, of which the point is the relative position of flesh and money as the medium of wealth in the past.Difficulty of legally recognising the bond evaded:The bond thus proposed and accepted, there follows the difficulty of representing it as entertained by a court of justice. With reference to Shakespeare's handling of this point it may be noted, first, that he leaves us in doubt whether the court would have entertained it:iv.i. 104.the Duke is intimating an intention of adjourning at the moment when the entrance of Portia gives a new turn to the proceedings.iv.i. 17.Again, at the opening of the trial, the Duke gives expression to the universal opinion that Shylock's conduct was intelligible only on the supposition that he was keeping up to thelast moment the appearance of insisting on his strange terms, in order that before the eyes of the whole city he might exhibit his enemy at his mercy, and then add to his ignominy by publicly pardoning him: a fate which, it must be admitted, was no more than Antonio justly deserved. This will explain how Shylock comes to have a hearing at all: when once he is admitted to speak it is exceedingly difficult to resist the pleas Shakespeare puts into his mouth.iv.i. 38.He takes his stand on the city's charter and the letter of the law, and declines to be drawn into any discussion of natural justice;iv.i. 90.yet even as a question of natural justice what answer can be found when he casually points to the institution of slavery, which we must suppose to have existed in Venice at the period? Shylock's only offence is his seeking to make Antonio's life a matter of barter: what else is the accepted institution of slavery but the establishment of power over human flesh and blood and life, simply because these have been bought with money, precisely as Shylock has given good ducats for his rights over the flesh of Antonio? No wonder the perplexed Duke is for adjourning.Difficulty as to the traditional mode of upsetting the bond met.There remains one more difficulty, the mode in which, according to the traditional story, the bond is upset. It is manifest that the agreement as to the pound of flesh, if it is to be recognised by a court of justice at all, cannot without the grossest perversion of justice be cancelled on the ground of its omitting to mention blood. Legal evasion can go to great lengths. It is well known that an Act requiring cabs to carry lamps at night has been evaded through the omission of a direction that the lamps were to be lighted; and that importers have escaped a duty on foreign gloves at so much the pair by bringing the right-hand and left-hand gloves over in different ships. But it is perfectly possible to carry lamps without lighting them, while it is a clear impossibility to cut human flesh without shedding blood. Nothing of course would be easier than to upset the bond on rationalgrounds—indeed the difficulty is rather to imagine it receiving rational consideration at all; but on the other hand no solution of the perplexity could be half so dramatic as the one tradition has preserved. The dramatist has to choose between a course of procedure which shall be highly dramatic but leave a sense of injustice, and one that shall be sound and legal but comparatively tame. Shakespeare contrives to secure both alternatives. He retains the traditional plea as to the blood, but puts it into the mouth of one known to his audience to be a woman playing the lawyer for the nonce;iv.i. 314, 347.and again, before we have time to recover from our surprise and feel the injustice of the proceeding, he follows up the brilliant evasion by a sound legal plea, the suggestion of a real lawyer. Portia has come to the court from a conference with her cousin Bellario, the most learned jurist of Venice.iii.iv. 47;iv.i. 143.Certainly it was not this doctor who hit upon the idea of the blood being omitted. His contribution to the interesting consultation was clearly the old statute of Venice, which every one else seems to have forgotten, which made the mere attempt on the life of a citizen by an alien punishable with death and loss of property: according to this piece of statute law not only would Shylock's bond be illegal, but the demand of such security constituted a capital offence. Thus Shakespeare surmounts the final difficulty in the story of the Jew in a mode which retains dramatic force to the full, yet does this without any violation of legal fairness.The interweaving of the two stories.The second purpose of the present study is to show how Shakespeare has improved his two stories by so weaving them together that they assist one another's effect.First, it is easy to see how the whole movement of the play rises naturally out of the union of the two stories. One of the main distinctions between the progress of events in real life or history and in Drama is that the movement of a drama falls into the form technically known as Complicationand Resolution.Complication and Resolution.A dramatist fastens our attention upon some train of events: then he sets himself to divert this train of events from its natural course by some interruption; this interruption is either removed, and the train of events returns to its natural course, or the interruption is carried on to some tragic culmination. InThe Merchant of Veniceour interest is at the beginning fixed on Antonio as rich, high-placed, the protector and benefactor of his friends. By the events following upon the incident of the bond we see what would seem the natural life of Antonio diverted into a totally different channel; in the end the old course is restored, and Antonio becomes prosperous as before. Such interruption of a train of incidents is its Complication, and the term Complication suggests a happy Resolution to follow. Complication and Resolution are essential to dramatic movement, as discords and their 'resolution' into concords constitute the essence of music.The one story complicated and resolved by the other.The Complication and Resolution in the story of the Jew serve for the Complication and Resolution of the drama as a whole; and my immediate point is that these elements of movement in the one story spring directly out of its connection with the other.i.i, from 122;i.iii.But for Bassanio's need of money and his blunder in applying to Shylock the bond would never have been entered into, and the change in Antonio's fortunes would never have come about: thus the cause for all the Complication of the play (technically, the Complicating Force) is the happy lover of the Caskets Story. Similarly Portia is the means by which Antonio's fortunes are restored to their natural flow: in other words, the source of the Resolution (or Resolving Force) is the maiden of the Caskets Story. The two leading personages of the one tale are the sources respectively of the Complication and Resolution in the other tale, which carry the Complication and Resolution of the drama as a whole. Thus simply does the movement of the whole play flow from the union of the two stories.The whole play symmetrical about its central scene.One consequence flowing from this is worth noting; thatthe scene in which Bassanio makes his successful choice of the casket is the Dramatic Centre of the whole play, as being the point in which the Complicating and Resolving Forces meet. This Dramatic Centre is, according to Shakespeare's favourite custom, placed in the exact mechanical centre of the drama, covering the middle of the middle Act. There is again an amount of poetic splendour lavished upon this scene which throws it up as a poetic centre to the whole. More than this, it is the real crisis of the play. Looking philosophically upon the whole drama as a piece of history, we must admit that the true turning-point is the success of Bassanio; the apparent crisis is the Trial Scene, but this is in reality governed by the scene of the successful choice, and if Portia and Bassanio had not been united in the earlier scene no lawyer would have interposed to turn the current of events in the trial. There is yet another sense in which the same scene may be called central. Hitherto I have dealt with only two tales; the full plot however ofThe Merchant of Veniceinvolves two more, the Story of Jessica and the Episode of the Rings: it is to be observed that all four stories meet in the scene of the successful choice. This scene is the climax of the Caskets Story.iii.ii, from 221.It is connected with the catastrophe in the Story of the Jew: Bassanio, at the moment of his happiness, learns that the friend through whom he has been able to contend for the prize has forfeited his life to his foe as the price of his liberality. The scene is connected with the Jessica Story: for Jessica and her husband are the messengers who bring the sad tidings, and thus link together the bright and gloomy elements of the play.iii.ii. 173-187.Finally, the Episode of the Rings, which is to occupy the end of the drama, has its foundation in this scene, in the exchange of the rings which are destined to be the source of such ironical perplexity. Such is the symmetry with which the plot ofThe Merchant of Venicehas been constructed: the incident which is technically its Dramatic Centre is at once its mechanicalcentre, its poetic centre, and, philosophically considered, its true turning-point; while, considering the play as a Romantic drama with its union of stories, we find in the same central incident all the four stories dovetailed together.Shakespeare as a master of Plot.These points may appear small and merely technical. But is a constant purpose with me in the present exposition of Shakespeare as a Dramatic Artist to combat the notion, so widely prevalent amongst ordinary readers, that Shakespeare, though endowed with the profoundest grasp of human nature, is yet careless in the construction of his plots: a notion in itself as improbable as it would be that a sculptor could be found to produce individual figures exquisitely moulded and chiselled, yet awkwardly and clumsily grouped. It is the minuter points that show the finish of an artist; and such symmetry of construction as appears inThe Merchant of Veniceis not likely to characterise a dramatist who sacrifices plot to character-painting.The union of a light with a serious story.There remains another point, which no one will consider small or technical, connected with the union of the two stories: the fact that Shakespeare has thus united a light and a serious story, that he has woven together gloom and brightness. This carries us to one of the great battlefields of dramatic history; no feature is more characteristic of the Romantic Drama than this mingling of light and serious in the same play, and at no point has it been more stoutly assailed by critics trained in an opposite school. I say nothing of the wider scope this practice gives to the dramatist, nor the way in which it brings the world of art nearer to the world of reality; my present purpose is to review the dramatic effects which flow from the mingling of the two elements in the present play.Dramatic effects arising out of this union.In general human interest the stories are a counterpoise to one another, so different in kind, so equal in the degree of interest their progress continues to call forth. The incidents of the two tales gather around Antonio and Portiarespectively;Effects of Human Interest.each of these is a full and rounded character, and they are both centres of their respective worlds.i.i. 1.The stories seem to start from a common point. The keynote to the story of the Jew is the strange 'sadness'—the word implies no more than seriousness—which overpowers Antonio, and which seems to be the shadow of his coming trouble. Compare with this the first words we hear of Portia:i.ii. 1.By my troth, Nerissa, my little body is aweary of this great world.Such a humorous languor is a fitting precursor to the excitement and energy of the scenes which follow. But from this common starting-point the stories move in opposite directions; the spectator's sympathies are demanded alternately for two independent chains of circumstances, for the fortunes of Antonio sinking lower and lower, and the fortunes of Portia rising higher and higher. He sees the merchant and citizen become a bankrupt prisoner, the lordly benefactor of his friends a wretch at the mercy of his foe. He sees Portia, already endowed with beauty, wealth, and character, attain what to her heart is yet higher, the power to lay all she has at the feet of the man she loves. Then, when they are at the climax of their happiness and misery, when Portia has received all that this world can bestow, and Antonio has lost all that this world can take away, for the first time these two central personages meet face to face in the Trial Scene.Effects of Plot.And if from general human interest we pass on to the machinery of plot, we find this also governed by the same combination: a half-serious frolic is the medium in which a tragic crisis finds its solution.Emotional effects: increase of tragic passion;But it is of course passion and emotional interest which are mainly affected by the union of light and serious: these we shall appreciate chiefly in connection with the Trial Scene, where the emotional threads of the play are gathered into a knot, and the two personages who are the embodiments of the light and serious elements face one another as judge andprisoner.iv.i, from 225.In this scene it is remarkable how Portia takes pains to prolong to the utmost extent the crisis she has come to solve; she holds in her fingers the threads of the tangled situation, and she is strong enough to play with it before she will consent to bring it to an end.178.She has intimated her opinion that the letter of the bond must be maintained,184-207.she has made her appeal to Shylock for mercy and been refused, she has heard Bassanio's appeal to wrest the law for once to214-222.her authority and has rejected it; there remains nothing but to pronounce the decree.225.But at the last moment she asks to see the bond, and every spectator in court holds his breath and hears his heart beat as he follows the lawyer's eye down line after line.227-230.It is of no avail; at the end she can only repeat the useless offer of thrice the loan, with the effect of drawing from Shylock an oath that he will not give way.230-244.Then Portia admits that the bond is forfeit, with a needless reiteration of its horrible details; yet, as if it were some evenly balanced question, in which after-thoughts were important, she once more appeals to Shylock to be merciful and bid her tear the bond, and evokes a still stronger asseveration from the malignant victor, until even Antonio's stoicism begins to give way, and he begs for a speedy judgment.243.Portia then commences to pass her judgment in language of legal prolixity, which sounds like a recollection of her hour with Bellario:—For the intent and purpose of the lawHath full relation to the penalty,Which here appeareth due upon the bond, &c.255-261.Next she fads about the details of the judicial barbarity, the balance to weigh the flesh, a surgeon as a forlorn hope; and when Shylock demurs to the last, stops to argue that he might do this for charity. At last surely the intolerable suspense will come to a termination.263.But our lawyer of half-an-hour's standing suddenly remembers she has forgotten to call on the defendant in the suit, and the pathos isintensified by the dying speech of Antonio, calmly welcoming death for himself, anxious only to soften Bassanio's remorse, his last human passion a rivalry with Portia for the love of his friend.iv.i. 276.Bid her be judgeWhether Bassanio had not once a love.iv.i, from 299.When the final judgment can be delayed no longer its opening sentences are still lengthened out by the jingling repetitions of judicial formality,The law allows it, and the court awards it, &c.Only when every evasion has been exhausted comes the thunderstroke which reverses the whole situation. Now it is clear that had this situation been intended to have a tragic termination this prolonging of its details would have been impossible; thus to harrow our feelings with items of agony would be not art but barbarity. It is because Portia knows what termination she is going to give to the scene that she can indulge in such boldness; it is because the audience have recognised in Portia the signal of deliverance that the lengthening of the crisis becomes the dramatic beauty of suspense. It appears then that, if this scene be regarded only as a crisis of tragic passion, the dramatist has been able to extract moretragiceffect out of it by the device of assisting the tragic with a light story.reaction and comic effect;Again, it is a natural law of the human mind to pass from strain to reaction, and suspense relieved will find vent in vehement exhilaration. By giving Portia her position in the crisis scene the dramatist is clearly furnishing the means for a reaction to follow, and the reaction is found in theiv.i, from 425.Episode of the Rings, by which the disguised wives entangle their husbands in a perplexity affording the audience the bursts of merriment needed as relief from the tension of the Trial Scene. The play is thus brought into conformity with the laws of mental working, and the effect of the reactionis to make the serious passion more keen because more healthy.effects of mixed passion.Finally, there are the effects of mixed passion, neither wholly serious nor wholly light, but compounded of the two, which are impossible to a drama that can admit only a single tone. The effect of Dramatic Irony, which Shakespeare inherited from the ancient Drama, but greatly modified and extended, is powerfully illustrated at the most pathetic point of the Trial Scene,iv.i. 273-294.when Antonio's chance reference to Bassanio's new wife calls from Bassanio and his followers agonised vows to sacrifice even their wives if this could save their patron—little thinking that these wives are standing by to record the vow. But there is an effect higher than this.iv.i. 184-202.Portia's outburst on the theme of mercy, considered only as a speech, is one of the noblest in literature, a gem of purest truth in a setting of richest music. But the situation in which she speaks it is so framed as to make Portia herself the embodiment of the mercy she describes. How can we imagine a higher type of mercy, the feminine counterpart of justice, than in the bright woman, at the moment of her supreme happiness, appearing in the garb of the law to deliver a righteous unfortunate from his one error, and the justice of Venice from the insoluble perplexity of having to commit a murder by legal process? And how is this situation brought about but by the most intricate interweaving of a story of brightness with a story of trouble?In all branches then of dramatic effect, in Character, in Plot and in Passion, the union of a light with a serious story is found to be a source of power and beauty. The fault charged against the Romantic Drama has upon a deeper view proved a new point of departure in dramatic progress; and in this particular case the combination of tales so opposite in character must be regarded as one of the leading points in which Shakespeare has improved the tales in the telling.FOOTNOTES:[1]No commentator has succeeded in making intelligible the linei.iii. 42.How like a fawning publican he looks!as it stands in the text at the opening of Shylock's soliloquy. The expression 'fawning publican' is so totally the opposite of all the qualities of Antonio that it could have no force even in the mouth of a satirist. It is impossible not to be attracted by the simple change in the text that would not only get over this difficulty, but add a new effect to the scene: the change of assigning this single line to Antonio, reserving, of course, the rest of the speech for Shylock. The passage would then read thus [the stage direction is my own]:EnterAntonio.Bass.This is Signior Antonio.Ant.[Aside]. How like a fawning publican he looks—[BassaniowhispersAntonioand brings him toShylock.Shy.[Aside]. I hate him, for he is a Christian, But more, &c.Both the terms 'fawning' and 'publican' are literally applicable to Shylock, and are just what Antonio would be likely to say of him. It is again a natural effect for the two foes on meeting for the first time in the play to exchange scowling defiance. Antonio's defiance is cut short at the first line by Bassanio's running up to him, explaining what he has done, and bringing Antonio up to where Shylock is standing; the time occupied in doing this gives Shylock scope for his longer soliloquy.III.How Shakespeare makes his plot more Complex in order to make it more Simple.A Study in Underplot.Paradox of simplicity by means of increased complexity.Thetitle of the present study is a paradox: that Shakespeare makes a plot more complex[2]in order to make it more simple. It is however a paradox that finds an illustration from the material world in every open roof. The architect's problem has been to support a heavy weight without the assistance of pillars, and it might have been expected that in solving the problem he would at least have tried every means in his power for diminishing the weight to be supported. On the contrary, he has increased this weight by the addition of massive cross-beams and heavy iron-girders. Yet, if these have been arranged according to the laws of construction, each of them will bring a supporting power considerably greater than its own weight; and thus, while in a literal sense increasing the roof, for all practical purposes they may be said to have diminished it. Similarly a dramatist of the Romantic school, from his practice of uniting more than one story in the same plot, has to face thedifficulty of complexity. This difficulty he solves not by seeking how to reduce combinations as far as possible, but, on the contrary, by the addition of more and inferior stories; yet if these new stories are so handled as to emphasise and heighten the effect of the main stories, the additional complexity will have resulted in increased simplicity. In the play at present under consideration, Shakespeare has interwoven into a common pattern two famous and striking tales; his plot, already elaborate, he has made yet more elaborate by the addition of two more tales less striking in their character—the Story of Jessica and the Episode of the Rings.The Jessica Story and the Rings Episode assist the main stories.If it can be shown that these inferior stories have the effect of assisting the main stories, smoothing away their difficulties and making their prominent points yet more prominent, it will be clear that he has made his plot more complex only in reality to make it more simple. The present study is devoted to noticing how the Stories of Jessica and of the Rings minister to the effects of the Story of the Jew and the Caskets Story.The Jessica Story. It serves as Underplot for mechanical personages.To begin with: it may be seen that in many ways the mechanical working out of the main stories is assisted by the Jessica story. In the first place it relieves them of their superfluous personages. Every drama, however simple, must contain 'mechanical' personages, who are introduced into the play, not for their own sake, but to assist in presenting incidents or other personages. The tendency of Romantic Drama to put a story as a whole upon the stage multiplies the number of such mechanical personages: and when several such stories come to be combined in one, there is a danger of the stage being crowded with characters which intrinsically have little interest. Here the Underplots become of service and find occupation for these inferior personages. In the present case only four personages are essential to the main plot—Antonio, Shylock, Bassanio, Portia. But in bringing out the unusual tie that binds togethera representative of the city and a representative of the nobility,e.g.i.i;iii.iii;iv.i.and upon which so much of the plot rests, it is an assistance to introduce the rank and file of gay society and depict these paying court to the commercial magnate. The high position of Antonio and Bassanio in their respective spheres will come out still clearer if these lesser social personages are graduated.i.i; compareiii.i. esp. 14-18.Salanio, Salerio, and Salarino are mere parasites; Gratiano has a certain amount of individuality in his wit;i.i. 74-118.i.ii. 124.v.i, &c.i.ii, &c.iii.i. 80, &c.while, seeing that Bassanio is a scholar as well as a nobleman and soldier, it is fitting to give prominence amongst his followers to the intellectual and artistic Lorenzo. Similarly the introduction of Nerissa assists in presenting Portia fully; Shylock is seen in his relations with his race by the aid of Tubal, his family life is seen in connection with Jessica, and his behaviour to dependants in connection with Launcelot; Launcelot himself is set off by Gobbo. Now the Jessica story is mainly devoted to these inferior personages, and the majority of them take an animated part in the successful elopement. It is further to be noted that the Jessica Underplot has itself an inferior story attached to it,ii.ii. iii;iii.v.that of Launcelot, who seeks scope for his good nature by transferring himself to a Christian master, just as his mistress seeks a freer social atmosphere in union with a Christian husband. And, similarly, side by side with the Caskets Story, which unites Portia and Bassanio,iii.ii. 188, &c.we have a faintly-marked underplot which unites their followers, Nerissa and Gratiano. In one or other of these inferior stories the mechanical personages find attachment to plot; and the multiplication of individual figures, instead of leaving an impression of waste, is made to minister to the sense of Dramatic Economy.It assists mechanical development: occupying the three months' interval,Again: as there are mechanical personages so there are mechanical difficulties—difficulties of realisation which do not belong to the essence of a story, but which appear when the story comes to be worked out upon the stage. The Story ofthe Jew involves such a mechanical difficulty in the interval of three months which elapses between the signing of the bond and its forfeiture. In a classical setting this would be avoided by making the play begin on the day the bond falls due; such treatment, however, would shut out the great dramatic opportunity of the Bond Scene. The Romantic Drama always inclines to exhibiting the whole of a story; it must therefore in the present casesupposea considerable interval between one part of the story and another, and such suppositions tend to be weaknesses. The Jessica Story conveniently bridges over this interval. The first Act is given up to bringing about the bond, which at the beginning of the third Act appears to be broken. The intervening Act consists of no less than nine scenes, and while three of them carry on the progress of the Caskets Story, the other six are devoted to the elopement of Jessica: the bustle and activity implied in such rapid change of scene indicating how an underplot can be used to keep the attention of the audience just where the natural interest of the main story would flag.and so breaking gradually the news of Antonio's losses.The same use of the Jessica Story to bridge over the three months' interval obviates another mechanical difficulty of the main plot. The loss of all Antonio's ships, the supposition that all the commercial ventures of so prudent a merchant should simultaneously miscarry, is so contrary to the chances of things as to put some strain upon our sense of probability; and this is just one of the details which, too unimportant to strike us in an anecdote, become realised when a story is presented before our eyes. The artist, it must be observed, is not bound to find actual solutions for every possible difficulty; he has merely to see that they do not interfere with dramatic effect. Sometimes he so arranges his incidents that the difficulty is met and vanishes; sometimes it is kept out of sight, the portion of the story which contains it going on behind the scenes; at other times he is content with reducing the difficulty in amount. In the presentinstance the improbability of Antonio's losses is lessened by the gradual way in which the news is broken to us, distributed amongst the numerous scenes of the three months' interval.ii.viii. 25.We get the first hint of it in a chance conversation between Salanio and Salarino, in which they are chuckling over the success of the elopement and the fury of the robbed father. Salanio remarks that Antonio must look that he keep his day; this reminds Salarino of a ship he has just heard of as lost somewhere in the English Channel:I thought upon Antonio when he told me;And wish'd in silence that it were not his.iii.i.In the next scene but one the same personages meet, and one of them, enquiring for the latest news, is told that the rumour yet lives of Antonio's loss, and now the exact place of the wreck is specified as the Goodwin Sands; Salarino adds: 'I would it might prove the end of his losses.' Before the close of the scene Shylock and Tubal have been added to it. Tubal has come from Genoa and gives Shylock the welcome news that at Genoa it wasknownthat Antonio had lost an argosy coming from Tripolis; while on his journey to Venice Tubal had travelled with creditors of Antonio who were speculating upon his bankruptcy as a certainty.iii.ii.Then comes the central scene in which the full news reaches Bassanio at the moment of his happiness: all Antonio's ventures failed—From Tripolis, from Mexico and England,From Lisbon, Barbary, and India,not one escaped.iii.iii.In the following scene we see Antonio in custody.The Jessica Story assists Dramatic Hedging in regard to Shylock.These are minor points such as may be met with in any play, and the treatment of them belongs to ordinary Dramatic Mechanism. But we have already had to notice that the Story of the Jew contains special difficulties which belong to the essence of the story, and must be met by specialdevices. One of these was the monstrous character of the Jew himself; and we saw how the dramatist was obliged to maintain in the spectators a double attitude to Shylock, alternately letting them be repelled by his malignity and again attracting their sympathy to him as a victim of wrong. Nothing in the play assists this double attitude so much as the Jessica Story. Not to speak of the fact that Shylock shows no appreciation for the winsomeness of the girl who attracts every one else in the drama, nor of the way in which this one point of brightness in the Jewish quarter throws up the sordidness of all her surroundings,ii.iii. 2.we hear the Jew's own daughter reflect that his house is a 'hell,' and we see enough of his domestic life to agree with her.e.g.ii.v.A Shylock painted without a tender side at all would be repulsive; he becomes much more repulsive when he shows a tenderness for one human being, and yet it appears how this tenderness has grown hard and rotten with the general debasement of his soul by avarice, until, in his ravings over his loss,iii.i, from 25.his ducats and his daughter are ranked as equally dear.iii.i. 92.I would my daughter were dead at my foot, and the jewels in her ear! Would she were hearsed at my foot, and the ducats in her coffin!For all this we feel that he is hardly used in losing her. Paternal feeling may take a gross form, but it is paternal feeling none the less, and cannot be denied our sympathy; bereavement is a common ground upon which not only high and low, but even the pure and the outcast, are drawn together. Thus Jessica at home makes us hate Shylock: with Jessica lost we cannot help pitying him. The perfection of Dramatic Hedging lies in the equal balancing of the conflicting feelings, and one of the most powerful scenes in the whole play is devoted to this twofold display of Shylock. Fresh from the incident of the elopement, he is encountered by the parasites and by Tubal: these amuse themselves with alternately 'chaffing' him upon his losses,and 'drawing' him in the matter of the expected gratification of his vengeance, while his passions rock him between extremes of despair and fiendish anticipation.Jessica Shakespeare's compensation to Shylock.We may go further. Great creative power is accompanied by great attachment to the creations and keen sense of justice in disposing of them. Looked at as a whole, the Jessica Story is Shakespeare's compensation to Shylock.iv.i. 348-394.The sentence on Shylock, which the necessities of the story require, is legal rather than just; yet large part of it consists in a requirement that he shall make his daughter an heiress. And, to put it more generally, the repellent character and hard fate of the father have set against them the sweetness and beauty of the daughter, together with the full cup of good fortune which her wilful rebellion brings her in the love of Lorenzo and the protecting friendship of Portia. Perhaps the dramatist, according to his wont, is warning us of this compensating treatment when he makes one of the characters early in the play exclaim:ii.iv. 34.If e'er the Jew her father come to heaven,It will be for his gentle daughter's sake.The Jessica Story explains Shylock's unyieldingness.The other main source of difficulty in the Story of the Jew is, as we have seen, the detail concerning the pound of flesh, which throws improbability over every stage of its progress. In one at least of these stages the difficulty is directly met by the aid of the Jessica Story: it is this which explains Shylock's resolution not to give way. When we try in imagination to realise the whole circumstances, common sense must take the view taken in the play itself by the Duke:iv.i. 17.Shylock, the world thinks, and I think so too,That thou but lead'st this fashion of thy maliceTo the last hour of act; and then 'tis thoughtThou'lt show thy mercy and remorse more strangeThan is thy strange apparent cruelty.A life-long training in avarice would not easily resist an offer of nine thousand ducats. But further, the alternatives between which Shylock has to choose are not so simple asthe alternatives of Antonio's money or his life. On the one hand, Shylock has to consider the small chance that either the law or the mob would actually suffer the atrocity to be judicially perpetrated, and how his own life would be likely to be lost in the attempt. Again, turning to the other alternative, Shylock is certainly deep in his schemes of vengeance, and the finesse of malignity must have suggested to him how much more cruel to a man of Antonio's stamp it would be to fling him a contemptuous pardon before the eyes of Venice than to turn him into a martyr, even supposing this to be permitted. But at the moment when the choice becomes open to Shylock he has been maddened by the loss of his daughter, who, with the wealth she has stolen, has gone to swell the party of his deadly foe. It is fury, not calculating cruelty, that makes Shylock with a madman's tenacity cling to the idea of blood, while this passion is blinding him to a more keenly flavoured revenge, and risking the chance of securing any vengeance at all[3].The Jessica Story assists the interweaving of the main stories.From the mechanical development of the main plot and the reduction of its difficulties, we pass to the interweaving of the two principal stories, which is so leading a feature of the play. In the main this interweaving is sufficiently provided for by the stories themselves, and we have already seen how the leading personages in the one story are the source of the whole movement in the other story. But this interweaving is drawn closer still by the affair of Jessica:It is thus a Link Action,technically described the position in the plot of Jessica's elopement is that of a Link Action between the main stories. Thislinking appears in the way in which Jessica and her suite are in the course of the drama transferred from the one tale to the other. At the opening of the play they are personages in the Story of the Jew, and represent its two antagonistic sides, Jessica being the daughter of the Jew and Lorenzo a friend and follower of Bassanio and Antonio. First the contrivance of the elopement assists in drawing together these opposite sides of the Jew Story, and aggravating the feud on which it turns.iii.ii, from 221.Then, as we have seen, Jessica and her husband in the central scene of the whole play come into contact with the Caskets Story at its climax. From this point they become adopted into the Caskets Story, and settle down in the house and under the protection of Portia.helping to restore the balance between the main stories,This transference further assists the symmetry of interweaving by helping to adjust the balance between the two main stories. In itsmass, if the expression may be allowed, the Caskets tale, with its steady progress to a goal of success, is over-weighted by the tale of Antonio's tragic peril and startling deliverance: the Jessica episode, withdrawn from the one and added to the other, helps to make the two more equal. Once more, the case, we have seen, is not merely that of a union between stories, but a union between stories opposite in kind, a combination of brightness with gloom.and a bond between their bright and dark climaxes.The binding effect of the Jessica Story extends to the union between these opposite tones. We have already had occasion to notice how the two extremes meet in the central scene, how from the height of Bassanio's bliss we pass in an instant to the total ruin of Antonio, which we then learn in its fulness for the first time: the link which connects the two is the arrival of Jessica and her friends as bearers of the news.

i.iii. 134.

when did friendship takeAbreedforbarren metalof his friend?

when did friendship take

Abreedforbarren metalof his friend?

i.iii. 72.

Shylock illustrates usury by citing the patriarch Jacob and his clever trick in cattle-breeding; showing how, at a time when cattle were the currency, the natural rate of increase might be diverted to private advantage. Antonio interrupts him:

i.iii. 96.

Is your gold and silver ewes and rams?

Shylock answers:

I cannot tell; I make itbreedas fast;

both parties thus showing that they considered the distinction between the using of flesh and metal for the medium of wealth to be the essential point in their dispute. With this notion then of fleshversusmoney floating in the air between them the interview goes on to the outbursts of mutual hatred which reach a climax in Antonio's challenge to Shylock to dohis worst;i.iii, from 138.this challenge suddenly combines with the root idea of the conversation to flash into Shylock's mind the suggestion of the bond. In an instant he smoothes his face and proposes friendship. He will lend the money without interest, in pure kindness, nay more, he will go to that extent of good understanding implied in joking, and will have a merry bond; while as to the particular joke (he says in effect), since you Christians cannot understand interest in the case of money while you acknowledge it in the case of flesh and blood, suppose I take as my interest in this bond a pound of your own flesh. In such a context the monstrous proposal sounds almost natural. It has further been usheredin amanner which makes it almost impossible to decline it. When one who is manifestly an injured man is the first to make advances, a generous adversary finds it almost impossible to hold back. A sensitive man, again, will shrink from nothing more than from the ridicule attaching to those who take serious precautions against a jest. And the more incongruous Shylock's proposal is with commercial negotiations the better evidence it is of his non-commercial intentions. In a word, the essence of the difficulty was the incongruity between human flesh and money transactions: it has been surmounted by a discussion, flowing naturally from the position of the two parties, of which the point is the relative position of flesh and money as the medium of wealth in the past.

Difficulty of legally recognising the bond evaded:

The bond thus proposed and accepted, there follows the difficulty of representing it as entertained by a court of justice. With reference to Shakespeare's handling of this point it may be noted, first, that he leaves us in doubt whether the court would have entertained it:iv.i. 104.the Duke is intimating an intention of adjourning at the moment when the entrance of Portia gives a new turn to the proceedings.iv.i. 17.Again, at the opening of the trial, the Duke gives expression to the universal opinion that Shylock's conduct was intelligible only on the supposition that he was keeping up to thelast moment the appearance of insisting on his strange terms, in order that before the eyes of the whole city he might exhibit his enemy at his mercy, and then add to his ignominy by publicly pardoning him: a fate which, it must be admitted, was no more than Antonio justly deserved. This will explain how Shylock comes to have a hearing at all: when once he is admitted to speak it is exceedingly difficult to resist the pleas Shakespeare puts into his mouth.iv.i. 38.He takes his stand on the city's charter and the letter of the law, and declines to be drawn into any discussion of natural justice;iv.i. 90.yet even as a question of natural justice what answer can be found when he casually points to the institution of slavery, which we must suppose to have existed in Venice at the period? Shylock's only offence is his seeking to make Antonio's life a matter of barter: what else is the accepted institution of slavery but the establishment of power over human flesh and blood and life, simply because these have been bought with money, precisely as Shylock has given good ducats for his rights over the flesh of Antonio? No wonder the perplexed Duke is for adjourning.

Difficulty as to the traditional mode of upsetting the bond met.

There remains one more difficulty, the mode in which, according to the traditional story, the bond is upset. It is manifest that the agreement as to the pound of flesh, if it is to be recognised by a court of justice at all, cannot without the grossest perversion of justice be cancelled on the ground of its omitting to mention blood. Legal evasion can go to great lengths. It is well known that an Act requiring cabs to carry lamps at night has been evaded through the omission of a direction that the lamps were to be lighted; and that importers have escaped a duty on foreign gloves at so much the pair by bringing the right-hand and left-hand gloves over in different ships. But it is perfectly possible to carry lamps without lighting them, while it is a clear impossibility to cut human flesh without shedding blood. Nothing of course would be easier than to upset the bond on rationalgrounds—indeed the difficulty is rather to imagine it receiving rational consideration at all; but on the other hand no solution of the perplexity could be half so dramatic as the one tradition has preserved. The dramatist has to choose between a course of procedure which shall be highly dramatic but leave a sense of injustice, and one that shall be sound and legal but comparatively tame. Shakespeare contrives to secure both alternatives. He retains the traditional plea as to the blood, but puts it into the mouth of one known to his audience to be a woman playing the lawyer for the nonce;iv.i. 314, 347.and again, before we have time to recover from our surprise and feel the injustice of the proceeding, he follows up the brilliant evasion by a sound legal plea, the suggestion of a real lawyer. Portia has come to the court from a conference with her cousin Bellario, the most learned jurist of Venice.iii.iv. 47;iv.i. 143.Certainly it was not this doctor who hit upon the idea of the blood being omitted. His contribution to the interesting consultation was clearly the old statute of Venice, which every one else seems to have forgotten, which made the mere attempt on the life of a citizen by an alien punishable with death and loss of property: according to this piece of statute law not only would Shylock's bond be illegal, but the demand of such security constituted a capital offence. Thus Shakespeare surmounts the final difficulty in the story of the Jew in a mode which retains dramatic force to the full, yet does this without any violation of legal fairness.

The interweaving of the two stories.

The second purpose of the present study is to show how Shakespeare has improved his two stories by so weaving them together that they assist one another's effect.

First, it is easy to see how the whole movement of the play rises naturally out of the union of the two stories. One of the main distinctions between the progress of events in real life or history and in Drama is that the movement of a drama falls into the form technically known as Complicationand Resolution.Complication and Resolution.A dramatist fastens our attention upon some train of events: then he sets himself to divert this train of events from its natural course by some interruption; this interruption is either removed, and the train of events returns to its natural course, or the interruption is carried on to some tragic culmination. InThe Merchant of Veniceour interest is at the beginning fixed on Antonio as rich, high-placed, the protector and benefactor of his friends. By the events following upon the incident of the bond we see what would seem the natural life of Antonio diverted into a totally different channel; in the end the old course is restored, and Antonio becomes prosperous as before. Such interruption of a train of incidents is its Complication, and the term Complication suggests a happy Resolution to follow. Complication and Resolution are essential to dramatic movement, as discords and their 'resolution' into concords constitute the essence of music.The one story complicated and resolved by the other.The Complication and Resolution in the story of the Jew serve for the Complication and Resolution of the drama as a whole; and my immediate point is that these elements of movement in the one story spring directly out of its connection with the other.i.i, from 122;i.iii.But for Bassanio's need of money and his blunder in applying to Shylock the bond would never have been entered into, and the change in Antonio's fortunes would never have come about: thus the cause for all the Complication of the play (technically, the Complicating Force) is the happy lover of the Caskets Story. Similarly Portia is the means by which Antonio's fortunes are restored to their natural flow: in other words, the source of the Resolution (or Resolving Force) is the maiden of the Caskets Story. The two leading personages of the one tale are the sources respectively of the Complication and Resolution in the other tale, which carry the Complication and Resolution of the drama as a whole. Thus simply does the movement of the whole play flow from the union of the two stories.

The whole play symmetrical about its central scene.

One consequence flowing from this is worth noting; thatthe scene in which Bassanio makes his successful choice of the casket is the Dramatic Centre of the whole play, as being the point in which the Complicating and Resolving Forces meet. This Dramatic Centre is, according to Shakespeare's favourite custom, placed in the exact mechanical centre of the drama, covering the middle of the middle Act. There is again an amount of poetic splendour lavished upon this scene which throws it up as a poetic centre to the whole. More than this, it is the real crisis of the play. Looking philosophically upon the whole drama as a piece of history, we must admit that the true turning-point is the success of Bassanio; the apparent crisis is the Trial Scene, but this is in reality governed by the scene of the successful choice, and if Portia and Bassanio had not been united in the earlier scene no lawyer would have interposed to turn the current of events in the trial. There is yet another sense in which the same scene may be called central. Hitherto I have dealt with only two tales; the full plot however ofThe Merchant of Veniceinvolves two more, the Story of Jessica and the Episode of the Rings: it is to be observed that all four stories meet in the scene of the successful choice. This scene is the climax of the Caskets Story.iii.ii, from 221.It is connected with the catastrophe in the Story of the Jew: Bassanio, at the moment of his happiness, learns that the friend through whom he has been able to contend for the prize has forfeited his life to his foe as the price of his liberality. The scene is connected with the Jessica Story: for Jessica and her husband are the messengers who bring the sad tidings, and thus link together the bright and gloomy elements of the play.iii.ii. 173-187.Finally, the Episode of the Rings, which is to occupy the end of the drama, has its foundation in this scene, in the exchange of the rings which are destined to be the source of such ironical perplexity. Such is the symmetry with which the plot ofThe Merchant of Venicehas been constructed: the incident which is technically its Dramatic Centre is at once its mechanicalcentre, its poetic centre, and, philosophically considered, its true turning-point; while, considering the play as a Romantic drama with its union of stories, we find in the same central incident all the four stories dovetailed together.

Shakespeare as a master of Plot.

These points may appear small and merely technical. But is a constant purpose with me in the present exposition of Shakespeare as a Dramatic Artist to combat the notion, so widely prevalent amongst ordinary readers, that Shakespeare, though endowed with the profoundest grasp of human nature, is yet careless in the construction of his plots: a notion in itself as improbable as it would be that a sculptor could be found to produce individual figures exquisitely moulded and chiselled, yet awkwardly and clumsily grouped. It is the minuter points that show the finish of an artist; and such symmetry of construction as appears inThe Merchant of Veniceis not likely to characterise a dramatist who sacrifices plot to character-painting.

The union of a light with a serious story.

There remains another point, which no one will consider small or technical, connected with the union of the two stories: the fact that Shakespeare has thus united a light and a serious story, that he has woven together gloom and brightness. This carries us to one of the great battlefields of dramatic history; no feature is more characteristic of the Romantic Drama than this mingling of light and serious in the same play, and at no point has it been more stoutly assailed by critics trained in an opposite school. I say nothing of the wider scope this practice gives to the dramatist, nor the way in which it brings the world of art nearer to the world of reality; my present purpose is to review the dramatic effects which flow from the mingling of the two elements in the present play.

Dramatic effects arising out of this union.

In general human interest the stories are a counterpoise to one another, so different in kind, so equal in the degree of interest their progress continues to call forth. The incidents of the two tales gather around Antonio and Portiarespectively;Effects of Human Interest.each of these is a full and rounded character, and they are both centres of their respective worlds.i.i. 1.The stories seem to start from a common point. The keynote to the story of the Jew is the strange 'sadness'—the word implies no more than seriousness—which overpowers Antonio, and which seems to be the shadow of his coming trouble. Compare with this the first words we hear of Portia:

i.ii. 1.

By my troth, Nerissa, my little body is aweary of this great world.

Such a humorous languor is a fitting precursor to the excitement and energy of the scenes which follow. But from this common starting-point the stories move in opposite directions; the spectator's sympathies are demanded alternately for two independent chains of circumstances, for the fortunes of Antonio sinking lower and lower, and the fortunes of Portia rising higher and higher. He sees the merchant and citizen become a bankrupt prisoner, the lordly benefactor of his friends a wretch at the mercy of his foe. He sees Portia, already endowed with beauty, wealth, and character, attain what to her heart is yet higher, the power to lay all she has at the feet of the man she loves. Then, when they are at the climax of their happiness and misery, when Portia has received all that this world can bestow, and Antonio has lost all that this world can take away, for the first time these two central personages meet face to face in the Trial Scene.Effects of Plot.And if from general human interest we pass on to the machinery of plot, we find this also governed by the same combination: a half-serious frolic is the medium in which a tragic crisis finds its solution.

Emotional effects: increase of tragic passion;

But it is of course passion and emotional interest which are mainly affected by the union of light and serious: these we shall appreciate chiefly in connection with the Trial Scene, where the emotional threads of the play are gathered into a knot, and the two personages who are the embodiments of the light and serious elements face one another as judge andprisoner.iv.i, from 225.In this scene it is remarkable how Portia takes pains to prolong to the utmost extent the crisis she has come to solve; she holds in her fingers the threads of the tangled situation, and she is strong enough to play with it before she will consent to bring it to an end.178.She has intimated her opinion that the letter of the bond must be maintained,184-207.she has made her appeal to Shylock for mercy and been refused, she has heard Bassanio's appeal to wrest the law for once to214-222.her authority and has rejected it; there remains nothing but to pronounce the decree.225.But at the last moment she asks to see the bond, and every spectator in court holds his breath and hears his heart beat as he follows the lawyer's eye down line after line.227-230.It is of no avail; at the end she can only repeat the useless offer of thrice the loan, with the effect of drawing from Shylock an oath that he will not give way.230-244.Then Portia admits that the bond is forfeit, with a needless reiteration of its horrible details; yet, as if it were some evenly balanced question, in which after-thoughts were important, she once more appeals to Shylock to be merciful and bid her tear the bond, and evokes a still stronger asseveration from the malignant victor, until even Antonio's stoicism begins to give way, and he begs for a speedy judgment.243.Portia then commences to pass her judgment in language of legal prolixity, which sounds like a recollection of her hour with Bellario:—

For the intent and purpose of the lawHath full relation to the penalty,Which here appeareth due upon the bond, &c.

For the intent and purpose of the law

Hath full relation to the penalty,

Which here appeareth due upon the bond, &c.

255-261.

Next she fads about the details of the judicial barbarity, the balance to weigh the flesh, a surgeon as a forlorn hope; and when Shylock demurs to the last, stops to argue that he might do this for charity. At last surely the intolerable suspense will come to a termination.263.But our lawyer of half-an-hour's standing suddenly remembers she has forgotten to call on the defendant in the suit, and the pathos isintensified by the dying speech of Antonio, calmly welcoming death for himself, anxious only to soften Bassanio's remorse, his last human passion a rivalry with Portia for the love of his friend.

iv.i. 276.

Bid her be judgeWhether Bassanio had not once a love.

Bid her be judge

Whether Bassanio had not once a love.

iv.i, from 299.

When the final judgment can be delayed no longer its opening sentences are still lengthened out by the jingling repetitions of judicial formality,

The law allows it, and the court awards it, &c.

Only when every evasion has been exhausted comes the thunderstroke which reverses the whole situation. Now it is clear that had this situation been intended to have a tragic termination this prolonging of its details would have been impossible; thus to harrow our feelings with items of agony would be not art but barbarity. It is because Portia knows what termination she is going to give to the scene that she can indulge in such boldness; it is because the audience have recognised in Portia the signal of deliverance that the lengthening of the crisis becomes the dramatic beauty of suspense. It appears then that, if this scene be regarded only as a crisis of tragic passion, the dramatist has been able to extract moretragiceffect out of it by the device of assisting the tragic with a light story.

reaction and comic effect;

Again, it is a natural law of the human mind to pass from strain to reaction, and suspense relieved will find vent in vehement exhilaration. By giving Portia her position in the crisis scene the dramatist is clearly furnishing the means for a reaction to follow, and the reaction is found in theiv.i, from 425.Episode of the Rings, by which the disguised wives entangle their husbands in a perplexity affording the audience the bursts of merriment needed as relief from the tension of the Trial Scene. The play is thus brought into conformity with the laws of mental working, and the effect of the reactionis to make the serious passion more keen because more healthy.

effects of mixed passion.

Finally, there are the effects of mixed passion, neither wholly serious nor wholly light, but compounded of the two, which are impossible to a drama that can admit only a single tone. The effect of Dramatic Irony, which Shakespeare inherited from the ancient Drama, but greatly modified and extended, is powerfully illustrated at the most pathetic point of the Trial Scene,iv.i. 273-294.when Antonio's chance reference to Bassanio's new wife calls from Bassanio and his followers agonised vows to sacrifice even their wives if this could save their patron—little thinking that these wives are standing by to record the vow. But there is an effect higher than this.iv.i. 184-202.Portia's outburst on the theme of mercy, considered only as a speech, is one of the noblest in literature, a gem of purest truth in a setting of richest music. But the situation in which she speaks it is so framed as to make Portia herself the embodiment of the mercy she describes. How can we imagine a higher type of mercy, the feminine counterpart of justice, than in the bright woman, at the moment of her supreme happiness, appearing in the garb of the law to deliver a righteous unfortunate from his one error, and the justice of Venice from the insoluble perplexity of having to commit a murder by legal process? And how is this situation brought about but by the most intricate interweaving of a story of brightness with a story of trouble?

In all branches then of dramatic effect, in Character, in Plot and in Passion, the union of a light with a serious story is found to be a source of power and beauty. The fault charged against the Romantic Drama has upon a deeper view proved a new point of departure in dramatic progress; and in this particular case the combination of tales so opposite in character must be regarded as one of the leading points in which Shakespeare has improved the tales in the telling.

FOOTNOTES:[1]No commentator has succeeded in making intelligible the linei.iii. 42.How like a fawning publican he looks!as it stands in the text at the opening of Shylock's soliloquy. The expression 'fawning publican' is so totally the opposite of all the qualities of Antonio that it could have no force even in the mouth of a satirist. It is impossible not to be attracted by the simple change in the text that would not only get over this difficulty, but add a new effect to the scene: the change of assigning this single line to Antonio, reserving, of course, the rest of the speech for Shylock. The passage would then read thus [the stage direction is my own]:EnterAntonio.Bass.This is Signior Antonio.Ant.[Aside]. How like a fawning publican he looks—[BassaniowhispersAntonioand brings him toShylock.Shy.[Aside]. I hate him, for he is a Christian, But more, &c.Both the terms 'fawning' and 'publican' are literally applicable to Shylock, and are just what Antonio would be likely to say of him. It is again a natural effect for the two foes on meeting for the first time in the play to exchange scowling defiance. Antonio's defiance is cut short at the first line by Bassanio's running up to him, explaining what he has done, and bringing Antonio up to where Shylock is standing; the time occupied in doing this gives Shylock scope for his longer soliloquy.

[1]No commentator has succeeded in making intelligible the linei.iii. 42.How like a fawning publican he looks!as it stands in the text at the opening of Shylock's soliloquy. The expression 'fawning publican' is so totally the opposite of all the qualities of Antonio that it could have no force even in the mouth of a satirist. It is impossible not to be attracted by the simple change in the text that would not only get over this difficulty, but add a new effect to the scene: the change of assigning this single line to Antonio, reserving, of course, the rest of the speech for Shylock. The passage would then read thus [the stage direction is my own]:EnterAntonio.Bass.This is Signior Antonio.Ant.[Aside]. How like a fawning publican he looks—[BassaniowhispersAntonioand brings him toShylock.Shy.[Aside]. I hate him, for he is a Christian, But more, &c.Both the terms 'fawning' and 'publican' are literally applicable to Shylock, and are just what Antonio would be likely to say of him. It is again a natural effect for the two foes on meeting for the first time in the play to exchange scowling defiance. Antonio's defiance is cut short at the first line by Bassanio's running up to him, explaining what he has done, and bringing Antonio up to where Shylock is standing; the time occupied in doing this gives Shylock scope for his longer soliloquy.

[1]No commentator has succeeded in making intelligible the line

i.iii. 42.

How like a fawning publican he looks!

as it stands in the text at the opening of Shylock's soliloquy. The expression 'fawning publican' is so totally the opposite of all the qualities of Antonio that it could have no force even in the mouth of a satirist. It is impossible not to be attracted by the simple change in the text that would not only get over this difficulty, but add a new effect to the scene: the change of assigning this single line to Antonio, reserving, of course, the rest of the speech for Shylock. The passage would then read thus [the stage direction is my own]:

EnterAntonio.Bass.This is Signior Antonio.Ant.[Aside]. How like a fawning publican he looks—[BassaniowhispersAntonioand brings him toShylock.Shy.[Aside]. I hate him, for he is a Christian, But more, &c.

EnterAntonio.

Bass.This is Signior Antonio.

Ant.[Aside]. How like a fawning publican he looks—

[BassaniowhispersAntonioand brings him toShylock.

Shy.[Aside]. I hate him, for he is a Christian, But more, &c.

Both the terms 'fawning' and 'publican' are literally applicable to Shylock, and are just what Antonio would be likely to say of him. It is again a natural effect for the two foes on meeting for the first time in the play to exchange scowling defiance. Antonio's defiance is cut short at the first line by Bassanio's running up to him, explaining what he has done, and bringing Antonio up to where Shylock is standing; the time occupied in doing this gives Shylock scope for his longer soliloquy.

How Shakespeare makes his plot more Complex in order to make it more Simple.

A Study in Underplot.

Paradox of simplicity by means of increased complexity.

Thetitle of the present study is a paradox: that Shakespeare makes a plot more complex[2]in order to make it more simple. It is however a paradox that finds an illustration from the material world in every open roof. The architect's problem has been to support a heavy weight without the assistance of pillars, and it might have been expected that in solving the problem he would at least have tried every means in his power for diminishing the weight to be supported. On the contrary, he has increased this weight by the addition of massive cross-beams and heavy iron-girders. Yet, if these have been arranged according to the laws of construction, each of them will bring a supporting power considerably greater than its own weight; and thus, while in a literal sense increasing the roof, for all practical purposes they may be said to have diminished it. Similarly a dramatist of the Romantic school, from his practice of uniting more than one story in the same plot, has to face thedifficulty of complexity. This difficulty he solves not by seeking how to reduce combinations as far as possible, but, on the contrary, by the addition of more and inferior stories; yet if these new stories are so handled as to emphasise and heighten the effect of the main stories, the additional complexity will have resulted in increased simplicity. In the play at present under consideration, Shakespeare has interwoven into a common pattern two famous and striking tales; his plot, already elaborate, he has made yet more elaborate by the addition of two more tales less striking in their character—the Story of Jessica and the Episode of the Rings.The Jessica Story and the Rings Episode assist the main stories.If it can be shown that these inferior stories have the effect of assisting the main stories, smoothing away their difficulties and making their prominent points yet more prominent, it will be clear that he has made his plot more complex only in reality to make it more simple. The present study is devoted to noticing how the Stories of Jessica and of the Rings minister to the effects of the Story of the Jew and the Caskets Story.

The Jessica Story. It serves as Underplot for mechanical personages.

To begin with: it may be seen that in many ways the mechanical working out of the main stories is assisted by the Jessica story. In the first place it relieves them of their superfluous personages. Every drama, however simple, must contain 'mechanical' personages, who are introduced into the play, not for their own sake, but to assist in presenting incidents or other personages. The tendency of Romantic Drama to put a story as a whole upon the stage multiplies the number of such mechanical personages: and when several such stories come to be combined in one, there is a danger of the stage being crowded with characters which intrinsically have little interest. Here the Underplots become of service and find occupation for these inferior personages. In the present case only four personages are essential to the main plot—Antonio, Shylock, Bassanio, Portia. But in bringing out the unusual tie that binds togethera representative of the city and a representative of the nobility,e.g.i.i;iii.iii;iv.i.and upon which so much of the plot rests, it is an assistance to introduce the rank and file of gay society and depict these paying court to the commercial magnate. The high position of Antonio and Bassanio in their respective spheres will come out still clearer if these lesser social personages are graduated.i.i; compareiii.i. esp. 14-18.Salanio, Salerio, and Salarino are mere parasites; Gratiano has a certain amount of individuality in his wit;i.i. 74-118.i.ii. 124.v.i, &c.i.ii, &c.iii.i. 80, &c.while, seeing that Bassanio is a scholar as well as a nobleman and soldier, it is fitting to give prominence amongst his followers to the intellectual and artistic Lorenzo. Similarly the introduction of Nerissa assists in presenting Portia fully; Shylock is seen in his relations with his race by the aid of Tubal, his family life is seen in connection with Jessica, and his behaviour to dependants in connection with Launcelot; Launcelot himself is set off by Gobbo. Now the Jessica story is mainly devoted to these inferior personages, and the majority of them take an animated part in the successful elopement. It is further to be noted that the Jessica Underplot has itself an inferior story attached to it,ii.ii. iii;iii.v.that of Launcelot, who seeks scope for his good nature by transferring himself to a Christian master, just as his mistress seeks a freer social atmosphere in union with a Christian husband. And, similarly, side by side with the Caskets Story, which unites Portia and Bassanio,iii.ii. 188, &c.we have a faintly-marked underplot which unites their followers, Nerissa and Gratiano. In one or other of these inferior stories the mechanical personages find attachment to plot; and the multiplication of individual figures, instead of leaving an impression of waste, is made to minister to the sense of Dramatic Economy.

It assists mechanical development: occupying the three months' interval,

Again: as there are mechanical personages so there are mechanical difficulties—difficulties of realisation which do not belong to the essence of a story, but which appear when the story comes to be worked out upon the stage. The Story ofthe Jew involves such a mechanical difficulty in the interval of three months which elapses between the signing of the bond and its forfeiture. In a classical setting this would be avoided by making the play begin on the day the bond falls due; such treatment, however, would shut out the great dramatic opportunity of the Bond Scene. The Romantic Drama always inclines to exhibiting the whole of a story; it must therefore in the present casesupposea considerable interval between one part of the story and another, and such suppositions tend to be weaknesses. The Jessica Story conveniently bridges over this interval. The first Act is given up to bringing about the bond, which at the beginning of the third Act appears to be broken. The intervening Act consists of no less than nine scenes, and while three of them carry on the progress of the Caskets Story, the other six are devoted to the elopement of Jessica: the bustle and activity implied in such rapid change of scene indicating how an underplot can be used to keep the attention of the audience just where the natural interest of the main story would flag.

and so breaking gradually the news of Antonio's losses.

The same use of the Jessica Story to bridge over the three months' interval obviates another mechanical difficulty of the main plot. The loss of all Antonio's ships, the supposition that all the commercial ventures of so prudent a merchant should simultaneously miscarry, is so contrary to the chances of things as to put some strain upon our sense of probability; and this is just one of the details which, too unimportant to strike us in an anecdote, become realised when a story is presented before our eyes. The artist, it must be observed, is not bound to find actual solutions for every possible difficulty; he has merely to see that they do not interfere with dramatic effect. Sometimes he so arranges his incidents that the difficulty is met and vanishes; sometimes it is kept out of sight, the portion of the story which contains it going on behind the scenes; at other times he is content with reducing the difficulty in amount. In the presentinstance the improbability of Antonio's losses is lessened by the gradual way in which the news is broken to us, distributed amongst the numerous scenes of the three months' interval.ii.viii. 25.We get the first hint of it in a chance conversation between Salanio and Salarino, in which they are chuckling over the success of the elopement and the fury of the robbed father. Salanio remarks that Antonio must look that he keep his day; this reminds Salarino of a ship he has just heard of as lost somewhere in the English Channel:

I thought upon Antonio when he told me;And wish'd in silence that it were not his.

I thought upon Antonio when he told me;

And wish'd in silence that it were not his.

iii.i.

In the next scene but one the same personages meet, and one of them, enquiring for the latest news, is told that the rumour yet lives of Antonio's loss, and now the exact place of the wreck is specified as the Goodwin Sands; Salarino adds: 'I would it might prove the end of his losses.' Before the close of the scene Shylock and Tubal have been added to it. Tubal has come from Genoa and gives Shylock the welcome news that at Genoa it wasknownthat Antonio had lost an argosy coming from Tripolis; while on his journey to Venice Tubal had travelled with creditors of Antonio who were speculating upon his bankruptcy as a certainty.iii.ii.Then comes the central scene in which the full news reaches Bassanio at the moment of his happiness: all Antonio's ventures failed—

From Tripolis, from Mexico and England,From Lisbon, Barbary, and India,

From Tripolis, from Mexico and England,

From Lisbon, Barbary, and India,

not one escaped.iii.iii.In the following scene we see Antonio in custody.

The Jessica Story assists Dramatic Hedging in regard to Shylock.

These are minor points such as may be met with in any play, and the treatment of them belongs to ordinary Dramatic Mechanism. But we have already had to notice that the Story of the Jew contains special difficulties which belong to the essence of the story, and must be met by specialdevices. One of these was the monstrous character of the Jew himself; and we saw how the dramatist was obliged to maintain in the spectators a double attitude to Shylock, alternately letting them be repelled by his malignity and again attracting their sympathy to him as a victim of wrong. Nothing in the play assists this double attitude so much as the Jessica Story. Not to speak of the fact that Shylock shows no appreciation for the winsomeness of the girl who attracts every one else in the drama, nor of the way in which this one point of brightness in the Jewish quarter throws up the sordidness of all her surroundings,ii.iii. 2.we hear the Jew's own daughter reflect that his house is a 'hell,' and we see enough of his domestic life to agree with her.e.g.ii.v.A Shylock painted without a tender side at all would be repulsive; he becomes much more repulsive when he shows a tenderness for one human being, and yet it appears how this tenderness has grown hard and rotten with the general debasement of his soul by avarice, until, in his ravings over his loss,iii.i, from 25.his ducats and his daughter are ranked as equally dear.

iii.i. 92.

I would my daughter were dead at my foot, and the jewels in her ear! Would she were hearsed at my foot, and the ducats in her coffin!

For all this we feel that he is hardly used in losing her. Paternal feeling may take a gross form, but it is paternal feeling none the less, and cannot be denied our sympathy; bereavement is a common ground upon which not only high and low, but even the pure and the outcast, are drawn together. Thus Jessica at home makes us hate Shylock: with Jessica lost we cannot help pitying him. The perfection of Dramatic Hedging lies in the equal balancing of the conflicting feelings, and one of the most powerful scenes in the whole play is devoted to this twofold display of Shylock. Fresh from the incident of the elopement, he is encountered by the parasites and by Tubal: these amuse themselves with alternately 'chaffing' him upon his losses,and 'drawing' him in the matter of the expected gratification of his vengeance, while his passions rock him between extremes of despair and fiendish anticipation.Jessica Shakespeare's compensation to Shylock.We may go further. Great creative power is accompanied by great attachment to the creations and keen sense of justice in disposing of them. Looked at as a whole, the Jessica Story is Shakespeare's compensation to Shylock.iv.i. 348-394.The sentence on Shylock, which the necessities of the story require, is legal rather than just; yet large part of it consists in a requirement that he shall make his daughter an heiress. And, to put it more generally, the repellent character and hard fate of the father have set against them the sweetness and beauty of the daughter, together with the full cup of good fortune which her wilful rebellion brings her in the love of Lorenzo and the protecting friendship of Portia. Perhaps the dramatist, according to his wont, is warning us of this compensating treatment when he makes one of the characters early in the play exclaim:

ii.iv. 34.

If e'er the Jew her father come to heaven,It will be for his gentle daughter's sake.

If e'er the Jew her father come to heaven,

It will be for his gentle daughter's sake.

The Jessica Story explains Shylock's unyieldingness.

The other main source of difficulty in the Story of the Jew is, as we have seen, the detail concerning the pound of flesh, which throws improbability over every stage of its progress. In one at least of these stages the difficulty is directly met by the aid of the Jessica Story: it is this which explains Shylock's resolution not to give way. When we try in imagination to realise the whole circumstances, common sense must take the view taken in the play itself by the Duke:

iv.i. 17.

Shylock, the world thinks, and I think so too,That thou but lead'st this fashion of thy maliceTo the last hour of act; and then 'tis thoughtThou'lt show thy mercy and remorse more strangeThan is thy strange apparent cruelty.

Shylock, the world thinks, and I think so too,

That thou but lead'st this fashion of thy malice

To the last hour of act; and then 'tis thought

Thou'lt show thy mercy and remorse more strange

Than is thy strange apparent cruelty.

A life-long training in avarice would not easily resist an offer of nine thousand ducats. But further, the alternatives between which Shylock has to choose are not so simple asthe alternatives of Antonio's money or his life. On the one hand, Shylock has to consider the small chance that either the law or the mob would actually suffer the atrocity to be judicially perpetrated, and how his own life would be likely to be lost in the attempt. Again, turning to the other alternative, Shylock is certainly deep in his schemes of vengeance, and the finesse of malignity must have suggested to him how much more cruel to a man of Antonio's stamp it would be to fling him a contemptuous pardon before the eyes of Venice than to turn him into a martyr, even supposing this to be permitted. But at the moment when the choice becomes open to Shylock he has been maddened by the loss of his daughter, who, with the wealth she has stolen, has gone to swell the party of his deadly foe. It is fury, not calculating cruelty, that makes Shylock with a madman's tenacity cling to the idea of blood, while this passion is blinding him to a more keenly flavoured revenge, and risking the chance of securing any vengeance at all[3].

The Jessica Story assists the interweaving of the main stories.

From the mechanical development of the main plot and the reduction of its difficulties, we pass to the interweaving of the two principal stories, which is so leading a feature of the play. In the main this interweaving is sufficiently provided for by the stories themselves, and we have already seen how the leading personages in the one story are the source of the whole movement in the other story. But this interweaving is drawn closer still by the affair of Jessica:It is thus a Link Action,technically described the position in the plot of Jessica's elopement is that of a Link Action between the main stories. Thislinking appears in the way in which Jessica and her suite are in the course of the drama transferred from the one tale to the other. At the opening of the play they are personages in the Story of the Jew, and represent its two antagonistic sides, Jessica being the daughter of the Jew and Lorenzo a friend and follower of Bassanio and Antonio. First the contrivance of the elopement assists in drawing together these opposite sides of the Jew Story, and aggravating the feud on which it turns.iii.ii, from 221.Then, as we have seen, Jessica and her husband in the central scene of the whole play come into contact with the Caskets Story at its climax. From this point they become adopted into the Caskets Story, and settle down in the house and under the protection of Portia.helping to restore the balance between the main stories,This transference further assists the symmetry of interweaving by helping to adjust the balance between the two main stories. In itsmass, if the expression may be allowed, the Caskets tale, with its steady progress to a goal of success, is over-weighted by the tale of Antonio's tragic peril and startling deliverance: the Jessica episode, withdrawn from the one and added to the other, helps to make the two more equal. Once more, the case, we have seen, is not merely that of a union between stories, but a union between stories opposite in kind, a combination of brightness with gloom.and a bond between their bright and dark climaxes.The binding effect of the Jessica Story extends to the union between these opposite tones. We have already had occasion to notice how the two extremes meet in the central scene, how from the height of Bassanio's bliss we pass in an instant to the total ruin of Antonio, which we then learn in its fulness for the first time: the link which connects the two is the arrival of Jessica and her friends as bearers of the news.

Back to Index Next