IN ENGLAND AFTER THE EXPULSION
THE banishment of the Jews from England by Edward I., in 1290, was
not quite so thorough as is popularly supposed to have been. A small
section of the community remained behind, or returned, under the
disguise of Lombards. This remnant, according to Jewish tradition,
was finally driven out in 1358; but there is on record a petition to
the Good Parliament which shows that, even after that date, some of
them continued to lead a masked kind of existence in England. The
same inference is to be drawn from the fact that the House for Jewish
Converts, built by Henry III. in the thirteenth century, continued
in existence till the seventeenth. Broadly speaking, however,
Edward’s expulsion cleared England of Jews. But, while removing the
objects of Christian hatred, it did not diminish the hatred itself.
Although the “unclean and perfidious” race had, to all intents and
purposes, vanished from men’s eyes, the legend of their wickedness and
misanthropy lingered in tradition and was consecrated by literature. In
the middle of the ensuing century we find Gower, the poet, representing
a Jew as saying:
“I am a Jewe, and by my lawe
I shal to no man be felawe
To keepe him trouth in word ne dede.”[126]
A few years afterwards Chaucer, in his _Prioresses Tale_, immortalised
the monkish fiction of child-murder, which had already done yeoman’s
service in justifying the persecution of the Jews. Chaucer’s child,
to judge from the scene of its murder being laid in Asia, seems to
be the eldest member of the large family of massacred Innocents,
representatives of which are to be met with in nearly every European
country.
“Heere bigynneth the Prioresses tale:
“There was in Asie, in a gret citee,
Amonges Cristen folk a Jewerye,
Sustened by a lord of that contree,
For foule usure and lucre of vilanye,
Hateful to Crist and to his companye;
And thurgh the strete men myght ryde or wende,
For it was free, and open at eyther ende.”
At the further end of this Jewish quarter stood a little school for
Christian children, who learnt in it “swich maner doctrine as men used
there,” that is, “to singen and to rede.” Among these youthful scholars
was a widow’s son, “a litel clergeon, seven year of age,” whom his
mother had taught to kneel and pray before the Virgin’s image. Day by
day on his way to and from school, as he passed through the Jewry, this
Innocent used full merrily to sing “Alma Redemptoris”:
“The swetnes hath his herte perced so
Of Cristes mooder, that, to hir to preye,
He can not stinte of singing by the weye.”
But
“Our firste foo, the serpent Sathanas,
That hath in Jewes herte his waspes nest,”
was sorely vexed at the child’s piety, and stirred up the inmates of
the Jewry with such words:
“O Hebraik peple, allas!
Is this to yow a thing that is honest,
That swich a boy shal walken as him lest
In your despyt, and singe of swich sentence,
Which is again your lawes reverence?”
The Jews took the hint, and conspired to chase this Innocent out of the
world. They hired a homicide, and, as the boy went by, this cursed Jew
seized him, cut his throat, and cast him into a pit.
The poor widow waited all night for her little child in vain, and as
soon as it was daylight she hastened to the school and elsewhere,
seeking it, until she heard that it had last been seen in the Jewry.
Half distracted with anguish and fear, she continued her search among
the accursed Jews, now calling on Christ’s mother for help, now
imploring every Jew she met to tell her if her child had passed that
way. They all answered and said no!
But Jesus, who loves to hear his praises sung by the mouth of
Innocence, directed her steps to the pit, and there, wondrous to
relate, she heard her child, with its throat cut from ear to ear,
singing lustily “Alma Redemptoris.”
“So loude, that al the place gan to ringe.”
The Christian folk, awestruck, sent for the Provost. The boy was taken
out of the pit, amid piteous lamentations, “singing his song alway,”
and was carried in procession to the Abbey, his mother swooning by the
bier. The Jews were punished for their crime “with torment and with
shameful death”; they were first drawn by wild horses and afterwards
hanged.
Meanwhile, this Innocent was borne to his grave, and when sprinkled
with holy water spoke and sang, “O Alma Redemptoris mater!” The abbot,
“who was a holy man as monks are, or else ought to be,” began to
adjure the child by the holy Trinity to tell him what was the cause of
its singing, “sith that thy throte is cut, to my seminge?” The child
answers: “‘My throte is cut unto my nekkeboon,’ and I should have died
long ago. But Jesus Christ wills that his glory last and be remembered.
So I am permitted to sing ‘O Alma’ loud and clear.”
He relates how Christ’s mother sweet, whom he had always loved, came
to him and, laying a grain upon his tongue, bade him sing this anthem.
Thereupon the holy monk, drawing out the boy’s tongue, removed the
grain, and forthwith the boy gave up the ghost softly. The martyr’s
“litel body sweet” was laid in a tomb of clear marble.
The _Prioresses Tale_ ends with an apostrophe to young Hugh of Lincoln
“sleyn also with cursed Jewes, as it is notable,” and a request that he
should pray for us “sinful folk unstable.” Amen.
Bishop Percy, in his _Reliques of Ancient Poetry_, has preserved the
Scottish ballad of _The Jew’s Daughter_, which turns on an incident
bearing a close resemblance to Chaucer’s tale, although it seems to
be based on the alleged murder at Trent, in 1475, of a boy called
Simon.[127] The name of the victim, on the legend reaching England, may
quite easily have been changed into the familiar Hugh. The Scottish
version is as follows:
“The rain rins doune through Mirry-land toune,
Sae dois it doune the Pa:
Sae dois the lads of Mirry-land toune,
Quhan they play at the ba’.
Than out and cam the Jewis dochter,
Said, Will ye cum in and dine?
‘I winnae cum in, I cannae cum in,
Without my play-feres mine.’”
However, the boy is enticed with an apple “reid and white” and stabbed
in the heart with a little pen-knife by the Jew’s daughter, who then
laughingly lays him out on a dressing board, dresses him like a swine,
puts him in “a cake of lead” and casts him into a filthy draw-well.
Lady Helen, the boy’s mother, misses him in the evening and runs to the
“Jewis castel,” calling upon her “bonny Sir Hew.” He answers from the
bottom of the well.
And so one century religiously handed down to the next its fictions and
its prejudices.
Yet, the Jew is as hard to keep out as Nature herself: _Expellas
furca tamen usque recurret_. In 1410 we hear of a Jewish physician
named Elias Sabot who came from Bologna with permission to settle and
practise in any part of the realm. There is also reason to believe
that the Jewish remnant left in England after Edward’s expulsion was
strongly reinforced by the immigration of refugees from Spain towards
the end of the fifteenth century. The reign of Queen Elizabeth was
also distinguished by the influx of many foreigners--merchants,
miners,[128] and physicians--and it is highly probable that there
were Jews amongst them. But how perilous such a venture was can be
seen from the following episode. In the year 1581 a certain Jeochim
Gaunz, or Gaunse, came over with a proposal to furnish to the English
Government some new information concerning the methods of smelting and
manufacturing copper and lead ores, and conducted experiments in the
mining districts of Cumberland. For some nine years the enterprising
stranger lived in London unmolested, because unsuspected. But on an
evil day, in September 1589, he went to Bristol, and there fell in with
the Rev. Richard Crawley, a clergyman interested in Hebrew. On finding
that Gaunz knew that language, Mr. Crawley cultivated his acquaintance,
and in the course of one of their learned discussions Gaunz betrayed
his Judaism. The discovery led to his arrest. Cross-examined by the
local magistrates, he boldly confessed that he was a Bohemian Jew, born
and bred, unbaptized and absolutely unable to accept the claims of
Christianity to a divine origin. He was sent before the Privy Council
at Whitehall, where all traces of him are lost.
But the unpopularity of the race in Elizabethan England, apart from
Gaunse’s case, is abundantly attested by the Elizabethan drama. A few
authors made occasional attempts to whitewash the stage Jew; but these
attempts, somewhat dubious at the best, were certainly not successful.
That the general opinion of the Jew continued to be anything but a
favourable one, is implied by casual references in various plays, and
is manifestly proved by the delineation of the Jewish character in
Marlowe’s _Jew of Malta_ and in Shakespeare’s _Merchant of Venice_.
Marlowe’s Barabas and Shakespeare’s Shylock are both replicas of the
Jew as conceived by mediaeval imagination: a money-monger fabulously
rich, ineffably tender to his own people, incredibly cruel to the
Christian. It is a portrait drawn by prejudice and coloured by
ignorance. The two great dramatists adopted the popular lay-figure
and breathed into it the spirit of life. The result is a gruesome
monstrosity, animated by genius.
Barabas in the first scene of the play “is discovered in his
counting-house, with heaps of gold before him.” This wealth is the
fruit of extensive trade with the lands of the East. Every wind that
blows brings to the Jew of Malta
“argosies
Laden with riches, and exceeding store
Of Persian silks, of gold, and oriental pearl.”
In all this prosperity Barabas sees a fulfilment of the ancient
blessing bestowed by Jehovah on the sons of Israel; a proof and a
pledge of the Lord’s continued favour to His chosen people:
“Thus trowls our fortune in by land and sea,
And thus are we on every side enriched:
These are the blessings promised to the Jews,
And herein was old Abram’s happiness:
What more may Heaven do for earthly man
Than thus to pour out plenty in their laps,
Ripping the bowels of the earth for them,
Making the seas their servants and the winds
To drive their substance with successful blasts?”
He does not envy the Christian his fruitless faith, nor does he see any
virtue in poverty:
“They say we are a scattered nation:
I cannot tell, but we have scrambled up
More wealth by far than those that brag of faith.”
He mentions wealthy Jews in various lands, “wealthier far than any
Christian,” and the opulence of the race consoles him for its political
humiliation:
“Give us a peaceful rule, make Christian Kings,
That thirst so much for principality.”
Thus this practical idealist soliloquises, spiritualising the realities
of filthy lucre, materialising spiritual prophecies, and, in the midst
of national disgrace, retaining his racial pride intact--a living Jew.
Nor is he devoid of human affections:
“I have no charge, nor many children,
But one sole daughter, whom I hold as dear
As Agamemnon did his Iphigen:
And all I have is hers.”
Round these two objects, “his girl and his gold,” all the emotions of
Barabas centre, and he is happy.
But, alas! Fortune is fickle. At the very moment when Barabas is
congratulating himself on his prosperity, calamity is at the door. A
Turkish fleet has arrived in the harbour to demand from the Knights of
Malta “the ten years’ tribute that remains unpaid.” At this emergency
the Knights hurriedly hold a consultation among themselves, and, of
course, decide that the Jews shall pay the debts of their Christian
masters. The scapegoats are summoned to the senate-house, and the
decision is announced to them, by one of the Knights, who candidly
tells Barabas:
“Thou art a merchant and a moneyed man
And ’tis thy money, Barabas, we seek.
_Barabas._ How, my lord! my money?
_Ferneze_, Governor of Malta: Thine and the rest.”
It is in vain that the Hebrews plead poverty. They are told that they
must contribute their share to the welfare of the land in which they
are allowed to get their wealth. Nor will their share be the same as
that of the faithful. The Christians, in suffering them to live in
their country, commit a sin against their God, and the present distress
is a punishment for it:
“For through our sufferance of your hateful lives,
Who stand accursed in the sight of Heaven,
These taxes and afflictions are befallen,
And therefore thus we are determined:
“First, the tribute money of the Turks shall all be levied amongst
the Jews, and each of them to pay one-half of his estate.
“Secondly, he that denies to pay shall straight become a Christian.
“Lastly, he that denies this shall absolutely lose all he has.”
How truly mediaeval the whole scene is!
The other Jews consent to give up one-half of their estates. Barabas
upbraids them for their cowardice, and stoutly refuses to comply. But
his refusal of half only leads to the confiscation of the whole of his
property. In return for this sacrifice Barabas is cheerfully told that
he will be suffered to live in Malta, and, “if he can,” make another
fortune. The Hebrew argues: “How can I multiply? of naught is nothing
made.” But the Christian retorts: “From naught at first thou com’st to
little wealth, from little unto more, from more to most.”
But what need have we of argument?
“If your first curse fall heavy on thy head,
And make thee poor and scorned of all the world,
’Tis not our fault, but thy inherent sin.”
Thus the poor millionaire is preached out of his possessions. What if
he individually be blameless? He is one of the accursed race, and must
pay the penalty for the collective sins of his forefathers. All that he
obtains by his vigorous protests is the comfortless saw:
“Excess of wealth is cause of covetousness,
And covetousness, O, ’tis a monstrous sin.”
He is stripped of all he had, his goods, his money, his ships, his
stores; and his mansion is converted into a nunnery. Nothing remains to
him but his life, and he is left to bewail his misery and to curse its
authors to his heart’s content. This he proceeds to do in the following
terms:
“The Plagues of Egypt, and the curse of Heaven,
Earth’s barrenness, and all men’s hatred
Inflict upon them, thou great _Primus Motor_!
And here upon my knees, striking the earth,
I ban their souls to everlasting pains
And extreme tortures of the fiery deep,
That thus have dealt with me in my distress.”
His brethren, too timid to second Barabas in his struggle, now gather
round him and strive to console him in his sorrow. But Barabas is
not to be comforted, any more than Job was under like circumstances.
Indeed, he compares his lot with Job’s, and finds it immeasurably
harder:
“He had seven thousand sheep,
Three thousand camels, and two hundred yoke
Of labouring oxen, and five hundred
She-asses; but for every one of those,
Had they been valued at indifferent rate,
I had at home, and in mine argosy,
And other ships that came from Egypt last,
As much as would have bought his beasts and him,
And yet have kept enough to live upon.”
What is there left to him to live for or upon? He likens himself to a
general
“That in a field amidst his enemies
Doth see his soldiers slain, himself disarmed,
And knows no means of his recovery:
Ay, let me sorrow for this sudden chance.”
However, Barabas lies. He is not quite so destitute as he would make us
believe. He hints that his genius had foreseen the possibility of such
a mishap and provided against it. While he is mourning his misery in
loneliness, there enters his lovely daughter Abigail, just turned out
of her home by the nuns, lamenting her father’s misfortunes. He tries
to calm her:
“Be silent, daughter, sufferance breeds ease,
And time may yield us an occasion
Which on the sudden cannot serve the turn.
Besides, my girl, think me not all so fond
As negligently to forego so much
Without provision for thyself and me:
Ten thousand portagues, besides great pearls,
Rich costly jewels, and stones infinite,
Fearing the worst of this before it fell,
I closely hid.”
But she tells him that his house has been taken possession of by nuns,
and therefore he cannot get at his hidden treasure. On hearing of this
crowning calamity poor Barabas cries:
“My gold! my gold, and all my wealth is gone!”
accusing Heaven and the stars of their exceeding cruelty. But his
courage and cunning do not fail him even then. He rises to the height
of his misfortune and instructs his daughter to go to the Abbess of the
nunnery, and, by pretending that she wishes to be converted, to obtain
access to the treasure. Abigail, after much hesitation, consents to
play the part of hypocrite, and she plays it with consummate skill and
success. “The hopeless daughter of a hapless Jew” goes to the holy lady
and declares that, fearing that her father’s afflictions proceed from
sin or want of faith, she desires to pass away her life in penitence.
She is admitted to the sisterhood as a novice. Barabas rails at her in
simulated wrath, while secretly he gives her some final instructions
concerning the treasure, and parts with her on the understanding that
at midnight she will join him with the hoard.
Vexed and tormented by the memories of his lost wealth, the wretched
Barabas roams the livelong night, sleepless and homeless, haunting,
like the ghost of a departed miser, the place where his treasure is
hid; and beseeching the God of Israel to direct Abigail’s hand. At last
she appears at a window aloft, and lets the bags fall. Whereupon the
Jew bursts forth into an ecstasy of joy:
“O my girl!
My gold, my fortune, my felicity.
O girl! O gold! O beauty! O my bliss!”
Two young Christian gentlemen, Mathias and Lodowick, are enamoured of
the Jew’s daughter. Barabas, in the bitterness of his soul, resolves
to have both youths murdered: Lodowick as the son of the Governor who
bereft him of his fortune, Mathias simply as a Christian. In pursuance
of this dark design, he makes use of his beloved daughter. He promises
her hand to each of the youths in turn; he incenses the one against
the other; and he instructs his daughter to receive them both, and
entertain them “with all the courtesy she can afford.” “Use them as if
they were Philistines,” he says to her, “dissemble, swear, protest, vow
love” to each. No considerations of maidenly modesty need restrain her,
for neither youth is “of the seed of Abraham.” She obeys, not knowing
her father’s real purpose. A mock betrothal to Lodowick takes place.
Abigail plights her troth to the youth; for “it’s no sin to deceive a
Christian”--one
“That never tasted of the Passover,
Nor e’er shall see the land of Canaan
Nor our Messias that is yet to come.
For they themselves hold it a principle,
Faith is not to be held with heretics;
But all are heretics that are not Jews.”
No sooner has the deluded Lodowick departed, than his rival appears on
the scene, and is treated likewise. But Barabas is counting without
his daughter. Abigail, though indifferent to Lodowick, reciprocates
Mathias’ affection. Besides, the double part she is induced to play for
her father’s sake is abhorrent to her nature.
In the meantime Barabas, by foul lies and forged letters, brings about
a mortal duel between the two rivals. Abigail, on hearing of her
lover’s death and of her father’s villainy, indignant at having been
made the instrument of his crime, revolted and sick of life, resolves
to return to the nunnery and take the veil in earnest.
Barabas is exasperated by this last blow. He curses his daughter for
her desertion, adopts for his heir a rascally Mohammedan slave, who had
been his accomplice throughout, and makes use of him to poison all the
nuns, his own daughter included.
Barabas is rejoicing at the success of his plot. On hearing the bells
ring for the funeral of his victims, he breaks into fiendish exultation:
“There is no music to a Christian’s knell.
How sweet the bells ring now the nuns are dead!”
But his joy is short-lived. Before her death Abigail confessed the part
which she had unwillingly taken in the conspiracy that brought about
the mutual murder of the two young gentlemen. The friar who received
Abigail’s confession taxes Barabas with the crime. The Jew, frightened,
tries to save his life by feigned conversion. He promises to do penance:
“To fast, to pray, and wear a shirt of hair,
And on my knees creep to Jerusalem,”
and to give an immense sum to the friar’s monastery. The friar accepts
the offer joyously, and is inveigled by the Jew into his house, where
he is strangled. But the Mohammedan slave, in a moment of merry and
amorous expansiveness, betrays his own and his master’s secrets to his
boon companions, who immediately inform the Governor. Barabas and the
slave are arrested and sentenced to death. The former drugs himself,
and, under the impression that he is dead, is thrown outside the city
walls. On recovering from the draught, he determines to avenge his
wrongs by delivering the city up to the Turks. The Governor and the
Knights of Malta are taken prisoners, and the Jew is made Governor.
But, knowing that he will never be safe in a place and amongst people
that had so much cause to hate him, he purchases peace and more wealth
by a second treachery. He offers to invite the Turkish general and his
comrades to a banquet and to murder them, while their soldiers are
entrapped in a monastery and blown up. The Christians accept the offer,
and Barabas felicitates himself on his cunning:
“Why, is not this
A Kingly kind of trade, to purchase towns
By treachery and sell ’em by deceit?”
But though they hate the Turk, the Christians hate the Jew more
heartily still. They apprise the doomed general of Barabas’ plan,
and the latter is, literally, made to fall into the pit which he had
dug for the Turk. In his fury and despair the wretch confesses all
his sins, boasting of the stratagems by which he had meant to bring
confusion on them all, “damned Christian dogs and Turkish infidels”
alike, and, having cursed his fill, dies. The Knights exact reparation
from the Turks for the sack of the city, and thus the play ends in a
triumph for the Cross.
The Jew, as has been seen, does not become the villain of the piece,
until after he has been made the victim. But the audience is supposed
to execrate his villainy and laugh at his sufferings. The author takes
good care to disarm pity by painting the Jew in the blackest and most
ludicrous colours that he can find on his palette. He endows him with a
colossal nose and all the crimes under the sun. Barabas’ cruelty to the
poor is only equalled by his insolence to the powerful. He is made to
say that he “would for lucre’s sake have sold his soul.” His contempt
and hatred towards the Christians is dwelt upon with reiterated
emphasis:
“’tis a custom held with us
That when we speak with Gentiles like you,
We turn into the air to purge ourselves;
For unto us the promise doth belong.”
He instructs his Mohammedan slave:
“First be thou void of these affections,
Compassion, love, vain hope, and heartless fear,
Be moved at nothing, see thou pity none,
But to thyself smile when the Christians moan.”
He brags that he himself has always acted on those precepts:
“As for myself, I walk abroad o’ nights,
And kill sick people groaning under walls:
Sometimes I go about and poison wells:
And now and then, to cherish Christian thieves,
I am content to lose some of my crowns,
That I may, walking in my gallery,
See ’em go pinioned along by my door.”
He gives a lurid account of his past life:
“Being young, I studied physic, and began
To practise first upon the Italian;
There I enriched the priests with burials,
And always kept the sextons’ arms in ure
With digging graves and ringing dead men’s knells.”
After a career of treachery as a military engineer, he became a usurer:
“And with extorting, cozening, forfeiting,
And tricks belonging unto brokery,
I filled the jails with bankrupts in a year,
And with young orphans planted hospitals,
And every moon made some or other mad,
And now and then one hang himself for grief,
Pinning upon his breast a long great scroll
How I with interest tormented him.”
And when the Turk had related some of his own exploits in the fields
of murder, deceit, and torture of Christians, the Jew sees in him a
brother:
“We are villains both:
Both circumcised, we hate Christians both.”
Thus all the anti-Jewish prejudices of the Middle Ages are embodied in
Barabas, who, lest the list should be incomplete, is also accused of
fornication and of having crucified a child. His daughter with all her
charm and loveliness seems to be created partly as a foil to the Jew’s
grotesque personality, partly as a means of wounding him through the
one weak spot in his anti-Christian cuirass--his affection for her.
The _Merchant of Venice_ has its twin brother in the ballad of
Gernutus, the _Jew of Venice_, preserved in Percy’s _Reliques_:
“In Venice towne not long agoe
A cruel Jew did dwell,
Which lived all on usurie,
As Italian writers tell.”
Both stories seem to be derived from an Italian novel by Giovanni
Fiorentino, written about 1378, and first printed at Milan in 1554.
Shakespeare’s Shylock is cast in the same mould as Marlowe’s Barabas.
He loathes the Christian and his manners, his masques, and merriments
and foppery. He will not dine with him, lest he should “smell pork, eat
of the habitation which your prophet, the Nazarite, conjured the devils
into. I will buy with you, sell with you, talk with you, walk with you,
and so following; but I will not eat with you, drink with you, nor pray
with you.” His covetousness intensifies his superstitious hatred of the
Gentile:
“I hate him for he is a Christian;
But more for that, in low simplicity,
He lends out money gratis, and brings down
The rate of usance.”
The Christian’s scorn exasperates the Jew still further:
“If I can catch him once upon the hip,
I will feed fat the ancient grudge I bear him.
He hates our sacred nation; and he rails
On me, my bargains, and my well-won thrift,
Which he calls interest. Cursed be my tribe
If I forgive him!”
But, while abhorring the Christian in his heart, he outwardly fawns
upon him, awaiting an opportunity of gratifying his hunger for
vengeance. This soon presents itself. Antonio, the upright and proud
Venetian merchant, proposes to stand security for a friend who wants to
borrow three thousand ducats of the Jew, on Antonio’s bond. Even while
negotiating the loan, the Christian reviles the Jew as “an evil soul, a
villain with a smiling cheek,” a whited sepulchre. Shylock now reminds
him of all the insults and invectives he used to heap upon him in the
Exchange:
“You call me misbeliever, cut-throat dog,
And spit upon my Jewish gaberdine,
and yet you solicit my help.” The Christian answers:
“I am as like to call thee so again,
To spit on thee again, to spurn thee too,”
and asks him to lend the money as to an enemy. The Jew pretends to
forgive and forget; but he takes Antonio at his word, and playfully
demands a forfeit “for an equal pound of your fair flesh, to be cut off
and taken in what part of your body pleaseth me.” The bond is sealed,
and it proves a fatal bond. Antonio’s ships are wrecked at sea, and,
when the term expires, he finds himself unable to pay the Jew.
Shylock, like Barabas, has an only daughter, Jessica, whom he cherishes
and trusts above all human beings. All the love that he can spare from
his ducats is lavished upon this daughter. Fair as Abigail, Jessica
lacks the filial loyalty and sweet grace which render the daughter of
Barabas so charming a contrast to her father. Jessica is “ashamed to
be her father’s child.” She detests him, and to her her own home “is
hell.” Enamoured of a Christian youth, she enters into a shameless
intrigue with him to deceive and rob her father, and, disguised as
a boy, she runs away with her lover, carrying a quantity of gold
and jewels from the paternal hoard. The discovery of his daughter’s
desertion throws Shylock, as it did Barabas, into despair. He never
felt his nation’s curse until now.
While in this mood he hears of Antonio’s losses and rejoices
exceedingly thereat. The news of his enemy’s mishap acts as a salve for
his own domestic woes. His old grudge against the Christian, embittered
by his recent misfortune, steels him against mercy. He recalls the
indignities and injuries of which he had been the recipient at
Antonio’s hands, all because he was a Jew, and vows to exact the full
forfeit: to have the Christian’s flesh. Antonio is taken to prison and
implores Shylock for pity; but the latter grimly answers: “I’ll have my
bond. Thou call’dst me dog before thou hadst a cause; but since I am a
dog, beware my fangs. I will have my bond.”
The Venetian law was strict on the subject of commercial transactions.
The prosperity of the Republic depended on its reputation for equity
and impartiality, and not even the Doge could interfere with the
course of Justice. The trial commences. Antonio appears in court, and
Shylock demands justice. He is not to be softened by prayers from the
victim’s friends, or by entreaties from the Duke. He will not even
accept the money multiplied three times over; but he insists on the
due and forfeit of his bond. Thus matters stand, when Portia, the
betrothed of Antonio’s friend, appears on the scene in the guise of a
young and learned judge. She first endeavours to bend the Jew’s heart;
but on finding him inflexible, she acknowledges that there is no power
in Venice that can alter a legally established claim: “The bond is
forfeit, and lawfully by this the Jew may claim a pound of flesh.”
Antonio is bidden to lay bare his breast, and Shylock is gleefully
preparing to execute his cruel intent; the scene has reached its climax
of dramatic intensity, when the tables are suddenly turned upon the
Jew. The young judge stays his hand with these awful words:
“This bond doth give thee here no jot of blood.
Take thou thy pound of flesh;
But, in the cutting it, if thou dost shed
One drop of Christian blood, thy lands and goods
Are, by the laws of Venice, confiscate
Unto the state of Venice.”
Shylock has scarcely recovered from this thunderclap, and expressed
his willingness to accept the money offered to him at first, when the
judge interrupts him: “The Jew shall have all justice--nothing but the
penalty”--just a pound of flesh, not a scruple more or less. If not,
“thou diest and all thy goods confiscate.”
Shylock is now content to accept only the principal. But the judge
again says: “Since the Jew refused the money in open Court, he shall
have merely justice and his bond--nothing but the forfeiture,” under
the conditions already named.
Shylock offers to give up his claim altogether. But no! the judge again
says:
“The law hath yet another hold on you.
It is enacted in the laws of Venice--
If it be proved against an alien
That by direct or indirect attempts
He seek the life of any citizen,
The party ’gainst the which he doth contrive
Shall seize one half his goods; the other half
Comes to the privy coffer of the State;
And the offender’s life lies in the mercy
Of the Duke only, ’gainst all other voice.
In which predicament, I say, thou stand’st.
Down, therefore, and beg mercy of the Duke.”
Antonio intercedes on behalf of his enemy, and allows him to retain the
use of one half of his goods, on condition that he become a Christian
and bequeath his property to his Christian son-in-law and his daughter.
The Jew perforce accepts these terms, leaves the Court crestfallen, and
every good man and woman is expected to rejoice at his discomfiture.
Such is the Jew in Shakespeare’s eyes, or rather in the eyes of the
public which Shakespeare wished to entertain. Yet, despite the poet’s
anxiety to interpret the feelings of his audience, his own humanity
and sympathetic imagination reveal themselves in the touching appeal
put into the victim’s mouth: “Hath not a Jew eyes? hath not a Jew
hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Fed with the
same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases,
healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and
summer, as a Christian? if you prick us, do we not bleed? if you tickle
us, do we not laugh? if you poison us, do we not die? and, if you wrong
us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will
resemble you in that.”
But few, if any, of Shakespeare’s contemporaries shared his own broad
sense of justice. The Jew was popularly regarded as the quintessence
of all that is foul, grim, and greedy in human form. In him the
Elizabethan Englishman saw all the qualities that he detested:
covetousness, deceitfulness, and cruelty. Moreover, the Jew was still
identified with the typical usurer, and usury continued to be regarded
in England with all the superstitious horror of the Middle Ages. ♦1546♦
It was not until the reign of Henry VIII. that a law was reluctantly
passed, fixing the interest at 10 per cent. But the prejudice against
lending money for profit was so strong that the law had to be repealed
in the following reign. All loans at interest were again pronounced
illegal under Edward VI. by an Act which defeated its own purpose, and
was in its turn repealed during the reign of Queen Elizabeth, when,
despite the law, the rate of interest was 14 per cent. A second Act,
passed in 1571, while violently condemning usury, in the modern sense
of the term, permits an interest of 10 per cent. This rate remained in
force under James I.
Bacon has recorded for us the opinions and the sentiments of his
contemporaries on the subject. In his essay _Of Seditions and
Troubles_, written some time between 1607 and 1612, he says: “Above
all things, good Policie is to be used, that the Treasure and Moneyes,
in a State, be not gathered into few Hands. For otherwise, a State
may have a great Stock, and yet starve.... This is done, chiefly, by
suppressing, or at least, keeping a strait Hand, upon the Devouring
Trades of _Usurie_, etc.” In this passage Bacon objects to usury on
economic grounds. Elsewhere he sets forth objections of a totally
different nature. In the essay _Of Riches_, published in 1625, he says:
“Usury is the certainest Meanes of Gaine, though one of the worst; As
that, whereby a Man doth eate his Bread; _In sudore vultûs alieni_; and
besides, doth Plough upon Sundaies.” Aristotle’s mischievous metaphor
was still quoted as an argument against usury. It is mentioned by Bacon
among the many “witty invectives against usury”[129] current in his
time, and it is embodied by Shakespeare in the phrase that usurers
“take a breed for barren metal.”[130]
At that time the question was engrossing public attention. In 1621 a
Bill for the abatement of usury had been brought into Parliament, and
two years later a second Bill to the same effect passed the Commons.
Bacon seized the opportunity for the publication of his essay _Of
Usurie_, which appeared in 1623. In a letter to Secretary Conway he
states that his object in writing it was to suggest means, whereby “to
grind the teeth of usury and yet to make it grind to his Majesty’s
mill in good sort, without discontent or perturbation.” In consonance
with this view, Bacon describes usury as an evil, indeed, but as an
inevitable evil: “For since there must be Borrowing and Lending, and
Men are so hard of Heart, as they will not lend freely, Usury must be
permitted.” He proceeds to balance the advantages and disadvantages of
the practice and comes to the conclusion that it should be recognised
and controlled by the State, for “It is better to mitigate Usury
by Declaration, than to suffer it to rage by Connivance.” Bacon’s
advocacy was not wasted. ♦1624♦ In the following year Usury was once
more sanctioned by the Legislature and interest was reduced to 8 per
cent. But this measure did not obliterate the deep-seated hatred of
the money-lender, nor did it weaken the popular idea that usury was
the peculiar attribute of a Jew. Bacon in the same essay tells us that
there were among his contemporaries men who recommended “that Usurers
should have Orange-tawney Bonnets, because they doe Judaize.”
However, the abhorrence of the Jew was that which is inspired by a
repulsive abstraction rather than by a concrete individual. The Jew in
the flesh was practically an unknown creature to the ordinary English
man and woman of the age. If he was hated as a blood-sucking ghoul,
he was not more real than a ghoul. But scarcely had the generation
that hissed Barabas and Shylock on the stage passed away, when the
Jew reappeared as a human reality upon the soil which his fathers had
quitted more than three centuries before.
Meanwhile a great change had come over England. The protest against
authority, both in its intellectual and in its spiritual form, had
crossed the Channel and been welcomed by responsive souls on our
shores. When Erasmus came to England in 1498, he found here more
than he brought with him. Grocyn had learnt his Greek in Italy, and
Colet had returned from that country breathing scorn for the “ungodly
refinements” of theology. In these scholars, and scholars like these,
Erasmus found kindred spirits; hearty allies in the struggle for light.
Colet enchanted him with his Platonic eloquence, and Sir Thomas More
with the sweetness of his temper. And the band of these three noble
men--Colet, Erasmus and More--all eager for reform and for purification
of mind and soul, sowed the seed from which was to spring a plant that
even they little dreamed of. The characteristic compromise between the
new and the old under Henry VIII., grew into the purer Protestantism
of Elizabeth and James I., and, though in Shakespeare we still see a
world essentially Catholic in tone and ideas, it is a world that is
fast dying away. Yet a few years more and Protestantism, under its most
militant and morose aspect, has banished the last vestiges of mediaeval
Catholicism and merriment from Merry England. King Charles is gone,
and Oliver Cromwell has inherited the realities, if not the pomp, of
royalty.