CHAP. III. present instance 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' ii. viii. 25. interval. 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:

iii. i.

iii. ii.

iii. iii.

The Jessica

Story assists

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

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 was known that 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. 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. In the following scene we see Antonio in
custody.

These are minor points such as may be met with in any play, and the treatment of them belongs to ordinary DraDramatic matic Mechanism. But we have already had to notice that Hedging in the Story of the Jew contains special difficulties which belong regard to

Shylock. to the essence of the story, and must be met by special

devices. One of these was the monstrous character of the CHAP. III. 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, we hear the Jew's own daughter reflect that his house is a 'hell,' and we see ii. iii. 2. enough of his domestic life to agree with her. A Shylock e.g. ii. v. 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, his iii. i, from ducats and his daughter are ranked as equally dear.

25.

I would my daughter were dead at my foot, and the jewels in iii. i. 92. 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,

Jessica

Shake

CHAP. III. 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. We may go further. Great creative power is accompanied by great compensa- 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. The sentence on

speare's

tion to Shylock.

394.

iv. i. 348- 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 ii. iv. 34. play exclaim:

lock's unyielding

ness.

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

The Jessica The other main source of difficulty in the Story of the
Story ex-
plains Shy- 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 ex-
plains 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 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 as

the alternatives of Antonio's money or his life. On the one CHAP. III. 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 all1.

From the mechanical development of the main plot and The Jessica the reduction of its difficulties, we pass to the interweaving of the two principal stories, which is so leading a feature of the interweav

sists the

main

play. In the main this interweaving is sufficiently provided ing of the for by the stories themselves, and we have already seen how stories. 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: technically It is thus described the position in the plot of Jessica's elopement is that of a Link Action between the main stories. This

1 This seems to me a reasonable view notwithstanding what Jessica says to the contrary (iii. ii. 286), that she has often heard her father swear he would rather have Antonio's flesh than twenty times the value of the bond. It is one thing to swear vengeance in private, another thing to follow it up in the face of a world in opposition. A man of overbearing temper surrounded by inferiors and dependants often utters threats, and seems to find a pleasure in uttering them, which both he and his hearers know he will never carry out.

G

Action,

221.

restore the balance be

tween the

CHAP. III. linking 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. Then, as we have seen, Jessica and iii. ii, from 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 helping to in the house and under the protection of Portia. This transference further assists the symmetry of interweaving by helping to adjust the balance between the two main stories. In its mass, if the expression may be allowed, the Caskets tale, with its steady progress to a goal of success, is overweighted 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 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.

main stories,

between

their bright and dark climaxes.

Character

Character

So far, the points considered have been points of Mechaneffects. ism and Plot; in the matter of Character-Interest the Jessica episode is to an even greater degree an addition to the whole effect of the play, Jessica and Lorenzo serving as a foil to Portia and Bassanio. The characters of Jessica and Lorenzo

of Jessica.