vile as a woman who should sell herself. To such a state of mind, Shylock's frank avowal that he takes interest1 amounts to such a cynical profession of rascality as might now once for all repel sympathy from a vicious female character. Again, to the mediæval mind—and in many respects the Elizabethan mind remained medieval- the Jew had been represented by centuries of churchly teaching as the living type of a race who had deliberately murdered an incarnate God. Nothing less than a tremendous decay of dogmatic Christianity could possibly have permitted the growth of such humane sentiments toward Jews as generally prevail to-day.

An imaginative effort to revive these old sentiments, and thus to place ourselves in the position of an Elizabethan audience, helps us in some degree to understand the treatment of Shylock. As Shylock is now presented on the stage, however, his fate remains repellent by no means the sort of thing we expect in a romantic comedy where virtue and vice get only their deserts. We can hardly help feeling that, despite his misfortunes and his faults, the grandly Hebraic Jew of the modern stage is treated outrageously; yet we cannot feel that any such sentiment could probably have been intended by an Elizabethan dramatist. To get at the bottom of the trouble, we must consider the stage history of "the Jew that Shakspere drew."

No records of any performance of the Merchant of

1 I. iii. 70-103.

Venice have been discovered earlier than 1701. In that year a much altered version of it, made by the Marquis of Lansdowne, was produced in London. The Shylock of this version was a broadly comic personage, with the huge nose and red wig of the traditional Judas. Forty years later, in 1741, Macklin revived Shakspere's play, and played Shylock in something resembling the modern manner. From that time to this, for above a century and a half, Shylock has looked not like a Jew, but like a Hebrew. Very clearly, the Lansdowne tradition of broad, low comedy does not fit Shakspere's lines. Shylock, as a character, is a great, serious Shaksperean creation, which may be psychologically studied almost like a real human being. In this psychologically sympathetic age, we are given to this sort of study; in literature, at all events, we consider rather what people actually are than what they look like. We neglect the various bodily forms in which character may manifest itself; no cant is more popular than that which disdains appearances. Such cant was as foreign to Shakspere's time as any other form of sentimental philanthropy; to an Elizabethan audience, what looked mean was for that very reason essentially contemptible. Though no actual records support the conclusion, then, it seems more than probable that the real Shylock of Shakspere's stage combined the old traditions with the new, that in make-up, in appearance, in manner, he was meanly "Jewy;" while the tremendous creative imagina

tion of the dramatist made him at heart sympathetically human. Only under such circumstances could the fate of Shylock be artistically tolerable.

At all events, we have certain side-lights on the matter. Elizabethan England was childishly brutal; to-day, indeed, England sometimes seems more robustly unsympathetic than America. In actual lunacy, as the Changeling of Middleton will show, the England of Elizabeth saw not something horrible, but rather something conventionally comic - much as drunkenness is still held comic on the stage. In physical suffering it often saw mere grotesque contortion: witness the frequency of thrashing in old comedy. And even to-day, we are less sincerely beyond these things than we sometimes admit. After all, what repels our sympathy in the Merchant of Venice is, not so much the actual treatment which Shylock receives as the grandly Hebraic aspect of the personage whom we see receive it. Substitute for this figure a meanly cringing one, like the pimps and pawnbrokers who still compose the Jewish rabble, and, for all Shakspere's sympathetic psychology, Shylock will seem to get little else than his deserts. If this be true nowadays, it would be vastly more true in an age so foreign to our fine philanthropy as the brutally childish England of Elizabeth; and some such childishly unfeeling conception was probably the real conception of Shakspere. As an artistic playwright, he could not have meant our sympathy to go with

Shylock; yet no rendering of Shylock which makes the man look noble enough to be seriously sympathetic could ever have failed to command sympathy. There are few facts in the Elizabethan drama which more strongly emphasize the remoteness from ourselves not only of Elizabethan England, but also of Shakspere, the Elizabethan playwright.

This view of Shakspere we must always keep in mind. As we come to these more lasting of his works, we are prone to forget it. In the Merchant of Venice, for example, we cannot but find, along with what we have already glanced at, a constantly growing beauty, gravity, significance of mere poetry; everywhere, in short, we feel Shakspere's grasp of life growing firmer, his wisdom deeper. We are tempted to guess that all this is not merely temperamental, but profoundly, philosophically conscious. We may generally be preserved from this temptation, however, by such constant consideration of fact as in this chapter we have insisted upon. Among the hypotheses about this play, the simplest is this: A stage playwright of that olden time set himself the regular task of translating into effective dramatic form an archaically trivial old story. In the course of some nine years of practice he had so mastered his technical art, theatrical and literary alike, and had so awakened his own faculty of spontaneously creative imagination, that he made his version of the story permanently plausible. He did more; like any masterly artist, he introduced into his work touch after touch of

the kind which makes works of art endlessly suggestive to ages more and more foreign, in thought and in feeling, to the age which produced them. The Merchant of Venice, then, is full of implicit wisdom, and beauty, and significance. That Shakspere realized all this, however, does not follow. Critics who declare a great artist fully conscious of whatever his work implies are generally those who least know how works of art are made.

VIII. THE TAMING OF THE SHREW.

[The Taming of the Shrew, in its present form, appeared first in the folio of 1623. There is no certain allusion to it at any earlier date.

On May 2nd, 1594, however, "A pleasant conceited history called the Tayming of a Shrowe" was entered in the Stationers' Register. This, which was published in quarto during the same year, is evidently the source, if not the original version, of the comedy finally ascribed to Shakspere. Who wrote the earlier play, how much of the final play may be pronounced Shakspere's, and to what period we may assign his work on it, have been much discussed with no certain result. It seems probable that the play as we have it is the work of several hands, revised by Shakspere somewhere about 1597.]

If the Taming of a Shrew be Shakspere's, and such, at least to a considerable degree, we may assume it until further adverse evidence appears, it is in various ways different from any of his work which we have as yet considered. In the plays discussed in the last chapter, Shakspere seemed plainly to be trying his hand, with marked versatility, at various experiments. In the plays hitherto discussed in this chapter, he has