Shylock the Jew also finds a place in the historical gallery, for the very reason that he is a Jew, "the Jew," indeed, a historical formation, and Shakespeare conceives and describes him with the characteristics proper to his race and religion, one might almost say, sociologically. It has been asserted that for Shakespeare and for his public Shylock was a comic personage, intended to be flouted and laughed at by the pit; but we do not know what were the intentions of Shakespeare and as usual they matter little, because Shylock lives and speaks, himself explaining what he means, without the aid of commentaries, even such as the author might possibly have supplied. Shylock crying out in his desperation: "My daughter! O my ducats!..." may have made laugh the spectators in the theatre, but that cry of the wounded and tortured animal does not make the poetical reader laugh; he forms anything but a comic conception of that being, trampled down, poisoned at heart and unshakeable in his desire for vengeance. On the other hand the pathetic and biassed interpretations of Shylock that have been given during the nineteenth century, are foreign to the ingenuousness of a creation, without a shadow of humanitarianism or of polemic. What Shakespeare has created, fusing his own impressions and experiences in the crucible of his attentive and thoughtful humanity, is the Jew, with his firm cleaving to the law and to the written word, with his hatred for Christian feeling, with his biblical language, now sententious now sublime, the Jew with his peculiar attitude of intellect, will and morality.