“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: