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 But the prejudice against lending money for profit was so strong that the law had to be repealed in the following reign.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 by an Act which defeated its own purpose, and was in its turn repealed during the reign of Queen Elizabeth, when, despite the law, the rate of interest was 14 per cent.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.