To anyone who has familiarized himself with the attitude of Elizabethan playgoers toward usurers and toward the Jews, it is evident that Shakspere intended the ‘Merchant of Venice’ to be a Portia play; its action begins with talk about Belmont and it ends at Belmont itself; and Shylock is absent from the final act. In spite of this intent of the author, the ‘Merchant of Venice’ has become in our eyes a Shylock play. In fact, Macready four-score years ago used to appear in a three-act version which ended with the trial scene,—a most inartistic perversion of the comedy. After all, the ‘Merchant of Venice’ _is_ a comedy, even if its love-story is sustained and stiffened by a terrible underplot. Shakspere created the abhorrent Shylock that the lovely Portia could cleverly circumvent him and score off him and put him to shame. His hardness of heart was to make more refulgent her brightness of soul. Shylock was set up to be scorned and hated and derided; he is a vindictive moneylender, insisting on a horrible penalty; no one in the play has a good word for him or a kindly thought; his servant detests him and his daughter has no natural affection for him. When all is said, we cannot but feel that Shakspere in his treatment of Shylock displays a callousness not uncommon in Elizabethan England. And yet—and yet Shakspere is true to his genius; he endows Shylock with life. The Jew stands before us and speaks for himself; and we feel that we understand him better than the genius who made him. Our sympathy goes out to him; and altho we do not wish the play to end otherwise than it does, we are almost ready to regard him as the victim of a miscarriage of justice, guilty though he is. Ellen Terry has quoted from a letter of Henry Irving’s a significant confession: “Shylock is a ferocity, I know—but I cannot play him that way!” Why couldn’t he? It was because the nineteenth century was not the sixteenth, because Victorian audiences were not Elizabethan, because the peoples who have English for their mother-tongue are less callous and more civilized than their forebears of three hundred years ago. III