generous in the prosecution of his aim.  The only reason he will vouchsafe for taking the pound of flesh is, “if it will feed nothing else, it will feed my revenge”; a reason all the more satisfactory to him, forasmuch as those to whom he gives it can neither allow it nor refute it:  and until they can rail the seal from off his bond, all their railings are but a foretaste of the revenge he seeks.  In his eagerness to taste that morsel sweeter to him than all the luxuries of Italy, his recent afflictions, the loss of his daughter, his ducats, his jewels, and even the precious ring given him by his departed wife, all fade from his mind.  In his inexorable and imperturbable hardness at the trial there is something that makes the blood to tingle.  It is the sublimity of malice.  We feel that the yearnings of revenge have silenced all other cares and all other thoughts.  In his rapture of hate the man has grown superhuman, and his eyes seem all aglow with preternatural malignity.  Fearful, however, as is his passion, he comes not off without moving our pity.  In the very act whereby he thinks to avenge his own and his brethren’s wrongs, the national curse overtakes him.  In standing up for the letter of the law against all the pleadings of mercy, he has strengthened his enemies’ hands, and sharpened their weapons, against himself; and the terrible Jew sinks at last into the poor, pitiable, heart-broken Shylock.

The inward strain and wrenching of his nature, caused by the revulsion which comes so suddenly upon him, is all told in one brief sentence, which may well be quoted as an apt instance how Shakespeare reaches the heart by a few plain words, when another writer would most likely pummel the ears with a high-strung oration.  When it turns out that the Jew’s only chance of life stands in the very mercy which he has but a moment before abjured; and when, as the condition of that mercy, he is required to become a Christian, and also to sign a deed conveying to his daughter and her husband all his remaining wealth; we have the following from him: 

    “I pray you, give me leave to go from hence;
    I am not well:  send the deed after me,
    And I will sign it.”

Early in the play, when Shylock is bid forth to Bassanio’s supper, and Launcelot urges him to go, because “my young master doth expect your reproach,” Shylock replies, “So do I his.”  Of course he expects that reproach through the bankruptcy of Antonio.  This would seem to infer that Shylock has some hand in getting up the reports of Antonio’s “losses at sea”; which reports, at least some of them, turn out false in the end.  Further than this, the Poet leaves us in the dark as to how those reports grew into being and gained belief.  Did he mean to have it understood that the Jew exercised his cunning and malice in plotting and preparing them?  It appears, at all events, that Shylock knew they were coming, before they came.  Yet I suppose the natural impression from the play is, that he lent