An audience can therefore tolerate him with mitigated disgust through the opening portions of the play.  When, however, in the grand climax of the trial scene Shakespeare intends that he shall be no longer tolerated or tolerable, but condemned alike by his Venetian judges and his English audience, he carefully avoids putting into his mouth any one of the reasons with which in the opening of the play he explains and justifies his hatred.  He does not make him quote the centuries-old Hebrew scorn of and aversion to the Gentiles, nor the merchant’s interference with his commercial speculations, nor the man’s unprovoked spitting at, spurning, and abuse of him; but he will and can give no reason for his abhorrence of Antonio, whom he says he loathes with the inexplicable revulsion of nature that certain men feel toward certain animals; and the mastery of the poet shows itself in thus making Shylock’s cruelty monstrous, and accounting for it as an abnormal monstrosity.

Hatred that has a reasonable cause may cease with its removal.  Supposing Antonio to have become a converted Jew, or to have withdrawn all opposition to Shylock’s usury and compensated him largely for the losses he had caused him by it, and to have expressed publicly, with the utmost humility, contrition for his former insults and sincere promises of future honor, respect, and reverence, it is possible to imagine Shylock relenting in a hatred of which the reasons he assigned for it no longer existed.  But from the moment he says he has no reason for his hatred other than the insuperable disgust and innate enmity of an antagonistic nature—­the deadly, sickening, physical loathing that in rare instances affects certain human beings toward others of their species, and toward certain animals—­then there are no calculable bounds to the ferocity of such a blind instinct, no possibility of mitigating, by considerations of reflection or feeling, an inherent, integral element of a morbid organization.  And Shakespeare, in giving this aspect to the last exhibition of Shylock’s vindictiveness, cancels the original appeal to possible sympathy for his previous wrongs, and presents him as a dangerous maniac or wild beast, from whose fury no one is safe, and whom it is every one’s interest to strike down; so that at the miserable Jew’s final defeat the whole audience gasps with a sense of unspeakable relief.  Perhaps, too, the master meant to show—­at any rate he has shown—­that the deadly sin of hatred, indulged even with a cause, ends in the dire disease of causeless hate and the rabid frenzy of a maniac.