The Merchant of Venice

Shylock’s vengeful efforts to procure a pound of Antonio’s flesh do not exist in a vacuum. From the earliest scenes featuring the moneylender, mitigating factors are introduced that help explain—if not quite justify—Shylock’s attitude and behavior. As a Jew, he is repeatedly antagonized and treated as less than human by the Venetian Christian elite, especially Antonio. Regardless of how contemporary anti-Semitic Englanders read Shylock’s character, his thirst for revenge is not framed as something that’s inherent to his personality or his ethno-religious group. At the end of his famous “If you prick us, do we not bleed?” speech, Shylock explicitly points this out, telling Salarino, “If a Christian wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be by Christian example? Why, revenge! The villainy you teach me I will execute, and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction” (3.1.67).

The workings of this cycle of dehumanization are laid bare during the court proceeding in an exchange between Bassanio and Shylock. Unable to understand why Shylock lashes out so dramatically and gruesomely at Antonio, Bassanio asks him, “Do all men kill the things they do not love?” (4.1.67). The exchange continues: