he life of his
Christian debtor, Antonio, by taking a pound of his flesh in place of
the unpaid gold, was greeted with shouts of delighted laughter. As a
matter of fact, Shylock, then as now, was a human being, and by virtue
{160} of that fact both ridiculous and pathetic. In any case, whatever
the dominant note of his character, he is not the dominant figure of
the play. If he were, the fifth act, which ends the play with
moonlight and music and the laughter of happy lovers, would be
distinctly out of place. Yet it is in reality the absence of such
defects of taste, the ability to bring everything into its proper
place, to make a harmonious whole out of the most various tones, which
best characterizes the Shakespearean comedy of this period. Instead of
being a play in which one great character is set in relief against a
number of lesser ones, _The Merchant of Venice_ is a comedy in which
there is an unusually large number of characters of nearly equal
importance and an unusually large number of plots of nearly equal
interest. There is the plot which has to do with Portia's marriage, in
which the right lover wins this gracious merry lady by choosing the
proper one of three locked caskets. There is the plot which deals with
the elopement of the Jew's daughter, Jessica. There is the plot which
relates the story of the bond given by Antonio to the Jew in return for
the loan which enables Antonio's friend, Bassanio, to carry on his suit
for Portia's hand, the bond, which, when forfeited, would have cost
Antonio his life had not Portia, disguised as a lawyer, defeated
Shylock's treacherous design. There is the plot which tells how
Bassanio and his friend Gratiano give their wedding rings as rewards to
the pretended lawyer and his assistant, really their wives Portia and
Nerissa in disguise,--an act which gives the wives a chance to make
much trouble for their lords. And all these plots are worked out with
an abundance of {161} interesting detail, and are so perfectly
interwoven that the play has all of the wonderful harmony of a Turkish
rug, as well as its brilliant variety. No play of Shakespeare's
depends more for its effect on plot, on the sheer interest of the
stories, and no one has, consequently, situations which are more
effective on the stage. It is, perhaps, an inevitable result that the
individual characters have a somewhat less permanent, less deeply
satisfying charm than do those of the comedies which