Prejudice and Intolerance
Theme Profile – At a Glance
- Focus: A city that spits on the man it borrows from – and what the spat-upon man does when the law finally puts a knife in his hand.
- Key Characters: Shylock, Antonio, Portia, Jessica, the Prince of Morocco.
- The Core Tension: Venice needs Shylock's money and despises Shylock's existence – and the play makes the audience hold both facts at once.
- Key Manifestations: The gaberdine speech (Act 1, Scene 3); Morocco's plea (Act 2, Scene 1); "Hath not a Jew eyes?" (Act 3, Scene 1); the forced conversion (Act 4, Scene 1).
- Famous Quote:
"Hath not a Jew eyes?"
(Act 3, Scene 1) - The Outcome: The "happy ending" requires Shylock stripped of his wealth, his daughter, his religion and his exit lines – and four centuries of audiences have left the theatre less sure than the Venetians that justice was done.
The Spit upon the Gaberdine
The play's prejudice is not reported – it is itemised, by its target, to its perpetrator's face. Asked for a loan, Shylock first presents the history of the relationship.
Original
You call me misbeliever, cut-throat dog,
And spit upon my Jewish gaberdine,
And all for use of that which is mine own.
(Act 1, Scene 3)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
You call me non-believer, and a mad dog
And spit upon my Jewish overcoat,
And just because I use the gold I own.
The catalogue is precise: the slurs, the spitting, the kicking "as you spurn a stranger cur" – and the perpetrator is not a street mob but Antonio, the play's title character and its model of Christian gentleness. Antonio's reply is the scene's true shock: no denial, no apology – "I am as like to call thee so again, / To spit on thee again". The prejudice is not a lapse in Venice's civility; it is Venice's civility, practised openly by its best citizen, who sees no contradiction between despising the moneylender and requiring his money. The bond that follows – the "merry sport" of a pound of flesh – is signed inside this history, and the play never lets us forget it: whatever Shylock becomes, Venice taught the class.
Hath Not a Jew Eyes?
The theme's central speech arrives in prose, in grief, between jokes at its speaker's expense. Antonio's friends have been baiting Shylock about his runaway daughter; one of them asks what a pound of flesh could possibly be good for. The answer detonates.
Original
Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed?
(Act 3, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Does a Jew not have eyes? Does a Jew not have hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Is a Jew not fed with the same food, hurt by the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same medicines, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, just like a Christian is? If you cut us, don't we still bleed?
It remains the most famous statement of common humanity in English – and the play is careful about what it is for. The speech is not a plea for tolerance; it is an argument for revenge, and the shared humanity is the premise: if a Jew is like a Christian in eyes, hands and hurts, he will resemble him in vengeance too. That double edge is the theme's genius. The lines force every audience to grant the full humanity of the man Venice has dehumanised – using evidence (bleeding, laughing, dying) that no prejudice can answer – and in the same breath show that humanity turning toward the knife. Shakespeare will not let the speech be safe: it dignifies and indicts in one movement, and it gives the play's most despised figure its most unanswerable words.
The Villainy You Teach
The end of the same speech supplies the theme's theory of transmission: where does cruelty come from? Shylock's answer is the play's most uncomfortable sentence.
Original
If a Jew wrong a Christian, what is his humility? Revenge. If a Christian wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be by Christian example? Why, revenge. The villany you teach me, I will execute, and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction.
(Act 3, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
If a Jew does something wrong to a Christian, what does he do? He gets revenge. If a Christian does something wrong to a Jew, what should he do if he's learnt by the Christian's example? Why, revenge. The evil things you teach me, I will do in return, but more intensely than you have taught me.
Prejudice, in this account, is a curriculum: Venice has been teaching Shylock its ethics for years – by example – and he announces himself a diligent student who intends to "better the instruction". The claim is half justification and half self-sentencing, and the play holds it to be both. It refuses the comfortable readings on either side: Shylock is not the devil of medieval stage tradition (his cruelty has a syllabus, and Venice wrote it), and he is not simply a victim (he chooses the knife, and his own opening aside confessed an "ancient grudge" that predates Jessica's flight). The theme's hardest question lives in this speech: whether a society that teaches contempt may disown the lesson when it comes home – and the trial scene is Venice's answer, which is no.
The Mercy of the Victors
The trial breaks Shylock with his own legalism, and then the Christians show him mercy – on terms the play prices very deliberately. Antonio names the conditions of the pardon.
Original
Two things provided more, that, for this favour,
He presently become a Christian...
(Act 4, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Two more provisos: in return for this,
Immediately he must become a Christian...
To the play's first audiences, compulsory baptism could read as a gift – a soul saved despite itself. To virtually every audience since, the condition reads as the theme's terminal demonstration: tolerance was never on Venice's menu, even in victory. Shylock leaves the court stripped in ascending order of intimacy – money, estate, religion – with three words, "I am content", that no actor has ever managed to make sound contented. The mercy the court preached in poetry is administered as erasure: the alien is forgiven by being abolished. And the play, having staged the operation, sends everyone to Belmont for a fifth act of moonlight and music from which the converted man is entirely, eloquently absent.
"The genius of Shakespeare rises still higher over the petty strife of two religious sects, and his drama shows us neither Jews nor Christians, but oppressor and oppressed, and the madly agonised cries of exultation of the latter when they can repay their arrears of injuries with interest."
— Heinrich Heine, Shakespeares Mädchen und Frauen, 1838
Key Quotes on Prejudice and Intolerance
Quote 1
I hate him for he is a Christian,
But more for that in low simplicity
He lends out money gratis and brings down
The rate of usance here with us in Venice.
(Act 1, Scene 3)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
I hate this man because he is a Christian,
But more than that, he idiotically
Lends money interest-free, thereby reducing
Inflated rates that we can charge in Venice.
Quote Analysis: Shylock's first aside refuses the audience any innocent victim. The hatred is mutual, and its anatomy is candid: religion first, but "more" – the economics. Antonio lends free and spoils the market. The line's honesty cuts both ways: it convicts Shylock of a hatred as ancient and entire as Venice's, and it quietly exposes how much of the city's "religious" conflict is commercial competition wearing vestments. Prejudice in this play is never pure: creed, money and injury are braided so tightly that no character – and no audience – can say where one strand ends.
Mislike me not for my complexion,
The shadowed livery of the burnished sun,
To whom I am a neighbour and near bred.
(Act 2, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Don’t hold the colour of my skin against me,
For it is darkened by the scorching sun
That I have lived under since I was born.
Quote Analysis: The Prince of Morocco's first words in Belmont are a defence he should not have to make – proof that he knows exactly what the fair-skinned marriage market sees first. His framing is proud and poignant at once: the dark skin is a "livery", a uniform of service to the sun, worn by a prince. The speech widens the theme beyond Venice and beyond religion: Belmont, the play's golden world of love and music, runs its own quiet exclusions. Morocco woos by the rules, chooses wrongly, and leaves with dignity – and then Portia's couplet closes the door behind him.
Let all of his complexion choose me so.
(Act 2, Scene 7)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Let everyone who looks like him choose so.
Quote Analysis: One line, spoken in relief as Morocco exits – and it undoes any illusion that prejudice in this play is a Venetian or a male disease. Portia, the play's voice of mercy and its cleverest mind, hopes that every suitor of Morocco's colour will fail as he failed. The line is brief, casual and unrepented, which is exactly its force: this is prejudice in its daily dress, spoken by the heroine, in the play's most beautiful place. Shakespeare gives the audience no villain to blame it on – only a culture, wearing its loveliest face.
You, that did void your rheum upon my beard
And foot me as you spurn a stranger cur
Over your threshold...
(Act 1, Scene 3)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Yes, you, who spat your phlegm upon my beard
And kicked me like you’d kick a mongrel dog
Out from your home.
Quote Analysis: The specificity is the indictment. Not "men like you" but you; not "insults" but spittle in the beard and a boot across the threshold – remembered, dated, itemised by a man who has had to stand and absorb each one because the law gave him no answer. The dog language matters most: Venice's favourite slur for Shylock is "cur", and here he replays it as choreography – kicked like a stray from the doorway. When he later turns implacable, he will quote the script back: you called me dog – "beware my fangs". The play's cruellest symmetry is built from this speech's receipts.
Key Takeaways
- The Best Citizen Spits: Venice's prejudice is practised by gentle Antonio, openly and without apology. It is not a flaw in the city's order – it is the order.
- The Great Speech Cuts Both Ways: "Hath not a Jew eyes?" proves a common humanity that no prejudice can answer – as the premise of a revenge no audience can bless.
- Cruelty Is a Curriculum: "The villainy you teach me, I will execute" – the play traces Shylock's knife back to Venice's classroom, without excusing the hand that holds it.
- Belmont Is Not Innocent: Morocco's reception and Portia's parting couplet show the golden world running the same exclusions in better light.
Study Questions and Analysis
Is The Merchant of Venice an antisemitic play or a play about antisemitism?
The honest answer is that the question has divided its best readers for two centuries, and the play supplies ammunition to both sides with troubling generosity. The case for the first reading is structural: the play inherits the medieval stage-Jew – the usurer, the knife, the obsession with ducats – and builds its comedy on his defeat; the trial invites an audience to cheer his ruin; the conversion is staged as a happy resolution; and the fifth act's harmony requires his absence. Harold Bloom, in his 1998 Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, stated the case with deliberate bluntness: "one would have to be blind, deaf and dumb not to recognize that Shakespeare's grand, equivocal comedy The Merchant of Venice is nevertheless a profoundly anti-Semitic work."
The case for the second reading is everything Shakespeare added to the inheritance. The stage-Jew of the sources does not get "Hath not a Jew eyes?"; he does not get the gaberdine speech's documented grievances, or Leah's turquoise, or a daughter whose flight wounds him in front of us, or the unanswerable observation that his villainy was taught by Christian example. Heinrich Heine, watching from inside the predicament in 1838, read the play as showing "neither Jews nor Christians, but oppressor and oppressed" – a drama whose sympathies escape its own conventions. Harold C. Goddard, in his 1951 The Meaning of Shakespeare, pressed the irony further: the play's Christians fail every test of their own creed, and the audience is meant to notice.
The deepest reading may be that both are true in sequence: Shakespeare took an antisemitic story and wrote a human being into the middle of it, and the two have been fighting inside the play ever since. The fight is the masterpiece – and the discomfort is not a flaw in the experience. It is the experience.
Is "Hath not a Jew eyes?" a plea for tolerance or a justification of revenge?
Grammatically and dramatically, it is the second – and it achieves the first in spite of itself, which is why it has never stopped working. Context matters: the speech is not delivered to power, or to the audience, but to two minor mockers, in answer to a practical question – what use is the flesh? Its logical engine is symmetry: a Jew shares every human property a Christian has, therefore he shares the human property the Christians have practised on him most diligently – revenge. "If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that." The shared humanity is not the conclusion; it is the warrant for the knife.
Yet the evidence assembled on the way is bigger than the argument it serves. Eyes, hands, senses, the same food, the same diseases, the same bleeding – the catalogue is so elementary, so bodily, that it establishes a common humanity no listener can unsee, whatever use Shylock makes of it. Audiences leave remembering the premise and not the conclusion, and the speech has accordingly led a double life: in the theatre it motivates a revenger; in the culture it became a foundational text against racism – quoted in courtrooms and classrooms by people who have never read the play.
The craft is in the refusal to separate the two. A safer dramatist would have given the oppressed man a noble plea or a villain's rant; Shakespeare fused them, so that the speech's dignity and its menace authenticate each other – this is what injury actually sounds like when it finally speaks. Heine (1838) heard exactly that fusion: the oppressed repaying "their arrears of injuries with interest" – the financial metaphor catching the play's whole tragic economy, where even revenge is calculated like a loan.
How does the play treat its other outsiders?
Consistently – which is the quiet scandal of Belmont. The Prince of Morocco arrives knowing his colour will be held against him and asks, with full courtesy, that it should not be.
Bring me the fairest creature northward born,
Where Phoebus' fire scarce thaws the icicles,
And let us make incision for your love...
(Act 2, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Bring me the blondest person from the north,
Where sun-god Phoebus’ rays don’t thaw the ice,
And let us cut our skin, in love of you...
His proposed proof is the same one Shylock will make famous – cut us, and the blood is the same colour. The echo is surely deliberate: the play's two excluded men, a Moroccan prince and a Venetian Jew, both reach instinctively for the body's evidence against the eye's prejudice, two acts apart. Morocco plays by every rule – he hazards, he chooses, he accepts his loss with grace – and Portia's relieved couplet ("Let all of his complexion choose me so") files him under his skin as he leaves. Aragon, the Spanish suitor, gets gentler mockery; Venice's contempt for him is national rather than racial, comedy rather than exclusion – a calibration that itself maps the period's hierarchy of foreigners.
The pattern matters because it spreads the theme beyond Shylock and beyond religion. Critics who defend the play's treatment of its Jew must still account for Belmont, where no ancient grudges or knife-edged bonds complicate the picture – just a beautiful, cultivated world quietly sorting humanity by complexion. Marjorie Garber (2004) notes how the casket plot, ostensibly a lesson against judging by exteriors, is administered by people who judge by exteriors habitually. The play's golden country teaches "all that glitters is not gold" – and never once applies the lesson to skin.
Is the forced conversion mercy or violence?
The trial scene frames it as mercy, and every detail of the framing curdles on inspection. Formally, the sequence is a cascade of clemencies: the Duke pardons Shylock's life before he asks; Antonio declines his half of the forfeit estate – and then attaches conditions, of which baptism is the first. Within the play's Christian vocabulary, the gift is real: conversion saves Shylock's soul, and (a point the period would have felt) ends the legal disabilities of his Jewishness. Elizabethan audiences could plausibly receive the moment as generosity completing justice.
The play, however, plants the seeds of the other reading with suspicious care. It gives Shylock a religious life to lose – the synagogue, the kosher table he names in his first scene ("I will not eat with you, drink with you, nor pray with you"), the dead wife whose ring he would not trade for a wilderness of monkeys, the "sacred nation" – so that the audience knows precisely what is being amputated. It assigns the demand not to the court but to Antonio, the man who spat on the gaberdine, making the baptism the final act of a personal history of contempt. And it gives Shylock's assent three syllables – "I am content" – followed by a request to leave because he is "not well": the shortest, sickest surrender in Shakespeare, and the last words the play allows him.
Heine's frame (1838) – oppressor and oppressed, not Christian and Jew – reads the conversion as the oppression perfected: the victor no longer punishing the alien but deleting him. The stage has largely concurred; modern productions play the moment as devastation, and even sympathetic accounts of the Christians' intentions concede the optics. The theme's verdict is structural rather than polemical: a play that ends its "comedy" by unmaking a man's identity, then needs a whole act of moonlight to recover the mood, knows what it has shown.
Does the play explain Shylock's hatred – and does explaining excuse it?
It explains with extraordinary thoroughness, and it polices the line between explanation and excuse more carefully than either of its modern factions tends to. The explanation is layered through the first three acts like sediment: the economic grievance (Antonio lends gratis and ruins the rate); the religious insult ("He hates our sacred nation"); the physical record – spittle, kicks, "cut-throat dog" – confirmed rather than denied by its perpetrator; the social bait of Bassanio's dinner invitations from men who mock him in the street; and finally the intimate devastation, a daughter who robs him, sells his dead wife's ring for a monkey, and flees to the faith of his tormentors. By the trial, the play has built a hatred with a complete archaeology. William Hazlitt, in his 1817 Characters of Shakespeare's Plays, made the classic statement of this reading – Shylock as "a good hater", a man more sinned against than sinning, whose vengeance has "strong grounds".
But the play keeps the ledger honest. The first aside (Quote 1 above) timestamps the hatred before most of the injuries we witness; the "merry bond" is proposed, whatever its mood, by Shylock; Tubal's report shows him grieving ducats and daughter in grotesque alternation; and in court he is offered thrice the principal and answers with a whetted knife and "I crave the law" – a moment where every explanation is still true and none of it is sufficient. Explanation tells you where the knife came from; it cannot make the hand put it down.
That is the theme's mature position: causes are not licences. Venice taught the villainy – the play insists on it – and Shylock chose to better the instruction – the play insists on that too. The double insistence is what keeps the character alive after four centuries: explained enough to be human, responsible enough to be tragic.
What does Jessica's flight add to the theme?
A defection from inside the despised house – and the play makes it far less comfortable than the lovers intend. Jessica's elopement is staged in the language of romantic comedy: a daughter escaping a joyless father, gold thrown down from a window, a gondola, a boy's disguise. But every of its details doubles as the theme's evidence. She is "ashamed" – of the disguise, but the word leaks; she calls the house "hell"; she converts not from conviction but for marriage; and she does not leave so much as defect, carrying as dowry the very ducats and jewels Venice mocks her father for loving. Her welcome in Belmont is genuine and faintly conditional – Lancelot jokes that her conversion will raise the price of pork, and the fifth act's lovers' duet places her among Cressida, Medea and Dido: betrayers and the betrayed.
The theft the play refuses to forgive is the turquoise. Tubal reports that in Genoa Jessica traded a ring for a monkey, and Shylock's response is the most humanising sentence he is given: "it was my turquoise; I had it of Leah when I was a bachelor: I would not have given it for a wilderness of monkeys." One sentence establishes a dead wife, a courtship, an interior life that ducats never touched – and a daughter who sold its relic for a pet. Whatever Jessica fled, the audience now knows it was not a man without a heart.
For the theme, her arc closes a circuit: prejudice's deepest victory is not the spit or the statute but the moment the despised internalise the despising – when the Jew's daughter wants out of Jewishness itself. The play grants her the escape and prices it precisely: in Act 5 she is in paradise, melancholy when the music plays, the one figure in Belmont with no answer when asked if she is merry.
How has the theme changed the play's performance history?
More than any other element – the stage history of this play is effectively a history of what each age could bear to see in Shylock. The seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries played him as comic grotesque, red-wigged and hook-nosed, a clown with a knife. The turn came in 1741, when Charles Macklin made him terrifying instead of ridiculous – serious enough to be feared is already halfway to serious enough to be wronged. Edmund Kean's 1814 performance completed the revolution: William Hazlitt, reviewing it, found a Shylock of vigour and grounds, "a good hater" more sinned against than sinning, and his 1817 essay built the sympathetic reading into the critical canon. Henry Irving's Victorian Shylock was a wronged patriarch of tragic dignity; by the twentieth century the role had become, in effect, a tragedy embedded in a comedy.
Then history intervened. After the Holocaust, the play's inheritance became unperformable as written innocence: the conversion, the "dog Jew" jokes, the comic baiting of A3S1 could no longer be staged neutrally, and productions have responded by turning the play's own evidence against its conventions – ending on Jessica's unease, or Shylock's offstage cry, or the empty space at the Belmont feast. W. H. Auden, in his 1962 essay "Brothers and Others", influentially read Antonio and Shylock as twin outsiders neither of whom the comedy can absorb – a frame much of the modern stage has adopted.
The performance history is itself the strongest answer to the play's hardest question. A truly antisemitic text could not have powered two centuries of increasingly sympathetic Shylocks; a truly innocent one would not have needed them. The play contains both possibilities – which is why every production must choose, and why the choosing never ends.
