[catonsville]

Shakespeare wrote for the anti-semetic audience of his day, yet gave Shylock one of the greatest pleas for justice in all of literature. While his audiences may have found pleasure at Shylock's fall, Shakespeare did not make it easy for them to gloat

"I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions?"
Jews are 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? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that."


Marvelous

[Timocrat]

Shylock is by far the most memorable character in the play. Bassanio seems like an idle playboy and Portia a smart "Trust fund" woman, forced into an odd way of picking a husband. Having been obliged to study the play at school the lasting impression it made on me was that a group of the "in" crowd got Antonio off on a legal technicality. I thought Shylock's speech had much more "guts" to it than Portia's quality of Mercy speech.