Do we not bleed?

There is probably no other character in all of Shakespeare's dramatic works who, despite making relatively few appearances in a play, calls the reader to conscience with more force than Shylock in The Merchant of Venice:

                                      "..........I am a Jew. 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? 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?.........."
                                                          Act III, Scene 1

Shylock all but steals the show; only Portia can compete with him at such heights of characterization. Book illustrators of Shakespeare's works couldn't help but take notice. Shylock is invariably depicted graphically as a greedy, grumpy, and grasping Semitic curmudgeon. The creation of this iconic literary character came to pass despite the limited contact and experience that Shakespeare could possibly have had with Jewish people: they had been kicked out of England when King Edward I promulgated the Edict of Expulsion in 1290, and weren't officially allowed to return until 1656.

During Shakespeare's lifetime, there were believed to be any number of Jews who stayed in the country by affecting a conversion to Christianity while still practicing the Hebrew faith in privacy. There were also Jewish figures in the upper reaches of the English court, including one Roderigo Lopez, a Jewish physician to Queen Elizabeth who was implicated in a Spanish plot to have her assassinated and was hanged, quite possibly an innocent man, in 1594. Some Shakespearean scholars believe that Lopez may have been the playwright's model for Shylock; The Merchant of Venice is believed to have been written within several years after the Lopez episode.

Shown above are two depictions of Shylock, published nearly a century apart, that vilify the moneylender: the top is from a 1798 copy of Merchant (London, printed by T. Bensley, Fleet St.) that relies to a great extent on Shylock's dark "Jewish gabardine" and dour expression to create a sense of menace. The upright postures of the two figures are typical of Shakespearean illustrations during the 1700's: artists then seemed to put a great deal of stock in hand gestures to convey the essence of any relationship between people. Most stage acting at that time was similarly restrained.

In the second depiction, first published in the latter half of the nineteenth century, the knife-wielding Shylock expresses both surprise and suspicion as he examines the bond in the hands of a disguised Portia, whose lawyerly demeanor is bettered only by the timeliness of her arrival on the scene. Or so would have thought Antonio, who was about to lose a pound of flesh and his life in the bargain. Readers mesmerized by Shylock should be forgiven for forgetting that it is Antonio who is referred to in the title of the play.