This Is Shakespeare

by Emma Smith

In a bravura speech on ‘the quality of mercy’ (4.1.181), Portia uses her rhetoric to displace the financial self-interest of the Christian community and substitute a more rarefied glossary of abstract ethical terms. Mercy is a hyper-currency, above the earthly ledger of debit and credit, because it ‘blesseth him that gives, and him that takes’ (4.1.184) as ‘an attribute to God himself’ (192). Portia’s intervention serves to establish the Christian community on the moral high ground and to back Shylock into a corner. He obliges, helpfully (for her plan) stereotyping himself as the vengeful Jew, stropping his knife blade on the sole of his shoe. Shylock is here completely isolated on ethnic, religious and legal grounds, as if he alone in the play was interested in money, profit and speculation, and is now being punished for it.