We respect the law, we honor the law, we obey the law - but crave it? This passionate yearning not only feels oddly mismatched with the dry legal code it also seems to suggest that the speaker lacks the law, is somehow outside of or excluded from it. We Americans - we white Americans, for reasons that will become clear in a moment - are used to thinking of the law much as Portia does: a dispassionate system that disregards personal attachments. “I crave the law”: the phrase has always struck me for its surprising vulnerability and emotional urgency. Momentarily bracketing the political significance of this scene for Renaissance England, though, I want to use it as a jumping-off point for some reflections on the current situation of the justice system in America. In the context of the play, this is meant to evoke a conventional contrast between Judaism and Christianity - between the letter and the spirit of the law - that Shakespeare sometimes reinforces and sometimes calls into question. Shylock’s position in this scene is easy to read as cold and cruel - and Portia isn’t wrong: he’s not being merciful, not showing any sympathy for Antonio as a person, not turning the other cheek. The penalty and forfeit of my bond” (IV.1.204-5, emphasis added). Shylock’s response is curt - two lines, two sentences - and much less often quoted, yet has always stuck in my head with particular force: We’re all sinners, in other words, redeemed only by God’s mercy - so isn’t it our duty to show mercy and forgiveness to our fellow men?Ī fine, poetic speech, 22 lines long, full of lovely metaphors and rhetorical paradoxes. It’s a famous speech: Portia opposes divine mercy, something like grace, to temporal justice, urging Shylock to consider “That, in the course of justice, none of us / Should see salvation” (IV.1.197-8). Portia, acting as Antonio’s lawyer for complicated reasons regarding the play’s love-plot, grants Shylock’s legal right to the flesh but asks him to forego his claim in the name of mercy. Antonio, our relatively nondescript title character, cannot afford to pay back the loan he took from Shylock, and Shylock is asking the Duke to honor their contract, which grants him a pound of Antonio’s flesh in the event of forfeiture. Act IV, scene 1 of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice takes place in a courtroom.
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