ABSTRACT
The time is past for speaking of Shakespeare as utterly impartial or inscrutable: the study of his work and that of his fellows as an expression of Elizabethan ideas and technique is teaching us better. Shylock is indeed condemned; Sir Henry Irving took no counsel of the poet when he made his exit from the ducal palace in pathetic triumph. Professor Baker holds that Shakespeare evinces a sense of dramatic values in presenting Shylock’s disappointment as tragic in his own eyes, amusing in Gratiano’s. Shylock’s disappointment is tragic to him, but good care is taken that it shall not be to us. Shakespeare is less intent on values than on the conduct and direction of our sympathies through the scene. This he manages both by the action and the comment. Critics speak as if it were impossible for Shylock to mean anything to us unless thus sentimentalized and tragicalized.
