Throughout The Merchant of Venice there is tension between Jews (mostly Shylock) and Christians. The Christians abuse, spit upon, and despise the Jews, and Shylock and the other Jews (other than his daughter, who elopes with a Christian) hate the Christians. Nobody seems completely in the right.
The tense fourth act deals largely with deals the most clearly with the conflict between Shylock and Antonio, or on another level, the law and mercy. Shylock insists “My deeds upon my head! I crave the law/ The penalty and forfeit of my bond.”(Act IV, Scene I, 213-214) In other words, he did not believe that he needed mercy at the moment, and he wanted a pound of flesh from Antonio’s chest. But a little later, once Portia has proved that he could not be convinced to take any sum of money in compensation, nor would he ease Antonio’s pain in any way, nor would he show any mercy at all of any sort not mentioned in the bond… then Portia brought up the specifics in the bond and in the law which showed that it was actually Shylock who needed mercy, not Antonio. This shows a kind of Protestant philosophy, you can’t trust in the law, or it will betray you. “That in the course of justice none of us / should see salvation: we do pray for mercy;” (Act IV, Scene I 206-207) Only in the mercy of Jesus Christ are we saved. Portia’s passionate plea for mercy lets her stand as a representative of Protestant understanding even while Shylock represents an Old Testament understanding of law and judgment, or the Jewish Law of Moses, along with a refusal of Christ and his mercy.Portia was described as being a sort of Christ-figure in my Honors Class when we discussed this, since in the beginning she is bound by some inheritance laws which she accepts, but once those laws no longer bind her she can act to bring mercy to her fellow Christians. She knows the laws very well, and she advocates mercy, but when Shylock insists on the law, and not mercy, once she reveals the legal difficulties he is in though, Portia does not urge any mercy in dealing with Shylock,.
It’s Antonio who seems the most merciful in actual practice. He asks for the fine of half of Shylock’s property that was to go to the state to be waved, and proposes that he keep the other half in trust for Shylock’s daughter's husband, as long as Shylock converts to Christianity and that he leave his own half also to his daughter when he dies. I believe that this was meant as mercy. Shylock needed money in order to live, and Antonio holding In trust the other half for Shylock’s daughter's husband is a kindness to the daughter and her husband, if not to Shylock who was still furious with her. The forced conversion was not something that would have been at all uncommon in the Renaissance days, and it had already been established that Jews were held in contempt… so it could be considered a mercy to try and pull Shylock’s soul into the path Antonio believed correct. But, it might not have been meant as a mercy, but as one of the most personal blows that he could possibly inflict on Shylock (and a similar sort of thing about requiring all the money to eventually go to Shylock’s daughter, as he’d recently said that, “Would that any of the stock of Barrabas / Had been her husband, rather than a Christian”). Shylock’s whole identity was bound up in being a Jew, to be forced to be a Christian like everyone he’d hated for so long, would be deeply difficult. But, I believe that Antonio meant mercifully, and this is after Shylock had insisted on cutting out a pound of Antonio’s chest flesh rather than ten times the amount of money loaned. Another way to interpret this is to relate the Jews to Catholics. Shakespeare and most of his contemporaries in England would have had little to do with Jews, though they were still plenty prejudiced against them, as a rule. But they did have Catholics among them, and in England during the 16th century and for a long time afterwards there was almost as much prejudice against Catholics as against Jews. Catholics also had a more doctrinal emphasis on the laws and works than Protestant ideas of grace and mercy.
