This page has been validated.
Assertion of Rights a Social Duty
the subjective, to law in the objective sense of the term and the meaning of the struggle for law, in a manner better than any philosopher of the law could have done it. These four words change Shylock’s claim into a question of the law of Venice. To what mighty, giant dimensions does not the weak man grow, when he speaks these words! It is no longer the Jew demanding his pound of flesh; it is the law of Venice itself knocking at the door of Justice; for his rights and the law of Venice are one and the same; they both stand or fall together. And when he finally succumbs under the weight of the judge’s decision, who wipes out his rights by a shocking piece of pleasantry,[1] when we see him pursued
- ↑ The eminently tragic interest which we feel in Shylock, I find to have its basis precisely in the fact that justice is not done him; for this is the conclusion to which the lawyer must come. The poet is, of course, free to build up his own system of jurisprudence, and we have no reason to regret that Shakespeare has done so here; or rather that he has changed the old fable in nothing. But when the jurist submits the question to a critical examination, he can only say that the bond was in itself null and void because its provisions were contrary to good morals. The judge should, therefore, have refused to enforce its terms on this ground from the first. But as he did not do so, as the “wise Daniel” admitted its validity, it was a wretched subterfuge, a miserable piece of pettifoggery, to deny the man whose right he had already admitted, to cut a pound of flesh from the living body, the right to the shedding of the blood which necessarily accompanied it. Just as well might the judge deny to the person whose right to an easement he acknowledged, the right to leave footmarks on the land, because this was not expressly stipulated for in the grant. One might almost believe that the tragedy of Shylock was enacted in the earliest days of Rome; for the author of the Twelve Tables held it necessary to remark expressly in relation to the laceration of the debtor (in partes secare) by the creditor, that the size of the piece should be left to his free choice. (Si plus minusve secuerint, sine fraude esto!)
87
