Excerpt from Shylock, the History of a CharacterJewish figure which has impressed itself on the imagination of the world and become a universal symbol of Jewry. Lessing's Nathan, Dickens' Fagin - to choose two extremes - are memorable, but they never achieved or came near to achieving the archetypal status of Shylock. For in Shylock are combined, in a mighty imaginative creation, the passionate determination to revenge the secular wrongs of Jewry with a scorching and irrefutable indictment of the Christianity which in¿icted them. He emerges in the play more as a Shakespearian hero than a Shakespearian villain. Compare him with Iago, and what has been called Iago's motiveless malignity. The malignity of Shylock is more than motived, it is justified. The suffering and injustice of a thousand years of spiritual outlawry seek through him their just 'revenge: were it not that revenge is stamped as unjust by the eternal law that is written in the human heart.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.